Simple and consistent solution: The user middle clicking on any element is doing so because they desire whatever action they clicked on to occur in a new tab. The solution is to make an exact replica of the current page and its state in a new tab, and then act as if the button had been pushed on the replica page instead. Sure, there will be things that don't work right with it, but I think most of the time that will give the correct behavior. Oh, and open in new tab should work with buttons too, not just links.
I seem to recall something about this idea on the TV show Andromeda (the one that just annouced it was getting cancelled). I think it was the Nietzscheans whose bodies had nanobots that would fight off attacking nanobots.
Some people can't get a legit version because it is not sold where they live.
Then they can order it over the Internet. That's where I buy all my software. I've even order stuff from England because I couldn't find it in the US.
Some can't buy it because they don't have enough money.
If they don't have enough money to buy it, then they shouldn't be using it, it's that simple. Mind if I use your car because I can't afford my own? That's not the best anology because one is a physical good while the other is pure information, but the point is, if something is too expensive, either don't use it, or wait until it reaches a price you can afford.
Some can't download a demo, because their Net access sucks, but they want to sample the game.
And so it's easier to download the full 650 MB version instead of the 100 MB demo? That statement is completely illogical.
I honestly don't have too much of a problem with using a cracked version as a demo to see if I want to buy it, but I imagine most people who download cracked version of stuff never buy the real thing.
Hopefully this didn't involve the groups that distribute no-CD cracks, just those that are distributing entire games illegally. Whenever I go buy a new game, the first thing I do is find the no-CD crack for it, for exactly the same reason you do. It would be a shame to lose such a valuable resource. But I imagine at least some of the groups overlap. I don't care what happens to the real pirates as long as I can still get my no-CD cracks.
To be honest, finding games that don't have no CD cracks provide a strong incentive to pirate them instead of buying them, but in reality, I tend to just ignore them and buy ones that I can use how I want.
Re:Both your friends?
on
Paid To Spam
·
· Score: 1
At $1/hour, this sounds like a low-gain way to infuriate both your friends and perfect strangers.
Hey, how'd you know I only have two friends...?
And furthermore, if I'm going to perfect someone, I'd rather it be myself, not a stranger.
I was a big blizzard fan until they decided to sue FSGS and the makers of bnetd. Their servers are garbage, and most of the players I've met on those servers are idiots, so without a way to play on a private server with just my friends (spread across the country), I refuse to buy any more Blizzard games.
I had never seen the original version that you quoted, but I did come across this once and kept a copy:
Once upon a time, there were five blind men who had the opportunity
to experience an elephant for the first time. One approached the elephant,
and, upon encountering one of its sturdy legs, stated, "Ah, an elephant is
like a tree." The second, after exploring the trunk, said, "No, an elephant
is like a strong hose." The third, grasping the tail, said "Fool! An elephant
is like a rope!" The fourth, holding an ear, stated, "No, more like a fan."
And the fifth, leaning against the animal's side, said, "An elephant is like
a wall." The five then began to argue loudly about who had the more accurate
perception of the elephant.
The elephant, tiring of all this abuse, suddenly reared up and
attacked the men. He continued to trample them until they were nothing but
bloody lumps of flesh. Then, strolling away, the elephant remarked, "It just
goes to show that you can't depend on first impressions. When I first saw
them I didn't think they they'd be any fun at all."
I just talked to a guy last night who used to work at DEC before they were bought out by Intel and Compaq, and according to him, the Alpha is still alive, being actively worked on by the department adjacent to his, and he started talking about how a lot of people still use VMS.
I agree, I haven't seen any news about the Alpha in a long time, but it's not dead. I suspect it's a matter of Intel would rather promote their Pentium and Itanium lines than the Alpha, but they're still making them.
VIA's C3 processor is i486 (or at least that's what the linux kernel compiled as when I selected C3), so I guess I can forget about downloading knoppix to run on my EIPA 5000 machine.
I used my IIGS pretty exclusively while I was in college (1996-2001), and the biggest problem I had with doing stuff over the serial line was dropped characters because certain things would block interrupts long enough to lose characters, such as the system beep.
I also spent many, many hours trying to get Marinetti to work. Our campus was wired with both 10baseT and for those without computers, dumb terminals connected via serial cables to the local HP/UX mail server. I had a friend set up PPP on his Linux machine and tried to get Marinetti to work over a telnet session over the serial line, but every time I tried to connect, I got a bouncing apple lockup (equivalent to a blue screen of death). I wanted to write an application or two for it (in assembly), and maybe try to port Lynx to GNO/ME, but I never did succeed in getting Marinetti working. Oh well.
