Here’s a screenshot I took this morning of Windows Taska Manager on my work computer after closing Firefox, which had been left running over the weekend. The pagefile usage went from 1.6 GB to 476 MB after ending the firefox.exe process, which was the only way I could shut down Firefox since its main window wasn’t responding to any mouse clicks. Can you say “major memory leak problem?”

The CPU industry is buzzing with reviews and online discussions about the new Intel Core 2 Duo chips unvieled earlier this week, and understandably so. With the Conroe (codename for the Core 2 Duo), Intel is finally doing dual core for the desktop right. Their earlier entry into the desktop dual core field was a total failure, which is what you’d expect when you take two fire hazards and cram them onto the same chip.

This time, however, the Israel-based design team (the same team responsible for the highly successful Intel mobile chips) came to the rescue with a native dual core archeticture for the Core 2 Duo, and the results are amazing. Don’t get me wrong– we were expecting these new babies to do well. But we didn’t expect (or at least I didn’t expect) them to completely eclipse the highest end AMD offering to date. All the tech review sites that I frequent– The Tech Report, HardOCP, Tom’s Hardware, AnandTech, and then some– are all in agreement.

Has the reign of AMD finally come to an end? I think this picture speaks for itself.

It’s amazing, really, when you consider that this could be a turning point in the AMD - Intel war which for the longest time has been very much one sided. Take this quote from The Tech Report, for example:

Pentium 4 and Pentium D CPUs have run at relatively high clock speeds but delivered relatively low performance compared to their competition from AMD. They’ve also drawn a tremendous amount of power, which they’ve generously expended as heat. In other words, they’ve been hotter than Jessica Simpson and slower than, well, Jessica Simpson.

Now take a look at the headlines from a couple reviews of the new Intel chips:

Tom’s Hardware: Game Over? Core 2 Duo Knocks Out Athlon 64
AnandTech: Intel’s Core 2 Extreme & Core 2 Duo: The Empire Strikes Back
ExtremeTech: The Core 2: Intel Goes for the Jugular

I for one will be looking forward to replacing my current AMD setup with one of these Intel Core 2 Duo chips. The only question is, when? Now if only Microsoft wouldn’t keep delaying Vista…

Well, first of all, when you think of a private business jet, the Boeing Business Jet or the Gulfstream V usually comes to mind, no? Well, the Google boys did something different back when they went IPO. They bought an old Boeing 767 instead, and now they’re arguing about exactly how they’re going to pimp their ride.

Things have been pretty hectic lately, but I was able to take some time this morning to work on the latest puzzle from Google’s Wei Hwa– a pretty clever sudoku puzzle. Apparently sudokus have been all the rage lately, appearing in the NYTimes and other publications. I just discovered them a couple months ago, and I must admit they are pretty fun, at least the ones put out by Google. I later discovered that the sudokus I saw from Google are actually variants of the more typical sudokus where each region is a simple square– now that’s just boring. Anyway, go try out this latest sudoku puzzle from Google. I had to print it out so I could jot down notes while working on it. If you’re smart, you can probably solve it without having to resort to note taking like I did. ;) Solutions are available on the web, or you can take a look at my screenshot.

You can read the story here. Meanwhile, I’m looking more and more forward to the wii. The wireless remote looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun.