most of these will be unbelievably terrible, just like the Transformers movies or the recent Battle of LA movie. Or that Number 4 movie.
Sci-fi is very, very difficult to translate to the screen. Hollywood has shown no interest in doing it right except in spite of itself when an unusually talented director with loyal producers and deep pockets reigns control of the project (Alien, Bladerunner, etc). A typical Hollywood sci-fi production simply takes the place of a summer action blockbuster. There's very little interest and profitability in making good or even passable sci-fi.
I'm pretty happy with sci-fi literature and comics. These forms work well both economically (small production not indebted too deeply to publishers) and artistically (no CGI, no egotistical actors). Dunno, but everytime I see "upcoming scifi movie" I cringe at how terrible its going to be and I'm almost always right.
>their obligations are to make sensationalist stories.
I can't believe the reporting on this. Words like "NUCLEAR NIGHTMARE" are on the TV and in print, while thousands are without power, water, and are looking for their lost loved ones.
I'm so sick of the sensationalist media. It just creates reactionary and sensationalist people. Sadly, the coal and oil industries are probably laughing at all this as building more reactors in the US will now be impossible or more difficult than usual. We're going to keep burning more fossil fuels. Oh well, here comes more pollution and guaranteed risk of lung cancer increases instead of a slim chance of radiation leakages.
I'm not sure about this. My facebook account is rarely used and involves a lot of self-censorship. I just don't think its fun or interesting and I always have a worry that future employers or whomever will find this stuff. Perhaps I'm more neurotic than most, but its a fear I find shared by a lot of people.
I'd be more comfortable hiding behind a username and segregating groups of friends (colleagues, high school, college, current friends, etc).
Regardless, maybe the FB people are right. Maybe they are not. Seems to me that Friendster and MySpace folded fairly quickly. My biggest worry is that social networking is a lot like the OS market - a natural monopoly. Maybe FB has enough people now that it will be a monopoly in this space for the foreseeable future.
Re:Mac, Linux, Android and Solaris.
on
New Adobe Flash 0-Day
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Most exploits are written as an attempt to get root/admin or affect system settings. In my testing of adobe exploits (not this one, but previous ones) I noticed that if I ran as a limited user the exploits don't usually work. If I run as admin with UAC running, the UAC never comes up and the exploit works. UAC + admin is not the same as running as a limited user.
Yes, you're right about malware running in user userspace and that's a real problem with this approach, but running as limited gives some benefits that are not obvious. Arguably, AV and smart computer usage makes up for the rest. This excel file seems to already be in all the major virus definitions.
Progress costs downtime. Apollo ended in 1975 and the STS started in 1981. That's 6 years of downtime. Thats how you pay for these projects. You don't have funding to launch and build a new system.
The "precious snowflake" generation should be able to handle some downtime in US launches just like the baby boomer generation before them. Making this out to be some huge discrepancy and unique event in US spaceflight is wrong and being overly dramatic.
Not to mention that the first shuttle launch was in 1981 and previous to that the last time the US was in space was in 1975. So that's 6 years of downtime. If those people can handle it then then we can certainly handle it now.
Could anyone in 1971 predicted the expensive and dangerous boondoggle that the STS turned out to be and how we held onto it for at least 10 more years than one can sanely justify? Or how the whole 'reusable' spacecraft didn't pan out economically? Or how a modular capsule design was, in the end, superior to a monolithic shuttle design?
Or that private enterprise is building capsules and rockets for human spaceflight? Or how NASA's budget is a paltry 30 billion while our defense and war budgets along with our black military budgets hover around 1 trillion?
I'm afraid at a certain point we need to accept that humans in general are an extremely irrational people. Sure we understand the origin of Atlantis, but people also love to believe myth and religion. You're a member of the reality-based community and to them you're the crackpot. In a democracy truth is sometimes a consensus, so to them you're not only crazy but "obviously wrong." I've been an atheist since I've been a teenager and I see this mentality all the time. Its pathetic and there's little fighting it.
>You just as well might search for the land of the Golden Fleece.
Go for a walk in America and start talking to people about religion. Ask them what their thoughts are about finding Noah's Ark, the Ark of the Covenant, the original Cross, etc. Their attitudes will be the same as the people who were looking for the fleece in antiquity. If we took away religion they'd just start up UFO cults. If we took that away, they'd worship rocks, etc, etc.
