Frankly, I don't see Debian as being only for 'advanced' users now. My qualifications for saying this? I'm a newly-minted Debian (linux overall) user who tried Mandrake 8 and RedHat 7.3 a few weeks ago, and gave up in utter disgust at how horribly broken their 'graphical config' tools are. (RedHat is admittedly much better than Mandrake in this regard, which sent my X server into impossible video modes in an infinite loop after I changed a few unrelated settings).
Wanting to try out *NIX in general, I then gave the BSDs a try. FreeBSD's hardware detect was so horrible it wouldn't even boot, and NetBSD seemed to not like the way DHCP was configured, or somesuch. OpenBSD installed well and securely, but X configuration was something out of a horror novel.
I'll admit that I'm slightly different from the average windows user, having paid my dues in the good (bad?) old days of DOS 5.0/WindowsFW 3.11, but the text-only boot-floppies install system aside (getting replaced anyways for sarge's release, as I understand it), Debian is just dead-simple to use. Sure, install asks questions that require thought, and I'd like to see more "if you don't know wtf we are saying, answer no" prompts, but in general, it is well thought-out.
I need not sing praises for apt (its benefits are well-known now), except to say that it is truly bulletproof, accounting not only for dependencies, conflicts, etc., but actually dealing with broken-off downloads on a dialup by resuming them -- a godsemnd when trying to update big debian-security packages over a modem.
Lastly: no, it's generally not the newest and shineyest, but everything is just _so_ well tested. While the bug list(s) may *look* impressively long, Woody at least is just as stable in the user-space as Win2k + properly configured apps.
Both Linux and Win2k have fairly stable kernels that don't crash a whole lot now, but in my past (brief) dalliances with SuSE 6.4, at that time, and with that distro, the apps were just bugggy and crashy. Debian's outstanding package maintainers take care of that by making the userspace programs as much of a technical tour-de-force as the kernel-space stuff, thus creating a truly superior experience for a novice user like me.
By creating a truly well-integrated, maintained, and bug-free distro, IMHO Debian contributes significantly to free/open software's cause.
The article says that the explosion might be useful for analysing chemicals in-field, which I can see, even if explosions are fairly uncontrolled, but what's this with 'as a power source?'
I agree that things like modern engines work by having mini explosions that push pistons up/down etc., but *in general* explosions are not a very efficient way to power things. Witness the fact that the human body does not burn/explode glucose, but rather goes through aerobic respiration to oxidize it.
So, um, how exactly does this stuff get used in controlled explosions as a continuous power source?
I've been wondering about that. On the other hand, wasn't the theory always that the hardware companies were being paid enough money by the media companies that they did what said media giants wanted anyway?
Witness the DVD region coding system (yes, I know region-free players are available at a premium). Is it a possiblity that DVD hardware sales would have been better if there was no region coding system in place and people could buy the region 6 chinese DVDs at cheaper cost, for example? One would assume that if software costs plummeted, hardware sales would increase as well?
Your complaint about earbuds is fairly easily resolved. What you want, are a better set of earbuds -- say, from a specialty company like Etymotics. These things come in a regular, and high-sensitivity version, and I'm thinking that the headphone out will drive it just fine.
Your other option is to go (as you did) with headphones. But the imedance of the headphones may or may not be too low for the device to drive if you're using *good* headphones (Grado RS-1, Sennheiser HD-600). In those cases, you'd have to lug around a portable HeadRoom amp to get the best result.
Conclusion: Etymotics rule for most portable applications.
True, the encrypted digital stream must be decrypted first. What makes you think that this functionality cannot be integrated onto the same chip that does the normal digital-to-analog conversion?
I.e. what about a D/A chip with decryption built in? Technological solutions will not easily help you in this case.
Inaccurate analogy, considering that Windows users are objectively speaking, generally less technologially proficient, whereas the more well-off audiophiles will indeed have both a $70,000 Rockport Sirius III LP player, and a $7,500 Marantz SA-1 SACD player.
Analog is not inherently lower in quality. You must sample at twice the rate in order to preserve all the information in digital information. Go below, and you hit analog.
Digital -> analog -> digital, as your dad was saying, will always be lower in quality due to the D/A and A/D conversion. Conversions are not perfect, eh?
By the way, I would prefer to have a good vinyl system over a good CD system any day. (Yes, you guessed it, I am one of them crazy audiophiles indeed.)
Granted, no good Graphic Calculator software exists for PCs besides the XP powertoy which won't run on this laptop.
