>The US has approximately a 5:1 ratio of jobs shipped into >the US by foreign companies vs. jobs shipped out of the US >by US companies.
Source, please. And how exactly are these jobs being shipped "into" the US? Or are these in fact employees of foreign companies that are selling goods and services in the American market?
It's true that a pyramid is a simple way to build tall structures that don't topple, but archeologists have recently uncovered traces of cocaine in Egyptian mummies. The coca plant only grows in the Americas. So it looks as though there was some form of trade between the ancient Egyptians and ancient American cultures. Perhaps the idea for a pyramid was traded between them as well.
In South America there's evidence that a great civilization once existed there thousands of years ago - far greater in scope than any other pre-Columbian civilization, such as the Mayans. There are the remains of a canal network that covers thousands of square miles. It's entirely possible that the Atlantis myth has a basis in reality, and that this pre-Columbian American civilization could form a part of that basis.
Personally, I suspect that the Atlantis myth is probably a combination of several "collapse events", perhaps covering a string of early civilization failures in the distant past due to climactic changes, global flooding following the last ice age, dramatic volcanic eruptions, and so forth. Those events could have been separated by hundreds or even thousands of years, slowly blending into a single story.
It's curious that Plato identifies the Atlantis story as having come from Egypt though, since we now know the Egyptians had some form of trade with the Americas and that it had collapsed well before Plato's time. It's also somewhat eerie to realize that perhaps the greatest civilization(s) of antiquity vanished without a trace, possibly due to a global warming episode that flooded productive, heavily populated coastal areas around the globe. A majority of today's global population is also parked within a few miles of the coasts, and much of the globe's most productive farmland sits near the current sea level. That certainly doesn't bode well for our civilization, given the warming climate and increasing glacier melt we're experiencing.
Sad but probably true. If I recall correctly, EA expressed some interest in reviving M*U*L*E in the '90s, but wanted to add weapons to the game. She wisely refused their offer.
what happens when a kid from hicktown, USA, has a Dialup 486 running windows 3.11 with a 500mb 5400rpm HD? is he supposed to invest in a new PC and a network around his house just so his XBOX2 will work?
Well for starters, videogame consoles clearly don't require a hard drive, as Sony's offerings demonstrate. So I'd imagine any Xbox 2 will function perfectly well with or without mass storage as a standalone video game player, using its DVD drive or whatever to read game discs. No hard drive required. Indeed, most existing Xbox games don't seem to be taking advantage of the hard drive in the Xbox at the moment. With drives getting faster - and with RAM prices falling - there's little incentive to continue offering hard drives in next-generation consoles. And folks with crappy computers won't see much benefit to networking their new Xbox 2 to their Commodore 64-esque antique PC. But the reality is, the average home PC is way, way beyond the strawman you cited. Even the cheapest PC's shipping today from the major vendors are coming with 40GB drives and 512MB of RAM - more than enough to store entire compressed music libraries and several compressed movies. And many users aren't even coming close to utilizing all that space. By the time the Xbox 2 ships, the average hard drive in a budget PC will exceed 120GB in size. And if folks who want to network their Xbox 2 into their home PC find that their PC is inadequate to the task, so much the better as far as Microsoft is concerned. They'll just run out and buy a newer PC, and Microsoft will make that much more money.
I don't think for one second Microsoft is aiming to become king of the videogame business. I think videogames are merely a means to an end, and if they happen to make some bucks off of them along the way, all the better.
Up until now, all console manufacturers have made their money off of the games. That's been their MO. Sell the consoles for a loss, and make it up on overpriced software. But for Microsoft to enter this space just doesn't make a lot of sense, at least not if all they're trying to do is become a gaming giant. They aren't a hardware company like Sony, and they don't have a huge library of game franchises to draw upon, like Nintendo. Even if they should somehow grow to dominate the videogame space, it would still represent only a fraction of their total business. And nobody has dominated the business for more than a few years - the history of boom bust cycles in the gaming business is daunting to say the least. New hardware technology evolves, a competitor jumps on it first, markets their product well, and it's all over for your console (at least for 3-5 years or so, until you can catch the next development cycle). I don't think Microsoft is out to dominate a business as cyclical and as hardware-oriented as the standalone console business at all, and I don't think the any Xbox 2 will be produced solely to dominate the videogame market as we've come to know it. Microsoft wants to lock people into a platform. You can't do that with a standalone console, not for more than a few years anyhow.
I don't think the existing Xbox was produced to dominate the videogame market. It costs way too much to produce for starters, and that hard drive is only marginally useful at best. I think the Xbox was just a beta test platform - something Microsoft could release as an open experiment yet make a little money off of, establishing themselves in the consumer electronics space at the same time while getting programmers familiar with writing for their platform. It's a trial run at what they're really after.
I think Microsoft wants to extend the Windows monopoly into the consumer electronics space, including the videogame console market, and the Xbox 2 will be their next attempt at it. Making these devices standalone videogame units that just run a version of Windows to play games isn't the goal, it was just the first step on the journey with the existing Xbox. What Microsoft really wants to do is t
You will instead rip MP3s or WMAs onto your Windows PC and then share the folders over your wired or wireless LAN. Your X-Box will access your music files over the network.
Yup. I think that's going to be Microsoft's strategy as well. Use the PC as a central file server (for audio, video, even games rented over the Internet) and use various devices scattered throughout the home - like the new Xbox - to access those files. It's probably the best way for Microsoft to exploit its PC monopoly in the consumer electronics marketplace, as it dramatically lowers the cost of those devices (no need to include expensive mass storage gadgets in all of them) while tying consumers to the PC and Windows.
I mean, why waste $50 or whatever slapping a hard drive into the Xbox 2 when you can just access the unused space on the home PC's hard drive instead? Especially since users may want to have access to many of those files (like the audio stuff) in both locations.
>A launch window to Mars comes every two years. >The unmanned portions will probably cost many >billions of dollars on their own. If you loose >them, not only will you have to wait two years >to try again, but you've also lost 10 billion >dollars.
That's correct. And it brings up another problem you'd have to plan for - what if you've built the manned portion of your program, have it gassed up and ready to go, and then find out your fuel factory on Mars just exploded? Is it going to be OK to leave your manned Mars rocket sitting around in Florida (or in orbit) for two years until your launch window opens up again? Or make that 4 years, since you'll need to send out another gas station first.
We all remember what happened to Galileo while it sat around for a few years after the Challenger explosion - some lubricant apparently leaked out of the mechanism that unfurled its high-gain antenna, crippling its ability to communicate with earth. A manned Mars probe is going to be vastly more complex than Galileo. Are you going to design and build it so it can properly withstand up to 4 years in storage, either here on Earth or in orbit? Or if something goes wrong with your gas station are you simply going to dispose of it and build another one? Either way, properly preparing for this contingency could add a billion or more to the cost of the mission . . . and NOT preparing for it could prove even more costly should something actually malfunction on the Mars end.
>You might be able to take enough raw materials, but >where does that leave the instruments you need to do >good science?
And how much would those instruments cost? After all, anything electronic you send to Mars is going to have to be as radiation-hardened as it gets. Marsies talk about a solar "storm cellar" to protect the astronauts in the case of flare or cosmic ray activity, but what about the electronics? The Japanese just lost a Mars probe thanks in part to solar flares. If you aren't going to properly shield the entire vehicle, you're going to at least have to shield the electronics and use radiation-hardened circuits. That's going to up the cost of the electronics aboard this mission considerably compared to the Shuttle and the ISS, neither of which has to deal with that kind of space radiation environment.
This whole misadventure has boondoggle written all over it. There are enough hidden costs and gotchas to make a used car dealer's head spin.
>On top of that, you have not done your homework. >On anything. Your post is so ignorant, you ought to >do something really drastic to expiate your shame. >I would suggest learning to study, and not posting >on any subject that you have not studied.
Insulting people is ALWAYS a good way to show how smart you are.
>>None of the components you listed in your message do >>us much good for a manned Mars exploration program. >>Take the Shuttle engines you list as one component. >>Only they aren't. They're needed in the (remaining) Shuttles. >>We'd have to build more of them to make a Mars mission >>possible before the end of the next decade - many, many >>more of them. > >Let's see, 1 launch window every 2 years, 2 vehicles per launch >window, 4 engines per vehicle = 4 engines per year. Manufacture >of High Pressure Fuel Turbopumps: "Production rate > 1 unit/ >month since first flight in July 2001 (STS-104)[1]. At the rate >of 1 unit per month, you could have enough engines to fly a Shuttle >every month and replace engines every 5 flights, send 4 vehicles to >Mars every launch window instead of 2, and have about 3 brand- >spanking new engines left over.
