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2/29/2004

Animated Clone Wars series (Ch. 11-20) forthcoming 3/26 - 4/8.

Look here. Punkbuster for CoD. Finally

CNN has an article about several different proposals for making standard SMTP email more secure.

Caller ID and SPF, at least, are likely to disrupt mail-forwarding services that colleges and companies offer to let alumni and subscribers route e-mail through a domain name other than their own service provider's.

They also could break "send to a friend" features in which someone clicks on a Web link to pass an interesting item to someone else.

Issues to be worked out for all three systems include how to properly send e-mail from cybercafes, hotels and public Wi-Fi hotspots and how to preserve privacy when using anonymous re-mailers, which are used by whistleblowers and others to intentionally mask the origin of messages.

I don't necessarily seeing the "send to friend" option being broken as a bad thing since most of the time I don't want to be sent a lame ass cartoon or an uplifting message about embracing Jesus. As for mail forwarding services.  Well, what about a web-based solution where you log into the host server, post your message and be on your way. Not as fast as email I know but as the article suggested, they're looking at these issues.

2/28/2004

Slate has a story about the popularity of Medal of Honor expansion. Apparently, the Japanese love shooting their grandfathers.

"And to give the game credit, it's as sensitive as you could be toward the Japanese, given that you're constantly, you know, killing them. Unlike the cackling Nazis of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, the enemies are not caricatures. They seem as desperate and panicked as you are."

See that's where part of the problem lies with games like MoH and Call of Duty. I like my villains of the cackling nature. If the Nazi soldiers had fiendish top hats and rolled their pencil thin mustaches between their gloved fingers.. hey, all the better!

2/25/2004

Where's the site been these past few days? I dunno.  I was told the server was being moved and that other sites on the box are working but mine isn't.  I don't know why. It's not my box and I can't complain too loudly since I'm given the space for free and the owner, my best friend, is a good guy so I'll just post here and so when it's back up you'll have an orgy of news. 

For instance,

BETA patch for Call of Duty is out.  Here it is in it's entirety:

ATTENTION: THIS PATCH IS A BETA PATCH and is not supported by Activision Customer Support. It is intended to address the critical issues listed below:

- Fixed a slow update problem with the server list.
- Fixed a problem where the server list would improperly list servers with a ping of “1.”
- Fixed a problem with the server list being incomplete.
- Fixed an exploit where prone players who leaned around corners could see the enemy without being seen.
- Fixed an exploit where players could switch between prone and jumping positions to move rapidly across a map.
- Fixed a bug with the sway animation of the sniper rifle scope on high ping servers.
- Made improvements to Autobalancing.

Please carefully consider the following information before downloading and/or installing this Beta patch:

- This 1.3 BETA patch only supports English-language Windows versions of the game. There is no Linux version of the updated beta multiplayer code, and you will NOT be able to see Linux servers.

- Once you have installed this patch, the ONLY Call of Duty games you will be able to see or join will be on game servers that are running the Beta patch code. You will NOT be able to access any of the servers running non-BETA Call of Duty code (i.e. 1.2 or earlier). If you have friends or teammates who are not utilizing this patch, you will not be able to play with them.

- Once installed, there is no "uninstall" for the patch that would roll your game back to the previous (release) version of Call of Duty. Therefore, once you have installed this beta patch, the only way to revert to the release version of the game is to uninstall Call of Duty completely, and then reinstall the game from your Call of Duty CD-ROMs.

- Installation of this Beta patch will make you ineligible for any Activision Customer Support on this product. HOWEVER, reverting to the original release code by re-installing the game from the CDROM you purchased will reinstate your eligibility. Installing subsequent official patches will also reinstate your eligibility for Activision Customer Support.

- This patch does not address all known issues with the game.

SUCH AS PUNKBUSTER!!! Cripes. 

Others like Silent Storm. Why don't I? What's wrong with me?

Winzip 9.0 out.  Register it? Ummm. Sure!

And since I know my site is the bastion of political, scientific, and ethical issues, obviously I have something to say about gay marriages or civil unions or whatever.  Fine. Let 'em do it. I don't care. Marry goats for all I care. If they want a Constitutional Amendment to ban such unions, then wouldn't we need one for adultery, too since that is one of the biggest reasons why the sanctity of marriage is broken as well?

There, that's my pedestal.  Oh. And this picture. Fake. 

2/21/2004

Usually I don't post much on weekends but a buddy passed this link to Slickdeals on to me. Excellent site.

