* Kali 1.99
This grandpa of online gaming has a new version. Many of the games on Kali are non FPS games, so it's a good tool for all you Starcraft addicts :)Games supported:
StarCraft, Warcraft 2, Quake 2, Quake 3 Arena, Duke Nukem 3D, Descent 1 & 2,
Baldur's Gate, Mechwarrior 2, Forsaken, Diablo Hellfire, Half-Life, Burnout, Command & Conquer, Diablo, Red Alert, Age of Empires, and many more...
http://www.kali.net

* Back Orifice 2K A Sys Admin Tool?
The Cult of the Dead Cow, makers of Back Orifice (a hacking tool to takeover a remote Win9x/NT computer) are releasing Back Orifice 2K this week and this kicker, it's open source under the GNU Public License. This means every hacker in America can alter and improve this tool, as well as system admins and the government.. but they must release the source code. This is crazy, one won hand it's unleashing a hackers best friend to be changed into a malicious crackers playtoy and a sytem admin's security sidekick. Now who will be the most honest in releasing their source? I say the hackers....
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2291762,00.html

* ZDTV Mutiplayer Spotlight
ZDTV recently had a bit on multiplayer which makes mention of Q3A and TF2. They also have the spotlight in Real Player format for your viewing pleasure.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdtv/gamespottv/videofeatures/story/0,3776,2291603,00.html

* Everyone Except You Has A Cable Modem
This is a funny post on the Onion that sums up how I will be the last human being in America with a non cable connection ;)
http://www.themushroom.com/mush0204/cablemodems.html

* #131 Never Look A Gift Monopolistic Company In The Mouth...
Windows Media Player and Rio.... I smell a rat....

* LINK OF THE DAY
Mr Hat's Hellhole... You guess the content...
 
 

SATURDAY, JULY 10, 1999

* ANIMEATANDPOTATOES Opens (12:10 PM, EST)
Rine kicked off his new site yesterday with loads of Anime/Manga news and resources. He'll be updating daily so go get your fill of all items on the menu and go back for dessert... ANIMEATANDPOTATOES

* Tim Sweeney On Athlon (K7)
Got this off the Unreal Technology Page

The AMD Athlon Rocks!

My new 550 MHz AMD Athlon (K7) just clocked a jaw-dropping 68.5 Unreal timedemo at 1024x768, running on a Voodoo3 3000 card.  Even more telling, at no point did the frame rate ever drop below 38.0 fps.  That's astounding, considering the intense lightmap and geometry usage in the timedemo level.  Even while playing Unreal Tournament's most texture and polygon intensive level (Shane Caudle's DmGothic), the frame rate hardly ever went below 60 fps.

The Athlon's 128K L1 cache is awesome for memory-intensive games like Unreal.   Operations like visibility determination, which thrash on the Pentium III's 32K cache, now run at full speed on the Athlon.  This CPU truly shows a generational performance improvement, like going from my old 486 to my first Pentium.

When I saw AMD's K7 spec, I was pretty skeptical.  The K6 had been hyped up, but in reality it was slower for Unreal than a
Pentium II of comparable clock rate, due to its poor non-SIMD floating point performance.  The K7 claimed to fix all of that, and debut a new architecture with 3 execution pipelines. I decided to wait and see, without getting my hopes up.

Bottom line: I waited, and now I have seen!  The Athlon is clearly the fastest x86 CPU at any clock speed.

Congratulations go to AMD.

My wish list:

* I want to be able to buy dual-processor Athlon workstations from major manufacturers like Dell and Gateway.
* I want MMX, 3DNow! and SSE code generation support in Visual C++, with native SIMD C/C++ datatypes like float2, float4, and short4, making the compiler manage all register allocation and code generation.
* I want one of these! 8-)

-Tim

Carmack and Sweeney love it... need I say more?

* History Of AD&D (Rine)
Gamespots interesting history of both the actual game and the video games made from AD&D. Good stuff: http://www.gamespot.com/features/history_add/index.html

* Paint Shop Pro 6.0 Beta
The poor man's art proggy.... With tons of new and improved features.
http://www.jasc.com/psp6beta.html

* On Digital Music....
Got a ZDNet article entitled: 'Digital Music Will Rule The World' which explains quite simply that MP3's are here to stay, and few folks will pay to download music.... :) http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_3600.html?chkpt=ad1qsfp

Also here snipets from a NY Times On The Web article explaining in a little more detail what the courts say on the issue of MP3's and digital music.

In an important decision, a Federal appeals court has partially answered that question by declaring that just as television viewers have the right to time-shift, computer users have the right to "space-shift" -- they can make additional copies of digital files they have obtained lawfully in order to listen to them in different places.

Judge Diarmuid F. O'Scannlain, writing for the unanimous panel, said that the cigarette-pack-sized player "merely makes copies in order to render portable, or 'space-shift,' those files that already reside on a user's hard drive." Such copying, as with time-shifting, "is paradigmatic non-commercial personal use," which is entirely consistent with the copyright law, the court said.

