boer Krelis schrijft: "Als je die nou ook op je MP3spelertje kan zetten... scheelt honderden guldens en er passen DAGEN muziek op!":

De draagbare harde schijf zal ongeveer 400 gulden kosten en bevat maar liefst 4 GB schijfruimte. Momenteel wordt nog gewerkt aan een 8 GB en 16 GB versie. Het apparaat beschikt over een eigen besturingssysteem, een Goldfire processor van Motorola en oplaadbare batterijen. Digital Wallet zal vanaf het eerste kwartaal van het jaar 2000 te koop zijn.

Tsja, daar kan een Camera met een flashcard van 8 MB niet tegen op

Vele ergenissen als je een eigen domein naam wil hebben binnen nederland... www.ditismijnnaam.nl is bijna niet te doen. Ook blijkt de nu vereiste bedrijfsnaam en inschrijving bij KvK niet altijd een garantie te zijn om je zo gewilde adres te krijgen. In het verleden zijn er vele verhalen geweest over éénmans zaakjes die hun naam niet konden krijgen, bijv. omdat de naam te algemeen was. Dit lijkt nu te veranderen:

Versoepeling regels

Door een versoepeling van de regels zoals die door Stichting Internet Domeinregistratie Nederland worden gehanteerd komen veel domeinen welke in het verleden voor registratie waren geblokkeerd weer vrij.

Alleerst zullen de organistaties welke reeds eerder het betreffende domein hebben getracht te registreren in de gelegenheid worden gesteld het betreffende domein alsnog te registreren. Na 1 september zullen de betreffende domeinen voor iedereen vrij zijn voor registratie.

Versoepeling regels (2)

Op dit moment is Stichting Internet Domeinregistratie Nederland bezig het ook voor particulieren mogelijk te maken een nl-domein te registreren. Zodra er meer bekend is over de voorwaarden en data laten wij het u in deze rubriek weten.

Toch blijft ook voor particulieren het grapje vrij duur..30,- registratie en 60 gulden per jaar voor www.firefox.nl is toch knap duur als je er alleen maar een webcam op wil vertonen .

Ik zie bij Voodoo Extreme dat 3DLabs nieuwe Windows 2000 RC3 beta drivers in elkaar geknutseld heeft voor hun Permedia3 Create!, Oxygen VX1 en GVX1 kaarten. Hieronder een lijstje met veranderingen.

• video playback bug fixed
• Fixed a problem with shadowed pointers causing corruption to OpenGL applications
• Fixed some power-management bugs
• Software pointer support improved
• Fixed some power-management bugs

Download ze hier. (1.9MB)

Target PC heeft deeltje 2 van hun 'Troubleshooting Overclocking Problems' artikel online gemikt. Hieronder een gedeelte:

When you overclock your processor there is an increase of the amount of "noise" within the CPU core that can cause errors, crashes and BSOD (Blue screens of death). The way to overcome this extra noise is by increasing the voltage to the CPU core… usually 15% is the maximum you want to deviate from the default voltage. Compare it to driving down the road with the windows down and the stereo on, at 30Mph the music sounds fine, but when you drive at 70 Mph you need to turn up the volume so you can still hear it.

L2 Cache can make a CPU with a beautiful core a rotten overclocker. The Celeron processors are still the overclocker’s choice. The integrated L2 cache runs at the processor speed and benefits from being cooled by the heatsink sitting on the CPU. The Pentium II and III’s have L2 cache chips that are external from the CPU and reside on the PCB next to the processor, these are not cooled by the heatsink and get very hot. In addition the speed of the L2 Cache chips often dictate how fast you can push the processor. An example of this is the PIII 450 with 4.4 Ns L2 cache chips Vs the 3.3 Ns L2cache chips. PIII with the faster L2 cache chips are being regularly overclocked to speeds of 600 MHz and in most cases higher than that…. Where as the slower 4.4 Ns chips are allowing owners to reach only into the 500Mhz range.

