Well, it's not that they don't have effect--your conversation choices will grant LS/DS points, as well as affect companion loyalty. It remains to be seen how much ME-style plot tracking will affect the story as the game develops.

Not to mention playing on the Empire side. I doubt a KotOR 3 would have had that.

SWG never to my knowledge broke 500K subs. It was declining after the initial surge after launch, and while I'd agree that the changes hastened its demise, it's hard to peg it as a extremely successful MMO even in its heyday, at least compared with the expectations of what a Star Wars property should bring.

From what I hear, SWTOR had about a million pre-orders. Only time will tell if will live up to its own expectations.

Remember, you can't be "up" all the time. You are in an orbit that is tilted relative to the plane, and thus must pass through the plane twice on each revolution. If it were only at the distance of the earth's orbit, you would probably get significant "glare" for a significant amount of time compared to an earth-based telescope.

I don't know the particulars of LEGO Universe, but the issue is very likely that they license a number of core technologies that sit at the center of their architecture (e.g. Big World, which I recall Stargate Worlds used). This and other packages would all have to be re-engineered, I imagine.

I was getting tired of FF4/5 using 800 MB of memory, so I decided to upgrade to FF7. Now it grows to 1.5 GB. Yes, it has almost doubled. On the plus side, it seems to perform a bit better at a higher memory level than FF4/5, but still gets to the same slow performance eventually (which is fairly quickly, on the order of a day). So no, FF7 did not have the great memory reduction it was touted to have, at least for me.

I've decided to experiment and disable most of my extensions. I'm now running with the minimum of Stylish, NoScript, and ABP. The growth rate has slowed it appears (maybe by half), but as of right now I am at 944 MB and slowly growing.

My suspicion? FF has terrible memory fragmentation behavior in their JS engine. The more things you run that need JS, the worse it gets. There's one, and only one thing holding me back from going with Chrome all the way: the lack of a Master password.

Keeping archival copies is probably harder than everyone thinks.

• In 1980, I saved my files from college on a DECtape. Few of you probably even know what that is.
• In 1988, I saved files from grad school on an 1/2" reel tape.
• In 1995, I saved files on 1/4" cartridge tapes.

So, basically, "archives" I made 15-30 yrs ago are basically trash to me (I'm not even sure the bits would have survived on those that long, but that's another story.)

Note that even if I had a DECtape reader that I could interface to modern computers, what's the format? It was a directory-based, block-structured device where files tended to be non-contiguous. Also, to get the most out of it, we generally uses FPIP to compress the data. And FPIP used a dynamic compression technique. That means if a byte corrupted in the file, you could no longer decompress as that would change the frequency counts used to determine the decompression tables.

So, in the list of archiving problems we have: old media, loss of integrity of the media, the hardware format of bits on the media, the software format of bits on the media, and the software encoding of those bits. How long will it be before MP4, etc., are no longer used?

I have one extension (at least) that doesn't support FF 6.0 yet. Until that changes, I don't move.

Yes, but how often do you actually exit? I never close mine, unless I'm forced to.

mailflix.com is taken, according to a WHOIS search. Maybe it could be bought for the right price. Just about every *flix.com name is probably also gone by now.

Are you not in the US? Because I just switched to a DVD-only plan.

http://backtothefuture.wikia.com/wiki/File:Mrfusion.png

Some timings. These are between the same Solaris 10 server and Ubuntu 10.10 client. X11 is via SSH port forwarding (unfortunately, it appears that Ubuntu doesn't even turn on X11 TCP connections, and I'd have to restart my display to set that up) and VNC is via a remote desktop. The times given are between issuing the command and the window being displayed, measured by a stopwatch.

• xterm: 11.5s via X11, 1.5s via VNC
• firefox: 56.5s via X11, 16s via VNC

Additionally, when I went to quit FF on the X11 connection, it took about 30s to display the File menu, while my system was frozen in a server grab.

On a high-latency WAN, using firefox as the benchmark, VNC is better from my experience. My guess is that it uses a lot of synchronous requests, and if you can only get about 10 requests/sec (at 100ms ping), it really adds up.

Count me as skeptical as to whether this is a good thing or not. I suppose one key aspect is how easy it will be to develop applications that are compatible with whatever the user is running. One thing I have to point out though, is that X11's greatest strength--virtualization--is also its greatest weakness. I work at home via a VPN connection to my company, and have about a 100ms ping time or so, and I can say that I'll run a remote display only under duress. It's slow to the point of being maddening. I will rather run a VNC desktop because that actually performs tons better. Of course, VNC is built on top of X11, but as long as something like that is possible, it isn't necessary to have a native remote window system.