Heh. here is a post I made shortly prior to my response.
I'm well aware of the various implications. I just don't think it's as bleak as everyone makes out to be. Sure, there might be killing, chaos, and a fairly abrupt end to our current way of life (IMO, things will simply reach critical mass and go reactor critical). The dollar losing value will likely have a large impact as well. There'll be a fair amount of cultural residue for a good while after US decline hits critical, I think, but we can likely expect the US to disappear from the world arena.
Whether that means the US is completely demolished and most of its citizens resort to rogue states (or smaller citizen states) or the US is simply converted to 3rd-world status with constant terrorist problems, I don't know. But those are the unfortunate scenarios I see playing out in my mind.
How can we prevent this from happening? I don't rightly know, and I don't really think we can. I do know that city residents won't likely have a good chance of surviving.
I personally kind of romanticize about such a situation in some respects, as it would be a true test of a person's "worth", if you will: you wouldn't survive unless you've got the skills and inborn abilities to "make a living" - in the purest sense of the phrase. The economy of skill would be balanced, with people who make copious amounts of money as a trader or corporate tycoon getting blasted back down to the level of factory workers by the over-night worthlessness of all their money and stocks. "Men would be men", as the saying goes, with personal merit being the truest form of assessment available - not how much someone is worth or what kind of car they drive, but what they know and can do.
Yes, I realize this is romanticized quite a deal. Yes, there will likely be death, murder, mayhem, disease, and starvation. It would be a natural restabilization of ecology, though. We've lived on the tit of oil for too long, and the earth can't bend that way much longer.
While I agree with you, there's another element to the scenario.
Whether related directly or not, the precipitation levels in the Midwest US have been near droubt levels for about 6 years. For instance, South Dakota has essentially gone from being a semi-arid state to an arid state.
This might seem trivial, but consider: the Midwest is not only the bread basket of the US; it's the bread basket of the entire world, producing an obscenely large percentage of the world's crops. A figure around 85% springs to mind, but that's likely not 100% correct. Keep in mind that US food production is -very- intristically linked with both the price and availability of oil.
Now, consider along side these facts that oil prices are increasing, with oil getting increasingly rare and in high demand, and you have a situation where there might be some serious repricusions. I don't suppose that several decades of designer crops that only grow for a single season (thus requiring the farmers to purchase new seeds yearly), combined with the fact that for roughly 50 years the soils have largely been operating in nutrient deficit (with the assistance of fertilizers), and the situation looks looks quite bleak, long-term, for the world.
Fanatical alarmist proclimations of doom in 3, 2, 1... oh. Too late!
So-called scientists have been saying that the end of the world is right around the corner since as early as the 1960's. Crazy nonsense, like that by 1980 the world would be massively over-populated requiring "population control" (eg. forced abortion/genocide/what have you), and that the entire world would either be starving to death or rationed on food.
"But this is different!" you say. Then tell me, how is it so different?
This seems like nothing more than more scare tactics by the likes of the Earth Day foundation and the Sierra Club. Granted, I've not tied the connections together myself, but if it fits the trend...
The only way for spam to finally be filtered and gone would be for the government to make it a felony to send spam, or for a complete redesign of current mail systems which would require centralized authority.
The first of those things will likely never happen; instead, the government would simply make it legal to send spam for certain reasons, and likely make it illegal to mess with such "mail" - in the same way the federal mail system works. They'd likely get a fair cut of all profits from that.
If that were to happen, there'd be little likelyhood that authorized hosts would do any good. Even if we can get such authorization sorted out first, it'll likely have design flaws for a good long while which will be exploitable.
Those that pay attention to mobile benchmarks can assure you, Pentium M chips have been roughly 1.5x faster than Pentium 4 chips on a per-Mhz basis. So, a 2GHz P-M performing as well as a 3GHz P4 is hardly surprising.
It is impressive, though, as the P-M is incredibly energy efficient. If it were cheaper, I'd get one in my next desktop and get rid of all those fans...
