Last night I found out that I won an Aquagate Max from Cooler Master's Summer Pixel Contest.  Sweet.  All I did was click some buttons.  Thanks Cooler Master!

Michael Ogawa has created some interesting videos visualizing the development of some open-source software.  He developed a program called code_swarm using processing.  Check out this and the other videos online.

Microsoft conducted an "experiment" to try to demonstrate that people actually like Vista when they don't know it's Vista.  Just more marketing junk from M$.

And if you didn't know, M$ actually makes people pay to "downgrade" from Vista to XP!  Wow, what other company can pull that off?  Make people pay you even more because your software sucks?  And OEMs and nearly everyone else are going right along with it.

Well, it makes no difference to me because I still have a completely free operating system with completely free software that works better than Microsoft's junk.

Scientists at Harvard have developed some semiconductor laser improvements.  Instead of using complex optics to focus the light from semiconductor lasers, they use "a plasmonic collimator, consisting of an aperture and a periodic pattern of sub-wavelength grooves, directly on the facet of a quantum cascade laser emitting at a wavelength of ten microns, in the invisible part of the spectrum known as the mid-infrared where the atmosphere is transparent."

Yeah, basically they added some small stuff to the surface of the semiconductor that will eventually cut down on the amount of optics needed to use the lasers.  It will probably lead to cheaper disc drives (CD, DVD, BR, etc.), laser printers, barcode readers, and some new devices making use of the lasers in the future.  Cool stuff.

Also, some new information about the Aurora Borealis has been discovered.

And there is a really cool picture from Hubble of very distant galaxies viewed through a gravitational lens.

There are some of the very basic details of the "next generation" GPUs from ATI and NVIDIA posted at techPowerUp!.

It looks like NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 350 is basically a single GPU card with basically twice the theoretical processing power of their current GTX 280.

ATI's RV870 looks like a shrunken version of the RV770 with a little bit more stuff added.  Nothing very interesting, but worth a mention.

In other news, a few new studies have concluded that there used to be lots of water on Mars.

Scientists have developed a new weighing scale for black holes.  Now they can find out exactly how obese the average black holes really are.

So there has been a lot of stuff going on in the world of technology the past week or two.  Here are some of the more interesting things.

Ken Gypen, author of several Linux-related articles on bit-tech, posted a new article about how to build your own router.  It is very interesting and can be useful if you have tons of unused computers around, like I do.  Be sure to check out Ken's other articles (build your own server and Linux has game), if you haven't already.

AMD released their new generation of video cards, the Radeon HD 4000 series.  TechReport has some thorough articles on the 4850 and 4870.  This new series seems like it might break NVIDIA's hold on the GPU market, and so far it has definitely made an impact on the Green Giant's stock.

In case you haven't heard already, Western Digital released a new version of their Raptor series of hard drives, the VelociRaptor.  Easily the fastest single hard drive around, and now with 300 GBs of space.

Also, I'm now using a Phenom X4 9850 BE CPU, 4GB Corsair Dominator 1066 MHz RAM, Biostar's TForce TA780G M2+ HP motherboard, and Seagate's Barracuda 7200.10 750 GB hard drive.  I just installed the new hardware yesterday, so I haven't had a chance to see the improvements yet, but I'll do some tests next week.  I'm definitely liking the 9850 BE/780G combo for sure.

I first posted about TGIMBOEJ a few weeks ago.

Well now I have my first box.  I haven't taken any pictures of the loot yet, but I'll do that soon.  There are some interesting pieces of hardware in the box (codenamed Toronto).  One of these, an ammeter, lots of LEDs, some seven-segment displays, an old AMD/Intel microcontroller, a bunch of random components and some more strange things.  Stay tuned for more details.

Windell, from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, recently posted an article about The Great Internet Migratory Box of Electronics Junk.  You're probably wondering what in the world that is.  Well, the short answer is this: a box of random stuff geeks send to other geeks.  For the comlete answer, you can read the article Windell posted or check out the wiki at TGIMBOEJ.org.

So if you're a geek like me, and you have a bunch of electronics junk you've collected over time, you probably want to see what it's all about.  I've found lots of interesting components looking through old or broken electronics.  The problem is that normally I'll end up with several interesting types of items, but loads of each item.  Then other geeks have the same thing happen.  So I'll have 512 flux capacitors and 84 gold-plated reactuator coils, while fellow geek Bob has 9,374 clickety-alphanumeric-tickers and 42 inducticatorifiers.  Why not exchange some of these items?  That's where TGIMBOEJ comes in.  It's an interesting solution to the problem, and it adds a little more randomness to make it more interesting.  So box up some of your extra electronics junk, mail it to another geek, and let everyone know about it!