Wednesday, November 15, 2000

RAMBUS Reprimanded -- 8:12 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

ITC Administrative Law Judge Sidney Harris busted out the legal whuppin' stick on RAMBUS, accusing them of "judge shopping" while attempting to defend its SDRAM patents against Hyundai. Here's a snip:

In documents filed in the case, Rambus denied it was guilty of judge shopping. The firm said it withdrew the complaint based on confidential strategic factors. Judge Harris rejected the Rambus response as vague allegations of litigation strategy, which is not described in detail and not even mentioned in the original motion to withdraw the case. It constitutes a failure to rebut the strong inference of judge shopping, he ruled. The claim of "privileged" litigation strategy is highly improbable, the judge added, saying that "Rambus has engaged in impermissible judge shopping."

Harris ruled that if Rambus in the future ever filed a new synchronous patent infringement case against Hyundai, or even any other firm, such a petition must be assigned to his court if he is able to hear it.

All I can say is, "What goes around, comes around." Thanks Slashdot.

3dfx Formally Drops Out of the Card Biz -- 8:07 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Blue's News got a hold of a press release from 3dfx formally announcing what we knew already. They are getting out of the board manufacturing business. There's a bunch of business-speak in the pr, which throws a bunch of nebulous numbers out there almost as if to cry out "please don't make our stock price plummet any further!" It almost sounds like it's conceding to NVIDIA to focus on other markets. Oh how the mighty have fallen . . .

On 24 on 3dfx -- 4:27 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

On 24 talked to a market analyst who is of the opinion that since 3dfx is dropping board manufacturing, they become a prime target for a take-over by NVIDIA or ATi. 3dfx stock is currentlt at $4 a share. I expect that will take a beating when they announce the hit they will take from closing the board manufacturing plant in Mexico.

Naturally, all this is pure speculation, but it does make a lot of sense.

Requiem 0.83 for Q3A released -- 9:15 am CST, Update by The Master

The Requiem team has released Requiem version 0.83 for Quake 3: Arena. I was a huge fan of the original Requiem for QuakeWorld, and A.T. has had good things to say about the Q3A version. This mod, like all others, requires Q3A version 1.17, not the beta .25 version that id released a while back.

MechWarrior 4 gold -- 9:13 am CST, Update by The Master

According to the MechWarrior 4 Developer Diary posted over on GameSpy, MW 4 has gone gold. Hopefully the price is right, I'd like to pick this one up.

Tuesday, November 14, 2000

My Netscape 6 Review -- 11:04 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Get Mozilla.

OK, that might seem a little brief, but I think it basically sums it up. Netscape 6 is OK and if your choices are Netscape 6, Netscape 4.7x, or IE, I'd most likely go with Netscape 6. However, the following reasons make me choose Mozilla builds over Netscape 6:

1. No AOL Crap: Netscape 6 comes bundled with too much of it. If you choose a custom install you can eliminate a good chunk of it, but not all of it.
2. More Rapid Bug Fixes: Mozilla bug fixes are showing up every day in the nightly builds. Netscape 6 has some strange page displaying bugs that do not exist in current Mozilla builds (and I tried them side by side).
3. Nothing New: If you've seen Mozilla, you've basically seen Netscape 6 (with the above caveats). If you have Mozilla, there is no reason to change.

My big question is this: since Mozilla is now dually-licensed under the MPL and GPL, and Netscape is based on Mozilla, doesn't the GPL demand that Netscape release the source for Netscape 6?

FWIW, I uninstalled Netscape 6. Then I promptly downloaded last night's (November 14) Mozilla build. So far, it's just dandy.

Netscape 6 Review -- 8:06 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

CNet has slapped up a review of Netscape 6 which was released earlier today. I agree with a lot of the points in the article, except the ones that say that IE is more stable. I've never found a program more unstable than IE. Plus when IE goes down, Win9x goes down with it. Netscape only crashes itself.

J.t.Qbe comments: So A.T., is that thumbs up or thumbs down? I do have to say (believe it or not) that on my own Win95 system, IE5.01 has been rock solid compared to Netscape 4.7. In fact, it's never crashed on me, while Netscape goes down at least 3-5 times per week--3-5 times per DAY on Linux. I hope the newer version is better. . .

A.T. Hun comments: See the above article. It's a thumbs sideways, basically. I'm going to stick with Mozilla builds.

3dfx Dumping Board Business -- 7:55 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

CNNfn is reporting that 3dfx will no longer be selling video cards. Instead, they are going to be closing the Mexican plant where the boards were made and instead try to sell their chips to card manufacturers. They call it "reinventing themselves". I call it "rudderless". Let's see, they managed to $%^& off all the board manufacturers when they bought out STB and cut off supply of their chips, now they are going to have to go begging to Creative, Guillemot, and the like who can't make boards for NVIDIA chips fast enough? Yeah. Sure. Thanks Shugashack.

Netscape 6 Released -- 9:22 am CST, Update by The Master

Looks like Netscape 6.0 has been released on Netscape's FTP site. I don't know much about this browser, since I gave up Netscape back in 4.x land, when it pretty much sucked hardcore. Hopefully 6 is a much better package, since I'm tiring of IE 5.5's newfound GPFness. I'm sure A.T. will give us a feel for the new Navigator whenever the heck he gets out of all his meetings :-)

A.T. Hun comments: I took just enough of a break between meetings to download Netscape 6 and install it. If you are familiar with the recent Mozilla builds, you will feel immediately comfortable with Netscape 6. It seems a little more solid--like some of the debugging code as been removed. I'll give it more time and give a full report later.

Firewall on a card? -- 9:14 am CST, Update by The Master

Merilus Technologies, Inc, has released FireCard, a firewall on a PCI card. How cool is that? It runs an embedded Linux on a Crusoe processor, and depends on it's parent PC for nothing more than power. Wicked cool. I'm (ahem) impressed.

Thanks User Friendly.

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