If this thing does any good predicting at all, I'm sure it's based on the number of screens that the movie shows on. Once you have that number, I'm sure your pick will usually be pretty close. This is because the theater companies pay public opinion eggheads big bucks to figure out how many screens to reserve for movies... based on the movie's expected audience draw. These theater people do the actual analysis. To piggyback on their results and then pretend you were the insightful one seems really... unimpressive.
Condoleezza Rice said, 'The president acted lawfully in every step that he has taken.'
If this is true, it only shows how corrupt our laws have become. No serious person could think that Jefferson, Franklin and the other Constitution authors would ever think it's OK for a president to do something like this.
Well, maybe no one is listening to you in particular, but I've seen a lot of Hybrid roundups which basically conclude that it's not worth the extra trouble, even from an environmental point of view (especially because of the batteries).
It's no accident that European manufacturers are simply not doing gas/electric hybrids. They think it's a purely American fad, the numbers just don't work out. I happen to agree with them. VW and BMW seemed to have put their money on Bio-diesel being the next big thing for efficiency-minded folk. Maybe they'll be dragged kicking and screaming by the market to do hybrids, but they'd rather do something else.
So this steam booster may be a good alternative, it certainly sounds very neato. I'd also lobby for injecting H2 and O2 gas into air-fuel mixture, which produces a much more complete burn - so less pollution and more power. And it's easy enough to make it on the fly from ordinary water. There are plenty of good ideas on which we should follow through. Car efficiency doesn't just end with hybrids. They were the first step in our thinking outside the box, now we have to prevent them from becoming a new box that confines our thinking again.
Or, you might be reading an unsubstantiated rumor (google acquiring opera), which seems a whole lot more likely. You're right that Google is still too weak to compete and make money on Microsoft's turf, and that their genius is in discovering new, uncolonized turf.
I'm starting to think to think that all these Google rumors are strategically placed to pull Microsoft in 100 different directions simultaneously. One way to keep them just spinning their wheels is to force them to develop every product type-X just to prevent Google getting the drop on them with their own type-X product. Microsoft has become the quintessential follower, and these rumors are enough to lead them around by their noses. How many things that Google actually released were preceded by a long swarm of rumors? Maybe Gmail, and even that wasn't very long. I think the safe bet is that if it's a Google rumor, it's false. Compare this to Apple: They seem to leak enough so that the rumor mill is surprisingly reliable. Google is a completely different animal; I suspect they use rumors in a strategy of befuddlement.
Sure, why would MS spend extra money (even if it is $5/console) to install an upgraded drive, when there's no demand and no movies to play (probably ever)? I think they see that HD-DVD is not gonna win. Still, it served its purpose: It made Sony really nervous about a repeat of the Betamax meltdown. Sony's commitment to put Blu-Ray into the PS3 was an act of war, not an act to boost its profits. Those drives are going to force them to sell PS3's at a huge loss, and right now they're crossing their fingers that the drives won't lead to delays.
Those things are an albatross that Sony would have never accepted without a perceived HD-DVD threat, brought on partially through Microsoft's disingenuous shrugging and saying "maybe we'll use it in the 360, so what ya gonna do about it?".
Now that Sony can't back out of the Blu-Ray on PS3 commitment, MS goes "psyche!" and gets to giggle while Sony has to spend big bucks to prematurely birth Blu-Ray to consumers who don't even care about it yet. Those are bucks that they could have been using to fight the 360.
Finally and editorial comment: I usually don't like MS business practices, but I have to respect this play. Maybe because its victim is Sony, who showed recently they can play dirtier than MS themselves. Also, to some extent the customers do benefit though a new technology being rushed into affordability at corporate expense. This means we'll have cheap Blu-Ray sooner, both players and media.
Heh, this is not Tom's finest hour. It sounds like they're terribly bored over there. The one interesting thing they found here could have been said in a blurb: "An SMP Opteron motherboard can run with two very asymmetric chips!" The fact that the two chips have a different architecture, different feature sizes, only one has SSE3, and only one is dual-core. This would make me think they'd never be able to help out one another on an SMP motherboard. The "S" is for Symmetric, after all.
So, it runs, well enough even to perform some benchmarks. Nice. But what's the point of actually reporting them? It's relevance is like me reporting acceleration figures for my car when it's dragging seven steel bathtubs on a gravel road. Who would ever consider actually doing this with their own car(/tubs)?
