Tom's cpu chart is a great tool, but they don't generally compare older chips to newer ones. They also change the testing credentials from time to time, so there's no real way to directly compare old vs. new.

Anandtech has a new cpu benchmark site that compares everything from a single-core atom up to the top-of-the-line core i7. They've also recently added two pentium 4 chips to the mix so you really can directly compare them to the newer stuff. Check it out:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/

Apparently, the tech report should have benchmarked their web server before putting this article up.

You are a smelly pirate hooker!

...who discovered the wheel and built the Eiffel Tower out of metal and brawn. That's what kind of man I am. You're just a woman with a small brain. With a brain a third the size of us. It's science.

... of making me buy the same shit over and over again. How do they do it? Damn you, Nintendo!

I can remember tinkering with it back in the early days. Of course, it was just a vector-based web animation tool at that time. Building flash animations and seeing what people could accomplish with this amazing tool was fun and entertaining.

Now, I just want it to die a horrible, horrible death. Browser focus-stealing advertisements, poor support on consoles like the wii and ps3, complete lack of support on certain portable devices, an awful video interface that suffers from performance issues... what the hell happened?

Flash has gone from a purpose-built vector graphics program, to a plague upon the www. Please kill it.

Just a few things off the top of my head...

-The Rendition Verite (V1000) was the first "true" 3d card that I can remember. It was capable of running accelerated Quake and the included Indy Car Racing II was breath-taking at the time with it's high framerate (30fps), high resolution (640x480), and bilinear filtering. I remember sitting in amazement as I watched the ICR2 demo play when I first bought this card. It was truly the first amazing 3d acceleration I had ever seen in my life. Probably the closest thing to it was the Race Drivin/Hard Drivin arcade game, with all of it's blocky polys and 10-15fps goodness.

-The article gives us a huge list of 3d cards, but little depth into the actual performance or market penetration of any of them. Most of these cards are barely worth mentioning. Even at the time, some of these cards sold in miniscule numbers or performed horribly. That's not to say that they shouldn't have been mentioned, but how about focusing on the major players a little more?

-How about 3dfx's "16-bit color is just fine!" rhetoric when Nvidia upped the ante with 32-bit color? I think the reason that 3dfx neglected to move to 32-bit color at the time was because they had tested it and performance on their cards was horrible. Hey, I bought 3dfx's bullshit at the time, mainly because I wanted to run Quake 2 as fast as possible.

I could go on, but the bottom line is this article isn't much of a "history" at all. It's nothing more than a list of cards with specs and brief summaries. How disappointing.

"They shot themselves in the foot with Windows ME too, luckily for them they had the reasonably stable Windows NT ready to go out the door."

Not exactly sure what you meant by this. Windows NT was around long before ME. I thought, maybe you meant Windows 2000. I was pretty sure that ME and 2000 were released around the same time. Nope. According to wikipedia, Win2000 came out in February 2000, while ME came a full 7 months later in September. So... what exactly did you mean?

Information wants to be free. Sure, you may think it's a silly cliche, but the message holds true.

So why would I pay for something that is readily available for free? The internet already provides me with an insurmountable amount of information on a daily basis... more information than I can ever recall reading in a week's worth of newspapers!

Digital readers will neither save or condemn the newspapers; it's up to the newspapers to save themselves. Learn a lesson from the RIAA. Your business model has changed. Adapt or die.

I get it. You're very proficient at wiring ethernet cables. For what it's worth, I agree with you in principle. I've run some lines in my home and it makes no sense to me to spend the extra money on pre-crimped wire.

In a corporate environment, however, it makes all the sense in the world. It's alleviates quality control issues and is easier. These conveniences come at a cost.

Oh, and that technician you're talking about hiring... the one with years of experience? That costs money, too.

I'd love to see you grab a spool of cable, measure and cut it, strip it and sort the wires, then crimp both ends in 15 seconds. I'm good, but not that good. When someone comes to me with a problem, it's much easier for me to reach over and grab a cable from a drawer.

