It is much more fuel efficient, and given the overwing engine mounting, much quieter, as aircraft with engines slung under the wings reflect noise off the wings and back at the ground, whereas overwing mounted engines reflect the noise up. Overwing mounted engines are also less susceptible to ingesting debris, and bird strike on rotation.
I'm sure you might express concern about engine noise behind the BWB. That is no longer a problem, especially with modern engine nacelle designs that carefully mix the air pushed by the large front fan and the air pushed through the engine's combustion chambers to lower noise levels. Also, Rolls-Royce recently demonstrated a new engine nacelle design for the Boeing 777-200ER that had a sawtooth-edged exhaust nozzle to reduce noise levels even further.
By the YB-49, it was reasonably stable for a pilot who'd spent time on type.
Unfortunately, the stability problems were not completely overcome with the YB-49. Edwards AFB was named after a pilot who crashed during YB-49 testing.
OK, so turn that on it's head: imagine how well the YB-49 would have done with those same J57 engines!
However, because YB-49 had it engines buried into the wing, the result was that it would have required some pretty expensive structural modifications to accommodate the larger J57 engine. If I remember correctly, the top speed of the YB-49 was around 510 mph; the B-52 had a top speed well over 600 mph, something the USAF definitely liked.
Hmmm... the sketches I've seen of the YB-49 (yes, sketches, since the original plans were confiscated) showed some pretty cavernous bomb bays. I'm not sure the size of the bombs of the era, but it seems they designed to fit the payload requested by the customer.
Unfortunately for Northrup, the gravity-dropped nuclear weapons were huge monsters that literally hogged much of the bomb bay of even the huge B-36 bomber. Given the size of the bombs of that era the YB-49 was pretty much a non-starter as a nuclear weapons platform. It wasn't until the late 1950's that gravity-dropped nuclear bombs started getting smaller (the B28 bomb, which dates from the late 1950's, was small enough that the B-52 could carry four of them internally).
Guess they were both a bit ahead of their time.
The Northrup and Horten designs were ahead of their time, but stability problems dogged both design teams. People forget that Horten planes weren't paragons of stability, either; a research prototype of a jet fighter built by Horten crashed after a few flights due to controllability problems. It wasn't until the advent of reasonably cheap fly-by-wire systems in the 1960's that finally made it possible to build a flying wing that flew with reasonable stability.
Unfortunately, the Northrup YB-49 had not a few technical issues to overcome.
First, the plane was not a paragon of stability. The plane proved difficult to control in the days of mechanically-controlled moving surfaces.
Second, the YB-49 used relatively inefficient turbojets, so speed and range was not a great leap forward as some people think. The B-52 used the same aerodynamic research that resulted in the breakthrough B-47, and also used the much more efficient Pratt & Whitney J57 engine; this meant the B-52 could fly over 600 mph and had a range of over 6,000 miles, which meant the B-52 could hit most targets in the Soviet Union from US bases with just one air-to-air refuelling.
Finally, the YB-49's bomb bay could barely carry the large-sized atomic weapons of the day. The B-52's bomb bay could easily carry the large nuclear bombs, and improvements to the B-52 allowed additional underwing carriage of weapons.
The modern Northrup B-2 benefits from modern structural design (which allows for a much larger bomb bay), modern, much smaller nuclear bombs, modern jet engine technology and fly-by-wire controls, none of which was available in the 1940's when the YB-49 was being designed.
Fortunately, the issue of engine selection for the BWB is not as serious an issue as you think.
Remember, when the Boeing 777 was being designed Pratt & Whitney, General Electric and Rolls-Royce all designed a new generation of high-bypass jet engines with huge front fans (about the width of a 737 fuselage). The BWB will likely incorporate a variant of these new engines (using three of them), and engine nacelles will use new designs to drastically lower noise levels. In short, the BWB could actually be much quieter than today's widebody jets.
Actually, the blended-wing body has a two aerodynamic advantages over the A380.
First, because the entire plane is a natural lifting body, this means shorter runway requirements than the A380.
