I guess you've never heard of an embedded system. Those can't ship with bugs.
They can and do, as anyone who has ever used a flakey piece of such equipment can atest. The big diff is they usually just lock up or reset without any indication of what went wrong, so all you can do is curse and shrug. And buy a new product.
Now, embedded systems do tend to have higher standards of quality then, say, a word processor. I suspect that's due to a number of factors. One is mindset (people expect "computers" to be buggy these days, but not a stereo). Easy of fixing is another (it's easier to load a new patch to MS Word then to your microwave).
But the big reason is complexity. Simple systems are easier to build right then complex systems. You don't see many buggy coffee maker designs, because all a cofee maker has to do is get hot at the right times. Compare that to the hundreds of thousands of lines of code in many software projects...
There is a lesson here. Simple designs enable robust designs.
Of course, it is true that getting into space is a complex problem, but many argue that the STS is needlessly complex.
Some apt quotes (I'm a quote junkie):
"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." -- C.A.R. Hoare
"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
This is all about stiring up the pot. Bad news sells best. I first heard this on a radio report earlier. They start in with "This just in... debris seen falling off the shuttle". They go on for a minute about cameras and analysis and everything else before then mention, quietly, that, oh, BTW, it didn't even hit anything.
I love all the remarks in the media about "It would be impossible to eliminate the chance of things falling off the shuttle". Yah, like how about the fuel tank the size of two football fields or the two giant boosters with flames shooting out of them!
Here's the way it's gonna be: Every time an an astronaut so much as breaks wind on this mission, there's gonna be a news report. Next launch will have three reports, "Shuttle going to take off", "Shuttle took off", and "Shuttle landed". After that, we'll be back to occasional random "We have a space program, or something" crap. Until the next big problem.
"So even though the first keyboards were silent..."
Heh. The earliest computer (or rather, terminal) keyboards were electro-mechanical teletypes which make the loudest modern PC seem quiet by comparison. The first glass teletypes (i.e., CRT, not printer) weren't much better. I think it's a fair bet that quiet keyboards came later. I don't have any solid references (but then, neither does the parent:), but that's my reasonably-well-educated guess.
"I found a couple of silent keyboards..."
Sacrilege! You can have by gloriously loud IBM model M when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers. Type hard or go home!
Not only that, but what's this fasination with quiet disk drives? It used to be I didn't need a hard disk LED, because I could hear the head servo motor running back and forth. It got to the point where I knew what certain programs sounded like when they ran and could hear when something went wrong. Now that's debugging! [Tim_Allen]Urh urh urh urh.[/Tim_Allen]:-)
"They have long touted HP-UX as their non-stop platform..."
I knew I was going to see this as soon as I saw the article.
NonStop is a platform all its own. It has nothing to do with HP-UX or the HP 9000 line. NonStop used to be called "Tandem". IIRC, DEC bought Tandem, Compaq bought DEC, and HP bought Compaq, which is how it ended up in HP's hands. Somewhere along the line, it got renamed to "NonStop".
HP-UX might be appropriate if you need 99.999% uptime. NonStop is appropriate when five nines isn't even close to what you need. This is totally fault-tollerant hardware. You can loose a processor, a memory bank, even a system bus and the system keeps right on going. Very high-end, esoteric stuff.
Personally, I think this is the right move for the ESRB and the industry as a whole. There's a whole group of people who want "the government" to start regulating video games (and movies, and TV, and books, and thought, and...). The industry always claims they can police themselves, given the chance. Well, here we had a video game maker shipping some dirty pictures in their game. Sure, they were disabled by default, but they were there. All you had to do was "rip off the cover", so to speak. Per modern mainstream American culture (right or wrong), and the ESRB's definitions ("graphic sexual content"), that's "Adults Only". It should be marked as such. Rockstar broke the industry's rules, and the industry is slapping them down because of it. Good. They should. If the industry wants to claim they can take care of themselves, they need to back it up with action.
Does this mean more games should be rated "Adults Only"? Prolly. Also to the good, IMO. If the shoe fits, wear it.
Does this mean parents shouldn't also be blamed for not paying closer attention? No. Parents (in general) should pay much closer attention to what their kids are watching, playing, and doing. They should spend more time being parents, in other words.
But two wrongs don't make a right, and Rockstar deserves what they got.
"...self-check-out kiosks in the stores lately use Windows XP, not even embedded XP..."
The ones around here are running Windows NT 4.0 Workstation. Same as you, I've seen them lock-up/crash/etc and the store people just reboot the things.
