I'm sure marketing was a big part of it was well. However, the fact that more than one company produced PCs was probably a big factor as well.
Perhaps IBM didn't intend for it to be that way, but that is how it ended up. If it didn't end up that way, I'm not sure the PC would have won out.
How many amiga or Mac clones were around back then? Note that when Apple allowed Mac clones they started taking off. Now, that wasn't good for Apple, but it was good for the architecture.
In the end, IBM didn't really get to capitalize on the PC, but the architecture was successful. It isn't all that unlike android in many ways - it doesn't matter if iOS is better or whatever, when it is one vendor vs 50, the 50 will win.
I take it that this is the total energy in the beam, and not in the collisions? I'm not a particle physicist, but I'm guessing that if you aim two beams of 2e10 particles each at each other probably almost all of them miss their counterparts and sail right by.
Ok, on one of the platforms that was around you didn't need the details. Of course having a blitter isn't the same as having a full graphics API at the OS level, but perhaps the Amiga really had that. In any case, my point still seems to stand in that most computer manufacturers still need to supply specs to make things work at that point in time.
I'm not sure that you can really call Intel the vendor of the PC - unless you're willing to concede that Motorolla was the vendor of the Amiga, and that the smartphone competition isn't really a competition at all since ARM makes 99% of them.
I'm not sure I ever claimed that the PC was better than its competitors. I just pointed out that it was fairly open in comparison.
Oh, that is FAR above the temperatures needed for controlled fusion.
We don't have any trouble creating the necessary temperature for controlled fusion. The part we aren't able to do is the "controlled" bit - in a way that allows a net positive energy return.
I'm guessing this collision released maybe a few kcal of energy (which is HUGE for two atom-sized masses, but otherwise on-par with a candle), but it probably consumed the resources from half of a power plant in the process.
The LHC isn't about energy generation - it is about generating huge concentrations of energy in an extremely small volume of space.
Yeah, but just stop and think about how many CPU cycles passed during 4 seconds back then, and today...
When I first used Windows 386 I think the PC I ran it on clocked in at 16MHz with the "turbo" button engaged. That was pretty good at the time, though I think they got the 386 up to 20MHz.
He's missing Windows/386. That was the first version I ever used, and as far as I can tell it was the first version to actually have real business application as something other than an early version of QT/GTK/etc.
And yet, you speak of 30 PC makers, and only a single vendor for the other options. Almost by definition, it was a more open platform. Indeed, if I dug around in my parent's basement I might just find my commented copy of the original PC BIOS source in the IBM PC Technical Reference manual.
I do agree that the other platforms were much more open at the time. That was almost a necessity, however, as you don't have all kinds of OS APIs to isolate hardware. If you wanted to draw a line on the screen you just edited the video RAM, or sent IO calls to the video chipset. That is, unless you wanted to write your whole app in BASIC or whatever the vendor supplied in ROM.
The first Windows I used was Windows 386, which I think fell between 2 and 3. Its biggest feature was the ability to run DOS applications. It ran them full-screen in a text console just as if Windows wasn't running.
It was still limited in use - nobody really booted into Windows or anything like that at the time. However, it at least held some promise as this was the first time I can remember that you could actually run more than one application at the same time - with the exception of a few TSRs, or some apple-menu apps in the macintosh world (at least, that was all I could multitask on the 128k Mac we had at the time - maybe application multitasking was available via other methods at that time on newer devices).
You put your order in at 5pm. Now you get news at 5:01 that can change the price drastically. Oops, you can't trade yet you have to wait an entire day to say, close your position. There is also news that comes out at 6pm, but you still can't trade.
In that case the system is operating EXACTLY as I intend.
During that 24-hour period NOBODY can change their positions. During that 24-hour period everybody gets to stew on the news, and think about what the new valuation should be. You don't put in an order to sell 1000 shares - you put in an order to sell 1000 shares for $12.95 or higher. Sell orders aren't emotional, they are considered. There is no panic rush to get out of a bad position, since there is nothing you can do to make things go faster.
Right now if that news comes out at 5:01PM there is a mad rush and all the institutional investors bail before the price drops much. Then, ordinary investors who don't have armies of analysts staring at CNN get stuck holding the bag.
The intent of my system is that NOBODY needs to sit and stare at CNN 24x7. Indeed, you could even ban voluntary disclosure of material news for a few hours prior to the market close time (of course, if a refinery catches on fire you can't do anything about that, but you can at least not release earnings statements and press releases right before trade time).
