Thursday, May 20, 2004

CBP2 Volume 1 Released -- 8:54 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Community Bonus Pack team has released the first part of CBP2 for Unreal Tournament 2004. You can get all the details on the release (including screenshots) in this forum post and also on Beyond Unreal. There is one new Assault, Bombing Run, and Double Domination map. There are four CTF maps, 10 Deathmatch maps, and four Onslaught maps. There are also new models and a mutator. And yes, this is just volume one. Volume two will be released next Thursday. Both of the above links have mirrors. This pack alone weighs in at 194M!

Linux UT2K4 3204 Patch Released -- 4:20 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Ryan "icculus" Gordon has released the 3204 patch for Unreal Tournament 2004 in Linux. You can get all the details here. Please be gentle since the icculus.org mirror is the only one right now. I'm sure more mirrors will be added soon. icculus adds that this patch contains new code that may fix the KIntersect bug. I sure hope so.

Update! Beyond Unreal is mirroring the patch.

Pondering the Imponderable -- 10:52 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Well, the old Linux UT2K4 didn't get released last night after all. Oh well. The UT2K4 Community Bonus Pack 2 is supposed to be released today. Hopefully it won't need the latest patch or the patch will get out before it.

Poking Holes in the de Tocqueville Report -- 9:45 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Andy Tanenbaum takes the opportunity to poke holes in the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution report which claims that Linus Torvalds really didn't write Linux, but stole it from other Unix sources. Tanenbaum was interviewed by Ken Brown for this report. Their chief argument seems to be that Linus couldn't possibly have written Linux all by himself because they cannot figure out how that could be possible, even though he isn't the only person to have done this. The cynic in me might wonder why stupid people insist that everyone else in the world must be stupid. And certainly the mere fact that the de Tocqueville Institution has taken large wads of cash from Microsoft doesn't affect their credibility at all. At any rate, it's a good read.

I've linked to a Slashdot mirror of the article since the original is Slashdotted. Please note that Tanenbaum and Torvalds have not always seen eye-to-eye, to put it kindly. That makes this defense all the more interesting.

By the way, Linus finally came forward and revealed the real authors of Linux.

J.t.Qbe comments: This article is well worth reading for anyone interested in Linux and/or the history of Unix. Tanenbaum is part of that history and has some great insights into the current lame attack by yet another thinly-disguised Microsoft front.

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.

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