Quick Start
FUN-SIZE NEWS
INTEL SCRAPS 4GHZ PRESCOTT PLANS
Intel says it has scrapped plans to introduce a 4GHz
Pentium 4 using the Prescott core that had been sched-
uled to ship early next year. The chip-
making giant decided to pull the pin on
4GHz in order to shift resources to its
dual-core processors which are due
sometime in 2005. The company says it
still has plans to introduce a P4 Prescott
next year with a super-sized 2MB of
cache across its entire desktop lineup
before dual-core hits the market.PHONES, HARD DRIVES GET
MARRIAGE LICENSE
If you’ve always wanted to defrag your smart phone, you
might get your chance in mid-2005 thanks to the creation
of a common interface specification for teeny, weeny
hard drives. It’s called CE-ATA, and it will govern an all-
new generation of drives designed specifically for use in
portable devices such as PDAs, handheld video players,
palmtops, and smart phones. This new storage specifica-
tion marks a radical shift away from flash memory, which
is both expensive and less capacious compared with
conventional magnetic storage drives. The specification
should be finalized by mid-2005, with products trickling out
shortly thereafter.SONY’S EPIPHANY: PEOPLE LIKE MP3S!
No doubt tipped off by an indus-
try insider, Sony has discovered
an audio compression format
called MP3. Acting quickly
and decisively, the company
announced it will immediately
begin integrating support for the
format into its flash-based digital
audio players (which already
support Sony’s proprietary
ATRAC3 format). This just in:
Sony plans to add MP3 support
to its hard drive-based digital
audio players too!INFINIUM DELAYS CONSOLE: INSERT
“PHANTOM” JOKE HERE
Infinium Labs confirmed that
the company’s Phantom
PC-based game console
and the Phantom Gaming
Service will not launch in
time for the 2004 holiday sea-
son. Instead, the launch has been
pushed to an unspecified date in 2005.
This comes on the heels of a press release announcing
a partnership with publishers and developers including
Vivendi Universal, Eidos, and Atari, who will be providing
content for the on-demand, broadband Phantom Gaming
Service—whenever it arrives.MA XIMUMPC DECEMBER 2004
The Virtual Window Project
“Where do you want to live today?”
H
ave you ever wished you could look out your bedroom window and see
the gentle waves of a languid Hawaiian beach instead of human bodies
floating face down in the East River? If so, check out the Virtual Window
Project at http://www.hoagy.org/virtualwindow. Here Ryan Hoagland has turned a stack of
discarded LCD panels into a pair of windows that look out onto literally any-
where in the world. Now that’s what we call “landscape mode.”Using Visual
Basic to cycle the
pre-cut images,
and Windows
to manage the
arrangement of the
displays, Hoagland
developed his first
proof-of-concept
virtual window.Although the
panels protrude
about one-half
inch from the
wall, Hoagland’s
handmade frames
disguise the edges,
as well as the
cable runs.Kicking back
in front of the
San Francisco
skyline,
Hoagland
begins plans
for Virtual
Windows 2.0,
which will use
the additional
bandwidth of
PCI Express
to display full-
motion video.
Attaboy!Photograph © Andy Rothfusz