Ik las op The Tech Report dat H.Oda. (die wazige japanner ondermeer bekend van WCPUID en SoftFSB) een programmaatje heeft gemaakt waarmee je de L2 cache divider van een Athlon kunt aanpassen. Hier een knipje uit het bericht :

The details on this one are still coming into focus, but I thought I'd share what I know already. This development could be a bonanza for Athlon overclocking. I received word yesterday from Dave at the ComputerNerd that the German hardware site hardwarelab.de has posted some info about the latest program from H. Oda, the Japanese author of WCPUID and SoftFSB. Here is a rough translation of that first post on the German site:

Athlon L2 Cache Settable by Software! Hardly has the 2/5 divisor become known than the next hammer blow falls. There is a new little program that permits one to simply set the Athlon L2 cache by software, so soldering is no longer necessary. The program with the name AthlonL2 originates from a programmer at www.h-oda.com, which has already developed SoftFSB, WCPUID and other tools. True, I haven't (yet) got the program but am presenting a screenshot!

Now this development is significant because the "Golden Fingers" Athlon overclocking cards can't control the L2 cache divisor via the Athlon's edge connector, and the Athlon's L2 cache chips are often the limiting factor for Athlon clock speeds. With control of the L2 cache divisor, Athlon overclocking could get much more interesting. (See our Athlon overclocking FAQ for more detail.) [break]Op The Tech Report staat ook een screenshot van dit handige programma.[/break]

hermanb schrijft: "kernel versie 2.214 heeft een module met statische webserver die 4 maal sneller is dan apache, en sneller dan zeus.

Another reason is that is really does produce some impressive results - see this benchmark plot for an example. Serving only static files (the only thing khttpd does), khttpd does about four times better than Apache. It also beats the speedy Zeus server, though by a much smaller margin.

Voor een leuk grafiekje moet je hier ff langslopen.

Via JC kwam ik op deze site terecht waar een plaatje te zien van Intel's roadmap voor de mobiele CPU's. Als het goed is komen de eerste 650MHz CPU's er in het eerste kwartaal, 700MHz in het het tweede kartaal en daarna de 750 en 800MHz versies. Hieronder de roadmap in klein formaat:

Ook Damage Gaming heeft vandaag een review op het net gekieperd van de Plextor PlexWriter 8/4/32 IDE CD-RW. Hieronder een stukkie:

As mentioned earlier, Plextor is known for quality CD-ROM and CD-RW drives. I wasn't surprised when I ran my tests on this drive to check out the quality of it, and I'm very glad.

Having some files to backup, I loaded up Adaptec's Easy CD Creator Deluxe, which comes with the drive, and slapped my files into the cue. I slipped an 8x compatible CD into the drive, and hit the record button. Roughly nine minutes later, my CD was done, burned to maximum capacity and without errors.

One nice feature of the Plextor PlexWrite is the 4096KB buffer that is provided to help prevent buffer under-run errors. If you are burning files from your hard drive, this basically means that you are going to be all right unless your drive just stops sending data. I was very pleased to see this in the PlexWrite. Just remember, if you are copying CD to CD and your CD-ROM has a varying read time (meaning that it reads the outer portions of the CD faster than the inner tracks) then you might want to burn at 4x to help that out.

As some might use the drive as a general CD drive, you might be interested in knowing that the PlexWrite is very capable of reading CDs just as well as any other CD-ROM out there, just at a slower 32x speed which isn't that terrible.

Lees ook even mijn verse review van de HP 9110i 8/4/32 IDE brander

Erhnam schrijft: "Op de Creative site staan nu ook Unified drivers voor de Annihilator. Deze maken het mogelijk om de Glide API op je GeForce te runnen en dit lukt ze aardig !":

The Creative Labs Unified Driver Database now seems to be fixed for Annihilator users to download the Unified drivers. These drivers (in case you don't know) give you pretty impressive 3DFX GLIDE compatibility.

Users have been reporting that entering the serial number off their CARD and not the BOX now works!

