Rather than reply in detail to a message you did not fully comprehend (I did after all point out the first trick is to not get found... but that does get a bit difficult when the various ship borne RADARs light up), I'll just make a few points in reply:
You said "do the math"; well, I pulled out my atlas instead. The coast of Taiwan that's closest to and roughly parallel to the mainland ranges from roughly 150 to 225 km apart. If a surface launched adaptation of this missile family is developed, which shouldn't be hard... well, things could get exciting. Not impossible, though, especially if the Hawkeye and/or Sentry are good enough to detect them at some distance.
And as I'm sure you're aware by the city you mentioned, they already have played nuclear blackmail... and I really have to wonder if it wasn't effective. E.g. why isn't the US government offering to seel the ROC the AEGIS ships they desperately need? Although we wouldn't know if they're on the short list to be supplied with the theater based ABM systems we're developing....
As for the threat to "them", it comes down to the threat to the PRC's nomenklatura; they don't care a whole lot about "the people" (Mao was rather famous for his attitude about taking nuclear casualties), but they do care about nasty things like faction fights that have led more than one country into a suicidal war (e.g. Japan in WII).
Great. So now attackers just have to cover their missiles with bicycle reflective strips and the lasers become approx. 99% less effective.
^_^
A serious reply to the general countermeasure issue that always pops up in these discussions.
First of all, you can't do anything with most currently fielded missiles: you'll destroy the weight budget, or otherwise have to do so much work it's not cost effective. (Note that in the case of the existing Katyusha and derivatives, they might be able to afford a lower range... but that still improves things for the defense. Standoff equals survival for an attacker....
Otherwise, the enemy has to develop a new generation of missiles, and that's not cheap. It's thought by many that the mere prospect of having to do this without the necessary resources is what caused Gorbichev to fold when the mere threat of taking SDI beyond the research phase became an issue. The Soviet Union had poured incredible resources into building their Strategic Rocket Forces by then....
China, for instance, may make a play for Taiwan at some point in the future.
Even more specifically, they are building and placing about 50 short/medium range nuclear capable missiles across from Taiwan each year.
Before the end of the decade they'll have about 800; rather than the ridiculed "million man swim" their battle plan is postulated to use these missiles (probably with conventional warheads, at least to begin with) to knock down the ROC's air power and defenses, and to then place enough paratroopers at key points to control the island. Unless the USNavy is both in place at the time and has solved the problem of supersonic sea skimming anti-ship missiles (perhaps by not getting precisely detected until things start flying), it is a plan that sounds like it might work.
A good theater ABM system will wreck it, especially since one of the key thinks people who oppose ABM systems don't realize is that the side attacking can't pick which missiles get taken out and therefore which targets are remain to do their job. An ABM system doesn't have to be very effective in practice to make a first strike impractical.
the fireball of a nuke is its liberated gamma rays interacting
with the atmosphere and being turned into heat
The majority of a fission reaction's fireball comes from the
Brehmsstrahlung Effect. Uranium fisses into two incredibly ionized
fragments each with a +46 charge on average. Those fragments have a
huge amount of kinetic energy and, due to their enormous charge,
tend to stop within inches of the detonation--meaning all that
energy gets liberated as heat inside a sphere about the same size as
a beach ball.
That's the fireball for you.
That's obviously almost certainly correct when you think about the
basic physics. I can't remember my source for gamma ray heating of
air causing the fireball (although it might contribute some)....
The entire idea that "gamma is easily absorbed by air" is
nonsense.
Indeed --- otherwise Enhance Radiation warheads (aka "The Neutron
Bomb") like the Sprint's (but not whatever it was we deployed in
Europe) wouldn't make sense. Therefore it's a good thing I said in
the context of gamma/X-ray lasers that "gamma/X-rays don't propagate
through the atmosphere very well."
This has been one of the major arguments for the use of nuclear pumped
X-ray lasers in space for ballistic missile defense; they can't kill cities.
If gamma is easily absorbed by air, then why did I have to
wear a lead apron whenever I was around a gamma source? Because
gamma travels through air quite readily, and ionizes holy hell out
of your body tissues as it travels through you.
Pretty obviously it's a question of distance, made more complicated
for a laser by the inverse square law not applying, although collimation is obviously important; scattering is probably the major factor (the cause of "skyshine").
This I can't entirely recommend (like I suppose everything else, but
the FAS is particularly suspect; they and this essay are certainly
open about their agenda). For an essay who's thesis is that excessive
secrecy is a bad thing, it's curious but very politically correct
to omit any mention of Teller's campaign against that. It also
ignores the evidence against Oppenheimer WRT the clearance
issue, which has been partly confirmed after the fall of the Soviet
Union: at a museum exhibit honoring their atomic spies (the third of
which is still unknown...), Oppenheimer has a place, but not as a spy per
se (the guide(s) were not clear about his role while they were about the confirmed spys).
I'm simply uncomfortable with anything that puts a pure white hat on
Oppenheimer and a black hat on Teller, or someone who tries to write
about nuclear war fighting without taking it seriously, i.e. thinking
and/or reading about how nukes would be used if worst comes to worst
(obviously his understandable dislike for the concept is the likely
cause). Morland's bias and gross ignorance about this field,
etc. makes the whole essay a questionable thing, and it's been amply
demonstrated that you need to carefully check technical papers in
the areas where they result in support for a thoroughly biased
author's thesis.
