News

The next major version of Windows is pushed back. Hey, I still use Win2k, XP is a bit to much for me.

While this week's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference has been host to exciting new product announcements and upcoming technologies, Microsoft executives delivered disappointing news to Windows enthusiasts. In his keynote address, group vice president Jim Allchin disclosed that Longhorn, the next major version of Windows originally scheduled for 2003, would not ship before 2004. Windows .NET Server will not meet its timeline either, due in part to delays Microsoft attributes to the massive security review that took place in February.
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BetaNews

Betanews has the new Winamp for your downloading pleasure.
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Winamp Full 2.80a

Winamp Standard 2.80a

Winamp Lite 2.80a

AMDZone has some notes up from the Merrill Lynch metting with AMD.

A guide to tweaking your 762 multi-processor platform can be found here.

Hammer speeds set to debut at 2Ghz. Good starting speed.

Meanwhile, AMD's chairman, Jerry Sanders, told an audience at Merrill Lynch's Hardware Heaven conference in San Francisco that Hammer, the company's forthcoming chip for desktops and servers, will debut at 2GHz or higher.

Hammer will ship to PC makers in the fourth quarter and will be released to the public in the first quarter of 2003, Sanders added. - CNET

Valve Software Interview

GameSpot Australia: Marc Laidlaw, thanks for taking time out to speak with us. First of all, on the topic of writing for interactive media, is the majority of your role actually spent writing? How does your fiction author's role blend into a game development environment?

Marc Laidlaw: Most of the design challenges I deal with daily have very little to do with storytelling. That's fine. One of the reasons I moved into game design was because I wanted some new tools to play with, and new problems to think about. Sometimes the tools are useful for telling stories; sometimes they're useful for building traps or puzzles or exciting combat sequences. When I can figure out how to do all those things at the same time, it's most gratifying. Although my background is in writing, more and more my skillset has come to revolve around pure game design. I don't know quite what to think of the writer/designers who "only" write. I actually don't know if such creatures exist. Most game development environments seem to involve a lot of hybridization of disciplines. I believe the writer for Deus Ex programmed a fair bit of the dialog system. I'm not that hardcore, and I have no coding background, but I do a lot of level prototyping, tinkering with entities, and endless amounts of talking about design.

ARUSH’s CEO talks about the latest Duke Nukem adventure w00t!
Question: Duke could almost be considered one of the 'granddads' of modern shooter games. To what do you attribute his longevity and his appeal? What kind of demographics does he draw?

Jim: “Duke is immensely appealing…he’s a shoot first, ask-questions-never kind of guy. He’s a confident hero, and the ladies flock to him like housewives falling over Mel Gibson. Who couldn’t admire that? The demographics of Duke followers are mostly male, (though I do stumble across a few female Duke fans from time to time) between the ages of 18-40, who like blood, bullets and babes.”

What am I the only person that doesn't have one of these?

tBreak has the Leadtek WinFast A250TD GeForce4 Ti 4400 in their hands.

There are certain companies in this industry that focus on producing good looking hardware, while others tend to chose features or maybe pricing as their weapon of sales. Leadtek is a company that focuses on performance. They don't make a lot of products, but whatever they do make, tends to be right up there as far as performance is concerned. Thus we had high hopes when we received the Leadtek Winfast A250TD GeForce4 Ti 4400 graphics card but we wondered if it could match the standards set by Gainward.

Tom reviews a $299 joystick from Thrustmaster. $299 for a joystick! And I thought $70 was bad.

Thrustmaster has launched a new joystick, the HOTAS Cougar, which will is destined to become the Rolls Royce of peripherals for PC-based games. This is partly due to the price - a massive $299! The high production quality and programming options are just as mind-blowing! So this is the question: is the Cougar worth such a huge investment? It's our job to try and find out.

Many thanks to Andy who sent this pic by email. Looks great!

Well, well... OCZ is looking pretty bad right now. This will make it look even worse

Some of you may remember my posting a thread about a week ago on OCZ and it's so called memory manufacturing capabilities. For those who didn't see it then click here!

Well since that time I have been doing some research and such and have tracked down what I believe to be a company shell game fronted by only a few individuals. The name of the companies to which is all associated with the shell game are as follows.

In the listing you will see the name of the company, their URL address, their physical location address, their phone. You will also see their Info Space Info and Onfo Space MAP and their VeriSign/Network Solutions Info.

I saw this at AMDZone:

Silicon Investor has a msg post about dual Opteron sledgehammers. There is quite a good amount of information in the post.

They had 2 Sledgehammer servers running there, running 64bit version of Windows Server. They had 2 Clawhammer clients connected to them. The Sledgehammer - Opteron servers were fairly big boxes, housing a new motherboard they call Melody. The boxes were closed, so I couldn't see inside. The guy presenting these said these were just development versions (these boxes) and they are largely empty). He said the production boxes will be more like the ones in the rack he pointed to (which was a full rack of 1U systems, each with 2 Athlon MP CPUs).

