Shameless Words from Shameless Geeks

AnandTech has posted a scientific guide to upgrades. It is essentially a cost/benefit formula for when and what computer components you should upgrade. Because of the fuzzy nature of some of the variables, I don’t know if it is hard science… and I doubt that its inventors intended it to be. One thing is for sure: It would make an excellent case for convincing a spouse that your new video card is a necessity, not a luxury. The married geeks of the world have a good reason to thank the folks at AnandTech.

It looks like there is yet another Internet hazard to avoid out there. TheRegister.com offers this brief article on pharming, an new way to lure unsuspecting victims into giving away their identities.

Famed free software Guru Richard Stallman has a few choice words about Sun’s recent patent release. In it, he chides Sun for making what is essentially a non-announcement. He goes on to rant about software patents in general in his own, typically Stallman way. He does make some good points though, and his rant is well worth reading.

The USPTO has been allowing silly patents for years. Now the lawyers have discovered that they can sue software companies for things that were once considered “prior art” because judges, juries, and USPTO “pseudo-engineers” don’t understand it. Throw the SCO suit in, and you have what amounts to blood in shark-infested waters.

ExtremeTech has this announcement of VIA’s new chipsets for the P4 and Athlon-64. I was once a VIA detractor, but I’ve been using an Athlon-64 Mobo with one of their chipsets for about 9 months, and it has turned out to be one of the most dependable and smooth-running machines I’ve ever had. My VIA based P4 is a completely different story. It’s troubles wouldn’t fit on the front page of a ‘blog like this.

According to TheRegister.com, the sale of IBM’s PC division to Lenovo may be in trouble. EWeek has a very similar article. It seems that the experts are focussing on the fact that this is a commodity business. They seem to forget that the deal allows Lenovo access to IBM technology and facilities for 5 years. The implications of this need to be considered carefully.

What both articles fail to mention is that the White House is still irritated with the sale of UAV equipment to China last year. Let’s see if the White House has forgiven them for that one.

… or rather, multiplying. While posting a tech tip a while back, I began to notice that I might be adding a few too many competing features to the site. It flies in the face of “Do one thing, and do it well". In that spirit, I’ve gone on a domain name shopping spree, and I’ll be dividing up some of the content among the new sites.

The breakdown (so far):

I’ll keep the blog right here, and use it as a clearinghouse for contributions on all of the sites. I’ll also leave the current user contributions here as well. The URL here (of course) is http://www.shamelessgeeks.com and the alias is http://www.shamelessgeek.com.

The employment stuff is certain to go to a new site that is dedicated to tech tips and freeware. The intention with that one is to allow techies to “strut their stuff” online for prospective employers/customers. It would be nice to be able to tie your resume/proposal to a well-written and insightful post, wouldn’t it? I’m leaning toward GeekHall.com for this one.

The third site would be the online store I’ve been hoping to start for months now. Of course, I would have to specialize in geek stuff like high-end hardware, geeky gizmos, and stuff like that. Hopefully, it will help carry the cost of the server, which is getting kinda heavy. This one may end up as GeekPen.com (playpen for geeks, get it?)

Another site may be dedicated to virtual hosting. Setup and maintenance for virtual web stuff is actually easier than I thought it would be. If you don’t believe me, scroll down and check out the 4 new sites I set up with complete DNS and Webalizer support. Did that in a few hours, and most of it was NRE while I learned how to get GoDaddy and Webalizer to do what I wanted them to. I’m offering a $5/m virtual web service for current SG members if they would like to get in on a beta test. Details coming soon.

All of the new domains are up and running, but they are almost completely bare. No content at all. If you are curious, they are at:
www.geekshire.com
www.geekhall.com
www.geekpen.com
www.geekton.com

In this NewsForge article, Dan Razzell answers some direct questions about security without attacking any specific OS. Lots of these principles have been known and repeated over and over in the FUD from all sides of the security dispute. Usually someone is using them to tell you how wonderful/terribly Linux/Windows is. This time, they are presented as basic principles, rather than OS features. It’s nice to see that someone is finally trying to apply the KISS principle to security.

