The first thing I thought about after reading the name of the game was the horrible horror/action movie made by the characters in Metalocalypse, "Bood Ocean". Now I can't get the idea of Nathan Explosion doing the absurd voiceover in the mock movie preview but doing it for "Bood Frontier".
It's also fear of something new. Any new tech tends to intimidate people, especially older people. This whole process is going to take time. By the time the finish rolling out broadband everywhere many of the older people in that 2/3 will have passed away. The rest of them will find that internet access has become as vital to daily life as telephone is now.
The question is, how honest is their 800 number? What percentage of those 800 are non-technical administrative employees? How many managers has MS included in that number even though they don't, directly, contribute to the work? How many of the technical people are only able to apply a token amount of time to the process because they are shared with other projects? I would be interested in knowing how the courts are monitoring their numbers (if at all). Just because the number sounds high doesn't mean it's a true gauge of how much effort they're putting in.
Yes, yes, I fully expected to get (-1, Redundant). Personally, I hate how overused the "In Soviet Russia" meme is but, in this case, I just couldn't resist. I figured the programming/OS tie in might add a, somewhat, new spin to it.;-)
Actually, this is the perfect place for the EU to work with Russia. It provides the possibility of improving relations in case either Putin or anyone who comes after him change their attitude and might help to bring about that change. The nice thing about using open source (assuming they honor the GPL) is that there is no true dependency on either side. In the event that either side chooses to stop sharing resources, the other side has the source code. The only way the EU could be burned would be if they didn't have their own developers intimately familiar with the source code and were relying, entirely, on the Russians to develop the project. In that case, it ceases to be a joint project and becomes the EU leeching off of Russia meaning that the EU would deserve the bad situation they'd find themselves in. I highly doubt that they would let it come to that. Of course, there would have to be high diligence on both sides to make sure there aren't any backdoors added to the code but another nice feature of open source software is that all changes made are in plain sigh for anyone to inspect.
If it detects you making unfavorable comments about Putin it send your address off to a mailing center where they send you a free "gift" package of Polonium-laced tea (Earl Gray, of course, to increase the chance of computer geeks drinking it).
I'm all for it. ISPs should have to work for free because we should all "think of the children". But, there's an even better way to make the money stretch further. Instead of paying the agencies employees (such as this CEO) they should just provide them with food, uniforms for clothing, public bathrooms/showers, and cots set up at the police station. Sure, it's not as nice as what they have now, but if he's truly dedicated the cause, this guy shouldn't have a problem making the sacrifice in order to provide more resources to the effort.
No, they didn't actually read every e-mail. They didn't even read a significant fraction of them. But, they did categorize every one by who sent them and who received them and then archived them for future use. That's the part that should scare everyone. Even if you happen to like/trust the current administration (or happened to like/trust the previous one), you and your descendents are going to live through many more presidencies. The legal red-tape that people like Bush & Cheney worked to eliminate wasn't, necessarily, meant to stop them it was meant to stop the true monster that will, inevitably, get into office someday. It's almost a guarantee that, some day, someone on the order of Hitler will sneak his/her way into office (Note: This isn't a Godwin as I'm not trying to suggest that Bush & Co. are like Hitler themselves.). When that happens, those limitations on government power are the only thing that has a chance of stopping them. The more we water them down, the more we guarantee his/her future success at destroying this country.
Even in the short term, this kind of illegal invasion of privacy can, easily, lead to lots of people being hurt. Just look at the improper/illegal attorney firing in the Department of Justice under the Bush administration. They went through and fired anyone they thought had connections with political/social views they didn't like. People lost their source of income and the government became much more politically polarized. The kind of info archived by a program like what this guy is suggesting could be used to make similar, illegal/improper, witch-hunt much more "efficient".
Hrm, you sure you were using the same model as the one in the article? The one in the article had 8 slots that could handle dimms up to 8GB each and didn't support ECC ram.
Most of what you said is right, but I don't know if I agree with "high reliability". Flash suffers from a limited number of writes per memory cell that RAM doesn't suffer from. Assuming the RAM disk is made with decent productiojn quality, it should be much more reliable, in the long term, than a Flash drive. The difference between this device and the previous ones is that this one is priced for the consumer or low end server market where most previous ones were priced for the enterprise market.
