Category: Mov Ax, Bx
Donkey Kong is back
The E3 is the world’s largest games expo held annually at LA, where all new tittles and consoles are shown to the fans and public at large.
This year Nintendo apart from showing the upcoming 3DS, and Goldeneye 007 also announced the return of Donkey Kong after a long absence since DKC for the N64.
For those who have played and owned Donkey Kong Country 1-3 originally released on SNES, it is the simply the best game ever ditto. It is the benchmark for all 2D platformers.
Watch the video, Nintendo is trying to keep and replicate the same elements that made the original trilogy famous, and the sound track is from DKC 2: Double Trouble. If you’ve never owned Wii this might just be the reason to get one now.
Apple iPhone 4
Intel launches hexa-core processor
Most apps are not even multi-threaded to take advantage of dual core, let alone tri-core AMD Phenom X3s, or quad-core Core 2s and Core i7s from Intel.
Now Intel launches the world’s first hexa-core (6) processor: core i7-980X with HT simulating 12 cores, 3.33 GHz frequency, a whopping 12MB L3 cache, 1066FSB, and SSE 4.1/2 support!
Considering the average boot time hasn’t drastically reduced as OS become bulkier and take more GBs of your hard disk, do we really need all this marketing gimmick as AMD Phenom II X6 is also on the horizon?
Kenya finally on fiber optics
Years of waiting and it’s finally here, although fiber optics is prevalent in organizations, and towns in Kenya are connected via fiber, it wasn’t the country’s backbone connection infrastructure. The main bottle neck was the outside gateway that was a terrestrial link through a massive radio antennae at Longonot base station inside Rift Valley. Most of Kenya’s bandwidth passes through here and out. Internet usage falls under CCK.
VSAT are allowed to be used by ISPs but are expensive. The Seacom link (1.28Tb/s) is one of three fibre cables to land in Mombasa, the others are EASSy (0.64Tb/s) and TEAMS (0.04Tb/s) project. This will finally bring true broadband speeds and cheaper prices to the country where the internet usage remains low due to high costs for consumers as most people browse at work or in cyber café’s.
Seacom project to increase affordable Internet access in Africa
Seacom link promises new telecoms era
Vista SP2
Process Explorer
Microsoft’s Process Explorer is an advanced Task Manager released for free after it acquired developer Sysinternals whose utilities I have used and written about in Spider.
Just yesterday, my other office system got infected with the latest and most lethal worm out there, and thinking I am The Guru thought would fix it in no time. However, I was bowled out big and bad. It was a like nuke, just devasted the poor dual-core system and sent it to ICU (IT) today to instill new life.
How the heck did I get the damn thing? Well just download Nero 9 throught µTorrent (BT client) and the setup was infected. RapidShare is always the best bet.
Cuil and Xobni
Cuil, a new search engine that wants to compete with Google to include results that Google omits. The interface and the way results are displayed is beautiful, however, the searches are poor.
Xobni (inbox spelt reverse) is a new plug-in for Outlook that makes your experience faster and more efficient. It turns your mail-client to a social network, readily displaying your most frequent contacts, conversations, fast search, analytics and files (attachments).
Still in beta (4249), the application requires .NET Framework 2.0 installed on your system.
Vista SP1
I had been waiting for this release with enthusiasm hoping it would drastically improve the performance of my system, however, it is a disappointment.
The 424MB download the largest service pack for a MS OS takes about 1.5 hours to install in passive mode. Whereby, the OS shuts down (not the system) installs over writing files and adding new in three stages restarting thrice.
Unlike previous service packs whereby the installation runs actively on your desktop and you can play minesweeper or solitaire to pass time. On the other hand, XP SP3 beta took half the time and prompted a restart only upon completion.
The boot time remains the same, copying files from one partition to another is now full speed, one of the promised fixes. Defrag has been improved, it now by default does not defrag all your partitions and lets you choose, the defrag times have also improved.
One of the fixes includes improving network transfer file speeds. The first day I tried took hook my laptop to my XP system via a direct network cable took a hair pulling 3 hours and I could still not create a work group. Vista could see the XP system and not vice versa, the network control panel is complicated, the XP SOHO wizard is gone and what is present is a wireless wizard. Transfer times were pathetic, showing hours for transferring a GB, XP to XP does it minutes.
Surprisingly, Microsoft claims that Vista is the fastest selling OS in history. With more than 100 million licenses sold and growing! Every new system ships with Vista, do you have a choice? Manufacturers don’t provide XP drivers for your system components, as I visited my model page on HP and found out the drivers there were for Vista only. So they know what’s best for us.
You can get a list of improvements here.
Windows XP SP3
I was originally going to post why Vista sucks which has made my Core 2 look like a P II, and was therefore going to install XP SP2. But then considering that Vista Home Premium OEM costs around $200 (or more) and that you’ve paid for it in the purchase price you are better off utilizing the OS to justify that money spent or wait for Vista SP1 to be out in Q2 08.
When Vista launched Q4 last year M$ prompted it won’t support previous Windows versions in order to influence Vista sells, and head the market in that direction. So the much awaited SP3 was officially dead, and users could download individual post-SP2 patches through Windows Update.
However, since Vista is slower and less productive then XP, it looked XP wouldn’t die that easily, and that’s why MS decided to roll-out the abandoned SP3. There are also rumours that Vista is dead and that MS will release a new Windows in 2009, a sad story considering that it took five years after XP’s Oct 2001 debut to launch the new RAM intensive OS with fancy Aero interface, and a dead DX10 support so far. MS later denied the release stating it will as schedule launch Windows 7 in 2011.
User can install SP3 RC2 through WU after downloading and installing the script that will enable their systems to see and install SP3 via WU or download the 315MB executable. However, I believe WGA validation may block pirated copies from downloading the update via WU.
Hopefully, a final version download as a single executable will be made available soon, and that XP CDs with integrated SP3 will hit the market. The overview and new features of SP3 can be found here.
In separate news EU has fined MS $1.3bn in the long standing antitrust lawsuit.
99Celcius 
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