taks

i'm more concerned with lightweight power supplies sufficient for operation at 80000-100000 feet AMSL. lithium ion does not work at those temperatures, so you end up with lithium sulfur dioxide (i think that's it) which is not rechargeable and really doesn't have a very good power density compared to lithium ion. of course, i have rather strange requirements for even stranger reasons. taks

interesting... i wonder what the temperature range for these cells is? given that they are "water activated" i'm guessing not too low, at least, probably somewhere around 0 C minimum, unless they've added electrolytes of some sort to drop the freezing point of the water. taks

off the top of my head, no. it is complicated by the fact that i recently had to reinstall my entire system so all my history is gone. there were a few places in there that i had to use IE over firefox. problems usually arose when there were forms involved, i.e. you had to fill stuff out. as i recall, flash, shockwave and java stuff was a bit more flaky, too, particularly java since MS has their own version. taks

oh, there are plenty of places that require IE and won't even work with firefox or other browsers. taks

the halo edition is nothing more than special trim on a pro/premium box, too. taks

i don't think atreides has specified any location for purchase... newegg just happens to be my vendor of choice given their outstanding customer service and liberal return policy (which i have exercised in the past, and i think the "problem" was actually my fault). their prices also tend to be very competitive on average. usually i can find each of the items i'm buying cheaper somewhere else, but i tend to buy a bunch at once and i can never find a better deal on everything at once after taking into account each of the individual shipping charges. long story short, newegg is simply my injection into the discussion. taks

newegg has two GA-965P-DS3 boards listed, both open box, but at $59.99 and $89.99 respectively. my guess would be a chipset revision with the ones you're seeing (P35 vs. 965P maybe?). taks

now if we could just get winders 32-bit versions to recognize more than 3 GB of mammaries we'd all be set. i've got one wasted GB as it stands (4 GB total, 3008 MB recognized by dxdiag, grrr...) taks

i think the key takeaway in any case is to avoid the X2 4000+ unless the extra $100 or so is just too much short term. if you aren't tempted by overclocking, the X2 6000+ probably is a good bet, though you may find yourself upgrading again in the near future. i haven't played in AMD land since i got this E6600, so i'm not sure how well mobos that support the X2 parts will handle AMDs future parts. oh, btw, compUSA got bought out by a liquidator and they're dropping prices every wednesday till they sell all their stock. from what i've seen, they're still pretty high on many items that i'd be interested in, but they're worth a look. particularly for budget-type items. apparently the ME Administrator's guide is 20% off (like anyone owns ME???). taks

that's why i mentioned the upgrade path. you get the mobo that can handle a core2 - many of which can handle the extremes and Q parts, dual or quad - and you've got a lot of headroom on future builds. uh, i think it's a more common myth that higher processor speed = better performance. the E6300 w/out overclocking (i.e. 1.86 GHz) is equivalent to, or better than, an X2 5000+ at 2.6 GHz. overclock the E6300 to a mere 2.59 GHz (anand's test) and it performs the same (almost) as the 6000+, though i don't know what the power difference would be (stock it is almost 60 W less, so an OC of 40% probably cuts that to 30 W less or so). AMD has more stuff coming out, but i just don't see any good competition yet. the biggest problem i have with the "budget approach" is how often you're going to need to upgrade in the future, and what it takes to upgrade. it's not hard to end up spending more because you have to buy a new mobo and memory to get back up to the low-end in the future. given that we've been on the transition stage for just about everything (PCI going away, AGP gone, memory bus changes, etc.), it's definitely easy to get sucked into something that's a dead-end. taks

while i prefer firefox, it still has issues with a lot of the pages i go to. my latest install at home is using IE7.0, which i will tolerate for a while before switching back to firefox. i'm on a firefox browser right now (at work), and i use thunderbird for my mailer. that's got some screwy issues, too. of course, outlook express requires that stupid messenger tool, and outlook is just waaaay too excessive for home use. grrr... taks

given the performance difference between AMD and intel right now, i'd steer clear of the former even if it saves you $100. the E6300 conroe is only $175 at newegg, and the upgrade path for the intel solution is solid. both of my desktops (work and home) use the core2 (E6600 at home, E6400 at work) and they really do blaze. i have a turion dual core on my laptop and it lack the ooomph, though that's a laptop so i can't really complain (a 12.1" laptop to boot, bought for its size, not processing power). i have the ASUS P5B-E (LGA775) mobo and i hate it. it's slightly smaller than standard ATX and as a result, it doesn't fit into my chassis quite right (not all the mounts line up properly). installing the processor onto the mobo was a hassle, and i'm still not convinced i didn't break something during install. in fact, my new seagate HDD just took a nose dive and winders wouldn't recognize it, which resulted in significant data loss (fortunately the main stuff was backed up). since i've been able to reinstall, i'm thinking something is wrong with the HDD controller, not the HDD itself. it uses the Jmicron, too. the software that came with the mobo was all but useless. none of their "utilities" work properly. as always, ASUS documentation is, well, translated from chinese (or some non-english language) and less than helpful. i have the documentation problem will just about every manufacturer, however (EPOX, Abit, etc...), so that shouldn't enter into the deciding process. ASUS often uses the AMI bios, too, which has its pros and cons. i can't say i've ever found a bios i really like, though AMI seems to be about as good as they get. taks

yes, they are. they take coincidental relationships that are, at best, tenuous, then extend them to full cause-effect without much justification. that's a standard "conspiracy theory" tactic. the only reason i gave any worth to the religion aspect is because of my already hardened notions on where it came from to begin with. even with that, plenty of what was said is questionable at best. taks

