Een groep van zeven bedrijven, waaronder Microsoft en Nortel Networks, hebben op de Super Computing '99 conferentie een internet verbinding van 2,4Gigabit/sec gedemonstreerd. Deze snelheid werd behaalt op een touwtje tussen Seattle en Portland en is volgens de deelnemende bedrijven een nieuw snelheidsrecord:

Seven high technology leaders collaborated at SC99 today to set a number of internet speed records, demonstrating that long-distance gigabit-per-second networking is ready for prime time and that next generation Internet technologies and capabilities are emerging in applications, in end-systems, and in network infrastructure. To set the stage, at the network infrastructure level, the DARPA-sponsored National Transparent Optical Network (NTON), the University of Washington-led

Pacific/Northwest Gigapop (P/NWGP), and Nortel Networks joined forces to deliver 2.4 gigabits per second (Gbps) of packet-over-SONET based standard Internet capacity from the Microsoft Corp. and University of Washington (UW) campuses, through a shared point of presence at the Pacific/Northwest Gigapop in Seattle, to the SC99 exhibition hall in Portland.

Microsoft, the National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance), the University of Washington (UW) and Sony (in support of the ResearchTV consortium) demonstrated two working, real-time gigabit applications in their coordinated SC99 exhibits. Further, the UW, Microsoft, the Alliance and Sony were able to run these applications concurrently, setting a record of well over 2 Gbps in aggregate throughput -- by a wide margin clearly the fastest real-time applications ever run over a wide area network.

Earlier this year, the UW and Sony were the first to demonstrate live studio quality, High Definition Television (HDTV) broadcasts over Internet2/Abilene. Today, in another record-breaking effort, they and the partnership successfully transmitted a real-time gigabit HDTV stream of five simultaneous channels of minimally-compressed, studio-quality HDTV over the internet, using industry-standard HDTV video, 'Wintel' computer systems, and networking equipment from leading vendors such as Juniper. Each channel within the overall stream consumed more than 200 million-bits-per-second (Mbps), for a total of well over a billion-bits-per-second in concurrent throughput in a state-of-the-art real-time application setting a new internet speed record.

Check voor meer info deze pagina bij de NCSA.

Thresh & Gang hebben een review in elkaar geflanst van de Logitech Extreme Digital 3D pretpook.

The ED3D is a good, solid device that performs as you'd expect. The stick is precise, and there isn't too much "center slop" (dead area) in the middle to annoy you. I liked the amount of resistance that the stick has, and the trigger has a very nice feel to it. My only complaints are the lack of stiffness in the twist handle and the feel of the thumb buttons. Another very minor complaint is that the stick is ergonomically designed…for the right hand. If you're a left handed joystick user you'll want to find something else that's more ambidextrous. Grabbing the ED3D with your left hand is definitely not an option.

Bij Digital-Clips is een review te vinden van de lang uitgestelde Nomad MP3 speler met 64MB aan opslagcapaciteit en een FM tunertje. Hieronder een stukkie copy/paste:

Had the Nomad been launched and shipped before summer, it would have blown the socks off the Rio and all its competitors. Now five months down the line, it’s still a good purchase with a features list superior to any other mp3 walkman. Its sleek magnesium shell is a true head-turner, and with no moving parts, it’s perfect for outdoor individuals.

However, five months down the line, many of its bread-and-butter features are now the norm for any self-respecting mp3 walkman – the Samsung Yepp comes loaded with a voice recorder, as done the JazPiper. The new Rio 500 lacks this feature but comes with true USB connectivity and 64MB built in memory, expandable to a total of 96MB with a 32MB flash card.

Still, it’s fair to say the Nomad ranks as one of the best mp3 walkmans your money can buy. It’s still got the most features, a cool docking station, and for some, drop-dead looks. Personally I’d hold off buying mp3s until the second generation machines reach the market. The first generation has shown the huge potential behind mp3 walkmans, but have yet to mature into truly outstanding products. New features such as USB connectivity, backlit LCDs, wired remote controls etc. are extremely enticing and may convince most users to hold onto their hard-earned cash for a few months. But for now, look no further than Creative’s Nomad, arguably the best mp3 walkman ever.

Ook BXBoards heeft een kort Comdex verslag gepost, met o.a. info over MSI, Aureal, Tyan, FIC. Verder wat nieuws van de Abit stand, die met hun nieuwe GeForce kaarten nog best wel eens een interessant produkt af zouden kunnen leveren:

I also got a chance to look at their new TNT2 and GeForce card. The GeForce had an average heasink/fan combo and the memory was of the ESMT 5ns variety, which has been known to hit speeds in excess of 200Mhz on som previous cards. Hopefully we'll have a chance to review this in the near future, but rumor has it that there is quite a delay on shipments from Nvidia at this point. As far as an AMD solution goes from Abit, they informed me that they are in fact interested, but AMD actually isn't quite cooperating. I guess Abit isn't in AMD's good graces after not making any Super 7 boards. Seems to me that AMD shouldn't be so picky given the current situation with the lack of quality Athlon mainboards on the market. I also had a chance to see a couple other new products that Abit is working on that I can't mention yet, but I must say that they're definately not sitting on their Laurels.

