I bought a WRT610N refurbished a few years ago. It was a V1. I found out they made a V2 because the V1's CPU was too slow to run wireless N at full speed, and running DD-WRT on it was even slower. It also ran pretty hot and had internal antennas. It didn't seem to like DD-WRT much but that was probably because it was new and not well supported yet.

I replaced it with an ASUS (N-16?) which has external antennas and has worked great. Supposedly the ASUS firmware is bad but I wouldn't know because I replaced it immediately (decided to try Tomato).

Linksys has always been much better with replacement firmware (they didn't used to have static DHCP in their stock firmware). Now other brands are offering better hardware and practically encourage you to replace the firmware. Personally I wouldn't bother with Linksys anymore unless you're putting it somewhere visible and want something that looks pretty.

The funny part is that originally the investment banks (Goldman Sachs, Bear Sterns) were not part of the FDIC and thus could not receive money from the Federal Reserve because they were not real banks. They had to be re-classified as normal banks to make it legal to give them money. But that wasn't a problem because The Secretary of the Treasury at the time was a former CEO of Goldman Sachs.

I'll have you know that I am very cool. I listen to hip-hop.

Don't worry we already had patent reform. The America Invents Act. All fixed! Thank you Congress!

Even if you are paying, you may still be the product. Do you really think your TV provider isn't tracking everything you do with those nifty little boxes?

I remember the idea of a small tax on trading came up back in 08/09 when the government was trying to figure out how to fix the system. The big players killed that one off real quick.

I don't believe Access comes with a standard Office installation. And while it does have VBA built in which would allow you to write software to interact with the database, VBA is a horrible horrible language. In fact if you're really that masochistic why don't you go all out and write a VBA application in an Excel spreadsheet to interact with your Access database. You'll know you're doing it right if you feel really dirty the whole time you're writing it.

I don't see how that would be a problem. The issue with thumb drives is to avoid viruses that exploit autorun. Windows allows you to disable USB mass storage devices. Smart phones are not an issue unless you try to connect them to your computer, which wouldn't work because they would likely be recognized as mass storage devices and prevented from being mounted.

Yeah things like code completion and syntax checking are terrible for people trying to learn.

Just to chime in here years ago I bought some Sony ear buds. I had to RMA one pair because the cord self destructed. The replacement was an upgraded model that also self destructed, but this time after the warranty expired.

To be fair I had the same problem with Shure headphones. The rubber couldn't handle the oil from my skin and would eventually crack. But at least the Shures had a 2 year warranty rather than the 1 month BS the Sonys had. I guess it's not as big of a problem if you're not using ear buds you're in contact with all the time but I've sworn off of Sony because of this and other quality issues with their products. I would rather spend $100 more and get something that won't break and sounds much better anyway.

That's a shame. I've always gone there when I need a new pair of ear buds. That's how I found out about the Fischer Audio DBA-02s I bought over a year ago and couldn't be happier with. diyaudio looks like it's oriented more towards large sound systems and headroom desn't seem to cover the obscure brands.

Well, MS is somewhat to blame for providing the OEMs with keys that only let you activate copies of Windows installed by their crapware-loaded discs. At least this was the case last time I tried to use a normal disc on a new HP computer (admittedly it was Win XP).

Lately I've been using both Eclipse (for Python) and VS2010 (for C#) at work and I really don't get why people are so crazy about VS. I work with someone who kept talking about how great it is and when I asked why his only response was "Eclipse is slow".

The first thing I did when I installed VS2010 was look for a way to turn on the 80 character vertical line. I couldn't find it under the options so I searched Google. I got some instructions to install a third party plugin then edit my registry. It also seems to make quite a mess with the folder structure when creating a new project or solution, though I admit that could be my own failure to configure it properly.

Aside from the lack of the 80 character line the editor is much like any other. You can write code, autocomplete, etc. It has a decent debugger, maybe slightly better than other IDEs but not drastically. Qt has a much better GUI editor. And you really can't ignore Eclipse's extendability and the fact that you can zip up a copy of Eclipse with a bunch of plugins and hand it to someone as a preconfigured development tool. I just don't see what VS has that makes it sooo much better than everything else.

This is sort of my situation. I know there are certain items Best Buy completely rips you off on. I went in there to buy a hard drive and found out it was $20 over MSRP. Fry's had it for MSRP but was much farther away.

Though as far as cables go I never buy them from any physical store, Best Buy or otherwise. Any time I realize I need something I just buy a few from Monoprice. My dad got confused between my Monoprice cable and the Monster cable Best Buy sold him because the ~$1 Monoprice one had filters and the Monster cable didn't.

I tried TaxAct a couple of years ago and it was good but I ended up not using it. I forget what the exact problem was that drove me away, but one unfortunate thing about it was that most other services (such as Charles Schwab) allow TurboTax to pull information directly. The process for TaxAct wasn't nearly as simple. I know it's not TaxAct's fault and I've been meaning to give them another shot. Maybe next year I will (filed my taxes back in February).