CNet is reporting that Napster, the
music-exchange service that's been embroiled in a legal battle with the
music industry, has signed a deal with German record label Bertelsman.
From CNet, "The two companies are developing
a new subscription service to let Net users swap songs copyrighted by
the recording giant. Members of the proposed service would be able to
search and download songs--legally--from Bertelsmann's entire catalog
of artists, including Santana, the Dave Matthews Band, Christina Aguilera
and Whitney Houston."
This signals a major change for Napster and the music industry,
which have until now, not been able or willing to agree on terms for a
partnership.
I don't know the details, I've been far too busy with... (insert your
favorite profanity here)-ing school.
Go see JC's and AMDZone
for all the scoop-dripping goodness.
...more to come. Related
links: AnandTech AMD760
DDR review
24 pages of Wonder-boy lovin'!
I know, I know... it sounds like an ad but seriously: There are some
great places to buy online, Buy, Mwave,
NECXDirect, but Onvia
has free UPS ground shipping on EVERYTHING! Their site says "for
a limited time," - yeh... they've been saying that for over 2 years
now.
Case in point: I'm scrapping together a PC for a friend, and I needed
an ATX case. I have an ATX power-supply, I just need something to throw
it in. Shop around, an ATX case costs about $40+ and at least $20 to ship.
But get this: I just ordered one from Onvia (w/o power supply) for $33.75
including (free) shipping and state tax.
Their prices are competitive, not the lowest, but you definitely
avoid any of that "Free RAM, only $150 to ship" bs. And just
as a bonus: if you live here in good-ole' Wa(r)shington, stuff shows up
in about 2 days 'cus Onvia ships from Seattle.
Just thought I'd drop that on ya... Related links: Onvia.com
in case you missed it
I guess this isn't a big deal either. CNET
is reporting that Microsoft
was a victim of a hacker attack which a microsoft spokesman called "industrial
espionage." Apparently other companies are interested in producing
overpriced bloatware and screwing over other companies and consumers:
they simply don't have Redmond's know-how
. Related
links: MSNBC coverage Slashdot tells us that WSJ broke the
story and MSNBC has the details. *note: Slashdot
will also beat you senseless if you say "hacked" instead of
"cracked" or whatever it is .
Nothing new here. We're already known that Intel had moved the release
date of the new cpu back to the week of Nov. 20. An interesting note is
that Pentium4 chips listed at reseller TechData are only listed as cpu
+ 64MB DRDRAM. The chipsets/motherboards for P4 that use SDR and DDR SDRAM
should be here shortly, if you're planning to "roll your own". Related
links: Intel Pentium4 site
Daniel Werner sends me news of his new registry utility: RegCompact.
From his site:
What RegCompact Does:
RegCompact eliminates registry fragmentation by writing the data in
the registry out into a temporary file. This data is written sequentially,
so there are no holes from deleted data or fragmentation. RegCompact
then reboots the system, and the compacted registry hives are replaced
when the system starts up.
I haven't had a chance to try this little gem, but the usual goes: whenever
you f* with the registry, back it up first. Or just be prepared for the
consequences (usually just an OS reinstall).
I will get this into the files section ASAP (read
"next year").
btw - I had an internal conflict posting these links since his site is
"The secret lair of..." Well if I go posting links to his site,
it's not exactly a secret anymore is it? Whatever...
Not like you care, but TC passed 50,000 hits satruday morning. THANK
YOU!
to all of you who have visited this site over the years.
Seriously though, I want to thank all of you who have written me with
suggestions, even something as small as a typo: you have helped make this
site better for everyone else.
Don't these guys have jobs or school or nap-time? I'm far too lazy to
do the guides. Sh@t, I'm too lazy to read them and link them on one page.
But luckily for you, there are more diligent webmasters out there. The
Reg has links to about half a dozen guides for customizing and enhancing
Redmond's latest. Go
take a pull and get your tweak-on. Related
links: Microsoft
WindowsME site
OverClocktoberFest! started (3 weeks late) source: TweakCentral of course!
10/20 - 12:10
Hey! I made a punkin!
I was tappin' the J & the B last night and thought of a cool new idea.
I also thought of OverClocktoberFest! (if you rip it off, make sure you
at least spell it right).
It's basically a banner-ad at the top of this page with some (lame - oops)
overclocking related links.
