You know, not all DVD chips are born equal. For example, some chips coming on the market, like the one from Sigma Designs, can decode MPEG-4 streams as well as MPEG-2. In my book that is a HUGE difference in usability, because it means you can play Xvid, Divx 4+ and new Quicktimes right in your living room.
And what about chips that support DVD-Audio? Jesus, how long has that format been just around the corner? As for me, I'm not buying a DVD standalone until it can play MPEG-4 and doesn't cost me much. If the established chip manufacturers are raising prices, maybe this will open a window for Sigma to get their better chips into consumer players. Hate them if you like for falsely taking credit for Xvid (I accepted their appology), but you still have to admit that MPEG-4 in the living room would rule! It's worth waiting for, in my opinion.
This is cool, but they forgot one important entry: The crew can't beam onto or off a planet, because at the crutial moment, there is too much "interferance." Hearing that really makes me want to drink.
Kahn is nothing like Bush. He is a million times smarter and more interesting. OK, maybe the part about being crazy it true.
Saddam being like Kirk is a more intereting comparison. Both seem like shoot-from-the-hip, anti-establishment swashbuckling types, who don't have a whole lot under their command but try to change the world anyway with what they do have. Still, I don't think Kirk has the same means-to-ends mentality as Saddam.
Look, you're free to not like star trek, but to make fun of the movies because some plotlines get reused is just stupid.
How many Star Wars movies had this plot: A jedi, too young to have earned the faith and respect of the established, goes on an epic adventure where, against all odds, he overcomes himself and accomplishes a great and improbable deed. AT LEAST two; to some degree, five.
How many James Bond movies had this plot: A rich villain comes up with a clever plan to rule one of the world's key industries and build a evil empire with the fortune this brings him. A romancing british secret agent attempts to foil his plan, gets caught, but miraculously escapes, going on to defeat the bad guy and romance one of his chicks.
My point is: do we complain? No, we would be stupid if we didn't see it coming. (Or, we might be a culture-section writer at the NYT who's out of ideas.) We're not there for a super plot. We're there because we enjoy the franchise, and we enjoy it BECAUSE of the archetypical plots.
First of all, if you actually read both of the stories you have linked, you'd see that your demonized "Environmentalists" have nothing to do with the opposition to the windmill plans. The only people raising protest are those who live directly under the structures and the rest who will see them through their windows. Hardly an occasion to attack Greenpeace. Anyway, ask to have the shit built outside your living room window if you think these people are so nuts.
Your citation of Dr. Moore shows what, exactly? That some in the left wing disagree with some others in the left wing? Oooh! Just because Greenpeace gets more involved in politics in the process of protecting the environment, and this old-schooler thinks they should proceed a different way, that doesn't mean Greenpeace is doing anything wrong. The thing about the lacking science education is true up to a point, but exactly how many science Ph.D.'s are memebers of Greenpeace? One that I know personally, and I bet you there are tons more. Yes the average environmentalist hippy doesn't know much about science, that's unfortunately a fair observation, but why should we hold them to a special standard regarding this? After all, only a right-wing nutcase could possibly think the average Greenpeace hippy knows less about science than the President of the United States.
I would not be sad if Hasbro D&D never saw the light of day. I like that name for Third Edition, because it reminds you of what it is: D&D for children who play with Barbie dolls. There was no need for a third edition, and there was no need for a second edition. First edition AD&D had class and content and consistency and charm.
I honestly don't understand what people over 12 like about the moronic Hasbro edition of D&D. It strikes me as the worst rules yet. There are people who know how to right good rules, because they know something about roleplaying. Such people are Gary Gygax, Dave Anerson, and everyone involved in the wonderful Hackmaster project. Compare their work to the Hasbro edition in terms of atmostphere and playability, and weep.
I disagree that Hackmaster is about power gaming. In fact, there is a whole lot more honest roleplaying in Hackmaster than any edition of D&D. This is because Hackmaster authors really pay attention to details which create an atmosphere of realism, making genuine roleplaying totally natural. Just one example: How many parties in your campaign were forced by your DM to hire a torchbearer?
About Hackmaster powergaming: The rules authors were clever enough to realize that some campains do as a matter of fact turn towards powergaming, so they made explicit rules so that even a powergaming campaign remains fun. That doesn't take away anything from the other "role-playing" elements of the game. It's just that Hackmaster rules don't wuss out and tacitly say "powergaming--don't go there!" There will always be powerhungry characters, and proper roleplaying requires that they be played so as to use every opportunity to grab more power. If a game does not support this sort of a role for characters, it's an woefully incomplete role-playing game. WotC's edition of D&D is one such game, but that is only one of its many flaws. I thank the gods for Hackmaster!
