According to networking guru, George Ou from ZDNet, Sony Play Station Portable (PSP) is bad enough to ruin wireless Local Area Network (LAN) in the home, due to its lack of support to WiFi Protected Access (WPA) security.

Currently, Sony PSP supports only Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) encryption security for wireless LAN, but too bad this encryption technology was found to be completely broken five years ago.

The Wi-Fi Alliance in 2003 mandated that all Wi-Fi products comply with the new WPA standard and use the new TKIP encryption algorithm yet Sony somehow feels exempt from this responsibility.

So, for PSP user, they will have to lower their wireless LAN security to only support WEP instead of a more secure WPA, in order to connect using PSP. The following is one of the suggestions from George :

Sony needs to rectify the situation as soon as possible by retrofitting all new PSPs off the factory floor with WPA capability and offer a free upgrade to the PSPs that are already out in the wild.

[Source]

We have seen the introduction dual core processors, first Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Opteron, then come Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 840.

Intel’s vision of a future chip design which are moves that are necessary to improve overall system performance as the chipmaker packs more cores onto a single chip.

The new head of Intel’s Corporate Technology Group, Justin Rattner, described Intel’s evolving vision of what its chips might look like around 2015 in an interview at Intel headquarters Thursday. Intel, like much of the chip industry, has decided that multicore designs are the way to go to improve performance in the future.

Some the early fruits of Intel’s project are evident in Intel’s I/O Acceleration Technology, announced earlier this year at the Spring Intel Developer Forum, Rattner said. This technology essentially improves the I/O performance of Intel chips by dedicating excess processing resources to I/O functions. It will be available next year with Intel’s first dual-core Xeon server chip, code-named Dempsey.

However, Intel is urged to move away from its frontside bus design by analysts and customers due to the advent of multicore processors. This is because in Intel’s current chips, the interaction between the processor and a system’s memory bank is handled by a memory controller on the chip set that feeds data to the processor at various speeds ranging from 400 MHz to 1066 MHz, depending on the chip. This design has served the company well for many years, but as chips start to take advantage of multiple processing units, they require increased amounts of memory bandwidth to perform to their true potential.

Some aspects of moving away from its frontside bus designs will start to become possible as Intel introduces its 45-nanometer and 32-nanometer processing technologies, which will be capable of producing smaller transistors than Intel’s current 90-nanometer processing technology, Rattner said. At the moment, those introductions are scheduled for 2007 and 2009.

45nm & 32nm ?? :-O

I’ve written about the official launching of 64bit Windows XP Professional, as well as the news of Microsoft Servers Migrating To 64bit last week. Unfortunately there are still some obstacles for Windows users to migrate to 64bit, One of the obstacles is lack of support from atleast 2 major antivirus vendors like Symantec and McAfee.

In a statement released to Ziff Davis Internet News, Symantec said it would be “monitoring the adoption of x64 very closely” but confirmed that virus protection on x64 was not yet available.

According to some users of Norton Internet Security 2005 under the newly released 64bit Windows XP Professional, they reveived error message saying “Symantec currently does not sell any consumer products that are certified to be compatible with 64-bit processors and operating systems.”.

The company said its Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition 10.0 will eventually support Windows XP Professional x64 Edition and Windows Server 2003 x64 Editions, but no timeline for full support was provided.

Whereas for McAfee, they have the same idea of 64-bit computing is not mature enough to justify a full anti-virus rollout yet.

Marc Solomon, senior product manager McAfee’s consumer strategy and market group, said the Windows XP Professional x64 Edition is initially geared only towards developers, gamers and early adopter enthusiasts. “We’ll go to market as the business dictates. We don’t see consumer adoption for 64-bit operating systems starting very soon,” Solomon said in an interview.

McAfee also do not think the 64bit market will mature until Longhorn ships or a bit after. At that time, there will be more drivers and software targeted at the consumer segment. However, on the enterprise side, McAfee does offer limited support for 64-bit systems. Unfortunately full anti-virus support isn’t expected until 2006.

[Source]

While 64bit is lacking of antivirus protection, fortunate enough we still atleast have 64-bit firewall for Windows. :)

Ok, usually I don’t write about sports here, but I just can’t stop myself to express my happiness to Chelsea achievements so far.

Chelsea Football Club, the club that i supported since I was 15 years old, when Gianfranco Zola (My all time favourite football player !) joined the Stamford Bridge club from Lazio. His skills attracted me to love Chelsea FC since then.

Today, Chelsea have been crowned champion of English Premier League after securing the last 2 points they needed so badly after waiting for 50 years since they last won as a champion back in 1955. There are still 3 matches to go for the season 04/05, but they have enough points to drop to emerge as the champion at the end of this season eventually. In other words, they have 88 points already in their pocket now, even the closest rival, Arsenal, can win all their 4 matches remaining, the most they can earn is only 86 points in total, so mathematically, Chelsea is the Champion Of English Premier League Season 04/05 !!

Chelsea have already won the Carling Cup and the English Premier League in this season. Their current aim will be winning the Champion League because this is the most prestigious tournament among European football clubs. They are now inches away from winning the Champion League, as they already in the semi-final second leg. I wouldn’t say they will certainly win the second leg, but a score line of atleast 1-1 will be good enough to send them to Istanbul for the Final !!

So, 2 down, 1 to go, chelsea will be the treble champion eventually !!
Go Chelsea, go !!