Whoever thought that designing a future product to use an ISA from the 1970s which emulates an ISA from the 1990s would be a good idea?
Well, yeah, except that's not all- AFAIK all Intel x86 CPUs since the Pentium Pro and Pentium II have been designed around a non-x86 RISC-like core, using an internal translation layer to convert x86 instructions on the fly (and hence are still "x86" compatible chips to an external observer).
Actually, I've heard some say the core isn't really that RISC-like, but the point is that it's still *not* x86 and relies on translation.
And yes, I did note in the other comments that Intel's solution uses static translation, but the whole thing is still quite silly when you think about it- a chip using a sort-of-RISC core pretending to be an x86 via a dynamic translation layer is being used to run ARM instructions converted to x86 format.
Forget losing performance, think about your GPU running 100% when it only needs to be at 10% and what that will due to your powerbill. My GTX460 eats 150watts and newer cards will be even more.
Yes, IIRC my understanding was that as generating new Bitcoins has been getting harder and harder (hitting the law of diminishing returns), we'd already reached a point some time ago where the potential returns no longer even covered the cost of the additional electricity required to run a card.
That doesn't mean this latest business model is flawed, however. If they can convince a bunch of gullible gamers to run their own cards at full-electricity-guzzling-whack in exchange for something that (logically) would have to be worth even less than the value of the generated Bitcoins, it's sensible enough (albeit in a totally amoral and probably exploitative way).
That makes it a very stupid deal for the gamer- or whoever pays for their electricity (e.g. Mummy and Daddy?)... but if they're willing to accept it, that's not the gaming company's problem.
Perry Bible Fellowship, even though PBF is a pretty much a ripoff of ["The Parking Lot is Full"]. Still, it ripped off the best, so it gets an honorable mention.
Are you actually serious, or have I just been trolled? I clicked the link, and they're nothing like each other in terms of humour or format (even allowing for the different artwork styles).
That "Ghastly's Ghastly Comic" one you linked to was actually pretty funny (if very NSFW)...
I actually noticed- and was pleased to see- that no-one had mentioned the once-geek-favourite "User Friendly" yet (until I opened my big mouth just then). As I once said elsewhere...
Aside from its "moderately-promising 14-year-old still showing too much influence from the Teach-Yourself-Cartooning book" drawing style, User Friendly has always relied on its geek-friendly subject matter and viewpoints to flatter the audience and obscure the fact that it's neither creative nor funny.
There's nothing creative about this. The "news" was a real-life item reported in many tech outlets about a year back [i.e. 2008]. The strip itself is just a lazy [and badly drawn] excuse to let the audience laugh again at that story- it adds nothing to it except an audience-pandering but uncreative aside."
Frankly, I'm guessing that User Friendly got popular because it came out at a time when web comics weren't ten-a-penny and was targeted towards (and pandered to) a geek audience at a time when this was still a novelty. If it had come out later, it would have been seen for what it is- mediocrely-drawn, and not actually that funny, clever or insightful in itself... and perhaps that's what happened?
In that case, please get rid of these non-natural things:
- Indoor plumbing instead of festering outhouses
Outhouses aren't "natural" either, they're just a less sophisticated version of the same human construct.
Air conditioned and insulated homes instead of drafty shacks
Shacks aren't "natural", unless you draw an arbitrary line between what you consider a "natural" human house and one that isn't.
Cushy office jobs instead of back-breaking labor in the sun
Do very primitive societies living what one could reasonably call a "natural" lifestyle (hunter-gatherer?) have "back-breaking labor" in the sense that you meant it?
Yes, agriculture requires "back breaking labour", but agriculture isn't "natural".
I think Fasttext - a feature that offered 4 colour-coded links at the bottom of the page to other pages that were pre-cached
Yes, I couldn't remember for sure if caching was an integral part of Fastext (and vice versa), but I was pretty sure that some sets did feature it- hence "some later sets cached a few pages". However, it was hardly in the same league as having all (or even a significant proportion) of pages cached and being able to flick between them almost instantaneously.
Additional; Assembly or not, London doesn't- and didn't- have entirely separate education, policing, health or legal systems from the rest of England, and England-wide stories on those subjects are still applicable to it. In short, it's a red herring from the point-of-view I was arguing.
It seems Scotland gets a reasonably good deal for it's local news, if we assume the amount of newsworthy activity generated per person is similar.
