Classic DF – 7/21/00

July 21, 2000: [•] Happy Birthday to my Mom! She was 50 years old yesterday. I love you Mom and congratulations 🙂 [•] The US House has passed a lift of the embargo of food, drugs, and travel to Cuba. [•] The US allowed infamous Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann to avoid capture for 4 years. [•] Stephen King will release the first shareware (pay to keep it) book. [•] Tom Welch (no relation to me) and David Johnson have been indicted in trying to bribe Olympics officials. [•] An earthquake hit Mexico City. [•] Augusto “I’m a lying scuzzball” Pinochet claims he never ordered any murders. Yeah, people are just making it up… sure (lying jerk). [•] A fire broke out in Mesa Verde National Park forcing an evacuation. [•] A gunman in Los Angelos shot himself. [•] Lots of tomatoes and no one to buy them. [•] Heroin deaths are up. [•] Namibia says it has to club 60,000 seals to death in order to preserve fish stocks, but wildlife activists say that its just because they want to sell seal balls to the orient for sex potions. [•] A new technique allows both strands of DNA to be analyzed at the same time. [•] Another study has labeled Napster as good for getting people to buy CDs. [•] Sega has stepped up its fight against software piracy and is closing down web sites hosting illegal games for sale. [•] Think you’ve seen the new G4 cube design before? You did. Back then in 1989 the design was called NeXT. [•] Computer enhanced “smart toys” may be the next big thing for Christmas. [•] Scientists have created man made diamonds so close to nature’s that even the atomic structure is nearly 100% of the real thing. [•] The West Nile Virus has come to Orange County, NY. [•] We want you for the Carnie Reserve. [•] A rape attempt was averted when a family shined its car lights on an attacker. [•] Once upon a time a student brought a pipe bomb to school and now he realizes it was stupid. This story even has a happy ending. [•] Monroe wants to add a K-9 cop to its police force. [•] Five people were caught smuggling drugs into the Orange County Jail. [•] A wanted child molester from Chester will see air time on American’s Most Wanted. [•] A missing man was found dead, a woman has been charged in stabbing her husband to death, and a street party is a brewing in The Times-Herald Record Briefs. [•] The new Palm M100 and VIIx have been announced. Both look very promising. [•] The first AutoCAD virus has been found. [•] The last British Ford Escort has rolled off the assembly line. As a proud driver of 3 generations of Escorts I can only say its a sad day in the motor industry, “sob”. [•] The cult of Mac continues. [•] A kid found a deep fried lizard in his Burger King Kid’s Meal. Yummy. [•] The NYC brick attacker has confessed. [•] Make money now! Sell stolen items back to their owners! [•] Creed has nicely told Fred “I’m a really big fat ugly loser” Durst to shut up and to stop thinking the world revolves around his fat ass. [•] Woodstock 99: Fans started the fire, but the promoters supplied the kindling. [•] Secure CRT 3.1 is out and if you shell, then you need. [•] Road & Track Online says that Nissan is upping its production in the US and GM is developing smart collision prevention systems to avoid crashes all together. [•] Learn the guitar styles of Tattoo The Earth. [•] Azazel, I love you! [•] I don’t know who is really into emulation anymore. Back in the day it was a big deal to play video games for Nintendo on your PC and such. Now it’s kind of a mute subject and played out. If you really want to get into some hard to configure stuff check out The Amiga Emulation Page. Since most of the ROMs have been removed they are hard to find, but that’s part of the fun. [•] Big news from the fish bowl– Heike has been banished! Now, this really starting to heat up. Did you see the shower cam? Pretty hot stuff 🙂 [•] Bored? I’m not going to be March 22nd. That’s when Azazel is due to give birth 🙂 And better yet– with my insurance it’s free! Talk to you either Monday or Tuesday. Keep it peachy.

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Classic DF – 2000 Digis Awards

Hardware Category :
Best Complete Home PC Manufacturer: Dell™ — The latest Dell™ machines throughout last year and this year have taken exceptional strides. With reliable components, software, and excellent construction you can not find a better complete machine… but don’t think it won’t cost you for the top of the line PC. The lower priced PCs are nothing to laugh at however and also make excellent buys over other low end price competitors. Dell™ did for awhile use Aztec™ software modems, which were absolutely horrible, but fixed the situation by no longer using that vendor’s products in its machines or replacing the modem in existing machines. Good job.

