Same thing happens if you bought a Vista upgrade edition - you need to install 98/2k/XP before installing Vista.
On the other hand, MS charge AU$129 for the Vista Home Premium (closer in features to OS X than Home Basic, though Ultimate is actually closest if you include the iLife stuff that carries over from your old full OS X install) upgrade. Apple charge AU$39 for the Leopard -> Snow Leopard upgrade.
Or you can buy the full Mac Box set for AU$229*, versus AU$259.95 or AU$319.95 for the full Vista Home Basic & Ultimate versions. Still cheaper, and you get full versions of the latest iLife & iWork thrown in. When was the last time MS gave away Office, or even Works?
Short version? There's differences in the upgrade path & bundled apps, but basically OS X "upgrade pricing" < Vista "upgrade pricing", and OS X full price < Vista full price.
(* I think the last full version I bought - 10.4.x - was $AU129. Yeah, Snow Leopard is AU$100 more, but several years have passed, & it now includes iLife (which was basically only GarageBand at that stage, with iTunes, iMovie, and iDVD updates), & iWork (which didn't exist except as a demo back then).)
If case any one reading this likes HHGTG and hasn't read Adam's Dirk Gently novels I can only recommend to get them and read them.
Or you could just watch the Dr Who episodes "City of Death" and (the unfinished, but available) "Shada" - both the Dirk Gently novels are basically recycled ideas and scenes from those 2 of the 3 Who stories he wrote / edited.
OK, "Shada" I can almost understand - it never completed production & was canned due to a BBC technician's strike. But recycling "City of Death" as the central concept of a book? Hell, it's wasn't even supposed to be a good story; merely an excuse for the cast & crew to run around Paris for a few days...
(Sorry to rain on everybody's parade. 'Hitchhikers' was funny & fun when I was ~13, when the radio series came out, but I'd pretty much gotten over it by the time I was 16 or so. It ain't that funny (people keep mentioning Pratchett upthread, for good reason...), it ain't that deep (note: superficial concepts brought up then not developed, only to pop up repeatedly and get ignored again repeatedy != "deep"), it's about as philosophical as a 'Matrix' sequel - and there's much better stuff produced both before and after that leaves HHGG in its wake.
Again, apologies - I know too many people who's bookshelves begin and end with Adams, and it's sad...)
The excuse that its takes up too much room does not work when considering subtitles.
Actually, it kinda does.
DVD subtitles aren't highly-compressible text, and they're not MPEG / JPEG compressed video or images either.
They're stored as run-length encoded (RLE) bitmaps and, as such, can take up quite a bit more room than you may expect. On top of that, IIRC there's a limit in the DVD spec on how many private streams can be included in the container (.VOB), and a practical limit on the bitrate available off the disc (total of all video (including alternate angles, etc) + all audio + all private streams must be less than ~10.8mbps (with video alone being limited to a max of ~9.8mbps)).
There is nothing to cite, because it hasn't happened yet. Until you link to some creditable sources (that does NOT mean NYT,/., or any other news site, but a scientific journal!) I cannot believe it.
Without being too snarky to you, I'm not going to link anything else because a lot of what someone might want to see as "evidence of evolution" depends on what one is expecting to see. Most people would be wanting to see a phentotypic change e.g. cocci <-> bacilli, cillate <-> flagellate, etc. - something that's obviously a different organism. Since we've only been looking for a short time - and the tens of thousands of generations in the paper I linked is only a short time in the scale of things - we're not going to see that unless we're extremely lucky. Keep looking, and the chance we will go up (assuming there is something to see;-)
But, really, that's just a matter of scale. Aren't smaller, less apparent-to-the-naked-eye adaptations (e.g. selected & inherited variations in the genome, membrane permeability, cell size, etc) just as much evidence of evolution as the development of, say, more efficient locomotive structures?
The answer to that question is, as I said, "depends on what you want to see as evidence". Someone who'll only accept hard indisputable evidence of proto-cows evolving into dolphins, or proto-chimps evolving into hominids, ain't going to be convinced by evidence of bacteria evolving to oxidise ethanol into acetaldehyde...
