The Apple II was dominant in terms of income, if not sales units. If you're referring to Jeremy Reimer's article you'll read that in 1980 Apple's turnover was $200 million, Radio Shacks was $175 million and Commodore's was $40 million. It might not have sold as many individual units but they made Apple a lot more money.
Sales figures for the PET weren't kept, but it is interesting that in 1982 Commodore sold more Vic 20s in 6 months than Apple sold Apple IIs in 5 years.
It is impossible to judge audio codecs through subjective tests. Companies that manufacture loudspeakers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on audio quality research- not in order to make their speakers better, but to understand the psychology behind the sounds that make people choose speaker A over speaker B in a showroom. They have discovered all sorts of quirks in human psychology and perception that they exploit to boost their sales, and they have little to do with overall 'quality'. Decades of expensive, meticulous, scientifically valid studies are responsible for the range of speakers you find at the average hifi shop, and even when several identical speakers are demonstrated (but the listener is told they are all different) most people will say that speaker number 2 sounds the best. The same applies to audio codecs. Even if you eliminate all sorts of hardware variables, then just listening to clip A, then B, then C and subjectively deciding which one sounds 'best' is totally unreliable. The results of this type of testing are completely useless. At the very least you would need to set up a triangle test, and to do this properly with 6 codecs in a controlled environment would take a very long time and the results still wouldn't correlate with true 'quality' unless it was repeated many times with different hardware setups. Ignoring the psychological weaknesses in these types of tests, the playback hardware would colour the sound enough as to make the underlying test - the codec - invalid. The choice of music, the amplifier, the speakers or headphones, and the volume used for playback will all contribute their own distinctive characteristics to the audio so that person A will not be hearing the same test as person B. Forget codec wars. Just buy a decent pair of earphones.
I own an original Drobo and am quite happy with it... but I don't think it's right for your needs.
I looked around for a while and there's nothing else that does exactly what the Drobo does - they fill a niche very well. But they're relatively slow and can be noisy. They're fine as a backup device or for low-bandwidth applications but I wouldn't recommend one to play media files from- the 4-drive model that I have is simply not fast enough. Perhaps the newer models are significantly faster, and although I think they're too loud for a bedroom they're probably no louder than any other multi-drive enclosure, so YMMV.
There are a few stories on the net from people who have had disastrous problems with theirs. I looked at these very closely before I bought mine. Mostly they're from individuals who make a lot of noise in order to get attention, some of whom had done really stupid things to cause their own problems (eg if you have a 4-drive raid, and one drive fails, don't update the firmware on the other drives while the raid is rebuilding...) Some of the other stories were the results of Seagate firmware issues that affected many products and manufactures, not just Drobo. Having worked in video production for almost 15 years with all sorts of RAIDS, NAS and SANs, the Drobo is no worse than anything else out there and seems to have lots of happy customers.
The biggest challenge facing Windows is its size and hardware requirements - as phones get smarter and netbooks become more popular then people will become accustomed to having a 'proper' computer on them at all time- for many people with an iPhone this is already happening. Even Miyamoto (the Nintendo guy) was talking today about broadening the range of applications available for the DS so that gamers begin to take them everywhere and use them for everything. It doesn't really matter whether it's a Nintendo DS, an Apple iPhone, a Palm Pre, a Blackberry or a netbook running Android- the key is portability. Portability is The Next Big Thing and in this market Windows does not seem to have a very attractive offering - Windows Mobile only makes headlines when it's market share is overtaken by something else. So personally I don't see Android as a specific challenge to Windows, I see Windows being challenged by a fundamental shift in computing - from the desktop to personal - and Windows biggest challenge in this area is probably itself and it's own bloated history.
Yes you're absolutely correct. The current GPS system has to incorporate aspects of both special and general relativity in order to be accurate to the meter. Special Relativity predicts that time slows down proportional to speed and therefore the speed of the satellites becomes a critical aspect of calculating their own "time". Additionally, General Relativity predicts that time slows down as a body is influenced by gravity, and because the GPS satellites do not have circular orbits the influence of the Earth's gravity changes with their position (they move closer and further away from the Earth as they orbit) and this also needs to be taken into account. The overall effect of "relativistic time slowing" is tiny and is in the nano-second ballpark, however when calculating positions using GPS a few nano-seconds can mean a few meters...