Worst Complete Home PC Manufacturer: E-machines™ — They ripped off the IMac™ all in one design. They didn’t have the guts to put the quality parts inside though. E-machines™ are unreliable, low quality, and poorly constructed. The parts are no name components with even less performance. Their high end machines are jokes. E-machines™ make better paper weights then home computers.

Best Commercial/Workstation Complete PC/Server Manufacturer: Dell™ — Surprised? Us neither. The top of the line Dell™ workstations feature powerful Xenon Pentium III™ processors. They have Ultra ATA hard disks. Incredible graphics and sound cards. What more could you want? Okay, they are also nicely built and tested. Good deal (and pricey too). Their servers are fast, built with expandability, and are highly scalable. Very cool (and pricey once again).

Worst Commercial/Work Complete PC/Server Manufacturer: Compaq™ — Before E-machines™ attempted to put together its first garbage PC Compaq™ was turning out inferior products by the ton. Now setting its sights on low cost hungry MIS departments they are trying to produce work stations and servers. More of glorified graphing calculators than workstations; the machines are definitely not meant for high end 3D work and more for office program users. Compaq™ is notorious for using HSP modems, which are the absolute worst modems on the market (HSPs are software modems and therefore suck). Compaq’s™ servers aren’t much better and offer extra features such as hardware failures, slow access rates, and poor uptime.

Best Processor Manufacturer: AMD™ — AMD™ a year ago had a horrible reputation. No one would buy their product. With the release of the Atholon™ processor that totally changed. The Atholon™ processor is ground breaking. While Intel’s™ Coppermine Core Pentium III™ is faster it was because of AMD™ that Intel™ had to up the bar for performance. The Atholon™ as a chip is more then good enough for gaming and normal number crunching. Some reports have complained about its server capabilities, but that isn’t the market AMD™ is after. The market, home users, will find the Atholon™ an exceptional value with excellent features.

Best Sound Card Manufacturer/Chipset: Creative Labs ™ — With the creation of Sound Blaster Live!™ 3D audio positioning took a step forward. The Sound Blaster MP3+™ and Gamer+™ both use Creative Labs’™ proprietary sound fonts technology via its EMU10K1 processor to provide realistic reverb and positioning. Aureal A3D™, their competitor, is good, but sound fonts for gaming especially shows superior realism and the MP3+™ comes with the most complete MP3 software package of any sound card. That is what puts this pick over the top for us.

Best Graphics Card Manufacturer/Chipset: nVidia™ — nVidia™ created the TNT™ Chipset and completely changed the graphics card market forever. Removing 3DFX Voodoo™ from the top spot in under a year nVidia™ then released TNT2™ finally putting Direct3D/Open GL graphics engines on the gaming map. When GeForce 256™ was released it utterly decimated the competition. Using a GNU (graphic processor) instead of the computer CPU to render graphics GeForce™ can render more triangles, pixels, and rotations per second then any other card/chipset. GeForce 256™ literally blows other chipsets away performance wise and is worth the high price for its surperior performance.

Best Modem/Communication Manufacturer: US Robotics ™ — 3Com™ used to own US Robotics™ and therefore had the best modems available for V.90/X2™. Plus X2™ is much more stable then V.90. Throughput rates are excellent and so is the error control/checking. However, when 3Com™ decided to unload US Robotics™ earlier this year every PC user shuddered. Will US Robotics™ maintain its hold on the modem market? We’ll see.

Best Hard Drive Manufacturer: Maxtor™ — Maxtor’s™ Ultra ATA hard drives are fast. Running at 7,200 RPMs with sub-9ms seek times the DiamondMax™ Series is an excellent storage choice. If bigger is better you can’t get much bigger then a 30GB hard drive. Maxtor™ hard drives have excellent reliability and a good warranty. All in all it DiamondMax™ is a great buy.

