Shuttle cock a leaky A64 DIMM view

AFTER A MONTH OR SO of being behind, it feels good to catch up with the latest press releases of interesting toys. The first of which is a simple sounding thing, but could have profound implications on the market. Shuttle, the maker of the 'shuttle' form factor barebones systems quietly put a shot across the bow of the computer manufacturers.

A few days ago, Shuttle announced the release of its XPC System Solutions, and their availability across all of Europe. These are complete computers, not barebones like they usually are. Instead of the usual store speech of 'add a CPU, RAM and HD', they do it for you, along with all the extras.

There are four models to chose from, business, gaming, and a few home models. They range from a rather spartan Celeron system to a fairly well equipped A64 machine, each with the options you would expect for such a targeted box. Read more here.

If you want to see these things in action, check out the World Cyber Games grand final. All the matches from the preliminaries on up will be played on Shuttle XPC SB83G5 WCG Edition machines. These are prebuilt gaming computers that sacrifice just a little speed for a lot of space. P4 3.4, GF6600 and an Audigy not enough for you? Ah well, then you need a bigger case.

Off on another tangent we get to O'Reilly again, with its aptly titled Steal This File Sharing Book. Sadly, O'Reilly took all the snide comments I could make and put them in the title, damn. It covers things from IRC to embroidery patterns to corporate lawsuits. This one looks like a really fun read, even if it covers serious things on occasion. If you want to know more, check it out here, it should be out soon. If they follow their usual form, when the site goes live, there should be a few downloadable chapters to read. If you like it, you can probably download a copy off of Edonkey before it comes out.

Up next is Coolermaster, and it isn't a product per se, but a web page about a line of analog products. Yes, I said the A word, and even more unusual, I am talking about computers. All those meters in the Coolermaster Musketeer, Cavalier and Real Power lines have to come from somewhere, and have to be built somehow. If you ever wondered how, check out this here. I found it quite interesting, with good photographs, just think of it as a FAQ for making your own analogue dials.

We once again find ourselves closing with OCZ. It came out with something very interesting this time. Like the last few things they have put out, RAM power boosters and the like, I was not expecting the new ZB-DDR DIMMs it announced today.

A little tech for you, buffered DIMMs put a buffer between the memory controller and the memory, and it adds reliability and capacity. It slows things down by one clock cycle, but allows you to have more DIMMs on the bus, the classic tradeoff. OCZ is saying that their new product allows you many of the benefits of server class memory with the low latency of high performance RAM. µ