> The movie has grossed $365M. That's not net. > Given the screwy way Hollywood plays with the > numbers, we may never know the true net.
If the government *really* let me report my net income instead of my (admittedly "adjusted") gross income, they'd be paying me money each year.
Gross income *is* what's important. It's how much money the film made. How much happens to have been pissed away by the filmmakers is less relevant, and using the net as a meter doesn't help to discourage skyrocketing expenditures.
> Phone number storage? I have that on my mobile phone anyways.
Imho, it's a bit more convenient when you can link phone numbers not just with names but with other pertinent details of the person. And it's nice to be able to give one person multiple phone numbers without having to input the person multiple times, though maybe the regular phones of today do that.
> Note taking? Pen and paper seem to have better input capabilities and work faster.
Hah! I'm tons faster on my pdas with note taking than I am with pen and paper. Granted, I'm using integrated thumbboards and not graffiti, but there you are.
Interestingly enough, back when I was using the Handspring Visor Prism and HandEra 330 PDAs, I found that I could take notes without actually looking at the handheld. This proved useful at times.
> Email, I'm still back to the phone.
Email on regular phones suck, when they exist at all. You're insulting yourself by implying that there's any contest here. Open up Eudora and compare its features to your phone's email client, and then get back to me.
> I suppose a Handspring Treo could make my life easier having more functionality > than a normal phone, but I have a tendancy to break things that are on my > body, glasses, bones, pagers, lesser phones (I carry a durable one) I couldn't > imagine trying to keep something as expensive as a PDA with me all the time.
That is a good reason, and I support you there. I also have a tendency to break stuff accidentally. Heck, I have a Treo and I accidentally fell asleep while reading usenet the other day. It woke me up a few hours later with a waaaaaailing sound to let me know that I was sleeping *on it*. Luckily, the full force of my head didn't break it, though I did have to reset it order to stop it from crying.
> Does anyone else share this same view. I'll admit that I find the > Sharp Zarus somewhat appealing, for one thing it has a mini keyboard, > and for another it runs Linux (maybe I would install a palm emulator > on it), but I still can't seem to justify that eaither.
Meh, the Palm emulation isn't so hot. On the 206MHz model, at least, it's slower than a 33MHz Palm in emulated app. Granted, I had my Z modded so that it was running stuff from flash memory instead of normal DRAM, so it might be faster on a normal device.
> With notebooks becoming more PDA like, and PDAs becoming more notebook like, > they're bound to meet in the middle. I would say something like a mini > notebook, like the ones that have the Transmetta processors, or a Treo which > would merge a device I already carry anyways are the only way I could justify adding computing power to my normal walk around aresonal. > I'll leave PDAs in my mental CEO toys catagory.
Just to let you know: One of the things that make PDAs attractive is that they give you most of the functionality of notebooks but (A) are more mobile and (B) cost $300 instead of $800. A savings of $500 is really, really necessary for unbelievably poor programmers/webmasters/techies.
> try to navigate the menus at the PGA Tour website in Opera 7 and in > another browser such as Mozilla or IE. Opera is so slow it's nearly unusable.
I'm using Opera 7.10 for Win2k. The speed difference between it and Mozilla 1.3 are negligable, if there is one at all. IE5 had some broken images and was slower than both, but that latter point was probably due to it wasting time on a popup ad.
> Actually in IE if you hold down the shift key, > the scroll-wheel becomes a back-forward wheel, > which is all I used the gestures for when I used > Opera. Although they were cool, I have to admit.
Using two hands defeats the purpose and concept of mouse gestures. They're for when you are unable or unwilling to reach the keyboard for every function you need to do. If you have to reach for the shift key *and* the mouse in order to go back and forward, why aren't you just using one hand to hit ALT+Left and ALT+Right instead?
If you can't do a function with only the mouse, then it's not a mouse gesture. Using the keyboard and the mouse together to perform a function is not a mouse gesture. In Opera and Mozilla, the Back function is done either by holding the Right mouse button, moving to the left and releasing the Right mouse button or by holding the Right mouse button and tapping the left mouse button. It's a mouse gesture, not a mouse-and-keyboard gesture.
Still, you are perfectly welcome to be uninterested in mouse gestures. In my opinion, they're a great feature for swapping back and forth between pages and windows a lot faster than I would normally be doing (it's a lot faster to practically subconsciously jerk a mouse around than it is if you need to look at the keyboard and find the keys before performing the action or if you need to move the mouse across the screen before getting to the tiny button that performs the action).
Here are the functions, off the top of my head, that made me buy Opera (and, mind you, after commute costs and taxes, my salary is probably well under $15k, so I'm not exactly in the upper class):
* In certain websites that are made to emulate presentation slides (for instance, online documentation, which has "Back", "Up", and "Next" links at the top or bottom of each page), and in various message boards, web search engines, etc., the "Fast Forward" feature automagically lets me go to the next "slide" by hitting ALT+Right (if I have nothing in my "future" history), tapping the Spacebar or doing a forward mouse gesture. Navigation through the message forum at aceshardware.com, one of my favourite technical news sites, is made substantially easier due to this feature.
* MDI (or "tabbed browsing", as the younger set like to call it) suits my "power user" needs, as I usually have in excess of thirty web pages open at any given time. If I couldn't give the browser control of the document handling, then my taskbar would be inundated with tons of entries and it'd be very difficult to select between active pages. Most people don't need this, but it's flat out the primary reason why I can't adopt something like Internet Explorer (there are third-party add-ons, like "Crazy Browser", that give similar functionality, but they're a bit slothy for my tastes).
* The context menu and hotkeys make it a little easier to get info/source/etc on either whole pages or individual frames
* Skinning is instantaneous in Opera 7. I took the opportunity to play around a lot, and I found that I really like the "BeOS" skin, even though I've never touched that old operating system.
* I frequently use the page zooming feature when my eyes are bugging me, so that both text, straight images, and images put together to look like text are more easily readable. I have very good vision in general, but I also seldom sleep, so I get periods where I really need a zoomed-in view, and the limited, text-only zooming in IE and Mozilla don't fit the bill there.
* SHIFT+arrowkey increases my speed and enhances my laziness. If I happen to not have the mouse in my hand, I shouldn't *need* to grab it in order to follow a link. Using the SHIFT key, I can often bypass that need and get to my links faster.
* For a web developer like me, there are a few useful sidebad applets (like "HTMLSpecial Characters" and "TripleColors") that I can use to reference what my sieve-like memory often drops.
