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--T H E --R I C E Rush Hour, starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker was released in the public cinemas today. The movie's a riot, go check out the review in the "Reviews" section. Quake 2's second mission pack is out in stores nationwide now. It was made by Rogue Entertainment, the same batch of people who worked on Classic Quake's Mission Pack #2: Dissolution of Eternity. Review will be posted sometimes next week (hey, I gotta finish the game). Going off to a mini-field trip to the Sierra's and Mono Lake, California. Be back Monday night! So no updates until then. =) 5 6 K --V . 9 0 --S P E E D --B O O S T Owners of the v.90 standard modems should be able to download things about ... 5% faster now that the FCC (Fedral Communications Commission) has decided to lift the 53k-max-speed barrier, thus enabling 56k modems to fully flex their muscles. Upload speeds remain at 33.6k. Personally, I don't know how much good that's going to do, since most people's top connection speed lands around 45k any how. I N T E L --1 9 9 9 --R O A D M A
P ... and you thought the 450-MHz chips were fast? Processor head chef Intel revealed its grand master cooking plan yesterday for 1999. Its mainstream chip lineup includes: The .18 micron 700MHz Xeons, 600MHz Katmai Pentium IIs, 256k integrated L2 cache Celerons and 100MHz FSB Celerons. Whoa Mama! Talk about raw power huh? Pentium 450-MHz owners, eat your heart out. =) Saw this while swimming by Sharky Extreme ('cuz I fell from my surfboard and lost it in the digital waves). Okay, sorry, bad joke. O F F I C E --9 7 --S E R V I C
E --R E L E A S
E I neglected to mention about the Office 97 service release 2 that Microsoft released last week. Sorry 'bout that, but I figure, better late than never! Anyways, it's the second service release for Office 97, which includes a full bowl of updated bugs / features. Weighs in at a hefty 23 megabytes. Grab it here! You may need service release 1 (7 megabytes) if you don't already have it to patch it on. You can get that here. So what's a service release? It's a fancy word for patch. Basically Microsoft throws in a bunch of bug fixes and shake some enchanced features into the patch, and calls it a Service Release. Don't look at me, personally, I think calling it patch is a lot simpler than calling it service release. =) Btw, added Sharky Extreme to the "Links" section. D I A M O N D ' S --R I O --P M P 3 0 0 ... what in the devil? No, it's not a sound card. No, it's not a video accelerator. Heck, it's not even a modem. As a matter of fact, it's nothing Diamond Multimedia is famous for. Nope, this Rio PMP300 baby is a portable music player to store and play up to an hour of digital MP3 music! Like the walkman of MP3's. Very compact, weighing in at 3½" x 2½" and only about half an inch thick. More info here: Click! Just think about it: playing your favorite songs all in CD quality in one light and easy to hold cartrige, instead of lugging around 5+ CD's and a hefty discman on the road! Um wait, did I say favorite songs? Uh, I meant, uh, LEGAL digitally compressed audio, of course. =) As a side note, previously there was a MPMAN released that also works as a portable MP3 player. However, it is quite a bit more expensive than the Rio. The MPMAN costs a whopping $300 dollars, while the Rio is about a hundred dollars less. M O R E --S O S A --R A N T I believe I am going to beat this subject to death, but here it goes. As you may or may not know, when Mark McGwire was closing in on Roger Maris's single season home run record of 61, Major League Baseball marked all the balls that McGwire swung at with some chemicals that can only be viewed under ultra-violet lighting. This was done to prove the authenticity of the baseball, if it was ever lost amongst the crowd of baseball fans. Fortunately for McGwire, his record tying, and record breaking balls were immediately brought back to him without a hitch, and so all that precaution with the chemicals were wasted. However, Major league Baseball decided NOT to mark the balls Sammy Sosa would hit, since, of course to the eyes of baseball fans, Sosa was never the "man of the hour", or someone to cheer for. On Sunday, Sosa blasted two monster home runs OVER the fences of Wrigley Field and onto Waveland Ave. One of which, record-tying #62, was lost!!!! Yes indeed, instead of promptly returning the ball back to Sosa, a mass pileup gathered outside where the baseball was, and in conclusion, nobody knows where the historic ball is now. I can hop down to my local drug store and buy any ol' white baseball, and have legitimate claim that it is the historic one Sosa hit out. Since the balls were not marked with the chemicals as were McGwire's, there is no positive way to confirm the identiy of the baseball. That, in my opinion, just really sucks. |