What about getting a ham radio license? That's fine and all, provided you don't ever use encryption, don't mind people intercepting your data, and remember to identify your station periodically.
Wait, what? Whoever told you ham radio would be an option for Internet access didn't know their ass from a dipole. Ham radio is for non-commercial point-to-point communications in a limited portion of the spectrum only. Anything else is illegal and/or not ham radio.
Honestly, being a casual Linux user, sound card support is not the defining factor holding back Linux adoption. While Ubuntu goes a long way to improving the user experience with Linux, even to get it to a 'standard' setup, I needed to use the console no less than 5 times. That's *needed* to, there was no GUI way to do what I was trying to do.
I'm sorry, but I'm getting really tired of the line of rhetoric that Linux isn't ready for the average user because you had to go to the command prompt for something. Chances are very good that you were trying to do something that the average user probably wouldn't need to do in order to go about their daily tasks. And if they did, they would call up someone who knew what they were doing, just like any Windows or Mac user would. I'd be interested to hear which five things you had to do on the command line to get to a "standard" setup. Every single time I've installed Ubuntu, I had a "standard" setup ready and waiting for me on the first boot.
If an OS must be suitable for the casual user before it can gain a sizeable market share, then I must presume that you would agree that Windows fits the bill, since it has something like 95% of the desktop market. How many people do you think became familiar with the Windows Registry against their will? Lots, probably. Google for any random windows problem (whether drivers, specific applications, or the OS itself) and you're sure to see at least one potential solution tell you to go into the registry and change something.
Now my question is: How is that better than having to go to the command line for occasional Linux problems? It's not, and in fact it's far worse because the Windows Registry is that gigantic tree full of "magic" settings that boggle even the most astute technician. I guarantee you, there are things in the Registry that even Microsoft forgot about. The Registry is not and cannot ever be self-documenting by its very design. Worse, it's perfectly possible to FUBAR your system by accidentally tweaking the wrong setting.
Contrast this with the Linux command line. Any command that you want to know about is a man page or --help away. Most configuration files are well-commented. And unless you're using sudo to run a command, you can't do any *real* damage to your system just by poking around. The Linux command line is tangible, powerful, and something you can actually learn to get the hang of, if you so choose.
The command line is NOT holding Linux back. Nor is anything else on the technical or UI side. Linux supports a wider variety of hardware than any other OS on the planet and can run more programs than all other operating systems ever written in the history of mankind combined. It is secure. It is reliable. It is usable, even by my wife and niece, neither of whom have any technical background at all.
The only reason Linux isn't yet "mainstream" is because there isn't yet a company that's willing to spend millions of dollars every quarter on advertising, marketing, and OEM deals on an OS that can be downloaded for free. The OEMs are showing mild interest, but they don't get kickbacks from bundle deals out of it and Microsoft is still wining and dining their decision-making executives. Like any "product" in on the market, Linux's market share has nothing at all to do with it's actual merits. Linux has no shortage of intelligent programmers, what it needs now is more intelligent businesspeople who are willing to figure out how to create markets around it so that the dinosaurs of the computing industry (IBM, Dell, Sun, even Microsoft) will slowly follow suit.
It's coming, it's just taking a lot longer than we thought.
My WRT54GL is likewise running just fine. It has OpenWRT which has has no hijacking feature that I'm aware of.
I'm curious, though, how is the hardware on these antiquated? They really just route ethernet and wifi packets and that's it. Some people are making robots out of them. The last benchmarks that I saw had these things slinging 30Mbits/sec and I know everyone's broadband speed hasn't quadrupled since the WRT came out.
'cd -' is quite handy but becomes useless if you need to wander around in the filesystem for awhile before returning to a specific directory.
I like bash builtins pushd/popd for this reason. While they're probably overkill for most routine tasks, pushd is really convenient for "bookmarking" a long or forgettable path that you can return to later with popd. (Directories can be stacked infinitely high, but I've never had much of a practical reason to stack more than two or three.)
Another good use is in shell scripts that you want to be able to run from any directory. Once in awhile, you have to script a command that must be run from a particular directory, but doing so would compromise the "path portability" goal. You could save the contents of $PWD to a variable and cd to it later, but there's a cleaner solution: pushd/popd to the rescue!
