I think it's pretty safe to say that the majority of the people in florida did not want him in office.
I think it's pretty safe to say that the majority of the voting age people in Florida are idiots. 5 year olds had no problem with their ballots, yet 60 year olds were "confused". If you can't follow simple directions, you really shouldn't be voting.
Except that management also wanted to automate things like it's done on the East Coast. In the east, the docks are so automated that they don't need nearly as many people to do the unloading. They have cranes that do it all. The union of course didn't like this as it meant that their loser workers would either have to A) update their skills to use the new "high tech" equipment or B) get let go because they didn't know how to use the new "high tech" equipment. No, I don't know exactly how all that automated equipment works, but my sisters husband works at those docks and could tell you the same thing. The majority of those guys wouldn't have a clue how to use a computer, even if you sat them down and trained them. They're just looking for their weekly paycheck, doing as little work as possible to get it.
This is not the way it happens at all the polling places. Where I went, to my great dismay, they had electronic voting. When I got there, I gave them my name and they gave me a slip of paper (I think it had a barcode on it, but I'm not sure). I took the slip of paper to another lady that fed it into a computer and the computer printed out my access code. I took the access code and used that to login to the machine. Now I didn't honestly check to see how they were hooked up, but that's how it was done where I went. My greatest concern is the same as others here. Sure, it's showing me what I picked, but is that what's being transmitted for the final count? There's no paper trail of my vote anywhere. I really have no idea if some backdoor code didn't flip one or some of my votes. And honestly, since I hate e-voting with a passion, I'll be voting absentee from this time forward.
What's to stop another recall initiative being put forward by the loosing party of this one?
Absolutely nothing and the anti-recall forces have already said that they will take out a recall petition as soon as the election is certified. They'll have to come up with enough signatures to get it qualified for the ballot though and that's likely where they'll get stopped.
The difference between Davis and Reagan is, first of all, huge. It's not just the budget that has everyone angry at Davis. He signed costly energy contracts at the last minute instead of taking care of things sooner. He tripled the car registration fee, BREAKING the law in the process (a fee increase is required to go through the assembly and state senate, he did not do that). He hired 40,000 employees during a hiring freeze. He allowed the state to blead $1 billion dollars per day unnecessarily (I don't know exactly what this was for, but I understand that it did happen). The worst Reagan can be accused of is giving us a high federal deficit, but at the same time he was cutting everyones taxes. That means you get more money to spend. Right now, California has no money to spend.
And actually, what those people are hoping for, the ones that think a GOP governor might throw the state, is that the state will be in such trouble at that point, that the people in California will welcome change at the state level and keep things the way they are at the federal level.
You're missing something. The recall is not dependant on the population of the state or the number of registered voters. It's a percentage of the number of people that voted in the last election. If I'm not mistaken, it's 15%. That should be a big wake up call to all the idiots out here (yes, I live in California) that don't get out and vote. I think turnout in the last election was about 40% of the registered population (it could be lower, I can't remember right now) which means that Davis only one by a little over half of that, about 25-30%.
So while only 900,000 signatures were needed (they collected nearly 2 million by the way) a lot of people want him gone. And no, it wasn't people going door to door gathering signatures. Sure, some gatherers sat outside supermarkets, but everything I've heard suggests that people would walk up and ask them where they can sign. No one was bugged to sign the recall. Everyone did it willingly (Republicans and Democrats).
Actually, I understand that they are already due that in places like New York and New Jersey, at the toll roads at least. They give you some kind of ticket when you go through the gate that has a time stamp on it. When you get to the other end, they take your ticket and check it against the time. If you've gotten there to fast, they issue you a ticket for speeding (whether that's mailed to you or handed to you I don't know).
This is not the case with nVidia drivers though. I don't have to wait 6 months for Dell to release new drivers for my GeForce2GO. I can go to nVidia's site, grab the source rpm, rebuild it, install it, and be up and running in a few minutes time.
Sure, it's not supported by Dell or nVidia, but it seems to work flawlessly.
Uh, I live on the west coast thank you, the LA area specifically. Aside from seeing FireFly preempted by baseball (can you blame them? the ratings for FireFly were abysmal at best), they've showed every show I watch on a consistent basis. And even the episodes of FireFly that were shown on Saturday were shown again in repeats. Admittedly, I don't watch that many shows on Fox anymore, but the ones I watch are consistent. 24 shows, when it's new, every Tuesday at 9pm. And when was the last time Malcolm in the Middle was shown on a Thursday night? The last one I DIDN'T watch (because I think it's a lame show) was on during it's scheduled time, Sunday at 9pm. I honestly don't know about Simpsons since it's really not as good as it used to be and I've never been that interested in Futurama.
