"Additionally, the Japanese appeared to be postponing invasion long enough to surrender to the Soviets, who were making steady progress accross China at this time,"
Against whom? Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Tokyo and stuck to it, ending it according to the terms of the treaty, with the proper warning and waiting the required period. The Soviet Union did not declare war against Japan until a few hours after the Nagasaki bomb.
"You've missed a word there, "American" lives. It killed around 140 thousand Japanese civilian lives."
You do realize that Japan at that point was training schoolgirls how to use spears, with the intent on using them against a perceived US landing, correct? Well, at least the ones that hadn't already thrown themselves off a cliff to avoid the ravages of the filthy gaijin invaders...
The Japanese military was more than willing to continue a conventional war to the last Japanese civillian. The atomic bombs saved Japanese lives through a show of force that left no room for an "honorable" death in defending a lost cause. There was no hope for forcing the US into at phyrric victory.
"War crimes" would require deliberately targeting civilians. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen for their military value (IIRC, Hiroshima was still pumping out munitions and Nagasaki was still an important port for the Imperial Navy). These certainly weren't the Dresden bombings.
"1) The US originally had many more targets on their list, including Kyoto, which has a large historical significance (the Heian period was a very peaceful time),"
The idea was brought up but, if I remember correctly, quickly abanonded by the Truman administration for the reasons you mention. If it was still on the list by the time Hiroshima was bombed, it was very far down the list. It had little military signifigance, unlike Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were still pumping out munitions.
"2) They issued an ultimatum, dropped the first bomb, and dropped the second bomb before the time was up."
However, the bombings weren't exactly simultaneous. Three days seem long enough to verify exactly what had happened to Hiroshima (it was obvious that the damage was done by a single catastrophic blast rather than a carpet-bombing campaign). And even after Nagasaki, it took six more days of waffling on the part of the Japanese government to get around to surrendering.
During those six days there was an attempted military coup aimed at preventing the emperor from surrendering, even after both bombs. Oh, and the Soviets declared war, and all this takes place months after the US submarine force set up a near-total blockade of the home islands, dooming Japan to slow starvation in any event.
Even after all this, when a sizable chunk of the Imperial Army was still willing to continue the war, why do you think the "same result" would have been acheived after just the first bomb?
"The bottom line of the FAA directive, states that "no measureable sonic boom overpressure" may reach the surface of the U.S. except within an authorized test area."
Unless you're a space shuttle. A landing shuttle will set off car alarms in New Orleans like clockwork.
Including a browser is one thing. "Integrating" it is something else. After an install, I use IE to go to mozilla.org, and that's it. Why should I be forced to hang on to IE and all the security vulnerabilities involved when I don't even use it?
Oh, wait, now I remember: because the integration routine is how they got out of a previous lawsuit. That's why I have to waste all that space on my HDD with an application that is redundant at best.
As soon as I saw this blurb, I figured out what the reason was, and TFA supported my conclusion:
The lack of interest from computer manufacturers for Windows XP N raises questions over the effectiveness of the EU's antitrust ruling, particularly the fact that Microsoft has been allowed to offer Windows XP N for the same price as the standard version of Windows XP.
While I'd probably still go for the N version just to get rid of security vulnerabilities involved in "integrating" WMP (get rid of Messenger and IE while you're at it!), most people will want to get everything they're paying for, and since they're paying for WMP in the price of XP whether they get it or not (as well as supporting the idea that WMP is "free as in beer"), they'll opt to get everything.
Perhaps one of the reasons 2000 had such a high adoption rate was because of how long it came out after NT 4.0. 98 had already come out (twice!), doing things that, for a "home" OS, their "professional" OS couldn't handle (like installing onto a partition bigger than 2 GB). Consider at the time of its release NT had 4 service packs out already (and now, after support has officially ended, 4.0 had a grand total of 6-and-change service packs, not counting the final security roll-up).