I always felt like most of the hype around the iPhone's launch missed the point. The hype was deserved, but everyone was hyping the wrong part. What I saw was Apple not launching a cell-phone, they were launching a new mobile computing platform that could also be used as a cell-phone. It's a fundamental paradigm shift. Even now when I read rumours of Apple launching a netbook I think to myself that they've already done it- the iPhone. Back then journalists scoffed at the price and laughed at suggestions that Apple might worry giants like Nokia but they simply didn't get it. The iPhone isn't simply a phone, it's the first of the next-generation in mobile computing. Comparing Apple's market share to Nokia's or other established phone manufacturers misses the point, because they are simply making phones. Even RIM just makes phones - call them smart phones if you prefer, but the basic way in which RIM have approached the Blackberry is the same as the way Nokia approaches the design of their phones. They do different things in different ways, but they are, first and foremost, phones. The parent poster is spot on when he refers to a new phone simply being the old phone but 20% faster etc etc etc. It's like car manufacturing, where many of today's cars are just the result of decades of incremental improvements on an old and outdated design. In some ways the iPhone is a technical trojan horse but with a sophistication beyond Sony using the PS3 to get BluRay players into living rooms. The iPhone is getting real mobile computers into people's hands, with the 'real' internet (ignoring the Flash issue), and a real operating system. If people think it's just a phone that can play games, or a combination of a phone and an iPod then fine- Apple have done their job. They've made a mobile computer that is so easy to use people take it for granted... I always thought that the iPhone deserved every bit of hype it received when it was launched, but not for the glossy interface or slick design. It was taking on industry giants such as Nokia and instantly making their corporate model obsolete, and offering instead a new paradigm in regards to mobile personal computers.
The incredible irony is that the only reason Apple are still around today is because they were so unpopular back then. Their computers were so overpriced compared to similar models - especially the Commodore PET - that they were simply not being bought or used. No-one wanted an Apple, everyone wanted a Commodore PET. To put this in perspective you need to understand the computer market of the late 70s, when they were being bought by students and hobbyists with super-low budgets, and the primary application was for BASIC programming. Computers were not being bought by rich people. The early Apples didn't have lower-case letters (only the Commodore did) and so weren't used for word processing. Commodore's clever deal with Epson meant they could offer printers at unprecented low prices (they sent Centronics out of business). Radio Shack's TRS-80 was also a massive hit. In those early days, 1977 - 1980, Apple were left in the dust by their high prices.
But what changed everything was the invention of VisiCalc. The guy who invented it - the first spreadsheet - was a guy called Dan Bricklin. He approached a company called 'Personal Software' which owned four Commodore PETs and one Apple II for development. The company liked the idea of the spreadsheet and encouraged him in every way they could (assistance even came directly from Chuck Peddle, inventor of the 6502) but the PETs were all in use, so he had to write it on the Apple II. So the first version of VisiCalc was initially only available for the Apple, because the PETs were so popular the developer couldn't get access to them!
Once VisiCalc was launched it suddenly made the Apple II an essential investment for businesses. While the Apple II was far too pricey for hobbyists and students, it was small change (and a valid investment) for a business. In fact reports from that time talk of accountants wanting to a buy 'a VisiCalc machine' with no specific knowledge they were buying an Apple II running VisiCalc. And so Apple turned a corner, sales took off, and they've never looked back. All because they were unpopular and overpriced to begin with...
Apple have been re-writing history from day one. Apple's early marketing claimed they were the number one computer seller and they never were. In 1977 Radio Shack received 10,000 pre-orders for the TRS-80 before it had been released. In 1978 they sold over 50,000 TRS-80s and in 1979 roughly 100,000. In 1979 Apple only sold 35,000 Apple IIs but continued to run advertisements claiming they were the world's number one selling computer manufacturer. It was only during 1980 (3 months after VisiCalc was released) that Apple outsold Commodore for the first time. In the first month that VisiCalc was released it sold 100,000 copies and was solely and directly responsible for saving Apple...
Even recently Woz has been quoted saying that Apple were the first company to sell 1 million computers. This is also untrue, the first company to sell 1 million computers was Commodore, which sold 2.5 million Vic 20s from 1982- 1985. The Commodore Vic20 sold over 1 million in its first year, while Apple had only sold 700,000 Apple IIs over the 5 years since its launch in 1977. The Vic 20 pipped Apple to sales of 1 million by a few months.
The guy mentions several times that the camera takes 2000 frames per second, but unfortunately states that this gives a precision of "two thousandths" of a second. The actual precision would be "one two-thousandth" of a second... I suppose this is an understandable translation error.
But I enjoyed the piece, I was interested that they used a GPS signal to synchronise their systems.
Also, this makes me wonder what those eukaryotes were doing for the first 2 billion years.
If you really want an idea, try reading "Oxygen" by Nick Lane, basically it's a popular science book which looks at recent research into the evolution of the Earth. It's very interesting and overturns a few established ideas, such as the "mass extinction" of anaerobic microbes as oxygen entered the atmosphere. I got it as a bonus when I bought his other book "power, sex, suicide" which looks at mitochondria and cellular evolutiuon too, and actually found it more interesting.