So I guess the point would be that as long as the programs you watch aren't on Fox, with the exception of John Doe and 24, you'd be ok with setting a VCR for those specific time slots to catch your program. By the way, no one ever said Fox was intelligent at scheduling programs. It's the only channel I ever really hear complaints about. All the other channels seem to be perfectly consistent.
Well, according to the simpsons website, it airs Sundays at 8pm. Sure, it might get preempted from time to time by sports, but it does have a regular time slot. Same goes for Futurama, Sundays at 7pm.
John Doe and FireFly aired consistently every Friday starting at 8pm for FireFly and 9pm for John Doe. Yeah, maybe John Doe didn't run EVERY week, but what show does?
So out of 6 shows that you mentioned, 2/3 of them do air at a consistent time and day, they just don't air every week. The parent poster makes it sound like the shows are moved to different DAYS and TIME SLOTS all the time, which simply isn't the case. That happens at most once per season (at the beginning) and sometimes not even that. X-Files aired for how many YEARS on Sundays at 9pm? I don't know off hand, but it was probably for at least half its run.
Someone didn't look hard enough. A quick google search on "vehicle recall" gets me a link to the NHTSA. That's right, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Oh, and look here, a Recall button where you can enter your vehicle information and see if there are any recalls.
There is actually one (that I know of). IGNBoards. It's not free, but it's used on boards.theforce.net very effectively. Basically, any time someone posts in a thread, that thread is moved to the top (based on the date). As more people post in threads, the threads become ordered by the date and time someone last posted in them.
What about parodies? A lot of parody (say, Weird Al) has music almost identical to the original works, but they don't even have to get permisison if they don't want to!
Uh, actually, yes they do. Weird Al has gotten permission from plenty of artists. He can't charge for the parody without getting permission (some of his earlier parodies are only found on Dr. Demento CDs because of this). He even claimed in an interview once that it was really hard to get permission until Michael Jackson let him do one of his songs. Now, all he has to say is "Michael Jackson let me do his" (that's what he said at the time) and they let him do it almost instantly.
By the same token, the guy who wrote "Star Wars Cantina" (to the tune of Copa Cabana) has never and can never charge for the song because Barry Manilow won't give him permission.
It really just depends on how big an artist you are. The bigger you are, the easier it will probably be to get permission to charge for a parody. Otherwise, you'll be limited to releasing your parody on some p2p network.
Heh, and that was one of the better love scenes. To be quite honest, I hated most of the love scenes too. I would've picked a better example. The fireplace scene. I would've chopped that whole scene out.
[Anakin and Padme in a room with a fireplace] [Padme wearing sexy evening dress]
Padme: We can't be together. Anakin: My heart is tormented!
Repeat above for 5-10 mins.
Ugh, cut the whole thing please. Fortunately, for the IMAX release, they did cut that scene in half.
Wow, it would be nice if GeForce 4's could play Doom III when it is finally released. From everything I read about the alpha version, it's barely playable with any current video card (except ATIs 9700 (I think)) unless you reduce all the pretty features. Of course, by the time Doom III comes out, a GFFX shouldn't cost much more than $250.
You're kidding right? I spend twice that per day surfing with Mozilla and the only time I ever had a crash was when I tried to go to Mozilla 1.2b from 1.1. I ended up going back because Save Image As... didn't work. I can't remember the last time I had a crash with Mozilla and I use it constantly everyday. I only use IE on two sites now, one to pay my phone bill (stupid Verizon screwed up their site) and another to access a vendor that only works with Windows products (stupid VB Script).
He may look a little like him, but he definitely won't ACT like him. JarJar is an annoying turd that needs to go away. Gollum is a creature you're supposed to take pity on because of what he's become. I think Gollum would kick JarJar's ass any day.
"Mesa JarJar Binks!" "You've got the ring! It's mine give it to me!" "But mesa just..ack...acck!" (as Gollum wraps his dirty little hands around JarJars throat)
I think you're misunderstanding me (or I'm not being clear).
I totally agree with everything you're saying.
I'm not going to highlight your message, but let me hit on a few points.
