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Quite the contrary. All you Johnnies-come-lately should just stick to Windows and Linux. Having to cater to the likes of you is already starting to ruin the Apple we love, the Apple you'll never understand.

From http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060615-7062 .html " 42 percent of its "mystery shoppers" between the ages of 13 and 16 were able to purchase M-rated games during 2005. That's an improvement from the 69 percent figure of 2003, but not where either the FTC or Congress wants it to be. " So yes, while it is enforced, it's pretty much a coin toss. Which means there is room for activist legislation that end runs the ESRB, though chances are any such legislation that is actually constitutional will be so watered down as to be useless. Videogames are still considered protected speech. I'm also pretty sure that the ESRB would have to become a federal (or at least state run) board before you could use its ratings in legislation. It may well be that the ESRB ratings will become an acceptable test of the phrase "The average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the video or computer game, taken as a whole, appeals to the minor's morbid interest in violence". Which would mean that Jack's law might actually do what you suggest in practice.

Seems obvious to me. Look for the column view. This was implemented by Apple in the year 2000; they also had implementations like this even earlier in 1986.

Instead of "Cube" or "Network" you have two genres like "Country" and "Anime"
Instead of "Applications", "Developer", "Library", "Mac OS 9", "System", and "Users" you have albums.
Instead of a list of applications, you have a list of songs

So the only secret sauce Apple added to column view to make it work on an iPod is to make the screen of the iPod exactly one column wide.

God I love it when people twist the Ugly Reality of Bill Gates into the Beautiful Legend of Bill Gates. Yeah, he built one of the most successful companies ever, using dirty tricks, outright theft, and funding backhanded lawsuits against competitors.

Meanwhile, the Open Source community, usually reviled by people like you as the "communist bad guys" have built an entire software stack that is available to the world free of charge. If you had to put a dollar sign behind the distribution of code used worldwide, it would amount to BILLIONS of dollars worth of software available to anyone the world over for free of charge. How many hundreds of thousands of people, their families and their communities, are now employed in places like South America, China, Africa, etc thanks to the generous spirit of the Open Source community? How many MORE people will have the opportunity to learn new modern technologies thanks to the availability of open source software? THe B&MG foundation is a great way to redistribute wealth that was accumulated by questionable means, but the open source movement is a far more effective way to build and maintain the health of impoverished areas that wouldn't otherwise be able to afford the costs that do nothing but line the pockets of organizations like the B&MG foundation.

As they say, you can feed a man with a fish for a day, or you can teach him to fish and feed him for life.

The article is next to useless if you've done any reading about the PS3 or 360 in the last year; you'll know it all anyway. You can basically sum up the advantage of the PS3 over the Xbox is that the Bluray drive is able to store quite a bit more data. The 360 does have the advantage of a mature on-line experience with Xbox Live, besides the price advantage.

There is a much better article at Ars Technica that goes into a little more detail about the visual differences from the point of a game developer. Visually, what does a game designer say the difference is going to be between a 360 and the PS3? None. Hardware wise, the 360 and PS3 are actually pretty evently matched, and considering that there are still going to be a lot of cross platform games even if one machine had a decided advantage over the other game studios aren't going to push that advantage given the time and cost involved in just getting a game out the door in the first place.

According to game developers, side by side you aren't going to be able to see a difference between the two systems playing the same game. Pretty much what I expected.

According to this article at Ars Technica, yes.

nobody has the resources to check such things as recording tv or radio programs on your home pc, tape deck, etc.

Why would Intel be saying this? I would like to know what Intel people have to gain by spreading rumors like this, 'cause this type of rumor mongering isn't really hurting anyone's impression of AMD or ATI (not that intel would want to ruin ATI's image). When you think about it, it only makes you want to look to AMD in the future, and away from Intel's new line of 2-core processors. Hmmm, I'm not saying that a merger like this would be bad, I just really want to know what some of the Intel guys are up to... On another note, AMD might really have something here, and the author really has something there with AMD's intro of the cHT. That alone is an indication that AMD might either buy out or partner up with ATI. I can't see AMD pulling the cHT off without dedicated support from a graphics producer. Anyways, just thinking aloud... or should I say, thinking... onto my keyboard... or something to that effect... :/

Invalid comparison and an old news discussion. Ars Technica had a thread about this started way back in January which covered all aspects of the discussion. http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f /48409524/m/224000827731

Game Boy (Color): any of the numerous GB Xchanger-type copiers

Which are available for sale where?