News Forge has a hilarious analysis of Windows viruses running on Linux using Wine. Ok… so only a real Geek would find this even remotely funny. It really does show how hard it is to level the playing field of OS’s.

I’ve updated the saga of the powercolor. You can check it out on this link or just scroll down till you find it.

This really makes all concerned look bad, but ATI especially. I would go easier on them, except that they could have eliminated a majority of the problems with an alternate power connector on their reference design. Oh well, check the update for the rest of my rant.

It seems that your identity is safer online than with your friends, family, and neighbors. Lots of people use a firewall and a AV app when they are online, but wouldn’t think of a shredding documents before throwing them away. Just remember one thing: CC numbers are easier to extract from paper than they are from a PC.

In this story about Take-Two’s purchase of the Civilization Franchise, One can’t help but notice the reference to a late-2005 release fo Civ 4. OH NO! Civ 1 and Civ 2 are where I wasted enough time to start an entire career! Love the games. Hate how they take up all of my attention and ruin my life. Anyone have a URL for a good gaming addiction detox?

Mr. Microsoft has donated a significant chunk of change to vaccinate the children of developing nations. It seems that he’s not all bad. Kinda lessens the pain of turning all of my hard-earned dollars over to his empire.

In this CNet News article, Microsoft officially announces what has been rumored for months. Pirates will not be getting security updates. Though I agree with the concept in principle, it will leave a lot of virus generating machines out there. Microsoft may want to re-think their responsibility in this matter. They decided to run an OS on RPC’s (something that makes programmers cringe), shouldn’t they clean up the mess?

It seems that Nvidia is catching up to ATI. I can see why. I’ve been an ATI fan for years. My last 4 video cards were ATI’s. But after my experiences with the 9600 Pro, I’m going to be a little slow to choose ATI next time.

While browsing /. I stumbled across this fitting tribute to Douglas Adams. Naming an asteroid after him that was found in the year he died and carrys a designation of 42 just sounds too good. I’m sure that even Marvin the Paranoid Android is smiling about this one. Well, maybe not, but he should be.

AMD has made know it’s intentions of shipping a dual-core processor in Q3 of 2005. Wow! AMD/Intel announced a new product line, and the other company says Me Too!. (yawn) That’s so unexpected. (/yawn) Really guys… AMD/Intel, ATI/Nvidia. We love the competition, but the Me Too announcements are getting old.

ask.slashdot has a cute discussion on what it takes for a geek to become a manager. Some of the suggestions are genuine, others are genuinely funny.

As a geek who has spent some effort avoiding management and observed other geeks become managers, I say Don’t Do It. It will probably cost you everything you love about being a geek. You won’t get to solve many technical problems and you will have to guide other geeks (worse than cat herding). Worst of all, as your real skills begin to dull, you will become one of those annoying “I think this will work, but I can’t do it myself” guys who sells bad ideas to customers, then blames the failure on the poor geek who got stuck trying to do the physically impossible.

You can tell I’ve run into some bad managers, can’t you?

Check out this virtual keyboard designed for PDA’s. Now that’s some serious Geekware. I would get one myselfy, but the $200 price tag is a little steep for me, and they wouldn’t take a virtual credit card number.

So… I’ll ask the obvious question… Do I have to remove the virtual keys occasionally to clean off the finger jam?

If it works the way it claims to, it would be a nice accessory for those who tote their systems to LAN parties.

Thanks to Specialst for the pointer to this one.

Bought one of these cards as a gift for my kid. No Video. Put it in a different machine. Windows works great, Linux doesn’t. Put it in a third machine, and I get intermittent crashes on CS:Source. If it weren’t for the fact that I can get all of the features to work in at least one machine, I would say it was a hardware fault. I can’t blame the 9600 Pro chip, because I have an ATI 9600 Pro in my machine that has performed admirably for over a year. No, the Powercolor doesn’t work in this one either.

