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If you want a small USB drive (size of 2 pennies next to each other) that holds up to 1 GB, and comes with a credit card holder that can fit 2 memory sticks in your wallet, then check out the intelligent stick by PQI. You can find it on newegg here. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16820214009. I swear by this thing, it is so convienent to fit in your wallet with the credit card sized holder that it comes with. I have had mine for almost a year now and I absolutely love it. Like you said, these thumb drives could be a lot smaller then the're being made to be. PQI seems to be the only company that makes them this small. You can find a review here complete with specs. http://www.extrememhz.com/Intellistick20-p1.shtml (I'm probably gonna get modded down for being offtopic, but I figured since we're talking about thumb drives, I might as well mention it. Cheers.

Please back this up or admit you pulled it out of your ass. According to this even 78X cds with no imperfctions ought to be perfectly fine.

PQI makes ones that are smaller than you'd believe. I just got a 512MB USB 2.0 one for under $50 and it works better than any previous USB flash drive I've tried (on both Mac and PC). All my family's cameras are CF (various elphs). But if I could I would choose this over CF. (Here's a review.)

I am a gamer -- pc, console, handheld -- I'll kick your ass wherever I find you.

Halo (and it's successor) do something different and great...actually it does many things, all of them slightly better than anyone else. It's like the perfect-storm -- lots of littles and a few bigs come together to make it fantastic.

-Real competitive FPS gameplay on a console. With an excellent control scheme (go ahead and whine about how you can't game w/out a mouse & keyboard -- in Xbox land the playing field is level and you're a wuss who can't adapt).
-Beautiful graphics that don't get in the way of the story or the game -- they aid it. And they're tuned so even with 16 people on single screen (each xbox running 4 screen splits) there's not a bit of lag/distortion/etc.
-weapons scale from newb-cannon to nuanced sniping (pistol!) -- a moment to learn, a lifetime to master (halo1 tip -- you can shoot-melee-shoot with the shotty faster than you can shoot-shoot)
-A real, deep, interesting storyline.
-real, deep, thought-through enemies and AI with different attacks and skill levels.
-from loser to legendary. you can play through on Easy, then master the game on the harder levels. Co-op through legendary -- when you finally beat the game it feels like something you should put on your resume.
-The mechanics of the game only enhance the experience, they never detract. You're not worrying about saving (automatic checkpoints)... you don't think about load times (virtually nonexistent)... you don't worry about what you can't do (drive the car or jack it. Blow it up. Roll over bad people and smear them across the landscape). Everything feels natural. -Multiplayer action that never gets old. I've put hours and hours into playing the same old maps with the same 20-30 guys -- and we're still learning from each other, tuning our games. -In Halo 2 -- xbox Live. The best gaming network ever put together. This is MP gaming the way it should be. Play with anybody anywhere. Drunk canadians and hardened college kids with nothing better to do at 2 am? It'll find you the perfect match.

There are joys in gaming on a console. You aren't getting owned because someone with a $5000 video card can see the corners of your polys when he's still a pixel on the far side of your map. You don't have to go out every night before playing to download punkbuster + or the dozens of flavor-of-the-minute cheat breakers... you don't have to download a patch, a revision, or check steam, or cut off and burn your left big toe as a sacrifice to the gods of the internet to gain access to a lag-free game.

You can jump right in, anywhere, and get your own setup running without having to put a carry strap on your pc.

I was actually cruising this thread to mod up somebody who would mention the fantastic multiplayer experience that Halo delivers, but this has devolved into a bunch of unrelated "MS is bad" and "fear gaming industry" crap. To get this back on topic:

The reviews are in from me, god, and everyone. They love Halo2 and rightly so. If you have an XBox then get it, get on Live, and come find me. I'm BurlyBob.

I've been researching chipsets for digital TV. Here are my links to current hardware products:

STMicroelectronics System on Chip (2) Get Linux here
ATI Xilleon 220 (Products)
Sigma Designs Digital Media Processors (Products)
IBM PowerPC405 STBxx (Zarlink [2], Araneo)
Texas Instruments DM642 DSP (i3 Mood Box , X-Designs Flikit + Softier MediaLinux)
NEC EMMArchitecture2 (Galaxis + LinuxTV , PRISMIQ + Linux)
Equator Technologies BSP-15 boards
Via CN400 (Mini-ITX Board), PM800 and PM880 (w/ HDTV for Pentium 4) , ShowShifter HMN, Soyo Multimedia Ready Motherboard (with TV Tuner, $129.99)
Toshiba TX System RISC (MontaVista Linux)
Windows chipsets:
Intel 815 VisionPlus terrestrial box (Korean OEM)
AMD Geode (CoCom)
ARM (Samsung, etc.)
Digeo X-Stream (Paul Allen company)

