Instead of going nuts with software and data, keep printed records of transactions, containing only required data to handle chargebacks and whatever it is you need to handle after the transaction is complete.
Following on the parent poster's mention of a decent soundcard, you could achieve efficiency by performing multiple copies at the same time, assuming you have the processing power to pull it off.
Say you have a good recording card with 4 stereo inputs, thus 8 channels. You could setup some software to record all 8 channels separately and send them off to the encoder in real-time on a 900mhz Athlon. Combine this with the speed-doubling or quadrupling technique, and you could be ripping at an effective 32x speed once the whole thing is decently setup. Of course you'd then need 8 tape decks, but that's a minor issue I think, given the size and importance of your audio archive. It would reduce your ripping time from several months to only a few days, assuming you're doing this 8 hours a day (or someone else is doing it for you).
Um.. losing 75 lbs in four months seems rather steep, especially since it's about 1/3 of your original weight. Doesn't the body have trouble accomodating such a pronounced change ? Sudden weakness/near-fainting, spontaneous nausea, that kind of stuff ?
I had once lost a fair chunk of weight (30lbs) after being bed-ridden for a month, and I felt sicker from the weight loss than the illness itself.
Whoa whoa whoa! So this guy sat on both sides of the law : enforcement and defense. That's kinda like getting arrested in the Texan outskirts and finding out the judge is married to the dirty cop who bagged you.
The concept of law is sane, the implementation isn't.
Aren't fish already sensitive to polluted waters ? Heck, we humans turn bluish/green when surrounded by chain-smokers.. I'm pretty sure fish have similar reactions when their environment is hostile to their health.
Or you could just look for dead yet unmutilated fish, that's a sure sign.
Why should we (the intelligent users) tell you (the overpaid 'consultant') how to put together a good session-based system ? The information is readily available on the web for anyone to read, and it's not even that hard to find, assuming you know how to use a search engine such as Google. The solution is a hybrid of simple techniques which make up for each others' weaknesses. Just use that Fortune-500 brain you've been neglecting all these years.
Before Chinese starts taking over the net, I hope someone will have the decency to teach them proper web design and the importance of good signal-to-noise ratios. I've often bounced around foreign-language sites in search of specific information, relying on babelfish. Most asian sites I've been to are just awful: piles upon piles of jumbled links that lead to more piles of links. My old netscape bookmark page was easier to navigate than these things. Even the commercial sites are incredibly hard to decipher.
Why bother with "an update per month" ? Who says you're going to need that update ? Let's say you just buy a month at a time, and only buy a month when you know there's an update waiting for you. Ximian (or any other company) will start producing minor half-assed updates just so you stay hooked onto the service every month. Now even though Ximian is a free-software house, they are still run by marketing and finance droids, so don't expect them to be any more honest than XYZ MegaCorp.
Once again, I declare that the net needs a micropayment system (with a warranty, if that's applicable at all). If you want to download 20 megs worth of updates, then pay for that 20 megs of bandwidth (let's say 2 dollars). If you spend the next year without needing or wanting an update, then you don't disburse another penny and life is good. This model is flawed because it will encourage them to release 'fat' patches, but there surely is a way to allow a reasonably honest and fair system for all.
Re:Piezoelectric fans are already available!
on
Swaying CPU Fans
·
· Score: 1
2 cfm ? You couldn't even cool your own self with that kind of non-power. Most mid-range CPU fans move 30-35 cfm, top-end case fans move 130+ cfm. You'd need a beowulf cluster of piezo fans to get that Athlon to just Post.
AdBusters is a non-profit organisation that marches against hyper-capitalism and corporate manipulation. They're not crazy, just pissed. I like, and you should too.
The Neo2 is able to play DVD-R copies, but it is a pain in the ass: it involves holding down the reset button for about 30 seconds while booting the ever-so-badly-coded gameshark, swapping with an original game with a large TOC, then finally releasing the reset button which would trigger a stealth-swapping sequence where you'd finally put in the backup copy. Messiah got rid of this tedium, resulting in a console that played copies as easily as originals, which means those pesky HongKong uberpirates could sell premodded PS2's with counterfeit games (silk-screen printed DVD-R copies, most likely). I think that's what Sony wanted to avoid, because it's a nasty problem way over there in Asia.