Bridges added that under the ruling, consumers may, for example, legitimately transfer music from their audio CDs to their hard drive, convert the files to MP3 format and either play them on the computer or download copies of the files to the Rio or to other devices.

Consumers may also download authorized MP3 files, like promotional freebies or non-copyrighted works, from the Internet and make copies of them on their hard drives and in the Rio, said Bridges. He cautioned that in his view "space-shifting" does not extend to the downloading of unauthorized or pirated MP3 files.

"Consumers are free to space-shift," said Steele. They can take an authorized recording on their hard drive and make a copy for their car stereo, a copy for their portable Rio player, or a copy for their home stereo, making as many copies as they want, she said.

To read the article (requires logging in): http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/07/cyber/cyberlaw/09law.html

* Micron offers 'free' PCs
This is whacked, you pay $1,087 plus a $49 activation fee, and get 3 years of internet service PLUS a PC with 400MHz Celeron processor, with 32MB of RAM, a 4.3GB hard drive, CD-ROM and a 15-inch monitor. OMG.... This is very cool, I need spare parts anyways... I could turn around and sell that system for $1500 and make a bit plus get 3 years net service... :)
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2290693,00.html?chkpt=hpqs014

* Players Against Won Authorization (PAWA)
I hate Wion and Heat for their shitty online gaming experience, but there's another major pain... Authorization. Sometimes you can't connect to game servers (especially Half-Life) due to problems with their system glitches. This authorization is to keep 'pirates' out, but it's keeping more legally registered folks out. If you are in this situation or just plain hate these stupid online gaming shams go add yourself to the PAWA army... http://www.angelfire.com/nt/pawa/

* Yahn Bernier Q+A
HalfLife.org has a great oppurtunity to ask Yahn Bernier (networking and bsp god) questions about mapping and networking stuff. It's a great oppurtunity to get answers from a 'master'. http://askyahn.halflife.org/

* UnrealFiles.com Opens
Think Quakefiles.com, but for Unreal... I installed the copy of Unreal that came with my Voodoo^3 (all patched and such) and I got bunches of crashes and errors... I didn't like Unreal anyway... ;)
http://www.unrealfiles.com/

* A Silent Death
This article on the BBC News tells of how documants have surfaced shiowing the government, NASA and Nixon were prepared to leave the first astronauts on the moon to die if they had problems gettting back. Scary crap. Makes you wonder, if they'd just let them die, what's your life worth? As I always say, don't trust your government....
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_390000/390634.stm

* # 130 Quit While You Are Ahead
This goes for gambling and relationships, if you keep pressing those buttons eventually you're gonna lose....

* LINK OF THE DAY
Hail Howie! These links keep getting weirder and weirder....
 
 

FRIDAY, JULY 9, 1999

* Kill The Stupid Kingpin Intro (11:45 AM, EST)
You know that intro cinematic with the rocket flying around the globe? Well for those of you who hate it (I do) but don't know how to kill it here's the trick: In the Kingpin dir there is a file called kpintro.exe that weighs in at a hefty 22 MB that contains the whole shebang. Delete it and never have to watch it again, and save 22 MB of wasted space...

Also check out the NoFaDz Kingpin server running at 151.200.17.6

* Ridah On Kingpin Patch Status
Load time be gone...

The long level loads, pauses during multiplay, scoreboard issues with more than 10 players and some server crashes are the main bugs fixed. The new client/server package will not be backwards compatible, so everyone will need to upgrade at once, which is why we want to put it through a good testing cycle first.

When it's done??? ;)

* ZDTV John Romero Interview
They caught Romero for a short interview where he says Daicraptana is coming along fine, and should be out by Christmas, although he dosen't mention what year.... http://www.zdnet.com/zdtv/gamespottv/videofeatures/story/0,3776,2287047,00.html

* Wally v. 1.40 Beta
Wally is the king of texture editing, converting, and anything else. You can convert bmps to wal, wal to tga and so on. The batch conversion utility rocks.
http://home.telefragged.com/wally/

* New KIMBLE
A while back  Iposted the link to the KIMBLE flash move, now there's a new one up on the Hate site. This one is as good as the last one...
http://www.wseeone.com/hate/

* Beta Test Winblow$ 2000
They say this one will work. They say this one will not use the Win9x kernel. They say this is going to rock. I say bah. But if you're seeking the next step in M$'s global domination racket then check out the Win2000 beta page to become a beta tester, it sounds like self torture to me... ;) BTW, it costs $59.95 for there BETA version. $60 for a beta.. not bad, the full version, when released, will still be beta quality and cost $90... Snag it now :)
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/preview/order.htm

* Need To Kill A Few Hours?
Browse throught the tons of content on ATTRITION. This site can keep you absorbed for hours if you navigate correctly... http://www.attrition.org/

* #129 Never be afraid of throwing away what you have; if you CAN throw it away, it's not really yours.
abraxas is back... Now if only I were certain who abraxas is... If you have no clue who abraxas is, get the background scoop... http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=47269&article=123

* LINK OF THE DAY
Bitchcraft... A female Satanist passing on the good word...