> Itanium is a very new architecture. It has the potential for > kicking i386 chips in the butt once it has a chance to grow up.
Could you please detail what you think the benefits are that place IPF above x86? I do agree there are are such benefits, but there seem to be some downsides.
For example, my conversations with Intel engineers lead me to believe that IPF's VLIW architecture is designed in a way that frowns upon the use of OOE (out of order execution) and similar cpu-level optimizations. One of the implicit problems here is that cpu-level (microarchitectural) optimizations have shown to transcend differences between instruction set architectures. Heck, even in the Itanium, the performance benefits shown do not appear to have much to do with the ISA. Instead, the high performance of the processor in certain areas is largely due to it having a bloody load of extra functional units, a feature that you can add to any modern ISA, even x86. Can you with certainty say that an x86 chip with eight flat register floating-point pipes (yay, you can do that now in x86!) and five megabytes of on-die cache would not outperform the Itanium II in floating-point applications?
What does the Itanium have, save for absolutely top-notch compiler writers and the rather interesting but seemingly wasteful feature known as predication?
> The last Linux UI innovation I can recall is > themeability - and I am still not sure whether > that was a good thing or a bad thing.
I dunno:
* I think that the arrangement of the program links (in the KDE and GNOME equivalents to win32's "Start Menu") is the greatest innovation in the GUI world for the last decade or so.
* The ability to embed applets into the bars is rather nice, and support for multiple bars is cool.
* The fact that you have the option of doing most tasks in MDI applications is kinda nice. I have to hunt and beg for MDI apps on win32, and while I've gotten most of the way there -- I have MDI capacity for word processing, spreadsheets (though I have to use a clunky "Window" menu there), usenet, http, irc, email and text editing -- I still can't find a decent terminal/console program that works with an MDI.
* having almost every program's executable in the path is a really nice interface choice, though that's not a new one
* resource utilization is balanced at the user level, so that programs that really, really need it get temporary dominance of system resources. This may not seem useful on the interface level, but it sure changes how I operate my programs. In Win2k (when I had a USB CD Writer), I had to close almost all my applications to burn a CD without getting a buffer underrun. In Mandrake 9, when I told it to burn, the system slowed down other applications, but I still could have some really intense programs running in the background (heavy downloading, extraction of large compressed files, parity checking, and maybe a compile running at the same time). A good interface is one that doesn't require you to close ten apps when you need to use one.
For that matter, the system keeps some of those resources so that you can use the KDE interface (well, I'm just assuming that GNOME and others are similarly nice) while a program is locking up tons of cpu/memory/etc. Have you never had portions of the explorer shell white- or gray- out while a program's doing some heavy thinking? I have a similar problem in my Win2k's LiteStep shell, except that I use virtual desktops and can't change them while a program is lost in thought. I love being able to swap back and forth between desktops in KDE, regardless of the resource utilization of applications (granted, screen widget rewrites slow down, but it's got to be hit somewhere).
* Back to real interface stuff: In KDE, the system controls window behavior. In Win2k, the application controls window behavior. I can make *any* window automatically on-top in KDE with little more than a right-click. In Windows, the app has to support this capability unless you use program hacks.
* I can set any window to appear in all desktops simultaneously in KDE with a similar right-click action. My upper-right desktop is for web stuff and my lower-right desktop is for typing my mother's handwritten homework papers (she's RCIA). I set my movie player, cd writer and konsole windows to live in all desktops, so I can go back and forth between these tasks without having to think about it, but I always see the progress of my movie/burn/compile. I can do some of this stuff in LiteStep, but it involves editing configuration files to recognize window id names, and that's annoying.
There's lots of little interface things that annoy me in Win2k that I can fix in KDE. You can't decouple the system tray from the taskbar. Your options for changing the look of the system clock are limited, and you can't really decouple that from the system tray. You can't access the programs menu without going to the Start button (eg, you cant just pop it up at your current mouse position). You can't configure alternate menus for your desktop (for example, what if I want to pop up my control panel by SHIFT-MiddleClicking the desktop?). Most of these problems can be mitigated by using alternative shells (but you'll be laughed at by the Windows Elite as I have been), hardware-specific drivers (I thin
> TMNT hasn't been shown on TV in years. It kicked ass, though.:)
There's a new version of the show. It kicks ass more than its predecessor. The characters are less hokey (except Michaelangelo, but it's amusing, since the new show is painfully aware of how annoying his attempts at generating catchphrases are). Villains actually seem dangerous and not just embarrassingly humourous. I mean, Shredder was a bad-ass from episode one, and he didn't even need to put on his spiky suit until the end of episode ten. He's no longer this fat black guy who adopted Will Smith. He's a guy who beats the crap out of people (and I think that he killed one guy, but I'm not sure about that, and it might have been done offscreen, but still....).
It's not a binary situation. Instead of generic bad guys versus generic good guys, there are multiple groups of people with different agendas.
Some stuff isn't as cool. April is a bit duller than before. Casey's pretty cool. Splinter's an improvement, especially since he's shown as able to perform impressive ninja feats despite his aging body. And he doesn't know how to work cell phones. Heh. ^_^
There's a retro thing going on. He-Man is back, and it's arguably better than ever. There's a new Justice League, and while it's not as impressive as other recent DC shows like Batman and Superman, it is as far beyond the original JLA cartoon as a galaxy is far beyond a molecule (and not one of those bullshit condensates that get to be larger than they should be due to stupid quantum physics).
The new Transformers series couldn't suck any more if it tried, though.:(
> I remember, as a child of the late 80s, every saturday morning watching Ghost Busters, Teenage > Mutant Ninja Turtles, reruns of Transformers, Thundercats, even the old tapes of He-Man. It > seems rather depressing that kids these days are not exposed to such entertaining shows.
Um. Three of those five shows exist in new incarnations, and two of them are (imho) superior to the originals. Only "Transformers Armada" turned out to woefully inferior (oddly enough, in every possible way, including both thematically and technically) to its predecessors, most notably Transformers ("G1", as some call it) and Beast Wars (wait, that was the good one, right? Not Beast Machines?).
In addition, I have found "Jackie Chan Adventures" to be on par with "The Real Ghostbusters" in both quality and humour. And I must give token credit towards "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Centure". They don't always succeed with this show, but you can tell their hearts are in the right place, and they certainly make a concerted, honest effort. I mean, it doesn't get any cooler than a cartoon that starts off with Holmes fighting Moriarty at the Falls.:)
Other than that, it's lightweight. "Kim Possible" (minus the too-Britney theme song) and "Fairly Oddparents" have the quirky humour that can appeal to adults. There's some pirate/videogame show that doesn't hold my interest but doesn't seem to insult childrens' intellect (I think this one is a British import).
