Shameless Words from Shameless Geeks

Jeopardy’s winningest player, UberGeek Ken Jennings, finally ended his unprecedented winning streak as reported here by the Toronto Star. Is it a coincidence that a Geek got beaten by someone named Nancy Zerg? I think not. The question that he stumbled on was understandable. It was about someone who does taxes for a living. Real Geeks do their own taxes.

We should all thank Ken. he made Geeks look good 74 times in a row!

Those of you having trouble with your power supply after upgrading to a new video card might by having trouble with inrush current. Some of the other manufacturers aside from ATI and Nvidia, do not current limit the power coming in from the 4 pin molex connector. I tried a Sapphire 9700Pro video card, with a Fortron 510 Watt supply. The card pulled enough current on power up that it shut down the power supply. After several of these power ons, the supply refuses to reset. The easiest solution to this problem is to put some resistance in the +12V lead. The +5 lead is not used, so it odesn’t matter. You should plan for about 3 amps or more. The card will regulate this down to 3.3V and less, so a drop from +12 is not a problem. For example, a 3 volt drop at 3 amps is 1 Ohm. The power dissipated by the resistor is 3 watts, so a 5 Watt resistor is a good choice. You can also put resistors in parallel to up the power dissipation, but remember to up the resistance by the same factor. Mount the resistor(s) on a seperate card with the 2 molex connectors, and insert between the power supply and the video card. The resistance will absorb the inrush current, and allow the power supply to come up.

USA Today reports that a US District Court Judge has ruled that keyboard logging does not violate federal wiretap laws. My question is: Does this allow a hacker to insert a keylogger without fear of arrest? I can already see that this means that my co-workers can install a keylogger on my work desktop and obtain my passwords, account numbers, or anything else they want. Yet another Stupid Judge Trick.

Just to let you know, I haven’t given up on putting pointers to interesting tech news stories in this blog. It’s just that there doesn’t seem to be any tech news worth telling! If you’ve been under a rock: There are security problems with Windows. The windows guys and the Linux guys don’t get along, SCO is still a lawyer pit that suffers regular DDOS attacks. RIAA is still trying to convince us that P2P is making them poor despite several consecutive years of record-breaking profits. AMD is still kicking Intel’s butt, but Intel sells more chips. ATI and Nvidia have cool new competing video chips that nobody can seem to buy. SLI is still too expensive for the sane. I’ll bet I haven’t told you anything that you didn’t know. I’ll pass along anything new I happen to stumble across.

Nighthawk flies in with an initial submission titled The Take-Back. It’s kinda like a computer geek action flick, if that’s possible. Incidentally, can you guess who ‘The Company’ is? Lots of clues here… but Nighthawk ain’t telling. Oh… and… May the penguins be with you!

eWEEK is reporting that MS has acknowledged that WINS is a flaw. OK, so maybe they really said that WINS has a flaw. Honestly, if you are dumb enough to run a Windows server and WINS, or even if you leave the ports open on a home network, you are inviting trouble. Please Please Please put a decent firewall between you and world+dog.

I finally got the resume uploader to work the way I want it to. Global resumes are now linked from the employent page, so (hopefully) they will be indexed by the major web crawlers. Resumes uploaded with the local-only option are properly wrapped in an authorization script and kept from the crawlers. This will be a great option when the local resume searcher goes online, but that might be a few days. I have uploaded 2 versions of my resume as examples of how things will turn out. shameless.shtml is an example of a resume uploaded as HTML, and spork.shtml is an example of a resume uploaded as text. For now, HTML and Text are the only 2 formats supported.

I encourage all members to upload a copy of their resume using the employment upload page. What do you have to lose?

If you want to see your resume online, just upload with the global option, then use the link at the bottom of the employment page to browse the list of global member resumes. As an alternative, you could always just type ‘http://www.shamelessgeeks.com/resumes/global/username.shtml’ into your browser’s address bar.

The management and staff of ShamelessGeeks.com (that would be me and me) would like to wish all of you a happy Thanksgiving day. What are we thankful for? We’re thankful for both of our regular visitors (that would also be me and me).

Found a CNET blog entry claiming that some
Half Life 2 players are calling out for Ralph. I don’t know how true it is, but I know that real gamers don’t hurl. If fast motions and flying body parts cause you to pray at the porcelain altar, you won’t be seen as a serious gamer. However, gamers have been known to call their boss claiming all kinds of diseases on a major game release day.

