CoffeeFiend

Nope. That is analog capturing in a nutshell: poor quality. Even the Hauppauge cards have so-so results (just not as bad as some other cards, but nothing great). If you want the same quality, then you gotta look into DVB cards (100% quality, bit for bit copies, but the feeds are usually encrypted though), or ATSC tuners if there are OTA feeds in your area or such. Analog capturing will always look bad. There is just too much conversions, recompression, filtering, cabling, interference, noise, distortion, miscalibration, etc. This is what you're essentially doing with those capture cards: Digital signal (cable/sat/dvd/whatever) -> mpeg decoder -> DACs -> filters -> plugs and wiring -> more filters -> ADC -> on the fly compression -> dumped to your HD. Whereas with DVB cards and other ways to capture digitally, it's more like Digital signal (cable/sat/dvd/whatever) -> dumped to your HD. Skipping the entire "digital to analog and back to digital and recompressed again" thing. You skip the ugly conversions, the filtering, the noise, etc. And capture cards aren't calibrated perfectly. Their white and black levels are always a bit off (I've seen some recordings that were pretty bad). To make an analogy with AudioCDs (yes, them old things), analog capturing would be: Play CD in whatever player you have, plug the line out in your sound card, and record it as a average bitrate CBR mp3 on the fly. (all kinds of noise is added, sound is distorted a bit, etc) versus Rip the disc digitally with a PC to WAV files. Actually, when you think of it, this is EXACTLY what happens when capturing the audio with your capture card, vs when you capture digitally (keeping AC3 5.1 or DTS instead)... Just like for the video. I think anyone can tell what the difference is going to be like, or at least which will sound better. So no, don't ever expect the same type of quality you'll get from a DVD rip or such. Never. Gonna. Happen.

If the playback isn't smooth, then it's a configuration problem (or perhaps a filter or drivers issue). I've *never* even had that happen, even in "simple" mode. It's quite lightweight, so i can't see it cause the problems itself (had it running perfectly fine on a Duron 800 a few years ago). The real strenght of ZP is the configuration (one could argue that there is such a thing as too many options though, but I like it that way- btw, you gotta pick advanced mode). The most useful part of this being the custom media playback mode. Which is only useful if you know what you're doing... You pick the actual renderer you want (not whatever the player feels like like with every other player). You pick the demuxer for every container (MS', gabest, haali, etc - useful for sometimes with some "picky" files). You get to pick what filter decodes each format (be it ffdshow, xvid, elecard, or whatever you want instead of whatever crappy decoder the other players will semi-randonly pick for you - based on filter merit alone), or even stack 'em! Extremely useful for DVDs... Decode with whatever mpeg2 decoder your eyes prefer (nvidia's in my case) and then post-process & scale with ffdshow! (try doing that with another player!) No other player will let you get a better picture quality. Same for audio, you pick the decoder as always (and can use DS filters for effects if you so please too)... You can even make your own filtergraphs with graphedit and use 'em in it (again, something no other player supports). This feature also enables it to work on PCs where nothing else will work as some codec pack (nimo and such) screwed up everything badly. This is a *NECESSARY* feature as far as i'm concerned, and NO other player has it AFAIK. Also, the GUI and menus are nice and well laid out (better than every other player IMHO). So easy to get to anything you need (DirectShow filter properties, aspect ratio controls, etc). And every single key/mouse action/event can be remapped. It's the only player besides WMP (which I truly dislike) that can also play DRM'ed WMV files (like my copy of T2 extreme and such). Works great for HTPCs and remote controls too. It supports pretty much all formats/containers/subs and all as well (DVDs, H.264, flash, matroska, etc). The big downside? Too complicated/too much work for most people to configure. And it's not free either (well, the std ed is, but it's severely crippled) - 35$ IIRC, but it's definitely worth it (to me at least). If one doesn't need/want those features, then VLC is usually a good pick (good for previewing temp files too), or MPC if one doesn't care for VLC's GUI (especially the seeking bar)

If you gave us more details, chances are we could give better suggestions. Like, what does it need to have features-wise? The usual thing I do when I hand out such CDs is creating web pages with thumbnails linking to the full pics (or bigger versions, and the full thing elsewhere, because they're often very high res). That works on any computer. Many programs will generate everything for you (photoshop and acdsee namely). It's easy to modify the templates or final pages too (with a little html/css knowledge - and both are quite simple, quick and easy to learn). If you need specific or complex features then let us know... (things like searching by keywords/exif/iptc, dynamic things like sorting and such) I'm not sure how that's supposed to prevent you from going online to find pics though (not sure what you meant by that)