You're missing the point. Some people seem to think that Scotland is getting a *better* deal then England because we have our "own" news and the English regions don't. The fact is that this Scotland-wide news is instead of the true local news that England gets, and is only necessary because of an implicit Anglo-centrism in news output in the first place.
English viewers have *their* national Education, Health and Policing stories covered during the "UK" wide 6 o'clock news, leaving a full half hour for true local news at 6.30-7.00. Whereas in Scotland we get the same "UK" news which means significant parts of our time wasted with stories relating to *English* policy that doesn't apply to us, *then* a Scotland-wide bulletin from 6.30-7.00 covering many things, including those issues as they relate to Scotland.
Can you imagine the apoplexy of the typical Home Counties Radio 4 type if the "national" news covered Scotland-only education, etc. and then their (non-)local news later on had to be taken up covering that stuff properly?! Yeah, as said, I appreciate that Scotland is smaller than England, but the fact remains that Scotland does *not* get the better deal, it gets fed a lot of news that doesn't apply to it, forcing true "local" news to be replaced so we can get *our* reporting on those "national" issues. (And then the English complain that we're getting "special" treatment because we have our own national news, despite the fact that this is instead of the true local news they get, and despite the problem being caused by England-only stories in the first place!)
No, I don't expect English viewers/listeners to be forced to listen to detailed descriptions of Scottish business, but I *will* happily condemn the BBC for rejecting "Scottish Six" (news) proposal- which would have addressed this problem- in the late 90s. The BBC bosses in London vetoed that, giving us instead the half-baked non-solution of a Scottish opt-out for the final 15 minutes of Newsnight on BBC2 at 11 PM(!!!)
I was appalled at how slow it was to load pages up compared to the fairly fast analogue teletext.
This always strikes me as an ironic expression considering that Teletext was probably one of (if not *the*) first widespread consumer-oriented *digital* services, as were its digital electronics in the mid-70s, before even the first-generation personal computers like the Apple II and Commodore Pet were out!
In your case, I assume you knew Teletext was digital and it was just unfortunate phrasing, but I sometimes wonder if this is the case for people who say "analogue Teletext" in general, or if they really don't realise that Teletext is- and always was- digital, even if it was piggybacked onto a system for transmitting analogue video.
It's even worse in Scotland. A significant proportion of the allegedly "(UK) national" news just doesn't apply to us (*), but we get fed it anyway (but little news that applies specifically to us), and they might acknowledge that it only applies to England (or "England and Wales", though even that is less common since the Welsh Assembly came into being).
Granted, I accept that Scotland is far smaller in terms of population than England and that there's always going to be an imbalance, but it doesn't change the fact that much of the UK news is in fact English news. (News of (English) "nation"-wide education/policing/legal/NHS issues are still relevant to even a sheep farmer in Cumbria in a way that they'll never be to most Scottish viewers).
And then you get English people whining that Scotland, Wales, etc. get "special treatment" with their own news- blind to the fact that such things only stand out because the mainstream "UK" media *is* "English by default".
In fact, the situation is that Scotland gets the UK 6 o'clock news- including much that is irrelevant to us- followed by Scotland-wide (non-local) news that fills in the gaps to some extent. The English get the same 6 o'clock news- except that it's mostly relevant to them, so they don't *need* an England-specific bulletin- followed by half an hour of true local news (which Scotland doesn't get). But Scotland is getting "special" treatment and the better deal because it has its own news programme apparently. *cough*
(*) Scotland has a different legal system, a different education system, the Scottish NHS is entirely separate to the English one and policing is generally not affected by policy in England. This has increased since the Scottish Parliament came into existence, but has always been the case to some extent.
It was generally the easiest way to get a TV schedule, especially once the newer TVs came in that did caching for pages (each of the pages would have its content updated very few seconds to scroll through things that were longer than a single page of text - newer TVs would record these and let you page through them without waiting for the next page to be broadcast).
Such caching makes a massive difference, but it's worth remembering that it's a luxury that wasn't- and couldn't have been- possible in Teletext's heyday. The early sets could only hold the page that was being displayed, and if you wanted to change the page (or wait for the next page in a set of (e.g.) 4 to load) you had to wait for it to be transmitted again, which could be around 30s. (IIRC some later sets cached a few pages, but it was still limited).
