There is a hoax running especially in Europe, +358 or similar number, similar to Italy code (+35). Once you get a "ring" from that line or tricked calling it, your phone bill will be doomed. I speak about thousands of dollars (euros) here and you can't get that money back.

Urban legend.

As for Nvidia, do they have any chips that fit in the price and power brackets of netbooks?

Hmm, apparently they do, in the form of their own ARM SoC...

I'd love a low-power, high-performance ARM notebook. I'd be happy with MIPS or Loongson (Chinese MIPS clone) as well. Debian already has a full-blown ARM port and I'll bet they could get it working on an ARM netbook in a day. Ubuntu would undoubtedly be soon-to-follow.

There was an ARM employee at DebConf with a protoype ARM-based netbook. I forget whether it was running Debian or Ubuntu, but in any case the software is basically ready.

As a side benefit, having multiple widely-used architectures for desktop systems (x86 and ARM) would be a support nightmare for hardware companies that still keep their drivers proprietary and undocumented. Yeah, I'm looking at you, Broadcom and NVidia.

I'm pretty sure Broadcom is already providing drivers for ARM as many home routers run on ARM. As for Nvidia, do they have any chips that fit in the price and power brackets of netbooks?

I see a significant barrier to ARM adoption in GCC's code generator, which is poor and apparently getting worse as the optimisations are more tuned for x86 than RISC processors. ARM, like Intel, has its own commercial compiler but it would probably make business sense for them to contribute to GCC as well, just as Intel does.

10 seconds is absurdly short for any kind of codec test.

WTFV. The keyframe interval is 10 seconds but the clip is nearly 5 minutes long.

Look ... when I buy a product, I expect it to come in its original packaging straight from the factory. When its out of its packaging, I have no idea where the product has been. Sure, it could have been safely stowed in drawer, but seeing the assholes who work at my local gamestop, I can only assume the game has been used as a coaster for a cigarette stuffed bottle of stale miller light. How am I to know otherwise?

Because, if it's not sealed in its original case, you can look at it, you know, with your eyes, and then choose not to buy it if it's scratched or if there are tracces of cigarette ash or beer stains on it. Or you can tell the manager that you want one that wasn't a "display copy" and if they only have "display copies", then you can either buy it, or not buy it, or try to Intimidate the manager, or just wander around and level up for a while and collect more gil, or whatever. It's really up to you. But let's dispense with the drama. It's not like the store is replacing the sticker on the top of the case (that's such a pain to remove) and then re-plastic wrapping it and pretending that it's never been opened. Sheesh.

Just in case anyone is wondering, I finally broke down and bought one of those CD/DVD buffing/repair kits (with the hand crank, haven't tried the automatic things) and it works great. I got a lot of games and DVD's that my kids had scratched working again with it.

sounds good