I'm waiting for the day when I have to reboot a toll booth before my EZ-Pass will work.:-)
Yah, they show some thruster exhaust. Whoopie-do. This does not mean the portrayal of space flight is realistic. The biggest glaring problem is that if you accelerate continuously with a big main engine, then half-way there, you have to flip around and decelerate with the same big main engine. So you always approach your destination backwards. But you never see that on TV or in movies. It's too weird looking to flatlanders like us.
I don't consider this a problem with BSG. It's a TV show; it's supposed to look cool, not be precisely realistic. But I don't go around gleefully claiming how good it is, either.
Yah know, claims like this surface all the time. And some of them are even true. But the one thing that seems to get missed in all the discussion is that stories get retold. There are a handful of fundamental conflicts that get used to build all stories. There are a slightly larger number of basic plots that appear to surface in just about every story ever told. Plot devices in SF get re-used and re-invented constantly. Gee, evil robots, never heard that one before. Hell, "man's creation turns against him" is arguably the first science fiction story ever -- remember Frankenstein? I don't see Mary Shelley suing Harlan Ellison or Sophia Stewart though. (Yes, I know she's long dead, I'm making a freaking point.)
These days, it's damn hard to have an idea that someone else hasn't had before.
Win XP Home is brain damaged by design and deliberate intent, no doubt about it. I've got an XP Home partition on my main home PC (for playing games). I don't spend that much time in Windoze at home. That being said, I have tweaked permissions and didn't find it all that hard to find what I needed. But then, I'm a professional computer geek. For "typical users", computers are nearly impossible to use properly (regardless of OS, platform, etc.), and Microsoft is the worst of a bad lot.
One thing I know for sure is that Win XP Home cannot be joined to a domain.
At work, if an XP Home PC shows up, the first then that happens is it gets wiped and reloaded with XP Pro.:-)
"What about the times when you install a stupid program (Warcraft III comes to mind) that saves games in a dir that only an admin can access (if installed as admin)?"
Just set the NTFS permissions on that file/folder/branch so the file(s) can be written by the "Users" group. Depending on the complexity of the program, who else needs to use it, and such, you can even lock it down against modification of the stuff that shouldn't change (to, e.g., to protect against virus infection of EXE files). I do this all the time, although it's usually to make some CAD program or some such work, and not to play games.:)
It's programs that do goofy, undocumented things like trying to install DLLs into the C:\WINDOWS directory every time they're run (no, I'm not making that up) that really irritate me.
While I think PETA consists mainly of radical nutcases, linking to a corporate mouth-piece in an attempt to discredit them isn't exactly fair and objective, either.
It really irrirates me when SF people (who often should know better). Terra is nothing more then the Latin word for "earth" or "land". It has no more implict value or distiction or anything else over modern-English "Earth". Since all space-traveling cultures speak English anyway (just watch any TV show or movie), "Earth" would be a lot more appropriate then "Terra" ever would.
As you note, the correct term for "occuring on Earth" is "terrestrial" (which does derive from the same root word, but that ain't the same thing).
I'm afraid they did. They often did show them working as a true reaction drive would, flipping over and counter-thrusting to reverse course, and I was suitibly impressed by the authenticity when I first saw that. But they also did the whole "swooping" thing to make it look cool on occasion. Usually when flying "around" the station. I can dig out my DVD's and give you an episode and time reference if you like.
I don't ding them for this; it's TV, after all, and looking impressive counts for a lot. But I also don't hold any illusions that it's a scientific model, either.:-)
"I also love the realism of the attack ships (raptors) as they fly. So many shows make ships in space behave as if they're flying through an atmosphere."
Yah, which is why we never see banking turns in BSG. (Or B5.)/SARCASM
While I've been impressed by the fact that they sometimes follow Newton's Laws of Motion in B5 and BSG, they also love to make things "look cool", so you get the banking turns and such.
Real spaceflight is radically different then in-air flight or on-ground driving. The biggest deal is that if you accelerate continuously with a big main engine, then half-way there, you have to flip around and decelerate with the same big main engine. So you always approach your destination backwards. But that looks "weird" to all us flatlanders, so you never see it on TV or in movies.
BTW: The fighers are "Vipers". "Raptors" are the larger, multi-person utility ships.
