But the point is that the neo-geo actually offered something that no one else did - virtually unlimited sprite-pushing power, and games that people cared about.
Games that people cared about, yes, all nine titles.
Nah, I actually agree with you that the neo-geo was a really incredible piece of equipment. Loved playing it. But I think what killed both players was the price point, pure and simple. Either one of those systems would have gone gangbusters if they had been priced at $299 or less. But of the two, I definitely agree with you that the neo-geo was the more deserving of cudos.
Dude, Trip's 3DO platform might have been expensive (although, funny enough, it was actually just a spec, which was kind of clever on Trip Hawkin's part, to just license the spec and let others do the work), but the neo-geo was butt bitingly expensive as well. They both ran, if my memory serves, somewhere around $600 on the shelves when they came out. And this was in the mid-90's. That's why the Neo-geo sold like 4 players in North America. Which (one second while I look up my sales stats...) yes, was actually 2 less than the 6 total shipped 3DO units.
Although, having played with both of them, the neo-geo games were way crisp and fun. Just way too expensive for the base hardware.
This dll hooks the Flight Simulator app into the Active Accessiblity API which provides features for people with disabilities. While I haven't coded to the MS platform specifically for a very long time, unless something major has changed, it wouldn't be odd at all for parts of that API to be actually buried in the innards of IE. A very annoying MS trait, that; to bury parts of their APIs all over the place. Many things can be said of MS as a development platform, most of them bad from my perspective, but one thing it most definitely isn't is orthangonal.
In the SF Bay Area, Safeway and Albersons already offer full online shopping to the door, ala webvan and have been for a little while now. Like a lot of web ideas that died during the Crash, but are doing fine now and just needed some time to get the model right and more penetration, this seems like a pretty obvious/good idea. The earlier guy was talking about NYC having similiar services.
I suspect that this is something that makes a lot more sense on a metro by metro basis, hooked into existing stores just as an added service, instead of a nationwide thing. Only non-perishables, like amazon, seems kinda annoying and limited unless there are deep discounts. I would rather pay a few pennies more to not have to order my groceries repeatedly. But maybe that's just me.
Well, if this place delivers to the greater new york area, then he is talking a company that reaches about 1/13 of the US population, so I will give it to him. And I really doubt that Amazon is going to offer their plan on a multinational basis. They don't offer DVD players on a multinational basis, try to hit Amazon in canada. They don't sell crap there.
Re:Military promotion is *very* clear cut.
on
The Living Dilbert?
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, I have been out quite some time. And, like you, I went one term and bailed because the way the military works and the way I work didn't mesh all that well. From a personal point of view I completely agree with you about the promotion system; while I admire its fairness it didn't agree with what I would make my priorties. But from a systems point of view, I think I get it now.
The key to the US Military is to think of it as a tremendously brilliant logistical system. When we win wars, it is about logistics. The US was a decisive factor in the winning of WWI without putting a significant number of boots on the ground until the last seconds, simply by putting our supply chain in the hands of the people on the lines. Think Patton's tank line and the extreme logistical problem that presented. The US Civil War wasn't going particularly well for the Union before Grant finally got put in the seat, and his winning insight was to grind troops and supplies into pulp as necessary because he had more of them than his tactically more gifted opposition. Iraq I was a joke because of the simply overwhelming firepower we put on point half a world away. And where we don't perform well is in the situations where logistics take a back seat: asymetrical warfare situations with or without arbitrary poltical constraints; Vietnam, Iraq II.
In that light, brilliance, or even better than average performance, isn't the key. The key is uniformity, interchangability. It isn't about good people, it is about Airman, Mk. I, interchangable with every other Airman, Mk. I. Fitting into the machine is more critical than being exceptionally effective. Got a bigger problem? Throw more Airman, Mk. I's at it. And your Airman, Mk. I's need to fit perfectly into your Airman, Mk. I holders and magazines.