2/20/2004

And just cause I think this whole Phantom console thing is stupid here's some more news regarding it for anyone who either does or doesn't care. Why? Cause it sounds like this guy running Infinium is a scoundrel of the most dastardly type. Just to be sure, here's the original investigation HardOcp did a few months ago.  

Is the MMO game market saturated?  YES!

Phantom = Vapor. At least till I see one of the shelves it's all bogus. Just like Duke, Doom III, and Half-Life 2. Delays and marketing hype means diddly to me.  Let's see product! 

Live journal stupidity ahead:

I think the fact that game stores take back used games is a great idea.  You give the kids store credit for a game and they buy more games. Then you jack up the price for the used game and you're all set to sell it again.  EB took back about 20 old games (most I still had the docs even) I had and gave me about $60 for them all. Considering I had games going all the way back to Quake 2 I think I did all right.  The biggest game they took back was Silent Storm.  So, there's my money for Painkiller. Excellent.  While on this topic though let me say that I think those guys working the counter were nuts.  They were giving high praise for games like Black & White, Gunship, and Silent Storm.  Now, if I was a bigger man in terms of mass I would have gladly leaned over the counter and slapped them silly for saying anything nice about Black & White.  Silent Storm I can see someone liking, but Black & White?! There's no excuse for that. No man should say he likes Black & White.  

Done with Live journal.

2/19/2004

SilentStorm review up.

2/18/2004

Good day to you all. 

First off, if you haven't downloaded Painkiller demo I highly recommend it.  This Havok engine it uses runs smooth as glass on my machine.  While the levels remind me of the washed out puke brown of Quake in some instances, that's not necessarily a bad thing.  But then, I've only played the first level in the demo due to time constraints. As a side note, the Havok engine is apparently what Half-Life 2 will be using as well? Correct me if I'm wrong there but that's my understanding. So, hopefully when the full Painkiller game comes out they'll allow for dedicated servers so people who want to run a server for Half-Life 2 can use Painkiller as practice. 

So Intel now concedes that 64-bit is the wave of the future (NY Times article. Go register or use Ars username/password: arstech1/arstech1.  Wasn't it just a few months ago they said otherwise?  I can see the Intel meeting now.

Intel-VP: "64-bit on the desktop? Bah the masses of dumb users don't need that."

Intel-crony: "AMD thinks otherwise. Their systems are selling pretty fast."

Intel-VP: "Bah it won't last! Who needs that much power?"

Intel-big-boss: "AMD is beating us with 64-bit, get busy on that!"

Intel-VP: "I was wondering when we'd do that! I'm already on that boss!"

Idiots. Welcome to competitive markets.  Everyone go buy an Athlon64 to make sure they, at the least, keep Intel on their toes. 

Working on Silent Storm Review. It won't be very long. In length or time to write. 

2/16/2004

Ok, it's 3:20 PM on Monday. I've had the whole day off from work. And there's still no Painkiller demo news even though it's supposed to be out today.

To amuse myself, I've been slogging through Silent Storm all day.  And by slogging I mean saving a lot then restoring a lot all the while scratching my head about (a) where is this fun and (b) why does this game lack any sort of personality.  Am I being too hard on this game or does my opinion just differ a whole heck of a lot from most other reviewers.  I'm just not getting into it. 

And AMD drops prices. Yeah!

2/15/2004

All this flap about Windows source code made many, including me, quite a bit worried about a forthcoming proliferation of new trojans or viruses.  The Register though, makes a good point:

Whereas it's not really, it's just stuff, and not all of the stuff either. There's an outside chance it could give you information about how you could screw up the world's Windows installations, but the world's virus writers appear to be doing that splendidly without recourse to source access, and carrying on without such access is probably quicker than trying to benefit from it.

Still, I'd prefer that black hatters didn't have more ammunition.

Painkiller demo out tomorrow!!  Get some more screenshots

2/14/2004

Best story I found today (yesterday, whatever) was how bad letting a game slip past it's intended launch date can hurt a company. 

After revving up the buzz machine for a March release of its DRIV3R console game, Atari was forced to wipe some egg off its face after slipping the game to June, a move that helped crater the company's stock.

Still, everyone involved agrees on one thing -- slips in release dates ultimately matter less than shipping an awesome game.

Huh, that's funny cause most games still need a bit of polish like, oh I dunno, how about some Punkbuster in your game!

