> 60k words are about as much vocabulary as you would need to say "I want to get some ice cream" in japanese, though saying "very much hello person who is above me in the social stature and introduced by a lower co-worker" takes about two.
Moral of the story: If you want a polite society that values automation and small consumer electronics, put some people on an island with no natural resources, but good trading links, and let simmer for 2500 years.
Prediction: Our first space colonies will have red circles on the sides of their spaceships, not stars.
> Sony's not the only company attempting to recreate Pinocchio [imdb.com]. It'll face competition from
ZMP Inc's "Pino" robot [google.com]. > > Question: Who will get the Disney deal [imdb.com] first?
Investment plan:
Find out who gets the Disney deal. Short their stock. Find out their closest competitor. Buy all the stock I can afford.
The Disney company sells one or two units to every household, and that's that.
The company that didn't get the Disney deal gets to sell (to your g/f or wife) the version of Pinocchio that accurately interprets the programming command: "Everything you say to your owner is a lie."
Waaaaaay more money in that market, particularly given that the nose of that robot burns out after about an hour or two and you gotta buy her a new one, but by then, she doesn't care;-)
> Unless they get them smart enough to be declared sentient, then he can go to jail instead of you. That would be fun, filling up the countrys prisons and courts with singing robots. They'd beg congress to repeal the DMCA then.
Huh? What the fuck do you think the courts and Congress are full of today, if not singing robots?
(Oh, wait, the singing robots have to be sentient first. Guess that rules out Congress and the courts.)
> You do realize that by going to these lengths to install the codecs you supported a company which forces so much garbage down ordinary users' throats?
Totally. I've firewalled all traffic to/from real.com, though the old (5.0) player did, insofar as I could tell, respect your "don't phone home" preference. (though the preference had to be reset every 30 days or so.)
If only DiVX had been around 5 years ago, Real would never have gotten started. (If I ever encode something, I avoid Real and WMV like the plagues they are.)
> I have to agree. Not only are the wet wipes better for your ass, they may be better for the
environment (takes a lot less wet wipes to clean up than it does toilet paper).
...and one would assume they feel a hell of a lot better against your ass than a:Cue:Cat!
Re:Because online polls are completely meaningless
on
IBM 120GXP Revisited
·
· Score: 2
> I stick to WD, because I haven't had one fail on me yet (knock on wood). I still have in working condition: 1.6G, 2 6.4G's, 18 G, 45G, ~80G.
WOW! One of the 3-platter drives?
You're one of the few people I know to have a WD 1.6G drive not fail!
That said, ever since the 1.6G QA problem of 1997, WD has been good to me -- Once I was convinced WD had the problem under control, which took a year or two, I've purchased 4-5 drives from 2.1G (RMA'd from a dead 1.6:-) to 60G. Across all manufacturers, every year's crop of drives seem to run quieter and cooler (for the same RPM).
The only consistent lesson I've learned is to monitor the USENET storage newsgroups (as an early-warning-system) when building a box, and to choose a drive appropriate for the application.
If I'm building a box for media playback, I'll happily go with a 60G 5400 RPM drive over a 40G 7200 RPM drive. Slower and cooler means more reliable over the long term. The 50% extra storage for the same price is a bonus.
If I'm building a server, I go with a faster/hotter drive, but I'm also not afraid to spend another $10 on a fan to protect the $100 drive with the $BIGNUM worth of data on it.
As others have said - while some drives have quality problems, the major killer of drives is still heat brought on by improper mounting.
In my experience, drive quality has increased greatly over the past 3 years. I have a Quantum 3.2G drive that spent its first year sandwiched between a 3.5" floppy and another hard drive. When I opened the case, I almost burned my hand on the drive - I'd say it was at least 50C.
I immediately rearranged the parts to give the drive some air, but figured the drive was probably gonna die in a year. It's still going strong after another 3 years of relatively heavy (home) use.
Yeah, "Data" is not the plural of "Anecdote", but I'm still amazed when I think of that drive.
> So how are people supposed to know what is "spyware infected" and what isn't?
Most software written before 1999 is mostly clean.
Most open source software is still clean, and is likely to remain clean from this point forward.
Windows software from 1999-2001 is dodgy (usually OK in 1999 to usually fuckware by 2001).
I assume all Windows software from today onwards contains spyware and/or adware until proven otherwise.
The solution in most cases is not to upgrade.