Second, because of the BWB's shape, a simple incorporation of folding wingtips could mean the BWB could fit into airport parking gates that now service the Boeing 747 easily. This is because instead of concentrating the usable interior space in a tube fuselage you have a huge amount of interior space width-wise.
If you look at the Avro Vulcan, the plane does have a regular fuselage, and the engines are buried into the wing itself like you see on the de Havilland Comet.
The Boeing BWB essentially turns the entire wing into a lifting body, and the engines are high-mounted on the rear of the plane. That means very efficient availability of interior space and also much more flexibility in engine choice.
I think if passengers and cargo operators are willing to give the blended-wing body airplane a chance to succeed, the plane will definitely have some major advantages.
First, the plane uses substantially less fuel on a seat-mile basis than even the Airbus A380. This means the BWB could carry 200-250 more passengers per plane for the same range as the A380-800 (8,000 nautical miles). If Boeing is willing to keep the passenger capacity at around 550 passengers the plane could achieve perhaps the last major goal of commercial aviation, the ability to fly between London, England and Sydney, Australia non-stop in both directions year around (the distance is about 9,000 nautical miles on a Great Circle route).
Second, because the engines are located on the back of the plane, this could mean lower noise levels, meeting the upcoming ICAO Stage IV noise standard easily.
Third, since the entire plane's shape becomes a lifting surface, that could mean the BWB will probably need less runway lengths than the A380-800. Also, the BWB's landing gear placement will also mean compatibility with today's airport taxiways.
Fourth, because the BWB's length from front to back is about the same as a 767-300, a simple incorporation of folding wingtips could mean the BWB can easily fit into airport parking gates now used by the 747--no need to build parking gates that comform to the 80 x 80 meter standard that the A380 will require (an very expensive proposition for many airports).
Finally, because of the unique interior volume area of the BWB, Boeing could easily design much more efficient seating areas and airlines could put in large lounge areas or for the first time turn First Class seating into roomettes like you see on railroad sleeping cars.
Let's face it folks. Air travel is going to continue to increase in popularity, and given the space restrictions and noise abatement rules at today's airports the BWB could become the new queen of the skies by 2015.
I also think the article forgot to mention you can install Critical Update Notification in Windows 98/ME/2000/XP that automatically flags you about security and other important updates whenever you log onto the Internet.
Re:Something MUCH more frightening: EMP bomb
on
Cyber-Attacks?
·
· Score: 2
And the frightening thing is such a bomb only needs about US$400 in parts to build.
Now who's laughing.
Something MUCH more frightening: EMP bomb
on
Cyber-Attacks?
·
· Score: 2
I think people here are ignoring something that is even more frightening than a concerted attack on the Internet: an electromagnetic pulse bomb.
Imagine a bomb filled with filaments of graphite detonated in a special manner near a power generating plant or major power substation. The EMP from such an explosion would effectively wipe out most everything electrical connected downstream from the point of attack and anything electrical within line of sight of the explosion; you might as well kiss anything connected to the wall outlet in your home goodbye since the pulse will overwhelm most surge protectors out there.
And the scary part is that building such a bomb is very inexpensive.
(which is why OPEC hasn't tried to push oil prices to where they hurt the overall economy as happened in the '70s)
The reason why OPEC can't push oil prices higher is because they forgot a basic rule of microeconomics--cartels don't last. With Mexico and Norway (both major oil producers outside the reach of OPEC) increasing production and with the massive oil reserves of the former Soviet Union now available to the West, OPEC's pricing leverage has dropped drastically, to say the least.
I think the new discovery of what was an ancient lake of water on that planet is kind of stating the obvious anyway.
Doesn't anymore remember the Mariner 9 mission? Mariner 9 in 1971 revealed what amounts of dried-up river channels, proof that there used to liquid water flowing on the surface of Mars in the distant past. The question that purplexed scientists was what happened to that water; the discovery from Mars Odyssey 2001 orbiter may have confirmed that a large portion of that liquid water has now turned into ice that is now underneath the surface of Mars.
