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Yes to both, BW: you need Silver and Bronze to sit for Gold, and degrees C.

"That uninspired dirge". Close enough for me. James, your renewed citizenship papers are in the mail. All your foreign jaunts have not hurt you in the least, I see. Mercutio: I hereby dub you a Fair-Dinkum Honourary Australian, qualified to mock, joke, laugh, take the piss, and bludge along...

Damn it, Mercutio! You were not supposed to help! Of course it's Waltzing Matilda. Always was, always will be, and they can play that appalling low-brow monument to bad taste and cultural cringe othewise known as "Advance Australia Fair" at as many Olympiads as they like, and it won't change...

Excellent post, Dozer. Change the emphasis here and there (merely matters of degree, not of substance) and add a dash of the obligitory colourful language, and I could have written it myself. In particular, I agree with your criteria for substantive action. James: I am delighted to see that you...

No, you can get the Bronze and the Silver on-line. The Bronze is something everyone here would pass without having to learn anything at all. (It proves you can spell "AMD" and that you know an Athlon is not a Pentium.) The Silver is on-line too and it took me maybe twenty minutes to look up...

Cool! Thanks Bill. 56 Victoria Street Ballarat, 3350

Nothing fancy, Buck. Just the AMD Gold Certification. I have some paper that proves I know how to unwrap an AMD retail-packaged CPU without blunting the chainsaw now.

The thin metal thingo was something Cyrix did very early on in the life of their 6x86 when it was still subject to heat problems. You got the metal thingo in its little thermal-grease-filled plastic bag (you took it out of the bag first, of course), and a really loud little high-RPM fan. The...

AMD do not recommend or support using thermal grease. They say that grease is good for short-term testing usage, but that it dries out and looses its conductive properties over time, so that for production purposes, you should always use phase-change pads or thermal tape.(Kristi and I did our...

Where do I get Lycoris from, Liam? I can't seem to find it listed at everythinglinux.com.au. (Don't want to download, prefer to pay a few dollars and buy it on CD.)

Keyboard design in general is hopeless. I better start a new thread for this one ....

We have had the Advertising Keys. Er ... sorry, the "Windows Keys". And we have had the Gimmick Keyboard ... er sorry, the "Internet Keyboard". But what, actually, has been done to improve keyboad layouts in the last 20 years? Precisely nothing. Coug still can't get a simple, easy to use...

(Just for those who don't follow these things closely, I better point out that The Giver, who claims to be offended by the mildest of terms used to describe the current US President (who just happens to be a Republican) has himself repeatedly used a made-up name for the immediate past...

First you affect an absurd hypersensitivity, and then you attempt to claim that your alleged problem is actually discourtesy on the part of others. No. That one won't wash, Bubba.

Now hang on a minute here. On the one hand, we read: "Ultimately, there is no difference, and indeed there can be no difference between the people of the United States and the government of the United States", and one the other hand we hear that "we have no quarrel with the Iraqi people". This...

Discourteous? Get real. He's an elected public servant, for the love of Mike, not a Holy Icon.

Why does this not surprise me?

I think that the Statsman site has a section on that somewhere.

Oh, don't worry Cliptin: we Australians make it a point of honour never to take anyone's country seriously, least of all our own. That sounds like a joke. Actually, though I write it with a smile on my face, it's not. It's one of those mythical "national character" things that really do have...

Well, five or six years ago, Sampo were a no-name try hard with questionable quality. This, of course, tells us nothing - that's a long time in this industry. Today, who knows? There is supposed to be a big LCD shake-out going on, with prices dropping hard, so it could be a good one. On the...

Number 6 for me. :)

As an experiment, slip a decent PSU into one or two of those Athlon 700s. Athlon boards can be incredibly fussy about power supplies. Two chances out of three the problems are the main boards, but one chance in three that the right PSU will magic all the instability away. If they happen to be...

The Giver: Tea was guilty of relying too much on her memory, I think. She should have re-read the piece before posting about it. I remember reading it the first time and thinking "oh, this is over the top". When I got to the bottom, I returned to the top of the page to start picking out the...

I respect that point of view, Cliptin. (Your "I refer to my colleages as Sir" post.) In formal interactions, I do the same. In informal discussion though, I would find that a fairly severe impediment to good, clear, lively and entertaining expression. On matters of great sensitivity, of course...

Hmm.. I guess that's what we were expecting: a "next to final" experiment, if you like. Another look at Linux to see where it's up to, another "not quite yet" decision. Mostly, the idea just to keep a finger on the pulse. When the time comes, desktop 'nix is going to just explode onto the...

More seriously, Mercutio, that sounds to me like you are heading in a useful direction. Let me ask you this: what there the best ten or fifteen systems you have at present. I know you have an assortment of different stuff, if you were to go through them and pick the eyes out of the existing...

Ahhh .... An Intel CPU. So that's how you get them into the sockets!

I'd consider Intel boards for our own entry-level systems, Bozo, except for one thing: I haven't figured out how to make the CPUs fit into those weirdo sockets.

