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11:57 AM
A new Pentium bug
Well, yes, a new Pentium bug has been found...thanks to Jonathan Pulling
for the info. There's a lot of discussion going on in the Bugtraq mailing list as
well as the newsgroups; basically, executing a certain invalid instruction causes the
computer to lock up. This bug isn't nasty because you might run into it in one of
your programs; it's nasty because on multi-user systems there's no way to protect against
somebody running this code to crash your computer. Big security hole.
People are saying that if Intel releases code to fix the problem, it could have REALLY
bad implications for new viruses which update the Pentium microcode with ugly stuff.
For those of you who don't remember, Intel can actually update certain microcode on
the Pentium in software to fix certain bugs, etc. However, this is my understanding
of the microcode updating procedure. The update goes in your BIOS and is not
permanent; the BIOS has to load the microcode into your Pentium on every boot. If a
virus can flash your BIOS without you knowing, you'll be in big trouble regardless of the
bug.
Which actually, brings me to another point. A large number of BIOS's are
flashable without some restrictions. Isn't this a bad thing? I keep expecting
somebody to write a virus which blanks out BIOS's, which would be god-awful nasty.
9:53 PM
SB16 NT4.0 driver problems
I ran the drivers for a couple of days and eventually got a blue screen.
I had the same problem with the previous set of drivers and it always happens when
I'm doing something with WinAMP. The crashes are very rare, about every couple of
days or so, but they are definitely there and they always happen when I'm doing something
with audio (like WinAMP). My friends don't seem to have this problem but I guess I'm
not so lucky. I don't have any hope of getting some stable drivers soon so I'm just
hoping the VideoLogic SonicStorm comes out soon and lives up to the hype.
Starship Troopers
It's a good movie. They really don't pull any punches either...you
want war, you got it! If you can get past the cheesy propaganda-like intermissions,
you're OK. Also, a lot of the higher ranking people still look too much like kids to
me. Whatever...I'm not going to nitpick everything, the point is, the special
effects are awesome, the plot is decent if a little jumpy, and it's not a movie that ends
in an hour and thiry minutes, so you get your money's worth. By the way, a great web
site to check your local movie theater times and even, at some theaters, to buy tickets
online, is MovieLink.
2:21 PM
Did I mention...
Just how much I hate RealNetworks registration?!?! I tried
downloading beta 2 of their products last night. It wasn't so bad until I got to
trying to download the RealSystem free server. There is a huge form full of junk you
have to enter and if you screw up even one little thing it gives you an error when you
submit the form. Then when you hit your browser back button, you find that all the
information you just entered is erased. Way to go RealNetworks! I was about
ready to kill somebody after the third time it erased all the info I had entered.
Starship Troopers
The name sounded goofy at first but I got used to it. The movie is
based on an old novel by Robert Heinlein. I'm all set to go see this one...but I
don't know if I'm going to go tonight or maybe catch the matinee tomorrow. The Starship Troopers website, by the way, is
absolute crap. It doesn't tell you jack about the movie and the interface is so
nonsensical that it's impossible to figure out what you are doing without clicking on
everything in sight. Sometimes I wonder if the people designing these websites have
an actual objective in mind or if they are just doing useless stuff with fancy toys.
12:44 AM
WinAMP 1.6 delayed?
It doesn't look like it's out yet. One guy I heard from said it's
been delayed until 6:00 PM tomorrow. Scratch that, it's out...being offered in IRC,
I don't know about the web page. Not that impressive really, especially since 3D
support did not make it in yet.
WinAMP site
NetMeeting 2.1 final released
The final did come out yesterday, if you didn't bother to check it.
Here is the download
page again.
Myth demo released
This game from Bungie, the makers of
the only Mac game in existence (that's a joke!), is pretty cool, especially if you have a
3D accelerator. I hope the multiplayer is good too, but for now it's definitely
worth the download.
Link to download page
New benchmarks from ZDBop
ZDBop (which stands for Ziff-Davis
Benchmark Operations, I think) has released their entire suite of benchmarks for 1998.
Winbench 98 is nice just to compare with others, 3D Winbench too. WinStone 98
is great for breaking in your computer and ironing out any compatibility issues.
Also for burning it in and making sure it's stable (even though they say that's not what
it's for). That bit about it being too big for FTP is a load of crap though.
Why don't they just let the user be the judge of what's too big to download?