Scott's Hardware heeft een review op het net gegooid van de Kodak DC240 Zoom digitale camera met een maximale resolutie van 1280x960 pixels. Hieronder wat over zijn kwaliteit:

The quality of the images captured by the Kodak DC240 was exceptionally clear and clean looking, rivaling images taken with a film camera. I own a Nikon SLR camera, so I know what quality pictures should look like, just so you know I wasn't comparing the Kodak DC240's results to that of a $10 disposable film camera. The only images where I noticed any distortion on, were the extreme close-ups. It seemed the auto focus feature couldn't focus in clearly when you were 2 feet or less from your subject. For most close up's you would be better off standing a greater distance away and later cropping the image to achieve the desired look. I also had to adjust the camera's brightness compensation control, because some of my initial shots were a bit on the dark side. However, after making some adjustments everything I shot afterward came out looking great.

Riva3D heeft een review van de Creative Labs Annihilator neer gemikt, met o.a. benchmarks van de in de Creative Unified drivers mee gebakken Glide emulator:

The Annihilator gives you something that no other manufacturer can: impressive 3DFX emulation. I was amazed to see that the Annihilator using the Unified Drivers posted almost 60 fps in 10x7 resolution running 3DFX's own MiniGL driver. Very impressive indeed! Creative has done a marvelous job in improving the Unified Drivers since their initial release. Virtually every 3DFX only title I tested ran well and looked great.

Billy van Voodoo Extreme weet te vertellen dat er een nieuwe beta van het SoftFSB busspeed overklok proggie is uitgebracht:

My little morning muffin-ass news ho-pop, Ion sent word that Mr. H. Oda has released a new beta version (77Kb) of his kick ass front side bus overclocking program, SoftFSB (which, contrary to what it sounds like, has nothing to do with drugs that reverses anything that viagra does). This is that bad boy that let's you alter your FSB speed on the fly, in Windows (without restarting). Very handy indeed.

Yoda, errr, Oda has also released a new beta version of WCPUID (57Kb - smaller than Sweet Dick's love dragon), his program that identifies your CPU (make), the speed of your CPU, if it supports KNI, MMX, 3DNow!, and just about anything else that you might want to know about your CPU.

Ik zag bij BBC News dit artikel over de Wearable PC van IBM. Een release date voor het apparaat is nog niet bekend, maar het ziet er in ieder geval kewl uit (t.netten vanaf de straat ):

Those tired of hauling around "portable" computers may be able to wear a Pentium PC from next year. Japanese camera-maker Olympus and IBM Japan recently revealed a prototype of a wearable PC.

The monitor is a 100 gram 'monocle' headset that projects a 10 inch virtual screen. The mini-monitor flips out from the headset and covers one eye.

The hardware is stored in a 380 gram box, which is controlled by three buttons. It has a Pentium processor, 64 megabytes of memory and runs Windows 98. A banana-shaped handle with a mouse and right-left click buttons is used to select icons on the virtual screen. The battery pack lasts up to three hours. The Wearable PC doesn't have keyboard yet, but "we may develop that in the future," said Olympus spokesman Shinichiro Murakami. Mr Murakami said the companies would decide next year when to launch the computer.

AMD heeft een nieuw Athlon reference bord ontwikkeld dat dankzij 4-layer technologie goedkoper is te produceren. De nieuwe opper-moederplank is voorzien van een verbeterde revisie van de Irongate chipset, die - zoals eerder aangetoond door c't - een hogere performance haalt dan de huidige Irongate revisies:

AMD has produced a new reference Motherboard: "Shinner", the succesor of Fester. I have received a prototype motherboard from DIGICOM, and I will be testing it soon.

The DIGICOM PRO 2000 slot A board is a 4 Layer motherboard, with much smaller voltage regulators, as small as a ring . It contains the new AMD 751 Northbridge rev. C5 which should make it slightly faster than the Fester based motherboard (Fester: rev. C3). One of the new features of rev. C5 seems to be a "bypass mode", allowing a better management of the queues (I am trying to find out what this exactly means ; ).

But the main purpose of introducing the "Shinner", seems to be reducing manufacturing costs. The DIGICOM PRO 2000 and other 4-layer slot A motherboards should make Slot A motherboard prices dive to 100$ and less (A ASUS K7M now cost about 165$). This should make the Athlon more attractive to "upgraders" and OEMS. I am working on a huge Slot A motherboard tests, so if you got a motherboard to review, feel free to contact me ! We hope to offer you a comprehensive and in-depth test next month.