When I was about 10, we went on vacation with a group of people that happened to have a lot of doctors. These doctors happened to have easy access to liquid nitrogen for medical reasons. They brought a couple huge containers of liquid nitrogen, and we took sodas and dipped them in with a string for a couple seconds. Nice and slushy:-)
Amen. I, like so many other people, was required to learn cursive writing back in elementary school. I always got perfect grades in handwriting class, but it always takes me so long to write anything in cursive that it's just torture. The way all the letters are run together does not in any way make it clearer to read. If someone accidentally slips an extra loop on a letter, or doesn't put a line at the right height, it becomes almost impossible to read, and when someone hands me something to read in cursive, most of the time I'll hand it back and say, "sorry, I can't read this". And even when I can read it, I often hit about every 10th word I have to spend ten minutes sitting there trying to figure out what it is based on context and what it looks like.
And when you're writing it, when you jump into a word, you have to keep writing it at a constant pace or it becomes distorted. You can't dot your i's and cross your t's as you write them, you have to go back and remember afterwards which of those lines sticking up is supposed to be an i, or if that's part of a u or v, or maybe that n is a slightly misformed r, and is that a g or a q?
I guess that's the real major problem reading it, cursive letters don't have distinctive forms like their print counterparts do. Everything is just a series of loops and humps, and which letter it is is determined by the height of the loop or the sharpness of an edge. Printed letters each have a distinct form that for the most part makes them harder to confuse.
The main problem is size. The prime number theorem tells us the number of primes less than n is about n/ln(n). So a quick calculation on my calculator tells me that there are somewhere on the order of 10^19 64 bit primes. A terabyte is approximately 10^12, so you would need somewhere on the order of eighty million terabytes just to store all the 64 bit primes. I shouldn't have to mention that that kind of storage capacity is somewhat out of reach of most individuals, although I suppose a government or large corporation would be able to handle something of that magnitude (if you figure $1/gig, that's $80 billion, just for the drives themselves). Now if you're going to store the product of each of these, you're going to have the square of that number of primes to deal with. So 10^19 squared is about 10^38 different products of 128 bits. Now we're talking on the order of 100 million million million million million million primes: 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0. If were put that in terms of terabytes, that's 10^26 terabytes. That's on the order of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 terabytes. Actually, it's even slightly worse: since we're storing 128 bit numbers, that's another 16 to multiply by the number of bytes, so we just added another order and a half of magnitude.
So to answer your question of what's to stop someone from doing this? It's physically impossible, and will be for the foreseeable future. Well, I guess if we assume that the increase in drive capacity can continue as it has (1000 fold in 10 years), in 200 years, it should be in reach of a large corporation or government:-) But I think there's a lot of limits to be run into during that time that will prevent hard drive growth from continuing on like it has indefinitely. There are much more valuable things to do with our resources than calucalating all 128 bit products.
Ok, I don't claim to be an encryption expert, but I have studied the mathematics behind both Diffie-Hellman key exchange and RSA encryption (and implemented DH for a game and RSA as proof of concept: wow, 32 bit key:-) ), and I'm not sure why you would claim DH needs similar key sizes as RSA, maybe someone who knows could enlighten me. Anyway, here's what I know:
RSA private keys are two primes, and the public key is the product of the two primes. So in other words, if you have a 128 bit RSA public key, breaking the key is reduced to searching for two ~64 bit primes, and primes are much more sparse than composites.
But with Diffie-Hellman, as long as you use a Sophie-Germain prime for your modulo, the potential key size is the full 128 bits. In other words, to break a diffie-hellman key, you have to brute force through each 128 bit number to find the discrete log which is the rest of the key. To anyone who truly understands the pitfalls of these two schemes, is my reasoning off base? Is Diffie-Hellman really as insecure as RSA at the same keysize?
Curious, did you also upgrade your video card at the same time? I had a Celeron 900 with onboard video, and I upgraded to an Athlon 1100 underclocked to 900 MHz with a Radeon 8500LE, and using the same PC133 DIMMs, and it felt a whole lot faster than the difference between an Athlon and a Celeron should make. I really think the video card has more to do with how fast screen draws feel than the CPU.
