I don't know why people around here just assume that Scaled can magically make everything cheaper and safer with space, when no space agency in the world and no private contractor has been able to. It's not like airplanes that Rutan has made cost less than other manufacturers; they tend to cost *more*, in fact, and he hasn't exactly been a role model of safety.
Perhaps they make this assumption because of NASA's incompetence. We have the Columbia disaster, which might have been preventable if one of NASA's middle managers had gotten off of her ass and called NRO and asked for some pictures of the Shuttle, but she didn't want to. We have the Challenger disaster, which would have been preventable if NASA hadn't been in such a hurry to give Ronnie Reagan something to talk about in his State of the Union address (he got it). You have ISS, which is a joke, it can't do anything that even resembles useful science and has cost more than the Apollo program did. NASA needs to be put out of its misery, the first step to doing so would be to eliminate the Shuttle program and ISS.
If the Shuttle is a research program as you maintain then it has no business being used as a cargo hauler for ISS. You don't fly passengers and cargo in an X plane. Killing the Shuttle and forcing NASA to instead spend that money on a new vehicle would be a lot more useful than keeping it flying meaningless missions to ISS or useless orbital missions where they raise worms.
I bet that'll make the anti-globilization folks happy. They've been wanting something to happen to the world bank.:)
I wonder if we could get Carly to take over Al Qaeda, in three years goodbye threat of terrorism, and I'd imagine that when you leave Al Qaeda you don't get a 20 million dollar severance package, probably just a bullet in the head and a shallow grave somewhere in the Afghanistan plains.
Ted and Lisa and Don are part of our fiendish plot to get the U.S. so sick of us that they kick us out, so that we don't have to go to the bother of a revolution. Sort of a ``be revolting so we don't have to revolt'' strategy.
Yeah, or we could just send in federal troops and decide that you are no longer a state and let L. Paul Bremer run things. That sounds like a pretty good idea to me. That way we get to keep the oil and military bases and we don't have to put up with your political stupidity. I like it.
I never thought that I'd be posting something to agree with Rei but he's right about titanium, and the capacity to manufacture airframes with this material was developed long before the Shuttle program started when Lockheed developed the SR-71. There's another cool feature about some titanium alloys, the more you anneal them, the stronger they get. There was a study of the SR-71s done in the late 80s that discovered that the airframe was actually stronger than it had been on construction due to repeated heating/cooling cycles during operation which effectively annealed the material.
Looking over the lessons learned from building and flying the SR-71 would be a good start for building the airframe for a winged orbital vehicle.
Did you bother reading the fine article? You did, Oh, are you one of those individuals who does poorly in reading comprehension tests? You must be, because if you had read the article you would have found out that Gilmore has epilepsy and lost his driver's license because of it. If you had bothered to read the article you also would have found out that the airlines claimed that it was not their policy but one they were forced to comply with by the federal government. Also the airlines are not allowed to just adopt any policy they like, as an example if an airline said "we don't like niggers and we don't let them on our planes" they'd be grounded pretty quickly by the federal government. Of course the federal government says that there is a policy but that we, the people who the federal government ostensibly serve, and who actually pay for the federal government, are not allowed to see it. If you can't see the danger in having the government create and enforce secret laws that the citizenry is expected to follow but not allowed to read then you're even dumber than your post makes you out to be. Who is to say that there isn't a secret law on the books that would allow me to come out to your house and hook some electrodes up to your nuts and show you all of the fun things that went on in Abu Ghraib? There might be a rule on the books that allows me to do this, but it's sensitive security information, so you can't see it, now shut up and stop screaming before I turn the voltage up even higher.
There are some people who are smart enough to be bothered by the whole concept of having a bunch of government bureaucrats enforcing secret and unwritten laws on an unknowing populace and then there are stupid bastards such yourself who aren't much higher on the intellectual food chain than say a retarded steer, or perhaps a particularly bright carp.
I just sold my left kidney so I could afford an nVidia 6800. I'm not selling a testicle just so I can upgrade my video card! Unless it gives me a 3fps framerate increase in Doom III, then I might consider it.
Eminent domain was created at the behest of the biggest companies of the time, railroad companies.
You are so incredibly ignorant as to boggle the mind. Eminent domain existed in the Constitution of the United States long before railroad companies existed.
Amendment V - Trial and Punishment, Compensation for Takings. Ratified 12/15/1791.
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Check out the US Constitution online and learn some history, and please do this before you even think about voting again.
