I see. Well, good luck with your quest.

I'm not familiar with EAC, but I did catch the bit about moving away from XP. That is why I mentioned wine. Wine supports some software better than others, and EAC seems to work well. (Now that I look in their database, it appears that Polderbits is not listed, so all bets are off.) Are you acquainted with Wine?

Based on your description, it seems like Polderbits would suit your needs better than EAC since it is designed for the purpose of archiving analog audio, while EAC seems geared towards digital audio. It may be that neither one can be made to work well under Linux, but it sounded like you were interested in possibilities, so I shared the one that came to mind. YMMV.

If 'better than Audacity' means (for you) good at recording albums and splitting tracks, then you might want to check out Polderbits. I used it for the purpose of digitizing cassette tapes many years ago, and I'm sure it has only gotten better. In terms of general features it is very limited compared to Audacity, but it is good at automatically detecting sensible places to split tracks. It is only released for Windows, but it may run in Wine.

For all the grousing that goes on here in regard to grammar in slashdot entries, one might think such engineers would not be so rare, after all.

Does the wait staff at that Dennys have a high rate of turnover? Sounds like they need to add "cool with open carry" to their job listings. :c)

Well, sure. I was responding to the 'no dual-booting phones' portion of your comment, but it is true that no amount of Linux will help us compare Windows to iOS. (Well, perhaps that is not true. One day we may be able to install roughly the same Ubuntu on a Nokia Lumia as well as an iPhone. That might give us some kind of transitive benchmarks.)

The Nexus 4 can allegedly run both Android and Ubuntu: http://www.ubuntu.com/phone. I have not tried it, and I don't think there's a dual-booting bootloader yet, but it sounds interesting.

I know they both use the same kernel (more or less), but the software ecosystem is probably quite different, including the power management.

That would make sense, too.

Have you ever used TeXmacs, and do you have an opinion of it? I suspect you have, since "what you see is what you mean" is a phrase of which they are quite fond.

For those who have not: TeXmacs is a graphical editor which implements the typesetting rules from TeX in an editor whose interface is inspired by emacs. (M-x commands, and all.) It does not use LaTeX as an intermediate rendering engine. I used it for a while. It has some virtue.

Hear, hear! Moderation is first about sifting threads for quality discussion. Rewarding and penalizing commenters comes later. I wonder, does the grandparent also never mod down anonymous comments?

(Posting non-anonymously as I haven't had any mod points since Saturday.)

A fair point, which had completely slipped my mind.

I lived in Scotland for a spell, and (while I didn't do any driving there) I used to see billboards encouraging people to actually shut off their engines while stopped at a light. Blew my mind. To be fair, the lights there have a half-second yellow-red combo to indicate that the lights are about to be green again. But I am genuinely curious what the laws in the US might have to say about (a) putting an automatic transmission in park and (b) switching off the engine while at a light.

Has Waze really gotten better in this regard? I stopped using it after a couple of months because it was always pestering me with alerts that were tens of miles off my course. I think the idea of crowdsourcing traffic patterns is brilliant, but the idea of social driving is bizarre.

And don't get me started on the new Google Maps. It is unusable in landscape mode, which is how I mount my phone to the dashboard. The controls take up so much space that there is no room left on screen for the map.

I guess my first line above could have been paraphrased like this:

Your point, however, stands: it is clear that – whatever sparse checkout features git may have – git's 'sparse checkout' abilities were added because of popular demand, not because sparse checkouts are a good idea. You obviously view them as a crutch, and I have no argument; I even believe I can see where you're coming from. If I invested the time necessary to master git, and spent time collaborating with others and sharing my code, I would probably reach the same conclusions.