Ace's Hardware wist meer interessante info over het Athlon DDR SRAM verhaaltje bijeen te harken. Volgens betrouwbare bronnen zou deze Athlon met full-speed L2 cache het werk zijn van een geheugenfabrikant:

Earlier, there was some talk regarding some folks in Japan who apparently managed to swap the cache chips on an Athlon in order to get the cache running at full speed (originally reported by Daiki). There has been some question as to whether or not this is even possible, however, particularly for someone working out of his or her basement. I am now hearing from reliable sources that are indicating that this full-speed DDR Athlon was produced by a memory supplier, and was not the work of a lone overclocker.

The people who have apparently done the work on this Athlon also seem to indicate that AMD's L2 cache controller could use some work, and that potentially even the upcoming Thunderbird may not be able to outperform this DDR-Athlon significantly without a tweaked controller.

Check Ace's Hardware voor de benchmarks.

Gamers Depot schreef een review van de Asus V6600, een GeForce die zich door de aanwezigheid van een TV-out en Video-in/out positief onderscheidt ten opzichte van z'n andere GeForce broeders:

Having a name synonymous with high quality motherboards, ASUS has leveraged their name once again, this time in the form of their GeForce SDRAM card, called the V6600. The particular version we were sent to review is the "Deluxe" version which also includes their 3D-eyewear. The V6600 is the most complete GeForce package that we've seen to date, complete with a DVD player, and video capture capabilities too. Breaking away from the "Reference" design, the V6600 built on the typical yellow/orangish PCB, and proves to be more stable while overclocking. We got ours up to 150/195 without a sweat.

ActiveWin heeft een review van de Creative Labs SBLive! Platinum op het net gezet. Deze high-end versie van de Soundblaster Live! wordt geleverd met een drive bay, die een brede sloot aan digitale en analoge aansluitingen geeft:

With the SoundBlaster Live! Drive II you have many benefits that other soundcards on the market do not have. You get easy front panel access so you can simultaneously connect both digital and analog devices. The other things you can connect to the front panel is S/PDIF in, S/PDIF out, line in (mic in), headphone out, MIDI in, and MIDI out. This is a major benefit if you are a musician and plan to have things like keyboards connected to your PC and don't want to keep having to move your PC round to connect at the back.

Nestor schrijft: "Ik surfte wat op de golven en opeens kwam mijn oog dit schitterende artikel tegen en terwijl ik het las, dacht ik bij mezelf: waarom betaal ik hier in Nederland nog steeds telefoontikken voor een gare telefoonverbinding?":

De Broadband Digital Group, een jong bedrijf geleid door Ryan Steelberg, de man die eerder succes boekte met AdForce en AdSmart, staat aan de vooravond van de lancering van een nieuwe dienst. In diverse Amerikaanse steden gaat BDG gratis ADSL aanbieden, zo meldt CNet.

Gemiddeld betaalt de Amerikaan 30 tot 50 dollar per maand voor een ADSL-aansluiting. BDG laat dat bedrag betalen door adverteerders. Klanten krijgen op hun scherm complete reclamespotjes te zien. Daarnaast denkt BDG geld te kunnen verdienen met extra diensten als video on demand, internettelefonie en online spelletjes.

...en ondertussen zitten wij arme hollanders nog steeds in de middeleeuwen van de telecommunicatie .

Bij Tech-Review is een review gepost van de Plextor PlexWrite 8/4/32 IDE CD-RW drive. Hieronder wat info over de performance van deze 8 speed IDE brander:

You know the drive supports everything it should, you know it even handles the increasingly popular 80 minute variety of CDs. But how does it really perform? Well we put the burner through some tests to see how reliable and efficient it actually is.

Our first test came through successfully with the burner completing a CD burn of a 63:03 (555 MB) CD in 8:30 including table of contents and disc closing, which translates into 7.4x recording. Take out the TOC and disc closing time of 30 seconds total and you have an 8 minute burn at a 7.9x rate.

