Let me see if I have this straight
on
Why Vista Won't Suck
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· Score: 2, Interesting
One of the reasons Vista won't suck is because Microsoft is moving a bunch of stuff out of the kernel and into user space. OK, 10 years ago when Microsoft shipped NT 4.0 they put GDI in the kernel to increase performance, which was a terrible idea as the performance increase this gave was more than offset by stability problems. If Microsoft had been smart they would have kept the kernel as small as possible and waited a couple of years for hardware speeds to increase, as they inevitably did. So basically one of the biggest reasons Vista "won't suck" is because Microsoft has finally decided to undo mistakes they made 10 years ago. Color me less than impressed.
Apparently, what is going to happen is Batman and Superman are going to start franchises. You pay up and receive your starter kit, (lycra, tights and underpants) and you can be the fully licensed(TM) Batman(R) or Superman(C) in your local franchising area.
Batman(R) and Superman(C) look forward to working with you to unleash your mutual synergy and craft moneymaking opporutnities! All this requires is one low, low monthly fee. Order in the next ten minutes and receive your complentary DVD of Bruce Wayne's motiviational seminar!
Wow, that's almost an obSimpson's reference to the Homie the Clown episode. And of course it's even more appropriate when you consider that in the episode Krusty lights a cigarette with a burning copy of Action Comics #1. OK, I'm officially pathetic for being able to recall all of that off of the top of my head.
Anyone here got contacts to a columnist at a computer magazine?
These writers seem to have access to some really heavy drugs and I'd like to buy some.
Or maybe Cringely and Dvorak are willing to share.
Think about this though, do you really want to take the kind of drugs that make Cringely and Dvorak write such utter crap? What would they do to your brain? It's obvious they haven't done any good things for Dvorak and Cringely.
I'm a huge fan of the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" school of design. On the other hand there are times when that doesn't work. The question with the CEV is whether or not NASA is going to turn this into another flying clusterfuck like the Shuttle, which NASA appears to have every intention of doing.
NASA's decisions in the 1970s on the Shuttle made short term budgetary sense but were catastrophic in the long term. The SRBs were an unproven technology that was used not because it made good engineering sense, Von Braun was appalled by the idea of launching a manned vehicle with solid boosters, but because NASA was too cheap to invest money into developing a completely liquid fueled booster for the Shuttle. NASA was facing budget cuts in the 1970s after Apollo and NASA management made the decision to lie to Congress and the Air Force about the capabilities of the Shuttle and about how much money was necessary to fly it. Rather than go to Congress and say "Hey guys, if you want us to do this right it's going to cost X dollars" NASA management lowballed their estimates, missed all of them anyways and ended up with a vehicle that has accomplished nothing significant in the last 25 years that could not have been done with Saturn IBs and Apollo capsules.
As far as the tile system goes not every new technology works out as well as intended. However that's another stupid argument that's totally irrelevant here. NASA will save a few bucks in the short term by using hypergolic fuels in those tried and true tested motors. On the other hand the long term costs of supporting hypergolic fuels will dwarf any savings in the present and will lock our efforts into using toxic fuels and 1950s engine technology. NASA will also end up with a system which is not sustainable or scalable. Yeah, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is a good rule of thumb but it has to be balanced with questions of long-term sustainability and scalability. I don't see that NASA is interested in any of that, they don't care about doing it right as long as they keep getting paid. If they did they'd go to Congress and say "The Shuttle and ISS are worthless wastes of money, let's use that funding for developing new vehicles that will actually allow us to do some exploration of some locale other than very low earth orbit."
Yes, and the price for using hypergolic fuels is that the ground support infrastructure is very complex and the fuels are dangerous, toxic and expensive, which is why everyone who builds rockets has been moving away from them for the last 40 years or so. So the trade-off for a theoretical advantage in flight due to an added layer of redundancy is a huge and expensive layer of complexity on the ground to handle and store these fuels. Oh, and you lose some performance too, the specific impulse for hypergolics isn't as good as LOX/methane.
At this point I would rather save money by ending NASA's manned space program instead of continuing to piss money down ratholes such as the Shuttle, ISS and now the Crude Exploration Vehicle all of which are just ways for NASA to hand money to large aerospace companies so that they can pad their bottom lines and continue to bribe congressmen.
SGI put their future on Itanic, and look what happened to them? they are in the doorway of chapther11. Itanium has become a small nische market. There are just a few HPC apps available except for institutions running their own code.