For instance, You use WinAMP to play MP3s. Does WinAMP 3.x play MP3s any better than 2.09 did? No? Then why would you want to upgrade?
Why make AOL's problem (their lack of data on your listening habits) your problem?
> I used to love Real and Real Player. Now they install so much extra junk and do everything they can to always have something running. Ugh. One of the worst offenders out there and they only install their own software.
On an old 98SE box, I installed Real 5.0.
When it wanted to be upgraded to G2 (because a file I wanted to play needed the new codec, and I didn't want to upgrade the spam-free 5.0 player), I imaged the drive, ran the "over-the-net" upgrade ("Play the video, then let us download and run an executable, just trust us!") on the imaged drive, swapped drives back and compared the results.
I then copied the modified DLLs from the "upgraded" drive into the proper directory on the "old" drive, and voila, RealPlayer 5.0 playing G2 streams.
Did it all over again for Realplayer 7.* and 8.*.
Man, I love my South Park;-)
The practical upshot of all this was that many of the "new" RealVideo streams don't need the new player - they just need the right DLLs copied into the right directories and the old player will work fine.
> Why are viruses (which I've never had ANY trouble with because they're frankly pretty easy to avoid) illegal, but virus-like behaviour in commercial software (which affects me much more frequently) is acceptable?
s/virus/trojan/g
"Because marketing departments have better lawyers than the writers of trojans."
> [great explanation of cosmic "yardsticks" deleted] > >The furthest object yet found is a quasar, 12 billion light years away. That is, the light has taken 12 billion years to get to us! This quasar probably does not even exist any more. Astronomers like to say that they are not looking though space at these distant objects, but back in time.
The other interesting implication is that if you want to know what that quasar looks like today, look around.
The centers of our galaxies may merely be the burned-out cinders that were once quasars. A lot can change in 10-15 billion years.
> 33. "We've been doubling sales every 18 months. However, when you start from zero, it takes a long while." -- Stephen Yeo, a
marketing director at Windows-terminal manufacturer Wyse, explaining his company's less-than-meteoric rise, to ZDNet UK
So they're the brains behind:Cue:Cats!
(Sure, Enron was fucked, but you'd think they could have spared one of the 15 Enron entries for at least one CueCat story!)
I humbly submit:
102-a: Our own failure to include the:Cue:Cat on the list of 101 dumbest moments in 2001 business.
102-b: Anyone who's gullible enough to believe that the CueCat really didn't belong on the list, and especially if you don't think the omission is linked to the fact that they had lots of money to spend on print advertisements, please call us. We'll need your business plan for the 2002 list.;-)
> Another of Mann's interests is surveillance. His investigation into the horror that the watchers feel when watched
back is interesting, but it always seems to involve a certain amount of confrontation (see his videos if you don't
believe me). Did the security personnel know he had cameras in his sunglasses & how did they react when they found
out?
Interesting. I'd forgotten about his fooling around at shopping malls.
If he was being confrontational, he may have deserved some (but not all) of the treatment he got. If his gear was functioning at the time the shit went down, we should all be able to view the video streams (well, once his site recovers from the/.ing) and make up our own minds.
On the flip side, isn't it against the law these days to take video of airport security checkpoints? (In which case, he should have shut down the recording portions of his gear, because failure to stop recording would lead to a Catch-22 situation where he's damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.)
> Anyone else see that show on the MIT (IIRC) guy who had a wearable computer?
> > Face rec, face rec!
Yeah, that's Steve.
As long as we're on the subject - it's one of the supreme ironies that Steve's tech, hooked into a large database and facial recognition system, could have improved security. (I have a hunch Steve would be loath to sell his ideas to these bastards now.)
No auto-scanning face-recognition cameras - just a guy wearing cool shades who looks at you, and your name pops up in front of his face.
When your face comes up clean, you get a "Welcome to America."
When Charles Manson tries it, the screener gets "Armed and dangerous. SWAT team notified. Ask him about the weather and stall him for another 30 seconds." Chucky doesn't know what hits him.
When Joe Sixpack tries it, the screener gets "10 outstanding warrants. Hand over to secondary inspectors immediately."
When an 80-year-old general tries it, the screener gets "Hey, asshole, don't you recognize a Medal of Honor when you see one? Let him through!" flashed onto his screen.
