The concept of individual weapon ownership may have been a deterrent to both criminals and governments, from the times of the Greeks through World War 1.
Since World War 1, it is no longer a deterrent to governments.
As has been shown in overseas wars, a small detachment of a dozen or so trained marines with modern weapons can mow down several thousand citizens. This is not utilizing things such as cruise missiles, air strikes, battleships, or even more feared weapons like tactical nukes, napalm, bio and chemical, etc.
The simple fact is that no matter HOW MANY guns and knives a person might have in their home, the government can destroy them from outer space, with no manpower, no risk and no fear. This nullifies the deterrent of weapons far more than any "gun control" does.
Yes and no.
Against a traditional battle scenario, tech/training/tactics can be crushing. The problem the US faces in Iraq today is the loosely organized militia units. Sure, we have superior technology and weapons. Even have kit that helps identify snipers. But... The hand made booby traps, the sniping, the hit and run tactics - all of these things make it damn hard to take advantage of those superior equipment/training. This was true 200 years ago when we successfully rebelled against the Brits as it is today. Do you remember what two people did sniping with a common gopher gun (semi auto.223)? Now imagine pockets of the population with an AK or equivalent taking potshots. Terror will not win a war, but it sure as heck would make make a bad situation get uglier. It looks like the existing government structure in Iraq may get toppled over before they even get going. Guess what I'm saying is individual weapon ownership can be a very destabilizing element, was recognized as such, and deemed a reasonable deterrent from keeping the government from going into deep weeds with it's citizens. The government would be in real trouble, however, before something like this would come into play. I don't think America is even close to that sort of scenario but if you look at other countries where things are open riots, warlords, and things generally in chaos it may matter.
So anyhow, I agree that small arms are not a deterrent to a stable government. Something like the Middle East, I'm less sure I agree with you.
Most Sales folks have one or two Sales Engineers assigned to them as part of any meaningful software sale. The role is a fuzzy combination of Sales, Development, and Consulting. Part of it is to be the internal voice to Sales to keep them from taking a gig that would bring ruin. Another is taking the core product, and knowing it well enough to adapt it the goofy requirements the customer is asking for. It is also sales. You get to become part of the Sales process, often sharing some of the windfall but not being (mostly) commission base. Some folks eventually cross over to Sales entirely, some don't. It can be a transitional role.
As a side note, Sales Engineering can be very lucrative for those who can be customer facing and technically adept. The down side is you don't get to just hunker down in a dark cube. Politics are there, pressure is there, mickey mouse dressing (suite is not uncommon with customers), and expectations are quite high.
You can get an IBM T60P from the factory with 4G of RAM. You will want to make sure you get a 64-bit CPU as well, otherwise you will have issues. Be warned, the 2G SIMs will set you back ~800 each. Much better as a workstation, however. The P also use a higher clocked RAM, 7200 RPM HDD, and some other perks that make it a bit faster than most laptops.
Yup - welcome to my boat - exactly the same issue. All the commercial players require HDCP encryption to display the 'native' resolutions. Lets hope they thoroughly crack the encryption and make a player which is not bound to the Blu-ray/HDDVD licensing terms. A Blu-ray/HDDVD decoder in VLC would be perfect for me.
I've got one of those 30" dell monitors. Problem is it does not have the fancy encrypted link, so 'useless' as a blueray/hd-dvd monitor. With this stuff getting cracked, I am looking forward to VLC playing not only my stack of DVD and whatever the next generation of movies I end up buying and re-encoding.
Since you have the hardware, like to know if a single 8800 can run two 30" monitors. I know I can do a single 30" at 2560x1600 and a 1600x1200 crt off of a single 7900gtx, but what I have yet to find out is if a single 8800gtx can do two 2560x1600 monitors for normal (non-game) 2D display.
Looking at the forms it looks like if you SLI, you only get one monitor. You running card at 2560x1600 and 1600x1200 and the other card at 2560x1600, without SLI?
Also, if you are doing two 30" monitors on one card, how much RAM is on it.... if you would.
