By George Ou on
6/26/2008 10:18 PM
 Finally I've found the one headset I've been looking for that can serve as a PC headset and a handset/mobile phone headset. I was pleasantly surprised by the Plantronics MX500i 3-in-1 VoIP Headset. I figure at an MSRP retail price of $60, it had to be good but it was even better than I though. You can actually get it for $38 including shipping.
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By George Ou on
6/21/2008 11:11 AM
I bought an Optiquest Q241WB 24" LCD display after seeing how brilliant the display looked in the store at Fry's Electronics. It was obviously the only 8-bit per color LCD panel on display in the computer monitor section and it looked awesome and it was on sale for a mere $350 with a $50 rebate. I picked one up even though it was an open-box model since there were no notes warning about dead pixels and I could always return it if I didn't like it.
Well as it turns out, there were no dead pixels but all the pixels could have been dead as far as I was concerned. To my surprise, the display was NOT the same panel technology being displayed on the show floor at Fry's. This was not the brilliant 8-bit PVA LCD panel being shown but it was a typical ugly 6-bit TN LCD panel yet it came with the same model number. This is a very deceptive pract ...
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By George Ou on
6/18/2008 8:18 PM
The NVIDIA 7150 integrated graphics motherboard and chipset is giving me more problems. This is the XFX nForce 630i model MG-630i-7159 motherboard I'm testing which has a lot of potential when I overclocked an Intel Allendale to 2.93 GHz effortlessly.
I really want to love this motherboard and chipset for all its potential at an affordable price, but I still can't get S3 sleep state working and the system locks up after I wake it up and log in. I still can't get a good answer from NVIDIA nor have I heard from XFX regarding the problem. I don't know if it's the motherboard implementation or NVIDIA drivers.
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By George Ou on
6/16/2008 7:08 PM
It's been nearly 3 months since I departed ZDNet. I'd like to thank everyone who has helped me after getting laid off at ZDNet.com regardless of whether it led to anything or not. I'm not mentioning any names but you know who you are and I want you to know how much I appreciate your help. It's been a rough two and a half months and my friends and colleagues have made all the difference in the world.
This week, I'm proud to announce that I've officially joined Washington DC based Think Tank ITIF.org (The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation
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By George Ou on
6/14/2008 6:54 AM
Thursday morning I sat on a panel at the Innovation 08 Net Neutrality event at Santa Clara University. This came right at the heals of my Brussels trip where I gave a presentation on Net Neutrality to the some members of European Parliament and various industry folks. The jet lag wasn't so bad but the bigger problem for me was missing my 6 year old daughter's first big singing solo at her school which had to be at the same time as my panel. I spent a lot of time training her so it was certainly a big disappointment for me. The jet lag certainly did have a lot to do with why this blog wasn't posted earlier yesterday.
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By George Ou on
6/14/2008 5:37 AM
Last Sunday I had a hell of a time getting my Lingo VoIP phone service to work properly. Certain phone numbers I was calling wouldn't transmit audio while I could hear sounds coming in. I had this problem before and it went away after I toggled the codec settings from G.729 to G.711 and rebooted the ATA (Analog Telephony Adapter) that came from Lingo which doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the stability of the "solution". This time no amount of toggling or reboots of the ATA or my home router which sits in front of the ATA would work.
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By George Ou on
6/8/2008 1:55 PM
Just getting reading to make a long journey to Brussels to meet European Parliament regarding Network Management and Net Neutrality for a panel discussion on the morning of June 11th.
Then on Thursday morning on June 12th, I'll be attending a panel hosted by MAP at de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University at 10:00 AM Pacific. Richard Bennett has more details here.
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By George Ou on
6/6/2008 9:44 AM
The Intel Atom on 945 chipset motherboards have arrived (thanks to my friend Max for the tip) and they're quite affordable! $77 with shipping in stock here. This should make an awesome embedded device or home server since the power consumption is so incredibly low.
This is a 4W TDP 45nm CPU that averages under a watt idle. The only thing that disappoints me is the big honking heat sink and fan on the GPU/chipset while the CPU takes a ti ...
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By George Ou on
6/6/2008 7:21 AM
I'm just building a new PC with using an Intel E2200 "Allendale" Core 2 2.2 GHz processor on an XFX nForce 630i model MG-630i-7159 motherboard. This is a very similar configuration to my $400 computer build list. Just for the heck of it I changed the FSB from 800 MHz to 1064 MHz using stock voltage and the next thing I know I'm running at 2.93 GHz.
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By George Ou on
6/5/2008 10:37 PM
In my last article on "Why BitTorrent causes so much latency and how to fix it", I talked a little about packet sizes and some people asked me what the optimum packet size for maximum throughput is on a DSL broadband connection.
In this article I'm going to show you how to optimize your DSL broadband connection in Windows by optimizing the MTU size to work for a Jumbo Frame capable Local Area Network and a DSL PPPoE broadband connection.
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By George Ou on
5/31/2008 4:54 PM
Anyone VoIP or online gamer who has a roommate or a family member who uses BitTorrent (or any P2P application) knows what a nightmare it is when BitTorrent is in use. The ping (round trip latency) goes through the roof and it stays there making VoIP packets drop out and game play impossible. I've personally experienced this and many of my friends have experienced it.
Now I've done a detailed study of how BitTorrent has significantly more impact on latency than other applications operating at the same throughput. I also explore potential ways to fix the problem.
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By George Ou on
5/28/2008 1:08 AM
My former blogging partner at ZDNet Zero-Day Nate McFeters asked me to come up with a power house gaming system that doesn't needlessly spend money on components that merely give slightly better performance. I figured a lot of people would be interested in this sort of system so I came up with the following computer build list. You won't really get much better performance with a system costing two or three times more money.
