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3:01 AM
Matrox's Productiva G100
Kind of a weird name, but good lord, an 8MB AGP card for $99?!?! The
2D performance looks great, not to mention Matrox's excellent Windows NT support so far
(well, except for the Rainbow Runner...still waiting on M-JPEG and multiprocessing support
under NT).
Got sidetracked a little...the point is, this card looks like it's poised to blow the
bottom out of the low end of the market.
Matrox's Productiva G100
information
Best Buy agony
I had a really annoying time today trying to return stuff at Best Buy.
First of all, I brought this 24X SCSI CD-ROM (which I opted out of because the IDE
drive was only $29.99...it's hard to argue with that price) in and managed to talk to a
lady right away. OK, things are smooth so far. Then she tells me I have to
bring it over to the computer parts service center so they can check it out and make sure
everything is in there. OK, no problem. I go over and there are about 3 people
in front of me. One lady is waiting because apparently she doesn't like the fact
that she's going to have to wait while the part they need to fix her computer gets shipped
in. Seriously, what did she want them to do about it? Give her a loaner?
I have no idea. The other lady in front of me was getting her computer fixed.
The idiot at the counter freaking hooked up her computer and fixed it over the span
of 15 minutes while I and some other people were waiting just to get our items checked out
for 30 seconds a piece. I didn't even see anything wrong with her computer...it
looked like she didn't know how to enter the serial number for Windows 95 or something.
That started to bug me, and when I finally got it checked out, the guy didn't even give
me a slip or anything. I could've just gone back to the returns lady and said I had
gotten it checked out and it would have worked just as well. Well, I finally head
back and the lady is off doing something so I have to wait for her to finish, and, as
she's filling out my return info, the manager comes up and sends me to some other person.
So now I'm standing in line behind two other people, and I'm thinking, man, I was
just about to get my return processed, what the hell am I doing back in line again?
So then, the return lady I'm with now is either retarded or new, because she's screwing
everything up. Some woman was returning some VHS tapes (one can only wonder), and
the return lady credits her for the whole receipt instead of just the tapes. The
manager has to come over every minute to show her something else she did wrong. I'm
thinking, "Great." When that's all taken care of, this other person in
front of me tries to return an IDE CD-RW, and she says the power doesn't work or something
like that. Yeah right. Well, the return lady is about to take it back when the
manager walks up and says, look, you're over 30 days, we can't take this back. I'm
thinking, "Oh, even better." Then the woman starts trying to argue or
weasel her way out of it. What's the point? 30 days is more than enough time
to return something. She says stuff like, "Oh, so you're saying you can't ever
buy a gift for somebody and return it." Seriously, if you are going to buy a
CD-RW for somebody as a gift (!?!?), how long do you need to hold it for? And
doesn't everybody keep that 30 day limit in mind?
Well, finally the manager just took me over to another register and rang me up in about
3 minutes. It's just amazing that anything gets done. They should hire more
managers, pay them 3 times as much money, and hire less peons, because they do about 5
times more work than those other people.
Speaking of peons, we played a lot of StarCraft today. Great game. Terran
defense is stupid, but on the other hand, they can have a tough time expanding to another
mine. Playing with other people on your team (either as a team or as allies) is the
way to go. It's a shame there aren't any team ladder games...one on one games just
aren't nearly as interesting.
10:28 PM
More Tekken 3 movies
By popular request, endings for Jin and Hwoarang from Tekken 3 are now up,
along with a clip of Gon fighting the good fight. Have fun!
3:01 AM
Terminal apps for Windows CE
In order to see what exactly is going wrong when I try to install BeOS,
I'm thinking about hooking up my Windows CE to COM1, where the BeOS kernel is supposed to
output detailed debugging information. Only problem is, I need to get a proper
terminal application for Windows CE (and reinstall my Windows CE software). I've got
this program called TermForce, but I'm not sure if just regular old Terminal built into
Windows CE might do the trick.
