quickstart THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALL
14 MA XIMUMPC NOVEMBER 2005
iBOOKS CAUSE iRIOT
A sale of used iBook laptops
for $50 each turned normally
peaceful Apple enthusiasts
into chair-wielding rioters in
Richmond, VA.
The 1,000-plus
attendees of
the iBook blow-
out found themselves
immersed in chaos as people were pushed,
trampled, and even beaten with folding
chairs. Rather than lose her place in line, one
woman peed her pants while another value-
conscious rioter attempted to drive his car
through the crowd.WD INCREASES WARRANTIES
Western Digital has increased the warranty
on all its “enterprise” drives to
five years. The move
mostly affects
the company’s
new Raid Edition
drives, which
previously sported
a three-year warranty.
(WD’s Raptor already has
a five year warranty). The
company has also boosted
the warranty on its Caviar
drives from one to three years. Sadly, all retail
packaged drives still include a miserly one-
year warranty.GOLDEN GO-GO JUICE
A new device developed by physicists in
Singapore produces electricity from urine. The
pee-powered battery is smaller than a credit
card and can produce 1.5 volts from just 0.
milliliters of urine. The current aim for the
device is home-based health test kits, though
hopefully we’ll one day be able to pee into
our laptops and iPods for some extra uptime
on the road.WOW TURNS TO OOPS!
A World of Warcraft enthusiast was bragging
on a local message board about how he was
up playing way, way past his bedtime. The
only problem is, his mom plays WoW too and
saw the posting, landing the MMORPG fanatic
squarely in hot water. ”Pardon me for hijack-
ing the thread, here...,” posted his mom, “but,
if you don’t want your mother to know you
were up and on the computer at 3:29 in the
morning—don’t post on a forum that she
reads. Busted. Grounded.”O
ur headphone cable has been trying to kill us
for years now, wrapping itself—like a deadly
cobra—around our feet while we’re at our PCs, and
then making us trip when we step away. Thanks
to the Cableyoyo, we’re no longer at the mercy
of wily wires. We just wind up any loosey-goosey
cable inside the device, then unwind just the right
amount to attach our headphones. Freedom!
$5, http://www.cableyoyo.comFUNSIZENEWS
In tel AdmitsDual-Core
Was Rushed
An Intel engineer speak-
ing at Stanford University’s
annual Hot Chips conference
shocked attendees with
his candor, admitting the
company’s dual-core CPUs
were pushed out the door too
quickly in order to compete
with offerings from rival AMD.
According to an article
published in Computerworld,
Jonathan Douglas, an engi-
neer with Intel’s Digital
Enterprise Group, said a big
challenge for Intel in devel-
oping the dual-core technol-
ogy was that it had no exper-
tise in designing multi-core
CPUs. Douglas also stated
that Intel simply failed to
design a new memory bus
for its dual-core CPUs, so it
was forced to use the same
bus it was using on the cur-
rent Pentium 4 processors.
Intel’s design requires both
processor cores to share a
front-side bus, which is less
efficient than AMD’s dual
independent bus design.
Even more surprising
is Douglas’ admission that
Intel didn’t begin work
on the dual-core project
until May of 2004, when
it announced it was can-
celing future single-core
designs in order to focus on
dual-core. AMD then sent a
shot across Intel’s bow by
demonstrating its new dual-
core Opteron in September
of that year. “We needed a
competitive response,” said
Douglas. “We were behind,”
he said, without mentioning
AMD by name.
Douglas ended his talk
on a positive note, saying
the upcoming Pressler CPU
will feature two separate
CPU dies in a single pack-
age, though the company
has decided that Pressler
won’t feature dual indepen-
dent buses.Geek Tested and Approved
City-Wide Wi-Fi on the Way
Metropolitan areas move to provide free wireless
Internet for allS
an Francisco made headlines recently when its
mayor announced plans for a city-wide Wi-Fi net-
work that will be “free or very cheap.” The plan for SF
comes at a time when several other cities including
Philadelphia, Portland, Minneapolis, Charleston, and
Orlando are planning similar networks.
The super-size hotspots, spanning more than 135
square miles in the case of Philadelphia, are intended
to bring net access to everyone in the city, regardless of
income. To this end, Dell will reportedly give thousands
of San Francisco’s low-income residents cheap PCs, so
they too will be able to receive spam email, flame strang-
ers on message boards, and surf eBay until the wee
hours of the morning.Finally, no more tripping over that
damned mouse cable!You know
Philadelphia
has cheese
steak, but did
you know it
has free Wi-Fi
too?&