Thursday, June 6, 2002

Pondering the Imponderable -- 11:13 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Nothing of great importance to talk about in the computing world today. I snagged Mozilla 1.0 for Linux and Windows and have been using it with great success. I'm really looking forward to seeing what people do with the Gecko rendering engine behind it.

In hockey news, my beloved Wings rose from the dead with two goals in the third period to knot their series with Carolina up 1-1 with a 3-1 victory. Game #3 is Saturday night.

Wednesday, June 5, 2002

The Joys of MS Product Activation -- 11:17 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Loyd Case at Extremetech tells of his recent problems with Microsoft product activation on a laptop. Apparently both Office XP and Windows XP mysteriously stopped running and demanded to be reactivated. That must be kind of like how Windows 98 occasionally "forgets" that I have a USB mouse and installs the USB drivers all over again for no apparent reason.

That's my gripe with things like this. They really don't prevent piracy, they just annoy legitimate users. It's like the SafeDisc copy protection. It causes my CD drive to go into convulsions, causes massive slowdowns in games like Morrowind, caused Unreal Tournament to have problems installing out of the box, and yet hacks to circumvent it pop up on the 'Net within moments of a game's release. Why bother?

J.t.Qbe comments: In the case of XP, a crack appeared before the OS was even officially released. And in the case of Morrowind, SafeDisc caused a really noticeable performance hit--I gained at least 25-30% framerate after getting the hacked version.

In the case of XP though, it's a question of who really owns your data? Are you keeping personal or company data in proprietary file formats on a proprietary office system on a proprietary OS which is owned and controlled by a monopoly which clearly has its own interests in mind rather than yours? And if so, doesn't that bother you?

Mozilla 1.0 Released! -- 12:43 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

It's done! At long last, it's done! After several years of work, the Mozilla team has released version 1.0 of their web browser suite which is the basis for Netscape 6.x and 7.x. You can download a build for your OS, check out the release notes, or read the FAQ. I've been using Mozilla pretty much exclusively as my web browser since October of 2000. I highly recommend it (as you've no doubt noticed if you've visited this site before).

UPDATE! The release was just announced on Slashdot. Thus the main FTP is being hammered into oblivion. You might want to wait for the download a bit . . .

UPDATE #2! More and more mirror sites are getting updated. Check the list for a mirror near you. I just downloaded the Win32 version as far as my DSL could go from one of them.

J.t.Qbe comments: Finally! I've just downloaded it (Win32 version) and am using it for this update. Much, much faster than the earlier releases. I hope it's much more stable and reliable than Netscrape 4.x!

Freelancer Interview -- 12:38 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Action Vault interviewed Digital Anvil's Jorg Neumann about their upcoming space game, Freelancer. This game has been in production for a long time. I hope it can live up to the hype. Here's a quote I liked:

Freelancer's game experience is very different from the traditional space shooters. The game is much closer to Elite and Privateer - other similarities exist to classics like Pirates, Fallout and Diablo. We do have a story arc with missions that resemble current space combat games, but the game entails so much more: more than 160 places to land, 50 very large star systems to explore, and an endless number of missions the player can embark on.

I really hope this game becomes an Elite for 2003. Thanks Evil Avatar.

J.t.Qbe comments: I too hope that it can live up to the hype. I could really go for a decent Elite-like space sim. . .

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