Going to have to politely disagree here. Appliances such as coffee makers, toasters and electric kettles most certainly benefit from 220.

There's a reason you don't see many electric kettles in the U.S... they take longer than the stove to almost boil a pot of water, compared to the 20 seconds or so you get in the UK for a rolling boil.

I also quite like the switches on UK outlets, although the size of the sockets is somewhat ridiculous.

I'll never forget my first trip to London (about 15 years ago)... the flat I stayed in was in a 150 year old building. Switches on all the outlets, and a central touchscreen that controlled the AC, heat and scheduled the water heater to kick on and off. Hot water in the kitchen sink was on-demand (much like the "electric showers" you see in small flats now).

At the time, it was absolute magic to my teenage American brain, and I began wondering why we don't do more in the U.S. to curtail wasted power.

Then there was the ubiquitous gas broiler on every stove I came across...

But the combo washer-dryer deals that take 5 hours for a load suck. And they're generally in the kitchen for some reason.

I'll come out and suggest the same codebase and be shocked if it wasn't a straight up PC-EFI 9 or the latest Chameleon + EFI combo. All Pystar has done is slap their own branding on existing OSX86 tools since the beginning.

They're more than kinda shady and I feel really sorry for folks who bought one of their insta-hackintoshes and didn't have the technical know-how to compile drivers / hack efi strings etc to keep their "Mac" running properly.

Moral of the story: if you're gonna do it, build one yourself so you can learn how to support your own build.

Pystar's gonna get sued into oblivion soon, and good riddance.

Gotta love MS, always two steps behind when they crib their strategy from elsewhere (in this case the big box stores that love overpriced accessories).

Marking the hell out of cheap commodity accessories stopped being a viable business model a few years ago.

Here's hoping that extended warranty scams and increased online competition force some sense into the big boxes at some point, but the writing's on the wall.

Amazon's already trialing same-day shipping in major markets. Other etailers won't be far behind.

Yeah, we were the same way. No rules lawyering at the table, 30 sec max for lookups then best judgement. Keep everything rolling so the laughs and momentum didn't start to lag.

Funny you mentioned Tunnels & Trolls. I'm still using the old grievous injury chart from that set just to spice stuff up and give the folks a little acting fodder for their characters.

I'm still considering going back to 1E right now... the interesting bit is that the wives/kids that get pulled into my games now "get" the talent tree/spec style system that 4E introduced. I like the concept of the eberron-style "dramatic actions" to use. I like the concept of powers for everyone (poor fighters in 1E)... I even like the care that's been taken into balancing everything this time out.

I just don't like a perfectly good story to be made tedious with an hour-long combat session and micromanagement for dots, bloody, focus, challenge, aoe, movement, opportunity... all that stuff. If I want that, I'll play Warhammer or Axis & Allies or any number of perfectly good wargames.

But for D&D, roll initiative, say what your character does with feeling and get your THAC0 on. You're doing something wrong at my table if you aren't trying to chew scenery or crack everyone up when it's your turn.

Poor attempt at a troll, but I'll bite, Mr. AC.

Chainmail (D&D's spiritual daddy) was a tactical wargame, as is Warhammer.

D&D is a Role Playing Game. You know: tell stories, have adventures.

Tactics are all well and good if that's the kind of game you want to play. It's not the kind of game I want to play, and it's not the kind of game most folks at my table want to play, either.

I want to get through an "episode" per 4ish hour session, not a paragraph of story progress and maybe two encounters.

There's a reason I've been holding onto my huge collection of 1st edition books for all these years -- they work, the rules are flexible, and most people at my table have them more or less memorized. I can put a few figures on a mat, not sweat the finer strategery of combat, and kill a few orcs in 10 minutes with almost zero bookkeeping apart from initiative and hit points.

This keeps the story moving and keeps combat fun.

Might come as a shock to you, but I encourage my players to act. Tunnels & Trolls had it right way back when with their grievous injury chart. Roleplaying is about far more than magical hit point numbers.

I've likely been DMing longer than you've been alive, so I'm just gonna laugh at the rest.

It's a pretty cool proof of concept, but I absolutely shudder at the amount of additional setup time something like this would require for campaigns.