Actually, I have my doubts that Neverwinter Nights would push the limits of ATA-33 IDE connections, especially if you have a modern IDE drive running at 7200 rpm and sporting a 2 MB on-drive cache.
Powerleap should soon ship the PL-370/T CPU upgrade, which will allow the installation of the Tualatin-core Celeron CPU running at 1,200 MHz on an AB-BM6 motherboard. At 1,200 MHz CPU speed that is more than enough to keep up with Neverwinter Nights, IMHO.
With the price of RAM, hard drives and lower-end graphics cards being pretty reasonable nowadays, there is no real incentive to actually buy a new computer for most users.
For example, right now I'm running a computer with an Abit AB-BM6 motherboard with 320 MB PC-100 SDRAM, 500 MHz Celeron A CPU, 8 GB hard drive, Matrox G400 DualHead AGP graphics card, a no-name PCI sound card with the Yamaha XS-DG sound chipset, and a Zoom Telephonics 2949L external V.90 modem. That's far more than enough to run Windows 98 easily, surf the Internet and run Works 2000 productivity software.
If I were to upgrade my system so I can run games, I can easily get a 40-60 GB ATA-100 hard drive, swap out the Matrox card for an ATI Radeon 7500 AGP card, and upgrade the CPU to a Celeron 850 MHz Coppermine CPU using a special Socket 370 adapter from Powerleap.
I think people will be surprised that a memory upgrade plus hard drive upgrade will speed up the system 50-75% pretty easily.
I believe that Disney has been using something called Computer Aided Production System (CAPS) for their animated features since the late 1980's.
From what I've read, CAPS allows you to digitally composite multiple types of animation together and do the final animation coloring/shading. I believe that The Little Mermaid used an early form of CAPS for some of the animated sequences, but CAPS was not used heavily until The Rescuers Down Under (1990).
I personally believe that Lilo & Stitch used CAPS to composite the foreground animation with the watercolor-painted backgrounds. It's unlike Atlantis: The Lost Empire, where CAPS was used to composite hand-drawn animation and computer-drawn animation.
I think Circuit City's announcement to phase out VHS movie sales at their stores could be a harbinger of things to come.
I would be not be surprised that within 18 months both Blockbuster and Hollywood Video will announce the phaseout of VHS-format video rentals for new movie releases. The reason is simple: because DVD's are way more durable than VHS tapes, DVD movies can be on the rental market for much, much longer than VHS titles, which means potentially more revenue for Blockbuster and Hollywood Video.
The thing is that most of the world's major commercial web sites are written for Internet Explorer 4.0 to 6.0 compliance, and to make the sites compliant with Mozilla 1.0 (neé Netscape 7.0) will require substantial investments to completely recoding the HTML, DHTML, XML, etc. source of the web site so it can be read by both browsers.
Alas, that isn't going to be cheap because because of the man-hours involved.
I think the K6-III was a disappointment of sorts because while having a bit L2 cache on the CPU die helped, that CPU was still hamstrung by the relatively poor K6 CPU core in general.
The Barton-core Athlon with the 512 KB L2 cache will definitely be a screamer because the Athlon design itself is already so efficient to start with. I mean think about it: the primary reason why the Northwood-core Pentium 4's are so fast is because of the generous 512 KB L2 cache on the CPU die itself.
What MS's inclusion of that dialog did is bring the internet to those people who would keep using MS regardless of if it had good internet capability or not (and that's a very big group).
I do offer a nod to some operating systems at the time that could support SLIP/PPP dial-up access, but you have to remember that before Windows 95 for Windows 3.1x users you had to install Trumpet Winsock separately to get Internet access.
Windows 95's inclusion of the SLIP/PPP stack made connecting to the Internet almost a snap, since all you need to do was to set up server name, DNS and IP addresses to do the connection. That is where Netscape really took off for nearly a year, because before Windows 95 OSR2 you had to install your own web browser, and Netscape Navigator by default was pretty much the only choice. It wasn't until Internet Explorer 3.0 arrived in August 96 that Microsoft started its road to browser dominance. Once MS included IE 3.0 with Windows 95 OSR2, the handwriting was pretty much on the wall for Netscape's dominance, given Microsoft's 85% marketshare for operating systems.