Yes, you're right- on a comparable scale of cost per megawatt produced our current PV technology costs more than 10x that of all other common energy sources. And although PV panels don't have any emmissions, the manufacturing process isn't exactly environmentally friendly either. However it is great for specific circumstances, mostly isolated (off-grid) applications, or for peak-demand in sunny areas (solar-powered air conditioners!). So developments like this one are welcome but it would be wrong to think that the world's energy problems will be solved soon. The only way in which solar power will make even a small difference to the world's energy production is if a new material is developed, or a fundamentally different solar technology, that lowers the overal cost to less than 1/10 of which is currently is. But it's certainly possible.
I work in animation & video production and a single project can take up a terabyte... I'm all for storage increases but I have no idea how to back it all up... It's all very well for the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD club to go on about storing 30/50 gig on a disc but when your drive holds 4 terabytes (and you just know it will fill up quickly) the backup problems just get bigger too...
I don't disagree with you, but in my experiece Adobe software has been great, so I've never complained- or even thought of Adobe as an evil monopoly. Microsoft doesn't have a good reputation for software quality and it's easy to find stories of Microsoft bugs seriousing affecting user's workflow, or simply their ability to do their job. I'm basically a professional After Effects user and I've never come across a bug in the application which has prevented me from doing my job, or working to a professional level. There are obvious complaints about the prices of Adobe software, and anytime a new version comes out there will be unhappy users complaining about upgrade pricing or the lack of feature x,y, or z, but in a general sense I haven't had a single bad day at work caused by an Adobe bug.
Perfect sequel to "Code"
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Inside the Machine
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· Score: 4, Informative
I bought the book because I read Ars and enjoy Stokes' articles. I read it, loved it.
I thought it was the perfect logical sequel to an older book called "Code", by Charles Petzold (ISBN 0-7356-1131-9).
"Code", about 7 or 8 years old now, starts with the very basics of computation- beginning with binary codes and lightbulbs, then demonstrating how a microprocessor can be built from nothing but relays, and ending with a discussion of two classic microprocessors- the 8080 and 6800.
"Inside the Machine" basically picks up where "Code" finishes. It begins with a look at ISAs and CPUs, examine theoretical models slightly simpler than the 8080 and 6800, before moving onto pipelining and superscalar execution, and ending with the very latest from Intel.
It's a shame someplace like Amazon isn't selling them packaged together, you can easily work your way through Petzold's primer- beginning with the most fundamental basics of computing, end it with a solid understanding of the state of technology in the late 70's, then pick up Stokes' book and continue the journey through to the present day.
From previous Opera related posts on Slashdot, it has come to my attention that you have some real babes working for you in Norway. Are any of them single and if so, would they be interested in dating a guy who reads slashdot? BTW I use Safari but I can be persuaded to switch...
I just finished reading "Neuromancer" (for about the 10,000th time) and so this seems pretty cool.
But I've always wondered how they deal with the potential for allergies... from what I understand, in theory you can become allergic to basically anything at anytime without warning, so you wouldn't want to get a fancy new implant only to die of anaphyllactic shock while watching porn....
They could do worse than begin by visitng this site:
http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/ which examines physics in Hollywood movies. The reviews alone are priceless.
Ok, this actually happened. One day our secretary comes to me and says her keyboard isn't working properly. I just assume it died naturally and so I grab a replacement from a pile in my cupboard and hand it over. 30 minutes later she comes back and says that the one I gave her is broken too. Now that seems strange, so I go to her system and do a full check, thinking that either her motherboard is faulty, or something is shorting out the keyboards, or she has some practical joke walware like the old Amiga virus which re-mapped keystrokes but only if you typed fast enough. After a thorough check, I confirm her system is OK and both keyboards are indeed dead. I take another spare keyboard from the cupboard, test it on my computer first to make sure it works properly, and then give it to her. 5 minutes later I decide I better check to see if it's OK, so I walk over to her desk just in time to see her take a bottle of spray'n'wipe, spray a massive amount directly into the keys, wipe them off, then bang the keyboard upside down against the edge of her desk to dislogde any dirt which may have been there. The 3rd keyboard she got that day was a new one so she didn't have the urge to clean it. It still works. The funny thing is that I felt an immense sense of relief knowing why they broke. 3 keyboards "mysteriously" dying in an hour is something I don't understand and makes me nervous, however stupidity is something I do understand and just accept.
I loved Blitz Basic on the Amiga. To me, programming languages like this remind me of the Commodore 64, where you were in a BASIC environment from the moment you switched it on. I was writing games on the Commodore 64 in primary school. I loved learning to write simple programs and the ease with which you could do stuff like scroll the screen or set up sprites fed a huge culture of bedroom programemrs. When I upgraded to an Amiga, although it was a more sophisticated computer with more powerful hardware, the GUI and OS made it difficult for an average schoolkid (ie me) to access and program in the same manner I had with the '64. Amiga Basic was shit, and lacked the immediacy and flexibility of C64 basic. BlitzMax, for me, is a chance to have fun with my machines again. Just reading through the website reminds me of the thrill I used to get on the '64 when I figured out raster interrupts and other hacks. I hope applications like Blitz can interest a new generation of bedroom games programmers, as the large companies move games-production into a more Hollywood-level industry.