If you think about it, it's actually a pretty good idea: The stock-market
usually takes a crap in October, so you can't afford that fast processor
(or whatever) you really wanted. The weather isn't as nice, so you can
justify spending 16 hours crouched under your desk. Speaking of weather,
you can pipe colder air in from outside to keep your cpu cool, and you
can use the warm air coming out of the computer to heat your home or trailer.
Bonus!
Kazuto Sato has written a cool little utility that lets you, among other
things, make the taskbar transparent, change the icon and text of the
button, change the date/time format in the tray and have your computer
automatically syncronize its clock with a timeserver. Now that's what
I call tweakin'. Go
take a pull.
Tim Wilkens has posted some benchmarks of an Itanium (IA-64 merced) system
on JC's. You have to scroll down quite a ways... It's only running at
667MHz (not participating in OverClocktoberFest?). It doesn't look too
impressive.
Remember these are preliminary benchmarks... blah blah... I think all
new processors and architectures have problems out of the blocks, so I'm
sure Intel and HP will get things straightened out eventually...
The Register is quoting Intel
CEO Craig Barrett as saying (in the 10/18/2000 FT), "We
made a big bet on Rambus and it did not
work out." He then went on to say, "We
hoped we were partners with a company that would concentrate on technology
rather than seeking to collect a toll from other companies."
OUCH! Let the truth be known.
The "forward looking statements" made by Rambus are pretty interesting:
go read it. Related
links: Financial
Times: Counting cost of Rambus partnership
Here is the original article (courtesy Slashdot)
CNet is reporting that Microsoft has issued a patch for it's IIS (Internet
Information Server) versions 4 and 5. Apparently there was a (heh, yeah,
just one) security hole that needed to be addressed. IIS is commonly used
to run web-servers running Windows2000 or NT operating systems. Microsoft
Security Bulletin
To download, go to the "Patch availability" section of the Microsoft
security bulletin:
What happened to Gnutella? Wasn't that a great idea that had the plusses
of Napster (illegal) without the minuses (getting caught)? Well gnutella
turned to garbage around May when so many users started using it, it just
bogged-down to the point where it didn't work anymore. Anyway, go
read about it. Related
links: Wego.net
Gnutella is here
In other non-news, SharkyExtreme
has an "eBay
user's guide" up. It's 16 damn pages! eBay
doesn't even have that much documentation on their site. I've used eBay,
it's not that complicated! Just remember, it's all about ad-views.
PCWorld has put up a
10-page article about what makes a given processor faster than another.
I didn't have a chance to read the whole thing, but it seems pretty accurate.
If you weren't paying attention in CS 320 or you're new to the computer
arena, go give it a read: it might pique your interest. Related
links: AMD
is what makes processors fast Intel
is no slouch either when it comes to fast cpu's
According to this
thread at Tweak3D, VoodooExtreme's
virtual host (it's tempting to say ISP, but that would be wrong) pulled
the plug on them with only two days notice. Ouch! Should've gone with
PAIR.
I hope Billy get's VE up again
soon, I'm getting sick of all the wanna-be webmasters trying to be funny.
Not me tho, I'm cool.<cough>.
On a related note, L0wTax (SomethingAwful)
got hosed (again?) by an "ad network." I won't even touch this
one. Remember what happened to Cr0bar (Detonate.net)?
Maybe the lesson here isn't to deal with crooked ad-brokers. Or maybe
the lession is not to have zero(e)s in your name: I heard having digits
in your name messes up banks and maybe the checks aren't getting deposited
properly?
I'm
sure this is more sensational than actual news but anyway. The article
basically says that some large corporations "lose" enough money
in stock options to employees that it offsets any federal tax they would
have to pay. The US government at work ladies and gentlemen!
JC basically did a text-dump of the MicroProcessor Forum 2000. Lots of
good little tid-bits (heh) tho. News on AMD's upcoming (SMP baby!) 760
chi(m)pset...etc
Go Learn-your-ass™ (oh don't worry, I
own that too). Related
links: µPF (MicroProcessor Forum)
2000
nerds unite!
This
is good stuff. If you're into cpu architecture, definitely check
this out. Ace's starts off with the performance limitations of today's
cpus. Then he goes into the P4 IA-32 (willamette) architecture
and what Intel has done in attempts to overcome the problems faced by
current processors. He also touches on what AMD has done and may do in
future processors.