It's called drama. In this case, the writers seem to be trying to write a futuristic Greek tragedy (which would be fitting, considering the blatant Greek mythology references). The entertainment is watching the way the characters react to the situation they are in and whether we think it is realistic.
Of course, that said, I agree that it can be depressing sometimes. That's why, as much as I might like it, I can't stand to watch more than a single episode of Law & Order in a row (not sure if it's true anymore, but TNT used to play 2-3 episodes in a row every day).
Real people change. Over time, stress and normal life change the way we respond.
Regarding your, specific, points:
* I don't find it hard to believe that a principled person like the character of Adama would, once he had made the decision to honor the civilian government structure Roslin had set up and supported by his son, would continue to do so even when things didn't go the way he'd like. Much of his original justification for keeping power in the beginning was because the emergency situation of the destruction of the 12 colonies was still in progress. By the time that other stuff happened, time had passed and people were a little more used to the state of things. It became more normal and less of a unusual situation.
* In real life, to my knowledge, all US fighter pilots are required to have college degrees. Assuming this holds true for the Galactica world then it makes sense that, when faced with a lack of trained lawyers in a ~40,000 person population of mostly military personnel, he may be one of the most educated people available to fill the role. Also, most people couldn't have been trusted to give Baltar an honest defense or, more likely, would never have been willing to be his lawyer in the first place.
* Of course U.S. aircraft carriers are like this. Human nature says that a certain part of the population with be bad people and that you don't really know until push comes to shove. Most people on both ships would be normal people who will do what they are ordered to. The main difference would be the handful of people on the command staff. Those people would have been hand picked by the captain and would, most likely, match his/her personality. Remember, at least one of them did dissent when ordered to do something criminal (and was promptly shot in the head for insubordination).
I think most of the problem with people who find the personality re-modeling or the acting a turnoff is that we are so used to generic action/sci-fi TV/movie acting where personalities are, locked in stone, stereotypes and lines are written to be melodramatic. This show, as far as I can see, is trying to portray fantastic situations and how real people might respond to them.
The end of the last season (half season?) was about them finally realizing their goal and the ensuing release that provided the characters. The final twist ending was kind of a "be careful what you wish for..." type situation. This most recent episode (and, I'm guessing, the rest of the season) is about everyone's world falling apart and a character study on how each person handles it. Dee gives up and kills herself, Roslin looses faith and suffers a mental break, Lee pushes on trying make more lemonade with the lemons life has given him, Adama gets drunk and tries to commit suicide by proxy, etc. I think the whole goal of the show has always been to put the characters in these situations and have the characters try to respond like real people would. The problems is, most other action/sci-fi shows have the characters act in a unrealistic manner that makes for "more interesting action".
It's meant to. The point was, supposedly, to not be so crass as to make it a 1-to-1 allegory for any particular war/conflict. The idea was to keep it, at lease a little, general. If they did their job right then it should remind you of whichever similar conflict that is on top of your thoughts.
Exactly, then you can keep blowing more of them up until they finally catch you. It has nothing to do with being unwilling to lay down your life, it just a matter of being ass effective as possible.
I can understand the wish to recognize marriage in government. There is a significant amount of data that shows that stable family units are good for child development and thus good for society as a whole. The problem is that there are two types of marriage. There is legal marriage (the government recognizing a union for tax/benefits reasons) and there is religious marriage (the rules of which vary based on religious beliefs). The way I see it, if anyone can claim that their religious beliefs demand acceptance of same-sex marriage then the government has no business saying that marriage can only be between a man and a woman. That would represent the government suppressing someone's religious beliefs. By extension, at that point, the idea of equal rights would require the government to recognize same sex marriages in the same way it recognizes any other. Any attempt at creating a separate "civil union" is no different, and no less disgusting, than the concept of "separate but equal" was during the racial segregation period.
I think Reeves could, actually, work for most of the scenes (Spike tended to be very melancholy and low key most of the time) but the directory will have to really push to get strong emotion out of him in certain scenes (such as fighting Vicious). As for Jet, I think a shaved Ron Pearlman could pull it off pretty well. Not sure who I'd pick for the rest of the parts.
While it is true that, at least, some of MS's patents are for hardware, most of them are, probably, software related. As far as patent trolls are concerned, I think you have it backwards. There would be noe patent trolls to defend against if we didn't allow software patents in the first place. Software is, simply, a math notation and we used to have the brains to rule that people couldn't patent math.
