DigiTimes reports that “Intel may be leaving the entry-level chipset market”:http://www.digitimes.com/mobos/a20050803A1001.html. I don’t know anything about the source, but if this is true, I wonder what it means for Apple, who, it’s been assumed, is going to make ample use of Intel’s hardware platform offereings (including chipsets and motherboards) as part of their transition from PowerPC to Intel. The Mac Mini, with its extremely low price point, would seem to be left hanging if Intel exits this market segment, which would give other vendors their opportunity to get their foot in the door with Apple and establish a chance for moving upmarket at some point in the future.

bq. Intel plans to phase out its 865 and 915PL/GL chipsets in the fourth quarter and exit the entry-level chipset market, sources with motherboard makers revealed. Intel has only told some first-tier mobo makers and OEM clients about the decision, and the company is not expected to make a public announcement, the sources said.

via “Anandtech”:http://www.anandtech.com

*Update:* “According to news.com”:http://news.com.com/Intel+phasing+out+low-end+chipsets/2100-1047_3-5817118.html?tag=nefd.top , Intel denies that it is exiting the low-end of the market. On the other hand, it sounds like they may have a rather large gap between product generations at the low end of the line. The timing may not impact apple, but it could send system vendors elsewhere when shopping for components for the low end of their product lines. If true, it seems that Intel needs to work on their execution (once again).

Anandtech did a review of “4 Ultra-compact Digicams”:http://www.anandtech.com/digitalcameras/showdoc.aspx?i=2473&p=1 and, like just about everyone else, they paid absolutely no attention to the quality of the movies.

As I’ve written before, I think “ignoring the movie capabilities”:http://www.geekfun.com/archives/000588.html of the latest generation of digicams is a big mistake.

With their compact “go-anywhere” form factor and their ability to do 640×40 @ 30 or 60 frames per second for minutes at a time, they are a hell of a lot more handy than your average camcorder and reasonably competitive quality-wise.

Since my brother picked up one of the Canon SD400s, I’ve received many more clips of my nephews than in all the years they had a FireWire capable camcorder and they look pretty good too.

A camcorder will likely always have better low-light performance, better audio and a wider range of optical zoom, but I think the movie featuers on digicams are already more useful for most of the footage consumers capture.

GeekFun has been getting a bit of traffic from people searching for information on the space shuttle and they’ve picked up since the space shuttle fleet was grounded, again, after the first shuttle launch since the Columbia disaster two years ago.

If the searches are at all representative of public opinion among interested parties, there are a few people who think that, as one searcher put it to Google, “the space shuttle [is a] piece of shit.”

Searching for “that phrase on Google”:http://www.google.com/search?q=space%20shuttle%20%20piece%20of%20shit includes a link to a post I made right after the Columbia disaster questioning “the value of continuing the shuttle program”:http://www.geekfun.com/archives/000089.html. On rereading, its pretty good, and, still pretty timely:

bq. The shuttle is supposed to be reusable, so we put all our space flight money into reusing them, rather than into designing and building truly inexpensive launch vehicles (reusable or not).

bq. The shuttle is supposed to be reusable, so we keep re-using them, even as we should be abandoning them, and people die in vain as a result.

bq. Its a good time to take stock and figure out the future of the space program, rather than plodding along in the past.

In my analysis, I drew heavily from an article on the shuttle program I’d read a few weeks before. If memory serves, it was an online reprint of an article first published 10-20 years earlier, probably in the Atlantic Monthly. Unfortunately, their online archive search doesn’t go back far enough to see for sure. I wish I could give credit where credit is due.

While we are on the subject of “SPF”:http://www.geekfun.com/archives/000613.html, I’ll mention a “Thunderbird SPF plugin”:https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=thunderbird&category=Message%20Reading&numpg=10&id=345 that I’ve just installed. It’s a bit quirky in that you have to tell it by hand what DNS servers it should use for it to work reliably (otherwise I suspect it forwards reqests to a server running on the author’s server, not something I feel good about).

It’s interesting to see what domains support SPF and which do not.

“Reed College”:http://www.reed.edu has SPF records for their mailservers while the University of Washington appearantly does not.

Others that do: Entercom, Netflix.

The plugin claims that Hotmail and MSN don’t support SPF verification, even though, to my untrained eye, their nameservers seem to report an appropriate SPF record.

E-mail sent through mailing lists, and forwarded from other personal accounts also fails because of the extra mailserver hop.

SPF, which stands for Sender Policy Framework, is one tool in the fight against e-mail spam and phishing (forged mail that attempt to trick people into turning over valuable information, like bank account numbers and passwords). It helps establish that email that is appearantly from a particular domain was sent via a server approved to send mail from that domain.

This helps with phishing e-mails by helping to establish whether a piece of e-mail appearantly sent by your bank (or PayPal, or eBay, etc) was actually sent via an approved server.

It helps fight spam in a few ways. First of all, a lot of spam, including phishing email, is sent using forged addresses. SPF helps email spam-filters identify mail with forged senders, which may be a hint that a given peice of email might be spam.

Similarly, the absense of any sort of approved sending mailserver for a given domain is a hint that a given email might be spam. Spammers can create SPF records for the mailservers they use, but that means they have to send mail using domain names they control, which makes it easier to track down the people responsible for illegal spam and pursue them in the civil and criminal courts.

The presence of a legitimate SPF record for a given e-mail doesn’t necessarily mean the message is legitimate and the absense of one doesn’t mean its spam, but both provide additional information to help determine whether a given message is legitimate or bogus.

There are lots of competing approaches to sender verification, and the big ISPs are still fighting with eachother for supremacy. All I know is that Google has started to use SPF records in the spam filters for Gmail while AOL and Hotmail are validating their mailservers with SPF.

I’ve done the same for Geekfun.com. My “DNS host”:http://www.pairnic.com advertises support for SPF records with their custom DNS. This is true, happily, though they don’t give any explanation on how to create one. Fortunately, I found this handy “SPF record creation wizard”:http://spf.pobox.com/wizard.html to help walk me through the process.