There will be no sixth season of Stargate Atlantis. The powers that be at Sci-Fi have decided to cancel it. They have already green lit a 2 hour movie, so it looks like it will follow SG1 in that direction. This doesn’t mean Stargate is going away though. There’s been buzz about another Stargate series in the works since SG1 got cancelled, well that series is going to air on Sci-Fi starting next summer after a 2 hour pilot episode sometime this winter/spring. The new show is called Stargate Universe.

Now this doesn’t exactly surprise me, with the Stargate Worlds MMO coming out I knew something would be happening. I’m a little surprised that they canceled Atlantis, but I think they were worried about taking audience from Universe. The concept behind Universe follows a new Stargate team, one that finds themselves on an unmanned ancient ship called the Destiny. This one is said to be focused on space action and I’m sure we’ll see all new bad guys. Brad Wright and Robert Cooper and producing and writing the show, so we can expect a similar tone to SG1 and Atlantis.

In some ways this sounds a bit like season one of Atlantis, our band of explorers is trapped, unable to return to earth. Now I understand why they did that with Atlantis, if they made it too easy to travel back and forth you end up with all kinds of questions and an expectation to see SG1 around more often. Even with the gate bridge there’s still a time factor. I’m hoping they use this trapped dynamic better than they did on Atlantis and that it sticks around. That’d be excellent from a story stand point, but how does it play out from a marketing perspective?

With Stargate Worlds coming out they’ve got some golden opportunities for some great promotions. If you can interact with the characters from the currently running television show then you’ve got a great way to pull more players in.  On the other hand you’ve also got something very unwieldy. You start sharing a universe across both mediums and you start having to worry about continuity. Frankly there are enough continuity issues in Stargate as it is. By cancelling Atlantis and starting a more isolated series they get two things. First of all they get a chance to change up the status quo with Stargates television prescence. Secondly you actually get to have more interaction with characters from SG1 and Stargate Atlantis.

I’ll be sad to see Atlantis go, but there were at least a couple of regular cast members planning on leaving at the end of the season anyway, we may actually see them stay around for the occasional TV or straight to DVD movie. This also means I can finally buy Stargate Atlantis on DVD when they release the entire series box set.  I have faith in Wright and Cooper, so far they haven’t steered the franchise wrong in my eyes. Let’s hope they can keep up the run with Universe.

The netbook market has been booming lately, everyone wants in. Lenovo and Dell are just the latest entries. I’ve had my 2133 for a while now and while I love it, I’m starting to think its screen is a bit small. I love how sturdy it is, I love the speakers and I love the large high speed HD and I really am happy with it. The thing is I don’t need this to be quite as portable or have quite as much battery life as I originally thought. I don’t travel all that much and I don’t just take this thing with very often. With my daughters when I go someplace there is no time for computing. Around the house though I use it more than my big laptop.

So now I’m thinking two things. Number one, do I need a netbook or would a basic no frills notebook be better? Number two, do I want a netbook with a bigger screen (although lower res)? I mean I should have no problem selling my 2133 for $500 which should be more than enough to get me one of the newer netbooks or a no frills laptop.

First off let’s take a look at no frills notebooks. This is definitely a more pricey solution it pushes the $500 mark pretty far. I end up with a 15.4″ laptop, Celeron under the hood with about the same amount of memory, HD space and around the same amount of battery life (probably a little less on the notebook) as a netbook. So more power and a bigger screen. Those are definitely bonuses. But I lose a lot of the ease of use. I mean 15″ is the same size as what I have now, not very easy to just whip out and play with (that’s right, I like to whip out my 15 inch “laptop” and play with it). I mean doesn’t that kind of defeat the purpose? As much as I like the idea of faster and more powerful, I just don’t think I can go bigger than 12 inches for a laptop like this. 12″ laptops start at around $700 to $750, that puts it out of my price range.  So that leaves me with other netbooks.

As I said at the start of this article there are a lot of netbooks either on the market or coming to the market.  The ones that most interest me are the 2133 (which I already have) the Acer Aspire One and the upcoming Lenovo S10 and Dell Mini. One of the things I want is a bigger screen. Well the Aspire One and Mini have the same size screen as my 2133. On top of that the Mini has no function keys. Keyboard is important to me on this kind of laptop. The Aspire One is very similar in size to the 2133, however it doesn’t nearly the speakers or resolution as the 2133. Compound that with a smaller battery and there’s really no reason for me to consider the Aspire One. So now I’m down to the Lenovo S10.