Definite date for Rise of Nations expansion (Late April). Good!

2/12/2004

ATI put out some new Catalyst drivers today (version 4.2). So, I took these drivers and uninstalled my 3.7 drivers. Then I fired up a timedemo using Enemy Territory.  Here's the results:

Old drivers test:

Fastest: 58.6 FPS
Fancy: 47.0 FPS

Now with newest drivers

Fastest: 46.9 FPS
Fancy : 40.6 FPS

A decrease in FPS after a new driver? Odd but possible I suppose. 

I must add a caveat that between the time I ran the 3.7 and 4.2 driver test I probably messed with the ATI control panel. To test that I ran the tests with ATI control panel defaults (application preferences) for OpenGL and recieved the same FPS on the fastest demo: 46.9 FPS.  

For even MORE giggles, I installed the drivers that came with my video card and got these results:

Fastest:

Application Preference: 51.6 FPS (AA appears to have been turned off).

4X Anti-Aliasing: 46.8 FPS

So, do the new drivers give me no increase but better stability? Appears so.

2/11/2004

Well, never played this but here ya go: Unreal Tournament 2004 demo.

You'd think that the head of HP would be smarter than this? Or at least more professional about it?

HP's CEO Carly Fiorina filled her keynote speech at CES with media piracy rhetoric, saying that consumers are undermining the economy and the morals of this nation by exchanging music.

Gee, I always thought it was corporate CEOs bilking shareholders, excessive greed, or corrupt political groups that were leading us down the road to hell and not some kids swapping a few music songs.

2/10/2004

Yeah, this change in MTVs showing racy videos only at night will last about two days.

This new moderator on the ESPN show "Around the Horn" sucks. Where's Kellerman? Ah well, PtI is still funny.

People still care about Star Wars Galaxies? Huh. 

And after cranking down the difficulty some on Silent Storm, it's getting a bit more interesting.  I think for my first foray into a hardcore turn based squad game like this, I'm doing all right.

2/9/2004

Well, a buddy of mine took me to task regarding SMTP and how I thought it needed to be replaced.  He suggested that spam/viruses via email will always exist and there's not much that can be done.  People can reduce it using PGP or other security layers but that's like what I see a lot of kids doing to their '88 Hondas: adding on bolt on products that in the end, are still latched onto a run down vehicle. Besides which, you can't force people to use PGP easily (unless you want to run a Draconian ISP which isn't a bad idea).  Do I have a solution? No. But I do know that if just about anyone can telnet into a standard email server and with a few simple commands send an email with any address they choose, it's not a very good system.  SMTP has to go.  

Don't ya love it when a website messes up a link? Then they really screw it up and allow you to browse their directories? Painkiller did that. All sorts of screenshots here.

2/8/2004

I'm a big fan of Gigabyte.  The boards are stable and they score well. Plus they don't cost an arm and a leg. So, here's a review for their Athlon64 motherboard, the Gigabyte GA-K8NNXP. But no benchmarks?

More importantly, is the chipsets on the motherboards.  There are four for the Athlon64 systems right now: ALi, SiS, Nvidia, and VIA.  Nvidia has abandoned the north/south bridge concept while the others have not.  Full information is here at Tom's Hardware

First thing that caught my eye in the reviews verbage:

• ALI - "The ALi chipset takes either silver or bronze in the gaming benchmarks. The benchmarks showed that the differences between candidates were marginal, at best. The only area where the M1687 didn't shine was in OpenGL environments." OpenGL = games. Ouch
• Nvidia - Where you can notice the drop in performance is in heavy OpenGL applications, as for example the results of SPECviewperf 7.1 demonstrate. However, using the latest platform driver 3.13 and NVIDIA's graphics driver revision 53.03 improves the performance disadvantage quite considerably, leaving only few benchmarks where nForce3 is outperformed by its competitors.
• SiS - The system was unfairly clocked at 2.010 MHz, which should give it a slight edge over the competition. However, not even this extra boost was enough to make the board shine: VIA's K8T800 beat it out in several disciplines nonetheless.
• ViA - On the contrary, the K8T800 tears up most of the gaming benchmarks and the SPECviewperf faster than its rivals, although the SiS755 starts out with a CPU-clock advantage of some 10 MHz.

Despite all that it appears that game demos (charts here) don't show much difference in frames per second. Plus the ViA is going to upgrade theirs soon. Here's a list of which motherboards support it. And the review of the Gigabyte K8VNXP.

