Yep. I'm deaf, in IT and on call. I have an alarm clock now, designed for deaf people of course, that has the giant vibrator that goes under the pillow. The alarm clock also has a port to plug in a lamp so it can flash the lamp (though this won't help your wife) and a phone port that activates the system whenever someone calls. Basically, if either the alarm goes off or someone calls my on call emergency number then the pillow shakes like it's having a seizure, the lamp on the bed side table goes on, off, on, off, etc and also it has a strobe that flashes. As a bonus it has a 24 hour clock option. I used to have a sonic boom alarm clock for deaf people that also had the phone jack but the clock couldn't keep time. Every week I had to re-adjust it to have the proper time again (every week it would be about 7 minutes off). The downside to all of this is it always woke my girlfriend up too (with the old one that didn't have the flashing lights) but the good news is that giant vibrator you stick under you're pillow can be used for all sorts of other things that your girlfriend or wife may enjoy ;-)

I don't know if she looks good. I mean to me she does and sure she's cute but if you look closely at the photo you can see the lines near where the cheeks meet the mouth that says "I'm old". After careful analysis, I wouldn't need to look her up on IMDB to think she looks older then 33 but I can tell she's trying to hide it well.

I agree that any cyanogenmod supported phone is plenty. You can get a phone from the carrier if you want. As long as cyanogenmod says it's supported then you root the phone, install cyanogenmod and can use you phone as a WiFi to 3G/4G hub without requiring any support from your carrier or even for them to understand what it is you are doing. I have used my CM7 powered Evo 4G as a WiFi hotspot for my laptop from time to time without having any contract or support from my carrier to enable this feature.

Dental floss? I got a spool of waxed linen sold just for lacing cables for $3 at the local hardware store.

HTML5 cannot replace webcams to the best of my knowledge. Any site that wants to use your web cam will need flash. I know google is working on doing this with HTML5 but, to the best of my knowledge, it hasn't been released yet and, even when it is, will it be done using pure HTML5? Will it be done with open source code? Maybe but unless it's done in a way that's free and open source (which it very well may be if google does it) and all sites that use web cams adopt this immediately then, unless that's done, then people will still need flash.

I went to Canada in March 2010 and I had an option with AT&T to pay for roaming data. I forget how much but AT&T had the option where I paid them ahead of time for X amount of data to be used from my US AT&T phone while I was in other countries and I would therefor not be billed roaming data rates while I was out of the AT&T network. I went to Canada and used data on my iPhone the whole time and when I got my cell phone bill, I was not charged a dime for roaming aside from the pre-paid cost I agreed to. See if Verizon offers the same thing. I will have to do this as well since I am now on Android with Spring and planning to go back to Canada soon but I have to admit that the AT&T roaming pre-pay was great. I will have to look into this again soon since I am now using Android on Sprint and planning to head up to Canada for a visit. Oh, and of coarse, use an Android or iPhone as a WiFi hotspot (iPhone supports that. right? I think). If you have a custom rom on your android then you don't even need to pay the fee the cell provider charges you to setup a hotspot on your phone.

No you are doing something very wrong. All distros I know of check the disk via fsck every so often. Typically if it has been more then 45 days since the last fsck run then a check is done at boot time.

Well that could be the case @ stale wiki and if so, then that makes a lot more sense for why Red Hat would choose it. The wiki page should be updated though because that stale wiki would have completely turned me off btrfs for a long time. In this case, I retract what I said if there is in fact fsck capabilities for btrfs.

"a very small risk"? Have you never had a system crash that you have had to reboot? Have you never had to run fsck to scan and correct a disk? Everyone else I know who uses Linux has done both multiple times. This particular "shiny new toys", as you put it, is not production ready if it does not contain fsck capabilities and according to it's authors it does not. When I say "production ready", I am not referring to whether or not it's stable enough to run a production server farm but I mean whether or not it is capable to handle a Linux desktop system that is not designated for beta testing only. I would be happy to run btrfs when everything is complete but right now the authors of btrfs say that a nessecary component for generic system failure issues is not yet complete.