which is sort of the point i was getting at. true a widespread enactment would be impossible, but enactment in this one area would not. i understand the notion of eliminating monetary policy from political influence, but that's easy enough to avoid with a government bureaucracy anyway. also, "private" wouldn't be nearly as bad if all the "owners" of the reserve were purely US citizens. they are not as far as i know (hard to find out specifics with all the tin-foil sites out there), so now you end up with a situation in which US political influence is avoided, but a lack foreign influence cannot be guaranteed. taks

waaaay too cold here to be offering up a pair of underpants to the nearest passerby. -11 C (13 F) with a windchill of -18 C (0 F)... supposedly it'll get above freezing after wednesday, which would be nice. yes, i'm still up. i spent all day rebuilding my rig. HDD took a nose-dive for some reason that i have yet to diagnose. winders didn't even recognize its format, yet here i am installed on it again. odd. wondering if my mobo is going bonkers (uh, hoping, actually, i don't like this one). taks

i quoted the lyrics to the song above... "this is the dawning of the age of aquarius..." which is taken from the song "aquarius/let the sunshine in" by the fifth dimension, which was #1 on billboard's hot 100 for 6 weeks in 1969. the song refers to the fact that we are about to enter the "age of aquarius" astrologically (though it will be several hundred years before we are fully in aquarius). taks

i don't doubt many of the connections made in the religion pieces. religion was originally designed to explain the inexplicable. interesting nonetheless. too bad none of us will be around when the age of aquarius arrives (this is the dawning of the age of aquarius, the age of aquarius...). i would love to see what the new religion will be then, and whether or not its fundamental principles are already being formed (e.g. who is the savior, who are the disciples, etc.). i think his thoughts on the banking, while seeded with a grain of truth, are a bit more of a stretch, however. i certainly do not like the federal reserve as it exists, though primarily because it is a privately owned entity that controls the US monetary system. i can't imagine how that has ever stood up to constitutional scrutiny, unless such a challenge has never really been offered. in any event, changing it now could be as bad, or worse, than letting it go on unimpeded. given that populations will inevitably increase continuously, some form of interest (inflation) is required to increase the pool of money available to the people. this is offset by the fact that "goods" also increase, i.e. there's more stuff to be owned. certainly there is a limit to the amount of resources available, the amount of goods that may be produced from said resources, as well as the population of the planet. i don't think the current system is set up to be able to deal with any of these limits, however. i suppose at some point we (or our descendants) will ultimately find out the answer, for better or worse. i didn't really pay much attention to the other segments of the movie. i did note the "driver shot kennedy" piece with a chuckle. taks

hence the term "mozillionaires" from netscape's original IPO. of course, they all got incentive stock options which required that you hold on to the shares for 1 year after exercising, but you pay taxes on the delta between your strike price (um, grant price) and the IPO price. those that exercised their options on the day of the IPO ended up with tax bills that were greater than the value of their stock holdings after a year... it was devastating to many poor netscape employees. taks

blow me. my brother has to do the "visit every subset of the family every year on xmas and turkey day" whirlwind tour every year - a half hour here, a half hour there... ugh. thankfully, we live far enough from all of our family (800 miles to st. louis, 2000 miles to NY and FL) that we do not have to do that. taks

we're going to see national treasure: book of secrets with friends tomorrow, then out to dinner when the friends' parents get into town later in the evening. there there is a fury of writing (me) followed by the premiere of bender's big score xmas eve (my son and i, got it on DVD, wife won't watch) and the opening of a random gift for the squirt. honey baked ham for dinner xmas day (same friends coming over) after the obligatory toy-festival xmas morning. i've been watching my gift all this week. HD is cool... merry xmas to all... taks

hehe, only a few of the shows listed here were around when i was a child. looney toons (and by extension, merrie melodies), tom and jerry and a few others were big on my list. in fact, we got my son a compilation DVD of some looney tunes for xmas. i still watch old bugs bunny/daffy duck shows on occasion. what i dislike, however, is that many are edited to the point that the jokes no longer make sense. fallout from our politically correct, always paranoid of the impact of cartoons on our children, way of the world. oh well. oh, my fave now is futurama. all-time, actually. i got the new movie ready for viewing on xmas-eve in spite of the plug for gore's movie. oh, i used to watch the animaniacs at the bar i managed in the mid-90s. i'd get in at 4:00 and didn't really see any customers till 5:00. in the mean time, i had the animaniacs up on our big-screen TV (20 foot projection) while i ate some mickey D's for lunch... taks

such an ability by current humans would certainly lend credence to this idea. at least, it goes from the realm of not possible to plausible. really, if we could do it, why couldn't someone else have done it before? taks

sigh... i don't even have time to play 2007 games. taks

yeah, you can do that, too. i have to be careful with such an option, however, since windows sometimes decides that matlab is OK to close, even though it is running a simulation. i kicked off a 48-hour sim once on friday only to return monday morning to discover that winders shut it down friday evening right after i left. grrr... taks

they had a special on the sci-fi channel last night: Sci vs. Fi: ME. talk about hype. they had interviews with many of the bioware folks. it was interesting to put faces to the names in some instances. they also included several game journalists and even a couple comedians. a half-hour long advert, IMO, but it was interesting to see some of the game aspects. of course, everyone that was on the show raved about the game (hardly a surprise). one guy, however, did mention a quirk in the flow - i don't recall exactly what he was referring to, but he put it in the context of "all computer games suffer from this." taks