In my post about eight posts back, Jake. The one where I was arguing with Cliptin about not being allowed to say "shrub". Tea was looking over my shoulder (as she so often does) and scribbled it down for me. Reading it over, it doesn't seem so special, but I think it's the first one Tea has...

Oh, you're back, are you, Tea? I wasn't sulking. I was just having a rest. Oh? And you slept right through dinner time? OK. I was sulking. It's OK, Tea. I liked it. No-one else did. That's not true, Tea. Look at these lovely bananas The Giver gave you. Hmmm .. They are nice bananas. He...

Oh, quite so. He is indeed free to object to my posts (so long as he does so in a civilised way, of course, which being Cliptin, he always does), just as I am free to object to his ojection, and you yourself are free to object to my objection to Cliptin's objection! That's what free speech is...

Coug, for once in your life, listen up: I don't constantly bag ECS /PC Chips products. I have given credit where it is due, here, on my own website, and at Storage Review. I grant you, credit to those dishonest scoundrels isn't due very often , but they do sometimes make things that work, and...

What's with this ridiculous respect business? I thought America was the Home of the Free? Good Lord, sometimes I call the Queen "the Queen", sometimes I call her "Liz". If it weren't for the fact that she happens to be an upright, honest and throughly decent old stick, I'd call her "the old...

Thankyou James. I find your father's view very persuasive. Further, it goes some way toward providing me with a convincing explanation of what had seemed very difficult to explain before. (What exactly is is that Bush is trying to achieve.) I most certainly hope he is right.

It's all very well for Tea to fiddle about telling you things that you already know, but what you really need to think about is the things that you don't know. Viz: What is the basis on which your budget was set? Who makes the budgetary decisions? Are they reasonably well aware of the costs...

What's an "über"? That's ones I'm using. Well, actually I use about five. Tea uses the rest for her valiant-but-doomed-to-failure attempt to stay in front of Jake the Dog in the Folding Stakes. Oh, and occassionally is gracious enough to allow me to sell one every now and then to pay for the...

Ask and ye shall receive, Doug. How about this? From The Inquirer today: [The writer] interviews Mitch Kapor. You know... the guy who built Lotus and popularized spreadsheets with Lotus 1-2-3 back when it ran on MS-DOS... and practically invented groupware with a little product called Notes...

About 15 at the moment.

Yes Tim. I'm afraid it (a) won't be suitable for publication in a family context, and (b) isn't going anywhere fast at present. I haven't worked on it for a year or so, though I'll go back to it eventually, no doubt. On the other hand, I just wrote a novel-length thought-post in the Iraq...

Yes please , James. Your father is always worth reading, or at least it seems so to me after looking at that last article of his you posted. I'm damned if I know what the right answer is on this one. Bush, I'm quite sure, is gunning for Iraq simply because to do otherwise would draw attention...

It's well known that I am anything but a big Intel fan, Blakewry, but this job sounds to me like one that is crying out for a Celeron in the 800 to 1400MHz class. Celerons have very low heat generation and some of them have excellent performance. The breakdown is like this: 266 and 300...

Crime and Punishment is wonderful. Not in the slightest bleak - the Russians have a genius for producing works that, from outside the cover, threaten you with terminal depression and terrible ordeals, and yet wind up being just plain fun to read: moving, entertaining, gripping, and even very...

Quite so, Pradeep. However, in Clancy's setting, it is the Pacific Fleet carriers and only the carriers which are disabled: their escorting destroyers and frigates are untouched. So, once the Atlantic and/or Mediteranian fleet carriers reach Pearl, it's business as usual. The Pacific Fleet has...

I like Dickens, but I often find myself wishing for an editor. The main body of his novels is one thing, but those bizarre outbursts of Victorian sensibility (some of Nancy's scenes in Oliver Twist, for example) are quite horrible. I've never read Hugo. I'm sure that I should, though I barely...

Clancy: yes, a wonderful writer, particularly when he sticks to what he knows well (security matters) and avoids the things where he is, at best, semi-bright (economics and government). Though even where he's bad, he's pretty good. And, come to think of it, vastly better at public policy matters...

Only if you're stupid.

I once read Lord of the Rings aloud to my girlfriend. Most nights we would go to bed and, instead of reading our seperate books, I'd read a few chapters of Tolkien to her. First The Hobbit, and then Lord of the Rings. I have no idea why we did all that reading aloud. After LOTR, in a quick...

Mark's collection is incredidle! I have more books than anyone I know (bar my parents), and yet only about one-third as many as Mark has!

I have two or three excellent more general works, Tim. Alas, I also have another half-dozen general ones that are not as good - and I can't rememember which is which! :(

At present I am reading on the Gulf War. Nothing too detailed this time, just the story as told by several of the prominent participants. I started with Fred Franks' Into the Storm, as ghostwritten by Tom Clancy. This rambles and wanders, spends far too much time repeating the obvious, and might...