On the other hand, about the time Windows XP came out, I got my special "early adopter" MCSE Win2k card from Microsoft.
"Looking Forward" is right. My ATI video drivers work better when I use the flavor that requires the.NET framework, and yet I have to go download that and install the.NET framework from Microsoft's website and install it into XP SP2, just as I had to with 2k SP4.
At least from my vantage point, XP and 2k are identical when it comes to.NET: you have to download it and install it after the fact.
"So what you're saying is that you'd prefer an OS which turns off protection on n00bs by default, rather than allowing those who know what they're doing to configure more access appropriately?"
A valid argument generally, except Microsoft offers two flavors of Windows XP, one flavor for n00bs/mom and dad/whatever, and one that's targeted at "those who know what they're doing" (it practically uses those same words right on the XP Pro box).
There are a lot of things that XP has that makes me happy when it comes to supporting my parents' boxen, but when it comes to my machine I'd rather not have them on. And since they run Home while I shelled out the extra money to run Pro, I'd rather have a system that offloads some of those security concerns onto me rather than treat me the same way it treats a Home user out of the box.
XP Professional, while running the NT 5.1 code base, should IMO look a lot like Windows 2000 Professional after a default install, simply because it says "Professional" on the box. Heck, consider the way Windows 2003 Server looks like after an install; the Windows XP theme isn't even included, let alone selected.
I don't need hand-holding widgets telling me that my antivirus software "might" be out-of-date. Heck, when I first installed SP2 I had to download an update to F-Prot just so the damned thing would believe that yes, I do have antivirus software installed and it is running. (ZoneAlarm still doesn't believe that F-Prot is an antivirus program, but at least it doesn't bug me about this apparent lack.)
The people who buy Professional are supposed to be the people who care about things like performance and maintaining their own machine. Save the default MSN Explorer install for the Home version, I'm tempted to say that particular bit of software shoudln't even be on the XP Pro CD at all.
A product labelled "Home" should be prepared to hold hands, and it does. But with the extra $100 you're expected to shell out for Pro, for a product labelled "Professional," you'd think the default install would actually believe you're a "Professional" without having to burn a CD with modified oemsetup files to get it to work that way after a reinstall.
And then there are the little things that are "integrated" in both Home and Professional that may be OK in the former but flat-out don't belong in the latter. MSN Messenger almost never belongs in the workplace. Neither do WMP or IE, but unfortunately those were integrated into 2000 as well (but at least the 2k version of WMP wasn't bloated Me-style!).
"First thing I did on my work computer (which is XP unfortunately) was switch the style to classic to save my eyes and some of my sanity."
At a former job all the clients were upgraded from 2k to XP for some reason at one point. Immediately after, I did what you did, and then my coworkers all chimed in:
"How come he got to hold on to 2000 when the rest of us were stuck with upgrading to XP?"
I showed them all what I did and pretty much from that point on the entire office was running with the "Windows Classic" theme.
Keep in mind that we weren't techies, we were typists. All the clients were being used for was to run Word 2000. We didn't even have a domain (small business, about 20-25 employees).
I never saw the case in marrying yourself to Microsoft software like that. I can understand choosing to use some flavor of Windows Server over using a Linux box running Samba, if only because it's a little easier to configure if you're already used to configuring Windows networks. But why choose to run Microsoft server applications that you aren't forced to run through OS integration? Most of those applications have consistently performed poorly compared to both free and non-free alternatives, relying on the name "Microsoft" on the box to sell more than anything else. Even the stuff that is integrated into the server software, like IIS, have proven to offer more in security vulnerabilities than functionality ("Gee, maybe we shoudln't include that in the default install any more...")
Just because you run Windows isn't a reason not to use Firefox, and the same can be said for just about any of Microsoft's server applications as well.
"The simple fact of the matter is that upgrading from Windows 2k to Windows XP, doesn't offer much, a server running Windows 2003 Server, can still operate the same without switching the clients to Windows XP."