I've run a couple of 4E campaigns after finally letting go of my 1E rules, and not to put too fine a point on things... combat takes way the hell too long when you're forced to deal with miniatures and it just bogs everything down -- don't get me started on the amount of stickers and markers that are required for bookkeeping now.

A couple people at my table like the more strategic combat options that minis offer, but the majority prefer that the story advances more than a paragraph per play session. As the DM, I'm one of them. I'd rather roll initiative and talk through fast-paced combat.

WOTC wants to sell their absolutely hideous plastic minis, and lots of them, so it's in their best interest to make the game mini focused. There are so many rules that depend on movement and proximity that you've basically got to remove the entire combat system and house-rule over it if you forego the minis.

I've seen some folks that use an LCD projector and Photoshop in lieu of a battlemat, but that's still an enormous amount of prep time for a campaign.

I work in advertising.

People hate advertising. They're inundated with it. People in advertising hate advertising (at least on the creative side)... but they recognize that it's a necessary evil, and it's one of the most reliable ways for slacker artist types like myself to get gainful career employment. I have no illusions. I'm helping sell shit to people that they don't want or need.

Usually, I work in business to business stuff, so I don't have to do the soul-searching thing as often as folks who market for consumer brands/retail.

Occasionally people might enjoy a Superbowl spot, or the like, but those are generally narratives, and they account for the tiniest fraction of a percent of all advertising.

I appreciate the craft and thought process that goes into making effective marketing in the same way that I can appreciate move recaps of classic chess games. That doesn't mean I want to experience them in real-time. I want to experience them on my own terms... marketers' responses have been to simply scream louder and louder so that the advertising can't be avoided.

My $12 movie ticket buys me 20 minutes of advertorial (not including previews) if I want to get a decent seat. I get congratulated on my free nano or wii 200x a day if I forget to disable Flash. Same thing on a different scale.

TLDR: Don't think you know too many folks who create advertising... just ones who sell it. There's a difference.

I doubt it. I've had negative reviews published on Newegg, and their reviews are absolutely essential for some of the cheapie parts you can score... for example, making sure a SATA external chassis actually supports 1gb drives, etc (which is often not in the specs).

In fact, I'd go a step further. Newegg leaves up flames and reviews by 'tards who don't know what they're talking about -- as long as you don't post competitive store URLs or prices, and they let manufacturers (or distributors) reply to reviews directly.

I think their system works about as well as Amazon, personally, and I'm generally confident when I buy from there that I know what I'm getting (again, pretty useful with no-name knockoffs).

They're the evil empire. I don't think they'll ever be seen as cool without being split into smaller companies that can develop their own personalities. And no, having the XBox team dabble in UI doesn't really help. Give me back a programs menu that works!

Honestly, the DoJ would have been doing them a favor to split them up like Ma Bell way back when. I'm not sure they'd have been doing the consumer any favors over the long run, though.

From a marketing standpoint, they need their own messaging: not kneejerk responses to Apple and Google. Speak with confidence on their strengths, but set yourself apart from the competition. Speak on your own terms.

It's really marketing 101. A leader in the industry with that kind of marketshare shouldn't even acknowledge the other guys, let alone focus neurotically on Apple who has like 12% market share (on a good day).

When you're that big, you lead -- not follow. It's just so weird to me that they're determined to acknowledge barbarians at the gate at every opportunity.

People who aren't cool enough for a Mac. Haven't you seen laptop hunters?

In fact, they're marketing to people who have enormous chips on their shoulders about being so entirely uncool (or poor) for Macs.

I jest. They're talking to themselves. Microsoft's insecurities have been laid utterly bare in all their marketing attempts for a decade.

There was a joint interview with Jobs and Gates not too long ago that I'm too lazy to dig up, and a question was asked "what do you envy about the other" -- Gates' answer came off as snide, yet honest: "I wish I had your taste"

They've been at this since the Zune came out and they started marketing to the Wal-Mart demographic. Because Wal-Mart folks like brown things that work almost sorta as well as an iPod at the same price. Because you're not cool enough for an iPod, and you've got a chip on your shoulder about it.

