Because he had no business sense at all. Key evidence? When CP/M was a success and the staff in the victorian house in Pacific Grove were supporting it and should have been trying to enhance & extend it, what did Kildall do?
He closeted himself in his office for more than a year to write a PL/I compiler! Granted, putting PL/I on an 8080 was a technical triumph and was probably immensely satisfying to Kildall himself, but the market demand for it was indistinguishable from zero. And all that time, Kildall was basically unavailable, an abdicated leader, during the most critical time of his company's life.
Killdall was certainly brilliant and a visionary -- I still remember a presentation of his at which he demonstrated the potential of controlling a videodisc player from a computer, in the process demoing all the functions that, 20 years later, appeared in DVD players -- but he had no interest in business success, and he lost interest in his own creation, CP/M, yet wouldn't trust anyone else to take it over.
I keep several browsers current for reference but I don't believe I'll be installing this one -- the Mac OS X version has (a) a default app icon instead of a custom one, and (b) a "ReadMeFirst.txt" file which is all-binary, not text. If it isn't something evil in disguise, it's too incompetent to trust.
...for home-theater buffs. No component video; while S-video is a step up from composite, anyone with (or wanting) an HD monitor wants component. No support for 1080i -- which means that even my little $800 samsung TV can't be used at its full resolution, let alone my brother-in-law's fancy 40-in LCD. Nor can you play DVDs at their full resolution and rectangular format.
Although it claims 5.1 audio out, there's no telling what the audio quality is like, compared to a decent receiver. And none of the sound-processing options of a receiver, or Dolby or THx movie encodings, etc. And no hi-end audio inputs, so it can't be used as a receiver, to switch between and record from other audio sources.
Compared to DirecTivo, it has only a single tuner, not two, so it can't record two simultaneous shows while playing back a recording, or record one while watching another. It doesn't have the season pass -- seek out and record every, or every new, episode of a series regardless of schedule changes -- or wish lists -- find and record every program whose title matches a search string. It has a "favorites" feature but does it auto-record "suggestions" based on your viewing patterns?
Compared to Tivo media management, there's no indication it will work with OS X, and definitely no connection to iPhoto or iTunes libraries. If you've already got gigabytes of music a/o photos stored in those (or other) apps, you don't want to either move them all to a new media management solution, or duplicate them in two unrelated and uncoordinated systems.
True, Yahoo says it's so but can anybody find the actual CERT or DHS press release?
I've just spent a very unrewarding half hour clicking around the CERT and DHS sites and found nada, zip. If either of those bodies really made this inflammatory recommendation, they confided it only in Yahoo, that I can find.
Nobody will notice - since the NYT persists in crediting Joy with every innovation Sun ever made, including being "developer of the Java programming language."
Does the actual inventor of Java get no respect because his name makes people think of little fuzzy birds instead of nerdish ecstasy?
A fun read still in print is Mark Shelton's The Next Great Thing -- a 1989 account, in a tone reminiscent of "The Soul of a New Machine," telling of the attempt by an Ohio company to develop a Stirling engine for use in solar power conversion.
The company still exists and sells a 1KW engine -- but as a $46K "prototype," not a production model.
awk! sppplbbt! But for a wad of catfur in my fingers, I would have correctly cited as an example of a short book, "The Elements of Programming Style" by Kernighan and Ritchie.
Publishers really like big, fat computer books, and pressure authors to produce them. Something like "The Elements of C Programming" wouldn't have a chance of being published today unless it could be inflated to 500pp minimum...
Anyway, I know from personal experience that a good SQL tutorial can be written in 350pp, because I wrote one -- and it not only covered SQL statements, it had an introduction to schema design as well.
That book is still in use 10 years after, although it has been revised by many hands since my time. This pdf is only a generation or two removed from the original and I can recognize much of the prose. Plus, it's free -- if you don't mind learning an out-of-date Informix variant of SQL...
This test is taken from a copyrighted book, "Image Grammar" by one Harry Noden. See http://www.uakron.edu/noden/.
But, where did Noden get it? The only Google hits on "University of Mottsburgh" are various copies of this same test... suspect it is an academic spoof...
