I'm pretty sure HyperCard was 1987, not 1986. Bill Atkinson presented a session on it himself. A very worthy successor to Rolodex! One part I remember distinctly was that he personally promised that the file format would be open and documented. In due course, I saw a Tech Note entitled "Hypercard File Format," and was very disappointed to find it consisted of a single sentence saying "The Hypercard file format is not available."
I don't think MacBottom could have been out in 1985. I think MacBottom was one of the first generation of SCSI external drives that materialized with the MacPlus in 1986. The first drives all had to work with the serial interface.
I remember Wingz. It did eventually ship, I'm not sure when. In 1991 I worked for a company with several avid Wingz fans. I sorta liked the artwork in their ads, dreamlike stuff with people in suits and ties flapping their arms and flying over a landscape of 3D bar charts... I wonder whatever happened to Wingz? Remember when there was more than one spreadsheet? Remember when there were more than TWO?
Lots of carrying cases. Lots of fonts. Not very much software.
I got Stephen Chernicoff to sign my copy of "Macintosh Revealed."
White Pine Software had an empty booth with a sign taped to the table announcing that they would soon have their first product, a VT-220 emulator for the Mac.
Someone was demoing software that created a small amount of RAM cache for the floppy drive. If you had a whopping 512K of memory, that RAM cache actually could speed things up a bit.
What else was there? Overvue, from Provue Development, I think... Filevision from Telos, which was really mindblowing at the time.
I believe it was the 1986 MacWorld that had the huge inflated Macintosh outside promoting MacPublisher, a very early desktop publishing product.
In the first few years, MacWorld was really great. You could belly up to a booth and really try out and learn about new software. The people exhibiting the software generally knew a lot about it and were often developers.
Ah, well... MacWorld may come back to Boston, but it will never be like 1985.
Gallun, "The Scarab," 1936
on
Micro Air Vehicles
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
OK, now I know what's been nagging at me... in Raymond Z. Gallun wrote a story which appeared in "Astounding Stories" in August, 1936, and which I read as a kid in Groff Conklin's anthology, "Science Fiction Thinking Machines."
"The Scarab... was a tiny thing, scarcely more than an inch and a half in length... it dipped in its flight and its quart-lensed eyes took in the scene below.... Excited shouts and cries were detectable to the sensitive, microphonic ears of The Scarab...."
It flies miles, into the room where the Bad Guys are broadcasting an extortion request: they will kill a million citizens unless "all available radium in the country is brought to our laboratory."
"The mind that controlled the Scarab had seen and heard enough. Now it decided that the moment in which to act had come. With a whir the Scarab shot from the concealing shadows of the corner where it had hidden itself." It injects an anesthetic; the Bad Guy loses consciousness; the nation is saved.
The brilliant, crippled, wheelchair-confined detective explains "A fella can't just sit around, you know. And so I got to thinking that if I had a little radio-controlled robot to do my crook-chasing for me--well, anyway, I wrote a letter to our good friend Dr. Clyde Allison, explaining my situation... after a while the Scarab and all the controls that deliver it were delivered here.... "
Let's hope those flywheels are enclosed in something pretty solid.
Storing that much energy is one thing. Accidentally releasing it is another. When I was a student at MIT there was a permanent display in a glass case in the hallway of the biology department showing a centrifuge rotor that exploded, just to remind everyone of what happens when something spins too fast.
Let's also hope there's something to muffle that 600 Hz whine (which is close to the peak of human hearing sensitivity).
And I thought the wheels on Boston's Green Line screeching when going around sharp turns was bad...
Steve Jobs had an incredible blind spot about internal, built-in hard drives. I don't know just what the deal was. Apple NEVER offered one for the Apple ][ AFAIK. And even in the late eighties, he tried to sell the NeXT cube with a magneto-optical removable as its only mass storage device... In the 1995 time frame, when internal hard drives were common in PC's, Apple had NO internal hard drives for the Mac (and no decent external drives).