No- unfortunately I can't provide specific links/ papers of studies, just a general outline from memory. It does come under Cognitive Psych.
Children learning grammer follow what is called a "U shaped curve". In other words, their progress/ skills decline before improving. For example a 4 year old might say 1 foot, 2 feet. Yesterday I ran, today I will run. In other words, their grammer is correct. What happens though is that they will then go through a stage (perhaps when they are 5 or 6) where they get it wrong- I have 2 foots, I runned to the shop, etc etc. Then they will learn the correct grammer over time. If you plot their performance over time, it is a U-shaped curve.
The study using Wugs is well known and widely taught, but the problem with Wugs is that it is assumed that the plural of Wug is Wugs. Because it is a made-up word, it probably is. For the study to have been conclusive, it would have needed to demonstrate the different types of plural present in English- 1 goose, 2 geese, 1 mouse, 2 mice, 1 virus, 2 virii (just kidding!).
After the results of the U-shaped curve study became apparent, it was proposed that younger children mimic the speech patterns they hear, and through mimicry their grammer appears correct. But their correct performance is not indiciative of "learned" grammer- they just copy. As the child develops and they actually begin to think about grammer rules, they initially get those rules wrong. Over time they learn correct grammer and language again, not through mimicry, but by an understanding of the structure of language and grammer.
Hence the 3 stages of the U-shaped curve: correct through copying, incorrect through thinking and learning, correct through thinking and understanding.
So the theory that grammer is learned before language was disproved by extensive research into the U-shaped curve, because the early expressions of grammer were not "learned" or comprehended but just copied, and as the child's progress followed a U-shaped curve they truly learned grammer after language.
Unfortunately I can only give this outline from memory and I don't have any links to papers.
Perhaps it's not that special, but it's interesting. I don't know if you've played around with your car's electrical system, but they can be an absolute nightmare when something goes wrong. I had all sorts of problems with my first (crappy) car, mainly stemming from a ground cable coming loose. Auto electrical systems are not a fun thing to work on. Traditional wiring can rust, connectors can break, faults in other parts of the car (especially grounding problems) can screw up totally unrelated parts of the car... I had my headlights refuse to work when I accidentally connected my car radio incorrectly, even though it worked fine etc etc etc. I've installed a lot of car radios and in older cars there is no uniform system for wire colours or even power colours. It can take longer to figure out which cables connect to which than it does to actually mount the radio and speakers... By moving from a traditional wire loom to an optical system with a protocol like 1394 not only are you avoiding physical problems like weight and corrosion, you're also making everything much easier to troubleshoot and install. Personally I think this is great. It's not too dissimilar to the comparison of VoIP to PSTN.
I saw Brian Greene buying a copy of "Flash for dummies".
Re:Dantz -- getting arrogant in its old age?
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EMC Buying Dantz
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· Score: 2, Informative
Yes possibly, market dominance can do that... I've had two experiences with Dantz- one positive and the other negative. In 1996 our 8mm Exabyte drive came bundled with an OEM version of Retrospect, and to activate it we had to make an international phone call (I'm in Australia) to receive an unlock code. No problems. Jump forward to 1999 and I have a hard-drive failure- my system drive with all applications on it. I replace the drive and go to re-install Retrospect so I can restore everything else from my backups, and discover the phone number is no more. I call Dantz directly (another international call) and the first person I spoke to understood that I had suffered data loss and required Retrospect to restore everything ASAP. They had no record of unlock codes from the older phone system so they express-couriered me a new and current copy of Restrospect OEM which arrived by FedEx the next day. This was at their expense- something which impressed me because we never purchased Retrospect anyway, it came with the drive. Chalk up a very positive experience. Three years later and I move to OS-X, and go to upgrade Retrospect so it runs on the new system. I responded to an advertised special for upgrades, planing to purchase online, but the website rejected my serial number. I sent a few emails and they told me that the offer only applied to full versions of Retrospect and not OEMs. While I can understand this, the advertisement specifically made it clear that the offer applied to ALL versions of Retrospect. Having swapped a few emails clarifying this from Dantz online support, I basically concluded that their website was clearly misleading. It might sound minor but it really annoyed me. I never did upgrade Retrospect, I keep an old G3 running OS-9 just to run it, and swap files over a network cable.
Slashdot Mirror
The Apple II was dominant in terms of income, if not sales units. If you're referring to Jeremy Reimer's article you'll read that in 1980 Apple's turnover was $200 million, Radio Shacks was $175 million and Commodore's was $40 million. It might not have sold as many individual units but they made Apple a lot more money.