Originally, most of the posts attributed to him provided links directly to his blog rather than to the original source. Once there, you were greeted by a summary that bordered very closely on, what many people considered, outright plagiarism. This, along with the sheer number of times the slashdot editors posted his submissions, caused a lot of slashdot readers to conclude that he was "stealing" stories to generate hits so he could profit from advertising. There was also question of whether there was some kind of improper favoritism going on between Roland and the Slashdot editors.
Personally, I doubt there was any overt quid-pro-quo between Roland and Slashdot. I think he was just a conveniently consistent source of new stories for the editors. As far as the supposed stealing of stories went, he responded relatively quickly by not linking to his own blog most of the time and by providing the summaries in more of his own words. This resolved any potential I, personally, might have had.
However, since then, there has always been a decent amount of eye rolling every time a story was posted with Roland as the source. This is why you see the "ohnoitsroland" meta tag. I think it's probably in jest, though maybe not the most tactful joke.
I would also like to join the people offering condolences to Roland's friends and family for his loss. Regardless of what some people may have thought of his posting style, it's a tragedy when a loved one is lost and my sympathy is with them.
It has nothingto do with DirectX10. They stopped updating their drivers before Vista even came out. This about them stabbing their customers in the back in exchange for a kick-back from a few vendors.
The real question is whether the program is opt-in or opt-out. If opt-out, is the option to turn it off hidden somewhere in the owner's manual or dashboard interface? Just because they say "Those who want to participate" doesn't mean they don't mean "The vast majority of people who otherwise wouldn't want to participate but can't figure out how to turn it off". It's similar to trying to buy a car without the dealer's advertising sticker/plate attached to the back of the car.
I've had this question since the tech was shown last year. Can you choose to run this on older displays? Some people still have older 120hz+ capable CRTs that should work just fine. Other people, like myself, have never had a problem with eyestrain on low refresh monitors and would like to try it on their existing monitors. Mine is a brand new 28" LCD with ~85hz max refresh. I have no intention of spending more money on a new monitor after having just purchased one, especially not a monitor significantly smaller than what I have now.
The article, however, suggests that the drivers are designed to check for (not just the 120hz capability) but for specific models of monitor that are "approved" by Nvidia. What I think is going on here is very similar to what happened when they released their first Stereo 3d drivers for Vista and I consider it a product tie-in scam as well as poor treatment of their customers.
Nvidia sold people on the 3d shutter glasses tech years ago. When CRTs died and the first generation of LCDs couldn't handle decent refresh rates Nvidia dropped support for the drivers. They didn't do it in a classy way, they just stopped talking about it and left their customers hanging. They never made it clear that they weren't going to update them and when rumors spread about stereo support being planned for the 8800 series people bought the new cards expecting the drivers that never came. Again, Nvidia kept quiet.
When news of the upcoming Vista stereo drivers started leaking, with what seemed to be tacit confirmation from Nvidia, people that had spent money on the hardware were excited. They were in for a rude awakening when it turned out that Nvidia had gone as far as to remove support for any stereo hardware they had pushed in the past and tried to require specific models of 3D monitors sold by their business partners. Basically, my understanding is, they had screwed over their past and present customers by handy-capping their drivers in exchange for payment from the monitor company. Here is a company that wants us to buy their video card (and now their shutter glasses) but is also trying to force us to throw out our present monitors, whether we need to or not, before we are allowed to use their 3d features and the only real justification is an artificial software block they put there themselves.
This is what I think is happening here again. I think they've probably made a deal with the monitor/projector manufacturers to be paid for the "Nvidia Approved" status which is why only two displays are allowed regardless of all the older CRTs still existing that match their supposed justification of high refresh rate. I'm smart enough to understand that it took extra work to go out of their way to take the power to decide for myself away from me. Nvidia needs to remember who their actual customers are and stop treating them as an afterthought. They're already on shaky ground with their present generation of cards competing poorly against ATI for price/performance. I, certainly, don't need Nvidia trying to force a Mitsubishi (or any other specific company's) monitor down my throat before I'm able to use a Nvidia product).
An addendum to my previous post is that working part-time while keeping your day job isn't a bad idea and will make it easier later should the economy pick up and you make the full move. Either way, keep the info you dig up while researching the idea in case the worst happens and the choice is made for you...