2:34 PM
Intel to release low-cost Pentium II
Similar to what it did with the 386SX and 486SX, Intel is going to be
releasing a low-cost version of the Pentium II targeted at the sub-$1000 PC market and
possibly undercutting competitors like AMD and Cyrix. The cost-cutting measure this
time will be the removal of the L2 cache from the processor cartridge. It's due for
release sometime in late 1998.
Infoworld's
story
Netmeeting 2.1 and DirectX 5 for NT?
I'm sitting here wondering why Microsoft's web site says NM 2.1 final is
available for download and the only thing I see is the Release Candidate. I'm also
wondering why this
download page says that DirectX 5 Core and Audio components for Windows 95 & *NT*
are available. Is this a mistake?
Internet Explorer for Unix
After a couple of years of promising total cross-platform support,
Microsoft is fixing to make good on its promises today with the Preview 1 release of IE
4.0 for Unix. It seems like only Solaris is supported at this time.
ZDNet's story
Link to download page
Link to FTP site directory
12:33 PM
New SB16 drivers for NT 4.0 available
Exactly what the title says. Now that the Daytona PCI is out of my
system, maybe I'll give these drivers a shot.
Driver
download page
3:42 AM
Callus
Back to the wonderful world of emulators! The latest godsend from
Bloodlust software is Callus, an emulator for Capcom's System1 board. This board is
responsible for many of the arcade games that die-hard gamers know and love, like Strider,
Street Fighter II, and UN Squadron.
The Callus web site
Dave's Classics (for game roms)
2:58 AM
Registry hacks
Just picked up another tip from JSI Inc's NT registry hacks page. Great
site, lots of interesting tips. Anyways, this one refers to the latest tip (301) on
the page, which tells you to modify the key SecondLevelDataCache under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session
Manager\Memory Management in the registry. According to the info there, the
default is 256K cache, so for those of us with 512K L2 cache, manually setting it to 512
should make a big difference.
Well, whatever the key does, it definitely seems to affect performance. On a
fresh install of NT, it dropped my CPUMark32 in NT but around 35, from around 635 to 598
on average. However, because I don't think CPUMark32 is necessarily the best
indicator of performance, it might be possible that setting this key could overall
positively impact performance. I'd like to test it out with WinStone 97, but it
takes a while to run so I'm not sure if I will get around to doing that.
On the other hand, I wonder exactly what this registry entry changes in NT. Does
it keep more of the kernel in memory or something? I don't really have any idea.
Xing MPEG encoder plug-in for
Premiere
Xing finally released a plug-in for Premiere which lets you output your
finished product to an MPEG-1 video stream. It's a lot easier than having to output
a file to raw format and then encode to MPEG. Good stuff!
Canopus Total3D 128V
Wow, this card looks like the bomb. Yes, it's a RIVA 128 card, but
what makes it cool to me is the fact that they integrated video-in onto the card.
They also give an explanation of why the Total3D 128V is able to make higher quality still
captures than the Rainbow Runner. I've observed the weird discoloration effects in
some of my own shots before so I'm inclined to believe them. Obviously the card
won't be able to capture at the same rates as the Rainbow Runner, but if you're not
looking to do heavy duty capture and you want a new card that will give you good 2D/3D
performance, this looks like the card to beat. The $50 premium for the superior
video-in/out capabilities over other cards is easily worth the money.
Total3D 128V specs
5:46 PM
WinAmp 1.6 release date
The latest revision, with a bunch of fullscreen visualization plugins and
coming support for Direct3D and Glide, is going to be released at 10:00 PM Arizona time,
November 6th, on #efnet in #mpeg3. Just in case you were waiting eagerly for
this one :-)
Libretto 70 stateside
I read that Toshiba officially announced that the Libretto 70 model would
be making it to the US after all. Consequently, prices on the 50 should have dropped
quite a bit. Wish I had one, but it's too much until I get a job or something.
4:49 PM
SCSI/Sound card conflicts
I ran Winbench 1.1 all night and nothing surfaced, but now I'm pretty sure
I've pinned down the problem, or at least, A problem. The
timeouts were caused by the Daytona PCI's driver in NT. Under Control Panel/Devices,
as soon as I removed the driver (s3knldrv), the timeouts on bootup stopped. I even
tried starting the device while booted and 3 new timeout errors showed up in the Event
Viewer. Although I haven't been completely able to tie this to any of the more
serious problems, it's definitely not something I need to deal with. I called NECX
and arranged a return, which went very quickly and easily. Meanwhile, I guess I'll
wait for that VideoLogic SonicStorm. 64 audio streams at once in a $99 card?