Yet U-verse is last mile technology (VDSL). I doubt AT&T will suddenly allow me to break the cap because the data center I'm downloading from is only 30 miles from my house.
AT&T has no incentive to do this. In fact they have a huge disincentive to do this. They offer their own unmetered VDSL-based IPTV. Why should they let their own product compete with an even footing with Netflix and the rest?
This isn't just technical, this is very much a business decision to help fight competitors like Netflix. The owners of the network get to decide who gets unmetered without any sorts of input from their customers. That's wrong. Selective metering brings us back to the network neutrality debate.
I think the ironic thing about this movie is that its a 100% sincere adaptation of a typical William Gibson/cybperpunk story. Things that sounds good in print like made-up slang, cool outfits, out of this world technology, overly fashionable hackers, unusually attractive hacker girls, a small crew taking 'the man', hacker bad guys, etc look incredibly silly on the big screen. This is because Gibson-esque stories, if not all of cyberpunk, are not much more than over the top, over-stylized, melodramas. I don't think its possible to make a sincere cyberpunk movie without falling into this incredibly cheesy and overly silly mode.
Actually this is not bait and switch. Good luck getting your DA to prosecute on this.
Its 100% legal to call overly throttled and capped service "unlimited broadband" as long as you stay over 256kbps with your cap based throttling, as thats the FCC's definition of broadband.
This low definition of broadband, bought by big corporations in the 90s, is meaningless today. The definition needs to change to at least 3mbps.
Enjoy your easy mod points from the randroids, but advertising is already heavily regulated - and with good reason. Hell, broadband is already defined at 256kps. This definition bought by big companies. The FCC needs to change this and start being more picky about advertising language. The language in these ads reflects nothing about the service. At the very least they should be forced to show us their caps and throttling policies. How can you have a function market when this information is purposely hidden from the consumer?
Its kinda sad that when big business causes problems some people think the solution is just more big business. This historically has never worked.
I know libertarianism is popular here, but advertising is already regulated and for good reason. The selling of internet is no different. Considering that they're obviously lying in their ads or at least being purposely misleading, this is an appropriate opportunity to engage in regulation.
Hell, its already regulated now. Broadband is defined at 256/kbits in the US. Mostly thanks to big donors who would rather pay off congress than provide good service. Now, people should be demanding an end to this poor definition that corporations have bought.
The funny thing about your comment is that the CEOs of these companeis don't know shit either. Both they and the politicians rely on their engineers to advise them. The difference is that government is beholden to voters and corporations to shareholders. One has the possibility of being democratic.
The drastic state of broadband in the US exists because of too much corporate power. Continuing to let them do as they please will lead to more of this kind of thing - high cost compared to other countries, sub-par wireless, throttling, false advertising, etc.
We really need a federal law that defines "unlimited broadband internet." Throttling me down to dial-up speeds past 5 gigabytes per month is not unlimited broadband. Hell, anything under 3mbps shouldnt even be called broadband.
The DSL reports forums about Clear are horrific. I was thinking of using them for a remote office's backup line, but absolutely no way now. Random throttling to 256k for day or weeks on end is not acceptable.
I feel if they had a decent business level service and priced it accordingly they could really break into the business market. Instead, the "business" package they sell is just a static IP and the same horrible throttling policies.
It might side-step local gun laws. Aren't lasers almost completely unregulated? If this was mass produced it could replace mace. I'd be a little concerned about blinding people. I'm not sure if IR blindness does anything to humans though.
Shame he didn't get a pork shank to show us the effect it would have on flesh.
Because there's a profit incentive in outrage and fear. I'm curious to see if CNN can outcrazy Fox on "ZOMG WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE ON A PLANE BECAUSE OF LAPTOPS!!"
I see bloggers as a much lesser evil and they typically have comments sections in which they can be corrected - like I just did to slashdot.
Not only is it for one specific module, its only at elevated power levels, not typical power levels. Lets watch the corporate media fuck this up and turn into a scare tactic to show more ads to morons.
