Sunday, June 25, 2000

Requiem .7 Released -- 7:31 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Requiem team has release a non-beta .7 version of their Quake III Arena mod. Requiem is a personal favorite of The Master and me, we highly recommend it. (A personal note: Flamethrower! Burn! Burn! Ahem, sorry.) Here's a list of the changes since beta3:

• Many freezebomb changes to balance out the game more
• Minor balance-changes to flamethrower and touch grenade
• ESD doesn't knock back people who are still in fairstart mode
• Disable-runes option was broken. Fixed.

Silly -- 11:38 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

If that Rambus article makes you mad, just check out this online comic strip and you'll feel all better. At least I did, but I've got a weird sense of humor.

Rambus Hates You -- 11:14 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

As if it weren't bad enough that Rambus memory just plain sucks, the company has found another way to make money and make consumers bleed until their white. According to this EBNews article, Rambus is going to use their patent arsenal to raise SDRAM and DDRAM prices to the point where Rambus can be competitive. Don't believe me? Here's a quote:

[Rambus VP Avo] Kanadjian said that as Rambus hammers out licensing deals with other companies, it will charge less for access to SDRAM than for emerging DDR SDRAM, which is perceived as the most likely competitor to the Direct Rambus interface.

"We will seek smaller royalty amounts for conventional [single-data-rate] SDRAM, but greater fees for DDR," he said.Asked if the payment plan was designed to head off a potential rival to Direct Rambus, Kanadjian replied, "I wouldn't argue with that conclusion."

So basically, we have a crappy technology but we will use our lawyers to ram it down your throat or, failing that, any other available orifice. It's one thing to be a total b@$t@rd, but it's another thing entirely to be smug about it. Thanks Slashdot.

Carmack on PS2/DX8 -- 9:51 am CST, Update by The Master

John Carmack has posted this blurb and this one over on /. on his feelings on Playstation 2 hype and on OpenGL/DirectX8 directions. Interesting port. Thanks Shugashack.

UPDATE! 3:45 P.M. by A.T. Hun Blue adds links to a couple of choice comments from Verant's Brian Hook on DX8. You can view his comments here and here.

Just a side note: if you visit Slashdot a lot, set up an account and set it to filter out all posts moderated lower than 2. The information will be much more useful and you won't have to mentally filter out all the dreck.

History today -- 9:39 am CST, Update by The Master

• 1788: Virginia ratified the U.S. Constitution.
• 1862: Seven Days Battles begin at Oak Grove (French's Field), Virginia.
• 1868: Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina were re-admitted to the Union.
• 1876: Lt. Col. George A. Custer and his Seventh Cavalry were wiped out by Sioux and Cheyenne Indians in the Battle of the Little Bighorn in Montana.
• 1942: General Dwight D. Eisenhower first showed his skills in coordinating Anglo-American forces in North Africa. On this day Churchill and Roosevelt placed him in charge of European operations. In addition, ~1,000 British Royal Air Force bombers raided Bremen, Germany.
• 1950: Forces from the communist North Korea invaded South Korea, starting the Korean War.
• 1951: CBS transmitted a one-hour special from New York to four other cities in the first commercial color telecast.
• 1956: The last 1956 Packard automobile was produced, marking the end of production at Packard’s Connor Avenue plant in Detroit, Michigan. Packard would continue to manufacture cars in South Bend, Indiana until 1958, but for those familiar with Packard, the last 1956 model is considered the last true Packard car.
• 1962: The Supreme Court ruled that the use of an unofficial, non-denominational prayer in New York State public schools was unconstitutional.
• 1973: Former White House Counsel John W. Dean began testifying before the Senate Watergate Committee.
• 1975: The People's Republic of Mozambique came into being, ending nearly five centuries of Portuguese rule.
• 1988: American-born Mildred Gillars, better known during World War II as "Axis Sally" for her Nazi propaganda broadcasts, died in Columbus, Ohio, at age 87. (Gillars had served 12 years in prison for treason.)
• 1995: Warren Burger, 15th chief justice of the United States, died in Washington of congestive heart failure at age 87.
• 1998: The Supreme Court rejected a 1997 line-item veto law as unconstitutional, and ruled that HIV-infected people are protected by the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Ranting -- 1:28 am CST, Update by J.t.Qbe

I've been a PC Gamer reader since '95 or '96. Back in the early days, you could buy the CD-ROM edition and count on getting some good demos. That changed. Nowadays, you can spend $7-8 on the CD-ROM edition of PC and you have a good chance of getting a defective CD. I've been getting defective CDs since late 1997, and have seriously cut down on buying the magazine at all. My last issue was in December 1998.