Oh shit, a Randite. I thought that all of you had died out from terminal humorlessness. Well I've read Atlas Shrugged too, and as I recall Henry Reardon wasn't relying on funding and research that came from NIH and public universities. Also Henry Reardon disdained purchasing legislative influence, something that can't be said of American drug companies. Maybe you should go back and re-read Atlas Shrugged to see what Rand had to say, through the cardboard characters of that novel, about companies that fed at the public trough and purchased government influence to deter their competitors.
Then, when you're done with that, (no cheating by skipping John Galt's 103 page long speech on objectivism) you might want to head over and read this article at the New York Review of Books, including these paragraphs:
These laws mean that drug companies no longer have to rely on their own research for new drugs, and few of the large ones do. Increasingly, they rely on academia, small biotech startup companies, and the NIH for that [7] At least a third of drugs marketed by the major drug companies are now licensed from universities or small biotech companies, and these tend to be the most innovative ones.[8] While Bayh-Dole was clearly a bonanza for big pharma and the biotech industry, whether its enactment was a net benefit to the public is arguable.
This is an industry that in some ways is like the Wizard of Oz--still full of bluster but now being exposed as something far different from its image. Instead of being a engine of innovation, it is a vast marketing machine. Instead of being a free market success story, it lives off government-funded research and monopoly rights
Re:The Time Ships
on
Exultant
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· Score: 2, Informative
Baxter's SteamPunk novel Anti-Ice is also very good. It deals with the discovery of a stable form of anti-matter by Victorian era civilization. This "anti-ice" is stable and can be reacted with regular ice to produce power. He also has a really good short story collection called
Traces which is unfortunately hard to find in the US but has some absolutely fantastic stories in it such as "Moon Six" and "Weep for the Moon", which actually made me tear up.
If the sun was only 10 kilometres from your house, a mass extinction might occur.
Seriously, this has to be the most bizzare astronomy story tagline I've ever read. I figured this was the submitter's quote, or possibly the article writer - nope, it was from one of the physicists.
Then you didn't read the New Scientist article which had this gem:
But Christopher Thompson, an astrophysicist at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Physics, says that may not be so. The neutron star in question is rare magnetar, with a magnetic field so strong it could wipe a credit card clean from a distance of 160,000 kilometres. And this magnetar is even rarer yet, one of three "soft gamma repeaters" (SGRs) in the Milky Way.
Ya know, IANAPOAPOA (I Am Not A Physicist Or AstroPhysicist or Astronomer) but I'm willing to bet that if I were 160,000 kilometers from this object, or even our sun, I might be worried about other things than my credit cards getting wiped.
I don't know much about the way that NASDAQ listings work but you would think that if SCO is really involved in examining how stock is used in compenation (and not just shitting themselves trying to figure out how they can get the fuck out of the country without being sued bloody) that they could call up the SEC and NASDAQ and say "look, we're in this process of examining our financials which will be done by date X and will file our financials accordingly on that date". I'd be willing to bet that if their story about examining stock compensation is true (it stinks on dry ice to me) that the SEC and the NASDAQ would cut them some slack.
A bit testy are we? My point was that Apple DITCHED all of the proprietary tech which as you note was better. Rather than make a better bus than PCI, a better USB etc. They used commodity parts which only exist because of the PC market.
Dude, you're posting from the clue free zone. Apple used superior technology in the late 1980s, but outside of ADB very little of it was proprietary. SCSI? Apple didn't own that. NuBus? TI would have happily sold you NuBus chipsets. This technology wasn't widely used, and more's the pity, but it was hardly proprietary as say, MCA was (sure, you could license MCA from IBM, but it was priced high to keep anyone from selling systems with an MCA bus that would undercut IBMs PC division).
They threw out all of the lovely Apple made it better hardware and noone noticed. They took out SCSI - why? Because IDE is better? How about because IDE is cheaper. So be happy for the PC commodity market and the open source movement - without either of them you couldn't have the Mac you have today at the price point it sells for.
They took out SCSI because the price/performance difference wasn't as great, vis a vis IDE, as it had been for desktop systems. It was a smart move, Oh, and if you need external storage you have FireWire as a replacement for SCSI or you can buy an Adaptec SCSI card if you really need the fastest drives out there.
I'm glad you have found memories of the Macs of the '80s and '90s. I won't argue that the PC hardware was better, and the PC OSes sucked. But so did MacOS.
