Evening Tech Reading - tech
(hx) 12:39 AM CEST - Aug,05 2002
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- AMSAT-DL announces formal go-ahead for space missions "Phase 3-E" and
"Phase 5-A" - In July 2002 the AMSAT-DL (Germany) board of directors
gave its official green light
to develop and build the two spacecrafts AMSAT-Phase 3-E (P3E) and AMSAT- Phase 5-A
(P5A). The high acceptance of the mission goals of these two projects expressed in the
recent AMSAT-DL member's survey was the final element to arrive at this decision. Both
satellites will be created in a common development process by an international team under
the leadership of AMSAT-DL. The P3E satellite is to be launched as communication and
scientific platform into a highly elliptical orbit around Earth. The second project with
the working name "AMSAT-Phase 5-A" is destined to enter an orbit around the
planet Mars.
- How to use one of your computer bays to house a PDA cradle - An external docking cradle for your PDA is good for portability, but it's
a waste of valuable desk space. The average cradle is nothing more than a USB connection
with a bulky housing (some can also recharge your PDA). With a quick trip to the hardware
store and some spare time, it's quite easy and cheap to free up precious wasted space.
- Western Digital 80GB (WD800JB) Hard Drive in RAID Review - They are
also the first to introduce groundbreaking technologies in the lower echelons of their
products in terms of sheer capacity. The WD800JB Hard
Drives offered something that nobody else had produced, a product with 8MB cache as
opposed to the normal 2MB cache on their Caviar series of drives. No wonder they dubbed it
special edition.
- Anti-Aliasing by Contemporary Graphics Cards - Xbit-Labs has posted an excellent article
about Anti-Aliasing.
- ATI RADEON 9700 preview - So, ATI announced the RADEON
9700 in advance - earlier it was known as R300. This chip unveils a new generation of
graphics architectures from ATI by realizing the latest trends in the hardware outlined by
the API DirectX 9.
- Ti 4200 Overclocking - Very obviously, this article aims to find out if
fill rate or memory bandwidth matters more for the performance of the GeForce4 Ti 4200. The Ti
4200 is priced very well and can play the current batch of games very well but one
still can't discount the fact that one can get more for one's money. The difference
between the GeForce4 Ti cards is basically just their core and memory clock speeds. If a
Ti 4200 could be overclocked to Ti 4400 and/or Ti 4600 levels, then that would be very
good. Ti 4400/Ti 4600 performance for the price of a Ti 4200.
- DDR-400 Comparison - With very few DDR-400 modules on the market at
this time, Samsung have defiantly put together a super high quality module that isn't
officially supported by the JEDEC. Compatibility wise, the Samsung
DDR-400 module worked in every board we had, and ran DDR-400 in every board that
supported the speed by default or by overclocking. Stability wise I couldn't fault it, and
overclocking, well 450Mhz is the highest I have ever seen from system memory to date.
- Socket-A Heat Sink Comparison - In this heatsink comparison we have 13 heatsinks battling it out head-to-head.
They range from the budget aluminum heatsinks with small fans, to big solid hunks of
copper with hurricane force cooling. Some of the brands in the review are Thermaltake,
Coolink, AOC, Dynatron, and Alpha.
- Linux is a great Windows recovery tool - A nice article - check
it out!
- NitroGL Demos For ATI Radeon 8500 - Download: Reflection And Refraction
NitroGL Demo / Fire
NitroGL Demo (thanks Rage3D).
- Nvidia SpeedTree Demo Using Cg - Interactive Data Visualization (IDV),
a developer of real-time nature tools for film, video and game developers, is also
debuting its Cg-enabled SpeedTree product line during SIGGRAPH 2002. By rapidly integrating Cg
into their OpenGL graphics engine in the days following Cg availability, IDV was able to
deliver compelling special effects, such as realistic swaying trees, adjustable wind,
dynamic shadows and running water on a very tight development schedule.
- WineX 2.1 - TransGaming Technologies announced the release of WineX 2.1, the revolutionary
portability layer that transparently allows Windows games to run on Linux. The defining
enhancement of WineX 2.1 enables recently released hit games such as Blizzard's Warcraft
III: Reign of Chaos to run seamlessly, out of the box, on Linux. TransGaming's Founder
Gavriel State boasts, "TransGaming accomplished this solo - independent of the
original developers and without any access to the game's source code, within days of
Warcraft's July release.
- DVD Region-Free 1.0 RC3 - DVD Region-Free is an unique, effective and
easy-to-use DVD tweaking tool.
- XBox DivX Player 5 - This new version (download) features new GUI (from contest winner!), A/V sync no longer
drifts, Divx3.11 support, Divx4.xx support, XviD support (this is new and is probably
going to have some problems), VCD (mpeg1) support, MP3 support.
- pre-alpha Linux BIOS for Xbox - This is the first release of the
replacement BIOS. It initializes all PCI peripherals and performs the PIC watchdog
challenge, so that we have full and stable control of the machine. No Microsoft code or
keys are used.
- SpamNet Beta 6 - This
version adds SOCKS4/5 firewall support, toolbar position memory, a fix for the
disappearing buttons and much more: Supports Outlook 2000/XP! Coming Soon Support for
Outlook Express.
- Netscape Communicator v7.0 Preview 1 - Netscape
Communicator 7.0 Preview Release 1 is now available to download: NC v7.0 PR1 Full version (31.3MM) / NC v7.0 PR1 Webinstaller (~31MB).
- Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1 Build 1082 - It seems that those nice people
down in south america (brasiliantech.com) have got a nice
present for us : IE6 6.0 SP1 Build 1082. (thanks NeoWin).
Check also this link.
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Updated:03:29 PM CEST Jun,22
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