Business will continue to purchase MS Office as long as the competing products are only 99.5% compatible. It's that last.5% that will always kill the competition because it's that last.5% that some people in corporations are using and they need to maintain compatibility with their customers.
No, I don't like the idea of running as root. But when the distro prompts you for a password to install some stupid piece of software, people will stop using it. "Windows didn't make me enter a password" Sure, Linux is more secure, but people don't necessarily want that.
And do you really think a family is going to pay MS to run XP on 5 different machines? Even if someone in the direct family doesn't know how to do it, they probably know someone that knows or has all the cracks necessary to get around that scheme. And sharing copies with your family isn't limited to Lindows. I'm sure you know it, but all the distributions allow you to share. RedHat is the only one I know of that doesn't like it when people install "unofficial" (read: downloaded) copies on peoples computers. And that's only a matter of not wanting support calls from people who haven't bought the distribution.
People won't run Linux until it comes pre-installed on good machines. And I'm not talking about the bargain basement machines Walmart sells. I've looked at their specs and I only half heartedly tell people about them. Crap like that just isn't reliable. When you can get a Dell, HP, Compaq, or Gateway with Linux preinstalled and pay less, then people might start to consider it.
Oh yeah, it'll help if Linux can play all their kids games too (I know it's getting better, but a lot of kids games still don't run on it).
No, they just shake their heads and take it. They expect to have to reboot their computers several times a day. They expect the computer to crash. If their refrigerator just suddenly died, you can bet your ass they'd have a repair man out to the house fixing it (assuming under warranty) to make sure it didn't break again. With Microsoft, they're charged for a support call and then they are reimbursed only if they can prove it's a bug in the product. But I'm going off on a tangent now. My point is that most consumers just take what they're given, and that happens to be Windows on a new PC.
China is not. Peru is not. Japan is not. Germany is not. India is not.
Funny you should mention China. Don't they have the highest rate of piracy in the world? The other countries are not going to make a large dent in Microsoft's bottom line.
My point is that large corporations are still sticking with MS because Licensing 6.0 doesn't change much for them. They've been paying million dollar contracts to MS for years to get the latest software updates each and every year and stay up on their licensing.
Will the average Joe switch to a free *nix to avoid paying higher license fees? Assuming they've been buying their copies of windows and not having Joey down the street install his copy onto their machines or using the copy they bought with their old computer on the new one they had Joey down the street build for them, maybe. Of course, their machine will still have to be setup by Joey down the street with that other OS and all the software they're gonna need or they won't be able to use the computer anyway. And if they can't use it, they won't want it. That is one of the major reasons I haven't put Linux onto my parents computer. They're not gonna remember the root password in order to install software. They want to be able to click on a file and have it go. And I don't want to constantly have to go do work on their system because a program needs the root password to be installed. Sure, I could make them run as root all the time, but then I lose the benefit of a permissions based system.
It's not that people don't have a clue that there are other alternatives out there (I've told my parents several times), it's that the alternatives are still not as easy to use.
Are you kidding me? 3 FPS slower in Linux. On the same hardware. Of course, I'm talking about 57 FPS vs 60 FPS. And I wasn't referring to any specific game. If you're thinking Doom 3, then, uh, haha, there is no way any current generation of Nvidia cards will be able to play that game with nearly enough detail to make it worth it. I should know. I've tried:)
Anandtech had all the same info as tech-report when the news hit. There's nothing new or earth shattering being reported at tech-report that anyone who has read Anandtech doesn't already know. Well, except for the fact that tech-report failed to mention that the memory on the GFFX runs at 500 MHz, which is why it needs a huge fan to cool it. The only thing they mention is that "the memory runs faster".
Sure, they talk down wider memory paths now, but will they say the same when ATI has a newer card out that uses the same technology?
It's a feature because instead of having to go to ATI's site and find the right driver for your card and OS, you just go to Nvidia's site and grab 1 driver that works with the entire line of TNT and GeForce cards with 1 driver for Win9x/ME and 1 driver for XP/2k.
It's also nice having a video card that can come within about 3 FPS of performance between Windows and Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's pretty safe to say that the majority of the people in florida did not want him in office.
I think it's pretty safe to say that the majority of the voting age people in Florida are idiots. 5 year olds had no problem with their ballots, yet 60 year olds were "confused". If you can't follow simple directions, you really shouldn't be voting.
