All I can say is, bloody marvelous. Daniel Day-Lewis at his best. It's a longish film (2hrs 38mins) but you pretty soon become immersed in the story and at no time did I feel compelled to look at my watch.

10/10

I'll keep it simple: "I upgraded to Firefox 3 and all I got was this lousy new back button".

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]