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By George Ou on
5/26/2008 5:00 PM
Fry's electronics has a one day sale for Memorial day where they offer an ECS NVIDIA 7150 based motherboard and Intel E7200 2.53 GHz 45nm dual-core processor for $130. This will allow you to build a great computer for $379 which is even lower cost than my previous budget built list.
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By George Ou on
5/23/2008 12:23 AM
AMD just released a "new" low-power 1.8 GHz quad-core model X4 9100e and dubbed it "the world's first 65W desktop processor". But you may be getting more than what you bargained for and AMD took some dubious and buggy shortcuts to make this power envelop possible.
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By George Ou on
5/20/2008 4:48 PM
I never liked the design of the original OLPC XO laptop, but the design of the XO-2 looks fantastic and very futuristic. It looks like two oversized iPhones connected in a clamshell design and it's using a soft touch-screen keyboard. It can be used in vertical book mode or in laptop mode with a virtual keyboard.
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By George Ou on
5/20/2008 1:40 AM
My former colleague Adrian Kingsley-Hughes pondered whether it was feasible to rip (to digitally archive) his entire DVD collection in to a computer. Adrian estimates that he has at least 600 DVDs and that each would take 30 minutes to rip which works out to 12.5 days of non-stop ripping. So I popped Adrian an instant message telling him that it's actually nowhere near as bad and that it could be done 6 DVDs at a time and each batch would probably take no more than 15 minutes which works out to 25 hours of solid ripping time.
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By George Ou on
5/19/2008 7:37 PM
The whole Comcast issue is being kicked around in the press in recent days because the Max Planck Institute released a study showing the rates of TCP resets happening throughout the world. But this whole issue is being mischaracterized as the "blocking" of BitTorrent and it's being portrayed as a free speech issue when it is nothing of a sort. Richard Bennett explained why this shouldn’t be considered blocking and Andrew Orlowski wrote a pretty good editorial raising the concern that this is trivializing real free spe
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By George Ou on
5/17/2008 3:53 AM
Here's a video clip showing Windows XP on the OLPC XO.
To get Windows XP on the OLPC XO, an additional SD flash card slot had to be added to supply enough storage for Windows. A fully functional version of Microsoft Office is also included and I'm sure that is a huge incentive for buyers of these notebooks to choose Windows.
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By George Ou on
5/16/2008 4:31 PM
My former colleagues Larry Dignan and Christopher Dawson have voiced their concerns about the OLPC foundation's decision to offer a choice between Windows XP or Linux plus Sugar interface on the XO laptop. Both of them point out that it will be Governments and purchasing agencies that will most likely make the decision to go with Windows XP and that children won't have a say in the decision when may instead pick the Linux plus Sugar interface.
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By George Ou on
5/15/2008 7:00 AM
One day after the Debian Linux project announced a massive flaw where its implementation of OpenSSL key generators only used 15 bits of entropy (32,768 combinations), HD Moore (creator of Metasploit) has released a tool to exploit it. Nate McFeters has a good write up here on this matter.
This means that any asymmetric crypto keys generated between September 2006 and 5/13/2008 a
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By George Ou on
5/10/2008 11:39 PM
The dirty little secret in information security is that anyone or company using FTP to transfer files is probably violating every security compliance requirement under the sun and most companies are guilty of it. The authentication and payload transmission system in the FTP protocol is completely unencrypted and in the clear. If those authentication credentials are shared by other access controls in the organization, then a lot more than the FTP server is at stake and a sniffed FTP password can lead to a much larger security compromise.
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By George Ou on
5/10/2008 8:03 PM
It looks like Microsoft's warning that you can't uninstall IE7 after you install Windows XP SP3 may apply conversely as well. If you do a fresh install of Windows XP SP3, the IE7 installer will fail. I'm still trying to see if I can force an IE7 install right now.
Update 9:25PM - Finally got IE7 installed. The first botched installation left some instructions on the desktop to reset some permission on some file and I cut-paste it in to the CMD console. Then I downloaded the installer manually and installed it but it still gave me a failure notice and to reboot. After I rebooted, it appears that IE7 did get installed. Weird.
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By George Ou on
5/10/2008 4:57 PM
I'm trying to do a fresh install of Microsoft Windows XP and I thought it would be great to upgrade it directly to Windows XP SP3. So I download the network-install version of Windows XP3 (filename WindowsXP-KB936929-SP3-x86-ENU.exe) and start installing it and get the disapointing news. It appears that Windows XP Sp3 will not install on any machine that doesn't at least have SP1 installed.
I guess I'll have to see if it's possible to slipstream it in to Windows XP using nLite.
Update 7:00PM - nLite worked well and got the slipstreamed installer working. I did have some Read More »
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By George Ou on
5/10/2008 2:02 AM
I did another guest appearance on Computer America last night with Carey Holzman last night who I met two years ago at DEFCON. Carey's a great guy who does solo shows on Friday nights and I've probably been on the show with him half a dozen times or more. You can hear the podcast here in their archives from the second hour of May 9th 2008.
Here we are pictured below at
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By George Ou on
5/9/2008 4:39 AM
Congressman John Conyers and Zoe Lofgren have reintroduced a Net Neutrality Bill that prohibits charges for "prioritization or enhanced quality of service" in the name of stopping discrimination. Unfortunately, it stops a lot more than discrimination; it flat out bans tiered pricing for different levels of QoS (Quality of Service) which cripples the Internet under the justification of banning "discrimination". Here's the text of the bill from the first time this bill was introduced that Richard Bennett dug up.
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