There has been a lot of buzz over the demo of new Tegra platforms recently. Most of the news seems to pit the Tegra against Intel for dominance of the Netbook market. Personally, I have to agree in the most part. Except for the purpose of running Windows applications, a Tegra Netbook would be a better choice than an Atom based system for one simple reason: performance per watt.

For those of you who do not understand the difference, suffice to say that the Tegra is built of a different architecture from the Atom systems. As a result, the Tegra provides a richer multi-media experience than the Atom system and consumes less power while doing it. The reason is very simple. The Tegra integrates graphics capabilities from NVIDIA and a low-power multi-media enhanced ARM based system.

For those of you who have never heard of ARM, they are the microprocessors that power your mobile phones, ipods and various other consumer electronic and multimedia devices.

The super exciting thing about this is that NVidia is able to fit an entire computer platform onto a board that is only slightly larger than your typical USB flash drive. Therefore, it is obvious which market segment is NVidia targeting – the ultra-mobile and integrated devices.

You may ask what kind of software it can run. The answer is that it can run almost everything except Windows software. You see, there has been an ARM port of Linux for ages. In fact, Ubuntu has been working on exactly that – an ARM port of Ubuntu for the purpose of placing it on ARM based Netbooks. Google has also moved the Android platform up from merely powering smart-phones to powering ARM based Netbooks. In fact, Adobe has recently announced that they will be releasing flash support for ARM as well.

So, you can see where this is headed.

Oh, I forgot to mention its performance numbers. The various sites claim that it can playback 1080p video and can run for several days on a single battery charge. Personally, knowing how these things work, the numbers sound right.

I am re-evaluating the possibility of using an Apple-TV for my HTPC. The advantage is that this is a device that was designed to be a HTPC from day one. It has all the right connections and is also low-powered. Furthermore, it turns out that XBMC is supported on the Apple-TV. The Apple-TV can be had for about RM1250 (GBP 216) from certain re-sellers in Malaysia (it is listed at RM1450 at the Apple store).

The only potential disadvantage is the lack of support for full-HD content. All references point to the fact that the Apple-TV is only able to decode HD-ready (720p) content but will upscale it to full-HD (1080p). This is not a serious problem at the moment for all of my available media are mainly SD content. Furthermore, I don’t see this situation changing anytime soon simply because there isn’t that much full-HD content available anyway.

Another difficulty may be with the ability to integrate the Apple-TV onto my home network. If I were to get the Apple-TV, I would be getting the 40GB one, which severely limits the amount of media it can store. So, the Apple-TV would need to stream the data off the network. It has got both wired and wireless network connections. However, it would need the correct software to be running on the network in order to work properly. Firefly doesn’t seem to support streaming videos at the moment.

This may be solved by installing XBMC on the Apple-TV. It is certainly capable of running as a standalone application.

Certainly something to consider. It would be easier to get this than some of the other options.

Streamyx sucks big time. I have a lot of problems accessing my blog from home. For some reason, most of the Internet is fine. I say most because there are a couple of other sites that I am having problems accessing. Unfortunately, these sites are also my favourite sites – such as Stack Overflow.

The trouble is that it is really difficult to report such problems. I had tried reporting it before and goodness knows what actually gets done. You see, my internet speed isn’t compromised. I can still get downloads at the correct speeds. So, it isn’t a question of bandwidth. However, when I try to ping my blog server, the number of packets that get lost is astronomical. I get about a 80%-90% packet loss.

As a result, my connection to the blog server constantly times out or gets rejected. You may think that it might be a problem with my blog server. However, my blog server works fine from elsewhere. That is the only way that I have been able to update my blog recently. I am forced to access it from elsewhere.

I’m not really keen on investigating the source of the problem as it is my ISPs job to do so! Streamyx sucks ass. I will try making another fault report later today and see if any action is taken. Otherwise, I may just consider switching over to another ISP. Packet One has been marketing itself aggressively in recent weeks. I believe that they have a 14 day trial period.

Streamyx sucks!

PS: Their favourite trouble-shooting method is to restart the port. Damn it, that doesn’t solve the problem!

Just found out that there is a new and exciting player in the low-end X86 market, today! NorhTec, a Thai company, has come out with a small netbook powered by 8 AA sized batteries. I checked out their product website and the netbook has a very exciting architecture. The main thing that made it stand out was that the entire PC motherboard + CPU platform consumes barely 1.2W of power. This beats even the numbers from AMD/Intel/VIA. Being the processor geek that I am, I decided to investigate further.

The netbook is based off a Xcore86 System-on-Chip, which contains a 586 class processor, audio, video, network, storage, and I/O all on one chip. From a purely technical perspective, this would actually be a whole PC-on-chip. All you would need to get it to run is to add some memory, monitor, keyboard and mouse. This got me thinking that it would be an excellent candidate for a variety of other PC-based products.

So, investigating further, this Xcore86 is a re-branded Vortex86 System-on-Chip. Again, checking out the information on the website, this chip reminded me of some of the older 386 based SiS System-on-Chips operating in the embedded market. So, doing a little more digging, it turns out that I was right! It is the SiS based system. It was the former SiS division that was sold off to a Taiwanese company. So, these babies are essentially the new and improved SiS chips.

