@James

my friend, people NEED to run at 1920x1200 if they have a 24" LCD display and that's the screen's native resolution. Everyone knows that monitors look best at their native res.

I had a 7900GTX that I bought a year ago, didn't use it much, and then Company of Heroes came around and the card stuttered at 1920x1200 resolution. That game was so great it made me go out and want to buy something that showed the game off in all its beauty. I bought the 8800GTX and it was worth every penny - TO ME (granted all the readers here that still get a weekly allowance from mom as their means to buying PC upgrades will ofcourse disagree).

Also, the argument that you could get a PS3 or XBOX360 is apples vs. oranges - there is simply no match on the console for games like Company of Heroes, or more significantly CRYSIS (the game that will rule them all). When Crysis comes out, have yourself a look at it running on a high-end rig and then tell me if anything else in existence comes anywhere close. Another reason I got the 8800GTX was for Crysis, though i'll probably have to SLI a couple of them and pair them up with a Quadcore CPU to get max eyecandy, but so be it - you only live once.

"Ala-Aqbar skyscraper to generate its own energy" -- *COUGH* and more importantly all the $3.50 per gallon gas bought by the U.S. and China from those sheiks is what generated this tower.

Electric cars, "energy efficient" houses - its all BULL$HIT.. The dirty truth is this: its really all just "pollution ELSEWHERE"

ZZZzz... Poor ATI - All R600 parts were pWNED by 8800GTX right out of the gate... Oh well there's always the drawing board.

As long as its not MACROvision that they're hiring as in the content scrambling company (those guys are A$$HOLES) .. at first that's what I thought.

@Rynth

Hello? Sleeping? The R600 has been delayed and delayed BECAUSE ATI has been trying to figure out how the hell to deal with the fact that the 8800GTX still kicks even the fastest R600-based part's ass (i.e. X2900 HD XTX). ATI was set to sell a flagship product (with flagship price) and spouted off all kinds of crap about re-taking the graphics crown from Nvidia. Sadly, the benches that are starting to leak one site after the next since last week put the fastest R600 incarnation closer to an 8800GTS than 8800GTX.

Meanwhile Nvidia has the 8800 Ultra they've had in their pockets for 3-4 months, plus they've got the 8900GTX, 8900GT2, 8950GTX and 8950GT2 all lined up ready to slap down ATI in case they WERE a contender.

Bad times for AMD and ATI (and yet these two geniuses thought it was a good idea to merge). Intel is killing AMD with its excellent Core 2 Cpu's (intel increased its market share in ONE QUARTER (Q1 07) more than AMD's entire year 2006 growth) and Nvidia is kicking ATI and the only place ATI cards have left to go are bargain bin ..

Hey look, its the 40 Year Old Virgin! Wheeeeeee!

This thing shouldn't be called a 'centaur' -- it should be called the Uberdork Transport.

Looks like they don't ship this POS to the U.S.

I say "POS" only after I found out it doesn't ship to the U.S. Before I found that out, it wasn't a POS. (just for the record).

It's pretty irresponsible to report that "BluRay has sales locked up" when MOST of the units that have been moved from shelf to consumer were the result of the g*d damn FREE BLURAY MOVIE voucher bundled with PS3's..

Therefore the figure is skewed like just about every wishfully-thought BluRay chest-thumping about 'the format war being over' that Sony and friends do on a weekly basis.

The marketing boneheads at Sony know that "perception is reality" and they really actually think that if they keep getting skewed reports and propaganda in the press that the mouth-breathing masses will actually start to think that BluRay is the one to spend their hard-earned bucks on toward overpriced early-adopted hardware.

I'm not a fan of either - both formats suck and are still on the bleeding edge with the various studios each doing their own thing trying to patch the AACS weaknesses in their own proprietary way, plus

Bottom line: perception is NOT reality when it comes to b.s. format-war reports & propaganda, sales of BOTH formats combined are abysmal, and disc players for both formats need to become compelling enough for joe-mouthbreather-just-bought-an-HDTV to forego a simple DVD player in favor of it, i.e. sub $300 or $250 pricing. Only when the players become compelling enough to buy will the 'war' really heat up.

So is Ubuntu THEE shiznit linux variant now? When I worked in datacenter/hosting years ago the go-to linux variant was Debian. I assume Redhat is also still the 'lamer' linux o/s, right? or is redhat now just the 'corporate' (relatively speaking) linux variant?

I dunno much about linux but I'm a windows XP person that was underwhelmed by Windows Vista and promptly rolled back to WinXP after a week, but I will try Ubuntu 7.04 - last time I tried any linux variant (redhat i believe) it was too much f'ing headache to be worthwhile and I promptly punted it off my HD.

Wow - its got the amazing Windows Mobile 5.0 which is only 2+ years old, and WM6 is already out but hey.. plus its got that big bulky body of the ever-boring HP Ipaq and Dell Axim type devices. PLUS its made by HTC, a company which I've owned three different phones of and all of them were crap (SP5m, Starflip, and the audiovox candy bar one rebranded from them) which had horrible reception (versus say a nokia in the same room on the same cel provider) and after a while would need a firmware reflash because the software kept getting flakier with time (i.e. would not ring when calls came in).

So this thing sounds like a winner!