You *cannot* make an 'import/region free only'-mod to PS2
Actually you can, but it involves performing some copy-protection inside the modchip itself. There were such chips for the PSX and they were actually quite popular in import shops, which would sell premodded consoles with the Jap import of Final Fantasy or other massive hits. These chips were regarded as perfectly legal.
It's not a matter of education, some people just don't have the right kind of gray matter to figure this stuff out. The inner workings of a PC involve alot of high-level abstraction. Bits fly around. How can you write the letter 'A' on the screen with only zeroes and ones ? Combinatorics, of course.
All these rather simple concepts that are like ABC's to most of us, simply don't fit inside some peoples' minds because they haven't stepped outside of reality for decades.
Take a construction worker for example (as a generalization, some construction workers have brains, but not all). What's going on in this guy's head ? Hammer + nail + wood = house. Objects, tangible things, precise concepts. That's how his mind works, and it is very efficient at it.
Now take a programmer, who is trying to write a shell script. What's going through his/her mind ? Zillions of things, because for any given problem there are an infinite number of solutions. Lateral thinking, creativity, and the ability to mentally process things that are purely fictitious. It's like algebra : lots of kids turn catatonic the minute they see 'X+5=8'. Even when you explain it thoroughly, they still don't get it, and they probably never will wholly understand. They just can't juggle with the abstraction.
For many of us, it's the other way around : we spend so much time in electron-land that real life sometimes stumps us because of its relative simplicity. Try building a small shed. It's simple : hammer + nail + wood. Or is it ? It may seem trivial for your redneck neighbor, but you might make a disaster despite your high I.Q., because your excellence is valid only inside your own head. It's like having a 42ghz processor with a 33mhz bus, while others have a 33mhz processor with a 266mhz bus instead.
There are always those of us who just can't wait for US releases of games. FFX isn't out in stores yet (2 days to go), yet I've already beaten it, because I've had the Jap import for months. A few years back I even struggled to learn basic japanese so I could enjoy these masterpieces and many others that never make it to Canada/USA.
I've been struggling with the functional yet awkward Neo2 chip, which involves single and/or dual swaps. I've been waiting for the Neo4/Messiah to fix my problems and allow me to fire up these imports without hassle. For die-hard gaming nuts like myself, these mods are worth every penny for the enjoyment they enable.
True, that does address the problem of "no warranty" I had mentioned, but why should I need to return a game in the first place ? Remember the dark ages of software, before the www became moderately mainstream around 4-5 years ago. You'd run down to the local radioshack or EB (which was much less game-oriented back then) and paid 5$ for a shareware disc of Duke Nukem or Quake. You played it to the bone, had a digital orgasm and called the 1-800-idsoftware to buy the full game, which arrived shortly in your mailbox. If you didn't like the 5$ episode, then you just deleted it and handed it to a friend.
Now with the net, it's even easier : just download the first episode for free, play it out, then order online if you liked it. Often they will let you download the full game minutes after you've paid for it.
You don't have to get off your fat ass and find a parking spot in the downtown frenzy. You don't have to endure nosey mindless sales kids who don't know a thing about _service_. Most importantly, when you call or email for tech support, you get a personal and useful answer, not just a corporate autoreply and some incompetent clerk's copy-paste solution.
Re:Most people use what is already there because
on
What's up with Lindows?
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
I didn't believe people could be this ignorant, until early this week when I went out with a friend to buy his first PC. Needless to say, I built one nearly identical to mine (1.4ghz, GeForce2 GTS, nice big monitor - the works:)
Then as I spent the evening loading WinXP and a few device drivers, I realized the extent of his misunderstanding of how a computer works. He kept pestering me with questions as to why I needed to install Windows, and "If I have a CD burner, why do I need burning software ?". It was painful, I felt like strangling him to death when the concept of lifetime tech-support glanced before my eyes.
People need to be educated. You need a drivers' license to scream off in a car, they should instate a Luser's license for computers. Just a quick 3-evening course to explain the fundamentals, then they pass a very easy test and we give them a license (perhaps a smartcard thing). You shove your license into the PC's card slot and it lets you poke away. The higher level your license, the more control you have. I know this concept is full of flaws but I just spent less than a minute thinking about it. People need to be taught the basics by qualified teachers, because we techies often can't find the dumbed-down terms to explain what's going on in that 20 seconds of boot-time, among other things.
Well I hate to say it but I'm somewhat in support of these groups, if only because I'm sick of buying the latest games only to discover that the best part of the game was the free demo. Truly great games are one in a thousand, and even then they don't last long enough.