The experience of Teletext I remember from the older sets was that of having to *wait*. Don't get me wrong- it was amazing for its time (it actually came out in the mid-70s, before even the Atari VCS)- but it still had its limitations.
I got a new TV in mid-2010 and I was very impressed by the speed of the Teletext- it was obviously caching the pages, and the performance was massively better than the waits I remembered from before. This made a huge difference in usability, but as I said wouldn't have been possible in Teletext's heyday.
The reason is simple- a single page (40 x 24 characters) would take just under 1 KB to store, and back in the late 70s / early 80s even just a few extra kilobytes (1 KB for every page you wanted to cache) would have massively increased the cost (e.g. even the Vic 20 computer only had 3.5K or whatever, the unexpanded ZX81 came with 1KB and the 16KB "ram pack" was £30, around £80 in today's money).
By mid-2010, even the few *megabytes* that would be needed to cache every page on all five main channels would add negligible cost to the electronics, so there was probably no reason not to. But that amount of memory would have cost ludicrous money (tens of thousands of pounds) even in the early 80s, and probably an order of magnitude more when Teletext first hit in the mid-70s.
Of course, six weeks after I got that set the analogue signal (and old-style Teletext) was switched off with it in my area, so it was kind of moot.:-/
That said, I did remember feeling that Teletext's time had been and gone.
And yes, this story is in the British news *now* because up-its-own-arse-oh-so-important London is being switched off. They're not the last area to switch over, and they're *far* from the first.
Sony's Betamax used U-loading whereas JVC followed a different route called M-loading.
I didn't claim it was a carbon copy in every respect- if it had been, JVC almost certainly would have been sued up the wazoo. What I pointed out was the oft-repeated allegation that Sony showed JVC key aspects of their Betamax plans and technology in good faith, and that JVC took advantage of this.
At any rate, Sony was responsible for the first video cassette system.
The M loading also proved better for camcorders, which is why JVC was able to shrink it to palmsize (VHS-C).
The question is whether that was a clever and/or elegant part of the original design or if it's just happy coincidence that it turned out to be more suited to portable use later on.
Also JVC was smart enough to make their tapes 2 hours standard, so they could record a whole movie, instead of just half (like the 1 hour Beta tapes).
Yes, they made the tradeoff of larger tapes and marginally lower quality. I'd say that they probably made the right choice (the difference in quality probably having been overstated). But I'm not convinced that there were many significant technical hurdles required to achieve that- it was just a choice that they made differently to Sony.
Actually, yep. Sony invented U-Matic in the late 1960s, which Wikipedia claims "was the world's first commercial videocassette format". (Though too expensive for the consumer market, it was very successful in the industrial and professional sectors).
As for JVC? At most they "invented" the VHS format and (by several different accounts I've read) that was basically the result of JVC ripping off Sony's plans for Betamax- shown to them in good faith- and stabbing them in the back.
Okay, Sony didn't invent the video recorder itself, but they probably deserve more credit for the development of the medium than JVC ever did.
Putting rootkits on CDs isn't a sufficient reason to boycott, for some people I know. (They don't buy music)
Calling PizzaAnalogyGuy... Calling PizzaAnalogyGuy..... eh, sod it, looks like I'll have to do it myself.
This is like frequenting a fast food restaurant that got caught serving poisoned pizzas a while back, and not being bothered because you don't like- and never order- pizza anyway.;-)
I am willing to give them a new chance now that they're rid of Howard Stringer and are restructuring.
Bear in mind that Stringer became CEO in 2005, and from what I understand Sony's perceived decline (in Slashdotters' view) began during the 1990s, so I doubt he's solely to blame.
Also bear in mind that- as others pointed out in the recent Sony jobs cut thread- the bits of Sony where the "evil" is occurring are actually doing quite well so this is "not Sony getting what _should_ be coming to them".
Sorry, but this is another example of Slashdotters' tunnel vision, forgetting that though such issues might matter to them, they're a much smaller and less influential (if somewhat atypical) part of the market than they'd like to think, and the great unwashed in general really do not give a toss about rootkit CDs, the loss of Linux on the PS3, and other such behaviours- even if they ought to.
I realize, but I picked 95 because that was the start of their real explosive growth.
True to some extent, but it cuts MS some slack- 1991 was four full years before even *that* landmark! I mentioned 3.0 and 3.1 because they were also significant releases- the first truly successful versions of Windows, the ones which established it, and thus most people's first experience of it (assuming they were old enough to be using PCs back then!)
