The one thing that sucks the most on slashdot is its typesetting. Type is the one thing web designers forget about, but doing it right drastically improves the appearance and readability of a site.
I'm all for web designers putting any font type they want on their website, as long as it always shows up on my screen as standard-spaced subpixel-antialiased 10 point Verdana.
(Which, BTW, the demo "improved" slashdot page did not do in Konqueror. Looks like I would have to learn how override their shiny new stylesheet. Annoying.)
No, you simply attacked apt-get without providing a feasible alternative.
I wasn't attacking apt-get, I was pointing out that some of its users have a false sense of security that they try to propagate to the world at large. I probably should have mentioned that there are also a few knee-jerk Microsoft apologists who make similar claims about Windows Update, but I didn't. Sorry.
There is no feasible alternative with current OS technology. Therefore, the only things that can be done for now are: (1) OS maintainers must maintain eternal vigilance over their patch servers to the best of their abilities, and (2) End users must be aware that there is some risk involved with patching (especially automatic patching). No update service is totally immune from compromise. Therefore, end users should refrain from making posts claiming that any particular update service is a panacea.
Why my apt-get was failing from people.debian.org last nite.
This is why I've always been skeptical of people who think they're golden when they say: "I'm already patched! My machine automatically ran apt-get last night, and my system was updated before I even heard of the bug!".
It seems like that's putting a lot of eggs in one basket.
The problem of what to do with nuclear waste has already been solved: just loaded it into another type of reactor (called a "fast breeder reactor") and continue to use it.
And generate all sorts of weapons-gradd material in the process. It's a major proliferation risk; that's why the U.S. has not chosen that option.
Nuclear waste simply is not a significant reason not to use nuclear power. The only problem is what to do with old, worn-out reactors.
There's another little reason: the risk of terrorist attacks on the plants. People argue all day about the technical safety and waste disposal issues. However, the security issues of proliferation and terrorist risks are by themselves enough to make avoiding nuclear power a no-brainer.
Our president has been running around hysterically shouting about WMDs for several years now. What's one of the most significant sources of material WMDs? It's when 2-bit countries convince people to let them have their own nuclear reactors. Again and again, we find out that they start producing weapons materials as soon as they crank up their plants. Part of the "war on terrorism" should be developing energy sources that allow us to totally eliminate nuclear power with its fuel cycle that has allowed several countries to hide their nuclear arms programs. Not to mention the problem that nuclear plants in your own country allow someone to turn a truck bomb or an airplane into a WMD (and don't bother bringing about the 3-foot thick shield around the reactor; I'm talking about attacking the unshielded spent fuel storage ponds).
it's can also reffer to possession. Where it owns something you would say "that is it's object"
No, you would write "that is its object". The word "its" is a possessive pronoun like "his" or "hers". You do not use "'s" to make pronouns possessive.
Looks like the Apollo guidance computers were 15-bits. From a random Google hit:
Each computer had two types of memory, erasable and fixed. The fixed memory contained the programs, constants and landmark coordinates using 36,864 terms or words, each of 15 bits length. That came to a grand total of 74 kilobytes of memory. The erasable memory, which was used to store variable data used in calculations or as registers for logic operations, had only 2,048 15-bit terms.
I remember reading elsewhere that the 36 Kwords of ROM were hard coded by hand threading the bit patterns with tiny wires and magnetic cores, and then they were sealed in a block of epoxy. Turnaround time to fix bugs took weeks.
Not sure they were ripped apart instead of running out of lift.
At least one was.... (let me go to the bookshelf to pull out "The Great Dirigibles, their Triumphs and Disasters" by John Toland)... thumb, thumb... There's a picture with the following caption: "Tail section of the Shanandoah, which was torn in three parts by a storm, near Ava, Ohio, on the morning of September 3, 1925." Another caption notes that the nose section landed 10 miles away.
I suppose if only they had had Internet service back then with the local weather radar updates they could have avoided a lot of grief.
Of course there are a couple of other problems with airships, like they don't do too well in strong winds, and they take a lot of "man handling" at the field
That's an understatement. When you need a vehicle almost as large as the Titanic to move a few dozen passengers at 80 mph max, you know you've going to have a hard time maintaining profit margins.
