I'm still using an Audigy 2 ZS I purchased in 2004. My 2007-ish motherboard sound device is turned off in BIOS. Why? Two reasons:

1) Motherboard sound is full of noise and glitches (pops and clicks).

2) Even more importantly: The onboard sound hardware *actively interferes* with sound under Linux. I have to turn it off, or I have mysterious and disruptive sound problems. Such as fmod using 100% of CPU cycles.

I can only speculate on the real cause of #2, but if experience is any guide, it's due to half-baked hardware that only "works" with a Windows-only driver.

This is why I put "works" in quotes: Even when integrated sound hardware works under Windows, it doesn't necessarily work all that well. I bought the Sound Blaster because the integrated audio on the PC I built in 2003 was also flaky.

The Audigy 2 ZS works absolutely fine under Ubuntu, so that's what I use. Yes... ... I have zero problems with this card and PulseAudio. But the onboard sound device is a piece of junk. Motherboard manufacturers throw in the cheapest junk they think they can get away with. They certainly don't give a damn whether it works in Linux.

To borrow a turn of phrase, the important thing is that you've found a way to feel superior to both.

You covered the main drawback to such monitors - price.

Did you also catch the insanely low refresh rate (25 or 41 Hz) and rather high 50 ms (or 25 ms, depending on how you measure) response time? Anything involving moving images would be a streaky, smeared mess. That said, it does seem odd that nothing similar is offered today for photo & graphic design folks.

FWIW, review of the VP2290b here: http://www.trustedreviews.com/monitors/review/2004/06/30/ViewSonic-VP2290b-High-Resolution-TFT/p1

Optical discs cost almost nothing to make, but the consumer has never seen the benefit. I don't recall game prices dropping substantially in the last 20 years. NES carts were usually around $40-$50, and the prices are the same or higher for today's DVD-ROM (or DVD-Wii, so to speak) games.

It's eerily parallel to the music world. CDs should have brought album prices down a lot, but it never happened.

Adjusting for inflation, prices have dropped overall, but not proportionately to the decrease in media cost.

It's nice they've developed a way to transfer data at ridiculous speeds, but it does the average user no good as long as we're using mechanical hard drives. Even a "mere" 1 gigabit network connection outstrips the ability of spinning platters to absorb it. I guess this Light Peak thing is aimed at the server market then?

If you're even mildly involved in real-life shooting, either as a hobby or professionally, you're going to spot a lot of gaffes.

I can understand simple continuity errors. By the time a film has been cut, edited, recut, edited again, Foleyed, CGI'd, etc. it's got to be difficult to keep track of whether the protagonist's gun should be empty. It doesn't take anything away to assume the hero simply reloaded offscreen.

But these things are a totally different matter:
-The mythical "Glock 7"
-The slow-motion sequence showing an entire round of ammunition going downrange, not just the projectile,
-Ammo "cooking off" somehow acting the same as if it were confined in a barrel (I'm looking at you, "Paycheck!"),

And I can't count the number of movies/TV shows where
-Someone "cocks the hammer" on a gun that doesn't HAVE a hammer, like a Glock.

We get it. You don't agree with Beck's opinions, so he shouldn't be on the list, even though you admit he is influential. This is what passes for "Insightful" here?

No no no...He takes the requirements from the customer and gives them to the engineers, so the engineers won't have to deal with customers. He has PEOPLE skills, dammit!

Meh. I'm just glad they're still patching Windows XP.

That this kind of regurgitated, thoughtless, statist propoganda can get rated "insightful" shows you what a +5 is worth around here. Which is why I started browsing at 0.

That's...kinda weird. Anyone tech-savvy enough to be buying bare HDD is just going to reformat it anyway, right?

I look at it like netbooks & laptops that inevitably come pre-configured with Windows and a ton of crapware: I may have little use for it, but there's nothing stopping me from wiping the drive & installing OS of my choice. If it lets them sell the machine more cheaply, under the fiction that the shovelware is "free advertising" for the vendors, it's a win for both me and the manufacturer.

Oh, except it's NOT a better deal. $100 is steep for only 500 GB. It would only look like a "deal" if you shop for components at Best Buy.