(Of course, when Mohammed Atta tries it, the screener gets "INS says he's a student at flight school who hasn't collected his visa notification yet, so let him on!", but that's not the fault of the wearable computer and augumented memory system, it's the fault of INS - the only organization capable of making airline security drones look like geniuses.)
> The reason that he ended up in a wheelchair was that since he no longer had his cyborg navigation gear, he supposedly
got confused while walking around the airport and hit his head on a pile of fire extinguishers. I don't even know where
to start with that one.
I do - if you've followed his research, you'd know that his glasses continually project data streams onto his eyes.
(example - he walks up to a price display at a store twiddles with his fingers, and sees, projected into his vision, the price of the same object at the competing store.)
If he's worn such glasses for a long period of time, and if he's doing some other sorts of tricks with prisms and mirrors to allow the merging of eyeball-data with bitstream-data before it hits his retina, the loss of the glasses could very well hamper his ability to navigate on foot.
(I'm reminded of an old experiment in depth perception where they gave subjects glasses with prisms that shifted their "vision" 30 degrees to the right. The first day, everyone was bumping into the left-hand side of every door they tried to walk through, as you might expect. After a few weeks, their brains "retrained" themselves to see the world with the glasses on, and everything was fine. Then they took the glasses off and everyone was bumping into the right-hand side of things until their brains "unlearned" the glasses.)
> In my opinion, the truly interesting part of this article is that once his technological aids were removed, this guy ceased to be able to complete basic tasks like walking. This has significant ramifications for wearable computing. Is it augmented reality? Or is it a crutch without which he can't function?
"Yes and yes."
And that's precisely the kind of stuff he's researching.
(Once my snowshoes were removed, I ceased to be able to walk in 4-foot-deep snow. Are my snowshoes a mobility-augmentor or a crutch?)
> Behind all those wires, or in the laptop he refused to have X-rayed (WHAT possible laptop can't handle an X-ray?!) could be explosives or other weapons.
With the possible exception of the X-ray issue, I point out that the bomb/drug-sniffing equipment is there for precisely that eventuality.
Let's give the drooling fucknozzle behind the counter the benefit of the doubt for a moment and think about what would have been reasonable.
At most, they should have stripped him to check where all the wires/electrodes went, and run the sniffer over each electrode to make sure nothing naughty was concealed beneath the electrode, nor anything else that didn't get X-Rayed.
Upon finding no explosives and no drugs, they should have let him put his clothes on and travel.
All of which is beside the point, which is that the goon should have started by reading the goddamn papers Prof. Mann was carrying, that authorized him to carry the gear on the flight.
(...and called his supervisor when he realized he couldn't understand the words with more than one syllable, and let the supervisor make the call.)
> I remember the porn that showed up from weasels wandering around with sony cams with x-ray vision. I can only imagine what the airport security will end up showing on the Internet when they get this.
Actually, I'd much prefer the full-body scan to the pat-down. Better security and less intrusive in that minimum-wage monkeys no longer have the opportunity to get their jollies by feeling you up.
Also consider that by typing "naked fuckk babes" into the AOL search bar, even an airline-security goon can get better pr0n than what the full-body-scanning gear provides. (Though I admit I may be overestimating the intellectual capacity of our minimum-wage goons here.)
> No one is ever responsible for anything at the cable company. Since most of the time, they are the only game in town, they can draw employees from the bottom of the food chain and unleash them on paying customers.
So, in answer to the original poster's question - there is no difference between a cable company and a telco.;-)
> > Soldiers who survived a tank hit with depleted uranium ammunition would likely have kidney uranium levels of 4 micrograms per gram. > >In other words, the slashdot write-up is an example of the worst kind of anti-nuclear hysterical
ignorance.
Agreed.
And while we're at it, if I were a soldier whose tank survived a strike from DU artillery, I'd be thankful my kidneys (along with the rest of my internal organs) were still inside my torso, and that I was still alive to worry about how my kidneys would function at some point in the future.
In other news today, the Friends of Gaia report that infantrymen shot by lead bullets often report negative health effects. Radiant Willow Moon, head spokesbeing for the FoG, has urged the United Nations to pass a resolution banning the use of such ecologically unfriendly bullets in favor of bullets fashioned from naturally-occurring stores of driftwood or pebbles.
> Microsoft has nothing what-so-ever to gain from including DRM features into the file system.
Except, of course, for being the only legal operating system when SSSCA passes.
