had to sit through a two hour session online plodding through a MS Partner Program exam that crashed at - yep - two hours in.
When BrainBench first started up, they offered their tests for free. I took a few for fun. Got a few of their "certs", but taking timed tests on a slow server was frustrating.
I'm not impressed with the "perpetual beta" and "using your users for Q/A" concept. Remember, the users can leave.
I've seen this happen with Tribe. Tribe was a nice little social networking system for people in the San Francisco area. Then, in 2007, they went "Web 2.0", with a system that let you "customize your home page".
At first, this drove the users nuts, as they tried to find a home page layout that would work. "Tribe.net bug reports" became the most popular forum. After a while, most users got their home page to some format that would work (the default was awful) and didn't have overlapping panes, then stopped using the new, fancy features. Users began to leave; some users even set up a competing system in disgust.
As more users left, Tribe tried to charge for some features. More users left.
Tribe is now down to two employees and a fraction of its user base of two years ago.
How did Gotham City become Chicago?
on
Batman Discussion
·
· Score: 1
The thing is set in Chicago, and obviously so. Great views of the Navy Pier, the Marina Towers, the Chicago Board of Trade building, and the river bridges. Seemed weird, but it worked.
The L.A. Times is now suggesting Batman move to LA.
US cities used to be that bad. I lived in Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit when they had steel mills. Cleveland was the worst, because it's not as windy. Normal visibility was under one mile.
The first time I went to downtown Cleveland, there it was: Heavy Industry - the Cleveland Flats. A river valley cuts through the city, and along the river were the steel mills.
The Flats had trains running along public streets, some carrying red-hot steel ingots. A huge pipe a quarter mile long was supported by towers - and it rotated. This turned out to be a rotary cement kiln. Visibility was about half a mile there. One year, the river caught on fire when an oil slick was ignited.
Now the mills are gone, there are nightclubs along the river, and the city is dying.
Pascal was built for that specific model of structured programming, but it's not a correctness requirement. As long as all the exit points go to the same place, there's a "single point of exit", even though it's reachable by multiple routes. "break" and "return" all lead to one exit point, so there's no real problem.
Exception handling, however, does bypass the return, and adds some interesting issues.
The "breakthrough" this time is that someone made gallium nitride substrates that might, someday, be useful for LEDs. After they solve the problem that their material cracks during cooling. However, Panasonic did that last year, and has been shipping white LEDs using that approach in sample quantities.
Plug "Mouse Jiggler" into USB port to keep no-activity timeout from causing logout.
Turn on UPS.
Plug HotPlug unit into UPS.
Plug HotPlug unit output plug (a male plug which is a power output) into power strip, or, if necessary, remove wall outlet plate and
connect clamp-on connectors to hot wires.
Unplug power strip from line power. HotPlug unit will switch in power from UPS.
Plug power strip into UPS. HotPlug unit will recognize this and deenergize its output plug.
Unplug HotPlug output plug and input plug. Computer is now running entirely on UPS.
Carry computer and UPS to forensics lab before UPS battery runs down.
Python people argue over tabs vs. spaces for indentation. In Python, where indentation matters, it's a major issue. Python implementations really ought to insist that a file have only leading tabs or leading spaces. Mixing of tabs and spaces is clearly wrong.
A big UNIX design mistake was to have a tab equal eight spaces. If it had been four, everything would have worked out better, since four spaces is a reasonable indentation amount. It's eight because, when outputting to a Teletype Corporation 100-speed printer (ASR/KSR 35 or 38), the carriage can reliably move eight spaces in one character time. So, if you set the hardware tab stops every eight spaces on the printer, this provides maximum output speed. That's the real reason.
For C and C++, just run the code through "astyle -style==ansi". Let the machine do the work.
The prohibition on "multiple exits" or returns comes from a misunderstanding of early program proving technology. As one of the few people who ever built a real proof of correctness system, I know that's just not a problem.
There are some topological restrictions on program proving, but you can't violate them with "break" or "return". You need "goto" to really screw up. The actual topological constraint is that backwards control paths must not cross.
The basic requirement for proving loops is that there must be some section in the loop through which control must pass on every iteration.
Somewhere in that section must go the loop invariant and the termination measure.
Nobody does this for software any more, although, interestingly, full-scale machine proof of correctness of hardware logic in VHDL is not that unusual. There are commercial tools for that.