Did you love Multifinder? How about having to manually adjust memory settings for each application? How about no preemptive multitasking? How about one app crashes and the whole system eats it? Memory fragmentation?
My favorite part of all. Troubleshooting MacOS. Oooh look a cannonball! Ooooh type 3 error!
Compared to working on any PC based OS at the time MacOS was a dream. You talk about the lack of pre-emptive multi-tasking on the Macintosh, yeah, Windows sure did multi-task well, and those neato Hex codes you got when your box blue-screened were always so informative that tracking down the cause of the problem was a piece of cake.
How about extensions? Did you enjoy working with them? Did you enjoy how one would stomp all over the address space of another? Did you like manually swapping extensions out of the system folder (pre extensions manager) to isolate the conflict?
Troubleshooting Mac problems was trivial (assuming that you weren't completely retarded). Want to have fun? Try to get your ethernet card driver, PC-NFS and the Renassance GRX graphics driver for AutoCAD to load into high memory. Remember having to edit your config.sys and autoexec.bat to change the order in which device drivers and TSRs loaded? Yeah, I remember doing that, and I'll never get that time back and while I did have to do similar things on the Mac I spent a lot less time doing it.
Yeah it was a dream OS to work on. Sorry, no thanks I had an Amiga back then. I got to run MacOS on it too for work purposes. In fact it was the cheapest way to run Mac software considering the crazy cost of '80s Macs. Oh yeah and the OS kicked ass. Preemptive multitasking, dynamice memory allocation, GUI and a nice shell.
Oh, you're a former Amiga luser, that explains a lot. Yeah, the Amiga was a great system, except for the fact that the GUI was almost as shit ugly as Windows versions 1 and 2. And there weren't any applications for it, and the company was run by fucking idiots, and if you wanted to put a fucking hard drive on one of them you had to pay a price that made Macintosh hardware look reasonable by comparison and there was no way to expand the system unless you used an external chassis (for the 500 or 1000) or had enough coin to buy a 2000 (which gave you lots of slots and perhaps you could even find some hardware that worked in them). Yeah, the Amiga, that platform was a model of open standards.
I do, and fondly. Let's look at the list you posted.
NuBus
NuBus was technically superior to any PC bus, including MCA. NuBus was true plug and play, put a card in, reboot your system and install driver software, no bullshit, no fucking around. NuBus was a 32 bit bus and you could have up to 16 cards on the bus, much better than ISA or current PCI implementations without various bridging schemes. MCA had similar specs to NuBus but the stupid configuation hoops that IBM made you jump through (booting off of your special system floppy when you added or removed cards and God help you if you lost the floppy or if it got corrupted) was a huge pain in the ass.
NuBus video card with Mac video out
Macintosh video was technically superior to any PC video standard of the late 1980 and early 1990s. Remember what you had back then? 640x480 VGA, 640x350 EGA, IBM's weird ass PGA standard, digital 640x480, that never went anywhere, and CGA. And multiple monitor support? It wasn't even possible on PCs at the time but was trivial on the Mac. I had all kinds of cool video hardware where I worked. Macs used for DTP with 1600x1200 black and white displays, Macs used for simulations with 1024x768 displays (which was high tech at the time) and some Macs that had both.
Often times special Apple SIMMs
There were just as many PC manufacturers back then who were doing similar shit. I remember when we had to upgrade several NEC 386s that we bought. The special NEC form factor memory that was required was so expensive that we ended up junking the systems and upgrading to 486s. Most Mac SIMMs were eight bit SIMMS, PC SIMMs were 8 bit with parity. I used to use PC SIMMs in the Macs I supported all the time without any issue.
SCSI drives
Technically superior to anything the PC had, unless you went with PC SCSI and wanted to try to get the Adaptec drivers to load into high memory, always a fun process. The Mac was the first computer outside of UNIX workstations that you could connect a CD-ROM to.
ADB
Which was technically superior to the PS/2 bus. How many times did you have to replace a motherboard because someone fried it by unplugging their PS/2 mouse while the system was powered up. I did a couple of times. The Mac was transparent, plug in a mouse, a keyboard, a trackball, a bar code scanner, hang them off of ADB and hot-swap devices.
