Wednesday Wonkage

The Amercian Chess Association was formed on this day in 1857 and held the first major chess tournament in the US. Thomas Edison showed his first motion picture in 1889. The first talkie, The Jazz Singer, premiered in 1927.

1. The US House of Representatives voted 399-1 to crack down on spyware. The bill requires spyware companies to get customer permission before loading software on their machine, and prohibits browser hijackers, keystroke loggers, and sticky pop-up ads. Representatives vote today on another bill that mandates jail time for violators.
2. AMD has announced dual core chips that the company says perform 125-140% faster than dual processor systems. AMD underclocks the chips to keep power consumption under 95 watts. Each 64-bit core contains a whopping 1MB of L2 cache but both share a single interface to RAM - a possible bottleneck. Expect the chips some time next year.
3. The other shoe drops. After Steve Ballmer's prediction on Monday that an IP-enabled set-top box would dominate the digital media market, Microsoft announced a new MSN TV on Tuesday, a - you guessed it - IP-enabled set-top box. The $200 box has no hard drive, but it does come with 128MB of RAM and 64MB of flash, Wi-Fi and ethernet connectivity, slots for camera flash cards. Users will have to pay a monthly fee to use it, however.
4. Wikis are hot all of a sudden. A new Palo Alto startup, JotSpot, offers its Java-based wiki sites free for the first three months. It's the brain child of two former founders of Excite. Another wiki provider, Socialtext, launched in August. Both received venture capital - looks like "social software" is the next buzz phrase. All I can say is that it sure beats Lotus Notes.
5. XBox-Scene does it again. They've got Mac OS X running on an X-Box. Now that's a hack.
6. Suse 9.2 ships today with kernel 2.6, Evolution 2, and improved wireless support.
7. Evan is quitting . The inventor of Blogger six years ago has announced he will leave the company, 20 months after its acquisition by Google.