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That the Pentium Pro has a temperature sensor implemented in silicon on the chip that will automatically shut the chip down at a certain temperature (approximately 130º) to prevent permanent damage? Don't take that as a license to overclock with total impunity, though.
Check this out... http://www.chipanalyst.com. Each document in the x86 compatible section is chock full of interesting and detailed information. I was actually quite shocked to see how accurate some of the predictions were that were in the older documents. However, the problem is that only old documents are on the site...the newsletter is about $1000! Well, quality costs, I guess. Still, it's well worth reading a lot of that stuff.
Seems like Apple has reneged on an announcement which it made last month which promised a $9.95 Mac OS 8 upgrade to all customers who purchased a Mac or Mac-compatible clone. Now only people who bought geniune Apple Macintosh's or people whose requests were received before August 1 are eligible. Man, I can't think of dumber to do than screwing your own users when their loyalty is the only thing keeping the company above water.
Where does that expression come from anyways? Anyhow, Jay Leno actually said something funny today! By the way, this is all absolutely true. A woman is suing a pharmacy that sold her contraceptive jelly that didn't work. She got pregnant anyway. Apparently, she thought that because it said "jelly" on the packaging you were supposed to eat it on toast! Ok, so a lawyer actually picked up this case and when asked why his client didn't read the instructions, he said "Well, when you are sexually aroused, who has time to read instructions?" Uh yeah, but, who has time to make toast?
PC Magazine has another nice article up, this time attempting to directly compare today's microprocessors head-to-head. It's not the most accurate article in the world in terms of recommending what to get but it is pretty informative and interesting to read. The article is here. Also, a very interesting article on Techwire was posted today with some hard numbers for the November Intel price drop and about how quickly Intel intends to transition the market to Pentium II. Once again Intel is cutting prices more than was expected. Good for us, but bad for AMD and Cyrix.
10:07 PM Your friendly neighborhood beta tester has something to report. If you use NT 4.0, don't touch the new SB16/AWE drivers that Creative Labs released with a ten-foot pole. I installed them today and got two bluescreens in NT today. After removing the drivers everything went back to normal. Whew! Blue screens really scare me in NT because you know there's something REALLY wrong when you get one, NT itself being very good (actually usually perfect once you get things set up right) about stopping crashes. The driver seems to erroneously report itself as full-duplex but it doesn't seem to be as far as I can tell. I held off on posting the link to the new drivers yesterday and it looks like that was a good idea.
7:35 PM I haven't downloaded it yet and if things go the way they usually do you will find a lot of overloaded FTP sites.
All current themes have been replaced by digitally sampled and encoded music straight from the soundtrack. It's a big upload so it should be finished some time late at night. I also added the Ground Water Vein theme. I like that one a lot!
10:37 PM A minor update that fixes some Mission Pack problems. ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/unsup/glq8_27.zip
9:46 PM I have caught sight of this game enhanced for 3Dfx and it is without a doubt the most spectacular display of graphics I have ever seen on a home platform. The game itself is not super-duper, but man, does it look good! Those weapons are just...awe-inspiring. I mean, WOW! There's this one weapon that charges up for a little bit and shoots a round red glowing star. It travels really slowly and there's a small lens flare effect and then KABOOM!!! there's a gigantic explosion and a huge burst erupts and shockwaves are flying past you. Sniff...it's beautiful, man
Apparently Cyrix had to recall a small batch of about 10,000 chips because their testing procedures weren't stringent enough and some people were experiencing failures. It supposedly didn't affect too many people, but really, what else would you expect Cyrix to say?
Net Express is a very reputable net vendor that specializes in building high-quality clones (and I mean high-quality). I bought my last full computer from them (a Pentium 100) and although their prices seemed to be a little expensive for a while, they seem to have become a little more reasonable now. Anyhow, they say they are expecting ASUS LX motherboards in around the first week of September. Well, it's comforting to know these things will actually be making it out on the market. The Intel LX motherboards are apparently all on allocation to OEM's like Dell and Gateway right now.