If someone was old enough to remember using 3.1, and was then reminded that it wasn't even out at the time of this supposed iPhone killer, then it *really* puts into perspective how long ago all this was- and how much of a stretch the story is when one remembers what computers were like back then! (^_^)
Seriously, Microsoft hadn't even released 95 by this point, and this guy is talking about them hedging risks by not going after a mockup iPhone that early?
It's worse than that- they hadn't even released Windows *3.1* at that point, and Windows 3.0 had only just come out the previous year!
If they had decided to make something like the iPhone, they would probably have also undertaken the research and development necessary to make a network for it to run on.
MS was nowhere near as big as it is today in 1991, and they certainly wouldn't have had the resources to even *consider* doing anything like that on their own. And even if they had, it would have taken years for *anyone* to develop things to a stage where they would have been good enough to do an "iphone" like device justice, and years more to have the infrastructure actually built.
But remember that the first Internet-enabled mobile devices were created around the turn of the millennium (i.e. the better part of a *decade* after this mockup was created) and they were still very crude WAP-based things.
So it wouldn't- and couldn't- have happened in 1991, and even if MS had been very insightful about the future, it would have been silly for them to put all their resources into an "iPhone" in 1991. As I said elsewhere, this guy's concept appears to have not that much to it- it appears to be primarily a futuristic concept sketch rather than anything workable at the time. Credit to him for that, but no more. He didn't- and couldn't have- invented the iPhone in 1991.
Honestly, given the level of detail in the article and the single, brief sketch shown, there's no indication that there was anything for MS to have "passed on" in the first place beyond a very basic concept. Nothing appears to have been implemented.
This is basic, first-draft future-concept sketch stuff. Reasonably insightful for the time, but not much more.
There's nothing here that would have been close to an iPhone if implemented with 1991-level technology (or even what they would have expected to have been available in the forseeable future at that point). 1991 was a long time ago. Remember how simple your old millennial call-and-text-and-Snake mobile phone was? It was *already* the better part of a decade after 1991 when those first truly mass-market phones came out, and they're still basic by modern standards. In 1991, GSM had just started, and mobile phones were still large and expensive (to buy and run) yuppie toys and tools for professionals, very crude and very expensive.
See that "slot for removable media"? Remember that even in the late 90s (several years later), flash media (e.g. those first-generation MP3 players' internal storage, SmartMedia careds, etc.) was typically in the range of 32 - 64 MB, i.e. circa a single MP3 album. Don't know how much could be stored on early-90s media, but the 1989 Atari Portfolio had "expansion cards available in sizes of 32, 64, and 128 KB initially, and later available in capacities up to 4 MB".
So you could probably have stored 1 song's worth if you forked out for a very expensive 4MB card, but there's no way a portable device would have been able to decode MP3 in real time anyway. (Mid-90s desktop PCs required most of their processing power to do that).
Others hit the nail on the head when they say that such a device would also require the infrastructure to be in place to be useful. I note that someone else mentions that "CDPD" existed for the (primarily North American) AMPS system back then, but was it ever supported and widespread enough in practice to have been usable? (WP suggests that it never took off) What would the cost have been of using the data necessary for this phone?
Notice that the title is "Visions for Consumer Computers"- this suggests that it's something they see for the future (i.e. a decade-plus hence, not within the next couple of years), and there's nothing technical or concrete here. As I said above, nothing wrong with that, but let's not inflate it to more than what it was nor make it out to be what it isn't- it's a first-level futuristic brainstorming sketch that in some ways is quite insightful, but it's not detailed, and it's not anything that would have been practical- or at least worthwhile trying to implement- circa 1991. And MS certainly didn't "pass" on the forerunner of the iPhone.... at least, not here.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoever thought that designing a future product to use an ISA from the 1970s which emulates an ISA from the 1990s would be a good idea?
Well, yeah, except that's not all- AFAIK all Intel x86 CPUs since the Pentium Pro and Pentium II have been designed around a non-x86 RISC-like core, using an internal translation layer to convert x86 instructions on the fly (and hence are still "x86" compatible chips to an external observer).
Actually, I've heard some say the core isn't really that RISC-like, but the point is that it's still *not* x86 and relies on translation.
