Taiwan has its own government, currency, army. They have 290K people in their armed forces (more than the UK or France). They develop their own weapons systems. How the heck do you think it isn't sovereign? Because the PRC says it isn't?
Uh I think I was using MP2 in 1996. I remember playing MP3 files in a Pentium (i586) computer so it should have certainly been possible to play the files in 1996. I do not remember which was my first MP3 encoder but I remember it was not LAME.
Yeah it looks the same. It has tiled icons which have been used since like forever and every PDA had them as well. I remember seeing them on a Handspring Visor and that not the first PDA. My Sony K750 mobile phone had tiled icons and I doubt it was the first either.
Apple launches a new smartphone model every year so it was hardly unexpected to me that it took about as long to design the first model. Software development could have started a long time before the hardware design. That would have been the item Apple invested most of its effort in anyway. The rest is outsourced...
I have been asked political questions in job interviews more than once. Yup it happens. Hobbies? There is a reason a lot of people put that in their resume.
Actually it is more like buy Ukrainian since they are the only place still manufacturing the RD-171. The Russians manufacture the two-chamber and single-chamber derivatives. UTC/Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne even have a license to manufacture the RD-180 two-chamber version in the US since it was a defense requirement for it to be useable in the Atlas V EELV.
Samsung and Microsoft were working on cellphones a long time before Apple ever entered the market and you say they are the ones hitching a ride on their bandwagon?
Try reading the pages you actually link to. They say the Lisa was introduced into the market in 1983 not 1981. Perhaps you are confusing that with the Xerox Star which was actually introduced in 1981 two years before the Apple Lisa.
Most of the things listed as Apple "innovations" in that article are considered misfeatures today. Fork files? No other operating system uses that crap for good reason. Direct manipulation of resource names? A trivial extension. Better internationalization? The Xerox Star was internationalized to Japanese... The only thing in his list which seems to be actually useful is pull-down menus. However Wikipedia says it was designed in PARC first.
Xerox was under anti-trust supervision at the time. Software patents were pretty much unenforceable and were usually not filed. When Xerox did sue Apple (after Apple sued Microsoft) it bumped into the statute of limitations because too much time had passed.
Xerox used the Xerox Alto prototypes internally (by the thousands) but they did sell a product in the market. The Xerox Star which also had a WIMP GUI and a mouse. It never got much market traction because it was too expensive. Same reason why Steve Jobs's NeXT nearly went bankrupt.
Heck I had a Sony K750 phone (with a camera flash) and it is also a black square rectangle candy bar with a color LCD screen with a chrome bezel around the phone. It did not have a large touchscreen because those were too expensive at the time. The fact is cellphones were converging towards that form factor regardless if Apple made the iPhone or not. Samsung is having problems trying to make their cellphones as different as possible from the iPhone because it is pretty hard to come with a different shape which makes sense from a usability perspective. Once you have the large touchscreen you cannot change the shape too much otherwise it won't fit a pocket anymore. Which is also why you hardly saw non-rectangular calculators either. As one guy from HP once said the constraint was that it had to fit into a shirt pocket.
If you compare it with other designs which also used large LCD screens like PDAs you can easily see that such designs keep popping up. The Handspring Visor is one example but there are others.
The SSME was not the big issue in Space Shuttle costs. The problem were the non-reusable parts and the high cost of maintenance of the vehicle between flights. The major cost items were the external tank, solids, refueling the hypergolic fuel used in the OMS/RCS, TPS maintenance. The SSMEs were pretty down the list and there were programs in the pipeline to further reduce engine marginal costs.
They may have bought some parts to inspect them. However I doubt they are using the parts in actual flight articles. SpaceX uses 9 engines in its Falcon 9 rocket. Even if there were enough parts with good enough performance characteristics they would quickly run out of stock. As for Burt Rutan and SpaceShipOne I doubt they have any hybrid rocket engines in that junkyard...
The RD-171 is a more complex staged combustion engine with many parts which is going to be more expensive to design and produce in the US than a gas generator engine with similar performance to the F-1 would be. That said there is plenty in the F-1 design that could be changed if it was done with today's technology. It makes little sense to slavishly copy the design.
It would be done completely differently today. Different materials, machine tools, tradeoffs. This is why J-2X is taking so long despite supposedly being based on an old design. Not to mention that Rocketdyne actually had recent experience building LOX/LH2 engines while they have designed no working LOX/Kerosene engine in recent times.
Sony made many mistakes with the PS3. While the PS2 indeed had backwards compatibility and was known to be easy to develop for the PS3 is the opposite. One reason why the Sega Saturn failed was the lousy development tools. Instead of Sony learning from its competitors mistakes they did the same crap again.
Actually there has been (or used to be) some low level funding of Polywell by the USN to check out the performance characteristics of this class of device.
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Taiwan has its own government, currency, army. They have 290K people in their armed forces (more than the UK or France). They develop their own weapons systems. How the heck do you think it isn't sovereign? Because the PRC says it isn't?
I guess you never heard of convergent evolution. This is why a lot of patents patents are idiotic and this is one of them.
