Good games, like good books, are never too long, they are too short. The only thing that is important is that you can stop in between and do some real life, just like putting down the book for a while.
This, of course, is another reason why the best computer game in the world is the best computer game in the world: Try finishing NetHack in one sitting.
Have fun banging your ball against your bedroom wall, Dan -- in the meantime, I'll be over here in the DVD rental store...
There was no third movie
on
Morpheus is Dead
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Neo died at the end of the third movie, so that one is not surprising.
You are suffering from a common misconception here: There was neither a second nor a third movie. "The Matrix" is the only film ever made and ends with Neo realizing he is The One. Any further additions to this story line would have been pure crap, suffering from lack of vision, no imagination, bad execusion, bad dialog, logic holes large enough to hide Zion in, and therefore were never made. You might be under the impression that you were in a movie theatre and saw two further firms, but this is a figment of your imagination. Hell is populated by lots of half-naked women in rubber and leather fetish clothing? Sure. In your dreams (well, possibly in mine, too, but that's a different story).
Neo is the savior, Trinity is alive, and Mr. Smith is dead. This is the truth and the whole truth. Believing anything else would just support sensless greed on the part of Holywood film managers and ruin something that was beautiful.
In other Apple news, rejected by the Slashdot editors: Trinity College in Melbourne, Australia has just dumped Debian Linux on some of their machines for OS X "Tiger", quoting ease of use for non-technical users as the reason. Read about it here, among other places. We're talking about 20 machines, and they are going to keep Debian in other labs, but the article is interesting because of the quotes from the Trinity's system admin, one of which is: "Apple is back". Trinity seems to have been one of the leaders in adopting Linux in 2000.
This supports my theory that the biggest threat to Linux is not Windows, but OS X: If you like Unix, you're probably not going to switch to Windows, but you very well might switch to Apple.
Again: It would be nice for Slashdot to have a "rejected" section so people could see what wasn't chosen. I realize that would put some pressure on the editors, but sometimes I wonder if that would really be a bad thing.
Why not combine the two techniques? Make one part of your password long and complicated and write it down in a safe place. Memorize the other part of your password, never write it down anywhere, and keep it for a long, long time. That way, if your wallet and keys are stolen, they might get your credit card, burgle your house and steal your car, but the porn collection on your laptop will be safe. Er. For example.
Though it is nice to see a discussion of this and the comments are useful, what is really getting to annoy me are the pseudo-journalist editorial lead-ins:
Spotlight turns out to be a major pain for many users because it can't be turned off and insists on indexing volumes each time they are mounted.
Just how did this AC arrive that the "many users" thing? Was there a poll among all Tiger users? How about "some" or "a couple" or "a few" or "one or two guys I just happened to know" instead? Sort of changes the whole story, right? This sort of thing is one of the reasons why people are turning away from the tradition media: They are sick and tired of everything being hyped. Please, just the facts, OK?
For the record: I use Spotlight on my aging iBook G4 800 MHz and don't see any speed problems. If anything, Tiger is a lot faster than Panther was (and my hardware doesn't even support those nifty Core whatever features). If you are that much into speed tuning, I suggest looking into Gentoo.
Stupid old laws are not the real problem but simply a symptom of the archaic American Common Law legal system. There is a good reason why modern legal systems insist that laws are given numbers and written down in books instead of accumulating them as hard to access "Jack Dipdork vs. the City of Jerktown" cases that even the professionals have trouble finding. Unforunately, fixing the cause and not the symptoms is totally unrealistic in a system where Congress is full of lawyers who don't even want tort reform: They realize too well that the real goal of the legal system is to make money for lawyers and prepare their political careers, with justice just a side effect.
This will just make the Op-Ed page less interesting for writers, less read by readers, and is another step in the downfall of a once great newspaper. There is no lack of opinion in the Internet, there is in fact no lack of well-researched news -- start here with the BBC and work your way on. Some of this is going to be as biased as the NYT, some is going to be as fabricated as seen on the NYT, but all of it is free. Even the Economist has oodles of good stuff for free.
This is also interesting for another reason: It sends the signal that they think their opinion is more important than their new reporting. What ever happened to "facts are sacred"?
I'm sure the NYT was a real shark in the days when they only had to compete for attention among other papers. But the rules have changed, and making it harder to get at their content is exactly the wrong move at the wrong time.