That's where the warez scene can swoop in and deliver salvation: download a stripped-down rip of whatever game you want, try it out for a couple days, then go out and buy the full-blown masterpiece. Or delete it and forget it ever existed. It encourages the game houses that work hard, while cutting the revenue stream of the half-assed hype-machine con artists, most of which sell their crap at Mallwart and other idiot chains.
Think of it like music: they put a catchy song on the radio, you pop 20$ on the album, then find yourself duped because 8 of the 10 songs are just filler. You can't ask for a refund because you've already 'consumed' the product (because that's what it is: a product). They'll politely tell you you're a pirate and that it would be unlawful for them to return your money. Same thing applies to PC games.
To get back to the point, I say they deserve a fair trial (if such a thing exists), not on the basis that I support organized non-profit piracy, but rather because the law system was most likely manipulated by corporate interests and thus the accused were unjustly treated.
The problem lies within the game market itself: the insane price-gouging that's going on and getting worse every year. Why should I blow 80$ (50 of your U.S. dollars) on a product I haven't seen nor experienced, and that carries no useful warranty ? Just look at Hasbro and how they're destroying the game industry by raping classic titles, making flashy smelly shit with the original concepts and selling them anywhere there's a cash register.
Ironically, the shareware business is practically dead, even though it was probably the most honest form of software marketing in existence. You had a decent game/utility on its own, not just a crippled 5-minute unstable demo. If you enjoyed the experience and wanted to prolong it, you'd pay 15-20$ for 2-3 extra episodes, or a bunch of USEFUL extra features in the case of utilities/mini-applications. And what if you didn't need or want the extras ? Then you just kept on using the shareware version because it was actually a fully enjoyable piece of software on its own.
Warez may be illegal, but it definitely has its place in the world and on the net. And its working members certainly aren't rats. If you want a rat, go find your favorite pro-invasive-law lobbyist. They're the ones making our lives miserable and taking away from everyone. Warez takes away from those who are screwing us in the first place.
Go buy a DVD-R burner for about 500$. At 4.7 billion bytes per disc, burning 2.6mb/sec, it's both cheaper, faster and more versatile than any low-end tape backup system. Of course they work in most DVD-Rom drives, so you can carry your discs anywhere. As a bonus, prices will surely drop within the next year as new models surface.
Sometimes the threat isn't enough. (Me = regular person with excellent credit and a crack-addict banker drinking tequila / Them = mult-million$ company with team of overpaid circus freaks drinking Shirley Temples)
But seriously, we need to create a legal weapon of mass retribution to right all these wrongs. The way things are going, in a few years you'll be carrying around a lawyer for your xmas shopping, writing waivers and debating loopholes just so you can safely buy that 125$ VCR at Mallwart's.
The businesses don't realize it, but by suing their competitors out of business, they're alienating the potential customers that they're actually trying to steal.
Let the two companies fight out their patents between each other.
Patents are like "Magic: The Gathering" cards. They've got evil looking avatars (in this case, the lawyers). They have a bunch of stats that affect the outcome (money and public image). You roll dice to bring random luck to decide the actual winner (an old vicious judge), and in the end, whether you've won or lost the battle, you eventually realize you've just wasted your money.
I don't necessarily do it for fun, I do it because I'm very nitpicky. I will rarely start up a project of my own, but I'm always glad to send in a few patches for others, especially when it boils down to little things that are often thrown on the back burner. I tend to mop up all those specks of brain dust.
They could have done us all a favor, called it "Rise of the Robots" like they probably did at first, and remind us all of that pathetic excuse for a fighting game. And then we'd just stay home and wait for T3 to come out on HBO.
The same drive (Pioneer DVR-A03) is available for about 599$ pretty much anywhere these days. The Superdrive is just an OEM version of the DVR-A03 with Apple's markup.
Indeed, Undernet is quite clean. I don't IRC much anymore, but practically every bored teen in this stupid region hangs out on the local channel on Undernet, so I have no choice but to be informed of it.
The various bot services are quite efficient, allowing fine-grained control over who gets ops and what they can do with 'em, with privilege levels going from 0-400 I believe, where one can only affect users of lower ranking than oneself. Simple yet effective, which is great because lots of IRC people aren't that technically inclined and rely almost exclusively on ready-made scripts to handle the dirty work. Netsplits are almost a thing of the past, happening less than once per week. It's quite nice.
