It's hard to believe that Carl Sagan's Cosmos is nearly 30 years old and I never got around to reading it until now, although I do remember watching the TV series as a kid. Whilst the science of astronomy and astrophysics has moved on somewhat since the book was written, Cosmos is a timeless book. Before I started to read it I thought it might feel dated and of its time, but not so. Forget Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything", Cosmos is the daddy. It truly is the the Total Perspective Vortex in a handy book format.

I just took delivery of my new video card which got slotted into the new Dell. The Quadro FX1700 cards weren't cutting it for 3D work, but I knew this would be the case any way. The new card is an overclocked NVidia GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB (MSI branded). The first thought I had when I unwrapped it from the anti-static bag was "jings, this thing is huge!". This is one of these cards that takes up two bays because of all the cooling and other heat sinking gubbins that go into making high performance video cards. Anyhow, go here to read all about it if you're so inclined: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/GeForce-8800-GTS-512,review-29805.html.

The new card boosted my 'Windows Experience Index' by a good bit, which is nice:

I can now run Eve with all the premium high quality rendering bits turned up to full at 1900x1200 and the average frame rate is around 120+fps.

And without further ado, the obligitory hardware pr0n:

1. Big, isn't it?

2. Even the Buzz thinks it's a chunky looking affair, or maybe just eyeing up the leftover ketchup

3. Two slots big...

Quite amusing. I'm platform agnostic and a reasonable kinda guy when it comes to using the right tools for the job (Linux hums away processing around 2million messages a day on our mail platform) but MS pays the rent and the beer for me. Actually, you'd have to pry my lovely VS08 and .NET tools out of my cold dead hands before forcing me to switch to being a LAMP/Mono stack developer. But that doesn't mean to say that if you came along and doubled my salary I wouldn't completely rule out the blue pill.

Anyway, go have a chuckle here: http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/

[Via: Miguel de Icaza]

I don't watch copied DVD's. I like to own the original media and box. Also because most DVD's are so cheap these days why wouldn't I just buy the original? Lately, one thing that's really been seriously pissing me off big time is the way that film companies take control of my DVD player and decide how I watch the DVD. i.e. forcing me to watch their 'COPYING IS STEALING' crap and a boat load of trailers for films I've no interest in.

Let's face it, if I was watching a hooky DVD or rip, none of this crap would be present and therefore completely missing the target audience...people who are watching hooky DVDs and rips. And, if I was so inclined to duplicate, say the rental copy, then I'd rip and burn the DVD minus all this crap anyway. The other thing that uniquely grips my shit are trailers I can't easily skip past. LionsGate DVD's are particularly guilty of this trick. I can fast forward (better than nothing, but as you fast forward past each trailer, the next one needs to be manually fast forwarded and so on; still a pain in the arse) but I'm not allowed just to go straight to the main feature menu.

So the movie I'm about to watch tonight made me sit through two mandatory 'YOU ARE A THIEF' messages and then made me fast forward through 4 trailers and 2 chocolate adverts and some other crap. Some are even worse, last week one DVD (I forget which one) did this to me -

1. Twenty seconds warning me not to dare copy the DVD, with fast forward/skip/menu prohibited.
2. Twenty seconds warning me not to even think about watching it in a public place, with fast forward/skip/menu prohibited.
3. Fifteen seconds of animated logos advertising the main production company, with fast forward/skip/menu prohibited.
4. Another fifteen seconds of shiny logos advertising how clever they were for using Dolby Digital, with fast forward/skip/menu prohibited.
5. Fifteen seconds advertising another film company involved in making the movie, with fast forward/skip/menu prohibited.
6. About four minutes of trailers and other spam with no option to skip to menu other than fast forward EACH trailer, skipping/menu prohibited.
7. Approximately 15-20 seconds of animation just to show the menu before I could select 'Play'

Talk about making enemies with the customers who actually paid for your product.

So...Dear Film Companies...stop assuming I'm a thief and stop taking control of MY DVD player which I paid for with MY MONEY and let me decide, or not, whether I watch your crappy legal messages and second rate movie trailers/spam. I don't have to put up with this nonsense every time I open a book or play my CD's (though wouldn't the music biz love that eh?). I'm not stupid and I know the book is protected by copyright, but I don't have to remind myself every time by re-reading the copyright page each time I pick it up, so why inflict this crap on me when watching a DVD. Yeah ok I could get the player chipped and made region free, blah, blah, blah, but why should I resort to invalidating my warranty just to be able to have the freedom to decide that today I want to watch the film now, and not after ten minutes of threats and unwanted DVD spam.

Yay! Re-sharper 4 just shipped (in the last hour by the looks of it, their blog entry says 10th of June and it's still the 9th) after the shortest Beta/RC period I think I've seen ever. Finally, support for all the clever new C#3.0 bits.