There's also the dingo fence, which originally was to keep the dingos on one side away from the sheep on the other side, but nowdays largely serves to keep the dingos on one side away from the dingos on the other.
It does make a really cool noise when you drive through it, though...
But you're talking phenotypic differences due to (relatively) minor genetic differences - this study is looking at gross genetic differences that effectively separate humans into 3 clades.
I'm still digging up the article, but in the meantime, this may help illustrate things. Although it's based on mitochondrial DNA (the study in the article is based on nuclear DNA), it shows that (broadly) there are 3 groups - the original African group, one that colonised Europe, and one that colonised the rest of the world. This study seems to back up the mtDNA evidence.
At the very least I find it hard to believe the Australian Aborigines aren't a distinct group since they separated from the rest of the race before Europeans left Africa.
Err... no?
There's some circumstantial evidence to suggest that there may have been early humans in Australia 80~125,000 years ago. But the genetic & archaeological evidence suggests that the arrival of the ancestors of current aboriginal Australians occurred 40~70,000 y.a.
In other words, there may have been humans in Australia before the group that colonised Europe and Asia left Africa, but modern Aborignal Australians would seem to be descendants of the first wave of H. sapiens to leave Africa and migrate along the equatorial line into southern Asia. This study doesn't contradict that at all (though it does a bit to challenge the prevailing view of the timing of the split between emergent African populations in the Middle East, and the European / Asian populations diverging from that.)
* Unlike PCs, which have 'backspace' and '(forward) delete' buttons, Macs have two buttons labeled 'delete' or 'del'--the big one which is backspace, and the small one next to help, home, end, etc., which is forward delete. That's the one you need for this shortcut. I imagine laptop users and people who use those new small keyboards are SOL.
In theory, the Mac's Fn key modifies the "delete" key to "del", so laptop / new keyboard users aren't so much SOL as "need to use another finger".
In practice, however, it doesn't matter - on my '06/'07 model Core2Duo MacBook, shift-command-delete works fine & brings up the FF dialogue - as does shift-fn-command-delete.
While some DVD players support DivX and often won't cough with XviD, the manufacturers did so to enable you to play the now-defunct DivX discs.
Nope, you're confusing 2 different DivX's there.
DIVX, the discs : rental system using MPEG-2 on DVD-like discs with triple-DES encryption. They had a writeable area on the disc so you could watch them within 48 hrs of the first play; also required a connection to the phone line so you could pay a fee to add another 48hrs to that.
DivX: Originally "DivX;-)", a hacked version of the MS MPEG-4 Version 3 codec (which wasn't actually MPEG-4 compliant...) renamed as a pisstake of the DIVX disc system (hence the winking emoticon). Later extended by independent hackers ("DivX;-)" 3.11 and later 3.xx versions), then an attempt at a clean-room implementation became DivX4.
2 different things, totally unrelated except by name.
"... made of metal that can't be transported back with you..."
Simple. You wrap it in bacon.
(That's how the Terminators worked; they couldn't send one back until they'd developed Terminators with real flesh to protect the metal endoskeleton. It might have been a more interesting movie if this hadn't worked; imagine Arnie turning up back then as a large fleshy blob (as opposed to the large fleshy blob he is now...))
Or was it living flesh? I forget. In that case, you just strap lots of cats to it...
What if...just suppose that the climate change that you fear for its cost is natural and not man-caused?
Should we then muck with the environment in an effort to stop it, because of the cost if we don't?
As someone who is on the never-ending path to becoming a scientist (in the field of environmental science, no less), I say "yes". Plenty of other organisms muck with and adapt their environment to suit them; we wouldn't be doing anything particularly unusual in the great scheme of things, just that we'd be particularly capable of it.
Still, you're going to need a damned good understanding of what you're doing, and what the effects - intended and unintended - are going to be before you do it. Either way, you're going to need good accurate and reliable models of global processes to help you with this.
