The best thing about web-based cartoons is the fact not only are you subject to less censorship, you can do things like very, very long serial stories (long serial stories was the hallmark of the best comic strips from the 1920's to 1950's). This is why Sluggy Freelance carries on that tradition--story arcs like the combo about Riff's time machine going haywire and the Stormbreaker Saga took over half a year to complete from start to finish.
I think what this really means is that we may be within two years see PDA's running the Palm OS from more than just Palm, Handspring and Sony. Imagine a company like Samsung and LG Electronics getting into PDA's big time running Palm OS; I believe Samsung has in a way dabbled with Palm OS with their new cellphone that has the Palm OS built in.
Or imagine NTT DoCoMo i-Mode cellphones with the Palm OS interface; in short, this could lead to widespread acceptance of the Palm OS on cellphones worldwide.
In fact, the primary use of this new satellite uplink system IS for video feeds.
I remember 11 years ago when CNN had to literally move a truckload of equipment from Jordan to Iraq in order to allow Peter Arnett to broadcast from Baghdad during Operation Desert Storm with broadcast-quality video, mostly because of the large size of the antenna needed to uplink to a satellite.
At 2 megabits/second uplink speed, this new system has enough bandwidth to have picture quality very close to that you get with a traditional uplink to satellite. This means high-quality picture just about anywhere in the world, and may spell the end of the videophone except in areas where extreme portability is a must.
Given that the whole setup is probably smaller than most checked luggage, expect within 18 months the likes of CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, the major American TV networks, BBC, ITV, etc. to use them on a large scale.
Re:Anime enjoyed due to great storytelling
on
NY Times on Anime
·
· Score: 2
Now, I would like to point out first of all that I watched all 200 episodes in *German*- a language which I did not know before watching the series. By the end of it all my German was pretty good, and I thought their dub was really good. In fact to this day I think Sailor Moon sounds just plain wrong in Japanese, despite being the big fan of original language I normally am...
What's real interesting is that the German dub of Sailor Moon is one of the best dubs done--I've heard rumors that Naoko Takeuchi really liked that dub because the company that did the dub didn't cut anything out like they did to the English episodes.:-) And the opening songs for the German dub were really good, too! (I have it on.MP3 format in both the short version and the longer version sung in English.)
I really hope that someone in Japan is willing to do Cherry Project as anime. By the way, Revolutionary Girl Utena was not done by Takeuchi-san--it was an original creation of manga artist Chiho Saito and the main director of Sailor Moon for a number of years. Whatever it was, Utena has to be watched more than once because there are a lot of things you have to carefully decipher in order to understand that series.
Re:Anime enjoyed due to great storytelling
on
NY Times on Anime
·
· Score: 2
The writers (Naoko Takeuchi in particular) manage to introduce four new characters (to an existing cast of eight), an entire cast of villains, a brilliantly complex plot and accompanying plethora of subplots, and they do so in a highly structured format without leaving any of the characters out or failing to resolve any of the subplots.
I wonder have you read the S story arc in the original manga form. That is one of the most gripping manga I've read in quite a long time--the ending is very powerful indeed. It is truly Takeuchi-san's best work.
Re:Anime enjoyed due to great storytelling
on
NY Times on Anime
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Then, switch over, and watch Blue Submarine, Grave of the Fireflies, or Serial Experiments Lain. We're talking serious eyecandy here. Anime took its inspiration from Disney films, but in true Japanese fashion, has improved upon the original to a great degree.
I've seen these anime you've mentioned and they are intended for a much older audience than the anime you normally see on television in Japan. I believe that Serial Experiments Lain was originally shown on a late night slot when it first aired in Japan some years ago.
Tell me, are you sure in regards to Sailor Moon you're watching the original uncut episodes shown in Japan or the hacked-up episodes that DiC did back in the middle 1990's? The original episodes have a tone often quite a bit more adult than you imagine. Indeed, the end of the first season caused major controversy in Japan because the main characters actually died, something not normally seen for anime aimed at the 8-14 female audience.