I do seem to remember someone working on a flashcart with support for the most common mappers

That was this, but unfortunately, "While you can buy the circuit boards from this guy he's pretty adamant about not selling the finished product".

I don't know much about the NES homebrew scene, but I do know there are a lot of them. Look around and you'll probably be able to find carts for purchase.

I used Google, AllTheWeb, Yahoo!, and MSN. All the results were for GBA flash carts to which one can write an NES emulator. The only relevant result from the first page of each search engine's results (ars, citing source) was disappointing: "While you can buy the circuit boards from this guy he's pretty adamant about not selling the finished product". If this product requires soldering, then it is a proof-of-concept, not a finished product. Which other keywords on which search engine should I use, or what other method of "look[ing] around" should I use?

"US telecommunications law rewrite a mixed bag"
"The US House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce released the final draft (PDF) of the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act"

TITLE IV -- MUNICIPAL
PROVISION OF SERVICES
SEC. 401. GOVERNMENT AUTHORITY TO PROVIDE SERVICES.

(a) IN GENERAL. Neither the Communications Act
of 1934 nor any State statute, regulation, or other State
legal requirement may prohibit or have the effect of pro-
hibiting any public provider of telecommunications service,
information service, or cable service (as such terms are
defined in sections 3 and 602 of such Act) from providing
such services to any person or entity.
(b) COMPETITION NEUTRALITY. Any State or polit-
ical subdivision thereof, or any agency, authority, or in-
strumentality of a State or political subdivision thereof,
that is, owns, controls, or is otherwise affiliated with a
public provider of telecommunications service, information
service, or cable service shall not grant any preference or
advantage to any such provider. Such entity shall apply
its ordinances, rules, and policies, including those relating
to the use of public rights-of-way, permitting, performance
bonding, and reporting without discrimination in favor of
any such provider as compared to other providers of such
services.
(c) COMPLIANCE WITH OTHER LAWS NOT AFFECTED.
Nothing in this section shall exempt a public
provider from any law or regulation that applies to pro-
viders of telecommunications service, information service,
or cable service.
(d) DEFINITION OF PUBLIC PROVIDER.
For purposes of this section, the term "public provider" means
a State or political subdivision thereof, or any agency, au-
thority, or instrumentality of a State or political subdivi-
sion thereof, that provides telecommunications service, in-
formation service, or cable service, or any entity that is
owned, controlled, or is otherwise affiliated with such
State or political subdivision thereof, or agency, authority,
or instrumentality of a State or political subdivision there-
of.

Robert M. Stockmann

Apparently slashdot gets it's facts from the same place it gets sex ed. From the streets. Now try reading what Arstech has to say on the issue.

HDR textures can take up something around 4x the space

Only when uncompressed, and even then they need take no more than 2x. There are numerous fast and efficent representation method for stored HDR images that take up little more than non-HDR. This is something I have a lot of experience in. Oh, and less texture compression usually means slower loading, as there is more data to fetch from disc. Better to encode it tighter, get it off the disc quicker, then decompress it in the background with a spare CPU core.

And 640k is enough for anyone, right?

A common misconception. A better quote from our mate Bill: "Understand that this is the last physical format there will ever be. Everything's going to be streamed directly or on a hard disk."

Developers may or may not be happy with DVD9, but even if MS changes their minds, few developers would ever consider releasing a 360 game on HD-DVD. Especially if the HD-DVD add-on penetration rate is only 10% as you suggest.

It never ceases to amaze me how the "gamer crowd" completely discards the idea that maybe, just maybe, children shouldn't have access to all video game content

Actually, that's not correct - and is really a superficial symptom of what is being compained about. There is no problem with 'M' being on the cardboard box and retailers asking that people should be over 17+ (or at least make it appear plausible enough if there's no ID available.)

