Opting for a modular power supply means paying a premium over their wired brethren, and if Ultra's recent lawsuit proves successful, the cost of ownership could go up even further. Details remain sparse, but Ultra's lawsuit casts a wide net over more than a handful of power supply makers on the basis of patent infringement, presumably over patent 7,133,293, which covers "removable cable[s] attached to the power supply." The list of Defendants reads as a who's who in the PSU industry, including Antec, Corsair, Mushkin, OCZ, Silverstone, and many more.
Anticipation of Intel's upcoming Nehalem refresh has enthusiasts chomping at the bits, but what can you expect from this new core architecture? Jon Stokes at Arstechnica takes an in-depth look at the 45nm part, and short of providing benchmarks, he covers nearly everything you could want to know about the new chip. Three pages of details outline everything from Intel's QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) to the execution engine and instruction window, and much more. Get prepped here.
If you've yet to be Rickrolled, well, you haven't been on the Net very long. The practice of tricking someone into viewing Rick Astley's 1980s hit Never Gonna Give You Up under the guise of an innocent link gains steam every April Fool's, and not even the New York Mets can avoid falling prey. The baseball club held an online contest to determine the tune for its traditional eight-inning sign-along, and that's all the fodder Digg and Fark needed to sabotage the poll. Rick's hit rolled during the Mets season opener against the Phillies, and to add insult to injury, the Mets lost the game 5-2.
Console News 
Teenagers may have a new excuse to tell their parents as to why they didn't take the garbage out: Wiiitis. Michael P. Nett, Mark S. Collins, and John W. Sperling of Mayo Clinic wrote a journal article for the May edition of Skeletal Radiology detailing this new videogame induced malady. Their subject, a 22-year-old male, reported shoulder soreness after playing Wii Sports Bowling, and an MRI "demonstrated marked T2-weighted signal abnormality within several muscles of the shoulder and upper arm."
The console world, that is. While both the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles are readily available, Nintendo's Wii continues to fly off store shelves just as fast as retailers can stock them. And according to Daniel Ernst of Hudson Square Research, this sales domination will continue through 2008. For fiscal year 2008, the Wii outsold both competing consoles by a margin of 2-to-1 worldwide, and Ernst predicts the same for fiscal year 2009. On the handheld front, Nintendo's 68 million DSs sold also trumped Sony, with the PSP selling 38 million units.
One of the most anticipated aspects of the upcoming GTA release remains the multiplayer capabilities, and Rockstar North's VP Geronimo Barrera revealed a few new details about online play. Players will need to earn a cell phone in single-player game, "which takes about minutes," and then can hop online and never look back. Once connected, matches will pit up to 16 players in various configurations, including the standard deathmatch mode. More exciting is the GTA Race mode, where players compete in a death-race using any vehicle available in the game. Read more on this and other challenges here.
Comments are closed on this article
damicatz
April 09, 2008 at 8:22pm
Ultra can rot along with the patent examiner that allowed that patent to go through in the first place.
Modular cabling isn't a unique invention; every television set has them and they've been around for decades.
Hell, Ultra wasn't even the first to come up with modular cabling for computer power supplies. Credit for that goes to Performance PCs. In essence, they patented someone else's idea.
This is just another example of why the patent system should be abolished. It's completetly against the spirit and concept of free market capitalism.
timmyw
April 10, 2008 at 4:03pm
The idea of a patent and copyright system worked great to stimulate technological development over the last couple of centuries. Unfortunately, it hasn't kept up with the pace of technology it was designed to help stimulate.
We also have way too many companies that use patent and copyright to suppress innovation.
Our patent clerks often have no idea what they are issuing a patent for anyway. Witness US patent 5443036, a patented method for using a laser pointer to exercise a cat. A method obvious to anyone who ever had both a cat and a laser pointer in the same room at the same time.
The Mickey Mouse Protection Act extended copyright so that no works have entered the public domain (in the US) since 1998.
How much of today's copyrighted code will be of any use to the advancement of computer science in 2103 when the corporate copyright expires?
nedwards
April 09, 2008 at 3:54pm
Strictly speaking, the Rick Roll phenomenon didn't gain any appreciable steam until May of last year, so this is the first April Fool's Day that has felt the full effect.
Paul_Lilly
April 09, 2008 at 6:57pm
I suppose it seemed longer, based on the stupid popularity it garnered. Although technically speaking, one could (and did) argue that we were all Rickrolled 20 years ago. ;)
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