Yep I want to stop for the night at 7 pm where are the hotels you can stay at and here are some places to eat...

One word.
Debugger.
Compilers are actually easy to come by today. Debugging is where you run into issues.

Mobile, Routers, NAS, and now servers. ARM is getting very big very quickly.
In computers Attacks come from the bottom up. PC where a joke and could not hold a candle to a real computer like a PDP-11! Forget about mainframes like the 370!
It was not HURD at the time but GNU Unix that was going to be the next big thing.
It wasn't but hey no one is perfect.

The closest we get to that is the airport, where rights have been considerably and visibly curtailed (as opposed to the comparatively invisible loss of rights due to government intrusion in electronic communications). People seem to have accepted that more or less gracefully: they bitch, but it's not seen as a massive imposition on most people's daily lives.

I don't know if we'd ever get to the point of rationing food. Even if we declared a full-scale war, technology means we grow a lot of surplus food in this country. Prices might rise, but I don't think we'd ever see "grow victory gardens" posters as we did in the last unlimited war.

Oil, however, would skyrocket, and technology might be severely curtailed. It would be interesting to see how people reacted to that. It's hard to say whether that would be a bigger factor than outrage at a draft of manpower. In Korea and Vietnam, a lot of the public seemed to take the draft with equanimity since it came without the kind of rationing we saw during World War II.

Yes, though not a general draft. Still a rather shocking thing to have happened, since it disguised the need for a general draft, that might have altered people's perceptions of the war.

Onboard sound sucks.

My work laptop (Lenovo T420s) is useless for microphone audio (some Conexant chip). The company keeps wanting us to use Skype and Lync and SoftVTC to do meetings, but all the people who try to use the onboard audio are inaudible (because the built-in noise cancellation keeps ducking their voice), or if they manage to dig 5 dialogs deep to disable the noise cancellation (with an option that gets reset every reboot), they have lots of system noise over their voices (even if they're using an external mic. ). So everyone dials in via phone for group VTCs and mutes their PCs.

I have an expensive Jabra headset with a USB dongle. That gives me pretty clean audio. Should be able to use bluetooth too, but that takes more driver updates and even then it's still a pain.

My gaming PC has somewhat nicer onboard audio, but even with a S/PDIF link to my Logitech Z-560 speakers, I still get a hiss whenever the OS turns on and "opens" the audio device. Would be nice to be able to input digital audio somehow for Skype, but I ended up just plugging in a cheap USB webcam with a digital mic instead.

Still, it's kinda sad that any cheap mobile phone has a better microphone with AEC (for speakerphone use) and NC than you can get on most computers.

It is easy to make good DACs these days. Basically any DAC, barring a messed up implementation, is likely to sound sonically transparent to any other in a normal system. When you look at the other limiting factors (amp, noise in the room, speaker response, room reflections, etc) you find that their noise and distortion are just way below audibility. Ya, maybe if you have a really nice setup with a quiet treated room, good amps, and have it set for reference (105dB peak) levels you start to need something better than normal, but that isn't very common. Even then you usually don't have to go that high up the chain to get something where again the DAC is way better than other components.

Now that said, there can be a reason to get a soundcard given certain uses. For example you don't always want to go to an external unit, maybe you use headphones. In that case, having a good headphone amp matters and onboard sound is often remiss in that respect (then again, so are some soundcards). Also even if you do use an external setup, you might wish to have the soundcard do processing of some kind. Not so useful these days, but some games like to have hardware accelerated OpenAL.

Regardless, not a big deal in most cases. Certainly not the first thing to spend money on. If you have $50 speakers, don't go and buy a $100 soundcard. If you have a $5000 setup, ok maybe a soundcard could be useful, but only in certain circumstances.

As a side note, the noise in a PC isn't a big issue. Properly grounding/shielding the card deals with it. A simple example is the professional LynxTWO, which is all internal yet has top notch specs, even by today's standards. http://audio.rightmark.org/tes...

I am not sure even gamers need sound cards any more... at least not those who don't use headphones. I have a 7.1 movie surround system hooked to a PC, and the Windows itself magically mixes sound bits into the HDMI stream coming from my Nvidia GPU. In games, I get as many discrete sound channels as the game software supports, plus I can push most any kind of bitstream (including DTS-HD and Dolby TrueHD) from media files.

With a complete digital path, what does a sound card have to offer me? I guess AMD is making some sound co-processor stuff that might make neat effects at low CPU usage, but I'll need to see some really killer apps for that before it looks remotely attractive.

Ha, and don't forget the "I'm a talking parrot! Say something to me!" thing with the shrill voice too!

I can't wait to buy a shiny new Sound Blaster ZxR so I can get that noticeably superior audio. It'll be great for my collection of 128 Kbps MP3s!

Why not just turn off your speakers? Every mobo comes with built-in audio these days anyway, doesn't mean you have to plug anything in to it.

The /. writeup sounds like audiophile wank to me. I would be surprised if this Soundblaster could justify its price in a proper double blind study on real world data (music, games, movies, etc...) vs. the built in audio on your mobo.

You could get a CFL in 1985? Back then "Compact" florescent seemed to be those fixture with the 12" diameter circular tube and a conventional ballast. They certainly did not fit in a traditional socket. I started seeing what we consider CFLs around 2000 or so, and the first versions were pretty bad. There was some seriously defective Chinese garbage all over the market during the first few years. Once I found a bulb I liked (Commercial Electric from Home Depot--they don't appear to exist anymore sadly), I bought a bunch and swapped out most of the bulbs in my house.

It's strange. Of the many CFLs I've installed, I've only had three failures. Two of which were early Walmart bulbs that were shit. The other was one of the bulbs I settled on for everything else, it got a smoky smell and discolored the plastic near one end of the tube: clearly some magic blue smoke escaped. Other than that, I've had 10 years of reliable service from a couple dozen bulbs. A few of the oldest ones (4 bulbs) have a "warm up" time where they are noticeably dim when you turn them on at first, but all of the other bulbs come on at or near their full brightness.

I do have underground power though, I wonder if comes out cleaner thanks to that?

My plan is to switch out my CFLs for LEDs when the CFLs burn out, but thus far none of them have. I did the bulk of the CFL replacements back in 2004 and they just don't want to quit. The only LED light I've been able to install is to replace an incandescent flood on a circuit controlled by a dimmer switch.