I tried 2 different versions of catalyst, omega drivers, all of the settings in both positions, AGP voltage adjustments, and every other wacky remedy I found on the web. No change. Stripped the OS, reformatted, and rebuilt. Still no go. I’ll be sending it back ASAP, but I thought people would want to know about this turd. Based on what I see on the wild, wild web, I’m not the only one to complain.

I like telling you about good experiences I have with hardware. I feel that it is my duty to also tell you about the bad.

Update:
I’ve upped the AGP voltage to 1.8V. Thats a 20% increase, and it is in the realm of scary things to do to your system. It seems to have stopped the crashes that happen during normal Windows stuff. I haven’t been able to test the card under load yet. I’ll post results when I have them.

Update 2:
The voltage increase has stabilized the system significantly. It made the system stable enough for me to figure out (by process of painful elimination), that I also needed to turn the bus speed down to 4x and turn fast writes off. This makes it perform just slightly better than the 9100 it replaced. Just to be fair, I swapped in my ATI Radeon 9600 Pro (I think they are made by Sapphire), and found that I could run with AGP 8x. Sounds like, whatever the problem is, Powercolor is much worse.

Speculation: There is a serious power problem with the 9600. It demands something that is at the limit of what many motherboard / power supply combinations can provide on a single AGP connection. The fault can easily be spread between the makers of the power supply, the chip, the AGP card, and the mobo. Any one of these can be a little lax about the impedances of the power supply rails, and POOF! endless hours of fun. My mobos (both MSI NEO series) have voltage adjustments for AGP that helped solve the problem. Those who don’t have luxuries like that could easily end up replacing their power supply and motherboard without fixing the trouble. It’s a really bad deal.

In the end, though, the finger should be pointed at ATI. It was probably quite obvious to them that this kind of problem existed (if it wasn’t… that’s an even worse thought). When they noticed it, they should have added an alternate power supply connector to their reference design. I’m guessing that some marketing genius decided that an extra power connector took away from the “mid-range experience” or some hopelessly vacuous bean-counter decided that the extra power connector was too expensive. Either way, it has made me decide that, even after being a loyal ATI customer for my last 4 cards, I’m going with NVidia next time. ATI has a lot to prove to me now.

I have invited ATI’s PR department to respond. Any bets on whether they will?

Update 3:
I reproduced the problem with an ATI branded 9600 Pro card. Though the problem was much less frequent, it still occurred. I guess it is safe to point a finger at ATI for this one. In addition, I’m not the only one with these problems. A quick search of the web will find you thousands.

By the way… ATI never answered. Go figure.

Firefox Keeps on growing, at least if you count the total number of downloads. I’ve made my feelings known about the browser in the past. I heartily recommend it. The link at the top of the page should have given you a clue

I know this isn’t exactly hard news, but TheRegister (among others) is printing what we all have been hearing as rumors lately. Mostly that Intel plans formal launches of both the new x86-64 line and a dual-core line. Check the link, and take it with “a grain of salt". Hopefully, these launches won’t be as bad as the vaporware GPU’s launched lately.

Seems that IE is getting a little run for it’s money. Firefox and other non-IE browsers have been gaining steadily since June. Though the big boy still has a 90% share, that is down from 95%+ about a half-year ago. That means that the little guys are taking twice as much bite out of IE as they did 6 months ago. It looks like we may actually end up with a choice after all.

SCO’s recent legal victory keeps their hopes for “cash for nothing” alive. It was one thing to argue that Linux contained stolen code. It is quite another to say that programmers got the idea for how to write Linux by looking at code. Those of us old enough to remember the “Look and Feel” lawsuits of the early 90’s get a chill when we hear this.

*For those who don’t remember: Apple tried to sue Microsoft for stealing the “Look and Feel” of Windows from them. The court almost agreed… until they found out that Apple stole the “Look and Feel” from Xerox.

As pointed out by AnandTech, todays Mirriam-Webster word of the day is vaporware. Any one taking bets on which video card the guy in charge tried to buy?