Was Mac stuff incompatible with the PC in the late 80s and early 90s? Yes, was it better, oh fuck yes it was, it was so much better that it wasn't even worth discussing. I had to support about 150 Macs and 150 PCs at the time. PC support was a total bitch, Mac support was easy, almost trivial. Macs were light years ahead of the PC on networking. Plug an ethernet card into a Mac, drag MacTCP into your System Folder and you were in business. Compare this to trying to get a PC to work with PC-NFS or Novell.
And when technology moved on Apple was smart enough to move with it. Which company was the first one to adopt USB across their product line? It was Apple. Hell, it's 2004 and that POS $1,500 P4 that you're talking about still has a fucking PS/2 mouse and keyboard port on it. Which company got rid of the floppy drive first? It was Apple. Your P4 probably still has a floppy controller on it. In the name of Satan and Aleister Crowley why? It's 2005, floppies are dead tech. PCI is better than NuBus. Apple saw the writing on the wall and discontinued NuBus in favor of a better standard. Apple also uses IDE drives, but they support firewire across their entire product line as a replacement for SCSI (another first). Apple didn't just use different technology back then for the sheer perverse joy of being different, they did it because the stuff they used was better than the noisome shit that the PC world used.
As far as jobs leverating open source contributions to OS/X yes he did do that. But the thing that makes OS/X so
entertainment center I want to build. Just have it sitting behind your bed projecting up on the ceiling and you can lie in bed and watch TV. Or have it project from behind the bed across the room. I want one.
Interesting now that the PC clone world is filled with all manner of diversity and the Mac is only offered in very particular market driven configurations (i.e. lowest end mini, mid range all in one and high end tower).
The "diversity" in the PC clone world is skin deep, if even that. Let's look at the "diversity". OK, you do have two different companies making processors, AMD and Intel and they may now have compatible 64 bit architectures. You basically have two companies that make graphics chipsets, ATI and nVidia. You have a few companies making mobo chipsets but it basically boils down to Via, nVidia or Intel. You do have lots of shiny, colorful, craptacular cases and four or five companies making hard drives but for the most important component of the computer you basically have two main families of operating systems, Windoze versions and Linux distros (I don't mean to slight you BSD users, it's a great OS, but it's a drop in the bucket of the PC OS market).
So what does this "diversity" buy you? Well it buys you a lot of friggin headaches, not as many as it used to, but still a lot more than any advantages that it brings you. Windows does things that Linux doesn't do (it's still a better desktop) and Linux does things that Windows doesn't (it's still a better server and a lot more secure) but the diversity within Linux distros and within Windows versions isn't that great. Having the ability to run Slackware on an AMD64 processor on an Asus motherboard with a Via chipset and an ATI graphics card is not really all that different from having the ability to run Debian on an Intel Pentium 4 on an Abit motherboard with an nForce chipset and an nVidia video card. Is it more "diverse"? Yes it is. Does it really matter? No it doesn't.
Fire protection is provided by private for-profit companies in many cities and counties in the US, and is provided by a volunteer organization that is not tax funded in many others.
Really? Where. Name a major city where this is the case. Bumfuck, North Dakota, home of the Freemen, does not count as a major city.
Many innovations in firefighting technique were pioneered by for-profit fire companies, which tend to produce better service at lower cost than public tax-funded ones.
Really? Name some. While you're at it compare and contrast these innovations with those developed by publicly funded fire departments. Also while you're at it please provide sources and documentation for your claim that these private fire services are better than the public ones.
Where fire protection is private, the cost tends to be covered by subscription as part of the homeowner's fire insurance policy required by the lender.
And in this case do I have a choice of fire protection companies? Can I choose to have the guys from engine 39 be my fire department instead of those cocksuckers at District 12?
Without sources this just sounds like more libertarian horseshit. Going back to the original thread the reason why many municipalities are considering the publicly funded deployment of WiFi services is that major telcos won't deploy such services in their communities. I find it interesting that so many of the libertarians on this thread seem to feel that having a municipality develop WiFi will somehow be bad, or inherently inefficient, or unjust but have no problem with the major telcos, all of whom own lots of legislators, spend lots of money on lobbying and get laws written to favor their monopoly status, deciding that they're not going to deploy WiFi unless they can make a killing on it. So let me see if I have this straight: You're against small, municipally controlled WiFi networks but you're in favor of large, government subsidized and authorized Telcos developing these networks?
Do we really want this? Somewhere, sometime before long, some small local group will take the city supplied internet connections to court, with the rallying cry of "Your tax dollars are providing pornography!"
