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Natural incompetency will prevent this from ever seeing the light of day.

By the end of the 80s the 3.5"was the most popular disk by far.

Questionable. Most machines other than PCs used 3.5" disks, but PCs were much more numerous and they all included a 5.25" drive. Most of them didn't include a 3.5" floppy drive (except as an option) before 1993. The 3.5" floppy didn't outsell the 5.25" until 1989.

Specifically, you should save your anger for these people (just going from the past 40 years of American history):

Henry Kissenger
Robert McNamara
Donald Rumsfeld
Richard Cheney


Perhaps you might add the names of their bosses, the guys who sign the orders:

JFK
LBJ
and GWB

And as far as Viet Nam is concerned, let's start that one with the real genesis, the folks who signedf up to the Potsdam Agreement (http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/decade/decade17 .htm) who handed Viet Nam over to the British and Chinese after WW2 (http://history.acusd.edu/gen/20th/vietnam-policie s.html). Too bad the Brits promptly rearmed the Vichy French who'd been captured with the Japanese occupation forces and handed So. VietNam back to the French- I suppose so they could feel better about having the Germans and Japanese hand them their collective asses. The French were stomping on Indochina before WW2 and we put them back in place to continue where they left off.

We had advisors in Japanese occupied Viet Nam during WW2 and helped them beat the Japanese and win thier own freedom. Christ, at his presidential inauguration, Ho read the our Declaration of Independence. What a blown opportunity - Ho loved us because we helped and didn't try to dominate them. Too bad we didn't stand by our own ideals and keep europe out.

economic embargo we imposed on Japan in response to human rights violations in China

Sept. 22 - Japanese troops crossed into Indochina; Vichy forced to agree
Sept. 26 - FDR imposed embargo on scrap iron to Japan

Does anyone else think that picture looks like it is from 1985? Compare it with the first Sony CD player in 1985 - http://history.acusd.edu/gen/recording/images/PDRM 1542a.jpg

It is huge and expensive...I'll wait for it to come down in price and when it can record.

"1. Speakerless. This yielded a smaller, lighter, less fragile, and lower power package."
"2. Good quality stereo playback. "
"While one might make a case for obviousness, I don't think that any of the earlier players that I'm aware of would reasonably qualify as prior art,"

I don't think we're disagreeing, I simply think he patented a smaller cassette deck and claims it as an invention.

Bear in mind the transistor radio already existed since the 1950's:
http://history.acusd.edu/gen/recording/images/8601 6a.jpg

The one at the front ONLY HAS AN EARPIECE, it doesn't have a speaker it was later that speakers became small enough to put one in.

http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/recording/tape4.ht ml

And that the Compact Cassette (1965 Philips) was invented to make smaller players in Stereo.

The Covenant of the Leage of Nations was never accepted by Congress, and the US never joined. http://history.acusd.edu/gen/WW2Timeline/1919Leagu e2.html

Ed Villchur, a loudspeaker design pioneer who invented the acoustic suspension speaker in the 1950s and founded the Acoustic Research corporation with Henry Kloss (http://history.acusd.edu/gen/recording/villchur.h tml ) used the propellor speaker design as a party gag. Interesting to see somebody actually making one, if it's real.

Nuclear Power.
... would probably not have been as far now without the work of Bohr, Einstein and other european scientists.
and..
Well, there you go. Not in the same leagues as the others, really. It improved on the cassette and phonograph, both American inventions. Something that changes the world I live in, and CDs don't cut it.
Ouch - that hurt. The cassette (the Compact Cassette) is a Philips invention building on a Danish invention by Valdemar Poulsen. Please do your research properly, or you end up just underlining the point of the article.

Nuclear Power.
... would probably not have been as far now without the work of Bohr, Einstein and other european scientists.
and..
Well, there you go. Not in the same leagues as the others, really. It improved on the cassette and phonograph, both American inventions. Something that changes the world I live in, and CDs don't cut it.
Ouch - that hurt. The cassette (the Compact Cassette) is a Philips invention building on a Danish invention by Valdemar Poulsen. Please do your research properly, or you end up just underlining the point of the article.