Wow. Don't know if I've ever read a thread with so much FUD in (and whining) it before. I can only 100% agree with Albuquerque. Wow. 100% wrong and pointless. Win XP doesn't have any more DRM than 2k does. WMP does support DRM'ed WMV files, just like it does on 2k. That's the *ONLY* DRM in XP anywhere, so strop spreading that kind of FUD, this isn't slashdot... Yes, XP was based on 2k, which was in turn based on NT4, etc. By what you say, seemingly every OS should be built from scratch or it sucks, so 2k sucks too, and perhaps the same goes for every linux kernel too... That's an overly tired argument. XP brought us a LOT of good and new things, that you guys have chosen to ignore, head in the sand, for the last 6 years or more. Things like: -ACPI that actually works (imagine that! funny how we don't get BSODs anymore) -64 bit support -remote desktop (TS) -volume shadow service -an updated IIS -prefetch to make apps faster -it has a basic firewall -DEP -much improved policies and deployment tools -cleartype -hibernate -improved security -has a bunch of new apps (movie maker, CD writing, etc) -better defragmenter support (for MFT mainly) -paging is improved, and registry too (faster, uses less memory, and less locks) -lots of improvement in the kernel (syscalls, locks for SMP, etc) This list could be almost endless. It's everything 2k should have been. But even today there are people who still think 2k or 98 were the best OS'es ever. One day, they might see the light... Vista brings a lot more new stuff. People whine it's too demanding hardware wise, just like they did years ago when XP came out (but now that's it's been out for years, our hardware is more than good enough for it). Honestly, if you turn the aero thing off, it runs just fine, even on older hardware (or even in VMWare). Even without the new GUI changes it's still a better OS in so many ways - at least for the new stuff in it for programmers (WPF, WCF, WWF and WCS). Oh, don't forget IIS7! Totally revamped installer (the Win NT 3.x era installer was beyond overdue, I mean, floppies for mass storage adapter drivers???) New and improved deployment tools (imaging based). LOTS of major kernel changes. The sidebar. DirectX 10. New network stack (ipv6 by default). So much new stuff... But then again, so people will keep denying all this new stuff somehow just isn't there. Or that for no reason, it's somehow not relevant or not useful. They will resist change as long as they can and put their heads in the sand. And like Albuquerque said, it doesn't matter how good Windows will ever be, some people will ALWAYS complain no matter what. Perfect wouldn't good enough (but then Steve Jobs poops in a bag and puts the almighty Apple logo on it... They'll praise it and run to the store to pay large sums for it! They can do now wrong.) Don't like it? Nobody's forcing you to buy or use it... Get Ubuntu or OS X or whatever, and see how much fun and how perfect it is... I will gladly buy my copy of Vista. Soon, Vista will be on almost every PC regardless (including new PCs).

Indeed, player is just to playback images. VMWare workstation also creates them but cost money. There's MS Virtual PC like some mentionned, it's free, but not my exactly favorite. There's also a couple more offerings which may interest you, especially if you're into virtualization a lot: MS Virtual Server 2005 R2, which is free, but it's not the best: VMWare Server (used to be called GSX), which is now free. Very powerful, works great, lets you create/run/use/mange/etc as many as you want at the same time. It's a very powerful virtualization platform. I use it to run various windows/linux installs, mainly for development. Works great, and it's free! Good way to run sever appliances and such (there's a bunch of pre-built appliances you can download for free too).

.

.