Slashdot Mirror
The first thing I thought about after reading the name of the game was the horrible horror/action movie made by the characters in Metalocalypse, "Bood Ocean". Now I can't get the idea of Nathan Explosion doing the absurd voiceover in the mock movie preview but doing it for "Bood Frontier".
It's also fear of something new. Any new tech tends to intimidate people, especially older people. This whole process is going to take time. By the time the finish rolling out broadband everywhere many of the older people in that 2/3 will have passed away. The rest of them will find that internet access has become as vital to daily life as telephone is now.
The question is, how honest is their 800 number? What percentage of those 800 are non-technical administrative employees? How many managers has MS included in that number even though they don't, directly, contribute to the work? How many of the technical people are only able to apply a token amount of time to the process because they are shared with other projects? I would be interested in knowing how the courts are monitoring their numbers (if at all). Just because the number sounds high doesn't mean it's a true gauge of how much effort they're putting in.
Yes, yes, I fully expected to get (-1, Redundant). Personally, I hate how overused the "In Soviet Russia" meme is but, in this case, I just couldn't resist. I figured the programming/OS tie in might add a, somewhat, new spin to it. ;-)
Actually, this is the perfect place for the EU to work with Russia. It provides the possibility of improving relations in case either Putin or anyone who comes after him change their attitude and might help to bring about that change. The nice thing about using open source (assuming they honor the GPL) is that there is no true dependency on either side. In the event that either side chooses to stop sharing resources, the other side has the source code. The only way the EU could be burned would be if they didn't have their own developers intimately familiar with the source code and were relying, entirely, on the Russians to develop the project. In that case, it ceases to be a joint project and becomes the EU leeching off of Russia meaning that the EU would deserve the bad situation they'd find themselves in. I highly doubt that they would let it come to that. Of course, there would have to be high diligence on both sides to make sure there aren't any backdoors added to the code but another nice feature of open source software is that all changes made are in plain sigh for anyone to inspect.
In Soviet Russia, operating system designs Soviet Russia.
If it detects you making unfavorable comments about Putin it send your address off to a mailing center where they send you a free "gift" package of Polonium-laced tea (Earl Gray, of course, to increase the chance of computer geeks drinking it).
I'm all for it. ISPs should have to work for free because we should all "think of the children". But, there's an even better way to make the money stretch further. Instead of paying the agencies employees (such as this CEO) they should just provide them with food, uniforms for clothing, public bathrooms/showers, and cots set up at the police station. Sure, it's not as nice as what they have now, but if he's truly dedicated the cause, this guy shouldn't have a problem making the sacrifice in order to provide more resources to the effort.
No, they didn't actually read every e-mail. They didn't even read a significant fraction of them. But, they did categorize every one by who sent them and who received them and then archived them for future use. That's the part that should scare everyone. Even if you happen to like/trust the current administration (or happened to like/trust the previous one), you and your descendents are going to live through many more presidencies. The legal red-tape that people like Bush & Cheney worked to eliminate wasn't, necessarily, meant to stop them it was meant to stop the true monster that will, inevitably, get into office someday. It's almost a guarantee that, some day, someone on the order of Hitler will sneak his/her way into office (Note: This isn't a Godwin as I'm not trying to suggest that Bush & Co. are like Hitler themselves.). When that happens, those limitations on government power are the only thing that has a chance of stopping them. The more we water them down, the more we guarantee his/her future success at destroying this country.
Even in the short term, this kind of illegal invasion of privacy can, easily, lead to lots of people being hurt. Just look at the improper/illegal attorney firing in the Department of Justice under the Bush administration. They went through and fired anyone they thought had connections with political/social views they didn't like. People lost their source of income and the government became much more politically polarized. The kind of info archived by a program like what this guy is suggesting could be used to make similar, illegal/improper, witch-hunt much more "efficient".
Hrm, you sure you were using the same model as the one in the article? The one in the article had 8 slots that could handle dimms up to 8GB each and didn't support ECC ram.
Most of what you said is right, but I don't know if I agree with "high reliability". Flash suffers from a limited number of writes per memory cell that RAM doesn't suffer from. Assuming the RAM disk is made with decent productiojn quality, it should be much more reliable, in the long term, than a Flash drive. The difference between this device and the previous ones is that this one is priced for the consumer or low end server market where most previous ones were priced for the enterprise market.