At the higher levels, O-4+ and E-6 and up, a lot of other factors seem to come into play. At least that would seem the case from my old mates who stayed in and moved up the ranks. But at the lower levels, at least when I was in, uniformity and staying within the lines were what you really got graded on in performance reports.
When I was in I found all this quite frustrating, and have only come to this view after a lot of time on the outside, where the whole thing is now an armchair exercise in musing instead of an annoying grind of consistently turning more units than anyone in my lab, but constantly being hounded for crap like not cutting my hair frequently enough or leaving my pocket unbuttoned.
Re:Military promotion is *very* clear cut.
on
The Living Dilbert?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
No, bearing isn't really that ill-defined. Just didn't feel like going to into details of the components; such as, in the original poster's case as a member of the Air Force, how well he meets the requirements of AFR 35-10, the appearance standards (which are so insanely detailed it is difficult to believe unless you have been subject to them), maintains a good posture and how well he recieves and issues commands. Oh, and that he doesn't lean against things and never puts his hands in his pockets (you can't make this stuff up). In the case of the Air Force, about 85% of basic training is fundamentally about military bearing issues, so it isn't like you don't know and understand them intimately before you are worried about fitness reports.
Another important point to remember about the military is that *nothing* is ill-definied. Every single thing that does or can ever happen in the course of being in the military is defined in a manual somewhere. There is a Tech Order for how to use a hammer, and right beside it are the instructions for using a screw driver. No, these aren't special hammers and screwdrivers, or doing weird things with them on some kind of exotic military equipment. Just how you use a hammer and a screwdriver. I can't remember the TO numbers on them, but I ran into them at some point and laughed for 20 minutes.
Military promotion is *very* clear cut.
on
The Living Dilbert?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
> Are there any 'honest' places to work any more (where promotions/awards are based on work preformed and >bureaucracy, and politics aren't encouraged to supplant the 'mission),
The United States Military is many ways a highly inefficent organization in the micro, and lord knows it is filled with bureaucracy that is phenomonal. That said, one of the strong points of the military is the promotion structure.
I have worked at a lot of different jobs in the 17 years since I have been out of the military, from very small shops to enterprise situations, and have never seen anywhere that the promotion situation is as clear-cut as the military. The rules for promotion in the military are phenomonally well definied. There is no guessing and the need for promotion politicing is *by far* the lowest of any organization I have ever been in or even heard of.
It is also completely color and gender blind, which is getting to be the standard in the US, but sure isn't in every shop I have seen.
That said, to be fair to the poster, in the critera for promotion, work performed tends to come about the middle of the list of things that determine your promotion status. Military bearing (a catchall for how well you meet the basic military requirements for behavior and action) for example, is often at least if not more important than your actual job performance at the lower ranks (which the poster is if he served 6 years). But if you are joining the military in the first place, you pretty much know that unless you aren't too bright. At least I sure did.
I am not pushing the military here, nor disagreeing with the poster's basic tenent that the military can be a phenomonally frustrating work envrionment. My decision to get out was definitely the correct one for me and I haven't looked back. But once I got a good taste of civilian experience, the one thing that kept impressing me about the military was the promotion system. Of course, that said, I have gotten a *lot* further in civilian life than I ever would have in the military rank structure. I sucked with the military bearing stuff, but that wasn't the fault of the military, I am the one who signed up to wear the green suit.
Doh, Of course, you are correct, I am comparing the specs on a 12 " powerbook and not a macbook. Not enough coffee.
Although, I highly doubt that the macbooks are going to get more battery life. Initial reports on the pre-production models reported significantly less battery life than their powerbook counterparts. But they might somehow jack it up.
Actually, in most review tests, it gets a full hour more battery life. I get around 5 hours on my powerbook, but the sony TX series gets around 6 hours.
Yeah, I agree with this. I got a lot of interaction with other students and my professors in college that I don't think I would have had online. I just watched my girl friend do an online masters that seemed like a good enough course, but the kind of interaction she was getting in email and using the courseware stuff wasn't the same as the kind of interaction I got going brick and mortar.
