The Smidgen

John McCain, presidential candidate and self professed technology curmudgeon, who admitted during his presidential campaign to having little or no knowledge or interest in modern technologies like email or the Internet, seems to suddenly be very interested in it’s ‘freedom‘.

His new bill, the ‘Internet Freedom Act’ sets out to stop the FCC from going forward with any sort of Net Neutrality regulations after the FCC has unanimously voted to go ahead with talks to formalize net neutrality guidelines.  In the bill the FCC “shall not propose, promulgate, or issue any regulations regarding the Internet or IP-enabled services.”  Now I have to echo Tony Bradley of PC World’s statement here and ask, isn’t that what the FCC is supposed to do?

Now McCain certainly knows nothing about the internet but he does know about removing regulations in the thought that the free market will police themselves, just like AT&T did when they blocked VoIP services or Comcast did when they throttled peer-to-peer networking on the down-low, both of which only retracted after threat of FCC net neutrality rules.  Go team “Honest and Fair”!

You know guys, if there is a legitimate reason to block net neutrality guidelines you have 120 days to gather your data and present your case in the debate the FCC has just voted to have.  No guidelines have actually been set yet so perhaps waving around legislation like a torch to scare off ‘the beast’ is a bit premature.  Remember, 120 days, and since you’re probably not good at math that’s about four months to prepare to defend the internet’s ‘freedom’.  Which I supposed would be the ‘god’ given freedom to rape and pillage, right?

It’s been a long, long time coming but if the rumors are true the next handheld system from Nintendo may get a significant performance boost thanks to the Tegra in the form of the tentatively named Nintendo TS (Tegra System?).  Yup, that’s right, the same multi-core ARM based chip that powers the new Zune HD could give Nintendo a portable system that is on par with the Wii in terms of processing power and graphics output.  Moreover, it could actually compete with the feature set of its closest rival, the PSP.

The news gets even better when you consider that the previous generations of DS hardware were based around 16 and then 32-bit ARM cores, making the leap to Tegra painless and, very likely, backwards compatible, which everyone apparently loves.

If true, this design win for the Tegra chip would mean a huge boost in revenue for Nvidia knowing that they power the new version of Nintendo’s 100 million selling DS system.

Conversely, this could be dire news for Microsoft if it ever plans on getting into the handheld market with their Zune hardware.  The Zune HD currently uses the same Tegra chip and therefore is currently sitting idly on the processing honchos to deliver a great gaming experience.  That is, of course, if MS can ever get off it’s backside and integrate the Xbox Live Arcade into the Zune and vice versa.  Delay too long and Nintendo will swoop in with a Tegra of it’s own and a long history of success in the handheld market to swing around like a 10 ton hammer.

The handheld market just got a whole lot more interesting for me.  Look for this rumored device to land sometime in late winter of 2010.