Fair enough, on second read my post did sound a bit fanboyish, and biased also because I'm not in the market for a laptop. I've got my eye on the desktop chip market of late '06, which is about when my present desktop will retire. Honestly, this Yonah at 2.4GHz would be good enough for me to consider buying, a lot depends on the price point and the available motherboards. But I had really thought that this "M" family, which is destined to be the core for all Intel consumer chips, would blow the socks off something. In being slower than AMD's slowest (and very overclockable) dual-core chip, I'm a little underwhelmed. I expected more just from the fact it's 65nm, which, btw., is something that Intel has done pretty impressively.
Did you read the article? The test motherboard was in a big ass tower case. Why? This chip is supposed to be the precursor of Intel's future desktop line (as well as its laptops). And while I would much rather run this than a dual-core Xeon (ouch!) in my desktop system, I have to wait till 2006, by which point the 3800+ that this thing couldn't beat may well be retired. You haven't yet seen AMD's entry into the dual-core laptop market and 65nm. You won't have to wait much longer. When it comes, it will rock. AMD's SOI fabbing system is inherently better at reducing current leakage. Those numbers will put this Yonah mediocrity into perspective.
Wow, a 65nm chip consumes slightly less power and performs slightly worse compared to AMD's bottom-of-the-line 90nm X2. Who's amazed? Aren't we just applauding because we see Intel as the big retarded kid who's just managed to tie his own shoes? What I'm trying to say is that this is no big accomplishment. If AMD's 65nm chips were turning out these sorts of performance numbers, we'd all scream about how this is a huge letdown, a step backwards, is this finally the end of AMD, etc.. So let's keep some perspective.
If I were on the research team, my next step would be to inject cool single women with NGF and do long informal interviews to figure out what happens. Maybe there'd also be wine. You know, for science!
So why did the people lose the elevated levels of NGF after they "settled" into their relationship?
And of course they're testing people who are not (yet) in love and hope to re-test them should their status change, but hey, give them time. It's not like working with mice; people falling madly in love is not something that happens on anyone's schedule! Yes, it would be nice to watch someone's NGF levels spike as they are falling madly in love, but it's not like you need that before the data suggests a causal influence.
I take this post as seconding the parent, so let me second the second. It seems like a straight-up bug. I mean, Firefox knows what client send my torrents to, but even when I ask it to "never again confirm", again a window pops up asking me whether I'd like to use my bittorrent app to open this torrent file. Grrrrr!
I looked over what's on my hard drives and realized that all the data that I need (original stuff I couldn't replace) fits on a 4.5GB DVD, or five if I really relax my standard of what I mean by "need" and "couldn't replace". I bought blank DVDs at US18c/each on sale at Best Buy. I'm really not itching for a better home backup solution. Am I really that different from the typical home user?
I'm not saying that this technology would find no customers. People that work with images or video need to save raw backups sometimes, and I've heard of terabyte databases, sure. But what are we ordinary people supposed to do with this at home? Look, it's already easy to be a pack rat when hard drives cost 30c/Gig, but making backups of all the stuff I rat away seems downright neurotic.
Recently I thought I lost my hard drive with 320 Gigs of data. All I had was a backup of my OS/programs partition (1.5G compressed) and a DVD of personal files. I was unhappy about losing the data, but not miserable. It felt like my basement flooded and destroyed all the junk that I never use anyway. Well, turns out that I rescued the hard drive and all the data - and now the data just sits there again. But am I not really typical in having this blase relationship to data?
This is what I do: I install XP from scratch on an newly-formatted C partition. About 3GB holds all my programs. Forget about hibernating and system restore, and put your temp directories and your pagefile.sys on the D partition (to prevent fragmentation as much as possible and keep your C as small as possible).
Now the important step: As soon as everything is running correctly, do a backup of the C partition with Acronis TrueImage. The best program ever! Then you don't need to reinstall; your C partition will be bit-for-bit identical to the way it was when everything worked great. The most important advice: only do backups of installations that didn't actually get used. That way they're not all rotten. When you get new software, first restore the C partition from backup, then install the new software, make any other tweaks you deem useful, and immediately do another backup. This really works and has kept me reasonably free of WinRot. With TrueImage it takes about 5 minutes to restore a partition, and it really feels like you've just done your laundry, that out-of-the-dryer smell!