The thing about games for me, it's not so much that they teach actual skills as much as they help me get interested in the subject that they're about. A couple examples:
Ever try to read the Silmarillion ? It's full of tons of different names and places and all kinds of stuff, and it can be tough to wade through it. But after playing Angband for a while, so many things were taken from the Silmarillion, when I finally read the book, the names had a familiarity to them as I try to connect them to what I saw in the game, and in the process, the very dry book becomes interesting. And when I played T.o.M.E., the geography of Middle Earth became much more interesting, because I had to navigate it myself in the game.
Another example: Robo Odyssey. This game was written back in 1984, and it teaches the player about logic gates and electronics design. I wish there were a more modern implementation of something similar (anyone out there know of anything similar?) that let you wire with logic gates to solve puzzles, but it really got me interested in doing logic design. I never did beat the game, and it had bugs, but the concept is great for teaching logic and electronic design.
The problem is not that there is a flaw in keyboards per-say, but that the input interface must change from pushing buttons.
Why is there an problem with an interface based on pushing buttons? I can't imagine any gesture based interface becoming more useful than a keyboard. While quite primative, I use the gesture feature in Mozilla, and while it is useful to some extent, most of the gestures go unused because they're too complicated to learn and to use.
I like typing a whole lot better than writing with a pen or pencil, because rather than having to take the time to shape each individual letter, a simple press of a button instantly produces the entire letter. I don't have to worry about trying to shape my motions such that my writing is legible, I merely have to push the correct buttons in the right order. It doesn't matter if I use the wrong form, it doesn't matter if I have the keyboard on my lap or on a desk or sitting on the floor, hitting the right key produces the same results no matter how you do it.
Even a 6 year old, if you tell them to type the word "cat", can most likely sit down at a keyboard and figure out how it works, even if they're not using the proper form. And as someone who can touch type about 80-100 words a minute, I can't imagine moving away from the simplicity and efficiency that discrete buttons provide.
I see two options for input using gestures: character at a time, and word at a time. Word at a time would end up being like learning Chinese, a different symbol for each word, so I think that's out for most of us. Entering one letter at a time, I cannot imagine any way to enter a single letter faster than pushing a single button. When I'm pressing one key, the next finger is already moving to where it needs to be to hit the next key, and it forms a rhythm of motion.
The only form of communication faster than button based keyboards would be speech, and there's too many problems with using that to communicate with a computer. I don't think button based input is going anywhere, anytime soon.
I would assume that the Palm wouldn't have an HP48 keyboard on it, so how would you operate it efficiently? I learned to navigate my HP48 by touch, the way you touch type on the computer. I can't imagine trying to actually use this for practical reasons. When an emulator on the PC came out for the HP49, I tried it out, and trying to do stuff with a mouse was just horrid.
And what about batteries? I haven't used a calculator too much since I got out of college, but while I was using it regularly, I changed the 3 AAA batteries probably twice a year under heavy use, including games when I'd get bored in class. I don't imagine Palms are anywhere near as power efficient. The custom Saturn processor used for the HP calculators might not have been very fast, but it was certainly power efficient.
In short, it sounds like something fun to play with for a bit, but if you actually want to use a HP calculator for what its meant for (games and entertainment of course...err...I mean, programming and calculating and graphing), I can't imagine a Palm running this actually being useful.
I definitely agree with your opinion of ViewSonic. I went in to Best Buy and CompUSA to get a new monitor, and I looked at every single model in my price range on display at both stores. These were floor models that stay on all the time. I noticed something about most of the monitors, most of them either had a jiggly image or they were starting to fade out a bit. The only ones that didn't have any display problems were the ViewSonic, so I went ahead and got one, and I really like it.
The only thing I need is a good hex editor. Or at least that's the way it was back in the Apple II days:-) Just a copy of Copy II+ had just about everything you needed for repair and rescue on the software side, it was the ultimate disk utility.
I was using VGA for output, for some reason I couldn't enable the TV output, I still haven't figured out why, but I only tried a couple times. I was using it under Windows 98, and when I tried playing DVDs, I used PowerDVD with hardware accelleration, and it was kind of jerky. One thing I might mention, I was using PC100 memory instead of PC133 memory, so that might have made things slower. But DVDs were far worse than the "soft codec" decoding. Like I said, it had problems with any video at 800x600, and DVDs normally decode to 800x600, so it was having to scale the image down to 640x480, whereas the other codecs were scaling the video up to 640x480. I was almost tempted to start ripping my DVDs just so I could watch them in good quality, but I would want a lot heaftier processor than a 533 C3 for DVD ripping/encoding.