I think what really killed the BBS systems had to do with the following reasons:
1. The decision in 1992 to commercialize the Internet. That made commercial public access to the Internet really explode in popularity, to say the least.
2. The development of the Mosaic web browser to access the World Wide Web in the early 1990's. That made Internet navigation very easy to do, and indeed that's how much of the world access the Internet nowadays--through a web browser.
3. The arrival of operating systems with easy-to-setup Internet access. Depsite what many people here on/. think of Microsoft, you have to admit that the inclusion of dial-up PPP access for Internet connections in Windows 95 was a major factor in the explosive growth of Internet usage.
The only reason I even turn on a radio is to listen to the news or talk.
And you wonder why talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, Art Bell and Dr. Laura have contracts paying them in the millions of dollars per year.
Radio's most profitable niche nowadays is talk radio, no contest. After all, Howard Stern's show is essentially a risqué talk radio show.
Re:The reason why XM and Sirius exists today
on
Homogenized Music
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· Score: 2
I of course understand your concerns, but still XM is WAY better than terrestrial radio stations nowadays. At least on XM you can hear things like Classical, New Age, Easy Listening, a lot of ethnic music, and a way bigger selection of oldies, too.
Also XM has both BBC World Service and ESPN Radio, both of which I listen to a lot.
Re:The reason why XM and Sirius exists today
on
Homogenized Music
·
· Score: 2
I've looked at the channel selections for both XM and Sirius.
They're pretty much the same, so you can't go wrong with either. Note that XM has a lot of channels of music you'll never hear on terrestrial radio nowadays. =(
Re:The problem is not a failure of the market
on
Homogenized Music
·
· Score: 2
However, while Clear Channel has an interest in XM satellite radio, they still have to consider the fact you have to fill some 100 channels of audio on XM. They realize this and have to program in a very large variety of music to fill these channel allocations.
Slashdot Mirror
An earlier AC post mentioned this:
It is much more fuel efficient, and given the overwing engine mounting, much quieter, as aircraft with engines slung under the wings reflect noise off the wings and back at the ground, whereas overwing mounted engines reflect the noise up. Overwing mounted engines are also less susceptible to ingesting debris, and bird strike on rotation.
I'm sure you might express concern about engine noise behind the BWB. That is no longer a problem, especially with modern engine nacelle designs that carefully mix the air pushed by the large front fan and the air pushed through the engine's combustion chambers to lower noise levels. Also, Rolls-Royce recently demonstrated a new engine nacelle design for the Boeing 777-200ER that had a sawtooth-edged exhaust nozzle to reduce noise levels even further.
By the YB-49, it was reasonably stable for a pilot who'd spent time on type.
Unfortunately, the stability problems were not completely overcome with the YB-49. Edwards AFB was named after a pilot who crashed during YB-49 testing.
OK, so turn that on it's head: imagine how well the YB-49 would have done with those same J57 engines!
However, because YB-49 had it engines buried into the wing, the result was that it would have required some pretty expensive structural modifications to accommodate the larger J57 engine. If I remember correctly, the top speed of the YB-49 was around 510 mph; the B-52 had a top speed well over 600 mph, something the USAF definitely liked.
Hmmm... the sketches I've seen of the YB-49 (yes, sketches, since the original plans were confiscated) showed some pretty cavernous bomb bays. I'm not sure the size of the bombs of the era, but it seems they designed to fit the payload requested by the customer.
Unfortunately for Northrup, the gravity-dropped nuclear weapons were huge monsters that literally hogged much of the bomb bay of even the huge B-36 bomber. Given the size of the bombs of that era the YB-49 was pretty much a non-starter as a nuclear weapons platform. It wasn't until the late 1950's that gravity-dropped nuclear bombs started getting smaller (the B28 bomb, which dates from the late 1950's, was small enough that the B-52 could carry four of them internally).