Bullshit, if that's the case then why haven't these groups gone out and complained about the department of transporation making roads that UPS trucks delivering pornography are driving on? Also corporations are just as likely to bend over as any municipality is. Look at the way that anything even remotely controversial is censored off of television by broadcasters afraid of alienating sponsors or small interest groups such as the Parent's Television Council.
The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross where one of the characters reveals that the reason why Knuth hasn't released volume 4 is that it contains a hack that allows you to solve non-deterministic polynomial (NP) problems in polynomial time. This is such a huge secret that the world's intelligence agencies, who already know how to do this, have an agreement with Professor Knuth where as long as he doesn't publish volume 4 they won't render him metabolically challenged (i.e, "dead".
The Atrocity Archives is a way cool book, I heartily recommend it to/. geeks. Stross used to work as a programmer/sysadmin so it's a lot of fun if you've ever worked in IT.
Weather satellites you dumbshit. Ever think of those? We have weather predictions that are far better than they were before the satellite era. Communications satellies? How about military spysats? Knowing what other countries are doing has been fantastically valuable to the USA and to the former USSR. And then there's GPS, a fantastically valuable benefit the space program has bought us.
You are fundamentally ignorant as to how scientific advancement works. It's not as if there are a whole bunch of easy solutions out there just waiting for the picking like so much low hanging fruit and that there are problems that aren't being solved because research scientists are haring off on impractical projects. If you want to find out how to solve these problems you have to do basic research. If society followed the stupidly ignorant approach that you advocate we wouldn't, as an example, know anything about DNA because back in the '50s someone would have said to Crick, Watson and Francis "Hey, stop fucking around with all of those X-ray crystallography studies and go work on a polio vaccine." Hell, we probably wouldn't have a polio vaccine because someone would have said to Salk/Sabin "Hey, stop working on that polio vaccine and start working on a better iron lung."
Is that why every major government intelligence house in the Western world devotes so many employees to it? Because oddly, I've never heard of a phrenologist working for the CIA and the astrologer/psychic they hired a few decades ago as a consultant was unceremoniously relieved of her duties after a string of nothing but failures, whereas the handwriting analysis unit is still around.
Would these be the same Western intelligence agencies who for years overestimated the capabilities of the Soviet Union and were completely blindsided by 9/11? I'd hardly use the fact that the CIA, of all organizations, employs
a group of graphologists as an endorsement of the validity of graphology. The fact that they had even hired a psychic/astrologer as a consultant explains a lot about why they're so fucked up, the fact that they apparently still have graphologists
on staff just confirms this.
One question that I have, if anyone is familiar with zBox. Why not go with 2 or 3 racks packed with commercial 1u 2CPU nodes? Was it cost, Heating/cooling? Perhaps it just wouldn't of had that "this is cool shit" factor...
Because you could get graduate students to work on it. Graduate students are sort of like slaves, except that you don't have to
feed them like you do slaves.
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Perhaps they make this assumption because of NASA's incompetence. We have the Columbia disaster, which might have been preventable if one of NASA's middle managers had gotten off of her ass and called NRO and asked for some pictures of the Shuttle, but she didn't want to. We have the Challenger disaster, which would have been preventable if NASA hadn't been in such a hurry to give Ronnie Reagan something to talk about in his State of the Union address (he got it). You have ISS, which is a joke, it can't do anything that even resembles useful science and has cost more than the Apollo program did. NASA needs to be put out of its misery, the first step to doing so would be to eliminate the Shuttle program and ISS.
If the Shuttle is a research program as you maintain then it has no business being used as a cargo hauler for ISS. You don't fly passengers and cargo in an X plane. Killing the Shuttle and forcing NASA to instead spend that money on a new vehicle would be a lot more useful than keeping it flying meaningless missions to ISS or useless orbital missions where they raise worms.
Umm, 'cause there isn't a whole bunch of shallow graves?
A two word solution to that problem - "log chipper".
I wonder if we could get Carly to take over Al Qaeda, in three years goodbye threat of terrorism, and I'd imagine that when you leave Al Qaeda you don't get a 20 million dollar severance package, probably just a bullet in the head and a shallow grave somewhere in the Afghanistan plains.
Yeah, or we could just send in federal troops and decide that you are no longer a state and let L. Paul Bremer run things. That sounds like a pretty good idea to me. That way we get to keep the oil and military bases and we don't have to put up with your political stupidity. I like it.
Looking over the lessons learned from building and flying the SR-71 would be a good start for building the airframe for a winged orbital vehicle.