A big part of my college time was lots of access to my professors and kicking about their offices working on projects and playing with ideas. But I went to a third rate state school and they seemed happy just to have a student who actually wanted to learn and had project ideas. At a good school, with higher profile professors and a presumably more talented group of students, your interaction as an undergrad with your professors is much more limited, and I wonder if you wouldn't get as much if not more interaction online.
As I am sure you know, Chell, that was one of the first demonstration cases for EInk, signage. Where I started following them, actually, doing tech reports for the sign industry in Signs of the Times magazine. They did some signage at JC Penny's stores in New England as a test case a few years back. I was kind of surprised that they didn't seem to follow up that direction.
I have stopped following the industry, and didn't realize that your team had gone to market in that space. Good on ya.
I know that at ST the editorial staff was mainly waiting on programmable bus wraps as the real killer app for this from a signage point of view. I guess if you need a lighted backplane to make the stuff viewable and it is thick and presumably hard to bend, I can see why that isn't happening tho:)
Yeah, I noticed the same thing. Evil microsoft promises from the slash writeup aren't delivered in the article, just: wow, these hardware makers and stores sure are stupid.
Actually, it looks to me a lot more like hardware makers being stupid. I mean, I can't much fault Best Buy if they aren't selling units that they would have to cobble together to make use of Linux friendly hardware when one of the points that he is trying to make in his article is that there there is very little linux friendly hardware. Although, personally, I never have much of a problem with that, but it is one of the points he is trying to make that seems to somewhat mitigate his point about the stores being in cahoots with an evil plot.
I mean, sure, they can build the boxen and sell them. But then when joe consumer buys nifty new item X and it doesn't work with his box, he blames Best Buy. And it is joe consumer he is talking about selling to, because the rest of us (the folks reading this here, pretty much) know how to build our boxes and install linux and make sure we have the right drivers and hardware combos for our systems.
The part where I think he is dead on is that hardware companies that don't supply drivers for Linux are idiots and shooting themselves in the foot. It isn't like writing the Linux drivers is a major undertaking when you have the full specs in front of you to already write the Windows driver. It is only a pain in the ass when you are trying to reverse engineer a piece of hardware you don't have the specs on.
But blaming the stores doesn't strike me as brilliant. They are only asking for hassles by providing self-branded boxes that average users are going to get pissed with the first time they try to install Cool New Video Hardware Foo or whatever.
And we never did get our Evil Microsoft connection.
Yeah, I think you are right. I hadn't eaten my live bat for the day to get my brain started. And that makes the whole thing make slightly more sense, obviously.
From the reqs: "Our challenge requires the delivery of a solution that will allow an MS-XP compatible application to install and run under Linux using x.org and open source WINE by October 5, 2005."
Actually, not that I think this is something I would do much, the casio EX line (I have had both the EX-S100 and EX-S500) not only do take pictures that fast, they have a mode just for this. I used it when I had a bunch of conference material on a trip to China. Instead of carrying the bulky notes back, I shot all of them in my hotel room and trashed the originals.
Fireworks does vector and raster in one program very intuitively and is my number one tool for quick web mockups. Unfortunately, like Freehand, I fear that Adobe is going to do the death dance on it to make you buy their TWO ridculously overpriced and overpowered tools for this space. Which is very, very sad, since it is the only tool I know of that does all the things it does without a ton of extra fodderol you aren't going to use for web work and costing a bloody fortune.
This product isn't going to be a significant competitor to Photoshop.
Now, my much beloved Macromedia Fireworks on the other hand is in just this space, vector+raster, and is a great little program. And that looks like a lot of where this is aimed.
And I am kind of torn. I suspect that Macrodobe is going to kill off Fireworks, and I really have a serious reliance on that tool. But when my possible replacement comes from Microsoft, well, I really don't like the taste of that at all.