Guess they were both a bit ahead of their time.
The Northrup and Horten designs were ahead of their time, but stability problems dogged both design teams. People forget that Horten planes weren't paragons of stability, either; a research prototype of a jet fighter built by Horten crashed after a few flights due to controllability problems. It wasn't until the advent of reasonably cheap fly-by-wire systems in the 1960's that finally made it possible to build a flying wing that flew with reasonable stability.
Unfortunately, the Northrup YB-49 had not a few technical issues to overcome.
First, the plane was not a paragon of stability. The plane proved difficult to control in the days of mechanically-controlled moving surfaces.
Second, the YB-49 used relatively inefficient turbojets, so speed and range was not a great leap forward as some people think. The B-52 used the same aerodynamic research that resulted in the breakthrough B-47, and also used the much more efficient Pratt & Whitney J57 engine; this meant the B-52 could fly over 600 mph and had a range of over 6,000 miles, which meant the B-52 could hit most targets in the Soviet Union from US bases with just one air-to-air refuelling.
Finally, the YB-49's bomb bay could barely carry the large-sized atomic weapons of the day. The B-52's bomb bay could easily carry the large nuclear bombs, and improvements to the B-52 allowed additional underwing carriage of weapons.
The modern Northrup B-2 benefits from modern structural design (which allows for a much larger bomb bay), modern, much smaller nuclear bombs, modern jet engine technology and fly-by-wire controls, none of which was available in the 1940's when the YB-49 was being designed.
Fortunately, the issue of engine selection for the BWB is not as serious an issue as you think.
Remember, when the Boeing 777 was being designed Pratt & Whitney, General Electric and Rolls-Royce all designed a new generation of high-bypass jet engines with huge front fans (about the width of a 737 fuselage). The BWB will likely incorporate a variant of these new engines (using three of them), and engine nacelles will use new designs to drastically lower noise levels. In short, the BWB could actually be much quieter than today's widebody jets.
Actually, the blended-wing body has a two aerodynamic advantages over the A380.
First, because the entire plane is a natural lifting body, this means shorter runway requirements than the A380.
Second, because of the BWB's shape, a simple incorporation of folding wingtips could mean the BWB could fit into airport parking gates that now service the Boeing 747 easily. This is because instead of concentrating the usable interior space in a tube fuselage you have a huge amount of interior space width-wise.
Well, almost.
If you look at the Avro Vulcan, the plane does have a regular fuselage, and the engines are buried into the wing itself like you see on the de Havilland Comet.
The Boeing BWB essentially turns the entire wing into a lifting body, and the engines are high-mounted on the rear of the plane. That means very efficient availability of interior space and also much more flexibility in engine choice.
I think if passengers and cargo operators are willing to give the blended-wing body airplane a chance to succeed, the plane will definitely have some major advantages.
First, the plane uses substantially less fuel on a seat-mile basis than even the Airbus A380. This means the BWB could carry 200-250 more passengers per plane for the same range as the A380-800 (8,000 nautical miles). If Boeing is willing to keep the passenger capacity at around 550 passengers the plane could achieve perhaps the last major goal of commercial aviation, the ability to fly between London, England and Sydney, Australia non-stop in both directions year around (the distance is about 9,000 nautical miles on a Great Circle route).
Second, because the engines are located on the back of the plane, this could mean lower noise levels, meeting the upcoming ICAO Stage IV noise standard easily.
Third, since the entire plane's shape becomes a lifting surface, that could mean the BWB will probably need less runway lengths than the A380-800. Also, the BWB's landing gear placement will also mean compatibility with today's airport taxiways.
Fourth, because the BWB's length from front to back is about the same as a 767-300, a simple incorporation of folding wingtips could mean the BWB can easily fit into airport parking gates now used by the 747--no need to build parking gates that comform to the 80 x 80 meter standard that the A380 will require (an very expensive proposition for many airports).
Finally, because of the unique interior volume area of the BWB, Boeing could easily design much more efficient seating areas and airlines could put in large lounge areas or for the first time turn First Class seating into roomettes like you see on railroad sleeping cars.
