The rumors that have been circulating for a couple of months about an AMD/ATI merger would appear to be true according to some quotes posted on the [H]ardOCP website today. This isn’t all that hard to imagine. After all, ATI and AMD have a lot in common and would certainly both benefit from their shared experience. It will be interesting to see what new products evolve from this union and what, if any efffect this will have on product diversity in the graphics market.

Whois Hijacking My Domain Research?

eWeek has an interesting article about a new development in domain squatting. A company called Chesterton Holdings is somehow finding out when unused domain names are being searched and is snapping them up before they can be registered by someone else. All the domains involved were submitted to a C|Net whois meta-search engine that checks a number of sources. There’s no answer as yet as to how Chesterton Holdings is doing this, but until it’s sorted out I would stay away from whois meta-search sites and do your research manually.

Over the weekend, I had a little bit of a scare. My wife and I were playing online and all of a sudden, the Coldplay album she was listening to stopped playing. When she tried again, iTunes said it could no longer locate the tracks for that album and a host of others. Fearing the worst I checked the hard drive on our server and sure enough, I could no longer access those files. In the end no data was lost. A single data block on the disk had gone bad, but was easily repaired. Thankfully I had just made a backup of our iTunes library the week before. What I had neglected to backup was the rest of the server, including this blog!! Circuit City just happened to be running a great deal this weekend on a 160GB ATA drive from Seagate for $39. (after rebates of course) I bought 2, one for the server and one as a backup. The server is back up and running on the new drive, and I have a complete copy of all the data on the other drive. Phew, I feel a little better now…