Coolest Innovation: Intellimouse™ — Microsoft™ really came through with its Intellimouse Explorer™ that uses a digital laser to track the mouse movements instead of a ball like a conventional mouse. It is very accurate and great for art, 3D, CAD, etc… Very cool idea that works well in both concept and design.

Stupidest Innovation: Diamond™ — When Diamond™ decided it didn’t want to be its own company and was bought out by S3™ no one thought there would be a problem. Then S3™ decided it would produce no new products without its proprietary chipsets. That wasn’t so bad. S3 Savage™ is an okay chipset, but the problem was then they pulled all driver support on their legacy products. Well, consumers started complaining and as cited in MaximumPC™ Diamond™ will once again start making drivers for its legacy TNT2/TNT™ and A3D™ chipset products. Too late though since consumers have already moved onto better products produced by Diamonds’™ competitors.

Software:
Best Operating System/Shell: Windows2000™ — Microsoft™ has not always been the most loved company. Windows98™ was a let down until the second edition was released, but stability was still questionable. With Windows2000™ Microsoft™ has hopefully fixed those issues. Windows2000™ is highly stable with a crash protected kernel, self repairing code, multiprocessor support, better file system, less crashes/reboots, Internet integration, and remote/server controls. If I was a home user I wouldn’t run out and buy it, but it is perfect for servers/workstations doing commercial work where up time is important.

Best Office Software Package: Star Office ™ — Sun™ did a good thing when they released their Star Office™ for free. For the first time a powerful and complete work solution package was available for under $10 on a CD. Star Office™ has an excellent word processor, spread sheet, web page authoring tool, web browser, and desktop interface. Highly recommended for business/home users who just can’t afford over priced software.

Best Graphics & Art Creation/Manipulation Software: Photoshop 5 ™ — Adobe Photoshop 5™ is a powerful solution to create graphics for the Internet or publishing. The graphics are rendered and outputted smoothly. The filters are powerful and easily expanded with cool effects plug-in packages that install easily. With a good mouse, steady hand, and some patience you can really output some great art. As always the product is great for photo manipulation. All the graphics on this site incidentally were created in Photoshop 5™.

Best Web Creation Software: Dreamweaver 2 ™ — Macromedia Dreamweaver™ has always been my WYSIWYG web creation tool of choice. It is easily expandable through other products (Flash™, Director™, or other Macromedia™ Products) and also thanks to its scripting features. This web page is made in Dreamweaver™ and everytime we go back to redesign we find something new in the product that we like, it grows with you as you learn to be a better web page designer.

Best Sound Editing/Tracking Software: Acid Pro 2™ — Back in the days of early sound production if you wanted quality sound editing you’d have to pay thousands. Forget that now. With Acid Pro™ you can have a multi-tracking and sound editing (via Sound Forge XP 2™ included in the package) to create music. Acid™ has multiple outputs, effects, and can basically do everything you want with your music. Got to love it… and yes all of DigitalFl00d’s music is done in its lower price ($99) little brother Acid Music™ and that too is a great value.

Best Internet Software: Internet Explorer 5™ — Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.02™ is stable and renders quickly. Its support for HTML 4 and DHTML is excellent. It renders what you tell it to in your design. It has Java, VBscript, and Active X (that may be its only downfall). Unfortunately early versions of Internet Explorer 5.5™ don’t look stable, but our hopes are the next version will be as good as the current one once the Beta version is finalized.

Best Software Innovation: Direct X 7™ — Microsoft™ decided to support hardware acceleration about two years ago with Direct X™. At first people laughed, but now they are choking on it. Direct X™ allows video devices (OpenGL and TNT™) or sound devices (A3D or Sound Fonts) to write from the hardware and control output. What that means is better graphics and sound if you have good hardware. Also this allows programmers to author software that can be generically dropped into a program via Direct X plug-ins™. The world will never be the same.