Gentoo allows you to be on the cutting edge, just like all the other distributions. The primary difference is it makes it very easy for those who don't know what they are doing to be there. Most folks running SuSE, RH, or one of the other 'package' based distributions won't build their own RPM, etc. There is nothing stopping one of the 'normal' distributions from upgrading the kernel with each release. I certainly don't update everything on my Gentoo box because it is there, on my server.
I run Gentoo on a server. The server is stripped down beyond what a typical 'router' distro looks like - one of the reasons I went with Gentoo is I could really trim the system down for the job at hand. My server only gets updates for security, and once in a while a bug fix that impacts the applications running on the server. Not often. When I need to compile something big, the last place I'd do it on is the server itself - it has another task. I take one of my workstations with far more GCC horsepower and let distccd do the work for the poor little pizza box. Beyond the initial build, I doubt those boxes have ever compiled anything.
Since it is a source-based distro, I also am not trapped by RPM's or other packages no longer getting provided for my system. One of the applications I had was using RH9 (with paid support) only to have them drop maintenance on it and have the vender drag their feet moving to another platform (clue stick, they had issues with the 2.6 kernel, so would not 'support' any platform but RH 8 and later 9. The enterprise editions? Forget about it... You want to live in the suck, you try keeping one of those boxes alive and secure years after it EOL.
I'm cheap! I have a license for Win2K, and would have to pony up $350 for Office 2004. Don't exactly qualify for the student/teacher $129 version. I might go Office 2008 when it comes out, but for now, good enough. I picked up crossover for a couple internal win32 apps that don't have an OSX port (and probably will never get beyond VB6), so the fact that Office 2000 worked was a huge bonus for my pocket book. I've got Office 2004 for one of the work G4 laptops... not worth paying a fourth of what the actual hardware cost (for the macbook) to get a personal copy.
Check out(http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac) Crossover for OSX. Just a commercial version of WINE, but for the $40-60 I can run office 2k without having to put a Win32 OS on the machine. It feels like it launches a hidden copy of the OS for each application under the covers, so I stay in OSX with my win32 apps running along side the Mac ones. Not a dual OS boot like boot camp, not a vmware OS in a OS like parallels. Just another option. I suspect you could do WINE for free, but the helper stuff was well worth the money, IMHO.
Did anyone who purchased one of these phones ask for the source? They don't have to put the source out there for the general public. The person who is entitled to the source could turn around and do that, but did Armijn even have one of these?
Took a quick look at the article. Many of these 'myths' are really serious issues for a touch screen smart phone getting pitched at this price point. I get to replace my smart phone on the company's nickel soon, and for what $600 gets me, I'll not buy one of these. Point 3, fsk them. An unlocked phone might have been worth that. A locked phone, no way. A smart phone without 3rd party applications? Nope. For anyone thinking of looking at the blog entry...
Myth One: the iPhone is missing EVDO (or some other high end feature) which will stifle adoption. Myth Two: The iPhone is priced too high. It needs a 2 GB version for $299 lacking phone features. Myth Three: The iPhone should be sold unlocked, not tied to Cingular service. Myth Four: The iPhone software is a closed model, therefore the sky is falling. Myth Five: The iPhone is just a phone with features lots of other phones already have. Myth Six: Cisco owns the iPhone name, which presents an impossible conundrum of epic proportions. Myth Seven: Apple will need to port iLife 07 to Windows in order to have a photo viewer for PC users. Myth Eight: An integrated battery is a significant problem for users Myth Nine: OMG Scratches Myth Ten: Apple can't figure out how do do a phone.
Why is a secret security patch a problem? Why broadcast security problems(which only invites people to try to exploit the problems)?
Good question. If I see an upgrade that adds functionality, I might just skip it. More often than not, the latest greatest just adds stuff I don't care about. If it is a security update, it always gets updated. I would potentially be exposed because I might not care about 'new themes', etc.
Watch out for condensation if your coolant (swimming pool water) is colder than room temperature! You don't need crazy temp differentials to cool a CPU. If you pull water from outside, odds are it will be colder than the air around your water block. This can cause all sorts of problems. Room temperature water is even easier to deal with than cold water. If you are just looking for quiet operation rather than crazy overclocks, you won't need the pool.