Honestly, the dev tools for 1.1 aren't nearly as good (VS2003 - no express eds either), the framework is not quite as good, same goes for the languages... v2.0 is a *HUGE* improvement - especially for ASP.NET! All kinds of extremely useful new features (like master pages). The whole thing's been improved so much I would never consider going back to 1.1! We've converted most of our 1.1 stuff already, but I can see someone maintaining a 1.0/1.1 app as-is (no conversion). But creating a new app from scratch using 1.1? Not gonna happen. Everything's moving to 2.0 and 1.1 is being abandonned (things like most new dev tools being for VS2005 and v2.0 only, MSDN has released their last MSDN for v1.1 a while ago e.g. expect no more doc updates, etc). Also, one ought to use 2.0 because it's what all of Vista's and ".NET 3.0" (which really isn't what is sounds to be) will work on top of, including lots of extremely useful new stuff one will want to use in their apps (communication foundation, workflow foundation and all). If you develop in 1.1, you'll have to convert it to 2.0 first before you can use any of the upcoming great new stuff. Why develop in 1.1 to be forced to convert to 2.0 later anyways (and then likely need a new host still)? If it comes down to that, I'd be looking for a new host, even if that's a pain (transferring), and could cost more. I don't understand why they don't provide 2.0 support either, any half-way competent host should by now, it's not like it costs them anything either (just install new framework and you're done). I would question them on their reasons for not supporting it. Developing new apps in 1.1 nowadays makes no sense. I think you're seriously looking for the wrong solution to your problem i.e. trying to work around the consequences (no good dev tools) of the actual problem (no 2.0 support for no reason). No host is cheap enough to be worth it. Even if it was free, I still wouldn't go that way.

.

Latest winamp for music. And another vote for ZoomPlayer for video (it TRULY blows everything else away in terms of playback configuration i.e. custom media playback mode; ffdshow for post-processing!) I also VLC and MPC occasionnaly... They're not bad, but it's not quite ZP.

.

I wasn't sure if the previous answer would be clear/simple enough (it just lists a bunch of features, no real comparison). Filesystem security (ACLs, users/groups, etc) are simplified in the home version. That's the biggest point against the home version IMHO (if you share files between PCs). There's also remote desktop (same thing, only if you have more than one PC and also want to remotely log onto the other one - and also that solutions like VNC aren't what you want/need, otherwise mainly irrelevant) One that's becoming a bit more problematic lately (but just a little bit) is multiprocessor support (SMP). That is multi CPU - *NOT* multi core. XP Home supports one processor only (doesn't matter if it's dual core, no problems), XP Pro supports two (regardless of # of cores). So if you're getting a dual Opteron... Go XP Pro. After that, it's mainly stuff most people won't use: -can't join domains (you know anyone who runs ActiveDirectory at home??? Obviously, no GPO either) -doesn't have IIS 5.1 (a severely crippled webserver, one ought to use the "real" thing instead) -doesn't have EFS (big deal... just use TrueCrypt!) -dynamic discs not supported (betcha you didn't even knew about those ) -no automated system recovery (which is ~100% useless from what I've seen) ...and a bunch of stuff we won't even bother getting into (more stuff nobody uses at home or that makes no sense whatsoever in that environment, and that non-IT folks have likely never heard of before) XP Home is good enough for most people really. As for x64... Lots of my hardware lacks 64bit drivers last I checked... And none of my PCs are 64bits anyways Next one will be a nice and fast Athlon64 X2, but right now I'm not worried about it one bit.

.

There are no such news. Microsoft doesn't even license chipsets or such. They're an unrelated 3rd party. Seemingly, you're referring to the old and very expected "news" of Intel pulling their bus (to the CPU) license, which truly doesn't surprise anyone... They're all at the mercy of Intel over this one (some were granted rights as a result of a lawsuit, but for a limited time and such). Hardly a big deal either. I think it's a good merger though, and more or less they had to do it to stay competitive and survive. Combined with the price slashing, it's very good news. I was thinking of getting a Core 2 Duo (the day they become available which may be a while), even though the motherboard selection is poor and their prices are quite high. Spending an extra 100$ on a motherboard for a 300$ CPU that beat's AMD top of the line FX62 that was like 1500$ when the Core 2 Duo was announced still seemed like a good deal. But now with AMD having somewhat comparable prices, and a far better selection of motherboards which are also better priced... I'll likely be getting a X2 4200+ soon, and a very nice motherboard ATI will bring a LOT of good stuff to AMD. PC-wise AMD only makes CPUs (disregarding things like flash and such), whereas Intel makes CPUs, chipsets, GPUs, and the whole nine yards. ATI will being chipset and GPU technology to AMD, which will also be able to compete, making half decent boards with everything AMD on it (their own chipsets, and half decent video). I mean, the Intel GMA900 video costs them like 4$ to produce IIRC (sufficient for most non-gamers really). Things are starting to get interesting!

Why comparing DDR and DDR2? Pick the type your motherboard supports?