It's really frustrating. When Pons and Fleischman originally announced "cold fusion", there was an immediate attempt at Stanford to replicate the result. The researchers gave a talk, which drew hundreds of people. In their first attempts, they had the apparatus surrounded with radiation detectors and alarms, in case there was a sudden burst of radiation. After a while, they realized that wasn't going to happen. The effect, if any, resulted in a few extra neutrons per hour over background.
They saw some variations in neutron flux, but discovered that people standing around the apparatus affected the result. Humans have lots of water and are neutron reflectors. So they moved the
apparatus into a cube of lead blocks. No more neutron emissions.
Somebody may eventually get fusion this way, but probably won't get out more power than they put in. If you can figure out some way to put a macroscopic amount of energy into a microscopic volume, you can get a little fusion. It's been done with big capacitor banks, with lasers, with explosive compression, and with the Farnsworth Fusor. But far more energy goes in than comes out.
The previous VIP container, called "Silver Bullet", actually was an Airstream trailer, minus the wheels and with an aircraft pallet base added. The new "Steel Eagle" thing was designed based on an aircraft-qualified shelter module, which is basically an empty metal box on a pallet base. Then the USAF had to engineer an aircraft interior into
the box, with lighting, HVAC, comms, and furnishings. It was a tight fit (the Airstream was bigger) and much
custom engineering was required to cram everything in.
Looking at the pictures, one can see how the project got out of hand. They're doing the engineering required for an aircraft interior, but only building two or three units.
There are companies that do luxury private aircraft interiors, and they would have had this done years ago at a lower cost, but the USAF apparently did this in-house, which ran up the costs.
Congress has full control over spending. "No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law." - U.S. Constitution, Article 1, section 7.
Congress can exercise detailed control over spending when they so choose. Sometimes bills will contain language like "No federal funds shall be expended upon...", and that's binding on the executive branch. It's not unusual for Congress to explicitly turn off some project in this way.
That's quite a rant on programming for a Javascript form field validator.
The right answer to this problem was probably WebForms, which added support to HTML for basic form validation. WebForms provided for simple regular expressions in HTML forms like
this one for a credit card number:
<input type="text" pattern="[0-9]{16}" name="cc"/>
If the field didn't match the pattern, the browser would tell the user, in a standardized way, probably at keystroke time. The browser would also do things like prevent alpha entries in a numeric field, something that IBM green screen terminals were doing in the 1970s. (You could even program a keypunch machine to do that.) It's kind of lame that HTML forms never had any built in input validation.
For some reason, the WebForms proposal made very slow progress and never caught on.
I haven't seen a clear sequence of events here. Exactly what preceded his being arrested? He doesn't seem to have been accused of any positive harmful acts. He was just removed (somehow) from a controlling position, leaving the system locked.
Once arrested, he has the right to insist on not being interrogated without his attorney present, and because of that problem with the public defender's office, his first attorney had to be replaced. So there's no way anyone can legitimately ask him for the password until he gets a proper lawyer.
He may have been insubordinate, but that's not a criminal offense.
I suspect that it's going to come out that the "security coordinator" the city hired asked for the passwords, and he refused. This is the person who says they were intimidated by his photographing them, which, one could argue, was a reasonable security precaution against a "social engineering" attack.
There are already plenty of providers selling crap "domain control only validated" certs. We (as SiteTruth) regard those as having no value, and we encourage others to do the same. If it doesn't have an "L" (location) field, it's worthless.
The
introduction of those crap "quick SSL" certs poisoned the whole cert industry.
It's a problem that certificates which verify business name and address cost too much. They ought to cost maybe $25 per year. Validation isn't that expensive. That's what registered mail is for.
There used to be some enthusiasm for "web of trust" schemes of certification, but since the bad guys organized into criminal networks, domain farms became popular, and it became easy to get phony GMail accounts in bulk, that approach is obsolete.
The guys who actually do this sort of thing are the ones in Delta, the SEALs, the FBI's HRT, and the British SAS. They all have quite a bit in common.
Candidates are chosen competitively from a large pool of people with military or police experience. Then they're run through a selection process, which most fail. The selection process tests primarily for endurance and the ability to function under pressure when exhausted. Interestingly, none of those groups test martial arts or shooting skills during selection.
