metadigital

Should be good for things like Venus's transition next year.

... And the literate. :ninja10:

Does this help? " Edit: monkeys attacked my keyboard.

clickie Reuters

I haven't found a Kubrick film I don't like, and I've seen all the ones you just mentioned. (I did walk out on Eyes Wide Shut in the cinema, though ... it was too long a film for me with Kidman and Cruise ... but then the couple separated and I re-analyzed the film and I saw more in it, namely their separation was etched into the film and Kubrick captured it.) 2001 is not a film, it's a tonal play. Part of the challenge he faced in making the film was that the book dealt with such unfilmable concepts (how do you show proto-humans gaining the spark of insight, without dialogue or a voice-over?) ... Clarke was baffled by the desire for a sequel to his book (an updated epic that he named after Homer's work) ... how do you See Spartacus. Coincidentally I saw the trailer for the new Rush Hour 3 and it looked pretty good (and I wasn't impressed with the first two ...)

clickie

Windows 2k is a very solid product (much better than everything before it, and equal to everything up to Vista after it) and is (was) very popular with enterprise computing clients. 2003 wasn't more than a cosmetic upgrade, from memory, certainly you won't notice the difference I believe (though do some googling / wikiing for the differences so that you don't miss out on a feature that you really want). It is certainly true, especially for the web, that *nix wins hands-down, though; the major drawback is that you will need to know how to configure the security after updating the kernel to the latest version. Why don't you try a prototype build to see for yourself?

Yeah, the file is busy, correct? You need to get into a command line ... alternatively a good Antivirus / Anti-spyware application should be able to complete the task, too.

I'm hoping AMD will bring home the bacon, as we need a competitive marketplace. Interestingly, I read (about a year ago) that Intel was scaling / has scaled back its R&D facilities / expenditure from the monolithic state it had achieved in recent years to a vestigial amount. If it's true, that's really sad (I haven't heard since).

I'm pleased because the 8800, whilst the best available, doesn't have the grunt to play this year's yet-to-be-released games with all the candy on max, and I haven't upgraded yet. I am not pleased with the prospect of paying premium Christmas prices, but maybe I'll rationalise it as a reward for my expected end-of-year achievements.

Inferior colours? Inferior eyes? Inferior humour receptors?

I have a goatee at the moment. It is a good stroking target. I may eventually get a pipe, too.

Great, terrible maybe but never had a boring acid trip. 2001 was a great movie, loved the book as well. If anything is dead it's film makers (Hollywood's) creativity. Remakes and sequels rule the day. Which of course explains the popularity of making films based on comic books - a large source of new "creative material" Gotta agree here: loved the book and I really enjoy Kubrick's artistic vision and superb skills. Also, you young people are demonstrating an incredible myopia for the genre; the Golden Age of SF was the fourth and fifth decades of the twentieth century, together with a "New Wave" of the sixth and seventh decades. Don't tell me you are all ignorant of classics like Metropolis (1927), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Forbidden Planet (1956), the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), The Blob (1958), etcetra, etc! As for the death of the genre, I would say that people are being a little premature ... AND I would say that the genre was very tired after a couple of decades and needed a rest ... a bit like how Doctor Who was bankrupt after John Nathan-Turner's production career and only returned when a diehard fan, in the person of Russell T Davies, with some vision could do so after a decade and a half lying fallow. Now there is a resurgence of SF, like the recent films of from the books of PKD (Through a Scanner Darkly (2006): the only author with more film adaptations of his work is Stephen King ... no, Ian Fleming doesn't count ;p ) and Asimov (I, Robot (2004)), to name only two; the bar is a lot higher now because the audience contains (geeks) who understand a lot more science to a higher degree. PS Ridley Scott freely admits (in the DVD special features) that the "dirty future" of Lucas's Star Wars film was a huge influence on his vision for the Nostromo and Alien.

clickie

The Matrix didn't invent the metaphysical concept detailed here, though it is a very famous and recent dissemination of it.

Fine, we could be simulations. Now what? Tierney doesn't have time to do much more than scratch the surface, but that's okay. When it comes to cutting-edge prognostication, it's not the New York Times we turn to. It's science fiction, which has been kicking around digitally replicated consciousness for a few decades now. One of the best treatments of this idea comes from Charles Stross. His Accelerando is a multidimentional, multimillennial romp across space, time and competing software formats. It's got political conspiracies, intelligence embodied as a flock of seagulls, and inspired the title of an upcoming feature of mine: "Even Posthumans Have Mothers-In-Law." Best of all, it's available under a Creative Commons license and can be downloaded here. Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch [New York Times] Nick Bostrom Wired

The best part about having super powers is that you don't have to adjudicate by democracy, so the ultimate judge of what is "right" is YOUR interpretation. What you are basically asking is what people would do if they were made absolute ruler of the world. The best part of having super powers is that one could remake the world in whatever image desired.

Bioshock is available on Xbox 360 ...

Apparently one of the benefits of the X-Fi system is that it works REALLY WELL with headphones.

That might not be the best way to encourage the little silicon beasties to work ... though I have never tried it, personally.

A lot of the motherboards coming out now/about to come out have some not-yet-implemented features, like DDR3 RAM. This means that you have a choice to buy a slightly cheaper bunch of components that do everything that can possibly be done right now, OR you buy a [limited] future-proof solution containing a lot of very expensive parts that aren't implemented yet and might even be implemented better in six months. I haven't had a moment to look into tech for a while: I was planning to build a new PC about now, but it looks like I'll be waiting on that for a little while. PS The Phemon is not given warm encouragement in the runes that I read.

If the problem persists immediately after a crash (and reboot) then it's probably due to heat. You might also check the voltage on the graphics card rail (what is that again? the V

Check out the guide I posted at the top of this forum; it takes one through a reasonably rigorous diagnostic process, and you should know what is broke and what is dangerous and might cause any new bits of kit to die and ignoble death. It does sound pretty bad, but it might just be a corroded integrated circuit in the motherboard. /the land of chocolate