[09/09/2001]
Ninth week's summary
This week was easy for me and hard for the others. For me it was easy because I was allowed to have a special training as a specialist - somekind of administrator for the Swiss Army's telecommunication "mediators". (which is a machine combining all kinds of interfaces, routing systems and telefone functions etc (it's both digital and analog). So I sat in the class room for 5 days, while my companions had to go out in the rain and lay cables and stuff. Anyway, on Saturday we had to support another company at their visitors day and thus we lost half of our free weekend and were all fairly pissed off. Next week we'll have some minor exercises, a major inspection and our visitors day, where we'll be promoted to "pioneers" or rather engineers, using the military term, which is our rank equal to soldier in the infantry. We also got our qualifications (so to say a grade) and most of us finished with a "good" or "very good". I could have lived with a "satisfactory" as well, but aparently wasn't lazy enough:)

[09/09/2001]
HP buys Compaq
As you have certainly heard (even I did!), Hewlett Packard has bought up Compaq for a lousy 26 billion dollars. The new merged company will run under the name of HP (I think) and will most certainly stay the nr.1 in the PC market for a while. Let's hope they will now also get rid of that horrible PC design Compaq had, damn those were ugly.

[09/09/2001]
Apple does well
the register notes that Apple's latest financial resuls are absolutely positive and that the company is most certainly going to stay healthy during the next several months. That certainly is good news for both users and share holders.

[09/09/2001]
Apple launches Quicksilver servers
the register also reports that Apple has finally started to ship their new server line based on the Quicksilver models (so far the 733MHz model), replacing the older Graphite Sawtooth machines.

[09/09/2001]
Nvidia nForce ships this month
the register confirms that nVidia is in fact going to ship their nForce mobo chipset in September. Along with the launch of the boards, new CPUs from AMD are also expected.

[09/09/2001]
Motorola has new technologies
Tom's Hardware has some interesting stuff on new chip technologies Motorola invented, making it possible for the first time to combine silicon and light-emitting semiconductors. Aparently a major step in CPU physics.