Must be hard to be an Intel Sales Rep these days
Ars Technica regularly runs a feature about building several different classes of machines, from the Budget Box to the God Box, and now the Ultimate Budget Box. Interesting that each of their latest systems use an AMD processor of some sort. Whether you want a high end system, with an AMD 64, or a low end system with a straight Athlon XP, it seems AMD has the entire spectrum covered, and for the best price as well.

Microsoft Unleashes C/C++ Complier
Microsoft has recently released their command line C/C++ compiler as a free download. You don't get Visual C++, but you can use it to write programs for the windows platform. Why they did this is anyones guess. Personally, I kind of like using Bloodshed's Free Dev-C++ IDE which works with Mingw and gcc for Windows to provide a pretty complete development package in the GNU vein.

New faster DDR2
Cnet News reports a new version of DDR called DDR2 will be hitting the shelves soon. Much faster than the current versions of DDR which have practical limits of 400 MHz rates, DDR2 is speced up to 800 MHz. I suspect this will be in my next computer.

Sentencing Spammers
The US Sentencing commission has issued it's first draft guidlines for sentencing email spammers. You can read the full thing here (PDF file) (which includes guidelines for many other crimes as well.) Here is an exert:

The criminal penalty for a violation of section 5(d)(1) of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 is a
fine or imprisonment for not more than five years, or both.

Next DVD to be made of Paper?
Sony and Toppan Printing are doing R&D on a new disk that is based on a Paper Substrate. It will hold about 5 times as much as the DVD, weigh less, and be more environmentally friendly.

Open Source Issues
Here is an insiteful look at the problems of the Open Source Community called What's Wrong with the Open Source Community at LinuxWorld. I agree with just about everything the author has to say. The Open source community is powerful, but often gets in its own way.