I've said this before, on Slashdot, even: There is no Internet. Not the way we like to think of it. It doesn't exist as a cohesive whole. You can't connect to "the Internet". The most you can do is connect your network to somebody else's network. Maybe multiple somebodies. But still, you're just connecting to their networks. Then they do the same with some others. And so on. That's what we're talking about here. An inter-network. A bunch of individual networks. They are operated by businesses, organizations, governments, and individuals.
Right now, almost everybody agrees that US-centric organization like ICANN get to govern top-level things like the root domain. But there is absolutely nothing keeping people following their own set of standards. Indeed, some already do.
I don't even worry that much about "fragmentation". The Internet is already horribly fragmented. It's no longer safe or consistent or well-organized, which you used to be able to count on. If, say, we end up with multiple conflicting namespaces, someone will create some meta-directory protocols or search engines or something.
Of course, it would be nicer if that didn't happen. No sense making things worse then they are.
My understanding is that MacOS X isn't really so-much "based on" NeXTStep (in terms of re-using the same implementation pieces), but rather makes use of many of the same ideas and interfaces. So "inspired by" might be a better term.
"How about Cern and Tim Berners-Lee? The initial Netscape release was basically the same as NCSA Mosaic which came before it."
Just to clarify:
CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research (the acroynm isn't English-language). Tim Berners-Lee "created" the original web browser, WorldWideWeb, while he was working there.
Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina were the original creators of Mosaic while they were students working at NCSA. Andreesen later founded Netscape Communications (originally Mosaic Communications) to try and build a company around the success of Mosaic.
"Ask the non-geeks around you if they know what Mosaic is. Then ask them when they started using "Netscape"."
Most of the non-geeks around me think "the Internet" is a big blue E that sits on their desktop. If I say "browser" they think I'm talking about a customer that doesn't buy anything.
"And the first release of the Netscape browser (the "Navigator" name didn't come until a couple years later, IIRC, but someone please tell me if I'm wrong)"
Not so much wrong as incomplete.
The original name for the company was "Mosaic Communications". The domain name they registered for this, http://www.mcom.com/, still takes you to the Netscape website. The name for the product was going to be "Mosaic NetScape". It turned out they couldn't use the Mosaic name (I forget why, prolly a trademark), so they changed the name of the company to "NetScape" and the name of the product to "Navigator".
And for those who don't know: The original "working title" for the program was "Mozilla", a combination of "Mosaic" and "Godzilla". That's where that name comes from.
"As I recall, you had the option of either using a standard phone line or getting 'data' phone lines in those days at a slightly higher cost from the phone companies. Might've been a scam most places, but who knows."
That's pretty much a scam, yah. At least it is in the US.
With standard analog modems at both ends, government mandated line quality is good enough for the 33 Kbit symetric max you see. Paying extra for what you're already entitled to is silly.
For 53 Kbit connects (which rely on having a digital telco switch at one end), I'm pretty sure the same standards apply, but I'm not positve.
Nobody (on the US PSTN) gets 56 Kbit, as that would exceed some obscure FCC limit. You're limited to 53 Kbit. I have seen that in practice, but it's pretty rare, and I expect you have to be right next to the CO on brand new wires to get it.
"Of course, it took a GUI (thanks to Mosaic) for hypertext to catch on..."
Um, the original web browser, called "WorldWideWeb", was GUI. On NextSTEP, even, which is known to be very GUI. The big thing that Mosaic introduced, I believe, was the ability to display graphics (GIFs and JPGs) and text together. It turned the web into multimedia.
Another interesting bit is that WorldWideWeb allowed interactive, real-time editing from early on. To edit a page, you just clicked in and started typing. Wiki is old news.
(DISCLAIMER: I've never actually used WorldWideWeb, only read about it. I could be even more wrong then usual.)
If this passes, I have a great solution. Google can just firewall out all Canadian IP addresses. Since half of all Internet usage is via Google these days, this will effectively be an Internet Death Penalty for Canada. That'll teach em! Heh heh heh...
(Yes, yes, I know geographic IP address blocking is iffy at best. It's a joke.)
Slashdot Mirror
I guess you've never heard of an embedded system. Those can't ship with bugs.
They can and do, as anyone who has ever used a flakey piece of such equipment can atest. The big diff is they usually just lock up or reset without any indication of what went wrong, so all you can do is curse and shrug. And buy a new product.
Now, embedded systems do tend to have higher standards of quality then, say, a word processor. I suspect that's due to a number of factors. One is mindset (people expect "computers" to be buggy these days, but not a stereo). Easy of fixing is another (it's easier to load a new patch to MS Word then to your microwave).
