It's summer on the north half of the planet, and everything has slowed down a bit. I just returned from a two weeks vacation on the Cayman Islands, following the second injury of my left shoulder joint. I know what you'll say when you hear it, a doctor should know better regarding what he can and what he cannot do in a gym after a previous left shoulder dislocation, but I can assure you that I am working out again for almost six months now and my previously damaged left shoulder had not given me any kind of trouble since I dislocated it for the first time after that nasty 'running accident' in November 1998. Well, the whole enchilada had to happen in the US of course, so that I had my first encounter with the US health system. I won't comment on it except of praising the paramedics, who did an excellent job, the ER-doctor did not impress me much though, but let's not get into that. The result of this re-occurred dislocation is that I'll have to face a shoulder repair operation pretty soon, and I'm currently consulting shoulder and sport medicine specialists.

Anyways, after this nasty incident I decided to take some time off, went to the Caymans and had a lovely scuba diving vacation together with Kate. We made friends with one of the best divers on the island, Jason Washington. He's a PADI Master Scuba Diver Trainer and upcoming NAUI Course Director, and a simply excellent diver with over 3000 dives at an age of only 25 years. Jason grew up in Arkansas close to a big lake and he's scuba diving since the age of 12. If you're not a scuba diver yet, but are interested in one of the most rewarding recreational activitiesthere are, I'd recommend a dive course. On the Cayman Islands, I wouldn't recommend any place else than the Seaview Dive Centre , which is managed by Jason. I've decided that you'll hear more about scuba diving on this website, if you like it or not. Please drop me a note if you're a scuba diver too, I'd like to find out how many hardware cracks are into scuba diving.

Divers United - John, Jason, Kate, Tom (from top to bottom)

AMD's Athlon - Why Doesn't Tom's Hardware Guide Talk About It?

Phew, how many times did I have to listen to this question!!! The answer is as simple as it is straightforward. I've got an exceptionally good and honest relationship with AMD since early 1997. Since this time I've always covered new AMD processors on the day of their releases and never earlier. I've simply complied to AMD's request of not publishing early, because I've always understood the reason why AMD didn't want to have any early reviews. Maybe we should ask ourselves who is benefiting from early and in most cases inaccurate articles about non-Intel-CPUs. Yes, the answer is damn simple! The only one who benefits from early K7-'reviews' or 'AMD-roadmaps' is Intel and ... of course the publisher of the early article. I don't feel bad writing early stuff about new Intel products or publishing and commenting Intel's roadmaps, because Intel is the market leader as well as one of the forces in the computer industry that tells us where to go. Thus Intel really needs tough criticism. AMD however deserves a bit more TLC whilst struggling against the almighty Intel. So let's be honest, early reviews that don't reflect the real performance at all and even close to accurate early reviews of 'Athlon' or 'K7' are a mere product of vanity, the website gets a lot of traffic and that's supposedly what web publishing is all about. I beg to differ! I still believe that a website is supposed to render a sensible service to the reader in the first place and not to be reckless to only serve oneself. Tom's Hardware Guide will publish its Athlon Review on the release day. It's certainly not going to be the first, but I will make sure that it will be the best.

3D Chips, Quake3 And More ...

Talking about 'being reckless to only serve oneself' brings me to another thing. Have you heard the 'news'? In the new version of Quake3-Test TNT2-boards are still beating Voodoo3-boards. Does that surprise anyone? Well, it should! I remember somebody making a big fuss over me claiming exactly that, when I ran two different versions of Quake3 before. I remember crap like 'inaccurate test' and 'software piracy', which was all only covering up for the fact that some individuals didn't like the TNT2 looking a lot better than Voodoo3 in Q3. I don't know what nice benefits the key person who ranted about my article received from 3Dfx and I can only guess which benefits were received by the publications who used his ridiculous accusations to crucify me, but now we can see the crystal clear truth, I was right all along. Thus I am looking forward to receive some nice apology letters from all the individuals who accused me of all kinds of crap. Let the apologies run in, I look forward to one in particular. In case you don't remember that person anymore, he was once taking advantage of the fact that he worked for Id Software, and luckily for all of us he's quieted down in the last months since nobody cares about him anymore.