I hate to point this out, but I use Firefox (Linux) with KDE and I use Firefox (OS X) with my iBook. This whole discussion reminds me of somebody from Switzerland and somebody from the Czech Republic sitting in front of San Diego Harbor arguing which of their two countries has the larger navy. As nice as both browsers are (yes, and I know that Konqueror is more than just a browser), the fact is that Firefox blows them both out of the water, to stick to the navy metaphor. I find it hard to imagine I could possibly care less about this debate, even though I use both systems.
Instead of of all this bitching, Apple and the KDE people should both be thinking about how to stop wasting their resources with two things that are pretty clearly second-best and how to move their cores to Firefox. The KDE people of course are doing this on their own time, so they are free reinvent whatever wheel they like to; Apple, however, is paying these people to waste their time with this. How about having them do something useful instead with the shareholder's money?
This is probably considered dodging the problem, but I still find Firefox to be superior to Safari even after the Tiger update. Like, plugins for one -- the AdBlock plugin has pretty much changed my whole net experience.
Safari is a good browser, of course, just as its daddy Konqueror is; it is just that Apple bet on the wrong horse. They should have gone with the Firefox core.
To be honest, I'm not sure this is a bad thing anymore. Being able to upgrade stuff was all good and well when that stuff was increasing power at a breakneck pace, but now that everybody, including even Intel, has realized that clock speed doesn't equal penis size, and DVD burners are standard, why do I need to upgrade that often? If all I am going to do is surf, write e-mail, chat, and write a bit, a Mac Mini should be just fine for years and years. Gamers will be gamers, but they're not out there buying Apples anyway.
This way, Joe Averages like me are at least not led into temptation to get the Next Great Thing I don't really need -- a P4 2.4 GHz after a P4 2.0 GHz or whatever. You mentioned video cards: My current card has 32 MByte (it's an iBook G4) and doesn't support Core Image. And you know what, Mail and Firefox and NeoOffice/J work just fine anyway, so big fat stinking deal. If I want my computer to get faster, well, Apple has given me that with every update of the operating system so far. I realize that is not true of all operating systems out there (cough) -- but Tiger is probably worth more than a few MHz more. Can't wait to see what they do for OS X 10.5 "Felix" or whatever it will be called.
On the financial side, I'm not sure if upgrading piecemeal over three years (roughly my cycle) gives me that much more of a savings than a totally new computer once you factor in the high resale value of Macs. Go on eBay, check out the prices for a last generation iMac, and subtract that from the new price, and you're a good way there. And lastly, since a lot of us own iBooks or PowerBooks rather than iMacs -- laptops are never really updated anyway even in the PC world. No difference between my iBook and a ThinkPad here.
If you take the time to read their quarterly earnings blurbs, you will notice they told you this would happen -- the last quarter was a fluke, they don't expect to make a steady profit with the Xbox until 2007.
Nothing here to see, ladies and gentlemen, please move on...
The BBC has some of the best shows around, especially when it comes to natural history, science, and whatnot -- probably the best in th world in fact. And the range of stuff they offer online is unbelievable. Every Thursday, they post their In Our Time program(me) online as a MP3 file. Listen to them all, if you can.
However, all is not well with the news content. The BBC is famous for switching to "propaganda mode" whenever British interests are involved, as good as they are with things that are far away. Also, there are been repeated charges of a systematic anti-Israeli bias in their coverage.
They do great work, but for all the gushing, do remember they have their share of problems.
You know, there's really practically no demand for it.
Let me tell you a little story about how the lack of a native office suite is hurting Apple's sales.
About two years ago, my in-laws had this old PentiumPro computer they wanted to get rid of. Basically, they write letters, do a little Excel for their business, e-mail, and surf -- that's all. My idea was to have them buy a Mac because they wouldn't have the hassle with all the malware, and it would Just Work. Also, my brother-in-law has a PowerBook and is there often enough to help them if something went wrong.
So they listen to my little pitch, and then ask about the office suite -- which one does Apple have? Well, you can get Microsoft Office for the Mac, too. But, they ask, if we're going to use Microsoft office anyway, doesn't it make more sense to get Windows, because they will cooperate better?
So they bought a Dell.