If you view the animation it is pretty clear how he wants the motor to work, but there is an obvious design issue: sealing.
The edge of the rotating "wobble plate" has to form a tight seal against the cylindrical, outer casing. Without an effective seal, combustion products leak across the plate, reducing power and (being hot) eroding the surface of the casing and the edge of the wobble plate.
Any point on the edge of the wobble plate is describing a long, looping path on the surface of the casing. If any pinpoint on that edge erodes it creates a path for hot gases which would quickly erode a wider and wider path.
Gas sealing was the downfall of the Wankel rotary and it is an even worse difficulty here. This engine is just not practical on that basis alone.
Re:A question of chronology...
on
Non-Stop
·
· Score: 1
Robert Heinlein's ORPHANS OF THE SKY, according to the title page of this first edition I am holding in my lap, "was originally published as a two-part serial in Astounding Science Fiction in 1941, under the titles Universe and Common Sense. Universe was republished in a Dell edition in 1951..." This "First American Edition" hardcover is dated 1964.
Problems noted in the first (and final) fifteen minutes with NS6:
* Very slow: takes 3-5 seconds to bring up a new page of the preferences dialog, for example - on a relatively fast machine.
* Cannot load www.slashdot.org -- shows only the graphic icons, no text, happily reports that it is done, 5.3 seconds.
* Cannot load www.macnn.com -- only displays blue page background, no graphics, no text. Says it's done in 1.2 seconds. Well hey, if you are gonna leave out all the text, why not do it in 0.1?
* Cannot locate a "reload" button on the "toolbar" (nor a print, nor big-A little-A, nor...)
* totally ignores MacOS look'n'feel in all widgets; dialog boxes reminiscent of 1995 X-windows (gag).
* dropdown lists of fonts under Appearances>Fonts contain hundreds of font variation names, ignoring presence of ATM and ATR.
* displays my carefully crafted "links" local file with much different table spacing than NS4.7, making it unusable. Tinkering with dpi setting in appearances has no effect whatever on fonts or table spacing.
Tested all the above on the latest (14) build of Mozilla, and same results obtained. Fuggedaboudit.
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Because he had no business sense at all. Key evidence? When CP/M was a success and the staff in the victorian house in Pacific Grove were supporting it and should have been trying to enhance & extend it, what did Kildall do?
He closeted himself in his office for more than a year to write a PL/I compiler! Granted, putting PL/I on an 8080 was a technical triumph and was probably immensely satisfying to Kildall himself, but the market demand for it was indistinguishable from zero. And all that time, Kildall was basically unavailable, an abdicated leader, during the most critical time of his company's life.
Killdall was certainly brilliant and a visionary -- I still remember a presentation of his at which he demonstrated the potential of controlling a videodisc player from a computer, in the process demoing all the functions that, 20 years later, appeared in DVD players -- but he had no interest in business success, and he lost interest in his own creation, CP/M, yet wouldn't trust anyone else to take it over.
I keep several browsers current for reference but I don't believe I'll be installing this one -- the Mac OS X version has (a) a default app icon instead of a custom one, and (b) a "ReadMeFirst.txt" file which is all-binary, not text. If it isn't something evil in disguise, it's too incompetent to trust.
...for home-theater buffs. No component video; while S-video is a step up from composite, anyone with (or wanting) an HD monitor wants component. No support for 1080i -- which means that even my little $800 samsung TV can't be used at its full resolution, let alone my brother-in-law's fancy 40-in LCD. Nor can you play DVDs at their full resolution and rectangular format.
Although it claims 5.1 audio out, there's no telling what the audio quality is like, compared to a decent receiver. And none of the sound-processing options of a receiver, or Dolby or THx movie encodings, etc. And no hi-end audio inputs, so it can't be used as a receiver, to switch between and record from other audio sources.
Compared to DirecTivo, it has only a single tuner, not two, so it can't record two simultaneous shows while playing back a recording, or record one while watching another. It doesn't have the season pass -- seek out and record every, or every new, episode of a series regardless of schedule changes -- or wish lists -- find and record every program whose title matches a search string. It has a "favorites" feature but does it auto-record "suggestions" based on your viewing patterns?