What we have seen, and object to:
- Outright banning of violent games, while movies and hockey don't receive the same treatment. While obscenities are not protected by First Amendment, Violence != Obscene unless you count 80+% of all literature to be just as obscene (including Little Red Riding Hood.)
- Banning excessivly violent game sales to minors, with criteria using traditional definitions of excessive violence. In that list provided (treating as is as opposed to the actual legislation), the list is poorly formed - identical offences are listed twice (decapitation, amputation, dismemberment and mutilation are subsets of aggrivated assault).
- Banning violent games sales, with absurd definitions of excessive violence. These absurd restrictions state that games should not allow assaulting cops - thus a criminal mastermind will gain an invulnerablity device as soon as he enters the police acadamy (and appears to otherwise keep his nose clean.) Some others restrict violence against women, which is one of the most sexist things I've seen since similirly treated males have no protection - at this rate, we might as well undo Sufferage and go back to the 1800s.
- Banning sales to minors based on ESRB rating. This does not work, since the ESRB is not infallible - they rated Oblivion as 'T' in spite of the maximum amount of Gore.
- Violence-as-porn bills. While this may be acceptable, it is completely moot since it provides an entirely inconsistant basis that varies from place to place. If children are allowed to watch cockfighting, why can't they play Command & Conquer? As a side note, these violence-as-porn must treat the work as a whole and the game must not have artistic, scienfic, or literary merit - most games already meet these criteria.
- And lastly, I am offended that these legislative bills don't attempt to ban the game of Chess. This game involves the equivalent of kidnapping high-ranking government officials by the players, and killing off their supporters - there is absolutly no reason why abstracted violence should be treated any differently than graphic violence.

In Ontario, I heard that there is legislation being introduced that restricts 'M' games to minors. While the one of the above argument applies, it's not as important since it does not carry as much weight in Canada. However, 'M' is a "soft" rating meaning that it may be worked around in some special circumstances.

And do the opponents of video game ratings apply their logic consistently? Do they also oppose movie ratings, and age limits on the purchase of porn, cigarettes, alcohol and firearms?

Video game ratings and movie ratings are not the same as age limits for porn, cigarettes, alcohol and firearms. The former are done by the industry, and the latter is done by the government.

If you are talking about opponents to video game legislation, then it's still something different. What is currently being signed into law is a hard restriction that makes no exceptions and keeps smacking head first into first-amendment challenges. Cigarettes, alcohol, firearms and automobiles are unsafe in a person too young - these are restricted as a public safety issue.

The only thing that really counts is the bit about porn - perhaps it is a double standard

"For giving this guy all that free stuff. Now could you do something about your monopoly in my area or at least not use the opportunity to gouge us on DSL prices?"

And yet broadband adoption in the US has grown 40 percent mainly because of the price of DSL versus cable.

This isn't the first time they cocked up an VLIW design, and they're not the only company who has designed one; take a look at the Majc chip from Sun, which is a VLIW designed as an embedded processor for Java based applications - http://arstechnica.com/cpu/4q99/majc/majc-1.html

You could say that EPIC/VLIW reads a bit like RISC (which is basically what EPIC is, RISC taken to the absolute extreme; through out all the OOE and so forth, push up the clock speed to handle any branch mispredictions etc. ); the slow realisation that academic 'theories' never translate into real world work loads.

Damn it, Zonk, some of us are at work. You could have linked to or some other version.

When you're running a story that's not really about games (this one's about moron lawyers and moron cops), PLEASE try to link to

a) a site that won't likely be firewalled and

b) a site that won't be slashdotted.

If you must link one of these types of sites, at least link the coral cache!

(PS- the new design is CRAP. Please change it bacK!)

Thats almost exactly what Jon Stokes thought over at Ars Technica in this article http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060602-6977 .html

the summary paragraph is lifted pretty much directly from an arstechnica article

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060602-6975 .html

suing kids and old ladies

"I sue dead people..."

I never said that capacity was a shortcoming of the iPod,.. I was just listing my requirements. The iPod met many of them - particularly in capacity and display, both of which were very nice. Despite your link, after one week of actually using the iPod, I wasn't convinced it was rugged enough. Sure, it may have survived a few drops - but then it would have messed up that pretty mirror-like back panel. Oddly, this probably wouldn't have bothered me if it didn't even have a mirror finish on the back panel. If you read on... my biggest problem with the nano was clearly the user-interface. I found that you could opperate it easily while standing still, or you could operate it while running and looking at it, but you couldn't realiably use it while running AND not looking at it, and that is my primary mode of operation.

