After 2000, it got to the point where hardly anyone even buys a sound card, and only specialized IO cards exist.
While i'm sure there is less of a market for many card types than there used to be the cards remain available and there are even PCIe models out there nowadays though the PCIe cards often seem to command a significant premium over PCI ones (PCIe sound cards seem to be particulally expensive).

While there are certainly cases where you are better off getting a new computer there are also plenty of cases where upgrading your existing one is a much cheaper way to get the performance you require.

The situation in ebook readers today reminds me of the situation in portable digital music players in April 2003, the month Apple introduced the iTunes Store. There were literally thousands of portable digital music players out there, the vast majority of which looked like portable USB keyfobs as far as operating systems were concerned, all of which played open unencrypted mp3 files. Then there was Apple selling their own proprietary-DRM'ed music files -- but it was integrated with the computer hardware and with their iPod music players. In the end people decided the convenience of having one application handle all their content whether local or located on a portable device was more important than the DRM, and the iPod won the portable digital music player contest by a landslide.

Right now, there are only three players that integrate content, software, and hardware: Sony, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. Amazon's Kindle wins the content war by a landslide, but their hardware looks dated and obsolete compared to the new readers from Sony and B&N. Sony's content situation is horrible -- books from Sony's ebook store actually cost more than paper books purchased in bookstores! The Nook right now is unobtainium and a bit unstable, as you'd expect from version 1.0 of a product, but is decidedly better hardware.

The wildcard is Apple. Will they do for ebooks what they did for digital music? The problem is that the iPad will have, realistically, a 5 hour battery life in normal usage, and that just isn't enough for most situations where I might haul my e-book reader. If I'm doing an intercontinental flight that is 10 hours long, a 5 hour battery life is a "don't even bother" for me. My Sony e-reader, on the other hand, will happily let me read books for 10 hours at a time, and still have plenty of battery life left, thanks to the e-ink display. It's just that my selection of content is rather limited -- all I have on it, for the most part, is Baen Webscriptions stuff (no DRM, reasonable prices), and you can only read so much sci-fi warporn before you're sick and tired of sci-fi warporn.

So I'm keeping my eye on Apple. But unless Steve Jobs has a change of heart on e-ink (which he sneers at) or there's some revolution in LCD technology that allows it to generate readable displays without a backlight and thus get decent battery life (don't care if it's as good as e-ink battery life, but it has to be at least competitive with the Nook's battery life!), the hardware simply isn't good enough. Otherwise I'd be reading books on my iPhone via Stanza or etc., which I'm not doing because realistically I only get three hours of battery life that way -- far less than if I fire up my e-ink based reader.

Oh, what about all these *other* ebook readers? Some of them have nice hardware and software. But it's all about content, in the end. I suspect they'll end up just like all those portable digital music players that plugged in like keyfobs -- they'll still sell, but the readers that allow a fully integrated content cycle (purchase, transfer, read) will be the ones that most people buy, because for most people, they just want to purchase books in a convenient manner and not worry about how they get onto the ebook reader.

http://techieblurbs.blogspot.com/2010/02/howto-replace-filevault-with-encfs.html

Be safer by using open-source. FileVault is a proprietary tool from a big and famous manufacturer. This means that you can be sure that there is a built-in backdoor for government bodies to use.

On the other side...

There are known problems with EncFS, as it only support basic POSIX operations (no locking, extended attributes, etc...). This works well for simple file storage or multiplatform applications, like MacPorts, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc..., but encrypting your whole homedir is known not to work.

So what is your priority? avoid file corruption or avoid the NSA?

I don't, except for the liter since that's how soda is sold. I guess that weighs about a kg, but that doesn't help much. There may be athletic events measured in meters, but that also doesn't help with my intuition!

If their online "profits" are any indicator, we'll see where the rest of their profits go as we all slip further and further into cloud computing. The rise in popularity of Mac OS and other alternate platforms make the "switch" pretty easy these days.

they've pretty much been whipping on the US Air Force when it comes to both aircraft and lasers and missile defense systems.

This has been going on since the 1950s.

Navy: F-8 Crusader. Air Force: F-100, F-101, etc...
Navy: F-4 Phantom II Air Force: F-101, F-105 - Result: AF forced to buy Navy planes.
Navy: A-4 and A-7. Air Force: THUNDERCHIEF! followed by A-7 (another AF forced to buy Navy planes)
Navy: Standard Missile (Ground to air) Air Force: Bunch of crap. Nike, Bomarc, etc...
Navy: Sparrow AAM Air Force: Falcon AAM
Navy: Phoenix AAM Air Force: Still Falcon AAM
Navy: Trident Air Force: MX - Guess which one is still in service.
Navy: F-14 Air Force: F-15. Close, but the Navy aircraft had superior long range ability (100+Mile range with Phoenix AAM) and the Air Force craft was a little better dogfighter.

Basically, there are very few situations where the Navy has had inferior equipment to the Air Force since the mid 1950s. When it's close, as in the F-16 vs F/A-18 or the F-14 vs the F-15 (hated seeing the Tomcat wear out, carrier life is rough) usually the Navy aircraft costs a lot less to operate.

What? Apple's monitors are identical to everyone else's, afaik. I know the displays themselves are all produce by the same people, Apple's just uses nicer glass and cabling. Also, Apple's multi-touch mouse does not well fit the human hand, just like all their previous mice.

I have OO and Office installed on the same machine, and I've moved to using OO for all word processing. It's a little slower, but I find it's much more reliable. Word seems to randomly glitch more on longer documents with complicated formatting. That and the built-in PDF export options make it more appealing for me.

Now, I find Calc to be clearly inferior to Excel; and their database program (forget the name) seemed even more primitive.

and of course OO is heavily dependent on Java.

Is it? I alway turn off the Java runtime whenever I install OO on any machine, and I've never noticed any problems. I don't use scripting or macros, though.

"Economists have modeled cap and trade versus the other alternatives (in a game theoretic sense)"

No politicians in that model? Cap-and-trade involves vast money flows that are not open to public scrutiny. If the penalty money goes into general revenues via a tax, then who gets the money will be somewhat more transparent.

This was a hearing in the federal court there is no further avenue of appeal.

The Full Court, the High Court? This was a decision at first instance, appeals are always available.

The only higher body is the high court which is mainly concerned with constitutional law etc which this case has no avenue too.

The High Court does deal with issues of constitutional law, but not exclusively (or even primarily) so. Furthermore the law under consideration arises out of the powers granted to parliament under section 51 (placita xviii & xxix) of the Constitution.

Whether or not this is appealed will depend on an assessment of how solid the judgment is.

A sparkline (or any graphic) is a matrix of points (pixels), that they in this case make proportional (resize to fit) the associated location (insertion point) in your document.

Part of what they're trying to patent, is sizing an inline graphic to the same height as your font.

What's with the bullshit redirect disguised as a Google page? If you're going to push a badly written, badly designed and blatantly agenda-pushing website on us at least have the balls to link directly to it.

And yet they export more goods than we do. A LOT has changed since 2000, mostly China ramping up production capacity as rapidly as possible. They've been building out manufacturing and power plants at an unprecedented rate. Let's not forget our massive trade imbalance, either.

Actually, there is a newer version that handles interrupts (required a very small set of changes in the core and all the interrupt hardware is in the FIO block except debugging interrupts which are in a new FDEBUG block). Saving the processor state is no worse than saving the things you use on the stack just like any other processor. There's more on this newer version at: http://www.awce.com/classroom/course/view.php?id=11