Just because we can stick chips into everything doesn't mean we should. I think is a good example of how starved for ideas we have become. I mean, this, along with "networked toasters" and "microwaves that download recipies from the internet." Have people gone nuts?
Here I am waiting for hydrogen cars and holodecks, what I get are talking furniture parts. Screw you guys.
Am I the only person who thinks the Media Labs are just a bunch of frauds who do mickey-mouse science in order to generate stories in the New Scientist and Scientific American Frontiers (which in turn bring more funding)? I mean, this fish thing isn't their lamest project (these are the same guys who pay big bucks to research dog training over the internet), but if this same research were coming out of some considerably less prominent school than MIT, people would look at it and say "hey kids, stop fucking around already and make something important."
You might be right and I'm not in a position to judge, but that just seems odd to me. I mean, why would they go through the trouble of making it worse? I can only think it was perhaps to make hardware decoding easier/cheaper.
Well, I suppose that if you're right, the good news is that there is not much danger of Sigma going it alone and writing their own mpeg4 implementation legally (i.e. without borrowed code). I mean, if their best and brightest manage to do nothing better than steal code and make it worse, their investors should worry.
I'm not sure I know all the details of the situation, but from what I read, SigmaDesigs did release the code. Of course, they did it badly and they are still breaking the law by having overwritten the copyright notices and not giving credit to the authors.
Apart from that, they did release the source code, and though it was "in wide parts identical or near identical to XVID source code," there are obviously some differences.
Well, if any of you XVID guys have a bit of time, instead of sitting on your hands in protest, maybe you could try out this new code and see if the jerks actually improved anything.
And it would take no skill at all to just take the SigmaDesigs code, overwrite their stupid copyright notices with the appropriate ones, and release the result as GPL. This is totally legal and someone can even do it this weekend (not necessarily the XVID developers, who have better things to do). I can't see how such a move could be legally contested. Or put it this way, if what I described is illegal, then the GPL means nothing--and I sure hope it's not come to that.
Well, for those who don't have enough experience to correctly diagnose what ails their box, it seems logical to make a diagnosis diskette, one that doesn't fix anything, but might give them a clue which pill has the best chance of fixing their problem.
I'm sorry, but I feel like I have to point out that your statement "Athlon's performance is going to lag quite a bit more than it already does" seems to imply that you actually think the P4 has the performance lead. You must not be reading slashdot much (check out 2600+ benchmarks and weep).
Also, the story didn't imply this was a big deal. It only remids us of all the dirty tricks Intel is forced to resort to when they try to maintain a market lead with a grossly inferior product. As long as people know this, benchmark-cooking is really no big issue.
OK, I've been playing with this for about a day. I do like these pie menus, but I don't find myself doing anything very useful with them. The problem is that basically, all the options you get are what you had before when you right-clicked in Mozilla. I mean, that's fine, but I don't spend a lot of time searching for things in the very short right-click menu.
What pie menus are supposed to replace is the stupid menubar itself, or at least some oft-used features of the menubar. For example, I would like some easy mouse path to open my bookmarks menu. I open that menu quite often, and here I agree with all the pie menu evangelists: it is a pain in the ass to hunt for that menu near the top-left corner, especially if you browse at 1600X1200 or higher. (High resolution means the target occupies a tiny proportion of the screen.)
Now, if I could have an easy way to pop out a bookmarks menu anywhere on the page that would really be progress. A real breakthrough would be if my bookmarks would somehow transform into pie slices. That would be sweeet! I think with high resolutions, it's actually not so unrealistic. I mean, the pie could cover a big chunk of the screen--that's not a problem.
I'm also mad that there is no way to go "Home" with this pie menu. In general, Mozilla is really bad about giving you quick access to the homepage. When you turn off the personal toolbar you don't even have a button (unlike every other browser), and the key combination Alt+Home is just stupid. I mean, Home is waay out there, and why the stupid Alt when unmodified Home does the same thing as the PageUp key right next to it? Home should just be home.
Anyway, feel free to ignore the digressions. What I'm trying to say is: PieBookmarks... mmmm, yummy! Gimme gimme.