Initial training for all these groups is 1-2 years. The training varies, but it's mostly about 1) getting into hard-to-enter places, 2) accurate shooting in combat situations, and 3) mission planning and execution. They all learn martial arts, but if they need them in the field, the mission has gone badly wrong. They don't usually let the bad guys get that close. (HRT might; the FBI tries to capture the bad guys alive.)
That's how the special ops community does it. They train to do the job without heroics. Basic military truth: if heroics are necessary, the mission is in trouble. The HRT motto is "No Heroes". The classic line, going back to the Romans, is "The Legion is not composed of heroes. Heroes are what the Legion kills."
Good point. After 300 years or so, gamma emissions are way down, and spent fuel rods can be handled with fewer precautions.
So the real concern at that point is not future radiation-ignorant miners. It's someone who wants to extract the plutonium from spent fuel rods and make a bomb. Anyone doing that will know about radiation.
First, Yucca Mountain is in an area where atmospheric nuclear blasts used to be conducted without bothering anybody. You can still go there and see the craters. The site was chosen partly because it's very remote.
Second, any future clueless explorers digging in that area would have to be well-equipped. They're going to have to bash their way through a considerable amount of steel and concrete, so they'll need some mining technology. Then when they get to the concrete casks enclosing stainless steel tubes of glass enclosing radioactive materials, they have to get those open. Then some of them die within a few days, and it finally dawns on the rest of them that they've found something that was buried because it was dangerous, not valuable.
The problem is not going to spread. If you just had a nuclear fuel rod lying in the open, it wouldn't be dangerous fifty feet away. To get a large scale hazard, you have to grind it into powder and put it in food or water.
You can build an embedded version of QNX which has only what you need for your dedicated application. If you boot QNX from disk in a full configuration using "diskboot", it takes about 15 seconds, but that's a whole development configuration. You can build a custom boot image with "mkifs" containing only the OS, drivers, services, applications, and shared objects you need.
QNX is designed for that. (Some fancier car stereos have a QNX system inside.)
If the machine doesn't need any state saved locally from boot to boot, you can build a diskless system and boot it from flash memory. On suitable hardware, you can run it from ROM, although that's generally done on rather small machines like an ARM.
There's something to be said for this. Many of the major spammers have been identified (see ROKSO). The anti-spam community needs "boots on the ground" to do something about them. There are private companies in that business.
Blackwater is one; Kroll is another. Spammers today are part of larger criminal enterprises, which makes them vulnerable to private investigators.
Pixar, in some ways, is very retro. They like the Populuxe look of the 1950s and 1960s, and their stories are very linear. Pixar films have few, if any, interspersed subplots, flashbacks, or flash-forwards. Shots are long and cuts are few by modern standards.
They even seem to be done with the technology. Pixar's short films have historically been technology demos - they were trials of the next generation of animation. "Geri's Game", for example, is a cloth demo. "Presto" doesn't seem to introduce any new technology; it's just a nice piece of character animation.
Psystar could probably win this on antitrust grounds. Apple's EULA is probably an "illegal tying arrangement" and unenforceable. But Psystar may not be able to afford the litigation.
Historically, IBM lost on this antitrust issue in the 1970s, which is why there were and are IBM mainframe clones and, indeed, IBM PC clones. In fact, IBM was forced to sell their mainframe OS and applications to users with mainframe clones from Amdahl and NCR.
The difference between this era of Mac clones and the last one was that the earlier generations (pre x86) of Apple machines had parts of the OS in ROM, which gave Apple more legal leverage. The current
Apple machines are essentially Intel-based PC clones, with little or no essential Apple intellectual property inside.
Psystar does not seem to be redistributing Apple updates. They distribute an installer which, on the client machine, downloads an update from Apple and patches it.
Jobs role in Apple is overrated
on
Inside Steve's Brain
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Apple's early success really isn't attributable to Jobs. The Apple II was Wozniak's thing. Jobs insisted on a moulded plastic case for the Apple II, but Commodore had that, too. The Lisa (a good machine, but too expensive because the parts cost was too high back then) was a commercial flop. The original Mac (not enough memory, no hard drive) was too weak to be useful, and the Mac was a commercial flop until it was built up to Lisa specs of 1MB or so and a hard drive. (Understand that there were UNIX workstations with graphics years before the Mac came out. Cost, not innovation, was the problem in the early days.)
