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Techno
Page - By Harendra Alwis Web space @
Geocities - Offers free web space for your Homepage and provides
tools for you to build the site yourself. Yahoo Briefcase
- 30 Mb (that's right... I said 30Mb...) of space to store your
files. You can access your briefcase from anywhere in the world
and even specify access rights for your friends to access your folders. These features
will definitely help you use the Internet in a more productive manner.
There are many more free services such as these on the Net. Do you know of any? If so, write in to technopage_lk@yahoo.com and share them with us. Borland
to upgrade Java tools JBuilder 8
enhancements include support for the Jakarta Struts open source
framework, designed to speed up development of Web applications,
and testing for Enterprise Java Beans (EJB). Also included are enhancements
to code management and debugging, such as tighter integration with
Borland TeamSource and Rational ClearCase, Concurrent Version System
and debuggers for non-Java code such as OracleJSP, and the ability
to modify Java classes on the fly while debugging. The software
supports new standards, including the Java 2 Standard Edition Version
1.4. Optimizeit
Suite 5 includes an Automatic Memory Leak Detector, designed to
improve Java performance. Google
home page Q
and A A: Hotmail
does not provide their users with the POP mail facility. That means
their email service does not use the Post Office Protocol 3. Instead,
when you read your e-mail at hotmail, you use HTTP or Hyper Text
Transmission Protocol to communicate with the hotmail server and
retrieve your mail. HTTP is the 'language of the Internet' and it
is the underlying protocol used by the World Wide Web. You will
not be able to use a POP client though to read your mail at Hotmail. All is not
lost because you can still use Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express
as your client programme for Hotmail (This is yet another one of
Microsoft's tricks). You may not find it to your liking because
every time you make changes to your mailbox, it may try to log on
to the Internet and synchronise itself with your hotmail inbox,
but apart from that little inconvenience, things should work out
fine. Yahoo terminated its POP service sometime back. But there are reports that there are ways within the legal frame of activities to get around that too. Watch out for ways to get your Yahoo POPs working back again, in a future issue of Techno Page. Linux
Vs. OpenGL OpenGL is not
solely for games but an array of other 3D modelling, rendering and
animation software too can take advantage of it. A good example
is Blender (www.blender.nl). This free yet powerful 3D animation
programme runs on Linux as well as on Windows. 3D Studio Max is
a very popular 3D animation software. You may see that in 3D Studio
Max, there are two modes that can be used to render the created
animation. OpenGL and
Direct3D Linux is a
good example. In Linux there is a free implementation of OpenGL
called Mesa (www.mesa3d.org). But simply having Mesa installed is
not enough to get hardware acceleration for OpenGL applications.
As I said earlier, it will fall into software rendering when hardware
acceleration is not available. I'll explain
this scenario with a simple example. Suppose you have a NVIDIA based
chip-set on your graphics card. The X Window System has support
for NVIDIA based graphic cards and therefore will run in higher
bit depths without a problem. So you install Mesa and fire up Quake.
It will definitely not run as it would on Windows. You might wonder
what is wrong. Some will eventually give up gaming on Linux thinking
that Linux is not for games. Do you really
have to give up gaming on Linux? I think not. Though the X Window
System may have run successfully with your video card it may have
failed to take the advantage of your card's special features such
as hardware acceleration for OpenGL applications. If so, it had
failed because these features are implemented by vendors using their
own proprietary software. So unless they put out a driver for their
card under Linux it will be very hard (if not impossible) to implement
these features. NVIDIA is now
changing the way some of us thought about Linux by putting out a
Linux driver for their chip-set based cards (you can download it
from NVIDIA's web site - www.nvidia.com). By using this driver you
could convert your ordinary X Window System into a gaming power
house like Sony Play Station in no time. This driver also works
with Riva TNT and Riva TNT2 series as well. These drivers tell the
X Server, how to use special features that are packed in your graphic
card. Installing
the driver is pretty easy. You can find rpm's that are designed
to work with Red Hat Linux and a compressed .tar archive that can
be installed in any Linux distribution. So NVIDIA Linux users have
a great chance of taking their video cards to the limits by updating
the drivers. With so many video cards available in the market it
is very difficult to provide details about each and every card in
a brief article such as this. So check with your video card's manufacturer's
web site to look for any Linux drivers for your card. In an immensely
competitive market, NVIDIA took a great step forward that others
are sure to follow. So don't be disappointed if a driver is not
available for your video card today. They will show up in the near
future. Keep that in mind the next time you go online. |
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