Hydrogen peroxide powered rocket packs fly for around 30 seconds, because they have a specific impulse of around 125, meaning that one pound of propellant can make 125 pound-seconds of thrust, meaning that it takes about two pounds of propellant for every second you are in the air. Mass ratios are low for anything strapped to a human, so the exponential nature of the rocket equation can be safely ignored.

A pretty hot (both literally and figuratively) bipropellant rocket could manage about twice the specific impulse, and you could carry somewhat heavier tanks, but two minutes of flight on a rocket pack is probably about the upper limit with conventional propellants.

However, an actual jet pack that used atmospheric oxygen could have an Isp ten times higher, allowing theoretical flights of fifteen minutes or so. Here, it really is a matter of technical development, since jet engines have thrust to weight ratios too low to make it practical. There is movement on this technical front, but it will still take a while.

John Carmack

umm, hello it was copied from a VMware img I know I for one have done it myself RTFM

Not only does AMD have the only desktop 64-bit offering right now, but their chips are much faster than Intel's at the same clockspeed, even in 32-bit mode. Whereas Intel's engineers are just running their chips at insane clockspeeds, AMD's are actually designing better processors. For the price of a 3.4GHz "800"MHz FSB P4EE ($989 on pricewatch right now), you could buy two Opteron 246s ($441 each) with cash to spare. If you want to talk raw, meaningless numbers, the Opterons still beat the P4EE (4GHz and 2MB cache total). Of course, SMP isn't simply additive like that, but consider the advantages of 64-bit and multiprocessing, and the fact that AMD chips are /much/ faster than Intel's at the same clockspeed (even on 32-bit code), and there's no contest. All halfway-modern Windows versions and Linux kernels can support SMP, and the latest support amd64, too.

Every product that I've ever bought from SonicBlue has been malformed and returned to sender.

The technology sounds cool, but I'll probably wait until it's available from another vendor.