But the big reason is complexity. Simple systems are easier to build right then complex systems. You don't see many buggy coffee maker designs, because all a cofee maker has to do is get hot at the right times. Compare that to the hundreds of thousands of lines of code in many software projects...
There is a lesson here. Simple designs enable robust designs.
Of course, it is true that getting into space is a complex problem, but many argue that the STS is needlessly complex.
Some apt quotes (I'm a quote junkie):
"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." -- C.A.R. Hoare
"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
This is all about stiring up the pot. Bad news sells best. I first heard this on a radio report earlier. They start in with "This just in... debris seen falling off the shuttle". They go on for a minute about cameras and analysis and everything else before then mention, quietly, that, oh, BTW, it didn't even hit anything.
I love all the remarks in the media about "It would be impossible to eliminate the chance of things falling off the shuttle". Yah, like how about the fuel tank the size of two football fields or the two giant boosters with flames shooting out of them!
Here's the way it's gonna be: Every time an an astronaut so much as breaks wind on this mission, there's gonna be a news report. Next launch will have three reports, "Shuttle going to take off", "Shuttle took off", and "Shuttle landed". After that, we'll be back to occasional random "We have a space program, or something" crap. Until the next big problem.
I hate the media.
"Tools can be used for good or for evil."
Dilbert: Stupidity is like nuclear power. It can be used for good or evil.
Wally: And you don't want to get any on you.
"So even though the first keyboards were silent..."
:), but that's my reasonably-well-educated guess.
:-)
Heh. The earliest computer (or rather, terminal) keyboards were electro-mechanical teletypes which make the loudest modern PC seem quiet by comparison. The first glass teletypes (i.e., CRT, not printer) weren't much better. I think it's a fair bet that quiet keyboards came later. I don't have any solid references (but then, neither does the parent
"I found a couple of silent keyboards..."
Sacrilege! You can have by gloriously loud IBM model M when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers. Type hard or go home!
Not only that, but what's this fasination with quiet disk drives? It used to be I didn't need a hard disk LED, because I could hear the head servo motor running back and forth. It got to the point where I knew what certain programs sounded like when they ran and could hear when something went wrong. Now that's debugging! [Tim_Allen]Urh urh urh urh.[/Tim_Allen]
"They have long touted HP-UX as their non-stop platform..."
I knew I was going to see this as soon as I saw the article.
NonStop is a platform all its own. It has nothing to do with HP-UX or the HP 9000 line. NonStop used to be called "Tandem". IIRC, DEC bought Tandem, Compaq bought DEC, and HP bought Compaq, which is how it ended up in HP's hands. Somewhere along the line, it got renamed to "NonStop".
HP-UX might be appropriate if you need 99.999% uptime. NonStop is appropriate when five nines isn't even close to what you need. This is totally fault-tollerant hardware. You can loose a processor, a memory bank, even a system bus and the system keeps right on going. Very high-end, esoteric stuff.
DrMrLordX: "Replace 'constituents' with 'campaign contributors' as you please."
mrmeval: "Replace republican with democrat as you please"
Replace "Republican" and "Democrat" with "politician" as you please.
Personally, I think this is the right move for the ESRB and the industry as a whole. There's a whole group of people who want "the government" to start regulating video games (and movies, and TV, and books, and thought, and...). The industry always claims they can police themselves, given the chance. Well, here we had a video game maker shipping some dirty pictures in their game. Sure, they were disabled by default, but they were there. All you had to do was "rip off the cover", so to speak. Per modern mainstream American culture (right or wrong), and the ESRB's definitions ("graphic sexual content"), that's "Adults Only". It should be marked as such. Rockstar broke the industry's rules, and the industry is slapping them down because of it. Good. They should. If the industry wants to claim they can take care of themselves, they need to back it up with action.
Does this mean more games should be rated "Adults Only"? Prolly. Also to the good, IMO. If the shoe fits, wear it.
Does this mean parents shouldn't also be blamed for not paying closer attention? No. Parents (in general) should pay much closer attention to what their kids are watching, playing, and doing. They should spend more time being parents, in other words.
But two wrongs don't make a right, and Rockstar deserves what they got.
"...self-check-out kiosks in the stores lately use Windows XP, not even embedded XP..."
:-)
The ones around here are running Windows NT 4.0 Workstation. Same as you, I've seen them lock-up/crash/etc and the store people just reboot the things.
I'm waiting for the day when I have to reboot a toll booth before my EZ-Pass will work.
"The one thing I love about BG is that the spaceships are physically accurate."