What's worse is the tendency for these things to get literally ripped apart any time they wander too near a wind storm. This happened to a couple of U.S. Navy helium-filled airships, as well as quite a few others from other countries.
I don't have the exact stats, but my understanding is that there were more crashes and disintegrations of dirigibles than fireballs. It also seems like more of them ended up crashing than retiring gracefully.
I just hope they aren't taking money away from everyone else in the state to pay for something that's only going to benefit the cities.
I like your attitude. Now, can you mail me a check to repay me for all these damned Universal Service Fees I've been slugged with for all these years? You know, where the people in the cities pay for something that's only going to benefit others?
Parts inside the frame? Kind of hard to do trailside maintainence on that!
That's why I'll never buy one of today's cars. With its enclosed transmission, I'd never be able to fix it roadside if it broke down. Detroit, if you're listening: you're not getting this customer back into the showroom until you go back to external chain drives like you had in the '90s.
They are trying to keep people interested, and special effects and exciting narrative help with that.
I think that the fact that they had to pack so many effects into the show to keep today's audience interested is mainly a reflection of the sad state of the MTV generation's attention span.
Actually, I was fine with the visual effects that demonstrated the physics priniciples. Computer graphics are available; why not use them. What stood out to me was the need to keep something, anything moving on the screen at all times. Thus, all the strange sliding panels contantly shuffling back and forth in the background behind the various extra-smart scientists as they talked.
The producers must have reasoned that the target audience was so used to being fed spinning logos, scrolling textbars, subsecond edit cuts and webpage-like clutter, that if they saw nothing but someone sitting still talking, then they'd assume the TV must somehow be broken.
People seem to be exremely afraid of anything made in a lab, but fail to recognize that the greater danger (by far) is from natural evolution of new viruses.
Unless somebody figures out how to make an artificial microbe that takes advantage of chemical processes that just aren't found in natural evolution. For example, the human body might not even be capable of attacking a hypothetical microbe that has a teflon or silicone-enhanced outer membrane.
At any rate, natural evolution proceeds at a slow rate, so the defending species has time to adapt. Anthrax, for example, implements a tricky chemical hack to breach animal cells and destroy them. Most animals are pretty defenseless against the special back door that antrax uses, and without it the anthrax bacteria would be no more harmful than a pimple. However, anthrax is a rather obscure organism that mostly lives in the dirt. The reason that animals haven't evolved a defense against its chemical attack is that it just doesn't spread that easily in a natural setting. If anthrax were contagious like a cold, animals would have evolved a defense against it long ago.
Now, people may soon have the knowledge to install anthrax's chemical attack into something like a common cold virus. This short-ciruits the evolutionary process. Instead of just having to resist natural random improvemts in microbes, we may soon also face improvements that take advantage of god-like knowledge of the weaknesses of the defenders.
By simultaneously combining the best parts of various different microbes found in nature, then adding unnatural chemical improvements and using our newly available schematics of human cell defense design, we will certainly be able to create microbes far more dangerous than anything nature is likely to randomly come up with.
I doubt that trying to control this kind of technology is going to do any good, however. Somebody somewhere in the world is going to work on this stuff whether its banned or not. Our only hope is probably to develop means to quickly detect any new microbes, along with adaptive technology to create unnatural defenses to unnatural new organisms in real time.
That's right, it's the file formats that are the real problem. Microsoft maintains its monopoly largely because their competitors must spend so much effort trying to reverse engineer the ever-changing secret file formats and APIs that they don't have resources left over to innovate new improvements.
A simple tweak to copyright laws would largely fix this. Make secret file formats and copyright protection a mutually exclusive choice. Copyright was originally instituted to encourage open publication. Therefore, it should only be fair that software which enjoys copyright protection must be provided with the full open specifications of the file formats it uses. This ensures that there will always be a free market for that type of application, and users are better off because their their valuable data is not held hostage under the exclusive control of an external vendor.
Of course, if a file format is so stupendously elite that a software vendor can't stand to publish it, they could always choose to release their programs without copyright protection. The choice would be theirs.
