Technology by Jacob Dybala

The new Sony PlayStation 3 with the Cell processor comes in 3 colors: white, gray and black. The case is very nice and shiny. The graphics are powered by nVidia and SCEI, has XDR Rambus memory and Blu-Ray discs are supported. A dual layer Blu-Ray disk can hold up to 54GB of data; imagine the possibilities. HDTV displays and DVD support are standard. A detachable 2,5″ HDD will be supported as well. No other console of the new generation will be as backwards compatible as the Playstation 3. Games from Playstation 1, 2 and 3 will work!

To be honest I’m not sure why Microsoft named their new console X-Box 360. 360 is a full circle, in other words nothing has changed, they’re where they started… The HDD in the 360 is detachable and the whole console is powered by 3 custom-made (by IBM) cores running at 3.2 GHz each. DDR3 memory is used for the unit. Everything else seems pretty much a standard in the next generation consoles. Microsoft now has an addon that supports HD-DVD discs.

Details on Nintendo’s Revolution (now known as the Wii) console have been released as well. The case is very small (the size of 3 DVD cases stacked together) and comes in a variety of colors. DVD playback is of course, a must, but worth mentioning is that Nintendo Gamecube games will play as well. I’m not expecting the Revolution console to take any market share away from Sony or Microsoft…

Bottom line: Playstation 3 and X-Box 360 will fight for the market share with both having very good hardware and the Playstation having many more games available. It’s hard to tell how things will look in 1 or 2 years. Nintendo Revolution, on the other hand, shouldn’t change much

PS: Microsoft’s X-Box 360 site doesn’t work too well under Firefox. Poor cross-platform design Go figure… (update: 9/22/2006 – the site has been fixed and works under FireFox as well.)

Links:
Microsoft X-Box 360:
http://www.xbox.com/en-us/xbox360/default.htm
Nintendo Revolution:
Press Release
Sony Playstation 3:
http://e3.playstation.com/hardware/ps3/index.aspx

Yesterday I spent a little over 2 hours trying to fix an AutoCAD setup for an architect. Of 5 computers in the office one was opening files and switching layouts with a very long delay – about 2-3 minutes before you could return to work. Sure, the files were big and had many objects but the workstation was an HP Pentium 4 3.2 GHz with 512 MB of RAM…

The problem was that each time AutoCAD regenerated the whole project it kept working and working… The most time was spent on formatting text so I started poking around in AutoCAD options and then started looking at Windows’ display settings. It was obvious that the whole delay was caused when redrawing the layers.

Well, we finally found the solution. There was nothing else to change in AutoCAD and changing the system Display settings did not affect the speed at all. So I turned off font smoothing in Display | Appearance | Effects and all of a sudden AutoCAD started working like it was supposed too. All 3.2 GHz to your command

I often say this, and it’s so far been true: the simplest solutions are always the hardest to find. I’m an administrator and programmer with years of experience and yet there are problems like this one that waste a lot of my time…

If you ever have this problem I hope Google points you here

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