It doesn't get much better, I think.
South Park episodes in RealVideo
The Wired article I read about this site said it probably would be shut
down, but so far it looks like it's still up. As for the content...well, you'll
either like it or you won't. I think it's pretty funny. The article also said
that it took a dozen SGI O2 machines to get it to look right. A pretty retro use for
technology, don't you think? Anyhow, here's the site.
This week on South Park
1:38 AM
More Voodoo 2 info
Seems like most of the info released yesterday was dead on accurate.
The only thing missing was the info that Voodoo 2 has a full on-chip geometry
processor. I think Voodoo 2 also does polygon edge anti-aliasing, unlike the old
Voodoo, where turning on anti-aliasing really gave your frame-rate a beating. The
BootNet story even has a picture of the board itself...definitely worth a look.
Yahoo press release
BootNet
exclusive
Yeesh
Well, I looked in NT's event viewer today and logged those timeout errors
all the way back to...tada! the day I installed my Daytona PCI. That was also the
day I removed the 2nd SCSI card so that I could put in the Daytona PCI. It looks
like this might have been the problem. I temporarily disconnected the narrow portion
of the SCSI bus (my CD-R and CD-ROM) and now I cannot reproduce the error at all.
The deal is, placing slower devices on a SCSI bus shouldn't cause problems in theory, but
often does in practice. I think I mentioned something about this when I took out my
SCSI card a week or two ago, actually.
I'm not completely sure what's going on here because I thought the problem might have
been overheating. In fact, the only thing I can think of now is that both things are
the problem. That is, the tape on my vent caused a problem yesterday, but that this
underlying problem has been there ever since I took out my other SCSI card. The
error is especially prone to occur on bootup. The timeout error isn't fatal, but who
knows what else might happen, right?
Of course, if I really do need the other SCSI card, I've got a problem. I don't
have any extra PCI slots, so something will have to go. My newly acquired PCI sound
card? My 3D accelerator? Geez, this is gonna be tough. There are
dual channel PCI SCSI cards out there like the 3940UW from Adaptec, but no way can I shell
out the cash for one of those.
My 9GB UltraStar has a 5 year warranty though. Boy, wasn't that a relief to see!
Just another reason to get one of these puppies from Onsale if you can.
3:36 AM
RealVideo, part 3
I guess I was a little harsh on RealVideo, especially the bit about
wanting them to go out of business. But I can honestly say that I've never had a
worse experience trying to download and install so-called "free" software.
Even Microsoft doesn't make it as painful!
I really am impressed with RealVideo, in case I didn't make that clear before.
I'm amazed at the quality that comes out of such low bandwidth. Although you
probably won't see me using it, since I'm pretty much a stickler for quality.
Whoops
There's a little vent on my hard drive that seems be an inlet for air.
It's on one of the corner edges so the vent is actually open to the air on the side
and bottom. The case fan I have rigged up to blow over the drive blows straight into
that vent. That made me a little nervous worrying about the force of air and dust
blowing in there (although the filter in the drive should theoretically take care of
that). So I placed a small piece of tape over the horizontal edge so that the fan
wouldn't blow directly in there. There was a lot of space on the bottom still open
for the vent.
Well, as it turns out, that was a pretty bad idea. The drive, for whatever reason
(overheating?) started timing out and producing errors during heavy disk activity.
NT logged the errors as "The device, Scsiport 1, did not respond within the timeout
period." I honestly didn't think the little piece of tape I used would cause
errors becuase I wasn't blocking the vent entirely by a long shot. Plus I thought
most of the cooling was coming from the fan blowing over the drive itself, not into the
vent.
If the problem really is overheating caused just by putting that little piece of tape
on there, then I might be a little worried. The drive certainly didn't feel any
hotter than usual. How close to the operating threshold am I, and is it normal for
the drive to be so sensitive to heat? Good question! Seems a little close to
the edge, I guess.
BTW. this has absolutely nothing to do with my Ethernet card.
10:08 PM
Cliffhangers!