Oh geez, not this again.
Yah, they show some thruster exhaust. Whoopie-do. This does not mean the portrayal of space flight is realistic. The biggest glaring problem is that if you accelerate continuously with a big main engine, then half-way there, you have to flip around and decelerate with the same big main engine. So you always approach your destination backwards. But you never see that on TV or in movies. It's too weird looking to flatlanders like us.
I don't consider this a problem with BSG. It's a TV show; it's supposed to look cool, not be precisely realistic. But I don't go around gleefully claiming how good it is, either.
Yah know, claims like this surface all the time. And some of them are even true. But the one thing that seems to get missed in all the discussion is that stories get retold. There are a handful of fundamental conflicts that get used to build all stories. There are a slightly larger number of basic plots that appear to surface in just about every story ever told. Plot devices in SF get re-used and re-invented constantly. Gee, evil robots, never heard that one before. Hell, "man's creation turns against him" is arguably the first science fiction story ever -- remember Frankenstein? I don't see Mary Shelley suing Harlan Ellison or Sophia Stewart though. (Yes, I know she's long dead, I'm making a freaking point.)
These days, it's damn hard to have an idea that someone else hasn't had before.
"Except that XP Home edition..."
:-)
Win XP Home is brain damaged by design and deliberate intent, no doubt about it. I've got an XP Home partition on my main home PC (for playing games). I don't spend that much time in Windoze at home. That being said, I have tweaked permissions and didn't find it all that hard to find what I needed. But then, I'm a professional computer geek. For "typical users", computers are nearly impossible to use properly (regardless of OS, platform, etc.), and Microsoft is the worst of a bad lot.
One thing I know for sure is that Win XP Home cannot be joined to a domain.
At work, if an XP Home PC shows up, the first then that happens is it gets wiped and reloaded with XP Pro.
"What about the times when you install a stupid program (Warcraft III comes to mind) that saves games in a dir that only an admin can access (if installed as admin)?"
:)
Just set the NTFS permissions on that file/folder/branch so the file(s) can be written by the "Users" group. Depending on the complexity of the program, who else needs to use it, and such, you can even lock it down against modification of the stuff that shouldn't change (to, e.g., to protect against virus infection of EXE files). I do this all the time, although it's usually to make some CAD program or some such work, and not to play games.
It's programs that do goofy, undocumented things like trying to install DLLs into the C:\WINDOWS directory every time they're run (no, I'm not making that up) that really irritate me.
The http://www.petakillsanimals.com/ site is operated by the self-titled "Center for Consumer Freedom", which, according to their own web site, is "a nonprofit coalition of restaurants, food companies, and consumers" (emphasis mine). See http://www.consumerfreedom.com/about.cfm.
While I think PETA consists mainly of radical nutcases, linking to a corporate mouth-piece in an attempt to discredit them isn't exactly fair and objective, either.
I saw and checked the same thing.
It really irrirates me when SF people (who often should know better). Terra is nothing more then the Latin word for "earth" or "land". It has no more implict value or distiction or anything else over modern-English "Earth". Since all space-traveling cultures speak English anyway (just watch any TV show or movie), "Earth" would be a lot more appropriate then "Terra" ever would.
As you note, the correct term for "occuring on Earth" is "terrestrial" (which does derive from the same root word, but that ain't the same thing).
"B5 starfuries never did banked turns."
:-)
I'm afraid they did. They often did show them working as a true reaction drive would, flipping over and counter-thrusting to reverse course, and I was suitibly impressed by the authenticity when I first saw that. But they also did the whole "swooping" thing to make it look cool on occasion. Usually when flying "around" the station. I can dig out my DVD's and give you an episode and time reference if you like.
I don't ding them for this; it's TV, after all, and looking impressive counts for a lot. But I also don't hold any illusions that it's a scientific model, either.
"I also love the realism of the attack ships (raptors) as they fly. So many shows make ships in space behave as if they're flying through an atmosphere."
/SARCASM
Yah, which is why we never see banking turns in BSG. (Or B5.)
While I've been impressed by the fact that they sometimes follow Newton's Laws of Motion in B5 and BSG, they also love to make things "look cool", so you get the banking turns and such.
Real spaceflight is radically different then in-air flight or on-ground driving. The biggest deal is that if you accelerate continuously with a big main engine, then half-way there, you have to flip around and decelerate with the same big main engine. So you always approach your destination backwards. But that looks "weird" to all us flatlanders, so you never see it on TV or in movies.
