Well, blame the english language for that one.
"Without Jobs, Will Open Souce Suffer? "
vs
"Without jobs and or employment, will open source suffer?"

Oops, you're absolutely right.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dilbert_Principle is not http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle

I am more of a believer in the dilbert principle. People will just get promoted until they suck at their job and become angry and resentful.

I was lucky enough to spend time in my last three weeks being shipped to different timezones on a glorified roadtrip to unfold network cables in poorly lit basements. I am a developer that was hired as a dev and never actually got to dev in 2 years there, until my group was closing and I was offered a job with less pay and more responsibility. I wrote my farewell email in 4 languages to make sure that all my contacts could read it.

The summaries

1. French (the language of managers) : Thank you for the chance to help me find myself. I wish you the best of luck with your future projects. (I was on a few failed projects)
2. English (the language of my peers) : So long and thanks for all the fish.
3. German (part of my roadtrip ) : Some google translated gibberish of how chocolate rain will purge the servers and that one day our company will learn that europe is on 230v and stop sending you 110 v transformers.
4. Klingon ( I was labeled as a trekkie so why not go out with a ka'plah) : Death to our enemies and long live us. (basically what our management was telling us to try to motivate us)

PS. I was leaving full in a poor emotional state. More or less astray dog with a heart full of napalm

Kosher pork though, or was it halal?

Wouldn't you be able to get a second job? A little consulting work or something if you want to spend more?

I feel the government should looks at e-taxes. If they come up with a good solution, cool, if not, then it won't fly. Then again, I consider music and videos to be a luxury item. I also consider the net to be a luxury item I gladly will shell out money for. I know I'm not in the majority here, I also know I cannot think of a proper way of getting the taxes to work, but hey, tiered (not fixed) income taxes weren't always around and it is now considered a given and a social equalizer.

A little background info. I am in Canada, I give approx 45% of my income to the government, and I know a lot of it is squandered. I understand though that the remainder winds up helping out a lot of people less fortunate than me.

This is an interesting response. I actually picked notepad because when it comes to viewing logfiles, it works reasonably well, it is one of my favorite MS products and I assumed that it would have 3 votes assides from me.

Why did the other 3200 people vote for this?

Just a heads up, if you're looking for an open source routing software, gEDA and Oregano are good options. The UI is no where near as nice as eagle's. I kind of enjoyed gEDA though. They also has rather anemic libraries if you deviate from standard issue parts, just like eagle. I think these should be a good start on that front.

On to matlab, have you tried scilab? Once again, not quite what you're asking for but it is open-source and can calculate matrices.

In general, I cannot recommend open-source physics stuff to people due to UI issues. Physics students want results and many are not all that comfortable with a computer. I am not trying to flamebait, I actually applaud you in your interest in these products. I feel that need a bit more polish before being able to seriously threaten the big boys.

A simple suggestion or two: if you're using ubuntu/debian, apt-get the packages, they are friendly and install nicely. Also, www.osalt.com is an interesting site to see if there are good open-source projects out there.

with enough hardware, anything is possible.

Here's a heads up on how LEDs work (not just for you, but in general). If you look at the frequency response of most leds, it will resemble an impulse function. Here's a pdf, on page 4 you see 4 peaks. You add them up, it makes a very uneven spectral response. http://media.digikey.com/pdf/Data%20Sheets/Optek%20PDFs/OVTL09LGAx.pdf

The way I can see it working is by using a phosphorescent surface. It could even out the frequencies a bit by adding harmonics. Still not as nice as a warm fire light though. You can make leds work and make the most perfect white light measured by a colorimeter. The main issue is that its frequency response will be empty still and it will make your world look at best, askew and at worst like it's trapped i the uncanny valley.

I'm luckily in Quebec and running on clean caribou killing hydro power.

These are going to be awesome in an office environment. Especially since the ceilings are so high and nobody likes changing the lights. But I have yet to find truly warm non-tungsten/halogen/mercury/fire/quartz/evil light for home use. I could not picture LEDs (which are basically antennas radiating a frequency that we happen to see) overtaking the other lights (heat sources that coincidentally give off visible light) in terms of color richness.

That is true. IMO in most cases this hard drive looks great.

My only issue is that most examples of hard disk bottlenecks I've seen were due to concurrent file access. Raiding is great for bandwidth... not so much for access time. Let's say someone is watching a video while you're doing some background re-encoding. A very common task btw. The movie may stutter. Now let's throw in some other tasks all with auto-save enabled, like word and a driver / antivirus program. Your seek time will become the limiting factor very very fast. The seek time on 5400 rpm drives is not that of an equivalent 7200. NCQ helps, but ncq shines even more on a pure 7200.

As for your statements:

They are true while talking about similar technologies. IIRC seagate stated using a fluid bearing on their 7200 line that made them produce less heat, noise, wear and consequently lowered their power requirements. I am not convinced without seeing tested results that a fluidic bearing would actually decrease it's friction at lower temperatures. It is supposedly non-newtonian.

As for the drive manufacturer's goals of speed/reliability and cost (important and not mentioned I think) most companies have several lines of products. An enterprise or business line for reliability and a gamer / home series for cost. In all seriousness WD/Seagate (re / es respectively) have a line of drives made for raiding. Those are the ones that should be used, they are tested and have higher tolerances. Think of them as the center cpus in a wafer. Then again, isn't the premise of most non-zero raids to kinda expect a hard drive to die, so you add a layer of redundancy?

I nearly spat all over my monitor/kb when I misread : "Microsoft donates 100k to ogg."

Wiggy.

I-river was great in that it supported ogg/vorbis encoded music. Mine also works with AA batteries for 30 hours of non-stop music. A pity it's not called the iIriver, then it would have been more successful. Here's a list of ogg capable mp3 players. http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/PortablePlayers

This hdd seems to be competing with the spinpoint f1 and the latest of seagate's 7200 RPM hdds. The kicker is this is a "green" series drive. It uses variable RPM technology. It actually spins at 5400 RPM quite often.
I'm still not convinced going green on the HDD will save energy as it drops 10 watts on your total load. In an array of arrays, there may be savings though. Gamers, remember, your power supply/CPU/video card are the biggest culprits. Lower power will generally equate to lower hear and thus less breakdowns though.
I'll wait a few months to see if there are recalls. If there are none, this drive looks like a winner.