One of the problems for Microsoft is that they never really made the case for upgrading from 2k to XP on the networking side of things, either. From the creation of the Windows NT line up to 2k, their client and server operating systems were married to each other, with the server offering services that could only best be taken advantage of by the latest client. XP, however, wasn't released with NT Server 5.1, it was released more to hurry up and marry the NT and Windows line more than anything else (some of the annoyances in the interface, after all, come from Windows Me). The preferred server for XP was still 2k, with no real added functionality from using XP with 2k Server rather than 2k Pro.
It took so long for them to get around to updating their server software that 2k3 is out of synch with XP's version number (NT Workstation 5.1, meet NT Server 5.2), but even then Microsft pretty much admits there's no advantages to using XP connected to a 2k3 server over a 2k Pro client. Because 2k3 is so much younger than either client, both are going to need a similar amount of patching to, say, take advantage of new bells and whistles in Active Directory.
Longhorn will probably have a similar problem unless there's a "Longhorn server" scheduled to come down the pipe shortly after its release. From the networking side, the only advantage it will have is "Won't need to have client updates installed to take advantage of 2k3," but by that point the old clients have already been patched.
This might be good for sales of Microsot's server offerings (no longer really need to think about upgrading your clients when you're ready to upgrade your server), but marrying their NT client to the old Windows family has effectively divorced it from their NT server line, and client sales are no longer driven by networking features.
Upgrading from 2k to XP isn't like upgrading NT 4.0 to 2k, it's more like upgrading NT 4.0 to 98. More of a "sidegrade" than an upgrade. The only changes have been in the user interface, and those changes were made with the home user in mind; who, other than home users, needs a widget to tell you to run antivirus software? And if your corporate network is reasonably secured and your clients locked down via group policies, why do you need an integrated client firewall?
"Microsoft's slow adoption may strictly be at the bequest of Intel (who know they don't really have anything that can compete with AMD right now)."
Except that AMD outperforming Intel's offering has become old news. Everybody who's into building PCs knows that AMD's policy is to name their chips with numbers based not on the chips frequency but on the frequency of the equivalent Intel chip, and it's only a matter of time before word of AMD's performance against Intel starts to trickle down to the general masses. It's going to take some sort of magic wand on the part of Intel to fix that one now, and so far it doesn't seem Itanium is that magic wand (especially when AMD beat them to the punch).
Besides, I don't see Microsoft being particularly maried to Intel at the moment, especially if Intel is getting buddy-buddy with the creators of OSX. So long as most of Microsoft's customers (the ones that refer to the computer case as the "hard drive") don't care about what's running all that nifty Windows software, there's no real reason for Microsoft themselves to care. There's no advantage to sucking up more to one processor manufacturer over another, especially when you look at the consequences of making the wrong bet.
OTOH, the Microsoft documentation I've seen says that WinServ2k3 Enterprise can support twice as much ram on an Itanium box as a 32-bit box, but no mention of AMD64. Maybe I haven't seen everything, but it seems odd that they've latched on to the product name "Itanium" here instead of AMD64 or the older x64 (which they referred to in the name of the 64-bit version of XP).
"Yes, I, private citizen of a nation with a resident population of 296,365,988, am worried that the stuff I use private key encryption on will be under attack."
The more processing power you have, the more insignifigant the effort to crack a single encrypted message. "Security through obscurity" doesn't help against brute force attacks.
Whether or not someone will actually be there to interpret the data is another matter, but why let it get to that stage?
Soared on GCN, crashed and burned on PS2, IIRC. Unfortunately, it's the latter that's considered "mainstream."
"Dark Stalkers (I think it's called that, it's a fighting game in the vein of Street Fighter 2)?"
The fact that you're unsure of the name, compared to the big-name (and 3-D) fighting games like Soulcaliber, Tekken, and even DoA seems to show something.
