• WakeMate – $50 and you might sleep better. It tracks your sleep patterns and wakes you between REM periods. It seems most useful for heavy sleepers, like me. My wife sleeps very lightly and wakes up often. I don’t think she’d need additional jarring.
• Samsung’s Galaxy S phones – good Android phones on every carrier… including AT&T. This may be the first real competitor to the iPhone for those locked into AT&T. The only downside is that AT&T doesn’t let you sideload applications, i.e. install them manually.
• Floppy drives with legs.

Things not exciting me:

• eBook readers – they’re just not there yet. The Kindle (or DX) and Nook are getting there, but they’re just not what I want. I read technical books, so I need a large screen. I don’t care about color, and I don’t want a touchscreen because it lowers the clarity of the screen. I don’t particularly care about the 3G access – I can download books at home, and I’d rather use my phone for mobile internet access. I want simple, cheap, clear, and free.
• Loss of freedom – particularly with regard to the internet. AT&T has already switched to limited data plans, Verizon probably will soon, and broadband providers have been considering the switch for a while. It makes me sick that this is possible when internet access should be a human right. I know for a fact that capacity far exceeds demand at some of these companies, so it’s dishonest.
• 3D – ugh. Movies and TV are equally bad ideas. Give me back my Virtual Boy.

I was growing a bit tired of the development lag in Crunchbang Linux and needed a new distribution. I want a well-built system that doesn’t take too much administration so I can focus on other things. (As you may know, I have a tendency to set up and administer machines for fun, forgetting to do any “real” work on top of it.)

Fedora sounded good. All free software with fairly frequent updates. RPM hell is avoided with Yum. I particularly appreciate the use of the free Nouveau driver for my Nvidia card, and Kernel Mode Setting for a smoother start and fewer hassles.

When it works, Fedora is slick. They’re a bit ahead of Ubuntu in terms of features, with default SELinux, KMS, and better video drivers. Another thing I appreciate is that one of Fedora’s goals is to stay close to upstream. They don’t want to apply 10 patches to every package, preferring to send patches upstream and get down to zero distribution-specific patches if possible.

It’s quick to boot, particularly with KMS. The battery life is about 10-15% longer than with Crunchbang, even with more daemons running.

However, I ran into a couple related bugs that hurt the experience. First, since I migrated my /home partition from a prior system without SELinux, I got a lot of SELinux warnings about my file labels. It told me to use restorecon, but that didn’t fix everything. The solution was to run “sudo touch /.autorelabel” which tells SELinux to relabel the entire system at the next boot.

This was complicated by the fact that HAL couldn’t start due to the SELinux failures. In today’s world of Xorg 1.4+, HAL detects and configures all of your input devices by default.

Without HAL, you have no keyboard or mouse to use in order to fix SELinux labeling. The solution is to log into single-user mode and fix it there. To get into single-user mode in Fedora, turn on your computer and hold Shift after the POST, before you see the Fedora startup screen. This will give you a Grub console. Hit “a” to append to the kernel line, adding a space and a “3″ to the end, then hit enter. (“3″ technically gives you multi-user mode with networking, but the point is that it doesn’t start X.) From there, you can create the autorelabel file or whatever else you need to do.

Note: If you just want X to start without worrying about SELinux, or if you have another problem related to HAL input devices, there’s another option. You can tell X to start even without detecting any devices from HAL. This makes it use the default keyboard and mouse types. Just create an /etc/X11/xorg.conf file with the following contents:

Section "ServerFlags"
  Option "AllowEmptyInput" "off"
EndSection

Summary: I’m going to stick with Fedora for a while because I trust a distribution that likes staying close to upstream.

Technically, Exherbo is most similar to Gentoo. It inherited some of Gentoo’s parts, and a fair bit of the mentality. You get deep configuration and understanding of your system. In fact, it’s required for use. If you don’t understand your hardware and the basic components of a Linux system, you’ll have a hard time getting it running. Don’t let that scare you off, though; it’s an excellent platform for learning.

That said, it’s obviously meant for a subset of users. Let me describe some things about me that led me to Exherbo. I like to understand everything that’s going on at some level of depth. I can’t rest until I understand, and I mean that literally – I’ve been up late most of the week trying to get my wireless working perfectly. I also like a lean system without a lot of moving parts that I didn’t ask for. It’s harder to understand what you don’t know is there. I appreciate performance and stability, like anyone, but I believe they are borne of simplicity.