Uh I think I was using MP2 in 1996. I remember playing MP3 files in a Pentium (i586) computer so it should have certainly been possible to play the files in 1996. I do not remember which was my first MP3 encoder but I remember it was not LAME.
Nah we should cut off everybody's tongue as a preemptive measure in case they decide to sing a song they do not have a license for.
Yeah it looks the same. It has tiled icons which have been used since like forever and every PDA had them as well. I remember seeing them on a Handspring Visor and that not the first PDA. My Sony K750 mobile phone had tiled icons and I doubt it was the first either.
Apple launches a new smartphone model every year so it was hardly unexpected to me that it took about as long to design the first model. Software development could have started a long time before the hardware design. That would have been the item Apple invested most of its effort in anyway. The rest is outsourced...
Then there are the Pythagorians which killed someone because they discovered irrational numbers. They also had a thing about people eating beans...
I have been asked political questions in job interviews more than once. Yup it happens. Hobbies? There is a reason a lot of people put that in their resume.
Actually it is more like buy Ukrainian since they are the only place still manufacturing the RD-171. The Russians manufacture the two-chamber and single-chamber derivatives. UTC/Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne even have a license to manufacture the RD-180 two-chamber version in the US since it was a defense requirement for it to be useable in the Atlas V EELV.
Samsung and Microsoft were working on cellphones a long time before Apple ever entered the market and you say they are the ones hitching a ride on their bandwagon?
Try reading the pages you actually link to. They say the Lisa was introduced into the market in 1983 not 1981. Perhaps you are confusing that with the Xerox Star which was actually introduced in 1981 two years before the Apple Lisa.
Most of the things listed as Apple "innovations" in that article are considered misfeatures today. Fork files? No other operating system uses that crap for good reason. Direct manipulation of resource names? A trivial extension. Better internationalization? The Xerox Star was internationalized to Japanese... The only thing in his list which seems to be actually useful is pull-down menus. However Wikipedia says it was designed in PARC first.
Xerox was under anti-trust supervision at the time. Software patents were pretty much unenforceable and were usually not filed. When Xerox did sue Apple (after Apple sued Microsoft) it bumped into the statute of limitations because too much time had passed.
Apple implemented these things in a shipping product. Xerox as a concept did not.
Wrong. The Xerox Star was introduced to the market in 1981 years before Apple ever sold a computer with a WIMP GUI.
Xerox used the Xerox Alto prototypes internally (by the thousands) but they did sell a product in the market. The Xerox Star which also had a WIMP GUI and a mouse. It never got much market traction because it was too expensive. Same reason why Steve Jobs's NeXT nearly went bankrupt.
Heck I had a Sony K750 phone (with a camera flash) and it is also a black square rectangle candy bar with a color LCD screen with a chrome bezel around the phone. It did not have a large touchscreen because those were too expensive at the time. The fact is cellphones were converging towards that form factor regardless if Apple made the iPhone or not. Samsung is having problems trying to make their cellphones as different as possible from the iPhone because it is pretty hard to come with a different shape which makes sense from a usability perspective. Once you have the large touchscreen you cannot change the shape too much otherwise it won't fit a pocket anymore. Which is also why you hardly saw non-rectangular calculators either. As one guy from HP once said the constraint was that it had to fit into a shirt pocket.
If you compare it with other designs which also used large LCD screens like PDAs you can easily see that such designs keep popping up. The Handspring Visor is one example but there are others.
Yeah but the RD-171 has more ISP and runs at a higher chamber pressure.
The SSME was not the big issue in Space Shuttle costs. The problem were the non-reusable parts and the high cost of maintenance of the vehicle between flights. The major cost items were the external tank, solids, refueling the hypergolic fuel used in the OMS/RCS, TPS maintenance. The SSMEs were pretty down the list and there were programs in the pipeline to further reduce engine marginal costs.
They may have bought some parts to inspect them. However I doubt they are using the parts in actual flight articles. SpaceX uses 9 engines in its Falcon 9 rocket. Even if there were enough parts with good enough performance characteristics they would quickly run out of stock. As for Burt Rutan and SpaceShipOne I doubt they have any hybrid rocket engines in that junkyard...
The RD-171 is a more complex staged combustion engine with many parts which is going to be more expensive to design and produce in the US than a gas generator engine with similar performance to the F-1 would be. That said there is plenty in the F-1 design that could be changed if it was done with today's technology. It makes little sense to slavishly copy the design.
It would be done completely differently today. Different materials, machine tools, tradeoffs. This is why J-2X is taking so long despite supposedly being based on an old design. Not to mention that Rocketdyne actually had recent experience building LOX/LH2 engines while they have designed no working LOX/Kerosene engine in recent times.
Sony made many mistakes with the PS3. While the PS2 indeed had backwards compatibility and was known to be easy to develop for the PS3 is the opposite. One reason why the Sega Saturn failed was the lousy development tools. Instead of Sony learning from its competitors mistakes they did the same crap again.
Actually there has been (or used to be) some low level funding of Polywell by the USN to check out the performance characteristics of this class of device.
Regardless of how little money you thrown down the toilet, it still is money going down the toilet.
He pays $1 billion in taxes? I doubt even Bill Gates pays that much.