Yeah, but you can do this through opening new windows, too. For example, I didn't want to lose my place on the page, so in order to reply to you, I middle-clicked on [Reply to This], which in my Mozilla setup opens a new window. I finish typing this message and close the window using all the neato features of my GUI.
The advantage of doing it this way is that I have all the advantage of tabs but I can manage all my windows in the same place.
Essentially, Quartz Extreme is a technology that off-loads most of the burden of displaying your Mac's interface to the Mac's dedicated video processor and video RAM.... By using your video subsystem to composite all the different objects on your Mac's screen, the technology allows your Mac's main processor and memory to concentrate on other tasks. The result is a system that feels more responsive, especially when it's busy with other tasks. When we had lots of applications open in the background, there were far fewer spinning cursors in OS X 10.2 than there were in OS X 10.1.
Now, here is a feature that makes a whole lot of sense. I mean, we hardly use the GPUs on our fancy cards when we aren't playing 3D games. About time our OS took advantage of them.
So why doesn't Linux and Windows have this sort of feature? I would love to see Gnome or KDE rendering everything using my GPU, so that my CPU could do something more interesting.
I'm sorry, but tabs are a feature I always turn off. I mean, I'm not mad they're there, but I tried using them and didn't like them. The basic problem with tabs is that they force you to switch windows at two totally different places on your desktop.
I imagine that I am fairly typical in that I have several browser pages up at any one time, and in addition to that, I have some other apps open (music player, IRC, news program, file manager, etc). The reason I have all that stuff open is because I switch between them, and I want to do this efficiently.
However, to switch from my newsreader to a "submerged" tab on Konqueror or Mozilla, I first have to use my WM to swith to the browser, and then use the browser interface to switch to the proper tab. What makes this process even more lame is that at least in Mozilla, the tabs are on the opposite end of the screen from where I switch tasks on my WM. This means I have to do a lot of unnecessary mousing around.
A much more sensible approach is to open new browser windows rather than tabs, and then do all of your switching using the WM. One of the many advantages of this is that you can use keyboard shortcuts to cycle through all your windows, browser and the rest.
All in all, I find myself wishing that Konqueror developers would concentrate more on rendering performance and standards compliance. I suspect that tabs are a gimmick that will be requested only by a tiny but vocal minority. It's my opinion that if you feel like you need tabs, there is something wrong with your window manager (or you don't know how to use it right).
Bullshit. Phlox is the only redeeming character on the whole show. Well, maybe that British guy's alright...
BTW. T'Pal is without contest the annoying character of Enterprise. I was sooo much hoping she'd be recalled back to the Vulcan home world... but stupid bitch didn't leave.
You know, when we first went into space, we knew it was dangerous. Plenty of people died, and we were sad about it, but we didn't freak out. By 1987 we had apparently changed, to the point where we really did freak out when the Challenger blew up, and it took us years to get the space program back on track.
Analogously, when red-shirted ensigns bit it on some dangerous, unexplored planet, Kirk was mad, but that didn't stop him from going erect when some cute alien chick walked by a few minutes later. Hey, going where no man has gone before is supposed to be dangerous. You have some funerals and you get over it!
This attitude was much less visible by the time Piccard took over command. Ensign mortality went waay down, and the few that bit it were mourned much more deeply. It's just like the Challenger thing: by TNG, people got into the mindset that interstellar space is not so dangerous after all, so they found the occasional ensign mortality appalling. They were also much better prepared to manage the risks of space. (Would Kirk have sent in a councelor to console the survivors? No way! At best, he would have sent in Scotty with some scotch!)
Of course, by extrapolation, life on the earliest starships would have been far cheaper still. One would expect "ensign resupply busses" to be dispatched regularly to catch up with the Enterprise and replenish its staff. I mean, from technical problems alone, I would imagine a few people might die each month. The first Enterprise was not designed to take hits from most of the weapons fired on it, so naturally it would not have been as mature in terms of safety as the later models... which means, more people would have died in comparatively minor situations. The survivors would surely have the attitude: Hey, that's just what space is like.
So I'm asking you: Why are ensign deaths so damn rare on the first Enterprise? Is this a big coverup? Are we really seeing "Enterprise propaganda?" Surely, a reasonable person cannot believe that all these interstellar freshmen really live through all those encounters with hostile and technologically superior races, riding on a ship that was designed by engineers who were merely guessing at what starships should be like, having no experience to base their designs on. I mean, come on, anybody gets on that thing is basically does so with the understanding that they will die there, probably sooner rather than later.
