The single-core N230 can run fanless, if there's sufficient ventilation, though the dual-core N330 will need one.

The Revo R3600 box I have does include a CPU fan, but it's inaudible from a normal viewing distance at the low CPU load during playback. The fan does spin up if the machine is loaded, but it's still only an added whoosh rather than the whine many laptop fans seem to have. Moving around the XBMC menus quickly and/or updating the metadata on a few items is about the most load my box gets, so it's not an issue.

I'm also a bit of a noise freak, with fanless or large slow fans in my desktop PC. If the fan in the Revo isn't a problem for me, it probably won't bother 99% of people :)

No Pentium board will have the slot for this card, and Pentium CPUs are just too inefficient nowadays.

You want an nVidia ION based board - even the single-core 1.6Ghz Atom can handle 1080p x264 with ~20% CPU usage, thanks to the 9400M supporting hardware decoding. I have a cheap Revo R3600 box running Linux XBMC, and it can play anything without breaking a sweat, and it's quiet enough to sit under the TV too.

This one is an outright lie. 1Password only runs on Macs. KeePass (or KeePassX) runs on everything.

The application only runs on Macs and iPhone, but that's not what it's claiming. The keychain includes an HTML file containing enough Javascript to decrypt (with your passphrase) the data files. It gives you read-only access to your data from any modern OS/browser combination.

I have my keychain in a Dropbox folder, shared between two Macs (accessed natively) and a Windows box (through the browser). Not as truly portable and flexible as KeePass, but their claim isn't a lie...

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IE has problems if you add a port number to the address, so google.com:80 doesn't work, but is fine after you add the protocol. That's the only situation I remember that fails.

I'm fairly sure the ~10GBP was the total cost to upgrade to UT2004, rather than just the discount off the price of the new game. I remember feeling a bit miffed about the quick release of 2004, and it was a great way to keep the existing users happy.

On the other side... Codemasters released Colin McRae Rally 2005 soon after CMR'04, but with no offer of a discount. I don't think I've bought a Codemasters game since ;-)

Had they offered a good discount to 2003 customers, I probably would have bought it.

That's exactly what they did do - the 3rd paragraph on Wikipedia covers it. I sent my UT2003 disc and ~10GBP for the full 2004 game.

Each pass will reduce the quality to some extent, so two lossy conversions will always be worse than one. The capabilities of each format differ, so the order of conversions will make a difference too.

That said, the average person probably won't lose sleep over the extra step in your example!

Converting to MP3 is lossy, regardless of the source format.