"Zelda Four Swords"
True, but for every Four Swords Adventures there's going to be 5 or 6 The Wind Wakers and whatever they're calling the sequel. It seeming like 2D hangs on for party games, and even that may be on borrowed time.
"Minish Cap?"
Would it still have been 2D if the GBA could have handled 3D well? And even though good 2D games keep coming out for the GBA, the ever-loving market seems to be ready for a 3D successor, be it the PSP, DS or some portable counterpart to the Revolution.
Really, unless the touch screen catches on more, the only reason to leave the GBA is for 3D games. If it's 2D, the GBA can do it easily.
Getting a region-free DVD player is cheaper/easier than getting a VCR that can handle both PAL and NTSC. DVD players take care of television format encoding in the box itself, leaving the media to be format neutral, but VCRs write the raw television feed directly onto the tape.
The gaming market has decided it's done with 2D games and has chosen to move on. It's why consoles started offering 3D hardware to begin with. Without this, there's no reason to get any console newer than a Saturn.
"Your family knows you like games, but to surprise you they might not ask you but some knucklehead retail guy."
Consider what your stereotypical "clueless girlfriend" usually shops for and where she usually shops. I'm probably carousing for trouble in saying this, but most of these "clueless" types are ones that spend a good deal of time shopping for clothes and other status-symbol items. There, they ask store clerks for their opinions partly because they're looking for a feel of what the current trends are, what other people have bought recently and the like. Because that's the shopping experience they're used to, they use the same methods in the video game store, looking less for something they know their signifigant other would enjoy and more for something that would "look good in his collection."
I'd say you'd have better luck if the "clueless girlfriend" is more accustomed to shopping for books than clothes, or anything else that relies more on personal taste than the taste of others. While it still may not be as good as simply asking you (which isn't an option if we're talking about a surprise gift), they'll at least understand things like "genres" and know that you're looking more for certain categories of games.
Slashdot Mirror
"Additionally, the Japanese appeared to be postponing invasion long enough to surrender to the Soviets, who were making steady progress accross China at this time,"
Against whom? Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Tokyo and stuck to it, ending it according to the terms of the treaty, with the proper warning and waiting the required period. The Soviet Union did not declare war against Japan until a few hours after the Nagasaki bomb.
"You've missed a word there, "American" lives. It killed around 140 thousand Japanese civilian lives."
You do realize that Japan at that point was training schoolgirls how to use spears, with the intent on using them against a perceived US landing, correct? Well, at least the ones that hadn't already thrown themselves off a cliff to avoid the ravages of the filthy gaijin invaders...
The Japanese military was more than willing to continue a conventional war to the last Japanese civillian. The atomic bombs saved Japanese lives through a show of force that left no room for an "honorable" death in defending a lost cause. There was no hope for forcing the US into at phyrric victory.
"War crimes" would require deliberately targeting civilians. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen for their military value (IIRC, Hiroshima was still pumping out munitions and Nagasaki was still an important port for the Imperial Navy). These certainly weren't the Dresden bombings.
"1) The US originally had many more targets on their list, including Kyoto, which has a large historical significance (the Heian period was a very peaceful time),"
The idea was brought up but, if I remember correctly, quickly abanonded by the Truman administration for the reasons you mention. If it was still on the list by the time Hiroshima was bombed, it was very far down the list. It had little military signifigance, unlike Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were still pumping out munitions.
"2) They issued an ultimatum, dropped the first bomb, and dropped the second bomb before the time was up."
However, the bombings weren't exactly simultaneous. Three days seem long enough to verify exactly what had happened to Hiroshima (it was obvious that the damage was done by a single catastrophic blast rather than a carpet-bombing campaign). And even after Nagasaki, it took six more days of waffling on the part of the Japanese government to get around to surrendering.
During those six days there was an attempted military coup aimed at preventing the emperor from surrendering, even after both bombs. Oh, and the Soviets declared war, and all this takes place months after the US submarine force set up a near-total blockade of the home islands, dooming Japan to slow starvation in any event.