I’m a long-time Gentoo user, and this reminds me of the early days of Gentoo before the committee. Progress is rapid and parts of the machine are being swapped out as it runs. The developers are passionate about what they’re doing, and if you agree with them, it’s a great place to be. One of the more vocal developers, Ciaran McCreesh, is a good example. He comes off as abrasive, but take his messages without emotion. I usually agree with him and he definitely writes good code. (He’s also a vim devotee.)

If you just want things to work, don’t use it. In fact, until last week, they actively discouraged anyone from using it. That warning has been lifted since I did my install, and they even added some user documentation. (Think of it as crib notes for your install – Gentoo’s handbook run through a compactor.) If you want to learn how your system works, from the hardware all the way to the user environment, give Exherbo a shot.

A side benefit of building a Linux system from scratch (with any low-level distribution) is that you get to see all the amazing work put forth in the free software community.

Here’s a summary of the problem. I wanted to try Ubuntu to see what all the hype was about. I downloaded the latest LiveCD for 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) and booted it up. Liking what I saw, I started the install process. From that point, until just before the install was completed, my computer would lock up hard. Every time.

It’s important to note that the same computer never crashes in Gentoo or even gasp Windows. Also, the “alternative mode” (text) installer works fine, and booting into Ubuntu recovery mode (single user) works fine as well.

If I just used the LiveCD without installing, sometimes it would be OK – but it would always lock up eventually. Usually this would happen when there was a high level of activity, but occasionally it would freeze when sitting idle as well.

At first, I thought it was caused by the hard drive I was installing to, because I’ve had some issues with it in the past. After unplugging every drive, and having the OS crash with the same frequency, that was quickly eliminated. This also eliminated problems with the drive controller.

Then I thought it had to be an incompatibility between Ubuntu and my motherboard chipset, which is an nVidia nForce 570 SLI. I tried all kinds of advice on disabling apic (noapic and nolapic kernel options) to no avail. I tried noacpi, but that disabled my keyboard and mouse and I don’t have any PS/2 ones lying around. I tried updating my BIOS to the latest version – no dice.

Then I thought it was an incompatibility with the video card, an nVidia GeForce 7950 GT. After all, it works in the alternative installer and recovery mode, so it has to be something graphical, right? Nope. I tried the “nv” and “vesa” drivers for Xorg with the same results. Any difference in time-to-crash was coincidental.

I tried to think of issues I’ve had in Windows in the past. Then, of course, it hit me. Whenever I tried to turn on AMD’s Cool’n'Quiet feature, the system became very unstable. I had to go through a lot of pain to remove that driver without crashing the system.

The equivalent software in Linux is powernowd, also known in Gnome (and, therefore, Ubuntu) as “CPU Frequency manager”, which takes advantage of the different CPU power-stepping features to slow down your processor when you don’t need it. This fits the pattern of crashing on high activity (when the CPU steps up) and occasionally at idle (when the CPU steps down after high activity).

The fix: Go to System -> Administration -> Services and uncheck the option for powernowd. This will permanently stop the daemon. You can also run “/etc/init.d/powernowd stop” on Ubuntu and several other distributions to stop the daemon temporarily. (Distributions vary as to how to permanently stop a daemon. In Gentoo, for example, you’d run “rc-update del powernowd default”.)

So, it seems that the chipset on many motherboards (mine is an Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe), or perhaps the processor (mine is an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+), is incompatible with power stepping. The same advice applies to Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) and probably previous releases as well.

We’ve even heard about some commercial software with heinous errors. Games with no sound. Security software that steals your resources. Sony installing rootkits. Microsoft software.

Eve Online, however, has just gone one step beyond. If you installed their new expansion, Trinity, on opening day, it deleted your boot.ini file. You can no longer boot Windows.

Even a rootkit leaves your computer working for a little while.

In case you haven’t heard of it, Eve Online is a space combat MMORPG. There are somewhere around 300,000 subscribers, and 30,000 people online on an average night. Tens of thousands of potential victims.

Of course, there was no warning that this would happen. They did not send out any kind of alert until a day later – today at 5:45pm EST. If you happened to reboot or shut down your system in that time, and you’re not running Linux (my saving grace), you’d be greeted with a unusable computer.

