and one can easily overcome is: MULTIPLAYER!

I looked at its specs. No way I'd buy that. With 10KS/s you can't even decode audio! The simplest audio files usually are 44kHz. It may be better to build one's own scope with an Arduino (which will get you more geek points), or buy a DSO Nano (with 1Msps 12Bits, and 8 times the sample storage). Minimum Voltage Range Accuracy of 37.5 mV also won't get you very far, specially if you try simple amplifier stuff (which very often can vary only a few millivolts or even only microvolts).

I agree that the Rigol DS1052E is pretty fine for most uses, specially if you have to ask such a question. I have one and it has done everything I needed so far. Even my college use scopes worse than those. If you need a logic analyzer to deal with digital stuff (I think you might, since you're compsci-oriented instead of a proper electronics engineer), you might take a look at the Open Logic Sniffer. It's even open-source, so you can hack it too. The only reason I think you might look for another one is if you deal with RF or something like that.

It was literally the blue screen of death

if you said what hobby and index is that. Doing so would surely catch more interest from the Slashdot crowd.

Sounds to me like religion.

That doesn't really explain why Ghana has so far won no World Cups.

I use plain osCommerce. Has good features to track what needs buying in an inventory. Also, it's good, though not necessary, to reference which drawer gets what. If not using drawer references, just keeping stuff categorized on the drawers works too. As noted by other commenters, the problem is keeping it up-to-date. Don't even bother tracking resistor/capacitor usage. Just buy a lot of them to have stock... you'll notice when one of them runs too low. The best reason to keep such inventory is for those parts that are not that common, which you may have few but want to keep control.

Looks like another case of edu-vaporware. Now it's eDukeNukem time!

The name of the technology should be blueray of death.

Buying a Linux-based laptop doesn't get us free from driver troubles. Once I bought an Acer laptop with a Linux-that-nobody-uses, and even from factory the webcam wouldn't work because it didn't have proper drivers. Luckily enough, I just had to wait a few months before smart people made an experimental gspca driver for it.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from black magic."

If you're looking for geometry learning, try to make an asteroids-like game.

It's not too challenging as to turn someone down, but lots of fun and you'll learn how to apply geometry. Specially sine and cossine, which my teachers did a terrible job in teaching what that was all about (only teached transformation formulae, never applying them). I only learnt what it was meant to do when I tried to do a subspace-like game.

to having our own bacta tanks!

Nice... Keep thinking that you're safe, and I won't tell you how I would have gotten a virus just today when I downloaded a basic app for my HP calculator, were it not for my AV software, which detected it just when I downloaded the installer from HP's official site.

I hope you never download anything from anywhere, including sites which should be safe and trustful, but just aren't.