GCC in Cambridge started cobbling together Macs with (big!) internal 10 megabyte drives. I don't remember whether they had any legal issues with Apple; IIRC there were minor skirmishes but Apple permitted them to do it with appropriate disclaimers.
I won't go so far as to say the HyperDrive saved the Mac, but certainly it helped. An awful lot of people who needed to do serious work on Macs (using that hot new program, PageMaker, for example) needed a hard drive and used the HyperDrive, and it was a very good proof of concept in showing everyone what the Mac was like with a decent hard drive instead of a 400K floppy.
I thought this was very interesting: (from http://icann.blog.us/stories/2002/07/29/auerbachWi nsCourtCriticize.html cited above:)
"ICANN responded that it didn't see Microsoft or IBM putting their general ledgers and charts of account on the web, but the Judge quickly intervened with this: Court: 'As a non-profit, public benefit corporation, you have a duty to the public -- the international public in this case -- that is very different than Microsoft or IBM. This is a public benefit corporation.'"
That's just the problem. ICANN keeps forgetting that it's public, and keeps falling back into the private, corporate mindset.
...and that's not even counting the possibility that Microsoft, the company whose motto was once "The job's not done 'til Lotus won't run" might mutate their file formats a bit.
For fifteen years now, I have been reading marketing guff about file format compatibility. And then, if you press, gradually the disclaimers emerge. Typically, things like: Oh, I forgot to tell you, you have to turn off "Fast Save" in Word. What? Your document as equations in it? You didn't expect equations to translate, did you? Oh, yeah, sorry about those accented characters... Pagination and line breaks? Gee, I guess our font metrics don't match exactly, huh? (And the last straw) Well, sir, no conversion is perfect but we get at least 95% of the formatting and most of our customers are happy with that, yada yada...
A recent review http://www.zdnet.com.au/reviews/software/business/ story/0,2000023555,20263448,00.htm says, in part: "Sun makes a big deal about StarOffice's compatibility with Microsoft Office file formats. That's smart, since Office is the de facto standard. Not so smart, however, is StarOffice's translation accuracy. With simple documents, such as lightly formatted Word docs or straightforward Excel spreadsheets, StarOffice is usually on the mark, though the beta version does create some pagination differences between a Word doc opened in Word and the same one opened in StarOffice's Writer. Give it something more complex, and it often chokes. When we opened a Word document with tables, two small charts, a footer, and minimal headings in Writer, it looked very different from the real thing, with one nearly blank page stuck into the document, and the table all on its lonesome on a separate page. We hope the final version fixes these problems. Expect complaints from Office owners if you trade documents more complex than plain text."
Remember that old (and very fine) SF novel of the 1950's?
Story opens with narrator in a hospital with bandaged eyes, recovering from an eye operation. Outdoors, people are stunned by a mysterious, worldwide, unexplained, beautiful display of bright lighting effects in space that look like fireworks. Everyone is going out to see them and raving about their spectacular beauty. Radio programs urge everyone not to miss it.
Narrator understandably feels left out.
After a while he notices that hospital has gotten very quiet and that nobody is coming around to take care of him. Eventually he can't stand it, gingerly takes off his bandage, his eyes are OK, and... it gradually emerges... everyone who has looked at the display has gone blind.
Narrator speculates it's a case of space weapons gone amok, but that since they weren't supposed to be there no government was willing to admit it or warn anyone...
"And God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night." Ergo, the God-given purpose of the moon is to provide light during the night. Ergo, there cannot be such things as moonless nights. Ergo, the moon cannot orbit the earth.
As many others have noted, the technique is silly because if you don't trust survey takers in the first place, why would you trust them when they say they are following the IBM randomization technique?
A couple of years ago, I received a survey in the mail that said the results would be kept completely confidential and anonymous. I thought it was odd that there was a mysterious seven-digit number in one corner, but anyway, I said to heck with it and pitched it. A week later I got a follow-up letter noting that I hadn't sent in my survey yet! Some anonymity!