Except, of course, for being able to extract royalties from every competitor because it has a patent on a "DRM OS".
> It's about replacing an antiquated system that's been around since MS-DOS with something future-proof, faster, and more reliable.
Sure, FAT16 and FAT32 sucked ass (but were great for interoperability), and NTFS is OK, and yeah, there are benefits to having more ability to manipulate metadata at the OS level - the example of running WinAMP and scanning 5000 ID3 tags being a great one.
But don't kid yourself into believing that there won't be more than just benefits with a new filesystem designed by MS. Their track record says it. Their future plans as in the Hallowe'en Documents say it. Their patent filings and current legislative environment constitute evidence that things are going to plan in Redmond.
To put it another way, XP is a "better" OS than 9x. But for my gaming/MP3/movie box, I still run 9x, because 9x doesn't come with spyware and nagware. (And for my real box, I no longer run M$ware). I suspect that Longhorn will be to XP what XP was to 9x.
Some people are willing to do without the perceived "benefits" of an upgrade because sometimes some things come at too high a price.
> One minor detail - Don't forget to bolt that webcam to the gun, so we can all watch that guy jump each time a rubber band leaves a nasty welt on his backside.;)
Better yet, use a small wireless webcam and bolt it to the cat;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Too late.
$ grep robot .newsrc
[...]
alt.sex.fetish.robots
[...]
Moral of the story: If you want a polite society that values automation and small consumer electronics, put some people on an island with no natural resources, but good trading links, and let simmer for 2500 years.
Prediction: Our first space colonies will have red circles on the sides of their spaceships, not stars.
>
> Question: Who will get the Disney deal [imdb.com] first?
Investment plan:
Find out who gets the Disney deal. Short their stock. Find out their closest competitor. Buy all the stock I can afford.
The Disney company sells one or two units to every household, and that's that.
The company that didn't get the Disney deal gets to sell (to your g/f or wife) the version of Pinocchio that accurately interprets the programming command: "Everything you say to your owner is a lie."
Waaaaaay more money in that market, particularly given that the nose of that robot burns out after about an hour or two and you gotta buy her a new one, but by then, she doesn't care ;-)
Especially after I've done a drive-by-hacking and eprogrammed every 'bot on the block to reply to all commands with "Bite my shiny metal ass!"
Huh? What the fuck do you think the courts and Congress are full of today, if not singing robots?
(Oh, wait, the singing robots have to be sentient first. Guess that rules out Congress and the courts.)
Totally. I've firewalled all traffic to/from real.com, though the old (5.0) player did, insofar as I could tell, respect your "don't phone home" preference. (though the preference had to be reset every 30 days or so.)
If only DiVX had been around 5 years ago, Real would never have gotten started. (If I ever encode something, I avoid Real and WMV like the plagues they are.)
WOW! One of the 3-platter drives? You're one of the few people I know to have a WD 1.6G drive not fail!
That said, ever since the 1.6G QA problem of 1997, WD has been good to me -- Once I was convinced WD had the problem under control, which took a year or two, I've purchased 4-5 drives from 2.1G (RMA'd from a dead 1.6 :-) to 60G. Across all manufacturers, every year's crop of drives seem to run quieter and cooler (for the same RPM).
The only consistent lesson I've learned is to monitor the USENET storage newsgroups (as an early-warning-system) when building a box, and to choose a drive appropriate for the application.
If I'm building a box for media playback, I'll happily go with a 60G 5400 RPM drive over a 40G 7200 RPM drive. Slower and cooler means more reliable over the long term. The 50% extra storage for the same price is a bonus.
If I'm building a server, I go with a faster/hotter drive, but I'm also not afraid to spend another $10 on a fan to protect the $100 drive with the $BIGNUM worth of data on it.
As others have said - while some drives have quality problems, the major killer of drives is still heat brought on by improper mounting.
In my experience, drive quality has increased greatly over the past 3 years. I have a Quantum 3.2G drive that spent its first year sandwiched between a 3.5" floppy and another hard drive. When I opened the case, I almost burned my hand on the drive - I'd say it was at least 50C. I immediately rearranged the parts to give the drive some air, but figured the drive was probably gonna die in a year. It's still going strong after another 3 years of relatively heavy (home) use.
Yeah, "Data" is not the plural of "Anecdote", but I'm still amazed when I think of that drive.
We never ask chicks out. So we never get rejected.
