Asus has announced the Radeon X1600 on it’s upcoming A7Gc laptop. The problem with that? The X1600 isn’t actually released yet!

Specifications on the video chipset include 128MB GDDR3 memory along with Analog TV & DVB-T outputs. It looks like a pretty hot chipset, hopefully it will perform as well as the stats suggest.

FCC chairman Kevin Martin is proposing pay-per-channel cable as solution to all the talk of indecency on television. After all, you can’t complain about what you yourself paid to watch. While I’m certain he’s under the impression this will possibly put the “offensive” stations off the air, I’m pretty sure it’ll have the exact opposite effect.

And of course, cable companies are fighting the move. Anything that would offer lower prices or “choice” will cause our entire social system to collapse into anarchy and worse, higher prices. I still haven’t worked out the paradox in that statement.

Massachusetts has come out swinging for Microsoft in their long running format debate. They’ve managed to quash the evil of standard, open formats and instead have chosen to rely on the goodwill of Redmond.

Apparently all the politicians got in a row for their handout in the coming elections and penalized the horrible troll of a public servant that wanted to use un-encumbered standards. A blow has been struck for purely mercenary motivations everywhere.

Apparently kids playing violent video games isn’t the responsibility of their parents. No. It’s the responsibility of anyone else. Heck, maybe even Canada.

In explanation: ABC is running a story on the MediaWise report card for the gaming industry. While they’re totally against censorship, they’re under the impression that the media rating system is totally broken… because parents buy their kids M rated games.

Here’s a newsflash. Maybe the people buying the games aren’t total idiots and can actually read those boldly labled warnings about violence and profanity. Maybe they just don’t care.

And another thing. If you’re playing a game (Grand Theft Auto III) in which a method of play involves brutally beating people with body parts and running them over repeatedly.. an accidental (and rather well censored) sex scene might not be the most offensive bit. Just a thought.

David Henderson has a fairly on-the-ball piece up about MIT’s 100$ laptop for poor countries getting mired in a bureaucratic nightmare. He points out that there’s a serious problem with having .gov’s buy the laptops and then distribute them to the people.

Logistics aside, I see another problem there. Unless this is the most splendidly brain-dead easy to use piece of technology ever invented, they’re going to need some training. In many years of reviewing products I have yet to see an advanced system that runs various pieces of software in multiple languages that needs no introduction.

Better distribution methods can be seen in South American countries that offer very low interest loans to purchase computers. That way, people that can use them can buy them without any upfront cash and benefit from them while having a vested interest in keeping the laptop running. And learning how to use it.

Subsidizing the cost and offering them up for whatever the market will bear (even if that’s only a few pennies on the dollar) is good. Punting them all over the globe might not be so hot. We’ll see.

Even NY’s attorney general Eliot Spitzer has gotten on the Sony bandwagon. Now NY’s famous music label hounding attorney is looking into their CD trojan shenanigans.

This can’t be good for Sony.. he’s actually got the tech-savvy and litegatory mojo to do something nasty if they’re violating laws. And I can’t see any way they’re not violating a few laws what with all the PC munging that’s been going on.

The CSFB Tech conference is happening today over in Phoenix, AZ. Attendees look to be in for a treat, as FreeScale, Dell, Inter-Tel, Emulex, and a horde of other technology outfits will be addressing them. This one’s invite only, so bring your pass.

Catch Amazon’s presentation webcast from Amazon.com.

A new device on the market takes advantage of our (humans, that is) hearing degrading as we get older. The Mosquito is pitched so that younger people will be irritated by it’s buzzing but older folks will be unawares.

This might be a bit of age discrimination.. it seems there might be a better solution to loitering. Like playing light classical music. You get the same effect without annoying the odd shopper with acute hearing.

The US government is under the impression that it is doing something to protect the atmosphere from contamination. They were defending not signing up to the Kyoto protocols indirectly by stating they are “doing more than most countries”. Choice quote:

“With regard to what the United States is doing on climate change, the actions we have taken are next to none in the world,”

If you can get a positive meaning out of that, you’ve been in Washington far too long.

What I’ve noticed is that the United States is attempting to curb it’s harm to the atmosphere in spite of the federal governments efforts. Cities and towns around the states are creating their own markets and statutes to curb pollution. Statutes that are largely being fought by the Federal government.

It seems that frogs can, in fact, fly. Given enough magentism that is. The frog pictured there is floating inside a very powerful magnet.

Apparently the frog exhibited no ill effects. It was happy to join it’s fellow amphibians back in the biology lab after the experiment.

It looks like Microsoft might have weazled it’s way back into MA’s graces again. They’ve made some vague statements about making their office format a standard XML and promising not to sue some users.

In a horrible piece of journalism, Forbes can’t seem to decide what the difference
between open formats, open standards, open source, and Open Office are.

That’s a whole lot of “open”’s but still no excuse for shoddy journalism. Let me see if I can clear this up. An Open Standard is generally a standard that anyone can use (or at least pay for). Open Document is an open standard that is also free to use. It’s well specified and contains all the “stuff” needed for document formatting. Open Office is a suite created by Sun Microsystems, among others, that uses the Open Document standard as it’s default.