Tide Water is a computer of small form factor, smaller than the Serial Micro ATX standard and will integrate a new power regulator, thermal solution and case. Intel will develop the product next year and debut the ready-made products in 2004. Tidewater will first be based on the 0.13 micron Northwood that will run at a speed of 3.xGhz. It will be based on the next generation Prescott processor based on 0.09 micron during second half of 2003 that may reach at a speed grade of 5Ghz or more. The cooling used is passive with two 80mm fans blowing across the system thereby cooling the huge CPU cooler with copper core, the memories, the chipset as well as the hard drive. - VR-Zone

That's a huge heatsink.

Version: 1.05
Size: 8.9 MB
Zip Archive
Release Date: 4/30/2002

Released for all Windows OSes
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nForce driver page

If a PC shipped with Windows preinstalled, can you remove the OS and install Linux instead? Well, no, according to Microsoft. A somewhat obscure Microsoft site aimed at helping schools deal with donated computers flatly states: "It is a legal requirement that pre-installed operating systems remain with a machine for the life of the machine."

WTF?
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If this is intended to mean what it says, then Microsoft is effectively treating the hardware and the software as a single, integrated package that you're not allowed to break up. If the statement is applied without qualification, then you're in breach of your licence agreement (and/or some bizarre law they've sneaked past us) if you vape Windows and put something else on instead, or if (as do many major companies) you buy a bunch of PCs with one MS installed and then install another. Put this together with Microsoft's campaigns against Naked PCs,* which make it fairly tricky to buy PCs without Windows on them because they 'fuel piracy,' and we're tottering on the brink of the age of compulsory Windows.

The Register.

Wired News is reporting that normal users won't be able to buy eMacs.

But some Macintosh fans -- a group that can be counted on to greet any new Apple product with untempered enthusiasm -- took in the eMac news with exasperation: Being long out of school, they're blocked from buying the eMac and they're not happy about it.

After a strong response to his guest commentary on NewsForge/Linux.com, a Ph.D. student in astrophysics from Great Britain is launching TheOpenCD project, an effort to convert Windows users to Open Source software by passing out CDs with Windows versions of popular Free Software packages on them.
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Omma's original idea for the project was to provide a convenient ISO image, so Open Source advocates could burn their own CDs to give to friends and schools. While he believes that's a good way to start, he thinks there may be a market for mass-produced CDs as well. "I think that the companies already specializing in this sort of burning will fill this need, so there should be no need for a centralized production at the moment," he says. "We can simply link to those companies. This saves us from having to deal with real-world logistics and real-world expenses and incomes, and makes it easier to treat this simply as a community project and not as a business."

NewsForge

Garage Games, comprised of many of the original developers of Starsiege: Tribes and Tribes 2, is currently developing an update for Tribes 2 due out later this summer.

As long as I get better frame rates. And those damn UE errors are still here!!!
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The update will fortify Tribes 2 with a more powerful editor, based on technology Garage Games has developed for their powerful Torque Game Engine. The update will also address some of the technical issues that some players still encounter with Tribes 2, including random Unhandled Exception errors. Garage Games is also looking into increasing the frame rate for some players, and making a number of other minor adjustments.

Sierra Forums

I had every Sim City, but 3000 left something to be desired...

After years of banking on the success of the immensely popular The Sims games, Maxis is finally returning to the series that put the company on the map. Originally released some 13 years ago, Will Wright's SimCity offered eager players an opportunity to build a city from scratch in their own image. Sure, it may not seem like such a big deal now, but in 1989, SimCity was nothing short of groundbreaking. In the years since, Maxis has released a pair of follow-ups to SimCity, but while they were quite fun and very successful, neither of them caused as big a splash as the original game did. Now, well over a decade a later, Maxis is preparing the fourth installment in the SimCity franchise, a game that the company hopes will have the same effect today that the original game had in its time. Maxis plans to unveil SimCity 4 at E3 in a few weeks, but we have some early details on this truly impressive game right now.
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Read more and GameSpot

Overclocked Cafe has an interview with the head guy making Sandra.

Every computer geek worth his salt has heard of and probably used SiSoft Sandra, arguably the most popular and comprehensive benchmarking and systems analysis suite that exists for the Win32/x86 platform. Being a major geek and a huge fan (as well as user) of Sandra, I was quite pleased when C. Adrian Silasi of SiSoftware agreed to answer a few questions for us. For those of you who haven't had the pleasure, Adrian is quite a nice fellow to talk to, not to mention extremely talented.

They also say it'll be ported to Linux.
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Overclocked Cafe

Skrybe has posted a nice topic in the forums

Drop in and post a few while your reading it.

