Duron Mini-Review

I watched the debate last night, and while I enjoyed most of it, George W. Bush said one sentence which really pissed me off. Here it is, the emphasis is mine:

"Columbine spoke to a larger issue, and it's really a matter of culture. It's a culture that somewhere along the line we begun to disrespect life, where a child can walk in and have their heart turned dark as a result of being on the Internet, and walk in and decide to take somebody else's life."

So being on the Internet is going to turn someone's heart dark? "Slashdot" picked up on it too, and they're running a story claiming that murders committed by those under the age of 18 have decreased since the rise of the Internet. I'm not really concerned about the statistics, I just think it shows that George W. Bush doesn't really understand the Internet, if he thinks that exposure to it will somehow turn a child into a mass-murderer.

I compare the Internet to a library, full of information, but not some place you necessarily want to let a child roam unchecked. Just think about that for a minute, realize that there are thousands of books and magazines in a well-stocked library that aren't suitable for children to read, they're filled with materials deemed "obscene", hate, violence, and mis-information. Yet we don't see our politicians decrying libraries on TV...

That said, I thought the debate was reasonable, and almost too polite. The first 30 minutes yielded no significant differences between the candidates. I agreed with Bush on the hate-crimes laws, we don't need laws which prosecute someone differently for the crime of murder if the person they murdered was of a minority group. However, I thought that Bush looked like a ghoul when he sat there gloating (incorrectly) that the three men involved in the killing of Byrd in Texas would be put to death.

Update: Brent weighed in with some comments (Welcome!) and I posted a response.

I've had my AMD Duron 600 system for a couple of weeks now, and I've played with it quite a bit. I like it, and it's a fast CPU for the price. Last night, I finally got around to trying to overclock it as fast as I could. I got it to boot and run at 678 mhz, but it locked up after it got into Windows. I could probably run it higher if I used a better fan and heat sink, but I'm not going to that much effort. I can stably run it at 660 mhz for days, and a 10% speed boost is nothing to sneeze at, especially from a CPU that sells for $64 over at JNCS. I did have some strange problems trying to play Unreal Tournament the other night. If I tried to use the onboard sound, the game locked up. If I used an Aureal Vortex2, the game played, but the sound didn't work. I finally wound up putting my Sound Blaster Live! in the machine, which worked fine, and I just put my Vortex2 back in the Dell. Other than that, which may be due to shoddy Aureal Win2000 drivers, I've had no problems. In fact, the Gigabyte Motherboard I used was extremely easy to install, despite the fact that it came with the incorrect manual. Thank god I could download the .pdf version from the web...