Yes, something seems wrong here. "I prefer to use windows media player...." Hey, to each his own; but this smells fishy.

I've been using WMP for at least five years since I got over winamp. Why would it seem fishy that I would be more familiar with it than iTunes which has a completely different user interface, look and feel?

Also, your aversion to being seen as "too metrosexual" is interesting. Do you consider 70% (or is it 80% now?) of MP3-player owners frighteningly "stylish"?

No, just the men I saw at the gym with them. More to the point, I am simply not a "Style" kind of person, so it sort of bothered me that so much of the mystic of the iPod is its "sexiness/style". I certainly did have the opinion that "most iPod users" were like the "cattle" mentioned in the article. I have friends who rant and rave about their iPods - when asked what they like so much... they never could give an actual answer. I am not a part of that crowd. Again, I am not saying that there is anything wrong with iPods, just that it wasn't the best choice for me to take on a 15 mile run during which I will be hitting the play/pause button about 200 times.

• Copyright
• Patent
• Trademark
• Industrial Design
• Trade Secret

Sir, I don't see how, according to your requirements, the nano was "completely ill suited."
Must have large capacity: You buy a 2 gig nano? Will 4 gigs do? I think they have those.
Must have a display: ??? Last time I looked at mine, the nano has that.
Must be rugged: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/nano.ars/3

Yes, something seems wrong here.
"I prefer to use windows media player...."
Hey, to each his own; but this smells fishy.

Also, your aversion to being seen as "too metrosexual" is interesting. Do you consider 70% (or is it 80% now?) of MP3-player owners frighteningly "stylish"?

Slashdot had a story about the 2010 agreement (really from a german source, link in story) - you're right that 's not exactly official.

HDMI may not have to include HDCP but as a practical matter it does in every piece of equipment that has it.

I agree I don't think you can avoid buying displays that have it, as you say pretty much every new HD display includes it (though I do not imagine that always to be true). What you are able to do thanks to Sony and Microsoft is not buy players that make use of it. If you buy any 360 to play HD-DVD, or the $500 PS3 you'll be contributing to a base of people that will not buy movies if they enable that flag. Bteween that and vigilant complaints if they ever do a trial balloon of a title with ICT enabled, we can pretty much halt the thing forever.

The heyday AMD has been having with Intel and their nutbust architecture is coming to an end, mid-July. Picture this, Intel is going to blow out the price floor on AMD and offer better performance, clock per clock, in addition to outclocking the K8 by a healthy margin (~20%). the T6600, an low-end chip is proving to outperform the FX-62 (AMD's bad dog) in pretty much every category worth noting, has full support for X86-64, and has a lower TDP. Comparing price is a joke, the T6600 is going to retail for ~300 USD and the FX-62 is ~900-1000 USD.

ThinGs actually look quite bleak for AMD right now. Intel has hemorrhaged hundreds of Engineering Samples to enthusiast circles and it has been independently confirmed. This isn't just "hype", barring some unforseen miracle, AMD will find themselves in the same position relative to Intel they were a decade ago.

Anybody with half a brain knows this is just mindless PR, most games gain nothing from dual-core processors as it is, aside from driver-level multithreading. The latency between physical cores is such that a SMP system is worthless for loads which are not embarrasingly parallel. AMD should be embarrased they're even trying to sell this crap.

I've exclusively used AMD processors since the 'thunderbird, i.e. K7., Arstechnica did an overview of the new Core architecture recently, and it is a good primer on what is different. http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/core.ar s for performance comparisons, see: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1970194 ,00.asp, http://www.xtremesystems.com/index.php.

here's Ars Technica's review on it:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060407-6554 .html

why a government entity is the one who generally prosecutes antitrust cases "for the people"

Dude, the government did procecute them, and the RAM companies have already admitted guilt in price-fixing. This story is filled with very ignorant commenters.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051013-5429 .html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20040915-4189 .html

why a government entity is the one who generally prosecutes antitrust cases "for the people"

Dude, the government did procecute them, and the RAM companies have already admitted guilt in price-fixing. This story is filled with very ignorant commenters.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051013-5429 .html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20040915-4189 .html

Meanwhile, competitor Microsoft is making room for 12,000 new employees.

