Thursday, June 15, 2000

Mini GeForce? -- 9:55 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

According to Well-Rounded Entertainment, NIVIDIA is about to release a mainstream version of their GeForce chip. Here's a snip:

nVidia's about to roll out another card. The company, already a favorite of hardcore games with its GeForce and GeForce 2 cards, will court a more mainstream audience later this month. On Wednesday, June 28th, nVidia will introduce a new GPU, with which it hopes to capture a broader user base.

I dunno if it will be like the Vanta or the TNT2 M64, but in general a cheaper card with near-GeForce2 speed would be a Very Good Thing (tMS). Thanks Shugashack.

Big Brother (Mattel) Is Watching You! -- 10:31 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

This Salon article details how a Broderbund/Mattel kids' program, Arthur's Reading Race, also installed a little program without the author's knowledge or consent that runs in the background and sends information to Mattel. The program ran silently and used PGP encryption to scramble its messages back and forth. Mattel claims that its purpose was innocuous but who wants it? And why didn't the installer mention it was installing this program? Slashdot has put out a call for the hackers among us to fire up their debuggers and figure out what information this little program is sending.

To see if you have this little "gem" running in the background, look for a program called DSSAgent . . .

Mozilla M16 Out! -- 10:16 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Mozilla has released Milestone 16 of their open-source browser. You can snag it from their FTP site (there is also a list of mirrors on Mozilla's site). Whilst you are downloading, you may care to peruse the release notes. I'll download this bad boy and give you a update later. Thanks Slashdot.

UPDATE! 11:35 A.M. So far everything seems to be going very nicely with M16. It's been stable so far and seems quite a bit quicker. I'll keep using it over the course of the next few days to see what happens. Definitely worth a download.

Starlancer Demo Tomorrow -- 9:38 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

In the "it's about bloody well time" category, Daily Radar is reporting that they will be posting a demo of Starlancer tomorrow night. It's an exclusive to Daily Radar, which means it will be impossible to get until a few mirror sites are set up. I wonder how much the Radar had to pay to get the demo exclusively? I don't understand why developers see fit to do that. Thanks Blue.

History today -- 7:30 am CST, Update by The Master

• 1215: King John put his seal to Magna Carta ("the Great Charter") at Runnymede, England, granting his barons more liberty.
• 1520: Pope Leo X threatened to excommunicate Martin Luther unless he recanted his religious beliefs.
• 1752: Benjamin Franklin carried out his famous experiment using a kite to prove that lightning was electricity.
• 1775: The Second Continental Congress voted unanimously to appoint George Washington head of the Continental Army.
• 1804: The Twelfth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, providing for the electoral college to elect the president and vice-president on separate ballots; it was designed to prevent another instance like the election of 1800 when Thomas Jefferson and his running-mate tied, almost denying Jefferson the presidency.
• 1836: Arkansas became the 25th state.
• 1846: The U.S.-Canadian Border is established.
• 1864: Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton signed an order establishing a military burial ground, which became Arlington National Cemetery. The Battle of Petersburg begins with the Union Army under U.S. Grant attacking Petersburg.
• 1877: Henry Flipper becomes the first African-American graduate of West Point.
• 1904: More than 1,000 people died when fire erupted aboard the steamboat General Slocum in New York's East River.
• 1944: American forces began their successful invasion of Saipan during World War II. B-29 Superfortresses made their first raids on Japan.
• 1960: South Korean government promulgated a new constitution introducing a parliamentary system of government.
• 1978: King Hussein of Jordan married 26-year-old American Lisa Halaby, who became Queen Noor.
• 1992: Pro-Iranian kidnappers freed two German aid workers in Beirut after 1,127 days in captivity, ending a decade-long hostage saga.
• 1994: Israel and the Vatican established full diplomatic relations.

Wednesday, June 14, 2000

Replacement Stylus -- 10:55 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

After getting sick and tired of trying to write with the dinky stylus that came with my Handspring Visor Deluxe, I made a little trip to Office Max (no affiliation, yadda, yadda) and purchased an Autopoint Stylus+. It's a pen, mechanical pencil, and PDA stylus all in one. Very nice. My Graffiti (the PDA's character recognition method) writing has improved dramatically. You can check out a review of the four-way version of the pen at Visor Central or buy it online at Stylus Plus.com. That version of the pen just adds another ink color or a highlighter. The four-way is US$19.95 (online) and the three-way is US$14.95 at Office Max. It's a bargain at twice the price. Now that I have one, I realize why all these PDA sites rate it so highly.

Doom Round Table -- 6:52 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The folks at Digital Eel got a round table discussion going with a number of developers on id's decision to make a new Doom. You can expect to see debates like this rage on messageboards all over the Net over the next two years (only with a lot more profanity and a lot less logic). This link came courtesy of The Shugashack, the spot for those kinds of messageboards.

SoF 1.05 Patch Released -- 5:58 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Raven's Rick Johnson updated his .plan with word that the 1.05 patch for Soldier of Fortune was released as promised. You can snag the 1.8M patch (which only updates version 1.03 aka the retail version) from the mirrors that are FilePlanet, or Blue's News. Here's the list of changes, brutally yanked from Blue's:

EAX performance optimizations

Update to A3D's A3DAPI.dll to provide detection for Vortex 2 chipsets

Pure server option. By default, this option is disabled. You will need to go into the parental menu to enable it, in order to connect to modified servers.

Added "net_mainip" cvar to specify the main IP index (use ip_list to see the IPs)

Update to the WON library that addresses some bugs

Addressed an issue where people behind firewalls are connecting from the same IP

By default, the Pure Server option will be set to "Locked Out" under the parental menu. When this option is locked out, you will only see multiplayer games in the server browser that are running the un-modified version of SoF V1.05. Enabling this feature will allow you to see all servers, including ones that are running code that has been modified by the community (i.e. MODs).

New Creative NVIDIA Drivers -- 8:13 am CST, Update by The Master

There's a whole slew of new drivers over on the Creative Support Site for the Creative Graphics Blaster TNT/GeForce lines. The NT and Win2K drivers are on top of the list-there's also Win98 drivers down a ways.

History today -- 12:02 am CST, Update by The Master

• 1775: The U.S. Army was founded.
• 1777: The Continental Congress adopted the Stars and Stripes as the national flag.
• 1789: 19 Survivors cast adrift from the HMS Bounty Mutiny Reach Timor.
• 1822: Charles Babbage proposes the "Difference Engine" in a scientific paper presented to the Royal Astronomical Society.
• 1846: A group of U.S. settlers in Sonoma proclaimed the Republic of California.
• 1922: Warren G. Harding became the first president heard on radio, as Baltimore station WEAR broadcast his speech dedicating the Francis Scott Key memorial at Fort McHenry.
• 1940: German troops entered Paris. In addition, Nazi Germany opens it's concentration camp at Auschwitz (in German-occupied Poland)
• 1943: The Supreme Court ruled schoolchildren could not be compelled to salute the U.S. flag if it conflicted with their religious beliefs.
• 1951: Remington Rand introduced UNIVAC, the first commercial large-scale business computer. Its first customer was the U.S. census bureau.
• 1954: President Eisenhower signed an order adding the words "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance.
• 1967: The U.S. space probe Mariner 5 was launched from Cape Kennedy on a flight that took it past Venus.
• 1982: Argentine forces surrendered to British troops on the Falkland Islands.
• 1985: The 17-day hijack ordeal of TWA Flight 847 began as two Lebanese Shiite Muslim extremists seized the jetliner shortly after takeoff from Athens, Greece.

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