Ask, and ye shall receive.

This technology dates back a ways to an 1878 invention, and devices such as the Webster wire recorder of the 1940s and these models from WWII.

Its amazing how often new tech is really old tech.

This technology dates back a ways to an 1878 invention, and devices such as the Webster wire recorder of the 1940s and these models from WWII.

Its amazing how often new tech is really old tech.

Not to be too harsh, but this problem has been around since the Sony walkman came out, about 25 or 26 years ago. You don't have to wait, people have been skiing and snowboarding with musical distractions for nearly a generation.

Could there be a similarity? Robertson boasted about the end of the retail record industry as we know it, and these guys bring out an absurdly expensive machine. Attention getters? Is there an ego at work here? Perhaps success will be won by coming in low and slow.

between the textile industry and computing industry... In the late 60s, before bipolar transistor memory or MOS transistor memories were commonplace and practical, companies like Digital and IBM employed several textile company weaving-experts on the efficient weaving of core memory "ropes" and "cloths." Basically, the problems encountered in the fabrication of core memory on a large, complex scale had been solved, or at least examined, centuries before. see Rope memory and Apollo Guidance Computer rope memory. And of course, who could forget the original programmed computer, the Jacquard's punch-card loom?

If you look at the expanded pic of the "shirt-pocket radio", you also see a Zenith hearing aid, which has a shape (especially considering the location of the earphone) surprisingly similar to an iPod...

For a neat one page history of the shirt-pocket sized transistor radio along with a picture of the TR-1, go here: transistor radio

Really... so Robertson registered mp3.com... everything I've seen says that he purchased it... Robertson and MP3 Nephilium

Please tell me what elected leaders we have assassinated.

Sure thing. The CIA assasinated Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, Guatemala.

Bullshit!
Everyone knew. There were delgations of Jewish leaders to FDR to urge him to bomb Aushwitz, and other death camps.
During the war, refugees were not allowed into the country. Boats were turned back.
Here's a link that comes up first in a slew of google hits on the subject.

Anointed might be a better word...

text below taken from here.

In the May 5 elections of 1932, Hindenburg defeated Hitler 53% to 37% for the presidency, but there was no majority in the Reichstag for any party; in the July31 elections the Nazis won 230 seats with 37% of the vote and became the largest German party, but dropped to 33% in the Nov. 6 elections; Dec. 1, Kurt von Schleicher replaced Franz von Papen as Chancellor but instability increased.

Hitler made Chancellor Jan. 30, 1933, with the help of von Papen, and sought revision of Versailles system by immediately beginning a rearmament program with the support of industrialists such as Alfred Hugenberg and Gustav Krupp (who by April agreed to remove Jewish workers from his factories), and a public works program announced at the Feb. 11 International Automobile and Motor-Cycle Exhibition in Berlin, to build autobahns with 600,000 workers and make a Volksauto for less than 1000 marks.

In the March 5, 1933 elections, the National Socialist German Workers' Party won 43.9% and 288 of 647 seats in the Reichstag. The Malicious Practices Act of March 21, 1933, began the mass arrests of communists and socialists, the Dauchau concentration camp was set up March 22 in a former powder milk plant, the Enabling Act March 23 made Hitler dictator and eliminated other parties such as the pro-Catholic Zentrum, radical books were burned May 10.

Well, let's start with the almost complete destruction of Battleship Row and go from there. Let's try the fact that we never attacked Japan before Pearl Harbor, no state of war was announced, no nothing. Fortunately, the USS Enterprise, an aircraft carrier, was away at the time of the attack.

Let's also keep in mind that General Curtis LeMay's 21st Bomber Command killed more people with firestorms than the nuclear weapons. Here's a quick timeline of firebombing in Europe, A good picture describing firebombing, Wiki of how Tokyo was firebombed, and the wonderful bomber that made this all possible.