The current blight of wimpy, inaccurate and incomplete man pages seems to originate from the GNU developers who insist on using the terrible "info" crap, writing huge volumes of text with no real content, and the tradition is continued by Linux developers who generally provide little or no man page documentation -- presumably in the hope that users of their software will be tempted to ask questions on various mailing lists where they can be ritually disemboweled for displaying such a lack of understanding and disturbing the peace of the cognoscenti who have much more important things to do than answer questions of mere users of their software.
I was halfway across the country on business and needed a file on my workstation at home. We have DSL, so I was able to call up my wife and have her press the power button on my workstation to turn it on. It was one of those big full tower cases with a zillion fans so you KNEW when that thing was on.
After a couple minutes, I was able to log in and retrieve the file. Once I got the info I needed, I told the wife I was all done. She asked what she needed to do to shut it off. I said, "Don't worry, it's already taken care of." I had already typed 'shutdown -h now' a few moments before so the timing was perfect: Just as I finished the statement, the machine shut off, the hard drives parked with an audible clank, and the fans spun down.
Just watched Obama's victory speech on the BBC, he namechecked Lincoln and derided Wall Street. If this is anything other than empty rhetoric he's not going to last a year
You're quire correct sir, our constitution gives him at least four.
.. because it's just a goofy novelty, with a minuscule market, and isn't worth the $10-$20k it costs to patent the stupid thing?
He needs to get over himself.
He did patent it. My 'early model' TV-B-Gone says Patent Pending on it. And then later decided it was better to have everything out in the open since everyone was hacking it anyway.
The Air Force excels at just about everything they do. But for the past decade or two, their Achilles Heel has been computing technology because it moves faster than anything else they're used to.
The Air Force is a very old organization and although they can generally respond to most anything quickly, overall change tends to happen very very slowly. Not long after I enlisted in 1998, there were rumors that the uniform was going to change from the classic camouflage pattern to a kind of pixellated-marble look. Based on what recent photos I can find, they're still only about halfway through getting the new uniform out to everyone.
Also, I know for a fact we're still flying some planes with vacuum tubes in the autopilot computer even though upgrades for all airframes have been around since at least the 80's. Most of the technical manuals that I used to repair avionics were between 25-40 years old and still had technical errors in them. (We weren't able to make corrections to technical manuals any more than you'd be allowed to make pen-and-ink corrections to a federal law.)
Computer use only became common in most squadrons about 10 years ago and even then, they were not really used for the correct purposes. Some captain would get the bright idea that somebody should use a spreadsheet program instead of a paper form for some menial task, force everybody to use it, ignore the pleas from his subordinates that it tripled the effort required to perform the task, and then make up some elaborate report for his commander about how he just saved the Air Force $358,000.
While I was in the service, the Air Force never really caught on that you had to hire and train smart people who know about computers if you wanted to make the most of them. Some squadrons took young administrative airman fresh out of tech school and sat them down in front of the admin console and said, "All right, it's your job now to make sure this doesn't break." This is very uncharacteristic of the Air Force as you normally need at least several weeks of training before you can be trusted to mop the floor correctly. But when a commander has something that needs to be done and he doesn't know how to do it, it's not at all uncommon for him to assign someone to it while implying that they should be rather quiet about it.
Others units farmed out network administration to government contractors like Lockheed Martin which wasn't any better because most of their employees are old military retirees who thought they were going to get paid more as a civilian for doing the same thing they did in the military and ended up being wrong on both counts. (Got seven stripes and an MSCE? Then they're hiring!)
I guess this long-winded point it that it doesn't surprise me that high-level Air Force officers are saying, "Hey, who says we can't control this thing? We're the Air Force, after all." They're used to having fine-grained control over everything in their view and a high degree of security surrounding it.
"Defensive operations are constantly playing 'catch up' to an ever-increasing onslaught of attacks that seem to always stay one step ahead," says the Air Force Research Laboratory's "Integrated Cyber Defense" request for proposals. "In order to tip the balance in favor of the defender, we must develop a strategic approach to cyber defense that transcends the day to day reactive operations."
In other words, the Air Force is still nowhere near where they need to be in terms of network security. The only encouraging part of this is that they finally realize it.
My direct download from Canonical (releases.ubuntu.com) went at full speed for the full 11 minutes it took to download. Plus it didn't break my ssh connections, which bittorrent always does.