I still remember when Neon Genesis Evangelion was first shown in Japan--it was extremely controversial, to say the least. The last two episodes of that show just drove everyone nuts, forcing the producers at GAINAX to make the Evangelion movies, which was just as controversial! Or watch all 39 episodes of Revolution Girl Utena--the phrase mind fuck (pardon my French! ^_^;; ) definitely applies here because trying to figure out this series makes you want to reach for the painkiller in very short order.:-/
Anime enjoyed due to great storytelling
on
NY Times on Anime
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I think anime has finally become mainstream because we are getting a deluge of releases here in the USA that are either officially licensed (CPM, ADV Films, AnimEigo) or brought over by the production company themselves (Bandai).
Because of these official releases, we're getting most importantly uncut anime, which reveals some truly astonishing storytelling, to say the least. Who would have thought that Saber Marionette J would be way better than anyone anticipated? Or the groundbreaking Neon Genesis Evangelion? Or be beautifully-animated The Vision of Escaflowne? Or the much-liked Gundam Wing? Or the serio-comic adventures of the three Slayers series?
Even Sailor Moon can be surprisingly good storytelling if you can get the uncut versions. We're very fortunate that Pioneer is bringing over the third season (Sailor Moon S(uper)), perhaps the best season of the series with very top-notch storytelling.
In short, Americans are discovering why anime can be quite good--they use superior storytelling to compensate for somewhat subpar animation.
I think what's interesting is that unlike today, earlier videogame designers were often very inventive in the look of the game itself.
It's too bad that Mattel's Intellivision system never really succeeded in the long run; they had games that in many cases were vastly superior to the competition at the time from Atari, Coleco, and so on. The PGA golf game on that system was quite playable for its time; and who can forget the games that used the Voice Module such as B-17 Bomber and Bomb Squad? The Bomb Squad game can be extremely unnerving, especially when you set it at the highest level of difficulty.
One thing I've noticed about the participants is that there's a lot of machines running the AMD Athlon or Duron CPU's. Let's see if the programmers an wring out the power of the FPU on the Athlon/Duron to get a winner.:-)
I still think Handspring blew it by NOT introducing a CDMA version of Treo first. They could have captured quite a huge market for Sprint PCS, Cingular and Verizon users almost immediately.
I think the reason why you may never see the Treo in the US market in its current form is the fact that the most common digital cellphone systems here in the USA do NOT use the GSM system (which the Treo requires)--they're mostly using the Qualcomm CDMA standard. Since Europe and Japan uses GSM, that's where most of the market for the Treo cellphone will be, alas.
I expect Handspring instead to develop something akin to the Treo but it will support the CDMA and the upcoming CDMA2000 standard that American cellullar providers use--we may not see it until the fall of 2002. My guess is that Handspring may co-market the device in conjunction with Sprint PCS, Verizon and Cingular Wireless, the largest cellular providers in the USA.
I remember the good old days when DirectX 3.0 was a major disaster for everyone involved--a lot of display drivers wouldn't work with DirectX 3.
Fortunately, once Microsoft got to DirectX 5.0 things were way better, with much more hardware support. Indeed, today's DirectX 8.1 is a very powerful and mature API for sound and graphics in general, and is well-liked by many developers.
IMHO, what Linux really needs is the equivalent of DirectX. I believe there are several Open Source development projects that is aimed specifically for better multimedia in Linux that uses DirectX-like API's.
I think in the end what really hurt Apple is the fact they want to produce both the hardware and software, which leads to a position of being almost completely dependent on Apple for any improvements in technology. Alas, this has kept prices high, which puts it out of reach of many computer users.
I think the biggest reason why Microsoft has done so extremely well was the fact they were able to take full advantage of truly open hardware design--the desktop computer architecture pioneered on the IBM PC two decades ago has evolved in a very open fashion for the most part. With the hardware specs being so open, there is much competition for hardware improvements, so the cost of PC hardware has gone down significantly. Remember the days when the average computer cost nearly US$2,000? Nowadays, very useful and power computers can be bought for less than US$500.