I can't find the link now, but do you know why those cities were picked? Because they had manufacturing facilities. Heard of Mitsubishi? They built planes, and engines, and bombs. They had factories in/near those cities. Those were also military targets, as much so as Pearl Harbor. Or do you not know that a lot of civilians lived in Pearl Harbor as well?

He also began trading with Russia. I just saw a video of the kitchen debate recently. It's hilarious: Nixon and Kruschev arguing with each other over who can make better toasters. I guess Nixon won.

But, how dare you sir, to question my comittment to trolling. Here are the pics as promised:

Getting my robes lit.
Ouch. That's gonna take a while to heal.
Fire!
Picture taken from the third floor balcony of the food court
It hurt like hell at first. Then shock set in.

Don't let anyone say that I'm not hardcore.

> The US did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING for Australia in
>WW2. Not one damn thing. In fact, if it weren't
>for Australia, you would never have defeated Japan.

Is that what they're teaching in Australian schools these days? The statement that the US did nothing for Australia is 100% wrong. I won't deny Australia was a valuable ally, but vital? Don't know about that. Anyway, here are items for your further research:

- "Battle for Australia" - Australian forces fail to stop Japan's advance. Prime Minister Curtin asks US for help. link
- Battle of Coral Sea. Japan wants to invade Australia, must take Port Moresby (an Australian air base) first. US stops Japan (also in above link). link
- Aircraft operated by Australia in WWII. How many are of Australian design and manufacture and how many are from the US and UK? link

Thanks for playing.

• Philips introduces the audio cassette in 1963.
• 1963+17=1980.
• CD-audio format introduced in 1982. Philips and Sony are the major companies involved.
• 1982+17=1999
• DVD format introduced in 1995 (Philips/Sony, Toshiba & Warner), with US launch in 1997 and DVD-audio(1.0) by 1999.

I don't have all the dates for everything but found a great timeline of recording history on this page. It doesn't provide the info about filmed TV (kinescope) though.

The very first video recorder (black & white, of course) was demonstrated in 1951: "Ampex team led by Charles Ginsburg began work on a video tape recorder (VTR) in October; Bing Crosby Enterprises demonstrated an experimental 12-head VTR at 100 ips."

In 1956, CBS broadcast the first network television show with videotape Nov. 30, Douglas Edwards and the News, for West Coast delayed broadcast.

Of course, this was before Helical Scan (rotating heads, which we still use) was developed by the Japanese and first demonstrated by Toshiba in 1959. Sony marketed a helical scan VTR, the PV100 in 1961, which was adopted by American Airlines in 1964 for in-flight movies; Ampex sued Sony over it in 1966 (in 1960 Ampex shared VTR patents with Sony and Sony shared transistorized circuitry with Ampex).

It's impressive to see that U-Matic (3/4", composite video), the very first videocassette format, was introduced by Sony in 1969 and is still in use, although it's been superseeded on the institutional market by low-end Beta SP in the last 10 years and now DV.

Cheers,
-max

The projectors of the 1940's and beyond used optical waveforms on the side of the film to reform an analog sound signal during playback, was used on cinema technology up until the early 70s as I recall..
http://history.acusd.edu/gen/recording/motionpictu re.html
Has information on the original technology.

So pulling the signal off vinyl probably can be done with some level of precision.
Jim.

The DVD was not devised by the MPAA. It was developed by technology companies like Toshiba, Philips and Sony. These companies wanted to advance digital media and home entertainment experience, while the MPAA would have been perfectly happy to sell VHS forever if the market allowed for it.

yerricde wrote:

1. Longer albums. Back in the day, when vinyl was king, 35 minutes was considered an album; nowadays, CD albums average 70 minutes.

Double albums were quite common (at least among the artists I listen to, and many artists would put extra tracks on their cassette releases because they wanted to get the music out and it wouldn't fit on the vinyl.

Yes, CD albums are probably longer on average than Vinyl albums were (Vinyl you could get about 18 minutes per side / 36 total before having to make sound quality compromises), but I question your "70 minutes" figure for the average CD albums. The longest many CD players can handle is 74 minutes, and most albums are far from full. My guess is the average new music CD is about 45 minutes (not counting compilation or "Best of" CD's, where it's trivial to just add tracks until it's full).