Hmm...

here ya go http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/vistab2.ars

It's obvious that they wouldn't be launching this service now if it won't also be needed for Vista. This was basically the last reason i needed to switch over to a Mac.

Ars Technica "tour". While it doesn't take up 30+ pages, it also doesn't spend an inordinate amount of time covering what's changed in Windows Solitaire..

Per this ArsTechinca article http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/PS 3-gamble.ars original X360 games are only using 3.2GB. What game exactly are you working on that takes 8 gigs? Even Oblivion fits on a single DVD.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=32082
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060531-6949 .html
http://www.macon.com/mld/macon/business/14707951.h tm
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/8923
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20 060531084202128

Want some more? I dare say they are easy to find.

Yes, the PS3 blows the mini out of the water in performance, but if the Wii takes off, then Apple might want a piece of the action. Plus, it has all the home media hub functions already, and a distribution network for music and video.

The return of the Apple Pippen? Ars technica had a journal article from 2005 about Apple and Sony integrating the iTMS with the PS3, could Apple just be deciding to do it themselves after they saw the price of the PS3? Remember the sales pitches of the 80's for the Commodores and Ataris? "It not only plays great games, but it is also a full blown computer!"

What about gothic-horror title Sadness. According to some forums you'll be using the Wiimote to slit people's throats.

SLIT PEOPLE'S THROATS! What's this about family-oriented strategy?

Right now the KHTML/KJS code runs on Cocoa (Apple's WebKit), QT (native) and GTK (Nokia's port), and I'm personally ready for a lighter alternative to Firefox.

None, Vista uses GPU aceleration and video memory for their UI.

So does Microsoft have an implementation of virtual video memory, like Apple does, so VRAM appears limitless? Or are they just hoping you have a video card with more dedicated memory than the operating system will ever need?

Either way, in the end, doing these spiffy effects does take memory. The "best" you can really do is hope the user has a graphics card with its own walled-off memory so they think it doesn't hit main memory.

If people complained that Java hogged memory, but Sun expected you to have a dedicated Java card with Special Java Memory, would that make it OK?

That's not to say I don't think graphics effects are worth it. I do -- they're great. But I won't pretend they have zero cost.

Think before opening (metaphorical) mouth! ;)

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060201-6098 .html

It's linked from the original article as well...

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050307-4675 .html

"Many people", including the Moscow Southwest regional prosecutor.

Allofmp3.com let off the hook
3/7/2005

Moscow Southwest regional prosecutor's office has apparently decided that a loophole in Russian copyright law (it only covers infringement via physical media, e.g., CDs and DVDs) allows Allofmp3.com to continue operations. In addition, Russia employs the concept of compulsory copyrights, where the copyrights belong to the artist or music label, but copyright owners are required to license it to anyone who making a request.

Why don't you just say it's "like pedophilia" or "supports terrorism" if you're going to use absurd analogies. As for the "letter" and "spirit" of the law; the mechanism AllofMP3 is using is basically the same as applies to radio stations; they don't have to negotiate with every label for every song, they just pay a lump sum to a collection agency. If AllofMP3 isn't making these payments, they would presumably have been prosecuted.

...in the sense that the manufacturer knows the highest allowable poser draw...

And the Louisiana thing: Oh for god's sake, have these people nothing better to do? They know the law is unconstitutional and will, after much time, effort and expense, be struck down.

"Provides for player participation in a video game in which the player commits any of the following criminal offenses: the murder of a law enforcement officer, first degree murder (R.S. 14:30), aggravated rape (R.S. 14:42), forcible rape (R.S. 14:42.1), simple rape (R.S. 14:43), aggravated kidnapping (R.S. 14:44), second degree kidnapping (R.S. 14:44.1), aggravated kidnapping of a child (R.S. 14:44.2), simple kidnapping (R.S. 14:45), terrorism (R.S. 14:128.1), aggravated battery (R.S. 14:34) when the victim is a female, a male over the age of sixty-five or a minor child, carjacking (R.S. 14:64.2), ritualistic torture or ritualistic sexual abuse (R.S.1 14:107.1(C)), or a violation of the Uniform Controlled Dangerous Substances Law."