Plan for a bit of condensation. Flip your motherboards around so if drops of water (*god forbid*) were to form, they drop away from the mainboard. Water from condensation tends to be pure enough that it won't short out your system as easy as one might think. Still... bad things can happen.
Also, you will want some sort of anti-crap mixed into your water, or you can get all sorts of funky growth. More of an issue for closed systems than water from a swimming pool (with all the CL, etc). Be sure your piping can handle that. I've seen folks use hose that did deteriorate over time. Not pretty. A clogged 'artery' on a heat sink will kill your system dead. Non-conductive anti-crap additive is a really good idea.
Lastly, if the water pump dies, everything else will die. Make sure you have some sort of kill switch so all your hardware shuts down if you lose water flow.
Check out the overclockers forums out there. While you don't need the extreme lower temperatures, a big radiator and large low RPM fan in another room make for a very quite office environment.
You would think they would match up "armsrace" with "Jon Smith"'s credit card info - which maps to a physical address. None of the Visa action was anonymous. Might be able to do some clever proxy stuff with paypal, but I'd be worried if I bought anything from AllOfMP3. In the past, they take the IP addresses and other stuff from the 'free' stuff - so this would give them much better quality targets than the fishing trips they are taking with the P2P stuff.
Looks like the poster had a 'real' Windows CD, but the license key he was trying to use was for the brain dead OEM version. Been there, done that. The trick is to transform a real CD into what HP (and all the other hardware vendors) should be including - a Windows install CD that works with the key on the sticker.
So look at the 'pre-installed' media, find the c:\i386\setupp.ini file that should be on the HDD. Build yourself a Windows install CD using NLite (because you should also trim th fat as long as you are going to be in there, along with adding drivers, security patches, etc) from some other source. Replace the setupp.ini file and it will use the OEM key. This won't turn an OEM version into an activation free volume version, but you can go the other way.
Did I mention nlite lets you add drivers to the install media? (grin) A must for those who have SATA drives.
Gave my 7 year old a DS this year. I am just astounded by the hardware. Great battery life, wifi (sans built in browser), touch screen, a microphone. Nice solid feeling unit. Her cousins had the Nintendo units as well, so all of them were able to play together in a virtual world (Animal Crossing) with the built in networking. As a nice touch, it also had a slot where it could play the older gameboy as well as the newer DS kit.
After playing with the kit and getting past the 'fun' part of playing games, one of the things that has me wondering is what does the SDK look like/cost to get into developing for the DS. Can anyone comment on what it costs to develop for that platform? I've heard that the Wii is ~$2,500. Anyone know what the DS SDK goes for?
Yup. This stuff costs about the same as a nice titanium bowl. Well worth adding it to your hunting/camping equipment. (Strong hint for those doing some Christmas shopping)
Got some of the sample trials they sent EMT's as a gift a few years back and unfortunately had the chance to use it when one of the guys cut their hand up doing something stupid with knife. Did an amazing job of stopping the bleeding while we paddled the guy out of the BWCA - I can't even imagine trying to stop that sort of bleeding with fabric. I've added since as a 'must have' to my kit.
Win64 is a piece of cake, for the most part. I picked up an NForce4 AMD64 board about a year and a half ago - they had drivers for all of the on board kit (Ethernet, usb, sound, firewire) and NVidia had drivers for the video cards I had as well. As a server or workstation (lines get fuzzy on a dev box), I had very little problems with finding drivers for even the SCSI kit I added into the mix. I also had 4x1G RAM, which Win64 picked up. I ended up going with Win2003-64 and Win2003-32 (with limited access to all 4G, closer to 3.5G with switches, etc) for the Windows environments as it had better support than WinXP-64. 3rd party hardware stuff may be iffy... scanner/printers seem to get forgotten.