> Who would rather watch Pokemon and Hey Arnold than Transformers or Voltron?
You don't have to watch the most popular shows to be sated. I've never seen "Hey Arnold", and I prefer to simply filter out any Pokemon-type show (including "Fighting Foodons", "Kirby" and "Yu Gi Oh", though the latter does seem to have some interest among the more mature anime-oriented folk, so maybe I'm missing something, or maybe it's just the ex-Magic[tm] set).
> I truly believe that my saturday morning cartoon experience > shaped me in many ways, one of which being my love for artistic anime. > I wonder how the shows nowadays that kids watch will shape them?
The best shows of the last fifteen years were the ones that eschewed straightforward good versus evil plots. I just had the fortunate opportunity to watch the first four seasons of X-Men, and do you know what I was shocked to find? Magneto wasn't a villain. The guy who appears in the opening sequence of the show every week clashing with Professor X, the guy who was jailed for several life sentences in the recent live-action movie series... this guy wasn't a bad guy. He was a criminal, yeah. He fought for ideals which would be considered illegal in our culture, yeah. But he was only a villainous character in the very first story (the two parter premiere of the show), and even then the conflict was framed inside the philosophical differences between him and his former friend, Xavier. Instead of having the bad guy laughing malevolently while throwing fireballs/forceblasts/missiles at the good guy, we have these two guys talking about whether or not segregation is an appropriate solution to the problem of racial conflict. I mean, holy fuck. He-Man wouldn't teach me this, save for giving me a generic "most ugly people are evil, but sometimes ugly people can be heroes" message. And, hell, Magneto and Professor X spend most of the first season walking around on a barbaric tropical region of Antarctica (don't ask) working together to survive. And then Magneto decided to build a giant asteroid with two hundred nuclear missiles (for purely defensive purposes) to foster a peaceful mutants-only community. If this were Transformers or Ninja Turtles, the ending would have shown Megatron or Shredder turning around and saying "Ha ha, you fools! This is merely part of my plan to take over THE WORLD!!". Here, though, we had a bit more depth. Sure, things went wrong and everything went to shit by the end, but it wasn'
> Seems to me the best thing for the machines to do is just kill > off all the humans and prevent any chance of revolution.
From what I've seen from Animatrix, the machines seem to be somewhat ethical in nature. They may not want to exterminate the Humans. They may, in fact, think that the Matrix is the only solution to getting Humans and machines to coexist peacefully.
And it is a good solution, especially if you think like Joey Pants.
> I believe a lot less people would care about wrestling if > a) They stopped calling it "Pro" wrestling. Those actors couldn't wrestle their way out of a wet paper bag. > b) They stopped with the hammy fucking acting. Again, none of them could act their way out of a wet paper bag. > c) People stopped trying to insist that it isn't all one big stage show. Its not real!
Maybe they shouldn't call Star Wars "Star" Wars. I mean, they don't really travel from Star to Star. They're just a bunch of bad actors pretending in front of blue screens. Hell, they're not even really having any wars at all! They have to shorten their name from "Star Wars" to "" before they can get any real respect.
And the characters should stop insisting that they're fighting against this Dark Empire. I mean, it's not real!
> >...this bug is not that serious, if you use IE correctly > What? You mean there's a correct way to use IE?!? Why didn't > you tell us earlier!? Oh, wait. You've just misunderstood > the meaning of the word 'correct'...;-)
The correct way to use IE is as a downloader for Mozilla/Opera/lynx/links/Konqueror4cygwin on newly installed Windows boxes.;P
> I remember when the mmx processor came. It hade this all new instructions > that would increase the preformance with over 400% or something:).. > But there where no applications so all the mmx instructions did was > increasing the cpu core -> making the cpu extra hot. Today we atleast > have some programs that utilize the mmx instructions. But > how long did it take? Now to the point. When they make a opteron > dist "Windows 64 and Redhat for example" do they only make sure that > all applications can run, like only patching the necesary or do they > redisign the whole os optimizing it for speed?
For the new instructions, you had to hard-code for the explicit parallelism. The additions in x86-64 include added registers, which would reduce the need for doing cache lookups. You don't have to specially code for this. So you can just recompile your app straight (this is reasonably trivial with the most important OSS).
I personally don't care all too much about the 64-bit registers (except that there are twice as many of them... that's kinda nice). There are other advantages under the hood that have nothing to do with needing recompilation. The integration of the memory controller and its subsequent reduction in memory latency has given a better performance boost than what I'd expected, given the benchmarks that have popped up. There are a few little microarchitectural things added on elsewhere. I haven't looked lately, but there are probably slightly larger buffers, capacity for more in-flight instructions, and I do recall that the instruction pipe was smoothed out somewhere around the decode area.
> The only real major deaths in Trek, that I can remember offhand anyway, > are Tasha Yar (killed in a stupid episode) and Jadzia Dax.
Although I'm not trying to refute your statement, I just want to briefly gripe about Voyager: They killed off two particular characters. These characters weren't main characters, but they were the only characters in the entire show that I considered even remotely interesting. Those were Suder (a recurring character with leanings toward sociopathy -- he could have been a truly Great character, but they weened him a little and then killed him off) and Tuvix (a one-shot deal, but he was the central character to that one really good episode of Voyager).
Not "First Contact". He was talking about the episode where the members are androgynous (they have no gender) and you are considered mentally ill if you develop a gender. One of the members of that planet's delegation to the Enterprise fell for Riker and decided to become a female.
In the very non-Trek style ending of this episode, that character was "reconditioned" back to understanding that genders were bad. Riker was forced to accept the loss and move on.
A lot of people hate this episode, but I think that it has a fantastic ending.
Anyway, you were thinking about the episode where Riker is spying on a pre-warp culture and gets injured and taken to a hospital where it's discovered that his body chemistry differs from the locals'. He eventually has sex with Frasier's wife in order to attempt an escape. Coincidentally, this episode *also* has a non-Trek style ending, where the leader of that world realizes that his world is unprepared to accept the existence of aliens (read: us) and the Enterprise cannot proceed with their plans with contacting this world's populace. They give up and move on.
I've been using the XCD format for several months now. I write my video files (usually TV episodes that I can't otherwise videotape) in Linux and can read them in both Linux and Win2k.