Let's face it folks. Air travel is going to continue to increase in popularity, and given the space restrictions and noise abatement rules at today's airports the BWB could become the new queen of the skies by 2015.
I also think the article forgot to mention you can install Critical Update Notification in Windows 98/ME/2000/XP that automatically flags you about security and other important updates whenever you log onto the Internet.
I suggest you read this article:
0 1/ 9/e-bomb/print.phtml
http://popularmechanics.com/science/military/20
And the frightening thing is such a bomb only needs about US$400 in parts to build.
Now who's laughing.
I think people here are ignoring something that is even more frightening than a concerted attack on the Internet: an electromagnetic pulse bomb.
Imagine a bomb filled with filaments of graphite detonated in a special manner near a power generating plant or major power substation. The EMP from such an explosion would effectively wipe out most everything electrical connected downstream from the point of attack and anything electrical within line of sight of the explosion; you might as well kiss anything connected to the wall outlet in your home goodbye since the pulse will overwhelm most surge protectors out there.
And the scary part is that building such a bomb is very inexpensive.
(which is why OPEC hasn't tried to push oil prices to where they hurt the overall economy as happened in the '70s)
The reason why OPEC can't push oil prices higher is because they forgot a basic rule of microeconomics--cartels don't last. With Mexico and Norway (both major oil producers outside the reach of OPEC) increasing production and with the massive oil reserves of the former Soviet Union now available to the West, OPEC's pricing leverage has dropped drastically, to say the least.
I think the new discovery of what was an ancient lake of water on that planet is kind of stating the obvious anyway.
Doesn't anymore remember the Mariner 9 mission? Mariner 9 in 1971 revealed what amounts of dried-up river channels, proof that there used to liquid water flowing on the surface of Mars in the distant past. The question that purplexed scientists was what happened to that water; the discovery from Mars Odyssey 2001 orbiter may have confirmed that a large portion of that liquid water has now turned into ice that is now underneath the surface of Mars.
Actually, I have my doubts that Neverwinter Nights would push the limits of ATA-33 IDE connections, especially if you have a modern IDE drive running at 7200 rpm and sporting a 2 MB on-drive cache.
Powerleap should soon ship the PL-370/T CPU upgrade, which will allow the installation of the Tualatin-core Celeron CPU running at 1,200 MHz on an AB-BM6 motherboard. At 1,200 MHz CPU speed that is more than enough to keep up with Neverwinter Nights, IMHO.
With the price of RAM, hard drives and lower-end graphics cards being pretty reasonable nowadays, there is no real incentive to actually buy a new computer for most users.
For example, right now I'm running a computer with an Abit AB-BM6 motherboard with 320 MB PC-100 SDRAM, 500 MHz Celeron A CPU, 8 GB hard drive, Matrox G400 DualHead AGP graphics card, a no-name PCI sound card with the Yamaha XS-DG sound chipset, and a Zoom Telephonics 2949L external V.90 modem. That's far more than enough to run Windows 98 easily, surf the Internet and run Works 2000 productivity software.
If I were to upgrade my system so I can run games, I can easily get a 40-60 GB ATA-100 hard drive, swap out the Matrox card for an ATI Radeon 7500 AGP card, and upgrade the CPU to a Celeron 850 MHz Coppermine CPU using a special Socket 370 adapter from Powerleap.
I think people will be surprised that a memory upgrade plus hard drive upgrade will speed up the system 50-75% pretty easily.
I believe that Disney has been using something called Computer Aided Production System (CAPS) for their animated features since the late 1980's.
From what I've read, CAPS allows you to digitally composite multiple types of animation together and do the final animation coloring/shading. I believe that The Little Mermaid used an early form of CAPS for some of the animated sequences, but CAPS was not used heavily until The Rescuers Down Under (1990).
I personally believe that Lilo & Stitch used CAPS to composite the foreground animation with the watercolor-painted backgrounds. It's unlike Atlantis: The Lost Empire, where CAPS was used to composite hand-drawn animation and computer-drawn animation.