And health care. There's a lot of HIPAA-related changes that are needed to take place now and over the next couple years, and quite a few facilities are behind.
For every person that has a good response to a product, they might tell 2-3 people. That's "good" response, not "mediocre" or "satisfactory" - I imagine it'd have to be like coming out of the stoneage to a fully-functional system.
For every person that has a negative response to a product, they tell 10 people (provided they don't have something invested in remaining mum).
Thus, you're going to hear a lot more bitching about failures from people that didn't make the decisions.
My suggestion? Do things in high school which you might do otherwise if it weren't for the other people doing them. You will have plenty of time later on in life if you're wise to work on projects. Now, I'm not saying don't work on your own personal projects - just temper those attempts with more social activities, if at all possible. Without social activies, its impossible to mature socially - and social immaturity will be one of the biggest setbacks you will run into in your life, period.
College is probably the worst time to have such social inhibitions, too, as it will lead to even further regrets. Such as never getting laid, not knowing how people tick so that you're able to impress that one particular girl, or never having confidence enough to approach the people you're interested in spending time with.
In my case, I didn't participate in sports and didn't express much interest in the opposite sex publicly. Was I interested? Hell yes. But in retrospect, I wish I'd taken the opportunity to get with the lead high school cheerleader, and other things of that order. I'll never have such freedom or opportunites like that again now that I'm grown up and have responsibilities. There will be plenty of time to sit in front of your computer researching, programming, and other such things.
Great! Now maybe they'll change their mind on DRM in general, and be the first company with a practical technology for ebooks that isn't a) a piece of shit, b) locked in with DRM, and c) proprietary formats.
So, how about it, Sony? Will you release a new version of the Libre, sans DRM?
And what do you think of Windows, hrm?
on
Is IRC All Bad?
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· Score: 1
And what do you think most of the software on most people's home PCs is? It certainly isn't $500 copies of the most recent Photoshop, Dreamweaver, AfterAffecs, all carefully purchased to keep the machine up to date constantly, and what have you.
So, based off of these observations, I've concluded - statistically - that 95% of Windows users are felonous pirates. It's a statistical fact.
Many vendors do that: take, for instance, the release of a new game console. They produce just enough to meet the -very- initial demand, if that, and make everyone else wait. Then, there's an increased demand not only due to the artificial shortage, but also because of the buzz surrounding the shortwage - "OMG, the X Box Xtreme 4 Turbo is so popular it sold out in 4 hours across the nation! It must be super!" - etc.
If you think about it, warez kind of meets the same conditions. There's no real shortage of it, but the difficulty of being able to find it and gain access to it - especially through some mediums with miniscule bandwidth rates - increases the desire to have it. "OMG, I'm so leet, I got the full release of ${release} in under 3 hours, and before it hit store shelves!"
Maybe if the corporate world stopped trying to demonize warezers (whatever they call themselves) they'd stop and analyze the situation. Then they'd see that it's economics like they are anywhere else in the world, and learn how to market to that demographic of people.
That 80% might be a bit high, but I doubt it'll be lower than 60%, possibly a bit more. Figure a season DVD goes for anywhere from $30 for cheap silt like Friends to $100 for ST:TOS, and the cost of an episode would probably be anywhere from $1 - $3.50, give or take. That's pretty damn expensive, considering you can rent a DVD of an entire season for $4.50 or so. However, that's roughly the pricing of most online music right now vs. CDs. Maybe even cheaper.
Personally, it'd have to be around $10 or less for an entire digital season for me to do that. Maybe even $15. It's just not worth the replay value. Precious few movies have much replay value, and even TV is much, much worse.
I've got a friend who purchased a bunch of digital music from Russia. Legal for him, not a crime for them. It was something like $10 USD for 1Gb, I think. The same place apparently offers TV show downloads and movie downloads now as well.
This friend also says that the site has had more demand than they can keep up with. I imagine that a "legit" American company could sell 1Gb of music for $40 or so and still make a healthy profit - RIAA tax withstanding.