Worst Software Innovation: Host Signal Processing/Software Emulation Hardware — When Rockwell/Conexant™, PCTel™, Lucent™, Ambient/Cirrus™, and Telepath™ decided that software emulation would be a great way to cut costs they weren’t wrong. By taking a modem (traditionally made up of tons of chips, ROM, RAM, and resistors) and replacing those parts with software that would “pretend” to be hardware they did cut costs. In fact by simply making a modem with a circuit that transferred analog data to a digital PCI port you can then use software to interpret that data. The idea looked great on the drawing board. That was four years ago. Since then a ton of modem makers are relying on the aforementioned chip makers to provide them with PCI controllerless cards that dare sport the word 56K modem. The software is buggy, unreliable, and takes up to three times the resources of conventional hardware modem. To make things worse the completely unreliable V.90 standard doesn’t have good error control to begin with. With the majority of users residing in rural/suburban communities there is no reliable since current phone line standards aren’t high enough to allow anyone can get a true 56K connection. The most common connect speed is 24K and the throughput is usually even lower. To make the situation worse now major vendors such as Compaq™, Gateway™, and even at one point Dell™ have cut costs by using cheap modems then blaming the Internet Service Providers for their defective software modems. So what can you do? Well, software modems are useful for something… they make great coasters!

Worst Software: AOL 5™/Netzip™ — Microsoft™ gets slammed for writing software that takes over your PC, but forget about Internet Explorer™ or antitrust. America Online released version 5 of its Internet access software knowing that once you said “yes” to the install it would render all other browsers and connections to the Internet useless. A lawsuit has since ensued, but no claims or even apologizes have come out officially from AOL™. Right up there with that fiasco is Netzip™ whose product also once installed will deny web pages and file transfers by placing garbage key values in your registry. Both companies deserve to have a nice big steaming bag of shit sent to them for there service contributions to crappy products.

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Classic DF – 12/15/99

Dec. 15, 1999: (Portion editing via pesonal request because some people are weird) Didn’t do too much today. Got my haircut. Mel and I cleaned out the flAnnel-fridge. That was fun. So on to World News— The war continues in Checnya and casualties have begun to run high. Bin Laden supporters planned a New Year’s bash… bashing of Americans that is. Venezuela is going to try its 26th constitution, 26 times is charm 🙂 The US market has been flooded with fake Poke’mon products (not that the real stuff is that much better). Al Gore is cool about shagging the weed yo. Win2K is ready to go; who shall we conquer today? MTV may be a monopoly; no they don’t force you to use their browser when you order the cable channel. The Beastie Boyz have apologized for there homophobic past; better late then never… damn lamers. If you check out here on marilynmanson.net you’ll get to see what Manson has to say about this millennium. Okay, here it is… the non-Y2K compliant bored post of the week… check out RRAnarchy‘s wonderful pic or just click here… either way it’s more fun then cleaning the flannel-fridge 🙂

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Classic DF – 12/7/99

Dec. 7, 1999: I promised Daemon Immoratlis I’d make fun of Marlin to cheer him up (poor Immy is still sick), so… he’s a dork. On to the news! For those of you who think it is only Midwestern kids who shoot up schools, Holland is having the same problem now too. Cuba claims that the US is holding a child found floating in the Atlantic Ocean hostage and they demand we send him back… okay if you say so 🙂 The Russians are still trying to take over Chechena (didn’t they learn anything about Vietnam from us?). Newflash: Teens who drink and use drugs are more likely to have sex… obviously the people who take these polls never belonged to a frat or else this would be common sense. The Babylonian virus is out, chatters beware! Microsoft isn’t the only one in trouble for antitrust violation, Apple of Japan has been brought up on monopoly charges. People who fear Echelon… relax, the NSA says they’d never use it on a US citizen (ummmm…). IBM wants to build a machine to figure out protein structures; sounds peachy. NIN just finished their new video for “Into the Void”. A court ruling says that Providers can’t be held for volatile content. Lego has been declared the toy of the century, ohhhh! The IE5.5 Beta is now out, download here. As far as DF’s revamped web page I’ve been playing with several formats and even showed one to Rock… he seemed okay with it (but it wasn’t like he did a jump for joy or anything). Look for the new Y2K compatible (sort of) DF2K to premiere at the end of December (coincidentally in time for the Year 2000 ohhhh:) In the mean time to keep the natives quiet I’ve removed the status bar Java crawler.

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