I was unable to boot into Linux, but this is most likely because I had compiled my kernal with Celeron (Coppermine) support, and it gave me a bunch of illegal instruction errors, so I can't report on any Linux video playback.
I bought one of these back in November, I'm planning to get a good sound card for recording and a CD-RW and use it for live recordings, but until I can afford that:
When I went to visit my parents at Christmas, I didn't have room or time to take my full tower case with me. But I pulled my hard drive (on which I had already downloaded EIPA drivers) on my main machine and took the EIPA instead. I had a big collection of DS9 episodes in various formats (DivX, wsf, other.avi, maybe even mpeg). Anyway, I didn't think they'd play very well on this machine, but they worked great in 640x480. Any higher resolution had problems playing, but it can handle any video of lower resulotion than that. Unfortunately, this doesn't include DVDs, they're watchable, but it tends to skip. But then again, I have the 533 MHz model, since it didn't require a fan, and I want a totally silent machine. If you can put up with a small fan on the 800 MHz version, I imagine it wouldn't have any troubles with DVDs. I honestly didn't expect to be able to play DVDs at all, but for as well as it did, I bet the little extra horsepower of a 800 MHz machine would be sufficient to play quite well.
The Iron Giant came out in 1999, and I saw a few TV commercials for it, and thought, oh, a kids movie, another boring animated cartoon. Then a couple years later, I was with some friends to watch videos, and one of them insisted we watch The Iron Giant, and wouldn't relent until it got voted in. When we finally watched it, it was way better than I expected. Somehow it got lost among all the other movies out there, but I think it's one of the most underappreciated movies out there. If you haven't seen it, I definitely recommend it.
Well, if you put a magician in a support slot, it gives +4 base morale. You could also put a paladin to reduce the morale loss rate. Here is where you can get more info on other units.
(This is supposed to be a humorous Kohan reference, in case any moderators think this is offtopic)
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Simple and consistent solution: The user middle clicking on any element is doing so because they desire whatever action they clicked on to occur in a new tab. The solution is to make an exact replica of the current page and its state in a new tab, and then act as if the button had been pushed on the replica page instead. Sure, there will be things that don't work right with it, but I think most of the time that will give the correct behavior. Oh, and open in new tab should work with buttons too, not just links.
I seem to recall something about this idea on the TV show Andromeda (the one that just annouced it was getting cancelled). I think it was the Nietzscheans whose bodies had nanobots that would fight off attacking nanobots.
Some people can't get a legit version because it is not sold where they live.
Then they can order it over the Internet. That's where I buy all my software. I've even order stuff from England because I couldn't find it in the US.
Some can't buy it because they don't have enough money.
If they don't have enough money to buy it, then they shouldn't be using it, it's that simple. Mind if I use your car because I can't afford my own? That's not the best anology because one is a physical good while the other is pure information, but the point is, if something is too expensive, either don't use it, or wait until it reaches a price you can afford.
Some can't download a demo, because their Net access sucks, but they want to sample the game.
And so it's easier to download the full 650 MB version instead of the 100 MB demo? That statement is completely illogical.
I honestly don't have too much of a problem with using a cracked version as a demo to see if I want to buy it, but I imagine most people who download cracked version of stuff never buy the real thing.
To be honest, finding games that don't have no CD cracks provide a strong incentive to pirate them instead of buying them, but in reality, I tend to just ignore them and buy ones that I can use how I want.
Hey, how'd you know I only have two friends...?
And furthermore, if I'm going to perfect someone, I'd rather it be myself, not a stranger.
And I'm not alone. That was Blizzard's misstep.
Once upon a time, there were five blind men who had the opportunity to experience an elephant for the first time. One approached the elephant, and, upon encountering one of its sturdy legs, stated, "Ah, an elephant is like a tree." The second, after exploring the trunk, said, "No, an elephant is like a strong hose." The third, grasping the tail, said "Fool! An elephant is like a rope!" The fourth, holding an ear, stated, "No, more like a fan." And the fifth, leaning against the animal's side, said, "An elephant is like a wall." The five then began to argue loudly about who had the more accurate perception of the elephant.
The elephant, tiring of all this abuse, suddenly reared up and attacked the men. He continued to trample them until they were nothing but bloody lumps of flesh. Then, strolling away, the elephant remarked, "It just goes to show that you can't depend on first impressions. When I first saw them I didn't think they they'd be any fun at all."