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Instead of going nuts with software and data, keep printed records of transactions, containing only required data to handle chargebacks and whatever it is you need to handle after the transaction is complete.
Following on the parent poster's mention of a decent soundcard, you could achieve efficiency by performing multiple copies at the same time, assuming you have the processing power to pull it off.
Say you have a good recording card with 4 stereo inputs, thus 8 channels. You could setup some software to record all 8 channels separately and send them off to the encoder in real-time on a 900mhz Athlon. Combine this with the speed-doubling or quadrupling technique, and you could be ripping at an effective 32x speed once the whole thing is decently setup. Of course you'd then need 8 tape decks, but that's a minor issue I think, given the size and importance of your audio archive. It would reduce your ripping time from several months to only a few days, assuming you're doing this 8 hours a day (or someone else is doing it for you).
Um.. losing 75 lbs in four months seems rather steep, especially since it's about 1/3 of your original weight. Doesn't the body have trouble accomodating such a pronounced change ? Sudden weakness/near-fainting, spontaneous nausea, that kind of stuff ?
I had once lost a fair chunk of weight (30lbs) after being bed-ridden for a month, and I felt sicker from the weight loss than the illness itself.
Whoa whoa whoa! So this guy sat on both sides of the law : enforcement and defense. That's kinda like getting arrested in the Texan outskirts and finding out the judge is married to the dirty cop who bagged you.
The concept of law is sane, the implementation isn't.
Aren't fish already sensitive to polluted waters ? Heck, we humans turn bluish/green when surrounded by chain-smokers.. I'm pretty sure fish have similar reactions when their environment is hostile to their health.
Or you could just look for dead yet unmutilated fish, that's a sure sign.
Why should we (the intelligent users) tell you (the overpaid 'consultant') how to put together a good session-based system ? The information is readily available on the web for anyone to read, and it's not even that hard to find, assuming you know how to use a search engine such as Google. The solution is a hybrid of simple techniques which make up for each others' weaknesses. Just use that Fortune-500 brain you've been neglecting all these years.
Come on geniuses, mod this up. I thought the exact same thing when I read the topic.
Have some humor, most of us are sitting at home playing FFX while our much-despised relatives are getting piss-drunk already!
Before Chinese starts taking over the net, I hope someone will have the decency to teach them proper web design and the importance of good signal-to-noise ratios. I've often bounced around foreign-language sites in search of specific information, relying on babelfish. Most asian sites I've been to are just awful: piles upon piles of jumbled links that lead to more piles of links. My old netscape bookmark page was easier to navigate than these things. Even the commercial sites are incredibly hard to decipher.
Why bother with "an update per month" ? Who says you're going to need that update ? Let's say you just buy a month at a time, and only buy a month when you know there's an update waiting for you. Ximian (or any other company) will start producing minor half-assed updates just so you stay hooked onto the service every month. Now even though Ximian is a free-software house, they are still run by marketing and finance droids, so don't expect them to be any more honest than XYZ MegaCorp.
Once again, I declare that the net needs a micropayment system (with a warranty, if that's applicable at all). If you want to download 20 megs worth of updates, then pay for that 20 megs of bandwidth (let's say 2 dollars). If you spend the next year without needing or wanting an update, then you don't disburse another penny and life is good. This model is flawed because it will encourage them to release 'fat' patches, but there surely is a way to allow a reasonably honest and fair system for all.
2 cfm ? You couldn't even cool your own self with that kind of non-power. Most mid-range CPU fans move 30-35 cfm, top-end case fans move 130+ cfm. You'd need a beowulf cluster of piezo fans to get that Athlon to just Post.
This sounds like a mission for AdBusters.
AdBusters is a non-profit organisation that marches against hyper-capitalism and corporate manipulation. They're not crazy, just pissed. I like, and you should too.
The Neo2 is able to play DVD-R copies, but it is a pain in the ass: it involves holding down the reset button for about 30 seconds while booting the ever-so-badly-coded gameshark, swapping with an original game with a large TOC, then finally releasing the reset button which would trigger a stealth-swapping sequence where you'd finally put in the backup copy. Messiah got rid of this tedium, resulting in a console that played copies as easily as originals, which means those pesky HongKong uberpirates could sell premodded PS2's with counterfeit games (silk-screen printed DVD-R copies, most likely). I think that's what Sony wanted to avoid, because it's a nasty problem way over there in Asia.
