RichWargo

I find the acopolyptic movies to be in general humerous. Most of the acting is overblown, the special effects overdone. Obviously the intent is to scare us all into behaving better, with the possible exception of ID4, which definitely takes the position of "see the alien, fear the alien, kill the alien", which is how humans acted towards each other in ages past. I always go back to the first real acopolyptic movie "Dr. Strangelove, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb". Produced by the great Stanley Kubrick in the early 1960's, it was a deliberately humorous (black humor, but still humorous), look at a possible Doomsday scenario. Peter Sellers plays like five or six different parts. Definitely a must see, just to have a good laugh over the inanity of it all. I won't give it all away, but the scene near the end with Slim Pickens is just a hoot. Literally. Believe it or not, when S.K. was making the film, the inside scenes of the B-52s that he developed were so much like the real thing, the government had a serious talk with him as to how he got the highly classified information. Turns out he did it all with help from some people who were equally in the dark as to the actual layout, but were airplane engineers and used common sense.

Well, I just checked the WU catalog (august 20, 2004) and there are no longer ANY entries for W2K SP5, so I guess MS pulled it, whatever it was....

This looks like a very promising site for sharing information on Microsoft's software products. I am an experienced (read: old) control systems engineer in the Albany NY area. Most of my professional experience is with industrialized computer systems NOT running any of Microsoft's fine (cough-cough) OSes. But I do enough integration work to give me at least a marginal experience in developing applications for the Windows-world, mostly using VB (yeah, I know, but I'm an engineer, not a computer science wonk). At home I have four operating systems: Shuttle SN45G with AMD XP2500+, 1GB memory, 160GB disk, ATI AIW9800Pro, DVD-ROM/CD-RW, yadda, yadda.... My daughter uses this one for multimedia (i.e., watching TV and DVDs), and for her homework. I put the system together myself out of components ordered from Newegg. My son has another custom-built system, an MSI KT3Ultra-ARU microATX mobo, AMD XP1900+ CPU, 256MB memory, two 160GB disk drives, DVD-ROM/CD-RW, Nvidia Ti4400-based Gainward vid card. He's a gamer, mostly. I use an old Celeron 400-based eMachines box, 384MB memory, nothing special, just a basic box for my business needs. I also have an old Celeron 466-based eMachines box, currently running SoL (Server Optimized Linux), that I am using to get a handle on the Penguin.