Time Digital heeft de Dreamcast uitgeroepen tot 'Machine of the Year', zo bericht The Adrenaline Vault:

Sega's Dreamcast videogame console has been named 1999's Machine of the Year by TIME Digital, TIME Magazine's publication devoted entirely to personal technology. The publication cited design and technology advances, including 128-bit 3D graphics capabilities, home theater-quality sound, portable gaming options and Internet functionality. The honor is part of TIME Digital's special holiday issue dated Nov. 29, 1999, on newsstands Monday.

Dreamcast beat out products such as MP3 players and personal video recorders. The story also cites the incredible consumer buzz and sales momentum, which has led consumers to purchase close to 1 million Dreamcast consoles since it launched in the U.S. on Sept. 9.

Bij ZDNet kwam ik een leuk berichtje tegen over het W97M/Prilissa virus (AKA X-Mas virus) dat zich via Word97 en Outlook verspreidt om vervolgens op 25 december je autoexec.bat aan te passen met format commandos. Ho ho ho wat funny

The virus itself looks for a registry key to verify if the local system has been infected. If it hasn't, the virus creates a Microsoft Outlook e-mail message with the subject line "Message From (Office 97 user name)" and a message body that says "This document is very Important and you've GOT to read this!!!"

The first 50 listings from all address books are selected, along with an attachment -- the infected document, whatever it is.

If the date is December 25, the virus runs a destructive payload to overwrite the existing C:/AUTOEXEC.BAT file with instructions to format the C drive.

The virus will not run on Windows NT. Another message is displayed on Word 97, adding:

"You Dare Rise Against Me ... The Human Era is Over, The CyberNET Era Has Come!!!"

Most anti-virus vendors are expected to have a definition update and fix prepared within the next few hours.

It's unclear who will carve the roast beast.

MadOnion.com heeft een aantal screenshots van 3DMark 2000 neer geplakt. De nieuwe versie van dit populaire benchmark proggie zal o.a. van T&L support voorzien zijn. Hier alvast een paar tumbnails:

Bij iXBT Labs hebben ze een artikel gepost met hun GeForce 256 overclocking avonturen. Na het hele systeem in een koelkast gekieperd te hebben kregen ze de videokaart op 150/210MHz.

Let's sum up the obtained results and draw certain conclusions. First we will take 16-bit color. At 1024x768 in normal conditions (chipset frequency increase made 16%, memory - 20%) we managed to improve the performance by 5%, but at 1280x1024 this value reached 10%. In fact, the performance gain was absolutely inadequate to the frequencies increase.

In extreme conditions (chipset frequency increase made 25%, memory - 27%) the card performed 18% faster at 1280x1024, which was also less than we had expected. Why did it happen like that? We think that it is again the system CPU that slows down the whole thing (note: there were no games supporting T&L among those considered).

And what about 32-bit color? Theoretically, the CPU should be powerful enough here and the only thing that may set certain limits is the graphics card and its potential. In normal conditions (chipset frequency increase made 16%, memory - 20%) at 1280x1024 we got a 24% performance gain (at 1024x768 - 12%). Well, now we start to like the situation: it really looks as if such overclocking was worth it.

In extreme conditions (chipset frequency increase made 25%, memory - 27%) at 1280x1024 the performance grew by 38% (at 1024x768 - 18%). To tell the truth, the result was beyond our expectations, however, the gaming performance of the card at 1280x1024 still left much to be desired.

Sharky Extreme heeft een review gepost van de Voodoo3-3000 in PCI smaak. De performance drop tov zijn AGP broer is niet groot te noemen:

Overall, the Voodoo3 3000 PCI's performance was pleasingly good in OpenGL and pretty good in D3D as well. It made an excellent showing against the GA660 Plus. The surprising thing was that the Voodoo3 3000 PCI hardly fell behind the V3 AGP. While the Voodoo3 3000 PCI was almost always slightly slower, even the largest performance gaps between the two cards was small. So despite all the wonderful bandwidth of AGP, at least with the Voodoo3, it hardly makes a difference to performance. It should be noted that the V3 AGP does not support AGP texturing, but instead uses 3dfx's own proprietary main memory texturing methods. If it did, there may have been some performance improvement in the 3DMark 16MB and 32MB textures for the V3 AGP, where textures larger than the V3's onboard 16MB of memory were used. But this would not have made a large difference to the scores anyway, especially since the V3 AGP does use the AGP bus and its larger memory bandwidth even if it doesn't use DIME.

