Another souvenir from New York. This is a very zoomed in picture of the head of the Statue of Liberty. It was night, and the BIG lady was all blue...
13-March-1999 [Artur Marques]
Today's contents, for now, are: #1) VICTORY for emulation, round #2! #2) Microsoft & INTEL - Love them or hate them? #3) E-Commerce is nice, but beware... #4) Law, oh law! #5) AAAS awards Natalia #6) GRAND TOURING tries to improve #7) DAIKATANA may live, after all! #8) Some Downloads. Plus, the usual picture of the day.
TIP of the day: Did you know that you can read some literary stuff, from my literary documents sub-section?
It has been a hard day... but no details... I just want to tell YOU that the previous news are now available in their own page, not in the main page. This will happen all SATURDAYS. From sunday to friday, the main page will keep growing with the week's news, but on saturday, all the week is organized per day, in individual files.
VICTORY for emulation, round #2!
The GIGANTIC SONY lost it again, for the 2nd time in a row, to the small guys at CONNECTIX who are selling, since February, a PLAYSTATION emulator for the Macintosh platform. It's rumored that there will be a PC version of the emulator, but you can already play some PSX games on your monster PC, thanks to some existing alternatives. Worst thing for SONY is that the motivated CONNECTIX is now selling version 1.2 of the emulator, just after court...
Emulation is a great thing, a terrific demonstration of the knowledge some programmers have of some systems, and should not be stopped, at any cost! But the are legal issues and copyrights who need to be respected... the illegal side of emulation is the ROM trading business where people dump software from their original ROM support and make it available in any other digital format, easily accessible to everyone else, who did not buy the original software. While this DOES NOT affect most of the systems, such as the ZX SPECTRUM or the C64, emulation has reached the state of the art with *FREE* products such as the UltraHLE emulator, who replicates one of the most high-tech consoles, the NINTENDO 64, on a monster PC (fast machine with fast 3D card). Games such as the very recent ZELDA are 100% playable! Do you need remembering that the N64 has a 100 MHz RISC processor?!
Microsoft & INTEL - Love them or hate them?
The Pentium 3 and its visible serial number keep users asking to what extent is their privacy menaced... INTEL is making available a patch to hide the processor's serial number, but there already are some ActiveX programs that can breakthrough this patch and grab the information, meaning that websites running this application will really identify the unique processor being their client, at the moment.
My personal opinion on this subject is that any "big brother is watching you" technique deserves the condemnation of the Internet community. Surely there are other effective ways of improving the authentication of the parts in e-commerce. But is this hardware signature thing, really worth all the fuss? I think it is not, at least here in Portugal. How the hell can INTEL know who is using processor #X? When you buy a processor in-a-box, you buy it from someone who already bought it from a reseller, who bought it from someone else, may be the importer... and all these traders didn't really control where the P3s were going. More: and if YOU, the end user, sold your PC to someone else? Too complicated. Ultimately there will be software that fakes the P3 ID, when some other software tries to spot it, so wrong identifications are very much possible. Don't you worry; be happy (but that is harder).
But Microsoft has really been invading your privacy! The bad guys were downloading Windows Registration Information from your PC, everytime you were at somewhere in www.microsoft.com... and God knows what else, as they've programmed the whole O.S. The worst thing is that all this information was (is?) being "shared" with "strategic partners"... meaning the ones who pay for it. I love Microsoft's software, but I found these attitudes quite strange.
E-Commerce is nice, but beware...
It's great to buy while on-line, but sometimes things just don't go your way. www.buy.com was "offering" PC monitors for damn attractive prices... so attractive, that they were not profitable! Not following the steps of www.800.com, who sold, by the end of 1998, thousands of DVD movies for 33 cents (1/3 USD ~ 62 ESCUDOS) each (!!!), buy.com decided that they should charge more than what was announced... and now, they are in big trouble with the law, because of consumers who sued the whole company. That is fair!
Having problems with the law? You might be, soon, very soon. With the approach of the new Star Wars movie [whose trailer is already available!], Lucas Arts decided to give some hunting to everything that ever used their copyrights without paying. This means that websites with Star Wars material are being warned to remove the stuff... Writers who ever sold books, with mere references to the saga, might have to pay for those lines... and any other media that once explored the Star Wars thing, without a tribute (TV series, other movies, etc), are also being invited for their payment day :-).
You think you are smart, don't you? Always in the mood to lecture other people, always laughing at other people's mistakes and misfortunes... well, may be you're not like that at all. In either case, go learn something with the American Association for the Advancement of Science who gave their 1999 award (50.000 USD) to Natalia Toro, aged 14 years old and very joyful. Way to go Toro!
GRAND TOURING tries to improve
The execrable GRAND TOURING is trying to improve on playability. This week ELITE is offering the large patch who tries to address some problems. Go check the downloads section.
DAIKATANA may live, after all!
At last!, when very few believed that the day would actually come, DAIKATANA makes a move and releases its first DEMO! DAIKATANA it's a 1st person game, distributed by EIDOS software, and announced almost 2 years ago, when it was supposed to be a QUAKE killer. Made by Ion Storm, where it is to be found John Romero, DOOM programmer, DAIKATANA promised the world, or should I write the 3D world... Is it too late? Well, I am not doing a review or even a preview right now, but let me remember you of such titles as QUAKE 3 and UNREAL...
Menace - The trailer of the next Star Wars movie!! (24 MB)
DAIKATANA - Demo #1 (35 MB)
GRAND TOURING, Large Patch version 2.0 (4.75 MB)
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Another souvenir from New York. This is a very zoomed in picture of the head of the Statue of Liberty. It was night, and the BIG lady was all blue... |