According to TheRegister:
Scientists at Okayama University in Japan have rather agreeably discovered that unidentified
compounds in lager and stout may help to prevent DNA damage leading to cancer.

I think I’ll have another.

This British article in The Sun teases about a new X-Files movie. I wouldn’t get too hopeful. Gillian Anderson isn’t on board yet. No Scully, No way.

The boys over at HardOCP seem to think so. If you were considering SLI, It might be a good idea to see if your favorite games support it. Otherwise, you’ll be spending lots of cash for no gain. SLI could be the future of graphics cards, so you may want to ‘future proof” a new system… Then again… 3dfx thought that SLI was the future… several years ago. I don’t think it did them much good.

It seems that Google has finally noticed blog spam and has decided to do something about it. They are asking bloggers to add a “nofollow” tag to every link that can be added by the general public. That should take away most of the incentive for blog spamming. I’ve actually had to switch to “no comments” for the short term while I figure out how to modify my blog software to require a login.

I finally got the jobs and resume service up and running. It still has a few warts to work out and a few features to add, but it is now at a point where it is useful. When I am satisfied that it works reasonably well, I’ll release the source code. There won’t be any intellectual property issues here… every damn line of it is original!

You can now perform the following functions:

• Post a Resume
• Delete a Resume
• Post a Job Listing
• Delete a Job Listing
• Search the Resume Database
• Search the Job Listing Database
• Show All Global Resumes
• Show All Job Listings

You can use the links above to test things out, or go to the permanent home by clicking the Employment button on the main menu.

All job listings also include a link to the company web site, a link to the company job site, and an embedded form that can be used to send an email to the employer.

Posting and deleting require a login (for obvious reasons), as well as searching private resumes. Searching public resumes and job listings is open.

I’ve also kick-started the database with 13 job listings from ICI, with about the same number from Sparta on the way… when I get some sleep. I could use a few more resumes to flesh out the job seekers side of things. Any volunteers?

If you have been wondering why the Shameless Geek has been silent lately, well… now you know.

USA Today has a good one about buzzwords in the tech industry. Most of us know someone who can’t speak without uttering a bunch of words that mean very little, but are intended to make them look like a tech insider. S’OK… That just makes the pretenders easier to spot. I must admit that I have been using the word blog a little too much lately. I guess I could cut down on it as a New Year resolution.

BTW… Tech guys are nothing compared to used car dealers. I knew some of those who were so big on buzzwords that they couldn’t understand regular American anymore.

Ran into this comparison of LCD and CRT monitors online. The article is less of a comparison, and more of a statement about how LCD’s have caught up to CRT’s in many ways. Still, based on my recent personal experience, it’s a pretty good analysis.

I recently switched from a 19″ CRT to a 20″ LCD to cut down on eyestrain. I expected that I would have to live with ugly interpolation for games. I was very surprised. The first time I ran Star Wars Battlefront, I was amazed at how good 1024*768 graphics looked on a 1600*1200 monitor. It almost looked like it was at it’s native resolution! Refresh rates were very playable, although I’m not sure I believe the 16ms advertised rate. As for the expected ghosting… non-existent. It seems that (almost) everything I disliked about LCD’s had been addressed and overcome. Now… If they could only do something about the price

ATI has released a whole bunch of driver software for me to download. This includes a update of
Catalyst 5.1 for XP and a whole new x86_64 driver for Linux. Happy days for me!

I’ve added a Linux/OSS category to the blog. Since I add quite a few news items about the Open Source Software community in general, I guess it’s time to add a category.

Stumbled across this pointer to coLinux online. It looks to be something like VMWare, but in Open Source form. It allows you to run a linux kernel from within Windows. If anyone has an analysis of this package, or wants to preview it, I’d be glad to publish the results.

Our old friend the zombie-recruiter MyDoom has returned with another variant labeled MyDoom-AI. This one spreads via email, so use the customary paranoia when opening something that you can’t readily identify.

Spammers may not be the brightest bulbs in the scoreboard, or even capable of an original thought, but you have to admit they are persistent. How many MyDooms have there been?