Counter-anecdote: My bittorrent download from users across the net went at full speed for the full 2 minutes it took to download. Plus it didn't break my SSH connections, which are never adversely affected by bittorrent anyway.
My computer-illiterate dad just wants to post a comment on a blog, or to login to a new website. You can't possibly expect him to do something as complex as reading up on what OpenID is, signing up for an OpenID account on a totally different website that has got nothing to do with the original website that he was on, and then logging in by entering a long magical URL. People like him - average users - have trouble enough understanding usernames and passwords!
My teenage son just wants to go to the store, or to go see a new movie. You can't possibly expect him to do something as complex as attend a class on how to drive a car, learn the rules of the road, and then take a test just to get a magical piece of plastic that allows him to drive. People like him - average teens - have trouble enough dealing with school and their social lives!
See how silly that sounds? I'm betting your dad isn't incapable of learning new things, but from your portrayal, you certainly make it sound like he's unwilling. And for what good reason? Because he's older? I'm sorry, but that just isn't a free pass. He had to learn how to use a computer, get online, and post to blogs, where's the gaping abyss that he has to leap over in order to learn how OpenID works?
If you want to be able to use technology, you have to be willing to learn something about it.
I guess part of me wants to know how he found out. If he found out by accident, then yeah, this is a case of "No good deed goes unpunished"....but if he was looking around for something to hack and found more than he was expecting, then there should be some punishment (though probably not three felony charges).....
I have a real problem with this kind of attitude. You're basically saying that nobody should question the security or intent of a system put in place by some kind of authority. Where would we be if the black hats were the only ones looking for bugs and bad design in proprietary software, financial networks, or sites that store private information?
How about a currently relevant topic, then? Voting systems. Using your logic, there shouldn't be any independent review of voting systems and procedures. If anyone does decide to probe some portion of the voting system (whether it be the machines used to count votes or the actions of the people responsible for holding the elections), there "should be some punishment" for those people who do so without express permission.
It is a ridiculous notion to assume that those who tinker, poke, prod, and look for problems with things (i.e., hackers) are automatically bad people looking to get into trouble. A good dose of scepticism towards all aspects of society is essential for the health of said society. We don't need to look too far in the past (or far beyond our own borders) to see what happens when a society becomes complacent and accepting of whatever is foisted upon them.
Heh, I just answered a question very similar to this earlier today.
Bottom line: For many circuits, it's almost impossible to get a good feel for what's going on without being able to look at a trace of the electrical signal. A scope has a very wide array of uses that no other piece of test equipment compares to. Anyone serious about learning electronics should have access to an oscilloscope.
As you're just getting into the hobby, I would avoid any digital scopes. If it doesn't trace a signal directly onto a CRT screen, don't bother. Especially steer clear of the USB and other external oscilloscopes. They're very expensive considering their limitations.
I would recommend getting either a new low-end scope or an older medium-end scope.
You can pick up a new low-end scope for around $200. Bandwidth tops out between 10-25MHz, so testing computers, some microcontrollers, and some RF circuits is out of the question but most everything else is fair game. The advantage to one of these is that will come calibrated, have a warranty, and be pretty easy to use since they're geared for beginners or automotive use. They also tend to be quite small and portable.
Another option is to go looking for a used mid-range scope for between $100 and whatever your budget ceiling is. eBay is good for this, but you have to be extremely careful. Most scopes sold there are "as-is", meaning they came off a pallet full of other shit that the seller bought at some liquidation auction. And just because a scope powers up and "appears to work fine" doesn't mean it's worth buying. As precision instruments, oscilloscopes have a ton of components that can fail or fall out of spec. Plus, they need to be calibrated every so often. Only get a used scope off eBay if the seller says that it was tested and calibrated or if you know someone who can repair/calibrate a used scope.
I ended up taking a chance and buying one of the latter variety just last week off eBay. It's a Tektronix 2246A: 4 channel, 100MHz for $300. The auction page said it was tested but sold as-is. Turns out it was a good gamble. It's slightly out of calibration, but the scope itself is clean, undamaged, and everything works properly. No idea what the 2246A sold for brand-new, but I'd be surprised if it was less than a few thousand dollars.
The x0xb0x is pretty much one of the most impressive things I've seen come out of the hacker/electronics/homebrew scene.
