The reason that the listeners could not hear a difference is not because the cables did not differ in quality, but because Ethernet is digital and has the capabilities of error correction and retransmit. The chip might have extra signal processing as well, to do noise reduction for example. In the test, these kind of characteristics were enough to fully compensate for the flaws of the crusty cable.

There's still many scenarios in which you can benefit from better EMI shielding and conductivity, even when talking about a digital application.

If you know what to look for, that is.

Sure. How about the Archival Disc?

Overhyped technology that will never ship as a part of real product.

Queued TRIM is serial as well... :) Everything is serial in the SATA bus.

With "serial TRIM" you probably mean "blocking TRIM" (it requires other operations to be halted and command queue flushed before it can be performed).

We don't live in such a world. If we want our computers to work properly today, these workarounds have to be taken into account.

It's boring.

Well, Samsung had some SSDs to sell. It's part of the open source philosophy: you scratch your own itch, and everyone benefits.

Still, the problem is that we don't arrive at a well-rounded result. Fixing some things here and there is not deep QA. After stories like this I always get cold chills imagining what else broken is there.

Umm, you don't seem to act any smarter yourself.

Classic tip from Thomas Jefferson: "Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances."

That was exactly my point. There is many kinds of freedom.

Free software sometimes carries limitations: the program might not be as featureful as a proprietary counterpart. The proprietary software might give me more freedom in the sense of getting my actual task done in the best way possible. Maybe it has better toolset to allow expressing myself artistically more freely, or maybe it has better hardware support so I have more freedom to choose among various hardware devices. Have you thought about freedom from this perspective?

The Half-Life wiki has a good article called Future of the Half-Life series where you can follow the latest developments.

On March 19, Gabe Newell, when asked about Half-Life 3, replied: "The only reason we'd go back and do like a super classic kind of product is if a whole bunch of people just internally at Valve said they wanted to do it and had a reasonable explanation for why [they did]." This, like all of Valve's other statements regarding Half-Life 3, neither confirms nor denies the possibility that the game will eventually be made.