Incidentally, this is not the only time I've gotten "anonymous, confidential" surveys with mysterious multi-digit numbers. In at least one case, it was at a big company and the survey involved things that nobody in their right mind would want their bosses to know about... and there were mysterious multi-digit numbers on the forms and, indeed, checking with colleagues confirmed that the numbers were different on each of our forms. Naturally, we all put down safe, inaccurate answers.
(Broadcast) Radio: same thing happened in 1934
on
The Internet Power Grab
·
· Score: 3, Informative
This parallels the history of radio in the late twenties and early thirties.
Broadcast radio was pioneered by universities, amateurs, and visionary entrepreneurs. It started out as a sort of friendly enterprise. In fact, in the early days of broadcast radio, it was normal practice for radio stations to keep their transmitters off for one (randomly selected) day each week in order to make it easier for listeners to receive more distant stations.
Basically the Communications Act of 1934 represented a victory for the commercial interests.
The "educational" licenses that still exist at the low end of the FM dial are the bone that was thrown to the noncommercial interests.
Remember eWorld? Apple's high-profile electronic community of, uh, was it the mid-nineties? IIRC GEISCO originally developed the software, which gradually morphed into AppleLink, AOL, and eWorld.
eWorld... the world's first electronic ghost town.
The BBC article mentions that "Developers, who include Mitsubishi and Nissan, hope that the new supersonic plane will have noise levels similar to the Boeing 747. That would mean that it would be able to operate far more widely than Concorde, which is notoriously noisy." This was also mentioned in previous news stories about the planned aircraft.
Nothing I've seen, however, explains how they were planning to deal with the sonic boom.
Or are they just referring to the noise level when in subsonic operation? In which case, like the Concorde, it could only go supersonic over water... but then how could it "operate far more widely" than the Concorde?
NOT a Mac case clone; lacks best Mac case feature
on
Mac-Case Clone for PCs
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
A colleague of mine who doesn't like Apples was in the lab when the first Mac with the current case design (the Blue-and-White) came in. It's on and working when he comes over to see it.
This is a bare-metal guy. All his machines in the lab have had their covers removed because he's in them so often he can't be bothered to take the time to take covers off and put them back on. (FCC? What FCC?)
He starts ranting and raving about how stupid Apple stuff is, how jerky the case looks, etc. "All this meaningless decoration." Pointing to the ring on the right side, he says, "Look at that stupid thing, for instance. What's that supposed to be?" He starts to fiddle with it--and the case swings open, the interior is completely exposed, the motherboard is mounted ON THE PIVOTING SIDE PANEL so it is totally accessible from above AND FROM THREE SIDES (nothing to obstruct your knuckles!)
And the Mac goes on working without missing a beat.
"Wow!" he says. "That's the best case design I've ever seen!" Then he adds, "I still hate Apple, though."
This case clone reveals the shallow understanding of most non-Mac users who think the Mac is all about appearance at the expense of functionality.
Who cares about a case that just looks vaguely like a Mac (I don't even think they've captured the appearance very well--it somehow looks awkward and unaesthetic)--but that leaves out the Mac case's best functional feature?
One advantage of open source is that the continuation of older versions is _truly_ market-based. That is, an old version that is genuinely valuable to a small coterie of users can remain in existence. In particular, low-benefit-low-cost products--products that appeal to a small base but cost little to maintain--can thrive as long as the benefit/cost ratio is good (even if numerator and denominator are both small).
IMHO one of the big problems with proprietary software--which I once saw personally from within a then-Fortune-500 company--is that career advancement depends on working on big projects and thinking big. One one occasion I was told that something wasn't pursuing because "on your own showing it can't bring in more than $2,000,000." I said, "yes, but the costs are trivial so it will be very good business." It was explained to me that projects of that size were just too insignificant to be considered. I believe that just the cost of translating the manuals into the fifteen languages supported by this global company was enough to sink the project (and of course ALL the company's product HAD to be translated into ALL languages because that was their procedure). On another occasion, when wondering whether we should be developing projects for a certain market sector, I was told, "Naaaah, we already had a consultant look into that, it's not worth it, it's just another $100 million market."