Even if people don't have the guts to univerally institute a reform like this today (and they most certainly don't), this condition could have been applied very effectively to the special case of the original Microsoft antitrust trial. It would have been less absurd than breaking the company up, and it would help restore a free market in desktop software. We wouldn't have to worry about WMP and its proprietary formats taking over the digital television and movie publication markets just because Microsoft locks in deals with a critical mass of content producers and nobody else can figure out how it works. They could bundle WMP to their heart's content, but competitors wouldn't be locked out of using native WMA formats.
There are those that would argue that exposing secret file formats is unfair to the software vendor. However, there are times when the harm to the public of keeping product information secret outweighs the economic benefit gained by the industry selling the products. Not many people today would argue that we should abolish food ingredients lists on labels to help protect the proprietary interests of food manufacturers. Now, it's just a fact of doing business in the food industry. They compete in other areas than top secret ingredients lists, and we all benefit from being able to know what we're eating.
If you go to a light specialty store they'll sell you 130 volt light bulbs that are a lot more durable. Extra cost, ~$0.06 a light bulb. They are used in places where it's a real pain to change a light bulb. They generally last longer in any light socket.
Long life bulbs last longer because they're designed so that the filament runs cooler than a normal bulb at any given voltage and wattage. What's the catch? A cooler filament generates significantly less visible light than a hotter one. That makes it even less efficient than the already horribly inefficient standard incandescent bulbs. If you take this idea to it's logical extreme, you could use a rangetop heating element for ultra long life, but you'd use 2500 watts of power used to get less cherry-red light than a 1 W night light bulb.
The lifetime of a light bulb is a balance between replacement cost and electricity cost. If you buy long-life bulbs, you'll spend far more on the extra kilowatt hours required to get the same amount of light as you would on new bulbs. That's why they're only recommended for areas that are inaccessible or subject to vibration.
If North Korea was properly dealt with in 1994, they wouldn't be in Bush's "Axis of Evil" today.
You still haven't explained how it would have been possible to "properly deal with" North Korea back in 1994 without devastating South Korea or sacrificing the lives of thousands of GIs.
This exact same problem has confounded every U.S. administration for over 50 years. Jimmy Carter didn't cause it.
North Korea has admitted to never stopping it's nuclear amibitions following the consessions made with Carter on behalf of Clinton in 1994. Their buildup of nuclear arsenol never stopped, therefore stating they want a nuclear deterrant is FALSE.
What could Clinton do to decisively stop North Korea's nuclear program? Nothing, since they have thousands of howitzers in caves within range of South Korea's capital which could decimate it in a couple of minutes.
What will Bush do to decisively stop North Korea's nuclear program? Nothing, since they have thousands of howitzers in caves within range of South Korea's capital which could decimate it in a couple of minutes.
Have you ever used an original IBM PC? (circa 1981/82)
Yes. Used them, hacked them, cloned them in my hardware design days.
It takes at least 45 seconds from the time you flick the switch until it decides that it is a computer and should start the boot process.
I'm guessing that you probably have 640K or more memory in it. Memory tests in those days were slooooow. On the bright side, very few machines from that time even supported more than 64K.
They had nice keyboards, and they were built like a tank. Apart from that, they don't have much going for them other than the IBM label.
Exactly. Most PHBs of the time had never used a computer, and this was the first personal computer that looked like and weighed as much as the equipment in the mainframe room. PHBs could relate to it because it looked like the computing equipment that their company had already been buying. Most other personal computers looked like toys or toaster ovens. IBM's focus on duplicating the terminal video display was part of that. The clicky keyboard keys were just like the mainframe terminals, too.
If you think about it, their focus on the industrial design and mechanical ergonomics of the PC was just important to IBM's PHB customers in the early 80s as Apple's focus on the same issues is to their pastel lucite-loving customers of today.
The reason PCs dominated was that many consumers wanted a computer that was compatible with the one they used at work.
And why did they use PCs at work? As I pointed out, partly because PCs had the best text mode display.
The Mac, Amiga and ST were released mid-80's with comprable text capabilities.
But these systems could not offer Lotus 1-2-3 and other brand-name apps that the customer demanded.
IBM was shrewd enough to get a professional grade text information display into the personal computer market prior to the mid-80's, and they ended up benefitting from the resulting vendor lock-in which did keep these competitors out of the market. (Unfortunately for IBM, the clone manufacturers were able to embrace and extend the same very same lock-in IBM created. Live and learn.)