(I suspect Morland is trying to be honest as he can, but too strong
a bias can e.g. cause one to not sufficiently check convenient results.)
Unfortunately, we have to start "thinking about the unthinkable"
again; "Wretchard's" indispensable essays in his Belmont
Club blog make the case better than I can, but the bottom line
is that a likel
[ Various factors ] mean Longhorn's pricetag will have to be pretty steep if MS is going to profit directly from it.
Well, Microsoft doesn't have to make (much of) a profit on the Longhorn iteration of their OS per se. What they do have to do is stay in the game: if previous and future iterations make nice profits, they'll do OK (until there is some paradigm shift and the game changes too much; I wonder if (in)security + too much malware might cause one given enough time...).
However, the delays on this, the next SQL server and.NET versions will hurt them or at least their subscription business model in the long term as the article pointed out....
(One minor note: true or not, some of the Longhorn delay is being blamed on talent being re-allocated to the emergency/crisis XP SP2... and I further note that if SP2 breaks too many things that will prolong the extreme insecurity that much more.)
Regardless of hollywood fantasies, it leaves you 3 seconds til detonation, once its armed and released.
I don't think it's so much fantasy as not being up to date. I've heard that WWII (and I assume Korean) era fragmentation grenades had a nominal 7 second fuze, and that was obviously too long.
What I remember is that it's now a nominal 4.5 seconds, but given the variability in such a mass produced device you're indeed supposed to treat it as being something like 3 seconds or less, and just throw it and don't mess with arming it and waiting.
And to get into real grenade trivia, I heard from someone in the 101st a few years ago that a very green just arrived to the division soldier managed to kill himself with a fragmentation grenade in Panama: they were clearing rooms, and he didn't notice that he had opened a door to a closet, thereby not giving him the necessary distance:-(. That helped induce the USArmy at the time to emphasize concussion grenades, especially for urban warfare, and e.g. the urban warfare manual emphasizes the extra training needed to use fragmentation grenades with some safety....
Well, Sam Cohen (sp?), inventor of the real "neutron bomb" (Enhanced Radiation (ER) warhead) and author of a cogent book about it (with the great punch line that we never deployed real ones in Europe (I think the Sprint ER warhead was probably the only one ever deployed)) at one time thought there might be something to "red mercury" but he of course didn't
get very explicit about it in public sources.... Curiously, Hf is about
95% the atomic weight of mercury....
It does sound unlikely on theoretical grounds, so it's up to the experimentalists to prove Hf-178 m2 decay can be induced by X-rays.
But what could this be used for? Those worried about bombs are not thinking this through, I suspect. Conventional Pu implosion based nukes would I think be much cheaper, and we can already fit one inside a 155mm artillery shell. Probably much cheaper --- I should read up on it --- but
with a stable isomer of Hf-178 have a 27.1% incidence in nature, you
aren't going to make it by pure extraction....
Gamma/X-ray lasers sound cool, and they are... for space combat. Problem is, gammm/X-rays don't propagate through the atmosphere very well. In fact, the fireball of a nuke is its liberated gamma rays interacting with the atmosphere and being turned into heat. One would have to check out distances and all sorts of other factors to see if it might make e.g. a good tank killer (and we already have LOTS of ways of killing tanks). But
as a directed energy weapon (X-ray laser) it might have short range uses inside an atmosphere compared to existing alternatives.
For bombs or X-ray lasers in space this might be very useful due to the low mass and ability to turn the source on and off for the latter, but that's
a long ways away, and realistically only threatens fast targets, i.e. incoming boosters or warheads that are going to kill people if you don't stop them. Kinetic kill is a very mature technology to compete with, but the speed of a directed energy weapon (e.g. X-ray laser) could make it very worthwhile,
especially if it's multi-shot (you could see if you've killed the target
and then try again).
Otherwise, at first thought is just seems to be useful for special cases of power generation; the ability to turn it on and off could do some really special things to weight budgets. (E.g. you only have to shield vulnerable parts of what you're powering; it's not "hot" all the time like a reactor or pure decay heat source.) However I wonder about its daughter isotope
decay patterns... those can be nasty.
[...] but in my main office I have quite a bit of time eaten up by the pointy-haired bosses.
And there lies the main problem.
Many if not most bosses will never willingly tolerate a daytime work at
home situation of any time. If you're not under their eyes/thumb,
in their gut they don't feel you're working. If company policy allows
work at home anyway, don't expect good career results at your company
no matter what wonders you accomplish.
(Don't forget politics: I speak from bitter experience
when I had to "disappear" for six weeks to write a "save the company"
software system. If you're not there to play politics at even a low
level, in many workplaces you'll find your position undermined.)
Otherwise in most if not practically all situations, if you aren't
working in a consulting model (however you get paid) where you've
first sold your out of the office services, you can arrange
a work at home site only after you've spent considerable time (half a
year or more) at the office establishing your relationships and
proving your worth. Then it becomes an option, but still
somewhat dangerous. (Once a small company made it easy by moving to
a more expensive building and not having an office for me... ^_^.