And if your company is into the whole cable certification thing (mine is), it's much more complicated than a simple continuity test:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_cable_certification

To me, it makes a hell of a lot more sense to use 1 or 2 manufacturers' products than you know are of good quality, than having to worry about a site where 3 or 4 technicians (with varying degrees of skill) may have crimped different lines throughout that location.

Using manufacturers' cables isn't only easier, it's also a form of standardization. And again... if your company can't afford to stock its' sites with spare patch cables, I really don't know what to say.

Compared with... filling in an internal requisition, having to justify the expense, waiting a week for order delivery, followed by resuming doing what you were doing when you needed the cable. If you can even recall what it was.

I'm not sure where you work, but I have a plethora of patch cables sitting in a cabinet next to my desk. It's very rare that I don't have what I need (in terms of ethernet cabling, anyway). And in the ultra-rare instance that I don't have what I need? My district office can have it shipped to me next-day. I think you're being a touch dramatic... or maybe the company you work for has some seriously screwed up policies if you can't even have a few cat-5e/6 cables on hand.

Yes, you can use handmade cables that are as good as mass-produced factory cables. But that really isn't the issue.

It's just not worth the time spent to cut and crimp your own lines anymore. In my experience, it was a more common practice years ago in IT. That may have had something to do with the fact that there weren't nearly as many PC's or ethernet ports in buildings as there are today.

My advice: Find a good supplier (i.e. not one that charges $800 for a 6 ft. adamantium-coated cable) and do something else with the rest of your time.

Here is a list of games (and communication apps) that I tried to get working recently and the result:

Cross Fire (www.crossfire-en.com)
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=9335
-Complete failure via wine. Tried via virtualbox w/ wined3d, crashed X server.

Team Fortress 2
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=9335
-wine appdb reports TF2 as a "gold" game. Great, I thought. Installed fine, but the framerates were absolutely horrible! Severe stuttering and fps lag on a system that rarely drops below 100fps with all eyecandy enabled (c2d 3+ghz, 8800gtx). Under wine, I would drop to 5-10fps frequently whenever more than a few players are on screen. Unplayable.

Ventrilo Client
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=2169
-Yet another app that is reported as "gold". Client installs after significant tinkering. Unfortunately, push to talk does not work unless ventrilo is active window (effectively making it useless if you are in game and attempt to chat in real-time). There are several scripts that supposedly fix this PTT focus issue; none of them worked for me on Jaunty x64. So, the primary VOIP client that I use for gaming was useless to me.

Xfire
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=2573
-Another supposed silver/gold app. Xfire installs fine, but the text on the main window is garbled. It is also unstable. Workaround = installing the gfire plugin for pidgin to chat to friends on xfire. It has no in-game functionality, but it works.

Quake Live
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=15796&iTestingId=37688
-Yet another gold app that I could not get working properly.

Left 4 Dead
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=14592
-Gold app, even rated as Platinum by one submitter. Works, but performance is terrible compared to native under windows.

Wine is a great tool, but it leaves much to be desired. Is this really a 1.x program? Probably not. Are some of these games really worthy of a Gold or Platinum rating? Definitely not. Admins should be reviewing these submissions.

So I do appreciate the fact that you've had some success with wine. It appears, however, that we're just playing different games.

No way, huh? This is sarcasm, right? I can easily use that amount of bandwidth per month legally.

Example of usage:
I stream internet radio pretty heavily.
-streaming internet radio @ 128Kbps x 6 hours/day = 345MB/day = 10GB/month

Hulu hd content is between 480Kbps and 1000Kbps.
Figuring for an avg. of 700Kbps:
-hulu hd @ 700Kbps x 4 hours/day (figuring for my usage and my wife's... VERY generous estimate) = 6.3GB per 5 days/week = 25GB/4 weeks (month)

I'm already at 35GB/month. And that doesn't even include our VoIP usage (skype and ventrilo), downloading of OS/software patches or downloading/seeding linux distros, or anything else I might want to legally do every month.

Ridiculous.