Re:Ah... those were the days :-)
on
Video Card History
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
It's so sad when people got excited about PC graphics cards. It wasn't/isn't because they were good, it's because they were/finally/ able to start doing what other platforms had been doing for years.
OTOH, most of the peers of the early PCs had total crap text modes; they couldn't do what the PC could do. (Yes, this includes the Apple. There were no Macs yet.) This is one of the major reasons the PC ended up dominating; text mode was simply more important. Remember that back then most all business use and a good amount of home use was in text mode (word processing, spreadsheets, financial, etc.).
The original IBM PC and its clones usually came with a specially designed monochrome text mode monitor with relatively high resolution (720 x something, no dot pitch to worry about). The monitors had a very long persistence phosphor that totally eliminated flicker. The monochrome text-mode video cards had a very nice serif font stored in their ROMs. IBM's intent was to recreate the feel of their expensive dedicated mainframe text terminals.
This setup had a very high quality feel, and you could stare at it all day without getting eye strain. Early color graphics monitors, OTOH, were horrible at showing text. This was compounded by the crappy fonts that were shipped with most early graphic OSes. This made most of the PC's early competitors pretty useless for doing long stretches of serious work.
IBM's attempt to provide color graphics did suck big time [*]. Originally, you had to buy two graphics adapters and two separate monitors to get text and graphics on the same machine. One of Compaq's claims to fame was getting the patent on unifying the PCs high-quality text mode and its graphics modes on a single graphics adapter and monitor.
[*] The original 16-bit color mode of the EGA cards and VGA cards must have been designed by somebody who was high on crack. You can't get at the pixel memory without setting up a bewildering array of registers that control mandatory and mostly non-useful logic operations on your bits. The memory is accessed as 4 independent planes, so you have to unnaturally slice every pixel up into individual bits and have a PhD in boolean logic to get them on the screen as you intended. It easily could take a newbie a whole day of reading manuals and hacking before they could get a single white dot on the screen.
Albolishing copyright is socialism, a concept where the public automatically owns the work of an author.
The public does automatically own the work of an author as soon as he discloses it. Check the Constitution. It clearly states that the public licenses the work exclusively to the author for a limited time. It also states the reason for this: to promote the production of useful arts and sciences. It does not say that the author owns copies of the work, nor that the goal of establishing copyright was create a new type of personal property. (If it were an item subject to natural property rights, then the expiration of a copyright would be an unethical confiscation of personal property. It isn't.)
Note that in all cases, a content creator has an easy way to retain to retain complete control of his works: he can simply keep it secret. If he doesn't keep it secret, the cat is out of the bag and the knowledge belongs to the public. Too many people these days assume that "temporary exclusive license from the public" == "my personal property", and anything else must == communism.
What, you're just going to blatantly assume that we'll not have discovered a way to perform our computations in another universe in the next 80+ years?
Well, some people argue that quantum computers would in fact take advantage of parallel universes to do their work. The huge number of alternative computations are done in parallel in their own universes, then only the correct answer ends up in our universe when the wave function collapses.
I'm not sure that this viewpoint is actually valid, but it seems to me that if it were true, it would help explain how such massive computational power (such as factoring numbers too big to factor conventionally) could theoretically be extracted out of just a tiny handful of subatomic particles.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm all for web designers putting any font type they want on their website, as long as it always shows up on my screen as standard-spaced subpixel-antialiased 10 point Verdana.
(Which, BTW, the demo "improved" slashdot page did not do in Konqueror. Looks like I would have to learn how override their shiny new stylesheet. Annoying.)
I wasn't attacking apt-get, I was pointing out that some of its users have a false sense of security that they try to propagate to the world at large. I probably should have mentioned that there are also a few knee-jerk Microsoft apologists who make similar claims about Windows Update, but I didn't. Sorry.
There is no feasible alternative with current OS technology. Therefore, the only things that can be done for now are: (1) OS maintainers must maintain eternal vigilance over their patch servers to the best of their abilities, and (2) End users must be aware that there is some risk involved with patching (especially automatic patching). No update service is totally immune from compromise. Therefore, end users should refrain from making posts claiming that any particular update service is a panacea.
