The Inquirer is reporting that a full range of AMD Mobile Semprons - from 2600+ to 3000+ speeds, and of the good Socket 754 variety (as opposed to the Socket A ones) - are on sale now in Japan, for what appear to be very reasonable prices.

10,800JPY for the 2600+, 13,800JPY for the 2800+ and 14,800JPY for the 3000+

Hopefully this will mean serious competition for the Pentium M.

Inquirer story

Of course, it’s only a “Technology Preview” at the moment, but I’m sure some programming geeks are busying about creating fancy programs for us all to drool over when the final version arrives.

From the Microsoft download page:

“Avalon" is the code name for Microsoft’s unified presentation subsystem for Windows. It consists of a display engine and a managed-code framework. “Avalon” unifies how Windows creates, displays, and manipulates documents, media, and user interface. This enables developers and designers to create visually-stunning, differentiated user experiences that improve customer connection. When it ships, scheduled for 2006, “Avalon” will be available on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and all future releases of the Windows operating system. When delivered, “Avalon” will become Microsoft’s strategic user interface (UI) technology. The “Avalon” Community Technology Preview (CTP) became available to the MSDN members in November of 2004. It is our pleasure to release the same build to the general public in response to numerous requests.

From the November news.com.com article:

Avalon was originally envisioned as a core feature of Longhorn, the next version of Windows. It will still be a part of that operating system, but it will also be made available as an add-on for users…
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Apple has officially opened the Irish iTunes Music Store. .99 per song.

Link to Article

Something that’s always made me wonder is the concept of an Operating System that can be run on many different architectures. The obvious example here is Linux. Of course, my limited experience with it is only on x86 architecture, so I never got to figuring out if something written for it on an x86 would also work on a PPC or Itanium, or ARM7, etc. - I’m guessing that the vast majority of it won’t.. not in binary form, anyway.

So I was reading up on C# at Wikipedia, and I got to thinking - is .NET and the attendant language, C# part of a grander plan from Microsoft?
What happens if/when MS get sick of pandering to Intel’s demands (or vice versa) and decide to pull the plug on x86 support? That’s an extraordinarily unlikely situation, I know, but let’s just imagine it happening after “Longhorn Next” is out. By then, the .NET framework and the C# language to go with it will probably be the In Thing to be programming stuff for Windows with. We already know that the Longhorn driver model requires drivers to be written for the .NET framework; just take a look at ATi’s [abysmal]…
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Today is the official opening of Deep Thought PC. If you like Deep Thought but prefer PC’s whether they run Windows or Linux, then this site could be right up your alley. And for those of you who think that it will be influence by it’s mac based sister site then think again. The PC staff are in charge of the site and they can post whatever they want.

We have also set up some new boards on our forum just for PC’s, so if you haven’t registered already, sign up and post, it’s free.