I agree, I haven't seen any news about the Alpha in a long time, but it's not dead. I suspect it's a matter of Intel would rather promote their Pentium and Itanium lines than the Alpha, but they're still making them.
VIA's C3 processor is i486 (or at least that's what the linux kernel compiled as when I selected C3), so I guess I can forget about downloading knoppix to run on my EIPA 5000 machine.
Actually, 1.1 just plain didn't work for me, but it was 2.0 that was giving me bouncing apple crashes, I believe.
I also spent many, many hours trying to get Marinetti to work. Our campus was wired with both 10baseT and for those without computers, dumb terminals connected via serial cables to the local HP/UX mail server. I had a friend set up PPP on his Linux machine and tried to get Marinetti to work over a telnet session over the serial line, but every time I tried to connect, I got a bouncing apple lockup (equivalent to a blue screen of death). I wanted to write an application or two for it (in assembly), and maybe try to port Lynx to GNO/ME, but I never did succeed in getting Marinetti working. Oh well.
When I was about 10, we went on vacation with a group of people that happened to have a lot of doctors. These doctors happened to have easy access to liquid nitrogen for medical reasons. They brought a couple huge containers of liquid nitrogen, and we took sodas and dipped them in with a string for a couple seconds. Nice and slushy :-)
And when you're writing it, when you jump into a word, you have to keep writing it at a constant pace or it becomes distorted. You can't dot your i's and cross your t's as you write them, you have to go back and remember afterwards which of those lines sticking up is supposed to be an i, or if that's part of a u or v, or maybe that n is a slightly misformed r, and is that a g or a q?
I guess that's the real major problem reading it, cursive letters don't have distinctive forms like their print counterparts do. Everything is just a series of loops and humps, and which letter it is is determined by the height of the loop or the sharpness of an edge. Printed letters each have a distinct form that for the most part makes them harder to confuse.
Cursive is evil.
So to answer your question of what's to stop someone from doing this? It's physically impossible, and will be for the foreseeable future. Well, I guess if we assume that the increase in drive capacity can continue as it has (1000 fold in 10 years), in 200 years, it should be in reach of a large corporation or government
RSA private keys are two primes, and the public key is the product of the two primes. So in other words, if you have a 128 bit RSA public key, breaking the key is reduced to searching for two ~64 bit primes, and primes are much more sparse than composites.
But with Diffie-Hellman, as long as you use a Sophie-Germain prime for your modulo, the potential key size is the full 128 bits. In other words, to break a diffie-hellman key, you have to brute force through each 128 bit number to find the discrete log which is the rest of the key. To anyone who truly understands the pitfalls of these two schemes, is my reasoning off base? Is Diffie-Hellman really as insecure as RSA at the same keysize?
Curious, did you also upgrade your video card at the same time? I had a Celeron 900 with onboard video, and I upgraded to an Athlon 1100 underclocked to 900 MHz with a Radeon 8500LE, and using the same PC133 DIMMs, and it felt a whole lot faster than the difference between an Athlon and a Celeron should make. I really think the video card has more to do with how fast screen draws feel than the CPU.
Ever try to read the Silmarillion ? It's full of tons of different names and places and all kinds of stuff, and it can be tough to wade through it. But after playing Angband for a while, so many things were taken from the Silmarillion, when I finally read the book, the names had a familiarity to them as I try to connect them to what I saw in the game, and in the process, the very dry book becomes interesting. And when I played T.o.M.E., the geography of Middle Earth became much more interesting, because I had to navigate it myself in the game.
Another example: Robo Odyssey. This game was written back in 1984, and it teaches the player about logic gates and electronics design. I wish there were a more modern implementation of something similar (anyone out there know of anything similar?) that let you wire with logic gates to solve puzzles, but it really got me interested in doing logic design. I never did beat the game, and it had bugs, but the concept is great for teaching logic and electronic design.
Why is there an problem with an interface based on pushing buttons? I can't imagine any gesture based interface becoming more useful than a keyboard. While quite primative, I use the gesture feature in Mozilla, and while it is useful to some extent, most of the gestures go unused because they're too complicated to learn and to use.
I like typing a whole lot better than writing with a pen or pencil, because rather than having to take the time to shape each individual letter, a simple press of a button instantly produces the entire letter. I don't have to worry about trying to shape my motions such that my writing is legible, I merely have to push the correct buttons in the right order. It doesn't matter if I use the wrong form, it doesn't matter if I have the keyboard on my lap or on a desk or sitting on the floor, hitting the right key produces the same results no matter how you do it.
