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8:13 PM
Bonk!
Argh! Welcome to Bonk, the next nuker in the continuing Windows
nuking saga. I heard about this bug a couple of days when I got back here and had my
computer crash three times in a row due to a so-called "friend" of mine.
It's a modification of the old teardrop attack, which I guess Microsoft didn't patch up
all the way with their hotfix. Check http://www.rootshell.com
for updates and full-disclosure information on attacks like this in the future.
4:02 AM
Portable DVD
The mere thought of it is enough to make any technophile drool. Read
this story
and look at this photo.
1:56 AM
100 player Quake 2 map
Christian Antkow updated his .plan with info on
a new huge map that is being run on an Alpha at Id to test server load. It
supposedly supports up to a hundred players, although when I got on it looked like they
had lowered the limit to around 64. The server is running on alpha2.idsoftware.com,
and the map can be downloaded here.
4:46 AM
Updates
I updated the PC-DVD
review to reflect a couple of new things I've learned about it. First of all, it
doesn't seem like the PC-DVD accelerates all MPEG streams properly. There are many
different settings you can pick when encoding MPEG streams, and then there are
"constrained" streams which conform more tightly to certain parameters.
Hardware decoders don't always have to play back non-constrained streams correctly, just
constrained streams.
Basically, the upshot of all this is that we downloaded an MPEG-1 and tried to play it
back with the Dxr2 and it played back at double speed. Opening it with ActiveMovie
and decoding it in software worked OK.
A reader was nice enough to let me know that he did indeed peel off the labels on the
Dxr2 and discovered that the chips were manufactured by C-Cube
Microsystems. I strongly suspected that was the case but it's nice to have
verification. C-Cube's primary focus right now seems to be releasing consumer priced
chipsets for MPEG-2 decoding/encoding. It may, in fact, be their chipsets which make
home DVD recording possible, or, at least, more affordable overall.
1:29 AM
StarCraft reports
Initial reports in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic are somewhat
disappointing. The biggest complaint heard is that "it's just Warcraft 2 in
space." Whether or not this is simply the fault of the testers for not trying
the Zerg or the Protoss or whether this is really and truly the case remains to be seen
until the final release, but things are not sounding as good as they used to be. I'm
getting a little worried, quite frankly!
Palm PC
Microsoft is introducing a version of its Windows CE 2.0 operating system
specifically targeted at the market niche the Palm Pilot from 3com monopolizes now, which is the superportable handheld
market. Looks like several manufacturers are going to be introducing these so-called
Palm PC's.
Infoworld's
story
1:54 PM
Video cards
I've got a preliminary review of the AccelStar II from Accelgraphics in
the reviews section now. The AccelStar II uses the Permedia 2 chipset and the
particular model I tried was the 8MB AGP version. I'm also working on a Diamond
Stealth II review, with some great info coming there, like overclocked frame rates and
even temperature measurements. One thing that surprises me the most is that from my
testing neither of these cards appears to support mipmapping in Quake II, which is strange
since I thought these cards were capable of supporting it.
9:25 PM
Modem issues
I returned that Cardinal Connecta modem today, but not before trying out a
33.6 modem with AT&T to see if I would get those long stalls that I was getting with
the Connecta. No stalls. It appears to be an interaction problem between
AT&T's modems and the Connecta, or perhaps a problem inherent to X2. I don't
really have any way to test it at this point unless I can get a hold of another X2 modem.
8:10 PM
Creative Labs PC-DVD Encore Dxr2 review
Spewing out the reviews, eh? Now I've got a review of Creative Labs'
latest offering in the DVD market. Visit the reviews section in the sidebar to get
to it.
3:53 PM
StarCraft beta commences
Even as we speak (read?), the first games of StarCraft are being played by
the lucky 1000 beta testers on Battle.net. Will
it live up to the hype?
2:44 PM
ASUS PCI-SC875 review
A great Ultra-Wide SCSI card at an affordable price. A preliminary
review is now up in the reviews section.
I feel like I'm coming down with something. My throat hurts and my nose is
running. Yech!
2:20 AM
HP 620LX
Oh yeah, now here's something worth mentioning. I ran across the new
HP620LX Windows CE 2.0 palmtop at CompUSA today. Looks like the first 256-color
palmtop to make it onto the market. It comes with a nice 640x240 screen and a
whopping 16MB of memory. It's also $899. Ouch! Nice, but I think I'll
stick to the $69 Windows CE 1.0 machine.
I cracked some joke there about waiting until the 620LX was only $69 next year.
The sales person said "that'll never happen, the cost of those things is too
high." True, they probably won't get as cheap as $69, but then again, did you
think Windows CE 1.0 machines would be going for that price in late 1997 when you were
staring at them in 1996? Probably not.
I was there picking up some 3M Imation CD-R's for $10 and the $10 rebate makes that
free, of course. Gotta love it.
Reviews
Slowly the reviews section is taking shape. Notice how the NEC
MobilePro review has been spiced up with some nice pictures? That's all thanks to my
friend's nice Sony
MVC-FD7 Mavica digital camera. I wanted to take some pictures of the Rainbow
Runner's box but that seems to have disappeared. My parents have a bad habit of
throwing away boxes that I need.
Now I'm taking pictures galore. I really like this other camera I saw at CompUSA
today, the Sony
DSC-F1. OK, it doesn't have zoom or store images on floppy like the Mavica, but
it's small and has an NTSC output. Well, I like it, anyway!
