Here's something I realized yesterday: Duke Nukem Forever is coming out before HL2: Episode 3.

Just think about that one for a little while.

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/10.04/release/
Lucid as well.

There was a series of Dell Inspiron laptops (8400? 8500? maybe 5000 series) that had the most ridiculous power connector. It was this big beefy cylinder, with a big beefy cable, where the receptacle on the motherboard was soldered on by three tiny tiny pins. Not even a big thick ground shield solder connection to help handle the physical stress. After a few months the connector would physically come off of the board requiring an RMA to Dell. A friend had three laptops go bad (once I resoldered the connector for him, worked like a charm till it came loose again) before Dell said they wouldn't replace the motherboard anymore. He eventually got them to send him a newer model with the same specs, even took the same power connector, and the problem disappeared.

There's a link at Ars Technica that has an interesting possibility.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/03/with-the-nintendo-dsi-xl.ars

That is true, I was thinking more of 3D graphics/replacement for OpenGL like the summary seemed to imply. OpenCL would be really awesome for stuff like Photoshop, video transcoding, etc, definitely.

FTA: and OpenCL a new open graphics standard

Not quite.
...a framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of CPUs, GPUs, and other processors.

OpenCL is like CUDA, but supposed to be more open along the lines of OpenGL, hence the name. The same guys who manage OpenGL (Khronos) manage OpenCL as well. You could probably use it to do graphics, but that would be stupid.

How is this fraud? He told Discover exactly what happened, and they took care of it. Assuming the GP didn't lie (either to us or to the Discover people), this is a perfectly valid method of dealing with being screwed over. Although, the little snide comment about the manager's orientation was uncalled for, and probably got him his flamebait mod.

Personally, I would have called the central office and had them take care of it. Had to do this once with a hotel where we found a used hypodermic under a bed in our room on the second night of our stay (wasn't there the first night, so someone shot up in our room during our occupancy). We only found it because my friend's fiancee was making sure we didn't leave anything as we packed, reached under the bed, and brushed it with her hand. Had the needle been pointing outward, she would have gotten a tasty dose of someone else's drugs and bodily fluids. Manager only wanted to refund the cleaning fee, I stated this wasn't acceptable, left, and called the central office. 5 minutes after calling the head office, the manager called me back, apologized, and refunded my entire stay.

It would probably be cheaper to give each new employee an allowance for a new computer and have them make the purchase directly.

But then everyone has a different machine from a different vendor, so a lot of your IT tips and tricks (standard images for all the machines, hot spares, emergency parts, etc.) go out the window, which means your support costs go up. If you're a small business, it's no big, but once you start getting into multiple hundreds of machines that need administered, shit can get nasty if each machine is just different enough to be a pain.

Dude, those ARE the FB-DIMM prices. FB-DIMM long ago stopped being more than a few dollars off from the normal DDR2 option.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134688
Kingston 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 FB-DIMM ECC Fully Buffered DDR2 800 - $33.49 each, $66.98 total; GP quoted $67.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134862
Kingston 4GB 240-Pin DDR2 FB-DIMM ECC Fully Buffered DDR2 800 - $156.99 each, $627.96 total; GP quoted $604.

FB-DIMM memory does not invalidate his argument in any way.