This article about yet another marriage of rat parts to nanotechnology, is another one to add to the list of vaguely scary scientific advances. You have to wonder if this one is science fiction. After all, it is a BBC article

Can anyone out there tell me why it is always rat parts that they use? First rat brains flying F-22 simulators, now rat hearts powering miniature robots. Haven’t these scientists ever heard of a cockroach?

In yet another spectacular government tech. failure, the FBI is abandoning it’s $170 million Virtual Case File software because it doesn’t work. I’m surprised that they abandoned it for such a petty reason . I’ve seen lots of government funded software that didn’t even exist by the end of the contract, let alone perform its function.

In his ZDNet interview Mozilla’s board chair discusses the past, present, and future of open source. He makes 2 interesting points: 1. Firefox users should stop gloating. 2. Taking out Microsoft (or any other commercial company) isn’t the point of open source. It’s nice to hear a OSS guy who has a reasonable attitude. The OSS community has gotten a little too overconfident after the recent Linux and Firefox gains.

I would really hate to work for PeopleSoft right now. According to news.com, Oracle is handling up to 6000 PeopleSoft layoffs in an impersonal, and inherently offensive way. I know we all have our horror stories about leaving jobs. I once worked for a company that had the humiliating policy of publicly escorting all employees out to the parking lot as soon as they were informed of their layoff. This included company founders. I know that this policy had an influence on my decision to leave. It may not have been the main reason for leaving, but it certainly made me rush the decision to resign.

As with other people, I would love to see those who make these policies become victim of them. Anyone have Ellisons letter?

Red Hat, Suse, and Mandrake released a bunch of Linux patches, some of which were labeled “extremely critical". They mostly concern DoS and local DoS vulnerabilities in .pdf and pixmap libraries.

Sidebar: For those running Fedora Core 3, kernel 2.6.10-1.741_FC3 is available.

It seems that Red Hat has noticed how they annoyed their customer base when they split their product line in two. Now they are trying to make up for it by making the Fedora project a little more developer friendly. It’s good news, but it remains to be seen whether they can attract all of the disgruntled Geeks back to the fold.

I’ve just finished the first draft of a Geeks guide to AMD’s Cool’n'Quiet feature. I intend to make this the first in a series of original tech submissions. If anyone has any ideas about what subject I should poke my nose into next, let me know.

NASA launced it’s Deep Impact comet buster on schedule today. The spacecraft is supposed to smash into a comet on July 4 to take pictures of it’s insides. Sounds vaguely like someone mixed up the plots of Independence Day and Armageddon. Hopefully, we won’t annoy any aliens living on the comet

Yahoo is reporting that another extremely critical IE bug has been reported. The bug has been known for a while, but security folks think it is much easier to exploit than they originally expected. This one takes advantage of drag-and-drop, and is pretty insidious. Check out the article for counter measures.

Update: Though originally thought to fix this bug, the recent pile of patches only lessens the effect of this hole. Not sure how, but thats what MS is saying. A patch is now in the works. I wish my previous mention of a fix were really true. Oh well, I only know what I read in the papers

Found a couple of links to the release of the Turion today, but they all seem to point back to this page at TheRegister.com. It seems as if nobody really knows about what the Turion is beyond ’some kind of Centrino competitor’. One thing is clear: AMD really needs to upgrade it’s marketing department.

It looks like the Spyware people have figured a way to use the Digital Rights Management features of Windows Media Player to load spyware on your PC. According to this article, the spyware comes disguised as a DRM-encumbered file. When WMP tries to acquire the rights to the file, it actually ends up going to a site that loads spyware on the machine.

The attack itself is a classic. It’s the kind of “in your face” method that is attractive to the hacker community. The surprising part of it is that fact that the entire thing seems to be funded by otherwise reputable online companies. Check out the article to see who they are. You’ll probably be surprised.