11:07 PM
Overclocking the Libretto 50
Those of you who've been visiting for a while know that I have a special
liking for Toshiba sub-sub-notebook, the Libretto. It looks like I might actually be
able to get a Libretto 100CT within the next couple of months, which prompted me to do a
little more reading about the current state of Libretto affairs. A very interesting
and recent development is that current Libretto 50's, which have a 75 MHz Pentium
processor, are actually being shipped with an underclocked 120 MHz MMX processor. I
suppose this is because the Pentium 75 has been discontinued. These processors are
usually easily overclocked to 166 MHz, and at the current price of $999 ESP, they look
like an especially attractive deal. Information on overclocking the Libretto can be
found here.
I'm sort of wondering whether or not I should go for that or the 100CT. The 100CT
looks great because it adds everything I thought was missing from the Libretto 50 and 70:
namely, a mic in, a bigger screen, two PC Card slots, and a PS/2 mouse and keyboard port
on the replicator. It's not just an incremental upgrade, it's completely different
and just a tad larger. The thing is, I have a chance to have one brought back from
Japan, which makes the price about $1700 as opposed to the $2300-2400 this new model costs
in the US. Of course, if you can't do that, you can always mail-order and save
yourself some money...try T-Zone for a
great deal on Libretto's.
9:01 PM
MacroVision defeated on the Encore Dxr2
Just in case you have one of the Creative Labs PC-DVD Encore kits and
don't follow the newsgroups regularly, it appears a hack has been developed to turn off
the Macrovision copy protection and select PAL or NTSC output in the Dxr2. It makes
a very tempting case for getting a PC-DVD Dxr2 kit instead of a standalone console.
Don't forget, there's a review of this kit in the Articles and Reviews section if you're
interested.
Erwin's Homepage - Where you can download
the Macrovision/Region code hacks
1:20 PM
NT OpenGL ICD for Riva 128
STB released a Windows NT OpenGL ICD for its cards that should work with
other Riva 128 based cards as well. You can download it here.
Downloads are active again
You can now download the clips in the Recent A/V clips section because the
server is back up again. Note that links to large clips that were on various other
sections of the site might not work any more, but I'm sure all the ones above will.
12:58 AM
Konica Q-Mini review is up
Check out a great value in the nascent digital photography segment, the
Konica Q-Mini digital camera. The review is up.
11:06 PM
iFilmEdit
iFilmEdit from Cinax is an interesting
little application that allows you to edit together MPEG-1 streams, which you normally
can't due to the compression. Comes in handy for creating huge MPEG-1 streams, such
as you might want to do for Video CD's.
11:06 PM
Movie downloads
Yes, the downloads from VGM aren't working right now. I really don't
have any other place to put the files, but the site should be back up soon. Until
then, you'll just have to be patient.
Some Rainbow Runner for NT fixes
For those of you running your Rainbow Runner in Windows NT, you might have
noticed that you can't open new windows in IE 4.0 anymore. This is due to the RR
drivers, and you'll need to do a couple of things to fix this problem. Go to
Start/Run and type "regsvr32 actxprxy.dll" and hit enter. Then after
that's done, go back to Start/Run and type "regsvr32 shdocvw.dll" and hit enter.
Then reboot. That should fix it. Good info from www.matroxusers.com.
5:42 PM
StarCraft for $24.95
I don't have a paper and CompUSA's
website hasn't been updated, but I've got one report that CompUSA is indeed
advertising StarCraft for $24.95 in this week's ad. That's $44.95 - $20 rebate.
Grab yourself a copy!
3:48 AM
Sound Blaster PCI 64
Check out Creative Labs' new PCI64 soundcard. Looks pretty cool at
first, until you realize that it's an Ensoniq AudioPCI with the CL brand on it. That
$99 starts to look like a rip-off real fast, doesn't it? Go to Best Buy and compare
the PCI64 to the Digital Research PCI sound card next to it. Identical cards!
Pretty funny, huh? This card is worth about $40-50 bucks, max.
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