Boeing, meanwhile, says: "Current testing by Boeing and Honeywell has determined that blanking may occur when a DU is subjected to testing procedures specified by the FAA requirements (AC-20-164) during installations of Wi-Fi systems on the airplane. Based on testing that has been conducted, Boeing and Honeywell have concluded that actual EMI levels experienced during normal operation of typical passenger Wi-Fi systems would not cause any blanking of the Phase 3 DU. This issue does not exist with the Phase 1 or 2 DU's." Honeywell says that, during recent ground testing "at elevated power levels", the company observed a momentary blanking on the 'flat panel' liquid crystal displays that it developed and pioneered for Boeing. "The screens reappeared well within Boeing's specified recovery time frame. The screens have not blanked in flight and are not a safety of flight issue. Honeywell is working to ensure the problem is addressed and fixed and that our technology will continue to exceed specifications," says Honeywell.
Thats a very modern and subjective way of looking at it, and its a bit unfair as we can look at the worst dictatorship and see some basic lower house that is powerless and call it a republic.
I believe the term, historically, was controversial because its not very meaningful.Wikipedia:
"he term is generally also understood to describe a government where most decisions are made with reference to established laws, rather than the discretion of a head of state, and therefore monarchy is today generally considered to be incompatible with being a republic. One common modern definition of a republic is a government having a head of state who is not a monarch"
So, in other words, there's some basic legal structure in place. The king just can't write up death notices for random people.
That's true. The hard part is defining what a republic means. It more or less means not a monarchy or dictatorship. I think democracy became the shorthand for the US government, especially in the past where everything else was either a monarchy, dictatorship, or theocracy.
If we look at definitions of republic they usually describe a democracy. Regardless, like most modern governments, the US is a mixed government. You have:
Obviously, all these branches except SCOTUS are directly voted in by the people. This is also a feature a lot of republics don't have. Instead people vote in the lower houses and the rest get appointed by the higher levels.
I had java disabled in Chrome and the latest java update re-enabled it. Ideally, disabling java should be the default and it should have an entry in the GUI settings menu. No need for a security nightmare VM to be ready to run at any webpage's request.
You probably don't want one. A few years ago I bought a cell phone jammer from a company in Hong Kong. The build quality was terrible and I was only able to jam phones within a 2 or 3 foot radius at best. Most of the time the phone would drop signal and then find its way back onto the network in 30 or so seconds. I managed just once to drop a stranger's loud call on the train after dozes on attempts.
Turns out cell phones are designed to find ways around interference. Afterall, my jammer was just like having to deal with 100 nearby cell phones trying to make calls. Some phones have no problem with this.
The real issue is that when you're dealing with potentially illegal items with no brands, there's no incentive to make the product work correctly. I wouldn't be surprised if these jammers sucked also.
Right. The android marketplace is ridiculously full with all sorts of "me too" phones. I don't see why we need yet another lazy Android vendor who will put in basic UI tweaks, crapware, etc and delay updates.
I'm looking forward to competition from WP7. Competition will help the tech industry deliver better phones, especially since WP will be a lot more controlled by MS than Android is by Google. MS will be pushing out updates, not Nokia. I hope the Android vendors start upping their game. The status quo of months late updates and phones abandoned to 1.6 is unacceptable.
As an owner of a Vibrant, which is a nice phone but suffers badly from uninstallable crapware and slow updates, I'm looking forward to more pressure on Android vendors to get off their asses and do more than a half-assed job.
> You take a platter, mount it on a spindle, spin it, send the data through the same IO standard that has been around for 10 years.
But, but, we have more cache and now "green" drives perform at 2/3rds speed for a slight savings in power! That's progress, right!?!
Ugh, the storage industry is a mess. Hopefully SSDs will sort them out. Its incredible I'm on an i7 machine with 4 cores and a 22" monitor with a 100mbps connection to the internet and yet I'm always waiting on this mechanical drive to catch up. This like using a jet fighter with no missiles or guns, just a spear launcher.
I can't remember the last time I saw a non-geek's laptop or any work laptop with more than 40 or 50 gigs of space used. There's a real opportunity for SSDs to enter the mid-range laptop market and business market with 120-160gig drives.
Price isn't great now, but the performance is great. Once people get to used to an SSD laptop they'll start to hate their mechanical disk based laptop. They'll be asking "why is this so slow to boot up and why is it slower than yours?" Just like they are now used to multi-core CPUs. Not to mention, a power savings depending on usage.
I have an 80gig intel in my desktop and a 500gig media drive. On my laptop I have a 60gig OCZ. It just kills me to use a big slow drive nowadays.