I've seen plenty of polarized 3D movies, in IMAX and other settings. They don't look real. They make the assumption you will be focused on a certain depth of field. If you choose to focus elsewhere, you can't. The thing you're trying to look at will be blurry no matter how you tweak your eyes, because it was out of focus on the film. If a display technology could sense where your eyes focus and then sharpen up that field, then it would look like a real landscape. This would require lots of extra data and some extra sensors, but the result would be perfect 3D. I say it's worth trying!
The best 3D technology we have now still sucks. Its basic premise consists in showing different images to each of your two eyes, but those images are taken with standard photo equipment, so some portions are blurry and others are sharp. This really makes people nauseous at 3D movies. It sucks, really takes away the realism! So I wonder if a retinal projection of a 3D movie shot with these cameras could make the focus more natural. Basically, it would read the depth of your retinal focus and adjust the image focus on the fly so that it looks just right. Of course, each frame would have to encode all that depth data, and that would be lots of data. But who thought that Blu-Ray would be our last movie format? I say we don't rest until movies are 100% holographic, and this may just be the technology that makes it work!
I liked your post, giggled, and also realized something: Firefox is not ThingYouNeverHeardOf. I would venture to guess that for most nerds, it's their most-used app (or close). It's quite right to closely follow its progress here in some detail, and I for one certainly appreciate it.
But to prevent whining, admins could make a "release announcement" sub category that would be blockable from the user's config page. That way the whiners could save themselves the 0.1 seconds that it takes to scroll past the story.
I agree witht the parent: if Apple offered to do this for free, I'd say hooray, you're in. Then I'd raise the price of the machine to $100.07 to cover the price of specially compiled Red Hat OS that you can load on the machine instead (hopefully Apple would be nice enough to provide OSX on a disk as well so you could switch back). Hell, I'd even let in Microsoft on these terms, if they provided an OS for free. It's not like there would be any worry about piracy, because these would be special versions that only work on these hand-crank computers.
I'm really curious about how big the margins are on a Mac. Are they really that much higher than Dell, as the aritcle suggests? To me, the Macs actually seem pretty price-competitive, especially when you consider how much custom hardware they have.
If Dell really wants to sell OSX on their machines, why not let them? Charge them $120 per machine OEM, that's all margin, no work, free advertising, lots of machines. Apple-branded boxes would take a hit for sure, so the question is about ratios. Somehow I don't see this working out badly for Apple.
Let's be realistic: the worst loss of revenue for Apple will be from pirated versions of OSX "fixed" to run on stock hardware. But that's inevitable, and it will hurt Apple. The right way to ask the question is like this: "Does Apple also want to make some money from OSX running on stock hardware?"
Grr, why is it that every release breaks the old extensions and requires a rewrite? Seriously, do the developers lack so much foresight that they can't settle on an extension API and support it in subsequent versions?
I understand that accreting backwards compatibility demands would add bloat, but what this runaround does is add a big pain in the ass. If you don't want to add bloat, why not offer a make-old-extensions-work extension? (And an interface that offers to install it it when you have old extensions that don't have compatible updates?) Once the compatibility extension becomes obsolete it could be uninstalled, but it would sure make these transitions a whole lot easier!
BTW, I have the very same gripe about themes. I have to look as something very ugly right now because the theme I insist on is still not updated. Why not a "do your best to use old themes" extension as a temporary compatibility layer?
Anyway, I am griping about this because it's not a big request, though it would make a big difference. There's no need to force users to go through this crap every time Firefox versions jump ahead by a few decimal points.
BTW. I love Firefox, I love where it's going, I think it's an almost perfect browser, I just though this small improvement would make a big useability difference and increase dramatically the number of people who are willing to test development branch browsers - which is good for everybody in the end!
As much as I like having the New Thing, I'd wait with the update. There is not much wrong with 1.07, and all the extras work.
Honestly, I regret my rush to 1.5RC1, not because it crashes, but because the theme I insist on (Nautical) doesn't work. Also, Stumbleupon and Google's official toolbar don't have 1.5 versions.
So upload now only if 1.07 is causing you headaches, which I honestly find hard to imagine. In about 3 weeks the situation with the 1.5 branch will be better... no harm in waiting that long with 1.07!
Also, I found All In One Gestures doesn't autoupdate, though you can get the new version from the project's homepage, and it works with 1.5. Back and Forward load times seemed to get noticeably quicker in 1.5 - but it's not worth worth all the broken extensions.