The story is pretty much this: In the early 80's, Roland comes out with the TB-303, an analog bass synthesizer designed to accompany musicians during practice sessions. The 303 bombed in the target market, though, because it sounded nothing at all like a bass guitar and was difficult to use. Years after the synth was out of production, DJs (ones that make music, not merely play it back) discovered it and eventually this one box spawned an entire music genre called acid.
So fast-forward to this decade where acid (and hence the 303) is still fairly popular even if not exactly mainstream anymore. For aspiring DJs and the dabbling techno hobbyist, a Roland TB-303 is nearly impossible to get. They're rare, old, and expensive. On the chance that one shows up on eBay, you'd like have to pay almost $3000 for it. Since the early 90's, many companies have tried to produce hardware and software clones but they usually fall quite short of the real 303 sound.
In 2005 or so, some MIT graduate gets a hold of a 303, reverse-engineers the circuits, designs an up-to-date 303 clone with identical analog circuitry and releases all her work in the form of schematics, PCB layouts, parts listings, and build instructions under the Creative Commons license. For the first time, a 303 clone is produced that sounds just like the original because it effectively *is* the original. And now anyone can buy a kit, source their own parts, or buy one from a builder.
Now THAT's what the hacker mentality is all about. Ladyada essentially did the same thing for this piece of synth hardware that open source communities do for software. And it's awesome.
(Disclaimer: I'm just about finished building a x0xb0x of my very own.)
Notoriously expensive? Believe me, I have no special attachment to Lenovo, but you're like the 5th Mac person in this thread to claim that Thinkpads are somehow the "expensive" brand of non-Apple Laptop. They simply aren't. I research laptops all the time and the Thinkpads always come out about the same in terms of cost with brands like Dell and HP. The difference is that Thinkpads are built better and typically have useful add-on features.
For giggles, I just went to Dell's website and configured a Latitude D830 similarly to the Thinkpad in the linked comment and even it came out to be much more expensive than the Thinkpad: $1854.
So much for the Thinkpad being on the high end in terms of cost.
It shouldn't be a huge surprise that the higher-density drives have a greater failure rate than those with lower-density platters that have been in manufacture for years.
I don't mind buying Seagate because their 5-year warranty for every drive that leaves their factory, frankly, the best available.
People have gotten the entire KDE 3.5 suite to run on the N800 but the UI is obviously not well-optimized for it and loading applications takes a good long while. (Once they're loaded, though, they don't perform too poorly.) As well, I'm sure there are a bunch of libraries being loaded that aren't strictly needed on a tablet. Some googling lead me to the following page which implies that KDE 4.x is being actively developed for the tablets as it shows a good number of applications running with modified tablet-style UI:
Slashdot Mirror
Wait, what? Whoever told you ham radio would be an option for Internet access didn't know their ass from a dipole. Ham radio is for non-commercial point-to-point communications in a limited portion of the spectrum only. Anything else is illegal and/or not ham radio.
What do you buy that's better than a consumer card and is compatible with Linux? As someone getting into music, I'm genuinely interested.
I'm sorry, but I'm getting really tired of the line of rhetoric that Linux isn't ready for the average user because you had to go to the command prompt for something. Chances are very good that you were trying to do something that the average user probably wouldn't need to do in order to go about their daily tasks. And if they did, they would call up someone who knew what they were doing, just like any Windows or Mac user would. I'd be interested to hear which five things you had to do on the command line to get to a "standard" setup. Every single time I've installed Ubuntu, I had a "standard" setup ready and waiting for me on the first boot.
If an OS must be suitable for the casual user before it can gain a sizeable market share, then I must presume that you would agree that Windows fits the bill, since it has something like 95% of the desktop market. How many people do you think became familiar with the Windows Registry against their will? Lots, probably. Google for any random windows problem (whether drivers, specific applications, or the OS itself) and you're sure to see at least one potential solution tell you to go into the registry and change something.
Now my question is: How is that better than having to go to the command line for occasional Linux problems? It's not, and in fact it's far worse because the Windows Registry is that gigantic tree full of "magic" settings that boggle even the most astute technician. I guarantee you, there are things in the Registry that even Microsoft forgot about. The Registry is not and cannot ever be self-documenting by its very design. Worse, it's perfectly possible to FUBAR your system by accidentally tweaking the wrong setting.