There are some people who are smart enough to be bothered by the whole concept of having a bunch of government bureaucrats enforcing secret and unwritten laws on an unknowing populace and then there are stupid bastards such yourself who aren't much higher on the intellectual food chain than say a retarded steer, or perhaps a particularly bright carp.
You are so incredibly ignorant as to boggle the mind. Eminent domain existed in the Constitution of the United States long before railroad companies existed.
Amendment V - Trial and Punishment, Compensation for Takings. Ratified 12/15/1791.
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Check out the US Constitution online and learn some history, and please do this before you even think about voting again.
Then, when you're done with that, (no cheating by skipping John Galt's 103 page long speech on objectivism) you might want to head over and read this article at the New York Review of Books, including these paragraphs:
These laws mean that drug companies no longer have to rely on their own research for new drugs, and few of the large ones do. Increasingly, they rely on academia, small biotech startup companies, and the NIH for that [7] At least a third of drugs marketed by the major drug companies are now licensed from universities or small biotech companies, and these tend to be the most innovative ones.[8] While Bayh-Dole was clearly a bonanza for big pharma and the biotech industry, whether its enactment was a net benefit to the public is arguable.
This is an industry that in some ways is like the Wizard of Oz--still full of bluster but now being exposed as something far different from its image. Instead of being a engine of innovation, it is a vast marketing machine. Instead of being a free market success story, it lives off government-funded research and monopoly rights
Seriously, this has to be the most bizzare astronomy story tagline I've ever read. I figured this was the submitter's quote, or possibly the article writer - nope, it was from one of the physicists.
Then you didn't read the New Scientist article which had this gem:
But Christopher Thompson, an astrophysicist at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Physics, says that may not be so. The neutron star in question is rare magnetar, with a magnetic field so strong it could wipe a credit card clean from a distance of 160,000 kilometres. And this magnetar is even rarer yet, one of three "soft gamma repeaters" (SGRs) in the Milky Way.
Ya know, IANAPOAPOA (I Am Not A Physicist Or AstroPhysicist or Astronomer) but I'm willing to bet that if I were 160,000 kilometers from this object, or even our sun, I might be worried about other things than my credit cards getting wiped.
Dude, you're posting from the clue free zone. Apple used superior technology in the late 1980s, but outside of ADB very little of it was proprietary. SCSI? Apple didn't own that. NuBus? TI would have happily sold you NuBus chipsets. This technology wasn't widely used, and more's the pity, but it was hardly proprietary as say, MCA was (sure, you could license MCA from IBM, but it was priced high to keep anyone from selling systems with an MCA bus that would undercut IBMs PC division).
They threw out all of the lovely Apple made it better hardware and noone noticed. They took out SCSI - why? Because IDE is better? How about because IDE is cheaper. So be happy for the PC commodity market and the open source movement - without either of them you couldn't have the Mac you have today at the price point it sells for.
They took out SCSI because the price/performance difference wasn't as great, vis a vis IDE, as it had been for desktop systems. It was a smart move, Oh, and if you need external storage you have FireWire as a replacement for SCSI or you can buy an Adaptec SCSI card if you really need the fastest drives out there.
I'm glad you have found memories of the Macs of the '80s and '90s. I won't argue that the PC hardware was better, and the PC OSes sucked. But so did MacOS.
Did you love Multifinder? How about having to manually adjust memory settings for each application? How about no preemptive multitasking? How about one app crashes and the whole system eats it? Memory fragmentation?
My favorite part of all. Troubleshooting MacOS. Oooh look a cannonball! Ooooh type 3 error!
Compared to working on any PC based OS at the time MacOS was a dream. You talk about the lack of pre-emptive multi-tasking on the Macintosh, yeah, Windows sure did multi-task well, and those neato Hex codes you got when your box blue-screened were always so informative that tracking down the cause of the problem was a piece of cake.
How about extensions? Did you enjoy working with them? Did you enjoy how one would stomp all over the address space of another? Did you like manually swapping extensions out of the system folder (pre extensions manager) to isolate the conflict?
Troubleshooting Mac problems was trivial (assuming that you weren't completely retarded). Want to have fun? Try to get your ethernet card driver, PC-NFS and the Renassance GRX graphics driver for AutoCAD to load into high memory. Remember having to edit your config.sys and autoexec.bat to change the order in which device drivers and TSRs loaded? Yeah, I remember doing that, and I'll never get that time back and while I did have to do similar things on the Mac I spent a lot less time doing it.