Turn your files into butter is right. Though I don't use Fedora, I was interested to look into btrfs again when I read this post on slashdot.

Much to my surprise, directly from the main btrfs wiki: "Note that Btrfs does not yet have a fsck tool that can fix errors. While Btrfs is stable on a stable machine, it is currently possible to corrupt a filesystem irrecoverably if your machine crashes or loses power on disks that don't handle flush requests correctly. This will be fixed when the fsck tool is ready."

Why would RedHat choose such a file system that does not have basic support for recovery of a file system after a system crashes? This has been an essential part of file systems since the as far back as I can remember.

I agree with the no letter boxing thing. I hate letter boxing but I also don't remember the last time I saw it. I watch all of my movies with mplayer and it's easy to remove letter boxing. First you play the movie for a few seconds somewhere in the middle with the cropdetect option and then you run it again with the crop option. For example, run the movie first with the following command:

mplayer dvd://1 -vf cropdetect -ss 600 -frames 25 -vf cropdetect -vo null

This will display, for each frame (25 frames in this case), a line with an option in brackets thats says something like "-vf crop=560:256:86:10". Since my display is 16:10 / 8:5 resolution then I just play the movie like so:

mplayer gamelbx.avi -vf crop=560:256:86:10,dsize=16/10

No more letter boxing. Problem solved. If I want to put the whole thing into one command (which can then easily be put into a shell script), assuming you're using bash, here it is as one command:

mplayer dvd://1 -vf $(mplayer dvd://1 -vf cropdetect -ss 600 -frames 25 -vf cropdetect -vo null 2>&1 | sed -e '/^\[CROP\]/!d;s/.* (-vf \([^)]\+\).*/\1/' | tail -1),dsize=16/10

Remember to replace dvd://1 (in both spots) with the movie you want to watch and "16/10" with the correct aspect ratio of the monitor you are watching it on and you are done. No more letter boxing in your movie.

Because the 1080p monitor was cheaper and on sale then the 1920x1200 even though I wanted the 1920x1200.

I'm still scratching my head over all of this but it seems to be like this is something specific to the way people who use fedora are trained or accustomed to using iptables. Is that right?

I use Ubuntu and Debian but the distro is irrelevant. I wrote a custom init.d script to start/stop/save iptables commands years ago. When I make changes to the firewall rules, I do it on the fly using the iptables command and then when I am done I run /etc/init.d/iptables save which just saves it to a file in etc using the iptables-save command. Fedora introducing some new way to make changes on the fly seems like something I have done since I have used ipchains predating iptables. Doesn't sound particularly new or interesting. It really doesn't sound new at all. It sounds like how system engineers and administrators have been doing iptables since before it was even iptables.

The only thing I am a little shocked about here and maybe this has to do with the fedora culture but people are saying they edit a file and then reload the file? That is without a doubt the wrong way to make any changes to your firewall. It's error prone based on the person making the changes. You may be the best and you may have never made a mistake but seriously, if you make one typo then iptables isn't going to read all your rules. Any experienced systems engineer or systems administrator would tell you to make the changes using the iptables command and then save it to a file with iptables-save. The only time that file should really ever need to be read/parsed is when the system boots and you know the file will work (assuming you have loaded any requisite modules first) because iptables created that file for you and not vice versa.

I use puppet myself and it is a great !@#$ing tool but as far as your yum question, I don't know what the answer is but on debian, ubuntu or anything else that uses the dpkg system, the answer is this

dpkg --get-selections package-name

This will return the package name you searched for, tab separated by it's install state. i.e. deinstall, install, hold, etc. Fairly easy to program to get the status of whether or not a package is installed.

I don't know if I will be able to get used to the concept of no minimize/maximize buttons or not. Maybe I will but none the less, no one should just remove such a strong staple of the UI and say "Hey I hope you enjoy it and if not, oh well". If they feel that strongly about removing them by default then they should but leave a option to re-enable them. It would be stupid to take them out and hope the rest of the world just happens to understand your design concepts.