metadigital

It looked bad.

Um, no, I think that is an exaggeration. I have a 30 month old laptop that can play all the latest games.

some geek has managed to turn his mouse into a hand scanner. :D

You should see the mouse!

Well, I would argue that is a little pessimistic; if one bought a pair of ATi X1900XT in crossfire / nVidia 7800GTX in SLI with a supported PCI-E motherboard and some good Corsair RAM, a decent screen (even a CRT if size is not a factor) and you won't be excluded from any game in the next five years. For sure.

This is too true. I think the problem is like asking "What do you like to eat?" or some other open, broad-spectrum question. I, for one, keep thinking of so many other books that I have forgotten I've read ..!

I was emphasizing the fact that preservation of human life was relative; i.e. US > rest-of-the-world, for the US.

I'm reading a book by an expert on the development of torture techniques who asserts that the Abu Ghraib photos do not just show examples of wild late night antics by a few out of control guards but rather show good examples of the implementation of CIA torture techniques using sensory deprivation, self inflicted injury, and ego assualt - techniques which start right at the moment of capture when captives are hooded, blindfolded, and earmuffed, and then forced to assume high stress positions. ... <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Sounds just boarding school sixth form detention ... :D

Fixed.

Thanks for the link, Numbers! PS Glad you're back (it was rude of me not to say so earlier, I know).

I knew I knew that name from somewhere! Yes they can be fun to read in a "get me to work without noticing the smelly guy next to me" kind of way: a bit too frothy for my liking, but certainly worth a skim. Has anyone mentioned Ray Bradbury? Obviously anything HG Wells ever even sneezed at. Flatland: A romance of many dimensions. The Creature from the Black Lagoon is a good read (the film is only good for shlock value). This link has some good ones: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/brows...0374817-2016106 Outer Limits and Twilight Zone (old and new series), X Files etc were all SF. John Carpenter's The Thing (not sure what the book is like) The Day the Earth Stood Still The Forbidden Planet The Fly and sequel (I prefer the remakes, but the originals have Vincent Price!) The Planet of the Apes (the original 1970s series of films, not the Tim Burton crap) Clockwork Orange This Island Earth (even better when seen as part of Mystery Science Theatre 3000) Barberella is a must see ...

There are a number of RAID configurations: they are meant to provide robust data integrity, not speed of access. (RAID 0 is only RAID in the pedantic sense similar to zero being a quanitity.) Check out the linkie for a full explanation, if you dare ... :D The only really useful RAID is RAID level 5. This is what businesses use for data that must not be compromised: it allows for a drive in the array to be lost, swapped out with a new, unformatted one, and the array survive and rebuild across the span including the new disk. (This is called "hot-swapping" and keeps the data secure whilst the maintenance is performed; I have actually done this.)

Just watched Liz Taylor and Montgomery Clift in Dreiser's A Place in the Sun. Excellent old film (won a bag oscars back in 1951).

Occupational hazards. caveat: Kaftan just pointed out to me that RAID 0 is in fact a good way to bring down average seek times for hard disk arrays (by the inverse of proportional capacity). Of course, RAID 0 isn't strictly RAID (the "R" in RAID stands for "Redundant", and RAID 0 is striping across all the available disks, so it provides no redundancy if a problem occurs). So setting up multiple disks in a striped array (RAID 0, sic passim) will increase performance, but don't think you are also ensuring against catastrophy.

Loquacious eloquence admixed with tolerant discussion FTW.

I always thought that if a prmie material plane dweller died (on their alignment plane) after death then they just ceased to be. Nihilistically bereft of purpose, meaning and anima / animus.

Wait for the next card release, then the older ones will be cheaper. No point in buying just yet. There are some bargains to be had, like the 6800GS, especially if you buy two in SLI (assuming you don't have an AGP motherboard, which IIRC you do). the newer cards will have more unified shading units, which should suit later games (like F.E.A.R. and games yet to be released), so buying a current card will just be a stop-gap ... after all the 6800 has been out for yonks.

Loads. And there is a new nVidia due out in the next month or so, too.

I didn't think that the case modding had contributed to the error. At worst I thought carelessness had led to static electricity damaging a critical component, like RAM. Best start with the power cord connected and the machine off. Open the case, touch the power supply with your hand. (This provides and earth for the built-up static in your very conductive human body.) Then unplug the power cable, touch the (metal) case and proceed with caution. People underestimate scale and prevalence of this type of damage. It's always easy in hindsight.

Current Pentium technology is only better for computational tasks that are highly repetitive, like video encoding, because of their ridiculously long predictive pipelines (twenty-odd stages, as opposed to the Athlon teens). Their cooler Pentium M range (laptops, predominantly, but their is no reason not to use one in a desktop if you self-build). This years Intel CPUs will be a "better Pentium M", with dual-core coming out in a few months, too. The Athlon have definitely been the gamer's choice for the last few years. Make sure the motherboard has support for the newer PCI-Express GPU, rather than the old AGP technology. Newer motherboards have a PCI-E 16 (which is far more than any card can use, but should provide some future-proofing). If you are thinking about cross-fire (twin X1900XT) or SLI (twin 7800GTX) then make sure you have two PCI-E slots: the lowest bus speed with throttle the two cards, if they are not equal. Less (1GB) super-fast, high quality RAM is better than more (2GB) slow crap RAM. Even if you don't overclock it. RAID is pointless for a gaming PC. It certainly doesn't imporve performance, can only hinder it, speed-wise. Better to use it as sequential storage, keeping your save games / perishables clutter off your kick-arse fast initial harddrive. Also, Vista will allow for the use of flash RAM (that stuff in those little keychain storage devices): this stuff is much faster than harddrive I/O (slower than comventional RAM, of course) which makes it perfect for pre-caching things like game level data ... not sure how this will best be implemented, yet, as no-one has used this hardware like that yet and Apple have bought up about 99.8% of capacity of flash RAM for their iPod Nano production.

:'(

Asimov used to put his name of annual SF anthologies: all the ones I've read have some cracking stories in them. I read one from the nineties that actually had the only real utopia I've ever heard of! If you are busy and don't get time to read big novels, short stories are great. Philip K. Dιck wrote loads of short stories and I prefer them to his novels (just about all the films made from his work were from short stories). Clarke wrote loads of short stories, too, including Sentinel, which was the one that he used as a template for 2001: A Space Odyssey.

It isn't available from my local blockbusters. Nor from WH Smith.

Not sure about that ... isn't it International Law, just located in Iraq? It's some sort of International Law facsimile. (I doubt Saddam had any laws against crimes against humaity.)

How can a cop control a psychopath?