Mike M

I've seen motherboards before which let you use your own image as the boot logo (i.e. the picture that displays after a succesful POST, when you'd usually see the manufacturer or OEM logo). What I'm wondering is: is there any mobo out there that lets you do something similar with audio? For example, Macs play a distinctive "chime" upon a successful startup, but there's no known way to customize that sound, and I've never heard of a motherboard or OEM PC that did anything similar. I know for sure that if there were such a board, the Hackintosh community would kill to get their hands on it. :P

I've seen motherboards before which let you use your own image as the boot logo (i.e. the picture that displays after a succesful POST, when you'd usually see the manufacturer or OEM logo). What I'm wondering is: is there any mobo out there that lets you do something similar with audio? For example, Macs play a distinctive "chime" upon a successful startup, but there's no known way to customize that sound, and I've never heard of a motherboard or OEM PC that did anything similar. I know for sure that if there were such a board, the Hackintosh community would kill to get their hands on it. :P

An Internet acquaintance of mine (who found me here on Y!A, incidentally) is working on a website for a charity. I recently helped her take the background out of the charity's logo, but yesterday morning she emailed me to say that while saving the image as a PNG preserved the transparency as expected, it was showing up "like a negative"...in Frontpage. (cue crowd gasps of shock, horror)

Frontpage has long been reviled as the bane of the Web, for the simple reason that, like the Internet Explorer browser it's designed to feed with content, it follows Microsoft's unswerving commitment to avoid compatibility with worldwide standards at all costs. Given that I haven't used Windows regularly for over four years now, I really have no idea what kinds of free web editors are available for that OS (and they would certainly have to be free, or they couldn't "compete" with Frontpage). It's kind of ridiculous that she should be forced to make severely broken pages just because she didn't know any better.

So my question is this: what's the easiest-to-use AND most standards-compliant free web page editor available for Windows?

I've noticed troublesome amounts of what seem to be spam answers to some of the questions I go to answer, although they all appear to come from different users (meaning either someone has a handy dandy botnet, Y!A's letting many accounts come from the same addresses, or — most implausibly — someone is actually posting these answers of their own volition). They all seem to follow the same format of a few keywords or a key phrase followed by a link (usually to a Blogspot blog), and nothing else, and the users have no avatars. I mostly tend to answer questions in the Computers & Internet section, so I'm not sure if the problem extends to other sections as well.

I guess my question is: Should I start reporting these answers as I find them (i.e. will it actually help Y!A staff weed out the spammers)? Will firing off reports willy-nilly (as there seem to be quite a few to report) damage my "trust rating"?

Examples:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AsYhm... (Bfxfgb B's answer)

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AjhMQ... (Jone S' answer)

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AsSDD... (oddly enough, a different "jone s")

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Avmaj... (jgj f, jone s, and probably Corene B)

What do you think is keeping electronic music and its many sub-genres from being perceived as "legitimate" music by most people, like rock or R&B? Is it because old habits die hard, because a lot of it really isn't that good, or for other reasons entirely? Personally, I hear a lot of pop music that's in the public eye (ear?) which has a lot less going for it than some amazing electronic music I've come across. So what's with the stigma?

The two years I've had my 17" PowerBook G4 have been a dream — except when it comes to hard drives. I seem to've had a streak of bad luck with them, as the first TWO hard drives I've had have failed, so I recently bought a new (and bigger...100GB vs. 80) drive and had it installed.

However, at some point I want to sell this laptop and buy a MacBook Pro. I'd get around half the needed money for a MBP from just selling the laptop (+ accessories, restore DVDs, etc.), so I obviously can't do it yet. I'm running off an external hard drive. While this works fine, the external is too small for me to install the software I need to make music, so basically I'm just spinning my wheels unless I finally give in and start using the internal.

What do you think? If I break down and install OS X on the internal hard drive and start using the laptop as a laptop again, will it still be saleable by the time I'm able to sell it? Should I save up for yet another drive, to be installed right before sale?

What pieces of music really start your brain churning? Something complex or experimental or just stupefyingly beautiful? For me, it's BT's album "This Binary Universe", which I'm listening to as I browse the questions here. What are your favourites?