64-bit Gentoo and SuSE both worked like a charm too - but you asked about Windows. Nice to have multiple HDD chassis. (grin)
The thing that you might have problems with were programs. I found that the 'default' install path for the 32-bit stuff would cause some of my programs to trip up. Things like the 32-bit DVD/CD burning software and a few other programs. But anyhow - should you go with a 64-bit CPU? Yes. Win64 is probably more trouble than it is worth for 'generic' gaming rig today. As Vista goes into mainstream, those using a 32-bit processor will be the odd man out.
Nope - it was closer to 300-500rs a minute. Granted, that was on a mobile phone and not a land line, but the phone bill was high enough I got to grovel to our CFO - two months was more than what I paid for a down payment on my house. Part of the problem was I had a US SIM chip and not a local SIM. Things were much better when I returned with an unlocked mobile.
(the base rate for tmobile is 1.60 USD, ~3 USD/minute roaming. Things got scary, however, if you wandered off the 'partner' network and the blackberry was set for automatic rather than manual network selection. In New Delhi, it would change networks on every call...)
As someone from the US who gets sent on trips to help partners in India, this would be insane. Depending on the network, calls ranged from $7-11 USD a minute, setting a company record when we got the bill since the blackberry seemed to hop to a new network every other call. I'll use VOIP via Google talk to chat with my family - without that, I'll be damned if they get me on site again. Penny wise, pound foolish. It was bad enough to pay $20 USD a day at the hotels for net access to do VOIP....
About time! I've been holding off for this stock to fall in the $1-1.50 USD before I ordered my paper certificates and they will have a small window before they get delisted. Looks like I place my order Monday. As far as white elephant gifts go, this is one of the best things you can give a *nix person - a shiny SCOX stock certificate all framed up. Keep in mind you will pay much more for the chunk of physical paper, but people loved the pets.com and other dot bombs. This one is special, or at least has a special place in hell. (grin)
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The concept of individual weapon ownership may have been a deterrent to both criminals and governments, from the times of the Greeks through World War 1.
.223)? Now imagine pockets of the population with an AK or equivalent taking potshots. Terror will not win a war, but it sure as heck would make make a bad situation get uglier. It looks like the existing government structure in Iraq may get toppled over before they even get going. Guess what I'm saying is individual weapon ownership can be a very destabilizing element, was recognized as such, and deemed a reasonable deterrent from keeping the government from going into deep weeds with it's citizens. The government would be in real trouble, however, before something like this would come into play. I don't think America is even close to that sort of scenario but if you look at other countries where things are open riots, warlords, and things generally in chaos it may matter.
Since World War 1, it is no longer a deterrent to governments.
As has been shown in overseas wars, a small detachment of a dozen or so trained marines with modern weapons can mow down several thousand citizens. This is not utilizing things such as cruise missiles, air strikes, battleships, or even more feared weapons like tactical nukes, napalm, bio and chemical, etc.
The simple fact is that no matter HOW MANY guns and knives a person might have in their home, the government can destroy them from outer space, with no manpower, no risk and no fear. This nullifies the deterrent of weapons far more than any "gun control" does.
Yes and no.
Against a traditional battle scenario, tech/training/tactics can be crushing. The problem the US faces in Iraq today is the loosely organized militia units. Sure, we have superior technology and weapons. Even have kit that helps identify snipers. But... The hand made booby traps, the sniping, the hit and run tactics - all of these things make it damn hard to take advantage of those superior equipment/training. This was true 200 years ago when we successfully rebelled against the Brits as it is today. Do you remember what two people did sniping with a common gopher gun (semi auto
So anyhow, I agree that small arms are not a deterrent to a stable government. Something like the Middle East, I'm less sure I agree with you.
Most Sales folks have one or two Sales Engineers assigned to them as part of any meaningful software sale. The role is a fuzzy combination of Sales, Development, and Consulting. Part of it is to be the internal voice to Sales to keep them from taking a gig that would bring ruin. Another is taking the core product, and knowing it well enough to adapt it the goofy requirements the customer is asking for. It is also sales. You get to become part of the Sales process, often sharing some of the windfall but not being (mostly) commission base. Some folks eventually cross over to Sales entirely, some don't. It can be a transitional role.
