Shameless Words from Shameless Geeks

Yep, It’s official, AMD has absorbed ATI. The dirty deed was done today. Needless to say: It’s the end of an era.

I’m always a little sad to see a choice removed from the list. It’s pretty obvious that they won’t want to compete with themselves on chipset sales. It also takes out the possibility that either of these companies will enter into the other’s traditional business (ie. there is now no chance that ATI will start making CPU’s). Ah well… lets hope for the best.

BTW:
If you try to visit www.ati.com you get redirected to ati.amd.com. I’m going to miss the slightly-over-the-top bright red ATI site. AMD ’s site is adequate, but boring. One thing they missed… The ATI pages still allow you to view prices in Canadian dollars. I wonder how long that will last.

Yesterday was supposed to be the big release date for two very popular software packages, and it was… sort of. First of all, Firefox 2 was released yesterday. I checked the web site several times yesterday, but could only find 1.5. Fortunately, I was able to download it this morning.

The other big news was that Fedora Core 6 was released yesterday. Ever since then, the site has been down for the count. I can’t say whether the cause was a crushing demand or something sinister, but it seems as if they may be out of commission for a while. Have no fear… you can download from one of the mirrors. Don’t expect a high bandwidth connection.

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted a review of a good PC multiplayer game. I’d like to be able to say it was because I was too busy to review them for the last year (or more). Unfortunately, I’ve only been too busy for the last few months. The truth is that there just hasn’t been anything that I’ve considered worth playing.

(more…)

I just ran across this story about modern ghouls. And you thought that a funeral director with necrophilia was bad.

After years of delays,Microsoft has finally released MSIE 7. Of course, I’ll be giving it a try, but it has a long way to go before it catches Firefox.

If you want to give it a try yourself, Here’s a direct link to the IE7 download page.

FYI.. don’t expect a fast download. I can’t get it to download any faster than 3KB/s.

I’m just posting something to let everyone know that I haven’t forgotten about the web site. For those who don’t know me, I recently started a new job. The work is great, but it is much more demanding than the old one. I simply haven’t had the chance to comment on any of the news. I haven’t even been able to post the little goodies that people send me via email. As soon as I am past the current crunch, I promise to post much more often.

On a related note, this is an open blog. All you need to do is sign up if you would like to post. Here’s your chance to comment on anything you want… as long as you have some kind of reasonable argument that the subject is somehow geek-related.

The recent flurry of online video deals is looks like it may be a good thing for all. All of the deals in advance of Google’s rumored takeover of YouTube.com involve large content owners offering their content for online viewing or downloading. Hopefully, this will lead to RIAA drying up and blowing away.

The recent surge in retro gaming really doesn’t surprise me much. Then, as now, it’s all about gameplay. Sure, Asteroids had a hideous vector graphic display that started to flicker badly when the number of flying rocks got large. Of course Pac-man had overly simplistic graphics, and Donkey Kong (the original) only used two sprites to walk. It didn’t matter then, and it doesn’t matter now. They were just plain fun.

Current video game developers are beginning to notice, but I still don’t think they fully understand. Stunning graphics and insanely smart AI are always nice, but a reasonable challenge and a good laugh will go a lot further.

Whoa! Here’s a surprise! Congress has effectively wiped out online gambling in the US in a single stroke. It did this by making it illegal for banks and credit card companies to make payments to online gambling sites.

I haven’t had a chance to think too much about this development, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. Here are the Pros and Cons:

Pros:

• Because US companies were excluded, all revenues were streamed directly out of the country. Now, the playing field is level… off-limits to all
• There is nobody watching over these companies. Gambling in the US is closely monitored, not only for the generation of revenue, but also to make sure that the games are fair. Only God really knows if these outfits are honest… The rest of us believe that they aren’t.
• After cheap drugs and manhood-expanders, spam from these online gambling sites is some of the worst net-clogging garbage on the planet. Lets hope that the demise of the gambling sites is followed by the demise of the hackers and online scumbags that they were supporting. It would be nice to have fewer blog spamments to delete from the queue every week from now on.

Cons:

• I really hate the idea of the US government getting it’s nose into the Internet so deeply. Governments in general, and the US in particular, have a long history of ridiculously ineffective management of things. If they get their hooks in too far, we’ll all have to dig up our old 2400 Baud modems.
• This bill was tacked onto legislation that was supposed to help keep our seaports safe. Irrelevant attachments on good legislation are disgusting in the extreme. If the law is good, it will stand on its own.
• Prohibiting a vice only drives it underground. Does anyone recall the history of the US in the 1930’s?

In the end, online gaming probably will not disappear altogether. Hopefully, it will come back in a way that is more fair to all concerned.