2/7/2004

By far, just about the funniest thing I ever read on poe-news.com.

Want a job in the computer industry? Sure ya do. How about fetching some coffee. Hop to it!

And as a shock through the world that should not surprise ANYONE, those who aren't computer literate are the ones who spread the MYDOOM virus.  Is it the user's fault? No.  For once I'm going to completely blame network administrators.  Including me since I am one.  End-users are not SUPPOSED to be completely computer literate. End-users are busy providing other services and making the company money. As an administrator, you're there to make sure their computer equipment works so they can.  If there are viruses or even newer things like phishing, the admin needs to keep his users apprised of the situation and give them a basic understanding of what it all means in the "big picture."  You, the administrator, are not an elitist, that accomplishes nothing!

I try at least every few months to email all users basic safety tips for browsing the 'Net either at home or at work.  Plus, I ensure that our systems are protected against things like MyDoom, DoSes, and what have you.

Finally, email needs to be changed at it's very core.  SMTP doesn't cut it anymore.  No authentication, it's easy to spoof, and it's an archaic throwback to the 70s and 80s when 1200 baud modems were hot stuff.  Smack a few layers of security on a new protocol, most users won't notice a thing. 

2/6/2004

In-frikkin-sane. From Ars today.

Prolific song-swappers would be encouraged to convert their collections of unprotected material into the protected format, and then paid a portion of the fees collected each time somebody purchases a song after copying it from them. Eventually, user-friendly software would allow amateur musicians without recording contracts to make their music available as well, DCIA said.

I mean that's it. I'm done today.

2/4/2004

Today I'm going to drop a little knowledge to everyone but it will round back to gaming.  Today's word is Opportunity Costs which means that it represents the true cost of something and not just the actual monetary value. For example, if I sit here and type this website, there's a cost involved in the fact that I wasn't using that time to study for another degree, or play a game or whatever.  Basically, even though I'm doing something I like it costs me to do this still since I gave up the chance for other opportunities.

Back to real life.  I took the opportunity to ask a girl out for Saturday night but she declined meaning that I had free time and so instead of spending that money (and time and so forth) on taking a young lady, I've instead spent that money on Silent Storm which will undoubtedly take me more time to play than the few hours that a first date normally involves.  By the young lady passing up the opportunity to go out with me and get some free food and some conversation she passed and that choice was passed onto me in buying another game to review and write up for you all when I could be doing something more constructive like sleeping or drinking or whatever.  So, my cost is your gain!  

2/2/2004

Internet running slow today. Probably people analyzing Ms. Janet (cause I'm nasty and her career is nearly over) and her (admittedly) nice chestal area.  Regardless, on to the news.

Microsoft extending support for Win98 till at least 2006? 

"Better to have people stay on Windows 98 than to start investigating things like Linux," said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter Research.

Note to Hardware Helix: spell check their Painkiller preview:

There’s the steak-gun, especially handy for nailing baddies to nearby walls, (from which they then hang limp in a great display of the Havok 2.0 physics engine.)

Cause I like my zombies with A-1 Sauce!

Regardless, phrases like this one below make me HAWT!!!

In one level, I fought several priests who would use their black magic to lift up fallen comrades and hurl their limp bodies at me. At the cemetery, witches scream at the player and cause the screen to slowly fade to black. (They explode into a flock of crows after death.)

Please let this game die!! Lightning, plague, whatever!!!

2/1/2004

Well I waited and waited to see if there was any gaming news this weekend and there wasn't.  I guess even nerds need time off to watch football. But I guess they're also just using their TiVOs to watch for slippage at halftime shows during the Super Bowl.  Still it's a pretty bad game and I hope they get rolling. Heck, even the commercials stink except for the one about the Chevy Truck. 

I spoke too soon about no news. Ars has some new info about the Prescott chip which is the next big thing from Intel or so it's said. More info is here and here

In other words, Prescott is being released at a speed below its ideal debut point, which suggests that Intel is indeed having some serious problems with the CPU. The problem isn't the 90nm fab process, though. It looks as though Intel has this down. Rather, one must consider the 40+ million new transistors into the mix. Indeed, the problem with Prescott (almost sounds like a movie title) is heat, heat, heat. That's the oddity of the situation: usually a shrink in die size results in less heat, but Prescott has extra mojo on board in terms of the expanded L2 cache (now 1MB), some additional SSE logic (13 new instructions for SSE3), HyperThreading improvements, and more.