And yes, I did note in the other comments that Intel's solution uses static translation, but the whole thing is still quite silly when you think about it- a chip using a sort-of-RISC core pretending to be an x86 via a dynamic translation layer is being used to run ARM instructions converted to x86 format.
Hmm
Forget losing performance, think about your GPU running 100% when it only needs to be at 10% and what that will due to your powerbill. My GTX460 eats 150watts and newer cards will be even more.
Yes, IIRC my understanding was that as generating new Bitcoins has been getting harder and harder (hitting the law of diminishing returns), we'd already reached a point some time ago where the potential returns no longer even covered the cost of the additional electricity required to run a card.
That doesn't mean this latest business model is flawed, however. If they can convince a bunch of gullible gamers to run their own cards at full-electricity-guzzling-whack in exchange for something that (logically) would have to be worth even less than the value of the generated Bitcoins, it's sensible enough (albeit in a totally amoral and probably exploitative way).
That makes it a very stupid deal for the gamer- or whoever pays for their electricity (e.g. Mummy and Daddy?)... but if they're willing to accept it, that's not the gaming company's problem.
Perry Bible Fellowship, even though PBF is a pretty much a ripoff of ["The Parking Lot is Full"]. Still, it ripped off the best, so it gets an honorable mention.
Are you actually serious, or have I just been trolled? I clicked the link, and they're nothing like each other in terms of humour or format (even allowing for the different artwork styles).
That "Ghastly's Ghastly Comic" one you linked to was actually pretty funny (if very NSFW)...
I actually noticed- and was pleased to see- that no-one had mentioned the once-geek-favourite "User Friendly" yet (until I opened my big mouth just then). As I once said elsewhere...
Aside from its "moderately-promising 14-year-old still showing too much influence from the Teach-Yourself-Cartooning book" drawing style, User Friendly has always relied on its geek-friendly subject matter and viewpoints to flatter the audience and obscure the fact that it's neither creative nor funny.
Here's a good example.
There's nothing creative about this. The "news" was a real-life item reported in many tech outlets about a year back [i.e. 2008]. The strip itself is just a lazy [and badly drawn] excuse to let the audience laugh again at that story- it adds nothing to it except an audience-pandering but uncreative aside."
Frankly, I'm guessing that User Friendly got popular because it came out at a time when web comics weren't ten-a-penny and was targeted towards (and pandered to) a geek audience at a time when this was still a novelty. If it had come out later, it would have been seen for what it is- mediocrely-drawn, and not actually that funny, clever or insightful in itself... and perhaps that's what happened?
Ha. My Atari 800XL was released in late 1983, so I'm safe for another year...
Yeah, but that doesn't really count, as it was essentially just an improved version of the Atari 800 which came out in 1979 :-)
In that case, please get rid of these non-natural things:
- Indoor plumbing instead of festering outhouses
Outhouses aren't "natural" either, they're just a less sophisticated version of the same human construct.
Air conditioned and insulated homes instead of drafty shacks
Shacks aren't "natural", unless you draw an arbitrary line between what you consider a "natural" human house and one that isn't.
Cushy office jobs instead of back-breaking labor in the sun
Do very primitive societies living what one could reasonably call a "natural" lifestyle (hunter-gatherer?) have "back-breaking labor" in the sense that you meant it?
Yes, agriculture requires "back breaking labour", but agriculture isn't "natural".
Although, Scottish MPs do get to vote on those matters...
True, and I disagree with this in principle.
I think Fasttext - a feature that offered 4 colour-coded links at the bottom of the page to other pages that were pre-cached
Yes, I couldn't remember for sure if caching was an integral part of Fastext (and vice versa), but I was pretty sure that some sets did feature it- hence "some later sets cached a few pages". However, it was hardly in the same league as having all (or even a significant proportion) of pages cached and being able to flick between them almost instantaneously.
Additional; Assembly or not, London doesn't- and didn't- have entirely separate education, policing, health or legal systems from the rest of England, and England-wide stories on those subjects are still applicable to it. In short, it's a red herring from the point-of-view I was arguing.
It seems Scotland gets a reasonably good deal for it's local news, if we assume the amount of newsworthy activity generated per person is similar.
You're missing the point. Some people seem to think that Scotland is getting a *better* deal then England because we have our "own" news and the English regions don't. The fact is that this Scotland-wide news is instead of the true local news that England gets, and is only necessary because of an implicit Anglo-centrism in news output in the first place.