Actually, it DID sound kind of interesting. But indeed, GPO works great for this. So does SMS. Or you can even use vbscript/WMI to spawn the processes remotely... And as some have mentionned, it's seemingly in alpha testing (not something I trust too much), and it's in javascript - a great technology for web pages, but for an install system? It's very limited, I'd much rather use something made with a "real" language honestly. Although the code looks better than I had expected really (thought it wouldn't have a single try/catch block i.e. no error handling and such), uses decent XML files for everything (not cryptic or overly verbose or anything). The only real bad thing I've noticed is that you kinda need to use AD to make it all happen (I thought that was the problem they were trying to solve in the first place...), or otherwise to keep an updated list of computers in XML format by hand (yay!) which would be quite a PITA for everyone still using NT domains and such. I guess it's just too bad there's already too many ways to accomplish those same tasks (including some apps we've built in-house eh).

I mainly reimage (or copy VM's containers for virtual PCs), and use unattended installs to create new images. Sysprep is your friend... Life's too short to reinstall it all unattended all the time. As Vista comes, we'll all be using imaging anyways

They aren't called "relative paths" but rather environment variables (leftovers from the DOS era) To see the list, drop to a command line (start -> run -> cmd) and type "set" (w/o the quotes obviously) and enter... Tada! BTW, what you're looking for is ALLUSERSPROFILE (first one on the list), so: %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Start Menu\Programs As for non en/en-US or whatever versions, I'm not sure what "start menu" or "programs" is named (or if they even change name). If you knew the other names, it would be easy to handle, but the command line environment (well, batchfiles I mean) is kinda limited... You might be able to export some infos from the registry too and rely on that (from a place like HKLM\Soft\MS\Win\CurVer\Explorer\Shell Folders\), but then again, they might have translated the registry key's names too or something. There's got to be a way, but I don't have any non-english versions of windows, so I can't be of much help for that.

Unless you need a little more than the VERY basic connections (e.g. the spdif out and mic in are the SAME plug IIRC), in which case it'll cost a lot more (platinum or better)... And still no DD Live, etc. No X-Fi for me! (can't say I'm a big fan of Creative's stuff anymore after buying a SB Live 5.1 Platinum in 2001 - VERY VERY bad experience overall) Edit: I've bought a X-Mystique card lately (didn't know about the X-Plosion - maybe it wasn't out back then either). It sure seemed to me like a WHOLE lot better card. It had extra features that really mattered to me (like DD Live), instead of overhyped stuff that makes no difference to me (an overstated SNR that's beyond overkill - there is a point of diminishing return; a 24/96 dithering that is kinda laughable thinking I'm listening to lossy music in the first place, and things like that). The X-Mystique had far better connectitivity too. I wouldn't buy a X-Fi even at half price.