That's nice. But that doesn't address my point. I didn't say it couldn't be done. I said it would take a lot of engines, unless you plan on somehow diverting the remaining Shuttles from their ISS missions to a Mars mission, or you plan to continue flying them long after they're scheduled to be decommissioned.
Or unless you plan on using those Shuttle engines in some other launcher. Which is probably a good idea - the Shuttle engines are arguably the best part of the Shuttle program - but the R&D on a new launcher large enough to hoist those Mars payloads into orbit / off to Mars could eat up $10 billion or more. Much more if you want to build something that can haul those Shuttle engines back to earth so they can be recycled. Otherwise, you have to eat the cost of 4 Shuttle engines with every launch. How many flights will this adventure take?
>>It would take several launches just to get the gadgets to Mars to >>make liquid water and oxygen and hydrogen and everything else >>for the astronauts to use once they finally arrived. > >It would take one launch, carrying about 50 tons on a trans-Mars >orbit.[2]
Wait a minute. You're telling us that this Martian contraption to manufacture hydrogen and oxygen and liquid water and everything else the astronauts are gonna need once they get to Mars is only gonna weigh 50 tons? An Apollo spacecraft at departure from earth orbit only weighed about 45 tons, and most of that weight was fuel. The LEM and capsule were tiny and fairly lightweight in comparison. It took a giant Saturn V to haul Apollo into orbit. Now you're saying that a rocket fuel / oxygen factory / storage facility and a bulldozer for Mars are only going to weigh 50 tons. I don't buy it. The Viking probe weighed 4 tons, not including fuel, and it didn't bulldoze rock and ice to manufacture and store rocket fuel. The Zarya module on the ISS weighs around 20 tons I think, and it didn't have to carry the equipment and fuel to slow it down and land successfully on Mars.
> The Shuttle orbiter weighs about 100 tons fully loaded; >its engines are around 10 tons, leaving 90 tons for vehicle, payload >and trans-Mars injection fuel.
So are you saying we'd launch on the Shuttle, or on some as-yet-to-be-developed vehicle. Because if you're launching on the Shuttle, it can only haul around 30 tons of cargo into LEO, if memory serves. So now we're talking at least two flights just to get your Mars rocket fuel factory into orbit and on its way. And if you're launch on some as-yet-to-be-developed vehicle employing Shuttle-derived technology, add at least another $10 billion to the cost of t
None of the components you listed in your message do us much good for a manned Mars exploration program. Take the Shuttle engines you list as one component. Only they aren't. They're needed in the (remaining) Shuttles. We'd have to build more of them to make a Mars mission possible before the end of the next decade - many, many more of them. It would take several launches just to get the gadgets to Mars to make liquid water and oxygen and hydrogen and everything else for the astronauts to use once they finally arrived. It would take still more engines to get the astronauts and their giant spaceship into earth orbit. And more still to get their fuel and supplies for the outbound trip into orbit. The whole project would probably require boosting into orbit about as much mass as the ISS project - a project that'll end up costing us in excess of $100 billion.
And how do you get those Shuttle-derived engines back to earth after launch? Or do you just throw them away at X-million dollars a pop? That's gonna add up fast. Maybe you design and build a new Shuttle to haul stuff into orbit, so you can get your $100 million engines back. But whoops - it costs $10 billion to design and build a new Shuttle, and billions more to operate it.
As for landing on the Red Planet, we've had trouble with that ourselves recently (Mars Polar Lander), and we'd been doing it successfully since the mid-'70s. Designing and building a man-rated lander for Mars (one that cannot fail) could easily run up a billion in design costs. Then there are the cargo / habitat landers, which also cannot fail. Chuck in another billion. Plus a billion more to design and build the habitats, and another couple of billion to get them all to Mars. That's a LOT of mass to haul into earth orbit and then blast out to Mars.
In-situ propellant production may have been demonstrated in the lab here on earth, but we don't know yet if it would even work on Mars. Right now we're having trouble getting simple robot rovers to function correctly, at $400 million a pop. What you're proposing is that we drop a small chemical factory on Mars, along with an automated tractor and bulldozer to haul it icy rock for processing. It could easily cost $10 billion to design and build such a setup, plus a billion more to get it to Mars.
The heat shields would also have to be pretty heavy-duty, since unlike Apollo or the Shuttles, these Mars vehicles are going to be traveling at interplanetary velocities. Because we'll want to minimize the astronauts' exposure to lethal doses of interplanetary radiation, as well as the amount of food and water needed to sustain them (costs a fortune to haul that stuff into orbit), their spacecraft is going to have to be traveling fast, and their landers are going to have to rely on the Martian atmosphere to slow them down.
Their rovers would also need to be far more durable than the moonbuggy used by the Apollo astronauts, since most plans call for the astronauts to remain on Mars for weeks at least, if not a year or more. The Marsbuggy could itself cost in excess of a billion to design, and another billion to build.
And since these guys are going to be there longer, in the hard radiation environment of Mars, they're going to need spacesuits that are far more durable, far better shielded against radiation, and far less susceptible to damage (from abrasive or chemically-reactive dust in particular) than the Apollo or Shuttle-era suits. Again, you could be talking a billion or more just to design and develop such suits, and heaven knows how much to build them. And with all that radiation shielding they're likely to be heavy as heck, too. Add millions more just to transport them to Mars.
I haven't even touched on all the other tech needed to get the astronauts there and back again safely and quickly. Large, powerful nuclear reactors will be needed to supply them with electrical power and probably power their engines. I can't see doing this practically or reliably with chemical rockets
That about sums it up. Back when the Bush Baby's daddy was President he also proposed a Mars mission. The cost was estimated at around $400 billion, which makes sense, as the Apollo program cost us over $110 billion in today's dollars. A manned Mars mission would be far more complex and expensive. As a result, the proposal never got anywhere - Congress shrugged it off, and NASA went for the ISS, which began life as Reagan's $8 billion "Freedom" station before shrinking and mutating into the $100 billion + ISS. Which kind of makes you wonder how much the estimated $400 billion Mars mission would really end up costing . ..
Now Bush has proposed two outlandish missions - a lunar base to be followed by a manned Mars mission - but he's only proposed adding an additional $1 billion to NASA's budget. $1 billion would barely cover the cost of the research needed to formulate a plan, let alone build anything, and we're committed to the ISS until around the end of the decade. The combined cost of a moonbase and the Mars mission could easily hit $1 trillion - more if the Fed keeps printing money and/or the value of the dollar continues to crumble under the burden of our $25 trillion of Federal debt (including the shortfalls in the Social Security and Federal Pension funds). Even if NASA's entire annual budget were devoted to both projects, they'd take decades to complete. It certainly isn't going to hit any 2020 deadline, unless the "moonbase" is a LEM.
Methinks this is a bait-and-switch and a publicity stunt. Bush has made his big pie-in-the-sky moon/Mars announcement - which is totally unfunded - to provide cover for gutting NASA. Hubble just got the axe, the ISS will be immediately defunded around the end of the decade once our obligation to our foreign partners has expired, the Shuttles are being grounded and my guess is any planned unmanned probes will be scaled back or eliminated in the not to distant future. The rationale utilized will be variations on the theme that we have to, "save money for the moon/Mars missions", except of course the money saved won't amount to squat compared to the cost of either undertaking (let alone both).
With the Shuttle, ISS and the unmanned probes out of the way and a moon/Mars program underfunded by several hundred billion dollars, the way will be cleared to defund NASA almost entirely, because there's no way Congress will cough up a trillion for a manned Mars mission or a shack on the moon. Not when the government is borrowing trillions from China to make up for the empty Social Security Trust Fund in 10 years.
>Interestingly, where normal humans had needs of 100 meg, >1 gig, 100 gig storage spaces, this represents the first >leap beyond what the ordinary person could ever hope to use.
Huh? I recently ripped my entire CD collection to my hard drives, and that coupled with a bit of video and the normal range of Windoze apps and entertainment software has consumed over 300 gigs. I'd love to have a terabyte right this minute, and I'm sure I'll need one within the next year or two.
>Whoever said space travel was supposed to be safe?