Physics and stuff, summer break is two weeks away!

PCRivals has written a great article on the future of computers.

I should just begin by saying that this article is different from the others. While our other articles can be quite useful to aid you in the design or purchase of your next computer system, this article is simply a fun look at things to come.

Tons of Ti 4x00 reviews lately.

SimHQ has a review up.
PNY has been somewhat quiet in their pursuit of the "US" crown of top selling graphics products. Visiontek has been very aggressive in the market and has reaped the benefits of becoming a popular brand with hardcore gamers. PNY is trying to also tap into that market with their Ti4600 so lets have a look at what they have to offer.

According to an article at the Register, Microsoft is willing to give out its code to non commercial people.
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But we digress. If you look here, you will see the text of something called the Microsoft Shared Source CLI, C# and Jscript License, this one being apparently aimed at the educational market. Shared Source is Microsoft's answer to the GPL, and was referred to in Bill's keynote in the sense that he said Microsoft customers and partners could get access to most of the company's source code if they needed it. So what does it say:

"You may use this Software for any non-commercial purpose, subject to the restrictions in this license. Some purposes which can be non-commercial are teaching, academic research, and personal experimentation. You may also distribute this Software with books or other teaching materials, or publish the Software on websites, that are intended to teach the use of the Software.

"You may not use or distribute this Software or any derivative works in any form for commercial purposes. Examples of commercial purposes would be running business operations, licensing, leasing, or selling the Software, or distributing the Software for use with commercial products."
The Register

In a move to increase revenue and its services business, Linux and Unix vendor Caldera International Inc. will now offer global support for other brands of Linux, including those of Red Hat Inc. and SuSE Inc.

About time. Source and PR

The first piece of news today comes from The Inquirer. In China, it seems that a $50 office program will win over MS Office. The reason it isn't free (Like Star Office or Open Office), is because the Chinese input is a bit different that ours and I'm sure it is difficult to program for.

As we reported last week, the Chinese government favours components made in the Greater China area, and this applies to software as much as to hardware. - Link

Another great day outside. I bring you Inquirer news to start off with.

Bluetooth 'total waste of time' . The devices aren't here yet, bluetooth was going to be the hugest thing since sliced bread I thought.
Bluetooth is taking an awfully long time to tip up. We're talking geological timescales here. Mobile phone makers, desperate to flog new handsets, have long had Bluetooth on their new feature ticklists, but really useful applications are non-existent.

Hynix, Micron deal is off
The board of directors, which is made up of bankers as well as directors, thought that selling the DRAM business to Micron wasn't the best option.

Intel to attack its own chipset customers
That's the essential message of a story on Bloomberg today which claims that Via will announce a drop in earnings as a result of failing to sell enough Pentium 4 chipsets, ceding market share to SIS and ALI. That story here.

AMD takes 64-bit MIPS on board AMD will be aiming for the PDA market.
Like Intel, AMD wants a tasty slice of the embedded and PDA marketplace, and it hopes to sell 64-bit processors it designs, and using the MIPS core, to customers making high speed devices.

That's all the news from that source. I'll keep scouring the net for more news.

Digitimes is reporting that MSI is looking to get into the LCD and optical drive market.

Declining motherboard profits has pushed manufacturers to diversify in recent years. In the first quarter of 2002, companies such as Asustek Computer, Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS) and MSI generated nearly 50% of their revenues from non-motherboard operations. In the second quarter, new businesses are expected to remain the sales driver for the companies.

Anandtech takes a look at 11 Nvidia cards in a roundup.

This all changed with the release of NVIDIA's GeForce4 GPU as the Ti 4400 and Ti 4600 models impressed us beyond belief. The performance these two GPUs offered not only in today's games but in other highly anticipated titles was beyond respectable. For the first time we had a graphics solution that could run almost any currently available game at 1600 x 1200 at very smooth frame rates. NVIDIA's new flagship also turned out to be the highest performing solution for Unreal Tournament 2003 and all other forthcoming games based on the latest Unreal Engine. To say the least, we were very impressed with the GeForce4 Ti 4400 and Ti 4600.

Accelenation brings us Ti 4400 action. The system used for benchmarking is dual 733mhz P3, so don't ask why the benchmarks are so low. You can tell that even at 12x10 the cpu is still the limiting factor.

SubZeroTech reviews the Asus P4S533. If you couldn't guess by the name, it is a Pentium 5 board supporting 533mhz FSB operation. It uses the SiS 645DX Chipset with DDR333 support.

I saw this at the Madonion message boards...

Check out these two sites, seems a bit strange to me. I'm sure OCZ just out-sources thier memory, but it is all speculation at this point I'm sure.

Site one: PDP Systems

Site two: OCZ