Yeah it was a dream OS to work on. Sorry, no thanks I had an Amiga back then. I got to run MacOS on it too for work purposes. In fact it was the cheapest way to run Mac software considering the crazy cost of '80s Macs. Oh yeah and the OS kicked ass. Preemptive multitasking, dynamice memory allocation, GUI and a nice shell.
Oh, you're a former Amiga luser, that explains a lot. Yeah, the Amiga was a great system, except for the fact that the GUI was almost as shit ugly as Windows versions 1 and 2. And there weren't any applications for it, and the company was run by fucking idiots, and if you wanted to put a fucking hard drive on one of them you had to pay a price that made Macintosh hardware look reasonable by comparison and there was no way to expand the system unless you used an external chassis (for the 500 or 1000) or had enough coin to buy a 2000 (which gave you lots of slots and perhaps you could even find some hardware that worked in them). Yeah, the Amiga, that platform was a model of open standards.
BTW it i
Why do you say that? Your mom and sister play a prominent role in what I want to watch on my bedroom ceiling.
I do, and fondly. Let's look at the list you posted.
NuBus
NuBus was technically superior to any PC bus, including MCA. NuBus was true plug and play, put a card in, reboot your system and install driver software, no bullshit, no fucking around. NuBus was a 32 bit bus and you could have up to 16 cards on the bus, much better than ISA or current PCI implementations without various bridging schemes. MCA had similar specs to NuBus but the stupid configuation hoops that IBM made you jump through (booting off of your special system floppy when you added or removed cards and God help you if you lost the floppy or if it got corrupted) was a huge pain in the ass.
NuBus video card with Mac video out
Macintosh video was technically superior to any PC video standard of the late 1980 and early 1990s. Remember what you had back then? 640x480 VGA, 640x350 EGA, IBM's weird ass PGA standard, digital 640x480, that never went anywhere, and CGA. And multiple monitor support? It wasn't even possible on PCs at the time but was trivial on the Mac. I had all kinds of cool video hardware where I worked. Macs used for DTP with 1600x1200 black and white displays, Macs used for simulations with 1024x768 displays (which was high tech at the time) and some Macs that had both.
Often times special Apple SIMMs
There were just as many PC manufacturers back then who were doing similar shit. I remember when we had to upgrade several NEC 386s that we bought. The special NEC form factor memory that was required was so expensive that we ended up junking the systems and upgrading to 486s. Most Mac SIMMs were eight bit SIMMS, PC SIMMs were 8 bit with parity. I used to use PC SIMMs in the Macs I supported all the time without any issue.
SCSI drives
Technically superior to anything the PC had, unless you went with PC SCSI and wanted to try to get the Adaptec drivers to load into high memory, always a fun process. The Mac was the first computer outside of UNIX workstations that you could connect a CD-ROM to.
ADB
Which was technically superior to the PS/2 bus. How many times did you have to replace a motherboard because someone fried it by unplugging their PS/2 mouse while the system was powered up. I did a couple of times. The Mac was transparent, plug in a mouse, a keyboard, a trackball, a bar code scanner, hang them off of ADB and hot-swap devices.
Was Mac stuff incompatible with the PC in the late 80s and early 90s? Yes, was it better, oh fuck yes it was, it was so much better that it wasn't even worth discussing. I had to support about 150 Macs and 150 PCs at the time. PC support was a total bitch, Mac support was easy, almost trivial. Macs were light years ahead of the PC on networking. Plug an ethernet card into a Mac, drag MacTCP into your System Folder and you were in business. Compare this to trying to get a PC to work with PC-NFS or Novell.
And when technology moved on Apple was smart enough to move with it. Which company was the first one to adopt USB across their product line? It was Apple. Hell, it's 2004 and that POS $1,500 P4 that you're talking about still has a fucking PS/2 mouse and keyboard port on it. Which company got rid of the floppy drive first? It was Apple. Your P4 probably still has a floppy controller on it. In the name of Satan and Aleister Crowley why? It's 2005, floppies are dead tech. PCI is better than NuBus. Apple saw the writing on the wall and discontinued NuBus in favor of a better standard. Apple also uses IDE drives, but they support firewire across their entire product line as a replacement for SCSI (another first). Apple didn't just use different technology back then for the sheer perverse joy of being different, they did it because the stuff they used was better than the noisome shit that the PC world used.