So goddamn it, die already! Then build a new ship, and get a better crew (except keep Phlox, he's cool).
I know Pataki and the gang are trying to make the Hudson valley sound sexier than Silicon Valley, but before they succeed, they really do need to get some better names. I mean, which address would you rather have, Mountain View or... East Fishkill? Could you really say the following with a straight face: "East Fishkill is actually a very glamorous place!"? "East Fishkill is a place where talented young people can really have a great time!"
I know this is a bit off topic, but I think it's pretty crappy how there seems to be a benchmarkers conspiracy going on. I don't know about you, but by the time I read my fourth description of the Commanche benchmarks and then the Jedi Knight 2 benchmarks, I wanted to scream. I mean, I understand benchmarkers can't be relevant to everyone, but this extreme. It's not merely that I don't care about either of these games. I mean, it's true. I couldn't give a shit. But my complaint is that there are some games that I and many people do care about, games that would stress these 3D cards, games that sell much better than the apparently obligatory Commanche. The parent post mentioned NWN and it makes a good example. Kudos to Tom for at least benchmarking Dungeon Siege. There, was that so hard?
The rest of you benchmarkers: fuck off. If I have to read another masturbatory "analysis" of how one card's Quake3 framerate is 4 times the refresh rate of the best available monitors, while an inferior card can only do 3 times, I will have to write you email to see whether you also spend a lot of time wondering how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Meanwhile, I'm seriously starting to wonder whether there is some payola behind the scenes of these uncannily similar choices of games to benchmark.
Fortunately, it is too late for now for a patent to be issued ("prior art"). However, the article you linked is indeed quite good for a zdnet piece. Sure, the US gov't is a big contract, and MS payola will make sure it's theirs. However, there are hundreds of other governments, like China's, that will surely be running a descenant of SELinux.
What we need is an international effort of coders to super-secure Linux. That sort of effort, distributed over the non-US world, would definitely justify the costs.
Maybe this will be the next step after Linux gets officially accepted by some large governments.
OK, I know this is a bit off topic, but I just can't live with the irony of yet another "Microsoft Payola story" which Slashdot serves up with a huge ad for Microsoft's VisualStudio.net.
Let me go on record as saying that the next time I see another such ad, I will install an ad-blocker so I won't see any of/.'s sponsors. It is for your guys' own good. I just dread the thought of what would happen if Slashdot got much cozier in Microsoft's money-lined bed.
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And what about chips that support DVD-Audio? Jesus, how long has that format been just around the corner? As for me, I'm not buying a DVD standalone until it can play MPEG-4 and doesn't cost me much. If the established chip manufacturers are raising prices, maybe this will open a window for Sigma to get their better chips into consumer players. Hate them if you like for falsely taking credit for Xvid (I accepted their appology), but you still have to admit that MPEG-4 in the living room would rule! It's worth waiting for, in my opinion.
This is cool, but they forgot one important entry: The crew can't beam onto or off a planet, because at the crutial moment, there is too much "interferance." Hearing that really makes me want to drink.
Saddam being like Kirk is a more intereting comparison. Both seem like shoot-from-the-hip, anti-establishment swashbuckling types, who don't have a whole lot under their command but try to change the world anyway with what they do have. Still, I don't think Kirk has the same means-to-ends mentality as Saddam.
How many Star Wars movies had this plot: A jedi, too young to have earned the faith and respect of the established, goes on an epic adventure where, against all odds, he overcomes himself and accomplishes a great and improbable deed. AT LEAST two; to some degree, five.
How many James Bond movies had this plot: A rich villain comes up with a clever plan to rule one of the world's key industries and build a evil empire with the fortune this brings him. A romancing british secret agent attempts to foil his plan, gets caught, but miraculously escapes, going on to defeat the bad guy and romance one of his chicks.
My point is: do we complain? No, we would be stupid if we didn't see it coming. (Or, we might be a culture-section writer at the NYT who's out of ideas.) We're not there for a super plot. We're there because we enjoy the franchise, and we enjoy it BECAUSE of the archetypical plots.