The Lenovo S10 is slated to release in early October. It’s a 10.2 inch netbook, similar in size to both the Aspire One and the 2133.  The S10 is a little deeper to acomadate the larger screen, but that difference is less than an inch. Weight wise they all come in about the same. While S10 has a larger screen it’s only 1024 x 600, quite a drop 1280 x 800 on the mini-note. The S10 also has less memory (ships with 512 meg and maxes out at 1.5 gig, my 2133 has 2 gig) and a smaller slower drive (80 gig 5400 rpm compared to a 120 gig 7200 rpm in the 2133). The upside is the S10 has the Atom. The problem is the Atom digs into battery life and the Lenovo only has a 3 cell battery. There is a reason the 2133 model I have is more expensive than the newer netbooks. In fact the 2133 I have is about as expensive as netbooks get. So can I give those things up?

This is a very tough call. I mean I can easily put an extra gig of memory in the S10 which really gets rid of that complaint. I love the battery life on my 2133, but I’m seldom very far from an outlet for any length of time. I think I can live with that. I have about 80 gigs of stuff on my 2133 right now (all my music mostly), so I’m definitely going to feel the decreased HD space. Still the Atom processor will make up for some of that performance drop from the drive speed.

In the end I think the Lenovo is a pretty good trade off. If I wait a little longer I could go with the Linux version of the S10 (assuming it comes with the larger drive and not just the 4 gig SSD) then put XP pro on there. That would save me enough money to bump up my memory. I think in the end the Lenovo is a better device for me. What do you guys think? Also while you’re at it, is anyone actually reading these blog posts? I mean we’ve never really blogged on Max Geek, we’ve always just been about the podcast, I’m interested in some feedback. Not that I’ll stop blogging, but I like to know what people think.

I resisted the urge to cuss in the title of this post, I don’t think I’ll resist that urge in the rest of the post, you’ve been warned. You see, Fox is seeking an injunction against Warner to stop the release of Watchmen. According a recent ruling Fox MIGHT not have given away all their rights to Watchmen in 1991, they MAY still have distribution rights. Then Fox had this to say.

 Via Comicbook Resources “Of course we are concerned about the fans; however, any disappointment from the core fans should not be directed toward Fox. What we are doing is seeking to enforce our distribution rights to ‘Watchmen.’ Legal copyright ownership should not just be swept under the rug and ignored.”

This is stupid and childish. “Don’t blame us they did it.” Good PR there Fox. Fox seems to not understand how little the average person cares about their fucking distribution rights. Of course Fox doesn’t care about the average person, they care about the bottom line, which they always assume has nothing to do with the average person.

We’ll see how this plays out, I’m guessing we’ll at least see a delay in the release. Which is really shitty.

OK all you relics of computing like me, reach way back into your memory and think of those Turbo buttons on the front of your 486 computers. Remember those? Well Intel i7’s won’t actually have those, but all the processors in the i7 family will have a turbo mode.

So we all know most computer apps don’t use 4 PC cores right? Well all of the i7 chips are quad cores. But what happens when two of those cores are just sitting there picking their nose? Well intel said “Hey, why don’t we take most of the power they would be using if they weren’t slackers and give it to the remaining cores?”. Thus we get turbo mode, the processor uses the same amount of power but when some cores are off it gets to boost the other cores. Actually this is some pretty excellent technology.

Things like this are why Intel now kicks AMD’s ass most of the time. AMD had to abandon a lot of their R&D in the wake of Intel kicking their ass in performance. Now they just struggle to keep up. Five or six years ago AMD led the way because they had the best research and development out there, it turns out that some of those developments were short sighted (on board FSB, really fast, but makes DDR2 terribly complicated to maximize performance for instance).

With the news of Nehalem delays to mass market people are worried, I wouldn’t be, AMD has nothing up their sleeves to fight Intel. It’ll take an entirely new processor architecture, one that’s revolutionary for AMD to regain the performance lead and some of their lost market share.

Jeff and I have taken to Twittering, so keep informed on all kinds of stuff, like when I workout and what I had for lunch. Also sometimes Max Geek related stuff.

Jeff http://twitter.com/jeffkirvin

Josh http://twitter.com/tibbarerew

Part of last nights MG was some discussion over what this interesting tablet device teased at IDF was. Well it’s no longer a mystery, it turns out it’s a boring medical tablet. A Panasonic Toughbook to be precise. How exactly is this big news? I mean is it a Transformer? Does it become a kick ass robot to help protect me from the Decepticons? Does it make me pie? Can I say “Bitch, get in the kitchen and make me some pie” in my best Cartman imitation and a mere hour later have some delicious pie? I doubt it.