Did I say it isn't?
This is why I've always been skeptical of people who think they're golden when they say: "I'm already patched! My machine automatically ran apt-get last night, and my system was updated before I even heard of the bug!".
It seems like that's putting a lot of eggs in one basket.
And generate all sorts of weapons-gradd material in the process. It's a major proliferation risk; that's why the U.S. has not chosen that option.
Nuclear waste simply is not a significant reason not to use nuclear power. The only problem is what to do with old, worn-out reactors.
There's another little reason: the risk of terrorist attacks on the plants. People argue all day about the technical safety and waste disposal issues. However, the security issues of proliferation and terrorist risks are by themselves enough to make avoiding nuclear power a no-brainer.
Our president has been running around hysterically shouting about WMDs for several years now. What's one of the most significant sources of material WMDs? It's when 2-bit countries convince people to let them have their own nuclear reactors. Again and again, we find out that they start producing weapons materials as soon as they crank up their plants. Part of the "war on terrorism" should be developing energy sources that allow us to totally eliminate nuclear power with its fuel cycle that has allowed several countries to hide their nuclear arms programs. Not to mention the problem that nuclear plants in your own country allow someone to turn a truck bomb or an airplane into a WMD (and don't bother bringing about the 3-foot thick shield around the reactor; I'm talking about attacking the unshielded spent fuel storage ponds).
No, you would write "that is its object". The word "its" is a possessive pronoun like "his" or "hers". You do not use "'s" to make pronouns possessive.
I remember reading elsewhere that the 36 Kwords of ROM were hard coded by hand threading the bit patterns with tiny wires and magnetic cores, and then they were sealed in a block of epoxy. Turnaround time to fix bugs took weeks.
At least one was.... (let me go to the bookshelf to pull out "The Great Dirigibles, their Triumphs and Disasters" by John Toland) ... thumb, thumb... There's a picture with the following caption: "Tail section of the Shanandoah, which was torn in three parts by a storm, near Ava, Ohio, on the morning of September 3, 1925." Another caption notes that the nose section landed 10 miles away.
I suppose if only they had had Internet service back then with the local weather radar updates they could have avoided a lot of grief.
That's an understatement. When you need a vehicle almost as large as the Titanic to move a few dozen passengers at 80 mph max, you know you've going to have a hard time maintaining profit margins.
What's worse is the tendency for these things to get literally ripped apart any time they wander too near a wind storm. This happened to a couple of U.S. Navy helium-filled airships, as well as quite a few others from other countries.
I don't have the exact stats, but my understanding is that there were more crashes and disintegrations of dirigibles than fireballs. It also seems like more of them ended up crashing than retiring gracefully.
I like your attitude. Now, can you mail me a check to repay me for all these damned Universal Service Fees I've been slugged with for all these years? You know, where the people in the cities pay for something that's only going to benefit others?
That's why I'll never buy one of today's cars. With its enclosed transmission, I'd never be able to fix it roadside if it broke down. Detroit, if you're listening: you're not getting this customer back into the showroom until you go back to external chain drives like you had in the '90s.
(1890s, that is.)
I think that the fact that they had to pack so many effects into the show to keep today's audience interested is mainly a reflection of the sad state of the MTV generation's attention span.
Actually, I was fine with the visual effects that demonstrated the physics priniciples. Computer graphics are available; why not use them. What stood out to me was the need to keep something, anything moving on the screen at all times. Thus, all the strange sliding panels contantly shuffling back and forth in the background behind the various extra-smart scientists as they talked.
The producers must have reasoned that the target audience was so used to being fed spinning logos, scrolling textbars, subsecond edit cuts and webpage-like clutter, that if they saw nothing but someone sitting still talking, then they'd assume the TV must somehow be broken.
Unless somebody figures out how to make an artificial microbe that takes advantage of chemical processes that just aren't found in natural evolution. For example, the human body might not even be capable of attacking a hypothetical microbe that has a teflon or silicone-enhanced outer membrane.