Also look at the page on performance and you will see them compare it to the MSI KM2M Combo-L. If you do a google search on those terms, the first link is their review of that board, which can take a "1GHz to 2600+ processor." On the performance page they benchmark the Soyo P4VAL (Projected price, $69 without tuner) with "Pentium 4 2.4GHz 533MHz" ($124) against the MSI KM2M ($54) with an unspecified CPU, but it does not have 333FSB support so it can't be more than an Athlon XP 2600+ 266MHz FSB ($77 - Actually the 333FSB model is $2 cheaper.) Hence, $193 for the soyo vs $131 for the MSI plus its most powerful CPU. The MSI does almost as well on the CPU benchmark (4391 vs 5810 PCMarks) and does much worse than the Soyo on memory (2400 vs 4844) and their conclusion for this page is "The Soyo P4VAL will have an MSRP of around $69 (without TV tuner, remote, etc, just the board), which is only about $13 more than the KM2M motherboard. It will obviously offer you much more in terms of features and performance and therefore, it's simply a better buy." So let me get this straight, a full size motherboard which, with the tested CPU will run you $63 more, being used for a purpose which does not require massive memory bandwidth, is a better buy? Yes it offers the goofy BIOS menu but that thing doesn't even seem to have SVCD support.

That's right, they don't bother to tell us if it supports nonstandard-bitrate VCD (known as XVCD) and if it doesn't support XVCD, SVCD, and XSVCD, I consider that to be an amazingly crippled featureset for a multimedia PC, one which will mandate the use of a real live hard-drive-installed (or net-booted, I guess) operating system. Neither their etbios page nor soyo's page for the board bother to tell you what types of media are played, but the review says "You have access to multi-media functions such as AUDIO/MP3 CD playback, VCD playback, DVD playback and TV Tuner support" which implies that that's all the functions. No MPEG4, for example, and no SVCD. This bios will only read media on CDs as far as I can tell from the review, so you can't play media off a hard drive, USB, memory stick, etc etc. In other words, it will do the things a $80 DVD player from Wal-Mart will do for you, but its output probably won't be as good (I don't see any component output on this baby, but my $80 Pana DVD-S35S is progressive scan, supports VCD, SVCD, XVCD, XSVCD, DVD, MP3, WMA, and JPEG.)

In fact, the reviewer couldn't even figure out how to get the TV feature to autoscan to select only good channels (a feature which might not even be present, for all anyone including soyo will tell us) but was impressed that there was an escape function to go back to the menu. Woop-de-doo!

All in all, this article is unprofessional crap, and the etbios is basically useless. The fact that it has funky bios means that it's likely to be a pain in the ass sometime down the road. This looks like a product looking for a purpose. Were it done right, with access to filesystems not on optical media, and support for additional codecs in some format, it would be interesting, but this product is as goofy as the review.

Also look at the page on performance and you will see them compare it to the MSI KM2M Combo-L. If you do a google search on those terms, the first link is their review of that board, which can take a "1GHz to 2600+ processor." On the performance page they benchmark the Soyo P4VAL (Projected price, $69 without tuner) with "Pentium 4 2.4GHz 533MHz" ($124) against the MSI KM2M ($54) with an unspecified CPU, but it does not have 333FSB support so it can't be more than an Athlon XP 2600+ 266MHz FSB ($77 - Actually the 333FSB model is $2 cheaper.) Hence, $193 for the soyo vs $131 for the MSI plus its most powerful CPU. The MSI does almost as well on the CPU benchmark (4391 vs 5810 PCMarks) and does much worse than the Soyo on memory (2400 vs 4844) and their conclusion for this page is "The Soyo P4VAL will have an MSRP of around $69 (without TV tuner, remote, etc, just the board), which is only about $13 more than the KM2M motherboard. It will obviously offer you much more in terms of features and performance and therefore, it's simply a better buy." So let me get this straight, a full size motherboard which, with the tested CPU will run you $63 more, being used for a purpose which does not require massive memory bandwidth, is a better buy? Yes it offers the goofy BIOS menu but that thing doesn't even seem to have SVCD support.