Maaikie schrijft: "Natural 3D Tech heeft een eerste review van de Celeron 533 in elkaar gebouwd":

Well, as you can see here it will get there and do the job in this low level testing format. But as seen in the 3DMark 99 Max results, it becomes all too clear that when run at this speed (600mhz) that in some cases there will be a performance hit. This just shows that this little piece of silicon has reached it's limits as far as this fab goes. Hopefully the next generation of Celerons that Intel has lined up will take us beyond the limitations of this family of Celerons. If you're wondering if I recommend getting this little thing, "WELL", I have to just leave that up to you. If you want that little bit more umph from your single Celeron system or you have an Abit BP6 and want to take it to the max then this is the way to go I guess. Just remember tho, with normal cooling and no increase in voltage only got me to 600mhz max. When I tried to go past that (with better cooling and higher voltage), I ran into the Windows lockup problem. I even had to do a reinstall 2 times because it FUBARed my HD. I'll be doing some more testing with W2K and see if it can handle the higher speed above 600mhz. But for now, looks like 600mhz is the limit.

Het chippie wil dus niet hoger dan 600MHz, valt tegen.

Waslijn (hmm ja, prettige nick) stuurde deze link naar een nieuwsbericht van Nu.nl, die schrijft dat de 1 GHz Athlon in het tweede kwartaal van volgend jaar zal komen. Niet echt schokwekkend nieuws, want dit wisten we al langer. In hetzelfde artikel ook wat info over de Intel Roadmap:

"De Athlon heeft duidelijk veel ruimte in de architectuur voor schaalbaarheid. AMD's 0,18 micron-productieproces moet de chip in staat stellen makkelijk 800 MHz te halen", zegt analist en president Nathan Brookwood van onderzoeksbureau Insight 64.

Intels toekomstplanning omvat een 800 MHz-processor in maart, een 866 MHz-chip tegen het einde van het tweede kwartaal, om aan het einde van de derde periode op 933 MHz uit te komen. Het lijkt er dus op dat AMD uitloopt in de kloksnelheidsrace tegen Intel. Aan de andere kant heeft de chipreus zijn 733 MHz-processor - vanwege de Athlon-druk - aanzienlijk eerder uitgebracht dan oorspronkelijk was gepland. Die Pentium III, codenaam Coppermine, is echter nog niet in grote hoeveelheden leverbaar.

Ace's Hardware heeft een aantal opmerkingen geplaatst over de 3.62 Athlon GeForce drivers. De nieuwe drivers blijken stabieler te zijn dan versie 3.48 en halen een hogere framerate op lage resoluties:

The Athlon Geforce Drivers do not decrease or increase performance significantly compared to the previous 3.48 drivers. The big difference is that you can not run any DirectX game with the 3.48 drivers without locking up your Athlon based computer. I tried Expandable, TA: Kingdoms 2.0 and Falcon 4.0 and all benchmark crashed. Quake 3 (1.09) and Unreal Tournament run fine on the Athlon system with both drivers.

With the new 3.62 Geforce drivers (Courtesy RIVA3D ) for the Athlon, all games work perfectly. A few benchmarks to show that the Geforce 3.62 driver for Athlon systems does not decrease performance :

(Athlon 700, Fester motherboard, AMD AGP miniport 4.45, ASUS V6600 Geforce 256 (120/166))

Quake 3	nVidia 3.48 Driver	nVidia 3.62 Driver
Fast	89.7	92
Normal	81.5	88.6
High Quality	62.2	61.1
HQ 1024x768	39.7	39

While higher resolutions run a bit slower, lower resolutions run faster. Not really a sacrifice for the significantly increased stability that the 3.62 driver offers.

AnandTech heeft een review van het FIC SD-11 Athlon modderbord neer gemikt. De SD-11 is gebouwd rondom de AMD Irongate Northbridge en VIA's VT82C686A 'Super' South Bridge met 4 USB poorten en AMR. Dank je wel zou je zeggen, alleen zijn er maar 2 USB naar buiten geleidt en AMR zijn ze helemaal vergeten (jippie ). Verder blijkt de power input van het bordje extreem gevoelig te zijn:

While Athlon motherboards in general are extremely sensitive to the quality of the power supply used, thanks to the CPU's high current draw, the FIC SD-11 is extremely sensitive to the PSU used. While AMD has a recommended power supply list, FIC has had to trim this list considerably and produced their own list of power supplies compatible with the SD-11.