Pages and Keynote are probably good products, but there is this thing about spreadsheets. When it comes down to it, Apple does not natively offer one of the most important programs or rather bundle of programs that everybody needs: An office suite. This leads to bizarre behaviour on the part of pro-Apple people:
Microsoft Office 2004 is pretty amazing, albeit not perfect. Everybody who needs it, already has it.
Microsoft costs about $350 at the Apple Online Store. This is money that goes to Microsoft (well, most of it, probably). Now, if Apple were to include a free office suite like a polished version of NeoOffice/J, those $350 could go to something that is actually Apple's -- an iPod, iSight, the beautiful Airport Express setup. $350 is getting close to another Mac mini for your dear old mother who never had her own computer before. In other words, everytime somebody buys MS Office for Mac, Apple looses money. This should be bugging Apple badly.
I realize that Apple is in a bad spot here. They simply need an office suite, and the only one that is aquafied enough for the general public is MS Office. They can't risk pissing off Microsoft by starting to make their own, even if they wanted to expend the resources -- Microsoft could make life hell for Apple by just little things in Office.
Coming out and supporting NeoOffice/J of couse is something that would really piss off Microsoft, so you can't do that. It's not reasonable to expect any major official support, even though the NeoOffice/J people are Apple's best shot on the long run to get at that $350 Microsoft tax.
What I do expect, however, is that Apple makes life a bit easier for people who don't want to spend $350 on fucntions that in the PC and Linux world they can get for free with OpenOffice. Like, including OpenDocument support natively with Tiger, instead of forcing the people to write one themselves.
I would be writing this on a ThinkPad running Linux and not an iBook if it wasn't for the OpenOffice people, and would never had gone for Airport Extreme, an iPod, iLife 05 (good grief, have I already spent that much?)... Apple will have to fix this problem at some point, and OpenOffice / NeoOffice/J seems to be their only realistic shot at the moment without start a war with MS they can't win. A bit of love would be nice.
From the little chance I had to play with it, Spotlight looks like the best candidate for that special new feature that changes the way you work with your computer from here on and that everybody from Microsoft to Linux will spend the next months copying. This is really, truely, seriously cool.
However --
There is currently no plugin for Spotlight that looks inside the OpenDocument formats -- the free office formats that OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice/J use to replace the closed Microsoft formats, that KOffice is going to adopt, that the European Union has recommended as the stardard formats for the governments of 400+ million people, and that are on their way to being a ISO standard. Since there is no serious free or even affordable office package for the Mac except for NeoOffice/J -- MS Office is too expensive, Pages is not a full office suite, and AppleWorks doesn't cut it -- NeoOffice/J is just about the only way to fly, so this would be a seriously important plugin.
This is one of the frustrating things about Apple, as much as I love my little iBook: They don't believe in supporting free formats unless they really, really have to (like MP3). The Ogg Vorbis problem has become something of a joke here on Slashdot, but in this case it is hard to argue that we're talking about an exotic, little-used format that is not worth their while. I'm disappointed, though not surprised, that Spotlight doesn't support OpenDocument out of the box. Those of us who can't will be very grateful to those who can when the have...
To be honest, that was my first reaction, too. However: The little plugin thingies are going to be one of the first places where lots of people cut their teeth on programming. Apple is doing a certain amount of hand-holding here and provides some documentation and a great programming enviroment -- it got even better with Tiger. Since this site is for people who at least would like to pretend that they could code if they only had the time (ah, like me), it does make sense.
One word of advice: If you ever have to ask a question that is critical about Apple on Slashdot, post as AC. Things that are considered normal, harmless questions or even humorous in other sections get trolled to death here. The "Cult of Mac", unfortunately, is not a joke.
Ah, the American legal system strikes again, calling forth armies of lawyers to waste a company's money on stupid claims that would be laughed out of court anywhere else, creating costs that in the end have to be paid for by the customer, and keeping people from doing serious work. These clowns waited one whole year to file at the last moment? Try telling a judge in Germany or Japan or the Netherlands how acutely you have been feeling the pain after pulling this kind of a stunt. If this was for real, they would have filed their claim eleven months ago the latest. Unfortunately, it is even conceivable they're going to get away with it.
The anachronism that is American's 18th Century
Common Law legal system has proven itself inferior to the modern
Civil Law systems in the rest of the world so many times just in the last years just in tech that it just isn't funny anymore. You do remember that SCO is still wasting IBM's time and money in a U.S. court, with no end in sight? You notice how the rest of the world got that crap out of their systems long ago?
