Round and round the hardware sites

The good Dr Pabst's site over at Tom's Hardware has an interesting interview with a 113-year old Tarot card reader which is a hoot. 3DFX and its future....tealeaf reading et al. It's a little while since we look at Ars Technica, a site which always turns up interesting anagrams when you feed those letters of the alphabet into a good Anagram Server. There's a great piece about IRQs, a cunning plan by the original designers of the PC (IBM) to waste people's time and eventually money. JC reports that IBM will not be fabbing chipsets for Via. Via is a victim of its own success and has started putting some of its chipsets on allocation. JC, rather wittily, points out that IBM used to fab for Cyrix in the old days...and look where that got them then. AMD Zone points out that Kryotech has managed to produce an Athlon system that hits 900MHz. Information about the thing may be found here. Anand has started taking one of his long hard looks at technology. In this case, it's the Via Apollo Pro 133 chipset. As he points out, the chipset isn't really new, but with the Camino i820 failing to make the grade, it's become of somewhat greater importance than it would otherwise. So get this. Via designs a chipset, Intel takes legal action against Via, and then with its legions of engineers can't produce a working chipset of its own. No wonder Kicking Pat Gelsinger's paranoid about Via...®