And of course with proprietary commercial software is you usually have the vendor "pushing" newer versions because selling new versions provides more profit to the vendor than maintaining old ones. The commercial software marketplace is a very imperfect, high-friction "market." And one place where the vendor has a lot of asymmetrical power is with respect to versions and releases. It is usually easy to keep customers on the "version treadmill." What if you don't like Microsoft discontinuing Windows NT 4.0? Where's the customer leverage? "If you do that I'll just buy Windows NT 4.0 from one of your competitors?"
I love it... follow these security procedures _on the specific date and time when a hacker's conference has an announced a scheduled social engineering demonstration_.
Don't worry about REAL security. Just worry about embarrassing PR. As long as the hacker breakins don't occur at a time and place when the press is likely to find out about them, everything is OK...
If they had NOT sent out the email, they would have had a good opportunity to find out whether the improved procedures they instituted following embarrassments at previous HOPE conventions were effective. (They DID institute improved procedures following those previous conventions, didn't they?)
I watched in 1962--so historic, yet so forgettable
on
Live Via Satellite
·
· Score: 2
I was attending summer school at the time. In 1962, like most college students, I did not have television sets in my dorm room; television sets were still fairly big, fairly heavy, and fairly expensive--and there were certainly no cable jacks in dorm rooms. It took a little searching to find a lounge somewhere in the university that had a TV set. And then I had to convince the people in the lounge to let me tune to the channel that was carrying it.
I felt at the time that this was a turning point in history--like the first transatlantic broadcast over that technological wonder, the "coaxial cable," which I had seen as a kid. _I_ was fairly excited by it. But the general lay population hardly knew or cared about it. Some years before, when my family and I went into the schoolyard on a summer evening to view the Echo satellite, we had plenty of company. In contrast, the Telstar broadcast went virtually unnoticed.
Well, of course, it WAS utterly boring. Speeches by dignitaries and some miserable scraps of French Ed-Sullivan-show-type entertainment--I think I remember some singers and some dancers.
Yes, it WAS an historic moment--yet utterly forgettable.
Later that year, an instrumental number named "Telstar" (for no apparent reason) made the top forty. Lots of people knew that tune. I'm not sure what percentage of them knew that "Telstar" was the name of a communications satellite.
I haven't seen one of those since the fifties. That logo is a PERFECT representation of a "Magic Eye" tube.
These tubes that had a cone-shaped phosphor-covered anode that lit up green, and a single grid wire that prevented electrons from striking a portion of the anode. The grid wire cast a wedge-shaped shadow on the anode. The width of the shadow varied with the grid voltage, causing the wedge to get wider or narrower.
They were widely used a cheap substitutes for meters. They also had the advantage of being inertialess. They were most familiar as tuning indicators in radios, recording level indicators on tape recorders, and null indicators on certain kinds of lab equipment (capacitance bridges, etc.)
"It's really all about control." Yes, which is WHY Microsoft finds the GPL such a threat--because the GPL is all about PREVENTING control.
I wonder when the LAST photograph will be taken?
on
World's First Photo
·
· Score: 2
...That is, the last photograph taken on film-as-we-know-it, by a photochemical process involving silver halides?
I know that won't be a very well-defined event, since undoubtedly researchers, historians, and dedicate hobbyists will periodically rediscover and revive it... there's never any point at which you can say "the last daguerrotype has been taken."
Let's put it this way. At the end, there will still be photo stores that carry film--but only specialty, boutique stores, and only in large cities, and the film they carry will be from the last manufacturer that will continue to make it for aficionados. Then that last manufacturer will pull the plug and you won't be able to make a "photo" unless you're prepared to make the emulsion and film yourself.
How long until that happens? My guess: fifteen years.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure HyperCard was 1987, not 1986. Bill Atkinson presented a session on it himself. A very worthy successor to Rolodex! One part I remember distinctly was that he personally promised that the file format would be open and documented. In due course, I saw a Tech Note entitled "Hypercard File Format," and was very disappointed to find it consisted of a single sentence saying "The Hypercard file format is not available."