12:41 AM
Papa John's pizza
Have you tried pizza from these guys? I think they must be making a
mint. One taste of it and none of my friends want to order pizza from freaking Pizza
Hut or Domino's ever again. The first time I tried it I couldn't believe how good it
was either. And it's cheap too! Just thought I should mention it, it's a slow
day. :-)
5:54 AM
WinGlide V0.5
I'm guessing this version actually works? I'm going to sleep.
I've decided to review a whole bunch of junk that my friends and I have and it's gonna
take a while, I think.
Version 0.5 of WinGlide
2:53 AM
Hercules Thriller/3D
Now this looks like another interesting video card. Excellent 2D/3D
acceleration at a pretty reasonable price (8MB version for $230), with a full OpenGL ICD
for NT and get this...MPEG-2 accelerated decoding. It remains to be seen how good
the Thriller/3D is at accelerating MPEG-2, but we could be seeing the beginning of the end
of those proprietary MPEG-2 DVD decoder boards that are currently needed to playback
DVD's. That would make DVD drives a lot more popular.
Another interesting trend here...software overclockability. Just like the 3Dfx
cards, the Rendition V2000 series of chips can be overclocked with a simple change to a
.ini file. The Stealth II uses the lower-end V2100 at 40 MHz. From what I
understand, people are getting this chip to 50 MHz off the bat and pushing to 60MHz with
makeshift cooling solutions like 486 CPU-fans on the chip. I'm deeply interested to
see how the V2200 based boards like the Thriller 3D will do. I read that the
Thriller 3D will start off at 60 MHz, so I guess we'll have to see how far this board can
be pushed.
There are software utilities to help you overclock the V2000 series boards. Check
out the very bottom of the Files/Utilities
section at Bjorn's 3D world.
1:02 AM
Pentium II 333
These are now floating into the OEM market. Not really a big deal.
Did you know that Intel dropped the price of the Pentium II 233's about a week ago?
I forgot to mention it but they did do it, prior to their usual February price cut.
Supposedly vendors wanted to start dropping their prices now. That's why you
can see P2-233's around for under $300 now.
9:52 PM
Quake 2 v3.10 released
Fixes a few more bugs...you can look at John Carmack's
.plan for details. Also, the official list of Quake 2 bugs is at http://www.idsoftware.com/cgi-win/bugs.exe.
It's good to look at and know what's being taken care of.
ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake2/q2-310.exe
WinGlide not working here
No idea what's wrong, but for some reason WinGlide does not work on this
system. Installation instructions seemed easy enough...just copy WinGlide's
glide2x.dll into the Quake 2 directory. No dice...I get an error about some OpenGL
command not being found.
7:36 PM
Winnov Videum AV review
I've now just finished a preliminary review of the Videum AV from Winnov.
Again, you can get to it by clicking the reviews section in the sidebar.
I'm writing this all from memory. Maybe when I get back I can take some
screenshots of the applications.
Babylon 5 movie
I only just now realized it, but the movie is showing right now on TNT!
I want to watch it from the beginning, and since my friend tells me it's going to
be rebroadcast again later tonight, I'll catch it then at my friend's house (no cable
here).
4:30 AM
100,000!
Looks like the counter hit 100,000 a few minutes ago. Cool!
Jackie Brown
A pretty cool movie, all in all. The beginning and the ending take a
few minutes too long. But there is some very funny dialogue, Tarantino style, and
when people get killed it really comes out of the blue.
Plus all the 70's funkmaster music you know and love!
We had a hell of a time trying to find a movie to watch. Originally we wanted to
see Devil's Advocate because it was probably going to be leaving the theatres soon and we
knew that if we didn't see it we would probably never get around to seeing it. Well,
first we tried to go to AMC Studio 30, but my friend didn't have any gas, so we stopped
for some, which would have made us late...plus he grabbed the early Sunday edition of the
movie schedules instead of the Saturday editions. So we turned back. Well, as
it turns out, the times were the same anyway, but it was too late for that. Next we
tried to go out to this theater called Tinseltown. We drove about 20 minutes out
there and the parking was incredicly screwed up. People were parking all over the
place, next to the curbs, on the grass, even the sides of the lanes (which I hate, I wish
they would just tow those cars). I dropped off my friend to buy tickets and drove
around for 15 minutes trying to find a parking spot. I finally ended up following
some people back to their parking spot and taking it. "Don't mind me!"
Hehe!
So I go out to the front of the theater and I see my friend. He tells me that the
movie is sold out. Devil's Advocate, the old movie, is sold out. Well, that
was pretty annoying. We figured then that if we were going to see another movie we
might as well do it near our house since it was a lot less crowded and nicer out here
anyway. We decided on Jackie Brown, ate some pizza, and that was that.
By the way, I can't believe the number of huge movie theaters they are building out
here. Are all these 24 and 30 screen theaters really necessary?
ISP weirdness
Between using Rice and AT&T, Rice seems to be better overall for
Quakeing. Those huge pauses that occur in Quake 2 on AT&T don't happen on Rice.
I'll probably just end up returning that X2 modem since I'll be heading back anyway
and won't be needing it. It was pretty expensive and I'd rather wait for the USB
models to appear.
Arc the Lad
I really wish they would bring this Sony Playstation RPG series to the US.
The first one was playable even if you didn't know Japanese but the second one is
much more difficult. I was a little disappointed today because I bought the Arc the
Lad soundtrack and I only recognized the first two and last two tracks. The rest
sounded like crap. Maybe I'll have to sample them off the Playstation myself?
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