Monday, August 19, 2002

Is the DMCA Really That Bad? -- 2:01 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

That's what this News.com column is asking. The author is not attempting to defend the DMCA, which he calls "an egregious law and a brazen power grab by Hollywood, the music industry and software companies" which "should be unceremoniously tossed out by the courts." Rather, he is saying that some, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, are resorting to fearmongering to whip up support against it. FUD is always FUD, even if it is for a good cause. Thanks Slashdot.

OpenOffice Printing Follow-Up -- 11:54 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

OK, so I decided to upgrade to Ghostscript 7.05 anyway and installed the HP hpijs 1.2 driver. Actually, the upgrade to GS 7.05 was relatively painless. After tweaking some settings, I determined that using the 600x600 Grayscale setting in the hpijs driver allows for lightning-fast and very crisp printing with both WordPefect 8 for Linux and OpenOffice 1.0.1. It took a little effort, but the results are more than worth it. If only all hardware manufacturers would support their products as well as HP does now (and Epson has for a long time)!

More OpenOffice Printing -- 10:43 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Last night I mercilessly slaughtered a few more trees in an effort to make printing look better in OpenOffice in Linux. This time, I was trying various Ghostscript drivers that work with my HP Deskjet 810C. I had been using HP's hpijs driver which, according to Linux Printing, is supposed to give the best results. It works great with output from WordPerfect, but OpenOffice output looks like garbage (fonts aren't crisp at all and every other line is darker than the rest). After that, I tried the cdj880 driver which produced infinitely crisper text, but it had an odd greenish hue to it as if it was using the color cartridge to produce black instead of the black cartridge. WordPerfect output looked great with that driver.

Finally, I tried the cdj550 driver. Not only did the printing get done much faster, but the output looks very nice. No odd hues, no alternating dark lines, no fuzzy fonts. The only caveat is that after a print job is done, the "eject paper" light flashes. Punching the button makes it go away. Eureka!

All in all, it seems that OpenOffice's PostScript generator could use some work, but at least I got it to work. There is a new version of HP's driver that I would like to try, but it would mean upgrading to Ghostscript 7.05. I'm not sure if I have the stomach for that, especially since it seems to be working decently. I have to give credit to HP for making a driver and releasing it completely open source with a BSD-style license.

Now I just have to get used to OpenOffice. Most of the frustrations I've felt with it is just because I don't understand how all of its functions work. That will come with time. If nothing else, I will use it for all the M$ Office docs people insist on sending me. It imports Word, Excel, and PowerPoint stuff very nicely--better than any non-Office app I've tried.

Saturday, August 17, 2002

Carmack Speech in MP3 -- 5:05 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Gamers Ammo posted a 16M MP3 of John Carmack's speech and QuakeCon. Great stuff for the technically inclined. For some reason, the MP3 has a "RAR" extension even though it is actually a ZIP file. Why they zipped it up is beyond me (OK, it saves a few 100K, but still), not to mention the extension problem. Oh well. Thanks Blue.

GameSpot on DOOM III -- 12:01 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

GameSpot posted some notes they jotted down during John Carmack's speech and Q&A at QuakeCon. The most interesting bits were about the multiplayer aspect of the game:

Carmack also revealed a few surprising details about Doom III's multiplayer. Id has always said that Doom III will be primarily a single-player game, and the company stated at E3 that the multiplayer would largely be restricted to deathmatch. However, Carmack admitted that even the game's deathmatch will be limited by certain engine considerations. The games will be limited to a much smaller number of players than other recent id games. The current estimate is a maximum of four players, so it'll be better suited to one-on-one and two-on-two matches. Carmack also said that players won't be able to join a match in progress. Nonetheless, id does have real plans for more serious multiplayer options for Doom III, which Carmack said would come either in a separate product, perhaps as an expansion pack.

It will be interesting to see how people react to such limited multiplayer options. Of course, if the single player gives people feelings that are even close to what they got with the original DOOM, no one will complain. Thanks Blue.

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