Or are you going to rely on the magic pixie dust of human ingenuity to solve individual problems as they crop up, without any understanding of the overall system? Because that's just stupid; a sort of inverse pyramid scheme where one solution creates two problems which require two solutions which create four problems which require four solutions which create 8 problems which require...
Face it; regardless of whether you believe GCC is an imminent threat or a crock of shit, a good understanding and model of global systems is the starting point regardless of which way you want to go...
I'll believe that a completely free to act econo/socio/political system can solve the CC (or overpopulation, or resource depletion, or whatever...) problem on the day that your GNU/OSS poster children solve the spam problem...
Please note: most of the current "solutions" for the spam problem don't solve anything; they just move it away (or hide it) from you in a "I see no spam - I'm alright, Jack!" manner.
To paraphrase Darth Vader: "I find your excessive faith... charming".
So... it's harder to get the right answer than previously though, but the previous calculations done the 'easy' way are still correct?
Yup, pretty much the point, but you'd be better off summarising it as "but the previous calculations done the 'easy' way are still largely correct". It's the difference between "the exact right answer" (e.g. 100.0097) and a "good enough for fairly accurate predictions answer" (e.g. 95 +-10%).
Mathematical models, like Penthouse models, are idealised representations of reality - you start with what you've got, and refine it until you get near the right answer. The big difference is that, in a scientific mathematical model you have historical data to show you what the right answer should be - once you build a model that takes reliable historical data and can reproduce an observed answer, you can then feed it current data and start extrapolating future answers.
In this case it seems that, for a given level of accuracy, the detail of how the water in the current returns to colder climes doesn't particularly matter. It's a black box; stuff goes in one end and, after a certain amount of processing, comes out the other in a certain pattern. That's enough to give you a certain amount, e.g. +-10%, of accuracy. To achieve better accuracy - say, +-5% - you need a better idea of what's going on in that black box.
Now we're looking into that particular black box, saying "oh, we were largely right about the inputs and outputs, but inside it's not at all how we thought it worked!". The next step is to create a better black box.
Think of it in terms of library functions. If you're doing integer math, you largely don't care if your multiplication library returns results +- 0.4, 'cos the results are rounded to the nearest int. Once you start wanting the better accuracy of floating point math, however, you'll need to fine-tune that function...
What they are saying by continuing to use these noisy analog devices is, "I don't care if I piss in the community pool because I am too cheap/lazy to get out and use the loo."
Which is exactly what the WiFi consortium said too, when they decided to use an open-to-all, licence-free band instead of ponying up the $$$ to pay the ITU & regional member organisations for a chunk of spectrum.
The 2.4Ghz ISM band has long been a radio sewer, and was allocated purposefully for non-licensed uses because it is a sewer. WiFi used it to play in because it was free, and now WiFi users are complaining because they're drowning in shit?
(Note: the "problem" in the article would appear to be fairly specific to the UK since they limit most uses of the 2.4GHz band to 10mW EIRP & 20MHz BW, compared to the rest of the world at 100mW EIRP & 15MHz BW - meaning that imported hardware is often non type-approved for use in the UK. What they're talking about as a "problem" is simply the normal state of affairs for the rest of the world.)
"The hell they don't. You're visiting their web site hosted on their hardware, at their expense, and maintained with their time/money."
Wrong. They choose to build their website, host it on their hardware, at their expense, and maintain it with their time/money. And they're free to choose to show ads.
They're also free to choose to disable access to people who block them, and suffer any reduced exposure / revenue that may result. But making that choice costs them; they don't want the opportunity cost, but they want the potential exposure / revenue.
They take the old adage "You have to spend money to make money", shorten it to their advantage and at your expense, and end up with "You have to... make money".
Who's the real leech - the person using a website with AdBlock turned on, or the person who built that website and wants everybody but him to pay for it?
"Copyright has been around for many years as a way for artists to be compensated for their work. It is not unjust. Is there a better way? Possibly, but then it is up to the Pirate Party (or anyone who wants to change things) to come up with a better way."