I don't think MacBottom could have been out in 1985. I think MacBottom was one of the first generation of SCSI external drives that materialized with the MacPlus in 1986. The first drives all had to work with the serial interface.
I remember Wingz. It did eventually ship, I'm not sure when. In 1991 I worked for a company with several avid Wingz fans. I sorta liked the artwork in their ads, dreamlike stuff with people in suits and ties flapping their arms and flying over a landscape of 3D bar charts... I wonder whatever happened to Wingz? Remember when there was more than one spreadsheet? Remember when there were more than TWO?
Lots of carrying cases. Lots of fonts. Not very much software.
I got Stephen Chernicoff to sign my copy of "Macintosh Revealed."
White Pine Software had an empty booth with a sign taped to the table announcing that they would soon have their first product, a VT-220 emulator for the Mac.
Someone was demoing software that created a small amount of RAM cache for the floppy drive. If you had a whopping 512K of memory, that RAM cache actually could speed things up a bit.
What else was there? Overvue, from Provue Development, I think... Filevision from Telos, which was really mindblowing at the time.
I believe it was the 1986 MacWorld that had the huge inflated Macintosh outside promoting MacPublisher, a very early desktop publishing product.
In the first few years, MacWorld was really great. You could belly up to a booth and really try out and learn about new software. The people exhibiting the software generally knew a lot about it and were often developers.
Ah, well... MacWorld may come back to Boston, but it will never be like 1985.
OK, now I know what's been nagging at me... in Raymond Z. Gallun wrote a story which appeared in "Astounding Stories" in August, 1936, and which I read as a kid in Groff Conklin's anthology, "Science Fiction Thinking Machines."
... was a tiny thing, scarcely more than an inch and a half in length... it dipped in its flight and its quart-lensed eyes took in the scene below.... Excited shouts and cries were detectable to the sensitive, microphonic ears of The Scarab...."
"The Scarab
It flies miles, into the room where the Bad Guys are broadcasting an extortion request: they will kill a million citizens unless "all available radium in the country is brought to our laboratory."
"The mind that controlled the Scarab had seen and heard enough. Now it decided that the moment in which to act had come. With a whir the Scarab shot from the concealing shadows of the corner where it had hidden itself." It injects an anesthetic; the Bad Guy loses consciousness; the nation is saved.
The brilliant, crippled, wheelchair-confined detective explains "A fella can't just sit around, you know. And so I got to thinking that if I had a little radio-controlled robot to do my crook-chasing for me--well, anyway, I wrote a letter to our good friend Dr. Clyde Allison, explaining my situation... after a while the Scarab and all the controls that deliver it were delivered here.... "
and a million watts is a lot of power.
Let's hope those flywheels are enclosed in something pretty solid.
Storing that much energy is one thing. Accidentally releasing it is another. When I was a student at MIT there was a permanent display in a glass case in the hallway of the biology department showing a centrifuge rotor that exploded, just to remind everyone of what happens when something spins too fast.
Let's also hope there's something to muffle that 600 Hz whine (which is close to the peak of human hearing sensitivity).
And I thought the wheels on Boston's Green Line screeching when going around sharp turns was bad...
Steve Jobs had an incredible blind spot about internal, built-in hard drives. I don't know just what the deal was. Apple NEVER offered one for the Apple ][ AFAIK. And even in the late eighties, he tried to sell the NeXT cube with a magneto-optical removable as its only mass storage device... In the 1995 time frame, when internal hard drives were common in PC's, Apple had NO internal hard drives for the Mac (and no decent external drives).
GCC in Cambridge started cobbling together Macs with (big!) internal 10 megabyte drives. I don't remember whether they had any legal issues with Apple; IIRC there were minor skirmishes but Apple permitted them to do it with appropriate disclaimers.
