Evil Empire Gaming

Finally got around to checking out the Doom 3 trailer they showed at E3 recently. It'll blow you away! I love the teasers they put into those trailers particularly for highly anticipated games like Doom 3. So I thought I'd take a look at the player weapons visible in the trailer, that I assume we can expect in the game.

I want one!

The whole hairdryer style cooling thing just struck me as a silly thing to release as a product. Especially when nVidia says it needs it 'cause it's such a badass card but then the Radeon is just as fast (if not faster) and doesn't need anything like that sort of cooling.

This card serves as an excellent example. I mean would anyone consider a passive cooling solution for an nVidia card? Is it even possible? Here is ATI's Radeon 9700pro card (by Saphire) with passive cooling.

At work we use MS Messenger for want of a better IM solution. Actually we are eventually going to get our own Lotus SameTime server sometime soon. Anyway, MS Messenger prompted the few users at work to upgrade to the latest version, so we did. Only to find all our accounts disabled and unable to sign in. Weird.

That night I came home and discovered Trillian logging into my MSM account just fine, *shrug*. So now we all use Trillian at work, logging into MSM with our normal accounts that the real MS Messenger app refuses to allow... stoopid...

[Updated] Hold the phone! I think I may have the answer, I just got this email from 'support@microsoft.com'. I just have to open this attachment...

Mozilla Firebird (formerly Phoenix) 0.6 is out and is the sweetest browser I know. Using IE6 feels like I'm back in the dark ages compared to this awsome browser. It's fast, slim and has all the goodies you need. Comes default with pop-up blocking enabled which is just wonderful. Here's a pretty screenshot of MozFb with the 'coffee' theme. Go get it!

Anyone catch the IT dorks on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" ? The dork in the 'hot seat' had a phone-a-friend mate: IT dork 2. They apparently practiced 'looking stuff up fast' . So when the 30 seconds came IT dork 1 said
"String: Australian Opera, Year: 2002"...
and there was silence on the other end...
and then he just read out the question in full...
and there was some more silence...
and the silence continued, grew longer and got more silent...
then the answer came as the timer reached 1...
"I got nothing"...
0...

Good one guys! Way to dorkify the IT professional!

This Register story claims Nvidia admits 5800 was a dud (and who are we to argue with that?). I'm still confused about the whole 5xxx range. So the 5800 Ultra was only limited cause it was stupidly loud and we've got the budget versions 5600 and 5200 which kind of suck... so where's the killer product? Did we ever see any 5xxx cards in Australia? The latest ATI card seems to beat the pants off the 5800 and with much less noise, power and space. Way to drop the ball Nvidia!

Anyway, now w're meant to forget the 5800, cause here comes the 5900! The Reg story points here from where I've ripped off this image (It's supposed to be a super secret exclusive or something):

[Update] This site's got benchmarks! If you can't get past the MySQL 'max-user' errors the results are:

FX 5900: 5981
Radeon 9800 Pro: 5496
FX 5800: 5429

And it appears (because the site's in French) that by using some spiffy det drivers they got the 5900 up to 6678 3DMarks.

Well kids if you didn't know DoD 1.0 is now out, WAIX users can get it here or here. The developers in their infinite wisdom have left out 2 maps that are currently being run on the servers.