Writing a timestamp in Batch using WMIC

WMIC(Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line) is one of the less used, but very cool & powerful features of windows.

Try this from a command prompt for an example:

wmic process

One of the things that sucks in windows is trying to use system date/time strings within a batch file, but WMIC makes this less painful:

:: Use WMIC to retrieve date and time
FOR /F "skip=2 tokens=2-7 delims=," %%A IN ('WMIC Path Win32_LocalTime Get Day^,Hour^,Minute^,Month^,Second^,Year /Format:csv') DO (
SET /A SortDate = 10000 * %%F + 100 * %%D + %%A
SET /A SortTime = 10000 * %%B + 100 * %%C + %%E
)

:: display timestamp
echo %SortDate%%SortTime%

References:
http://www.robvanderwoude.com/datetiment.html
http://blogs.technet.com/jhoward/archive/2005/02/23/378726.aspx

Intel Finally Including an Integrated Memory Controller

It's taken what, 4 years? Intel has decided that removing the frontside bus roadblock for communication between memory and the CPU might be a good idea.

Even though Intel has been handing AMD its hat since the introduction of their Core 2 Duo processors, they've been dependent on a separate chip on the motherboard to coordinate i/o between the CPU & RAM.

AMD figured this out in 2003 by placing the memory controller on the CPU die. IBM and Sun have done the same. With their 13 or 14 fabrication plants, it seems that Intel has been only incrementally releasing the good stuff when they could be further pummeling AMD. Intel's manufacturing methods are on a process half the size of AMD's, so addtional features and power savings should be readily available to the consumer. How is all that extra die space being used? Yet another core? How about placing some real goodies on there, like embedding VMWare, increasing cache size, and adding some sort of monitoring that can interface with applications for instruction optimization over time? Intel has incredible engineers, let's see some of their innovations!

Google Angering Mobile Phone Companies & Becoming a Giant US ISP

Whether or not Google actually ends up buying the 700-MHz band, an additional player/competitor toying with multi-billion dollar spectrum is not pleasant for Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint. Such are the effects of capitalism - go Google!

Bob Cringely puts Google's 700MHz plans in perspective in his latest post - here's a taste:
"Imagine a hybrid wireless broadband mesh network using 700-MHz connections for backhaul and some truly mobile links and WiFi for local service."

With the aggregate of personal information supplied by users googling their search terms(especially while signed in to a google account such as Gmail), Google's servers aboundeth with information as to that which is being searched, purchased, emailed(your friend's Gmail emails are indexed as well), and blogged. Google owns the servers running this blog.

Mobile internet access is about to change very quickly.