XCD basically allows you to use the Mode 2 (used by VCD), which allows you around 800MB on a "700MB" CD-R disc at the expense of physical error correction, but unlike other Mode 2 formats, you can write any movie format. VCD is limited to mpegs of a specific bitrate. I burn both SVCD files and Ogg files to XCD.
Setting it up was initially confusing (it wasn't complicated, but I simply couldn't find very good documentation), but now I only have to run 'mode2cdmaker -s -m sometvepisode.mpg', and I have a bin/cue/toc fileset that standard CD burning software can recognize (well, at least, K3b -- a Nero-like graphical burner for Linux/KDE -- can). The only problem I have with mode2cdmaker is that I can only use the -s parameter when creating an image with only a single movie file, but if I don't use the -s parameter, then the image has an empty-ish first track (three episodes of Futurama, for instance, would find themselves on tracks 2, 3 and 4). But that's a minor foible.
This is awesome. I am now addicted to downloading 750-805MB movies (not films -- I pay at the movies every week despite my disgust with the abundance of commercials before the films -- I mean, why am I paying twice as much as before if I'm no longer getting the benefit of watching the movie without commercials, which was one of the main benefits theatres had over television!) in svcd format and burning them to disk. I'm starting to run out of physical space in my room! *_*
Some relevant links:
http://xcd.sourceforge.net/ "XCD: The next home entertainment storage format"
http://www.divxland.org/eng/mode2cd.htm Mode 2 CD Guide
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/2881.cfm "XCD - 800 megs on a regular CD-R with any writer"
http://www.afterdawn.com/glossary/terms/xcd.cfm "Basically you can fit more data on single CD than using regular Mode 1, because Mode 2 doesn't use triple error correction like Mode 1 does."
You horrify me with your words. Every year, people become more and more lax with what they tolerate. I don't doubt that a year from now somebody will be saying "I guess I can live with hi-jak ads as long as they give control of your computer back to you within ten or fifteen seconds, but I can't live with ads that auto-extract money from your credit card". And then, the year after that, we'll get somebody who says something like "The auto-wallet ads are fine as long as they don't take more than a dime per ad from me, but I don't trust the new plan for the government to introduce an annual 'ad tax' to finance ad revenue companies". Flash forward a few more years and you'll get people who can live with the ad tax (probably because the lawmakers decided to name it the AMERICARULES bill), but they'll be complaining about those damned subdermal identity chips starting to use part of your brain for temporary ad storage.
Er.. That was odd. I think what I actually meant to say was this:
There are a whole wad of web browsers out there. I can only think of two offhand that fall prey to popup ads (Konqueror/Embedded for handheld devices and MSIE). There's nothing wrong with installing another browser to handle the sites that deliver the popups. I mean, can you honestly say that your hard drive doesn't have an extra ten megabytes to spare? Heck, even if you have some odd disease that forces you to only use that one desktop browser that allows popups through, why aren't you just installing a third party extension that gets rid of them? There's a whole bunch of options. You just need to *do* something.
> Try going from $1200/week to only $400/week without losing your home, > car, savings, and everything else you've worked your entire life for.
Wow. I... wow.
I know that you have to fund your family, but I've been working for something like a decade and a half (though only half of that has been in my chosen profession), and I'm feeling mildly put out that the unemployment rates being reported by posters seem to be in excess of my salary.
Damn. I mean, I wish you the best of luck in keeping your family safe and getting back on track, but... damn.
The Opteron die (the actually processor part, not the packaging around it, which includes the pins) is something like 193 or 194sqmm. Here's a quick list of other processor sizes:
As with the Opteron, these die size reflect the first introduction of a processor. In successive versions, process shrinks drastically decrease the area of the die. This is pretty normal.
As it is, the Opteron -- the *server* version of its family, is only slightly larger than AMD's previous generation's *consumer* level intro processor (the original Athlon). The consumer variant of the K8 core, the "regular joe" analogue of the Opteron, will likely have less L2 cache and fewer HyperTransport connections, so it's probably a given that this, the "Athlon 64" (I believe that this is what they're planning to call it), will start out at substantially less than the Athlon Classic's initial 184sqmm.
Granted, it'll have to, because Intel's consumer-level processors have die sizes under 150sqmm, and Intel is working with the benefit of larger production wafers.
> Uhm no. The geosynchronous satellites have a velocity of zero > (relative to me). What are you talking about?
That's because you're in an accelerating frame of reference.
Actually, relative to you, the satellites are going very fast. If they're 80000 miles up, and you're 4000 miles from the center of the planet, then in one day you travel 25000 miles, but the satellite travels half a million miles. From your perspective, the satellite travelled over 450000 miles. Remember that from your perspective, the satellites appear to be rotating around you, which means that relative to you, they're moving.
-JC
PS: Yeah, I know, 80000 miles isn't geosynch orbit. Lazy today....
> What's next? We shouldn't use power outlets, controller ports, > or component cable connections in games because the male and female > ends unintentionally demonstrate male penile dominance over the > female end's simulated vagina, and thus alienate female gamers?
You know, I always thought that electricity turned the male/female thing on its end. I mean, think about it. The "stimulated particles" go from the female (outlet) to the male (plug) in electrical systems. The female is, if you will, "giving it" to the male. It is the male who is being dominated, and the male will be damaged if the female is too strong for him (fucking women blew up my Zaurus last week, yeah, that's it!).
This is rather in opposition to the biological world.
> If i remember correctly you didn't learn that Samus was a girl until > several games later though. But i could be horribly, painfully worng[sic]
My memory alleges that you find out Samus's identity at the very, very end of the original Metroid.
-JC
PS: We're not even "several" games into the series yet! A quick and possibly horribly inaccurate web search suggeststo me that there has been only five Metroid games (seven if you count the two Smash Bros. fighters).
Slashdot Mirror
> The movie has grossed $365M. That's not net.
> Given the screwy way Hollywood plays with the
> numbers, we may never know the true net.
If the government *really* let me report my net income instead of my (admittedly "adjusted") gross income, they'd be paying me money each year.
Gross income *is* what's important. It's how much money the film made. How much happens to have been pissed away by the filmmakers is less relevant, and using the net as a meter doesn't help to discourage skyrocketing expenditures.
--
-JC
> Phone number storage? I have that on my mobile phone anyways.
Imho, it's a bit more convenient when you can link phone numbers not just with names but with other pertinent details of the person. And it's nice to be able to give one person multiple phone numbers without having to input the person multiple times, though maybe the regular phones of today do that.