A PIC 10F200 costs AU$1.24 in > 25 quantities, compared to an NE555 at AU$0.429 / unit, AU$0.351 > 10+, or AU$0.26 > 250+
And yeah, I was just poking fun at whippersnappers who automatically put a micro into everything. Don't forget to amortise the cost of your programmer hardware & coding time;-)
You also forgot the Vcc cap - don't worry, so did I with my mental zener-based supply. Don't want your regulator latching up or self-destructing on +- supply spikes, do you?;-)
(Aside: I once built a set of Knightrider lights for my car (OK, OK - feel free to poke fun at me for that but, in my defence, it was the 80's;-) based on a 555, a BCD up/down counter, and a BCD-decimal decoder. I didn't filter the supply well enough, but that had the advantage of when it started working erratically by skipping lights or suddenly reversing direction, I knew it was time to change the distributor points;-)
The 286 had protected mode; you just couldn't return to real mode (which is where everything ran in those days) without the nasty hardware hack IBM developed for the AT. The big advantage of the 386 over the 286 was that you could return to real mode from protected mode without resetting the CPU via the keyboard controller...
The C&T chipset certainly gave it a bump-along, but there were IBM PC clones around well before the 80386. Sales of original 8086/8088 genuine IBM PCs were dwarfed by sales of 8086/8088/V20-based clones, well before the 80386 was even developed.
(Actually, you've just inspired me. Someday I'm gonna build a calculator, based on a 8 pin micro, to display the optimum R1, R2, & C for a given frequency on an LCD screen.
I might even throw in calculation of values for monostable and bistable mode;-)
As an old fart, I wonder why you'd rather use a microcontroller with all the attendant pickyness over I/O and supply voltage stability and noise and costing > $1 in bulk, over a 555 that'll work in fairly noisy conditions from 5~15v and costs a few cents in bulk.
Horses for courses; just try getting your microcontroller to do something like flash an LED in a car without all the extra supply regulation and filtering. A 555 will do it with 6 additional components, including the LED, for less than $1;-)
Yeah, the 741 is there (though I reckon it should be #2, or even #1 - you know you can make a 555-equivalent suitable for most purposes with a couple of 741's and some clever circuit design, right?;-).
But yeah, the lack of 7400 series (the original TTL versions, not that 74xxC crap;-) is odd. Definately should be up there ~ #3 or higher. That stuff was the building blocks of computers before dedicated CPUs.
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(Oops: Vista Home Premium is AU$259.95; Vista Home Basic is AU$199.95)
Same thing happens if you bought a Vista upgrade edition - you need to install 98/2k/XP before installing Vista.
On the other hand, MS charge AU$129 for the Vista Home Premium (closer in features to OS X than Home Basic, though Ultimate is actually closest if you include the iLife stuff that carries over from your old full OS X install) upgrade. Apple charge AU$39 for the Leopard -> Snow Leopard upgrade.
Or you can buy the full Mac Box set for AU$229*, versus AU$259.95 or AU$319.95 for the full Vista Home Basic & Ultimate versions. Still cheaper, and you get full versions of the latest iLife & iWork thrown in. When was the last time MS gave away Office, or even Works?
Short version? There's differences in the upgrade path & bundled apps, but basically OS X "upgrade pricing" < Vista "upgrade pricing", and OS X full price < Vista full price.
(* I think the last full version I bought - 10.4.x - was $AU129. Yeah, Snow Leopard is AU$100 more, but several years have passed, & it now includes iLife (which was basically only GarageBand at that stage, with iTunes, iMovie, and iDVD updates), & iWork (which didn't exist except as a demo back then).)
Or you could just watch the Dr Who episodes "City of Death" and (the unfinished, but available) "Shada" - both the Dirk Gently novels are basically recycled ideas and scenes from those 2 of the 3 Who stories he wrote / edited.
OK, "Shada" I can almost understand - it never completed production & was canned due to a BBC technician's strike. But recycling "City of Death" as the central concept of a book? Hell, it's wasn't even supposed to be a good story; merely an excuse for the cast & crew to run around Paris for a few days...
