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I can't personally vouch for this, but my friend told me he saw on the news today that Microsoft makes more money off each Macintosh sold than Apple does. Well, it sure does explain a lot, doesn't it? I believe it. Lion Entertainment, which had been porting some of the PC's most popular as well as most anticipated games to the Macintosh, closed up shop yesterday. There weren't any reasons given as to why they closed; however, many of the ports will be finished, so don't kill yourself if you own a Mac.
In addition to a slew of new voodoo Rush cards (none of which I find particularly interesting because they are probably all the same), Matrox and Lockheed Martin are releasing 3D cards of their own. The Matrox will be an add-in PCI card operating in a simliar fashion to the PowerVR card by passing the rendered image over the PCI bus to the video card's framebuffer. It supposedly supports all the key features left out of the Mystique (like bilinear filtering and transparent alpha-blending) and also supposed to be fast enough to run GL Quake. There's a rumor that the card will only cost $99 dollars...I'm skeptical of that rumor but it's worth mentioning. The Lockheed card is based on Lockheed's Real3D technology which is used in Sega's Model 2 and Model 3 boards. Their new card is targeted at professionals and is priced way out of the consumer level. Microsoft has released an update for Office 97 which adds some new features and presumably fixes some bugs too. The big change that a lot of people were looking for is the filter that allows Word 97 to save documents in true Word 95/6.0 format (you can set this to be on by default if you like). There's a warning not to use it with any Windows betas or with the shell integration IE4, so I guess I won't be using it. I am DYING to play this game. Arrghhh!!! In case you haven't been reading the forum religiously, a guy named Ninja K wrote a nice CGI script which tracks and logs all of Blizzard's official posts. This article is more prediction than fact, but it's interesting nonetheless.
Kind of like hell and heaven coming together!...I'll leave it up to you to decide which is which. Microsoft is investing in $150 million of Apple's stock (non-voting) and promising to release 5 major revisions of its applications suite in as many years. Apple is making Internet Explorer the default browser for the Macintosh. Yowza! I wonder what all those Apple die-hards who think Microsoft and Intel are the anti-christ are going to say now...I think a lot of fanatics are going to be doing a hypocritical about-face.
ZDnet's article A new D3D patch adding some new graphical features for Interstate 76 was released today. http://www.activision.com/games/action/i76/downloads.html
The big news of the day is that Hercules is releasing two new Voodoo Rush Stingray cards, one with both 4MB of framebuffer and 4MB of texture memory, which is greater than any commercial level Voodoo card seen to date. The new cards will also sport a 180MHz RAMDAC for better refresh rates at higher resolution. Obviously, a lot of the early Stingray 128/3D adopters are feeling a little screwed by all this. Hey, I'm with ya! BTW, what the hell does Hercules mean by "ships with accelerated drivers for NT 4.0?" Last I checked, they had nothing of the sort. Both Tom's Hardware Guide and Tweak It have preliminary results of a preproduction 440LX based motherboard. The results are particularly unimpressive so far, but keep in mind the board is only in preproduction and that no final judgment can be made until the product is officially out.
ZDNet has a nice article describing the new architecture and issues surrounding Intel's upcoming 64-bit architecture. This chip will finally break from the x86 architecture almost completely, using on-chip logic to decode x86 instructions to native Merced instructions. 5:55 PM Oh yeah, just in case you are totally out of touch with the outside world, UPS went on strike today. They handle 4/5 of the country's package shipping and as a result other carriers are unable to handle the extra volume generated by the strike. Nobody is guaranteeing delivery times, etc. Wow, huh? Maybe you should pick up that new upgrade for your computer locally. I've had a yearning to be able to try out the new BeOS, but haven't been able to because it's only for PowerPC systems (basically, Macs). Now, it looks like I may get my chance. Be demonstrated a version of BeOS for Intel x86 processors today and plans to release it when the next release arrives, supposedly in January. Well, that's a ways off, but it's there, at least. Did you know that using the pkt:4 option in War2 makes the game virtually lag-free over Kali? Man, it's awesome! 6-player games are completely playable, although I haven't seen an 8-player yet. The server must have this option set since it's the server who determines the pkt setting. All you need to do is right-click on the Warcraft II icon in the Kali toolbar to change it.
It's pretty simple, apparently. All you need is ping, which comes with Win95/NT. Ping some of your favorite hosts with this command: ping -f -l 1460 -w 10000
The -f prevents routers from fragmenting the packet if it's too big for them, You can also observe the effects of fragmentation on your ping times. Do the same as above but don't use the -f flag. Watch ping times increase dramatically when -l 1460 if you are on a route where your packets are being fragmented.
Woo! This version has an ID3 tag editor, enhanced window-shade mode and an oscilloscope! Whoa!
http://winamp.lh.net/winamp.zip Despite my best efforts, I was completely unable to find any good information about consumer-level camcorders on the Web. Is this really possible? I was trying to find out the approximate resolution of the 8mm media used in camcorders. No dice. | ||||||||||||||||||