Also, I believe the economics of this works out. I've seen lots of companies and end users pay $100-$200 extra for a CPU with.1mhz faster clock. The real world benefit of having a super-fast disk greatly outweighs any CPU upgrade. Heck, most of the time your CPU is sitting there waiting for the disk.
Slashdot Mirror
most of these will be unbelievably terrible, just like the Transformers movies or the recent Battle of LA movie. Or that Number 4 movie.
Sci-fi is very, very difficult to translate to the screen. Hollywood has shown no interest in doing it right except in spite of itself when an unusually talented director with loyal producers and deep pockets reigns control of the project (Alien, Bladerunner, etc). A typical Hollywood sci-fi production simply takes the place of a summer action blockbuster. There's very little interest and profitability in making good or even passable sci-fi.
I'm pretty happy with sci-fi literature and comics. These forms work well both economically (small production not indebted too deeply to publishers) and artistically (no CGI, no egotistical actors). Dunno, but everytime I see "upcoming scifi movie" I cringe at how terrible its going to be and I'm almost always right.
>their obligations are to make sensationalist stories.
I can't believe the reporting on this. Words like "NUCLEAR NIGHTMARE" are on the TV and in print, while thousands are without power, water, and are looking for their lost loved ones.
I'm so sick of the sensationalist media. It just creates reactionary and sensationalist people. Sadly, the coal and oil industries are probably laughing at all this as building more reactors in the US will now be impossible or more difficult than usual. We're going to keep burning more fossil fuels. Oh well, here comes more pollution and guaranteed risk of lung cancer increases instead of a slim chance of radiation leakages.
I'm not sure about this. My facebook account is rarely used and involves a lot of self-censorship. I just don't think its fun or interesting and I always have a worry that future employers or whomever will find this stuff. Perhaps I'm more neurotic than most, but its a fear I find shared by a lot of people.
I'd be more comfortable hiding behind a username and segregating groups of friends (colleagues, high school, college, current friends, etc).
Regardless, maybe the FB people are right. Maybe they are not. Seems to me that Friendster and MySpace folded fairly quickly. My biggest worry is that social networking is a lot like the OS market - a natural monopoly. Maybe FB has enough people now that it will be a monopoly in this space for the foreseeable future.
Most exploits are written as an attempt to get root/admin or affect system settings. In my testing of adobe exploits (not this one, but previous ones) I noticed that if I ran as a limited user the exploits don't usually work. If I run as admin with UAC running, the UAC never comes up and the exploit works. UAC + admin is not the same as running as a limited user.
Yes, you're right about malware running in user userspace and that's a real problem with this approach, but running as limited gives some benefits that are not obvious. Arguably, AV and smart computer usage makes up for the rest. This excel file seems to already be in all the major virus definitions.
Progress costs downtime. Apollo ended in 1975 and the STS started in 1981. That's 6 years of downtime. Thats how you pay for these projects. You don't have funding to launch and build a new system.
The "precious snowflake" generation should be able to handle some downtime in US launches just like the baby boomer generation before them. Making this out to be some huge discrepancy and unique event in US spaceflight is wrong and being overly dramatic.
Not to mention that the first shuttle launch was in 1981 and previous to that the last time the US was in space was in 1975. So that's 6 years of downtime. If those people can handle it then then we can certainly handle it now.
Could anyone in 1971 predicted the expensive and dangerous boondoggle that the STS turned out to be and how we held onto it for at least 10 more years than one can sanely justify? Or how the whole 'reusable' spacecraft didn't pan out economically? Or how a modular capsule design was, in the end, superior to a monolithic shuttle design?
Or that private enterprise is building capsules and rockets for human spaceflight? Or how NASA's budget is a paltry 30 billion while our defense and war budgets along with our black military budgets hover around 1 trillion?
Its a lot more complex than "OMG RUSSIANS!!"
I'm afraid at a certain point we need to accept that humans in general are an extremely irrational people. Sure we understand the origin of Atlantis, but people also love to believe myth and religion. You're a member of the reality-based community and to them you're the crackpot. In a democracy truth is sometimes a consensus, so to them you're not only crazy but "obviously wrong." I've been an atheist since I've been a teenager and I see this mentality all the time. Its pathetic and there's little fighting it.
>You just as well might search for the land of the Golden Fleece.
