A few years back, the company I worked for tried pushing Windows 2003 terminal servers (using Linux as thin clients) for its clients. It actually worked rather well, but there was one major drawback: since Windows 2003 was a "server" OS, a lot of desktop applications and workstation hardware flat out refused to support it.
Our biggest challenge was printer drivers. Practically no printer manufacturers released Win2k3 drivers, because it was the only major MS operating system at the time that didn't have some sort of workstation edition. Even though there was no technical hurdles to providing the drivers, the installation packages would refuse to run, saying that they didn't support the OS. I was usually the one stuck having to hack in the manufacturer's Windows 2000 drivers just so our customers could print their stuff. In one case, we ended up deploying a Linux CUPS server just to forward the print jobs through because the Windows drivers were so terrible.
The psychoacoustic models of MP3 compression must have done wonders for the ancient recording.
As long as the quality settings are high enough, I wouldn't think it would matter much. The encoding scheme is designed to survive a hostile medium. (Audio.) The original magnetic tape mangles the signal far worse than encoding it in MP3 does.
Although for archival purposes, yes, a lossless codec should always be preferred.
The last century taught us a very important lesson that our military and civilian leaders hopefully will not forget: it is far easier to try to stay on top of technology and keep the military forces current than suddenly ramp up training and technology only when a threat appears.
While I strongly disagree with this administration's (ab)use of the our nation's armed forces and the government contractors who are becoming billionaires because of it, please understand that the military has many important roles besides defense.
Maybe that's why the Russians still use vacuum tubes in MiGs.
Even the mighty U.S. has a few planes flying with vacuum tubes. I worked in a Air Force avionics shop 6 years ago and the oldest system we maintained was a C-130 autopilot. The whole thing probably had around 25 tubes.
The newest system in the shop was the INS (intertial navigation system) for the MH-53J (in fact, it's likely that I worked on the very aircraft pictured). This was a rather elaborate system, so our troubleshooting was mostly limited to "yep, this unit is bad, order a new one." The computer that ran the test bench was an original IBM with an 8088 processor.
I'm an I.T. guy now instead of an airman, but I still sometimes miss getting to play around with solder, o-scopes, and servos...
I rarely use eBay for selling my miscellaneous junk anymore. They've made it so difficult and raised the listing fees so high that it's just not worth it. They also do little to prevent fraud (because they make money off it anyway) and they also have no problem taking down your auction and refusing to refund the listing fees if some giant software house in Washington doesn't want you to resell legitimate software.
Craigslist has gained enough critical mass that I can sell just about anything right here in my city. The listing is free, there's no shipping, and I'm MUCH less likely to get ripped off by the person who shows up at my front door to hand me cash versus some anonymous address on the other side of the country.
What I wonder, though, is whether there's a middle ground: a "pro-sumer" router. Maybe somebody has got some suggestions.
There sure is: a salvaged or home-built PC with Smoothwall, m0n0wall, IPCop, or pfSense. Any of these make an excellent home or small office router. Because you select the hardware yourself, you get to choose how fast, flexible, or reliable the resulting router is.
You want coal-fired electrical plants? No problem. We own the coal mines. You want hydro-electric power? No problem. We own the dams. You want nuclear power plants? No problem. We own the uranium mines. You want solar power? No prob Pause Solar power isnt feasible.
At a previous job, I was witness to a couple of examples of how not to do it...
When I got hired as an admin for a startup consulting company, I realized I was in for a challenge. My boss had already deployed a few servers, but it turns out he wasn't very creative with the naming conventions. The first server was called "dualath" because it contained two Athlon CPUs. The next one after that was also an SMP Athlon machine, so it was thus dubbed dualath2. To my knowledge, they're both still running although at least one has been updgraded to a single Opteron processor.
After the incidents above, we started naming some servers after the names of elements but quickly realized we were going to have a problem. You see, my boss was a horrible speeler. He woke me at 3AM one night because he couldn't log into a new server that I had set up during the day. After about a half-hour of coaching him over the phone, I figured out that he didn't realize there was a Y and two Ls in "beryllium".
I had the same idea but these converter boxes aren't really that big a deal.
First: they aren't free. You'll be hard-pressed to find any converter boxes for less than $50, so you're still paying between $10-$20 per box. I would bet anything that once the government coupons have expired, all of the converter box prices will magically dip to $35-$45.