It's called drama. In this case, the writers seem to be trying to write a futuristic Greek tragedy (which would be fitting, considering the blatant Greek mythology references). The entertainment is watching the way the characters react to the situation they are in and whether we think it is realistic.
Of course, that said, I agree that it can be depressing sometimes. That's why, as much as I might like it, I can't stand to watch more than a single episode of Law & Order in a row (not sure if it's true anymore, but TNT used to play 2-3 episodes in a row every day).
Real people change. Over time, stress and normal life change the way we respond.
Regarding your, specific, points:
* I don't find it hard to believe that a principled person like the character of Adama would, once he had made the decision to honor the civilian government structure Roslin had set up and supported by his son, would continue to do so even when things didn't go the way he'd like. Much of his original justification for keeping power in the beginning was because the emergency situation of the destruction of the 12 colonies was still in progress. By the time that other stuff happened, time had passed and people were a little more used to the state of things. It became more normal and less of a unusual situation.
* In real life, to my knowledge, all US fighter pilots are required to have college degrees. Assuming this holds true for the Galactica world then it makes sense that, when faced with a lack of trained lawyers in a ~40,000 person population of mostly military personnel, he may be one of the most educated people available to fill the role. Also, most people couldn't have been trusted to give Baltar an honest defense or, more likely, would never have been willing to be his lawyer in the first place.
* Of course U.S. aircraft carriers are like this. Human nature says that a certain part of the population with be bad people and that you don't really know until push comes to shove. Most people on both ships would be normal people who will do what they are ordered to. The main difference would be the handful of people on the command staff. Those people would have been hand picked by the captain and would, most likely, match his/her personality. Remember, at least one of them did dissent when ordered to do something criminal (and was promptly shot in the head for insubordination).
I think most of the problem with people who find the personality re-modeling or the acting a turnoff is that we are so used to generic action/sci-fi TV/movie acting where personalities are, locked in stone, stereotypes and lines are written to be melodramatic. This show, as far as I can see, is trying to portray fantastic situations and how real people might respond to them.
The end of the last season (half season?) was about them finally realizing their goal and the ensuing release that provided the characters. The final twist ending was kind of a "be careful what you wish for..." type situation. This most recent episode (and, I'm guessing, the rest of the season) is about everyone's world falling apart and a character study on how each person handles it. Dee gives up and kills herself, Roslin looses faith and suffers a mental break, Lee pushes on trying make more lemonade with the lemons life has given him, Adama gets drunk and tries to commit suicide by proxy, etc. I think the whole goal of the show has always been to put the characters in these situations and have the characters try to respond like real people would. The problems is, most other action/sci-fi shows have the characters act in a unrealistic manner that makes for "more interesting action".
It's meant to. The point was, supposedly, to not be so crass as to make it a 1-to-1 allegory for any particular war/conflict. The idea was to keep it, at lease a little, general. If they did their job right then it should remind you of whichever similar conflict that is on top of your thoughts.
Exactly, then you can keep blowing more of them up until they finally catch you. It has nothing to do with being unwilling to lay down your life, it just a matter of being ass effective as possible.
I, whole heartedly, agree with this idea.
I can understand the wish to recognize marriage in government. There is a significant amount of data that shows that stable family units are good for child development and thus good for society as a whole. The problem is that there are two types of marriage. There is legal marriage (the government recognizing a union for tax/benefits reasons) and there is religious marriage (the rules of which vary based on religious beliefs). The way I see it, if anyone can claim that their religious beliefs demand acceptance of same-sex marriage then the government has no business saying that marriage can only be between a man and a woman. That would represent the government suppressing someone's religious beliefs. By extension, at that point, the idea of equal rights would require the government to recognize same sex marriages in the same way it recognizes any other. Any attempt at creating a separate "civil union" is no different, and no less disgusting, than the concept of "separate but equal" was during the racial segregation period.
I think Reeves could, actually, work for most of the scenes (Spike tended to be very melancholy and low key most of the time) but the directory will have to really push to get strong emotion out of him in certain scenes (such as fighting Vicious). As for Jet, I think a shaved Ron Pearlman could pull it off pretty well. Not sure who I'd pick for the rest of the parts.
While it is true that, at least, some of MS's patents are for hardware, most of them are, probably, software related. As far as patent trolls are concerned, I think you have it backwards. There would be noe patent trolls to defend against if we didn't allow software patents in the first place. Software is, simply, a math notation and we used to have the brains to rule that people couldn't patent math.