Huh? I have no clue what you're talking about. I haven't looked at the free software side (although I do know that there are some there too), but in commerical software, we have: Mathematica, Derive, Maple, MatLab (and that's just general stuff), as well as Stata, and other more specialized packages.
You're not seriously going to claim that you couldn't find a good math package for your laptop, are you?
P.S. if really desperate, go find a TI-92 ROM and run it off a PC emulator -- they work perfectly.
I'm not sure entirely what you mean. I don't trust private ISPs any more than I trust public, municipal ones. After all, if the federal government (FBI, CIA, NSA, etc.) decide that they want 'electronic wiretaps' or other incarnations of Carnivore/Omnivore installed, I think that a private company may well bend over just as quickly as any public company.
There might still be quests to block this at the city level, however? Moreoever, even if the city is providing the hardware, there still must be a central body to provide the connectivity and software, no?
As a Chinese, I feel obligated to correct some of your statements.
China, after all, is a country that murdered enough people in the 20th Century to make Hitler look like an amateur.
I am uncertain what you are referring to, although it could have been the great famines at the time of Mao. It is true that a large number of people died, enough to make Hitler look like a little boy, but to be perfectly fair, from what my (anti-communist) parents who were there during that period) tell me, the famines resulted from a gross mismanagement in funds and use of the country's economic power, rather than an institutionalized system of mass concentration and killing of political dissidents, as was what occured in the U.S.S.R. with Stalin in the Gulags.
It's a country that forces women to have abortions, that jails religious leaders and condems them to death, that wants to hide it's citizens from the Internet...
China does not *force* women to have abortions. Instead, it gives significant *economic* incentives to have one child only. For example, there is preferential schooling of the first child, tax breaks and other forms of assistance, and of course, social approval, to name a few things.
The fact that male children are culturally preferred so much that females are occasionally murdered if they are born is a vestige of an older cultural system, and manifests itself in the grossly unbalanced male:female ratio. However, like I said, the system is vestigial, and is undergoing self-correction. (e.g. attitudes about grandchildren, as begotten through a strictly-male direct descent line, are no longer as exclusive today as they used to be)
Your statement about religious leaders is dubious. Moreover, realize that sometimes, prosecution is a good thing. *Gasp*. What do you make of evil organizations like $cientology that masquerade as religion to avoid prosecution? In Germany, AFAIK, they have been denied as a religion and actively prosecuted, to excellent effect. Do you know enough about the so-called "religious" leaders and their religions to be certain they are not a sham? (Yes, I'm implying certain things...)
Not only that, but just last year, China forced down a US plane over international waters, KIDNAPPED airmen, and tried to ransom them.
That statment is so utterly biased, and so obviously derived from U.S. only sources of news and information, that I'll not even deign to comment upon it.
This is especially relevant with the whole channel-bonding thing that's been developed lately. If you use numerous 100-megabit ethernet cards and bond them logically via software into giga-bit class cards via a few switches and routers along the way, you end up with giga-bit class performance for far lower cost.
How is this sad? They are doing what we all should be doing: if the interface sucks ass, or if the company is being careless with your user information, then boycott them.
Your acquaintences are doing the noble thing, and boycotting those establishments with less than savory business habits. And you object to their behavior and call it 'sad' because??
md5 is just one of many one-way hash algorithms out there. If the companies distributing the original packages are *truly* paranoid, they should be providing the resulting checksums using *several* hashing algorithms.
Faking something that gives the same md5 and crc32 alone, is probably nearly impossible, which would be a good thing.
I would maintain that "getting the latest file" would be a user's habit: a matter of checking the official company webpage (say, Ximian), and seeing what the current filename for a package is, as well as the checksum lists. Heck, if they're going to be downloading new checksums from the official company webpage anyhow, they should also be checking to see they have the newest version.
I suppose that problems with distribution of faulty packages does continue to exist. But I don't know how major those are -- presumably, faulty stuff also gets mirrored in today's more conventional distribution schemes until their spread is stopped by word-of-mouth?
Hats off to ya.:) I originally thought that perhaps integrity of binaries or source (who reads all their source? Really?) might be compromised in a P2P system, until I realized that companies could simply publish md5 checksums for their files on a central webpage.
That said, I have to say that your idea not only sounds implementable, but absolutely wonderful! And I don't think it would require much infrastructure change, either, considering we have P2P programs and networks galore. More a matter of what action the user chooses when they want to check for updates (use Red Carpet vs. hop on a Gnutella client...)