Second, the coupons are only good for a particular class of converter box: 1 RF input plus 1 RF and/or composite output. Any additional features (like composite input or digital output) make the box inelgible for use with the government coupon.
I bought a couple of Zenith converter boxes and they work fine for receiving digital TV. Upon disassembly, though, there's not much to them. A power supply plus a mainboard containing a RAM chip, the flash ROM, and an SOC made by LSI. That's it. I have more research to do, but so far it looks like the most hackable part (within my skill set at least) is the power supply.
I think they're having an sarcasm-a-thon in the reviews for this thing:
I knew my day was going to improve when the truck pulled up at my home with this cable deep within. No ordinary truck, this one was Holy White, and the gold Delivery logo sparkled like a thousand suns reflected through shards of the purest ice formed with unadulterated water collected at the beginning of the universe. The driver, clad in a robe colored the softest of white, floated towards me on the cool fog of a hundred fire extinguishers. He smiled benevolently, like a father looking down upon his only child, and handed me a package wrapped in gold beaten thin to the point where you could see through it. I didn't have to sign, because the driver could see within my heart, and knew that I was pure. Upon opening the package, an angelic choir started to sing, and reached a crescendo as I laid this cable on my stereo system. Instantly, my antiquated equipment transformed into components made from the clearest diamond-semiconductor. The cable knew where to go, and hooked itself into the correct ports without help from me - all the while, the choir sang praises to the almighty digital god. With trepidation, I pushed "play," and was instantly enveloped in a sound that echoed the creation of all matter, a sound that vibrated every cell in my body to perfection. I was instantly taken to the next plane, where I saw the all-father. I knew with my entire soul, that all was good in the world.
I think you're a little too quick to judge a situation that you had no part in. If the OP was telling the truth, he didn't find out the speakers were crap until AFTER he bid on them, hence all the backpedaling. Yes, it was rather dumb to bid on an item before researching it, but everyone (and I do mean EVERYONE, even myself) has made at least one stupid purchase in their life. It's part of the process that we call "learning from your mistakes."
Also, I can't be the only one who's getting a little tired of seeing the word "douchebag" in every other blog/Digg/Slashdot comment lately.
I wish I could mod you higher, that's a smashing article (pun intended).
One of the quotes in there confirmed something that I had long suspected:
"According to Bradsher, internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills."
Profit maximization, as long as their isn't collusion, is not illegal.
Every company in the same industry jacking up their prices for similar services in lock-step is collusion, even when there are no smoky, back-room meetings taking place. They all do the same thing, knowing that if they all do it, they all reap the rewards. This is how the cell industry has always worked because there are only a handful of players with an extremely high barrier to entry and a regulatory agency that's as good as on their payroll.
This is pretty much the very reason I stopped reading Tom's Hardware about 6 years ago. They went from the useful site with good info to sensationalistic 20-page stories with no (or worse, misleading) content.
Operating systems still aren't designed around these things, they are designed for physical rotating disks.
How exactly are current OSes designed for physical rotating disks?
You wouldn't design an OS around the hard disk any more than you would design one around the keyboard or power supply. As far as any OS is concerned,/dev/sda is just a block device, no matter whether it's a single-spindle hard disk, solid state disk, or a 42-disk hardware RAID 5. If the SSD needs any special treatment (such as wear-leveling), that function should be abstracted away and implemented in the drive itself, not the OS.
The phrase "real world benchmarks" is an oxymoron. There's no such thing as a real-world benchmark. Either you're simulating regular usage of something or you're actually using it. If you're actually using it, you can't use any specific numbers collected because they're going to change the next time you use it because you likely won't use it exactly the same way as before.
Wow, um, you definitely could use some edumacation on how SSDs and hard drives in general work. Here, let me help.
after using Seagate cheap stuff (SATA) and SCSI for years and never seen these things actually fail (besides stupid filesystems)
Then you don't handle very many hard drives. I work in a data center and around 5% of the disks we buy fail within a few months. We don't have one brand in particular that we use because they seem to all fail at about the same rate. (Seagate does have the best warranty and RMA program, though.)
I wait for Seagate, Fujitsu, Hitachi like known brands to ship their SSD rather than being abused by some memory vendor who has no clue about the hard disks to buy some overpriced flash memory fantasy.