It is because of the very nature of open hardware design that on the PC compatible side, you have multiple operating systems that will work: Windows, commercial UNIX variants, Linux, FreeBSD, and so on. Indeed, because people widely know how PC hardware works, Linux is heading to the point that within 4-5 years it might as well a OS with a graphical user interface, automatic detection and driver installation for new hardware, and so on.
In short, competition in the hardware side of computers has been a huge factor in lowering the cost of PC compatibles to significantly below that of Macintoshes.
Firewire is cheap these days, and pretty fast (50Mbyte/second) even it its first generation.
I think people are forgetting how cheap you can get IEEE-1394 interface cards for PC's nowadays. I believe you can get them for around US$40; drivers are available not only for Windows 9x/2000 (Windows XP supports IEEE-1394 natively), but also the latest Linux distributions.
You want to have IEEE-1394 connections anyway if you want to download videos from MiniDV camcorders or download images from professional-quality digital cameras (such as the much-praised Canon EOS-1D). Indeed, IEEE-1394 has become a de facto replacement for the SCSI interface on higher-end image scanners, too.
Has anyone bothered to actually go to a computer store and check out the pricing for PCI-slot IEEE-1394 interface cards? They're relatively inexpensive, and best of all drivers are available on the PC platform for Linux and Windows 9X variants (Windows XP supports it natively).
You want to have an IEEE-1394 interface for your computer anyway if you're doing any video editing work with video downloaded from a MiniDV format camcorder; a lot of professional-quality digital still cameras now sport IEEE-1394 interfaces also.
Anyway, most of the Compaq and HP computers you see sold at Best Buy, CompUSA, OfficeMax, Staples, and so on already sport an IEEE-1394 connector, so a portable MP3 player with a small hard drive that exclusively uses the IEEE-1394 interface is not as handicapped in the marketplace as many people think.
I think the anti-nuclear crowd often conveniently forget that Chernobyl was a disaster waiting to happen because there was no containment structure and also no really decent backups for the radiation moderating system.
Indeed, Three Mile Island was proof that the American safety measures for nuclear powerplants WORKED. The containment structure at TMI did succeed to keeping the radioactive release to a very low level indeed.
Anyway, the nuclear waste will be processed into a form that has a tiny fraction of the original before being stored away. It'll probably have less radiation that many natural rock types anyway.
Now you know why the Department of Energy is looking at using very deep salt mines to store nuclear waste (there are plenty of those here in the USA). Given the fact the nuclear waste will be processed into a form that has a tiny fraction of the normal nuclear waste (and that includes metal from nuclear powerplants), put it in the ultra-strong containers that the DoE has been using to transport nuclear materials and store them in these mines.
The fact salt is a very nice radiation absorber is a major plus, too.
When it comes to storing nuclear waste permanently, people are wrongly conjuring up images of thin-metal barrels of waste in liquid being dropped off.
WRONGO. Very likely, the radioactive waste will be mixed with molten glass and turned into glass balls, which are chemically extremely stable and have a tiny fraction of the radioactive output of spent fuel rods. These glass balls are then put into special large containers that are so strong even dropping them 30 meters wouldn't make anything close to a dent in the container. With the waste in barely radioactive form and these large containers, they could be dropped off anywhere undergground that has stable geology and never be an environmental problem to anyone.
I remember there was a bad joke going around early in the current Bush Administration about sending all the nuclear waste to Texas. That joke quickly ended when people read that DoE is actually looking at salt domes at now-dry oil fields in Texas as nuclear waste repositories, since salt absorbs radiation extremely well and these underground salt domes are geologically very stable.
I think people who want the Belgian government to install Linux on the machines that their government is paying for does not realize this thing: Windows is on 85% of the world's desktop computers.
I mean let's face it: the vast majority of the corporate desktop computers out there run Windows, which means if the average citizen in Belgium knows how to run Windows the learning curve to get into the business environment isn't so steep. I'm sure that Microsoft will offer very substantial discounts for this project in Belgium.
I think we will see the Dramatic Presentation Hugo split into TV and movie categories for the reason you stated.