(Sorry to rain on everybody's parade. 'Hitchhikers' was funny & fun when I was ~13, when the radio series came out, but I'd pretty much gotten over it by the time I was 16 or so. It ain't that funny (people keep mentioning Pratchett upthread, for good reason...), it ain't that deep (note: superficial concepts brought up then not developed, only to pop up repeatedly and get ignored again repeatedy != "deep"), it's about as philosophical as a 'Matrix' sequel - and there's much better stuff produced both before and after that leaves HHGG in its wake.
Again, apologies - I know too many people who's bookshelves begin and end with Adams, and it's sad...)
Depends on the jurisdiction. For example, in my state of Aus, last time I looked (a while ago, it may have changed),
Hence "breaking and entering", "entering without cause", and "entering with intent to xxx" were 3 different charges.
Actually, it kinda does.
DVD subtitles aren't highly-compressible text, and they're not MPEG / JPEG compressed video or images either.
They're stored as run-length encoded (RLE) bitmaps and, as such, can take up quite a bit more room than you may expect. On top of that, IIRC there's a limit in the DVD spec on how many private streams can be included in the container (.VOB), and a practical limit on the bitrate available off the disc (total of all video (including alternate angles, etc) + all audio + all private streams must be less than ~10.8mbps (with video alone being limited to a max of ~9.8mbps)).
Genomic evolution during a 10,000-generation experiment with bacteria. That's a fairly old one, but it's on about the second page when you hit up Google Scholar for +"bacteria" +"evolution". It also references several interesting previous studies.
Without being too snarky to you, I'm not going to link anything else because a lot of what someone might want to see as "evidence of evolution" depends on what one is expecting to see. Most people would be wanting to see a phentotypic change e.g. cocci <-> bacilli, cillate <-> flagellate, etc. - something that's obviously a different organism. Since we've only been looking for a short time - and the tens of thousands of generations in the paper I linked is only a short time in the scale of things - we're not going to see that unless we're extremely lucky. Keep looking, and the chance we will go up (assuming there is something to see ;-)
But, really, that's just a matter of scale. Aren't smaller, less apparent-to-the-naked-eye adaptations (e.g. selected & inherited variations in the genome, membrane permeability, cell size, etc) just as much evidence of evolution as the development of, say, more efficient locomotive structures?
The answer to that question is, as I said, "depends on what you want to see as evidence". Someone who'll only accept hard indisputable evidence of proto-cows evolving into dolphins, or proto-chimps evolving into hominids, ain't going to be convinced by evidence of bacteria evolving to oxidise ethanol into acetaldehyde...
There's also the dingo fence, which originally was to keep the dingos on one side away from the sheep on the other side, but nowdays largely serves to keep the dingos on one side away from the dingos on the other.
It does make a really cool noise when you drive through it, though...
But you're talking phenotypic differences due to (relatively) minor genetic differences - this study is looking at gross genetic differences that effectively separate humans into 3 clades.
I'm still digging up the article, but in the meantime, this may help illustrate things. Although it's based on mitochondrial DNA (the study in the article is based on nuclear DNA), it shows that (broadly) there are 3 groups - the original African group, one that colonised Europe, and one that colonised the rest of the world. This study seems to back up the mtDNA evidence.
Err... no?
There's some circumstantial evidence to suggest that there may have been early humans in Australia 80~125,000 years ago. But the genetic & archaeological evidence suggests that the arrival of the ancestors of current aboriginal Australians occurred 40~70,000 y.a.
In other words, there may have been humans in Australia before the group that colonised Europe and Asia left Africa, but modern Aborignal Australians would seem to be descendants of the first wave of H. sapiens to leave Africa and migrate along the equatorial line into southern Asia. This study doesn't contradict that at all (though it does a bit to challenge the prevailing view of the timing of the split between emergent African populations in the Middle East, and the European / Asian populations diverging from that.)
In theory, the Mac's Fn key modifies the "delete" key to "del", so laptop / new keyboard users aren't so much SOL as "need to use another finger".