2. Inflation. CDs cost USD 17 now, but $17 in AD2002 dollars is worth about $9 in AD1983 dollars (when CDs were first released).

According to the CPI, $17 in 2001 money (USD) is $9.65 in 1983 dollars. I don't think there are formal figures for 2002 yet, but your figure sounds plausible.

The thing is, how many people were buying CD's in 1983? CD sales didn't pass Vinyl sales until 1988 ($11.36). CD's didn't become the dominant form of music sales until they passed the cassette in 1992, and $17 in 2001 was $13.61 then (in terms of sales, cassettes were king from 1983 to 1992). As I recall, CDs themselves often sold for $9.95 in 1992 (because they were still competing with cassettes). We're talking about much more than just inflation here.

I don't have figures onhand, but my understanding is that CD production costs have dropped to the point where they are considerably cheaper to produce than cassettes (and have been for a while), yet the cassette version is sold for less than the CD of the same album. We're definately talking about much more than inflation here, and more than "longer albums".

In 1939, Gone With the Wind grossed a total of about $192 million ..adjusted for inflaction, it made about $2.3 BILLION DOLLARS.

In 1997, Titanic grossed about $600 million...adjusted for inflation...$0.6 BILLION.

So..Gone With the Wind made 3.83 TIMES AS MUCH as Titanic...

You wonder why they don't do things in terms of tickets sold don't you? They just keep increasing the price of movies so they can say last year's movie beat the year before's.

And yes, I do realize that these aren't opening week ticket sales; they are the total income for the movies.

I used this: Site (http://history.acusd.edu/gen/filmnotes/costs-movi es.html) for my info.

...sigh...you'd expect the Slashdot crowd to realize this...but since we're talking about Katz...I guess it slides.

> RCA was not purchased by GE until the mid 1980's.

GE was the major founder of RCA. A GE lawyer set up the company.

Viking Link

Sorry, somehow the above link didn't cut and paste correctly.
Try to see the Smithsonian exhibit when it's near you. Firsts are often disputed, but I think if you do enough research, you'll find:
First electronic computer (Atanasoff) despite ENIAC
First Laser (Gould) despite Townes Nobel Prize
First Settlement in America (Vikings) despite Columbus, Chinese. However the "skrallings" were already established in North America

But the piece betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how foreign policy is shaped. First, the world we live in is not black and white. More often than not, we're dealing with international problems that have no clean, clear answer.

For example, it's easy to dismiss American Cold War fears of Castro's Cuba. But then, he did ask for and receive assistance from the Soviets in the form of missiles, didn't he?

The Vietnam War was by almost anyone's estimation, a wasteful, stupid blunder of immense proportions. But let us not forget that a large part of the reason the US got involved in the first place was that the Soviets were making advances of one sort or another on almost every continent. They had what the US perceived to be a client state in North Vietnam.

The Soviet Union espoused a form of government that viewed the destruction of capitalism and the bourgeous democracies as a primary goal.

US foreign policy was dictated by the overarching threat of communism. Sure, now it seems a joke - it collapsed from the inside, from its own weight. But just as sabre-rattling from the West scared the Soviets, the US was scared by Soviet threats as well.

Yes, there are other factors at work. Yes, the Soviet Union is now dead. Yes, mistakes are still being made in US foreign policy.

But the September 11th attacks didn't happen because Bin Laden was pissed off about the Vietnam War, or about the Bay of Pigs, or our meddling with Iran. Bin Laden was pissed off because we supported Saudi Arabia, a country whose rulers he sees as morally corrupt.

Our reasons for supporting the House of Saud over the years primarily stemmed from our desire to maintain stability in the Middle East. During the Cold War, the Soviets were trying as hard as possible to exert influence there, in hopes that by choking off the supply of oil to the West, Europe and the United States would become vulnerable.