> Note taking? Pen and paper seem to have better input capabilities and work faster.
Hah! I'm tons faster on my pdas with note taking than I am with pen and paper. Granted, I'm using integrated thumbboards and not graffiti, but there you are.
Interestingly enough, back when I was using the Handspring Visor Prism and HandEra 330 PDAs, I found that I could take notes without actually looking at the handheld. This proved useful at times.
> Email, I'm still back to the phone.
Email on regular phones suck, when they exist at all. You're insulting yourself by implying that there's any contest here. Open up Eudora and compare its features to your phone's email client, and then get back to me.
> I suppose a Handspring Treo could make my life easier having more functionality
> than a normal phone, but I have a tendancy to break things that are on my
> body, glasses, bones, pagers, lesser phones (I carry a durable one) I couldn't
> imagine trying to keep something as expensive as a PDA with me all the time.
That is a good reason, and I support you there. I also have a tendency to break stuff accidentally. Heck, I have a Treo and I accidentally fell asleep while reading usenet the other day. It woke me up a few hours later with a waaaaaailing sound to let me know that I was sleeping *on it*. Luckily, the full force of my head didn't break it, though I did have to reset it order to stop it from crying.
> Does anyone else share this same view. I'll admit that I find the
> Sharp Zarus somewhat appealing, for one thing it has a mini keyboard,
> and for another it runs Linux (maybe I would install a palm emulator
> on it), but I still can't seem to justify that eaither.
Meh, the Palm emulation isn't so hot. On the 206MHz model, at least, it's slower than a 33MHz Palm in emulated app. Granted, I had my Z modded so that it was running stuff from flash memory instead of normal DRAM, so it might be faster on a normal device.
> With notebooks becoming more PDA like, and PDAs becoming more notebook like,
> they're bound to meet in the middle. I would say something like a mini
> notebook, like the ones that have the Transmetta processors, or a Treo which
> would merge a device I already carry anyways are the only way I could
justify adding computing power to my normal walk around aresonal.
> I'll leave PDAs in my mental CEO toys catagory.
Just to let you know: One of the things that make PDAs attractive is that they give you most of the functionality of notebooks but (A) are more mobile and (B) cost $300 instead of $800. A savings of $500 is really, really necessary for unbelievably poor programmers/webmasters/techies.
-JC
> try to navigate the menus at the PGA Tour website in Opera 7 and in
> another browser such as Mozilla or IE. Opera is so slow it's nearly unusable.
I'm using Opera 7.10 for Win2k. The speed difference between it and Mozilla 1.3 are negligable, if there is one at all. IE5 had some broken images and was slower than both, but that latter point was probably due to it wasting time on a popup ad.
-JC
> So where does firebird fit in then? It's light and fast, but
;)
> it has almost all the features of the mozilla browser component.
I guess that's jove or joe.
-JC
> Actually in IE if you hold down the shift key,
> the scroll-wheel becomes a back-forward wheel,
> which is all I used the gestures for when I used
> Opera. Although they were cool, I have to admit.
Using two hands defeats the purpose and concept of mouse gestures. They're for when you are unable or unwilling to reach the keyboard for every function you need to do. If you have to reach for the shift key *and* the mouse in order to go back and forward, why aren't you just using one hand to hit ALT+Left and ALT+Right instead?
If you can't do a function with only the mouse, then it's not a mouse gesture. Using the keyboard and the mouse together to perform a function is not a mouse gesture. In Opera and Mozilla, the Back function is done either by holding the Right mouse button, moving to the left and releasing the Right mouse button or by holding the Right mouse button and tapping the left mouse button. It's a mouse gesture, not a mouse-and-keyboard gesture.
Still, you are perfectly welcome to be uninterested in mouse gestures. In my opinion, they're a great feature for swapping back and forth between pages and windows a lot faster than I would normally be doing (it's a lot faster to practically subconsciously jerk a mouse around than it is if you need to look at the keyboard and find the keys before performing the action or if you need to move the mouse across the screen before getting to the tiny button that performs the action).
Here are the functions, off the top of my head, that made me buy Opera (and, mind you, after commute costs and taxes, my salary is probably well under $15k, so I'm not exactly in the upper class):
* In certain websites that are made to emulate presentation slides (for instance, online documentation, which has "Back", "Up", and "Next" links at the top or bottom of each page), and in various message boards, web search engines, etc., the "Fast Forward" feature automagically lets me go to the next "slide" by hitting ALT+Right (if I have nothing in my "future" history), tapping the Spacebar or doing a forward mouse gesture. Navigation through the message forum at aceshardware.com, one of my favourite technical news sites, is made substantially easier due to this feature.
* MDI (or "tabbed browsing", as the younger set like to call it) suits my "power user" needs, as I usually have in excess of thirty web pages open at any given time. If I couldn't give the browser control of the document handling, then my taskbar would be inundated with tons of entries and it'd be very difficult to select between active pages. Most people don't need this, but it's flat out the primary reason why I can't adopt something like Internet Explorer (there are third-party add-ons, like "Crazy Browser", that give similar functionality, but they're a bit slothy for my tastes).
* The context menu and hotkeys make it a little easier to get info/source/etc on either whole pages or individual frames
* Skinning is instantaneous in Opera 7. I took the opportunity to play around a lot, and I found that I really like the "BeOS" skin, even though I've never touched that old operating system.
* I frequently use the page zooming feature when my eyes are bugging me, so that both text, straight images, and images put together to look like text are more easily readable. I have very good vision in general, but I also seldom sleep, so I get periods where I really need a zoomed-in view, and the limited, text-only zooming in IE and Mozilla don't fit the bill there.
* SHIFT+arrowkey increases my speed and enhances my laziness. If I happen to not have the mouse in my hand, I shouldn't *need* to grab it in order to follow a link. Using the SHIFT key, I can often bypass that need and get to my links faster.
* For a web developer like me, there are a few useful sidebad applets (like "HTMLSpecial Characters" and "TripleColors") that I can use to reference what my sieve-like memory often drops.
* The Links sidebar is usefu
> Itanium is a very new architecture. It has the potential for
> kicking i386 chips in the butt once it has a chance to grow up.
Could you please detail what you think the benefits are that place IPF above x86? I do agree there are are such benefits, but there seem to be some downsides.