Best of all is to become indispensable, have that deeply recognized,
and then have it forced, as above, or say your spouse gets a job in
another area. Faced with the prospect of losing your high quality
and/or indispensable work a lot of companies will do most anything
to keep your services (this happened with my brother's wife).
Final note is that in my experience if you're building something big
enough to require a close knit team it's really hard to make it work
if you all aren't physically close. One study a long time ago said
the most effective collaboration requires people to be either 30 feet
or one flight of stairs from each other.
[...] most people here have been denying that it was better, except in certain cases.
Specifically (and this is all from memory):
Its big advantage was streaming, pumping out a very fast flow of sequential
bits. Intel and others were at the time enamored of "convergence"
(e.g. playing movies on your computer, which we now know is evil:-),
and it was thought this was a good thing for multimedia.
Except there were of course tradeoffs: you paid several prices in addition to the
royalties. The two killers were slow startup time, which made random
access speeds bad (which turned out to be critical), and its bit? serial interface, which required
something like 600MHz traces on a motherboard, which was well beyond
the realistic state of the art at the time. Intel did two separate
million part recalls, one for a chipset, and one for a motherboard
(just weeks before shipping...). (Note that your fast FSB busses
obtain their speeds by using the signal edges cleverly, not by pushing
the motherboard trace speeds outrageously.)
(It was also said that Intel higher engineering management forced this
down the throats of their engineers who had to try to make it work,
and fired anyone who was too persistent in pointing out the Emperor had
no clothes. Well, Intel paid a pretty big price for this debacle....)
As far as I'm concerned, it died a well deserved death. The only
question I see in this case as others have pointed out is exactly what did the manufacturers say to
each other, and can a judge or jury be convinced it was illegal
collusion instead of trading gripes. You do have to be careful
what you say to your competitors; many companies have strict rules to
try to avoid this sort of mess, since it does happen.
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices:
Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776) bk. 1, ch. 10, pt. 2
being investigated by New York City Police and members of the joint terrorism task force
That's just great. Not that I don't hope they find the crooks to walked off with this stuff - but once the word "terrorism" pops up, all of the sudden I'm thinking Patriot Act.
You're right to be concerned, but look at it this way: if you do
accept the existence of terrorism (on Manhattan Island no less), then
you need to accept the fact that units, especially "joint"ed ones need
to practice. I suspect they're probably pretty sure this is not
terrorism, but it gives them a great opportunity to do something real
that's still not as pressured as an attack.
And there's lots of kinks to work out, as a rule. "What's foobar's
phone number?" "How come this radio system isn't talking to this one." Etc.
Perhaps a "trust but verify" posture towards this is best....
If you applied last month's critical patches OR you have a working firewall - even the basic XP one - you won't get it.
Until someone brings in an infected laptop....
Unfortunately a basic firewall setup is a "crust" defense; get past the one layer of protection and it's all over. That's why "defense in depth" is such a big deal.
(In this case, applying patches as fast as practical to the machines you haven't been able to switch to something other than Windows, per-machine firewalls if you can deal with the hassle, multiple internal firewalls if you're big enough, and of course business continuity plans (can't emphasize that enough, so many things can take out e.g. your server room; e.g. is there a bathroom above it, kitchen below it? etc.)
Once again, cold fusion is championed by someone who's not a nuclear physicist.
MIT's EECS department is the home to a lot of people who ought to be in other departments that won't accept them for a variety of reasons, frequently political; after the work described below, there's no way the MIT Physics Department would ever let him darken their doorway.
Peter Hagelstein spend quite a bit of time at LLNL developing tiny X-ray lasers that were powered by Shiva (this is a matter of public record, it's his Ph.D. thesis...).
It's strongly rumored that he then worked on the nuclear pumped X-ray laser project (many terrawatts delivered over a few tens of nanoseconds), which was shut down for political reasons before it obtained conclusive results. When he gave a talk about his Ph.D. work the very first words out of his mouth were "I have no comment on..." the recent article in Aviation W[L]eek and Technology about the nuclear pumped variety.
Neither make him a nuclear physicist, but he has plenty of expertise to draw on: EECS does plasma physics which I think are intended to work towards fusion, and of course there's the Physics and Nuclear Engineering Departments. And as he demonstrates, there's no high wall between parts of EE and physics.
(A catchy title not meant to insult the asker of a very good question.)
Here's another question which nobody on the "We must clone Microsoft's products at all costs" lobby has ever satisfactorily answered: how are we contributing anything to the world if our product is just a (poor, it has to be poor, because Microsoft's technologies are not lumbered with having to run on a platform that was never designed to run them) clone of something that already exists?
Good question that, since Mono or any other.NET clone will by definition suffer by trailing MS's.NET and have the problems you and others point out.
My answer to that is very simple: security.
The Microsoft is really taking a hit on security. Bottom line IT support cost hits: wasn't there mention of how worms et. al. are hurting a lot of small-medium European companies? We've all seen or heard of this sort of crisis in companies we or friends know about. And if I was running a back end Windows based system I'd be nervous....
The biggest weakness of MS.NET is that you can run it on platform you want, as along as it is Windows (to paraphrase the very old Ford joke).