Even after all this, when a sizable chunk of the Imperial Army was still willing to continue the war, why do you think the "same result" would have been acheived after just the first bomb?
That's because we here in the US are more accustomed to being on the giving end of terroist attacks rather than the receiving. Case in point: the IRA.
No members of Congress were involved in IRA fundraising... this year...
Ah, my response was more focused on "Robin executes himself," wondering if he ingested cyanide, or maybe hara-kiri.
However, the Batman show was designed to be camp, what did you expect?
"The bottom line of the FAA directive, states that "no measureable sonic boom overpressure" may reach the surface of the U.S. except within an authorized test area."
Unless you're a space shuttle. A landing shuttle will set off car alarms in New Orleans like clockwork.
"I said he's the best at what he does, not at what I do."
:)
And where does Captain Marvel fit into this?
"Robin executes himself"
Don't think I saw that episode. Did he use the Bat-Cyanide Capsule?
Including a browser is one thing. "Integrating" it is something else. After an install, I use IE to go to mozilla.org, and that's it. Why should I be forced to hang on to IE and all the security vulnerabilities involved when I don't even use it?
Oh, wait, now I remember: because the integration routine is how they got out of a previous lawsuit. That's why I have to waste all that space on my HDD with an application that is redundant at best.
I'd wager that Pro N outsells Home N, however.
Perhaps one of the reasons 2000 had such a high adoption rate was because of how long it came out after NT 4.0. 98 had already come out (twice!), doing things that, for a "home" OS, their "professional" OS couldn't handle (like installing onto a partition bigger than 2 GB). Consider at the time of its release NT had 4 service packs out already (and now, after support has officially ended, 4.0 had a grand total of 6-and-change service packs, not counting the final security roll-up).
On the other hand, about the time Windows XP came out, I got my special "early adopter" MCSE Win2k card from Microsoft.
"Looking Forward: The Microsoft .NET Platform"
.NET framework, and yet I have to go download that and install the .NET framework from Microsoft's website and install it into XP SP2, just as I had to with 2k SP4.
.NET: you have to download it and install it after the fact.
"Looking Forward" is right. My ATI video drivers work better when I use the flavor that requires the
At least from my vantage point, XP and 2k are identical when it comes to
"So what you're saying is that you'd prefer an OS which turns off protection on n00bs by default, rather than allowing those who know what they're doing to configure more access appropriately?"
A valid argument generally, except Microsoft offers two flavors of Windows XP, one flavor for n00bs/mom and dad/whatever, and one that's targeted at "those who know what they're doing" (it practically uses those same words right on the XP Pro box).
There are a lot of things that XP has that makes me happy when it comes to supporting my parents' boxen, but when it comes to my machine I'd rather not have them on. And since they run Home while I shelled out the extra money to run Pro, I'd rather have a system that offloads some of those security concerns onto me rather than treat me the same way it treats a Home user out of the box.
XP Professional, while running the NT 5.1 code base, should IMO look a lot like Windows 2000 Professional after a default install, simply because it says "Professional" on the box. Heck, consider the way Windows 2003 Server looks like after an install; the Windows XP theme isn't even included, let alone selected.
I don't need hand-holding widgets telling me that my antivirus software "might" be out-of-date. Heck, when I first installed SP2 I had to download an update to F-Prot just so the damned thing would believe that yes, I do have antivirus software installed and it is running. (ZoneAlarm still doesn't believe that F-Prot is an antivirus program, but at least it doesn't bug me about this apparent lack.)
The people who buy Professional are supposed to be the people who care about things like performance and maintaining their own machine. Save the default MSN Explorer install for the Home version, I'm tempted to say that particular bit of software shoudln't even be on the XP Pro CD at all.
A product labelled "Home" should be prepared to hold hands, and it does. But with the extra $100 you're expected to shell out for Pro, for a product labelled "Professional," you'd think the default install would actually believe you're a "Professional" without having to burn a CD with modified oemsetup files to get it to work that way after a reinstall.