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
- WOPR, "War Games".
(Everything I needed to know in life I learned from the WOPR computer in War Games. Love, mutually-assured-destruction, hey, what's the difference ;-)
Most software written before 1999 is mostly clean.
Most open source software is still clean, and is likely to remain clean from this point forward.
Windows software from 1999-2001 is dodgy (usually OK in 1999 to usually fuckware by 2001).
I assume all Windows software from today onwards contains spyware and/or adware until proven otherwise.
The solution in most cases is not to upgrade. For instance, You use WinAMP to play MP3s. Does WinAMP 3.x play MP3s any better than 2.09 did? No? Then why would you want to upgrade?
Why make AOL's problem (their lack of data on your listening habits) your problem?
On an old 98SE box, I installed Real 5.0.
When it wanted to be upgraded to G2 (because a file I wanted to play needed the new codec, and I didn't want to upgrade the spam-free 5.0 player), I imaged the drive, ran the "over-the-net" upgrade ("Play the video, then let us download and run an executable, just trust us!") on the imaged drive, swapped drives back and compared the results.
I then copied the modified DLLs from the "upgraded" drive into the proper directory on the "old" drive, and voila, RealPlayer 5.0 playing G2 streams.
Did it all over again for Realplayer 7.* and 8.*.
Man, I love my South Park ;-)
The practical upshot of all this was that many of the "new" RealVideo streams don't need the new player - they just need the right DLLs copied into the right directories and the old player will work fine.
s/virus/trojan/g
"Because marketing departments have better lawyers than the writers of trojans."
>
>The furthest object yet found is a quasar, 12 billion light years away. That is, the light has taken 12 billion years to get to us! This quasar probably does not even exist any more. Astronomers like to say that they are not looking though space at these distant objects, but back in time.
The other interesting implication is that if you want to know what that quasar looks like today, look around.
The centers of our galaxies may merely be the burned-out cinders that were once quasars. A lot can change in 10-15 billion years.
So they're the brains behind :Cue:Cats!
(Sure, Enron was fucked, but you'd think they could have spared one of the 15 Enron entries for at least one CueCat story!)
I humbly submit:
102-a: Our own failure to include the :Cue:Cat on the list of 101 dumbest moments in 2001 business.
102-b: Anyone who's gullible enough to believe that the CueCat really didn't belong on the list, and especially if you don't think the omission is linked to the fact that they had lots of money to spend on print advertisements, please call us. We'll need your business plan for the 2002 list. ;-)
Interesting. I'd forgotten about his fooling around at shopping malls.
If he was being confrontational, he may have deserved some (but not all) of the treatment he got. If his gear was functioning at the time the shit went down, we should all be able to view the video streams (well, once his site recovers from the /.ing) and make up our own minds.
On the flip side, isn't it against the law these days to take video of airport security checkpoints? (In which case, he should have shut down the recording portions of his gear, because failure to stop recording would lead to a Catch-22 situation where he's damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.)
>
> Face rec, face rec!
Yeah, that's Steve.
As long as we're on the subject - it's one of the supreme ironies that Steve's tech, hooked into a large database and facial recognition system, could have improved security. (I have a hunch Steve would be loath to sell his ideas to these bastards now.)
No auto-scanning face-recognition cameras - just a guy wearing cool shades who looks at you, and your name pops up in front of his face.
When your face comes up clean, you get a "Welcome to America."
When Charles Manson tries it, the screener gets "Armed and dangerous. SWAT team notified. Ask him about the weather and stall him for another 30 seconds." Chucky doesn't know what hits him.
When Joe Sixpack tries it, the screener gets "10 outstanding warrants. Hand over to secondary inspectors immediately."
When an 80-year-old general tries it, the screener gets "Hey, asshole, don't you recognize a Medal of Honor when you see one? Let him through!" flashed onto his screen.
(Of course, when Mohammed Atta tries it, the screener gets "INS says he's a student at flight school who hasn't collected his visa notification yet, so let him on!", but that's not the fault of the wearable computer and augumented memory system, it's the fault of INS - the only organization capable of making airline security drones look like geniuses.)
I do - if you've followed his research, you'd know that his glasses continually project data streams onto his eyes.
(example - he walks up to a price display at a store twiddles with his fingers, and sees, projected into his vision, the price of the same object at the competing store.)