Microsoft’s new antivirus software is due to be released tomorrow as a critical patch. The first version is geared toward squashing the top 10 worms out there. Updates are expected to be done on a regular basis, with emergency patches pushed out for major viral outbreaks. If your microsoft update is set to automatic, expect to get the patch tomorrow. If not, you can download it from MS.

Found a link on /. to this discussion of Intel and AMD’s plans for the near future. Sound a bit like AMD is looking to do a bit more marketing. Thats just fine, as long as they don’t make the consumer pay for it. Yeah right! Like that’ll ever happen!

Can’t blame them though. If you can get other people to pay for your marketing, and it makes your company grow, why wouldn’t you do it?

A Flaw in the way that certain executables are loaded in Linux can allow a local user to gain root priveleges. This is one of those flaws that you can ignore if you don’t have any login users on your machine, or if you trust all of your users. For all other cases, it can be a pretty big security nightmare. This flaw is found in all 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, and there isn’t yet a workaround or patch.

Check out Wired’s 2004 Vaporware Awards. I must sheepishly admit that I was waiting for some of these products. I’m sure everyone who has any dealings with the world of high-tech has a million vaporware stories. I know I do.

On the heels of their AntiSpyware release, Microsoft is releasing an anti-virus application on Tuesday. According to MSN (another Microsoft venture), the program will be free, and will provide regular updates. It looks like Mcafee and Symantec have been Netscaped after all.

MS’s release of AntiSpyware made the PC security market a little “icky” (for lack of a better word). This one continues that trend by destroying the companies that tried to keep MS honest. Oh well. As I said before, building a business based on someone continuing to make mistakes is a really bad idea.

Security Focus is reporting that there are buffer overflow, spoofing, and temp file disclosure vulnerabilities in older versions of Mozilla, Firefox, and Thunderbird. These flaws can allow problems ranging from hijacked browser to exposed mail attachments. Luckily, all of the latest versions of the software are free of these flaws. Check your version against the versions listed in the table and upgrade as necessary.

Microsoft has released a beta version of their AntiSpyware application. You can also check it out here. The program is based on the Giant AntiSpyware application that they obtained from last months aquisition of Giant. You can check out a decidedly MS friendly review of the product. Yahoo has a much more neutral announcement that doesn’t have a review of the software. I found a few mentions of the software online, most of them saying that the software seems to perform its job fairly well, but the GUI is buggy, and it crashes too often. Bugs like these are forgivable behavior for a beta version. I have no doubt that these obvious bugs will be fixed ib tme for the final version.

This release presents a strange situation. If Microsoft ends up charging for the software this summer (the beta ends in July), then they will be selling a patch for bugs that they created, and should therefore be expected to fix for free, or at least in the next version. In addition, it seems a little shady to have an entire product that depends on you not fixing your own bugs. It all grates on my sense of right and wrong.

Whether they decide to charge for the product or not, it looks like a lot of Web security companies are about to get shut out a lot like Netscape did in the browser wars. You really can’t fault MS this time. The web security guys made a living from cleaning up after Microsoft. Any business model that depends on the continued screwups of another company is a bad one.

Samsung is showing off a prototype OLED display. To the uninitiated, OLED is an acronym for Organic Light Emitting Diode. The cool thing about OLED’s is that they create a very sharp picture with contrast ratios in the 5000 range, as compared to LED’s which range between 200 and 500. The uncool thing about them is that they have a very short lifespan. They tend to lose brightness 3 - 4 times as fast as regular LED’s.

According to this article at informationweek, Adobe has released a new version of Acrobat that allows a publisher to include DRM locking in a document. As usual, you can download the free Windows version of Acrobat reader. This site also has a link to an application to enter the Linux beta program.

TheRegister is running a story that could easily be titled Not Only in America. This one sounds like the 20 year, $10B (thats ten billion dollars) Comanche fiasco. If the public paid attention to how their tax dollars were being wasted on projects run by people with single digit IQ’s, they would be shocked. Unfortunately, nobody pays attention.