Tweak3D has an article with some quick
little changes you can make that will give your pc a little speed boost.
This a great guide and I recommend that everyone take
a look. There are a lot of little changes you can make that make you
think, "why didn't Bill just make
that the default setting?" Who knows? Related
links: WindowsME tweak guide
Tweak3D also has a guide to get you started on Redmond's
latest.
Adrain has updated his BIOS optimization guide (to rev.5.3). This is
a good if your motherboard didn't include (a very good) manual or if you
want to know what each of those little settings do. Definitely mark this
site and you can know how to set up your new motherboard if you ever upgrade.
*NOTE: I don't think "Rojak Pot" means what it does here in
hammer
These guys are nuts. They cut a hole in a small refrigerator and stuck
a computer in it. Then they used rubbing alcohol to cool the cpu. For
those aspiring nerds out there, some people will go to extreme measures
to cool their computer in an attempt to squeeze out that last drop of
performance.
It's not uncommon to see some idiot spending $600 to cool a $50 cpu when
common sense would tell you to buy a $600 cpu, a $10 fan and use the rest
to treat your favorite prostitute to a fancy dinner. But who am I to tell
you how to spend your money.
VIA
Technologies manufactures (supporting) chipsets for CPUs that go in personal
computers. That's not the only thing VIA does, but that's what they're
best known for. This article over on Tom's discusses what VIA has in store
for us in the coming quarters. In english, that means DDR.
Related
links: VIA website
VIA technologies corporate website.
This
article is dated September 13, 2000, but I thought it was pretty interesting.
If you're interested in video (pr0n) on your PC, take
a look. The MPEG2 codec is what is currently used as the compression
format for DVDs. MPEG4 is another version allowing for similar quality
using less storage space. The trade-off is the higher computing requirements
needed to compress and decompress MPEG4 as compared to MPEG2.
This article also covers the DivX codec
that you might have heard about.
btw, "MPEG (pronounced M-peg), which stands
for Moving Picture Experts Group, is the name of family of standards used
for coding audio-visual information (e.g., movies, video, music) in a
digital compressed format." - from mpeg.org Related
links: MPEG.org
The reference website for MPEG.
1. Unless you really want to get your hands dirty, there are nice utilities
that will do all this for you. I recommend X-Setup
from X-teq. Instead of hacking through the registry and changing the
value of a key, you can just check or uncheck a box for that setting.
I think it's easier.
2. Regedit.com has hundreds if not thousands
of registry settings all in a searchable database.
3. Who makes those logos? They're
everywhere. I want that gig: Make an action in Photoshop that makes text
look kinda shiny, make identical logos for a dozen sites and take checks
to the bank. Tough job.
TC Update source: Yours truly
10/06 - 00:06
Sorry about the lack of updates: there's just no PC news.
Either that, or I'm just lazy. If I wasn't so lazy, I'd say a. no news.
Anyway...
I've started my last quarter of school. Yeah, baby...
And I went to a High-Tech career expo Wednesday. I'm going to write a
career-expo-guide soon. Just a few pointers from a seasoned veteran. Well
I don't know about veteran, but I'm well "seasoned" all-right.
And take a look at some of the er... stuff I have to deal with: This is
an email I received yesterday from a good friend,
"Here it is - Often when viewing text in almost
any text programs (Word, IE5, Outlook Express, Etc.) I lose the upper
part of text (I only see the lower part of the text like it's cut in half).
If I scroll it out of view or highlight it comes back."
W-T-F? Now I know troubleshooting but seriously...
I told the guy to buy a new PC!
And then billed him for an hour's worth of grief.
information
Best tweak sites
OverClocktoberFest!
.
OverClocktoberFest! started (3 weeks late)
Kazuto Sato has written a cool little utility that lets you, among other
things, make the taskbar transparent, change the icon and text of the
button, change the date/time format in the tray and have your computer
automatically syncronize its clock with a timeserver. Now that's what
I call tweakin'. 
).
I'm
sure this is more sensational than actual news but anyway. The article
basically says that some large corporations "lose" enough money
in stock options to employees that it offsets any federal tax they would
have to pay. The US government at work ladies and gentlemen!
This
VIA
Technologies manufactures (supporting) chipsets for CPUs that go in personal
computers. That's not the only thing VIA does, but that's what they're
best known for. This article over on Tom's discusses what VIA has in store
for us in the coming quarters. In english, that means DDR.
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