What happened was a shift in the market demo for computers.
Home computers used to be aimed at hobbyists, which were mostly kids at the time. Kids with limited funds. Kids who had just stepped up from $150 game consoles.
Also, during the late 70s, early 80s era, CPU development was also mostly static, stalled at around 1-2MHZ. So the huge quantities of game consoles being produced drove down the cost of the CPU and memory facilitating cheap home PCs.
The IBM PC priced itself such that only middle to upper class adults could afford them. It was like buying a used car instead of a piece of HiFi equipment. And what did they get for their money? A 4.77Mhz 8086 with monochrome graphics and a buzzy internal speaker for sound. Hardly the big evolutionary leap over the 8-bit machines that it's normally seen as in the history books.
I can only speak for myself in saying that the IBM PC felt like a huge step back and I did not even consider moving to it. Also, the original Mac was monochrome, albeit high-res, and was equally unappealing for that reason.
But businesses loved that the PC was bland and boring. To us, that signifies archaic. To them, it epitomized "serious". For a PC to do wild sound and graphics would just invite comparisons to the glorified game machines that the kids were having fun with. They would have none of that, and because of that, we saw an unprecedented era of stagnation in computer development.
As soon as PCs started to displace mainframe/dumb-terminals in business, it became even less important for clone makers to drive the price down since corporations were doing all the buying.
It's only been since the late 90s that computers became more mainstream again because the average joe wanted to use them as an internet communications device.
Today, the overhead of everyday tasks can be met by even bargain basement CPUs.
Unless you want to play cutting edge games, do content creation (like do work in HDTV) budget CPUs and PCs from a couple years back are still more than adequate and will remain so.
I find it interesting that on the one hand we treat China as our mortal enemies and on the other we are completely dependent on them for almost all our manufactured goods. I don't think we can have our cake and eat it too.
How can you be pleasantly surprised? They are spending a lot of money to get a lame duck platform (Shuttle) back to space. The thing only has 5 years left before it's scheduled for retirement.
Meanwhile, the budget is being penny-pinched to the level where even tiny things like Voyager are being cut.
If they wanted to control costs they should just contract out all manned spaceflight to Russia, or license the technology and start building that design in the US. Then they could axe the Shuttle and not have to worry about reinventing the wheel.
That would be equivalent to the Apple goes Intel decision.
They are already relying on Russia as it is. I don't see the big deal making that permanent.
Then they can build their Mars program off of Russian boosters.
Yeah, there is no way you can consider PBS commercial-free anymore. The spots are almost indistinguishable from regular commercial spots these days.
As for getting Dr Who in America, just download the episodes off of the newsgroups. That's the global TIVO. The only problem is message retention because the drwho and the scifi group have a lot of posts. So you have to go in there and get each episode within a couple days of broadcast.
People find attractive what they find attractive and you just have to deal with it.
This cuts both ways. There are plenty of men out there who don't live up to the sex-appeal ratio and would have equal reason to feel bitter.
Nobody 'deserves' to be considered attractive. You are at the mercy of other people's irrational tastes. Shaming them for that doesn't change anything.
I remember a 20/20 story a few years back that had a lineup of guys and the guys who were the tallest were rated the highest and the really short guy was ruled out even when described as rich.
BTW, the Cinematronics arcade hardware used a similar approach of building a CPU out of TTL logic. In that case it was able to run at 5MHZ, which was faster than microprocessors at the time (the Apple II, for instance, only used a 1MHZ 6502).
It's amazing to me how few components it takes to create a fully functional CPU.
= Some, of course, will be so driven by the artistic/altruistic drive, but do you honestly believe that is even a significant minority, much less the majority of the population? =
The world existed before copyrights. The world can survive without them.
Would it be a very different world? Sure. Entertainment would become much more amateur.
You wouldn't see any big budget Lord of the Rings epics. Everything would collapse down to the garage band / Blair Witch level.
But society wouldn't collapse.
Would I like to see this happen? No. I'd like to still see the big budget polished stuff. But it's not exactly a big deal to me unless I were working in showbiz.