Your citation of Dr. Moore shows what, exactly? That some in the left wing disagree with some others in the left wing? Oooh! Just because Greenpeace gets more involved in politics in the process of protecting the environment, and this old-schooler thinks they should proceed a different way, that doesn't mean Greenpeace is doing anything wrong. The thing about the lacking science education is true up to a point, but exactly how many science Ph.D.'s are memebers of Greenpeace? One that I know personally, and I bet you there are tons more. Yes the average environmentalist hippy doesn't know much about science, that's unfortunately a fair observation, but why should we hold them to a special standard regarding this? After all, only a right-wing nutcase could possibly think the average Greenpeace hippy knows less about science than the President of the United States.
I honestly don't understand what people over 12 like about the moronic Hasbro edition of D&D. It strikes me as the worst rules yet. There are people who know how to right good rules, because they know something about roleplaying. Such people are Gary Gygax, Dave Anerson, and everyone involved in the wonderful Hackmaster project. Compare their work to the Hasbro edition in terms of atmostphere and playability, and weep.
About Hackmaster powergaming: The rules authors were clever enough to realize that some campains do as a matter of fact turn towards powergaming, so they made explicit rules so that even a powergaming campaign remains fun. That doesn't take away anything from the other "role-playing" elements of the game. It's just that Hackmaster rules don't wuss out and tacitly say "powergaming--don't go there!" There will always be powerhungry characters, and proper roleplaying requires that they be played so as to use every opportunity to grab more power. If a game does not support this sort of a role for characters, it's an woefully incomplete role-playing game. WotC's edition of D&D is one such game, but that is only one of its many flaws. I thank the gods for Hackmaster!
Here I am waiting for hydrogen cars and holodecks, what I get are talking furniture parts. Screw you guys.
Am I the only person who thinks the Media Labs are just a bunch of frauds who do mickey-mouse science in order to generate stories in the New Scientist and Scientific American Frontiers (which in turn bring more funding)? I mean, this fish thing isn't their lamest project (these are the same guys who pay big bucks to research dog training over the internet), but if this same research were coming out of some considerably less prominent school than MIT, people would look at it and say "hey kids, stop fucking around already and make something important."
Well, I suppose that if you're right, the good news is that there is not much danger of Sigma going it alone and writing their own mpeg4 implementation legally (i.e. without borrowed code). I mean, if their best and brightest manage to do nothing better than steal code and make it worse, their investors should worry.
Apart from that, they did release the source code, and though it was "in wide parts identical or near identical to XVID source code," there are obviously some differences.
Well, if any of you XVID guys have a bit of time, instead of sitting on your hands in protest, maybe you could try out this new code and see if the jerks actually improved anything.
And it would take no skill at all to just take the SigmaDesigs code, overwrite their stupid copyright notices with the appropriate ones, and release the result as GPL. This is totally legal and someone can even do it this weekend (not necessarily the XVID developers, who have better things to do). I can't see how such a move could be legally contested. Or put it this way, if what I described is illegal, then the GPL means nothing--and I sure hope it's not come to that.
Well, for those who don't have enough experience to correctly diagnose what ails their box, it seems logical to make a diagnosis diskette, one that doesn't fix anything, but might give them a clue which pill has the best chance of fixing their problem.
I think this speaks volumes: Intel are schmoozing the benchmarkers while AMD are designing kick-ass processors. I hope the stockholders are listening!
Also, the story didn't imply this was a big deal. It only remids us of all the dirty tricks Intel is forced to resort to when they try to maintain a market lead with a grossly inferior product. As long as people know this, benchmark-cooking is really no big issue.
What pie menus are supposed to replace is the stupid menubar itself, or at least some oft-used features of the menubar. For example, I would like some easy mouse path to open my bookmarks menu. I open that menu quite often, and here I agree with all the pie menu evangelists: it is a pain in the ass to hunt for that menu near the top-left corner, especially if you browse at 1600X1200 or higher. (High resolution means the target occupies a tiny proportion of the screen.)
Now, if I could have an easy way to pop out a bookmarks menu anywhere on the page that would really be progress. A real breakthrough would be if my bookmarks would somehow transform into pie slices. That would be sweeet! I think with high resolutions, it's actually not so unrealistic. I mean, the pie could cover a big chunk of the screen--that's not a problem.
I'm also mad that there is no way to go "Home" with this pie menu. In general, Mozilla is really bad about giving you quick access to the homepage. When you turn off the personal toolbar you don't even have a button (unlike every other browser), and the key combination Alt+Home is just stupid. I mean, Home is waay out there, and why the stupid Alt when unmodified Home does the same thing as the PageUp key right next to it? Home should just be home.
Anyway, feel free to ignore the digressions. What I'm trying to say is: PieBookmarks ... mmmm, yummy! Gimme gimme.