English viewers have *their* national Education, Health and Policing stories covered during the "UK" wide 6 o'clock news, leaving a full half hour for true local news at 6.30-7.00. Whereas in Scotland we get the same "UK" news which means significant parts of our time wasted with stories relating to *English* policy that doesn't apply to us, *then* a Scotland-wide bulletin from 6.30-7.00 covering many things, including those issues as they relate to Scotland.
Can you imagine the apoplexy of the typical Home Counties Radio 4 type if the "national" news covered Scotland-only education, etc. and then their (non-)local news later on had to be taken up covering that stuff properly?! Yeah, as said, I appreciate that Scotland is smaller than England, but the fact remains that Scotland does *not* get the better deal, it gets fed a lot of news that doesn't apply to it, forcing true "local" news to be replaced so we can get *our* reporting on those "national" issues. (And then the English complain that we're getting "special" treatment because we have our own national news, despite the fact that this is instead of the true local news they get, and despite the problem being caused by England-only stories in the first place!)
No, I don't expect English viewers/listeners to be forced to listen to detailed descriptions of Scottish business, but I *will* happily condemn the BBC for rejecting "Scottish Six" (news) proposal- which would have addressed this problem- in the late 90s. The BBC bosses in London vetoed that, giving us instead the half-baked non-solution of a Scottish opt-out for the final 15 minutes of Newsnight on BBC2 at 11 PM(!!!)
An example of the block graphics: German Teletext porn!
There's a notorious example in Britain of one disgruntled writer who slipped in what appeared to be a surreptitious "money shot" (NSFW?!) into the childrens' pages :-O
I was appalled at how slow it was to load pages up compared to the fairly fast analogue teletext.
This always strikes me as an ironic expression considering that Teletext was probably one of (if not *the*) first widespread consumer-oriented *digital* services, as were its digital electronics in the mid-70s, before even the first-generation personal computers like the Apple II and Commodore Pet were out!
In your case, I assume you knew Teletext was digital and it was just unfortunate phrasing, but I sometimes wonder if this is the case for people who say "analogue Teletext" in general, or if they really don't realise that Teletext is- and always was- digital, even if it was piggybacked onto a system for transmitting analogue video.
It's even worse in Scotland. A significant proportion of the allegedly "(UK) national" news just doesn't apply to us (*), but we get fed it anyway (but little news that applies specifically to us), and they might acknowledge that it only applies to England (or "England and Wales", though even that is less common since the Welsh Assembly came into being).
Granted, I accept that Scotland is far smaller in terms of population than England and that there's always going to be an imbalance, but it doesn't change the fact that much of the UK news is in fact English news. (News of (English) "nation"-wide education/policing/legal/NHS issues are still relevant to even a sheep farmer in Cumbria in a way that they'll never be to most Scottish viewers).
And then you get English people whining that Scotland, Wales, etc. get "special treatment" with their own news- blind to the fact that such things only stand out because the mainstream "UK" media *is* "English by default".
In fact, the situation is that Scotland gets the UK 6 o'clock news- including much that is irrelevant to us- followed by Scotland-wide (non-local) news that fills in the gaps to some extent. The English get the same 6 o'clock news- except that it's mostly relevant to them, so they don't *need* an England-specific bulletin- followed by half an hour of true local news (which Scotland doesn't get). But Scotland is getting "special" treatment and the better deal because it has its own news programme apparently. *cough*
(*) Scotland has a different legal system, a different education system, the Scottish NHS is entirely separate to the English one and policing is generally not affected by policy in England. This has increased since the Scottish Parliament came into existence, but has always been the case to some extent.
It was generally the easiest way to get a TV schedule, especially once the newer TVs came in that did caching for pages (each of the pages would have its content updated very few seconds to scroll through things that were longer than a single page of text - newer TVs would record these and let you page through them without waiting for the next page to be broadcast).
Such caching makes a massive difference, but it's worth remembering that it's a luxury that wasn't- and couldn't have been- possible in Teletext's heyday. The early sets could only hold the page that was being displayed, and if you wanted to change the page (or wait for the next page in a set of (e.g.) 4 to load) you had to wait for it to be transmitted again, which could be around 30s. (IIRC some later sets cached a few pages, but it was still limited).