Sorry, but isn't this just a waste of electricity?
on
RSA-640 Factored
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I want it to be clear that I support science and the use of brute computation in science, but this is not anything of the sort. After this five-month exercise which cost thousands of dollars of wasted electricity (all those processors could have been idling instead) and the associated increase in global polution, what have we learned? Absolutely nothing. We already knew roughly how long it would take to factor this, it's a quick calculation. But then going through the motions of actually factoring the number is absolutely pointless, and I'd even say irresponsible.
It's like figuring out how many times you'd need to toss a coin before you'd be likely to get 7 heads in a row... and after figuring this out, actually tossing the coin until you get 7 heads. Anybody who actually did that would a moron. It would show nothing... much like these "factor this" challenges.
I agree with the parent. If I were a potential future employer or if I sat on an admissions committe for grad school, I'd look at your "custom degree" and say this to myself:
"Here's a kid who wanted to get out of having to take the hard CS classes, so he made up a major that sounds sexy and then slacked off. He just couldn't hack the real CS program."
Now, I'm not saying that this is you. If this would be a mistaken perception of what you're doing, I advise you to not invite the mistake, prove to everyone you can satisfy the requirements of the CS degree, and that you're motivated to do this extra work on linguistics. Then you'll look good. And, you'll have a non-hokey degree that might help you get a job even if you one day decide to not do language processing.
What's great about the Google toolbar in Firefox is just how configurable it is. I've only kept a couple of buttons from it on the left side of my menubar. Really, if this were bundled with Firefox, it would seem harmless enough to not bother me. What I like about Google is that they didn't force Firefox users to display the toolbar in some sort of a monolithic way. It's just as configurable as all the UI elements that come standard with Firefox.
Let's see, the AMD 3800+ has less than half the power consumption of the Intel EE, costs less than a third as much and beats it in practically every benchmark. That's the Cliff Notes, you illiterate moron.
Slashdot Mirror
If this thing does any good predicting at all, I'm sure it's based on the number of screens that the movie shows on. Once you have that number, I'm sure your pick will usually be pretty close. This is because the theater companies pay public opinion eggheads big bucks to figure out how many screens to reserve for movies... based on the movie's expected audience draw. These theater people do the actual analysis. To piggyback on their results and then pretend you were the insightful one seems really ... unimpressive.
If this is true, it only shows how corrupt our laws have become. No serious person could think that Jefferson, Franklin and the other Constitution authors would ever think it's OK for a president to do something like this.
It's no accident that European manufacturers are simply not doing gas/electric hybrids. They think it's a purely American fad, the numbers just don't work out. I happen to agree with them. VW and BMW seemed to have put their money on Bio-diesel being the next big thing for efficiency-minded folk. Maybe they'll be dragged kicking and screaming by the market to do hybrids, but they'd rather do something else.
So this steam booster may be a good alternative, it certainly sounds very neato. I'd also lobby for injecting H2 and O2 gas into air-fuel mixture, which produces a much more complete burn - so less pollution and more power. And it's easy enough to make it on the fly from ordinary water. There are plenty of good ideas on which we should follow through. Car efficiency doesn't just end with hybrids. They were the first step in our thinking outside the box, now we have to prevent them from becoming a new box that confines our thinking again.
I'm starting to think to think that all these Google rumors are strategically placed to pull Microsoft in 100 different directions simultaneously. One way to keep them just spinning their wheels is to force them to develop every product type-X just to prevent Google getting the drop on them with their own type-X product. Microsoft has become the quintessential follower, and these rumors are enough to lead them around by their noses. How many things that Google actually released were preceded by a long swarm of rumors? Maybe Gmail, and even that wasn't very long. I think the safe bet is that if it's a Google rumor, it's false. Compare this to Apple: They seem to leak enough so that the rumor mill is surprisingly reliable. Google is a completely different animal; I suspect they use rumors in a strategy of befuddlement.
Those things are an albatross that Sony would have never accepted without a perceived HD-DVD threat, brought on partially through Microsoft's disingenuous shrugging and saying "maybe we'll use it in the 360, so what ya gonna do about it?".
Now that Sony can't back out of the Blu-Ray on PS3 commitment, MS goes "psyche!" and gets to giggle while Sony has to spend big bucks to prematurely birth Blu-Ray to consumers who don't even care about it yet. Those are bucks that they could have been using to fight the 360.
Finally and editorial comment: I usually don't like MS business practices, but I have to respect this play. Maybe because its victim is Sony, who showed recently they can play dirtier than MS themselves. Also, to some extent the customers do benefit though a new technology being rushed into affordability at corporate expense. This means we'll have cheap Blu-Ray sooner, both players and media.
