Wednesday, November 8, 2000

New UT D3D -- 11:32 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

An Unreal Tournament patch without Direct3D problems? Heaven forbid! If you are a TNT/TNT2 user who is having HUD or other D3D-related problems, head over to the Unreal Technology page and pick up the new (old) d3ddrv.dll. Thanks loonyboi.

CounterStrike 1.0 Tonight -- 10:25 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Everyone and their dog is reporting that the 1.0 version of the immensely popular CounterStrike mod for Half-Life will be released tonight. In celebration of the joyful event, Gamers.com posted a big ol' preview of the 1.0 release. We'll pass along mirror sites as soon as they are announced.

Baldur's Gate II Demo -- 8:34 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Bioware has released a demo of Baldur's Gate II which covers a full chapter in the game. You can even import your character into the full version if you decide to buy it. The catch? It's a 618M download. No, that is not a typo. It comes in seven ~90M chunks at FilePlanet. You need to download all seven parts to play. Here are the links to parts one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven. Thanks Blue.

XFree86 4.0.1, NVIDIA, and Mandrake 7.2 -- 2:51 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

As I mentioned earlier (story), I had a hard time getting the NVIDIA XFree86 4.0.1 drivers installed with Mandrake 7.2. The reason was that the Mandrake installer actually installed the XFree86 3.3.6 server and SVGA driver when X was configured. With a little scouring on the 'Net, I came up with a solution. You can read all about it in my latest how-to entitled, XFree86 4.0.1, NVIDIA, and Mandrake 7.2. While you are at it, why not check out all of our Alternate Operating System articles. You might just learn something!

Special thanks go out to Linux Frog for his help with this.

Stupid Linux Distro Tricks -- 10:51 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Yesterday I installed Mandrake 7.2 using the CDs that J.t. sent me. I was pretty keyed to have KDE2 and XFree86 4.0.1 built in so I didn't have to mess with it. Or so I thought. Apparently the Mandrake installer does something extremely stupid. It installs XFree86 4.0.1, but when it configures it at the end of the install, instead of installing the 4.0.1 server, it installs the 3.3.6 server and SVGA display. Thankfully a search of Deja provided a solution, which I will be posting today hopefully. You would think that SOMEONE would have caught this in the beta testing.

J.t.Qbe comments: Hmmph. I wish I could get Mandrake installed on MY system. It keeps freezing up during the install; my guess is it's a hardware conflict. Oh well, guess I'll just keep trying.

Congratulations W -- 1:41 am CST, Update by J.t.Qbe

Make a difference.

A.T. Hun comments: If only it were that simple. They've still got to recount in Florida. Can somebody tell me why it's going to take until early this evening for the recount to be completed?

J.t.Qbe comments: To give more time to generate more ballots for a certain candidate? Well, at the time I posted, this was accurate news. With 96% of Florida counted, W was ahead by 50K votes and the networks called it in his favor. Just goes to show you how accurate the so-called "experts" can be.

Oh well. My wife was getting sick of my political slogans anyway. Her favorite: "Minnesota. We elected a wrestler. Who knows what we'll do next?" My favorite: "Bill Luther. He's like Martin Luther, except Martin Luther went to heaven."

UT 436 Patch Released -- 12:11 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

According to the Unreal Technology Page, the 436 patch for Unreal Tournament has been released. You can see a list of the changes here. A list of mirrors for the Windows, Mac, and Linux versions (yep, all three at the same time) can be found here.

Tuesday, November 7, 2000

Censorware Blocks Political Sites -- 3:15 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I've long been critical of censorware (software that blocks access to "objectionable" sites), not because I'm in favor of kids having access to pr0n, warez, or other such sites, but for several other reasons:

1. It gives parents an excuse not to be parents and instead pass that responsibility to a third party.
2. It limits the freedom of speech. While I abhor some of the viewpoints expressed on the web, they do have a right to voice their opinions. It is very dangerous to not allow certain groups to say what they want, simply because we disagree. As a devout Christian, I know that one of the first things to be censored into oblivion would be the Bible.
3. It often blocks sites that shouldn't be blocked.

This article is a case in point for my third reason. It shows how Bess and Cyber Patrol have blocked access to some candidate's websites. It doesn't seem to be an ideological thing, since access has been blocked to conservative, liberal, and moderate sites, although Bess seems to have something against Republicans and Libertarians. Thanks Slashdot.

Alice screenshots -- 10:57 am CST, Update by The Master

There's a selection of 5 yummy new snapshots up over on the Alice website. I really have a hard time believing that's the Quake3 engine driving that game. Wow.

Paul Jaquays Interview -- 9:32 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

ParkLan has posted an interview with id's Paul Jaquays. There's some pretty interesting questions on tips to keep framerates high in maps and new things to look forward to in Quake III: Team Arena. Thanks Blue.

Election Day! -- 9:05 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

It's election day in the United States. Get out to the polls and vote! If you don't, you can't complain about politics for another four years. So, what are you waiting for?

UPDATE! My wife and I just voted. You should too. It was somewhat unfortunate that neither this candidate nor this candidate were on the ballot, but you can't have everything.

UPDATE! (The Master) We've done our civic duty as well. Was a difficult election to decide on this year for myself-considering I'm not party minded, but we'll see how this sucker lands . . .

Past Two Days' News

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