Combine the fact that this board is an engineering sample with the cost cutting measures FIC has taken and its no surprise that the SD-11 was one of the most unstable Athlon motherboards we have run across yet, under both overclocked and non-overclocked circumstances.

The layout is extremely strange, creating a large board with no additional functionality. The ATX I/O panel is also arranged seemingly at random. Combine these two issues and you have a board that will encounter great difficulty fitting into most ATX cases.

De jongens en meisjes van Hot Hardware maken ons blij met een review van de Kenwood 72X TrueX 'Jet Fuel Injected Funny Car':

As we saw in the Sandra benchmarks, the Kenwood drive is like a Jet Fuel Injected Funny Car when compared to a 48X drive. Once again, the Kenwood 72X True X CD-ROM shows it lives up to its 10MB/sec. claimed performance. Also, the access times are a little more in line with what we expected from both drives, sub 100ms.

One final note, these numbers are nice too look at but the experience when using this drive for a large program install is nothing short of amazing. We install many instances of Microsoft Windows 98SE around here these days. Never in my life has an installation gone so quickly than when using this CD-ROM drive. It literally cut the load time easily in half, maybe even less. There is a very prominent speed gain you will notice when you fire this drive up for the first time. You'll be spoiled from that point forward.

Dukeland heeft een aantal coole DNF wallpapers online gezet. Hier een voorbeeldje:

iXBT heeft een artikeltje in elkaar gedrukt over de 3dfx VSA architectuur, die in de Voodoo4 en Voodoo5 serie gebruikt zal worden. Hier een stuk uit de conclusie:

So, let's try to make a shot summary. 3dfx Company announced not just a new VSA-100 chip. It announced a new ideology of high performance graphics solutions. The mere idea of parallel data processing is very interesting and promising. In fact, it's now too hard to foresee the reaction of the market to these new solutions from 3dfx. Especially since there are still a few unclear and moot issues. There is only one indisputable thing: it is too untimely to make any definite conclusions before we see with our own eyes how it all works.

In fact, the users will have to choose between the T-Buffer (including FSAA effect) and hardware T&L in the Q1 2000. Besides, the situation with the geometric coprocessors support in the existing applications will matter a lot and is very likely to influence your decision. However, you should clearly understand one thing. The bare announcement that this or that game supports hardware T&L is not enough. Only if this game run on a graphics card equipped with the geometric coprocessor looks indisputably better on the user's monitor than in case he uses a Voodoo5, the user will prefer competitors' products to those from 3dfx. But if most games with the announced hardware T&L support turn out not to make full use of these graphics cards features (in other words, they use the same amount of polygons in the scenes as if they were run on a system without any geometric coprocessor), then there will be hardly any sense in buying graphics cards with the geometric coprocessor. Really, what's the use of buying a graphics card with the geometric coprocessor if in autumn 2000 we are offered another generation of the graphics cards of this type? In this case, we don't doubt that Voodoo5 cards will take the lead because they offer a wide range of features the user can apply immediately in new games as well as in older ones without waiting for anything. Here we mean T-Buffer, namely the major effect it provides - full scene anti-aliasing (FSAA). And that is not all! T-Buffer also provides hardware support for the whole lot of various cinematic affects. They have to be supported in the interfaces, while hardware FSAA is supported by all applications and API. All in all, we are facing a very interesting period of time when we will have to make our own choice and to pay for it.

Ik lees bij Voodoo Extreme bij Computer Games Online een nieuwe timedemo voor Unreal Tournament in elkaar gefrut heeft:

1. Unzip the file and put the UTbench.dem file in your UnrealTournament/System folder.

2. Run the game, and from within any map (the intro flyby will do), bring down the console with the tilde key (~).

3. Type "timedemo 1" and press enter.

4. Type "demoplay UTbench" and press enter, then press tilde (~) again so the console will go away as soon as the demo starts.

5. When the demo finishes, bring down the console again to show the total frames played, time, and average overall framerate.

