Nightly Tech Reading - tech
(hx) 04:05 AM CEST - May,25 2002
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- Hackers may have hit 265,000 state workers - Computer hackers gained
access to the California state government's computer systems in April and sensitive
financial and personal information about as many as 265,000 state workers, officials said
Friday. The electronic assault on payroll and other records was discovered by the
Sacramento Valley Hi Tech Task Force, which determined that none of the information has
been used illegally so far. Despite that, agents with the task force, which includes the
Sacramento Sheriff's Department and the FBI, have launched an investigation into the
security breach and are searching for the hackers, The Bee has learned.
- Make way for the uber worm - Virus writers could "own the internet in
their spare time", according to research from three well respected industry
experts. A highly effective uber worm, capable of hitting up to 10 million internet hosts
in a matter of hours, may be just around the corner. As the SQLsnake worm continues its
march - topping the list as the most prolific attacker on the net today with infection
attempts hitting the 600,000 mark - experts have warned of the potential for an even
greater danger.
- Video wall displays fantastic 3D voyage - The university's
Scientific Computing and Visualization Group recently opened a new front in the techno
revolution: creating
oversized and extremely detailed 3D images out of reams of data and mathematical
models to better study phenomena such as solar wind, electrical pulses or particle
interaction.
- Xbox struggling with math test - Microsoft has said it expects to
have more than 200 games for the Xbox by the end of the year, but less than two dozen
of those will be exclusive Xbox titles from third-party publishers. Sony, by
contrast, is touting high-profile exclusives from game publishers. "Grand Theft Auto
III," the top-selling video game for the past few months, will remain available only
for Sony's PS2, with publisher Take2 scrapping previous plans for an Xbox version. New
versions of Eidos' "Tomb Raider" and EA' "Medal of Honor" franchises
will also be available only for the PS2, as will upcoming online and offline updates of
the "Final Fantasy" series from longtime Sony booster Squaresoft.
- Online gaming: A revolution ahead? - Online gaming is a parlor
trick at E3 this year," said Jeff Brown, vice president of corporate communications
for leading game publisher Electronic Arts. "This is not a real business. This is not going to be a real
business until 2004 or 2005, and by then you're going to have a new generation of
consoles."
- MS preps all-new warez busting antitrust complying XP SP1 - Microsoft's
'Seattlement' Service Pack for Windows XP is to go into testing within the next few
weeks, and will ship later this year. The software covered here is IE, Outlook
Express, Messenger, Windows Media Player and Microsoft's Java Virtual Machine, and there
will be four configuration options made available via a new control mechanism.
- Raid on Spider Man DVDs piracy factory - More than 10,000 pirate Spider
Man and Star Wars: Episode II DVDs and 31 DVD burners were seized in the UK, in a raid
carried out by Surrey Trading Standards and Hampshire Police.
The illegal copies of the movies were made in a pirate DVD-R factory, after they were
downloaded from the Internet.
The raid was welcomed by the Business Software Alliance (BSA), which is calling for
tougher enforcement measures to combat piracy in general.
- Graphics technologies compared - In a strange twist, it's OS
vendor Microsoft that is driving the market in 3D graphics hardware. Whilst previous
versions of DirectX have been driven by hardware advances from companies like Nvidia, this
time, with DirectX9.0
Microsoft is setting the bar higher than many of the hardware vendors might have
imagined.
- Next-Gen ATI Card Used For Doom3 Presentation - ATI's chip was
chosen because it offers the most advanced, high-performance graphics architecture to power the
demonstration at E3 2002. DOOM III, scheduled for release in 2003, has been highly
anticipated both as an unbelievable game and as a true measure of today - and tomorrow's -
graphics architectures. Also highly anticipated, ATI's next generation product, scheduled
for release this fall, will cement ATI firmly as a leader in the ultra-high-end 3D and
gaming graphics market. "ATI's next generation hardware has an ideal feature
set for the DOOM III engine, and at the moment is the fastest platform to run the game
on," said John Carmack, Chief Technical Officer & co-founder of Id Software, Inc.
- ABIT KX7-333R Overclocking Review - Since ABIT boards are meant
for performance seekers and overclockers therefore i have checked out its overclockability
in details touching on the components and the BIOS options that will aid overclocking. I
have managed to push the FSB to 200Mhz at most aggressive timings and 225Mhz at SPD
timings! Therefore ABIT KX7-333R has reclaimed its overclocking title from EPoX 8K3A+.
- HW Roundup - 11
GeForce 4 Ti 4400 and 4600 Cards / Leadtek
WinFast A250 Ultra TD GeForce 4 Ti-4600 / Visiontek
Xtasy GeForce4 MX440 / Socket
478 Cooler Roundup / Samsung
SW-232B .
- Enable Gore In SoF2 SP Demo - Warrex
posted a solution on how to enable Gore in the singleplayer demo of Soldier Of Fortune 2,
which was released yesterday (see 2 posts below). Here's how: 1)On your
shortcut, right click -> Properties -> add "+set lock_blood 0" to the
Target line. 2) When you start the game, pull down the console by
pressing "shift" and "~" to 3)Type "menu
lock" 4) A new option on the bottom menu will be activated (it
has a pic of a lock). Click on it. It will promt for a password, you can just press ok. 5)Turn
on all of the gore and set a new password (or keep it blank). 6)Restart
and play with gore. (thanks 3DGPU)
- Roxio Easy CD Creator Basic Update - Roxio has released a new update for the basic version of their Easy CD Creator CD burning
suite. This web update is designed to update all versions of Easy CD Creator 5.xx Basic to
version 5.3.
- PowerStrip 3.18 Beta Build 283 - PowerStrip 3.16
provides advanced, multi-monitor, programmable hardware support to a wide range of
graphics cards - from the venerable Matrox Millennium I to the latest Radeon 8500DV and
GeForce4 Ti4600
- Mozzila v1.0 RC3 - Mozilla 1.0 Release Candidate 3 has been released. It contains many
fixes for crashes and other problems found in RC2. Please download RC3 and help us verify
our fixes.
- ACDSee 4.02 - ACDSee is an award-winning picture viewer, graphic converter and
digital image management tool. The latest version of this digital photo software, ACDSee
4.0, gives you intuitive, professional-quality imaging tools to get, view, organize,
enhance, share and print your images quickly. This new version improves the database (now requires significantly
less memory), stability, adds support for .crw files created by Canon S30 and S40 cameras
and many more.
- NVIDIA Linux Drivers 1.0-2960 - download / readme
- ATI RADEON v7.70 Reference Drivers - Download
v7.70 drivers for WinXP / Win2k / Win98/98SE / WinME / WinNT.
- Twister S3 Drivers - S3 has released new Twister
drivers for Windows 2k/XP
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Updated:02:02 PM CEST Jun,21
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