Personally, I think that it is great that the SiS chips are still alive – rise from the dead. They had a very specific niche market segment – embedded x86 applications. However, with the present boom in netbooks, they seem to have found a new market segment. However, I don’t see Intel taking this lying down. The situation with x86 patents is rather murky. They may or may not have the legal right to actually produce x86 processors.

Regardless of the legal issues, you can expect this processor to be slower than the offerings from any other company. However, they should be able to compete on cost – shrinking a whole motherboard of chips into one. Couple that with a sightly older manufacturing process, the prices should be competitive for the low-cost segment. Performance while running Linux should be perfectly fine. I am also running Linux on a similar class machine at home.

All in all, an interesting development. I like this NorhTec company. They have been at the fringe of my radar for quite a while now. They’ve got a bunch of other small-form factor PC products, including a couple that I am interested in.

I finally took the plunge today. I bought myself a 1080p capable HDTV. It was the model that I had been eyeing for a while – the 32LG53FR. This model has a RRP of about RM2,300 but most outlets have sold it for just under RM2,000 – making it the cheapest 1080p HDTV in the market. I had been waiting for the price to drop a little more before making the purchase.

I went shopping today and I checked out the recent prices. Carrefour was doing it for RM1,900. I then went to Harvey Norman who told me that they were all sold out and that the line had be discontinued. There weren’t any new units coming in. So, I went to Best, who were selling it at RM1,850. I got them to lower the price a little and settled at just under RM1,800. That was the price-point I was happy with.

So, I am now happily watching a DVD on my new HDTV.

Now, the next thing to do would be to buy myself a suitable HTPC platform. I had already tried out XBMC the other day and it seems to work okay. Obviously, it was slick as well. However, getting a suitable HTPC platform has not been as easy. I would preferably like to purchase it from a store that accepts credit card purchases without a surcharge. Not many of those around in Malaysia!

Intel is at it again. They are going to copy another thing from AMD and make the Atom more accessible to both hardware vendors and consumers. They are planning to combine the graphics core, memory controller and the Atom core into one. That is just a splendid idea.

AMD has had the same feature with their Geode processor for a long time. Incidentally, the Geode processor is also AMD’s offering at the low-power and low-performance end of the spectrum. It is usually used in embedded applications. Technically, NS did most of the work as AMD bought the entire Geode line off them.

Regardless, it is nice to know that Intel is going to do something to get rid of the 945GC chip once and for all. It must know that there is no point in pairing up a 2W CPU with a 25W north-bridge chip. Marketing can glaze over this fact but the numbers will speak for themselves.

Here is me hoping that Intel will combine it with some decent graphics chip. Then, the platform would make for a very snazzy media machine – great on performance and low on power consumption. Man, with this kind of developments in the industry, I wonder if I’ll ever get my HTPC built!

I should really just stick to the Sempron + NVidia system and wait 3 years before upgrading it to some other platform.

I attended the scholarship forum organised by DAP yesterday, mainly because I am personally interested in education matters and also because I was curious as to what kind of things does DAP have to say about it. They managed to present some data and I actually thought that things weren’t as bad as it may seem.

You see, if we consider only the top 2% of our students as the creme de la creme, that’s about 10,000 people coming out each year. JPA only gives out 2,000 scholarships and that is spread across multiple disciplines and countries. Obviously, many people will just fall through the net. There just isn’t the budget necessary to fund everyone. Personally, I think that we should all be thankful that our government actually bothers to fund anyone at all. There are not many governments that do that.

The DAP worked out the number of places available for non-bumi to be about 1080 places. To me, that is a fair number. Things have changed a lot. In my days, we were competing for double-digit spaces. The trouble is that these places are spread over a wide number of courses and countries. If everyone wants to study medicine in the UK, there aren’t enough places obviously.

An MP mentioned that the interview process was flawed. Students were interviewed in large groups and hardly given any time to speak. I went through those in my day as well. There is nothing wrong with group interviews. It is all about group dynamics. You just need to understand how to make yourself stand out in the ‘right’ way. If you are quietly sitting at the corner waiting for your turn to talk, obviously, you are not going to get anywhere with the interviewer.

Another MP mentioned that considering someone with 12A1 as equal to a 9A1 is not right while considering someone with 12A1 and 1A2 as worse than a 9A1 is wrong. Personally, I beg to differ. I think that having a 9A1 criteria as a clear cut-off point is good. That is a perfectly quantifiable criterion. Considering someone with 1A2 as less than perfect, is also fair to eliminate those who take more subjects as a lottery to simply increase their number of As. You may not agree with the fact that 12A1 + 1A2 is worse than 9A1, but that is a crystal clear criterion. At least it isn’t subjective.

Of course, there was a fair bit of politicking at the event. However, I turned off most of that by merely closing my eyes and taking a break. The speakers spoke for about 2 hours. So, my attention span was dwindling anyway. Luckily, those which had anything to say, got to say it first.

