Archive for August, 2004
-
27 Aug 2004
Just some quick comparisons of benchmarks of my old machine (Athlon 800) and my new one:
Benchmark Increase CPU int (dhrystone) 2.83x CPU float (whetstone) 3.38x CPU MMX/SSE 2.59x CPU 3DNow! 2.49x RAM int bandwidth 3.95x RAM float bandwidth 4.05x Cache and RAM "combined index" 3.77x 3DMark 2001 ~4.75x I certainly don't think I have the most beastly machine in the world (Nomad has more memory and a pair of RAIDed SATA drives, for instance, and at least one person I know at work has a Radeon X800), but I'm amazed with how much faster this machine is than my old one. I guess that's what happens when you wait 5 years between upgrades.
Update 08-28: 3DMark 2003 benchmark for the new machine: 3811 3DMarks.
Update 08-30: Doom3 High Quality timedemo: 30.4 fps (I couldn't run Ultra Quality because I only have a half-gig of memory)Discuss (4) -
26 Aug 2004
Long, but fantastic trailer for a movie that won't exist: Grayson. Years after Batman's death, Dick Grayson returns to his role as Robin to find the killer. Fanfilm at its finest, and it only cost Untamed Cinema $18,000 to make.
Movies that take place in an alternate timeline are dangerous, especially when DC Comics is trying to jumpstart a new series in their Universe.
-
25 Aug 2004
I wish I had had the balls (and the legal argument) to respond this way when I was served a Cease and Desist.
Heh, I just noticed that it's the same law firm as my C&D. I should find it and scan that thing in.
-
24 Aug 2004
-
24 Aug 2004
"I found a digital camera in the woods", Blair Witch for the Internet. Keep reading a few pages.
-
24 Aug 2004
Science and Industry is a teamplay based modification for the game Half-Life. I was an active part of the community for a couple years, running a server, working on some applications, helping with testing alpha versions, etc. Eventually, I became a full-fledged member of the development team, helping PapasNewBag out with the coding for the mod. Many of the visual enhancements included in version 1.0 were my contributions.
Read more... -
23 Aug 2004
For those of you having problems with VPU Recover errors with a brand new Radeon 9600XT (and the future me, the next time I reinstall), this page has the solution to all your problems. Turning off AGP Fast Writes and flashing my BIOS worked for me.
Update 20 Feb 2006: After getting a new motherboard and updating all of my firmware and drivers, I started having problems again. I found this page and tried some of the things on it. Setting AGP to 4x, in particular, seemed to help a lot.
-
23 Aug 2004
I don't miss this car one bit. Okay, maybe one bit, but it's a 0.
-
23 Aug 2004
I was doing research into hard drives for my new computer, since I've determined that my ancient Deathstar is really holding back everything. I saw good reviews about the new Hitachi Deskstar, and I happened upon this great deal. Check out the option dropdowns at the bottom though. Since "No" or "None" is the bottom choice on all of them, they're all set to a non-free option by default. Click "order" without changing them all, and you end up with $346.90 on your bill, not $63!
-
23 Aug 2004
I discovered Crux Linux exactly when I needed to. I was getting sick of Redhat's big-endian-ness. Upgrading was always a challenge, and the complexity of the boot scripts made things really confusing. Based on a BSD-like "ports" system, Crux is a built-from-source Linux in the tradition of Gentoo. But it's far simpler, and for the first time I really feel like I understand how Linux works, from one end to the other. There's only very weak dependency support (an advantage, in my mind, over having to run
rpmwith--nodepsthree-quarters of the time), and it's not for newbies (you need to partition your disk by hand, and compile your own kernel), but I'm in love. I was a ports maintainer for several months.
