Tuesday, March 19, 2002

XP333-R Review -- 10:33 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

HardOCP posted a review of the IWill XP333-R motherboard, the same mobo powering my new box (although I have the non-RAID version). It isn't the most glowing review in the world, mainly because they had a couple of boards that were DOA and they couldn't automatically overclock to a 166Mhz FSB like the board's name implies. The main problem is that IWill's marketing people should be beaten about the head.

Here's my personal experience with the board. 99% of the problems I had were fixed by flashing to the latest (January 17) BIOS and not running the ALi hardware monitor. Since then, it's been basically rock-solid. I do a lot of gaming on this box, but it is also my work box. If it doesn't function, I can't get my work done. I've been pleased with the lack of "issues" I've had with it either in Win98 or in Linux. The BIOS checksum error I had right after I got it (story) is not motherboard-specific. From what I've read on the newsgroups, just about every type of Award BIOS mobo has faced that problem at one time or another.

I'm not interested in overclocking (overclocking an Athlon XP 1800+ seems like overkill to me). The main reasons I got this board was to avoid problems with the VIA chipsets and because ALi actually goes out of their way to support Linux.

UPS Gets It Right? -- 10:11 am CST, Update by J.t.Qbe

Wow! On Friday at 5:30 pm I impulsively ordered Gothic during Amazon's $9.99 sale. Projected delivery date was Thursday. It arrived this morning. Impressive! Another game to add to the queue (but maybe to the top of the queue).

The World's Biggest Idiot Award Goes to . . . -- 9:10 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Jerome Heckencamp, accused of hacking into eBay and other sites, for his attempts to defend himself in court. He's either clueless or somehow hoping that being belligerent will help his cause. Here's a snip:

During what was to be a routine proceeding to set future court dates, Heckenkamp challenged the indictment against him on the grounds that it spells his name, Jerome T. Heckenkamp, in all capital letters, while he spells it with the first letter capitalized, and subsequent letters in lower case.

Last week, Heckenkamp, 22, fired attorney Jennifer Granick, and co-counsel Marjorie Allard, in order to personally defend himself against two federal grand jury indictments charging that he cracked computers at eBay, Lycos, Exodus Communications, and other companies in 1999. It was the second time Heckenkamp fired his lawyers -- in January, he had a federal magistrate appoint him as his own counsel, only to change his mind the same day.

Nothing like adding "contempt of court" to your list of charges. Thanks Slashdot.

Monday, March 18, 2002

Might & Magics (plural!) Gold -- 5:02 pm CST, Update by J.t.Qbe

Gone Gold is now Might & Magic IX and Heroes IV have gone gold. Don't they know about the stack of unplayed games I already have? Don't they care? Oh well, I guess I still have a week or two to finish them all.

I hope that 3DO can pull off another M&M VI: good game, almost no bugs (and thus no patch needed right away), lots of fun right out of the box! I'm not going to get Heroes IV, though; Heroes III is ok but not the type of game I'd jump at.

Past Two Days' News

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