Sadly for us Americans, there is no chance in hell for a serious, basic and fundamental legal reform. With a Congress filled full of lawyers, our sputtering system of codified greed won't even have to face the slight correction of a tort reform.
As nice as this is, what I think would be more important would be to update the PowerBook line for Tiger. The problem is not so much the processor (though a G5 or a dual core G4 would be nice), but the small video RAM -- to really make Tiger roar, it seems you need as much of that as you can get. 64 MByte doesn't really look like much (and the iBook's 32 MByte looks downright pathetic). And, if the PowerMacs have the Superduperdrive, could the PowerBooks get them, too, pretty please?
With all the comparisons with real journalists here, there is one missing: News agencies like AP or Reuters have something called a KILL, where they withdraw a story that is so completely and utterly wrong or missleading that there is no way they can correct it. This is never a happy occasion for anybody, but a recognized necessity -- sometimes, shit just happens, just like here. And we all know this is not the first time for Slashdot, eh?
I strongly suggest that the Slashdot editors sit down and devise a sort of KILL procedure, too. Use scull and crossbones, or the comic figure Death, use Gates Triumphant, and then a short line like: The story "Linus marries a three-breasted space alien after drunken fling in Tokyo bondage-palace" is wrong and is hereby withdrawn. Sorry, guys.". That's all it would take.
Oh, and did I mention it allows the newspaper to maintain its brand and sell its own advertising based on what the user is viewing?
Advertising, advertising, let me think -- that had something to do with not having Firefox and the Adblock extention, didn't it...I dimly remember advertising...oh, those were the days, when Saddam was still in power, Hellboy was only a comic and BSD was still alive...sigh...to be young and foolish again...
Slashdot Mirror
This, of course, is another reason why the best computer game in the world is the best computer game in the world: Try finishing NetHack in one sitting.
Have fun banging your ball against your bedroom wall, Dan -- in the meantime, I'll be over here in the DVD rental store...
You are suffering from a common misconception here: There was neither a second nor a third movie. "The Matrix" is the only film ever made and ends with Neo realizing he is The One. Any further additions to this story line would have been pure crap, suffering from lack of vision, no imagination, bad execusion, bad dialog, logic holes large enough to hide Zion in, and therefore were never made. You might be under the impression that you were in a movie theatre and saw two further firms, but this is a figment of your imagination. Hell is populated by lots of half-naked women in rubber and leather fetish clothing? Sure. In your dreams (well, possibly in mine, too, but that's a different story).
Neo is the savior, Trinity is alive, and Mr. Smith is dead. This is the truth and the whole truth. Believing anything else would just support sensless greed on the part of Holywood film managers and ruin something that was beautiful.
This supports my theory that the biggest threat to Linux is not Windows, but OS X: If you like Unix, you're probably not going to switch to Windows, but you very well might switch to Apple.
Again: It would be nice for Slashdot to have a "rejected" section so people could see what wasn't chosen. I realize that would put some pressure on the editors, but sometimes I wonder if that would really be a bad thing.
Why not combine the two techniques? Make one part of your password long and complicated and write it down in a safe place. Memorize the other part of your password, never write it down anywhere, and keep it for a long, long time. That way, if your wallet and keys are stolen, they might get your credit card, burgle your house and steal your car, but the porn collection on your laptop will be safe. Er. For example.
Spotlight turns out to be a major pain for many users because it can't be turned off and insists on indexing volumes each time they are mounted.
Just how did this AC arrive that the "many users" thing? Was there a poll among all Tiger users? How about "some" or "a couple" or "a few" or "one or two guys I just happened to know" instead? Sort of changes the whole story, right? This sort of thing is one of the reasons why people are turning away from the tradition media: They are sick and tired of everything being hyped. Please, just the facts, OK?
For the record: I use Spotlight on my aging iBook G4 800 MHz and don't see any speed problems. If anything, Tiger is a lot faster than Panther was (and my hardware doesn't even support those nifty Core whatever features). If you are that much into speed tuning, I suggest looking into Gentoo.
Stupid old laws are not the real problem but simply a symptom of the archaic American Common Law legal system. There is a good reason why modern legal systems insist that laws are given numbers and written down in books instead of accumulating them as hard to access "Jack Dipdork vs. the City of Jerktown" cases that even the professionals have trouble finding. Unforunately, fixing the cause and not the symptoms is totally unrealistic in a system where Congress is full of lawyers who don't even want tort reform: They realize too well that the real goal of the legal system is to make money for lawyers and prepare their political careers, with justice just a side effect.
