Gmail, AOL, and Frame Rates

Thanks to David Tenser for the Gmail invite. He and Asa at Spread Firefox are giving out a ton of invites they've suddenly been given. Looks to me like Google's viral marketing deal is winding down. I set up my account in Thunderbird 1.0, which is still the best free mail client I've ever used on a consistent basis, and I actually managed to send a test message, as well as recieve one. I hadn't been able to do that with any POP/SMTP mail account using any client while using PeoplePC. I think PPC blocks the default SMTP port. Gmail uses a different one.

Speaking of Asa, he raised an interesting question yesterday: Do Firefox users already outrank AOL subscribers? With 23 million downloads and counting, it looks that way. If not, there clearly will be before Firefox 1.1 (final) is released on June 1. And speaking of AOL, in an article at CNet News about the upcoming Netscape Browser's phishing counter-measures, I saw this:

Netscape claims to be the No. 2 browser company--after Microsoft--but sources close to the company say that Firefox is gaining "really fast."

"Firefox is moving the needle," said one source close to Netscape who asked not to be named. "They are gaining very rapidly."

That's just bizarre. Firefox is known to have over 5% of the browser market already, with IE just below 90%. That means Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, and god knows what else are sharing the remaining 5%. So what the hell is AOL talking about?

Anyway, turns out that Half-Life maps with low r-speeds, like the entire hazard course and Opposing Force's boot camp, run quick enough with this Rage 6 that I get a frame rate between 45 and 60fps even at 1024x768. And Quake II, which was released before my video card was made, holds a rock solid 60fps at that res. That surprised me a bit, as id Software built the Quake games with 3Dfx chipsets primarily in mind. Hell, GLQuake requires 3Dfx drivers. Anyhow I installed the Quake 3 Arena demo, and it runs decently enough, but to get a halfway decent frame rate I had to tweak it 'til it looks like complete crap. I cut my teeth on this game on a borrowed box I had for six months, and I'm too used to playing at 800x600 with all the graphical goodies turned up high to actually go out and buy a copy now. At least, not until I can see what this junker box I got last week can do. There's a gigantic heat sink sealed onto the CPU that I can't seem to get loose, so I don't even know whether I'm dealing with an AMD or Intel chipset yet.