At any rate, natural evolution proceeds at a slow rate, so the defending species has time to adapt. Anthrax, for example, implements a tricky chemical hack to breach animal cells and destroy them. Most animals are pretty defenseless against the special back door that antrax uses, and without it the anthrax bacteria would be no more harmful than a pimple. However, anthrax is a rather obscure organism that mostly lives in the dirt. The reason that animals haven't evolved a defense against its chemical attack is that it just doesn't spread that easily in a natural setting. If anthrax were contagious like a cold, animals would have evolved a defense against it long ago.
Now, people may soon have the knowledge to install anthrax's chemical attack into something like a common cold virus. This short-ciruits the evolutionary process. Instead of just having to resist natural random improvemts in microbes, we may soon also face improvements that take advantage of god-like knowledge of the weaknesses of the defenders.
By simultaneously combining the best parts of various different microbes found in nature, then adding unnatural chemical improvements and using our newly available schematics of human cell defense design, we will certainly be able to create microbes far more dangerous than anything nature is likely to randomly come up with.
I doubt that trying to control this kind of technology is going to do any good, however. Somebody somewhere in the world is going to work on this stuff whether its banned or not. Our only hope is probably to develop means to quickly detect any new microbes, along with adaptive technology to create unnatural defenses to unnatural new organisms in real time.
A simple tweak to copyright laws would largely fix this. Make secret file formats and copyright protection a mutually exclusive choice. Copyright was originally instituted to encourage open publication. Therefore, it should only be fair that software which enjoys copyright protection must be provided with the full open specifications of the file formats it uses. This ensures that there will always be a free market for that type of application, and users are better off because their their valuable data is not held hostage under the exclusive control of an external vendor.
Of course, if a file format is so stupendously elite that a software vendor can't stand to publish it, they could always choose to release their programs without copyright protection. The choice would be theirs.
Even if people don't have the guts to univerally institute a reform like this today (and they most certainly don't), this condition could have been applied very effectively to the special case of the original Microsoft antitrust trial. It would have been less absurd than breaking the company up, and it would help restore a free market in desktop software. We wouldn't have to worry about WMP and its proprietary formats taking over the digital television and movie publication markets just because Microsoft locks in deals with a critical mass of content producers and nobody else can figure out how it works. They could bundle WMP to their heart's content, but competitors wouldn't be locked out of using native WMA formats.
There are those that would argue that exposing secret file formats is unfair to the software vendor. However, there are times when the harm to the public of keeping product information secret outweighs the economic benefit gained by the industry selling the products. Not many people today would argue that we should abolish food ingredients lists on labels to help protect the proprietary interests of food manufacturers. Now, it's just a fact of doing business in the food industry. They compete in other areas than top secret ingredients lists, and we all benefit from being able to know what we're eating.
What about beer?
Long life bulbs last longer because they're designed so that the filament runs cooler than a normal bulb at any given voltage and wattage. What's the catch? A cooler filament generates significantly less visible light than a hotter one. That makes it even less efficient than the already horribly inefficient standard incandescent bulbs. If you take this idea to it's logical extreme, you could use a rangetop heating element for ultra long life, but you'd use 2500 watts of power used to get less cherry-red light than a 1 W night light bulb.
The lifetime of a light bulb is a balance between replacement cost and electricity cost. If you buy long-life bulbs, you'll spend far more on the extra kilowatt hours required to get the same amount of light as you would on new bulbs. That's why they're only recommended for areas that are inaccessible or subject to vibration.
You still haven't explained how it would have been possible to "properly deal with" North Korea back in 1994 without devastating South Korea or sacrificing the lives of thousands of GIs.
This exact same problem has confounded every U.S. administration for over 50 years. Jimmy Carter didn't cause it.
What could Clinton do to decisively stop North Korea's nuclear program? Nothing, since they have thousands of howitzers in caves within range of South Korea's capital which could decimate it in a couple of minutes.
What will Bush do to decisively stop North Korea's nuclear program? Nothing, since they have thousands of howitzers in caves within range of South Korea's capital which could decimate it in a couple of minutes.
Yes. Used them, hacked them, cloned them in my hardware design days.
It takes at least 45 seconds from the time you flick the switch until it decides that it is a computer and should start the boot process.
I'm guessing that you probably have 640K or more memory in it. Memory tests in those days were slooooow. On the bright side, very few machines from that time even supported more than 64K.
They had nice keyboards, and they were built like a tank. Apart from that, they don't have much going for them other than the IBM label.