Who do you think Seagate, Western Digital, and Fujitsu will buy their memory from? Those companies manufacture hard disks, not memory chips. They have huge investments in the production of mechanical drives. It's possible that some of them might set up memory fabs at some point, but that could still be a long way off because mechanical drives are not going to be completely obsolete for quite some time. In the short term (and possibly long term), they're going to be outsourcing flash chips for their SSDs from lots of companies you've never heard of before.
I also don't know the actual reliability of SSD too. What about journaling? Can it handle? A journal is still needed on SSD drive, what if kernel fails or OS filesystem layer goes nuts? A journal will be in same area of disk and will be written over and over millions of times.
It's too early to tell what the long-term reliability of current SSDs will be, but it's dead-certain that they will improve regardless. (Keep in mind that all early hard disks came with defects on them from the _factory_ and users were expected to format around them, so SSDs already have a good head start in terms of reliability.) SSDs were just introduced and haven't had much real-world testing yet. However, all of the manufacturers have been marketing them as replacements for mechanical hard disks, so clearly they expect the lifespan of an SSD to come close to that of a mechanical disk.
Journaling isn't a concern, because all of these drives implement wear leveling to lengthen the life of the drive.
I could never buy the "speed" claims of SSD
You don't have to buy anyone's claims, look at the numbers yourself. The read speed of SSDs beats the pants off mechanical disks. And I believe they've caught up on write speeds already.
not just because I use very fast SCSI stuff but I actually see the horrible performance of them in my smart phone, HD Camera. It is like performance suicide if someone dares to put a very complex applications to "memory card" instead of phones built in memory.
Err, yeah, I'm pretty sure your bottleneck is going to be the smart phone with it's 200MHz CPU and 0.9MB/sec max transfer rate.
They are trying to ship it before it is a technology fit to general use. Much like some video sites existed while everyone had to struggle with 56K modem.
The problem is that they're hidously expensive. SSDs are just fine for general use. There are people using them that don't have a problem with them. Yes, there are some drawbacks because they're an early technology, but it will get better with time. Remember the first LCD monitors? People said those would never catch on. They were analog only, had a very narrow viewing angle, displayed washed-out colors and horrible refresh rates. They were also hideously expensive but eventually these problems were fixed and price came down until they were comparable with CRTs. In just a couple years, you won't be able to buy a CRT monitor at an affordable price because LCDs have made them obsolete in just about every field.
The same thing will happen with mechanical drives and SSDs.
It's surprising that you, with your impressive multiple degrees and whatnot, do not appear to be aware that the lay-person's definition of "average" is synonomous with your definition of "mean".
TV is for old people! The internet has confirmed it.
This has bum-fuck nothing to do with the Internet. What this is really saying is that the older generation is (perhaps wisely) more likely to tune into free local broadcast programming rather than shell out a huge monthly fee for satellite or cable programming.
I'm with you on this one. Windows keys annoy the shit out of me.
- They don't serve any purpose that Ctrl and Alt couldn't. You can open up the Start Menu or KDE menu! Well congratulations, I can do the same thing with Ctrl+Esc or my mouse.
- It's one more piece of Microsoft branding that I have to look at every day. At work, I have a Windows license on the side of my workstation, a "Certified for Windows Vista" sticker on my monitor of all things, a Microsoft mouse, and two Windows logos on my keyboard. And I run Linux for fuck's sake.
- Every keyboard and laptop manufacturer makes the Windows key slightly different, so it's impossible to train your muscle memory to hit them if you switch between several keyboards daily. Worse, this slightly-different placement prompts keyboards makers to produce keyboards where the Ctrl and Alt keys are slightly different sizes. So you see, it has this viral effect on other keys on the keyboard as well.
- Playing Quake in 1996. Oh what fun it was to chase an enemy down for half a minute waiting patiently for a perfect shot and right when they pause to take a breath you slam down on what you think is the Ctrl key and... bring up a goddamn Start menu! I wanted to KILL, not bring up my recent documents!
One of my favorite laptops (a Dell Inspiron 1100) stuck the Windows keys way up out of the way in the upper right-hand corner. It was a really nice touch, but unfortunately MS must have caught them because it was the only model I ever saw them do that on.
I do have a Model M, by the way, but for some reason it's not all "clicky" as the rest I've tried. I can't use it on a daily basis though because the keys are too heavy and my fingers get tired after only about 5 minutes of typing.
