The more state you can have available in front of you, that can be offloaded out of your head and onto the screen, the more efficiently you can work. Yes, there is an upper limit to this, but in my experience, especially with digital content creation, there's still room. Most of us do multiple monitors at home, but especially with laptops, having that real-estate available on the go is a huge boon. If you design UIs, do graphic design, make games, 3D graphics, edit videos... all of the pro software have seriously large toolboxes, and that means a lot of buttons. The more tools and views into your work you can have available, especially at the pro level, the more efficient you can be. I work in Blender for fun and even with keyboard shortcuts, I typically need to have 5-12 views open at once to have access to all the parts I need. Toggling the view configuration only goes so far because of the out-of-sight problem. So: I crave more pixel real-estate.

Cause that's really the decision for me. I've worked in all of them over the years, and I prefer box modelling for organic forms. Sketchup/CAD/SolidWorks is great if you're machining a part, but if you're scratching a creative itch and just want to fool around, Blender/3dsMax/Maya are looser.

All tools have tradeoffs. Your question is open ended and it seems everyone's making assumptions about what you want to do based on the CNC mill. I will second starting on Sketchup for geometric forms such as machinery parts because of it's ease of use. You will have to go to the Pro version in order to export an STL file though. But if you want to make models for miniature painting or something on a 3D printer, you're going to have better luck with something like ZBrush or Dyntopo in Blender. It really just comes down to what problem you're trying to solve.

FYI, I see a lot of people hating on Blender, but it's pretty easy to make a closed form in it. BlenderCookie just put up a simple way to do it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnCf-5G7DYc

If the OP can give more details on what the intended work is, I can give better suggestions.

I know everyone else has answered this already. I'm a fan of the Grado SR60is. As a game design hobbyist, I have spent a little time messing around with wave forms, so I have a little experience. I don't care for most of the audiophile nonsense I've seen around, and I have not performed any form of tests, so this is of course only my non-professional opinion. They still sound great to me, better than any of the others I've tried. The open cups do reduce the bass some, but the drivers are big enough that it still works well. I've heard the wood ones have slightly better resonance and have considered upgrading them to see if it's true, but probably don't care enough to invest. They have physically fallen apart on me slowly, frankly, and the build quality is significantly cheaper than their hundreds of dollar sets, but it's nothing a little tape hasn't fixed. And I only really care about how they sound, not how they look. I got my pair for $70, which is 20 more than your price range, but it's the best i found for the money at the time. Feel free to take it or leave it, I hope one more opinion in the mix is useful.

And not worth it. The couple of sarcastic comments that have started off the replys here are telling you this. The problem is you need to dump interesting data out of the packets, and there's no easy way to tell what is actually interesting. Also, this is a cryptographer's nightmare or dream depending on how you look at it. You're Charlie here, and that means you're the guy that everyone wants to defeat in this scenario. It's not going to yield much useful data since more and more communications on the 'net are switching to HTTPS. Also, I don't think you can fully appreciate the amount of storage this will require. I work with network video, and when I have to run a packet capture to do analysis, the problem is finding a storage medium to dump to that can handle the throughput. The only thing I can usually make feasibly work is a ramdisk. You can't do that from your linux embedded router. It just isn't going to happen. Now, I suppose you could only capture the headers of the packets. But again, that's not going to do you any good. You don't capture any of the payload then. Conclusion: Way more trouble than it's worth, and to do what you're talking about will cost a lot of money. Don't bother. Frankly, if you're client is that concerned about the traffic coming out of the house, wipe all the computers to remove any potential malware on them already, install a fresh OS, install your own keyloggers on the systems if it's the human element you don't trust, and be done with it. It's invasive as hell, but it's a lot less sinister, and easier, than trying to play the panopticon game.

Yah, it was. I was a bit distracted when writing that, so I apologize. I only meant by "run faster" that it feels way snappier than on other platforms I had tried it on, which matters to me because I hate bad UIs. I deal with enough of those at work.

Or anything else, other than a surrender of a right, and a public sharing of it. A bit testimonial sounding here, so I apologize, but this is a doorway to getting game developers to start taking linux seriously. I just started using the Desura client and found that it runs faster on Ubuntu than on Windows. Just sayin'. Installing and purchasing are painless too. If you game, I wish you'd help promote it. Take it seriously and try not to be so flippant and judgemental. I'm going back to porting one of my projects to SDL now.