I won't go so far as to say the HyperDrive saved the Mac, but certainly it helped. An awful lot of people who needed to do serious work on Macs (using that hot new program, PageMaker, for example) needed a hard drive and used the HyperDrive, and it was a very good proof of concept in showing everyone what the Mac was like with a decent hard drive instead of a 400K floppy.
I thought this was very interesting: (from http://icann.blog.us/stories/2002/07/29/auerbachWi nsCourtCriticize.html cited above:)
"ICANN responded that it didn't see Microsoft or IBM putting their general ledgers and charts of account on the web, but the Judge quickly intervened with this: Court: 'As a non-profit, public benefit corporation, you have a duty to the public -- the international public in this case -- that is very different than Microsoft or IBM. This is a public benefit corporation.'"
That's just the problem. ICANN keeps forgetting that it's public, and keeps falling back into the private, corporate mindset.
...and that's not even counting the possibility that Microsoft, the company whose motto was once "The job's not done 'til Lotus won't run" might mutate their file formats a bit.
/ story/0,2000023555,20263448,00.htm says, in part: "Sun makes a big deal about StarOffice's compatibility with Microsoft Office file formats. That's smart, since Office is the de facto standard. Not so smart, however, is StarOffice's translation accuracy. With simple documents, such as lightly formatted Word docs or straightforward Excel spreadsheets, StarOffice is usually on the mark, though the beta version does create some pagination differences between a Word doc opened in Word and the same one opened in StarOffice's Writer. Give it something more complex, and it often chokes. When we opened a Word document with tables, two small charts, a footer, and minimal headings in Writer, it looked very different from the real thing, with one nearly blank page stuck into the document, and the table all on its lonesome on a separate page. We hope the final version fixes these problems. Expect complaints from Office owners if you trade documents more complex than plain text."
For fifteen years now, I have been reading marketing guff about file format compatibility. And then, if you press, gradually the disclaimers emerge. Typically, things like: Oh, I forgot to tell you, you have to turn off "Fast Save" in Word. What? Your document as equations in it? You didn't expect equations to translate, did you? Oh, yeah, sorry about those accented characters... Pagination and line breaks? Gee, I guess our font metrics don't match exactly, huh? (And the last straw) Well, sir, no conversion is perfect but we get at least 95% of the formatting and most of our customers are happy with that, yada yada...
A recent review http://www.zdnet.com.au/reviews/software/business
The three Edward R. Tufte books...
"The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" Graphics Press; ISBN: 0961392142; 2nd edition (May 2001)
"Envisioning Information" Graphics Press; ISBN: 0961392118; (May 1990)
"Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative"; Graphics Press; ISBN: 0961392126; (March 1997)
"The Frozen Keyboard: Living With Bad Software." Boris Beizer, 1988, Tab books, ISBN 0-0306-3146-1. Out of print, alas. Absolutely wonderful.
Remember that old (and very fine) SF novel of the 1950's?
Story opens with narrator in a hospital with bandaged eyes, recovering from an eye operation. Outdoors, people are stunned by a mysterious, worldwide, unexplained, beautiful display of bright lighting effects in space that look like fireworks. Everyone is going out to see them and raving about their spectacular beauty. Radio programs urge everyone not to miss it.
Narrator understandably feels left out.
After a while he notices that hospital has gotten very quiet and that nobody is coming around to take care of him. Eventually he can't stand it, gingerly takes off his bandage, his eyes are OK, and... it gradually emerges... everyone who has looked at the display has gone blind.
Narrator speculates it's a case of space weapons gone amok, but that since they weren't supposed to be there no government was willing to admit it or warn anyone...
I own a cute little Canon Digital Elph that happens to save images in the formerly-standard JPEG format.
Exactly what happens if the patent is upheld? Am I personally liable? In theory, could Forgent come after me for royalties?
What happens if you buy and use a product that later on turns out to infringe on someone's patent?
Offhand I don't recall any language in any fine print anywhere that says I'm held harmless, it's all the vendor's fault.