What actually saved Apple was the LaserWriter. That's what made the Mac useful and created the "desktop publishing" industry.
Slashdot Mirror
Social networking, content management, Web 2.0, and e-commerce in the same program! Think of the fraud opportunities!
"Creates a direct connection between your wallet and us!"
had to sit through a two hour session online plodding through a MS Partner Program exam that crashed at - yep - two hours in.
When BrainBench first started up, they offered their tests for free. I took a few for fun. Got a few of their "certs", but taking timed tests on a slow server was frustrating.
I'm not impressed with the "perpetual beta" and "using your users for Q/A" concept. Remember, the users can leave.
I've seen this happen with Tribe. Tribe was a nice little social networking system for people in the San Francisco area. Then, in 2007, they went "Web 2.0", with a system that let you "customize your home page".
At first, this drove the users nuts, as they tried to find a home page layout that would work. "Tribe.net bug reports" became the most popular forum. After a while, most users got their home page to some format that would work (the default was awful) and didn't have overlapping panes, then stopped using the new, fancy features. Users began to leave; some users even set up a competing system in disgust. As more users left, Tribe tried to charge for some features. More users left.
Tribe is now down to two employees and a fraction of its user base of two years ago.
The thing is set in Chicago, and obviously so. Great views of the Navy Pier, the Marina Towers, the Chicago Board of Trade building, and the river bridges. Seemed weird, but it worked.
The L.A. Times is now suggesting Batman move to LA.
US cities used to be that bad. I lived in Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit when they had steel mills. Cleveland was the worst, because it's not as windy. Normal visibility was under one mile.
The first time I went to downtown Cleveland, there it was: Heavy Industry - the Cleveland Flats. A river valley cuts through the city, and along the river were the steel mills. The Flats had trains running along public streets, some carrying red-hot steel ingots. A huge pipe a quarter mile long was supported by towers - and it rotated. This turned out to be a rotary cement kiln. Visibility was about half a mile there. One year, the river caught on fire when an oil slick was ignited.
Now the mills are gone, there are nightclubs along the river, and the city is dying.
Pascal was built for that specific model of structured programming, but it's not a correctness requirement. As long as all the exit points go to the same place, there's a "single point of exit", even though it's reachable by multiple routes. "break" and "return" all lead to one exit point, so there's no real problem.
Exception handling, however, does bypass the return, and adds some interesting issues.
It's so Roland the Plogger.
The "breakthrough" this time is that someone made gallium nitride substrates that might, someday, be useful for LEDs. After they solve the problem that their material cracks during cooling. However, Panasonic did that last year, and has been shipping white LEDs using that approach in sample quantities.
Here's the existing approach to this problem.
Python people argue over tabs vs. spaces for indentation. In Python, where indentation matters, it's a major issue. Python implementations really ought to insist that a file have only leading tabs or leading spaces. Mixing of tabs and spaces is clearly wrong.
A big UNIX design mistake was to have a tab equal eight spaces. If it had been four, everything would have worked out better, since four spaces is a reasonable indentation amount. It's eight because, when outputting to a Teletype Corporation 100-speed printer (ASR/KSR 35 or 38), the carriage can reliably move eight spaces in one character time. So, if you set the hardware tab stops every eight spaces on the printer, this provides maximum output speed. That's the real reason.
For C and C++, just run the code through "astyle -style==ansi". Let the machine do the work.
The prohibition on "multiple exits" or returns comes from a misunderstanding of early program proving technology. As one of the few people who ever built a real proof of correctness system, I know that's just not a problem.
There are some topological restrictions on program proving, but you can't violate them with "break" or "return". You need "goto" to really screw up. The actual topological constraint is that backwards control paths must not cross.
The basic requirement for proving loops is that there must be some section in the loop through which control must pass on every iteration. Somewhere in that section must go the loop invariant and the termination measure.
Nobody does this for software any more, although, interestingly, full-scale machine proof of correctness of hardware logic in VHDL is not that unusual. There are commercial tools for that.
It's really frustrating. When Pons and Fleischman originally announced "cold fusion", there was an immediate attempt at Stanford to replicate the result. The researchers gave a talk, which drew hundreds of people. In their first attempts, they had the apparatus surrounded with radiation detectors and alarms, in case there was a sudden burst of radiation. After a while, they realized that wasn't going to happen. The effect, if any, resulted in a few extra neutrons per hour over background.
