For me, it was a matter of wanting to run DRDOS for its benefits and the occasional Windows program on top. See, the problem was that MSDOS was shit. DRDOS had a lot of polish to it, including a few things like the ability to undelete files (including the first letter) which Windows and even Linux cannot do to this day.

It gave you more memory, and for a command-line OS it was a heck of a lot friendlier than MSDOS, and a real boon for developers and gamers. Mostly it was a lot of little things, like the in-kernel command history. You didn't need DOSKEY or whatever, it did that automatically and unlike MSDOS, it would work inside applications. In DEU, for example, it would remember the command history on the DEU command-line as well as command.com. The CLI editor allowed you to delete words with CTRL-T which Windows 7 can't do. TYPE and virtually every other command could use /p to page the output. Oh, and DISKCOPY could copy two and from disk image files.

At the time, if you were doing DOS application development, it really had a lot going for it.

Yes, but without plugins they're not going to be much use.

I'm not sure there's a future for that. Everyone is moving to a sandboxed model with no plugins and no IPC. That includes Windows, where Metro is so hobbled that even Microsoft can't do it - and that's where they want all new development to go. IIRC they are already referring to the desktop as 'legacy applications'. Sadly OSX seems to be moving in the same direction - iOS and Android are already there, of course.

There is no room for Photoshop, Sonar or Protools in the brave new world that Apple and Microsoft seem to be fashioning, so realistically you may end up with three choices: 1. Try and keep the old stuff going, 2. Hope it gets ported to Linux or some other system with a less draconian application model, or 3. Replace your VST stuff with hardware.

I think the problem is that the new director may be turning CSIRO into a patent troll...

There is a slight problem with that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PAL-NTSC-SECAM.svg

...the green bits are 30fps. Everything else, i.e about 2/3 of the planet, is 25fps. 25 does not go into 60. I suppose at a pinch it could be run at 24fps with the 120Hz timebase you suggested, but that's not exactly optimal...

I started out with iMovie, but it caused no end of problems for the project I was trying to do, essentially a slideshow with narration. I can't remember what the last straw was, but I switched over to Kdenlive on Linux and although it took a bit of getting used to and the crashes could be extremely frustrating, it worked a lot better for me than iMovie did on Snow Leopard.

You'd use SMPTE format - specify the time and the frame, e.g. 00:03:56:23.

Yeah, you'd still need to preview the video to find the edit points, but as I understand it, this is essentially how it was done from about 1975-1995 or so using systems like CMX, You'd enter the list of edit points, load up the videotapes and the computer would handle the edit/assembly by itself.

I wondered whether the device was actually bypassing the hair cells entirely...

I have often come up with melodies, chorus lines and the like on the way to work. With a smartphone or other pocket recording device I can whistle or sing them in the car-park or any other convenient point, and work them into something useful when I get home. I've had a couple of really good lines come that way - the first one of which I didn't have a recorder with me and lost it. I was able to remember parts of it a few days later but I never managed to get it as perfect as it had been. Two others would have been similarly lost if I had't been able to record them.

I think the weirdest one is when I've been playing Doom or Doom 2, and suddenly had harpsichord waltzes appear in my mind. On more than one occasion I've immediately quit the game so I could put the waltz into the sequencer as a bridge in whatever song I've been working on.

They were all the rage ten years ago. HP's PocketPC 3 devices had them. I think they may even have still been Compaq at the time. Using the screen is new, but now I think about it, the scanning devices were probably the same kind of capacitive matrix we're using now.

What most of these systems did was they hashed the fingerprint anyway, since they were IIRC vectorised, measuring the size and shape of the print. If the new devices do that too, it's less of a security problem, but if there's userspace access to the capacitive grid, you might be able to grab the image of the fingerprint with a trojan.

That is fascinating, and I love the idea. But it's not going to fly unless they can get rid of the wailing sound (apparently caused by the 'voxels' which the record is made up of)

The VRX was very expensive, had a frequency response up to about 12KHz and a maximum of about 15 minutes a side. ('Momentary Lapse of Reason' was about 26 min/side). I was curious about the idea of making one-off LPs of my music, but once I saw the specs I realised why it was discontinued.

In the late 60s, my parents saw some of the first performances of 'Hair' in the West End, at blistering volume. This eventually caused the theatre to collapse, around 1973 according to Wikipedia, and it's citation is here: http://www.thisistheatre.com/londontheatre/shaftesburytheatre.html

I have Rune. It's a little difficult to get it to run because the infrastructure has changed over the last 10 years, but last I played it a couple of years back, it did still work.

This was actually the reason I didn't buy Deus Ex on first release - I was waiting for the Linux port. Sadly Loki imploded before it could be completed.

Traditionally the MPAA member funds the production. They may use fraudulent accounting techniques and behave abominably afterwards, but if they've paid for something to be produced or distributed, they are entitled to a stake in it.