"You might be interested in the specs, the price, the product line or the technology, but that's not what you really want to know. You'll scan this article over quickly because even tough you might want the details (and I'll give them to you), you really want to know one thing: How cool is it?

I'll tell you.

The GeForce 4 titanium can calculate over a trillion operations in a single second.

It can render about a hundred Jurrasic Park dinosaurs at thirty frames per second.

Eight GeForce 4 titaniums have more geometry processing power than all the 3dfx Voodoo 1 cards ever shipped.

One GeForce 4 titanium has more floating point power than was available on the entire earth in 1985.

The GeForce 4 titanium produces the same amount of floating point power of 394,000,000 IBM PCATs, which in 185 would cost about $2,000,000,000. That's more than the gross national product of the US that year.

If you laid all of those PCs end to end, they would wrap around the world 4.5 times.

All of those IBM PCATs together would equal the weight of the combined population of France.

These were some of the tidbits shared with about 300 members of the press and the computing industry tonight in San Francisco by Tony Tomasi, Senior director of graphic processor unit business. With a combination of real-time demos, detailed descriptions of specifications and explanations of feature sets, NVIDIA introduced the future of their company to the world there, and as NVIDIA has largely ruled the 3D hardware world in 2001, they probably showed us the future of gaming as well. "

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hmm...it sounds interesting, but god, they need to improve the implementation over what Black and White had. That fucking floating hand thing...I gave my copy away after about five hours of gameplay, it was that frustrating. Give us a real interface, not something that makes it easier to port, for christ's sake. The guy does neat stuff when he's not trying to reinvent the wheel, and he does have interesting conceptual driving forces for his games, but I think they tried to fit too much into one screen in Black and White. Give me some menus.

I doubt they'll change their formula too much, though; too many people seemed to think BW was the pinnacle of gaming art and "more significant to human civilization than any event since the initial singularity that formed matter, space and life." (apologies to Mike Nelson.) Simple is great; simplistic leads more often to frustration, in my experience...

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It's just a general geometry term; I don't think she invented it. Technically, it's just a 4-D equivalent of a cube.

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Cool name for a company. But they better hope it's a good MMORPG; I suppose the million dollar question is: how many more can fit in the market?

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And maybe a Targ to kick around when things go wrong. I'd personally get a kick out of killing subordinates when they don't perform as expected. I hope there's some way to demote your peons in the Federation version. I want to be more of a martinet than Captain Jellico...

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Glad I wasn't the only one who found that pretty funny. This game sounds like Old Man Murray needs to review it.

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This is the "full working version of World War II Online that is good for a 14-day free trial period."? Whycome it's only 107 megs? The MOH:AA singleplayer demo is 180 megs, but these guys can somehow manage to fit an entire game into 107 megs? Crazy.

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If it works, it works. Most of the Q3 engine licenses have done pretty well.

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Maybe he knows something that we don't. For the longest time, the scuttlebutt has been that TF2 has been surreptitiously cancelled and that Valve is cranking on Half-Life 2, but someone seems to have pressed the Mute button on Valve's remote control, so who knows what is going on. I doubt anything from Valve will come out in 2002, though.

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Considering that MOH is a Teen rated game, I can't imagine Nintendo having a problem with it being ported. I'd certainly hope it'd wind up on there eventually, though I don't know if I'll be getting a Cube at this point. There are only two games I'd like to play, and when I glanced at the release dates, I noticed a big goose egg in terms of interesting games on the horizon...so it could probably use some ports of good games.

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Considering that no one even was sure if the game would ship with CTF until now, this is a good thing. And I'm glad to see the random map generation getting in there for multiplayer; should make things a little more discombobulated, so that you won't have people making beelines for the best weapons on the map. The buying weapons thing is obviously CS inspired, but it sounds like an interesting implementation. Will it be only for teamplay, or just regular deathmatch? I think it'd be interesting to have every player start out with nothing but a knife or a simple gun, and then have to kill off their enemies to gain money to purchase weapons. I'm sure it's been done in a mod somewhere before, but it'd still be fun.

This stuff is why I like Raven so much.

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That sounds wise, in this era of can't-miss, sure-to-be-classic games.

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I don't understand that. I don't recall much in terms of the cutscenes that was more offensive than what was in the actual game. It was mostly talking. I suppose verbal sexual innuendo is more objectionable than roasting a dozen cops alive with a flamethrower?

But who cares; the game is fun and it's good to know that Australian people can buy it if they so choose. Heck, I even wrote an FAQ for it:

http://db.gamefaqs.com/console/ps2/file/grand_theft_auto_3_tank.txt

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Not familiar with these Collective fellows, but at least LucasArts isn't going to try and do anything themselves.

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Astronomy picture of the Day. Same thing that Blue linked to below, just jump ahead a day.

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Please don't say Live anymore. It hurts.

I've been running a SBLive! Platinum 5.1 on a Abit KT7A mobo (Via chipset) under Windows 2000, and it's horrible. Sound pops and stutters all the time, I get random system crashes every few hours (with completely updated 4n1's and Live! drivers, and SP2), games crash to the desktop...I'm never going to buy a Creative product again. And my Cambridge Soundworks speakers have never been able to pick up a Dolby Digital signal. Time to upgrade.

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Tomorrow's APOD is pretty interesting if you follow the search for quantum gravity at all.

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It appears this is the official Romero, since the email given is john@rome.ro, and www.rome.ro is none other than "Planet Romero". I don't whether this is an opportunity to delight in a little gaming-industry celebrity schadenfreude, or if it's just kind of sad.

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March 2002? I got the impression it was a little farther off. Looks like I'll have to upgrade this old GeForce256 pretty soon...

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I think the news post is weird; I believe those prices are comparing the European price of the XBox (450 or so U.S. dollars) as compared to the U.S. price (299) and the Japanese price (250 or thereabouts). It's pretty insane, in other words. There's no way a petition is going to have any effect, but I commiserate somewhat.

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