This is also interesting for another reason: It sends the signal that they think their opinion is more important than their new reporting. What ever happened to "facts are sacred"?
I'm sure the NYT was a real shark in the days when they only had to compete for attention among other papers. But the rules have changed, and making it harder to get at their content is exactly the wrong move at the wrong time.
Shame on you, Microsoft! Shame on you!
[Yes, that was joke]
Instead of of all this bitching, Apple and the KDE people should both be thinking about how to stop wasting their resources with two things that are pretty clearly second-best and how to move their cores to Firefox. The KDE people of course are doing this on their own time, so they are free reinvent whatever wheel they like to; Apple, however, is paying these people to waste their time with this. How about having them do something useful instead with the shareholder's money?
Safari is a good browser, of course, just as its daddy Konqueror is; it is just that Apple bet on the wrong horse. They should have gone with the Firefox core.
To be honest, I'm not sure this is a bad thing anymore. Being able to upgrade stuff was all good and well when that stuff was increasing power at a breakneck pace, but now that everybody, including even Intel, has realized that clock speed doesn't equal penis size, and DVD burners are standard, why do I need to upgrade that often? If all I am going to do is surf, write e-mail, chat, and write a bit, a Mac Mini should be just fine for years and years. Gamers will be gamers, but they're not out there buying Apples anyway.
This way, Joe Averages like me are at least not led into temptation to get the Next Great Thing I don't really need -- a P4 2.4 GHz after a P4 2.0 GHz or whatever. You mentioned video cards: My current card has 32 MByte (it's an iBook G4) and doesn't support Core Image. And you know what, Mail and Firefox and NeoOffice/J work just fine anyway, so big fat stinking deal. If I want my computer to get faster, well, Apple has given me that with every update of the operating system so far. I realize that is not true of all operating systems out there (cough) -- but Tiger is probably worth more than a few MHz more. Can't wait to see what they do for OS X 10.5 "Felix" or whatever it will be called.
On the financial side, I'm not sure if upgrading piecemeal over three years (roughly my cycle) gives me that much more of a savings than a totally new computer once you factor in the high resale value of Macs. Go on eBay, check out the prices for a last generation iMac, and subtract that from the new price, and you're a good way there. And lastly, since a lot of us own iBooks or PowerBooks rather than iMacs -- laptops are never really updated anyway even in the PC world. No difference between my iBook and a ThinkPad here.
Nothing here to see, ladies and gentlemen, please move on...
- get yourself a fireplace. Anybody who can reconstruct your papers after that is going to get you anyhow.
However, all is not well with the news content. The BBC is famous for switching to "propaganda mode" whenever British interests are involved, as good as they are with things that are far away. Also, there are been repeated charges of a systematic anti-Israeli bias in their coverage.
They do great work, but for all the gushing, do remember they have their share of problems.
Let me tell you a little story about how the lack of a native office suite is hurting Apple's sales.
About two years ago, my in-laws had this old PentiumPro computer they wanted to get rid of. Basically, they write letters, do a little Excel for their business, e-mail, and surf -- that's all. My idea was to have them buy a Mac because they wouldn't have the hassle with all the malware, and it would Just Work. Also, my brother-in-law has a PowerBook and is there often enough to help them if something went wrong. So they listen to my little pitch, and then ask about the office suite -- which one does Apple have? Well, you can get Microsoft Office for the Mac, too. But, they ask, if we're going to use Microsoft office anyway, doesn't it make more sense to get Windows, because they will cooperate better?
So they bought a Dell.
Pages and Keynote are probably good products, but there is this thing about spreadsheets. When it comes down to it, Apple does not natively offer one of the most important programs or rather bundle of programs that everybody needs: An office suite. This leads to bizarre behaviour on the part of pro-Apple people:
Microsoft Office 2004 is pretty amazing, albeit not perfect. Everybody who needs it, already has it.