One problem that the majority of users might run into when burning from one CD to the PlexWriter directly, is the inadequacy of your CD-ROM. The majority of CD-ROM drives on the market today are variable read drives. This means that the drive reads the outer part of the disc, faster than the inner part. If the drive cannot keep a constant rate of transfer of at least 8x, then burning a CD directly at 8x will result in buffer underrun and a wasted disc. For those that encounter this situation, burning at 4x speed may have to be endured unless you copy the CD to your hard drive and burn from the hard drive at 8x speed. An unfortunate situation, but not the fault of the PlexWriter.

In terms of CD reading performance, the specifications state a 32x read rate on the outer part of the disc, and a 14x read rate on the inner part.

wildhagen en OdY stuurden vrijwel gelijktijdig hetzelfde nieuws: "Toch nog een smeuïge millennium-bug: bij de politie in Venetië en Napels ging het flink mis. Lees hier het teletekstbericht":

NAPELS De millenniumbug heeft tot chaos geleid bij de justitiele administratie in de Italiaanse steden Venetie en Napels.Gevangenen die in 1999 vrij zijn gekomen 'moeten' nu tot 2099 zitten. Straffen die dit jaar aflopen,hadden in 1900 moeten zijn beeindigd.

Het Zweedse leger gaat een speciaal team van IT soldaten opleiden die de tent moet beschermen tegen digitale aanvallen, meldt IDG Webwereld:

Het technologieteam moet militaire computersystemen beschermen tegen hackers en vijandige mogendheden die het op de digitale infrastructuur van Zweden hebben voorzien, zo meldt het Svenska Dagbladet.

De aanval is de beste verdediging, weten ook de Zweden. Dus de IT-soldaten moeten ook zelf kunnen cracken. "Ze moeten vijandige systemen kunnen vernietigen," schrijft de Zweedse krant.

Necrocon komt vertellen dat de Millannium LAN party wegens gebrek aan belangstelling is gecancelled:

Hallo iedereen die zich heeft ingeschreven voor de Millannium Party: The Russian Edition. Vanwege het ZEER lage aantal mensen (14) dat zou komen, is de organisatie tot de moeilijke beslissing gekomen om het hele gebeuren AF TE BLAZEN. Dit komt natuurlijk hard aan, maar een lan-party met maar 14 mensen is ook niet alles.

Het gebouw is woensdag en donderdag dus niet open!

In ieder geval heel erg bedankt voor de inschrijving, en er komt later misschien een wel goed georganiseerde party aan. Maar dat is nog even afwachten natuurlijk. Reply dit mailtje alsjeblieft, zodat we zeker zijn dat je hebt ontvangen.

Met spijtige groet,

Marcel Duin
Millannium party: the Russian Edition organisatie

Hans schrijft: "TCX heeft weer een aantal nieuwe MySQL releases de deur uit gegooid. Voor Unix varianten zijn versie 3.22.29 (stable) en versie 3.23.8 (dev) gereleased. Ook de mensen die MySQL onder Windoos durven draaien is het feest: versie 3.22.29 is ook als shareware Win32 binary vrijgegeven":

Hi!

MySQL 3.22.29 and 3.23.8 are now released for Unix; They should be on our mirror site after a short while, so please don't mail us if you try to get it right away!

The 3.23 series seems to stabilize quite good. If you don't have any of the problems listed in the Changelog, you don't have to upgrade from 3.23.7.

We hope this is the last 3.22 release; This mainly fixes some small problems in the 3.22.27 and 3.22.28. The biggest 'known bug' this release fixes is that in some not very likely cases, when using packed text keys, the index could get corrupted on delete.

Note: This release doesn't fix any Y2K bugs, as we haven't found any

Details over fixes en nieuwe features vind je in de Changelog.

Oppertweaker Tom heeft een artikeltje in elkaar geblurbt over de geschiedenis van z'n website. Zelf volg ik Tom's Hardware Guide sinds mei 1997 en heb ik de ontwikkeling van THG redelijk mee mogen maken. Destijds behoorde het samen met o.a. SysOpt.com tot de eerste hardware sites. Hier een stukje over de opkomst van het fenomeen overclocking:

