Monthly Archives: July 2006

69-ing at zero gravity

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One question from me today to the whole world is why is 69 just the maigc numer? I mean really. Why does a lot of people use 69 in reference to sex more than a count of something. It is just another position number that was given in the Kama Sutra (apparently). Why couldn't 67 be the special number?

And why on earth would people me talking about sex in space within public circles? I can see austranuats joking about it in break rooms or producers/writers throwing the idea around for some crazy space movie or may be porn. As Avenue Q quite frankly put it, the internet is for porn, no matter what other uses it has. Which is very similar to what Coupling covered – everything men ever did was apparently a leap towards getting access to more bottoms.

The article itself does put forward some interesting questions about the role of gravity, not just in sex but in our lives. It's just funny how the sex just overshadowed birth, growth and all of that.

The AMD-ATi question

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Even though I knew that it was happening for about a week, on Monday morning I got bombarded (not literally) by messages about AMD's acquisition of ATi. Some of my friends were curious to know what would happen and if Intel could put an offer out to nVidia. One of the reasons being a article that I read last year (which I conveniently cannot find now). The article stated that a lot of people would be shocked to know that Intel held the majority of the market share for graphics processors. This is only due to the fact that they have an Integrated Graphics Processor (IGP) solution; they weren't even close to the most powerful Graphics Processing Units (GPU) out there.

What is interesting, however, is what AMD plans for the future with this acquisition. There are doubts that the CPU/GPU integration would achieve a higher performance now that the high end graphics cards all run with GDDR3 whereas the processors are still running on DDR2. Not to mention that GDDR4 is just around the curve.

Though, nothing beats nVidia's comment about the acquisition which seemed to me a slap on the face to ATi.

Today's news about the acquisition of ATI by AMD is a positive development for NVIDIA. We are now the only graphics processor and core logic company that supports both Intel and AMD processors.

Must have been a heck of a deal for the GPU king's manufacturer. Of course, the crown keeps changing heads and we know that GeForce 8 series is not that far away.

Microsoft and their fugly skins

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Remember that I said that Windows Vista is pretty? Yes it was. Just like Windows XP was before it became XP from Codename Whistler. I don't get why Microsoft does this always. Granted that it is not as ugly as the every so popular blue Luna (yuk!), but still. Just look at it.

New Windows Vista Basic theme

Look at what the basic used to look like and what it looks like now (via LonghornBlogs.com). Apparently their reason for changing was that there is too much grey. Not to mention that Aero is only available to people with a version beyond Windows Vista Basic and with a good graphics card. I guess they really wanted to move away from the grey as Mac OS X is just so huge on it.

On a better note, however, the new build 5472 is apparently faster and they finally fixed the problems with video playback. Some even say that it works better with the new nVidia drivers and that some games are actually running at reasonable speeds again.