Hi Ian! Can you comment about game mechanics that you wish designers explored in more depth?

I just want to point out that Cow Clicker was made as a response to the shitty flash games that you're talking about. And amazingly, sadly, and happily became rather successful, despite it being a simple, transparent version of everything that's "wrong" with shitty flash games. That should tell you something about how we judge game design.

But I wouldn't go with the AGs. I have the WHR-HP-G300NH and have used it for the last two years. They're based on Atheros chipset, and assuming you're not running the user-friendly (read: buffalo's proprietary f/w for dummies) firmware on them, it is quite solid. It's held up rather well, excepting a brown out where I killed one which is my own fault for not having it on a UPS. This model has a 400mhz chip on it, so it's more than powerful enough, and with the DD-WRT firmware you can do all the ridiculous iptables routing you'd want to. I did support for these things, and the worst it ever got was people trying to hook up the WDS to another brand router (geek note: WDS only works to the same chipset). I can safely tell you that my lack of issue tickets attests to the solidity of these. On the other hand, I will bitch endlessly about Buffalo's storage products. They honestly do make good hardware, but their firm/software leaves something to be desired. WRT is the best thing they could've done with these. I have all Gb NICs on my home network (excepting game consoles) and we hammer it pretty hard with media sharing internally, along with some compiling/rendering I do for gaming/3D graphics hobby stuff. I've never had it choke.

You're running into the big problem with wifi: Everything on the same channel has to take turns. If there's 40 APs all in the same vicinity, they're going to start a round-robin game of who-goes-first, and if there's enough other interference, they're all going to keep yielding, and nobody gets heard. See "myth" #1 here: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/wireless/ps9391/ps9393/ps9394/prod_white_paper0900aecd807395a9_ns736_Networking_Solutions_White_Paper.html As it mentions, this is more accurately called co-channel cooperation, rather than interference. And it's a huge problem in a convention. You're really kinda screwed in that scenario... unless you can use another spectrum, but it sounds like that's not much of an option given that you're trying to demo on consumer client hardware that's almost invariably 802.11b/g/n, 2.4ghz. Use A band if you can. Another thing you can try, and this would take some serious cooperation with other convention-goers (read:social engineering, perhaps?) is to get everyone to turn down the broadcast power on their APs. That's what the real problem is. If everyone talks quieter in the library, more people can carry on their conversations in their corner of the woods. You can also try to work out a pattern with nearby AP users to switch their APs to channels that don't overlap with yours. Be careful with this one, cause if you've got two APs on channels 1 and 4, they overlap enough it might still cause co-channel cooperation. This is probably pie-in-the-sky thinking that your fellow convention goers (and possible competitors even) might cooperate to that level, but there's no hurt in trying, right?

to paraphrase, is also known as "reporting", or revealing information to the public that may not have been widely known. So how exactly is Wikileaks (and for that matter, bloggers, which are part of the same maligned group) *not* Journalism? Definitions and semantics seem to be a major part of the legal arguments that seem to be made about this topic. And it sounds awfully familiar to the arguments I hear related to the whole "games/art" debate.

You should look into the WZR-HP-G300NH. It's a gigabit switch device with a fairly ridiculous amount of memory for a router, with N capability on it. I'm running it at home, and I love it. It did take me about an hour to get the TFTP to take, but it's been running like a champ since. I bought this one back in October, so I got one of the earlier revisions. the current revision of the hardware DOES NOT allow you to install DDWRT; this is speculation, but I believe they made it harder to install because of the Official release of the DD-WRT that's supported by Buffalo, and warrantied, being released in a month's time. I've used it for fairly heavy media streaming (HD), torrenting, remote access for SFTP, VPN, NXserver, even using synergy on wireless machines. It's not even burped since I've had it setup right. Full disclosure, I'm in tech support for a company related to Buffalo, so I may be biased. But I think a 2 year warranty with full phone support is a better deal than what the competition offers. Not that I expect too many of us on /. to need that, but you never know when a power supply might go out.