Originally, most of the posts attributed to him provided links directly to his blog rather than to the original source. Once there, you were greeted by a summary that bordered very closely on, what many people considered, outright plagiarism. This, along with the sheer number of times the slashdot editors posted his submissions, caused a lot of slashdot readers to conclude that he was "stealing" stories to generate hits so he could profit from advertising. There was also question of whether there was some kind of improper favoritism going on between Roland and the Slashdot editors.
Personally, I doubt there was any overt quid-pro-quo between Roland and Slashdot. I think he was just a conveniently consistent source of new stories for the editors. As far as the supposed stealing of stories went, he responded relatively quickly by not linking to his own blog most of the time and by providing the summaries in more of his own words. This resolved any potential I, personally, might have had.
However, since then, there has always been a decent amount of eye rolling every time a story was posted with Roland as the source. This is why you see the "ohnoitsroland" meta tag. I think it's probably in jest, though maybe not the most tactful joke.
I would also like to join the people offering condolences to Roland's friends and family for his loss. Regardless of what some people may have thought of his posting style, it's a tragedy when a loved one is lost and my sympathy is with them.
It has nothingto do with DirectX10. They stopped updating their drivers before Vista even came out. This about them stabbing their customers in the back in exchange for a kick-back from a few vendors.
The real question is whether the program is opt-in or opt-out. If opt-out, is the option to turn it off hidden somewhere in the owner's manual or dashboard interface? Just because they say "Those who want to participate" doesn't mean they don't mean "The vast majority of people who otherwise wouldn't want to participate but can't figure out how to turn it off". It's similar to trying to buy a car without the dealer's advertising sticker/plate attached to the back of the car.
I've had this question since the tech was shown last year. Can you choose to run this on older displays? Some people still have older 120hz+ capable CRTs that should work just fine. Other people, like myself, have never had a problem with eyestrain on low refresh monitors and would like to try it on their existing monitors. Mine is a brand new 28" LCD with ~85hz max refresh. I have no intention of spending more money on a new monitor after having just purchased one, especially not a monitor significantly smaller than what I have now.
The article, however, suggests that the drivers are designed to check for (not just the 120hz capability) but for specific models of monitor that are "approved" by Nvidia. What I think is going on here is very similar to what happened when they released their first Stereo 3d drivers for Vista and I consider it a product tie-in scam as well as poor treatment of their customers.
Nvidia sold people on the 3d shutter glasses tech years ago. When CRTs died and the first generation of LCDs couldn't handle decent refresh rates Nvidia dropped support for the drivers. They didn't do it in a classy way, they just stopped talking about it and left their customers hanging. They never made it clear that they weren't going to update them and when rumors spread about stereo support being planned for the 8800 series people bought the new cards expecting the drivers that never came. Again, Nvidia kept quiet.
When news of the upcoming Vista stereo drivers started leaking, with what seemed to be tacit confirmation from Nvidia, people that had spent money on the hardware were excited. They were in for a rude awakening when it turned out that Nvidia had gone as far as to remove support for any stereo hardware they had pushed in the past and tried to require specific models of 3D monitors sold by their business partners. Basically, my understanding is, they had screwed over their past and present customers by handy-capping their drivers in exchange for payment from the monitor company. Here is a company that wants us to buy their video card (and now their shutter glasses) but is also trying to force us to throw out our present monitors, whether we need to or not, before we are allowed to use their 3d features and the only real justification is an artificial software block they put there themselves.
This is what I think is happening here again. I think they've probably made a deal with the monitor/projector manufacturers to be paid for the "Nvidia Approved" status which is why only two displays are allowed regardless of all the older CRTs still existing that match their supposed justification of high refresh rate. I'm smart enough to understand that it took extra work to go out of their way to take the power to decide for myself away from me. Nvidia needs to remember who their actual customers are and stop treating them as an afterthought. They're already on shaky ground with their present generation of cards competing poorly against ATI for price/performance. I, certainly, don't need Nvidia trying to force a Mitsubishi (or any other specific company's) monitor down my throat before I'm able to use a Nvidia product).
An addendum to my previous post is that working part-time while keeping your day job isn't a bad idea and will make it easier later should the economy pick up and you make the full move. Either way, keep the info you dig up while researching the idea in case the worst happens and the choice is made for you...