So much by "jury by a trial of your peers" eh? I think there's a very high unlikelyhood that any computer professional would even hesitate to cast "not guilty" for this felonous charge. Absolutely rediculous.
Now, that's not to say that they didn't commit copyright, or that it's not wrong - but it's no felony. The rough equivilant of throwing a gum wrapper out your car window, maybe (ie, $100 - $500 fine).
Er, that hardly sounds legal, re: bittorrent. That'd be using the evidence that a person is -downloading- as colateral evidence to imply and then assume that the person must also be uploading.
You've got quite a bit of contradiction in that write-up, turbo. If someone's got their BT client capped at 0kbps, then they're not sharing, and, by your definition, not breaking the law.
Not only that, but ashcroft's statement illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of economics when he says "...but also the American people, who shoulder the burden of increased costs for goods and services."
The only reasons that the cost of "goods and services" would or should go up in a software market is when the company wants to either prove a point that "piracy is bad, ok? blame it on them." or when there's a need/desire to increase profits.
Piracy is a 0-loss affair for software companies (by and large), because unlike a table, chair, lawnmower or book, software isn't a readily quantifiable item. That is, they don't lose anything concrete, such as a customer or a sale, when piracy occurs (for the most part). Companies provide support for software which you will very rarely get with the other product types, and even then it usually only results in a replacement if the problem occurs within the first # years. If anything, piracy assists in sales, as studies have suggested in other industries: if people want patches, updates, and support, they will splash out their money. If the software is important enough for them to use and need, in other words, they will buy it. Most piracy is simply, "look what I have on my computer". Kind of the same mentality behind having a PDA - no real concrete benefit over a pad of paper, but damn, look how cool it is.
That, and software doesn't really have a value to most people - either the computer "works" or it doesn't. It's a necessary evil to get the computer working, and they think they shouldn't -have- to pay for it. Microsoft can be thanked for this, what with their bundling of Windows for the past 10 years, but that's the way things currently are.
Dear god. Felony copyright violation charges? *blink* That has to be a misprint.
Maybe I don't understand what the word "felony" means or applies to. My understanding is that a felony charge is given for causing life-threatening or altering harm to another person.
What kind of things get classified as felonies? Is grand theft auto a felony? How about breaking and entering? I don't think inciting a riot is, or in many cases even something like attacking another person (non-lethally). Drunk driving isn't a felonous charge unless you -really- fuck up.
This isn't a violent crime, has not even the slimmest chance of harming someone's livelyhood, and about as harmless as some guy on the street in Mexico selling "Timex" watches on the street for $15. Maybe less so.
It just seems incredibly draconian and fascist to have laws that protect corporations to the utmost while punishing the violators with a life-destroying sentence. Copyright law is a fucking civil issue. The parties involved should have the option to take them to a civil court, and nothing more. Now, if these people hacked into systems to store or acquire their warez, sure, prosecute them federally. But this is just rediculous.
I can see it now. School cops will start looking for CDs and removeable hard disks when they search through students' lockers now, and burned CDs will first be an automatic 2-week expulsion, followed up by a $20,000 fine the second time and 6 months imprisonment at the county jail. Then, it's pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
If your compiles aren't disk IO bound, then your likely best option for speeding up compiles is to distribute the CPU load with something like distcc to a workstation or server, if you've got one on the network. That is, if you run linux.
I also suspsect that you are indeed having your build times slowed by the disk, whether you notice it or not, between building and linking of binaries. If you've got ample RAM, why not make a ramdisk to speed up the process and store/tmp there? Once again, I don't know how you'd do this if you run Windows.
Racing games are tired. Sure, they vary a bit from one to another, but they are, in essence, the same: go around a track. It's worse than FPS games in terms of repetitive gameplay.
I want something along the lines of "Rock 'n' Roll Racing" but with a modern game engine and graphics and additional gameplay modes. Is that too much to ask for?