The experience of Teletext I remember from the older sets was that of having to *wait*. Don't get me wrong- it was amazing for its time (it actually came out in the mid-70s, before even the Atari VCS)- but it still had its limitations.
I got a new TV in mid-2010 and I was very impressed by the speed of the Teletext- it was obviously caching the pages, and the performance was massively better than the waits I remembered from before. This made a huge difference in usability, but as I said wouldn't have been possible in Teletext's heyday.
The reason is simple- a single page (40 x 24 characters) would take just under 1 KB to store, and back in the late 70s / early 80s even just a few extra kilobytes (1 KB for every page you wanted to cache) would have massively increased the cost (e.g. even the Vic 20 computer only had 3.5K or whatever, the unexpanded ZX81 came with 1KB and the 16KB "ram pack" was £30, around £80 in today's money).
By mid-2010, even the few *megabytes* that would be needed to cache every page on all five main channels would add negligible cost to the electronics, so there was probably no reason not to. But that amount of memory would have cost ludicrous money (tens of thousands of pounds) even in the early 80s, and probably an order of magnitude more when Teletext first hit in the mid-70s.
Of course, six weeks after I got that set the analogue signal (and old-style Teletext) was switched off with it in my area, so it was kind of moot. :-/
That said, I did remember feeling that Teletext's time had been and gone.
And yes, this story is in the British news *now* because up-its-own-arse-oh-so-important London is being switched off. They're not the last area to switch over, and they're *far* from the first.
Oh, and the obligatory [penny-arcade.com].
WTF? No, this is the obligatory Penny Arcade cartoon. (Could it be any more appropriate to this story?!)
Sony's Betamax used U-loading whereas JVC followed a different route called M-loading.
I didn't claim it was a carbon copy in every respect- if it had been, JVC almost certainly would have been sued up the wazoo. What I pointed out was the oft-repeated allegation that Sony showed JVC key aspects of their Betamax plans and technology in good faith, and that JVC took advantage of this.
At any rate, Sony was responsible for the first video cassette system.
The M loading also proved better for camcorders, which is why JVC was able to shrink it to palmsize (VHS-C).
The question is whether that was a clever and/or elegant part of the original design or if it's just happy coincidence that it turned out to be more suited to portable use later on.
Also JVC was smart enough to make their tapes 2 hours standard, so they could record a whole movie, instead of just half (like the 1 hour Beta tapes).
Yes, they made the tradeoff of larger tapes and marginally lower quality. I'd say that they probably made the right choice (the difference in quality probably having been overstated). But I'm not convinced that there were many significant technical hurdles required to achieve that- it was just a choice that they made differently to Sony.
VCR? Nope. It's JVC technology.
Actually, yep. Sony invented U-Matic in the late 1960s, which Wikipedia claims "was the world's first commercial videocassette format". (Though too expensive for the consumer market, it was very successful in the industrial and professional sectors).
As for JVC? At most they "invented" the VHS format and (by several different accounts I've read) that was basically the result of JVC ripping off Sony's plans for Betamax- shown to them in good faith- and stabbing them in the back.
Okay, Sony didn't invent the video recorder itself, but they probably deserve more credit for the development of the medium than JVC ever did.
Putting rootkits on CDs isn't a sufficient reason to boycott, for some people I know. (They don't buy music)
Calling PizzaAnalogyGuy... Calling PizzaAnalogyGuy..... eh, sod it, looks like I'll have to do it myself.
;-)
This is like frequenting a fast food restaurant that got caught serving poisoned pizzas a while back, and not being bothered because you don't like- and never order- pizza anyway.
I am willing to give them a new chance now that they're rid of Howard Stringer and are restructuring.
Bear in mind that Stringer became CEO in 2005, and from what I understand Sony's perceived decline (in Slashdotters' view) began during the 1990s, so I doubt he's solely to blame.
Also bear in mind that- as others pointed out in the recent Sony jobs cut thread- the bits of Sony where the "evil" is occurring are actually doing quite well so this is "not Sony getting what _should_ be coming to them".
Sorry, but this is another example of Slashdotters' tunnel vision, forgetting that though such issues might matter to them, they're a much smaller and less influential (if somewhat atypical) part of the market than they'd like to think, and the great unwashed in general really do not give a toss about rootkit CDs, the loss of Linux on the PS3, and other such behaviours- even if they ought to.
and i just got rid of my 8 track...
