PC Perspective has an excellent article entitled Rendering Games with Raytracing Will Revolutionize Graphics that goes through some of the progress made on real-time ray tracing engines and what the future might hold, at least according to Intel. If you don’t know what ray tracing is, the Wikipedia has the dirt as usual.
According to APC Magazine, Hewlett-Packard are planning on selling desktop PCs in Australia that are loaded with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop, with Red Hat providing the support. The models available will be AMD systems with Semprons, Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 X2 CPUs. Honestly, I’m not sure why anyone would want to buy system based on those CPUs (with the superior Intel chips being available) but I guess these are aimed at small to medium businesses, which is the reason for the choice of Red Hat as the operating system.
Now I’d like for Dell to make some sort of announcement for when they’re going to be selling Ubuntu-based systems in Australia as well. I hope that more and more PC vendors will start supporting Linux options, which might put some pressure on the hardware manufacturers to release decent Linux drivers - perhaps even open source versions.
A few days ago an interesting article on Ars Technica about the Charmr, an insulin pump meant to be well designed, turned up in my feeds. Being diabetic myself, I admit I was intrigued so I took a look at the kinds of things Charmr is meant to be capable of.
Quite possibly one of the most convenient “new” computer technologies, USB disks are gradually starting to replace pretty much all other forms of file transfer for me. It’s quicker to put some files on a disk to take to uni than to send them via email (seriously slow upload speeds). It’s more convenient, and cheaper, to put anime series and the like on my iPod (30GB) rather than burning a bunch of DVDs. Hell, you can even boot off USB disks now!
The reason for this rant is today’s purchase of a 4GB USB pen drive. A snazzy little orange plastic and aluminium job. It’s made by some brand I’ve never heard of: Tomato Flash. I was actually ripped off as it was $98 but I knew this since I was buying it at uni, which isn’t exactly the most wallet-friendly place on Earth (interesting, considering the average student income). (I bought it because I wanted to get 4GB worth of anime from a student of mine!) Still, such a small disk which is almost the capacity of a DVD should last a while, and is a lot more convenient to carry around than an iPod with the connection cable.
I’ll probably buy a 16GB one once they get cheap enough since that should do away with the iPod completely for file transfers, leaving it free for music. 
Here’s a question I’m throwing out to whoever is reading this, and who uses an iPod: what do you use to manage it and how has it worked out for you? I’ve recently been experimenting with a multitude of ways of controlling the little beast but nothing has really provided a complete solution. No, not even iTunes.
I’ll write about what I’ve tried some other time but I’d like to know if there’s anything out there I’ve missed.
After the last post about Intel vs. AMD in Australian prices, the battle has raged on for control of your CPU slot. Both sides have made price cuts and Intel has actually released a complete line of updated processors. Does this change anything?