I bought a 12" powerbook a year ago for just this reason. Yeah, it has a *nix underpinning and I generally don't like M$ related items, and getting a lin distro on a particular notebook model can be a little hit and miss, but the key reasons were form factor and the 5+ hour battery life I get on my powerbook.
Last week I was in Japan. Everyone there had little notebooks. My US-tiny powerbook was actually rather bulky compared to most of the notebooks I saw waiting on flights at Narita. While there are a couple of very small form factor notebooks available in the US using intel chips (and costing more than my powerbook), there appear to be a raft of choices in asia. I wish there were more options in this category shipped to the US market chasing the long tail of people like you and I who obviously favor the smaller form factor systems. Not that I don't like my powerbook, but more choice is always a good thing for me, particularly in very personal hardware, which my notebook is.
You sure you aren't thinking about Tesla? I haven't seen any fun conspiracy theories about my boy Philo. But I would love to if you can find some references. Can't help but love a good doomsday device conspiracy theory.
You would be right, if there weren't already other ways of doing fusion without a tokamak or simlar devices.
Philo Farnsworth was doing table top fusion back in the 60's using tube techniques that were part of the outgrowth of his pioneering work in Television.
Look around on the Net, and you can find more articles on the device in question, including people who have built them to play around with. To the best of my knowledge, there is no practical appliction for a Farnsworth device, except the not-inconsiderable bragging rights that you have built your own fusion reactor (a line sure to have the babes just lining up).
This isn't new, it is normal. Every time a new technology that shifts the economic landscape comes onto the scene in the US this same thing happens. Broadband is nothing compared to what was happening with the railroad robber barrons or with GM managing to trash otherwise perfectly good public transit systems in cities with their PR and campaigning.
The most instructive example for those of us involved with the nets is the early days of radio and how our public bandwidth became anything but. Early radio looked a lot like the internet. And under the guise of fixing a couple of real problems with the system, became a corporate-only playground regulated to specifically prevent low-barrier public entry in an astoundingly short period of time.
Slashdot Mirror
Games that people cared about, yes, all nine titles.
Nah, I actually agree with you that the neo-geo was a really incredible piece of equipment. Loved playing it. But I think what killed both players was the price point, pure and simple. Either one of those systems would have gone gangbusters if they had been priced at $299 or less. But of the two, I definitely agree with you that the neo-geo was the more deserving of cudos.
Dude, Trip's 3DO platform might have been expensive (although, funny enough, it was actually just a spec, which was kind of clever on Trip Hawkin's part, to just license the spec and let others do the work), but the neo-geo was butt bitingly expensive as well. They both ran, if my memory serves, somewhere around $600 on the shelves when they came out. And this was in the mid-90's. That's why the Neo-geo sold like 4 players in North America. Which (one second while I look up my sales stats...) yes, was actually 2 less than the 6 total shipped 3DO units.
Although, having played with both of them, the neo-geo games were way crisp and fun. Just way too expensive for the base hardware.
This dll hooks the Flight Simulator app into the Active Accessiblity API which provides features for people with disabilities. While I haven't coded to the MS platform specifically for a very long time, unless something major has changed, it wouldn't be odd at all for parts of that API to be actually buried in the innards of IE. A very annoying MS trait, that; to bury parts of their APIs all over the place. Many things can be said of MS as a development platform, most of them bad from my perspective, but one thing it most definitely isn't is orthangonal.
In the SF Bay Area, Safeway and Albersons already offer full online shopping to the door, ala webvan and have been for a little while now. Like a lot of web ideas that died during the Crash, but are doing fine now and just needed some time to get the model right and more penetration, this seems like a pretty obvious/good idea. The earlier guy was talking about NYC having similiar services.
I suspect that this is something that makes a lot more sense on a metro by metro basis, hooked into existing stores just as an added service, instead of a nationwide thing. Only non-perishables, like amazon, seems kinda annoying and limited unless there are deep discounts. I would rather pay a few pennies more to not have to order my groceries repeatedly. But maybe that's just me.