Some tips:

- There's a whole lot of combat, blood, smoke, and weapon effects, so this is a bit of a "worst case" scenario. You'll likely get a better framerate in day-to-day play. You may not see any difference at all between low resolutions...I'm not sure if this is something with how demos are made or a product of the demo's content.

- The demo is recorded at 20 frames "snapped" per second. This should make it run excessively fast if you get a great framerate (ala Quake timedemo), but also should make it more accurate on slower machines.

- If you want to turn vsync off, do it however you normally do for your video card and also in the advanced options (type "preferences" at the console, look under "rendering")

- You can switch resolution and color depth easily with the "setres" console command. For example, "setres 800x600x32" will set the game to 800x600 resolution with 32bit color. It's faster than using the menus.

Je kunt het ding hier downloaden (923Kb)

De allmighty Opperkoe is in verpleging door een stel database Jomanda's, schrijft Nugget in z'n meest recente .plan update. De RC5 statistieken zullen tijdens de healing offline blijven:

We've attracted quite a number of offers to assist in debugging the Sybase problems. So many, in fact, that I haven't had a chance to respond to all of them. Two very talented guys have started going over the code and Sybase configuration looking for oddities or suspicious configuration items. So far, no serious red flags have turned up, but we have decided on a good number of performance improvements that can be made.

I've spent the past 36 hours continuing to do all the normal repair and check routines that I'm accustomed to doing. dropping and rebuilding indexes, doing checktables and checkdbs. The "dbcc checktable" on the rc5_64_master table took just over 12 hours to complete!

Given the serious slowdown brought about by having web access enabled, I've unfortunately had to conduct most of these repairs and checks with stats disabled. I know it's been frustrating. As of tonight's run (yes, csc stats are current) I'm still unable to do anything, even bcp data into the server, if the web server is enabled. This fact makes it impractical to be running the rc5-64 logs as it would require even more downtime from the server.

Rest assured, we're still prodding and tweaking, looking for the cause of the problem. Thanks, as always, for your continued patience and support.

Update van Azqi: de statistieken zijn nu weer online, alleen klopt er niets van...

Volgens c't geeft Asus in Deutschland nu ook e-mail en telefonische support op de K7M. Daarmee is het in Duitsland naast Biostar en FIC de derde fabrikant die officieel support voor z'n Athlon mobo's geeft (MSI en Gigabyte doen dit niet):

Der Mainboard-Hersteller Asus leistet nun auch für sein Board K7M, das für AMDs Athlon konzipiert worden ist, Support per Telefon-Hotline und E-Mail. Zudem hat Asus die technischen Daten des Athlon-Boards samt Handbuch im PDF-Format und Hinweisen zur Jumper-Einstellung ins Internet gestellt. "Wir bewerben das K7M zwar nicht, aber wir bieten den vollen Asus-Support," so ein Mitarbeiter der deutschen Niederlassung zu c't.

Zuvor hatte Asus bei Fragen, die das Athlon-Board betrafen, keine Hilfe geboten. Lediglich aktualisierte BIOS-Versionen wurden zum Download bereit gestellt. Die neue Seite ist bemerkenswerterweise nur über die Suchfunktion oder durch direkte Ansprache, aber nicht durch einen Link von der Asus-Homepage aus zu erreichen. Der Hersteller legt offenbar großen Wert darauf, den OEM-Status des K7M zu unterstreichen. Die Seite selbst trägt den zusätzlichen Hinweis, daß sie nur eine Referenz für OEM-Kunden und Wiederverkäufer darstellt. Solange der Einzelhandel jedoch das Asus K7M verkauft und der Support funktioniert, kann dem Endkunden der offizielle Status des Boards ziemlich egal sein.

Damit bietet Asus neben Biostar und FIC als dritter Hersteller in Deutschland Support für Athlon-Mainboards an. Gigabyte und MSI verkaufen ihre Boards weiterhin ohne Herstellerunterstützung. Einen Test aller fünf in Deutschland erhältlichen Mainboards für den AMD Athlon enthält die Ausgabe 24/99 der c't (derzeit am Kiosk).