Mono/[your favorite.NET clone] has the potential of running on a more secure platform, and that is of very serious interest to a lot of institutions, especially since Java is perceived to be a bit weak right now.
I'm also a little concerned about the dates (not to mention the source; this field and NASA are totally politicized; is Hansen (sp?) still with NASA?):
Why 1998, instead of 2001 +- one year; it's really easy to make these studies say what you want if you cherry pick the data or beginning and end points. Anyone familiar with other pre-1981 or post 1998 data?
It's not really a GUI though, as gui means windows that you can move around and overlap, with menus at the top of the screen. The Xerox machine was less GUI than it was anything else. It took until Apple released the first MAC to get a GUI going.
Ehh? As I remember, Engelbart and co. at SRI put together everything but a bitmap monitor. They had all that was really important (since graphics was an obvious extension): (tiled) windows, mouse, chord keyboard (like a few piano keys), the whole paradigm.
Xerox added the graphical to it, and made Altos in small batches but in a total fairly large quantity. It was indeed Apple that had the first GUI to achieve commercial success (on their second try, after the Lisa), and for that they get credit, but they were implementing early '70s state of the art a decade later (about the usual lag from lab to industry).
I really don't know what you mean by "The Xerox machine was less GUI than it was anything else."; I'd say the GUI was the biggest thing it had going for it, given that it had a 16bit bit-slice processor with (argh) bank-switching of up to 4 64KB memory banks. (And it was probably a good price/performance PC for it's time, but preferred a PDP-11/45 with split I/D (65KB instructions, 56KB data, 8KB stack due to it's MMU) with a graphics system... running UNIX (that was the choice I actually did make in 1980:-)
As a side note, I've often thought that the relative granularity of objects in LISP and Smalltalk had to do in no small part with the fact that LISP was traditionally run on big address space machines (PDP-6/10/DEC 20, 1MB!!!:-), and Smalltalk on machines were it could be much more painful to access an object, encouraging larger objects.
Do not hire anyone you are not willing to fire, with the attendant consequences.
Unless you are a master at dealing with people, non-family/friend potential hires or employees will view such a situation with extreme skepticism at best. Me, I spot a business owner one family member to handle the money, but beyond that I never go to work for a company that has more family/friend employees unless I'm desperate.
In the three or so situations where I didn't realize ahead of time the situation (and one very early startup composed of a set of friends and one brother who was a brilliant programmer), I had very bad experiences, but then none of the managers were very experienced.
Bottom line is probably "how big do you want your company to become?" If you go the route of nepotism, you'll be very lucky if it ever gets big (unless you have a lot of talented relatives you can hire!:-) You simply won't be able to hire or retain "outsiders" as you need.
Note this is somewhat akin to "high trust" vs. "low trust" cultures. E.g. (not to single them out, but they're a familiar example), Chinese tend to keep a company inside the family; this limits the type and scope of their companies, and in cases like Wang putting his son in charge of R&D, can (help) kill a company. (It's not likely Wang the company would have survived the transition to PCs, but this sealed its fate (I had a friend working in their R&D at the time)).
I assume you mean it will replace all the Fixed wing fighters:), not
the C-130s
Well, those are transports, not "tactical" planes (not counting the
small number of gunships built on the base airframe).
or A-10s
Nope, the A-10 is doomed and to be replaced by the F-35. The only
question is will they continue the A-10 Service Life Extension Plan
(SLEP) out to 2008, which as I remember is the official retirement
date. Remember, at the top the Air Force has never wanted
this plane nor its mission.
[...] It looks like the F-22 isn't going to happen, from what I was reading today.
There
certainly have been strong rumors of that for a while; if so, it'll cause massive
waves: what I've heard is that "if it isn't the F-22 we're not
interested in it" is the overwhelming attitude of the current Pentagon
etc. AF "leadership", which is overwhelmingly made of "fighter jocks".
I don't think its going to replace the F-14 or F-15.
It's supposed to replace the F-14, and let's face it, both it and the
A-10 are old. Something has to replace them before
their airframes can't be patched up any more, and in the case of the
F-14, its mission is suffering akin to the Comanche; we don't expect
to have to defend an aircraft carrier battle group against a horde of
Backfire bombers. Note that F-14s were mostly/entirely used to drop
bombs in the recent Gulf War, something this interceptor wasn't
designed to do at all....
Anyway, we're in for interesting times; let's hope we have usable and
useful planes (old or new) when we need them in earnest (oh, say, in
The Battle for Taiwan around the turn of the decade...).
I love the A-10, too, but it is planned to be replaced by the F-35 eventually. Not sure that will happen, though; I recall reading back around 1990 that the A-10 was to be replaced by the F-16.
The F-35 will "replace" every tactical airplane in our inventory except the F-15, for which the F-22 is the replacement. Let us pray it is not going to turn out to be a fiasco as great as the '60s TFX, or more like the M14, which was an acceptable M1 Garand replacement, but didn't do well in replacing every other small arm from sub-machine gun to auto-rifle (i.e. the BAR).