This is simply inexcusable. CCP, the developer of Eve, and whose slogan is “We Care More, We Work Harder,” is a professional software development firm. They should have tested what they’re putting on your computer. My God, you’d think making a computer inoperable would make one of their QA people say “Hmmm… that can’t be right.” There is no conceivable reason for the game installer to even touch the boot.ini file, forget about deleting it.

99% of their player base has no idea what a boot.ini file is, and they shouldn’t have to. It was a sacred contract that games would stay out of system space. The worst case was that a game had to install something extra as a form of DRM or copy protection.

Because of this, the user would probably not suspect that the game expansion they just installed was responsible for the problem. They would probably not call CCP. They might call Microsoft, or their computer manufacturer, who would have them wipe their hard drive and reinstall Windows. The user would never know how to recover a boot.ini file. The sad part is that the manufacturer probably wouldn’t know either.

But the fun doesn’t stop there.

CCP released a message regarding the issue. This message is incomplete and incorrect. (If they remove or change the message, I’ll copy it here.) It says that the issue only occurs if several conditions are true:

• You upgraded on opening day, 12/6 (many people)
• You’re not using Windows Vista (most people)
• Windows is not on the primary partition, or is on a secondary drive (false)

I have Windows on the primary partition of my primary drive. It still deleted my boot.ini file. So the criteria are incorrect.

They’re also incomplete. CCP gives two options for restoring your boot.ini file. First, you can use System Restore (and possibly lose other changes) IF you haven’t rebooted or shut down. Second, you can boot with a Windows CD, use the Repair Console, run “bootcfg /rebuild”, and then answer a bunch of questions that they don’t tell you how to answer.

In short, there is no good recovery option. If you’re an average user and you’ve shut down, you would probably not be able to restore the file from the Repair Console. I’m guessing that their temporary support lines are rather busy at the moment.

There are only three ways around the issue.

1. You upgraded on 12/6 or later.
2. You’re running Windows Vista.
3. You have another bootloader on your primary drive, such as Grub for Linux. This bypasses the boot.ini file.

I lucked out with option 3. I also happened to have not rebooted, but I don’t like System Restore unless it’s absolutely necessary.

In short, CCP needs to issue a serious apology. They need to publish more information about how to recover from the error. They need to beef up their testing department, and possibly fire whoever was responsible for the expansion release. And everyone else needs to learn from the mistake.

Vim – if I were stuck on a desert island with only one program, it’d be Vim. At least I could write the rest of the applications I’d need in a good editor.

Zsh – Bash’s big brother. Better completion, more customizable, great builtins, just as fast.

Ruby – An elegant, expressive programming language, suitable for almost any purpose. They hype is justified. And please, look at it separately from Rails.

Linux kernel – If you ask me, this Unix clone has surpassed its master. A free, stable, modular kernel with a huge support base, what more could you ask for?

Gentoo Linux – A remarkable way to package an OS. Gentoo gives you the flexibility and power to turn the Linux kernel into a full, beautiful environment without the worries of many other distributions.

Amarok – I keep discovering more thoughtful features of this music player. It can move audio files to your collection with any naming format you choose. It has great dynamic playlisting, podcasting, and net radio support. I couldn’t begin to list everything, but it still doesn’t feel bloated.

Firefox – No other browser to this day has given developers such a good platform for improving the client-side web experience. Since the web might actually move us towards the “thin client” dreams of old, this is increasingly important. Specific addons I couldn’t live without – Adblock, Noscript, Firebug. And then there’s Greasemonkey, a platform on a platform for a platform. You could call it web³.

All free software.

Essentially, he says that Wal-Mart’s pricing on a single flat-panel TV in the Christmas season has fundamentally and permanently changed the landscape of the electronics market as a whole. A no-name TV, specifically a 42″ Viore, was priced at $988. A similar Panasonic was priced at $1294. Other retailers couldn’t match these prices – or didn’t want to – as their prices had been nearly double that for some time.

Cleary, this was an evil act. I mean, come on, retailers are going out of business.