I think Circuit City's announcement to phase out VHS movie sales at their stores could be a harbinger of things to come.
I would be not be surprised that within 18 months both Blockbuster and Hollywood Video will announce the phaseout of VHS-format video rentals for new movie releases. The reason is simple: because DVD's are way more durable than VHS tapes, DVD movies can be on the rental market for much, much longer than VHS titles, which means potentially more revenue for Blockbuster and Hollywood Video.
You have a very valid point.
The thing is that most of the world's major commercial web sites are written for Internet Explorer 4.0 to 6.0 compliance, and to make the sites compliant with Mozilla 1.0 (neé Netscape 7.0) will require substantial investments to completely recoding the HTML, DHTML, XML, etc. source of the web site so it can be read by both browsers.
Alas, that isn't going to be cheap because because of the man-hours involved.
I think the K6-III was a disappointment of sorts because while having a bit L2 cache on the CPU die helped, that CPU was still hamstrung by the relatively poor K6 CPU core in general.
The Barton-core Athlon with the 512 KB L2 cache will definitely be a screamer because the Athlon design itself is already so efficient to start with. I mean think about it: the primary reason why the Northwood-core Pentium 4's are so fast is because of the generous 512 KB L2 cache on the CPU die itself.
I have to wonder what is the current ferry service like between Sicily and the Italian mainland.
Has there been talk of upgrading the ferries to very large ships like they do on the English Channel crossings?
What MS's inclusion of that dialog did is bring the internet to those people who would keep using MS regardless of if it had good internet capability or not (and that's a very big group).
I do offer a nod to some operating systems at the time that could support SLIP/PPP dial-up access, but you have to remember that before Windows 95 for Windows 3.1x users you had to install Trumpet Winsock separately to get Internet access.
Windows 95's inclusion of the SLIP/PPP stack made connecting to the Internet almost a snap, since all you need to do was to set up server name, DNS and IP addresses to do the connection. That is where Netscape really took off for nearly a year, because before Windows 95 OSR2 you had to install your own web browser, and Netscape Navigator by default was pretty much the only choice. It wasn't until Internet Explorer 3.0 arrived in August 96 that Microsoft started its road to browser dominance. Once MS included IE 3.0 with Windows 95 OSR2, the handwriting was pretty much on the wall for Netscape's dominance, given Microsoft's 85% marketshare for operating systems.
I think what really killed the BBS systems had to do with the following reasons:
/. think of Microsoft, you have to admit that the inclusion of dial-up PPP access for Internet connections in Windows 95 was a major factor in the explosive growth of Internet usage.
1. The decision in 1992 to commercialize the Internet. That made commercial public access to the Internet really explode in popularity, to say the least.
2. The development of the Mosaic web browser to access the World Wide Web in the early 1990's. That made Internet navigation very easy to do, and indeed that's how much of the world access the Internet nowadays--through a web browser.
3. The arrival of operating systems with easy-to-setup Internet access. Depsite what many people here on
The only reason I even turn on a radio is to listen to the news or talk.
And you wonder why talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, Art Bell and Dr. Laura have contracts paying them in the millions of dollars per year.
Radio's most profitable niche nowadays is talk radio, no contest. After all, Howard Stern's show is essentially a risqué talk radio show.
I of course understand your concerns, but still XM is WAY better than terrestrial radio stations nowadays. At least on XM you can hear things like Classical, New Age, Easy Listening, a lot of ethnic music, and a way bigger selection of oldies, too.
Also XM has both BBC World Service and ESPN Radio, both of which I listen to a lot.
I've looked at the channel selections for both XM and Sirius.
They're pretty much the same, so you can't go wrong with either. Note that XM has a lot of channels of music you'll never hear on terrestrial radio nowadays. =(
However, while Clear Channel has an interest in XM satellite radio, they still have to consider the fact you have to fill some 100 channels of audio on XM. They realize this and have to program in a very large variety of music to fill these channel allocations.