As someone who sits in front of a computer all day, I'd pay absolutely any amount of money to buy a keyboard that's got good but lightweight tactile response *without* the annoying clicking sound, has no Winders keys, and has a backslash in the right place. It can't be that hard to make a good keyboard, but even those few companies who actually are intent on making a good keyboard focus too hard on one aspect for marketing purposes and ignore everything else that matters. This Das Keyboard is just yet another example.
Slashdot Mirror
A few years back, the company I worked for tried pushing Windows 2003 terminal servers (using Linux as thin clients) for its clients. It actually worked rather well, but there was one major drawback: since Windows 2003 was a "server" OS, a lot of desktop applications and workstation hardware flat out refused to support it.
Our biggest challenge was printer drivers. Practically no printer manufacturers released Win2k3 drivers, because it was the only major MS operating system at the time that didn't have some sort of workstation edition. Even though there was no technical hurdles to providing the drivers, the installation packages would refuse to run, saying that they didn't support the OS. I was usually the one stuck having to hack in the manufacturer's Windows 2000 drivers just so our customers could print their stuff. In one case, we ended up deploying a Linux CUPS server just to forward the print jobs through because the Windows drivers were so terrible.
The psychoacoustic models of MP3 compression must have done wonders for the ancient recording.
As long as the quality settings are high enough, I wouldn't think it would matter much. The encoding scheme is designed to survive a hostile medium. (Audio.) The original magnetic tape mangles the signal far worse than encoding it in MP3 does.
Although for archival purposes, yes, a lossless codec should always be preferred.
Wow, cynical much?
The last century taught us a very important lesson that our military and civilian leaders hopefully will not forget: it is far easier to try to stay on top of technology and keep the military forces current than suddenly ramp up training and technology only when a threat appears.
While I strongly disagree with this administration's (ab)use of the our nation's armed forces and the government contractors who are becoming billionaires because of it, please understand that the military has many important roles besides defense.
Maybe that's why the Russians still use vacuum tubes in MiGs.
Even the mighty U.S. has a few planes flying with vacuum tubes. I worked in a Air Force avionics shop 6 years ago and the oldest system we maintained was a C-130 autopilot. The whole thing probably had around 25 tubes.
The newest system in the shop was the INS (intertial navigation system) for the MH-53J (in fact, it's likely that I worked on the very aircraft pictured). This was a rather elaborate system, so our troubleshooting was mostly limited to "yep, this unit is bad, order a new one." The computer that ran the test bench was an original IBM with an 8088 processor.
I'm an I.T. guy now instead of an airman, but I still sometimes miss getting to play around with solder, o-scopes, and servos...
I rarely use eBay for selling my miscellaneous junk anymore. They've made it so difficult and raised the listing fees so high that it's just not worth it. They also do little to prevent fraud (because they make money off it anyway) and they also have no problem taking down your auction and refusing to refund the listing fees if some giant software house in Washington doesn't want you to resell legitimate software.
Craigslist has gained enough critical mass that I can sell just about anything right here in my city. The listing is free, there's no shipping, and I'm MUCH less likely to get ripped off by the person who shows up at my front door to hand me cash versus some anonymous address on the other side of the country.
There sure is: a salvaged or home-built PC with Smoothwall, m0n0wall, IPCop, or pfSense. Any of these make an excellent home or small office router. Because you select the hardware yourself, you get to choose how fast, flexible, or reliable the resulting router is.
You want coal-fired electrical plants? No problem. We own the coal mines.
You want hydro-electric power? No problem. We own the dams.
You want nuclear power plants? No problem. We own the uranium mines.
You want solar power? No prob Pause Solar power isnt feasible.
At a previous job, I was witness to a couple of examples of how not to do it...
When I got hired as an admin for a startup consulting company, I realized I was in for a challenge. My boss had already deployed a few servers, but it turns out he wasn't very creative with the naming conventions. The first server was called "dualath" because it contained two Athlon CPUs. The next one after that was also an SMP Athlon machine, so it was thus dubbed dualath2. To my knowledge, they're both still running although at least one has been updgraded to a single Opteron processor.
After the incidents above, we started naming some servers after the names of elements but quickly realized we were going to have a problem. You see, my boss was a horrible speeler. He woke me at 3AM one night because he couldn't log into a new server that I had set up during the day. After about a half-hour of coaching him over the phone, I figured out that he didn't realize there was a Y and two Ls in "beryllium".