Now that everybody is on the same playing field, you don't need to pay for armies of analysts to stare at CNN, and that means lower fees for investors. Individuals who hold stocks also can get out of bad positions without being behind institutions who have already jumped ship. Indeed, practices like mixing institutional trades with individual trades that cause huge problems now become minor issues in this scheme (though institutional traders should still not be able to see individual orders).
The whole point is to slow down Wall Street and make it less of a flea market and more of a Walmart for stocks.
Of course, the banks would never go for this. They make tons of money just by being able to stay ahead of the masses, and they'd lose their advantage in a system like this.
I don't get why we can't even just have one-day ticks. Every day an order book accumulates, and at 5PM the exchange executes everything at the price that generates the most volume. Priority is given to sellers who offer the lowest price and buyers who offer the highest price. Within a price orders are executed in random order.
The book is kept secret until after all trades are settled. So, you can't see if the price is trending towards a price you like and then put in a bunch of sells for 0.01 to get ahead of the line - if you put in that price you might just find your trades executing at that price.
With such a system ordinary investors can compete with investing houses. Bad news means that everybody loses out at the same time, and the insiders don't have nearly the same advantage (getting news 15 minutes early can make a HUGE difference today). You could even make the trade settlement time midnight or something like that so that it is well after the business day so that last-minute news has more time to get around.
You wouldn't need so many market-makers and other forms of arbitrage since the total daily volume of a stock will tend to guarantee that there will always be buyers and sellers. Market makers could still fill a niche in low-volume stocks making sure that there are always buy and sell orders in the book.
You could even go a step further and execute trades once per week/month/etc - that would start to make investing more of a long-term thing and less of exploiting market psychology..
Ah, in that case the browser would need to sandbox it and allow the user to tell it how to report the OS to it. Of course, that does require implementing a flash interpreter, and most of the open-source ones out there don't handle video websites well.
Google should just make an advanced configuration settings page, and let users set whatever user-agent/etc they want there.
If users can edit all of the http request headers, then there will be no way for providers to filter by browser/etc. They just need to put in the headers for IE9 or whatever and they're done.
Google of course should not distribute anything with those settings to stay in the clear.
Don't worry - the average consumer is pretty smart and they'll get their smart next-door-neighbor's kid to set them up.
About the only way studios could block this would be to put keys/certificates on boxes that they want to provide content to. That will last about as long as HDCP...
Not a bad idea. Also, I'd have to insist that all devices get delivered without keys, so that there is no way to know if a key is the original one or one that was later generated. Also, as the owner of the device I should be able to choose whether the device generates a key that never leaves the device, or one that it provides a copy to me for safe keeping. The device should never remember disclose which option was chosen.
This is necessary to defeat trusted computing approaches. If the device locks up keys at my whim to keep me safe, that is fine, but if the device locks up keys to keep somebody else safe from me, then I'm not buying into that.
What practical alternative do you offer, beyond making the user type it every time? At best you can encrypt it using a different password, which you have to type every time (at least that is only one password to remember, but only if the phone provides some kind of central support for this).
Plaintext or encrypted makes no difference - if the key is stored on the phone anyway. What passes for "encrypted" in most applications is really just obfuscation.
Agreed - it drives me nuts when app makers deny me the ability to cache passwords/etc. It drives me nuts that chromium stopped caching passwords at the request of the requesting pages a few months ago.
If I want it to remember my password, I'll tell it to. If I don't want it to remember my password, I'll tell it not to. Either way my password gets recorded in a safe place - I can't set and remember 487 unique passwords for all the sites I visit. I just don't want app writers dictating that choice for me.
One of these days I'll get around to patching chromium to ignore the setting that prevents it from caching credentials...
If that is the case, you also can't tell if your vote was counted correctly, which means that this is not a verifiable system. If it isn't verifiable, then the problems with verifiable systems don't need to apply...
Frankly, my feeling is that the only thing worse than people too apathetic to vote are people who are too apathetic to research issues and then they vote anyway.
If somebody can't be bothered to vote, then then last thing I want is for them to pull some lever just to be more popular.
That isn't a bad concept. You could probably accomplish the same thing by having everybody just vote like they normally do, and print out a receipt randomly a small percentage of the time (maybe 10% - maybe less). The booth would be designed to make receipt printout undetectable to those in the vicinity (very quiet, or with masking noise/etc).
Then when your boss asks for a receipt you just say that you didn't get one. However, if you don't know which votes have receipts you don't know which ones you can safely change.