They saw some variations in neutron flux, but discovered that people standing around the apparatus affected the result. Humans have lots of water and are neutron reflectors. So they moved the apparatus into a cube of lead blocks. No more neutron emissions.
Somebody may eventually get fusion this way, but probably won't get out more power than they put in. If you can figure out some way to put a macroscopic amount of energy into a microscopic volume, you can get a little fusion. It's been done with big capacitor banks, with lasers, with explosive compression, and with the Farnsworth Fusor. But far more energy goes in than comes out.
The portion of the "regulatory compliance fee" that's chargeable to CALEA (i.e. wiretapping) should be broken out and listed as such.
The previous VIP container, called "Silver Bullet", actually was an Airstream trailer, minus the wheels and with an aircraft pallet base added. The new "Steel Eagle" thing was designed based on an aircraft-qualified shelter module, which is basically an empty metal box on a pallet base. Then the USAF had to engineer an aircraft interior into the box, with lighting, HVAC, comms, and furnishings. It was a tight fit (the Airstream was bigger) and much custom engineering was required to cram everything in.
Looking at the pictures, one can see how the project got out of hand. They're doing the engineering required for an aircraft interior, but only building two or three units. There are companies that do luxury private aircraft interiors, and they would have had this done years ago at a lower cost, but the USAF apparently did this in-house, which ran up the costs.
Congress has full control over spending. "No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law." - U.S. Constitution, Article 1, section 7.
Congress can exercise detailed control over spending when they so choose. Sometimes bills will contain language like "No federal funds shall be expended upon...", and that's binding on the executive branch. It's not unusual for Congress to explicitly turn off some project in this way.
That's quite a rant on programming for a Javascript form field validator.
The right answer to this problem was probably WebForms, which added support to HTML for basic form validation. WebForms provided for simple regular expressions in HTML forms like this one for a credit card number: />
<input type="text" pattern="[0-9]{16}" name="cc"
If the field didn't match the pattern, the browser would tell the user, in a standardized way, probably at keystroke time. The browser would also do things like prevent alpha entries in a numeric field, something that IBM green screen terminals were doing in the 1970s. (You could even program a keypunch machine to do that.) It's kind of lame that HTML forms never had any built in input validation.
For some reason, the WebForms proposal made very slow progress and never caught on.
I haven't seen a clear sequence of events here. Exactly what preceded his being arrested? He doesn't seem to have been accused of any positive harmful acts. He was just removed (somehow) from a controlling position, leaving the system locked.
Once arrested, he has the right to insist on not being interrogated without his attorney present, and because of that problem with the public defender's office, his first attorney had to be replaced. So there's no way anyone can legitimately ask him for the password until he gets a proper lawyer.
He may have been insubordinate, but that's not a criminal offense.
I suspect that it's going to come out that the "security coordinator" the city hired asked for the passwords, and he refused. This is the person who says they were intimidated by his photographing them, which, one could argue, was a reasonable security precaution against a "social engineering" attack.
There are already plenty of providers selling crap "domain control only validated" certs. We (as SiteTruth) regard those as having no value, and we encourage others to do the same. If it doesn't have an "L" (location) field, it's worthless. The introduction of those crap "quick SSL" certs poisoned the whole cert industry.
It's a problem that certificates which verify business name and address cost too much. They ought to cost maybe $25 per year. Validation isn't that expensive. That's what registered mail is for.
There used to be some enthusiasm for "web of trust" schemes of certification, but since the bad guys organized into criminal networks, domain farms became popular, and it became easy to get phony GMail accounts in bulk, that approach is obsolete.
The guys who actually do this sort of thing are the ones in Delta, the SEALs, the FBI's HRT, and the British SAS. They all have quite a bit in common.
Candidates are chosen competitively from a large pool of people with military or police experience. Then they're run through a selection process, which most fail. The selection process tests primarily for endurance and the ability to function under pressure when exhausted. Interestingly, none of those groups test martial arts or shooting skills during selection.
