Test Center Daily | InfoWorld Staff » Test Center Tracker: AMD revs a powerful quad-core engine

December 06, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Test Center Tracker: AMD revs a powerful quad-core engine

TAGS: Test Center Tracker

Test driving AMD's 4-by-4: Chief Technologist Tom Yager shares his experiences with AMD's powerful new Quad FX, a dual socket, quad-core client platform that enables some serious "megatasking." "The FX-74 Quad FX platform running in a two-headed (two monitors) configuration genuinely obviates the need for a second machine," writes Yager. As for Intel, well, Yager concludes that AMD has placed itself of that adversary with this new technology.

Power of open Web architecture: Why, oh why, must switching e-mail clients be so burdensome? Test Center Lead Analyst shares an anecdote in which he helps a friend move from Outlook Express to Gmail. Creating a CSV file of contacts and moving them to Gmail is a snap. Moving her 15 distribution lists, however, proves less so, requiring capturing an HTTP transaction, doing some scripting, and leveraging an API called ibgmail. Perhaps not an ideal solution, or even a full one, "but the fact that it’s possible to discover and exploit implicit APIs in this way is a testament to the power and flexibility of the Web’s architectural style."

A Word of warning: Microsoft released a security advisory yesterday, warning of exploits for a previously unknown hole in various versions of Microsoft Word. Details were limited, indicating that "victims would have to open a malicious Word file with 'a malformed string,' that could then 'corrupt system memory in such a way that an attacker could execute arbitrary code,'" reports Paul Roberts. Stay tuned to Microsoft for forthcoming patch information.

Posted by Ted Samson on December 6, 2006 06:05 AM

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