You *cannot* make an 'import/region free only'-mod to PS2
Actually you can, but it involves performing some copy-protection inside the modchip itself. There were such chips for the PSX and they were actually quite popular in import shops, which would sell premodded consoles with the Jap import of Final Fantasy or other massive hits. These chips were regarded as perfectly legal.
It's not a matter of education, some people just don't have the right kind of gray matter to figure this stuff out. The inner workings of a PC involve alot of high-level abstraction. Bits fly around. How can you write the letter 'A' on the screen with only zeroes and ones ? Combinatorics, of course.
All these rather simple concepts that are like ABC's to most of us, simply don't fit inside some peoples' minds because they haven't stepped outside of reality for decades.
Take a construction worker for example (as a generalization, some construction workers have brains, but not all). What's going on in this guy's head ? Hammer + nail + wood = house. Objects, tangible things, precise concepts. That's how his mind works, and it is very efficient at it.
Now take a programmer, who is trying to write a shell script. What's going through his/her mind ? Zillions of things, because for any given problem there are an infinite number of solutions. Lateral thinking, creativity, and the ability to mentally process things that are purely fictitious. It's like algebra : lots of kids turn catatonic the minute they see 'X+5=8'. Even when you explain it thoroughly, they still don't get it, and they probably never will wholly understand. They just can't juggle with the abstraction.
For many of us, it's the other way around : we spend so much time in electron-land that real life sometimes stumps us because of its relative simplicity. Try building a small shed. It's simple : hammer + nail + wood. Or is it ? It may seem trivial for your redneck neighbor, but you might make a disaster despite your high I.Q., because your excellence is valid only inside your own head. It's like having a 42ghz processor with a 33mhz bus, while others have a 33mhz processor with a 266mhz bus instead.
There are always those of us who just can't wait for US releases of games. FFX isn't out in stores yet (2 days to go), yet I've already beaten it, because I've had the Jap import for months. A few years back I even struggled to learn basic japanese so I could enjoy these masterpieces and many others that never make it to Canada/USA.
I've been struggling with the functional yet awkward Neo2 chip, which involves single and/or dual swaps. I've been waiting for the Neo4/Messiah to fix my problems and allow me to fire up these imports without hassle. For die-hard gaming nuts like myself, these mods are worth every penny for the enjoyment they enable.
True, that does address the problem of "no warranty" I had mentioned, but why should I need to return a game in the first place ? Remember the dark ages of software, before the www became moderately mainstream around 4-5 years ago. You'd run down to the local radioshack or EB (which was much less game-oriented back then) and paid 5$ for a shareware disc of Duke Nukem or Quake. You played it to the bone, had a digital orgasm and called the 1-800-idsoftware to buy the full game, which arrived shortly in your mailbox. If you didn't like the 5$ episode, then you just deleted it and handed it to a friend.
Now with the net, it's even easier : just download the first episode for free, play it out, then order online if you liked it. Often they will let you download the full game minutes after you've paid for it.
You don't have to get off your fat ass and find a parking spot in the downtown frenzy. You don't have to endure nosey mindless sales kids who don't know a thing about _service_. Most importantly, when you call or email for tech support, you get a personal and useful answer, not just a corporate autoreply and some incompetent clerk's copy-paste solution.
I didn't believe people could be this ignorant, until early this week when I went out with a friend to buy his first PC. Needless to say, I built one nearly identical to mine (1.4ghz, GeForce2 GTS, nice big monitor - the works :)
Then as I spent the evening loading WinXP and a few device drivers, I realized the extent of his misunderstanding of how a computer works. He kept pestering me with questions as to why I needed to install Windows, and "If I have a CD burner, why do I need burning software ?". It was painful, I felt like strangling him to death when the concept of lifetime tech-support glanced before my eyes.
People need to be educated. You need a drivers' license to scream off in a car, they should instate a Luser's license for computers. Just a quick 3-evening course to explain the fundamentals, then they pass a very easy test and we give them a license (perhaps a smartcard thing). You shove your license into the PC's card slot and it lets you poke away. The higher level your license, the more control you have. I know this concept is full of flaws but I just spent less than a minute thinking about it. People need to be taught the basics by qualified teachers, because we techies often can't find the dumbed-down terms to explain what's going on in that 20 seconds of boot-time, among other things.
Well I hate to say it but I'm somewhat in support of these groups, if only because I'm sick of buying the latest games only to discover that the best part of the game was the free demo. Truly great games are one in a thousand, and even then they don't last long enough.