As a side note, Sales Engineering can be very lucrative for those who can be customer facing and technically adept. The down side is you don't get to just hunker down in a dark cube. Politics are there, pressure is there, mickey mouse dressing (suite is not uncommon with customers), and expectations are quite high.
You can get an IBM T60P from the factory with 4G of RAM. You will want to make sure you get a 64-bit CPU as well, otherwise you will have issues. Be warned, the 2G SIMs will set you back ~800 each. Much better as a workstation, however. The P also use a higher clocked RAM, 7200 RPM HDD, and some other perks that make it a bit faster than most laptops.
Yup - welcome to my boat - exactly the same issue. All the commercial players require HDCP encryption to display the 'native' resolutions. Lets hope they thoroughly crack the encryption and make a player which is not bound to the Blu-ray/HDDVD licensing terms. A Blu-ray/HDDVD decoder in VLC would be perfect for me.
I've got one of those 30" dell monitors. Problem is it does not have the fancy encrypted link, so 'useless' as a blueray/hd-dvd monitor. With this stuff getting cracked, I am looking forward to VLC playing not only my stack of DVD and whatever the next generation of movies I end up buying and re-encoding.
Since you have the hardware, like to know if a single 8800 can run two 30" monitors. I know I can do a single 30" at 2560x1600 and a 1600x1200 crt off of a single 7900gtx, but what I have yet to find out is if a single 8800gtx can do two 2560x1600 monitors for normal (non-game) 2D display.
Looking at the forms it looks like if you SLI, you only get one monitor. You running card at 2560x1600 and 1600x1200 and the other card at 2560x1600, without SLI?
Also, if you are doing two 30" monitors on one card, how much RAM is on it.... if you would.
Gentoo allows you to be on the cutting edge, just like all the other distributions. The primary difference is it makes it very easy for those who don't know what they are doing to be there. Most folks running SuSE, RH, or one of the other 'package' based distributions won't build their own RPM, etc. There is nothing stopping one of the 'normal' distributions from upgrading the kernel with each release. I certainly don't update everything on my Gentoo box because it is there, on my server.
I run Gentoo on a server. The server is stripped down beyond what a typical 'router' distro looks like - one of the reasons I went with Gentoo is I could really trim the system down for the job at hand. My server only gets updates for security, and once in a while a bug fix that impacts the applications running on the server. Not often. When I need to compile something big, the last place I'd do it on is the server itself - it has another task. I take one of my workstations with far more GCC horsepower and let distccd do the work for the poor little pizza box. Beyond the initial build, I doubt those boxes have ever compiled anything.
Since it is a source-based distro, I also am not trapped by RPM's or other packages no longer getting provided for my system. One of the applications I had was using RH9 (with paid support) only to have them drop maintenance on it and have the vender drag their feet moving to another platform (clue stick, they had issues with the 2.6 kernel, so would not 'support' any platform but RH 8 and later 9. The enterprise editions? Forget about it... You want to live in the suck, you try keeping one of those boxes alive and secure years after it EOL.
I'm cheap! I have a license for Win2K, and would have to pony up $350 for Office 2004. Don't exactly qualify for the student/teacher $129 version. I might go Office 2008 when it comes out, but for now, good enough. I picked up crossover for a couple internal win32 apps that don't have an OSX port (and probably will never get beyond VB6), so the fact that Office 2000 worked was a huge bonus for my pocket book. I've got Office 2004 for one of the work G4 laptops... not worth paying a fourth of what the actual hardware cost (for the macbook) to get a personal copy.
Check out(http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac) Crossover for OSX. Just a commercial version of WINE, but for the $40-60 I can run office 2k without having to put a Win32 OS on the machine. It feels like it launches a hidden copy of the OS for each application under the covers, so I stay in OSX with my win32 apps running along side the Mac ones. Not a dual OS boot like boot camp, not a vmware OS in a OS like parallels. Just another option. I suspect you could do WINE for free, but the helper stuff was well worth the money, IMHO.
