Links for Tuesday January 4^th, 2011

• Sandy Bridge arrives from Intel with up to 50% performance boost: A pretty good rundown of Intel's new line of CPUs. They look like real winner.

• First Look: Alyson Hannigan Gets Simpsonized!: Looks good — here's hoping that this episode is actually funny.

• udp and me: David Reed on the design of UDP. Includes this interesting tidbit towards the end:

  "One project where my friend and officemate Steven T. Kent ... and I lost was our strong argument to put mandatory end-to-end encryption into TCP (and adaptations of the ideas to UDP-based protocols, such as RTP, [w]hich I worked out but abandoned). Steve’s design was rejected, not because it was unsound, but because NSA did not want to see ANY encryption work going on in the public domain ARPA project, some say because they did not want to see the world be “too secure” by default."

• Nintendo 3DS China Leak: Some neat pre-release photos of the upcoming Nintendo 3DS portable console.