We utilized balance of power politics, the same thing that Metternich used in Europe to avoid a major war for years. It's not policy driven by right and wrong. It's policy driven by expediency. It's not perfect. Hell, it's barely adequate much of the time.

But I'd much rather trust foreign policy to people who are thinking of overall balances and stability and peace, than people who would rather persue blindly optimistic policy based on idealism.

The track record of idealistic US foreign policy is pretty dismal. Woodrow Wilson got us involved in WWI too late, because he was loathe to go to war. Then his idealism failed at the Treaty of Versailles, because he went along with France's desire to humiliate and punish Germany.

Jimmy Carter was so infatuated with the idea of working with the Soviets for detente, that when they surprised him by invading Afghanistan, he launched a massive arms buildup (yes, Reagan didn't start it - Carter did) and sent the CIA in to support the mujahedin.

So while it's easy to throw rocks, and it's easy to look at history in retrospect, dealing with the day-to-day matters of international relations is a mite trickier.

The UN won't save you from terrorists. Germany won't work to protect American jobs by keeping the price of oil stable. Japan isn't going to keep India and Pakistan from nuking each other. It's a big, complicated, dangerous world out there.

Finally, the argument that Americans are being misled by the government about US foreign policy is a load of crap. American foreign policy aims are well known to anyone who takes the time to read about them.

Foreign policy is a complex topic, and you can't get a grip on it by watching E! Entertainment News. Less than half the eligible population of the US votes. News shows that stick to news get lower ratings than those that pander to the lowest common denominator.

Americans largely don't want to think about international affairs. That is a far more serious problem for the US in the long run than any specific policy blunders.

Overemphasis on new technology actually lengthened the war against Japan by 18 months. Read this for one of many accounts of how the United States' dogged insistence on the efficacy of the magnetic detonation torpedo rendered the US submarine fleet impotent for 18 months, whereas after downgrading to earlier technology of contact detonation (and other fixes) the submarine fleet succeeded in sinking more than half of Japanese shipping, in effect imposing a total naval blockage. Note how scientific theory was perverted to reject empirical evidence from the submarine crews.

US intelligence had plenty of chances to have successfully warned the country of imminent Japanese attack. What saved the US was that the Japanese were so far below the US level of industrial capability and resources that even a perfect plan might not have been sufficient. The only Japanese hope was to have destroyed the oil storage tanks at Pearl Harbor in a follow-up attack. Ironically the Japanese own rigidity in their military thinking possibly influenced the commander of the fleet from pressing home the advantage, a pattern repeated when they failed at Leyte Gulf to seize the opening to attack the landing fleet.

All the futuristic technology and information isn't going to help if the leadership at the top is incapable or unwilling to determine what is of the most importance. Fortunately for the winning side in World War II the opposition had far less industrial capability and resources. And what won the war was more from the bottom-up as entire populations united and bottlenecks were solved in practical ways. As the war progressed it became easier for men of merit to get their jobs done. In such improved environments a million small improvements could work their way into the war effort, so yes there was some technical progress. But remember the Germans had V2 rockets and jet fighters and they still lost.

It seems to me the modern American large corporation is not facing a lack of technology problem, it's facing organization problems. The people at the top who are supposed to be setting direction for the company cannot or will not accurately access the reams of information at their disposal. In story after story I read about World War II, the solution to a problem turns out to be putting the competent man in charge and letting him use his expertise. Preconceptions, ideology, and prejudice driving policy are the enemy.

Bright-and-cheery is in fact the old-fashioned view of the future. With the exception of the postapocalyptic subgenre, visual SF movies most often portrayed the future as shiny and upbeat. Think of Amazing Stories covers by Frank R Paul; the polished look of The Day the Earth Stood Still; the perfectly pristine appearance of everything in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

StarWars in 1977 first popularized grimy spaceships, and the hugely influential BladeRunner in 1982 gave us claustrophobic, murky cityscapes -- surprisingly, only because Ridley Scott had a small budget and needed to hide the smallness of his set with rain, fog, and darkness. Since then, noir future has been a trope.

Curiously, there is a clear example of noir SF from 1926: Metropolis.