Not long after AMD claimed the title of the “world’s best processors”, four days to be exact, Intel is fighting back with all the Moore’s Law and Israeli-scientists it’s got, and today it launched the fastest quad-core consumer processor on the market, the Core 2 Extreme processor QX6800.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Apr. 9, 2007 – Intel Corporation today advanced its enthusiast-level quad-core processor family with the introduction of the Intel® Core™ 2 Extreme processor QX6800, the company’s twelfth quad-core processor offering. Running at 2.93 GHz — the fastest native clock speed yet reached with the Intel® Core™ microarchitecture for the quad-core desktop — this addition to Intel’s innovative processor family sets new standards for desktop PC performance. The Intel Core 2 Extreme processor QX6800 is ideal for those gamers, digital design professionals and enthusiasts who crave the highest performing computers they can get their hands on.

The Intel Core 2 Extreme processor QX6800 is produced on Intel’s industry-leading 65 nanometer process, key to enabling the large 8 megabyte cache. A 1066 MHz system bus is supported and the processor is available now at a cost of $1,199.

Of course, I don’t have one of these precious babies for testing to tell you exactly how awesome they are *cough*, so I’ll just have to base my analysis on this carefully crafted PR release. It’s this <--------------------> awesome!

One of the key benefits Intel describes as a result of increased performance is “better gameplay with more intelligent computer-generated opponents”. But I’ve always played computer games because I can actually win, and laugh at the stupidity of artificial intelligence. Does that mean I should stick to my slower AMD Athlon for dumber AI? The Intel spokesperson did not wish to comment.

A local bank has also informed me they will be be launching their new “Core 2 Extreme” loan alongside their “Playstation 3” loan to accommodate the modern day geek. An anonymous bank staff tells me they’re appalled at the price of the Wii and AMD processors for undercutting profitability.

Hallucination is generally a very bad thing, especially when small mystical creatures are involved. But Microsoft Research has published a paper today that makes hallucination a lot more interesting, and a lot more useful. It’s a set of algorithms, tools and magic when combined, allows users to ‘hallucinate’ high-dynamic range in low-dynamic range photographs. What they can do will blow every HDR photographer away, which is becoming the fad of the decade.

The researchers Lvdi Wang; Li-Yi Wei; Kun Zhou; Baining Guo; Heung-Yeung Shum describes in the “High Dynamic Range Image Hallucination” paper,

We introduce high dynamic range image hallucination for adding high dynamic range details to the over-exposed and under-exposed regions of a low dynamic range image. Our method is based on a simple assumption: there exist high quality patches in the image with similar textures as the regions that are over or under exposed. Hence, we can add high dynamic range details to a region by simply transferring texture details from another patch that may be under different illumination levels.

What they can do is simply amazing. Check out this demo video! I promise you won’t be disappointed.

If you don’t want to watch the video, then have a look at these screen captures (which are featured in the video).

Texture sample (left). Original image (middle). Original image with ‘Hallucination’ processing (right).

Original image (left). Original image under-exposed (middle). Original image under-exposed with ‘Hallucination’ processing (right).

Original image (left). Original image under-exposed (middle). Original image under-exposed with ‘Hallucination’ processing (right).

Original image (left). Original image under-exposed (middle). Original image under-exposed with ‘Hallucination’ processing (right).

It’s so simple that anyone could add HDR to LDR photographs, just even two brush stroke can recreate the effect what normally takes time and effort to take bracketed photographs, then post-processing in Photoshop or other HDR editing tools. I can’t wait to see any commercial applications taking up their research and embedding it into image editing tools.

Oh, and did I tell you they can do this for video? 😉

So I was looking at some canned food today, being very health conscious and all, and I came across this interesting food label. This was obviously an international product that was packaged for 2 counties, United States and Australia. One would generally assume the same product in two countries remain equally nutritious right? Wrong!

You could suggest the values are rounded up, but how do you explain the extra milligram of sodium? 😮

I also love it how for the US, it’s “nutrition facts“, whereas it’s only “nutrition information” for Australia. The difference? Facts as “well tested information that are intersubjectively evaluated and can be proven true or false.” (UTA) Obviously not well tested enough.

These are f******* amazing. Microsoft Studios needs to spin off a short-movie company! These come from a new Microsoft campaign promoting Office 2007, “It’s a new day. It’s a new Office.” Microsoft should so put these ads in cinemas or wherever you could run long-format ads! It’s funny and it makes you ponder. It brings a fresh new perspective on a boring application suite.

The quest

Mesmerized

The divider

The stranger

Nightmare

Backed by popular demand, here are two special edition print-quality “I want you” posters for the next versions of Office and Windows that Microsoft aren’t willing to talk about. Dedicated to Steve Sinofsky – godfather of NDAs.

P.S. Happy easter everybody. Stay safe on the roads/plane/super-yacht, whatever you preferred method of transportation is.
P.S.S. The first person to print a copy, post it outside Sinofsky’s office and take a picture gets massive brownie points! 😀

In another week of Paul says, Mr. Thurrott claims on his WinInfo Short Takes article now Microsoft has no plans to ever ship Windows XP Service Pack 3. I’m not going to dispute whether he’s right on wrong, but who the hell cares?

What is a service pack? And why is it the holy grail of computing all of a sudden? Microsoft says,

“Microsoft continually works to improve its software. As part of this effort, we develop updates and fixes to recognized issues and release them for customers. On a regular basis, we combine many of these fixes into a single package and make the package available for installation. These packages are called Service Packs.”

Great, so a service pack is like a collection of hundred of patches rolled up into one neat executable. History has proven us that’s exactly what it is with one exception, Windows XP Service Pack 2, which included enhancements to the operating system beyond what was available in patches. That was done only because it made sense to include such a big modification to the operating system in a package you’d expect to make big modifications sooner than later. To make sense of what I just said, you wouldn’t deliver a silent patch over Windows Update, and users the next morning would discover their whole operating system has changed, would you? Don’t get smart.

We shouldn’t expect anything like that to ever come again. With the increasing popularity of the intertubes and use of Windows Update, we’re getting patches in real-time, as soon as they’re available. A service pack on the other hand would seem out-of-date. A service pack would only make sense as a long-term solution to update retail copies to include major security fixes.

The only difference service packs has is the inclusion of some hotfixes which target specific issues that aren’t applicable to the majority. For example, a Toshiba optical bay may not be recognized when you swap it. Issues like these are common, fixes are available either by request from Microsoft, or the particular OEM will distribute it themselves. A service pack would come in handy for users affected by these problems, but if they’re suffering from problems, they would have called support and got the fixes anyway.

I really don’t know why anyone thinks they need Windows XP Service Pack 3, or thinks Windows Vista isn’t worth using until Service Pack 1. If you want SP3 or SP1, turn on Windows Update, and visit your OEM’s website often. Windows XP was still a usable operating system before SP2, it only got better. Windows Vista will without a doubt, continually get better too, but it doesn’t mean it’s not approachable right now.

Update: From reading some of the great comments on this article, I have this to say… I don’t speak for an IT manager, or any group of client users even, I just speak for myself. I’m just a little disturbed by the public’s attitude to service packs and whatever benefits they think it will bring to the platform. Obviously I worded my post a little heavy, but I didn’t mean to tell anyone what they should or should not think, but only to describe what I thought and why I thought.