HP is not dead, nor will it be for a long time. However HP has a new name since the split, the real HP is called Agilent now. The mediocre computer and ink sales portion wasn't really HP.

Take Mono seriously, it does quite well, but MonoDevelop nope. It's about as easy to do it all by hand in your favorite text editor.

I'd be more scared of Ivanova.

B5 wins hands down. It's one of the few sci-fi shows that I don't cringe or yell at the screen about. Being an engineer seems to ruin a lot of the sci-fi genre for me.

I can't speak to the specific function (after all it's been 16 years already), but there were certainly more specific timers to be had in DOS than the CPU speed. The turbo button was primarily on the XTs running at 8 MHz to reduce them to the IBM standard of 4.77 MHz. When IBM XTs all ran at 4.77 MHz the use of loop based timing was common, Frogger comes to mind. By the time AT computers were common place loop based timing was mostly going the way of the dinosaur as it became evident that programs would be run on different speed machines.

However, one place I worked had to keep buying pallets of 386 motherboards whenever they could even after 2000 because they ran their older data capture platform with loop based timers. Fortunately for the platform I worked on they hired some real programmers who knew better.

Digikey has 17,000 in stock axial resistors. HSC Electronic Supply probably has some as well, but their website isn't responding. (One of the few things I miss from the Bay Area is HSC.)

It was totally unrealistic, no one in their right mind would vote Schwarzenegger for governor.