It looks like Valve is fighting back against people with hacked CDKeys. They shut down 20,000 of them today . I understand that the price of games is high, but that doesn’t justify stealing them.

Hexus.net has a pretty good overview of SLI for those of us too rushed for the detailed tutorial. You’ll also find some good, honest opinions on what is missing. I’m looking forward to the rest of the series… as well as ATI’s return of serve.

I’ve re-arranged things a little bit to make room for the new categories. Check out some of the new menu items. I’ll be completely reworking the appearance soon to eliminate some of the obvious shortcomings, so please be patient with the features that seem counter-intuitive. I just want to add the resume/job listing and virtual web host features first.

Shameless has posted yet another commentary on life. Check it out when you have the time.

Here is todays SLI announcement from AnandTech. If you’re like me, you have been waiting a while for NVIDIA to catch up to ATI. If you want a bit more than just a press release, check out the Asus web page. I can’t wait for the reviews. I expect that the reviewers will be all over this one.

Looks like the lame duck congress might push through some of the incredibly STUPID legislation aimed at P2Pers. I don’t count myself among the ranks of the downloading public, so I don’t have a downloading religion to cloud my vision on this point. The thing that I noticed was that the concept of “fair use” that has been around for a while may get spiked with this legislation. Fair use was the reason you couldn’t go to jail for making a VHS copy of CSI for personal viewing.

Looks like we know the 3rd most likely place where the money you pay for CD’s will go… Congress. Up the promoter’s nose and into the lawyers Jaguar (a.k.a. horribly overpriced Ford) are always the top 2. The artist and the CD media itself end up somewhere just below the promoter’s L.A. poolboy. I’ll bet Shameless will have something to say about this one.

Well, somebody’s schedule. I know some gamers who bought video cards that came with a free coupon for HL2… and the video cards are probably now too old to play the game! Check out the the official HL2 website. Notably missing from the page are the system requirements. I found an old web page with online that has the requirements as of March 2004. Let me know if you find anything more definitive.

Toms Hardware has released this years holiday buging guide . I spent hours looking at the guide, but I can only remember one item. Unfortunately, she isn’t for sale . It says so on the TRO her lawyers sent me.

Here’s AnandTech’s take on the new Gigabyte K8NXP-9 board. If this is an example of the performance we can expect from the new crop of Athlon 64’s, I can’t wait to see whats next!

ATI has released version 4.11 of the Catalyst driver. Looks like the biggest fix is a performance upgrade for 256 MB cards. Still, it’s always nice to have the latest version of stuff.

AnandTech has this article about the SCO arguments. Looks like Novell explicitly retains all rights to Unix code based on the minutes of a 1995 board meeting. Groklaw sees this as a showstopper for SCO. Can you see someone’s lawyer fees swirling their way toward the sewer?

InfoWorld is reporting that Dell amd AMD are talking about a deal …again. If you’ve been following these two companies over the last few years, it seems that this happens every time Dell and Intel have a contract about to expire. It would be wonderful news if it happened, but I’ll just assume it is yet another attempt by Dell to squeeze a better deal out of Intel. Some things never seem to change.

Drog has submitted our first three Poetry entries. I have to admire poets. I can’t seem to squeeze out anything more artistic than a dirty limerick.

His submissions are:
Untitled
Technosoul
Aspiration Always Calls

Check them out. They bring a little class to this joint.

Uh Oh. Looks like CBS has ticked off Shameless. When you do that, you just might die (laughing, that is). Check out what he has to say to the network that pre-empted one of his favorite shows. Caution: contains senseless simulated stylized fantasy violence against executives and newsmen.

Annandtech has a new review of Abit’s new 1066 FSB Fatal1ty motherboard. Interesting result: It’s the best 925XE out there, but the new Athlon 64’s stomp it into the ground with gaming performance.

In an interview with Yahoo! News, Lucas Arts president Jim Ward revealed the future of Star Wars games. Looks like we’ll have a couple of Episode III based games, as well as a new RTS, within a year. Can’t wait for the RTS. Hope the gameplay is at least as good as Gallactic Battlegrounds was, but that the graphics are a lot better.