Microsoft costs about $350 at the Apple Online Store. This is money that goes to Microsoft (well, most of it, probably). Now, if Apple were to include a free office suite like a polished version of NeoOffice/J, those $350 could go to something that is actually Apple's -- an iPod, iSight, the beautiful Airport Express setup. $350 is getting close to another Mac mini for your dear old mother who never had her own computer before. In other words, everytime somebody buys MS Office for Mac, Apple looses money. This should be bugging Apple badly.
I realize that Apple is in a bad spot here. They simply need an office suite, and the only one that is aquafied enough for the general public is MS Office. They can't risk pissing off Microsoft by starting to make their own, even if they wanted to expend the resources -- Microsoft could make life hell for Apple by just little things in Office. Coming out and supporting NeoOffice/J of couse is something that would really piss off Microsoft, so you can't do that. It's not reasonable to expect any major official support, even though the NeoOffice/J people are Apple's best shot on the long run to get at that $350 Microsoft tax.
What I do expect, however, is that Apple makes life a bit easier for people who don't want to spend $350 on fucntions that in the PC and Linux world they can get for free with OpenOffice. Like, including OpenDocument support natively with Tiger, instead of forcing the people to write one themselves.
I would be writing this on a ThinkPad running Linux and not an iBook if it wasn't for the OpenOffice people, and would never had gone for Airport Extreme, an iPod, iLife 05 (good grief, have I already spent that much?) ... Apple will have to fix this problem at some point, and OpenOffice / NeoOffice/J seems to be their only realistic shot at the moment without start a war with MS they can't win. A bit of love would be nice.
Wow. Thanks for this and all the other great work you guys are doing -- without NeoOffice/J, I'd be dual booting all the time.
However --
There is currently no plugin for Spotlight that looks inside the OpenDocument formats -- the free office formats that OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice/J use to replace the closed Microsoft formats, that KOffice is going to adopt, that the European Union has recommended as the stardard formats for the governments of 400+ million people, and that are on their way to being a ISO standard. Since there is no serious free or even affordable office package for the Mac except for NeoOffice/J -- MS Office is too expensive, Pages is not a full office suite, and AppleWorks doesn't cut it -- NeoOffice/J is just about the only way to fly, so this would be a seriously important plugin.
This is one of the frustrating things about Apple, as much as I love my little iBook: They don't believe in supporting free formats unless they really, really have to (like MP3). The Ogg Vorbis problem has become something of a joke here on Slashdot, but in this case it is hard to argue that we're talking about an exotic, little-used format that is not worth their while. I'm disappointed, though not surprised, that Spotlight doesn't support OpenDocument out of the box. Those of us who can't will be very grateful to those who can when the have...
To be honest, that was my first reaction, too. However: The little plugin thingies are going to be one of the first places where lots of people cut their teeth on programming. Apple is doing a certain amount of hand-holding here and provides some documentation and a great programming enviroment -- it got even better with Tiger. Since this site is for people who at least would like to pretend that they could code if they only had the time (ah, like me), it does make sense.
One word of advice: If you ever have to ask a question that is critical about Apple on Slashdot, post as AC. Things that are considered normal, harmless questions or even humorous in other sections get trolled to death here. The "Cult of Mac", unfortunately, is not a joke.
The anachronism that is American's 18th Century Common Law legal system has proven itself inferior to the modern Civil Law systems in the rest of the world so many times just in the last years just in tech that it just isn't funny anymore. You do remember that SCO is still wasting IBM's time and money in a U.S. court, with no end in sight? You notice how the rest of the world got that crap out of their systems long ago?
Sadly for us Americans, there is no chance in hell for a serious, basic and fundamental legal reform. With a Congress filled full of lawyers, our sputtering system of codified greed won't even have to face the slight correction of a tort reform.
Maybe come Monday?
... you spend the rest of your life smelling like rotten eggs because of the sulfide...
"I find your lack of faith disappointing."
I strongly suggest that the Slashdot editors sit down and devise a sort of KILL procedure, too. Use scull and crossbones, or the comic figure Death, use Gates Triumphant, and then a short line like: The story "Linus marries a three-breasted space alien after drunken fling in Tokyo bondage-palace" is wrong and is hereby withdrawn. Sorry, guys.". That's all it would take.
Gee, you might even use this for dups...
Advertising, advertising, let me think -- that had something to do with not having Firefox and the Adblock extention, didn't it...I dimly remember advertising...oh, those were the days, when Saddam was still in power, Hellboy was only a comic and BSD was still alive...sigh...to be young and foolish again...