And then there are the little things that are "integrated" in both Home and Professional that may be OK in the former but flat-out don't belong in the latter. MSN Messenger almost never belongs in the workplace. Neither do WMP or IE, but unfortunately those were integrated into 2000 as well (but at least the 2k version of WMP wasn't bloated Me-style!).
"First thing I did on my work computer (which is XP unfortunately) was switch the style to classic to save my eyes and some of my sanity."
At a former job all the clients were upgraded from 2k to XP for some reason at one point. Immediately after, I did what you did, and then my coworkers all chimed in:
"How come he got to hold on to 2000 when the rest of us were stuck with upgrading to XP?"
I showed them all what I did and pretty much from that point on the entire office was running with the "Windows Classic" theme.
Keep in mind that we weren't techies, we were typists. All the clients were being used for was to run Word 2000. We didn't even have a domain (small business, about 20-25 employees).
"reaching a whopping 91.29 teraflops"
What is that in real units, like bogomips?
I never saw the case in marrying yourself to Microsoft software like that. I can understand choosing to use some flavor of Windows Server over using a Linux box running Samba, if only because it's a little easier to configure if you're already used to configuring Windows networks. But why choose to run Microsoft server applications that you aren't forced to run through OS integration? Most of those applications have consistently performed poorly compared to both free and non-free alternatives, relying on the name "Microsoft" on the box to sell more than anything else. Even the stuff that is integrated into the server software, like IIS, have proven to offer more in security vulnerabilities than functionality ("Gee, maybe we shoudln't include that in the default install any more...")
Just because you run Windows isn't a reason not to use Firefox, and the same can be said for just about any of Microsoft's server applications as well.
"The simple fact of the matter is that upgrading from Windows 2k to Windows XP, doesn't offer much, a server running Windows 2003 Server, can still operate the same without switching the clients to Windows XP."
One of the problems for Microsoft is that they never really made the case for upgrading from 2k to XP on the networking side of things, either. From the creation of the Windows NT line up to 2k, their client and server operating systems were married to each other, with the server offering services that could only best be taken advantage of by the latest client. XP, however, wasn't released with NT Server 5.1, it was released more to hurry up and marry the NT and Windows line more than anything else (some of the annoyances in the interface, after all, come from Windows Me). The preferred server for XP was still 2k, with no real added functionality from using XP with 2k Server rather than 2k Pro.
It took so long for them to get around to updating their server software that 2k3 is out of synch with XP's version number (NT Workstation 5.1, meet NT Server 5.2), but even then Microsft pretty much admits there's no advantages to using XP connected to a 2k3 server over a 2k Pro client. Because 2k3 is so much younger than either client, both are going to need a similar amount of patching to, say, take advantage of new bells and whistles in Active Directory.
Longhorn will probably have a similar problem unless there's a "Longhorn server" scheduled to come down the pipe shortly after its release. From the networking side, the only advantage it will have is "Won't need to have client updates installed to take advantage of 2k3," but by that point the old clients have already been patched.
This might be good for sales of Microsot's server offerings (no longer really need to think about upgrading your clients when you're ready to upgrade your server), but marrying their NT client to the old Windows family has effectively divorced it from their NT server line, and client sales are no longer driven by networking features.
Upgrading from 2k to XP isn't like upgrading NT 4.0 to 2k, it's more like upgrading NT 4.0 to 98. More of a "sidegrade" than an upgrade. The only changes have been in the user interface, and those changes were made with the home user in mind; who, other than home users, needs a widget to tell you to run antivirus software? And if your corporate network is reasonably secured and your clients locked down via group policies, why do you need an integrated client firewall?
"Microsoft's slow adoption may strictly be at the bequest of Intel (who know they don't really have anything that can compete with AMD right now)."