Speaking of MiniDisc, couldn't that be described as an "ATRAC cartridge"?
I realize, but I picked 95 because that was the start of their real explosive growth.
True to some extent, but it cuts MS some slack- 1991 was four full years before even *that* landmark! I mentioned 3.0 and 3.1 because they were also significant releases- the first truly successful versions of Windows, the ones which established it, and thus most people's first experience of it (assuming they were old enough to be using PCs back then!)
If someone was old enough to remember using 3.1, and was then reminded that it wasn't even out at the time of this supposed iPhone killer, then it *really* puts into perspective how long ago all this was- and how much of a stretch the story is when one remembers what computers were like back then! (^_^)
Seriously, Microsoft hadn't even released 95 by this point, and this guy is talking about them hedging risks by not going after a mockup iPhone that early?
It's worse than that- they hadn't even released Windows *3.1* at that point, and Windows 3.0 had only just come out the previous year!
If they had decided to make something like the iPhone, they would probably have also undertaken the research and development necessary to make a network for it to run on.
MS was nowhere near as big as it is today in 1991, and they certainly wouldn't have had the resources to even *consider* doing anything like that on their own. And even if they had, it would have taken years for *anyone* to develop things to a stage where they would have been good enough to do an "iphone" like device justice, and years more to have the infrastructure actually built.
But remember that the first Internet-enabled mobile devices were created around the turn of the millennium (i.e. the better part of a *decade* after this mockup was created) and they were still very crude WAP-based things.
So it wouldn't- and couldn't- have happened in 1991, and even if MS had been very insightful about the future, it would have been silly for them to put all their resources into an "iPhone" in 1991. As I said elsewhere, this guy's concept appears to have not that much to it- it appears to be primarily a futuristic concept sketch rather than anything workable at the time. Credit to him for that, but no more. He didn't- and couldn't have- invented the iPhone in 1991.
Idea was before its time. See the Apple Newton.
Honestly, given the level of detail in the article and the single, brief sketch shown, there's no indication that there was anything for MS to have "passed on" in the first place beyond a very basic concept. Nothing appears to have been implemented.
This is basic, first-draft future-concept sketch stuff. Reasonably insightful for the time, but not much more.
There's nothing here that would have been close to an iPhone if implemented with 1991-level technology (or even what they would have expected to have been available in the forseeable future at that point). 1991 was a long time ago. Remember how simple your old millennial call-and-text-and-Snake mobile phone was? It was *already* the better part of a decade after 1991 when those first truly mass-market phones came out, and they're still basic by modern standards. In 1991, GSM had just started, and mobile phones were still large and expensive (to buy and run) yuppie toys and tools for professionals, very crude and very expensive.
See that "slot for removable media"? Remember that even in the late 90s (several years later), flash media (e.g. those first-generation MP3 players' internal storage, SmartMedia careds, etc.) was typically in the range of 32 - 64 MB, i.e. circa a single MP3 album. Don't know how much could be stored on early-90s media, but the 1989 Atari Portfolio had "expansion cards available in sizes of 32, 64, and 128 KB initially, and later available in capacities up to 4 MB".
So you could probably have stored 1 song's worth if you forked out for a very expensive 4MB card, but there's no way a portable device would have been able to decode MP3 in real time anyway. (Mid-90s desktop PCs required most of their processing power to do that).
Others hit the nail on the head when they say that such a device would also require the infrastructure to be in place to be useful. I note that someone else mentions that "CDPD" existed for the (primarily North American) AMPS system back then, but was it ever supported and widespread enough in practice to have been usable? (WP suggests that it never took off) What would the cost have been of using the data necessary for this phone?
Notice that the title is "Visions for Consumer Computers"- this suggests that it's something they see for the future (i.e. a decade-plus hence, not within the next couple of years), and there's nothing technical or concrete here. As I said above, nothing wrong with that, but let's not inflate it to more than what it was nor make it out to be what it isn't- it's a first-level futuristic brainstorming sketch that in some ways is quite insightful, but it's not detailed, and it's not anything that would have been practical- or at least worthwhile trying to implement- circa 1991. And MS certainly didn't "pass" on the forerunner of the iPhone.... at least, not here.
Wh. Oo. Sh.
I was under the impression that the guy's comment was tongue-in-cheek, and besides, BSD isn't Linux, even if it shares some of the same utilities.