Well, that's a very over-simplified view on the whole thing, and can be false too. It really depends on the particular JVM you're using and such. I doubt you could back up that claim... It's not instantly cross-platform. Not all widget libs have a normal look and feel, and don't always use the OS'es native widgets and such. It's a bit more complicated than that. And .Net apps can be easily ported to Mono to run on any platform, or can be compiled to java bytecode using grasshopper - which will run on every platform where java does... Not quite a tie, but almost. Again, that's a simplistic view of the whole matter. FAR from all apps do just calculations like that, more like a very small portion. C/C++ isn't the magic and best language to solve all problems either. It may not be possible, reasonable, or practical to solve a particular problem like you mention in C/C++ either. Like I've said before, in most cases, it would cost far more to pay someone to write code this efficient than it would cost buying the extra speed by throwing hardware at it. Programmers ARE expensive, hardware isn't. (Unless you're talking about a HPC cluster solution or such, in which case it might make sense, and even then things aren't automatically written in C/C++ either). You can code fast stuff that way, but it's expensive, takes more time, etc. And the problem is? ... At current prices, 10MB is about a whole dollar's worth of RAM to leave it running. And that's taking languages using VMs and such at a huge and unrealistic disadvantage. They load with them a basic set of functions that you're not using, which the other languages don't offer... That's like an apples to oranges comparison. Compare the average app written in both ways, and you'll see the difference between the two shrink (as the other languages load the required libs to get similar features). It's not really representative of anything. I disagree yet again. It totally depends of the actual JVM you're using and such. And in most cases, I dare say the C# version will be slightly lighter and faster. Apples to oranges. MFC sucks, really (quite dated too). What you're not mentionning, is that the app (if it's used to do anything useful - not hello world - a stupid comparison case), will likely load dozens of MBs of data, eat CPU cycles away and such about as bad as the previous 2 apps. As your apps needs features (which are already included in the other languages) you'll start loading more libs, and eating just as much ram too, maybe even more... Nobody's ever said that it was built on .Net technology, and there's no reason for that either. Right tools for the right job. However, you're going to need .Net for most of Vista's new shiny features. Good luck trying to get WPF widgets working in MFC and such. Tell that to millions of lines of mission critical server middleware in use everyday. It's a GODSEND. There's simply NO going back. Same goes for Java. If it wasn't for C#, I'd likely be coding Java. ROFL. Good one. Pintos are great cars too (ok, there's nothing wrong with javascript really, but PHP... eww, really, really eww - I can't even think of anything worse, seriously) And then you say .Net 3 looks good, which really is .Net 2, which you're bashing... Not making a whole lot of sense to me. The only [weak] point you had against .Net or Java you had was higher memory usage for trivial apps. I don't know, but I don't feel overly concerned about firefox eating away 600 to 700mb of RAM on this PC everyday (and VMWare, DBs and IDEs and other apps eating away hundreds more), what's the big deal with a simple app taking 5 megs more of RAM than it could have, especially if it took half as long to code, is more maintainable, cost less and all? That extra RAM usage could have worried me 5years+ ago, but nowadays 10mb is nothing. Pushed to the extreme, we might as well say "let's code it all in hand-optimized win32asm, it's the only efficient thing, everything else sucks". And if you look at some benches, you'll see that Java performance (excluding the jvm startup delay, JIT and such - and same goes for .Net) is quite on par with C++'s, the difference is quite small. And performance can vary greatly no matter what language you use (depending on the perf of libs used, how well architected/profiled/optimized it is, etc). Using C++/MFC for everything? Bad idea, but when the only tool you got is a hammer, eventually everything starts to look suspiciously like a nail...

I'd agree that JS is more of a PITA. But I'm not sure what you're using to test, there are various browsers and utilities/tools to debug JS, and they do say a LOT more than just "typo in function" or such. There's firefox extensions for that, MS has a free script debugger (also works in IE if you need to), visual studio can also do it - lots of apps really. Java of course has more powerful tools, it's not a just simple interpreted scripting language. Same holds true with almost anything else... (C, C++, C#, etc)

I can only strongly disagree on this one. PHP is perhaps the worst language I've ever seen (not mentionning things like GWBasic or the like). God awful is more like it. A few links that explain my thoughts: http://tnx.nl/php http://maurus.net/work/php-sucks/ http://www.bitstorm.org/edwin/en/php/ http://plasmasturm.org/log/393/ http://spyced.blogspot.com/2005/06/why-php-sucks.html http://minutillo.com/steve/weblog/2004/6/1...e-and-data-loss http://lumphammer.net/articles/phpannoyances/ http://keithdevens.com/weblog/archive/2003/Aug/13/HATE-PHP http://keithdevens.com/weblog/archive/2005/Nov/24/PHP-sucks http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2002/pape.../php/index.html http://rc3.org/2006/02/php_is_bad.php PHP seems good if that's all you've ever seen or such. Actually, to be honest, I would say it's better than classic ASP, but again, what isn't? It's not exactly something you brag about. The whole thing sucks thoroughly. It's not compiled, it's ridiculously inconsistent, unicode support is non-existant (something that's a basic necessity these days) - a step back from perl, laughable DB interfaces hacked together with a bunch of half-assed escaping functions when everything else has been using prepared statements/parameterized queries for forever, etc. Most of the PHP stuff out there is fugly. No content/code separation (and often no separation in any of the code), nothing like a proper tiered OO design, it's usually ripe with bugs and vulnerabilities like SQL injection, etc (much like a lot of the classic ASP stuff). And it's usually paired with one of the worst DBs out there (no need to mention the name) using proprietary SQL... One could go on about this for days. PHP is basically the only language I refuse to work in nowadays (there's enough work out there to be minimally "picky").