Maybe they can have an episode that comments on the phenomenon of TV and film constantly needing to remake franchises, but in a way that completely destroys what made the original appealing.
Why is it a good thing for the global population to keep growing? Can't humanity thrive and progress with even 1/10th the current human population? As far as I'm concerned, human population size is the REAL core of the environmental problem. We could use all the oil we wanted if there were only a few million of us and not impact the planet.
That is the fear. However, the difference between an Indy movie and the SW Prequels is that Lucas wouldn't be directing.
In the prequels, Lucas surrounded himself with yes men who were too grateful to be associated with the "legend" to talk back to him.
Spielberg is a true contemporary of Lucas' and has no reason to pull punches. He would not let the Indy franchise go down with bad dialogue in order to save Lucas' ego.
Spielberg doesn't direct movies the way Richard Marquand did in ROTJ. He would not just be a puppet for Lucas. He would be able to make it work. He would let Lucas do what he's good at, which is come up with good action choreography, and fill in the rest.
It's interesting that we are so accepting of remakes now. I wonder how much of that has to do with Lucas himself, but obviously there have been other remakes lately too so maybe not.
To me, I think Lucas is an insecure filmmaker, and that's why he takes a cut-and-paste editor's approach. When interviewed he implies that there is more prethought in the story than there really is. For the most part it's improvised because Lucas doesn't seem to have enough confidence in his abilities to commit to one direction and stay the course. It's like ADD.
Now we're supposed to look at his stuff as an eternal work-in-progress and keep buying every "upgrade" as if it's software?
It's like a sketch artist that is continually erasing and redrawing stuff. It's a sign of the amateur.
If you have 3 years to make a movie and an unlimited budget, you should be able to get it right the first time.
And despite the limitations on the first two SW movies, there is no reason to go back and change story elements like Greedo shooting first that had nothing to do with production values.
This just points to someone who will never be satisfied with his creative output, but doesn't have the vision to know what to change and what to leave alone!
That may be true, in which case all natural section will occur at a social level. In other words, the culling part of evolution would be the judgments that women make about men as gatekeepers of reproduction.
DOS was the official OS of the original IBM PC. That gave it the headstart in the apps department.
Imagine how small a percentage of Mac users run OSs other than Apple ones, for instance?
Once the clone market came out, in theory, alternate OSs could have competed, like GEOS which was way ahead of Windows, but they had an uphill battle.
I really don't think DOS succeeded due to any actual merits. It's hardly less primitive than CP/M and woefully primtive in comparison to the early MAC OS. But to business, IBM was computers. Apple was for artsy fartsy types or schools. Business users didn't understand what was more "innovative" as long as they could run their CGA spreadsheet apps.
The computer market is so different today that it's not fair to compare.
Did people use 8-bit computers to play music and videos? Nope. (It wasn't that long ago that FMV clips on PC games were jerky 15-fps block-fests.) Did they communicate over a high speed global network? Nope. You were lucky if you had a 300 baud modem.
Today the mainstream computer market uses PCs solely as media players and communications devices. To a lesser extent, they could use utilities like word processors, tax software, and CD/DVD burning software. But that's it. A very short list of things they really need.
(plus games of course)
There is no reason a console can't provide this, and yes, with output to HDTV or a "VGA BOX" then it is a clear enough display that you don't risk "Web TV" syndrome.
There will always be a need for more varied software for some people, but the average person really uses very few programs on a PC.
Slashdot Mirror
What happened was a shift in the market demo for computers.
Home computers used to be aimed at hobbyists, which were mostly kids at the time. Kids with limited funds. Kids who had just stepped up from $150 game consoles.
Also, during the late 70s, early 80s era, CPU development was also mostly static, stalled at around 1-2MHZ. So the huge quantities of game consoles being produced drove down the cost of the CPU and memory facilitating cheap home PCs.
The IBM PC priced itself such that only middle to upper class adults could afford them. It was like buying a used car instead of a piece of HiFi equipment. And what did they get for their money? A 4.77Mhz 8086 with monochrome graphics and a buzzy internal speaker for sound. Hardly the big evolutionary leap over the 8-bit machines that it's normally seen as in the history books.
