Evening Tech Reading - tech
(hx) 02:02 AM CEST - Aug,27 2002
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- NVIDIA ECTS Unreal 2003 Death-Match Tournament -
NVIDIA will be
hosting the first ever European Unreal 2003 death-match tournament live at
ECTS 2002 on their stand (number 1240). This will be first time that EPIC's
hotly anticipated game will be publicly shown to European press and it's
guaranteed to be a spectacle using NVIDIA's GeForce4 Ti4600 GPU. This isn't
just a battle for pride. The two winner's will be walking away with a
state-of-the-art Shuttle PCs plus the two qualifying champions from each day
will each pick up a top-of-the-range GeForce4 Ti4600 graphics cards.
There will be two separate tournaments on Thursday 29th August and Friday 30th
August. Each event will be split into two qualifying rounds of 6 combatants.
The top two warriors from each round will go on to battle it out for the
inaugural Unreal 2003 Champions crown where they will compete with Mark Rein
and Jay Wilbur from EPIC Games.
- MS to intro product key check in WinXP SP1 WPA - Microsoft has
released
details
of the changes being made in Windows Product Activation (WPA) with WinXP
Service Pack 1. As expected, SP1 will fail to install if either of "two
well-known pirated product keys" has previously been used to activate the
system, and such systems will also be denied access to Windows Update. But the
changes will have a far wider impact than this, as Microsoft appears to be
trying to cover all currently known holes in WPA security.
- Controversial Police Database Lists "Future Criminals" - Defense
lawyers and the American Civil Liberties Union are up in arms over a police
file of potential criminals in Delaware. The database contains
a list of people who police believe are likely to break the law. It
features names, addresses and photographs of potential suspects - many of whom
have clean slates. Since the system was introduced in Wilmington in June, most
of the 200 people included in the file have been minorities from poor,
high-crime neighborhoods. State and federal prosecutors say the tactic is
legal. The photos are being taken by two Wilmington police squads created to
arrest drug dealers.
- RIAA plans will cripple the Internet -
The recent
announcement by the RIAA that they will take law enforcement into their
own hands in order to punish P2P evil doers is disturbing. The RIAA intends to
use hackers to intrude into the computers of private individuals on file
sharing P2P networks. This is outrageous and maybe the greatest form of
government supported invasion of privacy that the US (and the world) has ever
seen! The RIAA is attempting to rewrite law.
- Israeli firm unveils the "copy-proof" CD - An Israeli security firm
has developed
a
smart-card based copy protection technology that it claims can prevent
software piracy. The technology, called OpSecure from start-up firm
Doc-Witness, features a smart card embedded within an optical disc, which can
run on conventional PC CD or DVD drives. However the embedded smart card,
which is needed to decrypt the disc's content, will frustrate any attempts to
copy the disc.
- Toshiba, NEC plan new DVD format - Toshiba and NEC are planning to
propose a new optical disk format to the DVD Forum that will be capable
of recording
up to 25 hours of television broadcasts. In February, a consortium of nine
companies, including Sony, Matsushita and Hitachi , announced a new format
that would offer 50GB of data storage. Both formats feature optical discs 12
centimeters in diameter and that are capable of recording, rewriting and
reading data. Both formats use the blue laser, whose wavelength is shorter
than that of the DVD's red laser. While the Toshiba/NEC option is smaller at
40GB, it is cheaper to produce. The two disc formats will not be compatible.
- SIS and VIA turns to limited support of DDR400 - According to
OCWorkBench, VIA's P4X400 couldn't reach the performance level of DDR400
and have removed the information that P4X400 supporting DDR400. Last week's
KT400 chipset document, the word "supporting DDR400" has also disappeared. The
same thing applies to SiS648, it is now only supporting DDR333 and DDR400 will
only be supported in SiS648DX as described in the latest roadmap. SiS mentions
that from its test, SiS 648 can perform at DDR400 performance, JEDEC hasn't
standardise the DDR400 standard. It might have some compatibility issues with
certain brands of modules.
- AOpen starts shipping slim-type external CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo drives
- In a move to avoid the fray in "combo" drives that are built into notebook
computers, AOpen has introduced
external slim CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo products and started shipments this
month.
- Intel unveils Pentium 4 chips, trims prices -
The new processors--with speeds up to 2.8GHz--come amid a desperate race
between Intel and longtime rival Advanced Micro Devices for revenue and market
share.
- Intel 2.8Ghz CPU reviews -
VR-Zone
/
AnandTech /
Tom's Hardware /
Hardware-Unlimited /
Gamersdepot /
HotHardWare./
Hardware Analysis /
Hardcoreware /
Firingsquad /
Tweakers /
HardOCP
/
TweakTown
/
SimHQ /
TechReport /
GamePC /
NeoSeeker.
- Java 2 Platform 1.4.1 RC - There's a
new release of the
Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition version 1.4.1 RC software for Windows,
Linux, and Solaris.
- CPU-Z 1.14 -
Freeware
CPU-Z is a program that provides: Processor name and vendor, Core stepping
and process, Processor package, Processor current core voltage, Internal and
external clocks, clock multiplier, Partial overclock detection, Processor
features, including supported instructions sets,
L1 and L2 cache information : location, size, speed, technology, Motherboard
information : BIOS, chipset, memory, AGP.
- Sound Blaster Audigy DriverPack -
This Driver Pack is available for Sound Blaster Audigy owners operating on
Windows 2000 or XP operating systems only. The driver contains optimized
support for these two operating systems and is designed for use with all
current models of Sound Blaster Audigy audio cards. Added features: Provides
Dolby Digital decoding from external SPDIF Input, Speaker settings in Creative
Audio Mixer are synchronized with Windows Multimedia setting, New presets and
effects added.
- SlowView 1.0 RC1 -
SlowView is an ACDSee like multimedia viewer that supports more than 40
image, video, and audio formats. Among the most known are: JPEG, GIF, MNG,
PSD, TIFF, TGA, MP3, AVI, MOV, and many others
- ATI Radeon Drivers - The drivers release version is
7.75-020725a-005193C-ATI, WHQL'ed on 6th of August 2002.
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Updated:09:48 AM CEST Jun,21
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