It certainly won't replace the A-10; it's way too fragile. The Air Force simply isn't really interested in direct support of men on the ground --- and the reason the Army is so into helicopters is the "Treaty of Key West", which forbids them from having fixed wing (tactical, I think) aircraft weighting over 10,000 lb. (This was part of the separation of the Air Force from the Army.)
As for the attempted F-16 replacement of the A-10, I heard it foundered on trying to put a serious cannon on a pylon; this has always been difficult, and aside, from, say WWII era 40mm versions I don't remember anyone ever doing it with success (and those may have been firmly attached to the airframe).
If Micron was doing such a thing, why wouldn't Crucial, Buffalo, Geil, Kingston, and so forth lower their prices and blow the competition away?
You make a good general point: cartels (like OPEC) break down when competitors in or out of the cartel find it to their advantage to lower their prices.
The problem with your example is that Crucial is a unit of Micron, and I don't believe any of the others actually make chips (they (I assume) just make S/DIMMs using the chips from a limited number of fabricators, such as Micron). If that number is limited enough, a successful price fixing cartel can be pulled off:
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776) bk. 1, ch. 10, pt. 2
Just how many primary, world-class (i.e. low cost and therefore have some pricing flexibility) chip manufacturers are there? (It's obviously in the interests of the higher cost manufacturers to keep prices high....)
[...] Actually, I thought "Micro Channel", but they're pretty much interchangeable. IBM trying to set another standard, and not realizing that the rest of the PC industry was heading off in a completely different direction.
IBM's R&D at the time was at least half the speed of its competitors (the PC division had been absorbed back into the rest of the company, as I remember); in classic IBM style, the Micro Channel was designed to pump twice as much data as what they initially shipped. What they didn't realize is that they didn't have a monopoly on fast bus design or fabrication, or a need to move slowly: others shipped faster busses sooner.
IBM also didn't realize that the PC open standard was critical (as I mentioned, they never shipped a "PC compatible" PC after the original base model, and only made a standards change stick with the AT). They created a monster with open bus standards and allowing "white room" BIOSes.
I can remember only one company that licensed the Micro Channel (ALR, I think), and the one MC computer of theirs that I used... wasn't up to their normal standards, let alone anything really good. (Until I replaced it, the company I worked for was dependant on a driver that only supported a IBM MC SCSI card.)
Ah. Point taken, along with binaryDigit's clarifications.
However, I'd say we should keep in mind our various definitions of "flop". E.g. I would call Transmeta a "hype flop", in that they may have a very nice business (or not, I don't know), but it didn't live up the to hype. (Then again, the hype put them on the map.:-)
I'm 100% agreed with binaryDigit in "calling most attempts to create a next generation OS a flop", I just think most of these OS "flops" are not "biggest flops" except for OS/2, simply because they never got very big to begin with. I'd say that (for now) the idea of creating a next generation OS is a "biggest flop"; the market does not seem to be ready --- but note what MS is saying about Longhorn....
(And this includes Linux, which is a very nice Unix like OS and not a "flop", but can't be called "next generation", I think. Thinking about it in terms of Clayton Christensen's "disruptive technologies" is useful; Linux is disruptive, especially due to its development model and the business models it allows, but by definition that doesn't make it "next generation" in the way I think we mean.)
OS/2 is most certainly a big flop (although not a horrible product as others have pointed out); it had the potential to defeat or niche MS Windows. If e.g IBM had listened to Microsoft (!) and wrote OS/2 early on for the 386, things would be different; This is another piece of fallout from IBM's "the AT is the last PC you'll need to buy for a long while" decision, and given the massive nightmares and performance penalties in writing for 286 protected mode, that plus the decision to do it in assembler doomed it from the start.
Errr, I take it you don't remember that in 1980 (the last year of Carter) the inflation rate was (from memory) 13%, and the prime rate 20-22%? Remember "stagflation"? Low/no growth, coupled with high unemployment and inflation (which '"keynesian" economics' and most especially the Phillips curve said was impossible, in my understanding). (Not that Carter gets all the blame, in fact, he started both deregulation and as I remember capital gains tax rate cuts, and of course JFK was the original "supply side" tax cutter.)
Until the Reagan tax cuts were fully phased in (note that phasing in big tax cuts it a guaranteed way to create or prolong a recession, as people wait to create taxable events), the '80s were very bad (e.g. my parents' company almost went under due to the stress of borrowing costs), and few including myself believe that Reagan could turn things around.
The Arpanet came before the net and demanded that all computers that connect to it do so with the same hardware and software.
I was really disappointed to read this in the article. First, it wasn't true. There were a lot of such restrictions in the early implementations, but by the time that TCP was spec'd, there were already cases of interconnected hardware and software from different vendors. [...]
Err, I think you may both be right; there were both IMPs, Interface Message Processors, minicomputers made by Honeywell as I remember (and the software that ran on them) and the computers that connected to IMPs. And "NCP", the pre-TCP protocol, may have run only on the IMPs, and may have imposed limits on what the connecting computers could do.
I wouldn't categorize most of your examples as tech flops at all, and certainly they wouldn't be among anyone's list of the Eight Biggest Tech Flops Ever, IMNSHO.
For most of the items, I agree; many are qualified successes (very qualified in some cases), or hype more than product flops, which would include the.COM bubble; I think there are too many successful.COMs to call that a flop.