I can only speak for myself in saying that the IBM PC felt like a huge step back and I did not even consider moving to it. Also, the original Mac was monochrome, albeit high-res, and was equally unappealing for that reason.
But businesses loved that the PC was bland and boring. To us, that signifies archaic. To them, it epitomized "serious". For a PC to do wild sound and graphics would just invite comparisons to the glorified game machines that the kids were having fun with. They would have none of that, and because of that, we saw an unprecedented era of stagnation in computer development.
As soon as PCs started to displace mainframe/dumb-terminals in business, it became even less important for clone makers to drive the price down since corporations were doing all the buying.
It's only been since the late 90s that computers became more mainstream again because the average joe wanted to use them as an internet communications device.
Today, the overhead of everyday tasks can be met by even bargain basement CPUs.
Unless you want to play cutting edge games, do content creation (like do work in HDTV) budget CPUs and PCs from a couple years back are still more than adequate and will remain so.
I find it interesting that on the one hand we treat China as our mortal enemies and on the other we are completely dependent on them for almost all our manufactured goods. I don't think we can have our cake and eat it too.
How can you be pleasantly surprised?
They are spending a lot of money to get a lame duck platform (Shuttle) back to space. The thing only has 5 years left before it's scheduled for retirement.
Meanwhile, the budget is being penny-pinched to the level where even tiny things like Voyager are being cut.
If they wanted to control costs they should just contract out all manned spaceflight to Russia, or license the technology and start building that design in the US. Then they could axe the Shuttle and not have to worry about reinventing the wheel.
That would be equivalent to the Apple goes Intel decision.
They are already relying on Russia as it is. I don't see the big deal making that permanent.
Then they can build their Mars program off of Russian boosters.
Yeah, there is no way you can consider PBS commercial-free anymore. The spots are almost indistinguishable from regular commercial spots these days.
As for getting Dr Who in America, just download the episodes off of the newsgroups. That's the global TIVO. The only problem is message retention because the drwho and the scifi group have a lot of posts. So you have to go in there and get each episode within a couple days of broadcast.
"That hasn't been so true for a while though, check out stuff like Catwomen, or Birds of Prey for strong women in charge."
It just swung too far to the other side.
When DC remade catwoman they turned her into an ex prostitute rape victim. That's pretty heavy for a largely juvenile male readership.
Why does a female superhero now have to be the fontpiece for some kind of gender-related social commentary?
If we were a truly egalitarian society then female superheroes would just be 'around' and it wouldn't be ABOUT them being women.
This argument is pointless.
People find attractive what they find attractive and you just have to deal with it.
This cuts both ways. There are plenty of men out there who don't live up to the sex-appeal ratio and would have equal reason to feel bitter.
Nobody 'deserves' to be considered attractive. You are at the mercy of other people's irrational tastes. Shaming them for that doesn't change anything.
I remember a 20/20 story a few years back that had a lineup of guys and the guys who were the tallest were rated the highest and the really short guy was ruled out even when described as rich.
BTW, the Cinematronics arcade hardware used a similar approach of building a CPU out of TTL logic. In that case it was able to run at 5MHZ, which was faster than microprocessors at the time (the Apple II, for instance, only used a 1MHZ 6502).
It's amazing to me how few components it takes to create a fully functional CPU.
=
Some, of course, will be so driven by the artistic/altruistic drive, but do you honestly believe that is even a significant minority, much less the majority of the population?
=
The world existed before copyrights. The world can survive without them.
Would it be a very different world? Sure. Entertainment would become much more amateur.
You wouldn't see any big budget Lord of the Rings epics. Everything would collapse down to the garage band / Blair Witch level.
But society wouldn't collapse.
Would I like to see this happen? No. I'd like to still see the big budget polished stuff. But it's not exactly a big deal to me unless I were working in showbiz.
Maybe they can have an episode that comments on the phenomenon of TV and film constantly needing to remake franchises, but in a way that completely destroys what made the original appealing.
Why is it a good thing for the global population to keep growing? Can't humanity thrive and progress with even 1/10th the current human population? As far as I'm concerned, human population size is the REAL core of the environmental problem. We could use all the oil we wanted if there were only a few million of us and not impact the planet.
