Tuesday, June 3, 2003

A Lawyer's Look at SCO's Lawsuit -- 11:19 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

AlwaysOn posted an article by an intellectual property lawyer who looks at SCO's lawsuit against IBM. I won't give away all the good bits, but the title of the article is "SCO & UNIX: A Comedy of Errors." It's interesting to hear about this from someone who is actually involved in this sort of thing. Thanks Linux Today.

HardOCP on Futuremark -- 9:40 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Kyle at HardOCP posted this editorial on Futuremark and the recent weirdness surrounding it. What does he suggest we do? It might surprise you.

I humbly ask that anyone evaluating computer hardware to stop publishing the game demo scores taken from 3DMark03. The media is greatly responsible for giving FutureMark its power in the industry and it is my thought that if we work collectively, we can shift that power to a more responsible set of real world utilities that I suggest will become a reality this year.

How does he come to that conclusion and why do I agree with him? Read the article to find out.

Monday, June 2, 2003

QScript 1.2 Released -- 11:17 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Wraith emailed to fill us in on the latest incarnation of his write-your-own-mod mod, QScript 1.2 for Quake III Arena. Here's the scoop on the changes:

• Completely rewritten from the ground up
• Supports Q3A 1.32+
• Removed D!ablo's Map Editor
• New, easier mod-package creation
• Configuration file now set by cvar. Configuration files can be changed while the server is running, with the changes taking effect after the map changes or the server "restarts".
• QScript is now open-source. Download the source code above; however, the source comes with no support. QScript is released under the GNU Public License, which means that if you use QScript code in your mod, you must release the source code.

Diablo II 1.10 Horadric Cube Recipes -- 6:54 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Blizzard's Arreat Summit posted some hints of new Horadric Cube recipes that will be in the Diablo II 1.10 patch. Still no ETA on the patch's release other than "as soon as possible." Thanks Shacknews.

Futuremark: NVIDIA Doesn't Cheat -- 6:52 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Futuremark and NVIDIA released a joint statement basically saying that NVIDIA's drivers don't "cheat" on Futuremark's 3DMark03. Futuremark calls it "an application specific optimization and not a cheat". ToMAYto, toMAHto. HardOCP hypothesizes that this press release is the result of NVIDIA threatening to sue Futuremark into oblivion. Personally, I find synthetic benchmarks like this to be virtually worthless. That will only become more true as GPUs become more complex.

The Master comments: Ahh, and now with this little precedent behind them, Futuremark can never claim cheating in any driver, since they've allowed it before as an "application specific optimization". Welp, one more marketing company shot to the winds. Heh.

A.T. Hun comments: I've always thought it was bizarre that Futuremark basically makes its money by charging the chip makers to be in their beta program. Doesn't that seem to scream "conflict of interest"?

Past Two Days' News

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