The next milestone in the history of Tom's Hardware Guide was my first motherboard review in October 1996. It was the first hands-on motherboard-review published on the Internet altogether, and the tested board was the Asus P55T2P4 that I had bought and then reviewed. This motherboard was the first Pentium-motherboard that would let you alter the bus-speed from the Intel-default 66 MHz up to 83MHz. The review was a huge success and was followed in November 1996 by the '75/83 MHz Bus Speed Project' that for the first time showed the advantage of the faster bus and thus L2-cache speed over pure processor core clock. This article received a lot of attention worldwide and many print-publications made own articles out of it. The result was also that many motherboard-makers suddenly included several bus clock settings and Abit introduced their first SoftMenu, which was heavily promoted by me, due to the easiness it offered to overclockers. Abit was actually the first company that jumped on the Internet-bandwagon. They saw the huge marketing potential of websites and half a year later they did whatever they could to supply any of the suddenly new upcoming hardware websites with their products, regardless how small the site was. Today motherboard companies couldn't really do without websites anymore, because it's the cheapest and easiest marketing tool there is and websites still consider it as a favor to receive review-units and tend to give good reviews in return.

GA-Source heeft een review van de nieuwe Diamond Rio 500 online geplant. De Rio 500 is in vergelijking met de oudere Rio 300 voorzien van een dubbele hoevelheid geheugen: 64Mb, goed voor een uurtje muziek op 128Kbit/s. Verder zorgt een USB interface voor snel uploaden van MP3'tjes:

With the second generation of MP3 players, Diamond extends and continues their quality that they started with on the Rio PMP 300. In the process they changed some things and left some the same. I think they did an excellent job overall. One nice thing that they changed was the ability to upgrade the firmware, to allow potential support for new music formats. One thing that they left the same, and at first I had to question the logic behind, was the lack of ability to use the Rio to transfer files from one PC to another.

Een 26-jarige inwoner van Dallas, die zichzelf heeft omgedoopt tot 'DotComGuy', sluit zichzelf op om een jaar lang online te leven. Alle benodigde goederen moeten via internet shops z'n hut binnen komen. Om het feest ook voor ons internetters interessant te maken wordt het huis met webcams vol gehangen:

After locking himself inside the rented house Saturday, he added: “I’m going to come out being a loon.” The “live” part of the DotComGuy stunt involves 24-hour streaming video from dozens of digital cameras set up throughout the house. One camera points at the kitchen, several face the living room, and one even sits on a bathroom shelf — turned away from the toilet and bathtub. Advertisement

The DotComGuy project, which sounds like a cross between the enviro-colonization experiment Biosphere and the film “EdTV,” has a few ground rules. Maddox can have visitors. He simply can’t go farther than the back yard.

“We certainly don’t recommend that people lock themselves away from the world, but we will prove that it can be done,” said Len Critcher, a friend of Maddox’s and president of DotComGuy Inc.

Maddox’s first monthly paycheck from the company will be $24, but it will double every month as an incentive to stay in the house, Critcher said.

Check dit artikel van CNN voor meer info.

Nugget schrijft in z'n .plan dat-ie (weer eens) een foutje gemaakt heeft, waardoor sommige RC5 members de koppeling met hun team zijn verloren. Als je meedoet voor de Dutch Power Cows, check dan even of je nog steeds lid bent:

We tried to be clever, and it didn't work out... We tried to recover some of the team joins performed during the 27-Dec to 29-Dec and it looks like our code accidently unjoined a few people from their teams. The problem doesn't look too widespread, but it may have affected you. If you notice that your blocks are not being properly assigned to your team (you'd see this in the members list), please kindly rejoin your team.

If your team doesn't provide a member's listing, you can verify that you're still properly joined to your team by editing your participant information, which will show your current team affiliation.

Sorry for the mishap.

