Specifications

T
he Comic Book Connection.
Fans of The Simpsons are famil-
iar with the
oafish nerd who
owns the town’s comic book
store. Can you imagine him de-
signing and selling his own x86 chips?
That seems to be the story behind the V-
Dragon, a
CPU out of China supposedly
developed by Culturecom Holdings, a
former comic book publisher. The Chi-
nese have been chatting up an x86 chip of
Chinese design called the Dragon. Critics
say it is roughly the equivalent of a
slow
486.
The V-Dragon, we hope, is better.
I have found little in the way of details
regarding the V-Dragon, but reports
claim that sales of 100,000 chips will be
delivered for Linux boxes, which are pop-
ular in
cost-conscious, pro-open-source
China. One giveaway might be the men-
tion of Transmeta and
IBM in the press
materials. I suspect a Transmeta design
and an
IBM foundry. The way I see it, the
first Chinese-designed Dragon chip was
a
hopeless exercise, and this may be a
way to save face. Whatever the case, it is
probably good news for Transmeta and
the Linux community. Stay tuned.
Some of the great new applications for
Linux will eventually come from China.
Microsoft knows this and is doing every-
thing it can to pump money into the
country. The Chinese will
wisely take the
money and still use Linux. Just watch.
While we’re on the subject of Linux, ap-
parently the Linux community has
gone
hog-wild
over initiatives to crack the
Microsoft Xbox
and turn it into a Linux-
powered
PC/game console combo.
Microsoft is willing to sue anyone it can
over this sort of thing, since that would
seriously
derail the company’s long-term
strategy.
I think these Xbox cracks will
result in Microsoft discontinuing the
gaming platform altogether. The com-
pany needs an excuse to quit.
Microsoft’s Xbox strategy is unusual in
that it involves
three marketing stages,
rather than two as with Sony and Nin-
tendo. In a two-stage scheme, a company
sells a box at cost or at a loss and makes
a fortune by licensing and selling game
titles. It’s the so-called
razor blade theory
of marketing. With the Xbox, Microsoft
added a third step: online gaming fees.
There is no question that the Xbox is
designed to be the online box of choice.
But this
assumes the playing field is fair
and level, which means the boxes cannot
be compromised, lest
gamers cheat.
Once cheating is possible, then all efforts
go into cheating better, and the mass mar-
ket falls apart. No newcomer will even
want to play online with a bunch of
cheaters, and the predicted profits will
never materialize. This is why Microsoft
is so adamant about suing people who
crack the box. Otherwise, why would the
company care?
The Xbox is based on
PC technology
instead of a complex proprietary archi-
tecture like that of the Sony PlayStation,
making it
a natural target for hackers.
And we already know that when trying to
make products hacker-proof, Microsoft
falls short. The company was
not think-
ing clearly
when it decided to use a PC ar-
chitecture. I think this will be the final
straw for the Xbox unless Microsoft can
make money with conventional games
and rethink the online strategy. If the
company is really serious, it will have al-
ready begun
a new Xbox II and changed
the architecture completely.
Chicken and Egg Dept.: Most experts
agree that in terms of
CD drives, Plextor
rocks. So we’ve been waiting for its
DVD-RW drives. The company wants to
go to
8XDVD-writing speeds ASAP now
that it has the mechanism it likes. But 8
X
media don’t exist yet. Apparently, the
media and drive speeds need to match
for the media to be tested properly. But
how do you design an 8
X drive with no
8
X media? And how do you test 8
X
media with no 8X drive? Apparently, this
was less of a problem with the old
CD-
R/
RW
technologies, since the drives
could be
easily tweaked. Look for Plex-
tor to solve the problem later this year
with a recordable
DVD drive that can
write at 8
X on 4X media. In the business,
this is called a workaround. I’m sure the
folks working on 8
X media will be only
half happy. If the drive can do 8
X on 4X
media, then can they be sure that the 8X
media are really 8X? Oh, the agony of
technology!
Charity Begins at Home Dept.: Michi-
gan-based ReCellular (www.recellular
.net), a unique company that specializes
in recycling cell phones, has created a
cell-phone recycling program called Do-
nate A Phone for organizations that are
looking beyond door-to-door candy sales.
Go to the company’s Web site or www
.wirelessrecycling.com for more informa-
tion. Excellent idea.
Pocket Cables? I’ve been meaning to
mention a very cute little product that
came my way recently. A gizmo called the
Zip-Linq (www.ziplinq.com) uses flat
cabling to create an incredibly compact
spring-loaded roll-up device for RJ-45,
USB, and other cabling. For around $20
(for the
RJ-45 version), you can now carry
a
pocket full of cabling without those un-
sightly bulges! This thing is very nifty.
Check it out if you like to travel light and
compact. I should create a new column
category called “More weird stuff from
China that I like.”
The Linux
community
has gone
hog-wild
over
initiatives
to crack the
Microsoft
Xbox.
www.pcmag.com SEPTEMBER 16, 2003 PC MAGAZINE
55
Inside Track
JOHN C. DVORAK