There has been much arguement about just what constitutes a movie and what constitutes a TV show for the new separate Hugos, but I think the arguement should be settled by the this premise: where it was shown first. A science-fiction movie first shown on TV should definitely go in the TV category, IMHO.
Anyway, I can hazard a guess that Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring will win this year's Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation.
Tom's Hardware already did a review [tomshardware.com] of the Celeron 1300 vs the Duron 1200 (benchmarks included the Celeron 1200) where the Duron simply spanks the Celeron.
The test shows why the Celeron is inferior to the Duron: the Duron's vastly superior FPU unit allows it to substantially outrun the Celeron on FPU-intensive tasks. That is the reason why the Duron has become the choice for many do-it-yourself computer builders.
Really, the scroll-wheel is the first thing to disable on any new computer.
You have got to be kidding.
One reason why I use a scroll wheel is the very fact that you can scroll up and down a page very easily without the extra mouse pointer movements needed to move the scroll bar on the right side of the screen. It's a major timesaver, to say the least.
Anyway, if you get a good mouse pointer with scroll wheel that comfortably fits into your hand (I have a Logitech Wheel Mouse Optical and it comfortably fits my right hand like a glove), RSI problems should not be an issue.
Re:Yeah, but rectangular is, you know, square...
on
New iMac Announced
·
· Score: 2
If they had designed the CPU box with a rectangular box but with the right proportions, it would have looked very professional and I'd approve immediately. The new iMac design with its half-sphere CPU box design just looks too avant-garde for business environments, IMHO.
If you think Microsoft's Intellimouse has problems, try using Logitech's excellent mouse pointers.
I'm using a Logitech Wheel Mouse Optical and it does work under MacOS X by connecting the mouse to one of the USB ports on the newer Macs. The nice thing about the Wheel Mouse Optical is that the mouse is smaller than the Intellimouse with a very nice shape that fits both left and right hands comfortably.
I'd wish the "base" was squareish, though
on
New iMac Announced
·
· Score: 2
After looking at pictures of the new iMac in TIME magazine, while I think the machine is an engineering masterpiece, I'd wish that the machine had a rectangular box for the CPU unit instead of that half-sphere shape. The rectangular box would have looked a bit more professional in corporate environments, where I expect a good number of the new iMacs to be used.
Slashdot Mirror
Bingo.
The best thing about web-based cartoons is the fact not only are you subject to less censorship, you can do things like very, very long serial stories (long serial stories was the hallmark of the best comic strips from the 1920's to 1950's). This is why Sluggy Freelance carries on that tradition--story arcs like the combo about Riff's time machine going haywire and the Stormbreaker Saga took over half a year to complete from start to finish.
I think what this really means is that we may be within two years see PDA's running the Palm OS from more than just Palm, Handspring and Sony. Imagine a company like Samsung and LG Electronics getting into PDA's big time running Palm OS; I believe Samsung has in a way dabbled with Palm OS with their new cellphone that has the Palm OS built in.
Or imagine NTT DoCoMo i-Mode cellphones with the Palm OS interface; in short, this could lead to widespread acceptance of the Palm OS on cellphones worldwide.
In fact, the primary use of this new satellite uplink system IS for video feeds.
I remember 11 years ago when CNN had to literally move a truckload of equipment from Jordan to Iraq in order to allow Peter Arnett to broadcast from Baghdad during Operation Desert Storm with broadcast-quality video, mostly because of the large size of the antenna needed to uplink to a satellite.
At 2 megabits/second uplink speed, this new system has enough bandwidth to have picture quality very close to that you get with a traditional uplink to satellite. This means high-quality picture just about anywhere in the world, and may spell the end of the videophone except in areas where extreme portability is a must.
Given that the whole setup is probably smaller than most checked luggage, expect within 18 months the likes of CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, the major American TV networks, BBC, ITV, etc. to use them on a large scale.
Now, I would like to point out first of all that I watched all 200 episodes in *German*- a language which I did not know before watching the series. By the end of it all my German was pretty good, and I thought their dub was really good. In fact to this day I think Sailor Moon sounds just plain wrong in Japanese, despite being the big fan of original language I normally am...
