The fact is that Roland MT-32 / LAPC-1 were for long time be-all end-all of PC audio. In fact most game music was composed for this particular synth was exactly because the alternatives were SO bad and the composers, being musically oriented people, wanted something that didn't sound like absolute crap. It's not like MT-32/LAPC-1 ever was that popular. And Sierra's Larry 3 theme sure made you soil your pants on Roland after cheap tinny synth-sound of Adlib/Soundblaster..

This is actually one lost piece of computer history. As far as I know, there is no real emulator for MT-32 which can reproduce the customized instruments possible with that synth and used extensively by composers. Even if you have the (copyrighted) original ROM, it just gives you the stock samples, not the customization, unless there's an emulator for the actual syntheziser chip.

PC sound was really stagnated for really long time, much thanks to creative's absolute domination of the market. GUS was a brave attempt at a paradigm shift but ultimately fell flat on it's face, only to be reincarnated by creative copying the concept with AWE32 and such. With Win95 standardizing the audio interface, Creative came up with EAX to again get a stranglehold of PC audio. It wasn't until Vista made soundcard a commodity DAC with no special hardware caps used at all that the sound card scene became open. Unfortunately it also made lowest common denominator (AC'97 with digital out) de-facto standard. As far as I know, if you want to have fancy audio processing, it has to be all done in software now. Not that it REALLY matters when everyone has at least dual core with majority of games not using the 2nd core (3rd, 4th..) core for anything much.

Bussard ramjet is pretty standard fare in more reasonable sci-fi. First we'd have to have a robust space infrastructure in place, thought. It'll take seriously long time to colonize and exploit resources in solar system only.

The way things are going now I'm not holding my breath over seeing proper orbital shipyard or asteroid belt manufacturing ability in my lifetime.

Then again, these things have a kind of bottleneck for progress so the 1st one is enormously expensive but the 2nd one far less so.

Think how industrial revolution got started, things didn't exactly stop at the level of 1st steam engines or machine shops.

Excuse me?

The 2.1 firmware leaks for A1 are apparently falling from the sky then? It's not like Acer is about to publish official eclair firmware? In modaco forum they're up to 3rd leaked 2.1 firmware now unless I'm mistaken.

Acer has also released 1.6 firmware update that helps on the abysmal release battery life. This phone still needs a 3rd party battery, thought.

Darn, I read that headline as "three-patent embryo" and thought it's some kind of IP gripe article.

Never mind, I'm sure the number of patents on this is bigger by the order of magnitude anyways.

In fact, there are drugs for colic. Well, at least for some of the cases. It's just the "common mom wisdom" that there's nothing that works and the doctors do not often bring it up unless directly asked. cf. infecting your children with horrible diseases instead of getting them shots..

SIQ was not even a crippling problem in the end as there was one programmer on IBM team that made an heroic effort and implemented kind of watchdog functionality into the kernel. So if one program hogs the input queue, it gets booted to the corner. Kids today probably can't imagine a situation where you have no access to keyboard because a trivial 3rd party app is misbehaving. I do not remember when we got the fix, but probably either out of box with 3.0 or with a service pack.

The real killer was complete inability of the kernel to kill a process which was unable to terminate gracefully. There simply was no "kill -9" equivalent. Don't try telling me your favourite app z fixed that because they never worked properly and I tried them all back in the day. Maybe one time in 5 you got lucky and the offending app got zapped but in the end you had to reboot because you had half-dozen zombi apps cluttering the desktop..

Personally I actually gave up home computing for a couple of years between giving up OS/2 and before Win2k came out. I skipped the dos extender garbage completely.

Real reasons for OS/2 failure are pretty simple to enumerate:
1) you really honestly needed at least 16MB of memory and that was the time when the RAM cartel was in full swing and almost everyone was squeaking along with 8MB that was completely insufficient as memory was more expensive than ever.
2) Microsoft promptly and thoroughly sabotaged OS/2 ability to run windows programs by "updating" Win32s API to allocate processes beyond 2GB, which OS/2 couldn't handle. This was the real death knell, ability to gain Win32 apps was regained only far too late by very very nifty executable converters that could actually take MS Office and convert the binaries to OS/2 binaries (OS/2 implemented natively about 80% of Win32 api anyways)
3) It was totally different from what people were used to. See how much problem MS has dragging XP users to Vista/7 and they have near-absolute monopoly to back them up.

