Must resist...

The urge to buy some of that new Apple hardware. Check this photo out from Appleinsider.com The new LED 24" display parked next to a new MacBook Pro. Niiiice. Makes this orig. 20" Cinema Display and Dual 2.7Ghz G5 PPC system I'm typing this on seem.. uh, well, ancient? :-)

Intel's i7 "Nehalem" release event Nov. 17th 2008

With all the bad news about Cali. fires, the tanking economy and such.. here is some good news for us tech-heads, who seem to spend much of our working hours sitting in front of, using, or *waiting* on a computer. It's been on the drawing boards for several years now as many of us that work as suppliers have known. But these are the sorts of things you dont really talk about in your day to day blogging, discussions etc: (nda's and all) if you want to remain gainfully employed :-)

It's also not really a secret that Intel uses software from Synopsys to help design and verify these sorts of ICs.

When will this sucker show up in a Mac Pro Tower system? Jan. @ MacWorld would be my guess? although those machines already have some pretty fast Xeon chips in them.

The guys/gals at ARS technica have the breakdown here:

The Microarchitecture

The Core i7

The making of the i7

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Turbo Boost Technology

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Power Gating Technology.. while not new, it's adding a whole level of complexity to processor design

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5 Year design cycle

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Does a Chinese Pirate say Arrrrgh? or Alllllgh?

Blu-Ray bootlegs.. it was only a matter of time!
As noted in this WSJ story.. pirated Blu-Ray discs are showing up in China.

Law enforcement in Shenzhen, China, raided a warehouse last month that contained HD copies of a number of popular movies. Over 800 discs in fake boxes, and holograms to make them look legit. The Chinese Blu-ray knock-offs run as little as $7 apiece (compared to the typical Blu-ray disc at $30+).

The process involves ripping high-def movies (cracking Blu-ray's AACS and BD+ encryption in the process) and re-encoding them using AVCHD, which offers a 720p picture.


Because of the reduction in resolution, files can be burned to regular DVDs instead of the more costly Blu-ray discs, can you say profit!?.

Interesting, the BD+ encryption scheme has only been out a little more than a year and a half. BD+ is the DRM protocol used to protect Blu-ray discs. It makes use of a small virtual machine environment to enforce compliance. BD+ was considered much harder to crack than the encryption used on HD DVD discs.

Some crafty programmers at work here. Wont bore you with the technical details, but if you're a code/hardware person you'll find the comments in the Slashdot URL thread an interesting read!