So, it runs, well enough even to perform some benchmarks. Nice. But what's the point of actually reporting them? It's relevance is like me reporting acceleration figures for my car when it's dragging seven steel bathtubs on a gravel road. Who would ever consider actually doing this with their own car(/tubs)?
Fair enough, on second read my post did sound a bit fanboyish, and biased also because I'm not in the market for a laptop. I've got my eye on the desktop chip market of late '06, which is about when my present desktop will retire. Honestly, this Yonah at 2.4GHz would be good enough for me to consider buying, a lot depends on the price point and the available motherboards. But I had really thought that this "M" family, which is destined to be the core for all Intel consumer chips, would blow the socks off something. In being slower than AMD's slowest (and very overclockable) dual-core chip, I'm a little underwhelmed. I expected more just from the fact it's 65nm, which, btw., is something that Intel has done pretty impressively.
Did you read the article? The test motherboard was in a big ass tower case. Why? This chip is supposed to be the precursor of Intel's future desktop line (as well as its laptops). And while I would much rather run this than a dual-core Xeon (ouch!) in my desktop system, I have to wait till 2006, by which point the 3800+ that this thing couldn't beat may well be retired. You haven't yet seen AMD's entry into the dual-core laptop market and 65nm. You won't have to wait much longer. When it comes, it will rock. AMD's SOI fabbing system is inherently better at reducing current leakage. Those numbers will put this Yonah mediocrity into perspective.
Wow, a 65nm chip consumes slightly less power and performs slightly worse compared to AMD's bottom-of-the-line 90nm X2. Who's amazed? Aren't we just applauding because we see Intel as the big retarded kid who's just managed to tie his own shoes? What I'm trying to say is that this is no big accomplishment. If AMD's 65nm chips were turning out these sorts of performance numbers, we'd all scream about how this is a huge letdown, a step backwards, is this finally the end of AMD, etc.. So let's keep some perspective.
If I were on the research team, my next step would be to inject cool single women with NGF and do long informal interviews to figure out what happens. Maybe there'd also be wine. You know, for science!
And of course they're testing people who are not (yet) in love and hope to re-test them should their status change, but hey, give them time. It's not like working with mice; people falling madly in love is not something that happens on anyone's schedule! Yes, it would be nice to watch someone's NGF levels spike as they are falling madly in love, but it's not like you need that before the data suggests a causal influence.
I take this post as seconding the parent, so let me second the second. It seems like a straight-up bug. I mean, Firefox knows what client send my torrents to, but even when I ask it to "never again confirm", again a window pops up asking me whether I'd like to use my bittorrent app to open this torrent file. Grrrrr!
I'm not saying that this technology would find no customers. People that work with images or video need to save raw backups sometimes, and I've heard of terabyte databases, sure. But what are we ordinary people supposed to do with this at home? Look, it's already easy to be a pack rat when hard drives cost 30c/Gig, but making backups of all the stuff I rat away seems downright neurotic.
Recently I thought I lost my hard drive with 320 Gigs of data. All I had was a backup of my OS/programs partition (1.5G compressed) and a DVD of personal files. I was unhappy about losing the data, but not miserable. It felt like my basement flooded and destroyed all the junk that I never use anyway. Well, turns out that I rescued the hard drive and all the data - and now the data just sits there again. But am I not really typical in having this blase relationship to data?
Now the important step: As soon as everything is running correctly, do a backup of the C partition with Acronis TrueImage. The best program ever! Then you don't need to reinstall; your C partition will be bit-for-bit identical to the way it was when everything worked great. The most important advice: only do backups of installations that didn't actually get used. That way they're not all rotten. When you get new software, first restore the C partition from backup, then install the new software, make any other tweaks you deem useful, and immediately do another backup. This really works and has kept me reasonably free of WinRot. With TrueImage it takes about 5 minutes to restore a partition, and it really feels like you've just done your laundry, that out-of-the-dryer smell!
I've seen plenty of polarized 3D movies, in IMAX and other settings. They don't look real. They make the assumption you will be focused on a certain depth of field. If you choose to focus elsewhere, you can't. The thing you're trying to look at will be blurry no matter how you tweak your eyes, because it was out of focus on the film. If a display technology could sense where your eyes focus and then sharpen up that field, then it would look like a real landscape. This would require lots of extra data and some extra sensors, but the result would be perfect 3D. I say it's worth trying!