Sales figures for the PET weren't kept, but it is interesting that in 1982 Commodore sold more Vic 20s in 6 months than Apple sold Apple IIs in 5 years.
Figures are here: http://jeremyreimer.com/postman/node/329
It is impossible to judge audio codecs through subjective tests.
Companies that manufacture loudspeakers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on audio quality research- not in order to make their speakers better, but to understand the psychology behind the sounds that make people choose speaker A over speaker B in a showroom. They have discovered all sorts of quirks in human psychology and perception that they exploit to boost their sales, and they have little to do with overall 'quality'. Decades of expensive, meticulous, scientifically valid studies are responsible for the range of speakers you find at the average hifi shop, and even when several identical speakers are demonstrated (but the listener is told they are all different) most people will say that speaker number 2 sounds the best.
The same applies to audio codecs. Even if you eliminate all sorts of hardware variables, then just listening to clip A, then B, then C and subjectively deciding which one sounds 'best' is totally unreliable. The results of this type of testing are completely useless. At the very least you would need to set up a triangle test, and to do this properly with 6 codecs in a controlled environment would take a very long time and the results still wouldn't correlate with true 'quality' unless it was repeated many times with different hardware setups.
Ignoring the psychological weaknesses in these types of tests, the playback hardware would colour the sound enough as to make the underlying test - the codec - invalid. The choice of music, the amplifier, the speakers or headphones, and the volume used for playback will all contribute their own distinctive characteristics to the audio so that person A will not be hearing the same test as person B.
Forget codec wars. Just buy a decent pair of earphones.
I own an original Drobo and am quite happy with it... but I don't think it's right for your needs.
I looked around for a while and there's nothing else that does exactly what the Drobo does - they fill a niche very well. But they're relatively slow and can be noisy. They're fine as a backup device or for low-bandwidth applications but I wouldn't recommend one to play media files from- the 4-drive model that I have is simply not fast enough. Perhaps the newer models are significantly faster, and although I think they're too loud for a bedroom they're probably no louder than any other multi-drive enclosure, so YMMV.
There are a few stories on the net from people who have had disastrous problems with theirs. I looked at these very closely before I bought mine. Mostly they're from individuals who make a lot of noise in order to get attention, some of whom had done really stupid things to cause their own problems (eg if you have a 4-drive raid, and one drive fails, don't update the firmware on the other drives while the raid is rebuilding...) Some of the other stories were the results of Seagate firmware issues that affected many products and manufactures, not just Drobo. Having worked in video production for almost 15 years with all sorts of RAIDS, NAS and SANs, the Drobo is no worse than anything else out there and seems to have lots of happy customers.
But the older models are really quite slow.
The biggest challenge facing Windows is its size and hardware requirements - as phones get smarter and netbooks become more popular then people will become accustomed to having a 'proper' computer on them at all time- for many people with an iPhone this is already happening. Even Miyamoto (the Nintendo guy) was talking today about broadening the range of applications available for the DS so that gamers begin to take them everywhere and use them for everything. It doesn't really matter whether it's a Nintendo DS, an Apple iPhone, a Palm Pre, a Blackberry or a netbook running Android- the key is portability. Portability is The Next Big Thing and in this market Windows does not seem to have a very attractive offering - Windows Mobile only makes headlines when it's market share is overtaken by something else.
So personally I don't see Android as a specific challenge to Windows, I see Windows being challenged by a fundamental shift in computing - from the desktop to personal - and Windows biggest challenge in this area is probably itself and it's own bloated history.
Yes you're absolutely correct. The current GPS system has to incorporate aspects of both special and general relativity in order to be accurate to the meter. Special Relativity predicts that time slows down proportional to speed and therefore the speed of the satellites becomes a critical aspect of calculating their own "time". Additionally, General Relativity predicts that time slows down as a body is influenced by gravity, and because the GPS satellites do not have circular orbits the influence of the Earth's gravity changes with their position (they move closer and further away from the Earth as they orbit) and this also needs to be taken into account. The overall effect of "relativistic time slowing" is tiny and is in the nano-second ballpark, however when calculating positions using GPS a few nano-seconds can mean a few meters...
I always felt like most of the hype around the iPhone's launch missed the point. The hype was deserved, but everyone was hyping the wrong part.
What I saw was Apple not launching a cell-phone, they were launching a new mobile computing platform that could also be used as a cell-phone. It's a fundamental paradigm shift. Even now when I read rumours of Apple launching a netbook I think to myself that they've already done it- the iPhone. Back then journalists scoffed at the price and laughed at suggestions that Apple might worry giants like Nokia but they simply didn't get it. The iPhone isn't simply a phone, it's the first of the next-generation in mobile computing.