Screw safe - how about cost-effective? The Shuttle was already the most expensive launch vehicle in the world on a per-pound basis BEFORE this latest disaster. Manned or unmanned. Now, it'll be even MORE outrageously overpriced.
It should be dumped immediately and replaced with Soyuz for manned launches, and an array of unmanned boosters for cargo launches. Giant-sized payloads can wait for the higher-capacity Atlas, Delta and Ariane boosters that are slated to come online over the course of the next decade. The tens of billions saved over the Shuttle's remaining "lifetime" (deathtime is probably more like it, given the vehicle's record to date) could be dedicated to constructing a viable replacement for Soyuz for manned orbital launches.
>Its design and performance was far superior to the slightly >higher clocked ST.
Huh? It was obviously a better graphics box than the ST, but that never really seemed to translate to much in the marketplace. The ST had games that were at least as good as the Amiga's (Dungeon Master being a prime example), and productivity apps like word processors and desktop publishers were equivalent at least (neither system was particularly impressive in that department, though). About the only noteworthy thing the Amiga gave to the world was the Video Toaster, which eventually made things like Babylon 5 possible.
Like I said, if you're ranking "important home computers", there's little cause to list the Amiga. It wasn't particularly unique - there were plenty of comparable Mac clones in the marketplace at the same time. It never sold particularly well - Atari was trouncing Commodore before the A500 came along, and neither company was ultimately successful in the long run. It didn't spawn any hardware, OS, software or interface innovations we're still utilizing today. I think the Amiga was a great machine for the time, like the Atari 800 was 6 years or so earlier, but as far as importance goes I don't think it could scrape into a list of the top 20 most important home computers, let alone the top 10. The Commodore Pet, Vic 20 and 64 were probably all more important to the home computer market than the Amiga was.
Which just goes to show that kewel tech can't make up for abysmal management. Or the infinite number of monkeys banging away on the clones, for that matter.
>As well as being far too frequent, the 'cherry bomb' error >messages looked as if they had been coded by a novice.
And the Amiga's "Guru Meditation Errors" were somehow better? At least the ST's offered a clean video output and halfway decent monitors. The Amiga looked like a C64 being piped through a cheap television set in comparison. Both systems suffered from awful color choices for the interface, though. Whoever chose lime green as the ST's desktop color should have been taken out and shot. (Yes, I know it was supposed to look better over a television set - fuck people who are too cheap to buy a monitor for their computer.) And the Amiga's desktop looked like it had been designed by a color blind graffiti artist. There's a reason why the Mac triumphed over not one but two technically superior, less expensive challengers in the marketplace - both challengers looked like ass.
>The Atari 400/800 reminded me of a 2600 VCS with a >keyboard. (Stick a colour card in a ][+ and you could >have been playing those games for years).
Huh? You do know the 400/800 were designed by pretty much the same guys who designed the Amiga, don't you? The 400/800 were technically comparable - if not superior - to the Commodore 64, and they entered the marketplace 3 years before the C64. The 400 & 800 came out in 1979. I don't think there were any expansion cards available for the// with the kind of graphics and sound abilities those two systems had, and if there were, they probably cost more than the 400 did in 1979. Apple didn't catch up to Atari on the graphics and sound front until the//gs came out a day late and a dollar short in the fall of 1986. By then, both the Amiga and the ST were well established in the marketplace (and cheaper!).
The 400/800 were also unique in the home computing space for the ease with which peripherals could be added. Disk drives, printers, modems and other input and output gadgets could simply be plugged in, using a single daisy-chaining connector. No terminators. Frequently no dip-switches. The guy who designed the SIO interface for the Ataris went on to help design another computer interface you might be familiar with - USB.
I posted about his original list here on/. when it was first mentioned here. By tacking on the Amiga he really hasn't fixed a thing, and he hasn't adequately addressed any of the substantial complaints made the first time around.
For starters, the Tandy Sensation doesn't belong on *anybody's* list. CD-ROM drives and "multimedia" abilities were already commonplace on the Macs by the time Tandy slapped together their Sensation. Being the first major manufacturer to do in the clone market what Apple had already been doing for quite awhile really doesn't count for much - it was obvious that's where the market was heading at the time. It's not like the Sensation was a sales . . . er, um . . . sensation that inspired other clone makers to follow in its footsteps. They all continued to do what they'd been doing for some time,and would continue to do straight through the '90s - chase the Mac. And I guarantee you could have purchased a similarly equipped PC straight out of the pages of ComputerShopper back in the day. The Trash-80 is arguably the only important machine Tandy ever released, given the sheer number of programmers and students who cut their teeth on that system, although the CoCo had its devotees too I suppose.
If he wanted to cite a revolutionary multimedia clone, he should have put the Mindset PC in his list instead. That system was well over 5 years ahead of its time when it was released in 1984.
And I don't think the Amiga belongs on his list, either. He claimed to be listing "important" PC's in "home computing", and the Amiga certainly wasn't any more important than the Atari ST, the Sinclair QL, the Acorn Archimedes or any of the other Macalike systems that came out in the mid-'80s. None of them established themselves as a standard the way the Macs and PC's did, and while much ado has been made concerning the Amiga's multimedia abilities, little of note happened to the home computing market because of them. The Amiga's video editing abilities were certainly neat, but like the Atari ST's MIDI interface, there wasn't much use for those abilities in the home. How many home PC users had a video editing setup or a bunch of MIDI keyboards?
The PC's and Macs were both able to successfully exceed the Amiga's graphics and sound abilities within just a couple of years, mostly because both the PC and Mac leveraged their formidable economies of scale to rapidly adopt more powerful 32-bit processors and more capable expansion interfaces. Custom chipsets are nice, but they're no match for the rapid adoption of faster, better CPU technology. And all of those Macalikes quickly fell behind the PCs and Macs when it came to offering faster chips and higher-resolution displays.
If you want to list an "important" home computer with multimedia capabilities, swap out the Amiga with the Atari 800. When it was released in 1979 it was far ahead of its time, and it maintained that lead really until the Macintosh came out in 1984. The C64 came close to equaling it, but no 8-bit system ever truly bested it, and in many respects as a home computer it was superior to the IBM PCs (it was certainly easier to configure and use, and sported the best game titles of the era).
And I see Compaq's stupid clone is still tops on his list. What a joke that is. Sure Compaq was the first to successfully reverse-engineer the PC, but they hardly would have been the last. Japan, Inc. would certainly have gotten around to it eventually even if nobody in America had bothered. As I said about the first article, the hardware doesn't matter all that much, anyway. It's the interface and the abilities that count. If you want to look back in history to choose an important home computer, I should think you'd want to look for the first successful machines to implement the interface and abilities commonly used today. Since we continue to utilize the same interface introduced to the home computing market by
>You were posting all over the last story about how you >don';t know anything about Squeezebox but you sure do >like cd30.
Huh? I went to the website and read everything there was to read about the Squeezebox. Please identify some factual errors I made in my analysis - then or now. About the only thing I can recall offhand from the last time this subject came up is the double-size font mode, which I'd missed in the fine print of their brochure. That might make it possible to actually read what's on the Squeezebox's display from across a reasonably-sized room, though I still think cd3o's voice guide is a better solution (neither is ideal).
The best solution would probably be a remote with a large display. Creative is making such a gadget, but it's costly ($250) and lacks many of the features both the Squeezebox and the cd3o player support (like uncompressed audio).
I'm actually surprised Apple hasn't entered this space, with some kind of wireless iPod for the home. It would even present them with a licensing option - they could sell their tech to Japan, Inc. for use in receivers and such.
I think Slim Devices has a wonderful gadget here, but the price is on the high side of outrageous. You can buy a gigantic Sony 400 *DVD* changer for $400 standard retail, and it'll even support MP3 encoded CR-R discs and Super Audio CD's. Yeah, it's nice to be able to stream audio straight from your PC, but if you want to store uncompressed or losslessly compressed audio, that's going to take a lot of storage space if you have a 400 disc collection. I've ripped pretty much every disc I own to my hard drives, mostly uncompressed, and it consumes well in excess of 250 gigabytes. Factor the cost of that kind of storage into the equation, and getting a proper Squeezebox configuration going (including a wireless router) could add up to well over $500.
I went with cd3o's $200 wireless media receiver a few months ago, and I've been pretty happy with my decision. Does most of what the Squeezebox does plus a few things that it doesn't do and costs $100 less. It's also a Linux device like the Squeezebox, although their server software isn't currently available for Linux (though others have apparently written a Linux server for it - check their support forums).