For example, my conversations with Intel engineers lead me to believe that IPF's VLIW architecture is designed in a way that frowns upon the use of OOE (out of order execution) and similar cpu-level optimizations. One of the implicit problems here is that cpu-level (microarchitectural) optimizations have shown to transcend differences between instruction set architectures. Heck, even in the Itanium, the performance benefits shown do not appear to have much to do with the ISA. Instead, the high performance of the processor in certain areas is largely due to it having a bloody load of extra functional units, a feature that you can add to any modern ISA, even x86. Can you with certainty say that an x86 chip with eight flat register floating-point pipes (yay, you can do that now in x86!) and five megabytes of on-die cache would not outperform the Itanium II in floating-point applications?
What does the Itanium have, save for absolutely top-notch compiler writers and the rather interesting but seemingly wasteful feature known as predication?
-JC
> The last Linux UI innovation I can recall is
> themeability - and I am still not sure whether
> that was a good thing or a bad thing.
I dunno:
* I think that the arrangement of the program links (in the KDE and GNOME equivalents to win32's "Start Menu") is the greatest innovation in the GUI world for the last decade or so.
* The ability to embed applets into the bars is rather nice, and support for multiple bars is cool.
* The fact that you have the option of doing most tasks in MDI applications is kinda nice. I have to hunt and beg for MDI apps on win32, and while I've gotten most of the way there -- I have MDI capacity for word processing, spreadsheets (though I have to use a clunky "Window" menu there), usenet, http, irc, email and text editing -- I still can't find a decent terminal/console program that works with an MDI.
* having almost every program's executable in the path is a really nice interface choice, though that's not a new one
* resource utilization is balanced at the user level, so that programs that really, really need it get temporary dominance of system resources. This may not seem useful on the interface level, but it sure changes how I operate my programs. In Win2k (when I had a USB CD Writer), I had to close almost all my applications to burn a CD without getting a buffer underrun. In Mandrake 9, when I told it to burn, the system slowed down other applications, but I still could have some really intense programs running in the background (heavy downloading, extraction of large compressed files, parity checking, and maybe a compile running at the same time). A good interface is one that doesn't require you to close ten apps when you need to use one.
For that matter, the system keeps some of those resources so that you can use the KDE interface (well, I'm just assuming that GNOME and others are similarly nice) while a program is locking up tons of cpu/memory/etc. Have you never had portions of the explorer shell white- or gray- out while a program's doing some heavy thinking? I have a similar problem in my Win2k's LiteStep shell, except that I use virtual desktops and can't change them while a program is lost in thought. I love being able to swap back and forth between desktops in KDE, regardless of the resource utilization of applications (granted, screen widget rewrites slow down, but it's got to be hit somewhere).
* Back to real interface stuff: In KDE, the system controls window behavior. In Win2k, the application controls window behavior. I can make *any* window automatically on-top in KDE with little more than a right-click. In Windows, the app has to support this capability unless you use program hacks.
* I can set any window to appear in all desktops simultaneously in KDE with a similar right-click action. My upper-right desktop is for web stuff and my lower-right desktop is for typing my mother's handwritten homework papers (she's RCIA). I set my movie player, cd writer and konsole windows to live in all desktops, so I can go back and forth between these tasks without having to think about it, but I always see the progress of my movie/burn/compile. I can do some of this stuff in LiteStep, but it involves editing configuration files to recognize window id names, and that's annoying.
There's lots of little interface things that annoy me in Win2k that I can fix in KDE. You can't decouple the system tray from the taskbar. Your options for changing the look of the system clock are limited, and you can't really decouple that from the system tray. You can't access the programs menu without going to the Start button (eg, you cant just pop it up at your current mouse position). You can't configure alternate menus for your desktop (for example, what if I want to pop up my control panel by SHIFT-MiddleClicking the desktop?). Most of these problems can be mitigated by using alternative shells (but you'll be laughed at by the Windows Elite as I have been), hardware-specific drivers (I thin
> TMNT hasn't been shown on TV in years. It kicked ass, though. :)
:(
There's a new version of the show. It kicks ass more than its predecessor. The characters are less hokey (except Michaelangelo, but it's amusing, since the new show is painfully aware of how annoying his attempts at generating catchphrases are). Villains actually seem dangerous and not just embarrassingly humourous. I mean, Shredder was a bad-ass from episode one, and he didn't even need to put on his spiky suit until the end of episode ten. He's no longer this fat black guy who adopted Will Smith. He's a guy who beats the crap out of people (and I think that he killed one guy, but I'm not sure about that, and it might have been done offscreen, but still....).
It's not a binary situation. Instead of generic bad guys versus generic good guys, there are multiple groups of people with different agendas.
Some stuff isn't as cool. April is a bit duller than before. Casey's pretty cool. Splinter's an improvement, especially since he's shown as able to perform impressive ninja feats despite his aging body. And he doesn't know how to work cell phones. Heh. ^_^
There's a retro thing going on. He-Man is back, and it's arguably better than ever. There's a new Justice League, and while it's not as impressive as other recent DC shows like Batman and Superman, it is as far beyond the original JLA cartoon as a galaxy is far beyond a molecule (and not one of those bullshit condensates that get to be larger than they should be due to stupid quantum physics).
The new Transformers series couldn't suck any more if it tried, though.
-JC
> I remember, as a child of the late 80s, every saturday morning watching Ghost Busters, Teenage
:)
... this guy wasn't a bad guy. He was a criminal, yeah. He fought for ideals which would be considered illegal in our culture, yeah. But he was only a villainous character in the very first story (the two parter premiere of the show), and even then the conflict was framed inside the philosophical differences between him and his former friend, Xavier. Instead of having the bad guy laughing malevolently while throwing fireballs/forceblasts/missiles at the good guy, we have these two guys talking about whether or not segregation is an appropriate solution to the problem of racial conflict. I mean, holy fuck. He-Man wouldn't teach me this, save for giving me a generic "most ugly people are evil, but sometimes ugly people can be heroes" message. And, hell, Magneto and Professor X spend most of the first season walking around on a barbaric tropical region of Antarctica (don't ask) working together to survive. And then Magneto decided to build a giant asteroid with two hundred nuclear missiles (for purely defensive purposes) to foster a peaceful mutants-only community. If this were Transformers or Ninja Turtles, the ending would have shown Megatron or Shredder turning around and saying "Ha ha, you fools! This is merely part of my plan to take over THE WORLD!!". Here, though, we had a bit more depth. Sure, things went wrong and everything went to shit by the end, but it wasn'
> Mutant Ninja Turtles, reruns of Transformers, Thundercats, even the old tapes of He-Man. It
> seems rather depressing that kids these days are not exposed to such entertaining shows.