Did anyone who purchased one of these phones ask for the source? They don't have to put the source out there for the general public. The person who is entitled to the source could turn around and do that, but did Armijn even have one of these?
Took a quick look at the article. Many of these 'myths' are really serious issues for a touch screen smart phone getting pitched at this price point. I get to replace my smart phone on the company's nickel soon, and for what $600 gets me, I'll not buy one of these. Point 3, fsk them. An unlocked phone might have been worth that. A locked phone, no way. A smart phone without 3rd party applications? Nope. For anyone thinking of looking at the blog entry...
Myth One: the iPhone is missing EVDO (or some other high end feature) which will stifle adoption.
Myth Two: The iPhone is priced too high. It needs a 2 GB version for $299 lacking phone features.
Myth Three: The iPhone should be sold unlocked, not tied to Cingular service.
Myth Four: The iPhone software is a closed model, therefore the sky is falling.
Myth Five: The iPhone is just a phone with features lots of other phones already have.
Myth Six: Cisco owns the iPhone name, which presents an impossible conundrum of epic proportions.
Myth Seven: Apple will need to port iLife 07 to Windows in order to have a photo viewer for PC users.
Myth Eight: An integrated battery is a significant problem for users
Myth Nine: OMG Scratches
Myth Ten: Apple can't figure out how do do a phone.
Why is a secret security patch a problem? Why broadcast security problems(which only invites people to try to exploit the problems)?
Good question. If I see an upgrade that adds functionality, I might just skip it. More often than not, the latest greatest just adds stuff I don't care about. If it is a security update, it always gets updated. I would potentially be exposed because I might not care about 'new themes', etc.
Watch out for condensation if your coolant (swimming pool water) is colder than room temperature! You don't need crazy temp differentials to cool a CPU. If you pull water from outside, odds are it will be colder than the air around your water block. This can cause all sorts of problems. Room temperature water is even easier to deal with than cold water. If you are just looking for quiet operation rather than crazy overclocks, you won't need the pool.
Plan for a bit of condensation. Flip your motherboards around so if drops of water (*god forbid*) were to form, they drop away from the mainboard. Water from condensation tends to be pure enough that it won't short out your system as easy as one might think. Still... bad things can happen.
Also, you will want some sort of anti-crap mixed into your water, or you can get all sorts of funky growth. More of an issue for closed systems than water from a swimming pool (with all the CL, etc). Be sure your piping can handle that. I've seen folks use hose that did deteriorate over time. Not pretty. A clogged 'artery' on a heat sink will kill your system dead. Non-conductive anti-crap additive is a really good idea.
Lastly, if the water pump dies, everything else will die. Make sure you have some sort of kill switch so all your hardware shuts down if you lose water flow.
Check out the overclockers forums out there. While you don't need the extreme lower temperatures, a big radiator and large low RPM fan in another room make for a very quite office environment.
One of my friends who ends up porting and bridging Cobol systems was quick to inform me, "COBOL is OO, look, see, print line is extending space".
What's the freakin' deal with making up new words for small, medium, and large?
To truly appreciate it, you have to translate the cup size in the original Klingon.
You would think they would match up "armsrace" with "Jon Smith"'s credit card info - which maps to a physical address. None of the Visa action was anonymous. Might be able to do some clever proxy stuff with paypal, but I'd be worried if I bought anything from AllOfMP3. In the past, they take the IP addresses and other stuff from the 'free' stuff - so this would give them much better quality targets than the fishing trips they are taking with the P2P stuff.
That when all is said and done, one of the things the RIAA will walk away with a list of customers who used the service?
Looks like the poster had a 'real' Windows CD, but the license key he was trying to use was for the brain dead OEM version. Been there, done that. The trick is to transform a real CD into what HP (and all the other hardware vendors) should be including - a Windows install CD that works with the key on the sticker.
So look at the 'pre-installed' media, find the c:\i386\setupp.ini file that should be on the HDD. Build yourself a Windows install CD using NLite (because you should also trim th fat as long as you are going to be in there, along with adding drivers, security patches, etc) from some other source. Replace the setupp.ini file and it will use the OEM key. This won't turn an OEM version into an activation free volume version, but you can go the other way.
