Friday, February 11, 2000

Win2K with Bugs63K -- 6:41 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

ZDNet is reporting that the soon-to-ship Windows 2000 has some 63,000 bugs or incomplete features. Some 28,000 of these bugs are likely to cause "real problems". Hoo boy. Thanks Blue's News.

J.t.Qbe comments: Ok, with ~40M lines of code in the thing, you'd expect some bugs. Since it'll be the first release of a Microsoft product, you'd expect a lot of bugs. But 28K or 63K? If it had that many serious bugs, I think we'd've heard a huge outcry from the "beta testers" (who pay for the privilege of beta testing). I always take Mary Jo Foley (ZDNet author) with several grains of salt.

Not that I don't expect a lot of serious problems with Win2K, mind you. I'm sure it'll have many, many real bugs and security holes. But the pointy-haired bosses love Microsoft's marketing machine and buy the bit about "the incredibly high quality and reliability of Windows 2000". I can't wait till my company inflicts Win2K on us later this year (sarcasm). Sure, my Win2K PC will be welcome to sit on my desk. I'll still do my real work with Linux, just as I do now. . .

NVIDIA and SGI's New Babies -- 4:50 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The folks over at Riva 3D have gotten a scoop on some sweet new Linux-based systems coming down the pipes as a result of NVIDIA and SGI's partnership. Here's the goods:

SGI is getting ready to announce its new LINUX workstation, code named FLASH, which contains...(drum roll please)...the NVIDIA Quadro as the graphics processor!

In addition, they are about to announce a new system which uses a 32MB DDR (probably Quadro again) GPU, and at NAB, they'll roll out two more systems, the first being a dual Intel CPU with a 64MB DDR GPU (again a Quadro most likely).

But the really huge news is the third system that contains 4 Intel CPUs, and a MULTI-GPU being developed by NVIDIA AND SGI. The system reportedly will process 50 million poly's per second!

I wonder how fast it could run Quake 3.... :)

From my perspective, this means that NVIDIA is ready to support Linux in a big way. Hopefully this will make Linux a viable alternative to gaming on Win32 platforms.

Female Skins and Sounds Contest -- 4:30 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Trillian sends along news that the QGirlZ have chosen a winner in their female Quake III Arena model contest. The winner is Bolek's Kuyozuka No Rei. Congratulations!

Now they are running a female Q3A skins and sounds contest. The winner could walk away with a GeForce with 64M DDRAM! Entries must be in between February 22 and March 19. Check the contest site for more details.

Blame Linux for DoS? -- 12:19 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

This is straight out of the "Check my facts? What does that mean?" category. A trained monkey at Network Associates claims that Solaris and Linux have an inherant vulnerability that Windows does not have, making them vulnerable to being taken over and used for Denial of Service attacks. He claims that the OS's open-source nature makes it very easy for these hacks to be added. The really sad thing is that the utterly clueless will buy into this tripe. Thanks Slashdot for the continuing reminder that just because someone works for a big computer-oriented company, it doesn't mean that they can't suffer from cranial-rectal inversion.

The Master comments: Heh-this coming from a company that can't release a decent auto-up(date/grade) system for THEIR OWN VIRUS APP under win9x, and releases false-alarm virus detects that they don't fix for multiple dat releases. Sure-whatever Network Associates.

J.t.Qbe comments: This story was pulled at 11:17 PST due to "flagrant inaccuracies." Yeah, no kidding! Lots of good discussion over at Slashdot and Linux Today, though.

SBLive! Linux Driver Update -- 11:32 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I just saw on the emu10k1 (the chip behind the Sound Blaster Live! series of cards) developers' mailing list that the Makefile for the driver has been changed today so that it will theoretically work correctly for Red Hat users. I haven't had a chance to verify this personally. There are some other bug fixes made today so I may check it out. Get the drivers at ftp://opensource.creative.com/pub/snapshots/ and check out my Sound Blaster Live! in Linux page for installation instructions.

Update! The new Makefile detects my kernel version just fine, but I still have to change the MODVERSIONS line in the Makefile to avoid the "unresolved symbols" error.

Thursday, February 10, 2000

Yet Even Further Linux Fonts -- 10:11 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

A couple people have emailed me about how I got fonts to look decent under Linux. I'm glad I waited because I found an even better way! Ready? Here's the Reader's Digest condensed version (full report to follow when I get the chance to type it all up).

Step #1: Install xfs. Recent Red Hat distributions have this as the default font server so you're ready to go there already. Check the section on xfs in the Font Deuglification Mini-HOWTO for more information.

Step #2: Go to the Fuzzy small TT-fonts on the web section of the "Some Linux for beginners" webpage. Copy that big section of information on the arial font into a file called fonts.alias in your true type directory. Exit X and restart xfs (as root type /etc/rc.d/init.d/xfs restart or use linuxconf to do it). Note: this assumes that you have an Arial true type font from a Windows installation.

Step #3: Fire up Netscape and change the variable space font (under Edit->Preferences->Appearance->Fonts) to Arial (Monotype), 14 pt, and click the "allow scaling" box. Also check the "Use document-specific fonts, including Dynamic Fonts" box.

It's not absolutely perfect, but it's about a million times better than the default (that's very little hyperbole). The problem is that you have to create the fonts.alias file to convince Netscape that the Arial font can indeed be used in more than 12pt. Rumor has it that Mozilla M14 will fix this, but it'll be a bit before that comes out (M13 crashes spectacularly when you try to change fonts).

Bad Games . . . Way Bad -- 9:35 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Daily Radar has an editorial posted about a recently announced and profoundly bad video game which I will not even mention by name, so as not to besmirch our news page. Let's just say it's another in a long line of games swimming in a sea of retarded sexuality. Daily Radar is fed up and they're not going to take it any more. I'm with them 100%. Just say "No" to Lameware. Thanks Evil Avatar for the link.

Is the Andover.net purchase really good? -- 9:44 am CST, Update by The Master

Got a link from Webmonkey today to an article on the whole VA Linux aquisition of Andover.net (the parent company of Slashdot). Interesting article, with a dour opinion of the aquisition.

J.t.Qbe comments: Another "sky is falling" editorial has been posted at Linux Weekly News. Personally, I don't see why so many are wetting their pants over the possible effects this will have on Slashdot. Slashdot never claims to be complete, thorough or authoritative, but they post what they want anyway. If I want complete, I check out Linux Today. If I want to know what to think, I decide for myself. If Slashdot were to disappear tomorrow, it would be far from the end of the world. There's far more available on the net than just Slashdot. . .

Happy Birthday A.T. -- 12:02 am CST, Update by J.t.Qbe

Join me in wishing A.T. Hun a great birthday! May it live up to the high ideals described by Weird Al in his song "Happy Birthday":

Today is your birthday,
it happens every year.
We'll eat a lot of broccoli
and drink a lot of beer.

Happy birthday, and may you have more birthdays ahead of you than behind!

A.T. Hun comments: I plan to celebrate my birthday by sitting around and muttering. "Hey, you kids! Get off my lawn!" ^$@! hippies.

The Master comments: Happy Birthday you old fart :-)

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