Trinity Micro heeft een nieuw Gold Finger device in z' assortiment opgenomen. Met de dip switch, die 75 dollar gaat kosten, kunnen de multipier en het voltage van een Athlon aangepast:

The first Golden Finger Devices shipped today, here is a picture of the current revision. Don't be fooled by the simple look, there is quite a bit of wiring on the backside. Total build time is almost as much as a full mod.

An initial price of $75 has been set on the "Golden Finger Device" and quantity shipments will begin on the 2nd of December. We will also continue to offer Modded Athlons (the old method or a hybrid). Many have asked, "What is the difference?" See the Modified Athlon FAQ for more information.

Golden Finger Device - An add on solution that provides multiplier and voltage control (no cache control). Overclocking limited by cache (1/2 mult) until mainboards support this feature. Plastic cover must be removed or notched. Maximum overclock, ~700MHz. Cost: $75 + CPU

Original mod - A full solution that gives control over multiplier, cache multiplier, and voltage. Is a full non-reversible solution. Maximum overclock, ~800Mhz + Cost: $310 (modded CPU) or $125 + CPU

Roekie stuurde een link naar dit artikel van PC Format, over de National Security Agency die gaar wordt van de enorme berg info die het te verwerken krijgt:

According to CNN, America's National Security is suffering from information overload. There is just too much stuff to sift through, apparently.

This comes as great news to the enemies of Echelon, the NSA's global spying network, which is popularly supposed to be able to listen-in to the world's telecommunications. In particular it will please the participants of Jam Echelon Day, who included such key words as BOMB, CONTRA and IRAN in their e-mails in the hope of giving the system too much to cope with.

However, the NSA's problems probably have a lot more to do with the problem of being a spying agency in the Information Age, than any drop in the ocean contributed by a few privacy activists. Once upon a time the only target was the Soviet bloc, now there are dozens, from international drug cartels to fringe terrorist organisations. And then there's the Internet.

Sake schrijft: "Op 3DNow.net staat deze link naar The Unofficial ASUS K7M Support Centre. Ik denk dat op Tweakers.net ook al een aardig aantal K7M eigenaars zitten. Het is over 't algemeen erg interessant om sites te weten voor specifieke mammaplanken":

Graham Inggs has launched a website dedicated to supporting and resolving issues with ASUS K7M Slot A Motherboard. You'll find specifications, drivers, BIOS updates, and links to reviews on this site. Click here to check it out - The Unofficial ASUS K7M Support Centre.

Anonieme Harrie stuurde een link naar ZDNet NL, over een bug in de PIII 733. De info is afkomstig van c't, die hebben al eerder ontdekt dat de PIII foute resultaten geeft in de 132.ijpeg test van de SPEC benchmark (zie c't NL, pagina 49). Het lijkt hier om een ander probleem te gaan:

Het Duitse magazine c't beweert dat er een bug zit in de 733 MHz Coppermine van Intel. De super-microprocessor geeft errors bij het optimaliseren van de registers. Dit gebeurt bij zowel Microsoft- als Intel-software.

Het tijdschrift beweert bovendien dat er bugs in de hardware zitten. Deze hebben vermoedelijk te maken met de cache, die in twee levels is verdeeld.

Verder is opmerkelijk dat de grootste distributeurs de nieuwe processor nog niet op voorraad hebben. Ingram en Tech Data hebben het superproduct zelfs niet op de lijst staan.

Wat betreft de bugs: de meeste tests van de nieuwe processor zijn noodgedwongen gedaan met een i820 (Caminogate) mobo. Intel spreekt bovendien niet van bugs, maar van kleine foutjes. Verder heeft Intel nog niet gereageerd op de bevindingen van c't.

chucky neukt ff een mier : "Volgens een oplettende lezer van GA-Source bestaat er helemaal geen 'ICD' voor Linux en werkt nVidia eigenlijk aan een volledig Linux OpenGL implementatie ":

One of our readers sent in the following note regarding the news we published about the NVIDIA Linux OpenGL ICD in development: "There is no such thing as a "ICD" for Linux. The term "ICD" is an acronym coined by MicroSoft for a driver which links itself to Windows' WGL library.

Nvidia isn't actually working on a Linux "ICD" (no such thing) but a full Linux OpenGL implementation.

It is similar as referring to a driver in Linux as a "VxD", which is a wholly Microsoft device driver."