However, it sounds like you can't confirm that the vote got counted for the right person, and an arbitrary 3rd party can't verify that the correspondence between votes and ballot positions wasn't tampered with after voting.
So, this preserves some anonymity by giving up some verifiability. That doesn't sound like anything new to me.
So, what does this get you that the current system doesn't get you. All activities associated with the current election system are supposedly done in a public manner, and I can't check if my vote was counted correctly. It sounds like the proposal is a system that also depends on oversight, and it too doesn't let me check that my vote was counted correctly. It only protects against a particular type of fraud, which probably isn't how actual fraud is carried out.
You say "and this is why," and you don't say what the "this" is... By all means feel free to summarize the approach, but it sounds like you don't actually think it will work.
From your description it seems that they don't actually give you enough information to verify the vote, which means that it isn't actually a verifiable system. Of course, a system that isn't verifiable doesn't suffer from the downsides of a verifiable system...:)
For each image, there corresponds a unique ordering of the candidates
I'm not really sure what images have to do with voting. Again, the article contained no words so I have no idea what the actual proposal is.
It sounds like they encrypt the receipt, and you can verify that the encrypted receipt was displayed on some website. If so, how do you know whether the receipt actually matches your vote, unless you can decrypt it? And if you can decrypt it, why can't your boss?
Well, he didn't argue that the Republicans would be more responsible with spending. His argument was that by having opposing parties in power that any kind of spending would be more difficult.
That is only partially true. The one thing they can all agree on is pork. As long as the Republican votes for the $100M Bill Clinton post office the democrats are more than happy to vote for the $100M radar upgrade for the GW Bush cruiser.
Megacorps have learned that you don't sell products - you sell brand. You don't sell a fancy phone - you sell the iPhone by Apple.
Two years ago Obama did it with "Hope" and who doesn't want hope? This time the Republicans did it with less taxes and waste, and who doesn't want that?
In two years somebody will be peddling something else that sounds nice, and whoever has the best marketing campaign will win.
In the meantime, both parties when in office will generally do whatever best serves those who got them in office.
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I'm sure marketing was a big part of it was well. However, the fact that more than one company produced PCs was probably a big factor as well.
Perhaps IBM didn't intend for it to be that way, but that is how it ended up. If it didn't end up that way, I'm not sure the PC would have won out.
How many amiga or Mac clones were around back then? Note that when Apple allowed Mac clones they started taking off. Now, that wasn't good for Apple, but it was good for the architecture.
In the end, IBM didn't really get to capitalize on the PC, but the architecture was successful. It isn't all that unlike android in many ways - it doesn't matter if iOS is better or whatever, when it is one vendor vs 50, the 50 will win.
True, I agree the Mac had a graphics API. That I do remember firsthand.
Your assessment seems about right to me. Sometimes being open compensates for not being better. That seems to be the story of the PC architecture.
I take it that this is the total energy in the beam, and not in the collisions? I'm not a particle physicist, but I'm guessing that if you aim two beams of 2e10 particles each at each other probably almost all of them miss their counterparts and sail right by.
Ok, on one of the platforms that was around you didn't need the details. Of course having a blitter isn't the same as having a full graphics API at the OS level, but perhaps the Amiga really had that. In any case, my point still seems to stand in that most computer manufacturers still need to supply specs to make things work at that point in time.
I'm not sure that you can really call Intel the vendor of the PC - unless you're willing to concede that Motorolla was the vendor of the Amiga, and that the smartphone competition isn't really a competition at all since ARM makes 99% of them.
I'm not sure I ever claimed that the PC was better than its competitors. I just pointed out that it was fairly open in comparison.
Oh, that is FAR above the temperatures needed for controlled fusion.
We don't have any trouble creating the necessary temperature for controlled fusion. The part we aren't able to do is the "controlled" bit - in a way that allows a net positive energy return.
I'm guessing this collision released maybe a few kcal of energy (which is HUGE for two atom-sized masses, but otherwise on-par with a candle), but it probably consumed the resources from half of a power plant in the process.
The LHC isn't about energy generation - it is about generating huge concentrations of energy in an extremely small volume of space.
Yeah, but just stop and think about how many CPU cycles passed during 4 seconds back then, and today...
When I first used Windows 386 I think the PC I ran it on clocked in at 16MHz with the "turbo" button engaged. That was pretty good at the time, though I think they got the 386 up to 20MHz.