Well, in Philly both the X-Files and DS9 were supposed to have really
kick-ass episodes tonight. Somehow they managed to work it so that the episodes they
showed today weren't where the proverbial SH*T hit the fan, so to speak. I thought
this week was gonna be the one, now it looks like next week is going to be. DS9
pulled the same stunt at the beginning of the season. They showed you this huge
fleet of a hundred ships at the end of last season and everyone was thinking about this
fleet and the Dominion fleet meeting up and going, "Oh man, this is gonna be
awesome!" It wasn't like that at all. The season premiere was just one
ship going into Dominion territory to blow up their supplies.
I think next week has to be it. They can't pull this kind of thing for too long,
you know?
More RealVideo observations
More things about RealNetworks software that piss me off. I noticed
that the RealPlayer software put a registry entry in for itself that made it start on
login. As far as I can tell, there's absolutely no way to get rid of this short of
uninstalling the software or, of course, deleting the registry entry. Gee, it's not
like an option for that kind of junk might be desirable to the user? And, of course,
they can't just put it in the Startup group,. because that would mean almost anybody could
get rid of the stupid thing!
I was able to get rid of it fairly easily, but I think it's fairly obvious your average
computer user won't have any idea how to do the same thing. RealNetworks is worse
than Microsoft (and I actually don't really hate Microsoft all that much). Any
company that treats users like that should go under as far as I'm concerned. I've
never had a piece of software aggravate me so much.
I also tried RealVideo out on a Marvel Super Heroes capture. It did quite badly
compared to the Tekken 2 intro clip I tried it on previously. It doesn't handle fade
transitions or heavy motion very well at all. It's very good at situations where
things are changing at a fairly smooth and steady rate. The heavy scrolling in MSH
gave RealVideo fits...very inconsistent and low frame rate overall.
Voodoo 2 info
Some of the first hard info I've seen so far. Each board will have
two Texture Map Units for single-pass rendering of what are normally multi-pass operations
like, for example, the lighting in GL Quake. Voodoo 2 will have a 90 mpixel/sec fill
rate, and, like the Quantum boards, you can put two Voodoo 2 boards in one PC and have
them do scan line interleaving (2 boards double your speed, basically). Diamond
appears to be the first to announce that it will have a Voodoo 2 product. Don't buy
from them if you can help it though, I don't think it's a good idea to reward bad customer
service with your dollars.
Oh yeah, and I'm wondering, just how much of the Voodoo 2's improvements are due to
process technology improvements and how much is due to architectural improvements?
After all, if I recall correctly, Voodoo Graphics was done on 0.5 microns, which leaves a
lot of room for shrink and speed increases. Maybe 3D processors should become
commodity items like the Pentium family of microprocessors, where you buy an expansion
card and upgrade the chip on the card as your needs see fit. On the other hand,
memory performance is tightly coupled to the performance of 3D accelerators, so I don't
know if that's really realistic or not.
GameCenter's
article
2:08 AM
Playing with RealVideo
After running across an entire episode of South Park in RealVideo format
(I think the site these originated on has been shut down already), I decided to try
playing around with the encoder and player a little. First off, the RealNetworks
site and the software seem hellbent on making you enter your personal information for
them. You can't download the software unless you enter your info and if you don't
register your information when you run the application, you are constantly bothered by the
pop-up screen every time you run the RealPlayer or RealEncoder until you do. There
are no options to turn this off, even though this is supposedly free software.
Anyhow, there are now a few "asdhfsda" registered in RealNetworks' user
database, hahaha! Serves 'em right!
Generally, I guess I'm pretty impressed with RealVideo, although I need to run a few
more tests. It certainly manages to get the point of whatever it's playing across to
the user. I'm still a little amazed at how much smaller the files are compared to
what I normally generate when I make a capture. I'm not sure what the acceptable
trade-off point is between size and quality. When I make a capture, I keep it at
pretty much broadcast quality. Almost nothing gets lost. I guess I'm kind of
picky that way. I'm going to play with the low bit-rate settings of Xing MPEG
Encoder and see how they compare to RealVideo. By the way, PC Magazine did a streaming video review a
few weeks ago and RealVideo came out on top.
While I'm at it, I'd like to say that Adobe Premiere is a horribly bug-ridden program.
Every time I try to do anything serious with it, it crashes. I am at a loss
as to how this program ever gets any Editor's Choice awards because I don't see how
anybody can get any work done with it.
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