Now that you know, you’ll understand that Open Document has nothing to do with open source, which is a software licensing scheme in which the source code of software is available to the recipient of the binary code, commonly for no additional charge.

For the record, Forbes, these aren’t “open source formats” that we’re speaking of. Possibly intentional mis-phrasing such as that clouds issues worse than aged Wiskey at a political convention.

If you enjoy playing guitar and need to sate that internet addiction at the same time there’s now a solution. Catch a load of the Intel®/Fender® Telecaster® Concept Guitar, a wonder that intends to revolutionize. Well. Something, I’m sure.

While there are an absolute ton of things I can think of that you could do with a system embedded inside your Fender, surfing the internet wouldn’t make the list.

I mean.. you’ve got a computer with all sorts of neat I/O options and you’re using it for looking over websites? Emailing riffs to friends? Somehow, I think there might more creative uses out there.

comScore Media Metrix is representing Mapquest as loosing market share, even though it hasn’t (err..) lost market share. Wired reports that competitors are starting to take a bite out of MapQuest with their more feature-rich services.

I’m a bit more in favor of Google Maps neat features and don’t like MapQuest’s directions very much. It seems that there’s always a “Left Turn” in an erronious spot.

Also, google seems to do pan ‘n scan on the map more cleanly than MapQuest.

Looking to debug and performance tune a Linux machine? Then you couldn’t do much better than Linux Debugging and Performance Tuning (Tips and Techniques) by Steve Best. Check out PCBurn’s review and see if it’s right for your bookshelf.

It looks like First4Internet was offering up a cash reward for the code they allegedly pirated from the LAME project. Boing Boing has come through with a plee from the developers in a newsgroup post.

It look to me like someone could have actually sold them code from the LAME project (among others). Now that’d be a horrible example of negligence in copyright checking

SpaceX’s Falcon 1 rocket has now been rescheduled for a Saturday launch at 21:00 GMT.

The Falcon 1 is SpaceX’s $6M USD rocket that they’re aiming to revolutionize the market for space “travel” with. This launch also features a brand new launch site, so expect potential delays as the launch date approaches.

It looks like Helios over at lobby4linux has received one to many flames recently and is firing a salvo back. I was also just reading (and responding in comments to) a similar article at LXer. It’s my belief Linux media sites have an important role in the greater computing community.

Professional journalistic outlets and writers with a solid knowledge of and foundation in Unix and OSS are currently outstripped by the demand for their writing. While it’s important to have “general” news venues that cover a variety of media in addition to Unix/Linux/OSS specific topics, open source media has a definate place.

Open source doesn’t tend to sell itself much, if at all. There’s nothing to point you to what hardware will work, which software to use, what might be a good (non-commercial) choice for your company.

This is where open source software journalists (such as yours truly otherwhere) have an important role to play. We can highlight software and hardware that might otherwise be over-looked.

While the news might be a little more geared toward Unix/Linux/OSS than at a more general site, chances are that’s what you (as a reader) are looking for. If you’re going to Lobby4 Linux, I’d think that you’re looking for information about linux.

To flame Helios for reporting on the topic of the website heavily seems a bit silly. I think he’s got the right of the matter.

Reading through the dig all section of digg.com gives reminds me of why editors will never be out of work.

Digg, for anyone that hasn’t sampled it’s user provided and voted on content, provides a venue for people to submit stories. After submission, they’re voted on by the readership and promoted, ostensibly, based on merit. At least one would assume so at first glance.

What I’ve noticed is that stories tend to float to the top based on the whims of the people reading the dig all section of the site. These same people don’t seem to represent a large quantity of the readership, although for all I know it’s an adequate cross section.

Stories tend to have either ultra high numbers of votes (if they’ve been voted to the main page) or very few votes (less than 20). I would expect more stories to be somewhere in the middle if an adequate amount of readers were looking at the “all” section. Instead there appears to be quite a bit of voting on the front page stories.. which is less than usefull.

Another problem with the format is lack of editing on the articles. While we all gripe about Slashdot (and Kuro5hin, and heck, even PCBurn) having some odd wording or poorly phrased frontpage copy at times, they’re a bit different from digg. They all take at least a minimum of effort to look over every story and clean up the verbage.. make it look presentable. Someone is there, editing down the stories so we can appreciate the information linked to or contained therein.

So while I’m not nieve enough to think that there’s no place for a resource like Digg on the web, I’m also not in fear of it replacing proper editors anytime soon. Bring on the editors!

Google is donating donated $3M USD toward the preservation of rare documents from around the world. It’s good to see money going to world-wide media preservation rather than just English language material.

South African billionaire Elon Musk is about to see the maiden voyage of SpaceX’s new rocket. Constructed for a meer (in rocket ship money, anyway) 6.7 million USD, it’s been created to further the goal of cheap space travel.

You might remember SpaceX from the recent competition to launch a commercial manned spacecraft.