There is still some hope, maybe the tablet is powered by some super secret Intel processor we don’t know about. I mean there’s already an Atom powered medical tablet, so this would have to be something new. The problem is there doesn’t appear to be anything but Nehalem (code name for Intel’s new Core i7 processors) on the horizon. It seems most likely that Intel was trying to create some buzz just for the sake of buzz, stupid move.

Hey, we’re up early this week, woohoo. We cover a lot and in the end I lay the smack down on Jeff. Here’s what we cover.

• Intel Nehalem, 4 cores, 8 threads
• 6 core Xeon server processors
• AMD kicks some Atom ass link
• Toshiba upscaling DVD player, but is it really a surplus HD-DVD player with new firmware? link
• Hong Kong Lego User Group makes 300,000 brick Olympic complex link
• Vista gets no loving, as many as a third of PC still ship with XP link
• Mobile way more than a minute
  • Sprint Airave, The Good, The Bad and the WTF.
  • Sprint being a dumbass, part deux… Diamond $100 more than the iPhone link
  • HTC Dream approved by FCC, T-Mobile to carry first Android phone this fall link
  • Treo Pro leaked, redacted, leaked… link
  • Intel has something up its sleeve link
  • Game changing hardware link

 

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OK, we recorded this last week but I’m a big wuss and didn’t post it until today. Here’s what we covered.

• iPhone kill switch
• Flock http://www.flock.com
• Star Trek Online Link

Stay tuned this week for us talking about stuff or something.

 

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So, I’ve been waiting for today. Launch day for Sprints big product that was going to keep me with them. The Sprint Airave. For those of you who don’t know, the Airave is basically a cell tower for your living room. It connects to sprint through your broadband connection and gives you very good signal inside your house. I drop calls in my house all the time, I was psyched.

Some quick details, I think the Airave is a bit overpriced at $99 to buy it and then $5 to $10 a month (per phone, $5 to use your existing minutes, $10 for unlimited when connected to the Airave). I was stoked even with the steep entry price of $99.

I showed up at my local Sprint store, credit card in hand. I called ahead to make sure they had it. So I tell the kiosk chick I’m here for the Airave, she stares blankly for a moment and then goes “Oh, those, we’ve got them, we’ll get a salesman with you soon.” Cue me standing around for 20 minutes waiting. The salesman is a nice guy (I worked with him on the whole Q9 fiasco) I tell him I want the Airave he says “It’s not out yet” I say “It came out today and you have them.” He looks a little confused then someone else tells him they do. He goes back and gets me my ticket to getting rid of my home phone.

Now I’m the only guy in the state apparently who knows this is launch day for the Airave. So no one has done an activation of one. This is where the WTF comes in. You see, I have a discount on my account, when Sprint switched over to the new billing system it flagged all accounts with any sort of corporate discount on it as a commercial account. Turns out the Airave isn’t available for commercial accounts (stupid fucking bullshit decision #1). Not a huge deal, 20 minutes later I’m fixed and an individual again. So now we go back to activate the Airave. It still won’t go. Cue Sprint Customer Service Rep Jeremey (nice guy, no complaints about him) calling for some tech support. I stand and listen. 30 minutes later they figure out that the Airave, from an account perspective, is treated like a phone, it requires an open line.

Now I haven’t been exactly good about paying on time, so I’m screwed, I can’t get a 3rd line added. Even though there isn’t actually a phone attached and it’s a whooping $10 a month difference, I can’t get a damn Airave because I can’t have another line. I DON’T NEED ANOTHER LINE, I NEED THE ONE I HAVE TO WORK. So Jeremy is a good guy so he tries calling credit, who promptly dismisses him saying “nothing we can do”. So what exactly is the fucking point of taking up a phone line with the Airave? Bottom line is it’s about equipment tracking and it’s complete bullshit.

So I’m sitting here, unable to use my Cell phone to talk to people because my house is a giant blackhole for all wireless signals. Yay. Fuck you very much Sprint, my contract is up early next year and I’m about to say bye bye. They need to fix some of this shit like yesterday, no wonder they’re self destructing.

OK, so we recorded this last week, I meant to get it up last Friday (1 day after the Writerly cast) but I got crazy swamped last week. So here ya go. Here’s what we cover.

• Splashtop hacked
• Cloud computing, Midori is coming.
• Josh loves to touch his touch
• Mobile More Than a Minute
  • More 800w goodness
  • The second (or third or fourth) coming of Palm.
• Microsofts new approach.

Stay tuned, Thursday I’ll be posting a new cast full of techalicious goodness.

 

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