Comparing Apple's market share to Nokia's or other established phone manufacturers misses the point, because they are simply making phones. Even RIM just makes phones - call them smart phones if you prefer, but the basic way in which RIM have approached the Blackberry is the same as the way Nokia approaches the design of their phones. They do different things in different ways, but they are, first and foremost, phones. The parent poster is spot on when he refers to a new phone simply being the old phone but 20% faster etc etc etc. It's like car manufacturing, where many of today's cars are just the result of decades of incremental improvements on an old and outdated design.
In some ways the iPhone is a technical trojan horse but with a sophistication beyond Sony using the PS3 to get BluRay players into living rooms. The iPhone is getting real mobile computers into people's hands, with the 'real' internet (ignoring the Flash issue), and a real operating system. If people think it's just a phone that can play games, or a combination of a phone and an iPod then fine- Apple have done their job. They've made a mobile computer that is so easy to use people take it for granted...
I always thought that the iPhone deserved every bit of hype it received when it was launched, but not for the glossy interface or slick design. It was taking on industry giants such as Nokia and instantly making their corporate model obsolete, and offering instead a new paradigm in regards to mobile personal computers.
Yes you are absolutely correct.
The incredible irony is that the only reason Apple are still around today is because they were so unpopular back then. Their computers were so overpriced compared to similar models - especially the Commodore PET - that they were simply not being bought or used. No-one wanted an Apple, everyone wanted a Commodore PET. To put this in perspective you need to understand the computer market of the late 70s, when they were being bought by students and hobbyists with super-low budgets, and the primary application was for BASIC programming. Computers were not being bought by rich people. The early Apples didn't have lower-case letters (only the Commodore did) and so weren't used for word processing. Commodore's clever deal with Epson meant they could offer printers at unprecented low prices (they sent Centronics out of business). Radio Shack's TRS-80 was also a massive hit. In those early days, 1977 - 1980, Apple were left in the dust by their high prices.
But what changed everything was the invention of VisiCalc. The guy who invented it - the first spreadsheet - was a guy called Dan Bricklin. He approached a company called 'Personal Software' which owned four Commodore PETs and one Apple II for development. The company liked the idea of the spreadsheet and encouraged him in every way they could (assistance even came directly from Chuck Peddle, inventor of the 6502) but the PETs were all in use, so he had to write it on the Apple II. So the first version of VisiCalc was initially only available for the Apple, because the PETs were so popular the developer couldn't get access to them!
Once VisiCalc was launched it suddenly made the Apple II an essential investment for businesses. While the Apple II was far too pricey for hobbyists and students, it was small change (and a valid investment) for a business. In fact reports from that time talk of accountants wanting to a buy 'a VisiCalc machine' with no specific knowledge they were buying an Apple II running VisiCalc. And so Apple turned a corner, sales took off, and they've never looked back. All because they were unpopular and overpriced to begin with...
Apple have been re-writing history from day one. Apple's early marketing claimed they were the number one computer seller and they never were. In 1977 Radio Shack received 10,000 pre-orders for the TRS-80 before it had been released. In 1978 they sold over 50,000 TRS-80s and in 1979 roughly 100,000. In 1979 Apple only sold 35,000 Apple IIs but continued to run advertisements claiming they were the world's number one selling computer manufacturer. It was only during 1980 (3 months after VisiCalc was released) that Apple outsold Commodore for the first time. In the first month that VisiCalc was released it sold 100,000 copies and was solely and directly responsible for saving Apple...
Even recently Woz has been quoted saying that Apple were the first company to sell 1 million computers. This is also untrue, the first company to sell 1 million computers was Commodore, which sold 2.5 million Vic 20s from 1982- 1985. The Commodore Vic20 sold over 1 million in its first year, while Apple had only sold 700,000 Apple IIs over the 5 years since its launch in 1977. The Vic 20 pipped Apple to sales of 1 million by a few months.
A recent journal article on ArsTechnica points to an Intel blog on Larrabee: http://arstechnica.com/journals/hardware.ars/2008/05/01/larrabee-engineer-on-personal-blog-larrabee-is-all-about-rasterization Curious.
The guy mentions several times that the camera takes 2000 frames per second, but unfortunately states that this gives a precision of "two thousandths" of a second. The actual precision would be "one two-thousandth" of a second... I suppose this is an understandable translation error. But I enjoyed the piece, I was interested that they used a GPS signal to synchronise their systems.
Well, then why don't you buy iWoz (ISBN 978-0393330434). I have both and preferred iWoz. It's a good read but the author tends to eulogise a bit... http://www.amazon.com/iWoz-Computer-Invented-Personal-Co-Founded/dp/0393330435/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1216234368&sr=8-1 -Chris
If you really want an idea, try reading "Oxygen" by Nick Lane, basically it's a popular science book which looks at recent research into the evolution of the Earth. It's very interesting and overturns a few established ideas, such as the "mass extinction" of anaerobic microbes as oxygen entered the atmosphere. I got it as a bonus when I bought his other book "power, sex, suicide" which looks at mitochondria and cellular evolutiuon too, and actually found it more interesting.