Contrast this with the Linux command line. Any command that you want to know about is a man page or --help away. Most configuration files are well-commented. And unless you're using sudo to run a command, you can't do any *real* damage to your system just by poking around. The Linux command line is tangible, powerful, and something you can actually learn to get the hang of, if you so choose.
The command line is NOT holding Linux back. Nor is anything else on the technical or UI side. Linux supports a wider variety of hardware than any other OS on the planet and can run more programs than all other operating systems ever written in the history of mankind combined. It is secure. It is reliable. It is usable, even by my wife and niece, neither of whom have any technical background at all.
The only reason Linux isn't yet "mainstream" is because there isn't yet a company that's willing to spend millions of dollars every quarter on advertising, marketing, and OEM deals on an OS that can be downloaded for free. The OEMs are showing mild interest, but they don't get kickbacks from bundle deals out of it and Microsoft is still wining and dining their decision-making executives. Like any "product" in on the market, Linux's market share has nothing at all to do with it's actual merits. Linux has no shortage of intelligent programmers, what it needs now is more intelligent businesspeople who are willing to figure out how to create markets around it so that the dinosaurs of the computing industry (IBM, Dell, Sun, even Microsoft) will slowly follow suit.
It's coming, it's just taking a lot longer than we thought.
My WRT54GL is likewise running just fine. It has OpenWRT which has has no hijacking feature that I'm aware of.
I'm curious, though, how is the hardware on these antiquated? They really just route ethernet and wifi packets and that's it. Some people are making robots out of them. The last benchmarks that I saw had these things slinging 30Mbits/sec and I know everyone's broadband speed hasn't quadrupled since the WRT came out.
'cd -' is quite handy but becomes useless if you need to wander around in the filesystem for awhile before returning to a specific directory.
I like bash builtins pushd/popd for this reason. While they're probably overkill for most routine tasks, pushd is really convenient for "bookmarking" a long or forgettable path that you can return to later with popd. (Directories can be stacked infinitely high, but I've never had much of a practical reason to stack more than two or three.)
Another good use is in shell scripts that you want to be able to run from any directory. Once in awhile, you have to script a command that must be run from a particular directory, but doing so would compromise the "path portability" goal. You could save the contents of $PWD to a variable and cd to it later, but there's a cleaner solution: pushd/popd to the rescue!
This might be easier, unless there's some advantage to using find that I'm unaware of:
But hey, at least you're not bitter about it.
I was halfway across the country on business and needed a file on my workstation at home. We have DSL, so I was able to call up my wife and have her press the power button on my workstation to turn it on. It was one of those big full tower cases with a zillion fans so you KNEW when that thing was on.
After a couple minutes, I was able to log in and retrieve the file. Once I got the info I needed, I told the wife I was all done. She asked what she needed to do to shut it off. I said, "Don't worry, it's already taken care of." I had already typed 'shutdown -h now' a few moments before so the timing was perfect: Just as I finished the statement, the machine shut off, the hard drives parked with an audible clank, and the fans spun down.
She was floored.
"quite"
Even used the Preview button!
Bah.
You're quire correct sir, our constitution gives him at least four.
I was an Airman, trust me, I'm well aware of Air Force history. :)
I meant "old" in terms of "older than most U.S. corporations" which is the kind of organization that most Slashdotters would be familiar with.
He did patent it. My 'early model' TV-B-Gone says Patent Pending on it. And then later decided it was better to have everything out in the open since everyone was hacking it anyway.
RTFA there, buddy.
This isn't the Hotel California, you're welcome to log off and end your suffering any time you like.
Sincerely,
Fellow Whiny Internet Citizen
The Air Force excels at just about everything they do. But for the past decade or two, their Achilles Heel has been computing technology because it moves faster than anything else they're used to.
The Air Force is a very old organization and although they can generally respond to most anything quickly, overall change tends to happen very very slowly. Not long after I enlisted in 1998, there were rumors that the uniform was going to change from the classic camouflage pattern to a kind of pixellated-marble look. Based on what recent photos I can find, they're still only about halfway through getting the new uniform out to everyone.
Also, I know for a fact we're still flying some planes with vacuum tubes in the autopilot computer even though upgrades for all airframes have been around since at least the 80's. Most of the technical manuals that I used to repair avionics were between 25-40 years old and still had technical errors in them. (We weren't able to make corrections to technical manuals any more than you'd be allowed to make pen-and-ink corrections to a federal law.)