Go for a walk in America and start talking to people about religion. Ask them what their thoughts are about finding Noah's Ark, the Ark of the Covenant, the original Cross, etc. Their attitudes will be the same as the people who were looking for the fleece in antiquity. If we took away religion they'd just start up UFO cults. If we took that away, they'd worship rocks, etc, etc.
Yet U-verse is last mile technology (VDSL). I doubt AT&T will suddenly allow me to break the cap because the data center I'm downloading from is only 30 miles from my house.
AT&T has no incentive to do this. In fact they have a huge disincentive to do this. They offer their own unmetered VDSL-based IPTV. Why should they let their own product compete with an even footing with Netflix and the rest?
This isn't just technical, this is very much a business decision to help fight competitors like Netflix. The owners of the network get to decide who gets unmetered without any sorts of input from their customers. That's wrong. Selective metering brings us back to the network neutrality debate.
I think the ironic thing about this movie is that its a 100% sincere adaptation of a typical William Gibson/cybperpunk story. Things that sounds good in print like made-up slang, cool outfits, out of this world technology, overly fashionable hackers, unusually attractive hacker girls, a small crew taking 'the man', hacker bad guys, etc look incredibly silly on the big screen. This is because Gibson-esque stories, if not all of cyberpunk, are not much more than over the top, over-stylized, melodramas. I don't think its possible to make a sincere cyberpunk movie without falling into this incredibly cheesy and overly silly mode.
Its does not apply to wireless. The FCC weighs these things based on type of service. Wireless broadband is defined at 200kbps.
Actually this is not bait and switch. Good luck getting your DA to prosecute on this.
Its 100% legal to call overly throttled and capped service "unlimited broadband" as long as you stay over 256kbps with your cap based throttling, as thats the FCC's definition of broadband.
This low definition of broadband, bought by big corporations in the 90s, is meaningless today. The definition needs to change to at least 3mbps.
Enjoy your easy mod points from the randroids, but advertising is already heavily regulated - and with good reason. Hell, broadband is already defined at 256kps. This definition bought by big companies. The FCC needs to change this and start being more picky about advertising language. The language in these ads reflects nothing about the service. At the very least they should be forced to show us their caps and throttling policies. How can you have a function market when this information is purposely hidden from the consumer?
Its kinda sad that when big business causes problems some people think the solution is just more big business. This historically has never worked.
I know libertarianism is popular here, but advertising is already regulated and for good reason. The selling of internet is no different. Considering that they're obviously lying in their ads or at least being purposely misleading, this is an appropriate opportunity to engage in regulation.
Hell, its already regulated now. Broadband is defined at 256/kbits in the US. Mostly thanks to big donors who would rather pay off congress than provide good service. Now, people should be demanding an end to this poor definition that corporations have bought.
The funny thing about your comment is that the CEOs of these companeis don't know shit either. Both they and the politicians rely on their engineers to advise them. The difference is that government is beholden to voters and corporations to shareholders. One has the possibility of being democratic.
The drastic state of broadband in the US exists because of too much corporate power. Continuing to let them do as they please will lead to more of this kind of thing - high cost compared to other countries, sub-par wireless, throttling, false advertising, etc.
We really need a federal law that defines "unlimited broadband internet." Throttling me down to dial-up speeds past 5 gigabytes per month is not unlimited broadband. Hell, anything under 3mbps shouldnt even be called broadband.
The DSL reports forums about Clear are horrific. I was thinking of using them for a remote office's backup line, but absolutely no way now. Random throttling to 256k for day or weeks on end is not acceptable.
I feel if they had a decent business level service and priced it accordingly they could really break into the business market. Instead, the "business" package they sell is just a static IP and the same horrible throttling policies.
It might side-step local gun laws. Aren't lasers almost completely unregulated? If this was mass produced it could replace mace. I'd be a little concerned about blinding people. I'm not sure if IR blindness does anything to humans though.
Shame he didn't get a pork shank to show us the effect it would have on flesh.
Because there's a profit incentive in outrage and fear. I'm curious to see if CNN can outcrazy Fox on "ZOMG WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE ON A PLANE BECAUSE OF LAPTOPS!!"
I see bloggers as a much lesser evil and they typically have comments sections in which they can be corrected - like I just did to slashdot.