Yes, you're right- on a comparable scale of cost per megawatt produced our current PV technology costs more than 10x that of all other common energy sources. And although PV panels don't have any emmissions, the manufacturing process isn't exactly environmentally friendly either. However it is great for specific circumstances, mostly isolated (off-grid) applications, or for peak-demand in sunny areas (solar-powered air conditioners!). So developments like this one are welcome but it would be wrong to think that the world's energy problems will be solved soon. The only way in which solar power will make even a small difference to the world's energy production is if a new material is developed, or a fundamentally different solar technology, that lowers the overal cost to less than 1/10 of which is currently is. But it's certainly possible.
I work in animation & video production and a single project can take up a terabyte... I'm all for storage increases but I have no idea how to back it all up... It's all very well for the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD club to go on about storing 30/50 gig on a disc but when your drive holds 4 terabytes (and you just know it will fill up quickly) the backup problems just get bigger too...
I don't disagree with you, but in my experiece Adobe software has been great, so I've never complained- or even thought of Adobe as an evil monopoly. Microsoft doesn't have a good reputation for software quality and it's easy to find stories of Microsoft bugs seriousing affecting user's workflow, or simply their ability to do their job. I'm basically a professional After Effects user and I've never come across a bug in the application which has prevented me from doing my job, or working to a professional level.
There are obvious complaints about the prices of Adobe software, and anytime a new version comes out there will be unhappy users complaining about upgrade pricing or the lack of feature x,y, or z, but in a general sense I haven't had a single bad day at work caused by an Adobe bug.
I bought the book because I read Ars and enjoy Stokes' articles. I read it, loved it.
I thought it was the perfect logical sequel to an older book called "Code", by Charles Petzold (ISBN 0-7356-1131-9).
"Code", about 7 or 8 years old now, starts with the very basics of computation- beginning with binary codes and lightbulbs, then demonstrating how a microprocessor can be built from nothing but relays, and ending with a discussion of two classic microprocessors- the 8080 and 6800.
"Inside the Machine" basically picks up where "Code" finishes. It begins with a look at ISAs and CPUs, examine theoretical models slightly simpler than the 8080 and 6800, before moving onto pipelining and superscalar execution, and ending with the very latest from Intel.
It's a shame someplace like Amazon isn't selling them packaged together, you can easily work your way through Petzold's primer- beginning with the most fundamental basics of computing, end it with a solid understanding of the state of technology in the late 70's, then pick up Stokes' book and continue the journey through to the present day.
I recommend both books.
From previous Opera related posts on Slashdot, it has come to my attention that you have some real babes working for you in Norway.
Are any of them single and if so, would they be interested in dating a guy who reads slashdot? BTW I use Safari but I can be persuaded to switch...
I just finished reading "Neuromancer" (for about the 10,000th time) and so this seems pretty cool. But I've always wondered how they deal with the potential for allergies... from what I understand, in theory you can become allergic to basically anything at anytime without warning, so you wouldn't want to get a fancy new implant only to die of anaphyllactic shock while watching porn....
They could do worse than begin by visitng this site: http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/ which examines physics in Hollywood movies. The reviews alone are priceless.
Ok, this actually happened.
One day our secretary comes to me and says her keyboard isn't working properly. I just assume it died naturally and so I grab a replacement from a pile in my cupboard and hand it over. 30 minutes later she comes back and says that the one I gave her is broken too. Now that seems strange, so I go to her system and do a full check, thinking that either her motherboard is faulty, or something is shorting out the keyboards, or she has some practical joke walware like the old Amiga virus which re-mapped keystrokes but only if you typed fast enough. After a thorough check, I confirm her system is OK and both keyboards are indeed dead. I take another spare keyboard from the cupboard, test it on my computer first to make sure it works properly, and then give it to her. 5 minutes later I decide I better check to see if it's OK, so I walk over to her desk just in time to see her take a bottle of spray'n'wipe, spray a massive amount directly into the keys, wipe them off, then bang the keyboard upside down against the edge of her desk to dislogde any dirt which may have been there.
The 3rd keyboard she got that day was a new one so she didn't have the urge to clean it. It still works.
The funny thing is that I felt an immense sense of relief knowing why they broke. 3 keyboards "mysteriously" dying in an hour is something I don't understand and makes me nervous, however stupidity is something I do understand and just accept.
I loved Blitz Basic on the Amiga.
To me, programming languages like this remind me of the Commodore 64, where you were in a BASIC environment from the moment you switched it on. I was writing games on the Commodore 64 in primary school. I loved learning to write simple programs and the ease with which you could do stuff like scroll the screen or set up sprites fed a huge culture of bedroom programemrs.