I think these gadgets are certainly the wave of the future, though I suspect we'll see their functions rolled into standard receivers / preamps at some point.
>Sorry, but I fail to see how anyone could rate >either the Apple I or the Apple Lisa as one of >the "most popular" PCs of all time.
Did you read the (fine) article? Obviously not. The author wasn't ranking the "most popular" PC's of all time, he was ranking the "most important" (although he never really gave any criteria for what determined "importance"). If he were ranking based on popularity (by which I'm assuming you mean sales), I'm guessing not a single one of those models on his list could have made the cut (apart from possibly the Commodore 64) as most of them predated the '90s, when the personal computer market was much, much smaller than it is today. Dell probably ships more of some Latitude laptop models in a single year than Apple shipped original Macs during that model's production run.
>It seems to me like what this writer did was look at >each loose "era" of personal computing . . . He then >included 3 or 4 PC's from each era on his list . ..
I don't think it's clear WHAT criteria the author used to compile his silly list, and I think that's the #1 problem with his list. Was it sales? Well, the average Dell Latitude model today probably outsells the original Mac, because the market for personal computers is so much larger today. So sales isn't the whole story.
He says he's ranking the most "important" PCs, but I don't even remember some of those systems. The "Tandy Sensation" at #8? What the hell was *that*? A 1992 release, he claims it showed other PC makers, "how multimedia should be done", but the Mindset PC had already taken a stab at that in the PC market back around 1983. The Amiga and Atari ST were certainly showing how multimedia could work on the desktop, and had both been doing so for around 7 years at that point. And of course there were the Macs, which started shipping with CD-ROM drives as standard equipment long before PC's did. I don't think the clone market looked to Tandy's system at all as some kind of standard - I think they were all chasing the Mac. As usual. And I say this as someone who has never owned a Mac, but let's be real here - whatever Apple is doing today with their hardware and interface, you can almost bet the PC will be doing in a year. Or two. Or three . ..
As for Compaq's portable being the "most important" PC ever - what a joke! It may have been the first copy of the IBM PC, but the PC would have been cloned by somebody (probably many somebodies) eventually, anyhow. It's not like nobody had heard of reverse engineering in 1983. If Compaq hadn't done it, Japan, Inc. would have. The Compaq portable is probably one of the "most important" developments in the *IBM* PC & compatible market, but from an end-user's perspective on the personal computer as a tool, it really doesn't matter anymore what brand of box you're running so long as it accomplishes the job you've set out to do. And today's personal computers pretty much all operate alike regardless of what brand is stamped on the front of the box or the chips inside. You can thank a personal computer company for that development alright, but it ain't Compaq.
The user survey accompanying the article reflects that point of view perfectly. Currently, the Mac, Apple// and Commodore 64 are ranked 1, 2 and 3, with 35%, 24% and 21% of the vote, respectively. I think that's a very sensible ranking of the options the author gave in his top-10 list. Obviously, the Wintel PC that so dominates the market today is essentially a glorified, hopped up Mac-emulator. The interface bears zero relation to the way the PC originally worked, but any Mac user from 1984 could fire up one of today's PC's and be on their way in a matter of minutes. And yes, I know Apple stole the Mac interface from Xerox, but it's not like Xerox was going to do anything with it. They developed scads of tech they weren't able to successfully commercialize. Pity, that.
As for the Apple// and the C-64, the// was the first computer to sell in significant numbers, proving there was some kind of market for these costly devices, while the C-64 proved there was truly a mass-market for the personal computer - including in the home - and that entertainment applications (particularly videogames) were just as appealing on PCs as they were on dedicated consoles. The C-64 also introduced a useable PC to tens of millions of people who would have never had the opportunity to lay their hands on a pricey Apple or IBM system. I think the C-64 was a very weak sister to Atari's 8-bit computers, which were far better designed and built, but it certainly won the price and marketshare battle. You can bet a lot of folks learned something from that lesson - dominate the market first or potentially not at all
>or $249 for the Sound Blaster Wireless Music which >is a similar "wireless DAC," but the display is on >the remote.
I like the display on the remote idea, but it looks like the Creative gadget only supports.mp3 and.wma. I've already ripped my entire collection as.wav files, and have no intention of compressing them (for home use, anyhow).
You also have to wonder how much power a remote like that takes, since I'm assuming it's both a transmitter and a receiver with a fairly large display. Must chew through the old batteries. Not much of a problem with good rechargeables, but you might have to cycle them pretty often. And while it's nice to have the display up close, it would have to be pretty high-res to display much information, as it's kinda small.
Also, it looks like Creative forces you to use their software to control playlists and the like. I don't think it supports standard Winamp playlists and the like, as many other media receivers do.
It's not worth the $150 premium over the cd3o, even if you can live with the fact it only supports compressed audio.
>Why bother spending the money on this box when you >could take an old laptop, a WiFi network card, some >audio and video cables and a cordless keyboard and >mouse and get even more functionaltiy by hooking the >laptop into your entertainment center?
I thought about taking this route myself a few months ago, before finally breaking down and purchasing a cd3o player. There are plenty of reasons why laptops and small PCs don't make a lot of sense as media players:
1) Interface. This is really a two-parter:
a) How are you going to get commands to the device, and b) How is the device going to acknowledge the results of those commands
Getting commands to the device is fairly simple with a keyboard, but how are you going to see what the results of those keyboard commands are from across the room? You could plug the PC into a large display, but most of those make a nasty whining noise, and anyhow, who wants to have to leave the tee vee on just to listen to music? Laptops with displays large enough to be visible from across the room are still on the spendy side for the most part, and their look hardly blends into most living rooms. For that matter, most wireless keyboards would also stick out like a sore thumb.
There are dedicated wireless media remotes designed for PC's, but they tend to be somewhat expensive, and limited in what software they'll work with off the shelf. They're fine if you want to use Media Player as your jukebox software (gag), not so fine if you want to use other programs. Yeah, you can customize them in most cases, but that's a lot of effort to go thru for something so basic. And, there goes about $50.
2) Storage. Unless you have a laptop or small form factor PC with a gigantic hard drive inside of it, or can live with the idea of ripping your ENTIRE LIBRARY to lossy-compressed.mp3, you're going to need a lot of storage space to hold a decent-sized CD collection. Uncompressed, my collection currently consumes 200+ gigabytes. Yeah, I could have saved scads of space by storing them compressed, but:
a) Editing all the metadata that goes along with a huge library is a significant undertaking - one I never want to repeat, thank you very much and b) I would have opted for the least compression possible, which is fine for home use, but would suck for portable use, meaning I'd have to recompress files for portable devices, and suffer additional quality loss as a result. Ick.
So I'm either going to need to hook a giant external hard drive up to the laptop (here's hoping that old laptop has USB2 or Firewire connections), or I'm going to need to network it into my main PC and use it as an audio server. So what exactly am I gaining by using the laptop over a cd3o, Audiotron or Slim Devices gadget, other than (possibly!) saving a couple of bucks? And will I really even save any money? Read on . .. 3) Audio Quality. In a word, the D/A converters and amps in most laptops SUCK. They typically transmit more than a bit of electronic noise from inside the laptop as well. Not an option for quality audio. And I've had laptops that sent a nasty popping sound to the speakers when the power cycled. Don't want that frying my stereo. You could always add on a halfway decent external sound option from Creative, but there goes another USB connection and at least another $50.
4) Mechanical Noise. Laptops are quieter than most desktops, but they still aren't silent. When I'm listening to music, I do not want to hear hard drives clicking and whining or the whirr of a fan. These dedicated media receivers are all perfectly silent - a huge advantage.
5) OS License. This isn't such a problem if you happen to have a laptop sitting around, but if you're trying to assemble a small form factor PC from scratch and want to use Windows, kiss another $100 goodbye. Yeah, you can use Linux, but there's less support for formats like Windows
>Actually, the SlimServer does support ID3 tags in WAV >files and has for a while.
Interesting. I went to their website today and couldn't find any information regarding support for.wav tags. Which.wav tag format does it support? There isn't any standard (Micro$loth apparently didn't think to include any metadata like that in the original.wav specification).
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>The US has approximately a 5:1 ratio of jobs shipped into
>the US by foreign companies vs. jobs shipped out of the US
>by US companies.
Source, please. And how exactly are these jobs being shipped "into" the US? Or are these in fact employees of foreign companies that are selling goods and services in the American market?