The fallout is evident: After closing 70 stores in February, Circuit City Stores on Mar. 28 laid off 3,400 employees and put its 800 Canadian stores on the block. Tweeter Home Entertainment Group, the high-end home entertainment store, is shuttering 49 of its 153 stores and dismissed 650 workers. Dallas-based CompUSA is closing 126 of its 229 stores, and regional retailer Rex Stores is boarding up dozens of outlets, as well as selling 94 of its 211 stores. [...] Circuit City shares have fallen 24%, to $18.76, since the end of November, when the price war started. In the same period, Tweeter’s shares declined 32%, to $1.72, near a 52-week low, and Best Buy’s stock is down 9%, to $48.73. Shares of Rex Stores have been flat, down 0.7%, to $16.98. [...] The carnage has one phrase written all over it: the “Wal-Mart effect.”

The profit bubble was burst for these old-world retailers who could no longer sell their TVs at a huge profit margin. Someone actually came along and offered a better price. A price based on reality and efficient distribution methods. Amazing. From the same article:

“It’s Econ 101: Best Buy and Circuit City had seen fat margins from flat-panel TVs for a while, and as it happens with any product, eventually the margins come down and the music stops,” says David Abella, a portfolio manager at New York-based Rochdale Investment Management, with assets of $2 billion.

Did the executives at Circuit City, Tweeter, CompUSA, Best Buy, and Rex all neglect their studies in economics? Or did they take too large an executive bonus this year? Someone offers a better price, and their only reaction is to close half their stores and lay off thousands of workers. It boggles the mind.

Furthermore, I propose that this had nothing to do with flat-panel TVs anyway. Feast your eyes, again from the same article:

In fact, even though Wal-Mart set in motion the price drops, it has actually been a bit player in the high-definition TV segment.

So, not only did the pricing on one TV bankrupt five companies, but the pricing on one TV from a bit player bankrupted five companies? Come on.

We all know why it really happened. These retailers are living in an older world, a world of brick and mortar and electronics cartels. They can’t compete with Wal-Mart and the internet. The power is finally in the hands of the consumer, who can order a flat-panel TV from anyone on the web and pay half the price, or simply walk into their local Wal-Mart. Efficiency is finally paying off for the businesses.

People are starting to ignore the giant retail outlets who have given them no choice for so long. Why pay hundreds or thousands extra at Circuit City for terrible service?

if consumer-electronics purveyors are hoping to maintain sky-high prices on new products, they’d better not count on it. After all, they have no idea what Wal-Mart has in store.

And Wal-Mart has no idea what the web has in store.

Not all wireless devices are a commercial success, of course. Remember the portable TVs of the 90’s? They were in every electronics store and usually had a 2″ screen. You never see one anymore. It’s because of the popularity of cable and satellite TV, and the unwillingness to settle for three channels. It is not because of the screen, I might note – geeks go crazy for tiny screens for the portability. I predict that we’ll see a resurgence of portable televisions, though in a different form. We’ll have television streamed onto portable media players through wifi or cellular broadband. And this brings us to the topic of this post.

Cellular broadband is the only commercially viable method of sending data wirelessly to the entire country. Public wifi networks only exist in a few major cities. Satellite is available, but not feasible due to cost and receiver size. Cellular networks such as EVDO and HSDPA are virtually nationwide, the new standards are coming soon, and the older EDGE and 1xRTT standards are available as fallbacks.

Think of what we could do with the cellular data networks in an ideal world. First of all, no cables. Your computers wouldn’t need network cables, your TV wouldn’t need a cable line, your online-capable video game systems wouldn’t even need a wireless router. Your cell phone or portable media player could be fully internet capable, not crippled like most current devices. Your car, house, and appliances could send you maintenance reports. You’d never lose a device again, because they’d all have GPS-like capabilities. You’d worry a lot less about stolen goods for the same reason. And these are just the basics.

So why isn’t cellular data more widespread? Because the cellular companies like their profits. Huge profits. Text messages are marked up 7314% from the data charge, and the data charge itself is marked up by an even larger percentage. The most basic data plan for a PDA from Cingular is $19.99/month for five megabytes. For comparison, I can download five megabytes at home in about five seconds, for a cost per megabyte of 0.007 cents. The first unlimited plan, not including any text or media messaging, is $44.99/month.

Quite frankly, it’s absurd, and I think it’s holding back technological progress. It seems to be another case of short-term thinking on the part of the business, and consumers lacking the information they need to make better decisions.