They've been saying for a good decade that such storage devices will be commonplace RSN. I don't think so.
CF is almost there, I think. Closer than the memory tech you speak of, at least. It's lagging about 10 years behind PCs as far as storage capacity is concerned, but it's certainly a solid-state solution, if you're looking for one.
The main differences between the Pentium M and the Pentium # Mobile processors are two fold:
1) The Pentium M has been completely redesigned with primary considerations for power management. It is significantly more efficient with batteries and seems to run a bit cooler. 2) The number of executions per clock cycle is drastically increased. This means a 1.4GHz P-M performs on par with a Pentium 4 2.6GHz or so.
If you want information on the P-M specifically, take a look for reviews of the Pentium M itself (not the systems it's on) dated from 2001 to 2002, I think. IIRC, it was a Tom's Hardware article/review.
Personally, I don't think the "twice as fast" rule has applied for a couple years now. My fastest system is an AXP2000+, and it does all I want it to do, including a fair bit of gaming with modern releases.
The price/performance difference is different now, too, as well as the needs placed on the processor by both applications and games. No longer is the CPU the principle bottleneck on performance, but disks and the amount of memory the system has - and for games - how modern the video card is, are the main deciding factors.
Also keep in mind that things like processor cache have a large performance hit differential depending on your application (ie, databases need a lot of it).
Really, CPUs seem to be largely commodity parts now. There's a negligible difference between the different CPUs (aside from the 64 bit models) - it largely comes down to price. I'd just say get something which has good power ratings and fits your pocketbook. I'm fond of AMD, personally. I've always been pleased with the price/performance ratio.
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Heh. here is a post I made shortly prior to my response.
I'm well aware of the various implications. I just don't think it's as bleak as everyone makes out to be. Sure, there might be killing, chaos, and a fairly abrupt end to our current way of life (IMO, things will simply reach critical mass and go reactor critical). The dollar losing value will likely have a large impact as well. There'll be a fair amount of cultural residue for a good while after US decline hits critical, I think, but we can likely expect the US to disappear from the world arena.
Whether that means the US is completely demolished and most of its citizens resort to rogue states (or smaller citizen states) or the US is simply converted to 3rd-world status with constant terrorist problems, I don't know. But those are the unfortunate scenarios I see playing out in my mind.
How can we prevent this from happening? I don't rightly know, and I don't really think we can. I do know that city residents won't likely have a good chance of surviving.
I personally kind of romanticize about such a situation in some respects, as it would be a true test of a person's "worth", if you will: you wouldn't survive unless you've got the skills and inborn abilities to "make a living" - in the purest sense of the phrase. The economy of skill would be balanced, with people who make copious amounts of money as a trader or corporate tycoon getting blasted back down to the level of factory workers by the over-night worthlessness of all their money and stocks. "Men would be men", as the saying goes, with personal merit being the truest form of assessment available - not how much someone is worth or what kind of car they drive, but what they know and can do.
Yes, I realize this is romanticized quite a deal. Yes, there will likely be death, murder, mayhem, disease, and starvation. It would be a natural restabilization of ecology, though. We've lived on the tit of oil for too long, and the earth can't bend that way much longer.
While I agree with you, there's another element to the scenario.
Whether related directly or not, the precipitation levels in the Midwest US have been near droubt levels for about 6 years. For instance, South Dakota has essentially gone from being a semi-arid state to an arid state.
This might seem trivial, but consider: the Midwest is not only the bread basket of the US; it's the bread basket of the entire world, producing an obscenely large percentage of the world's crops. A figure around 85% springs to mind, but that's likely not 100% correct. Keep in mind that US food production is -very- intristically linked with both the price and availability of oil.
Now, consider along side these facts that oil prices are increasing, with oil getting increasingly rare and in high demand, and you have a situation where there might be some serious repricusions. I don't suppose that several decades of designer crops that only grow for a single season (thus requiring the farmers to purchase new seeds yearly), combined with the fact that for roughly 50 years the soils have largely been operating in nutrient deficit (with the assistance of fertilizers), and the situation looks looks quite bleak, long-term, for the world.