Blaming SGI's troubles on the Itanium is ridiculous. SGI was heading downwards long before they decided to build the Altix line. In the early to mid 90s SGI had a great, high margin business selling lots and lots of systems for people who wanted to do CGI and visualization. This was very sexy and got SGI a featured role in Jurassic Park and everyone liked their funky, multi-colored workstations.
SGI lost out in the late 90s because the company was focussed on graphics and they completely missed the e-commerce boom. Graphics are nice, but was anyone purchasing SGIs to run their Oracle databases, or for web servers, or for anything other than graphics? No, SGI was never a player in the e-commerce sphere and Apple, Microsoft and Linux systems eroded their high margin workstation business with cheaper machines that ran more accessible operating systems and which had a greater variety of applications.
I hope that SGI can get their shit together and keep going in the much smaller supercomputing market. I have an Altix and it's a nice system, one of the best engineered I've ever seen, and the SGI folks I've dealt with have been uniformly excellent and my Altix running Linux is much nicer than the Origin 3000 running Irix (Irix sux!) it replaced. But time will tell.
You're right that lots of people die in hospitals due to errors. And you're right that quality is a problem. But these are not quite as related as you think. For a start, risk = frequency * severity. Medicine entails invasive procedures and sick people, so severity is very high. Human error is inevitable and will always have consequences, failsafe systems notwithstanding -- and it counts a lot more in medicine than in software code (mostly, anyway). Secondly, medicine involves hugely complex biological systems and we just don't know how to measure quality most of the time.
So, BFD, you've made a statement which sounds profound but which means nothing. OK, risk = frequency * severity, I'll buy that. So let's look at each hospital and the procedures they do and evaluate the outcomes. It wouldn't be at all difficult to anonymize this data so that it could be published. So that if you looked at two hospitals, A and B, you could see that if you were a white male 55 to 65 years old with no significant complications your risk of dying during coronary bypass might be 10 percent at hospital A and 20 percent at hospital B. At this point the prospective patient can say, "Hmmm, looks to me as if hospital B is kind of fucked up, maybe I should go to hospital A for my bypass.
The people who say that we need to do something about the lawyers to fix medicine have obviously never spent time in a hospital. I spent two months at a level 1 trauma center after a motorcycle accident and I managed to catch two medication errors where the nurses were giving me meds that my doctors had discontinued, and I was fucked up on opiates and suffering from a low hematocrit. Fortunately neither error would have killed me if I hadn't caught it, but still...
Did you RTFA? John Gilmore is a suspicious looking WHITE guy. And if my name appeared on TSA's no-fly list I'd be far more concerned with how it got there, then actually making my flight.
Yes fucktard, I did read the fucking article. Exactly what is so suspicious looking about John Gilmore? I guess if you're a bigot who thinks that anyone who doesn't wear a suit and look like George W. Bush is suspicious then he is by definition suspicious looking. The rest of us are smarter than that.
I personally have no problem with this. Given even the small chance of someone attempting to do something on a plane when i'm flying, i don't see a problem with them checking my or anyone elses ID and denying someone that flight based on a suspision. Of course one can never say "this is what i would do" until they are in that situation.
I'll bet that if your name got put on the No-Fly list that you'd start singing a different tune PDQ.
This was a no brainer. The airline industry is a private corporation, not a federally run operation. (Yes, they are regulated by the FAA, a governmental agency). He didn't have to travel by air. It is like driving a car. It is not a right but a privledge. Travel by airline is not federal transportation, it's just more convienent.
So let's say I set up Anonymity Air, we dispense with all of the fol-de-rol of checking IDs (which has little or nothing to do with safety and is actually the airlines way of making sure you didn't sell your ticket to someone else). We insure the safety of our passengers by having rigorous positive bag matching (if you don't get on the plane then neither do your bags, something we still don't have four years after 9/11) and by having a couple of armed guards in a compartment between the passengers and the cockpit, can I still operate? Well no I can't, you see the FAA won't let me operate an airline unless I comply with their stupid ID checking regulations, which they won't let you or I see because they're sooper dooper top seekrit or some such nonsense. So at this point the federal government is restricting your rights. The airline is not a totally free private actor in a free market.