On my interpretation of the law (IANAL), the following is forbidden:
- Killing enemy soldiers, as they can qualify as law-enforcement officers. Normally, they are considered military, but some police states and despotisms have military as their police force.
- Most multiplayer games (e.g. Counterstrike, America's Army), where teams need to complete conflicting objectives. In some cases, it involved planting explosives (omg terr0riztz!!!1!)
- Command & Conquer: Generals, where at least one of the units is capable of disabling/stealing enemy vehicles (which can qualify as carjacking.)

Most of the games on the market would only fall into some of these categories - the things listed generally are not released or would otherwise not be affected by the law. Other then "General Custer's Revenge", I am hard pressed to even find commercial games that would be affected by the silly law.

As a side note, it seems that they have to list kidnapping four times. Unless there's some strange requirement that I'm not aware of, this indicates that the writing of the law is just as bad as the spirit of the law.

Now that both the 360 and PS3 will offer HD DVD/Blu-ray drives without HDMI, there's a LOT of rumors going around that hardware manufacturers have brokered a deal with studios to delay turning on the ICT flag until 2010. If so, that would make the $500 PS3 more viable, IMHO.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060521-6880 .html
http://www.engadget.com/2006/05/22/studios-wont-do wngrade-hd-video-for-now/

ArsTechnica reported on this issue as well: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060522-6881 .html

The article notes that "Right now, those who can't afford a Windows PC are faced with three alternatives: run Linux, run Windows Starter Edition, or obtain a pirated copy of Windows. The third option is often the most attractive one for consumers and conversely, the least attractive one for Microsoft." I must differ with one aspect of this comment - I would think the least attractive option for Microsoft would be for consumers to install and become comfortable with Linux.

The problem with MacOS parental controls is that it basically hides apps from the finder. Other applications can be used to circumvent the contols. The only way to properly implement MacOS parental controls is to use fine grained ACLs at the kernel and filesystem level. Apple can implement these ACLs, but it is going to be a lot of work.

This type of spam isn't too bad given traditional spam methods, as smarter users won't open attachments from people they don't know. The dumb ones generally dont know a word doc from an EXE so hopefully they are also avoiding most attachments. However there have been a few articles on the future of spam and local data mining. Consider what would happen if the next virus your co-worker got looked through their emails, found the last word document they sent out, and then copied that but embedded this exploit. They might even say, its been revised please have another look. The chances you wouldn't open this are extremely low, and especially when you are opening a normally okay attachment. It is coming from someone you know, from their computer, through their isp, and even is styled the same way as normal. The question is how will we attempt to combat such things? It doesn't just have to do with holes in microsoft office, or any other format too. When local data mining is combined with exploits in any other common formats (give the image exploits of other os's even) you now have a delivery method that can almost promise execution.

I'll just tag onto this since I just acquired a Lenovo/IBM laptop. I got an X60 which is 3.5 lb.s with the bigger battery that offers 6-10 hours of life (which I acn vouch for). It's a great laptop; light, powerful, mostly well made. Even the vendor software is good. This is a good Ars Techica review. Lenovo has owned the Thinkpad line for just over a year now, but the purchases are made via an ibm.com web site, and the case on mine says IBM. So far, mine looks like a quality piece of kit.

As far as linux goes, since the hardware is a little bleeding edge, thus far I've chosen to run linux in a virtual machine using VMWare Player, for which you can download an Ubuntu image. No sweat, runs great. The X60 has an Core Duo which sports Intel's VT virtualization stuff. I don't know if the current VMWare Player takes advantage of that or not, but so far performance has been very good. Of course, add some memory if you go this route.

There are numerous pre-made images that one can download, including Debian, Gentoo, and a bunch of others. If you want to make your own, you need to buy once of VMWare's other products. Fair enough. And keep your eyes on Xen, too.

There's a good column on Ars Technica on this topic. In my opinion glossy displays suck, it's not a matter of preference, it's a matter of "Ooooh, shiney!". Shiny stuff might be OK on 17" MacBook Pros because you are more likely to have a well postioned computer desk for this computer (they are stationary computers after all, just easier to carry around). I hope that matte display will become at least an option for MacBooks, right now it's a big obstacle in buying them for anybody who actually has tried to use glossy displays.