That's right, they don't bother to tell us if it supports nonstandard-bitrate VCD (known as XVCD) and if it doesn't support XVCD, SVCD, and XSVCD, I consider that to be an amazingly crippled featureset for a multimedia PC, one which will mandate the use of a real live hard-drive-installed (or net-booted, I guess) operating system. Neither their etbios page nor soyo's page for the board bother to tell you what types of media are played, but the review says "You have access to multi-media functions such as AUDIO/MP3 CD playback, VCD playback, DVD playback and TV Tuner support" which implies that that's all the functions. No MPEG4, for example, and no SVCD. This bios will only read media on CDs as far as I can tell from the review, so you can't play media off a hard drive, USB, memory stick, etc etc. In other words, it will do the things a $80 DVD player from Wal-Mart will do for you, but its output probably won't be as good (I don't see any component output on this baby, but my $80 Pana DVD-S35S is progressive scan, supports VCD, SVCD, XVCD, XSVCD, DVD, MP3, WMA, and JPEG.)

In fact, the reviewer couldn't even figure out how to get the TV feature to autoscan to select only good channels (a feature which might not even be present, for all anyone including soyo will tell us) but was impressed that there was an escape function to go back to the menu. Woop-de-doo!

All in all, this article is unprofessional crap, and the etbios is basically useless. The fact that it has funky bios means that it's likely to be a pain in the ass sometime down the road. This looks like a product looking for a purpose. Were it done right, with access to filesystems not on optical media, and support for additional codecs in some format, it would be interesting, but this product is as goofy as the review.

Also look at the page on performance and you will see them compare it to the MSI KM2M Combo-L. If you do a google search on those terms, the first link is their review of that board, which can take a "1GHz to 2600+ processor." On the performance page they benchmark the Soyo P4VAL (Projected price, $69 without tuner) with "Pentium 4 2.4GHz 533MHz" ($124) against the MSI KM2M ($54) with an unspecified CPU, but it does not have 333FSB support so it can't be more than an Athlon XP 2600+ 266MHz FSB ($77 - Actually the 333FSB model is $2 cheaper.) Hence, $193 for the soyo vs $131 for the MSI plus its most powerful CPU. The MSI does almost as well on the CPU benchmark (4391 vs 5810 PCMarks) and does much worse than the Soyo on memory (2400 vs 4844) and their conclusion for this page is "The Soyo P4VAL will have an MSRP of around $69 (without TV tuner, remote, etc, just the board), which is only about $13 more than the KM2M motherboard. It will obviously offer you much more in terms of features and performance and therefore, it's simply a better buy." So let me get this straight, a full size motherboard which, with the tested CPU will run you $63 more, being used for a purpose which does not require massive memory bandwidth, is a better buy? Yes it offers the goofy BIOS menu but that thing doesn't even seem to have SVCD support.

That's right, they don't bother to tell us if it supports nonstandard-bitrate VCD (known as XVCD) and if it doesn't support XVCD, SVCD, and XSVCD, I consider that to be an amazingly crippled featureset for a multimedia PC, one which will mandate the use of a real live hard-drive-installed (or net-booted, I guess) operating system. Neither their etbios page nor soyo's page for the board bother to tell you what types of media are played, but the review says "You have access to multi-media functions such as AUDIO/MP3 CD playback, VCD playback, DVD playback and TV Tuner support" which implies that that's all the functions. No MPEG4, for example, and no SVCD. This bios will only read media on CDs as far as I can tell from the review, so you can't play media off a hard drive, USB, memory stick, etc etc. In other words, it will do the things a $80 DVD player from Wal-Mart will do for you, but its output probably won't be as good (I don't see any component output on this baby, but my $80 Pana DVD-S35S is progressive scan, supports VCD, SVCD, XVCD, XSVCD, DVD, MP3, WMA, and JPEG.)

In fact, the reviewer couldn't even figure out how to get the TV feature to autoscan to select only good channels (a feature which might not even be present, for all anyone including soyo will tell us) but was impressed that there was an escape function to go back to the menu. Woop-de-doo!

All in all, this article is unprofessional crap, and the etbios is basically useless. The fact that it has funky bios means that it's likely to be a pain in the ass sometime down the road. This looks like a product looking for a purpose. Were it done right, with access to filesystems not on optical media, and support for additional codecs in some format, it would be interesting, but this product is as goofy as the review.

Take a really nice (and expensive) 15Krpm SCSI hard drive, and do this to it.

Fucking morons.

Charles Darwin would be proud to see his theory working well! Uncle Ben would be proud, too, to see how technologically advanced rice has become.

*sigh*...

You can get more information here: http://www.extrememhz.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=12 .

Orange

I'd like to say that this is a case of bad editorial research, but unforunately that's something of an institutional joke around here...

http://www.extrememhz.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=12

http://www.extrememhz.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=12 . Note that right now it's got the /. effect (you've got it watercooled. now let's overclock already!! :), but it was fine a few minutes ago..

--pi

And more pics at
http://www.extrememhz.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=12

Mesa no karma whore