He's missing Windows/386. That was the first version I ever used, and as far as I can tell it was the first version to actually have real business application as something other than an early version of QT/GTK/etc.
And yet, you speak of 30 PC makers, and only a single vendor for the other options. Almost by definition, it was a more open platform. Indeed, if I dug around in my parent's basement I might just find my commented copy of the original PC BIOS source in the IBM PC Technical Reference manual.
I do agree that the other platforms were much more open at the time. That was almost a necessity, however, as you don't have all kinds of OS APIs to isolate hardware. If you wanted to draw a line on the screen you just edited the video RAM, or sent IO calls to the video chipset. That is, unless you wanted to write your whole app in BASIC or whatever the vendor supplied in ROM.
The first Windows I used was Windows 386, which I think fell between 2 and 3. Its biggest feature was the ability to run DOS applications. It ran them full-screen in a text console just as if Windows wasn't running.
It was still limited in use - nobody really booted into Windows or anything like that at the time. However, it at least held some promise as this was the first time I can remember that you could actually run more than one application at the same time - with the exception of a few TSRs, or some apple-menu apps in the macintosh world (at least, that was all I could multitask on the 128k Mac we had at the time - maybe application multitasking was available via other methods at that time on newer devices).
You put your order in at 5pm. Now you get news at 5:01 that can change the price drastically. Oops, you can't trade yet you have to wait an entire day to say, close your position. There is also news that comes out at 6pm, but you still can't trade.
In that case the system is operating EXACTLY as I intend.
During that 24-hour period NOBODY can change their positions. During that 24-hour period everybody gets to stew on the news, and think about what the new valuation should be. You don't put in an order to sell 1000 shares - you put in an order to sell 1000 shares for $12.95 or higher. Sell orders aren't emotional, they are considered. There is no panic rush to get out of a bad position, since there is nothing you can do to make things go faster.
Right now if that news comes out at 5:01PM there is a mad rush and all the institutional investors bail before the price drops much. Then, ordinary investors who don't have armies of analysts staring at CNN get stuck holding the bag.
The intent of my system is that NOBODY needs to sit and stare at CNN 24x7. Indeed, you could even ban voluntary disclosure of material news for a few hours prior to the market close time (of course, if a refinery catches on fire you can't do anything about that, but you can at least not release earnings statements and press releases right before trade time).
Now that everybody is on the same playing field, you don't need to pay for armies of analysts to stare at CNN, and that means lower fees for investors. Individuals who hold stocks also can get out of bad positions without being behind institutions who have already jumped ship. Indeed, practices like mixing institutional trades with individual trades that cause huge problems now become minor issues in this scheme (though institutional traders should still not be able to see individual orders).
The whole point is to slow down Wall Street and make it less of a flea market and more of a Walmart for stocks.
Of course, the banks would never go for this. They make tons of money just by being able to stay ahead of the masses, and they'd lose their advantage in a system like this.
I don't get why we can't even just have one-day ticks. Every day an order book accumulates, and at 5PM the exchange executes everything at the price that generates the most volume. Priority is given to sellers who offer the lowest price and buyers who offer the highest price. Within a price orders are executed in random order.
The book is kept secret until after all trades are settled. So, you can't see if the price is trending towards a price you like and then put in a bunch of sells for 0.01 to get ahead of the line - if you put in that price you might just find your trades executing at that price.
With such a system ordinary investors can compete with investing houses. Bad news means that everybody loses out at the same time, and the insiders don't have nearly the same advantage (getting news 15 minutes early can make a HUGE difference today). You could even make the trade settlement time midnight or something like that so that it is well after the business day so that last-minute news has more time to get around.
You wouldn't need so many market-makers and other forms of arbitrage since the total daily volume of a stock will tend to guarantee that there will always be buyers and sellers. Market makers could still fill a niche in low-volume stocks making sure that there are always buy and sell orders in the book.
You could even go a step further and execute trades once per week/month/etc - that would start to make investing more of a long-term thing and less of exploiting market psychology..
Ah, in that case the browser would need to sandbox it and allow the user to tell it how to report the OS to it. Of course, that does require implementing a flash interpreter, and most of the open-source ones out there don't handle video websites well.
Google should just make an advanced configuration settings page, and let users set whatever user-agent/etc they want there.
If users can edit all of the http request headers, then there will be no way for providers to filter by browser/etc. They just need to put in the headers for IE9 or whatever and they're done.
Google of course should not distribute anything with those settings to stay in the clear.