The Silmarillion (nor Marillion - they're bloody rubbish) is well worth a read (although it takes some concentration). Don't judge Tolkien just by LOTR any more than you would judge him just by The Hobbit.
Indeed. Despite the fact that a siginficant portion of the population does not appreciate the Silmarillion to nearly as great an extent as they do LOTR, it is IMO by far Tolkien's greatest work. (Criticisms that Christopher Tolkien had to edit and piece it together be damned...)
Deep literary analysis aside, The Hobbit was a children's tale. Perhaps one with an interesting moral ending, qualifying it as an extended fable, perhaps not, but still a children's tale.
LOTR is, of course, very enjoyable. I must confess that I had as great of a blast reading it as did any other fan of Tolkien. The man's ability to weave together so many different threads of the story into a cohesive whole, is possibly what makes the tale so marvelous. Together with the extensive information he provided about the background environment into which he placed his characters, the story became very, very real indeed.
However, what really brought everything into sharp focus, was The Silmarillion. Despite (or perhaps because) Tolkien did not have to describe all events in excruciating detail, he was freed to give the reader an expansive view of the entire history of Middle Earth.
I mean, sheesh, if I thought Tolkien's ability to hold multiple threads of plot together in LOTR was impressive, then The Silmarillion was absolutely mind-blowing. The expansiveness of the history he created, both in time (going back to the creation of the world to the present) and in space (Valinor to Middle Earth to the residence of Iluvatar) is not only an excellent complement to LOTR to give said epic more realism, but stands on its own as a fascinating read of perhaps a mythological beginning for Europe (as he intended, I believe?)
Head over to AVSForum for a look at their HTPC (Home Theater PC) section, they already have some interesting sources.
These guys are, of couse, looking to build a pure home-theatre PC system (turns out software line-doubling is far cheaper than hardware line-doublers for their DVD players), but the problem with housing their PCs is the same.
They've been looking into various cases and solutions that are worthy of sitting on their AV rack for a long time, and have come up with some good looking cases, as well as leads on where to source them.
For clarification, I've attached this flowchart [160.79.249.139] which demonstrates the relationship between the corporations of America (Adobe, Sony, the RIAA, the WTO, etc.) and the people of America. The people are represented at the bottom; the Corporations at the top.
Hmm, try something like this instead, maybe? (Warning, contains icky Flash!)
Agree completely. It's also more than just mitochondrial DNA -- there are other specific organelles as well as cyclin/cdk complexes that may well be specific to the Tasmanian Tiger.
I'm just guessing here, but although cyclin/cdks are evolutionarily conserved from yeast to human, I would believe that there is also still more than enough specificity to make actual regeneration of anything resembling a Tasmanian Tiger quite difficult.
Another issue would be 'maternal genes,' which are genes where the genotype of the gene is held in the mother, but expressed as proteins deposited in her offspring. Given that there would not be the exact 'maternal genes' available for a Tasmanian Tiger, this might also prove to be a problem, I would think.
I bought one of these foldable keyboards from Plycon also for space saving issues, but it is absolutely terrible.
There's a sleep button on it that you accidentally hit, the insert/delete/home/end/pgup/pgdn keys are shifted one row lower than normal, as are the printscreen/break keys, such that you keep fumbling.
The space bar is broken up into multiple chunks for foldability, as is the left shift.
Worst part: feels like typing on very soft rubber. No tactile feedback whatsoever, and you have to hit the keys with serious power to get them to register (and sometimes not even then!)
The IBM PCJr gum key keyboards are lightyears ahead of these foldables in terms of real-world usability.
M-Audio and MidiMan provide professional-caliber cards with pro-level features, and support Linux as one of their OSes, as well as Mac/Windows, of course.
Their driver support for Windows is okay, but I believe their Linux support may well be binary only. That said, their drivers generally don't suck.
I'm not affiliated with them -- just a happy home user who enjoys using their pro-level cards for cleaner sound output under Windoze.
I used to be turned off by the fact that geeks could get girls only based on "money," but then I realized this:
would it really be so much better to get girls because you benched 250 lbs and can act like a total asshole? When it comes down to it, girls being attracted to you for your money is pretty close to girls being attracted to you for your talent, which is just fine with me.
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Frankly, I don't see Debian as being only for 'advanced' users now. My qualifications for saying this? I'm a newly-minted Debian (linux overall) user who tried Mandrake 8 and RedHat 7.3 a few weeks ago, and gave up in utter disgust at how horribly broken their 'graphical config' tools are. (RedHat is admittedly much better than Mandrake in this regard, which sent my X server into impossible video modes in an infinite loop after I changed a few unrelated settings).
