Wednesday, May 19, 2004

NBC/ESPN to Air NHL -- 7:16 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I know this isn't standard Haus fare, but I'm a huge hockey fan so bear with me. The National Hockey League announced new broadcasting contracts with NBC and ESPN. These contracts are for quite a bit less money than the sweetheart deal the league had with ABC and ESPN. Still, cash is cash and NBC even agreed to air games 3-7 of the Stanley Cup finals in prime time. Here's to hoping that there's a new Collective Bargaining Agreement so that they can play next season.

UT2K4 3204 Linux Patch Tonight -- 7:04 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Ryan "icculus" Gordon reports that the 3204 patch for Unreal Tournament 2004 in Linux will be released this evening. Obviously, it will not fix the aforementioned KIntersect crash, but it will give Linux users all the other goodies. I guess I'll have to go "fly" a Leviathan for the last time :) Naturally, we'll post links to mirrors when the patch becomes available. That's the kind of guys we are.

Episode III Named? -- 4:59 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Britain's The Sun newspaper claims that the name of the final Star Wars prequel will be Birth of the Empire. It certainly would fit and would be a lot better than the titles of the previous two prequels. No official word from Lucasfilm yet. Thanks Slashdot.

UT2K4 KIntersect Update -- 2:01 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Ryan "icculus" Gordon made a Bugzilla post on the status of the dreaded KIntersect bug in Unreal Tournament 2004 that has been plaguing Linux users for some time and is now affecting Windows users with the latest patch. Here's the scoop:

• We're still working on it (no, we really are, I swear!)
• I have gone over Karma with a fine tooth comb, and it's now valgrind clean in the 3204 patch. There's 10-15 significant memory access fixes over 3186 in Karma and the surrounding code. Some of these were crashbugs that hadn't been a pesk yet, others were related bugs. To my chagrin, none of them fixed the KIntersect issue.
• Win32 clients are seeing this in 3204, too, many with as much frequency as Linux users are accustomed to. As someone predicted, the retail Linux build is a few revisions ahead of the retail win32, so it's possible this bug sneaked in between the Win32 binaries going gold, and the Linux binaries going gold. However, the Mac client hasn't ever experienced this crash, to my knowledge, and it's a later build by several days...this is noteworthy, since the bug has dug in so deep that the win32 client is now triggering it months after 3186 went gold.
• Obviously, we've got a better grasp on the problem, thanks to the win32 client misfortune. We don't, however, have a fix yet, but now there's more developers at Epic directly interested in fixing this bug, fwiw.

Understandably, the natives are starting to get restless about this. Thankfully with the latest Linux binaries (the so-called "fix-2" binaries) I can play offline to my heart's content. It still crashes online.

Gmail Goes To Eleven -- 7:55 am CST, Update by J.t.Qbe

Competition can be a fun thing. Gmail has made news recently with its forthcoming free webmail service which offers a gigabyte of storage. Not to be outdone by an upstart, some of the other services (e.g. Yahoo) started upping their storage too. Today it's reported that Gmail is now offering one terabyte of storage. I logged in this morning and verified it: "You are currently using 0 MB (0%) of your 1000000 MB." That's a million megs, for those of you who are zero-impaired.

UPDATE I'm seeing reports in many places that the numbers have gone back down to the normal GB of storage. Mine has not, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time. No biggie--1GB is still more than I'll ever need.

A.T. Hun comments: Mine is reporting 1000M aka 1G. They might as well make it a million terabytes for me because I'll never begin to approach a gig.

Tuesday, May 18, 2004

DOOM3 X-Box E3 Trailer -- 11:05 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Computer Games.ro got their hands on the DOOM3 trailer from E3. It's also available from Gamer's Hell. The video is in Quicktime format. Granted, it's the X-Box version, but remember the graphics will look just like it on a PC--only cooler. Thanks Blue's News.

Pondering the Imponderable -- 9:42 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

You know, I wonder who the brain cell is who pitched this movie to the Sci-Fi channel. I saw a commercial for it and almost fell out of my chair. Perhaps the bigger question is what the suits were smoking when they gave it the green light.

UnWheel UT2K4 Mod -- 9:24 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

As soon as I saw the vehicles in Unreal Tournament 2004, I thought to myself, "This has the potential for a cool racing mod." Apparently the UnWheel team felt the same way. They've taken it the extra step by adding monster trucks and even huge construction equipment. They recently took first place in the non-FPS mod portion of the "Make Something Unreal" competition. I'm going to keep an eye on this one . . .

RIAA Fibbing? -- 12:39 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Someone did a little fact checking and found out that, gasp, the RIAA's sales figures may not be entirely be on the up-and-up! Soundscan reported a 10% increase in sales, while the RIAA whined of a 7% drop. How can both be true? Soundscan only counts actual units sold. The RIAA counts shipments. So while they sold more, they shipped less. The good folks at Ars Technica (from whence I got this link) add a few choice comments as well.

It seems that the RIAA has taken an accounting lesson from Enron, but in reverse. Instead of using accounting tricks to prop up a failing company, they are using accounting tricks to hide profits. I'm not in favor of people downloading stuff that they have no intention of buying. However, now that I read this, I have to wonder who the real crooks are.

The Master comments: Gosh, a business that is all about tearing as much profit from the customer as possible lying about their profits? I'm shocked.

Jeremy White Q&A -- 10:40 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Slashdot posted a reader-driven interview with Jeremy White, the CEO of CodeWeavers and general WINE evangelist. He talks about their efforts to get Windows apps to run in Linux, what obstacles they face, and how they try to overcome them.

Past Two Days' News

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