Maybe if more of the consumers knew they were paying a 285,571% markup for mobile data, they would have a word with their cell phone provider.

wife: what about from Falcon?
wife: I’m totally going to check their site and price out a spectacular computer for you
wife: you’ll be totally amazed at my computer prowess

wife: MACH 5!
wife: the best of the best
wife: and it involves silicon
wife: which is like big boobies
wife: so obviously this is the one you want to get
wife: and I’m going to configure it for you as well

wife: I clicked on the “Bragging Rights” computer
wife: which costs slightly less than your car did.
wife: ok how about the middle one?
wife: it’s like $5k
wife: that’s chump change!
wife: for donald trump.

wife: i selected the chassis with teh FLAMES
wife: what’s a computer chassis?
wife: I don’t know
wife: but this one has FLAMES

wife: and I selected a FREE TSHIRT
wife: you can order a usb flash drive with it too
wife: comes with the package
wife: and WESTERN DIGITAL RAPTOR
wife: because raptor sounds badass
wife: I don’t know why in the hell you don’t let me order the computer shit.
wife: I totally know what to do.

wife: I also ordered you 5 raids
wife: because you love raiding and not leveling.
wife: in all of your games
me: only 5 games.
me: in the 6th game I’ll have to level
wife: oh shit
wife: but they don’t have a selection for 6 raids
wife: so you will have to give up your slot to a noob.

me: what else did you get me?
wife: I got an nVidia nForce 680I – SLI
wife: because Crossfire is bad
wife: you don’t want to get caught in that.
wife: the creative labs X-Fi Fata1ity
wife: because Fata1ty is the name of that Halo dude who quit school at an early age and will end up stupid and without a girlfriend in 10 years
wife: but he’s leet right now
wife: so that must mean you would be a leet gamer if you had that
wife: like Fata1ty
wife: the halo dood.

me: I can’t wait to own my masterpiece!
wife: oh also
wife: you are getting a silverstone 850watt Zeuss
wife: Zeus!
wife: anything less is wimpy and doesn’t sleep around nearly as much.

wife: also, you will be getting the 4GB corsair dominator DOMINATO
wife: just so you can say you have dominato.
wife: it sounds foreign.
wife: and cool.
wife: I would have totally pimped out your computer if you had let me order it.

Sennheiser HD580 headphones

I’ve had a set of these for a few years now and have been nothing but impressed. Music is perfectly clear and full, and has a rich tone that can’t be explained if you’ve only used crappy earbuds or cheapo headphones. There’s a true soundstage – close your eyes and you can position every element of the performance as if you were there. I couldn’t class myself as an audiophile yet, but my HD580’s produce some of the best sound I’ve ever heard. Don’t expect them to block any outside noise, though.

The HD580 is the baby brother to Sennheiser’s HD600 and, more recently, the HD650. That’s a pretty good family to be in, I’d say. All three have a 300 ohm impedance. If you don’t know an ohm from an amp, impedance measures the resistance to your music that the headphones provide. The higher the impedance, the more power your music player needs to put out. For comparison, most earbuds have around a 16 ohm impedance. If you’re going to use real headphones like the HD580’s with a tiny portable mp3 player, you’ll need a headphone amp. (Some mp3 players have a decent output and can put out enough power themselves, but don’t count on it unless you’ve checked.)

That said, the retail price on these bad boys is $200 – $250, though you can get them at most stores for $150. If you’re serious about your music and have a decent source, I’d say it’s worth every penny.

Dune prequels – Butlerian Jihad, Machine Crusade, Battle of Corrin

I can’t say that these books were a mistake or that they’re insulting, but they’re certainly not up to the legacy of Frank Herbert’s original Dune. There are better things you could be reading, unless you really, really need an explanation of Dune’s history.

First of all, the explanations given are lackluster and convenient. The setting: 10,000 years before Paul Atreides and the original Dune story, just before the creation of the Spacing Guild. The plot: Humans and thinking machines fight a long, bloody battle for their respective existences. The mistake: Almost everything in the Dune universe, or at least most of the strongest elements, are explained or created within a 100-year span of time, 10,000 years before the events we know. Apparently, very little happens after this century of intense drama, because the prequels could, with only minor changes, come directly before the first Dune. A century of intense action, then ten millennia of boredom before Dune. Granted, I haven’t read everything that Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson have written, but I hope they have more planned for this massive hole…

If I had to pick one, I’d say that The Butlerian Jihad was, by far, the most entertaining of the three. The characters were at least somewhat intriguing and the story was entertaining. The pace was reasonable and I never lost interest.

