Wednesday, January 26, 2000

Aussie Interview with Willits and Steed -- 6:13 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

PlayNOW! has posted an interview with id's Tim Willits and Paul Steed from when they were in Australia. The interview is quite long and filled with interesting tidbits. Steed even seems to be sober! Thanks Blue.

One Quadrillion Ops Per Second -- 3:07 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

In the February 8, 2000 issue of PC Magazine on page 80, there is an article on IBM's newest supercomputer project called Blue Gene. It will be the successor to Deep Blue, but its uses will be far more noble than making Garry Kasparov say, "Uncle!" Blue Gene will be used to model the folding of human protiens to help understand diseases and make new drugs. Blue Gene will take up 2,000 square feet, house 1,000,000 processors, be capable of 8,000,000 hardware threads, and perform 1,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second (that's one pentaflop, for those of you keeping score at home).

I can't help thinking that you could play a pretty sweet game of Quake III Arena on that bad-boy :)

I also can't help but think that if Moore's Law remains constant, I probably will live to see that kind of power in a desktop computer (assuming that I don't get hit by a blimp or anything . . .).

OpenGL is now Open Source -- 2:18 pm CST, Update by The Master

According to a news article on Blue's, Silicon Graphics has Open-Sourced their OpenGL Sample Implementation. According to their press release, this will open the way for OpenGL drivers for Linux. Good news :-) You can download the code, and view FAQs and articles on the OpenGL Sample Implementation page.

Sun to make Solaris easy to buy! -- 1:57 pm CST, Update by The Master

Sun Microsystems is planning to announce huge price slashing on their Solaris UNIX line, with the base price being $79 for bundled applications (read: the OS is FREE) and with the ability to modify the source. Wow. Excellent news for all those ISPs out there who run on Solaris. Saw this in an article on C|Net Thanks DT.

Qbe comments: This certainly will be positive for a lot of Solaris users (but Sun will still charge for machines with more than 8 CPUs). However, for at least the last year Sun has made Solaris available for "free" to individual users (you must pay for media and shipping, ~$20). If you want to run Solaris on your x86 or Sparc, you can get Solaris 7 and a preview of Solaris 8 at http://www.sun.com/developers/tools/solaris/index.html.

Running Solaris at home is cool and does look good on the resume, but Linux and BSD still give you more, IMHO.

Blair Witch Games -- 1:07 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Is there anyone beside me who thinks that three Blair Witch Project games are about four too many? At any rate, if you are a fan of the movie and looking for information on the games, PC.IGN has your fix. Thanks Shugashack.

Sweeney Interview -- 10:07 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Unreal Universe has posted an interview with Epic's Tim Sweeney. Topics include the final Unreal D3D patch and the future of the Unreal franchise. Most interesting was this comment regarding Mike Dussault's departure from Monolith:

I'm not too sure how things work over in Monolith land, but would any sane company license an Epic engine if I left the company, or license the Quake engine if Carmack left id? Sure our companies could hire more programmers and throw them on the project, but certainly the future of the Quake technology would be bleak without Carmack's vision to guide it.

I spent the better part of last year trying to read Monolith's mind regarding Shogo. Still haven't figured it out. Thanks sCary for the link.

Zoid Interview -- 10:00 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Mean Arena has a pretty nice interview with id's David "Zoid" Kirsch on his work with id and, of course, Capture the Flag. Thanks Blue.

Tuesday, January 25, 2000

Benchmark-Fest -- 1:09 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Ace's Hardware has posted the mother of (or at least the nephew of) all benchmarking articles with 14 video cards on five processors running seven games. Whew! Thanks Riva 3D (which just got a new facelift, coincidentally).

SoF First Look -- 1:02 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I set my modem to download the Soldier of Fortune demo as I slept last night (it took about six hours at 4.7K/sec). I installed it this morning. The graphics are pretty slick and the EAX sounds are nice. The realistic settings really draw you in. The violence is close to being a little too real for my tastes (exit wounds, etc.) but that can turned down or off altogether. I like how you have to be stealthy at times and have good aim (breaking out the shotgun against a thug holding someone hostage is a bad idea). Definitely worth the download if you have the patience.

Running Red Hat -- 10:26 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Fortunately, I talked to my good pal and Haus-contributor, Qbe, before I fdisked my new hard drive. I divided it up into three drives 6.7G, 6.7G, and 3G. The 3G drive will be used for (drum roll) Red Hat Linux! Now that The Haus is Linux-powered, I figure I'd better bone up on it, in case The Master gets involved in an accident involving a rotory mower and some whipped topping or something. Qbe is actually going to be at my house on Friday to help me with the install. Cool beans.

The Master comments: I don't even want to know what the heck I'd be doing with a rotary mower and whipped topping. Don't wanna go there. Nope. HOWEVER, I moved all my old data off my 2gb drive, and intend to make that a RH 6.1 partition, so I can have seperated drives (and don't have to deal with drive letters. Ick.)

Windows Roadmap -- 10:22 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Paul Thurrott over at WinInfo has put up an article on the future of Windows, especially concerning the recent revelation that M$ will once again be attemting to bring the "business" (WinNT) and "home user" (Win98) versions of Windows together on the Win2K codebase. The much-ballyhooed update to Win98 due to come out this summer (possibly to be called Windows 98 Millennium edition *barf*) will be along the same lines as Win98 SE was.

Shogo Anti-Lag Rez -- 10:06 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Ghost has created an anti-lag rez for Shogo. According to some of his tests, this rez improves pings on slower connections between 10-30%. Now that I have the hard drive real estate, I may just reinstall Shogo and give it a spin. Thanks PlanetShogo.

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