Traditional IDE/PATA drives have less than a week before they will no longer make their way to high end Intel systems. Beginning with the ICH8 south bridge Intel no longer plans on providing native IDE support on south bridge chips. Just a day ago, a certain fellow at the inquirer ranted over how Plextor is the only manufacturer of SATA optical drives. In the end he said that IDE’s days are numbered as he believe that by next year IDE will be reserved only for low end systems. Mr. Demerjian said that the market really needed a kick start to get more suppliers for SATA optical drives, and it seems Intel is going to be that boot that will be doing the kicking. It’s about time PATA dies, I really want a SATA dual layer BluRay R/RW drive in my next desktop system.

-John Havlik

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MIT, among several other ‘high end’ universities require all students to pass a swimming test of four laps in their pool in order to graduate. Swimming, a basic survival skill as viewed by the university, may be the first test many freshmen will fail in a long while. I found this amusing since it would be the first test that I would ace at MIT, if I was to attend that college. Someone that I know at Chaska is going to MIT, which he found out only a few weeks ago, and has been trying to sell off his AP test spots since they won’t do him any good for MIT.

Here is the link: The Boston Globe

-John Havlik

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Yesterday, at work one of the tenants was throwing away a ton of dated computer components. Most of the stuff was SCSI Pentium and Pentium 2 servers, some Pentium overdrives, and old apples and one old power mac. Among the mess were two jewels, one was a case with a Biostar motherboard with a AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1.4Ghz, which we found later, and another was a Elitegroup motherboard with a AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1.0Ghz. Both boards have AGP 4x slots, well the Biostar has a AGP pro 4x slot but AGP cards work in it so it’s all good.

The Elitegroup one wouldn’t POST so it has been robbed of its CPU and heatsink. The Biostar does work. It took a bit of coxing to get it to find the 40GB western digital hard drive to boot Windows XP, but it is working now. The 512Mb DDR ram from my brother’s shot motherboard fits nicely next to the ATi Radeon 9600 that was in my brother’s old box. My Sound Blaster Live! card, Pioneer DVD burner, and my 200GB hard drive will be making their way into the new system by the end of next week. I can finally play Halo at full settings without any lag.

-John Havlik

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So there is this art collaboration by the art community at Blue Sfear that is approximately 56.25 feet long. The image is about 7.0 MB in size, so dial-up users you have been warned. Each member has created a section is 600×450 pixels, and the artist is allowed to use any program he/she wants. The worm flows as one gigantic mural and is a must see. There is some sexually suggestive content on it, even though the artists are required to refrain from posting explicit images.

-John Havlik

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