:-) And the opening songs for the German dub were really good, too! (I have it on .MP3 format in both the short version and the longer version sung in English.)
What's real interesting is that the German dub of Sailor Moon is one of the best dubs done--I've heard rumors that Naoko Takeuchi really liked that dub because the company that did the dub didn't cut anything out like they did to the English episodes.
I really hope that someone in Japan is willing to do Cherry Project as anime. By the way, Revolutionary Girl Utena was not done by Takeuchi-san--it was an original creation of manga artist Chiho Saito and the main director of Sailor Moon for a number of years. Whatever it was, Utena has to be watched more than once because there are a lot of things you have to carefully decipher in order to understand that series.
The writers (Naoko Takeuchi in particular) manage to introduce four new characters (to an existing cast of eight), an entire cast of villains, a brilliantly complex plot and accompanying plethora of subplots, and they do so in a highly structured format without leaving any of the characters out or failing to resolve any of the subplots.
I wonder have you read the S story arc in the original manga form. That is one of the most gripping manga I've read in quite a long time--the ending is very powerful indeed. It is truly Takeuchi-san's best work.
Then, switch over, and watch Blue Submarine, Grave of the Fireflies, or Serial Experiments Lain. We're talking serious eyecandy here. Anime took its inspiration from Disney films, but in true Japanese fashion, has improved upon the original to a great degree.
:-/
I've seen these anime you've mentioned and they are intended for a much older audience than the anime you normally see on television in Japan. I believe that Serial Experiments Lain was originally shown on a late night slot when it first aired in Japan some years ago.
Tell me, are you sure in regards to Sailor Moon you're watching the original uncut episodes shown in Japan or the hacked-up episodes that DiC did back in the middle 1990's? The original episodes have a tone often quite a bit more adult than you imagine. Indeed, the end of the first season caused major controversy in Japan because the main characters actually died, something not normally seen for anime aimed at the 8-14 female audience.
I still remember when Neon Genesis Evangelion was first shown in Japan--it was extremely controversial, to say the least. The last two episodes of that show just drove everyone nuts, forcing the producers at GAINAX to make the Evangelion movies, which was just as controversial! Or watch all 39 episodes of Revolution Girl Utena--the phrase mind fuck (pardon my French! ^_^;; ) definitely applies here because trying to figure out this series makes you want to reach for the painkiller in very short order.
I think anime has finally become mainstream because we are getting a deluge of releases here in the USA that are either officially licensed (CPM, ADV Films, AnimEigo) or brought over by the production company themselves (Bandai).
Because of these official releases, we're getting most importantly uncut anime, which reveals some truly astonishing storytelling, to say the least. Who would have thought that Saber Marionette J would be way better than anyone anticipated? Or the groundbreaking Neon Genesis Evangelion? Or be beautifully-animated The Vision of Escaflowne? Or the much-liked Gundam Wing? Or the serio-comic adventures of the three Slayers series?
Even Sailor Moon can be surprisingly good storytelling if you can get the uncut versions. We're very fortunate that Pioneer is bringing over the third season (Sailor Moon S(uper)), perhaps the best season of the series with very top-notch storytelling.
In short, Americans are discovering why anime can be quite good--they use superior storytelling to compensate for somewhat subpar animation.
I think what's interesting is that unlike today, earlier videogame designers were often very inventive in the look of the game itself.
It's too bad that Mattel's Intellivision system never really succeeded in the long run; they had games that in many cases were vastly superior to the competition at the time from Atari, Coleco, and so on. The PGA golf game on that system was quite playable for its time; and who can forget the games that used the Voice Module such as B-17 Bomber and Bomb Squad? The Bomb Squad game can be extremely unnerving, especially when you set it at the highest level of difficulty.
One thing I've noticed about the participants is that there's a lot of machines running the AMD Athlon or Duron CPU's. Let's see if the programmers an wring out the power of the FPU on the Athlon/Duron to get a winner. :-)
I still think Handspring blew it by NOT introducing a CDMA version of Treo first. They could have captured quite a huge market for Sprint PCS, Cingular and Verizon users almost immediately.