I had the same idea but these converter boxes aren't really that big a deal.
First: they aren't free. You'll be hard-pressed to find any converter boxes for less than $50, so you're still paying between $10-$20 per box. I would bet anything that once the government coupons have expired, all of the converter box prices will magically dip to $35-$45.
Second, the coupons are only good for a particular class of converter box: 1 RF input plus 1 RF and/or composite output. Any additional features (like composite input or digital output) make the box inelgible for use with the government coupon.
I bought a couple of Zenith converter boxes and they work fine for receiving digital TV. Upon disassembly, though, there's not much to them. A power supply plus a mainboard containing a RAM chip, the flash ROM, and an SOC made by LSI. That's it. I have more research to do, but so far it looks like the most hackable part (within my skill set at least) is the power supply.
I think they're having an sarcasm-a-thon in the reviews for this thing:
I think you're a little too quick to judge a situation that you had no part in. If the OP was telling the truth, he didn't find out the speakers were crap until AFTER he bid on them, hence all the backpedaling. Yes, it was rather dumb to bid on an item before researching it, but everyone (and I do mean EVERYONE, even myself) has made at least one stupid purchase in their life. It's part of the process that we call "learning from your mistakes."
Also, I can't be the only one who's getting a little tired of seeing the word "douchebag" in every other blog/Digg/Slashdot comment lately.
Who didn't think it was going to come to this when the FCC mandated GPS capability on all phones sold after a particular date (2005, I believe)?
I wish I could mod you higher, that's a smashing article (pun intended).
One of the quotes in there confirmed something that I had long suspected:
More proof that it doesn't pay to doubt Einstein.
Profit maximization, as long as their isn't collusion, is not illegal.
Every company in the same industry jacking up their prices for similar services in lock-step is collusion, even when there are no smoky, back-room meetings taking place. They all do the same thing, knowing that if they all do it, they all reap the rewards. This is how the cell industry has always worked because there are only a handful of players with an extremely high barrier to entry and a regulatory agency that's as good as on their payroll.
This is pretty much the very reason I stopped reading Tom's Hardware about 6 years ago. They went from the useful site with good info to sensationalistic 20-page stories with no (or worse, misleading) content.
Operating systems still aren't designed around these things, they are designed for physical rotating disks.
How exactly are current OSes designed for physical rotating disks?
You wouldn't design an OS around the hard disk any more than you would design one around the keyboard or power supply. As far as any OS is concerned, /dev/sda is just a block device, no matter whether it's a single-spindle hard disk, solid state disk, or a 42-disk hardware RAID 5. If the SSD needs any special treatment (such as wear-leveling), that function should be abstracted away and implemented in the drive itself, not the OS.
The phrase "real world benchmarks" is an oxymoron. There's no such thing as a real-world benchmark. Either you're simulating regular usage of something or you're actually using it. If you're actually using it, you can't use any specific numbers collected because they're going to change the next time you use it because you likely won't use it exactly the same way as before.
Wow, um, you definitely could use some edumacation on how SSDs and hard drives in general work. Here, let me help.
after using Seagate cheap stuff (SATA) and SCSI for years and never seen these things actually fail (besides stupid filesystems)
Then you don't handle very many hard drives. I work in a data center and around 5% of the disks we buy fail within a few months. We don't have one brand in particular that we use because they seem to all fail at about the same rate. (Seagate does have the best warranty and RMA program, though.)
I wait for Seagate, Fujitsu, Hitachi like known brands to ship their SSD rather than being abused by some memory vendor who has no clue about the hard disks to buy some overpriced flash memory fantasy.
Who do you think Seagate, Western Digital, and Fujitsu will buy their memory from? Those companies manufacture hard disks, not memory chips. They have huge investments in the production of mechanical drives. It's possible that some of them might set up memory fabs at some point, but that could still be a long way off because mechanical drives are not going to be completely obsolete for quite some time. In the short term (and possibly long term), they're going to be outsourcing flash chips for their SSDs from lots of companies you've never heard of before.
I also don't know the actual reliability of SSD too. What about journaling? Can it handle? A journal is still needed on SSD drive, what if kernel fails or OS filesystem layer goes nuts? A journal will be in same area of disk and will be written over and over millions of times.
