I don't know about you, but I really see no reason I should have paid an extra $100 over the last few years for ports that I will never, ever use. I mean, what about PS2 keyboard and mouse ports? What about so-called "standard" keyboard ports? I bet you could add SCSI to a modern computer pretty cheaply.

I mean, basically, your cutoff point is "well I might use it at some point in the future". Apparently a serial port is useful to everyone (it's not) while an ISA port is useless to everyone (it's not). As mentioned, the vast majority of people will use, *at most*, one PCIe slot for a flashy graphics card, an onboard Ethernet port, onboard audio out, and USB. And most people will honestly just rely on the onboard video.

That's it. That's all you need for a modern computer. Anything more is a waste of money for most users.

(also I have no idea how you can use modern sound cards, they're all absolute junk and I haven't had one that worked properly for the last five years, my "sound card" is - natch - connected over USB :P)

I'm curious - does anyone know what fraction of air travel prices are oil? I'd have a hard time imagining it being more than 50%, and obviously if it's low enough then "dwindling oil" won't have a particularly big effect.

Agreed. That is not fast, at all. I think I've thrown together machines faster than that in the excitement of getting new hardware up and running. I think it would be more impressive if they were required to get them to boot, not to mention small details like hooking up the power and reset buttons, etc.

AR gaming is but one application. AR's real promise IMO is in fusing digital information with the real world to create a richer environment for people to accomplish various tasks more efficiently. The military has used this concept for years with fighter HUDs. There are smart phone apps that overlay real-estate data as you pan the camera across a row of houses. It's not just about games, and there are a lot of very interesting applications that come to mind for different industries if you start thinking outside the box.

It would be better to have asked if the article describes a homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI) or diffusion burn process. There's a huge difference between them in terms of emissions and thermal efficiency. In the traditional diesel cycle, fuel combusts along a locally "rich" flame front that propagates outwards from the kernel. Since it's locally rich, you get particulate and NOx formulation. In HCCI, you have a uniform (lean) distribution of fuel and air that combusts simultaneously with lower emissions and higher efficiency as a byproduct. Both are compression ignition processes, but one is far more efficient than the other. The trick with HCCI has always been air/fuel ratio and combustion timing control and the large number of variables that can affect both. Playing with inlet conditions including the equivalence ratio, EGR rate, intake temperature and pressure, and adding "exotic" diluents are all potential control options. This system may be using one or more of them to achieve HCCI.