Sunday, January 7, 2001

Hard Drive Copy Protection DOA? -- 6:52 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Privacy advocates have rightfully griped up a storm about the proposed copy protection scheme for hard drives. According to this article, they were able to gain some major concessions from the hard drive makers. Hopefully, they can kill this extremely stupid idea off before it sees the light of day. Thanks Slashdot.

Blowin' Cash -- 6:37 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

My CD-ROM drive recently went to the big motherboard in the sky, so I took Best Buy (no affiliation, yadda, yadda) up on a Sony CRX140E 8x4x32 burner. They had it for $149 + $20 rebate + $20 gift card. Can't be bad. Plus Sony has a deal where they will send you free CD-Rs and a labeling kit.

I burned my first disc (huzzah!), copying the massive 600M+ Baldur's Gate II demo into permanent archive land. I also took the opportunity to upgrade to Norton SystemWorks 2001, as version 1.0 was getting a little long in the tooth.

Saturday, January 6, 2001

Torvalds Interview -- 10:26 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet conducted a brief email interview with Linus Torvalds, the main man behind the Linux kernel, on his thoughts about the 2.4.0 kernel. He even rips on Foley for a stupid question, but then proceeds to give a multi-paragraph answer.

State of Linux Gaming 2000 -- 9:15 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Linux Games posted an editorial on the state of Linux gaming as we enter 2001. It really is an excellent, sober look at the gaming in Linux now (actually, it's one of the best editorials I've ever read on any website). It's a must-read for anyone even remotely interesting in Linux as a gaming platform.

J.t.Qbe comments: Overall it's a thorough and pretty accurate article. Unfortunately, the authors only seem to consider new and flashy games to be real: they claim that there are no (commercial) role-playing games for Linux, missing (as everyone does) the excellent game Exile III by Spiderweb Software. (Keep your eyes peeled for a review right here at The Haus!) If you actually look at the freeware games out there, you'll find a very rich array of gaming choices (Freeciv, Nethack, Angband, Empire, et al). No, they don't have the eye candy of the latest, but they do have depth, something sorely lacking in most of today's games.

Fact is, the dearth of Linux games and the low sales of existing games simply show that Linux is still a minority OS and has a long way to go. It needs a much, much larger user base to support its own gaming industry.

Linux Filesystem Explained -- 7:38 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

FreeOS explains all about the Linux filesystem. The article is geared toward people familiar with Windows, but unfamiliar with Linux. It explains a bit about Linux's "everything is a file" paradigm, and what all those directories are for. Thanks Linux Today.

After that article, you might want to read their article on the /proc filesystem to see all the cool stuff you can do, find out, or break with Linux in real-time.

XBox Revealed Today -- 10:10 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

As was announced earlier (story) Bill Gates is going to formally unveil the XBox hardware at the CES in Las Vegas today. XBox.com will have a live webcast starting at 11:30 U.S. Central Time. I think the XBox will be interesting, at least to see if hackers can turn it into the world's cheapest Linux box.

UPDATE! They now have some Flash animations showing off the XBox itself and the controller.

UPDATE #2! 5:15 P.M. XGR posted some similar pictures of the XBox as well as some screenshots from two games. I just wish that XGR would learn that every <center> tag needs a corresponding </center> tag.

Past Two Days' News

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