Oh, and I'm willing to bet that you're white because white people don't have a problem with having suspicious looking brown people refused passage on a flight. I'm sure though that if someone put your name on the TSA's no-fly list that you'd be singing a different tune very, very quickly.
Whenever I build a new system I check the BIOS and if there is an option for disabling BIOS updates I select it. I figure that BIOS updates are few and far between and that if I need to install one that I can go in and change this setting, install the update, and then disable it again. Is this really providing me with any protection or is it just a fantasy?
At $15 each, you could buy 285 DVDs. I can guarantee that when you pay for entertainment you're a lot more choosy about what you watch. It reminds me of software pirates who spend so much time and energy collecting software (or porn fanatics, too, I guess) but never actually enjoy what they've collected.
Actually you can get DVDs for less if you're willing to wait until Hollywood Video clears their shelves of new titles. The Hollywood Video by my house regularly sells used DVDs 3 for $25, you might have to wait three months after it comes out on DVD to have your own copy of "Batman Begins" but hey, you can use the money you saved to purchase one of the new Sony 400 disc DVD changers with DVI output.
Everyone who brings up the spectre of Chernobyl (bad reactor design coupled with massive incompetence causes accident) or Three Mile Island (meltdown happens, containment structure does its job) as a reason for not further developing nuclear power must also be intellectually honest and then advocate the cessation of commercial air travel because of what happened on 9/11. No. I don't want to hear any arguments about how 9/11 couldn't happen again because of better security and because the passengers would probably overpower any future hi-jackers. No, that will be completely unacceptable and will be countered with pictures of the WTC collapsing and people jumping off of the WTC so they wouldn't burn to death.
That's completely ridiculous of course and so are most of the arguments against developing nuclear power it's interesting to note that more people were killed on 9/11 than at Chernobyl and unlike the Chernobyl figures, which have been spun into fantasy by anti-nuclear environmental groups we can actually say that around 3000 people died on 9/11 because we found dead bodies or pieces thereof unlike Chernobyl where most of the body counts are the result of statistical extrapolations. But enviros haven't called for a cessation of air travel, probably because so many of them are rich and white and like to fly to places like Costa Rica for their vacations.
Just tried it.... you piece of crap, I was stuck in the elevetor for 30 mins.
Good thing you posted as AC, otherwise Frank Forchione would be sending the cops after you and you'd probably wind up in one of those "pound me in the ass" penitentiaries.
1) You will all die without a patent system. I'm not sure I'd have even been able to use pig insulin, let alone human from recombinant source insulin, without the patent regime. Who exactly is going to spend billions on cancer research if they have no market share following their discovery of the cure?
Bullshit! There are plenty of counter examples to this, the Salk polio vaccine being a fairly huge one. The funding for the polio vaccine was raised by individuals who wanted to eradicate polio, not by a bunch of VCs who were looking to make a buck by cashing in on a patent portfolio. Also given the way drug companies work they're not going to be interested in finding a cure for cancer because the definition of a cure is that once you take it you're done with it. Drug companies want to find cancer treatments that they can continue to charge you for so they can guarantee a revenue stream.
You could try a gas turbine, but, again, diesel fuel isn't designed for that; it will ignite when you don't want it to, and not ignite when you need it to. Go with kerosene.
Gas turbines are pretty rugged, when I was in the army we fueled our M1 Abrams tanks
with the same DF2 that we filled our HEMTTs (Damnation Alley trucks) and HMMWVs (Hummers) with. The gas turbine on the M1 is multi-fuel capable, the only caveat being that you can't use the smoke generators with anything other than diesel fuel or bunker oil as it will cause an explosion.
For the Nth time: in response to all the inevitable "far cheaper than NASA" posts; this is not an orbital launch - it just goes up to the edge of space, then straight down again. And getting into orbit isn't just going that "little bit extra"; a spacecraft in low earth orbit has about 15 times the potential + kinetic energy of a spacecraft that is at the same height but is just at the top of a vertical up/down loop.
For the Nth time: in response to all the inevitable "NASA goes to orbit this is
just sub-orbital" posts; NASA's manned spaceflight division is a stupid, incompetent,
completely fucked up bureaucracy that if you gave them $225 million to build a launch facility would get as far as clearing a dirt parking lot and putting up three portapotties before they ran out of money. Remember, we're talking about an agency that stuck two fully functional Saturn V boosters out in the sun and rain and let them rot. We're talking about an agency that let Skylab fall out of the sky. We're talking about an agency that built three flight qualified Skylab space stations and let two of them rot in museums. We're talking about an agency that just spent two billion dollars trying to make the Shuttle safe from chunks of falling foam and still failed. We're talking about an agency that gave us ISS.