But binaryDigit is spot on with his last three:
Windows version Lotus 1-2-3, it's failure helped to change the landscape of application isv's and helped to firmly root Office as defacto.
I would go further and say the failure of all the competitors of Office to deliver timely or sufficiently bug free Windows versions of their products. One of Microsoft's "secrets of success" is that they consistently write software that basicly works (stop laughing, now!:-).
(By that I mean it didn't GP fault so quickly you couldn't even run a demo. Or in the case of Word Perfect, which had an amazing lock on the market, delivering a version that was totally obnoxious to use (e.g. the pictures dropping to the bottom of the document). I had a loyal WP friend at the time who gave up in disgust.)
Apple Lisa/III. Nuff said.
Not the Lisa, if for no other reason than it translated into lessons learned the hard way for the Mac. The Apple III, on the other hand, was critical. Thanks to VisiCalc, Apple had gained a degree of respectability with businesses, which they could have in theory build upon with a credible serious business machine.
Thank goodness we were spared the horrors of memory bank switching (something that crippled the Xerox Alto), but Apple's abject failure to execute (right down to sockets that were so cheap chips were frequently rattling loose in the case upon arrival at the dealer) gave IBM a free shot at capturing the next generation PC market... and the rest is history. (The critical historical strategic failure for Apple has always been to target profit margin before quantity in an area where network effects are overwhelming.)
PCJr, NOTHING compared to PS/2, the system that helped IBM lose the PC market.
The PCJr. was a credibility flop, although there's a strong argument that using off the shelf components was the fatal flaw for IBM, since it removed the IBM mystique. However, I don't single out the PCjr since except for the AT all of IBM's follow ons to the original PC were flops (as I remember, none of them were even "PC compatible"!).
I'm not sure I'd count the PS/2; it was a flop as an attempt to recapture control of the PC market, but I'd argue that the failure to counter or preempt the Compaq 386 cemented IBM's loss of control. (It was said that IBM had promised its customers that the AT was the last PC they'd have to buy for a long time... that was a/the critical mistake in what turned out to be their end game.)
If the email is sent using government, rather than private or party equipment, does the list become a record that can be obtained using FOIA (Freedom of Information Act?)
Could be --- but it won't matter for the Congress. Due to the principle of separation of powers, the Congress pretty much has to be exempt from FOIA or anything else enforced by the Executive branch. Can anyone confirm this?
(That's the good explanation for why they are "above the law". They have to be to help prevent abuses by the Executive branch. The powers of the "purse" and ultimately impeachment back this up, but this tends to stop things before it gets ugly --- an imperfect but stable system.)
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You said "do the math"; well, I pulled out my atlas instead. The coast of Taiwan that's closest to and roughly parallel to the mainland ranges from roughly 150 to 225 km apart. If a surface launched adaptation of this missile family is developed, which shouldn't be hard ... well, things could get exciting. Not impossible, though, especially if the Hawkeye and/or Sentry are good enough to detect them at some distance.
And as I'm sure you're aware by the city you mentioned, they already have played nuclear blackmail ... and I really have to wonder if it wasn't effective. E.g. why isn't the US government offering to seel the ROC the AEGIS ships they desperately need? Although we wouldn't know if they're on the short list to be supplied with the theater based ABM systems we're developing....
As for the threat to "them", it comes down to the threat to the PRC's nomenklatura; they don't care a whole lot about "the people" (Mao was rather famous for his attitude about taking nuclear casualties), but they do care about nasty things like faction fights that have led more than one country into a suicidal war (e.g. Japan in WII).
^_^
A serious reply to the general countermeasure issue that always pops up in these discussions.
First of all, you can't do anything with most currently fielded missiles: you'll destroy the weight budget, or otherwise have to do so much work it's not cost effective. (Note that in the case of the existing Katyusha and derivatives, they might be able to afford a lower range ... but that still improves things for the defense. Standoff equals survival for an attacker....
Otherwise, the enemy has to develop a new generation of missiles, and that's not cheap. It's thought by many that the mere prospect of having to do this without the necessary resources is what caused Gorbichev to fold when the mere threat of taking SDI beyond the research phase became an issue. The Soviet Union had poured incredible resources into building their Strategic Rocket Forces by then....
Even more specifically, they are building and placing about 50 short/medium range nuclear capable missiles across from Taiwan each year.
Before the end of the decade they'll have about 800; rather than the ridiculed "million man swim" their battle plan is postulated to use these missiles (probably with conventional warheads, at least to begin with) to knock down the ROC's air power and defenses, and to then place enough paratroopers at key points to control the island. Unless the USNavy is both in place at the time and has solved the problem of supersonic sea skimming anti-ship missiles (perhaps by not getting precisely detected until things start flying), it is a plan that sounds like it might work.
A good theater ABM system will wreck it, especially since one of the key thinks people who oppose ABM systems don't realize is that the side attacking can't pick which missiles get taken out and therefore which targets are remain to do their job. An ABM system doesn't have to be very effective in practice to make a first strike impractical.
That's obviously almost certainly correct when you think about the basic physics. I can't remember my source for gamma ray heating of air causing the fireball (although it might contribute some)....