It's true that a pyramid is a simple way to build tall structures that don't topple, but archeologists have recently uncovered traces of cocaine in Egyptian mummies. The coca plant only grows in the Americas. So it looks as though there was some form of trade between the ancient Egyptians and ancient American cultures. Perhaps the idea for a pyramid was traded between them as well.
In South America there's evidence that a great civilization once existed there thousands of years ago - far greater in scope than any other pre-Columbian civilization, such as the Mayans. There are the remains of a canal network that covers thousands of square miles. It's entirely possible that the Atlantis myth has a basis in reality, and that this pre-Columbian American civilization could form a part of that basis.
Personally, I suspect that the Atlantis myth is probably a combination of several "collapse events", perhaps covering a string of early civilization failures in the distant past due to climactic changes, global flooding following the last ice age, dramatic volcanic eruptions, and so forth. Those events could have been separated by hundreds or even thousands of years, slowly blending into a single story.
It's curious that Plato identifies the Atlantis story as having come from Egypt though, since we now know the Egyptians had some form of trade with the Americas and that it had collapsed well before Plato's time. It's also somewhat eerie to realize that perhaps the greatest civilization(s) of antiquity vanished without a trace, possibly due to a global warming episode that flooded productive, heavily populated coastal areas around the globe. A majority of today's global population is also parked within a few miles of the coasts, and much of the globe's most productive farmland sits near the current sea level. That certainly doesn't bode well for our civilization, given the warming climate and increasing glacier melt we're experiencing.
Best!
Rant!
Evah!!!
Sad but probably true. If I recall correctly, EA expressed some interest in reviving M*U*L*E in the '90s, but wanted to add weapons to the game. She wisely refused their offer.
Pinheads.
Can't wait for M*U*L*E - The Movie.
Now if only EA would release the damn game for a modern platform . . .
what happens when a kid from hicktown, USA, has a Dialup 486 running windows 3.11 with a 500mb 5400rpm HD? is he supposed to invest in a new PC and a network around his house just so his XBOX2 will work?
Well for starters, videogame consoles clearly don't require a hard drive, as Sony's offerings demonstrate. So I'd imagine any Xbox 2 will function perfectly well with or without mass storage as a standalone video game player, using its DVD drive or whatever to read game discs. No hard drive required. Indeed, most existing Xbox games don't seem to be taking advantage of the hard drive in the Xbox at the moment. With drives getting faster - and with RAM prices falling - there's little incentive to continue offering hard drives in next-generation consoles. And folks with crappy computers won't see much benefit to networking their new Xbox 2 to their Commodore 64-esque antique PC. But the reality is, the average home PC is way, way beyond the strawman you cited. Even the cheapest PC's shipping today from the major vendors are coming with 40GB drives and 512MB of RAM - more than enough to store entire compressed music libraries and several compressed movies. And many users aren't even coming close to utilizing all that space. By the time the Xbox 2 ships, the average hard drive in a budget PC will exceed 120GB in size. And if folks who want to network their Xbox 2 into their home PC find that their PC is inadequate to the task, so much the better as far as Microsoft is concerned. They'll just run out and buy a newer PC, and Microsoft will make that much more money.
I don't think for one second Microsoft is aiming to become king of the videogame business. I think videogames are merely a means to an end, and if they happen to make some bucks off of them along the way, all the better.
Up until now, all console manufacturers have made their money off of the games. That's been their MO. Sell the consoles for a loss, and make it up on overpriced software. But for Microsoft to enter this space just doesn't make a lot of sense, at least not if all they're trying to do is become a gaming giant. They aren't a hardware company like Sony, and they don't have a huge library of game franchises to draw upon, like Nintendo. Even if they should somehow grow to dominate the videogame space, it would still represent only a fraction of their total business. And nobody has dominated the business for more than a few years - the history of boom bust cycles in the gaming business is daunting to say the least. New hardware technology evolves, a competitor jumps on it first, markets their product well, and it's all over for your console (at least for 3-5 years or so, until you can catch the next development cycle). I don't think Microsoft is out to dominate a business as cyclical and as hardware-oriented as the standalone console business at all, and I don't think the any Xbox 2 will be produced solely to dominate the videogame market as we've come to know it. Microsoft wants to lock people into a platform. You can't do that with a standalone console, not for more than a few years anyhow.
I don't think the existing Xbox was produced to dominate the videogame market. It costs way too much to produce for starters, and that hard drive is only marginally useful at best. I think the Xbox was just a beta test platform - something Microsoft could release as an open experiment yet make a little money off of, establishing themselves in the consumer electronics space at the same time while getting programmers familiar with writing for their platform. It's a trial run at what they're really after.
I think Microsoft wants to extend the Windows monopoly into the consumer electronics space, including the videogame console market, and the Xbox 2 will be their next attempt at it. Making these devices standalone videogame units that just run a version of Windows to play games isn't the goal, it was just the first step on the journey with the existing Xbox. What Microsoft really wants to do is t
You will instead rip MP3s or WMAs onto your Windows PC and then share the folders over your wired or wireless LAN. Your X-Box will access your music files over the network.
Yup. I think that's going to be Microsoft's strategy as well. Use the PC as a central file server (for audio, video, even games rented over the Internet) and use various devices scattered throughout the home - like the new Xbox - to access those files. It's probably the best way for Microsoft to exploit its PC monopoly in the consumer electronics marketplace, as it dramatically lowers the cost of those devices (no need to include expensive mass storage gadgets in all of them) while tying consumers to the PC and Windows.
I mean, why waste $50 or whatever slapping a hard drive into the Xbox 2 when you can just access the unused space on the home PC's hard drive instead? Especially since users may want to have access to many of those files (like the audio stuff) in both locations.
>A launch window to Mars comes every two years.
>The unmanned portions will probably cost many
>billions of dollars on their own. If you loose
>them, not only will you have to wait two years
>to try again, but you've also lost 10 billion
>dollars.
That's correct. And it brings up another problem you'd have to plan for - what if you've built the manned portion of your program, have it gassed up and ready to go, and then find out your fuel factory on Mars just exploded? Is it going to be OK to leave your manned Mars rocket sitting around in Florida (or in orbit) for two years until your launch window opens up again? Or make that 4 years, since you'll need to send out another gas station first.
We all remember what happened to Galileo while it sat around for a few years after the Challenger explosion - some lubricant apparently leaked out of the mechanism that unfurled its high-gain antenna, crippling its ability to communicate with earth. A manned Mars probe is going to be vastly more complex than Galileo. Are you going to design and build it so it can properly withstand up to 4 years in storage, either here on Earth or in orbit? Or if something goes wrong with your gas station are you simply going to dispose of it and build another one? Either way, properly preparing for this contingency could add a billion or more to the cost of the mission . . . and NOT preparing for it could prove even more costly should something actually malfunction on the Mars end.
>You might be able to take enough raw materials, but
>where does that leave the instruments you need to do
>good science?
And how much would those instruments cost? After all, anything electronic you send to Mars is going to have to be as radiation-hardened as it gets. Marsies talk about a solar "storm cellar" to protect the astronauts in the case of flare or cosmic ray activity, but what about the electronics? The Japanese just lost a Mars probe thanks in part to solar flares. If you aren't going to properly shield the entire vehicle, you're going to at least have to shield the electronics and use radiation-hardened circuits. That's going to up the cost of the electronics aboard this mission considerably compared to the Shuttle and the ISS, neither of which has to deal with that kind of space radiation environment.
This whole misadventure has boondoggle written all over it. There are enough hidden costs and gotchas to make a used car dealer's head spin.
>On top of that, you have not done your homework.
/
>On anything. Your post is so ignorant, you ought to
>do something really drastic to expiate your shame.
>I would suggest learning to study, and not posting
>on any subject that you have not studied.
Insulting people is ALWAYS a good way to show how smart you are.
>>None of the components you listed in your message do
>>us much good for a manned Mars exploration program.
>>Take the Shuttle engines you list as one component.
>>Only they aren't. They're needed in the (remaining) Shuttles.
>>We'd have to build more of them to make a Mars mission
>>possible before the end of the next decade - many, many
>>more of them.