Initial training for all these groups is 1-2 years. The training varies, but it's mostly about 1) getting into hard-to-enter places, 2) accurate shooting in combat situations, and 3) mission planning and execution. They all learn martial arts, but if they need them in the field, the mission has gone badly wrong. They don't usually let the bad guys get that close. (HRT might; the FBI tries to capture the bad guys alive.)
That's how the special ops community does it. They train to do the job without heroics. Basic military truth: if heroics are necessary, the mission is in trouble. The HRT motto is "No Heroes". The classic line, going back to the Romans, is "The Legion is not composed of heroes. Heroes are what the Legion kills."
Good point. After 300 years or so, gamma emissions are way down, and spent fuel rods can be handled with fewer precautions.
So the real concern at that point is not future radiation-ignorant miners. It's someone who wants to extract the plutonium from spent fuel rods and make a bomb. Anyone doing that will know about radiation.
First, Yucca Mountain is in an area where atmospheric nuclear blasts used to be conducted without bothering anybody. You can still go there and see the craters. The site was chosen partly because it's very remote.
Second, any future clueless explorers digging in that area would have to be well-equipped. They're going to have to bash their way through a considerable amount of steel and concrete, so they'll need some mining technology. Then when they get to the concrete casks enclosing stainless steel tubes of glass enclosing radioactive materials, they have to get those open. Then some of them die within a few days, and it finally dawns on the rest of them that they've found something that was buried because it was dangerous, not valuable.
The problem is not going to spread. If you just had a nuclear fuel rod lying in the open, it wouldn't be dangerous fifty feet away. To get a large scale hazard, you have to grind it into powder and put it in food or water.
You can build an embedded version of QNX which has only what you need for your dedicated application. If you boot QNX from disk in a full configuration using "diskboot", it takes about 15 seconds, but that's a whole development configuration. You can build a custom boot image with "mkifs" containing only the OS, drivers, services, applications, and shared objects you need. QNX is designed for that. (Some fancier car stereos have a QNX system inside.)
If the machine doesn't need any state saved locally from boot to boot, you can build a diskless system and boot it from flash memory. On suitable hardware, you can run it from ROM, although that's generally done on rather small machines like an ARM.
Blackwater would probably do it.
There's something to be said for this. Many of the major spammers have been identified (see ROKSO). The anti-spam community needs "boots on the ground" to do something about them. There are private companies in that business. Blackwater is one; Kroll is another. Spammers today are part of larger criminal enterprises, which makes them vulnerable to private investigators.
Pixar, in some ways, is very retro. They like the Populuxe look of the 1950s and 1960s, and their stories are very linear. Pixar films have few, if any, interspersed subplots, flashbacks, or flash-forwards. Shots are long and cuts are few by modern standards.
They even seem to be done with the technology. Pixar's short films have historically been technology demos - they were trials of the next generation of animation. "Geri's Game", for example, is a cloth demo. "Presto" doesn't seem to introduce any new technology; it's just a nice piece of character animation.
Psystar could probably win this on antitrust grounds. Apple's EULA is probably an "illegal tying arrangement" and unenforceable. But Psystar may not be able to afford the litigation. Historically, IBM lost on this antitrust issue in the 1970s, which is why there were and are IBM mainframe clones and, indeed, IBM PC clones. In fact, IBM was forced to sell their mainframe OS and applications to users with mainframe clones from Amdahl and NCR.
The difference between this era of Mac clones and the last one was that the earlier generations (pre x86) of Apple machines had parts of the OS in ROM, which gave Apple more legal leverage. The current Apple machines are essentially Intel-based PC clones, with little or no essential Apple intellectual property inside.
Psystar does not seem to be redistributing Apple updates. They distribute an installer which, on the client machine, downloads an update from Apple and patches it.
Also, Psystar's web site is not down. It's just slow.
Apple's early success really isn't attributable to Jobs. The Apple II was Wozniak's thing. Jobs insisted on a moulded plastic case for the Apple II, but Commodore had that, too. The Lisa (a good machine, but too expensive because the parts cost was too high back then) was a commercial flop. The original Mac (not enough memory, no hard drive) was too weak to be useful, and the Mac was a commercial flop until it was built up to Lisa specs of 1MB or so and a hard drive. (Understand that there were UNIX workstations with graphics years before the Mac came out. Cost, not innovation, was the problem in the early days.)
What actually saved Apple was the LaserWriter. That's what made the Mac useful and created the "desktop publishing" industry.