When I upgraded to an Amiga, although it was a more sophisticated computer with more powerful hardware, the GUI and OS made it difficult for an average schoolkid (ie me) to access and program in the same manner I had with the '64. Amiga Basic was shit, and lacked the immediacy and flexibility of C64 basic.
BlitzMax, for me, is a chance to have fun with my machines again. Just reading through the website reminds me of the thrill I used to get on the '64 when I figured out raster interrupts and other hacks.
I hope applications like Blitz can interest a new generation of bedroom games programmers, as the large companies move games-production into a more Hollywood-level industry.
No- unfortunately I can't provide specific links/ papers of studies, just a general outline from memory. It does come under Cognitive Psych.
Children learning grammer follow what is called a "U shaped curve". In other words, their progress/ skills decline before improving.
For example a 4 year old might say 1 foot, 2 feet. Yesterday I ran, today I will run. In other words, their grammer is correct.
What happens though is that they will then go through a stage (perhaps when they are 5 or 6) where they get it wrong- I have 2 foots, I runned to the shop, etc etc. Then they will learn the correct grammer over time. If you plot their performance over time, it is a U-shaped curve.
The study using Wugs is well known and widely taught, but the problem with Wugs is that it is assumed that the plural of Wug is Wugs. Because it is a made-up word, it probably is. For the study to have been conclusive, it would have needed to demonstrate the different types of plural present in English- 1 goose, 2 geese, 1 mouse, 2 mice, 1 virus, 2 virii (just kidding!).
After the results of the U-shaped curve study became apparent, it was proposed that younger children mimic the speech patterns they hear, and through mimicry their grammer appears correct. But their correct performance is not indiciative of "learned" grammer- they just copy. As the child develops and they actually begin to think about grammer rules, they initially get those rules wrong. Over time they learn correct grammer and language again, not through mimicry, but by an understanding of the structure of language and grammer.
Hence the 3 stages of the U-shaped curve: correct through copying, incorrect through thinking and learning, correct through thinking and understanding.
So the theory that grammer is learned before language was disproved by extensive research into the U-shaped curve, because the early expressions of grammer were not "learned" or comprehended but just copied, and as the child's progress followed a U-shaped curve they truly learned grammer after language.
Unfortunately I can only give this outline from memory and I don't have any links to papers.
Perhaps it's not that special, but it's interesting. I don't know if you've played around with your car's electrical system, but they can be an absolute nightmare when something goes wrong. I had all sorts of problems with my first (crappy) car, mainly stemming from a ground cable coming loose. Auto electrical systems are not a fun thing to work on. Traditional wiring can rust, connectors can break, faults in other parts of the car (especially grounding problems) can screw up totally unrelated parts of the car... I had my headlights refuse to work when I accidentally connected my car radio incorrectly, even though it worked fine etc etc etc. I've installed a lot of car radios and in older cars there is no uniform system for wire colours or even power colours. It can take longer to figure out which cables connect to which than it does to actually mount the radio and speakers...
By moving from a traditional wire loom to an optical system with a protocol like 1394 not only are you avoiding physical problems like weight and corrosion, you're also making everything much easier to troubleshoot and install.
Personally I think this is great. It's not too dissimilar to the comparison of VoIP to PSTN.
Kramer: I've cut slices so thin, I couldn't even see them.
Elaine: How'd you know you cut it?
Kramer: I guess I just assumed...
I saw Brian Greene buying a copy of "Flash for dummies".
Yes possibly, market dominance can do that...
I've had two experiences with Dantz- one positive and the other negative.
In 1996 our 8mm Exabyte drive came bundled with an OEM version of Retrospect, and to activate it we had to make an international phone call (I'm in Australia) to receive an unlock code. No problems. Jump forward to 1999 and I have a hard-drive failure- my system drive with all applications on it. I replace the drive and go to re-install Retrospect so I can restore everything else from my backups, and discover the phone number is no more. I call Dantz directly (another international call) and the first person I spoke to understood that I had suffered data loss and required Retrospect to restore everything ASAP. They had no record of unlock codes from the older phone system so they express-couriered me a new and current copy of Restrospect OEM which arrived by FedEx the next day. This was at their expense- something which impressed me because we never purchased Retrospect anyway, it came with the drive. Chalk up a very positive experience.
Three years later and I move to OS-X, and go to upgrade Retrospect so it runs on the new system. I responded to an advertised special for upgrades, planing to purchase online, but the website rejected my serial number. I sent a few emails and they told me that the offer only applied to full versions of Retrospect and not OEMs. While I can understand this, the advertisement specifically made it clear that the offer applied to ALL versions of Retrospect. Having swapped a few emails clarifying this from Dantz online support, I basically concluded that their website was clearly misleading. It might sound minor but it really annoyed me.
I never did upgrade Retrospect, I keep an old G3 running OS-9 just to run it, and swap files over a network cable.