The weird part is... that demographic's pretty much stuck with MS out of ignorance, and MS is tilting at windmills whenever they go against apple. They inevitably end up looking as insane (and sad) as Don Quixote himself.

They're trying so hard to astroturf these days, build a viral movement. I'm not sure they understand that apart from a handful of lunatics/idiots/middle managers out there, there is nobody on earth who actually likes Microsoft. Maybe they do understand, and they're trying to overcompensate?

Their messaging isn't helping any.

So, as a career advertising guy (15 years & counting) I don't get it either.

Round about Vista/Zune, MS and their various agencies of record starting shooting themselves in the foot. I'm here to tell you Crispin/Porter is a great, kooky agency... but they just can't speak to the Wal-Mart moms that MS thinks they're in danger of losing.

Microsoft's achilles heels are Office (in the near term) and Mobile (in the long term). If they lose control over file formats and Exchange lock-in, Microsoft as we know it gets pushed over their tipping point. Over the long term, so many of our common tasks will be moving to mobiles or embedded devices instead of PCs -- and MS let Mobile languish as a steaming pile for the better part of a decade.

But now they're just shitting out me-too copies of consumer electronics.

Maybe the whole thing is misdirection? I don't think so, but there has to be a few smart folks at that company who can see the forest for the trees.

Actually, Mental Ray satellite (as craptastically buggy as it is) still had a 8-thread limit under Maya 2009 sp1a (patch notes say they removed the restriction, but watch your CPU usage with a dual Nehalem and tell me it's not locked to 8 cores still)....

But it's not so much that... I mean if you've got the budget for Renderman Pro or Mental Ray standalone, you've got the budget to build a farm properly, and yeah an i7 is most definitely worth every penny, Nehalem Xeons are great too if someone else is paying the tab. If you're buying Renderman Pro, you're likely getting Xeons.

I've got 3 identical i7s, a core 2 quad and a core 2 duo for rendering here, and whenever I'm doing hair (shave in particular) or some dynamics plug-in work, I get significantly better render time using the core 2 duo due to the nature of multithreading. If you're only using 1 thread on a hyperthreaded quad, you're only using 12% of the available processing power, and it's more efficient to use a slower processor that you can utilize more of, if that makes sense. Same goes for a few repeat offending after effects plug ins (cinelook and magic bullet come to mind here). I mean you could go a step further and run 8 single core VMs on an i7 to saturate the CPU doing a hair scene (actually works pretty well with linux VMs in a pinch).

I do love the i7s from the very bottom of my heart, though. I'm getting almost a 50% gain in frames rendered between q4400s and i7 920s using Mental Ray in most cases.

I'm a big fan of imaging my boxes, as you mentioned. Particularly with a small shop it can be an absolutely maddening time sink to troubleshoot faulty nodes.

I can't think of the last time I ran into the video card issue... might have been lightwave way back when, but I've seen it. The real point here is "make sure the stuff you're buying is suitable for the work you're doing". If the bulk of your software is single threaded still, an i7 box really might not be the best choice. For most folks doing this professionally, it's an awesome choice though. If you're editing HD or 2k/4k over a network, you need to spend a little extra cash to make sure your disk reads and net throughput are up to snuff.

With that goes: if you're using enormous float textures and displacement maps out the ass, you're going to lose a substantial amount of time on disk & network throughput. Go gigabit ethernet at a minimum (it's cheap) and get a nice, fast raid 5 or 6 for your primary storage (and get another big disk to back it up with, at a minimum). Just because you don't need much storage on those render doesn't mean you can cheap out on the drives (ie 5400 rpm throwaways). Disk and network throughput matter and the matter more as you add more render slaves.

Regarding Vista: it depends on your hardware. Up through SP1, I still had a couple of mainboards with unstable (*cough*nforce*cough) drivers in Vista 64, as well as a few pieces of software that required UAC off (eww). Gave up on Vista then and I've had really good, rock solid stability in XP64. Win 7 seems to be shaping up nicely on my 2 oldish Athlon x2 test sandboxes. I think this really depends on preference and available hardware, personally, but it's going to be a non-issue come October anyhow (and thankfully).