If he's worn such glasses for a long period of time, and if he's doing some other sorts of tricks with prisms and mirrors to allow the merging of eyeball-data with bitstream-data before it hits his retina, the loss of the glasses could very well hamper his ability to navigate on foot.
(I'm reminded of an old experiment in depth perception where they gave subjects glasses with prisms that shifted their "vision" 30 degrees to the right. The first day, everyone was bumping into the left-hand side of every door they tried to walk through, as you might expect. After a few weeks, their brains "retrained" themselves to see the world with the glasses on, and everything was fine. Then they took the glasses off and everyone was bumping into the right-hand side of things until their brains "unlearned" the glasses.)
> In my opinion, the truly interesting part of this article is that once his technological aids were removed, this guy ceased to be able to complete basic tasks like walking. This has significant ramifications for wearable computing. Is it augmented reality? Or is it a crutch without which he can't function?
"Yes and yes."
And that's precisely the kind of stuff he's researching.
(Once my snowshoes were removed, I ceased to be able to walk in 4-foot-deep snow. Are my snowshoes a mobility-augmentor or a crutch?)
With the possible exception of the X-ray issue, I point out that the bomb/drug-sniffing equipment is there for precisely that eventuality.
Let's give the drooling fucknozzle behind the counter the benefit of the doubt for a moment and think about what would have been reasonable.
At most, they should have stripped him to check where all the wires/electrodes went, and run the sniffer over each electrode to make sure nothing naughty was concealed beneath the electrode, nor anything else that didn't get X-Rayed.
Upon finding no explosives and no drugs, they should have let him put his clothes on and travel.
All of which is beside the point, which is that the goon should have started by reading the goddamn papers Prof. Mann was carrying, that authorized him to carry the gear on the flight.
(...and called his supervisor when he realized he couldn't understand the words with more than one syllable, and let the supervisor make the call.)
Actually, I'd much prefer the full-body scan to the pat-down. Better security and less intrusive in that minimum-wage monkeys no longer have the opportunity to get their jollies by feeling you up.
Also consider that by typing "naked fuckk babes" into the AOL search bar, even an airline-security goon can get better pr0n than what the full-body-scanning gear provides. (Though I admit I may be overestimating the intellectual capacity of our minimum-wage goons here.)
So, in answer to the original poster's question - there is no difference between a cable company and a telco. ;-)
>
>In other words, the slashdot write-up is an example of the worst kind of anti-nuclear hysterical ignorance.
Agreed.
And while we're at it, if I were a soldier whose tank survived a strike from DU artillery, I'd be thankful my kidneys (along with the rest of my internal organs) were still inside my torso, and that I was still alive to worry about how my kidneys would function at some point in the future.
In other news today, the Friends of Gaia report that infantrymen shot by lead bullets often report negative health effects. Radiant Willow Moon, head spokesbeing for the FoG, has urged the United Nations to pass a resolution banning the use of such ecologically unfriendly bullets in favor of bullets fashioned from naturally-occurring stores of driftwood or pebbles.
Make him a Senator, then let him rant about how space tourism is wrong after his flight.
Except, of course, for being the only legal operating system when SSSCA passes.
Except, of course, for being able to extract royalties from every competitor because it has a patent on a "DRM OS".
> It's about replacing an antiquated system that's been around since MS-DOS with something future-proof, faster, and more reliable.
Sure, FAT16 and FAT32 sucked ass (but were great for interoperability), and NTFS is OK, and yeah, there are benefits to having more ability to manipulate metadata at the OS level - the example of running WinAMP and scanning 5000 ID3 tags being a great one.
But don't kid yourself into believing that there won't be more than just benefits with a new filesystem designed by MS. Their track record says it. Their future plans as in the Hallowe'en Documents say it. Their patent filings and current legislative environment constitute evidence that things are going to plan in Redmond.
To put it another way, XP is a "better" OS than 9x. But for my gaming/MP3/movie box, I still run 9x, because 9x doesn't come with spyware and nagware. (And for my real box, I no longer run M$ware). I suspect that Longhorn will be to XP what XP was to 9x.
Some people are willing to do without the perceived "benefits" of an upgrade because sometimes some things come at too high a price.
Better yet, use a small wireless webcam and bolt it to the cat ;-)
>
> [Clippy: Excuse me, it looks like you're writing a letter!]
>
> IIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!
Hey, it got rid of the fuckin' paperclip, right?