Fanatical alarmist proclimations of doom in 3, 2, 1... oh. Too late!
So-called scientists have been saying that the end of the world is right around the corner since as early as the 1960's. Crazy nonsense, like that by 1980 the world would be massively over-populated requiring "population control" (eg. forced abortion/genocide/what have you), and that the entire world would either be starving to death or rationed on food.
"But this is different!" you say. Then tell me, how is it so different?
This seems like nothing more than more scare tactics by the likes of the Earth Day foundation and the Sierra Club. Granted, I've not tied the connections together myself, but if it fits the trend...
The only way for spam to finally be filtered and gone would be for the government to make it a felony to send spam, or for a complete redesign of current mail systems which would require centralized authority.
The first of those things will likely never happen; instead, the government would simply make it legal to send spam for certain reasons, and likely make it illegal to mess with such "mail" - in the same way the federal mail system works. They'd likely get a fair cut of all profits from that.
If that were to happen, there'd be little likelyhood that authorized hosts would do any good. Even if we can get such authorization sorted out first, it'll likely have design flaws for a good long while which will be exploitable.
Only if you're hearing negative things about it.
If you're hearing positive things, it's likely quite good.
No.
Those that pay attention to mobile benchmarks can assure you, Pentium M chips have been roughly 1.5x faster than Pentium 4 chips on a per-Mhz basis. So, a 2GHz P-M performing as well as a 3GHz P4 is hardly surprising.
It is impressive, though, as the P-M is incredibly energy efficient. If it were cheaper, I'd get one in my next desktop and get rid of all those fans...
And health care. There's a lot of HIPAA-related changes that are needed to take place now and over the next couple years, and quite a few facilities are behind.
For every person that has a good response to a product, they might tell 2-3 people. That's "good" response, not "mediocre" or "satisfactory" - I imagine it'd have to be like coming out of the stoneage to a fully-functional system.
For every person that has a negative response to a product, they tell 10 people (provided they don't have something invested in remaining mum).
Thus, you're going to hear a lot more bitching about failures from people that didn't make the decisions.
Work on interesting projects? Please.
My suggestion? Do things in high school which you might do otherwise if it weren't for the other people doing them. You will have plenty of time later on in life if you're wise to work on projects. Now, I'm not saying don't work on your own personal projects - just temper those attempts with more social activities, if at all possible. Without social activies, its impossible to mature socially - and social immaturity will be one of the biggest setbacks you will run into in your life, period.
College is probably the worst time to have such social inhibitions, too, as it will lead to even further regrets. Such as never getting laid, not knowing how people tick so that you're able to impress that one particular girl, or never having confidence enough to approach the people you're interested in spending time with.
In my case, I didn't participate in sports and didn't express much interest in the opposite sex publicly. Was I interested? Hell yes. But in retrospect, I wish I'd taken the opportunity to get with the lead high school cheerleader, and other things of that order. I'll never have such freedom or opportunites like that again now that I'm grown up and have responsibilities. There will be plenty of time to sit in front of your computer researching, programming, and other such things.
Might this not be a shortcoming in the textbooks in use instead of a inherrent superiority in games?
I've not met a college/high school textbook I liked well enough to keep.
Great! Now maybe they'll change their mind on DRM in general, and be the first company with a practical technology for ebooks that isn't a) a piece of shit, b) locked in with DRM, and c) proprietary formats.
So, how about it, Sony? Will you release a new version of the Libre, sans DRM?
And what do you think most of the software on most people's home PCs is? It certainly isn't $500 copies of the most recent Photoshop, Dreamweaver, AfterAffecs, all carefully purchased to keep the machine up to date constantly, and what have you.
So, based off of these observations, I've concluded - statistically - that 95% of Windows users are felonous pirates. It's a statistical fact.