Well, if this place delivers to the greater new york area, then he is talking a company that reaches about 1/13 of the US population, so I will give it to him. And I really doubt that Amazon is going to offer their plan on a multinational basis. They don't offer DVD players on a multinational basis, try to hit Amazon in canada. They don't sell crap there.
Yeah, I have been out quite some time. And, like you, I went one term and bailed because the way the military works and the way I work didn't mesh all that well. From a personal point of view I completely agree with you about the promotion system; while I admire its fairness it didn't agree with what I would make my priorties. But from a systems point of view, I think I get it now.
The key to the US Military is to think of it as a tremendously brilliant logistical system. When we win wars, it is about logistics. The US was a decisive factor in the winning of WWI without putting a significant number of boots on the ground until the last seconds, simply by putting our supply chain in the hands of the people on the lines. Think Patton's tank line and the extreme logistical problem that presented. The US Civil War wasn't going particularly well for the Union before Grant finally got put in the seat, and his winning insight was to grind troops and supplies into pulp as necessary because he had more of them than his tactically more gifted opposition. Iraq I was a joke because of the simply overwhelming firepower we put on point half a world away. And where we don't perform well is in the situations where logistics take a back seat: asymetrical warfare situations with or without arbitrary poltical constraints; Vietnam, Iraq II.
In that light, brilliance, or even better than average performance, isn't the key. The key is uniformity, interchangability. It isn't about good people, it is about Airman, Mk. I, interchangable with every other Airman, Mk. I. Fitting into the machine is more critical than being exceptionally effective. Got a bigger problem? Throw more Airman, Mk. I's at it. And your Airman, Mk. I's need to fit perfectly into your Airman, Mk. I holders and magazines.
At the higher levels, O-4+ and E-6 and up, a lot of other factors seem to come into play. At least that would seem the case from my old mates who stayed in and moved up the ranks. But at the lower levels, at least when I was in, uniformity and staying within the lines were what you really got graded on in performance reports.
When I was in I found all this quite frustrating, and have only come to this view after a lot of time on the outside, where the whole thing is now an armchair exercise in musing instead of an annoying grind of consistently turning more units than anyone in my lab, but constantly being hounded for crap like not cutting my hair frequently enough or leaving my pocket unbuttoned.
No, bearing isn't really that ill-defined. Just didn't feel like going to into details of the components; such as, in the original poster's case as a member of the Air Force, how well he meets the requirements of AFR 35-10, the appearance standards (which are so insanely detailed it is difficult to believe unless you have been subject to them), maintains a good posture and how well he recieves and issues commands. Oh, and that he doesn't lean against things and never puts his hands in his pockets (you can't make this stuff up). In the case of the Air Force, about 85% of basic training is fundamentally about military bearing issues, so it isn't like you don't know and understand them intimately before you are worried about fitness reports.
Another important point to remember about the military is that *nothing* is ill-definied. Every single thing that does or can ever happen in the course of being in the military is defined in a manual somewhere. There is a Tech Order for how to use a hammer, and right beside it are the instructions for using a screw driver. No, these aren't special hammers and screwdrivers, or doing weird things with them on some kind of exotic military equipment. Just how you use a hammer and a screwdriver. I can't remember the TO numbers on them, but I ran into them at some point and laughed for 20 minutes.
> Are there any 'honest' places to work any more (where promotions/awards are based on work preformed and >bureaucracy, and politics aren't encouraged to supplant the 'mission),
The United States Military is many ways a highly inefficent organization in the micro, and lord knows it is filled with bureaucracy that is phenomonal. That said, one of the strong points of the military is the promotion structure.
I have worked at a lot of different jobs in the 17 years since I have been out of the military, from very small shops to enterprise situations, and have never seen anywhere that the promotion situation is as clear-cut as the military. The rules for promotion in the military are phenomonally well definied. There is no guessing and the need for promotion politicing is *by far* the lowest of any organization I have ever been in or even heard of.