NASA's manned spaceflight division hasn't done anything worth a shit since 1975.
brand name servers is to vary the maintenance contracts. I have an Oracle production, test and development environment. The production environment gets gold service, even though it's a RAC
cluster because if something breaks I want it fixed now! The development and test environments have next business day. If we lose a whole RAC node in test we have to wait at the most three days (box goes down on Friday before a three day weekend) before we get it fixed, which we can live with. Going to NBD from gold service on Dells saves you about $1,500 per system, which makes up for part of the cost difference between a Dell and a white box server and I have the peace of mind of knowing that I have the same hardware across my environment so that rolling something from the test environment to the production environment will just work because it's the same hardware.
that way I could pimp the site out to various companies and get free stuff from them like Taco has done here. What's next? A review of the laser zit removal service that Taco uses? A review of Taco's favorite hand cream for wanking to porn in front of his laptop? Man, the possibilities are endless.
Uh I dunno, because they work really well, because they're the company that makes the sensors in Nikon and Pentax's gear.
Canon knows optics. Canon makes awesome cameras. Try a Powershot or a Rebel, absolutely blows away everything on the market.
The Digital Rebel? Nice try, it's a light-weight, cheaply built piece of crap. I had a Pentax K-1000 (the old Japanese model, not the later, unfortunate, Chinese built ones) that's more solidly put together than the Digital Rebel. And for the price of the EOS 20D I'd rather buy a Nikon so I have a broader selection of lenses.
and the anti-Microsoft meme has penetrated to the core of my being to such an extent that I read that headline as "Microsoft Launches Anti-Public Virus Beta".
How long can the suck factor on /.
on
The Demise of IP?
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· Score: 1
continue it's dizzying rate of increase? We have the Roland P. eyeball bait stories, we have the crap that Timothy posts, we have the countless duplicate stories, we have incredibly fucking stupid "Ask Slashdot" posts that could have been answered in five minutes of judicious Googling, we have incredibly stupid articles on the exciting new concept of the "type manager" (which is anything but
exciting and new) and now we get CNET filler stories where they interview paid shills for Microsoft. Suck factor 9 into the future/. editors! To suckfinity and beyond!
Slashdot Mirror
One of the reasons Vista won't suck is because Microsoft is moving a bunch of stuff out of the kernel and into user space. OK, 10 years ago when Microsoft shipped NT 4.0 they put GDI in the kernel to increase performance, which was a terrible idea as the performance increase this gave was more than offset by stability problems. If Microsoft had been smart they would have kept the kernel as small as possible and waited a couple of years for hardware speeds to increase, as they inevitably did. So basically one of the biggest reasons Vista "won't suck" is because Microsoft has finally decided to undo mistakes they made 10 years ago. Color me less than impressed.
Apparently, what is going to happen is Batman and Superman are going to start franchises. You pay up and receive your starter kit, (lycra, tights and underpants) and you can be the fully licensed(TM) Batman(R) or Superman(C) in your local franchising area.
Batman(R) and Superman(C) look forward to working with you to unleash your mutual synergy and craft moneymaking opporutnities! All this requires is one low, low monthly fee. Order in the next ten minutes and receive your complentary DVD of Bruce Wayne's motiviational seminar!
Wow, that's almost an obSimpson's reference to the Homie the Clown episode. And of course it's even more appropriate when you consider that in the episode Krusty lights a cigarette with a burning copy of Action Comics #1. OK, I'm officially pathetic for being able to recall all of that off of the top of my head.
These writers seem to have access to some really heavy drugs and I'd like to buy some.
Or maybe Cringely and Dvorak are willing to share.
Think about this though, do you really want to take the kind of drugs that make Cringely and Dvorak write such utter crap? What would they do to your brain? It's obvious they haven't done any good things for Dvorak and Cringely.