Compared to Tivo media management, there's no indication it will work with OS X, and definitely no connection to iPhoto or iTunes libraries. If you've already got gigabytes of music a/o photos stored in those (or other) apps, you don't want to either move them all to a new media management solution, or duplicate them in two unrelated and uncoordinated systems.
True, Yahoo says it's so but can anybody find the actual CERT or DHS press release?
I've just spent a very unrewarding half hour clicking around the CERT and DHS sites and found nada, zip. If either of those bodies really made this inflammatory recommendation, they confided it only in Yahoo, that I can find.
Nobody will notice - since the NYT persists in crediting Joy with every innovation Sun ever made, including being "developer of the Java programming language."
Does the actual inventor of Java get no respect because his name makes people think of little fuzzy birds instead of nerdish ecstasy?
A fun read still in print is Mark Shelton's The Next Great Thing -- a 1989 account, in a tone reminiscent of "The Soul of a New Machine," telling of the attempt by an Ohio company to develop a Stirling engine for use in solar power conversion.
The company still exists and sells a 1KW engine -- but as a $46K "prototype," not a production model.
awk! sppplbbt! But for a wad of catfur in my fingers, I would have correctly cited as an example of a short book, "The Elements of Programming Style" by Kernighan and Ritchie.
Publishers really like big, fat computer books, and pressure authors to produce them. Something like "The Elements of C Programming" wouldn't have a chance of being published today unless it could be inflated to 500pp minimum...
Anyway, I know from personal experience that a good SQL tutorial can be written in 350pp, because I wrote one -- and it not only covered SQL statements, it had an introduction to schema design as well.
That book is still in use 10 years after, although it has been revised by many hands since my time. This pdf is only a generation or two removed from the original and I can recognize much of the prose. Plus, it's free -- if you don't mind learning an out-of-date Informix variant of SQL...
This test is taken from a copyrighted book, "Image Grammar" by one Harry Noden. See http://www.uakron.edu/noden/.
But, where did Noden get it? The only Google hits on "University of Mottsburgh" are various copies of this same test... suspect it is an academic spoof...
The edge of the rotating "wobble plate" has to form a tight seal against the cylindrical, outer casing. Without an effective seal, combustion products leak across the plate, reducing power and (being hot) eroding the surface of the casing and the edge of the wobble plate.
Any point on the edge of the wobble plate is describing a long, looping path on the surface of the casing. If any pinpoint on that edge erodes it creates a path for hot gases which would quickly erode a wider and wider path.
Gas sealing was the downfall of the Wankel rotary and it is an even worse difficulty here. This engine is just not practical on that basis alone.
Robert Heinlein's ORPHANS OF THE SKY, according to the title page of this first edition I am holding in my lap, "was originally published as a two-part serial in Astounding Science Fiction in 1941, under the titles Universe and Common Sense. Universe was republished in a Dell edition in 1951..." This "First American Edition" hardcover is dated 1964.
Problems noted in the first (and final) fifteen minutes with NS6:
* Very slow: takes 3-5 seconds to bring up a new page of the preferences dialog, for example - on a relatively fast machine.
* Cannot load www.slashdot.org -- shows only the graphic icons, no text, happily reports that it is done, 5.3 seconds.
* Cannot load www.macnn.com -- only displays blue page background, no graphics, no text. Says it's done in 1.2 seconds. Well hey, if you are gonna leave out all the text, why not do it in 0.1?
* Cannot locate a "reload" button on the "toolbar" (nor a print, nor big-A little-A, nor...)
* totally ignores MacOS look'n'feel in all widgets; dialog boxes reminiscent of 1995 X-windows (gag).
* dropdown lists of fonts under Appearances>Fonts contain hundreds of font variation names, ignoring presence of ATM and ATR.
* displays my carefully crafted "links" local file with much different table spacing than NS4.7, making it unusable. Tinkering with dpi setting in appearances has no effect whatever on fonts or table spacing.
Tested all the above on the latest (14) build of Mozilla, and same results obtained. Fuggedaboudit.