Wanting to try out *NIX in general, I then gave the BSDs a try. FreeBSD's hardware detect was so horrible it wouldn't even boot, and NetBSD seemed to not like the way DHCP was configured, or somesuch. OpenBSD installed well and securely, but X configuration was something out of a horror novel.
I'll admit that I'm slightly different from the average windows user, having paid my dues in the good (bad?) old days of DOS 5.0/WindowsFW 3.11, but the text-only boot-floppies install system aside (getting replaced anyways for sarge's release, as I understand it), Debian is just dead-simple to use. Sure, install asks questions that require thought, and I'd like to see more "if you don't know wtf we are saying, answer no" prompts, but in general, it is well thought-out.
I need not sing praises for apt (its benefits are well-known now), except to say that it is truly bulletproof, accounting not only for dependencies, conflicts, etc., but actually dealing with broken-off downloads on a dialup by resuming them -- a godsemnd when trying to update big debian-security packages over a modem.
Lastly: no, it's generally not the newest and shineyest, but everything is just _so_ well tested. While the bug list(s) may *look* impressively long, Woody at least is just as stable in the user-space as Win2k + properly configured apps.
Both Linux and Win2k have fairly stable kernels that don't crash a whole lot now, but in my past (brief) dalliances with SuSE 6.4, at that time, and with that distro, the apps were just bugggy and crashy. Debian's outstanding package maintainers take care of that by making the userspace programs as much of a technical tour-de-force as the kernel-space stuff, thus creating a truly superior experience for a novice user like me.
By creating a truly well-integrated, maintained, and bug-free distro, IMHO Debian contributes significantly to free/open software's cause.
Is there an issue of copy protection being broken? I believe that said issue was the only reason Sony gets pissed at PSX emulators on other platforms.
(well, that and I guess making games look graphically subpar most of the time, heh.)
The article says that the explosion might be useful for analysing chemicals in-field, which I can see, even if explosions are fairly uncontrolled, but what's this with 'as a power source?'
I agree that things like modern engines work by having mini explosions that push pistons up/down etc., but *in general* explosions are not a very efficient way to power things. Witness the fact that the human body does not burn/explode glucose, but rather goes through aerobic respiration to oxidize it.
So, um, how exactly does this stuff get used in controlled explosions as a continuous power source?
I've been wondering about that. On the other hand, wasn't the theory always that the hardware companies were being paid enough money by the media companies that they did what said media giants wanted anyway?
Witness the DVD region coding system (yes, I know region-free players are available at a premium). Is it a possiblity that DVD hardware sales would have been better if there was no region coding system in place and people could buy the region 6 chinese DVDs at cheaper cost, for example? One would assume that if software costs plummeted, hardware sales would increase as well?
Your complaint about earbuds is fairly easily resolved. What you want, are a better set of earbuds -- say, from a specialty company like Etymotics. These things come in a regular, and high-sensitivity version, and I'm thinking that the headphone out will drive it just fine.
Your other option is to go (as you did) with headphones. But the imedance of the headphones may or may not be too low for the device to drive if you're using *good* headphones (Grado RS-1, Sennheiser HD-600). In those cases, you'd have to lug around a portable HeadRoom amp to get the best result.
Conclusion: Etymotics rule for most portable applications.
Phillips is doing practically everything I would have wanted a hardware manufacturer (and holder of the CD Rom license) to do!
So, mmm, what's the giant conspiracy? Why is this happening?
True, the encrypted digital stream must be decrypted first. What makes you think that this functionality cannot be integrated onto the same chip that does the normal digital-to-analog conversion?
I.e. what about a D/A chip with decryption built in? Technological solutions will not easily help you in this case.
Inaccurate analogy, considering that Windows users are objectively speaking, generally less technologially proficient, whereas the more well-off audiophiles will indeed have both a $70,000 Rockport Sirius III LP player, and a $7,500 Marantz SA-1 SACD player.
Analog is not inherently lower in quality. You must sample at twice the rate in order to preserve all the information in digital information. Go below, and you hit analog.
Digital -> analog -> digital, as your dad was saying, will always be lower in quality due to the D/A and A/D conversion. Conversions are not perfect, eh?
By the way, I would prefer to have a good vinyl system over a good CD system any day. (Yes, you guessed it, I am one of them crazy audiophiles indeed.)
