While this isn’t exactly hot off the press, (the press release came out in July) I thought some of you might find it interesting. Winternals, the company run by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell was aquired by Microsoft. Mark and Bryce also have a companion site called Sysinternals that contains a wealth of useful freeware utilities. Many of the freeware programs also come with source code allowing interested software programmers to make modifications. The recent aquisition has been a cause for some fearmongoring on sites like Slashdot and others. While I’d like to believe that Microsoft will allow Mark and Bryce to keep the Sysinternals site available, I have to admit I downloaded a copy of every one of the utilities just in case. I honestly think this aquisition is a win for Mark and Bryce as well as for Microsoft. These are 2 of the brightest windows developers around and their combined experience can only serve to improve the quality of Microsoft’s products. (and that’s good for all of us…)

Wired News: Text Games Get Film Treatment

Jason Scott, a UNIX sysadmin from Boston is shooting a documentary about the text-based adventure game genre of the late 70’s and early 80’s. There weren’t any flashy graphics, just text on a screen. Your own imagination played a large role in your progress and interpretation of the game. That’s something that seems alien in this age of heavily scripted photorealistically rendered games. I remember enjoying some of those games so much that I tried my hand at writing a few. (probably to the detrement of my studies..) I’m glad someone is documenting these things since all I have are my memories. I might just have to pull the old Apple II out and reminisce a bit. 🙂

[H]ard|OCP – www.hardocp.com

The guys over at [H]ardOCP got the scoop on Dell’s plans to integrate more AMD-based products into their desktop and server lines. There have been rumors flying around for years about Dell entertaining the idea of using AMD processors in their products. In the past, nothing’s ever come of it, but with HP eating Dell’s lunch in the server market, I can’t say I’m entirely surprised. However, with Intel getting more competitive with Core 2, it’s going to take a lot more than including AMD for Dell to get some market-share back. At the same time this news came out, Dell also admitted that their accounting practices are under review by the SEC. One wonders if the AMD news was released to distract us from the SEC probe and their laptop battery recall.