Ars Technica heeft een behoorlijk diep artikel gebakken over de architectuur van de AMD Athlon en Motorola G4. Beide processors blijken erg veel met elkaar gemeen te hebben en combineren elementen uit de traditionele RISC en CISC wereld. Hier een hap uit de intro:

Throughout this article, I'll emphasize the fact that regardless of marketing spin, stone-age controversies between platform factions, and general hysteria surrounding the terms "RISC" and "CISC", the K7 and the G4 are remarkably similar. They face similar problems, and they solve them in similar ways. The majority of the differences between these two CPUs are not the result of any sort of fundamental difference between "RISC" or "CISC" design philosophies -- most of the K7's CISC baggage is taken care of in its front end, and the back ends of both CPUs are fully post-RISC designs. Rather, their differences stem from perfectly ordinary design tradeoffs of the kind all engineers and architects make, tradeoffs that involve price, power dissipation, performance, speed, support for legacy technology, and a whole host of other considerations. AMD's K7 and Motorola's MPC7400 (the unit which, when paired with a particular chipset, becomes known as the G4) are, in fact, cousins with common ancestry.

Johan de Gelas van Ace's Hardware heeft een review van de el cheapo Digicom Pro 2000 slot-A plank omhoog geladen. Dit 4-layer bord is gebaseerd op AMD's nieuwe low-cost 'Shinner' reference design en heeft geen ISA slots en AMR zooi, waardoor het bord onder de 100 dollar geprijst kan worden:

We hope the companies offering these budget motherboards will not skimp on voltage regulators, as it is clear that good voltage regulators are necessary to produce a stable motherboard. I doubt customers will mind paying an additional $10 to $15 for a reliable product. We can not recommend the Digicom Pro 2000 at this time, due to the stability/compatibility issues we encountered.

A pity, as it is a fast yet inexpensive Slot A motherboard. Clearly the Athlon needs cheaper motherboards to become an attractive upgrade option to the many PC enthusiasts with tight budgets.

Mike Andrawes, huurling van Anand, heeft een review van de Guillemot Maxi Gamer Gougar gepost. Deze videokaart is gebaseerd op de TNT2 Model 64 met gemankeerde 64-bits geheugenbus en 125/150Mhz kloksnelheid. De performance is vergelijkbaar met een normale TNT2, zolang er geen hoge resoluties en 32-bit kleur worden gebruikt:

Generally, the 2D image quality of the TNT2 M64 is fine at resolutions up to 1280 x 1024, but at 1600 x 1200 the image quality makes a small, but noticeable drop.

The Cougar is also available in a "Video Edition" that, as the name implies, offers video in and out features in addition to the standard Cougar we have here. Since it's based on the same TNT2 M64 chip, expect the Cougar Video Edition to compete with the original ATI All-in-Wonder 128 from a 3D performance stand point, but fall behind the Marvel G400 and Voodoo3 3500 on that front. We won't comment on its video capture abilities until we're able to get a hold of an evaluation sample.

Boomgames.com verblijdt ons met een review van de Aureal Vortex II SQ2500 geluidskaart met 4 speaker support en digitale S/PDIF interface. Als we de reviewer mogen geloven dan levert deze kaart een erg brute experience in games zoals Quake III Arena:

Playing Quake III Arena was a blast. This is something you should experience. If you already have a 3D audio card, disable A3D and play the game for a while. Now, play it with A3D. You should notice that A3D not only adds to the realism of the game, it helps you distinguish the location of opponents. Half-Life worked pretty much the same way, although HL has both A3D and EAX support.

Sharky Extreme heeft een review van de Elsa Erazor X2 online gezet. Hier wat info over de overklokbaarheid van deze GeForce DDR videokaart:

Using the NVIDIA reference drivers, the X² can be overclocked fairly easily. Performance will be contingent on the resolution as we observed the largest improvement at 1280x1024.

Perfectly stable at 130/330MHz, a 10% speed increase can be expected from Quake III. Trying to push the card too far, however, results in hampered performance, slowing the game to a paltry 15fps. Overall, overclocking this speed demon may not be worth the time.

Ik lees op PHP.net dat er een nieuwe versie van de PHP Hypertext Preprocessor gereleased is:

January 1, 2000. The long-awaited release of PHP 3.0 contains numerous bug fixes and a bonus of new features. Support for GNU recode, portable access to stdio streams, enhanced FTP support, support for Mcal and IMSP, as well as PNG functions for gd make this release a must for every user of PHP.

Voor een complete lijst van updates en nieuwe features kun je terecht in de Changelog. Source code en binaries kunnen hier neergehaald worden.