Exactly. Most PHBs of the time had never used a computer, and this was the first personal computer that looked like and weighed as much as the equipment in the mainframe room. PHBs could relate to it because it looked like the computing equipment that their company had already been buying. Most other personal computers looked like toys or toaster ovens. IBM's focus on duplicating the terminal video display was part of that. The clicky keyboard keys were just like the mainframe terminals, too.
If you think about it, their focus on the industrial design and mechanical ergonomics of the PC was just important to IBM's PHB customers in the early 80s as Apple's focus on the same issues is to their pastel lucite-loving customers of today.
There were no Macs when the PC came to prominence, and very few secretaries had Apple ][s.
And why did they use PCs at work? As I pointed out, partly because PCs had the best text mode display.
The Mac, Amiga and ST were released mid-80's with comprable text capabilities. But these systems could not offer Lotus 1-2-3 and other brand-name apps that the customer demanded.
IBM was shrewd enough to get a professional grade text information display into the personal computer market prior to the mid-80's, and they ended up benefitting from the resulting vendor lock-in which did keep these competitors out of the market. (Unfortunately for IBM, the clone manufacturers were able to embrace and extend the same very same lock-in IBM created. Live and learn.)
OTOH, most of the peers of the early PCs had total crap text modes; they couldn't do what the PC could do. (Yes, this includes the Apple. There were no Macs yet.) This is one of the major reasons the PC ended up dominating; text mode was simply more important. Remember that back then most all business use and a good amount of home use was in text mode (word processing, spreadsheets, financial, etc.).
The original IBM PC and its clones usually came with a specially designed monochrome text mode monitor with relatively high resolution (720 x something, no dot pitch to worry about). The monitors had a very long persistence phosphor that totally eliminated flicker. The monochrome text-mode video cards had a very nice serif font stored in their ROMs. IBM's intent was to recreate the feel of their expensive dedicated mainframe text terminals.
This setup had a very high quality feel, and you could stare at it all day without getting eye strain. Early color graphics monitors, OTOH, were horrible at showing text. This was compounded by the crappy fonts that were shipped with most early graphic OSes. This made most of the PC's early competitors pretty useless for doing long stretches of serious work.
IBM's attempt to provide color graphics did suck big time [*]. Originally, you had to buy two graphics adapters and two separate monitors to get text and graphics on the same machine. One of Compaq's claims to fame was getting the patent on unifying the PCs high-quality text mode and its graphics modes on a single graphics adapter and monitor.
[*] The original 16-bit color mode of the EGA cards and VGA cards must have been designed by somebody who was high on crack. You can't get at the pixel memory without setting up a bewildering array of registers that control mandatory and mostly non-useful logic operations on your bits. The memory is accessed as 4 independent planes, so you have to unnaturally slice every pixel up into individual bits and have a PhD in boolean logic to get them on the screen as you intended. It easily could take a newbie a whole day of reading manuals and hacking before they could get a single white dot on the screen.
A rather poetic post. I think that it works pretty well as alternate lyrics to James Taylor's "Fire and Rain".
The public does automatically own the work of an author as soon as he discloses it. Check the Constitution. It clearly states that the public licenses the work exclusively to the author for a limited time. It also states the reason for this: to promote the production of useful arts and sciences. It does not say that the author owns copies of the work, nor that the goal of establishing copyright was create a new type of personal property. (If it were an item subject to natural property rights, then the expiration of a copyright would be an unethical confiscation of personal property. It isn't.)
Note that in all cases, a content creator has an easy way to retain to retain complete control of his works: he can simply keep it secret. If he doesn't keep it secret, the cat is out of the bag and the knowledge belongs to the public. Too many people these days assume that "temporary exclusive license from the public" == "my personal property", and anything else must == communism.
Well, some people argue that quantum computers would in fact take advantage of parallel universes to do their work. The huge number of alternative computations are done in parallel in their own universes, then only the correct answer ends up in our universe when the wave function collapses.
I'm not sure that this viewpoint is actually valid, but it seems to me that if it were true, it would help explain how such massive computational power (such as factoring numbers too big to factor conventionally) could theoretically be extracted out of just a tiny handful of subatomic particles.