The best 3D technology we have now still sucks. Its basic premise consists in showing different images to each of your two eyes, but those images are taken with standard photo equipment, so some portions are blurry and others are sharp. This really makes people nauseous at 3D movies. It sucks, really takes away the realism! So I wonder if a retinal projection of a 3D movie shot with these cameras could make the focus more natural. Basically, it would read the depth of your retinal focus and adjust the image focus on the fly so that it looks just right. Of course, each frame would have to encode all that depth data, and that would be lots of data. But who thought that Blu-Ray would be our last movie format? I say we don't rest until movies are 100% holographic, and this may just be the technology that makes it work!
But to prevent whining, admins could make a "release announcement" sub category that would be blockable from the user's config page. That way the whiners could save themselves the 0.1 seconds that it takes to scroll past the story.
I agree witht the parent: if Apple offered to do this for free, I'd say hooray, you're in. Then I'd raise the price of the machine to $100.07 to cover the price of specially compiled Red Hat OS that you can load on the machine instead (hopefully Apple would be nice enough to provide OSX on a disk as well so you could switch back). Hell, I'd even let in Microsoft on these terms, if they provided an OS for free. It's not like there would be any worry about piracy, because these would be special versions that only work on these hand-crank computers.
If Dell really wants to sell OSX on their machines, why not let them? Charge them $120 per machine OEM, that's all margin, no work, free advertising, lots of machines. Apple-branded boxes would take a hit for sure, so the question is about ratios. Somehow I don't see this working out badly for Apple.
Let's be realistic: the worst loss of revenue for Apple will be from pirated versions of OSX "fixed" to run on stock hardware. But that's inevitable, and it will hurt Apple. The right way to ask the question is like this: "Does Apple also want to make some money from OSX running on stock hardware?"
I understand that accreting backwards compatibility demands would add bloat, but what this runaround does is add a big pain in the ass. If you don't want to add bloat, why not offer a make-old-extensions-work extension? (And an interface that offers to install it it when you have old extensions that don't have compatible updates?) Once the compatibility extension becomes obsolete it could be uninstalled, but it would sure make these transitions a whole lot easier!
BTW, I have the very same gripe about themes. I have to look as something very ugly right now because the theme I insist on is still not updated. Why not a "do your best to use old themes" extension as a temporary compatibility layer?
Anyway, I am griping about this because it's not a big request, though it would make a big difference. There's no need to force users to go through this crap every time Firefox versions jump ahead by a few decimal points.
BTW. I love Firefox, I love where it's going, I think it's an almost perfect browser, I just though this small improvement would make a big useability difference and increase dramatically the number of people who are willing to test development branch browsers - which is good for everybody in the end!
Honestly, I regret my rush to 1.5RC1, not because it crashes, but because the theme I insist on (Nautical) doesn't work. Also, Stumbleupon and Google's official toolbar don't have 1.5 versions.
So upload now only if 1.07 is causing you headaches, which I honestly find hard to imagine. In about 3 weeks the situation with the 1.5 branch will be better... no harm in waiting that long with 1.07!
Also, I found All In One Gestures doesn't autoupdate, though you can get the new version from the project's homepage, and it works with 1.5. Back and Forward load times seemed to get noticeably quicker in 1.5 - but it's not worth worth all the broken extensions.
It's like figuring out how many times you'd need to toss a coin before you'd be likely to get 7 heads in a row... and after figuring this out, actually tossing the coin until you get 7 heads. Anybody who actually did that would a moron. It would show nothing... much like these "factor this" challenges.
"Here's a kid who wanted to get out of having to take the hard CS classes, so he made up a major that sounds sexy and then slacked off. He just couldn't hack the real CS program."
Now, I'm not saying that this is you. If this would be a mistaken perception of what you're doing, I advise you to not invite the mistake, prove to everyone you can satisfy the requirements of the CS degree, and that you're motivated to do this extra work on linguistics. Then you'll look good. And, you'll have a non-hokey degree that might help you get a job even if you one day decide to not do language processing.
What's great about the Google toolbar in Firefox is just how configurable it is. I've only kept a couple of buttons from it on the left side of my menubar. Really, if this were bundled with Firefox, it would seem harmless enough to not bother me. What I like about Google is that they didn't force Firefox users to display the toolbar in some sort of a monolithic way. It's just as configurable as all the UI elements that come standard with Firefox.
Let's see, the AMD 3800+ has less than half the power consumption of the Intel EE, costs less than a third as much and beats it in practically every benchmark. That's the Cliff Notes, you illiterate moron.