The Machine Crusade took place decades later, which threw off the pacing and forced a lot of conclusions. Most of the people you meet in the first book have to die, purely due to age. What fun is that? By the characters’ own admissions, everyone is bored with the action.

The Battle of Corrin was almost forgettable, which is difficult to do with a trilogy-ender. I found myself having a hard time caring what happened, because half of the interesting material died in book two and the other half faded away in this book. All the while, loose ends were being mechanically tied up. Emotions were forced. “Look, reader! You must now feel this, and you must now dislike this character, for it is so in Dune!“

Samsung SGH-X497 cell phone

My wife and I have had this phone for almost a year now, and I would not recommend it. I bought two of them because we had to switch our service to Cingular (accursed contracts!) and there was not a large selection. This phone was a decent size and looked friendly enough, without a lot of extra gadgets – no camera, for example, which is banned at many workplaces.

The size is, indeed, comfortable, but that’s about all I can say for this phone. This particular clamshell-style model opens to a somewhat awkward position that feels it might break at any minute. The number buttons are not well defined, and there are extra, dedicated buttons for such ridiculous features as instant messaging. It is not immensely configurable. Worst of all, though, is the godawful interface. It is so awkward to find what you want, and to simply move around, that I hardly use any of its features.

Needless to say, I’m not keeping this phone any longer than needed.

Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop

I never did a proper follow-up to my first impressions of the Inspiron 6000 laptop. I’ve now had it for 6 months and I’m quite happy. The machine has lived up to my expectations, performing admirably in any task I throw at it, and not having a single hardware defect to date. The screen is very nice – bright, clear, no dead pixels, and I’m loving widescreen. It’s truly hard to see how I could go back to a standard 4:3 monitor.

Wireless performs well, having very few issues in Windows with Intel’s native drivers. The Intel 2915 wireless seems to have a bit of trouble in Linux, mainly with connecting to my access point. I’ve also seen a few firmware error messages. Nevertheless, after a bit of tweaking it connects and serves for what I use it for. (Most of the time I have an ethernet line connected.)

It’s no slouch in the speed department, with its Pentium-M 2.0 GHz processor, but it’s not as fast as I was used to. When you have to make concessions for battery life, namely speed-stepping the processor and throttling the hard drive, you can’t expect stellar performance. Even so, it hardly lags. I wouldn’t recommend running a distributed.net client, though, as it heats the sucker up to about 75 degrees Celsius. Battery life with the high-power battery and good power management is easily 5 – 6 hours, or if you insist on bright screens and high speeds, probably around 3.

I would recommend this laptop to anyone, though I suspect Dell will soon phase it out for Intel’s new dual-core chips. I only paid $1100 for high-end specs and portability, which is hard to beat.

Brands

I received a Netflix gift subscription earlier this year, and would recommend the service. Their service is excellent, speed is impressive, and if you enjoy movies, the rates are easily worth it.

Two brands that I cannot recommend highly enough: Amazon and Falcon Northwest. I presume you are familiar with Amazon, but maybe not Falcon Northwest. Here are my experiences with both.

Amazon has impressive customer service, which is all the more surprising given that they often have the lowest prices and biggest selection as well. I recently ordered a birthday present for my wife from Amazon. Through online tracking, I saw that it was delivered – but there was no package at our apartment. My first suspicion was that one of the other people in the building saw a juicy package from Amazon and snatched it. (We don’t have a very good rapport with others in the building.)

I called Amazon, and with hardly a question, they sent another free copy of my order via two-day shipping, so that it would arrive in time for her birthday. How great is that? I’ve heard nothing but good stories about their service, and they’ve only confirmed it in my experience. (It turns out that our mailman marked the original package as delivered when it was still on the truck. I received it the next day, and returned the replacement to Amazon.)

Falcon Northwest makes some of the best gaming computers you can buy. If you have a couple bucks to spend, their support is the best in the industry and the computers are designed, built, tested, and serviced (in-house) by true professionals. We ordered my wife’s new computer, a Talon, from them a few months ago. They do some serious testing for days at a time on every machine that ships out.

If anything goes wrong with one of their computers, they pay to overnight the entire thing back to their offices and overnight it back to you once fixed. I haven’t had to do this yet, but I did call to ask about an adapter I needed – which they were not obligated to provide – and, without hesitation, they overnighted it to me. Copious documentation is provided, both for the novice and advanced user. Highly recommended.