>
>Let's see, 1 launch window every 2 years, 2 vehicles per launch
>window, 4 engines per vehicle = 4 engines per year. Manufacture
>of High Pressure Fuel Turbopumps: "Production rate > 1 unit
>month since first flight in July 2001 (STS-104)[1]. At the rate
>of 1 unit per month, you could have enough engines to fly a Shuttle
>every month and replace engines every 5 flights, send 4 vehicles to
>Mars every launch window instead of 2, and have about 3 brand-
>spanking new engines left over.
That's nice. But that doesn't address my point. I didn't say it couldn't be done. I said it would take a lot of engines, unless you plan on somehow diverting the remaining Shuttles from their ISS missions to a Mars mission, or you plan to continue flying them long after they're scheduled to be decommissioned.
Or unless you plan on using those Shuttle engines in some other launcher. Which is probably a good idea - the Shuttle engines are arguably the best part of the Shuttle program - but the R&D on a new launcher large enough to hoist those Mars payloads into orbit / off to Mars could eat up $10 billion or more. Much more if you want to build something that can haul those Shuttle engines back to earth so they can be recycled. Otherwise, you have to eat the cost of 4 Shuttle engines with every launch. How many flights will this adventure take?
>>It would take several launches just to get the gadgets to Mars to
>>make liquid water and oxygen and hydrogen and everything else
>>for the astronauts to use once they finally arrived.
>
>It would take one launch, carrying about 50 tons on a trans-Mars
>orbit.[2]
Wait a minute. You're telling us that this Martian contraption to manufacture hydrogen and oxygen and liquid water and everything else the astronauts are gonna need once they get to Mars is only gonna weigh 50 tons? An Apollo spacecraft at departure from earth orbit only weighed about 45 tons, and most of that weight was fuel. The LEM and capsule were tiny and fairly lightweight in comparison. It took a giant Saturn V to haul Apollo into orbit. Now you're saying that a rocket fuel / oxygen factory / storage facility and a bulldozer for Mars are only going to weigh 50 tons. I don't buy it. The Viking probe weighed 4 tons, not including fuel, and it didn't bulldoze rock and ice to manufacture and store rocket fuel. The Zarya module on the ISS weighs around 20 tons I think, and it didn't have to carry the equipment and fuel to slow it down and land successfully on Mars.
> The Shuttle orbiter weighs about 100 tons fully loaded;
>its engines are around 10 tons, leaving 90 tons for vehicle, payload
>and trans-Mars injection fuel.
So are you saying we'd launch on the Shuttle, or on some as-yet-to-be-developed vehicle. Because if you're launching on the Shuttle, it can only haul around 30 tons of cargo into LEO, if memory serves. So now we're talking at least two flights just to get your Mars rocket fuel factory into orbit and on its way. And if you're launch on some as-yet-to-be-developed vehicle employing Shuttle-derived technology, add at least another $10 billion to the cost of t
None of the components you listed in your message do us much good for a manned Mars exploration program. Take the Shuttle engines you list as one component. Only they aren't. They're needed in the (remaining) Shuttles. We'd have to build more of them to make a Mars mission possible before the end of the next decade - many, many more of them. It would take several launches just to get the gadgets to Mars to make liquid water and oxygen and hydrogen and everything else for the astronauts to use once they finally arrived. It would take still more engines to get the astronauts and their giant spaceship into earth orbit. And more still to get their fuel and supplies for the outbound trip into orbit. The whole project would probably require boosting into orbit about as much mass as the ISS project - a project that'll end up costing us in excess of $100 billion.
And how do you get those Shuttle-derived engines back to earth after launch? Or do you just throw them away at X-million dollars a pop? That's gonna add up fast. Maybe you design and build a new Shuttle to haul stuff into orbit, so you can get your $100 million engines back. But whoops - it costs $10 billion to design and build a new Shuttle, and billions more to operate it.
As for landing on the Red Planet, we've had trouble with that ourselves recently (Mars Polar Lander), and we'd been doing it successfully since the mid-'70s. Designing and building a man-rated lander for Mars (one that cannot fail) could easily run up a billion in design costs. Then there are the cargo / habitat landers, which also cannot fail. Chuck in another billion. Plus a billion more to design and build the habitats, and another couple of billion to get them all to Mars. That's a LOT of mass to haul into earth orbit and then blast out to Mars.
In-situ propellant production may have been demonstrated in the lab here on earth, but we don't know yet if it would even work on Mars. Right now we're having trouble getting simple robot rovers to function correctly, at $400 million a pop. What you're proposing is that we drop a small chemical factory on Mars, along with an automated tractor and bulldozer to haul it icy rock for processing. It could easily cost $10 billion to design and build such a setup, plus a billion more to get it to Mars.
The heat shields would also have to be pretty heavy-duty, since unlike Apollo or the Shuttles, these Mars vehicles are going to be traveling at interplanetary velocities. Because we'll want to minimize the astronauts' exposure to lethal doses of interplanetary radiation, as well as the amount of food and water needed to sustain them (costs a fortune to haul that stuff into orbit), their spacecraft is going to have to be traveling fast, and their landers are going to have to rely on the Martian atmosphere to slow them down.
Their rovers would also need to be far more durable than the moonbuggy used by the Apollo astronauts, since most plans call for the astronauts to remain on Mars for weeks at least, if not a year or more. The Marsbuggy could itself cost in excess of a billion to design, and another billion to build.
And since these guys are going to be there longer, in the hard radiation environment of Mars, they're going to need spacesuits that are far more durable, far better shielded against radiation, and far less susceptible to damage (from abrasive or chemically-reactive dust in particular) than the Apollo or Shuttle-era suits. Again, you could be talking a billion or more just to design and develop such suits, and heaven knows how much to build them. And with all that radiation shielding they're likely to be heavy as heck, too. Add millions more just to transport them to Mars.
I haven't even touched on all the other tech needed to get the astronauts there and back again safely and quickly. Large, powerful nuclear reactors will be needed to supply them with electrical power and probably power their engines. I can't see doing this practically or reliably with chemical rockets
In Soviet Russia, Mars rocks probe you!
That about sums it up. Back when the Bush Baby's daddy was President he also proposed a Mars mission. The cost was estimated at around $400 billion, which makes sense, as the Apollo program cost us over $110 billion in today's dollars. A manned Mars mission would be far more complex and expensive. As a result, the proposal never got anywhere - Congress shrugged it off, and NASA went for the ISS, which began life as Reagan's $8 billion "Freedom" station before shrinking and mutating into the $100 billion + ISS. Which kind of makes you wonder how much the estimated $400 billion Mars mission would really end up costing . . .
Now Bush has proposed two outlandish missions - a lunar base to be followed by a manned Mars mission - but he's only proposed adding an additional $1 billion to NASA's budget. $1 billion would barely cover the cost of the research needed to formulate a plan, let alone build anything, and we're committed to the ISS until around the end of the decade. The combined cost of a moonbase and the Mars mission could easily hit $1 trillion - more if the Fed keeps printing money and/or the value of the dollar continues to crumble under the burden of our $25 trillion of Federal debt (including the shortfalls in the Social Security and Federal Pension funds). Even if NASA's entire annual budget were devoted to both projects, they'd take decades to complete. It certainly isn't going to hit any 2020 deadline, unless the "moonbase" is a LEM.
Methinks this is a bait-and-switch and a publicity stunt. Bush has made his big pie-in-the-sky moon/Mars announcement - which is totally unfunded - to provide cover for gutting NASA. Hubble just got the axe, the ISS will be immediately defunded around the end of the decade once our obligation to our foreign partners has expired, the Shuttles are being grounded and my guess is any planned unmanned probes will be scaled back or eliminated in the not to distant future. The rationale utilized will be variations on the theme that we have to, "save money for the moon/Mars missions", except of course the money saved won't amount to squat compared to the cost of either undertaking (let alone both).
With the Shuttle, ISS and the unmanned probes out of the way and a moon/Mars program underfunded by several hundred billion dollars, the way will be cleared to defund NASA almost entirely, because there's no way Congress will cough up a trillion for a manned Mars mission or a shack on the moon. Not when the government is borrowing trillions from China to make up for the empty Social Security Trust Fund in 10 years.
>Interestingly, where normal humans had needs of 100 meg,
>1 gig, 100 gig storage spaces, this represents the first
>leap beyond what the ordinary person could ever hope to use.
Huh? I recently ripped my entire CD collection to my hard drives, and that coupled with a bit of video and the normal range of Windoze apps and entertainment software has consumed over 300 gigs. I'd love to have a terabyte right this minute, and I'm sure I'll need one within the next year or two.