"And God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night." Ergo, the God-given purpose of the moon is to provide light during the night. Ergo, there cannot be such things as moonless nights. Ergo, the moon cannot orbit the earth.
As many others have noted, the technique is silly because if you don't trust survey takers in the first place, why would you trust them when they say they are following the IBM randomization technique?
A couple of years ago, I received a survey in the mail that said the results would be kept completely confidential and anonymous. I thought it was odd that there was a mysterious seven-digit number in one corner, but anyway, I said to heck with it and pitched it. A week later I got a follow-up letter noting that I hadn't sent in my survey yet! Some anonymity!
Incidentally, this is not the only time I've gotten "anonymous, confidential" surveys with mysterious multi-digit numbers. In at least one case, it was at a big company and the survey involved things that nobody in their right mind would want their bosses to know about... and there were mysterious multi-digit numbers on the forms and, indeed, checking with colleagues confirmed that the numbers were different on each of our forms. Naturally, we all put down safe, inaccurate answers.
This parallels the history of radio in the late twenties and early thirties.
Broadcast radio was pioneered by universities, amateurs, and visionary entrepreneurs. It started out as a sort of friendly enterprise. In fact, in the early days of broadcast radio, it was normal practice for radio stations to keep their transmitters off for one (randomly selected) day each week in order to make it easier for listeners to receive more distant stations.
Basically the Communications Act of 1934 represented a victory for the commercial interests.
The "educational" licenses that still exist at the low end of the FM dial are the bone that was thrown to the noncommercial interests.
Remember eWorld? Apple's high-profile electronic community of, uh, was it the mid-nineties? IIRC GEISCO originally developed the software, which gradually morphed into AppleLink, AOL, and eWorld.
eWorld... the world's first electronic ghost town.
The BBC article mentions that "Developers, who include Mitsubishi and Nissan, hope that the new supersonic plane will have noise levels similar to the Boeing 747. That would mean that it would be able to operate far more widely than Concorde, which is notoriously noisy." This was also mentioned in previous news stories about the planned aircraft.
Nothing I've seen, however, explains how they were planning to deal with the sonic boom.
Or are they just referring to the noise level when in subsonic operation? In which case, like the Concorde, it could only go supersonic over water... but then how could it "operate far more widely" than the Concorde?
A colleague of mine who doesn't like Apples was in the lab when the first Mac with the current case design (the Blue-and-White) came in. It's on and working when he comes over to see it.
This is a bare-metal guy. All his machines in the lab have had their covers removed because he's in them so often he can't be bothered to take the time to take covers off and put them back on. (FCC? What FCC?)
He starts ranting and raving about how stupid Apple stuff is, how jerky the case looks, etc. "All this meaningless decoration." Pointing to the ring on the right side, he says, "Look at that stupid thing, for instance. What's that supposed to be?" He starts to fiddle with it--and the case swings open, the interior is completely exposed, the motherboard is mounted ON THE PIVOTING SIDE PANEL so it is totally accessible from above AND FROM THREE SIDES (nothing to obstruct your knuckles!)
And the Mac goes on working without missing a beat.
"Wow!" he says. "That's the best case design I've ever seen!" Then he adds, "I still hate Apple, though."
This case clone reveals the shallow understanding of most non-Mac users who think the Mac is all about appearance at the expense of functionality.
Who cares about a case that just looks vaguely like a Mac (I don't even think they've captured the appearance very well--it somehow looks awkward and unaesthetic)--but that leaves out the Mac case's best functional feature?
One advantage of open source is that the continuation of older versions is _truly_ market-based. That is, an old version that is genuinely valuable to a small coterie of users can remain in existence. In particular, low-benefit-low-cost products--products that appeal to a small base but cost little to maintain--can thrive as long as the benefit/cost ratio is good (even if numerator and denominator are both small).
