Tuesday, February 19, 2002

Writable DVD Standard -- 8:47 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Is that an oxymoron? At any rate, Matsushita issued this press release, announcing Blu-Ray discs. Co-developed by Hitachi, LG, Matsushita, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, and Thomson, the new disc can hold 27G of information. Current DVDs can hold 4.7G. If this standard actually takes hold (since there are multiple incompatible writable DVD formats) it'd be great. I also wonder what kind of "content protection" might be attached to this. I guess I'll file this under "show me, don't tell me." Thanks Slashdot.

Monday, February 18, 2002

Upgrade Update -- 11:30 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I was having some minor problems with lock-ups on graphics-intensive apps (read: games). Further research showed me that my video card and network card were sharing the same IRQ. Oops. That would've been interesting if I had played online. Moving my NIC to another PCI slot did the trick. The main culprit has been Diablo II, although from what I've read, Diablo II does not get along well with GeForce-class cards.

I reinstalled Shogo in Linux and have been playing with Quincunx (man, I hate that name) anti-aliasing. It really makes a difference there--but the framerates are still awesome. I don't know if I'd use it with Q3A/TA, but it definitely has a place. It makes LBreakout2 look a lot better too, especially since it will only go up to 640x480.

More on the Q3A Master Server -- 9:28 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

id's Graeme Devine updated his .plan with an update on the fixes applied to the Quake III Arena master server:

Everything seems to have been smooth for the past 24 hours.

We've replaced the master server hardware, changed the software to be (hopefully) more attack proof, and separated out the processes so that if one is attacked heavily the others will be okay. We've weathered attacks before, but each one is always an education.

I got a bunch of emails on people with routers not being able to connect. When the authorize server is down the game server automatically authorizes all clients, this is why people attack the authorize server to bring it down. The only way you can get a denied to connect from the game server is when the authorize server sends that packet to the game server, when there is no authorize server, the game server errs on the side of caution and lets everyone play.

The solution of setting your hosts file to 127.0.0.1 for the various id masters will cause a few things. You will no longer be able to get the in-game browser to work, and worst of all you will not be able to play on game servers that you connect to because the game server will get a deny packet from the authorize server (because you sent your cdkey to 127.0.0.1).

How lame is that? Attacking the master server so you can play your warezed Q3A. Sheesh. Somebody give those guys a baseball bat to the knees.

Past Two Days' News

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