Many vendors do that: take, for instance, the release of a new game console. They produce just enough to meet the -very- initial demand, if that, and make everyone else wait. Then, there's an increased demand not only due to the artificial shortage, but also because of the buzz surrounding the shortwage - "OMG, the X Box Xtreme 4 Turbo is so popular it sold out in 4 hours across the nation! It must be super!" - etc.
If you think about it, warez kind of meets the same conditions. There's no real shortage of it, but the difficulty of being able to find it and gain access to it - especially through some mediums with miniscule bandwidth rates - increases the desire to have it. "OMG, I'm so leet, I got the full release of ${release} in under 3 hours, and before it hit store shelves!"
Maybe if the corporate world stopped trying to demonize warezers (whatever they call themselves) they'd stop and analyze the situation. Then they'd see that it's economics like they are anywhere else in the world, and learn how to market to that demographic of people.
Yeah, no kidding. I mean, a felony copyright violation charge? FFS!
:-/ What's the US coming to? :(
On the other hand, it makes you wonder how abusive the charges levied against them were if this was their plea bargain.
Small change, eh?
.8($cost_of_season_dvd/$episodes);
I say you can count on the episodes being roughly adherent to this formula:
$episode_price =
That 80% might be a bit high, but I doubt it'll be lower than 60%, possibly a bit more. Figure a season DVD goes for anywhere from $30 for cheap silt like Friends to $100 for ST:TOS, and the cost of an episode would probably be anywhere from $1 - $3.50, give or take. That's pretty damn expensive, considering you can rent a DVD of an entire season for $4.50 or so. However, that's roughly the pricing of most online music right now vs. CDs. Maybe even cheaper.
Personally, it'd have to be around $10 or less for an entire digital season for me to do that. Maybe even $15. It's just not worth the replay value. Precious few movies have much replay value, and even TV is much, much worse.
I've got a friend who purchased a bunch of digital music from Russia. Legal for him, not a crime for them. It was something like $10 USD for 1Gb, I think. The same place apparently offers TV show downloads and movie downloads now as well.
This friend also says that the site has had more demand than they can keep up with. I imagine that a "legit" American company could sell 1Gb of music for $40 or so and still make a healthy profit - RIAA tax withstanding.
So much by "jury by a trial of your peers" eh? I think there's a very high unlikelyhood that any computer professional would even hesitate to cast "not guilty" for this felonous charge. Absolutely rediculous.
Now, that's not to say that they didn't commit copyright, or that it's not wrong - but it's no felony. The rough equivilant of throwing a gum wrapper out your car window, maybe (ie, $100 - $500 fine).
Er, that hardly sounds legal, re: bittorrent. That'd be using the evidence that a person is -downloading- as colateral evidence to imply and then assume that the person must also be uploading.
You've got quite a bit of contradiction in that write-up, turbo. If someone's got their BT client capped at 0kbps, then they're not sharing, and, by your definition, not breaking the law.
Not only that, but ashcroft's statement illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of economics when he says "...but also the American people, who shoulder the burden of increased costs for goods and services."
The only reasons that the cost of "goods and services" would or should go up in a software market is when the company wants to either prove a point that "piracy is bad, ok? blame it on them." or when there's a need/desire to increase profits.
Piracy is a 0-loss affair for software companies (by and large), because unlike a table, chair, lawnmower or book, software isn't a readily quantifiable item. That is, they don't lose anything concrete, such as a customer or a sale, when piracy occurs (for the most part). Companies provide support for software which you will very rarely get with the other product types, and even then it usually only results in a replacement if the problem occurs within the first # years. If anything, piracy assists in sales, as studies have suggested in other industries: if people want patches, updates, and support, they will splash out their money. If the software is important enough for them to use and need, in other words, they will buy it. Most piracy is simply, "look what I have on my computer". Kind of the same mentality behind having a PDA - no real concrete benefit over a pad of paper, but damn, look how cool it is.