Rally has submitted our first game review: Star Wars Battlefront. It is obviously an honest appraisal from someone who has played the game, not someone who just opened the box and read someone else’s review. Read this before you buy the game.

Oger has submitted our first Limerick. Let’s hope he has more where that came from.

Intel is updating its Itanium line again. The 2 most notable parts of this article are the 9MB cache, and the $4k+ price tag. Anyone wonder why it didn’t float?

Adding to the flurry of Open Source releases, the Mozilla Project released their official 1.0 version of Firefox today. I tried accessing the page via various links, including the one at the top of this site, but it appears that their servers are overwhelmed. I personally recommend Firefox. I’ve been using it exclusively for Windows and Linux since version 0.9, and I’m impressed. That doesn’t happen often. If you want a copy, you know where to find it (Hint: scroll up).

Looks like a bumper crop of Linux releases. Novell has released their Linux Product, described by many as a scaled down version of Suse. Check it out Here. Good to see another competitor enter the Linux arena.

As promised, RedHat has released Fedora Core 3 today. Some of the reported enhancements include kernel 2.6.9, Gnome 2.8, KDE3.3, Evolution 2.0, Firefox 1.0PR, and Thunderbird 0.8. It might be worth waiting a few days until the crowd of downloaders thins out a little. I noticed a download for a rescue cd that is only available for the i386 architecture. I’d be interested in finding out what that is about.

We’ve all seen the “Get the Facts” campaign that has been running for the past few months. Go to any IT-oriented web site and you’ll probably trip over banner ads leading to MS’s propaganda page. Novell has posted an answer called Unbending the Truth that could very well be just as misleading. Personally, I think this could get as bad as the recent elections, where nobody knew the truth.

Not exactly a revelation, but very good news for fans of the Athlon-64 chips. The news is all over the net, and you can find lots of early reviews everywhere. If you just want an executive view, check out TheRegister.

I’ve gotten a reasonable uploader to work. It has found a temporary home on the Fiction page with the fiction submissions. While working on the uploader, I determined that the best way to handle authentication is to do it on an ‘as needed’ basis. The login page now contains links to account creation and lost password pages, but not login. User’s will now be authenticated when they first attempt to use a “members only” page. Currently, the uploader is the only page that requires authentication.

I’ve added a fiction button to the main menu. This points to a page with links to all of our current fiction submissions. I recommend you check them out. They are truly unique.
It looks like I’ll be running out of menu room soon, so I’m toying with some ideas for a new format. The two most viable for a large number of pages is either a collapsible tree view, or a multilayer tab system. Tabs are much easier, but collapsible tree views are much slicker. Any thoughts?

As mentioned here before there is a 1.1 patch available for Star Wars Battlefront. This is the patch for the client, not the dedicated server. That one can be downloaded here, as we previously posted.

Mozilla has announced the release of Thunderbird 0.9. Check out the release notes Here .Use the link on the page to download. I’ve been using it on some of my systems for a while, and I like it. I’ve run into occasional annoyances with the Linux versions, but far fewer that you would expect from a sub-1.0 version.

A little birdie told me that Rise of Nations sneaked into stores without us noticing. Shame on us. You can find it all over the web, so there’s no need to supply a link.

EWeek is reporting that IE is losing market share. It’s about time someone started pushing them out. Despite major security problems, they haven’t released a new version in 3 years.

TheRegister.com is reporting that ATI is well along on their R5xx cycle, and that the new chips should be out in the first half of next year. Maybe that will convince me to upgrade.

3D Gamers has posted a new version of the Star Wars Battlefront Dedicated server by Pandemic Studios. It’s supposed to be coupled with a new 1.1 client, but I can’t find it yet. If you see it, please post it here. May the Force be with you, Jedi.

Looks like SCO has given up on the idea of countering Groklaw as reported by TECHWORLD. I wish they would just SCO away. It’s one thing to claim that your great-great-great-granfather company wrote some code that someone else gave away. But don’t expect any sympathy if you can’t even show which code that is.

The Register is reporting that Intel will launch its 1066 FSB front side parts this week. If you want a good look at the actual performance improvement, Anandtech has a comparison in their report The improvement seems somewhat marginal, especially at the price for an upgrade. I think I’ll stick with my AMD-64 3200+ for a while.

I’ve added a tech news category for general discussion of… tech.

There is now a gaming category useful for discussing any gaming news/opinions/questions.