Open Source is not just for software.

It seemed awkward to me when I heard it at first, but now it seems quite feasible. Opensource is making its presence felt at all walks of life. No, not because some of the Opensource software are used in many embedded systems like mobile phone and other electronic gadgets. But it has gone even more further, in the Autoshow, AutoRAI held at Amsterdam last week, an Open source car was unveiled. It was jointly developed by the Dutch Universities: Delft, Eindhoven and Enschede.
The car can take four passengers and runs in zero emission hydrogen. Anyone can contribute to the car's design and machinery as the design blueprints and technical data are available freely over internet, and the contributions would still be under Opensource.
The name of the may not be that impressive as the very news is, it is named c,mm,n (pronounced common, I am not sure why those commas are for). The c,mm,n site provides further details about the project and technical data, though most of the content is in Dutch.
c,mm,n website

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Google offers TiSP, the free wireless broadband!

Google has offered so many wonderful services like, Google Romance, Google Gulp!, Google Lunar Job, Pigeon Rank, and The MentelPlex, all of those have been wonderful, overnight hits and even have had the internet jammed for a few days from release.
Now Google has come up with a better, bigger and utilitier product, Google TiSP. Once you sign up, Google will ship you with a self installation kit with which you can set up your own Wireless broadband internet for free! This kit setup guide, fiber-optic cable, spindle, wireless router and installation CD.
The broadband is to be installed on your closet and Google will make use of your sewage lines to connect to the server and provide high speed broadband. They offer it in 3 variants, The tricke, #2 and Royal Flush. The first one being the free version. Google cleared the doubt many had, announcing that this broadband kit will in no way hamper your actual working of your closet, but insisted to take technical support of a plumber to install the kit correctly.
Anyway if still have not figured it, then you deserve the kit, because you really are the right candidate for the Google's April fool pranks. Here are the links for you to sign up.

Google TiSP sign up(free)
TiSP FAQ
Google Press Release

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Intel and the benchmark scams?

We all believe that now, it is Intel's time to beat the hell out of AMD after the release of the Core Microarchitecture. But, for so long AMD had been shouting foulplay by Intel to mislead the analyst, Wall street and the consumers to make them believe this. Until recently, I never gave my ear to it, despite being an AMD fanboy. But, now analysis and post mortem of the presentation meet by, Intel Server Platforms Group general manager Kirk Skaugen on February 21st, and later on 28th is shocking to say the least.

The way Intel has presented the presentation has been very unprofessional and unethical. They have tried to impose and highlight their supremacy over AMD in a very cheap manner. These are the few of those.

• Intel has compared their latest Xeon processors with pretty much old Opterons to declare themselves the leader. To make it worse, they even have a unnamed processor compared with the Xeon. Some of the benchmarks are with dual cores, some with single cores, and one nameless processor. All the while the Intel counterpart remains the same.
• Lot of footnotes and disclaimers on each of the slide, which are hardly legible and the scores have been twisted, the slide title showing two high end Intel and AMD processors while tests being done between, the best Intel and a weaker AMD.
• In the 1st presentation (on 21st), a footnote says " the latest opteron XXX has not been used because the benchmarks are not available, and hence we are comparing against an older version". Next presentation(on 28th) , the footnote is missing, so we naturally assume that it uses the latest Opteron, but on close examination, it is still the older one.
• A slide show titled comparison of Xeon 5xxx with Opteron 2xxx, and not a single comparison is with 2xxx and this fact is safely buried in the cryptic footnotes.
• They were using a six year old SPEC benchmark to prove that they were leaders and the wide gap in the benchmarks, while no one is using those benchmarks and the new ones are pretty common.

These medley of errors, or delibarate makeovers flooded the whole presentation. I wonder how could a high profile company even dare to do this? Obviously, every single analyst would have figured out these. This has simply been shameful, to say the least.
Adopted from: blogs.ZDnet.com

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download the Intel presentation and check for yourself.
Read the original article.
Post-mortem report (must see).

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technorati tags:intel, amd, scam, benchmark, presentation, opteron, xeon, core, dualcore, singlecore, SPEC