Thursday, September 21, 2000

Red Hat 7.0 Info -- 6:19 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

MaximumLinux posted an article on the big changes in Red Hat Linux 7.0. The most cool additions (for me anyway) are USB support and the fact that XFree86 4.0.x is installed by default, so we NVIDIA users can immediately take advantage of their sweet Linux drivers. Very cool indeed. Hey J.t.Qbe, fire up that burner! Thanks Slashdot.

NVIDIA announces the MCPX -- 11:29 am CST, Update by The Master

NVIDIA has a press release talking about their second contribution to Microsoft's X-Box project, the MCPX. The MCPX is a special coprocessor dedicated to processing audio/multimedia and broadband data access for the X-Box, at a reported 4 billion operations per second. Wow. Now, let's see it come to the PC market :-)

Carmack on Unreal -- 8:45 am CST, Update by The Master

There's a short blurb over on Slashdot on visibility technology as it was used in Unreal. Thanks Blue.

PVS was The Right Thing when level geometry counts were much lower. With tens of thousands of polygons in a scene, creating a cluster tree directly from that becomes completely unrealistic from a space and time perspective.

The options are to either do PVS with a simplified version of the world, or ignore the geometry and just work with portal topology.

Unreal used a scan-line visibility algorithm, which crippled it's ability to have high poly counts or high framerates with hardware accelerators.

Tim Sweeny knows full well that the architecture is very wrong for modern systems, but many of the original decisions were based on earlier software technologies. Unreal was supposed to be a "killer app" for the Pentium-200 MMX processor.

I have a lot of respect for Tim and Unreal, but the visibility algorithm in Unreal turned out to be a bad call. He is changing it for future work.

Carmack Interview on VE-day 3 -- 8:35 am CST, Update by The Master

The third part of VE's interview with John Carmack is online over at Voodoo Extreme. Today, a few blurbs on hardware, and a big answer on John's feelings towards software patents (I paraphrase: they suck).

Wednesday, September 20, 2000

Mozilla Roadmap -- 9:10 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

There is a new Mozilla Roadmap on Mozilla.org, detailing some new processes and dates for upcoming milestones. A theoretical Mozilla 1.0 is listed on their chart for Q2 2001. I would have hoped it would have been earlier than that, but if it is standards-compliant, fast, and relatively crash-free, I'm there. Thanks Slashdot.

Red Hat 7.0 Soon -- 9:02 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

According to this Yahoo! News article, Red Hat will soon be rolling out version 7.0 of its popular Linux distribution. If this one includes XFree 4.0.x, I'm going to be all over it. Red Hat will also be announcing a new subscription service that will allow users ready access to new software, patches, etc. Thanks Slashdot.

Pondering the Imponderable -- 10:17 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I'm back from my conference, didja miss me? Of course you didn't. Anyway. My NFL picks slid for the second consecutive week. I ended up 8-6 (still better than Eeyore *cough*) which brings my overall record to 28-16. Hopefully this week will be better.

I also hope to get some Visor and other articles written soon. I heard a rumor that Handspring was going to be coming out with a color Visor called the Visor Prism which will sport 16 bit color. It'll be interesting to see what the battery life will be with that bad boy.

UPDATE! I just saw on Visor Central that the Prism should go for US$449, have 8M RAM, PalmOS 3.5, and a lithium-ion battery.

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

The Catacombs has posted an interview with Valve's Yahn Bernier on Team Fortress Classic (TFC) 1.5 and TFC2. It gives some glimpses at what we can expect in these future versions. Don't know what TFC is? Check out J's introduction to TFC for all the details. Thanks Blue.

Carmack, Day II -- 8:35 am CST, Update by The Master

Day two of the John Carmack interview is online over at Voodoo Extreme. Today, we discuss some HEAVY stuff on video cards and rendering, and a bit on game design choices.

Past Two Days' News

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