Um. Three of those five shows exist in new incarnations, and two of them are (imho) superior to the originals. Only "Transformers Armada" turned out to woefully inferior (oddly enough, in every possible way, including both thematically and technically) to its predecessors, most notably Transformers ("G1", as some call it) and Beast Wars (wait, that was the good one, right? Not Beast Machines?).
In addition, I have found "Jackie Chan Adventures" to be on par with "The Real Ghostbusters" in both quality and humour. And I must give token credit towards "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Centure". They don't always succeed with this show, but you can tell their hearts are in the right place, and they certainly make a concerted, honest effort. I mean, it doesn't get any cooler than a cartoon that starts off with Holmes fighting Moriarty at the Falls.
Other than that, it's lightweight. "Kim Possible" (minus the too-Britney theme song) and "Fairly Oddparents" have the quirky humour that can appeal to adults. There's some pirate/videogame show that doesn't hold my interest but doesn't seem to insult childrens' intellect (I think this one is a British import).
> Who would rather watch Pokemon and Hey Arnold than Transformers or Voltron?
You don't have to watch the most popular shows to be sated. I've never seen "Hey Arnold", and I prefer to simply filter out any Pokemon-type show (including "Fighting Foodons", "Kirby" and "Yu Gi Oh", though the latter does seem to have some interest among the more mature anime-oriented folk, so maybe I'm missing something, or maybe it's just the ex-Magic[tm] set).
> I truly believe that my saturday morning cartoon experience
> shaped me in many ways, one of which being my love for artistic anime.
> I wonder how the shows nowadays that kids watch will shape them?
The best shows of the last fifteen years were the ones that eschewed straightforward good versus evil plots. I just had the fortunate opportunity to watch the first four seasons of X-Men, and do you know what I was shocked to find? Magneto wasn't a villain. The guy who appears in the opening sequence of the show every week clashing with Professor X, the guy who was jailed for several life sentences in the recent live-action movie series
> Seems to me the best thing for the machines to do is just kill
> off all the humans and prevent any chance of revolution.
From what I've seen from Animatrix, the machines seem to be somewhat ethical in nature. They may not want to exterminate the Humans. They may, in fact, think that the Matrix is the only solution to getting Humans and machines to coexist peacefully.
And it is a good solution, especially if you think like Joey Pants.
-JC
> I believe a lot less people would care about wrestling if
> a) They stopped calling it "Pro" wrestling. Those actors couldn't wrestle their way out of a wet paper bag.
> b) They stopped with the hammy fucking acting. Again, none of them could act their way out of a wet paper bag.
> c) People stopped trying to insist that it isn't all one big stage show. Its not real!
Maybe they shouldn't call Star Wars "Star" Wars. I mean, they don't really travel from Star to Star. They're just a bunch of bad actors pretending in front of blue screens. Hell, they're not even really having any wars at all! They have to shorten their name from "Star Wars" to "" before they can get any real respect.
And the characters should stop insisting that they're fighting against this Dark Empire. I mean, it's not real!
-JC
> > ...this bug is not that serious, if you use IE correctly ;-)
;P
> What? You mean there's a correct way to use IE?!? Why didn't
> you tell us earlier!? Oh, wait. You've just misunderstood
> the meaning of the word 'correct'...
The correct way to use IE is as a downloader for Mozilla/Opera/lynx/links/Konqueror4cygwin on newly installed Windows boxes.
-JC
> I remember when the mmx processor came. It hade this all new instructions :)..
> that would increase the preformance with over 400% or something
> But there where no applications so all the mmx instructions did was
> increasing the cpu core -> making the cpu extra hot. Today we atleast
> have some programs that utilize the mmx instructions. But
> how long did it take? Now to the point. When they make a opteron
> dist "Windows 64 and Redhat for example" do they only make sure that
> all applications can run, like only patching the necesary or do they
> redisign the whole os optimizing it for speed?
For the new instructions, you had to hard-code for the explicit parallelism. The additions in x86-64 include added registers, which would reduce the need for doing cache lookups. You don't have to specially code for this. So you can just recompile your app straight (this is reasonably trivial with the most important OSS).
I personally don't care all too much about the 64-bit registers (except that there are twice as many of them... that's kinda nice). There are other advantages under the hood that have nothing to do with needing recompilation. The integration of the memory controller and its subsequent reduction in memory latency has given a better performance boost than what I'd expected, given the benchmarks that have popped up. There are a few little microarchitectural things added on elsewhere. I haven't looked lately, but there are probably slightly larger buffers, capacity for more in-flight instructions, and I do recall that the instruction pipe was smoothed out somewhere around the decode area.
-JC
> The only real major deaths in Trek, that I can remember offhand anyway,
> are Tasha Yar (killed in a stupid episode) and Jadzia Dax.
Although I'm not trying to refute your statement, I just want to briefly gripe about Voyager: They killed off two particular characters. These characters weren't main characters, but they were the only characters in the entire show that I considered even remotely interesting. Those were Suder (a recurring character with leanings toward sociopathy -- he could have been a truly Great character, but they weened him a little and then killed him off) and Tuvix (a one-shot deal, but he was the central character to that one really good episode of Voyager).
-JC
> Riker fucked out of necessity
Not "First Contact". He was talking about the episode where the members are androgynous (they have no gender) and you are considered mentally ill if you develop a gender. One of the members of that planet's delegation to the Enterprise fell for Riker and decided to become a female.
In the very non-Trek style ending of this episode, that character was "reconditioned" back to understanding that genders were bad. Riker was forced to accept the loss and move on.
A lot of people hate this episode, but I think that it has a fantastic ending.
Anyway, you were thinking about the episode where Riker is spying on a pre-warp culture and gets injured and taken to a hospital where it's discovered that his body chemistry differs from the locals'. He eventually has sex with Frasier's wife in order to attempt an escape. Coincidentally, this episode *also* has a non-Trek style ending, where the leader of that world realizes that his world is unprepared to accept the existence of aliens (read: us) and the Enterprise cannot proceed with their plans with contacting this world's populace. They give up and move on.
-JC
I've been using the XCD format for several months now. I write my video files (usually TV episodes that I can't otherwise videotape) in Linux and can read them in both Linux and Win2k.
"XCD - 800 megs on a regular CD-R with any writer"
XCD basically allows you to use the Mode 2 (used by VCD), which allows you around 800MB on a "700MB" CD-R disc at the expense of physical error correction, but unlike other Mode 2 formats, you can write any movie format. VCD is limited to mpegs of a specific bitrate. I burn both SVCD files and Ogg files to XCD.