NASA's decisions in the 1970s on the Shuttle made short term budgetary sense but were catastrophic in the long term. The SRBs were an unproven technology that was used not because it made good engineering sense, Von Braun was appalled by the idea of launching a manned vehicle with solid boosters, but because NASA was too cheap to invest money into developing a completely liquid fueled booster for the Shuttle. NASA was facing budget cuts in the 1970s after Apollo and NASA management made the decision to lie to Congress and the Air Force about the capabilities of the Shuttle and about how much money was necessary to fly it. Rather than go to Congress and say "Hey guys, if you want us to do this right it's going to cost X dollars" NASA management lowballed their estimates, missed all of them anyways and ended up with a vehicle that has accomplished nothing significant in the last 25 years that could not have been done with Saturn IBs and Apollo capsules.
As far as the tile system goes not every new technology works out as well as intended. However that's another stupid argument that's totally irrelevant here. NASA will save a few bucks in the short term by using hypergolic fuels in those tried and true tested motors. On the other hand the long term costs of supporting hypergolic fuels will dwarf any savings in the present and will lock our efforts into using toxic fuels and 1950s engine technology. NASA will also end up with a system which is not sustainable or scalable. Yeah, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is a good rule of thumb but it has to be balanced with questions of long-term sustainability and scalability. I don't see that NASA is interested in any of that, they don't care about doing it right as long as they keep getting paid. If they did they'd go to Congress and say "The Shuttle and ISS are worthless wastes of money, let's use that funding for developing new vehicles that will actually allow us to do some exploration of some locale other than very low earth orbit."
http://www.space.com/adastra/adastra_tumlinson_060 130.html
At this point I would rather save money by ending NASA's manned space program instead of continuing to piss money down ratholes such as the Shuttle, ISS and now the Crude Exploration Vehicle all of which are just ways for NASA to hand money to large aerospace companies so that they can pad their bottom lines and continue to bribe congressmen.
Blaming SGI's troubles on the Itanium is ridiculous. SGI was heading downwards long before they decided to build the Altix line. In the early to mid 90s SGI had a great, high margin business selling lots and lots of systems for people who wanted to do CGI and visualization. This was very sexy and got SGI a featured role in Jurassic Park and everyone liked their funky, multi-colored workstations.
SGI lost out in the late 90s because the company was focussed on graphics and they completely missed the e-commerce boom. Graphics are nice, but was anyone purchasing SGIs to run their Oracle databases, or for web servers, or for anything other than graphics? No, SGI was never a player in the e-commerce sphere and Apple, Microsoft and Linux systems eroded their high margin workstation business with cheaper machines that ran more accessible operating systems and which had a greater variety of applications.
I hope that SGI can get their shit together and keep going in the much smaller supercomputing market. I have an Altix and it's a nice system, one of the best engineered I've ever seen, and the SGI folks I've dealt with have been uniformly excellent and my Altix running Linux is much nicer than the Origin 3000 running Irix (Irix sux!) it replaced. But time will tell.
So, BFD, you've made a statement which sounds profound but which means nothing. OK, risk = frequency * severity, I'll buy that. So let's look at each hospital and the procedures they do and evaluate the outcomes. It wouldn't be at all difficult to anonymize this data so that it could be published. So that if you looked at two hospitals, A and B, you could see that if you were a white male 55 to 65 years old with no significant complications your risk of dying during coronary bypass might be 10 percent at hospital A and 20 percent at hospital B. At this point the prospective patient can say, "Hmmm, looks to me as if hospital B is kind of fucked up, maybe I should go to hospital A for my bypass.
The people who say that we need to do something about the lawyers to fix medicine have obviously never spent time in a hospital. I spent two months at a level 1 trauma center after a motorcycle accident and I managed to catch two medication errors where the nurses were giving me meds that my doctors had discontinued, and I was fucked up on opiates and suffering from a low hematocrit. Fortunately neither error would have killed me if I hadn't caught it, but still...
Yes fucktard, I did read the fucking article. Exactly what is so suspicious looking about John Gilmore? I guess if you're a bigot who thinks that anyone who doesn't wear a suit and look like George W. Bush is suspicious then he is by definition suspicious looking. The rest of us are smarter than that.
I'll bet that if your name got put on the No-Fly list that you'd start singing a different tune PDQ.
So let's say I set up Anonymity Air, we dispense with all of the fol-de-rol of checking IDs (which has little or nothing to do with safety and is actually the airlines way of making sure you didn't sell your ticket to someone else). We insure the safety of our passengers by having rigorous positive bag matching (if you don't get on the plane then neither do your bags, something we still don't have four years after 9/11) and by having a couple of armed guards in a compartment between the passengers and the cockpit, can I still operate? Well no I can't, you see the FAA won't let me operate an airline unless I comply with their stupid ID checking regulations, which they won't let you or I see because they're sooper dooper top seekrit or some such nonsense. So at this point the federal government is restricting your rights. The airline is not a totally free private actor in a free market.