It is also completely color and gender blind, which is getting to be the standard in the US, but sure isn't in every shop I have seen.
That said, to be fair to the poster, in the critera for promotion, work performed tends to come about the middle of the list of things that determine your promotion status. Military bearing (a catchall for how well you meet the basic military requirements for behavior and action) for example, is often at least if not more important than your actual job performance at the lower ranks (which the poster is if he served 6 years). But if you are joining the military in the first place, you pretty much know that unless you aren't too bright. At least I sure did.
I am not pushing the military here, nor disagreeing with the poster's basic tenent that the military can be a phenomonally frustrating work envrionment. My decision to get out was definitely the correct one for me and I haven't looked back. But once I got a good taste of civilian experience, the one thing that kept impressing me about the military was the promotion system. Of course, that said, I have gotten a *lot* further in civilian life than I ever would have in the military rank structure. I sucked with the military bearing stuff, but that wasn't the fault of the military, I am the one who signed up to wear the green suit.
Doh, Of course, you are correct, I am comparing the specs on a 12 " powerbook and not a macbook. Not enough coffee.
Although, I highly doubt that the macbooks are going to get more battery life. Initial reports on the pre-production models reported significantly less battery life than their powerbook counterparts. But they might somehow jack it up.
Actually, in most review tests, it gets a full hour more battery life. I get around 5 hours on my powerbook, but the sony TX series gets around 6 hours.
Yeah, I agree with this. I got a lot of interaction with other students and my professors in college that I don't think I would have had online. I just watched my girl friend do an online masters that seemed like a good enough course, but the kind of interaction she was getting in email and using the courseware stuff wasn't the same as the kind of interaction I got going brick and mortar.
A big part of my college time was lots of access to my professors and kicking about their offices working on projects and playing with ideas. But I went to a third rate state school and they seemed happy just to have a student who actually wanted to learn and had project ideas. At a good school, with higher profile professors and a presumably more talented group of students, your interaction as an undergrad with your professors is much more limited, and I wonder if you wouldn't get as much if not more interaction online.
As I am sure you know, Chell, that was one of the first demonstration cases for EInk, signage. Where I started following them, actually, doing tech reports for the sign industry in Signs of the Times magazine. They did some signage at JC Penny's stores in New England as a test case a few years back. I was kind of surprised that they didn't seem to follow up that direction.
:)
I have stopped following the industry, and didn't realize that your team had gone to market in that space. Good on ya.
I know that at ST the editorial staff was mainly waiting on programmable bus wraps as the real killer app for this from a signage point of view. I guess if you need a lighted backplane to make the stuff viewable and it is thick and presumably hard to bend, I can see why that isn't happening tho
The libre ebook reader uses this and is shipping in Japan.
E Ink's PR on it
Review of unit
The libre ebook reader uses this and is shipping in Japan.
E Ink's PR on it
Review of unit
Yeah, I noticed the same thing. Evil microsoft promises from the slash writeup aren't delivered in the article, just: wow, these hardware makers and stores sure are stupid.
Actually, it looks to me a lot more like hardware makers being stupid. I mean, I can't much fault Best Buy if they aren't selling units that they would have to cobble together to make use of Linux friendly hardware when one of the points that he is trying to make in his article is that there there is very little linux friendly hardware. Although, personally, I never have much of a problem with that, but it is one of the points he is trying to make that seems to somewhat mitigate his point about the stores being in cahoots with an evil plot.
I mean, sure, they can build the boxen and sell them. But then when joe consumer buys nifty new item X and it doesn't work with his box, he blames Best Buy. And it is joe consumer he is talking about selling to, because the rest of us (the folks reading this here, pretty much) know how to build our boxes and install linux and make sure we have the right drivers and hardware combos for our systems.