I think the reason why you may never see the Treo in the US market in its current form is the fact that the most common digital cellphone systems here in the USA do NOT use the GSM system (which the Treo requires)--they're mostly using the Qualcomm CDMA standard. Since Europe and Japan uses GSM, that's where most of the market for the Treo cellphone will be, alas.
I expect Handspring instead to develop something akin to the Treo but it will support the CDMA and the upcoming CDMA2000 standard that American cellullar providers use--we may not see it until the fall of 2002. My guess is that Handspring may co-market the device in conjunction with Sprint PCS, Verizon and Cingular Wireless, the largest cellular providers in the USA.
I remember the good old days when DirectX 3.0 was a major disaster for everyone involved--a lot of display drivers wouldn't work with DirectX 3.
Fortunately, once Microsoft got to DirectX 5.0 things were way better, with much more hardware support. Indeed, today's DirectX 8.1 is a very powerful and mature API for sound and graphics in general, and is well-liked by many developers.
IMHO, what Linux really needs is the equivalent of DirectX. I believe there are several Open Source development projects that is aimed specifically for better multimedia in Linux that uses DirectX-like API's.
I think in the end what really hurt Apple is the fact they want to produce both the hardware and software, which leads to a position of being almost completely dependent on Apple for any improvements in technology. Alas, this has kept prices high, which puts it out of reach of many computer users.
I think the biggest reason why Microsoft has done so extremely well was the fact they were able to take full advantage of truly open hardware design--the desktop computer architecture pioneered on the IBM PC two decades ago has evolved in a very open fashion for the most part. With the hardware specs being so open, there is much competition for hardware improvements, so the cost of PC hardware has gone down significantly. Remember the days when the average computer cost nearly US$2,000? Nowadays, very useful and power computers can be bought for less than US$500.
It is because of the very nature of open hardware design that on the PC compatible side, you have multiple operating systems that will work: Windows, commercial UNIX variants, Linux, FreeBSD, and so on. Indeed, because people widely know how PC hardware works, Linux is heading to the point that within 4-5 years it might as well a OS with a graphical user interface, automatic detection and driver installation for new hardware, and so on.
In short, competition in the hardware side of computers has been a huge factor in lowering the cost of PC compatibles to significantly below that of Macintoshes.
Firewire is cheap these days, and pretty fast (50Mbyte/second) even it its first generation.
I think people are forgetting how cheap you can get IEEE-1394 interface cards for PC's nowadays. I believe you can get them for around US$40; drivers are available not only for Windows 9x/2000 (Windows XP supports IEEE-1394 natively), but also the latest Linux distributions.
You want to have IEEE-1394 connections anyway if you want to download videos from MiniDV camcorders or download images from professional-quality digital cameras (such as the much-praised Canon EOS-1D). Indeed, IEEE-1394 has become a de facto replacement for the SCSI interface on higher-end image scanners, too.
Sheesh.
Has anyone bothered to actually go to a computer store and check out the pricing for PCI-slot IEEE-1394 interface cards? They're relatively inexpensive, and best of all drivers are available on the PC platform for Linux and Windows 9X variants (Windows XP supports it natively).
You want to have an IEEE-1394 interface for your computer anyway if you're doing any video editing work with video downloaded from a MiniDV format camcorder; a lot of professional-quality digital still cameras now sport IEEE-1394 interfaces also.
Anyway, most of the Compaq and HP computers you see sold at Best Buy, CompUSA, OfficeMax, Staples, and so on already sport an IEEE-1394 connector, so a portable MP3 player with a small hard drive that exclusively uses the IEEE-1394 interface is not as handicapped in the marketplace as many people think.
I think the anti-nuclear crowd often conveniently forget that Chernobyl was a disaster waiting to happen because there was no containment structure and also no really decent backups for the radiation moderating system.
Indeed, Three Mile Island was proof that the American safety measures for nuclear powerplants WORKED. The containment structure at TMI did succeed to keeping the radioactive release to a very low level indeed.