Oh, and I'm willing to bet that you're white because white people don't have a problem with having suspicious looking brown people refused passage on a flight. I'm sure though that if someone put your name on the TSA's no-fly list that you'd be singing a different tune very, very quickly.
Hey, why don't you practice what you preach and conserve energy by turning your computer off?
Actually you can get DVDs for less if you're willing to wait until Hollywood Video clears their shelves of new titles. The Hollywood Video by my house regularly sells used DVDs 3 for $25, you might have to wait three months after it comes out on DVD to have your own copy of "Batman Begins" but hey, you can use the money you saved to purchase one of the new Sony 400 disc DVD changers with DVI output.
That's completely ridiculous of course and so are most of the arguments against developing nuclear power it's interesting to note that more people were killed on 9/11 than at Chernobyl and unlike the Chernobyl figures, which have been spun into fantasy by anti-nuclear environmental groups we can actually say that around 3000 people died on 9/11 because we found dead bodies or pieces thereof unlike Chernobyl where most of the body counts are the result of statistical extrapolations. But enviros haven't called for a cessation of air travel, probably because so many of them are rich and white and like to fly to places like Costa Rica for their vacations.
Good thing you posted as AC, otherwise Frank Forchione would be sending the cops after you and you'd probably wind up in one of those "pound me in the ass" penitentiaries.
Bullshit! There are plenty of counter examples to this, the Salk polio vaccine being a fairly huge one. The funding for the polio vaccine was raised by individuals who wanted to eradicate polio, not by a bunch of VCs who were looking to make a buck by cashing in on a patent portfolio. Also given the way drug companies work they're not going to be interested in finding a cure for cancer because the definition of a cure is that once you take it you're done with it. Drug companies want to find cancer treatments that they can continue to charge you for so they can guarantee a revenue stream.
Gas turbines are pretty rugged, when I was in the army we fueled our M1 Abrams tanks with the same DF2 that we filled our HEMTTs (Damnation Alley trucks) and HMMWVs (Hummers) with. The gas turbine on the M1 is multi-fuel capable, the only caveat being that you can't use the smoke generators with anything other than diesel fuel or bunker oil as it will cause an explosion.
For the Nth time: in response to all the inevitable "NASA goes to orbit this is just sub-orbital" posts; NASA's manned spaceflight division is a stupid, incompetent, completely fucked up bureaucracy that if you gave them $225 million to build a launch facility would get as far as clearing a dirt parking lot and putting up three portapotties before they ran out of money. Remember, we're talking about an agency that stuck two fully functional Saturn V boosters out in the sun and rain and let them rot. We're talking about an agency that let Skylab fall out of the sky. We're talking about an agency that built three flight qualified Skylab space stations and let two of them rot in museums. We're talking about an agency that just spent two billion dollars trying to make the Shuttle safe from chunks of falling foam and still failed. We're talking about an agency that gave us ISS.
NASA's manned spaceflight division hasn't done anything worth a shit since 1975.
brand name servers is to vary the maintenance contracts. I have an Oracle production, test and development environment. The production environment gets gold service, even though it's a RAC cluster because if something breaks I want it fixed now! The development and test environments have next business day. If we lose a whole RAC node in test we have to wait at the most three days (box goes down on Friday before a three day weekend) before we get it fixed, which we can live with. Going to NBD from gold service on Dells saves you about $1,500 per system, which makes up for part of the cost difference between a Dell and a white box server and I have the peace of mind of knowing that I have the same hardware across my environment so that rolling something from the test environment to the production environment will just work because it's the same hardware.
Uh I dunno, because they work really well, because they're the company that makes the sensors in Nikon and Pentax's gear.
Canon knows optics. Canon makes awesome cameras. Try a Powershot or a Rebel, absolutely blows away everything on the market.
The Digital Rebel? Nice try, it's a light-weight, cheaply built piece of crap. I had a Pentax K-1000 (the old Japanese model, not the later, unfortunate, Chinese built ones) that's more solidly put together than the Digital Rebel. And for the price of the EOS 20D I'd rather buy a Nikon so I have a broader selection of lenses.