That, and software doesn't really have a value to most people - either the computer "works" or it doesn't. It's a necessary evil to get the computer working, and they think they shouldn't -have- to pay for it. Microsoft can be thanked for this, what with their bundling of Windows for the past 10 years, but that's the way things currently are.
Dear god. Felony copyright violation charges? *blink* That has to be a misprint.
Maybe I don't understand what the word "felony" means or applies to. My understanding is that a felony charge is given for causing life-threatening or altering harm to another person.
What kind of things get classified as felonies? Is grand theft auto a felony? How about breaking and entering? I don't think inciting a riot is, or in many cases even something like attacking another person (non-lethally). Drunk driving isn't a felonous charge unless you -really- fuck up.
This isn't a violent crime, has not even the slimmest chance of harming someone's livelyhood, and about as harmless as some guy on the street in Mexico selling "Timex" watches on the street for $15. Maybe less so.
It just seems incredibly draconian and fascist to have laws that protect corporations to the utmost while punishing the violators with a life-destroying sentence. Copyright law is a fucking civil issue. The parties involved should have the option to take them to a civil court, and nothing more. Now, if these people hacked into systems to store or acquire their warez, sure, prosecute them federally. But this is just rediculous.
I can see it now. School cops will start looking for CDs and removeable hard disks when they search through students' lockers now, and burned CDs will first be an automatic 2-week expulsion, followed up by a $20,000 fine the second time and 6 months imprisonment at the county jail. Then, it's pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
If your compiles aren't disk IO bound, then your likely best option for speeding up compiles is to distribute the CPU load with something like distcc to a workstation or server, if you've got one on the network. That is, if you run linux.
/tmp there? Once again, I don't know how you'd do this if you run Windows.
I also suspsect that you are indeed having your build times slowed by the disk, whether you notice it or not, between building and linking of binaries. If you've got ample RAM, why not make a ramdisk to speed up the process and store
Excuse me, where are the guns?
Racing games are tired. Sure, they vary a bit from one to another, but they are, in essence, the same: go around a track. It's worse than FPS games in terms of repetitive gameplay.
I want something along the lines of "Rock 'n' Roll Racing" but with a modern game engine and graphics and additional gameplay modes. Is that too much to ask for?
Well, being as it is a different chipset, I'd think that, well, it'll be a different shipset and use different drivers.
They've been saying for a good decade that such storage devices will be commonplace RSN. I don't think so.
CF is almost there, I think. Closer than the memory tech you speak of, at least. It's lagging about 10 years behind PCs as far as storage capacity is concerned, but it's certainly a solid-state solution, if you're looking for one.
The main differences between the Pentium M and the Pentium # Mobile processors are two fold:
1) The Pentium M has been completely redesigned with primary considerations for power management. It is significantly more efficient with batteries and seems to run a bit cooler.
2) The number of executions per clock cycle is drastically increased. This means a 1.4GHz P-M performs on par with a Pentium 4 2.6GHz or so.
If you want information on the P-M specifically, take a look for reviews of the Pentium M itself (not the systems it's on) dated from 2001 to 2002, I think. IIRC, it was a Tom's Hardware article/review.
Personally, I don't think the "twice as fast" rule has applied for a couple years now. My fastest system is an AXP2000+, and it does all I want it to do, including a fair bit of gaming with modern releases.
The price/performance difference is different now, too, as well as the needs placed on the processor by both applications and games. No longer is the CPU the principle bottleneck on performance, but disks and the amount of memory the system has - and for games - how modern the video card is, are the main deciding factors.
Also keep in mind that things like processor cache have a large performance hit differential depending on your application (ie, databases need a lot of it).
Really, CPUs seem to be largely commodity parts now. There's a negligible difference between the different CPUs (aside from the 64 bit models) - it largely comes down to price. I'd just say get something which has good power ratings and fits your pocketbook. I'm fond of AMD, personally. I've always been pleased with the price/performance ratio.