Anyway, the nuclear waste will be processed into a form that has a tiny fraction of the original before being stored away. It'll probably have less radiation that many natural rock types anyway.
Now you know why the Department of Energy is looking at using very deep salt mines to store nuclear waste (there are plenty of those here in the USA). Given the fact the nuclear waste will be processed into a form that has a tiny fraction of the normal nuclear waste (and that includes metal from nuclear powerplants), put it in the ultra-strong containers that the DoE has been using to transport nuclear materials and store them in these mines.
The fact salt is a very nice radiation absorber is a major plus, too.
Folks,
When it comes to storing nuclear waste permanently, people are wrongly conjuring up images of thin-metal barrels of waste in liquid being dropped off.
WRONGO. Very likely, the radioactive waste will be mixed with molten glass and turned into glass balls, which are chemically extremely stable and have a tiny fraction of the radioactive output of spent fuel rods. These glass balls are then put into special large containers that are so strong even dropping them 30 meters wouldn't make anything close to a dent in the container. With the waste in barely radioactive form and these large containers, they could be dropped off anywhere undergground that has stable geology and never be an environmental problem to anyone.
I remember there was a bad joke going around early in the current Bush Administration about sending all the nuclear waste to Texas. That joke quickly ended when people read that DoE is actually looking at salt domes at now-dry oil fields in Texas as nuclear waste repositories, since salt absorbs radiation extremely well and these underground salt domes are geologically very stable.
I think people who want the Belgian government to install Linux on the machines that their government is paying for does not realize this thing: Windows is on 85% of the world's desktop computers.
I mean let's face it: the vast majority of the corporate desktop computers out there run Windows, which means if the average citizen in Belgium knows how to run Windows the learning curve to get into the business environment isn't so steep. I'm sure that Microsoft will offer very substantial discounts for this project in Belgium.
I think we will see the Dramatic Presentation Hugo split into TV and movie categories for the reason you stated.
There has been much arguement about just what constitutes a movie and what constitutes a TV show for the new separate Hugos, but I think the arguement should be settled by the this premise: where it was shown first. A science-fiction movie first shown on TV should definitely go in the TV category, IMHO.
Anyway, I can hazard a guess that Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring will win this year's Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation.
Tom's Hardware already did a review [tomshardware.com] of the Celeron 1300 vs the Duron 1200 (benchmarks included the Celeron 1200) where the Duron simply spanks the Celeron.
The test shows why the Celeron is inferior to the Duron: the Duron's vastly superior FPU unit allows it to substantially outrun the Celeron on FPU-intensive tasks. That is the reason why the Duron has become the choice for many do-it-yourself computer builders.
Really, the scroll-wheel is the first thing to disable on any new computer.
You have got to be kidding.
One reason why I use a scroll wheel is the very fact that you can scroll up and down a page very easily without the extra mouse pointer movements needed to move the scroll bar on the right side of the screen. It's a major timesaver, to say the least.
Anyway, if you get a good mouse pointer with scroll wheel that comfortably fits into your hand (I have a Logitech Wheel Mouse Optical and it comfortably fits my right hand like a glove), RSI problems should not be an issue.
If they had designed the CPU box with a rectangular box but with the right proportions, it would have looked very professional and I'd approve immediately. The new iMac design with its half-sphere CPU box design just looks too avant-garde for business environments, IMHO.
Gorimek,
If you think Microsoft's Intellimouse has problems, try using Logitech's excellent mouse pointers.
I'm using a Logitech Wheel Mouse Optical and it does work under MacOS X by connecting the mouse to one of the USB ports on the newer Macs. The nice thing about the Wheel Mouse Optical is that the mouse is smaller than the Intellimouse with a very nice shape that fits both left and right hands comfortably.
After looking at pictures of the new iMac in TIME magazine, while I think the machine is an engineering masterpiece, I'd wish that the machine had a rectangular box for the CPU unit instead of that half-sphere shape. The rectangular box would have looked a bit more professional in corporate environments, where I expect a good number of the new iMacs to be used.