Quite honestly, I haven't had much time to play with all the new Vista stuff much. .Net 2.0 is still very recent (lots of people haven't made the switch yet or just have now), and what ".Net 3.0" brings isn't so much language changes, but is rather a set of additions on top of the existing v2.0: -WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation a.k.a. Avalon), for creating the new UIs using XAML and all; -WCF (Windows Communication Foundation a.k.a. Indigo), for communication (think web services, WSE, MSMQ messenging, remoting, etc). That's the part I'm really looking forward to! -WWF (Windows Workflow Foundation - not related to wrestling in any way...), a workflow engine (which is getting to be a necessity in many enterprise apps nowadays) -WCS (Windows CardSpace a.k.a. infocard), for identities - haven't looked at it much but it looks decent/useful. Yes, the 3.0 name is confusing, as the language is unchanged, and there is no new framework, just new stuff on top of the existing one... The bad part? We just went thru a .Net 2.0 change (new stuff to learn), a new version of SQL Server (2005) - more changes (not just minor things) and things to learn, new version of Visual Studio (2005 too) and a whole bunch of other new stuff. Now, we'll only have to learn ALL of Vista (and the new admin stuff/imaging & unattended install stuff and all), and all of these brand new technologies (WPF/WCF/WWF/WCS) that goes with it too... That's a LOT of new things to learn again! And that's not considering that we're (I am at least) learning a lot more things on the side, be it from things like TechEd, PDC and MIX, or from having to port some app to another database (DB2/oracle/postgresql/firebird/sqlite/etc) hence learn that one too, having to learn new frameworks and libs (VSTO, Enterprise Library, log4net, Atlas or whatever the case may be) or ORMs and codegens (LLBLGen, CodeSmith, NHibernate, MyGeneration/d00dads, etc) or having to get overly familiar with some new apps of diverse complexity (DotNetNuke, CommunityServer, BizTalk, CRM, ...), and that's not counting time to look at some of the new overhyped stuff (AJAX, RoR, etc), nor getting better at things like patterns, architecture and all... Or domain specific knowledge. I like learning new stuff, but at one point, it's just TOO [censored] MUCH. </rant>

Too much people are confusing java and javacript indeed, which are totally different even though they sound alike. Javascript is what your web browser executes (inside web pages). That's NOT java (so anyone who said they like it based on that...) Java is a programming language. It DOESN'T run in a web page / web browser or such. Ok, there *are* applets (like pjirc and what not), but most people don't want to run those (and are usually a bit freaked out because they're not signed as no one wants to pay for the certificates), also because it takes a while for the browser's java plugin to start, jvm and all (can be quite slow on older PCs), also because people have a problem executing/trusting anybody's code on a web page, people complaining they got to download a 20mb+ JVM to "view a web page"... (people tend to prefer dhtml/ajax/flash stuff to applets generally speaking) As for liking java or not... Yes and no? It has its uses, but it's not the one and only solution either. Besides, what does the question really ask? Do you (dis)like java... the language itself? the jvm's startup times? on the desktop or server side? the license? ... This question is far too broad to be answered by just yes or no. There's points to like (some mentionned later in post), and others that aren't so great (the XML overdose, some widget toolkits, jvm initial load times)... It can be cross-platform, but the whole "write once run everywhere" thing like some mentionned is patently false. It's more like "write once, debug everywhere". Some apps need a certain version of a jvm to work properly, in many cases, they almost have to write a version of the app for every jvm (j2me for every phone seems to differ), some PCs have what I'd call "defective" jvms (MS'), etc. It's a pretty good language with a decent set of features (garbage collection, generics, threads, etc etc), has good and stable/mature frameworks, it has some good dev tools (eclipse like mentionned before, but also intellij, and Sun's now-free products to name a few more), scales well, the JIT is always getting better (hotspot is quite good), there's a bunch of app servers (including free ones and big behemoths), it has good support, it has good performance (excluding initial jvm startup time), it's widely known, ... Native/unmanaged code is preferred by some, but it takes FAR more time to develop that way for many apps, resulting directly in longer dev times and unreasonable costs. I'm all for managed/garbage collected languages. And as for the RAM usage of these, RAM is dirt cheap nowadays. 1GB (2x512) of Crucial Rendition DDR2 is like 80$USD currently, while the average programmer earns like 40$/hr+ (add administrative overhead, benefits and all so almost double the rate). Anyhow. I'm definitely a C# person (.Net 2.0 rocks!)

I've bought some retractable USB cables (that come with all kinds of different USB plugs too - like the tiny ones for cameras and memory cards readers and such too). These to be exact. Kinda nice. They go on special for like 3$ CAD every now and then