As far as jobs leverating open source contributions to OS/X yes he did do that. But the thing that makes OS/X so
The "diversity" in the PC clone world is skin deep, if even that. Let's look at the "diversity". OK, you do have two different companies making processors, AMD and Intel and they may now have compatible 64 bit architectures. You basically have two companies that make graphics chipsets, ATI and nVidia. You have a few companies making mobo chipsets but it basically boils down to Via, nVidia or Intel. You do have lots of shiny, colorful, craptacular cases and four or five companies making hard drives but for the most important component of the computer you basically have two main families of operating systems, Windoze versions and Linux distros (I don't mean to slight you BSD users, it's a great OS, but it's a drop in the bucket of the PC OS market).
So what does this "diversity" buy you? Well it buys you a lot of friggin headaches, not as many as it used to, but still a lot more than any advantages that it brings you. Windows does things that Linux doesn't do (it's still a better desktop) and Linux does things that Windows doesn't (it's still a better server and a lot more secure) but the diversity within Linux distros and within Windows versions isn't that great. Having the ability to run Slackware on an AMD64 processor on an Asus motherboard with a Via chipset and an ATI graphics card is not really all that different from having the ability to run Debian on an Intel Pentium 4 on an Abit motherboard with an nForce chipset and an nVidia video card. Is it more "diverse"? Yes it is. Does it really matter? No it doesn't.
Really? Where. Name a major city where this is the case. Bumfuck, North Dakota, home of the Freemen, does not count as a major city.
Many innovations in firefighting technique were pioneered by for-profit fire companies, which tend to produce better service at lower cost than public tax-funded ones.
Really? Name some. While you're at it compare and contrast these innovations with those developed by publicly funded fire departments. Also while you're at it please provide sources and documentation for your claim that these private fire services are better than the public ones.
Where fire protection is private, the cost tends to be covered by subscription as part of the homeowner's fire insurance policy required by the lender.
And in this case do I have a choice of fire protection companies? Can I choose to have the guys from engine 39 be my fire department instead of those cocksuckers at District 12?
Without sources this just sounds like more libertarian horseshit. Going back to the original thread the reason why many municipalities are considering the publicly funded deployment of WiFi services is that major telcos won't deploy such services in their communities. I find it interesting that so many of the libertarians on this thread seem to feel that having a municipality develop WiFi will somehow be bad, or inherently inefficient, or unjust but have no problem with the major telcos, all of whom own lots of legislators, spend lots of money on lobbying and get laws written to favor their monopoly status, deciding that they're not going to deploy WiFi unless they can make a killing on it. So let me see if I have this straight: You're against small, municipally controlled WiFi networks but you're in favor of large, government subsidized and authorized Telcos developing these networks?
Bullshit, if that's the case then why haven't these groups gone out and complained about the department of transporation making roads that UPS trucks delivering pornography are driving on? Also corporations are just as likely to bend over as any municipality is. Look at the way that anything even remotely controversial is censored off of television by broadcasters afraid of alienating sponsors or small interest groups such as the Parent's Television Council.
The Atrocity Archives is a way cool book, I heartily recommend it to /. geeks. Stross used to work as a programmer/sysadmin so it's a lot of fun if you've ever worked in IT.
You are fundamentally ignorant as to how scientific advancement works. It's not as if there are a whole bunch of easy solutions out there just waiting for the picking like so much low hanging fruit and that there are problems that aren't being solved because research scientists are haring off on impractical projects. If you want to find out how to solve these problems you have to do basic research. If society followed the stupidly ignorant approach that you advocate we wouldn't, as an example, know anything about DNA because back in the '50s someone would have said to Crick, Watson and Francis "Hey, stop fucking around with all of those X-ray crystallography studies and go work on a polio vaccine." Hell, we probably wouldn't have a polio vaccine because someone would have said to Salk/Sabin "Hey, stop working on that polio vaccine and start working on a better iron lung."
Would these be the same Western intelligence agencies who for years overestimated the capabilities of the Soviet Union and were completely blindsided by 9/11? I'd hardly use the fact that the CIA, of all organizations, employs a group of graphologists as an endorsement of the validity of graphology. The fact that they had even hired a psychic/astrologer as a consultant explains a lot about why they're so fucked up, the fact that they apparently still have graphologists on staff just confirms this.
Because you could get graduate students to work on it. Graduate students are sort of like slaves, except that you don't have to feed them like you do slaves.