That's where the warez scene can swoop in and deliver salvation: download a stripped-down rip of whatever game you want, try it out for a couple days, then go out and buy the full-blown masterpiece. Or delete it and forget it ever existed. It encourages the game houses that work hard, while cutting the revenue stream of the half-assed hype-machine con artists, most of which sell their crap at Mallwart and other idiot chains.
Think of it like music: they put a catchy song on the radio, you pop 20$ on the album, then find yourself duped because 8 of the 10 songs are just filler. You can't ask for a refund because you've already 'consumed' the product (because that's what it is: a product). They'll politely tell you you're a pirate and that it would be unlawful for them to return your money. Same thing applies to PC games.
To get back to the point, I say they deserve a fair trial (if such a thing exists), not on the basis that I support organized non-profit piracy, but rather because the law system was most likely manipulated by corporate interests and thus the accused were unjustly treated.
The problem lies within the game market itself: the insane price-gouging that's going on and getting worse every year. Why should I blow 80$ (50 of your U.S. dollars) on a product I haven't seen nor experienced, and that carries no useful warranty ? Just look at Hasbro and how they're destroying the game industry by raping classic titles, making flashy smelly shit with the original concepts and selling them anywhere there's a cash register.
Ironically, the shareware business is practically dead, even though it was probably the most honest form of software marketing in existence. You had a decent game/utility on its own, not just a crippled 5-minute unstable demo. If you enjoyed the experience and wanted to prolong it, you'd pay 15-20$ for 2-3 extra episodes, or a bunch of USEFUL extra features in the case of utilities/mini-applications. And what if you didn't need or want the extras ? Then you just kept on using the shareware version because it was actually a fully enjoyable piece of software on its own.
Warez may be illegal, but it definitely has its place in the world and on the net. And its working members certainly aren't rats. If you want a rat, go find your favorite pro-invasive-law lobbyist. They're the ones making our lives miserable and taking away from everyone. Warez takes away from those who are screwing us in the first place.
Go buy a DVD-R burner for about 500$. At 4.7 billion bytes per disc, burning 2.6mb/sec, it's both cheaper, faster and more versatile than any low-end tape backup system. Of course they work in most DVD-Rom drives, so you can carry your discs anywhere. As a bonus, prices will surely drop within the next year as new models surface.
Sometimes the threat isn't enough. (Me = regular person with excellent credit and a crack-addict banker drinking tequila / Them = mult-million$ company with team of overpaid circus freaks drinking Shirley Temples)
But seriously, we need to create a legal weapon of mass retribution to right all these wrongs. The way things are going, in a few years you'll be carrying around a lawyer for your xmas shopping, writing waivers and debating loopholes just so you can safely buy that 125$ VCR at Mallwart's.
The businesses don't realize it, but by suing their competitors out of business, they're alienating the potential customers that they're actually trying to steal.
Let the two companies fight out their patents between each other.
Patents are like "Magic: The Gathering" cards. They've got evil looking avatars (in this case, the lawyers). They have a bunch of stats that affect the outcome (money and public image). You roll dice to bring random luck to decide the actual winner (an old vicious judge), and in the end, whether you've won or lost the battle, you eventually realize you've just wasted your money.
I don't necessarily do it for fun, I do it because I'm very nitpicky. I will rarely start up a project of my own, but I'm always glad to send in a few patches for others, especially when it boils down to little things that are often thrown on the back burner. I tend to mop up all those specks of brain dust.
They could have done us all a favor, called it "Rise of the Robots" like they probably did at first, and remind us all of that pathetic excuse for a fighting game. And then we'd just stay home and wait for T3 to come out on HBO.
The same drive (Pioneer DVR-A03) is available for about 599$ pretty much anywhere these days. The Superdrive is just an OEM version of the DVR-A03 with Apple's markup.
Indeed, Undernet is quite clean. I don't IRC much anymore, but practically every bored teen in this stupid region hangs out on the local channel on Undernet, so I have no choice but to be informed of it.
The various bot services are quite efficient, allowing fine-grained control over who gets ops and what they can do with 'em, with privilege levels going from 0-400 I believe, where one can only affect users of lower ranking than oneself. Simple yet effective, which is great because lots of IRC people aren't that technically inclined and rely almost exclusively on ready-made scripts to handle the dirty work. Netsplits are almost a thing of the past, happening less than once per week. It's quite nice.