What both the original engineers and the restorers accomplished given what hey had to work with.

A good sub-woofer allows for crisp clean bass - not loud and thumpy. I build my own speakers, primarily because I don't like black boxes and can build something out of my woodshop for substantially less money. I can demonstrate good base by using the Titanic soundtrack - My Heart Will Go On - not a favorite, but part of the feeling in the movie was they used a pipe organ in the piece that gets down to the 15 - 16 Hz range to represent the feeling of the ship moving through the water. If you compare the exact same music from the CD, in MP3 (256K), AAC (256K), Apple Lossless, and FLAC, you only hear it in the CD. But as it has been mentioned, people like me are the exception rather than the rule when it comes to audio. Most people will be happy with their downloaded compressed music on an iPod with $2 earbuds. Also, my primary music system is $600 worth of homemade speakers hooked up to a 1974 Pioneer Quadrophonic Receiver with a pair of 1975 McIntosh amps and equally high end turntable, reel to reel, CD player (1986), tape deck, EQ, and for a humorous conversation piece - a component 8-track deck.

Not hard to find. My first Mac OS was 2.1 I think - it was a Mac 512k. Here's a link to get the image. http://www.nd.edu/~jvanderk/sysone/

You are dead on with this. I teach technical classes (Large GIS Database creation, usage and manipulation) on an adjunct basis. I have watched promising STEM students drop out or postpone their education due to a factor of higher costs and harder classes. They receive the same financial packages as a social science or liberal arts student, but have to pay more and have less time to work part time to support themselves. The original purpose of public universities was education for the public good, as a conservative as well, I see little public good in graduating 50 history majors for every electrical engineer. Yes the engineer will make more out of college, but they will also contribute more to the economy a through their work. The 50 history majors consume public resources for a degree that has little chance of landing them a job. Last time I had lunch with one of my history professors (which was my minor in college as I enjoy it), in an average year there is one history related position for every 2500 graduates - so I question the purpose of a public university wasting resources in such degrees. Should they offer degree minors and classes in areas like history? Yes. Should they spend money on an entire program, probably not. Take where I teach, a university of 16000 students, they have 11 full time history faculty and use 5 adjunct faculty to graduate 50 majors and 7 masters a year. If they were to scale back to a history minor and have enough faculty to cover general education and interdependent majors, they would need 4 full time faculty and a couple of adjunct. The savings could hire 4 STEM faculty (they cost more - 35k for a starting history PhD v. 70k - 80k for a STEM PhD) and would better serve the purpose of a public institution. I have no problem letting the small liberal arts colleges pick up the students that really want to study history as they graduate more than enough to cover what the market needs. This would require a shift in thinking about how public universities are run, but it needs to be looked at. It is my personal belief that societally, making STEM degrees cheaper to obtain is good for all parties involved and represents a solid investment by society.

I agree as well. As someone who teaches in academia on occasion, the university should reverse their thinking. It should be significantly cheaper to get a degree in a field where their is demand - the STEM degrees - and should cost significantly more for all other degrees. Coffee shops like Starbucks may have fewer History majors to choose from in hiring, but I think they would be able to adapt.

Unfortunately true. I remember in college being able to turn on MTV in the background and study, as they played a good mix of music videos both in style and content. You actually had more music on than some of the music radio stations. Then came Real World (aka cheap to produce TV) - and the beginning of the end for MTV as far as I am concerned. Then MTV2 was launched to play videos only to repeat what happened to MTV, then MTV bought VH1 because they played videos, repeated what happened again and it continues. It seems that this is just the accepted business model for cable TV. This is one of the reasons that I don't have cable or satellite anymore, they would advertise a 100+ stations, some of which sounded interesting, but have little to do with what they are suppose to be about (try finding history on the History Channel), I ended up watching maybe 5-6 shows with any regularity, not worth the price. I put up a good aerial antennae and now get two music video channels, four PBS stations (including one that focuses on cooking / crafts / home improvement) and all the regular network garbage I can handle. Add to this my DVR and Netflix, and I have more TV than I can watch.

First Post.

5? Isn't that a bit generous?

If they aren't bringing back a retro style BYTE Magazine (a hardware persons monthly reference), why bother. Call it something else. If they brought a BYTE like publication back that was an electronic publication formatted for e-readers and tablets, then I would be excited.

As the owner of an older (well built) house, I went to Lowes to find a couple of parts to fix a 60 year old laundry faucet. The manager of the plumbing department looked at them and sent me over to the local hardware store. His comments, first, they sure don't build faucets that well any more (he thought if taken care of, they should last another 60+ years) and that the big box stores just don't carry parts for older items. The owner of the local hardware store backed that up when he told me that since most the houses in the area were built in the same couple eras (1920's - 1950's) he specifically stocked that parts needed for that age of house.