The advantage of doing it this way is that I have all the advantage of tabs but I can manage all my windows in the same place.
So why doesn't Linux and Windows have this sort of feature? I would love to see Gnome or KDE rendering everything using my GPU, so that my CPU could do something more interesting.
I imagine that I am fairly typical in that I have several browser pages up at any one time, and in addition to that, I have some other apps open (music player, IRC, news program, file manager, etc). The reason I have all that stuff open is because I switch between them, and I want to do this efficiently.
However, to switch from my newsreader to a "submerged" tab on Konqueror or Mozilla, I first have to use my WM to swith to the browser, and then use the browser interface to switch to the proper tab. What makes this process even more lame is that at least in Mozilla, the tabs are on the opposite end of the screen from where I switch tasks on my WM. This means I have to do a lot of unnecessary mousing around.
A much more sensible approach is to open new browser windows rather than tabs, and then do all of your switching using the WM. One of the many advantages of this is that you can use keyboard shortcuts to cycle through all your windows, browser and the rest.
All in all, I find myself wishing that Konqueror developers would concentrate more on rendering performance and standards compliance. I suspect that tabs are a gimmick that will be requested only by a tiny but vocal minority. It's my opinion that if you feel like you need tabs, there is something wrong with your window manager (or you don't know how to use it right).
Try today's build.
BTW. T'Pal is without contest the annoying character of Enterprise. I was sooo much hoping she'd be recalled back to the Vulcan home world... but stupid bitch didn't leave.
Analogously, when red-shirted ensigns bit it on some dangerous, unexplored planet, Kirk was mad, but that didn't stop him from going erect when some cute alien chick walked by a few minutes later. Hey, going where no man has gone before is supposed to be dangerous. You have some funerals and you get over it!
This attitude was much less visible by the time Piccard took over command. Ensign mortality went waay down, and the few that bit it were mourned much more deeply. It's just like the Challenger thing: by TNG, people got into the mindset that interstellar space is not so dangerous after all, so they found the occasional ensign mortality appalling. They were also much better prepared to manage the risks of space. (Would Kirk have sent in a councelor to console the survivors? No way! At best, he would have sent in Scotty with some scotch!)
Of course, by extrapolation, life on the earliest starships would have been far cheaper still. One would expect "ensign resupply busses" to be dispatched regularly to catch up with the Enterprise and replenish its staff. I mean, from technical problems alone, I would imagine a few people might die each month. The first Enterprise was not designed to take hits from most of the weapons fired on it, so naturally it would not have been as mature in terms of safety as the later models... which means, more people would have died in comparatively minor situations. The survivors would surely have the attitude: Hey, that's just what space is like.
So I'm asking you: Why are ensign deaths so damn rare on the first Enterprise? Is this a big coverup? Are we really seeing "Enterprise propaganda?" Surely, a reasonable person cannot believe that all these interstellar freshmen really live through all those encounters with hostile and technologically superior races, riding on a ship that was designed by engineers who were merely guessing at what starships should be like, having no experience to base their designs on. I mean, come on, anybody gets on that thing is basically does so with the understanding that they will die there, probably sooner rather than later.
So goddamn it, die already! Then build a new ship, and get a better crew (except keep Phlox, he's cool).
I know Pataki and the gang are trying to make the Hudson valley sound sexier than Silicon Valley, but before they succeed, they really do need to get some better names. I mean, which address would you rather have, Mountain View or ... East Fishkill? Could you really say the following with a straight face: "East Fishkill is actually a very glamorous place!"? "East Fishkill is a place where talented young people can really have a great time!"
The rest of you benchmarkers: fuck off. If I have to read another masturbatory "analysis" of how one card's Quake3 framerate is 4 times the refresh rate of the best available monitors, while an inferior card can only do 3 times, I will have to write you email to see whether you also spend a lot of time wondering how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Meanwhile, I'm seriously starting to wonder whether there is some payola behind the scenes of these uncannily similar choices of games to benchmark.
What we need is an international effort of coders to super-secure Linux. That sort of effort, distributed over the non-US world, would definitely justify the costs.
Maybe this will be the next step after Linux gets officially accepted by some large governments.
Let me go on record as saying that the next time I see another such ad, I will install an ad-blocker so I won't see any of /.'s sponsors. It is for your guys' own good. I just dread the thought of what would happen if Slashdot got much cozier in Microsoft's money-lined bed.