Yes. And your point?
>Whoever said space travel was supposed to be safe?
Screw safe - how about cost-effective? The Shuttle was already the most expensive launch vehicle in the world on a per-pound basis BEFORE this latest disaster. Manned or unmanned. Now, it'll be even MORE outrageously overpriced.
It should be dumped immediately and replaced with Soyuz for manned launches, and an array of unmanned boosters for cargo launches. Giant-sized payloads can wait for the higher-capacity Atlas, Delta and Ariane boosters that are slated to come online over the course of the next decade. The tens of billions saved over the Shuttle's remaining "lifetime" (deathtime is probably more like it, given the vehicle's record to date) could be dedicated to constructing a viable replacement for Soyuz for manned orbital launches.
>Its design and performance was far superior to the slightly
// with the kind of graphics and sound abilities those two systems had, and if there were, they probably cost more than the 400 did in 1979. Apple didn't catch up to Atari on the graphics and sound front until the //gs came out a day late and a dollar short in the fall of 1986. By then, both the Amiga and the ST were well established in the marketplace (and cheaper!).
>higher clocked ST.
Huh? It was obviously a better graphics box than the ST, but that never really seemed to translate to much in the marketplace. The ST had games that were at least as good as the Amiga's (Dungeon Master being a prime example), and productivity apps like word processors and desktop publishers were equivalent at least (neither system was particularly impressive in that department, though). About the only noteworthy thing the Amiga gave to the world was the Video Toaster, which eventually made things like Babylon 5 possible.
Like I said, if you're ranking "important home computers", there's little cause to list the Amiga. It wasn't particularly unique - there were plenty of comparable Mac clones in the marketplace at the same time. It never sold particularly well - Atari was trouncing Commodore before the A500 came along, and neither company was ultimately successful in the long run. It didn't spawn any hardware, OS, software or interface innovations we're still utilizing today. I think the Amiga was a great machine for the time, like the Atari 800 was 6 years or so earlier, but as far as importance goes I don't think it could scrape into a list of the top 20 most important home computers, let alone the top 10. The Commodore Pet, Vic 20 and 64 were probably all more important to the home computer market than the Amiga was.
Which just goes to show that kewel tech can't make up for abysmal management. Or the infinite number of monkeys banging away on the clones, for that matter.
>As well as being far too frequent, the 'cherry bomb' error
>messages looked as if they had been coded by a novice.
And the Amiga's "Guru Meditation Errors" were somehow better? At least the ST's offered a clean video output and halfway decent monitors. The Amiga looked like a C64 being piped through a cheap television set in comparison. Both systems suffered from awful color choices for the interface, though. Whoever chose lime green as the ST's desktop color should have been taken out and shot. (Yes, I know it was supposed to look better over a television set - fuck people who are too cheap to buy a monitor for their computer.) And the Amiga's desktop looked like it had been designed by a color blind graffiti artist. There's a reason why the Mac triumphed over not one but two technically superior, less expensive challengers in the marketplace - both challengers looked like ass.
>The Atari 400/800 reminded me of a 2600 VCS with a
>keyboard. (Stick a colour card in a ][+ and you could
>have been playing those games for years).
Huh? You do know the 400/800 were designed by pretty much the same guys who designed the Amiga, don't you? The 400/800 were technically comparable - if not superior - to the Commodore 64, and they entered the marketplace 3 years before the C64. The 400 & 800 came out in 1979. I don't think there were any expansion cards available for the
The 400/800 were also unique in the home computing space for the ease with which peripherals could be added. Disk drives, printers, modems and other input and output gadgets could simply be plugged in, using a single daisy-chaining connector. No terminators. Frequently no dip-switches. The guy who designed the SIO interface for the Ataris went on to help design another computer interface you might be familiar with - USB.
I posted about his original list here on /. when it was first mentioned here. By tacking on the Amiga he really hasn't fixed a thing, and he hasn't adequately addressed any of the substantial complaints made the first time around.
For starters, the Tandy Sensation doesn't belong on *anybody's* list. CD-ROM drives and "multimedia" abilities were already commonplace on the Macs by the time Tandy slapped together their Sensation. Being the first major manufacturer to do in the clone market what Apple had already been doing for quite awhile really doesn't count for much - it was obvious that's where the market was heading at the time. It's not like the Sensation was a sales . . . er, um . . . sensation that inspired other clone makers to follow in its footsteps. They all continued to do what they'd been doing for some time,and would continue to do straight through the '90s - chase the Mac. And I guarantee you could have purchased a similarly equipped PC straight out of the pages of ComputerShopper back in the day. The Trash-80 is arguably the only important machine Tandy ever released, given the sheer number of programmers and students who cut their teeth on that system, although the CoCo had its devotees too I suppose.
If he wanted to cite a revolutionary multimedia clone, he should have put the Mindset PC in his list instead. That system was well over 5 years ahead of its time when it was released in 1984.
And I don't think the Amiga belongs on his list, either. He claimed to be listing "important" PC's in "home computing", and the Amiga certainly wasn't any more important than the Atari ST, the Sinclair QL, the Acorn Archimedes or any of the other Macalike systems that came out in the mid-'80s. None of them established themselves as a standard the way the Macs and PC's did, and while much ado has been made concerning the Amiga's multimedia abilities, little of note happened to the home computing market because of them. The Amiga's video editing abilities were certainly neat, but like the Atari ST's MIDI interface, there wasn't much use for those abilities in the home. How many home PC users had a video editing setup or a bunch of MIDI keyboards?
The PC's and Macs were both able to successfully exceed the Amiga's graphics and sound abilities within just a couple of years, mostly because both the PC and Mac leveraged their formidable economies of scale to rapidly adopt more powerful 32-bit processors and more capable expansion interfaces. Custom chipsets are nice, but they're no match for the rapid adoption of faster, better CPU technology. And all of those Macalikes quickly fell behind the PCs and Macs when it came to offering faster chips and higher-resolution displays.
If you want to list an "important" home computer with multimedia capabilities, swap out the Amiga with the Atari 800. When it was released in 1979 it was far ahead of its time, and it maintained that lead really until the Macintosh came out in 1984. The C64 came close to equaling it, but no 8-bit system ever truly bested it, and in many respects as a home computer it was superior to the IBM PCs (it was certainly easier to configure and use, and sported the best game titles of the era).
And I see Compaq's stupid clone is still tops on his list. What a joke that is. Sure Compaq was the first to successfully reverse-engineer the PC, but they hardly would have been the last. Japan, Inc. would certainly have gotten around to it eventually even if nobody in America had bothered. As I said about the first article, the hardware doesn't matter all that much, anyway. It's the interface and the abilities that count. If you want to look back in history to choose an important home computer, I should think you'd want to look for the first successful machines to implement the interface and abilities commonly used today. Since we continue to utilize the same interface introduced to the home computing market by
>You were posting all over the last story about how you
>don';t know anything about Squeezebox but you sure do
>like cd30.
Huh? I went to the website and read everything there was to read about the Squeezebox. Please identify some factual errors I made in my analysis - then or now. About the only thing I can recall offhand from the last time this subject came up is the double-size font mode, which I'd missed in the fine print of their brochure. That might make it possible to actually read what's on the Squeezebox's display from across a reasonably-sized room, though I still think cd3o's voice guide is a better solution (neither is ideal).
The best solution would probably be a remote with a large display. Creative is making such a gadget, but it's costly ($250) and lacks many of the features both the Squeezebox and the cd3o player support (like uncompressed audio).
I'm actually surprised Apple hasn't entered this space, with some kind of wireless iPod for the home. It would even present them with a licensing option - they could sell their tech to Japan, Inc. for use in receivers and such.
I think Slim Devices has a wonderful gadget here, but the price is on the high side of outrageous. You can buy a gigantic Sony 400 *DVD* changer for $400 standard retail, and it'll even support MP3 encoded CR-R discs and Super Audio CD's. Yeah, it's nice to be able to stream audio straight from your PC, but if you want to store uncompressed or losslessly compressed audio, that's going to take a lot of storage space if you have a 400 disc collection. I've ripped pretty much every disc I own to my hard drives, mostly uncompressed, and it consumes well in excess of 250 gigabytes. Factor the cost of that kind of storage into the equation, and getting a proper Squeezebox configuration going (including a wireless router) could add up to well over $500.