Except that management also wanted to automate things like it's done on the East Coast. In the east, the docks are so automated that they don't need nearly as many people to do the unloading. They have cranes that do it all. The union of course didn't like this as it meant that their loser workers would either have to A) update their skills to use the new "high tech" equipment or B) get let go because they didn't know how to use the new "high tech" equipment. No, I don't know exactly how all that automated equipment works, but my sisters husband works at those docks and could tell you the same thing. The majority of those guys wouldn't have a clue how to use a computer, even if you sat them down and trained them. They're just looking for their weekly paycheck, doing as little work as possible to get it.
This is not the way it happens at all the polling places. Where I went, to my great dismay, they had electronic voting. When I got there, I gave them my name and they gave me a slip of paper (I think it had a barcode on it, but I'm not sure). I took the slip of paper to another lady that fed it into a computer and the computer printed out my access code. I took the access code and used that to login to the machine. Now I didn't honestly check to see how they were hooked up, but that's how it was done where I went. My greatest concern is the same as others here. Sure, it's showing me what I picked, but is that what's being transmitted for the final count? There's no paper trail of my vote anywhere. I really have no idea if some backdoor code didn't flip one or some of my votes. And honestly, since I hate e-voting with a passion, I'll be voting absentee from this time forward.
No, either way it's your own damn fault for not having proper backups.
What's to stop another recall initiative being put forward by the loosing party of this one?
Absolutely nothing and the anti-recall forces have already said that they will take out a recall petition as soon as the election is certified. They'll have to come up with enough signatures to get it qualified for the ballot though and that's likely where they'll get stopped.
The difference between Davis and Reagan is, first of all, huge. It's not just the budget that has everyone angry at Davis. He signed costly energy contracts at the last minute instead of taking care of things sooner. He tripled the car registration fee, BREAKING the law in the process (a fee increase is required to go through the assembly and state senate, he did not do that). He hired 40,000 employees during a hiring freeze. He allowed the state to blead $1 billion dollars per day unnecessarily (I don't know exactly what this was for, but I understand that it did happen). The worst Reagan can be accused of is giving us a high federal deficit, but at the same time he was cutting everyones taxes. That means you get more money to spend. Right now, California has no money to spend.
And actually, what those people are hoping for, the ones that think a GOP governor might throw the state, is that the state will be in such trouble at that point, that the people in California will welcome change at the state level and keep things the way they are at the federal level.
You're missing something. The recall is not dependant on the population of the state or the number of registered voters. It's a percentage of the number of people that voted in the last election. If I'm not mistaken, it's 15%. That should be a big wake up call to all the idiots out here (yes, I live in California) that don't get out and vote. I think turnout in the last election was about 40% of the registered population (it could be lower, I can't remember right now) which means that Davis only one by a little over half of that, about 25-30%.
So while only 900,000 signatures were needed (they collected nearly 2 million by the way) a lot of people want him gone. And no, it wasn't people going door to door gathering signatures. Sure, some gatherers sat outside supermarkets, but everything I've heard suggests that people would walk up and ask them where they can sign. No one was bugged to sign the recall. Everyone did it willingly (Republicans and Democrats).
Not for any products according to that page. It says "Not supported." How does that mean not for all products? They don't list any!
Actually, I understand that they are already due that in places like New York and New Jersey, at the toll roads at least. They give you some kind of ticket when you go through the gate that has a time stamp on it. When you get to the other end, they take your ticket and check it against the time. If you've gotten there to fast, they issue you a ticket for speeding (whether that's mailed to you or handed to you I don't know).
This is not the case with nVidia drivers though. I don't have to wait 6 months for Dell to release new drivers for my GeForce2GO. I can go to nVidia's site, grab the source rpm, rebuild it, install it, and be up and running in a few minutes time.
Sure, it's not supported by Dell or nVidia, but it seems to work flawlessly.
Uh, I live on the west coast thank you, the LA area specifically. Aside from seeing FireFly preempted by baseball (can you blame them? the ratings for FireFly were abysmal at best), they've showed every show I watch on a consistent basis. And even the episodes of FireFly that were shown on Saturday were shown again in repeats. Admittedly, I don't watch that many shows on Fox anymore, but the ones I watch are consistent. 24 shows, when it's new, every Tuesday at 9pm. And when was the last time Malcolm in the Middle was shown on a Thursday night? The last one I DIDN'T watch (because I think it's a lame show) was on during it's scheduled time, Sunday at 9pm. I honestly don't know about Simpsons since it's really not as good as it used to be and I've never been that interested in Futurama.