Not only is it for one specific module, its only at elevated power levels, not typical power levels. Lets watch the corporate media fuck this up and turn into a scare tactic to show more ads to morons.
http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2011/03/10/354179/wi-fi-interference-with-honeywell-avionics-prompts-boeing.html
Thats a very modern and subjective way of looking at it, and its a bit unfair as we can look at the worst dictatorship and see some basic lower house that is powerless and call it a republic.
I believe the term, historically, was controversial because its not very meaningful.Wikipedia:
"he term is generally also understood to describe a government where most decisions are made with reference to established laws, rather than the discretion of a head of state, and therefore monarchy is today generally considered to be incompatible with being a republic. One common modern definition of a republic is a government having a head of state who is not a monarch"
So, in other words, there's some basic legal structure in place. The king just can't write up death notices for random people.
That's true. The hard part is defining what a republic means. It more or less means not a monarchy or dictatorship. I think democracy became the shorthand for the US government, especially in the past where everything else was either a monarchy, dictatorship, or theocracy.
If we look at definitions of republic they usually describe a democracy. Regardless, like most modern governments, the US is a mixed government. You have:
Monarchy element: President/Executive branch
Aristocratic element: Senate
Democratic element: House
Judicial/Elders element: SCOTUS
Obviously, all these branches except SCOTUS are directly voted in by the people. This is also a feature a lot of republics don't have. Instead people vote in the lower houses and the rest get appointed by the higher levels.
I had java disabled in Chrome and the latest java update re-enabled it. Ideally, disabling java should be the default and it should have an entry in the GUI settings menu. No need for a security nightmare VM to be ready to run at any webpage's request.
You probably don't want one. A few years ago I bought a cell phone jammer from a company in Hong Kong. The build quality was terrible and I was only able to jam phones within a 2 or 3 foot radius at best. Most of the time the phone would drop signal and then find its way back onto the network in 30 or so seconds. I managed just once to drop a stranger's loud call on the train after dozes on attempts.
Turns out cell phones are designed to find ways around interference. Afterall, my jammer was just like having to deal with 100 nearby cell phones trying to make calls. Some phones have no problem with this.
The real issue is that when you're dealing with potentially illegal items with no brands, there's no incentive to make the product work correctly. I wouldn't be surprised if these jammers sucked also.
Right. The android marketplace is ridiculously full with all sorts of "me too" phones. I don't see why we need yet another lazy Android vendor who will put in basic UI tweaks, crapware, etc and delay updates.
I'm looking forward to competition from WP7. Competition will help the tech industry deliver better phones, especially since WP will be a lot more controlled by MS than Android is by Google. MS will be pushing out updates, not Nokia. I hope the Android vendors start upping their game. The status quo of months late updates and phones abandoned to 1.6 is unacceptable.
As an owner of a Vibrant, which is a nice phone but suffers badly from uninstallable crapware and slow updates, I'm looking forward to more pressure on Android vendors to get off their asses and do more than a half-assed job.
> You take a platter, mount it on a spindle, spin it, send the data through the same IO standard that has been around for 10 years.
But, but, we have more cache and now "green" drives perform at 2/3rds speed for a slight savings in power! That's progress, right!?!
Ugh, the storage industry is a mess. Hopefully SSDs will sort them out. Its incredible I'm on an i7 machine with 4 cores and a 22" monitor with a 100mbps connection to the internet and yet I'm always waiting on this mechanical drive to catch up. This like using a jet fighter with no missiles or guns, just a spear launcher.
I can't remember the last time I saw a non-geek's laptop or any work laptop with more than 40 or 50 gigs of space used. There's a real opportunity for SSDs to enter the mid-range laptop market and business market with 120-160gig drives.
Price isn't great now, but the performance is great. Once people get to used to an SSD laptop they'll start to hate their mechanical disk based laptop. They'll be asking "why is this so slow to boot up and why is it slower than yours?" Just like they are now used to multi-core CPUs. Not to mention, a power savings depending on usage.
I have an 80gig intel in my desktop and a 500gig media drive. On my laptop I have a 60gig OCZ. It just kills me to use a big slow drive nowadays.
Also, I believe the economics of this works out. I've seen lots of companies and end users pay $100-$200 extra for a CPU with .1mhz faster clock. The real world benefit of having a super-fast disk greatly outweighs any CPU upgrade. Heck, most of the time your CPU is sitting there waiting for the disk.