Did I mention nlite lets you add drivers to the install media? (grin) A must for those who have SATA drives.
Gave my 7 year old a DS this year. I am just astounded by the hardware. Great battery life, wifi (sans built in browser), touch screen, a microphone. Nice solid feeling unit. Her cousins had the Nintendo units as well, so all of them were able to play together in a virtual world (Animal Crossing) with the built in networking. As a nice touch, it also had a slot where it could play the older gameboy as well as the newer DS kit.
After playing with the kit and getting past the 'fun' part of playing games, one of the things that has me wondering is what does the SDK look like/cost to get into developing for the DS. Can anyone comment on what it costs to develop for that platform? I've heard that the Wii is ~$2,500. Anyone know what the DS SDK goes for?
Yup. This stuff costs about the same as a nice titanium bowl. Well worth adding it to your hunting/camping equipment. (Strong hint for those doing some Christmas shopping)
Got some of the sample trials they sent EMT's as a gift a few years back and unfortunately had the chance to use it when one of the guys cut their hand up doing something stupid with knife. Did an amazing job of stopping the bleeding while we paddled the guy out of the BWCA - I can't even imagine trying to stop that sort of bleeding with fabric. I've added since as a 'must have' to my kit.
Win64 is a piece of cake, for the most part. I picked up an NForce4 AMD64 board about a year and a half ago - they had drivers for all of the on board kit (Ethernet, usb, sound, firewire) and NVidia had drivers for the video cards I had as well. As a server or workstation (lines get fuzzy on a dev box), I had very little problems with finding drivers for even the SCSI kit I added into the mix. I also had 4x1G RAM, which Win64 picked up. I ended up going with Win2003-64 and Win2003-32 (with limited access to all 4G, closer to 3.5G with switches, etc) for the Windows environments as it had better support than WinXP-64. 3rd party hardware stuff may be iffy... scanner/printers seem to get forgotten.
64-bit Gentoo and SuSE both worked like a charm too - but you asked about Windows. Nice to have multiple HDD chassis. (grin)
The thing that you might have problems with were programs. I found that the 'default' install path for the 32-bit stuff would cause some of my programs to trip up. Things like the 32-bit DVD/CD burning software and a few other programs. But anyhow - should you go with a 64-bit CPU? Yes. Win64 is probably more trouble than it is worth for 'generic' gaming rig today. As Vista goes into mainstream, those using a 32-bit processor will be the odd man out.
Nope - it was closer to 300-500rs a minute. Granted, that was on a mobile phone and not a land line, but the phone bill was high enough I got to grovel to our CFO - two months was more than what I paid for a down payment on my house. Part of the problem was I had a US SIM chip and not a local SIM. Things were much better when I returned with an unlocked mobile.
(the base rate for tmobile is 1.60 USD, ~3 USD/minute roaming. Things got scary, however, if you wandered off the 'partner' network and the blackberry was set for automatic rather than manual network selection. In New Delhi, it would change networks on every call...)
As someone from the US who gets sent on trips to help partners in India, this would be insane. Depending on the network, calls ranged from $7-11 USD a minute, setting a company record when we got the bill since the blackberry seemed to hop to a new network every other call. I'll use VOIP via Google talk to chat with my family - without that, I'll be damned if they get me on site again. Penny wise, pound foolish. It was bad enough to pay $20 USD a day at the hotels for net access to do VOIP....
The flaw is in Office 2004 for Mac - and on my new MacBook, they bundled a 'trial' version of Office 2004 with OSX.
About time! I've been holding off for this stock to fall in the $1-1.50 USD before I ordered my paper certificates and they will have a small window before they get delisted. Looks like I place my order Monday. As far as white elephant gifts go, this is one of the best things you can give a *nix person - a shiny SCOX stock certificate all framed up. Keep in mind you will pay much more for the chunk of physical paper, but people loved the pets.com and other dot bombs. This one is special, or at least has a special place in hell. (grin)