IMHO one of the big problems with proprietary software--which I once saw personally from within a then-Fortune-500 company--is that career advancement depends on working on big projects and thinking big. One one occasion I was told that something wasn't pursuing because "on your own showing it can't bring in more than $2,000,000." I said, "yes, but the costs are trivial so it will be very good business." It was explained to me that projects of that size were just too insignificant to be considered. I believe that just the cost of translating the manuals into the fifteen languages supported by this global company was enough to sink the project (and of course ALL the company's product HAD to be translated into ALL languages because that was their procedure). On another occasion, when wondering whether we should be developing projects for a certain market sector, I was told, "Naaaah, we already had a consultant look into that, it's not worth it, it's just another $100 million market."
And of course with proprietary commercial software is you usually have the vendor "pushing" newer versions because selling new versions provides more profit to the vendor than maintaining old ones. The commercial software marketplace is a very imperfect, high-friction "market." And one place where the vendor has a lot of asymmetrical power is with respect to versions and releases. It is usually easy to keep customers on the "version treadmill." What if you don't like Microsoft discontinuing Windows NT 4.0? Where's the customer leverage? "If you do that I'll just buy Windows NT 4.0 from one of your competitors?"
Subject line says all...
I love it... follow these security procedures _on the specific date and time when a hacker's conference has an announced a scheduled social engineering demonstration_.
Don't worry about REAL security. Just worry about embarrassing PR. As long as the hacker breakins don't occur at a time and place when the press is likely to find out about them, everything is OK...
If they had NOT sent out the email, they would have had a good opportunity to find out whether the improved procedures they instituted following embarrassments at previous HOPE conventions were effective. (They DID institute improved procedures following those previous conventions, didn't they?)
I was attending summer school at the time. In 1962, like most college students, I did not have television sets in my dorm room; television sets were still fairly big, fairly heavy, and fairly expensive--and there were certainly no cable jacks in dorm rooms. It took a little searching to find a lounge somewhere in the university that had a TV set. And then I had to convince the people in the lounge to let me tune to the channel that was carrying it.
I felt at the time that this was a turning point in history--like the first transatlantic broadcast over that technological wonder, the "coaxial cable," which I had seen as a kid. _I_ was fairly excited by it. But the general lay population hardly knew or cared about it. Some years before, when my family and I went into the schoolyard on a summer evening to view the Echo satellite, we had plenty of company. In contrast, the Telstar broadcast went virtually unnoticed.
Well, of course, it WAS utterly boring. Speeches by dignitaries and some miserable scraps of French Ed-Sullivan-show-type entertainment--I think I remember some singers and some dancers.
Yes, it WAS an historic moment--yet utterly forgettable.
Later that year, an instrumental number named "Telstar" (for no apparent reason) made the top forty. Lots of people knew that tune. I'm not sure what percentage of them knew that "Telstar" was the name of a communications satellite.
I haven't seen one of those since the fifties. That logo is a PERFECT representation of a "Magic Eye" tube.
These tubes that had a cone-shaped phosphor-covered anode that lit up green, and a single grid wire that prevented electrons from striking a portion of the anode. The grid wire cast a wedge-shaped shadow on the anode. The width of the shadow varied with the grid voltage, causing the wedge to get wider or narrower.
They were widely used a cheap substitutes for meters. They also had the advantage of being inertialess. They were most familiar as tuning indicators in radios, recording level indicators on tape recorders, and null indicators on certain kinds of lab equipment (capacitance bridges, etc.)
"It's really all about control." Yes, which is WHY Microsoft finds the GPL such a threat--because the GPL is all about PREVENTING control.
...That is, the last photograph taken on film-as-we-know-it, by a photochemical process involving silver halides?
I know that won't be a very well-defined event, since undoubtedly researchers, historians, and dedicate hobbyists will periodically rediscover and revive it... there's never any point at which you can say "the last daguerrotype has been taken."
Let's put it this way. At the end, there will still be photo stores that carry film--but only specialty, boutique stores, and only in large cities, and the film they carry will be from the last manufacturer that will continue to make it for aficionados. Then that last manufacturer will pull the plug and you won't be able to make a "photo" unless you're prepared to make the emulsion and film yourself.
How long until that happens? My guess: fifteen years.