Neowin.net

AOL Time Warner on Wednesday said full service had been temporarily restored for Road Runner and America Online subscribers locked out of Microsoft Web sites, as more details emerged about a glitch that inconvenienced millions of Web surfers for nearly two days. "In the interest of our mutual consumers, AOL has stepped forward and proactively restored network connectivity strictly on a short-term interim basis," AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said. "We will continue to work with Microsoft and other providers toward a long-term solution."

Connectivity issues between MSN and AOL surfaced Tuesday when some Road Runner users complained they could not access a number of Microsoft sites, such as Hotmail and MSN. A Road Runner representative said at that time the outage occurred when its technicians were updating routing tables and as Microsoft was doing routine maintenance. By Wednesday AOL confirmed that some of its members could not access MSN sites and that the problems were related.

Regardless of who is to blame, the problems between AOL and Microsoft were not entirely coincidental, according to sources familiar with the problem. A source close to Microsoft who asked to remain anonymous said the lockout stemmed from changes in a bandwidth "peering" agreement between America Online and Microsoft. Since the beginning of the Internet, service providers have piggybacked off each others' networks to deliver data more efficiently between end points. Companies, including AOL and Microsoft, have long established such peering relationships to efficiently route traffic.

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News source: news.com

What's New
DirectX 9.0 SDK Update (Summer 2003) -RC0 - New!

Areas of concentration for this Summer Update have been with the Direct3D Extension Library (D3DX), Graphics Samples, Tools and Documentation. The DirectX for Managed Code assemblies were also updated to take advantage of the changes to D3DX.
DirectX 9.0 SDK

There were many updates made within the previously released DirectX 9.0 SDK.

One such feature was the addition of the high level shading language (HLSL) in the D3DX library. This language provides a C-like language for creating and defining your vertex and pixel shaders. The SDK also added a member to its core technology called DirectX for Managed Code, a DirectPlay port for the PocketPC, and Windows XP parity on down-level operating systems for DirectShow and the DirectX audio APIs.

DirectShow provided a new Video Mixing Renderer (VMR9) which uses D3D9 surfaces and always renders video through the 3D pipeline, along with updated samples.

DirectSound provided support for sample rates above 192 kHz, improved effect support, and a low-latency sink for DirectMusic. DirectMusic included new features targeted toward sound designers, some new wizards, as well as an updated version of the authoring tool, DirectMusic Producer.

DirectX 9.0 Sample Browser: This was a new method of access samples, documentation and projects with DirectX 9.0. With the Sample Browser, traversing the lengthy Start Menu hierarchy to execute samples was removed and replaced with a Sample Browser. From the browser you can execute samples, view documentation, load a sample project in Visual Studio & access DirectX utilities.