So I guess the point would be that as long as the programs you watch aren't on Fox, with the exception of John Doe and 24, you'd be ok with setting a VCR for those specific time slots to catch your program. By the way, no one ever said Fox was intelligent at scheduling programs. It's the only channel I ever really hear complaints about. All the other channels seem to be perfectly consistent.
Well, according to the simpsons website, it airs Sundays at 8pm. Sure, it might get preempted from time to time by sports, but it does have a regular time slot. Same goes for Futurama, Sundays at 7pm.
John Doe and FireFly aired consistently every Friday starting at 8pm for FireFly and 9pm for John Doe. Yeah, maybe John Doe didn't run EVERY week, but what show does?
So out of 6 shows that you mentioned, 2/3 of them do air at a consistent time and day, they just don't air every week. The parent poster makes it sound like the shows are moved to different DAYS and TIME SLOTS all the time, which simply isn't the case. That happens at most once per season (at the beginning) and sometimes not even that. X-Files aired for how many YEARS on Sundays at 9pm? I don't know off hand, but it was probably for at least half its run.
Someone didn't look hard enough. A quick google search on "vehicle recall" gets me a link to the NHTSA. That's right, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Oh, and look here, a Recall button where you can enter your vehicle information and see if there are any recalls.
There is actually one (that I know of). IGNBoards. It's not free, but it's used on boards.theforce.net very effectively. Basically, any time someone posts in a thread, that thread is moved to the top (based on the date). As more people post in threads, the threads become ordered by the date and time someone last posted in them.
Anyway, this is severely OT. Just FYI.
What about parodies? A lot of parody (say, Weird Al) has music almost identical to the original works, but they don't even have to get permisison if they don't want to!
Uh, actually, yes they do. Weird Al has gotten permission from plenty of artists. He can't charge for the parody without getting permission (some of his earlier parodies are only found on Dr. Demento CDs because of this). He even claimed in an interview once that it was really hard to get permission until Michael Jackson let him do one of his songs. Now, all he has to say is "Michael Jackson let me do his" (that's what he said at the time) and they let him do it almost instantly.
By the same token, the guy who wrote "Star Wars Cantina" (to the tune of Copa Cabana) has never and can never charge for the song because Barry Manilow won't give him permission.
It really just depends on how big an artist you are. The bigger you are, the easier it will probably be to get permission to charge for a parody. Otherwise, you'll be limited to releasing your parody on some p2p network.
I hope this was a joke, as the Uzi has been illegal to own, unless you're a licensed collector, and then it's still illegal to use, since the '70s.
Heh, and that was one of the better love scenes. To be quite honest, I hated most of the love scenes too. I would've picked a better example. The fireplace scene. I would've chopped that whole scene out.
[Anakin and Padme in a room with a fireplace]
[Padme wearing sexy evening dress]
Padme: We can't be together.
Anakin: My heart is tormented!
Repeat above for 5-10 mins.
Ugh, cut the whole thing please. Fortunately, for the IMAX release, they did cut that scene in half.
Wow, it would be nice if GeForce 4's could play Doom III when it is finally released. From everything I read about the alpha version, it's barely playable with any current video card (except ATIs 9700 (I think)) unless you reduce all the pretty features. Of course, by the time Doom III comes out, a GFFX shouldn't cost much more than $250.
I haven't checked it out completely yet (I'm still downloading the first one), but I believe you can download them from bmwfilms.com.
Try spending 2-3 hours per day surfing.
You're kidding right? I spend twice that per day surfing with Mozilla and the only time I ever had a crash was when I tried to go to Mozilla 1.2b from 1.1. I ended up going back because Save Image As... didn't work. I can't remember the last time I had a crash with Mozilla and I use it constantly everyday. I only use IE on two sites now, one to pay my phone bill (stupid Verizon screwed up their site) and another to access a vendor that only works with Windows products (stupid VB Script).
He may look a little like him, but he definitely won't ACT like him. JarJar is an annoying turd that needs to go away. Gollum is a creature you're supposed to take pity on because of what he's become. I think Gollum would kick JarJar's ass any day.
"Mesa JarJar Binks!"
"You've got the ring! It's mine give it to me!"