In practice, however, it doesn't matter - on my '06/'07 model Core2Duo MacBook, shift-command-delete works fine & brings up the FF dialogue - as does shift-fn-command-delete.
Nope, you're confusing 2 different DivX's there.
DIVX, the discs : rental system using MPEG-2 on DVD-like discs with triple-DES encryption. They had a writeable area on the disc so you could watch them within 48 hrs of the first play; also required a connection to the phone line so you could pay a fee to add another 48hrs to that.
DivX: Originally "DivX ;-)", a hacked version of the MS MPEG-4 Version 3 codec (which wasn't actually MPEG-4 compliant...) renamed as a pisstake of the DIVX disc system (hence the winking emoticon). Later extended by independent hackers ("DivX ;-)" 3.11 and later 3.xx versions), then an attempt at a clean-room implementation became DivX4.
2 different things, totally unrelated except by name.
Simple. You wrap it in bacon.
(That's how the Terminators worked; they couldn't send one back until they'd developed Terminators with real flesh to protect the metal endoskeleton. It might have been a more interesting movie if this hadn't worked; imagine Arnie turning up back then as a large fleshy blob (as opposed to the large fleshy blob he is now...))
Or was it living flesh? I forget. In that case, you just strap lots of cats to it...
As someone who is on the never-ending path to becoming a scientist (in the field of environmental science, no less), I say "yes". Plenty of other organisms muck with and adapt their environment to suit them; we wouldn't be doing anything particularly unusual in the great scheme of things, just that we'd be particularly capable of it.
Still, you're going to need a damned good understanding of what you're doing, and what the effects - intended and unintended - are going to be before you do it. Either way, you're going to need good accurate and reliable models of global processes to help you with this.
Or are you going to rely on the magic pixie dust of human ingenuity to solve individual problems as they crop up, without any understanding of the overall system? Because that's just stupid; a sort of inverse pyramid scheme where one solution creates two problems which require two solutions which create four problems which require four solutions which create 8 problems which require ...
Face it; regardless of whether you believe GCC is an imminent threat or a crock of shit, a good understanding and model of global systems is the starting point regardless of which way you want to go...
I'll believe that a completely free to act econo/socio/political system can solve the CC (or overpopulation, or resource depletion, or whatever...) problem on the day that your GNU/OSS poster children solve the spam problem...
Please note: most of the current "solutions" for the spam problem don't solve anything; they just move it away (or hide it) from you in a "I see no spam - I'm alright, Jack!" manner.
To paraphrase Darth Vader: "I find your excessive faith ... charming".
Yup, pretty much the point, but you'd be better off summarising it as "but the previous calculations done the 'easy' way are still largely correct". It's the difference between "the exact right answer" (e.g. 100.0097) and a "good enough for fairly accurate predictions answer" (e.g. 95 +-10%).
Mathematical models, like Penthouse models, are idealised representations of reality - you start with what you've got, and refine it until you get near the right answer. The big difference is that, in a scientific mathematical model you have historical data to show you what the right answer should be - once you build a model that takes reliable historical data and can reproduce an observed answer, you can then feed it current data and start extrapolating future answers.
In this case it seems that, for a given level of accuracy, the detail of how the water in the current returns to colder climes doesn't particularly matter. It's a black box; stuff goes in one end and, after a certain amount of processing, comes out the other in a certain pattern. That's enough to give you a certain amount, e.g. +-10%, of accuracy. To achieve better accuracy - say, +-5% - you need a better idea of what's going on in that black box.
Now we're looking into that particular black box, saying "oh, we were largely right about the inputs and outputs, but inside it's not at all how we thought it worked!". The next step is to create a better black box.
Think of it in terms of library functions. If you're doing integer math, you largely don't care if your multiplication library returns results +- 0.4, 'cos the results are rounded to the nearest int. Once you start wanting the better accuracy of floating point math, however, you'll need to fine-tune that function...
Which is exactly what the WiFi consortium said too, when they decided to use an open-to-all, licence-free band instead of ponying up the $$$ to pay the ITU & regional member organisations for a chunk of spectrum.
