the USA banned it from their airports out of jealousy before it had even flown
.
Then what was that Concorde-looking plane that landed at my (US) city's international airport back around 1975, belching soot and making a thunderous noise?
No need for jealousy, when noise, soot, sonic booms and enormous fuel costs do a perfectly good job all by themselves of spiking the economic viability of the Concorde.
The fundamental flaws in *every* SST are: 1) sonic booms (which make them banned everywhere over the US except over certain desert regions allocated to the Air Force for training/testing; similar rules almost certainly applied in Europe), and 2) fuel consumption: at supersonic speeds, they suck gas like it's going out of style.
Neither of those problems were even *close* to being solved in 1970.
Also, the Concorde was stunningly loud (violating all sorts of noise regulations), belched tons of soot, and it's range was limited, so it couldn't fly Pacific routes.
This is a canard. It happens sometimes but it's the rare exception.
A comment that incredibly *wrong* belongs on YouTube.
(Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are the exception to the rule. Them convincing kids to drop out and write JavaScript are a big reason why so many sites suck so badly.)
Do you really want smug, sanctimonious hypocrites like him swimming in the gene pool?
lol. There are a *lot* of people that I don't want swimming in the gene pool. (But I'm sure that there are many who don't want relatively stable corporate drones like me in the gene pool either...)
Everything done in the past looks easier once you see it done.
An analogy with Windows:
People don't give a shit about Windows. Or, really, their programs. What they care about are: (1) their data (which requires their existing software, which requires Windows), and (2) the ability to do something (which means software, which -- on PCs -- is essentially only written for Windows.
That, and that alone is what maintains Microsoft's dominance.
Think: how popular would Firefox, Thunderbird & LibreOffice be if they only ran on Linux? And if LibreOffice only understood it's own file formats?
Google Docs is breaking the lock that MS Office has on people, but only because it can read and write.doc and.xls files. The ability to manipulate your data anywhere is only useful if you can access the tons of documents that you've already created.
It's also the reason that "we" who see monoculture a threat push so hard for open standards.
Who knows what the next generation will prefer?
That's the pertinent question. My kids don't voluntarily use Facebook. But if they want to share something with adult ("hey, look at our vacation pics!"), they do.
Is there a Facebook API that allows users to access their pictures, tags, comment threads, everything posted on their walls, etc?
If so, then there's an opening for the competition. If not, it'll take a generation for Facebook to die, and a lot of memories will die with it.
many might have thought they could never be displaced.
Sure we thought that they'd always be the market *leader*. But the thing is that replacing an IBM PC AT with a Compaq DeskPro isn't traumatic *at all*. In fact, it was quite easy.
What was (and still is) impossible was replacing the h/w and s/w compatibility.
It's why the computer that I'm typing this on is the direct descendant of that 1981 IBM Model 5150 instead of on an Alpha, SPARC or MIPS workstation, or an ARM-powered PC, and 90% of PCs still run the direct descendant on MS-DOS 1.0.
Remember what Andy Tanenbaum wrote in 1992: "Of course 5 years from now, everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5."
You forget that the PC market -- for all the units sold each year, making Compaq the fastest company to $1Bn in sales -- was still t-i-n-y, with *lots* of room for clone competitors.
(I was there, too, and remember Compaq, Leading Edge, KayPro, Gateway 2000, an all the other brands sold in Computer Shopper.)
IBM had a customer base in large systems and global infrastructure matched by no one.
FTFY.
34 years ago, the personal computer industry was t-i-n-y. Therefore, it was ripe for exploitation and expansion by *lots* of companies when IBM "validated" that single-user computers were worthy of use by the masses.
Social media was in (almost) the same situation 10 years ago: MySpace was used by a relatively small, but dedicated group, and there were competitors, one of which was Facebook.
It wound up dominating, and has locked up that domination of "the masses" just like Microsoft has.
Slashdot Mirror
3748 people have died on 747s since they entered service.
That's 2/3 of 1% of 1% of 1% of total passengers. (approx 5,700,000,000 according to the article).
the USA banned it from their airports out of jealousy before it had even flown
.
Then what was that Concorde-looking plane that landed at my (US) city's international airport back around 1975, belching soot and making a thunderous noise?
No need for jealousy, when noise, soot, sonic booms and enormous fuel costs do a perfectly good job all by themselves of spiking the economic viability of the Concorde.
according to my dad
Your dad is wrong.
The fundamental flaws in *every* SST are:
1) sonic booms (which make them banned everywhere over the US except over certain desert regions allocated to the Air Force for training/testing; similar rules almost certainly applied in Europe), and
2) fuel consumption: at supersonic speeds, they suck gas like it's going out of style.
Neither of those problems were even *close* to being solved in 1970.
Also, the Concorde was stunningly loud (violating all sorts of noise regulations), belched tons of soot, and it's range was limited, so it couldn't fly Pacific routes.
