I also had both. And when implemented properly, A3D really was that good, especially compared to EAX.

There was a company back in 1997 that had a fantastic (series of) cards that did all this 3d transformation, reflection, deflection and occlusion of audio in hardware. The company was Aureal, and their A3D system was fantastic, doing everything that this demo showed. The competitor, Creative's EAX, instead used the entirely dumb method of "turn on reverb in a room". Creative sued Aureal, thinking that they had a leg up on 3D audio. Aureal countersued, and won, but the legal costs drove them into bankruptcy. Creative then bought Aureal's assets, and buried the company, and all it's technology, never to be seen again. In fact, EAX is still the stupid-simple (and very broken) "turn on reverb" (though now it also has "Adjust reverb"). And, as Creative have shown before (With the whole "Carmack's Reverse" fiasco) They're more than willing to use legal means to muscle their way.

It needs more than just "a bit of rework", it requires a complete overhaul. Which is what SystemD is.

So, instead of one system handling bringing up a service, you want two. One to bring it up at runtime, and another to bring it back up if/when it crashes.

What SystemD is doing is, rather than using a stupid-simple for loop to start things, it's using an event-based system. This also means you can have things happen like "Network comes up, start network-dependent services", "USB printer plugged in, start print daemon", "Device hot-plugged, start dependent services". These are all things that are missing from the current SysV system, and require extra tools, along with their associated extra configuration and extra points of failure.

You're posting a lot on the drawbacks of SystemD, but you're not including any of the drawbacks for SystemV.

• SysV starts every task and service one at a time, waiting for the previous one to finish before it starts the next. This is fine for single-core single-threaded workloads, but most systems these days are multi-core. It also means that startup is slow. SystemD, on the other hand, can (and does) start up services in parallel, making sure that dependencies are resolved before starting the next item. This makes SystemD MUCH faster at booting.
• SysV only handles the initial bringing up, and the final tearing down, of services. Any service failures are not noticed, any errors are not dealt with. SystemD monitors services even while they're running, and can re-start them if they fail, handle crash reporting and log rotation. This makes SystemD more error resilient and stable.
• SysV only runs the services, and doesn't care about their configuration, so basic configuration and dependencies have to be handled in a myriad of ways, different for every service. SystemD attempts to be a central repository for ports (and handling the necessary firewall rules for them), configuration files, logging locations, and the rest. While this does make startup a touch more difficult to configure, it makes the system as a whole a lot simpler to deal with.

It doesn't have to be a Samsung app (Which, by the way, is kinda awful). DLNA means it can be any DLNA server, like Serviio (for instance) that also happens to have the wonderful feature that it will auto-transcode into a suitable format if your TV/Console/Whatever doesn't support it. Which means the PS3 and X360 (Also supported by Serviio) can also get in on this party.

3-Phase AC produces a smoother (considerably less ripple) DC current pattern when rectified than single or split-phase AC.

3 Phase doesn't require the return neutral, unless your load is very unbalanced. So they both require 3 wires to transmit.

And yes, it does appear to be a simple buck converter. Though you could probably use a Z-Source inverter too.

Yes, because the US cheats and uses 220 split-phase to provide 110 power. Most everywhere else that needs high power uses 3-phase, as it's smoother, easier to produce and rectify, and just as safe to transmit.

Why on earth would they call for 240V 60Hz? (almost) Nobody uses that. It's either 110V 60Hz (North America and colonies) or 240V 50Hz (UK, Europe and similar). And inverting to single phase is a lot harder than to 3-phase (and a lot less efficient).

And if you can still find them, the A1200 has expansion options up the wazoo, including RTG graphics, 16-bit soundcards, Ethernet adapters, dual-channel PIO Mode 4 IDE interfaces (To augment/replace the single-channel on-board IDE), Keyboard converters, even full PCI Backplanes or Zorro II/Zorro III/ISA/PCI backplanes which support many modern graphics cards, among other things.

The thing is, that was SCSI's fault, not the Amiga's. Dealing with DIP switches and termination was a problem no matter what OS you ran, or who made your hardware. Amigas had AutoConfig, which would (for Zorro I/II/III cards) allocate DMA, Interrupts and IRQs automatically at boot-time, along with auto-loading firmware and drivers. It was so good, in fact, that Intel copied it and called it "Plug 'n Play".

See, the thing is, that "Front panel audio" connection is running through a wire inside the case (Where all the RF interference from hard-drives and fans comes from) and is entirely unshielded. So it gets affected by everything going on inside the case.

Well, as the phone (that you slot into the "front" of the contraption) already has a suite of magnetometers, gyroscopes and accelerometers, it can quickly and reasonably accurately track head movement. There's also a hold for the phone's camera to look out, so it can be used for AR purposes (and the camera can be used to augment the head-tracking above).

Of course, what I'm waiting for is for someone to add some kind of "Steam In-Home Streaming" (or something similar) support for the phone, so you can run Oculus-supporting games on your PC and have the video sent over WiFi to your phone/HMD, which would be the perfect "Killer app" for this system. And the chances are, someone (Possibly even Valve) are working on this right now. It might exacerbate the lag issues (what with WiFi latencies and encoding/decoding latencies being added to processing latency), but it would be palpably better from a "freedom of movement" standpoint (and possibly a weight standpoint) than a Rift.

Okay, so here's a scenario for you. I've just built a nice new Ara phone. It has a computing module, a camera module, an LTE/GSM+SIM module, a 802.11a/b/g/n/ac module, 128GBs of storage, a touchscreen and a fingerprint reader.

It's the first time I've put this device together, with brand new parts out of the box. How am I meant to download the drivers? I can't use the WiFi, or the cellular modem, I don't have drivers for them yet. And I can't display any kind of configuration, because the display isn't set up either.

The "phone" has the main OS pre-loaded (I'm presuming a bare kernel on the Computing module, as that's what would decide what version of binaries and the like would be needed), so it can boot, but there's no functionality on it to mount the storage, or bring up the display, or even to start the WiFi and/or Cellular data, because there's no drivers for that yet.

The way I'm suggesting means that all the drivers are compartmentalized and available from first boot. The moment you slot a new module in it's ready to use. And while you can update the software onboard, you don't need to download software to get the system up and running. The on-module flash would also be locked into read-only mode for regular operations, and only unlocked as read/write when an update is required.

It's called Autoconfig. Essentially, Autoconfig does IRQ and address assignment (And is so good at it that Intel copied it for their "Plug'n'Play" system), but Autoconfig does more than that. It also initializes the firmware and loads it in. And the firmware for each device then contains the necessary libraries to (at the very least) get the hardware running. So, for example, hard-drive controllers get their drivers loaded and the hard-drive becomes available as a boot device, network cards are initialized enough that PXE booting works, graphics cards are started up and displays initialized, sound cards are initialized, etc.

So, essentially, every piece of hardware would take care of it's own drivers and NVRam config. WiFi module has WiFi drivers on it. And so on. The configuration software was not included on-device, but there's next-to-no reason why that couldn't be on-device too, as the price of flash is extremely cheap these days.