Oh No! SLI is back.
Tom's Hardware and others are reporting that NVIDIA is releasing their newest 6800 series graphics cards with the ability to plug two of them into PCIx16 motherboards to essentially double the video throughput. It also essentially doubles the price of the system. Not to mention that the required motherboards aren't widely available. Still, if you feel the need for speed, and have no limit on your credit card, this should interest you.

Stop using IE
I've been saying it for a long time, but now News.com has news that the best way to make your surfing safe may be to just stop using Internet Explorer. I highly recommend switching to Mozilla Firefox. There are lots of alternative browsers, and it is just plain silly to be using IE with all of it's problems.

Japanese Gaming Market Down (again)
Game Informer has news that the Japanese Gaming market has gone down for the second year in a row. This time by as much as 40%. Hardware is the biggest drop, meaning that the PS2 has probably hit saturation level. I doubt Sony will be very concerned about that since they make their money on the games and liscenses, and virtually give the consoles away.

Next phase of the Space Age started today
Foxnews has a story about the first successful launch of a private rocket to the fringes of outer space. It was a sub-orbital flight just like the first American space flights by Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom in the early 60's, but it proved that a company with the resources could get into space without government assistance. They also have a completely reusable space craft system, which will make future flights much more economical.

Xbox2 in 2005, but is it a mistake?
Microsoft is hoping to get a jump on Sony and Nintendo by introducing the next generation Xbox in 2005, well ahead of plans for the Playstation 3 (2006 or maybe 2007). However, they may be making a mistake as an article at Gameindustry points out. If they were the current industry leader, the move might be good, but since they are not, they may find several developers aren't ready to spend the time developing for the new console just yet. A bigger issue in my mind is backwards compatibility. If they want to win over new users to the Xbox2, they had better make sure the old games keep playing on it. Most developers say that isn't going to be the case, and I'd suspect nobody will want to write games that run on PS2, Gamecube, Xbox AND Xbox2.

Time to dump IE
I haven't used Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) for a couple of years now. I find that the simplest way to improve security is simply to not use Microsoft applications. It is odd to me, in fact, that on the one hand Microsoft touts how easy it is to write simple web apps with ActiveX, and on the other hand, they recommend that you turn the feature off for security reasons. The folks over at Lockergnome have done a pretty good job of explaining many of the reasons to stop using IE. Personally, I recommend Mozilla Firefox

Half-Life 2 Code Thiefs Arrested
Or so it seems... Gamespot has a rather mysterious announcement from Valve stating that people in several countries have been arrested for the theft of the Half-Life 2 source code, which occured last year. However, it is unclear when the arrests took place.

SCO losing ground?
ArsTechnica has an excellent article describing how SCO seems to be losing steam in courts. Most important, the federal judge reviewing the Novell lawsuit seems to side with Novell, meaning that SCO doesn't own the copyrights that they claim to own, and therefore making their other lawsuits invalid.

AMD 64 bit Dual Core processors in 2005
Yahoo has news that AMD has finished R&D on it's new dual core processors, and expects them to be shipping by the middle of next year. Just in time for my next planned upgrade :)

Microsoft getting soft?
The Seattle Weekly has a great (although long) article by a former Microsoft Employee who observes that MS is missing a lot of innovations simply because they do not want to harm their core products: Windows and Office. Is MS setting itself up for a fall?