Computer use only became common in most squadrons about 10 years ago and even then, they were not really used for the correct purposes. Some captain would get the bright idea that somebody should use a spreadsheet program instead of a paper form for some menial task, force everybody to use it, ignore the pleas from his subordinates that it tripled the effort required to perform the task, and then make up some elaborate report for his commander about how he just saved the Air Force $358,000.
While I was in the service, the Air Force never really caught on that you had to hire and train smart people who know about computers if you wanted to make the most of them. Some squadrons took young administrative airman fresh out of tech school and sat them down in front of the admin console and said, "All right, it's your job now to make sure this doesn't break." This is very uncharacteristic of the Air Force as you normally need at least several weeks of training before you can be trusted to mop the floor correctly. But when a commander has something that needs to be done and he doesn't know how to do it, it's not at all uncommon for him to assign someone to it while implying that they should be rather quiet about it.
Others units farmed out network administration to government contractors like Lockheed Martin which wasn't any better because most of their employees are old military retirees who thought they were going to get paid more as a civilian for doing the same thing they did in the military and ended up being wrong on both counts. (Got seven stripes and an MSCE? Then they're hiring!)
I guess this long-winded point it that it doesn't surprise me that high-level Air Force officers are saying, "Hey, who says we can't control this thing? We're the Air Force, after all." They're used to having fine-grained control over everything in their view and a high degree of security surrounding it.
In other words, the Air Force is still nowhere near where they need to be in terms of network security. The only encouraging part of this is that they finally realize it.
Counter-anecdote: My bittorrent download from users across the net went at full speed for the full 2 minutes it took to download. Plus it didn't break my SSH connections, which are never adversely affected by bittorrent anyway.
I just know there's an "unlikely" tag around here somewhere...
I'm sure that was a very useful link in 2006.
My teenage son just wants to go to the store, or to go see a new movie. You can't possibly expect him to do something as complex as attend a class on how to drive a car, learn the rules of the road, and then take a test just to get a magical piece of plastic that allows him to drive. People like him - average teens - have trouble enough dealing with school and their social lives!
See how silly that sounds? I'm betting your dad isn't incapable of learning new things, but from your portrayal, you certainly make it sound like he's unwilling. And for what good reason? Because he's older? I'm sorry, but that just isn't a free pass. He had to learn how to use a computer, get online, and post to blogs, where's the gaping abyss that he has to leap over in order to learn how OpenID works?
If you want to be able to use technology, you have to be willing to learn something about it.
I have a real problem with this kind of attitude. You're basically saying that nobody should question the security or intent of a system put in place by some kind of authority. Where would we be if the black hats were the only ones looking for bugs and bad design in proprietary software, financial networks, or sites that store private information?
How about a currently relevant topic, then? Voting systems. Using your logic, there shouldn't be any independent review of voting systems and procedures. If anyone does decide to probe some portion of the voting system (whether it be the machines used to count votes or the actions of the people responsible for holding the elections), there "should be some punishment" for those people who do so without express permission.
It is a ridiculous notion to assume that those who tinker, poke, prod, and look for problems with things (i.e., hackers) are automatically bad people looking to get into trouble. A good dose of scepticism towards all aspects of society is essential for the health of said society. We don't need to look too far in the past (or far beyond our own borders) to see what happens when a society becomes complacent and accepting of whatever is foisted upon them.
Heh, I just answered a question very similar to this earlier today.
Bottom line: For many circuits, it's almost impossible to get a good feel for what's going on without being able to look at a trace of the electrical signal. A scope has a very wide array of uses that no other piece of test equipment compares to. Anyone serious about learning electronics should have access to an oscilloscope.
As you're just getting into the hobby, I would avoid any digital scopes. If it doesn't trace a signal directly onto a CRT screen, don't bother. Especially steer clear of the USB and other external oscilloscopes. They're very expensive considering their limitations.
I would recommend getting either a new low-end scope or an older medium-end scope.
You can pick up a new low-end scope for around $200. Bandwidth tops out between 10-25MHz, so testing computers, some microcontrollers, and some RF circuits is out of the question but most everything else is fair game. The advantage to one of these is that will come calibrated, have a warranty, and be pretty easy to use since they're geared for beginners or automotive use. They also tend to be quite small and portable.