The chipset has been released, when do the motherboards go into wide availability? For that matter what about the AGP video cards like the Riva 128? It's a painful time for people who want to get a computer now before school starts (like my friends), because the latest thing is just around the corner and every major vendor has a lead time of at least 3 weeks... Parts would be good and probably faster, if you could find somebody who could sell you the parts you needed. 3 more days and I am outta here!!! Well, out of work. I'm going back to school on the 1st of Sept. (Monday), man it's going to be good to be back. Ethernetted with my buddies and the Internet, it doesn't get any better. I'm going to be checking and insuring my computer on the plane as luggage. I hope that works out OK. Still gotta register for classes though! Hehe. I signed up for a quad with 3 other guys but one of them left. Now I found out we have a roommate from some country named Gorizia. I was like, "Where the f**k is that!?!?" Anyway, my friend looked it up and it seems it's a province of Italy. I knew it couldn't be a country. I think we are going to put the guy in the single (the room should have two singles and a double).
I always seem to get stuck with a third roommate. My junior year we got this one guy, Mike, who seemed pretty normal. He played water polo, I don't know how normal that is. Anyways, things were ok, we weren't great buddies but we basically just let the guy mind his own business. One day a bunch of my friends and I were in the room playing this game that we had found called Virtual Valerie 2. Well, even if you don't know what that game is off-hand, I bet you could guess. :-) It was just me and a bunch of the guys, so we didn't care, we had the speakers up pretty loud, although the door was closed. Anyway we were messing around with the game and laughing a lot, and when we finished, we all went out into the living room and there was Mike and his dad standing there. Which is pretty screwed up since Mike was from California....I mean, what the heck was his dad doing there? So, man, that was pretty screwed up. But when we all got away from there we were silent for about 5 seconds and then died laughing. Well, all I gotta say is that if you live with guys in a dorm you have to give a little warning before you have the folks over. That's just common sense. Mike moved out the next semester. Maybe his dad made him do it, haha!
Given the vast similarity between the Pentium II and the Pentium Pro, I always suspected that the 440LX and upcoming 440BX chipset would be compatible with the Pro. Now, at least, my suspicions regarding the 440LX seem to have been validated. Tyan's upcoming motherboards based on the 440LX have been stated to support the Pentium Pro's in a press release. I would say with the riser card adapters, of course. Anyhow, this is pretty great news...in case AGP or SDRAM somehow revolutionizes the market PPro owners won't be left in the dust. Makes me feel good, anyways!
7:32 PM The Pentium II is a pretty damn hot chip, and the surprising thing is that they are still aiming to put it in notebooks. Although this won't happen until the forthcoming process shrink to 0.25 microns, the heat generated will still be considerable and bring about a whole new era in thermal management for notebooks. Ever wanted a hot plate in your lap? Furthermore, the weird cartridge packaging used for Pentium II's will make it impossible to fit in the recent spate of ultra-thin form factor laptops. There will be two kinds of packaging, a 7mm high mini-cartridge and a 10mm IMM (Intel Mobile Module).
Both ASUS and Supermicro have expanded their motherboard line-ups with a significant amount of 440LX based motherboards. The new 440LX chipset, which was released today, features support for SDRAM and AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port). Take a look at their homepages for details. Also, PC Magazine has a review of several 440LX Pentium II 300 computers from various vendors. They also review a computer from Micron based on Micron's own homegrown chipset (a rather shocking thing actually these days), the Samurai, which supposedly features an optimized memory architecture and a 66 MHz PCI bus. It gets some top marks.
I was trying out GL QuakeWorld today and I was lagged pretty badly. I couldn't aim to kill anybody at all. It kind of stunk, actually. My ping was around 350 or so. I can't understand how anybody could play like that. Do people normally have better pings? For some reason I can't run my external modem at 115200 port speed, only 57600. I'm considering getting an X2 or K65flex modem once I graduate, but the port speed thing bothers me since I'll need the extra port speed if compression takes place. I was looking into USB (Universal Serial Bus) devices. Not only would this eliminate the crappy serial interface we have today, it would eliminate parallel ports, game ports, keyboard ports...basically every slow port that exists in today's computer. Replaces them all with one easy to use port which you can daisy chain an incredible number of devices off of and it only uses one interrupt. At 12 Mbit/sec, it's not that slow, either. But where are the devices!?! Modems would be a perfect candidate for this technology but I can't find any info on USB modems on the market or even in development. I played a little more today. The game was much less lagged but I still couldn't really find anything to do. I would find random stuff out in the woods and scavenge it. I was following a guy to Vesper and then a cougar came up and ate me. Wheehaa. | |||||||||||||||||||||
