Friday, February 22, 2002

Wal-Mart Offers OS-Free PCs -- 4:06 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Wal-Mart.com is now offering the option to buy a PC without an operating system. Whether this goes anywhere or not remains to be seen. As the article points out, the cost of Windows is a rather high proportion of the cost of a low-end box. I'm surprised that MS isn't throwing a fit. Of course, they can't afford to alienate the largest retailer on the planet, either. Thanks Linux Today.

Like Some Cheese with That Whine? -- 11:06 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Well, it's happened. The Russians are protesting last night's women's figure skating results, even though everyone who saw it felt that Sarah Hughes was by far the best and the Russian had some wobbly landings. Now they are threatening to walk out of the games. If the USA-Russia hockey game actually happens, I hope our boys win 10-0 so they have to go shut up.

The Master comments: Nah, I'm sure they'll blame that on the altitude or something and demand we lower Salt Lake City. Nimrods. Most of the countries that go into these games don't walk with tons of medals. Russia also doesn't dump half their economy into winning an olympic game anymore. I think it's time they get over themselves. Jeez.

UPDATE! Team USA just beat Russia 3-2. The US almost blew a three goal lead. All three of their goals were on the power-play, so I'd imagine there will be some whining about that too.

Linux Will Succeed on the Desktop -- 10:20 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Or so claims this ZDNet commentary. The reasons he gives are compelling. KDE is every bit as easy to use (actually, even more so) than Windows. You can even configure it to work exactly like Windows--although there are good reasons not to. The big stumbling blocks are the Word and Excel file formats. If the government really wants to punish M$, don't make them open the Windows source. Who needs a zillion lines of spaghetti? Force them to open--and keep open--the file formats for their word processors and spreadsheets. That would break M$'s real death-grip on the desktop. Thanks Slashdot.

BTW, I've been using Red Hat 7.2 as my primary desktop OS for six months now. Every time I have to do something in Win98 now I'm even more stunned by stability problems and never-ending reboots when you install anything. If it weren't for a couple of games, I could nuke that partition entirely.

Another MOO3 interview -- 9:03 am CST, Update by The Master

There's a Interview with the MOO3 team up on GameSpy. It's pretty much a review of everything else out there, but it does come with the good news that testing has begun and that the Q2-2002 release date still looks good. This is very good news for us Master of Orion fans :-)

A.T. Hun comments: Both of you :)

Thursday, February 21, 2002

Pondering the Imponderable -- 2:17 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

As The Master hinted, things have been a bit nuts around here. I nearly gave myself a case of death driving through yesterday's snowstorm. I've never driven through anything like that before and I hope I don't ever have to again.

I have managed to sneak in a bit of gaming on my new system. The game du jour is Serious Sam: Second Encounter. I must say that I'm having a lot more fun with the full version than I did with the demo. For $15, it was a steal.

I redownloaded the United Devices client so I could let this CPU rip for a while and see how well my cooling holds out. After some SS:SE and now running the UD client for eight minutes it's up to 41C, which is the highest I've seen it after playing games. Hopefully it will stick around there. 60C is when the warnings go off.

UPDATE! After two hours, the temperature remained 41C. Even better, once I turned off the UD client, the temperature immediately began to drop. After about four minutes, it was down 5C to around its normal temperature. I guess my extra case fan is paying off!

Bleh -- 12:30 pm CST, Update by The Master

I've been sick most of this week, and it appears that A.T. has been busy himself, and, heck, things are slower than molasses in the FPS gaming news world right now anyway. So, I'm gonna babble :-)

Played a little Q3A single-player against Xaero the other night. Two rounds of smack around, and I totalled his butt. Now, if I could only learn to use the stupid rail gun I'd be good. Just don't have the reflexes for that one I guess. I've also been playing a lot of Master of Orion 2. What a great game--when you don't manage to get yourself pinned into a corner, or get into a battle with the Antarans that causes the game to crash. Too bad people can't buy that one anymore, or I'd recommend it highly.

Past Two Days' News

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