Indeed --- otherwise Enhance Radiation warheads (aka "The Neutron Bomb") like the Sprint's (but not whatever it was we deployed in Europe) wouldn't make sense. Therefore it's a good thing I said in the context of gamma/X-ray lasers that "gamma/X-rays don't propagate through the atmosphere very well."
This has been one of the major arguments for the use of nuclear pumped X-ray lasers in space for ballistic missile defense; they can't kill cities.
Pretty obviously it's a question of distance, made more complicated for a laser by the inverse square law not applying, although collimation is obviously important; scattering is probably the major factor (the cause of "skyshine").
This I can't entirely recommend (like I suppose everything else, but the FAS is particularly suspect; they and this essay are certainly open about their agenda). For an essay who's thesis is that excessive secrecy is a bad thing, it's curious but very politically correct to omit any mention of Teller's campaign against that. It also ignores the evidence against Oppenheimer WRT the clearance issue, which has been partly confirmed after the fall of the Soviet Union: at a museum exhibit honoring their atomic spies (the third of which is still unknown...), Oppenheimer has a place, but not as a spy per se (the guide(s) were not clear about his role while they were about the confirmed spys).
I'm simply uncomfortable with anything that puts a pure white hat on Oppenheimer and a black hat on Teller, or someone who tries to write about nuclear war fighting without taking it seriously, i.e. thinking and/or reading about how nukes would be used if worst comes to worst (obviously his understandable dislike for the concept is the likely cause). Morland's bias and gross ignorance about this field, etc. makes the whole essay a questionable thing, and it's been amply demonstrated that you need to carefully check technical papers in the areas where they result in support for a thoroughly biased author's thesis.
(I suspect Morland is trying to be honest as he can, but too strong a bias can e.g. cause one to not sufficiently check convenient results.)
Unfortunately, we have to start "thinking about the unthinkable" again; "Wretchard's" indispensable essays in his Belmont Club blog make the case better than I can, but the bottom line is that a likel
Well, Microsoft doesn't have to make (much of) a profit on the Longhorn iteration of their OS per se. What they do have to do is stay in the game: if previous and future iterations make nice profits, they'll do OK (until there is some paradigm shift and the game changes too much; I wonder if (in)security + too much malware might cause one given enough time...).
However, the delays on this, the next SQL server and .NET versions will hurt them or at least their subscription business model in the long term as the article pointed out....
(One minor note: true or not, some of the Longhorn delay is being blamed on talent being re-allocated to the emergency/crisis XP SP2 ... and I further note that if SP2 breaks too many things that will prolong the extreme insecurity that much more.)
I don't think it's so much fantasy as not being up to date. I've heard that WWII (and I assume Korean) era fragmentation grenades had a nominal 7 second fuze, and that was obviously too long.
What I remember is that it's now a nominal 4.5 seconds, but given the variability in such a mass produced device you're indeed supposed to treat it as being something like 3 seconds or less, and just throw it and don't mess with arming it and waiting.
And to get into real grenade trivia, I heard from someone in the 101st a few years ago that a very green just arrived to the division soldier managed to kill himself with a fragmentation grenade in Panama: they were clearing rooms, and he didn't notice that he had opened a door to a closet, thereby not giving him the necessary distance :-(. That helped induce the USArmy at the time to emphasize concussion grenades, especially for urban warfare, and e.g. the urban warfare manual emphasizes the extra training needed to use fragmentation grenades with some safety....
It does sound unlikely on theoretical grounds, so it's up to the experimentalists to prove Hf-178 m2 decay can be induced by X-rays.
But what could this be used for? Those worried about bombs are not thinking this through, I suspect. Conventional Pu implosion based nukes would I think be much cheaper, and we can already fit one inside a 155mm artillery shell. Probably much cheaper --- I should read up on it --- but with a stable isomer of Hf-178 have a 27.1% incidence in nature, you aren't going to make it by pure extraction....
Gamma/X-ray lasers sound cool, and they are ... for space combat. Problem is, gammm/X-rays don't propagate through the atmosphere very well. In fact, the fireball of a nuke is its liberated gamma rays interacting with the atmosphere and being turned into heat. One would have to check out distances and all sorts of other factors to see if it might make e.g. a good tank killer (and we already have LOTS of ways of killing tanks). But
as a directed energy weapon (X-ray laser) it might have short range uses inside an atmosphere compared to existing alternatives.
For bombs or X-ray lasers in space this might be very useful due to the low mass and ability to turn the source on and off for the latter, but that's a long ways away, and realistically only threatens fast targets, i.e. incoming boosters or warheads that are going to kill people if you don't stop them. Kinetic kill is a very mature technology to compete with, but the speed of a directed energy weapon (e.g. X-ray laser) could make it very worthwhile, especially if it's multi-shot (you could see if you've killed the target and then try again).
Otherwise, at first thought is just seems to be useful for special cases of power generation; the ability to turn it on and off could do some really special things to weight budgets. (E.g. you only have to shield vulnerable parts of what you're powering; it's not "hot" all the time like a reactor or pure decay heat source.) However I wonder about its daughter isotope decay patterns ... those can be nasty.
And there lies the main problem.