There are/were solid technical limitations (Back at the day only thing MS shills wanted to talk about was symmetric multiprocessing that only became reality with dual cores more than a decade later..) but they were largely irrelevant to the real success and/or failure.

There's an easy way to generate a strong password. Pick a passphrase of your choice and make an acronym out of it.

Picard Would Kick Kirk's Ass Any Day => PWKKAAD

Good luck trying password attack on that one. It's rather easy to come up with these things once in a while. Add your birday or something if they have daft letters and numbers policy in place.

Surprisingly, getting your fingers repeatedly burned will teach you this lesson sooner or later. It just becomes a learned instinct to look at the soldering iron every time you're reaching for it...

It's a nice reference. Once in a while you just have to get right back to the basics and remind yourself how some common BJT circuits such as current mirrors work. Ditto with basic opamp circuits.

Depending what's understood with "electronics" it's big and sprawling subject with many sub-disciplines. You can get into EMI quagmire and never really come out of it, for example.

I was interviewed with one company where "cad heads" and designers are quite separate with layout designers being the less appreciated job.

In any case, there are many, many things to learn and you only become really good when years go by and you accumulate knowledge. You do, however, probably become good only in subset of things you've worked with.

For example. Mosfets are voltage controlled devices and you do not have to worry about power to the gate, right? Wrong. The gate charge, while very small _does_ add up hugely in SMPS circuits and such when you're charging and discharging that small capacitor 100000 times a second or so.

Tap water tastes like water, hence it sucks as a placebo. For placebo to work, the person has to believe it's actually medicine so it should taste/smell/look/cost like actual medicine. Or you should be daft enough to be conditioned that plain water is a real cure.

WRT this homeopathic remedy stuff, I'm darn sure it'd be really very hard to actually produce such a pure solution assuming you've been handling substance z in any meaningful quantity in the premises.

Hmm, I think the legislation here in Finland is moving towards opt-out approach to organ harvesting. That being said, I doubt they'll want my cholesterol clogged lazy fat heart and internal organs maltreated by steady intake of booze much. Well, ok, I don't smoke so feel free to carve a lung out afterwards assuming they do not get haemorrhaged or somesuch.

"magic infinite energy source" is spelled interstellar hydrogen, no? Bussard Ramjet can conceivably generate "free" energy. Besides which, consider extremely advanced society with wast resources. Then consider George W. Are you scared yet?

It doesn't take many people acting irrationally to screw you up sideways if they have a slice of huge resource base. You have to consider aliens might be acting for religious or ideological basis, and just a small minority of their society.

In any case, "invasion fleet" would need about exactly one ship, one. We have zero defense against a spaceship which has capability to move in stellar space, never mind interstellar.

Yeah, if they're kind and give us couple of years, we can for sure build orion and go get them. no, no, not the nasa boondoggle killed in crib, the real deal from 50s! Unfortunately "they" would have the absolute high ground and would most likely have the means to take out fairly primitive nuclear propulsion spacecraft without breaking sweat.

Now that they have de facto taken governor generalship of earth, what are they going to do with it? Occupy earth? Ha. Hardly likely. More like some kind of deal where X amount of industrial and energy output would be devoted to whatever our saviours bloody well want. Or else. Then again, what would they want? If it's more starships, they'd be giving us the technology and industrial base to go get them. Bring us freedom? Convert us? Make us biggest reality TV show ever?

Who knows.

As an male who had his weenie chopped in his 30s, I can say I enjoy sex whole a lot more without the painful splits in the foreskin that take forever to heal and general constriction/pain due to naturally moderately undersized foreskin.

I only wish public healthcare didn't drag their heels about it for a decade due to general perceptions over here.

Uh, what?

After quick googling, shift-f10 is used for booting Win7 from a virtual HDD image. That's hardly something you need to know for anything closely resembling a normal setup. I do assume your anecdote about APIC/PIC/APIC dance is somehow related for that too.

So, yes, installing some kind of weird virtual machine windows 7is somewhat complicated. And this is relevant to the 99% of setups not using virtualization, how?

Normal home desktop installation definitely does not need any of that crap, I've installed W7 on acer laptop, my desktop PC and a HTPC, each of which went with no hitches whatsoever despite not having cherry picked hardware as they started life as XP machines originally.