You've never seen one explode a tire and send high-velocity rubber chunks flying out the side?

You do NOT want to be beside it when it happens, and with 18 wheels ready to pop, it happens too frequently for me to risk being in the trajectory when it does.

(Disclaimer: My daily drive is the stretch of 403/QEW which connects Niagra Falls (ie, the US) with Toronto (ie, the Canada), and there are a very large number of trucks on that road. Once you see a tire blow in front of you, you will never drive beside a truck again.)

Assuming you've got access to a Windows machine (which is sadly the only platform for which 'hardcore' dvd ripping tools are written for), you should be able to attack the disk with a combination of AnyDVD (installs a device driver that will remove all known protection) and vStrip.

A word of warning: vStrip is NOT an easy tool to use (there are guides all over the place though), but it's by far the most powerful DVD ripping software I have ever found.

I was given a 4GB SDHC card by a friend, frantic that all her photos had disappeared. She did not do anything do physically damage the card, it was sitting in her camera and just suddenly started showing 0 photos one day when she turned it on.

I popped it into my linux machine and started to dd all the data I could get off of it. The first 512MB were fine. The next 512MB were completely unreadable. The last 3GB were fine.

Not sure exactly what could cause this type of partial failure, but it certainly seems like SHDC cards are actually multiple devices internally connected together, and it's possible to have just one fail at a time. Alternate explanations are welcome.

(VirtualBox + XP + Kernel FAT NTFS did the trick by the way, was able to save 80% of the photos).

Techno or any other "music" that requires all the effort of hitting some buttons.

I bet you think yourself mighty insightful, but exactly what do you do in order to play say, a piano? Beethoven was just hitting some buttons.

So how about you get off your high horse, and just admit that you don't like techno simply because you don't like it. This is fine, you are entitled to a personal opinion. Just don't claim your opinion is due to some inherent inferiority of the genre... it's not.

Counter-anecdote: I have a Q6600 / 6GB 800Mhz RAM / 512mb Geforce 8600GT (almost the exact same system as you, with a little less RAM).

Running Ubuntu 8.04, with desktop effects cranked to maximum, at 1920x1200 .. everything is both responsive and beautiful. When friends come over and see my desktop, their jaws drop to the floor and they end up leaving with Ubuntu live CDs in their pockets.

I'm curious where your performance problems are coming from, considering our systems are so similar.. what motherboard chipset are you using? Intel ICH9 here (Asus P5K-C).

Btw, how does movies work on it? Do you get unsynced audio? VLC and such can fix that but anyway, maybe you never notice it. Add 30-40 ms delay on the audio as default? =P)

Movies work great, no adjustments required. I believe 80-100ms or so is the minimum noticeable audio delay.

But the problem with S-PVA is that I will want to play sometimes and I wouldn't feel good with 30+ ms input lag, even if it may not affect my performance that much.

I know where you're coming from, and this was almost a deal-breaker for me when I was shopping for monitors. In the end though, I'm very happy that I decided to ignore the S-PVA input-lag naysayers. While I haven't tried anything recent, I can say that UT2k4 runs fantastic (and looks great) at 1920x1200, with no perceivable input lag.

Ultimately, being 1 frame behind is really not nearly as big of a deal as it's made out to be (like any game doesn't double- or triple- buffer anyway). Don't reject an otherwise all-around amazing display technology just because of that one thing.. at least not until you see it for yourself and realize just how stunning the images S-PVA displays can render are :)

I absolutely love my S-PVA Dell 2408WFP. A touch expensive for a 24", but they go on sale often. I got it for $599 CDN.. I've since seen it for $549 CDN, very reasonable considering after you see one, you will never want to look at TN display again.

If you'd actually listened to some of the (admittedly small amount of) material available on SACD then you'd realise that the high cost and format lock-in are small prices to pay for an extraordinary step forwards in high-fidelity music. SACDs sound phenomenal compared to vanilla CDs.

What difference does higher quality make if nobody buys your products? The high cost and format lock-in were clearly not "small" prices to pay, because today the format is pretty much dead.