T.V Antics

Ahhh, My week doesn't seem complete without a good watch of The apprentice.

This week's episode of the Apprentice wasn't as funny as the last couple of episodes now that Sam and her "bright" ideas are gone but it was still a good watch. I missed the first 15 minutes of the show because I was off fighting malware infections so I missed how they concocted their products. I was actually genuinely glad that Platinum (or is it that other team?) won the task. The concept of buddy is much better than that jug alcomesure thing. Putting buddy on top of the wine to discourage drinking is really nice. It makes sense. Now if they put more facial expression in there like what they did with smilies it could fly off the shelves. But I don't think a non-drinker's opinion counts.

I noticed that the contestants makes an awful lot of small mistakes each week. Considering they're professional with a lot of experience under their belt it shouldn't have happened. Maybe the fact that they're on T.V might have thrown them off a bit or the fact that they have to both work and live together every week might have gotten in to them. Who Knows? Like Ruth for example. She forgot to calculate the VAT rate and it wasn't the first time that happened. But it's understandable. If I was that under that kind of pressure I would've done the same mistake.

I was actually disappointed that Ruth didn't attend the Apprentice: Your Fired after show. I'm sure she had a good reason for not showing up but still. Now, what I really liked was that the host replaced Ruth with a cardboard box cutout. It was hilarious. Maybe that was the inspiration for J.C in our MMP project? I not even sure who came up with that but I really liked it.

My Tree House Project

Since I am an I.T student now, I figured it's about time to build my very first machine(computer). For the past few weeks, I've been researching parts for my build and it was daunting at first but I had to say it was actually pretty enjoying. After all It would be blasphemous for an I.T student not to enjoy reading about computer hardware. Well not "blasphemous" but you have to like that sort of stuff if you want to get anywhere. This would be the family computer that'll do some heavy internet surfing, office stuff and a few gaming weekends. Here is the specs.

GPU = ATI Radeon HD5770 - £120
CPU= AMD Phenom II x4 905e - £130
HDD= 500GB Western Digital Caviar "Green" - £35
MoBO= Asus M4A78T-E motherboard - £99
CASE= Antec 902 case - £88
PSU= 400w Silverpower (Seasonic) PSU 80 plus "Green Power" - £44

And the grand total iiss...£516. Ouch, that's a lot of money considering it's in Pounds and it doesn't include a monitor,the RAM, shipment and stamp duty. I specifically picked these parts to make it as energy efficient as possible without sacrificing too much performance so I will have to pay a little premium for it. I guess it's worth it because it's more green than most regular pre-built PCs and the ESB bill would be a little bit cheaper every month. Additionally, this build is pretty much a medium-high end computer so it will run any software for the next couple of years and I plan to keep it for at least 5-6 years so this would be a worthy investment. I must say out of all the components, choosing the CPU was the hardest. I was split between the 905e and the energy efficient Intel S-series equivalent of it. But in the end I had to go with AMD because Intel's S-series was too expensive and I'm already over budgeted.

I'm really looking forward to building this PC and it should be fun, sorta like the modern version of building a tree house in a vague sense specially if you get your family involved. So I guess that's were the tree house analogy comes in. Well that's it for week 8.

Intel v AMD

I was researching on what CPU to buy the other day when I saw an interesting article about antitrust lawsuits against Intel. Intel was found guilty of monopoly charges by the Japanese government, South Korean Government and the European Commission against it's competitors. Monopoly charges are also being investigated in the U.S.

Okay here's the gist of it. In 2005 the Japanese government accused Intel of anti-competitive practices by giving unfair discounts that discriminates against its main rival AMD. In 2007 Intel Korea was found guilty of granting incentives to computer manufacturers on the condition that they buy less CPUs from AMD and Intel got fined by $25 million. In May 2009 the European Commission found Intel guilty of granting rebates to computer manufacturers like Dell, HP and Acer on the condition that they buy less or don't buy at all from AMD. Intel was also guilty of paying some manufacturers to postpone launch of AMD based computers and laptops. Intel was fined by a record 1.5 billion euros.

It was really shocking to hear that such a reputable and huge company like Intel is doing all of this shady dealings to drive its main competition out of the market. With a quick look at the Wikipedia page of AMD, it is apparent that competition between the two is fierce dating back in the late 80's when Intel broke a deal with AMD in 1985. What really worries me is that AMD's market share has shrunk in the past few years and they are losing a lot of money as a result of this with the worst case scenario of AMD going bankrupt in the future and CPU advancement slowing down because of lack of competition. Well it's not really worrying because I'm sure AMD wouldn't let that happen. I just need something for week 7.