That is the fear. However, the difference between an Indy movie and the SW Prequels is that Lucas wouldn't be directing.
In the prequels, Lucas surrounded himself with yes men who were too grateful to be associated with the "legend" to talk back to him.
Spielberg is a true contemporary of Lucas' and has no reason to pull punches. He would not let the Indy franchise go down with bad dialogue in order to save Lucas' ego.
Spielberg doesn't direct movies the way Richard Marquand did in ROTJ. He would not just be a puppet for Lucas. He would be able to make it work. He would let Lucas do what he's good at, which is come up with good action choreography, and fill in the rest.
The idea that we should have allies only based on their global popularity index is silly.
Now I thought I had read every possible misspelling of prequel. Only in a Star Wars thread.
It's interesting that we are so accepting of remakes now. I wonder how much of that has to do with Lucas himself, but obviously there have been other remakes lately too so maybe not.
To me, I think Lucas is an insecure filmmaker, and that's why he takes a cut-and-paste editor's approach. When interviewed he implies that there is more prethought in the story than there really is. For the most part it's improvised because Lucas doesn't seem to have enough confidence in his abilities to commit to one direction and stay the course. It's like ADD.
Now we're supposed to look at his stuff as an eternal work-in-progress and keep buying every "upgrade" as if it's software?
It's like a sketch artist that is continually erasing and redrawing stuff. It's a sign of the amateur.
If you have 3 years to make a movie and an unlimited budget, you should be able to get it right the first time.
And despite the limitations on the first two SW movies, there is no reason to go back and change story elements like Greedo shooting first that had nothing to do with production values.
This just points to someone who will never be satisfied with his creative output, but doesn't have the vision to know what to change and what to leave alone!
Prequil? Is that related to Nyquil?
You obviously never saw the Zorro movie with Hopkins and Banderas or the sequel that is about to come out.
Ford did do a cameo in Young Indy.
Kirk had personal demons. Watch an episode like Obsession for instance. And Star Trek II explored his divorce situation which wasn't in the TV series.
Ah, I knew I couldn't read a prequel thread without someone spelling it "Prequal".
Thanks a lot.
If you think every guy in GITMO would just filter back home and take no further part against the US or current Afghan or Iraqi govt. you are crazy.
That may have been the case when each side freed POWs in past wars, but not this time.
If you place greater importance on the human rights of these guys over the welfare of our troops then you are a dick.
Would you like to move within a few hundred feet of Chernobyl?
Didn't think so.
That may be true, in which case all natural section will occur at a social level. In other words, the culling part of evolution would be the judgments that women make about men as gatekeepers of reproduction.
DOS was the official OS of the original IBM PC. That gave it the headstart in the apps department.
Imagine how small a percentage of Mac users run OSs other than Apple ones, for instance?
Once the clone market came out, in theory, alternate OSs could have competed, like GEOS which was way ahead of Windows, but they had an uphill battle.
I really don't think DOS succeeded due to any actual merits. It's hardly less primitive than CP/M and woefully primtive in comparison to the early MAC OS. But to business, IBM was computers. Apple was for artsy fartsy types or schools. Business users didn't understand what was more "innovative" as long as they could run their CGA spreadsheet apps.
The computer market is so different today that it's not fair to compare.
Did people use 8-bit computers to play music and videos? Nope. (It wasn't that long ago that FMV clips on PC games were jerky 15-fps block-fests.) Did they communicate over a high speed global network? Nope. You were lucky if you had a 300 baud modem.
Today the mainstream computer market uses PCs solely as media players and communications devices. To a lesser extent, they could use utilities like word processors, tax software, and CD/DVD burning software. But that's it. A very short list of things they really need.
(plus games of course)
There is no reason a console can't provide this, and yes, with output to HDTV or a "VGA BOX" then it is a clear enough display that you don't risk "Web TV" syndrome.
There will always be a need for more varied software for some people, but the average person really uses very few programs on a PC.
Is this what Slashdot has come to? One news regurgitator site posting headlines that point to another news regurgitator site?