Don't worry - the average consumer is pretty smart and they'll get their smart next-door-neighbor's kid to set them up.
About the only way studios could block this would be to put keys/certificates on boxes that they want to provide content to. That will last about as long as HDCP...
Not a bad idea. Also, I'd have to insist that all devices get delivered without keys, so that there is no way to know if a key is the original one or one that was later generated. Also, as the owner of the device I should be able to choose whether the device generates a key that never leaves the device, or one that it provides a copy to me for safe keeping. The device should never remember disclose which option was chosen.
This is necessary to defeat trusted computing approaches. If the device locks up keys at my whim to keep me safe, that is fine, but if the device locks up keys to keep somebody else safe from me, then I'm not buying into that.
What practical alternative do you offer, beyond making the user type it every time? At best you can encrypt it using a different password, which you have to type every time (at least that is only one password to remember, but only if the phone provides some kind of central support for this).
Plaintext or encrypted makes no difference - if the key is stored on the phone anyway. What passes for "encrypted" in most applications is really just obfuscation.
Agreed - it drives me nuts when app makers deny me the ability to cache passwords/etc. It drives me nuts that chromium stopped caching passwords at the request of the requesting pages a few months ago.
If I want it to remember my password, I'll tell it to. If I don't want it to remember my password, I'll tell it not to. Either way my password gets recorded in a safe place - I can't set and remember 487 unique passwords for all the sites I visit. I just don't want app writers dictating that choice for me.
One of these days I'll get around to patching chromium to ignore the setting that prevents it from caching credentials...
If that is the case, you also can't tell if your vote was counted correctly, which means that this is not a verifiable system. If it isn't verifiable, then the problems with verifiable systems don't need to apply...
Frankly, my feeling is that the only thing worse than people too apathetic to vote are people who are too apathetic to research issues and then they vote anyway.
If somebody can't be bothered to vote, then then last thing I want is for them to pull some lever just to be more popular.
That isn't a bad concept. You could probably accomplish the same thing by having everybody just vote like they normally do, and print out a receipt randomly a small percentage of the time (maybe 10% - maybe less). The booth would be designed to make receipt printout undetectable to those in the vicinity (very quiet, or with masking noise/etc).
Then when your boss asks for a receipt you just say that you didn't get one. However, if you don't know which votes have receipts you don't know which ones you can safely change.
However, it sounds like you can't confirm that the vote got counted for the right person, and an arbitrary 3rd party can't verify that the correspondence between votes and ballot positions wasn't tampered with after voting.
So, this preserves some anonymity by giving up some verifiability. That doesn't sound like anything new to me.
So, what does this get you that the current system doesn't get you. All activities associated with the current election system are supposedly done in a public manner, and I can't check if my vote was counted correctly. It sounds like the proposal is a system that also depends on oversight, and it too doesn't let me check that my vote was counted correctly. It only protects against a particular type of fraud, which probably isn't how actual fraud is carried out.
And this is why you should go watch the movie...
You say "and this is why," and you don't say what the "this" is... By all means feel free to summarize the approach, but it sounds like you don't actually think it will work.
From your description it seems that they don't actually give you enough information to verify the vote, which means that it isn't actually a verifiable system. Of course, a system that isn't verifiable doesn't suffer from the downsides of a verifiable system... :)
For each image, there corresponds a unique ordering of the candidates
I'm not really sure what images have to do with voting. Again, the article contained no words so I have no idea what the actual proposal is.
It sounds like they encrypt the receipt, and you can verify that the encrypted receipt was displayed on some website. If so, how do you know whether the receipt actually matches your vote, unless you can decrypt it? And if you can decrypt it, why can't your boss?
Well, he didn't argue that the Republicans would be more responsible with spending. His argument was that by having opposing parties in power that any kind of spending would be more difficult.
That is only partially true. The one thing they can all agree on is pork. As long as the Republican votes for the $100M Bill Clinton post office the democrats are more than happy to vote for the $100M radar upgrade for the GW Bush cruiser.
Nah, politics is just catching up with marketing.
Megacorps have learned that you don't sell products - you sell brand. You don't sell a fancy phone - you sell the iPhone by Apple.
Two years ago Obama did it with "Hope" and who doesn't want hope? This time the Republicans did it with less taxes and waste, and who doesn't want that?
In two years somebody will be peddling something else that sounds nice, and whoever has the best marketing campaign will win.
In the meantime, both parties when in office will generally do whatever best serves those who got them in office.