I’m currently beefing up some of the features on the site for an upcoming move toward virtual web hosting. You may have already noticed that things like webmail and https have started working. In the future I also hope to add some affiliate links to places that I think will serve geeks well.

I’m currently setting up a few test web sites for loyal friends. Once I have worked the bugs out of the process, I’ll be taking on a limited number of personal web clients. I’ll be providing quite a bit of bandwidth and space for the price, and I intend to keep the number of sites low so that response time will be quick… but I won’t be available 24/7 to hold anyone’s hand. If you are interested, stay tuned for more info, or contact the webmaster for details.

BTW… I don’t intend to make a big profit from this. I just need something to offset the monthly cost of the server.

If you are involved in any type of development. you might want to check out this study of the reasons why development projects fail . I guess nobody wants to hear “I told you so", but it says exactly what I tried to tell so many software people for so many years: If you don’t use the right tools for the right job, things break. Maybe Engineers/Techs/Developers should spend less time arguing about whether a wrench is better than a hammer, and more time deciding which one fits the task at hand.

The fact that “changing requirements” came in so low as a reason for project failure was surprising to me… I guess if you think about it really hard, “changing requirements” is used very often to request an extension or an increase in funding, but I don’t remember it being an actual reason for failure. It is usually just the most iron-clad excuse that people come up with.

The one that they didn’t cover was “Idiots in charge". That would wipe the rest of the reasons off of the list.

Check out thisBest Of list out at TechReport. At the very least, you’ll want to know who got the middle finger award. I’m not sure I agree with all of their choices for winners, but I certainly agree with the last one

I saw all of the headlines about counterfeit AMD CPU’s yesterday, but this article at TheRegister.com seems to say that they were actually bad chips marked for disposal. I guess we’ll all need to look suspiciously at any cheap CPU’s coming out of Asia for a while.

Found a pointer to what looks like a new Star Wars RTS . The last one (Galactic Battlegrounds/Clone Campaigns) had pretty cheesey graphics and dopey sounds, but the game play was fun. I can’t get too down on Battlegrounds because it kept me and a few friends in a small RTS LAN party group occupied until C&C Generals came out. Hopefully, The new one will have all of the gameplay, but will have some reasonable graphics and sounds. Unfortunately, it looks like at least another 6 to 9 months before we find out.

I’ve added a new site map to help the spiders crawl my IFrame infested pages. While I was at it, I made the map useful to humans. It will probably find a permanent home it the upper left corner of the page. If any of you webmasters out there would like a copy of the PHP script that generates the page, let me know.

Ran across a way to make Firefox scream on broadband connections. I tried it at home on Linux, and was amazed at the results. Basically, it enables the browser to make lots of requests at the same time, and cuts back on the amount of time it waits before acting on information that comes in. I also found it kinda cool to browse through all of the variables in Firefox.

Tom’s Hardware gives us this analysis of Linux gaming with an eye toward the how’s and why’s instead of a comparison of benchmarks. Those of you who know me, know I’ve written drivers for both Linux and Windows, (among others) so I have some expertise in the matter. In my opinion, their analysis of the current state of affairs is close to a bullseye. The fact that things aren’t quite where they should be, but they are slowly drifting in the right direction is very accurate. The fact that Nvidia is much more Linux friendly than ATI is also correct.

However… I think they let ATI get away too easily with the failure in their Linux driver. To let them off that easily, you would have to believe that they didn’t know that Doom 3 was coming out in a Linux version until 3 weeks before the launch, that they couldn’t contact ID about it, that ID wouldn’t have worked with them, and that they were taken completely by surprise by the failure. I think the truth is closer to didn’t care than it was to didn’t know.

If companies would learn that Shameless Geeks tend to be in positions where we recommend hardware purchases both to our companies and friends, and that more and more geeks are discovering the beauty of Open Source… well, you do the math. Lets just say that any company that continues to ignore us is denying the black gooey ooze that is slowly pulling them into the tarpit.

Well, I’m back from holiday vacation. I’d like to use this first post of the new year to wish all of you a healthy, happy, and prosperous New Year.