Granted, no good Graphic Calculator software exists for PCs besides the XP powertoy which won't run on this laptop.
Huh? I have no clue what you're talking about. I haven't looked at the free software side (although I do know that there are some there too), but in commerical software, we have: Mathematica, Derive, Maple, MatLab (and that's just general stuff), as well as Stata, and other more specialized packages.
You're not seriously going to claim that you couldn't find a good math package for your laptop, are you?
P.S. if really desperate, go find a TI-92 ROM and run it off a PC emulator -- they work perfectly.
I'm not sure entirely what you mean. I don't trust private ISPs any more than I trust public, municipal ones. After all, if the federal government (FBI, CIA, NSA, etc.) decide that they want 'electronic wiretaps' or other incarnations of Carnivore/Omnivore installed, I think that a private company may well bend over just as quickly as any public company.
Well, one would hope that the system is at least mildly upgradable, so that physical and infrastructure upgrades are not pure hell?
There might still be quests to block this at the city level, however? Moreoever, even if the city is providing the hardware, there still must be a central body to provide the connectivity and software, no?
from The Register as well about this.
As a Chinese, I feel obligated to correct some of your statements.
China, after all, is a country that murdered enough people in the 20th Century to make Hitler look like an amateur.
I am uncertain what you are referring to, although it could have been the great famines at the time of Mao. It is true that a large number of people died, enough to make Hitler look like a little boy, but to be perfectly fair, from what my (anti-communist) parents who were there during that period) tell me, the famines resulted from a gross mismanagement in funds and use of the country's economic power, rather than an institutionalized system of mass concentration and killing of political dissidents, as was what occured in the U.S.S.R. with Stalin in the Gulags.
It's a country that forces women to have abortions, that jails religious leaders and condems them to death, that wants to hide it's citizens from the Internet...
China does not *force* women to have abortions. Instead, it gives significant *economic* incentives to have one child only. For example, there is preferential schooling of the first child, tax breaks and other forms of assistance, and of course, social approval, to name a few things.
The fact that male children are culturally preferred so much that females are occasionally murdered if they are born is a vestige of an older cultural system, and manifests itself in the grossly unbalanced male:female ratio. However, like I said, the system is vestigial, and is undergoing self-correction. (e.g. attitudes about grandchildren, as begotten through a strictly-male direct descent line, are no longer as exclusive today as they used to be)
Your statement about religious leaders is dubious. Moreover, realize that sometimes, prosecution is a good thing. *Gasp*. What do you make of evil organizations like $cientology that masquerade as religion to avoid prosecution? In Germany, AFAIK, they have been denied as a religion and actively prosecuted, to excellent effect. Do you know enough about the so-called "religious" leaders and their religions to be certain they are not a sham? (Yes, I'm implying certain things...)
Not only that, but just last year, China forced down a US plane over international waters, KIDNAPPED airmen, and tried to ransom them.
That statment is so utterly biased, and so obviously derived from U.S. only sources of news and information, that I'll not even deign to comment upon it.
This is especially relevant with the whole channel-bonding thing that's been developed lately. If you use numerous 100-megabit ethernet cards and bond them logically via software into giga-bit class cards via a few switches and routers along the way, you end up with giga-bit class performance for far lower cost.
How is this sad? They are doing what we all should be doing: if the interface sucks ass, or if the company is being careless with your user information, then boycott them.
Your acquaintences are doing the noble thing, and boycotting those establishments with less than savory business habits. And you object to their behavior and call it 'sad' because??
md5 is just one of many one-way hash algorithms out there. If the companies distributing the original packages are *truly* paranoid, they should be providing the resulting checksums using *several* hashing algorithms.
Faking something that gives the same md5 and crc32 alone, is probably nearly impossible, which would be a good thing.
I would maintain that "getting the latest file" would be a user's habit: a matter of checking the official company webpage (say, Ximian), and seeing what the current filename for a package is, as well as the checksum lists. Heck, if they're going to be downloading new checksums from the official company webpage anyhow, they should also be checking to see they have the newest version.
I suppose that problems with distribution of faulty packages does continue to exist. But I don't know how major those are -- presumably, faulty stuff also gets mirrored in today's more conventional distribution schemes until their spread is stopped by word-of-mouth?
Hats off to ya. :) I originally thought that perhaps integrity of binaries or source (who reads all their source? Really?) might be compromised in a P2P system, until I realized that companies could simply publish md5 checksums for their files on a central webpage.