Setting it up was initially confusing (it wasn't complicated, but I simply couldn't find very good documentation), but now I only have to run 'mode2cdmaker -s -m sometvepisode.mpg', and I have a bin/cue/toc fileset that standard CD burning software can recognize (well, at least, K3b -- a Nero-like graphical burner for Linux/KDE -- can). The only problem I have with mode2cdmaker is that I can only use the -s parameter when creating an image with only a single movie file, but if I don't use the -s parameter, then the image has an empty-ish first track (three episodes of Futurama, for instance, would find themselves on tracks 2, 3 and 4). But that's a minor foible.
This is awesome. I am now addicted to downloading 750-805MB movies (not films -- I pay at the movies every week despite my disgust with the abundance of commercials before the films -- I mean, why am I paying twice as much as before if I'm no longer getting the benefit of watching the movie without commercials, which was one of the main benefits theatres had over television!) in svcd format and burning them to disk. I'm starting to run out of physical space in my room! *_*
Some relevant links:
http://xcd.sourceforge.net/
"XCD: The next home entertainment storage format"
http://www.divxland.org/eng/mode2cd.htm
Mode 2 CD Guide
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/2881.cfm
http://www.afterdawn.com/glossary/terms/xcd.cfm
"Basically you can fit more data on single CD than using regular Mode 1, because Mode 2 doesn't use triple error correction like Mode 1 does."
> but I guess I can live with pop-ups
You horrify me with your words. Every year, people become more and more lax with what they tolerate. I don't doubt that a year from now somebody will be saying "I guess I can live with hi-jak ads as long as they give control of your computer back to you within ten or fifteen seconds, but I can't live with ads that auto-extract money from your credit card". And then, the year after that, we'll get somebody who says something like "The auto-wallet ads are fine as long as they don't take more than a dime per ad from me, but I don't trust the new plan for the government to introduce an annual 'ad tax' to finance ad revenue companies". Flash forward a few more years and you'll get people who can live with the ad tax (probably because the lawmakers decided to name it the AMERICARULES bill), but they'll be complaining about those damned subdermal identity chips starting to use part of your brain for temporary ad storage.
Er.. That was odd. I think what I actually meant to say was this:
There are a whole wad of web browsers out there. I can only think of two offhand that fall prey to popup ads (Konqueror/Embedded for handheld devices and MSIE). There's nothing wrong with installing another browser to handle the sites that deliver the popups. I mean, can you honestly say that your hard drive doesn't have an extra ten megabytes to spare? Heck, even if you have some odd disease that forces you to only use that one desktop browser that allows popups through, why aren't you just installing a third party extension that gets rid of them? There's a whole bunch of options. You just need to *do* something.
-JC
> Try going from $1200/week to only $400/week without losing your home,
... wow.
... damn.
> car, savings, and everything else you've worked your entire life for.
Wow. I
I know that you have to fund your family, but I've been working for something like a decade and a half (though only half of that has been in my chosen profession), and I'm feeling mildly put out that the unemployment rates being reported by posters seem to be in excess of my salary.
Damn. I mean, I wish you the best of luck in keeping your family safe and getting back on track, but
-JC
The Opteron die (the actually processor part, not the packaging around it, which includes the pins) is something like 193 or 194sqmm. Here's a quick list of other processor sizes:
Athlon Classic: 184sqmm
"Willamette" Pentium 4: ~217sqmm
"Cascades" PIII Xeon: > 300sqmm
Pentium Pro: 306sqmm(?)
"McKinley" Itanium II: 421sqmm
Pentium Classic: 294sqmm
As with the Opteron, these die size reflect the first introduction of a processor. In successive versions, process shrinks drastically decrease the area of the die. This is pretty normal.
As it is, the Opteron -- the *server* version of its family, is only slightly larger than AMD's previous generation's *consumer* level intro processor (the original Athlon). The consumer variant of the K8 core, the "regular joe" analogue of the Opteron, will likely have less L2 cache and fewer HyperTransport connections, so it's probably a given that this, the "Athlon 64" (I believe that this is what they're planning to call it), will start out at substantially less than the Athlon Classic's initial 184sqmm.
Granted, it'll have to, because Intel's consumer-level processors have die sizes under 150sqmm, and Intel is working with the benefit of larger production wafers.
-JC
> Uhm no. The geosynchronous satellites have a velocity of zero
> (relative to me). What are you talking about?
That's because you're in an accelerating frame of reference.
Actually, relative to you, the satellites are going very fast. If they're 80000 miles up, and you're 4000 miles from the center of the planet, then in one day you travel 25000 miles, but the satellite travels half a million miles. From your perspective, the satellite travelled over 450000 miles. Remember that from your perspective, the satellites appear to be rotating around you, which means that relative to you, they're moving.
-JC
PS: Yeah, I know, 80000 miles isn't geosynch orbit. Lazy today....
> What's next? We shouldn't use power outlets, controller ports,
> or component cable connections in games because the male and female
> ends unintentionally demonstrate male penile dominance over the
> female end's simulated vagina, and thus alienate female gamers?
You know, I always thought that electricity turned the male/female thing on its end. I mean, think about it. The "stimulated particles" go from the female (outlet) to the male (plug) in electrical systems. The female is, if you will, "giving it" to the male. It is the male who is being dominated, and the male will be damaged if the female is too strong for him (fucking women blew up my Zaurus last week, yeah, that's it!).
This is rather in opposition to the biological world.
-JC
> If i remember correctly you didn't learn that Samus was a girl until
> several games later though. But i could be horribly, painfully worng[sic]
My memory alleges that you find out Samus's identity at the very, very end of the original Metroid.
-JC
PS: We're not even "several" games into the series yet! A quick and possibly horribly inaccurate web search suggests to me that there has been only five Metroid games (seven if you count the two Smash Bros. fighters).
Yeah. Real men play "A Quest For Herring", not that nerdy racing crap.
> > Microsoft Security products fit in perfectly,
> > I mean, it is science fiction isn't it?
>
> More like fantasy...
As an woefully underpaid system administrator and coder for nigh a decade, I can easily assert that the genre you're looking for is "horror".
-JC
(I still get that recurring nightmare of Freddy Gates telling IBM, "You've got the body, I've got the brains"...)
> Did you forget John
What about Bill? I mean, his company probably could have *bought* Iraq....