Eagleman schrijft: "Nog wat network-nieuws van de Comdex:":

Novell Wins PCWEEK Best of Comdex Award for NetWare 5.1

- PCWEEK judges select NetWare 5.1 from among more than 2100 products

- NetWare 5.1 recognized as a platform for developing Web and e-business applications

- NetWare 5.1 furthers directory-based networking with NDS 8

PROVO, Utah -- Nov. 18, 1999 -- Novell, Inc. today announced that NetWare® 5.1 was selected as the best networking software at the Fall Comdex trade show and received the coveted PCWEEK Best of Comdex award. Every Spring and Fall Comdex, PCWEEK judges spend countless hours scouring the halls of Comdex to find and select the best new products from among the hundreds that are introduced.

NetWare 5.1 was selected for its focus as a Web application server platform, innovative Web-based tools for managing and administering networks and for its mature directory with Novell® Directory Services® or NDS® 8.

Ook het AnandTech Team was naar de Comdex beurs in Las Vegas gefietst om daaro wat nieuws bijheen te schrapen voor ons. Zo hebben ze o.a. een verslag van de AMD presentaties in elkaar gedouwd. Daarnaast een apart verslag van de Voodoo4/5 aankondiging door 3dfx. Als laaste heeft Jason deel 2 van zijn report online gemikt, met nu aandacht voor Creative Labs, Linksys, Videologic en Altec Lansing. Hieronder wat spul over een nieuwe Webcam van Creative:

The first interview I had was with Creative Labs. We spoke to one of their PR guys, Jim Carlton. Creative showed off three of their new products at the show - the WebCam Go and their new broadband technology modems. The Webcam Go is quite neat actually. It is essentially a WebCam 3, but mobile. So what you end up with is a webcam that sits on top of your monitor, like the conventional web cams; and, you can unhook the USB cable, fold it up, and it will take stills Very good idea. Now, it\'s not a digital camera - it really wasn\'t intended to be anyway. It does not have a flash, nor does it support additional memory storage. But for those of you in the market for a webcam, I would take a look at this unit. We will of course be reviewing this unit soon. At the show, Creative had it and the SoundBlaster Live Platinum on special: $69 for the WebCam Go, and $99 for the SoundBlaster Live Platinum. Very good deals, if you ask me. Creative, of course, has other product ideas up their sleeves, but we will just have to wait and see what they are.

leX schrijft: "Nadat superweb zoveel blunders maakte, blijven er maar nieuwe ISP's opduiken.
Deze heet dus Quickonline en bied een uurtje per dag gratis internet aan, vanaf 26 november dan. Inschrijven is gratis, en je krijgt een pop3 mail box en homepage ruimte. Je kunt zelfs een subdomein krijgen.

So far so goed, maar nadat ik me aangemeld had, zag ik dat je op een 0900 nummer moet inbellen... heb geen idee of ze dan stiekem toch nog een f1 p/m kunnen gaan vragen.

Verder zag ik ook ineens dat de site van 4Free ook ineens weer actief is.
Hier nog een stukje van de Quickonline site
":

Gratis internettoegang wordt meer aangeboden op de Nederlandse markt maar dan moet de gebruiker de telefoontikken voor eigen rekening nemen. Het systeem van Quickonline, Happy Hours , draait op sponsors die zich op dit moment nog niet bekend wensen te maken. Die sponsors kunnen via speciale portals, toegangspoorten tot internet, hun doelgroepen doelgericht benaderen. Zo komt er op woensdagmiddag een uurtje gratis internetten voor kinderen onder de naam 'Kids4Free'. "We zorgen er dan voor dat de toegang tot allerlei ongewenste sites wordt afgesloten", aldus de woordvoerder van Quickonline. Voor volwassenen is er onder meer een sportportaal met sportnieuws. Dit portaal zal worden uitgebreid met een aantal andere aandachtsgebieden. Om gebruik te kunnen maken van het Happy Hour kan vanaf vandaag worden ingelogd op de site www.quickonline.nl. Vanaf deze site kan de benodigde software worden gedownload. Via deze site komt men ook op het gratis netwerk na het beantwoorden van een aantal vragen.