It's too early to tell what the long-term reliability of current SSDs will be, but it's dead-certain that they will improve regardless. (Keep in mind that all early hard disks came with defects on them from the _factory_ and users were expected to format around them, so SSDs already have a good head start in terms of reliability.) SSDs were just introduced and haven't had much real-world testing yet. However, all of the manufacturers have been marketing them as replacements for mechanical hard disks, so clearly they expect the lifespan of an SSD to come close to that of a mechanical disk.
Journaling isn't a concern, because all of these drives implement wear leveling to lengthen the life of the drive.
I could never buy the "speed" claims of SSD
You don't have to buy anyone's claims, look at the numbers yourself. The read speed of SSDs beats the pants off mechanical disks. And I believe they've caught up on write speeds already.
not just because I use very fast SCSI stuff but I actually see the horrible performance of them in my smart phone, HD Camera. It is like performance suicide if someone dares to put a very complex applications to "memory card" instead of phones built in memory.
Err, yeah, I'm pretty sure your bottleneck is going to be the smart phone with it's 200MHz CPU and 0.9MB/sec max transfer rate.
They are trying to ship it before it is a technology fit to general use. Much like some video sites existed while everyone had to struggle with 56K modem.
The problem is that they're hidously expensive. SSDs are just fine for general use. There are people using them that don't have a problem with them. Yes, there are some drawbacks because they're an early technology, but it will get better with time. Remember the first LCD monitors? People said those would never catch on. They were analog only, had a very narrow viewing angle, displayed washed-out colors and horrible refresh rates. They were also hideously expensive but eventually these problems were fixed and price came down until they were comparable with CRTs. In just a couple years, you won't be able to buy a CRT monitor at an affordable price because LCDs have made them obsolete in just about every field.
The same thing will happen with mechanical drives and SSDs.
It's surprising that you, with your impressive multiple degrees and whatnot, do not appear to be aware that the lay-person's definition of "average" is synonomous with your definition of "mean".
TV is for old people! The internet has confirmed it.
This has bum-fuck nothing to do with the Internet. What this is really saying is that the older generation is (perhaps wisely) more likely to tune into free local broadcast programming rather than shell out a huge monthly fee for satellite or cable programming.
Hmm, but you put up your real-time location on the Internet for everyone to see and possibly archive?
Most spam is totally useless.
Is there a correlation here that some spam is useful?
How appropriate, when I clicked on the link to TFA, the first thing I see is a pop-up ad.
The irony of getting spammed while trying to read an article about spam...
I'm with you on this one. Windows keys annoy the shit out of me.
- They don't serve any purpose that Ctrl and Alt couldn't. You can open up the Start Menu or KDE menu! Well congratulations, I can do the same thing with Ctrl+Esc or my mouse.
- It's one more piece of Microsoft branding that I have to look at every day. At work, I have a Windows license on the side of my workstation, a "Certified for Windows Vista" sticker on my monitor of all things, a Microsoft mouse, and two Windows logos on my keyboard. And I run Linux for fuck's sake.
- Every keyboard and laptop manufacturer makes the Windows key slightly different, so it's impossible to train your muscle memory to hit them if you switch between several keyboards daily. Worse, this slightly-different placement prompts keyboards makers to produce keyboards where the Ctrl and Alt keys are slightly different sizes. So you see, it has this viral effect on other keys on the keyboard as well.
- Playing Quake in 1996. Oh what fun it was to chase an enemy down for half a minute waiting patiently for a perfect shot and right when they pause to take a breath you slam down on what you think is the Ctrl key and... bring up a goddamn Start menu! I wanted to KILL, not bring up my recent documents!
One of my favorite laptops (a Dell Inspiron 1100) stuck the Windows keys way up out of the way in the upper right-hand corner. It was a really nice touch, but unfortunately MS must have caught them because it was the only model I ever saw them do that on.
I do have a Model M, by the way, but for some reason it's not all "clicky" as the rest I've tried. I can't use it on a daily basis though because the keys are too heavy and my fingers get tired after only about 5 minutes of typing.
As someone who sits in front of a computer all day, I'd pay absolutely any amount of money to buy a keyboard that's got good but lightweight tactile response *without* the annoying clicking sound, has no Winders keys, and has a backslash in the right place. It can't be that hard to make a good keyboard, but even those few companies who actually are intent on making a good keyboard focus too hard on one aspect for marketing purposes and ignore everything else that matters. This Das Keyboard is just yet another example.