Even a 6 year old, if you tell them to type the word "cat", can most likely sit down at a keyboard and figure out how it works, even if they're not using the proper form. And as someone who can touch type about 80-100 words a minute, I can't imagine moving away from the simplicity and efficiency that discrete buttons provide.
I see two options for input using gestures: character at a time, and word at a time. Word at a time would end up being like learning Chinese, a different symbol for each word, so I think that's out for most of us. Entering one letter at a time, I cannot imagine any way to enter a single letter faster than pushing a single button. When I'm pressing one key, the next finger is already moving to where it needs to be to hit the next key, and it forms a rhythm of motion.
The only form of communication faster than button based keyboards would be speech, and there's too many problems with using that to communicate with a computer. I don't think button based input is going anywhere, anytime soon.
And what about batteries? I haven't used a calculator too much since I got out of college, but while I was using it regularly, I changed the 3 AAA batteries probably twice a year under heavy use, including games when I'd get bored in class. I don't imagine Palms are anywhere near as power efficient. The custom Saturn processor used for the HP calculators might not have been very fast, but it was certainly power efficient.
In short, it sounds like something fun to play with for a bit, but if you actually want to use a HP calculator for what its meant for (games and entertainment of course...err...I mean, programming and calculating and graphing), I can't imagine a Palm running this actually being useful.
I definitely agree with your opinion of ViewSonic. I went in to Best Buy and CompUSA to get a new monitor, and I looked at every single model in my price range on display at both stores. These were floor models that stay on all the time. I noticed something about most of the monitors, most of them either had a jiggly image or they were starting to fade out a bit. The only ones that didn't have any display problems were the ViewSonic, so I went ahead and got one, and I really like it.
The only thing I need is a good hex editor. Or at least that's the way it was back in the Apple II days :-) Just a copy of Copy II+ had just about everything you needed for repair and rescue on the software side, it was the ultimate disk utility.
I was using VGA for output, for some reason I couldn't enable the TV output, I still haven't figured out why, but I only tried a couple times. I was using it under Windows 98, and when I tried playing DVDs, I used PowerDVD with hardware accelleration, and it was kind of jerky. One thing I might mention, I was using PC100 memory instead of PC133 memory, so that might have made things slower. But DVDs were far worse than the "soft codec" decoding. Like I said, it had problems with any video at 800x600, and DVDs normally decode to 800x600, so it was having to scale the image down to 640x480, whereas the other codecs were scaling the video up to 640x480. I was almost tempted to start ripping my DVDs just so I could watch them in good quality, but I would want a lot heaftier processor than a 533 C3 for DVD ripping/encoding.
I was unable to boot into Linux, but this is most likely because I had compiled my kernal with Celeron (Coppermine) support, and it gave me a bunch of illegal instruction errors, so I can't report on any Linux video playback.
When I went to visit my parents at Christmas, I didn't have room or time to take my full tower case with me. But I pulled my hard drive (on which I had already downloaded EIPA drivers) on my main machine and took the EIPA instead. I had a big collection of DS9 episodes in various formats (DivX, wsf, other .avi, maybe even mpeg). Anyway, I didn't think they'd play very well on this machine, but they worked great in 640x480. Any higher resolution had problems playing, but it can handle any video of lower resulotion than that. Unfortunately, this doesn't include DVDs, they're watchable, but it tends to skip. But then again, I have the 533 MHz model, since it didn't require a fan, and I want a totally silent machine. If you can put up with a small fan on the 800 MHz version, I imagine it wouldn't have any troubles with DVDs. I honestly didn't expect to be able to play DVDs at all, but for as well as it did, I bet the little extra horsepower of a 800 MHz machine would be sufficient to play quite well.
The Iron Giant came out in 1999, and I saw a few TV commercials for it, and thought, oh, a kids movie, another boring animated cartoon. Then a couple years later, I was with some friends to watch videos, and one of them insisted we watch The Iron Giant, and wouldn't relent until it got voted in. When we finally watched it, it was way better than I expected. Somehow it got lost among all the other movies out there, but I think it's one of the most underappreciated movies out there. If you haven't seen it, I definitely recommend it.
(This is supposed to be a humorous Kohan reference, in case any moderators think this is offtopic)