Well, I was tempted by the July 2000 issue, in which the CD-ROM is purported to have free copies of a dozen classic games--good stuff too, like Ultima Underworld and X-Com. I bought it and took it home, expecting that the CD wouldn't work. Sure enough, it didn't work. I wrote to PC Gamer to request a new CD. Haven't seen one now after 2 weeks of waiting. I've exchanged the magazine four more times and still don't have a working CD. I've tried the CDs in 3 different computers, and none can read them. Numerous others have had the same problem, and PC Gamer doesn't seem to care.

This is inexcusable. It's disappointing to miss out on some of these good games. It's infuriating to spend $7-8 on a magazine primarily to get a CD-ROM which doesn't work (the magazine itself certainly isn't worth that much). It's disheartening to see the lack of concern PC Gamer shows toward its readers. I'll never again buy any copy of PC Gamer. They've lost me for good. And I'm sure they don't care.

Saturday, June 24, 2000

KDE2 Preview -- 10:32 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

KDE is a very powerful and user-friendly graphical front-end for Linux' X Window system. It's the one I use when I boot to Linux. The next version, KDE2, promises to be even more friendly. GNULinux.com has a quick preview of KDE2, based on beta code. Most impressive is their kOffice productivity suite. I'm hoping this will be another step toward allowing me to dump Windows eventually. We'll see. Thanks Linux Today.

J.t.Qbe comments: KDE2 promises to be a huge improvement over an already great window manager. I use Enlightenment at work, but KDE2 may very well lure me away.

But it won't let you dump Windows entirely. The games will keep pulling you back. Kudos to Loki for helping to bring high quality games to Linux, but I still have a ton of Windows/DOS games I still play (or intend to play). Until you're ready to dump your legacy stuff altogether, you'll need that legacy OS. . .

Q3A Side-Scroller -- 10:17 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

TargetQuake attempts to turn our favorite first-person shooter into a classic side-scroller. Interesting concept. You can download the PK3 file here. There are a few bugs, so make sure to check out the TargetQuake page first. Thanks Blue.

History today -- 10:57 am CST, Update by The Master

• 1497: The first recorded sighting of North America by a European took place as explorer John Cabot spotted land, probably in present-day Canada.
• 1509: Henry VIII was crowned king of England.
• 1675: In colonial New England, King Philip’s War began when a band of Wampanoag warriors raided the border settlement of Swansee, Massachusetts, and massacred the English colonists there.
• 1793: The first republican constitution in France was adopted.
• 1812: Following the rejection of his Continental System by Czar Alexander I, French Emperor Napoleon order his Grande Armée, the largest European military force ever assembled to that date, into Russia.
• 1910: The Wireless Ship Act of 1910 required all American ships carrying more than fifty people to be equipped with radios.
• 1915: More than 800 people died when the excursion steamer Eastland capsized at Chicago's Clark Street dock.
• 1940: France signed an armistice with Italy during World War II.
• 1945: Soviet troops parade past Red Square in celebration of their victory over Germany. As drums rolled, 200 soldiers performed a familiar ritual: They threw 200 German military banners at the foot of the Lenin Mausoleum. A little over 130 years earlier, victorious Russian troops threw Napoleon's banners at the feet of Czar Alexander I.
• 1948: Communist forces cut off all land and water routes between West Germany and West Berlin, prompting the Western allies to organize the massive Berlin Airlift.
• 1968: "Resurrection City," a shantytown constructed as part of the Poor People's March on Washington, D.C., was closed down by authorities.
• 1975: 113 people were killed when an Eastern Airlines Boeing 727 crashed while attempting to land during a thunderstorm at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport.
• 1989: Zhao Ziyang, who had expressed sympathy with pro-democracy students, was replaced by Jiang Zemin as general secretary of the Communist Party.
• 1994: The European Union and Russia signed a landmark friendship accord in Corfu, Greece.

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