BTW: The fighers are "Vipers". "Raptors" are the larger, multi-person utility ships.
I've said this before, on Slashdot, even: There is no Internet. Not the way we like to think of it. It doesn't exist as a cohesive whole. You can't connect to "the Internet". The most you can do is connect your network to somebody else's network. Maybe multiple somebodies. But still, you're just connecting to their networks. Then they do the same with some others. And so on. That's what we're talking about here. An inter-network. A bunch of individual networks. They are operated by businesses, organizations, governments, and individuals.
Right now, almost everybody agrees that US-centric organization like ICANN get to govern top-level things like the root domain. But there is absolutely nothing keeping people following their own set of standards. Indeed, some already do.
I don't even worry that much about "fragmentation". The Internet is already horribly fragmented. It's no longer safe or consistent or well-organized, which you used to be able to count on. If, say, we end up with multiple conflicting namespaces, someone will create some meta-directory protocols or search engines or something.
Of course, it would be nicer if that didn't happen. No sense making things worse then they are.
"Anybody know if 1. the code to WorldWideWeb is still around..."
a tion/
http://www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-NeXT/Implement
"if it works on OS X?"
This says no.
"Which is based upon NeXTStep."
My understanding is that MacOS X isn't really so-much "based on" NeXTStep (in terms of re-using the same implementation pieces), but rather makes use of many of the same ideas and interfaces. So "inspired by" might be a better term.
"How about Cern and Tim Berners-Lee? The initial Netscape release was basically the same as NCSA Mosaic which came before it."
Just to clarify:
CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research (the acroynm isn't English-language). Tim Berners-Lee "created" the original web browser, WorldWideWeb, while he was working there.
Mosaic was developed at NCSA, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina were the original creators of Mosaic while they were students working at NCSA. Andreesen later founded Netscape Communications (originally Mosaic Communications) to try and build a company around the success of Mosaic.
"Ask the non-geeks around you if they know what Mosaic is. Then ask them when they started using "Netscape"."
Most of the non-geeks around me think "the Internet" is a big blue E that sits on their desktop. If I say "browser" they think I'm talking about a customer that doesn't buy anything.
"And the first release of the Netscape browser (the "Navigator" name didn't come until a couple years later, IIRC, but someone please tell me if I'm wrong)"
Not so much wrong as incomplete.
The original name for the company was "Mosaic Communications". The domain name they registered for this, http://www.mcom.com/, still takes you to the Netscape website. The name for the product was going to be "Mosaic NetScape". It turned out they couldn't use the Mosaic name (I forget why, prolly a trademark), so they changed the name of the company to "NetScape" and the name of the product to "Navigator".
And for those who don't know: The original "working title" for the program was "Mozilla", a combination of "Mosaic" and "Godzilla". That's where that name comes from.
"As I recall, you had the option of either using a standard phone line or getting 'data' phone lines in those days at a slightly higher cost from the phone companies. Might've been a scam most places, but who knows."
That's pretty much a scam, yah. At least it is in the US.
With standard analog modems at both ends, government mandated line quality is good enough for the 33 Kbit symetric max you see. Paying extra for what you're already entitled to is silly.
For 53 Kbit connects (which rely on having a digital telco switch at one end), I'm pretty sure the same standards apply, but I'm not positve.
"On a real note, who gets 56k dialup?"
Nobody (on the US PSTN) gets 56 Kbit, as that would exceed some obscure FCC limit. You're limited to 53 Kbit. I have seen that in practice, but it's pretty rare, and I expect you have to be right next to the CO on brand new wires to get it.
"Of course, it took a GUI (thanks to Mosaic) for hypertext to catch on..."
Um, the original web browser, called "WorldWideWeb", was GUI. On NextSTEP, even, which is known to be very GUI. The big thing that Mosaic introduced, I believe, was the ability to display graphics (GIFs and JPGs) and text together. It turned the web into multimedia.
Another interesting bit is that WorldWideWeb allowed interactive, real-time editing from early on. To edit a page, you just clicked in and started typing. Wiki is old news.
(DISCLAIMER: I've never actually used WorldWideWeb, only read about it. I could be even more wrong then usual.)
If this passes, I have a great solution. Google can just firewall out all Canadian IP addresses. Since half of all Internet usage is via Google these days, this will effectively be an Internet Death Penalty for Canada. That'll teach em! Heh heh heh...
(Yes, yes, I know geographic IP address blocking is iffy at best. It's a joke.)