"But mesa just..ack...acck!" (as Gollum wraps his dirty little hands around JarJars throat)
"It's my preciousssss!"
I think you're misunderstanding me (or I'm not being clear).
.5% that will always kill the competition because it's that last .5% that some people in corporations are using and they need to maintain compatibility with their customers.
I totally agree with everything you're saying.
I'm not going to highlight your message, but let me hit on a few points.
Business will continue to purchase MS Office as long as the competing products are only 99.5% compatible. It's that last
No, I don't like the idea of running as root. But when the distro prompts you for a password to install some stupid piece of software, people will stop using it. "Windows didn't make me enter a password" Sure, Linux is more secure, but people don't necessarily want that.
And do you really think a family is going to pay MS to run XP on 5 different machines? Even if someone in the direct family doesn't know how to do it, they probably know someone that knows or has all the cracks necessary to get around that scheme. And sharing copies with your family isn't limited to Lindows. I'm sure you know it, but all the distributions allow you to share. RedHat is the only one I know of that doesn't like it when people install "unofficial" (read: downloaded) copies on peoples computers. And that's only a matter of not wanting support calls from people who haven't bought the distribution.
People won't run Linux until it comes pre-installed on good machines. And I'm not talking about the bargain basement machines Walmart sells. I've looked at their specs and I only half heartedly tell people about them. Crap like that just isn't reliable. When you can get a Dell, HP, Compaq, or Gateway with Linux preinstalled and pay less, then people might start to consider it.
Oh yeah, it'll help if Linux can play all their kids games too (I know it's getting better, but a lot of kids games still don't run on it).
Go ahead and laugh.
Customers are not.
No, they just shake their heads and take it. They expect to have to reboot their computers several times a day. They expect the computer to crash. If their refrigerator just suddenly died, you can bet your ass they'd have a repair man out to the house fixing it (assuming under warranty) to make sure it didn't break again. With Microsoft, they're charged for a support call and then they are reimbursed only if they can prove it's a bug in the product. But I'm going off on a tangent now. My point is that most consumers just take what they're given, and that happens to be Windows on a new PC.
China is not. Peru is not. Japan is not. Germany is not. India is not.
Funny you should mention China. Don't they have the highest rate of piracy in the world? The other countries are not going to make a large dent in Microsoft's bottom line.
My point is that large corporations are still sticking with MS because Licensing 6.0 doesn't change much for them. They've been paying million dollar contracts to MS for years to get the latest software updates each and every year and stay up on their licensing.
Will the average Joe switch to a free *nix to avoid paying higher license fees? Assuming they've been buying their copies of windows and not having Joey down the street install his copy onto their machines or using the copy they bought with their old computer on the new one they had Joey down the street build for them, maybe. Of course, their machine will still have to be setup by Joey down the street with that other OS and all the software they're gonna need or they won't be able to use the computer anyway. And if they can't use it, they won't want it. That is one of the major reasons I haven't put Linux onto my parents computer. They're not gonna remember the root password in order to install software. They want to be able to click on a file and have it go. And I don't want to constantly have to go do work on their system because a program needs the root password to be installed. Sure, I could make them run as root all the time, but then I lose the benefit of a permissions based system.
It's not that people don't have a clue that there are other alternatives out there (I've told my parents several times), it's that the alternatives are still not as easy to use.
Are you kidding me? 3 FPS slower in Linux. On the same hardware. Of course, I'm talking about 57 FPS vs 60 FPS. And I wasn't referring to any specific game. If you're thinking Doom 3, then, uh, haha, there is no way any current generation of Nvidia cards will be able to play that game with nearly enough detail to make it worth it. I should know. I've tried :)
Anandtech had all the same info as tech-report when the news hit. There's nothing new or earth shattering being reported at tech-report that anyone who has read Anandtech doesn't already know. Well, except for the fact that tech-report failed to mention that the memory on the GFFX runs at 500 MHz, which is why it needs a huge fan to cool it. The only thing they mention is that "the memory runs faster".
Sure, they talk down wider memory paths now, but will they say the same when ATI has a newer card out that uses the same technology?
It's a feature because instead of having to go to ATI's site and find the right driver for your card and OS, you just go to Nvidia's site and grab 1 driver that works with the entire line of TNT and GeForce cards with 1 driver for Win9x/ME and 1 driver for XP/2k.
It's also nice having a video card that can come within about 3 FPS of performance between Windows and Linux.