Thus, it was doomed from the start.
And carried about a jillion times more people and cargo.
(In fact, it was *designed* as a cargo plane.)
Who the hell voted *that* the be-all and end-all measure of need in desktop RAM???
Ooooo, gotta love scientists (or "science" writers) lying with statistics!
(Mars' atmospheric pressure is currently 6/10 of 1% of Earth's atmospheric pressure.)
Which pretty much makes it explicit that when the NSA comes to your CEO, they're rude, obnoxious and demanding. And you can't say no.
I live 25 miles from a very small town (population 50) and have DSL.
Congratulations. My mother lives 8 miles from a modest sized town (population 718) and does *not* have DSL availability.
We have an office in a small, very remote town.
And the people who live 8-10 miles outside of town?
the entire area is blanketed with 4G LTE through ATT/Verizon/TMo.
IOW, cell networks.
I climbed a remote mountain.
Wi-Fi access on top of the remote mountain?
Or was a cell tower erected?
Drive beyond the suburbs and disabuse yourself of the notion that everyone lives within range of a Wi-Fi station.
Only to people who have been in the Ivory Tower waaaaaay too long.
are functional Turanga Leela armbands.
This is a canard. It happens sometimes but it's the rare exception.
A comment that incredibly *wrong* belongs on YouTube.
(Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are the exception to the rule. Them convincing kids to drop out and write JavaScript are a big reason why so many sites suck so badly.)
Yup. Someone didn't learn his history lessons very well. (Or, more likely, was taught that, God Dammit, communism *works* if you only do it right!!!)
This falls under the stuff that matters
That's such a broad enough charter as to make any sort of nerd filter meaningless.
though I'm pretty sure nerds care about free speech too.
Then every free speech case in the country is going to be posted on /.?
but how is this news for nerds?
Do you really want smug, sanctimonious hypocrites like him swimming in the gene pool?
lol. There are a *lot* of people that I don't want swimming in the gene pool. (But I'm sure that there are many who don't want relatively stable corporate drones like me in the gene pool either...)
No. I have a wife.
Gah. That's *exactly* what I was thinking. Also that he has a very reduced chance of transmitting his DNA to the next generation...
Everything done in the past looks easier once you see it done.
An analogy with Windows:
People don't give a shit about Windows. Or, really, their programs. What they care about are:
(1) their data (which requires their existing software, which requires Windows), and
(2) the ability to do something (which means software, which -- on PCs -- is essentially only written for Windows.
That, and that alone is what maintains Microsoft's dominance.
Think: how popular would Firefox, Thunderbird & LibreOffice be if they only ran on Linux? And if LibreOffice only understood it's own file formats?
Google Docs is breaking the lock that MS Office has on people, but only because it can read and write .doc and .xls files. The ability to manipulate your data anywhere is only useful if you can access the tons of documents that you've already created.
It's also the reason that "we" who see monoculture a threat push so hard for open standards.
Who knows what the next generation will prefer?
That's the pertinent question. My kids don't voluntarily use Facebook. But if they want to share something with adult ("hey, look at our vacation pics!"), they do.
Is there a Facebook API that allows users to access their pictures, tags, comment threads, everything posted on their walls, etc?
If so, then there's an opening for the competition. If not, it'll take a generation for Facebook to die, and a lot of memories will die with it.
many might have thought they could never be displaced.
Sure we thought that they'd always be the market *leader*. But the thing is that replacing an IBM PC AT with a Compaq DeskPro isn't traumatic *at all*. In fact, it was quite easy.
What was (and still is) impossible was replacing the h/w and s/w compatibility.
It's why the computer that I'm typing this on is the direct descendant of that 1981 IBM Model 5150 instead of on an Alpha, SPARC or MIPS workstation, or an ARM-powered PC, and 90% of PCs still run the direct descendant on MS-DOS 1.0.
Remember what Andy Tanenbaum wrote in 1992: "Of course 5 years from now, everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5."
Either food in America is super cheap
Must be, since we feed a family of 4 on $900, and that's on the high side...
Damn, you beat me to it!
You forget that the PC market -- for all the units sold each year, making Compaq the fastest company to $1Bn in sales -- was still t-i-n-y, with *lots* of room for clone competitors.
(I was there, too, and remember Compaq, Leading Edge, KayPro, Gateway 2000, an all the other brands sold in Computer Shopper.)
What's wrong with farmed algae?
IBM had a customer base in large systems and global infrastructure matched by no one.
FTFY.
34 years ago, the personal computer industry was t-i-n-y. Therefore, it was ripe for exploitation and expansion by *lots* of companies when IBM "validated" that single-user computers were worthy of use by the masses.
Social media was in (almost) the same situation 10 years ago: MySpace was used by a relatively small, but dedicated group, and there were competitors, one of which was Facebook.
It wound up dominating, and has locked up that domination of "the masses" just like Microsoft has.