News

Hexus reviews the P4X266A chipset motherboard directly from VIA

We feel that the VIA P4X266A P4PA's performance certainly entitles it to be considered as a viable option when choosing a P4 motherboard. Its surprisingly adjustable BIOS allows one to get the most out of the chipset. The original VIA P4X266 was competitive in the performance stakes but times have moved on. The enhanced memory controller and deepened queues mean that its performance is at least on a par with that of the Intel I845D, often eclipsing it by the smallest of margins.

Anandtech looks at HPQ's Presario 2800 featuring the Radeon 7500 and P4M 1.7ghz. Wow, I'd like a notebook like that rather than this POS one I have now.

As the description hints at with the "distinctive style" line, the Presario 2800 series notebooks are desktop replacement notebooks in a smaller form factor. The Presario 2800T that we received was more of a thin and light notebook than it was a full fledged desktop replacement. The Presario 2800 series notebooks are currently available with 1.4GHz to 1.8GHz Mobile Pentium 4-M processors, 128MB to 1024MB of SDRAM, a 20GB to 60GB hard drive, and various internal optical disc solutions.

Microsoft is pissing everyone off with their new subscription plan. The plan costs more money than to upgrade once and awhile, and you are forced to upgrade when new versions are out. You are also locked into a contract.

One year ago this week, Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft announced a radical change in the way that businesses buy its software: Rather than simply being able to upgrade their software when they wanted to--and when their budgets allowed--companies would need to commit to buying operating-system and application upgrades ahead of time through an annual fee.[PAGEBREAK]
Just remember, even now you don't own the software if you buy it from Microsoft. They are just liscensing it to you, Microsoft still owns it. This is just one step further.

News.com has more

Jedi Knight 2 has been a great game to play, I just recently got into some multiplayer action. The demo version contains a new never seen before level.[PAGEBREAK]
Download it at 3DGamers

FilePlanet download

The Reg US looks at the next offering of the popular Linux distro SuSE. It is a version 8.0 and comes with the all new KDE 3.0. Maybe I should load SuSE instead of Mandrake hmm?[PAGEBREAK]
Package selection in any SuSE Pro distro is a lengthy affair, taking a good twenty minutes if you're familiar with it. If you've never used SuSE, then you might count on forty-five minutes to get it all sorted. Pretty much everything you could ever hope to find on the Web for Linux is there. The packages have been separated into even more categories now in hopes of simplifying the task. I don't think it helps much; but I really like the freedom of choice. That is, after all, one of the chief virtues of Linux.

Read the full Preview at The Register US

Since probably 90% of you have either seen or plan to see Spider-man, here's a little news.

First: Current box-office totals... $144,156,124!

Second: Marvel is suing Buena Vista (part of Disney) for it's ads in various newspapers, posters, etc. for "Spider-Man: The Ultimate Villain Showdown" (the old cartoon one) that used a picture of Spider-man clinging to a wall that they allegedly took from a picture belonging to Marvel. Read more about it here. With all things successful, there will be a few lawsuits, I guess.

And finally: Spider-man is better than Superman and Batman combined! When's the last time a Batman movie beat any amazing records, and when's the last time anyone's even MADE a (live-action) Superman movie? huh? huh? Yes, the 80's, and there won't be another 'til 2004! Sure, I'd like to be rich like Bruce, but Spiderman has powers. Well, since I'm gonna get flamed for saying all this, I'm gonna go hide somewhere:-\

While going over VisionTek's website I found this cool GeForce4 demostration. It's really flashy but it also tells quite a bit about the card. It's near even if you're not an NVidia fan.

Joel at VH has posted 5 things he'd like to say to Intel and AMD

I agree with all points, well except the TPI initiative. Intel will never do that.

I'm done with school for the year w00t! Expect things around here to get a bit faster. And I've got some fresh reviews coming up (finally).

Gamespot has a preview of Star Trek: Elite Force 2. It also has the voice of Patrick Stewart in it as Jean Luc Picard! w00t.

Released in the fall of 2000, the original Star Trek: Voyager Elite Force was hailed as one of the few Star Trek games that was actually a good game in its own right, with or without the multimillion-dollar license attached to it. The game was developed by Raven Software, whose experience in the FPS genre helped craft a solid action game that put the Quake III Arena engine to good use. A sequel was sort of inevitable, but with Raven tied up with work on the just-released Jedi Knight II and the in-development titles Soldier of Fortune II and Quake IV, Activision had to find a different developer for the game. For that, it turned to Ritual Entertainment. Like Raven, Ritual is no stranger to the genre. It created the first mission pack for the original Quake and followed that up with SiN and the third-person title Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K. 2.[PAGEBREAK]
Gamespot has the full preview

Microsoft is in yet another legal battle (almost) over the Samba file sharing program used in Linux OSes to talk to Windows boxes. Microsoft complains that Samba developers did not sign an agreement, but used it without authorization. The issue in despute is CIFS, common internet file sharing.[PAGEBREAK]

Specifically, Microsoft requires programmers to sign an agreement that prohibits using information in the document when building software governed by the General Public License (GPL). Among the products affected by the restriction is Samba, widely used software that competes with file sharing technology in Microsoft's Windows operating system. Samba uses CIFS to communicate with client systems.

"In brief, it sucks," said Jeremy Allison, a leader of the Samba project. He called Microsoft's agreement "a direct attack" on Samba and the GPL.

News.com has more

That's the story on News.com. Funny how IBM considers it only 'some layoffs'.

Word of the potential layoffs follows an across-the-board slowdown in business during the company's first quarter. The slowdown hurt sales of most of IBM's main products--everything from servers to services--and caused analysts to revise their IBM earnings outlooks for the rest of the year. IBM did meet lowered expectations for the quarter, but the company gave little in the way of estimates for the rest of the year.

Westwood has opened the floodgates on the MASSIVE multiplayer gaming persistant universe game: Earth and Beyond Online (EABO)! I signed up already, have you? This looks to be one cool game.[PAGEBREAK]
Hurry up and sign up here for testing!

This article on News.com reports that a company says that they have a crash-proof (almost) server. Right, less than 5 minutes downtime per year.

Stratus' server figures are the latest to come out of a competition between companies such as Sun Microsystems, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard to achieve "five-nines" reliability--servers that work 99.999 percent of the time, or spend less than 5 minutes per year on the blink. Different companies have laid claim to the coveted five nines over the years. But one company's results are often disputed by another company, owing to factors such as which software is running on the tested servers.

Duh, that's what it is planned for. Digitimes reports that the K8 core will be used to fight the P4. Among other things, the chip will be made at FAB 30 while 32bit Athlons will be outsourced by UMC.

According to the company’s schedule, the new desktop-use Athlon will hit the market in October, while shipments of the Opteron processors are expected to start in the first half of 2003. Lee added that the shipment ratio of the K8-core processors should be able to exceed that of the company’s 32-bit, K7-core products as early as 2003.