Except that AMD outperforming Intel's offering has become old news. Everybody who's into building PCs knows that AMD's policy is to name their chips with numbers based not on the chips frequency but on the frequency of the equivalent Intel chip, and it's only a matter of time before word of AMD's performance against Intel starts to trickle down to the general masses. It's going to take some sort of magic wand on the part of Intel to fix that one now, and so far it doesn't seem Itanium is that magic wand (especially when AMD beat them to the punch).
Besides, I don't see Microsoft being particularly maried to Intel at the moment, especially if Intel is getting buddy-buddy with the creators of OSX. So long as most of Microsoft's customers (the ones that refer to the computer case as the "hard drive") don't care about what's running all that nifty Windows software, there's no real reason for Microsoft themselves to care. There's no advantage to sucking up more to one processor manufacturer over another, especially when you look at the consequences of making the wrong bet.
OTOH, the Microsoft documentation I've seen says that WinServ2k3 Enterprise can support twice as much ram on an Itanium box as a 32-bit box, but no mention of AMD64. Maybe I haven't seen everything, but it seems odd that they've latched on to the product name "Itanium" here instead of AMD64 or the older x64 (which they referred to in the name of the 64-bit version of XP).
"Yes, I, private citizen of a nation with a resident population of 296,365,988, am worried that the stuff I use private key encryption on will be under attack."
The more processing power you have, the more insignifigant the effort to crack a single encrypted message. "Security through obscurity" doesn't help against brute force attacks.
Whether or not someone will actually be there to interpret the data is another matter, but why let it get to that stage?
"What about Viewtiful Joe?"
Soared on GCN, crashed and burned on PS2, IIRC. Unfortunately, it's the latter that's considered "mainstream."
"Dark Stalkers (I think it's called that, it's a fighting game in the vein of Street Fighter 2)?"
The fact that you're unsure of the name, compared to the big-name (and 3-D) fighting games like Soulcaliber, Tekken, and even DoA seems to show something.
"Zelda Four Swords"
True, but for every Four Swords Adventures there's going to be 5 or 6 The Wind Wakers and whatever they're calling the sequel. It seeming like 2D hangs on for party games, and even that may be on borrowed time.
"Minish Cap?"
Would it still have been 2D if the GBA could have handled 3D well? And even though good 2D games keep coming out for the GBA, the ever-loving market seems to be ready for a 3D successor, be it the PSP, DS or some portable counterpart to the Revolution.
Really, unless the touch screen catches on more, the only reason to leave the GBA is for 3D games. If it's 2D, the GBA can do it easily.
Getting a region-free DVD player is cheaper/easier than getting a VCR that can handle both PAL and NTSC. DVD players take care of television format encoding in the box itself, leaving the media to be format neutral, but VCRs write the raw television feed directly onto the tape.
The gaming market has decided it's done with 2D games and has chosen to move on. It's why consoles started offering 3D hardware to begin with. Without this, there's no reason to get any console newer than a Saturn.
"from the not-a-surprise-folks dept."
Hrm... a dupe posted by none other than Taco... nope, not a surprise at all.
"Your family knows you like games, but to surprise you they might not ask you but some knucklehead retail guy."
Consider what your stereotypical "clueless girlfriend" usually shops for and where she usually shops. I'm probably carousing for trouble in saying this, but most of these "clueless" types are ones that spend a good deal of time shopping for clothes and other status-symbol items. There, they ask store clerks for their opinions partly because they're looking for a feel of what the current trends are, what other people have bought recently and the like. Because that's the shopping experience they're used to, they use the same methods in the video game store, looking less for something they know their signifigant other would enjoy and more for something that would "look good in his collection."
I'd say you'd have better luck if the "clueless girlfriend" is more accustomed to shopping for books than clothes, or anything else that relies more on personal taste than the taste of others. While it still may not be as good as simply asking you (which isn't an option if we're talking about a surprise gift), they'll at least understand things like "genres" and know that you're looking more for certain categories of games.