I found it particularly interesting that a politician can make his ‘last point’ extremely lasting.

I had just read a response to my comment on the Education Malaysia blog. In it, the author claimed that I was “out of sync”. So, this got me thinking if I am truly out-of-sync with our education issues. Granted, I have left school for more than a decade and I do not have any school going children. However, the issue of Chinese schools being better than National schools have been ongoing since before I went to school. So, while the players may have changed, the arguments have not changed much.

Sigh. Ad nauseum

The reason that I had pointed out John Lee’s statement is because I doubt that either Kian Ming or Tony Pua would have made sweeping statements like he did without the numbers to back them up. In fact, that is all I was asking for – the necessary facts to back up his statement. As evident in some of my previous posts, I’m biased because I personally think that all vernacular schools in Malaysia should be shut down.

But the question here is whether or not I am in-sync or out-of-sync.

Anyone who reads Coltz’s reply to my statement can immediately see that he does not have any numbers to back up his statement either. He has to infer that that Chinese schools are better from a bunch of disconnected ‘facts’. Or are they? Correlation does not imply causation.

Firstly, he pointed out crime rates in schools. While I am not sure if the police actually publish statistics down to that level of granularity, I do have a simple answer to his assertion. There are more delinquents in national schools simply because the national school delinquents still bother to go to school. The Chinese school delinquents would have dropped out of school by then and are busy peddling VCDs in the market or earning some other form of work. That takes care of your bottom 30%.

Secondly, he posited that based on the National Math Olympiad results, there are a disproportionate number of top Chinese schools as opposed to National schools. So, I just quickly browsed through the list and this got me wondering, where were all the top National schools. Then, I suddenly recalled something from my past. My school never joined any National Math Olympiad. Instead, we joine the International Math Olympiad. I did okay enough. Granted, I do not know if this was still the practice today, but it is a possibility.

Thirdly, his assertion that Chinese schools have the ability to fire incompetent teachers, which may result in better teachers. Well, I would like to point out the fact that many of the Chinese schools do not even have teachers whom were qualified to be trained as teachers in the first place. Many of them enter teaching by first becoming a volunteer/substitute teacher at schools and then use that experience to then have the schools forward them for teacher training before being assigned as permanent teachers. This does not happen in national schools, which largely get teachers straight out of teacher training colleges. However, which is better is open to debate.

So, I’m not quite sure if I am in-sync or out-of-sync. Personally, I would like to think that my personal background does give me some insight into the system that I would otherwise not have.

Well, you’ve probably heard of the D-DoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. It is a cyber attack where a number of computers are used to attack a single machine by overwhelming it with requests so that it is unable to service legitimate requests. It is the easiest way to take down any single web site.

Now, the Swedish pirates behind The Pirate Bay (TPB) have come up with the money equivalent. In case you have not been following the spec-trial recently, this is a quick summary. Swedish law has maintained that there was nothing illegal with downloading content, just illegal in distributing it. TPB is a BitTorrent site that doesn’t host any files but provides links to where you can download them.

So, they were recently sued and found guilty. As part of their punishment, they were fined heavily. So, in order to pay their fine, the TPB have come up with an ingenious system of doing it. They have dubbed it the Distributed Denial of Dollars (D-Do$) attack. It basically works this way.

They are encouraging everyone to help them pay their fine by donating a small (1 SEK) amount to a specific account. This account is owned by the law firm that prosecuted them. They intend to pay their fine via the law firm. The catch is that this account has a small (2 SEK) processing fee connected to it. So, the law firm would have to fork out money in order to receive money!

Of course, the legality of the whole thing is in question. IANAL. So, I’m not sure if the law firm is obliged to accept the funds. If they don’t this D-Do$ attack wouldn’t work. But if they are legally bound to accept the funds – goodness – they would have to fork out more than they received!

Hence, this is just so typical TPB.

Guess what arrived in my mailbox today – Jaunty Jackalope! I had pre-ordered it before it was officially released. It is extremely good for them to have hardly a fortnight for it to get to me. I am quite excited about playing around with it. However, I will hold-off actually tinkering around with it for a while – at least until the weekend!

There are a bunch of things that I am looking forward to. A friend of mine mentioned the other day that operating systems were no longer exciting. I beg to differ. Linux is still very exciting, even on a non-geek level. In Jaunty, I am dying to try out the new digiKam and Amarok. These are the best media management apps, IMHO. They have plenty of advanced features.

Jaunty spouts many under-the-hood improvements. For a long time, Ubuntu has been suffering from performance degradation. The developers have been working hard and they are now able to boast a significant speed increase. I have been suffering for a few months because of this degradation too. I hope to be able to run fast again!

Unfortunately, there are some known issues with using the open source ATi graphics drivers. So, I may have to resort to using the proprietary drivers from ATi themselves until this issue gets sorted out, which it will. The open source drivers are improving by leaps and bounds ever since ATi released its hardware documentation.

There are of course, a whole lot of other minor usability and speed improvements. It has been branded – “Speed, Beauty and Innovation”. I sure hope so!