The 2.4Ghz ISM band has long been a radio sewer, and was allocated purposefully for non-licensed uses because it is a sewer. WiFi used it to play in because it was free, and now WiFi users are complaining because they're drowning in shit?
(Note: the "problem" in the article would appear to be fairly specific to the UK since they limit most uses of the 2.4GHz band to 10mW EIRP & 20MHz BW, compared to the rest of the world at 100mW EIRP & 15MHz BW - meaning that imported hardware is often non type-approved for use in the UK. What they're talking about as a "problem" is simply the normal state of affairs for the rest of the world.)
Wrong. They choose to build their website, host it on their hardware, at their expense, and maintain it with their time/money. And they're free to choose to show ads.
They're also free to choose to disable access to people who block them, and suffer any reduced exposure / revenue that may result. But making that choice costs them; they don't want the opportunity cost, but they want the potential exposure / revenue.
They take the old adage "You have to spend money to make money", shorten it to their advantage and at your expense, and end up with "You have to ... make money".
Who's the real leech - the person using a website with AdBlock turned on, or the person who built that website and wants everybody but him to pay for it?
There's vanishingly few examples where the former is the case. I'll remind you that /. is owned by SourceForge, Inc - a publicly-listed company with a market cap of over $62 million dollars.
I suggest the Gilbert & Sullivan approach myself : release your next product yourself, right in the midst of the pirates.
Amusingly ironic, really...
Sorry, should have said AU$ ;-)
A PIC 10F200 costs AU$1.24 in > 25 quantities, compared to an NE555 at AU$0.429 / unit, AU$0.351 > 10+, or AU$0.26 > 250+
And yeah, I was just poking fun at whippersnappers who automatically put a micro into everything. Don't forget to amortise the cost of your programmer hardware & coding time ;-)
You also forgot the Vcc cap - don't worry, so did I with my mental zener-based supply. Don't want your regulator latching up or self-destructing on +- supply spikes, do you? ;-)
(Aside: I once built a set of Knightrider lights for my car (OK, OK - feel free to poke fun at me for that but, in my defence, it was the 80's ;-) based on a 555, a BCD up/down counter, and a BCD-decimal decoder. I didn't filter the supply well enough, but that had the advantage of when it started working erratically by skipping lights or suddenly reversing direction, I knew it was time to change the distributor points ;-)
I think you mean "No 286? Protected mode FTW".
The 286 had protected mode; you just couldn't return to real mode (which is where everything ran in those days) without the nasty hardware hack IBM developed for the AT. The big advantage of the 386 over the 286 was that you could return to real mode from protected mode without resetting the CPU via the keyboard controller...
The C&T chipset certainly gave it a bump-along, but there were IBM PC clones around well before the 80386. Sales of original 8086/8088 genuine IBM PCs were dwarfed by sales of 8086/8088/V20-based clones, well before the 80386 was even developed.
(Actually, you've just inspired me. Someday I'm gonna build a calculator, based on a 8 pin micro, to display the optimum R1, R2, & C for a given frequency on an LCD screen.
I might even throw in calculation of values for monostable and bistable mode ;-)
As an old fart, I wonder why you'd rather use a microcontroller with all the attendant pickyness over I/O and supply voltage stability and noise and costing > $1 in bulk, over a 555 that'll work in fairly noisy conditions from 5~15v and costs a few cents in bulk.
Horses for courses; just try getting your microcontroller to do something like flash an LED in a car without all the extra supply regulation and filtering. A 555 will do it with 6 additional components, including the LED, for less than $1 ;-)
Yeah, the 741 is there (though I reckon it should be #2, or even #1 - you know you can make a 555-equivalent suitable for most purposes with a couple of 741's and some clever circuit design, right? ;-).
But yeah, the lack of 7400 series (the original TTL versions, not that 74xxC crap ;-) is odd. Definately should be up there ~ #3 or higher. That stuff was the building blocks of computers before dedicated CPUs.
Sshhh! You'll break Slashdot!