Another option is to go looking for a used mid-range scope for between $100 and whatever your budget ceiling is. eBay is good for this, but you have to be extremely careful. Most scopes sold there are "as-is", meaning they came off a pallet full of other shit that the seller bought at some liquidation auction. And just because a scope powers up and "appears to work fine" doesn't mean it's worth buying. As precision instruments, oscilloscopes have a ton of components that can fail or fall out of spec. Plus, they need to be calibrated every so often. Only get a used scope off eBay if the seller says that it was tested and calibrated or if you know someone who can repair/calibrate a used scope.
I ended up taking a chance and buying one of the latter variety just last week off eBay. It's a Tektronix 2246A: 4 channel, 100MHz for $300. The auction page said it was tested but sold as-is. Turns out it was a good gamble. It's slightly out of calibration, but the scope itself is clean, undamaged, and everything works properly. No idea what the 2246A sold for brand-new, but I'd be surprised if it was less than a few thousand dollars.
**(wince)** Should have used the preview button. :(
The x0xb0x is pretty much one of the most impressive things I've seen come out of the hacker/electronics/homebrew scene.
The story is pretty much this: In the early 80's, Roland comes out with the TB-303, an analog bass synthesizer designed to accompany musicians during practice sessions. The 303 bombed in the target market, though, because it sounded nothing at all like a bass guitar and was difficult to use. Years after the synth was out of production, DJs (ones that make music, not merely play it back) discovered it and eventually this one box spawned an entire music genre called acid.
So fast-forward to this decade where acid (and hence the 303) is still fairly popular even if not exactly mainstream anymore. For aspiring DJs and the dabbling techno hobbyist, a Roland TB-303 is nearly impossible to get. They're rare, old, and expensive. On the chance that one shows up on eBay, you'd like have to pay almost $3000 for it. Since the early 90's, many companies have tried to produce hardware and software clones but they usually fall quite short of the real 303 sound.
In 2005 or so, some MIT graduate gets a hold of a 303, reverse-engineers the circuits, designs an up-to-date 303 clone with identical analog circuitry and releases all her work in the form of schematics, PCB layouts, parts listings, and build instructions under the Creative Commons license. For the first time, a 303 clone is produced that sounds just like the original because it effectively *is* the original. And now anyone can buy a kit, source their own parts, or buy one from a builder.
Now THAT's what the hacker mentality is all about. Ladyada essentially did the same thing for this piece of synth hardware that open source communities do for software. And it's awesome.
(Disclaimer: I'm just about finished building a x0xb0x of my very own.)
Notoriously expensive? Believe me, I have no special attachment to Lenovo, but you're like the 5th Mac person in this thread to claim that Thinkpads are somehow the "expensive" brand of non-Apple Laptop. They simply aren't. I research laptops all the time and the Thinkpads always come out about the same in terms of cost with brands like Dell and HP. The difference is that Thinkpads are built better and typically have useful add-on features.
Almost one month ago, I compared the cost of a ThinkPad with an equivalent MacBook Pro. The MacBook Pro costs more than TWICE as much and the only significant advantage that it held was that it had a superior graphics chipset.
For giggles, I just went to Dell's website and configured a Latitude D830 similarly to the Thinkpad in the linked comment and even it came out to be much more expensive than the Thinkpad: $1854.
So much for the Thinkpad being on the high end in terms of cost.
It shouldn't be a huge surprise that the higher-density drives have a greater failure rate than those with lower-density platters that have been in manufacture for years.
I don't mind buying Seagate because their 5-year warranty for every drive that leaves their factory, frankly, the best available.
What about Konqueror on that device? Impossible?
People have gotten the entire KDE 3.5 suite to run on the N800 but the UI is obviously not well-optimized for it and loading applications takes a good long while. (Once they're loaded, though, they don't perform too poorly.) As well, I'm sure there are a bunch of libraries being loaded that aren't strictly needed on a tablet. Some googling lead me to the following page which implies that KDE 4.x is being actively developed for the tablets as it shows a good number of applications running with modified tablet-style UI:
http://kde.garage.maemo.org/screenshots_kdebase.html
Maybe I'll have a go at getting konqueror running on mine soon.