I went with cd3o's $200 wireless media receiver a few months ago, and I've been pretty happy with my decision. Does most of what the Squeezebox does plus a few things that it doesn't do and costs $100 less. It's also a Linux device like the Squeezebox, although their server software isn't currently available for Linux (though others have apparently written a Linux server for it - check their support forums).
I think these gadgets are certainly the wave of the future, though I suspect we'll see their functions rolled into standard receivers / preamps at some point.
>Sorry, but I fail to see how anyone could rate
>either the Apple I or the Apple Lisa as one of
>the "most popular" PCs of all time.
Did you read the (fine) article? Obviously not. The author wasn't ranking the "most popular" PC's of all time, he was ranking the "most important" (although he never really gave any criteria for what determined "importance"). If he were ranking based on popularity (by which I'm assuming you mean sales), I'm guessing not a single one of those models on his list could have made the cut (apart from possibly the Commodore 64) as most of them predated the '90s, when the personal computer market was much, much smaller than it is today. Dell probably ships more of some Latitude laptop models in a single year than Apple shipped original Macs during that model's production run.
>It seems to me like what this writer did was look at .
.
// and Commodore 64 are ranked 1, 2 and 3, with 35%, 24% and 21% of the vote, respectively. I think that's a very sensible ranking of the options the author gave in his top-10 list. Obviously, the Wintel PC that so dominates the market today is essentially a glorified, hopped up Mac-emulator. The interface bears zero relation to the way the PC originally worked, but any Mac user from 1984 could fire up one of today's PC's and be on their way in a matter of minutes. And yes, I know Apple stole the Mac interface from Xerox, but it's not like Xerox was going to do anything with it. They developed scads of tech they weren't able to successfully commercialize. Pity, that.
// and the C-64, the // was the first computer to sell in significant numbers, proving there was some kind of market for these costly devices, while the C-64 proved there was truly a mass-market for the personal computer - including in the home - and that entertainment applications (particularly videogames) were just as appealing on PCs as they were on dedicated consoles. The C-64 also introduced a useable PC to tens of millions of people who would have never had the opportunity to lay their hands on a pricey Apple or IBM system. I think the C-64 was a very weak sister to Atari's 8-bit computers, which were far better designed and built, but it certainly won the price and marketshare battle. You can bet a lot of folks learned something from that lesson - dominate the market first or potentially not at all
>each loose "era" of personal computing . . . He then
>included 3 or 4 PC's from each era on his list . .
I don't think it's clear WHAT criteria the author used to compile his silly list, and I think that's the #1 problem with his list. Was it sales? Well, the average Dell Latitude model today probably outsells the original Mac, because the market for personal computers is so much larger today. So sales isn't the whole story.
He says he's ranking the most "important" PCs, but I don't even remember some of those systems. The "Tandy Sensation" at #8? What the hell was *that*? A 1992 release, he claims it showed other PC makers, "how multimedia should be done", but the Mindset PC had already taken a stab at that in the PC market back around 1983. The Amiga and Atari ST were certainly showing how multimedia could work on the desktop, and had both been doing so for around 7 years at that point. And of course there were the Macs, which started shipping with CD-ROM drives as standard equipment long before PC's did. I don't think the clone market looked to Tandy's system at all as some kind of standard - I think they were all chasing the Mac. As usual. And I say this as someone who has never owned a Mac, but let's be real here - whatever Apple is doing today with their hardware and interface, you can almost bet the PC will be doing in a year. Or two. Or three . .
As for Compaq's portable being the "most important" PC ever - what a joke! It may have been the first copy of the IBM PC, but the PC would have been cloned by somebody (probably many somebodies) eventually, anyhow. It's not like nobody had heard of reverse engineering in 1983. If Compaq hadn't done it, Japan, Inc. would have. The Compaq portable is probably one of the "most important" developments in the *IBM* PC & compatible market, but from an end-user's perspective on the personal computer as a tool, it really doesn't matter anymore what brand of box you're running so long as it accomplishes the job you've set out to do. And today's personal computers pretty much all operate alike regardless of what brand is stamped on the front of the box or the chips inside. You can thank a personal computer company for that development alright, but it ain't Compaq.
The user survey accompanying the article reflects that point of view perfectly. Currently, the Mac, Apple
As for the Apple
>or $249 for the Sound Blaster Wireless Music which
.mp3 and .wma. I've already ripped my entire collection as .wav files, and have no intention of compressing them (for home use, anyhow).
>is a similar "wireless DAC," but the display is on
>the remote.
I like the display on the remote idea, but it looks like the Creative gadget only supports
You also have to wonder how much power a remote like that takes, since I'm assuming it's both a transmitter and a receiver with a fairly large display. Must chew through the old batteries. Not much of a problem with good rechargeables, but you might have to cycle them pretty often. And while it's nice to have the display up close, it would have to be pretty high-res to display much information, as it's kinda small.
Also, it looks like Creative forces you to use their software to control playlists and the like. I don't think it supports standard Winamp playlists and the like, as many other media receivers do.
It's not worth the $150 premium over the cd3o, even if you can live with the fact it only supports compressed audio.
>Why bother spending the money on this box when you
.mp3, you're going to need a lot of storage space to hold a decent-sized CD collection. Uncompressed, my collection currently consumes 200+ gigabytes. Yeah, I could have saved scads of space by storing them compressed, but:
.
>could take an old laptop, a WiFi network card, some
>audio and video cables and a cordless keyboard and
>mouse and get even more functionaltiy by hooking the
>laptop into your entertainment center?
I thought about taking this route myself a few months ago, before finally breaking down and purchasing a cd3o player. There are plenty of reasons why laptops and small PCs don't make a lot of sense as media players:
1) Interface. This is really a two-parter:
a) How are you going to get commands to the device, and
b) How is the device going to acknowledge the results of those commands
Getting commands to the device is fairly simple with a keyboard, but how are you going to see what the results of those keyboard commands are from across the room? You could plug the PC into a large display, but most of those make a nasty whining noise, and anyhow, who wants to have to leave the tee vee on just to listen to music? Laptops with displays large enough to be visible from across the room are still on the spendy side for the most part, and their look hardly blends into most living rooms. For that matter, most wireless keyboards would also stick out like a sore thumb.
There are dedicated wireless media remotes designed for PC's, but they tend to be somewhat expensive, and limited in what software they'll work with off the shelf. They're fine if you want to use Media Player as your jukebox software (gag), not so fine if you want to use other programs. Yeah, you can customize them in most cases, but that's a lot of effort to go thru for something so basic. And, there goes about $50.
2) Storage. Unless you have a laptop or small form factor PC with a gigantic hard drive inside of it, or can live with the idea of ripping your ENTIRE LIBRARY to lossy-compressed
a) Editing all the metadata that goes along with a huge library is a significant undertaking - one I never want to repeat, thank you very much and
b) I would have opted for the least compression possible, which is fine for home use, but would suck for portable use, meaning I'd have to recompress files for portable devices, and suffer additional quality loss as a result. Ick.
So I'm either going to need to hook a giant external hard drive up to the laptop (here's hoping that old laptop has USB2 or Firewire connections), or I'm going to need to network it into my main PC and use it as an audio server. So what exactly am I gaining by using the laptop over a cd3o, Audiotron or Slim Devices gadget, other than (possibly!) saving a couple of bucks? And will I really even save any money? Read on . .
3) Audio Quality. In a word, the D/A converters and amps in most laptops SUCK. They typically transmit more than a bit of electronic noise from inside the laptop as well. Not an option for quality audio. And I've had laptops that sent a nasty popping sound to the speakers when the power cycled. Don't want that frying my stereo. You could always add on a halfway decent external sound option from Creative, but there goes another USB connection and at least another $50.
4) Mechanical Noise. Laptops are quieter than most desktops, but they still aren't silent. When I'm listening to music, I do not want to hear hard drives clicking and whining or the whirr of a fan. These dedicated media receivers are all perfectly silent - a huge advantage.
5) OS License. This isn't such a problem if you happen to have a laptop sitting around, but if you're trying to assemble a small form factor PC from scratch and want to use Windows, kiss another $100 goodbye. Yeah, you can use Linux, but there's less support for formats like Windows
>Actually, the SlimServer does support ID3 tags in WAV
.wav tags. Which .wav tag format does it support? There isn't any standard (Micro$loth apparently didn't think to include any metadata like that in the original .wav specification).
>files and has for a while.
Interesting. I went to their website today and couldn't find any information regarding support for
Dude, that was classic.