That said, I have to say that your idea not only sounds implementable, but absolutely wonderful! And I don't think it would require much infrastructure change, either, considering we have P2P programs and networks galore. More a matter of what action the user chooses when they want to check for updates (use Red Carpet vs. hop on a Gnutella client...)
The Silmarillion (nor Marillion - they're bloody rubbish) is well worth a read (although it takes some concentration). Don't judge Tolkien just by LOTR any more than you would judge him just by The Hobbit.
Indeed. Despite the fact that a siginficant portion of the population does not appreciate the Silmarillion to nearly as great an extent as they do LOTR, it is IMO by far Tolkien's greatest work. (Criticisms that Christopher Tolkien had to edit and piece it together be damned...)
Deep literary analysis aside, The Hobbit was a children's tale. Perhaps one with an interesting moral ending, qualifying it as an extended fable, perhaps not, but still a children's tale.
LOTR is, of course, very enjoyable. I must confess that I had as great of a blast reading it as did any other fan of Tolkien. The man's ability to weave together so many different threads of the story into a cohesive whole, is possibly what makes the tale so marvelous. Together with the extensive information he provided about the background environment into which he placed his characters, the story became very, very real indeed.
However, what really brought everything into sharp focus, was The Silmarillion. Despite (or perhaps because) Tolkien did not have to describe all events in excruciating detail, he was freed to give the reader an expansive view of the entire history of Middle Earth.
I mean, sheesh, if I thought Tolkien's ability to hold multiple threads of plot together in LOTR was impressive, then The Silmarillion was absolutely mind-blowing. The expansiveness of the history he created, both in time (going back to the creation of the world to the present) and in space (Valinor to Middle Earth to the residence of Iluvatar) is not only an excellent complement to LOTR to give said epic more realism, but stands on its own as a fascinating read of perhaps a mythological beginning for Europe (as he intended, I believe?)
Head over to AVSForum for a look at their HTPC (Home Theater PC) section, they already have some interesting sources.
These guys are, of couse, looking to build a pure home-theatre PC system (turns out software line-doubling is far cheaper than hardware line-doublers for their DVD players), but the problem with housing their PCs is the same. They've been looking into various cases and solutions that are worthy of sitting on their AV rack for a long time, and have come up with some good looking cases, as well as leads on where to source them.
For clarification, I've attached this flowchart [160.79.249.139] which demonstrates the relationship between the corporations of America (Adobe, Sony, the RIAA, the WTO, etc.) and the people of America. The people are represented at the bottom; the Corporations at the top.
Hmm, try something like this instead, maybe? (Warning, contains icky Flash!)
Agree completely. It's also more than just mitochondrial DNA -- there are other specific organelles as well as cyclin/cdk complexes that may well be specific to the Tasmanian Tiger.
I'm just guessing here, but although cyclin/cdks are evolutionarily conserved from yeast to human, I would believe that there is also still more than enough specificity to make actual regeneration of anything resembling a Tasmanian Tiger quite difficult.
Another issue would be 'maternal genes,' which are genes where the genotype of the gene is held in the mother, but expressed as proteins deposited in her offspring. Given that there would not be the exact 'maternal genes' available for a Tasmanian Tiger, this might also prove to be a problem, I would think.
I bought one of these foldable keyboards from Plycon also for space saving issues, but it is absolutely terrible.
There's a sleep button on it that you accidentally hit, the insert/delete/home/end/pgup/pgdn keys are shifted one row lower than normal, as are the printscreen/break keys, such that you keep fumbling.
The space bar is broken up into multiple chunks for foldability, as is the left shift.
Worst part: feels like typing on very soft rubber. No tactile feedback whatsoever, and you have to hit the keys with serious power to get them to register (and sometimes not even then!)
The IBM PCJr gum key keyboards are lightyears ahead of these foldables in terms of real-world usability.
M-Audio and MidiMan provide professional-caliber cards with pro-level features, and support Linux as one of their OSes, as well as Mac/Windows, of course.
Their driver support for Windows is okay, but I believe their Linux support may well be binary only. That said, their drivers generally don't suck.
I'm not affiliated with them -- just a happy home user who enjoys using their pro-level cards for cleaner sound output under Windoze.
I agree.
I used to be turned off by the fact that geeks could get girls only based on "money," but then I realized this:
would it really be so much better to get girls because you benched 250 lbs and can act like a total asshole? When it comes down to it, girls being attracted to you for your money is pretty close to girls being attracted to you for your talent, which is just fine with me.