Update vanaf de KPN stand op de HCC (op een iMac nog wel ): Beyond3D heeft een artikel gepost over de Comdex presentatie van Gigapixel, een of andere vage club die een paar week geleden bekend maakten een 3D accelerator te hebben ontwikkeld met een fillrate van boven de 1 Gigapix/sec. De chip werkt met behulp van tiled-based rendering en doet anti-aliasing zonder performance hit - althans, dat claimt Gigapixel. Hier een stukje over de performance van het Comdex demo modelletje, die slechts van een enkele functionerende pipeline voorzien was:

Well back to Comdex itself, demo-ing at Gigapixel's booth, they were showing what was actually a year old chip (something they now claim to be two generations past). Running on this prototype was Quake III Arena with the same running on the G400 right next to it. The Gigapixel chip was really bare minimum, doing only a single pixel per-clock. Running though, they had full-scene anti-aliasing and performance was probably around 25-35 fps. The cool thing was though that the full-scene anti-aliasing was in full effect. The texture quality on the G400 seemed to be slightly better, but when you take into account the anti-aliasing that Gigapixel had running, there really was no comparison. The overall quality was simply great.

insane schrijft: "Nvidia heeft nieuwe drivers gereleased voor athlon gebruikers. Met deze update moet de problemen verdwijnen tussen de geforce en athlon. Je kan de driver hier downloaden. Dat is trouwens wel de ultieme dream-machine: Athlon + GeForce...":

In our Quality Assurance testing, NVIDIA and AMD discovered potential system issues when a GeForce 256 is installed in a PC using AMD's Athlon processor and 750 core logic chip set. NVIDIA and AMD worked cooperatively to address this issue and offer the following solution. NVIDIA's reference driver, build #3.62, detects this core logic chip set and optimizes system settings to correct this issue.

Ruben pruim schrijft: "Ik heb zelf de dualhead alleen heb er een vette bug in zitten. In alle spellen zit een rode gloed. Ik heb alles al geprobeerd, ik denk dat ik terug breng!! Hier een review (de zoveelste...) van de Single Head versie":

Back in the day when we all had our Voodoo 1's and our Voodoo 2's we where looking for the best add-on card at that time. It seems everyone came to the conclusion that the Matrox Millennium II or even Millennium I was the best card to pair with it. Why was it the best card to pair it with the Voodoo 1 and 2's? For the simple reason is was the best 2D card out there. Since then, Matrox has released hybrid cards (2d/3d). They released the Matrox G200 card that performed well, but wasn't accepted to the hard core gamer because of the mediocre performance in OpenGL and sub par Direct 3D. Now Matrox is back with their new video card the G400. How does it stand up?

En het artikel kun je hier vinden.

Ruben pruim schrijft: "Ik zag het ineens staan!!":

3D Blaster Annihilator (GeForce) Drivers - 1:39 PM EST This is a new driver release (v2.02) for the Creative 3D Blaster Annihilator (GeForce - CT6941) for Windows 95 and 98. This update allows standby mode in AMD/ALI chipset based systems enables LAVA to run smoothly and allows the 3D Blaster Annihilator (GeForce) to run as secondary display adaptor in Windows 98. Thanks, 3D Chipset.

JanKees schrijft: "FullOn3D heeft een geheime informant die altijd betrouwbare info levert. De nu inmiddels beruchte T&L van S3 schijnt inderdaad niet te werken in de hardware. Een eerder gemaakte opmerking dat T&L wel in software kan, vind ik erg grappig . Dat kon mijn Virge namelijk ook al! Anyway, hier is de Soap :"

About S3 and the Savage 2000. I got good info on this, not only is T&L not supported in the Viper II, there is actually T&L on the silicon but it is horribly broke. The rendering portion does ok, but they can't get the T&L portion to work correctly. They tried to push this one too hard and now they have a defective part until Q1 2000. By then they are hoping to re-tape the chip and get T&L to work properly. [break] "PS: ik heb op mijn site nog een informatieve link over 'tape out'": [/break] Short answer: It's a design milestone indicating the design is basically done and that it is time to start the manufacturing process.

Long answer: (and a bit technical)

First a little backround: IC's are generally made by an optical process in which a pattern of rectangles are transfered to a wafer (disc of silicon) This pattern is then used to control where the dopants (chemicals diffused into the silicon) will go or where the metal (interconections) will go. The pattern of rectangles are stored as a "photograph" on a glass plate called a mask.

After a chip is designed and layed-out (converted into a set of rectangles on multiple layers - each layer for a different process step), these rectangles must be sent to a place which will produce the glass masks for use in fabrication. Since there are up to 100's of rectangles per gate and chips usually have thousands to millions of gates, this is a rather large database, which in the past, was usually sent to the mask fafrication house on a series of 9-track computer tapes (the ones you usually see spinning in bad sci-fi movies when they want to indicate a big computer.) Thus the name - indicating that the tapes have gone out the door.

After Tape-Out, The design is commited and any bugs left in at this time must either be worked-around by software (this is usually the cause of "poor drivers") or fixed in a latter turn of the chip (with another tape-out).

Each Tape-Out can be rather expensive as the masks generally cost about $10,000 each and you need from 8 to 13 masks per chip, depending on the foundry and the process you are using.