The part where I think he is dead on is that hardware companies that don't supply drivers for Linux are idiots and shooting themselves in the foot. It isn't like writing the Linux drivers is a major undertaking when you have the full specs in front of you to already write the Windows driver. It is only a pain in the ass when you are trying to reverse engineer a piece of hardware you don't have the specs on.
But blaming the stores doesn't strike me as brilliant. They are only asking for hassles by providing self-branded boxes that average users are going to get pissed with the first time they try to install Cool New Video Hardware Foo or whatever.
And we never did get our Evil Microsoft connection.
Yeah, I think you are right. I hadn't eaten my live bat for the day to get my brain started. And that makes the whole thing make slightly more sense, obviously.
From the reqs:
"Our challenge requires the delivery of a solution that will allow an MS-XP compatible application to install and run under Linux using x.org and open source WINE by October 5, 2005."
Doesn't look like just an installer.
Actually, not that I think this is something I would do much, the casio EX line (I have had both the EX-S100 and EX-S500) not only do take pictures that fast, they have a mode just for this. I used it when I had a bunch of conference material on a trip to China. Instead of carrying the bulky notes back, I shot all of them in my hotel room and trashed the originals.
Fireworks does vector and raster in one program very intuitively and is my number one tool for quick web mockups. Unfortunately, like Freehand, I fear that Adobe is going to do the death dance on it to make you buy their TWO ridculously overpriced and overpowered tools for this space. Which is very, very sad, since it is the only tool I know of that does all the things it does without a ton of extra fodderol you aren't going to use for web work and costing a bloody fortune.
This product isn't going to be a significant competitor to Photoshop.
Now, my much beloved Macromedia Fireworks on the other hand is in just this space, vector+raster, and is a great little program. And that looks like a lot of where this is aimed.
And I am kind of torn. I suspect that Macrodobe is going to kill off Fireworks, and I really have a serious reliance on that tool. But when my possible replacement comes from Microsoft, well, I really don't like the taste of that at all.
I bought a 12" powerbook a year ago for just this reason. Yeah, it has a *nix underpinning and I generally don't like M$ related items, and getting a lin distro on a particular notebook model can be a little hit and miss, but the key reasons were form factor and the 5+ hour battery life I get on my powerbook.
Last week I was in Japan. Everyone there had little notebooks. My US-tiny powerbook was actually rather bulky compared to most of the notebooks I saw waiting on flights at Narita. While there are a couple of very small form factor notebooks available in the US using intel chips (and costing more than my powerbook), there appear to be a raft of choices in asia. I wish there were more options in this category shipped to the US market chasing the long tail of people like you and I who obviously favor the smaller form factor systems. Not that I don't like my powerbook, but more choice is always a good thing for me, particularly in very personal hardware, which my notebook is.
Repeat after me, do not feed the troll, do not feed the troll...
You sure you aren't thinking about Tesla? I haven't seen any fun conspiracy theories about my boy Philo. But I would love to if you can find some references. Can't help but love a good doomsday device conspiracy theory.
You would be right, if there weren't already other ways of doing fusion without a tokamak or simlar devices.
Philo Farnsworth was doing table top fusion back in the 60's using tube techniques that were part of the outgrowth of his pioneering work in Television.
Check out fusor.net for details on the technique.
Look around on the Net, and you can find more articles on the device in question, including people who have built them to play around with. To the best of my knowledge, there is no practical appliction for a Farnsworth device, except the not-inconsiderable bragging rights that you have built your own fusion reactor (a line sure to have the babes just lining up).
This isn't new, it is normal. Every time a new technology that shifts the economic landscape comes onto the scene in the US this same thing happens. Broadband is nothing compared to what was happening with the railroad robber barrons or with GM managing to trash otherwise perfectly good public transit systems in cities with their PR and campaigning.
The most instructive example for those of us involved with the nets is the early days of radio and how our public bandwidth became anything but. Early radio looked a lot like the internet. And under the guise of fixing a couple of real problems with the system, became a corporate-only playground regulated to specifically prevent low-barrier public entry in an astoundingly short period of time.