Many if not most bosses will never willingly tolerate a daytime work at home situation of any time. If you're not under their eyes/thumb, in their gut they don't feel you're working. If company policy allows work at home anyway, don't expect good career results at your company no matter what wonders you accomplish.
(Don't forget politics: I speak from bitter experience when I had to "disappear" for six weeks to write a "save the company" software system. If you're not there to play politics at even a low level, in many workplaces you'll find your position undermined.)
Otherwise in most if not practically all situations, if you aren't working in a consulting model (however you get paid) where you've first sold your out of the office services, you can arrange a work at home site only after you've spent considerable time (half a year or more) at the office establishing your relationships and proving your worth. Then it becomes an option, but still somewhat dangerous. (Once a small company made it easy by moving to a more expensive building and not having an office for me... ^_^.
Best of all is to become indispensable, have that deeply recognized, and then have it forced, as above, or say your spouse gets a job in another area. Faced with the prospect of losing your high quality and/or indispensable work a lot of companies will do most anything to keep your services (this happened with my brother's wife).
Final note is that in my experience if you're building something big enough to require a close knit team it's really hard to make it work if you all aren't physically close. One study a long time ago said the most effective collaboration requires people to be either 30 feet or one flight of stairs from each other.
Specifically (and this is all from memory):
Its big advantage was streaming, pumping out a very fast flow of sequential bits. Intel and others were at the time enamored of "convergence" (e.g. playing movies on your computer, which we now know is evil :-),
and it was thought this was a good thing for multimedia.
Except there were of course tradeoffs: you paid several prices in addition to the royalties. The two killers were slow startup time, which made random access speeds bad (which turned out to be critical), and its bit? serial interface, which required something like 600MHz traces on a motherboard, which was well beyond the realistic state of the art at the time. Intel did two separate million part recalls, one for a chipset, and one for a motherboard (just weeks before shipping...). (Note that your fast FSB busses obtain their speeds by using the signal edges cleverly, not by pushing the motherboard trace speeds outrageously.)
(It was also said that Intel higher engineering management forced this down the throats of their engineers who had to try to make it work, and fired anyone who was too persistent in pointing out the Emperor had no clothes. Well, Intel paid a pretty big price for this debacle....)
As far as I'm concerned, it died a well deserved death. The only question I see in this case as others have pointed out is exactly what did the manufacturers say to each other, and can a judge or jury be convinced it was illegal collusion instead of trading gripes. You do have to be careful what you say to your competitors; many companies have strict rules to try to avoid this sort of mess, since it does happen.
You're right to be concerned, but look at it this way: if you do accept the existence of terrorism (on Manhattan Island no less), then you need to accept the fact that units, especially "joint"ed ones need to practice. I suspect they're probably pretty sure this is not terrorism, but it gives them a great opportunity to do something real that's still not as pressured as an attack.
And there's lots of kinks to work out, as a rule. "What's foobar's phone number?" "How come this radio system isn't talking to this one." Etc.
Perhaps a "trust but verify" posture towards this is best....
Until someone brings in an infected laptop....
Unfortunately a basic firewall setup is a "crust" defense; get past the one layer of protection and it's all over. That's why "defense in depth" is such a big deal.
(In this case, applying patches as fast as practical to the machines you haven't been able to switch to something other than Windows, per-machine firewalls if you can deal with the hassle, multiple internal firewalls if you're big enough, and of course business continuity plans (can't emphasize that enough, so many things can take out e.g. your server room; e.g. is there a bathroom above it, kitchen below it? etc.)
MIT's EECS department is the home to a lot of people who ought to be in other departments that won't accept them for a variety of reasons, frequently political; after the work described below, there's no way the MIT Physics Department would ever let him darken their doorway.
Peter Hagelstein spend quite a bit of time at LLNL developing tiny X-ray lasers that were powered by Shiva (this is a matter of public record, it's his Ph.D. thesis...).
It's strongly rumored that he then worked on the nuclear pumped X-ray laser project (many terrawatts delivered over a few tens of nanoseconds), which was shut down for political reasons before it obtained conclusive results. When he gave a talk about his Ph.D. work the very first words out of his mouth were "I have no comment on..." the recent article in Aviation W[L]eek and Technology about the nuclear pumped variety.
Neither make him a nuclear physicist, but he has plenty of expertise to draw on: EECS does plasma physics which I think are intended to work towards fusion, and of course there's the Physics and Nuclear Engineering Departments. And as he demonstrates, there's no high wall between parts of EE and physics.
Good question that, since Mono or any other .NET clone will by definition suffer by trailing MS's .NET and have the problems you and others point out.
My answer to that is very simple: security.
The Microsoft is really taking a hit on security. Bottom line IT support cost hits: wasn't there mention of how worms et. al. are hurting a lot of small-medium European companies? We've all seen or heard of this sort of crisis in companies we or friends know about. And if I was running a back end Windows based system I'd be nervous....
The biggest weakness of MS .NET is that you can run it on platform you want, as along as it is Windows (to paraphrase the very old Ford joke).
Mono/[your favorite .NET clone] has the potential of running on a more secure platform, and that is of very serious interest to a lot of institutions, especially since Java is perceived to be a bit weak right now.
Why 1998, instead of 2001 +- one year; it's really easy to make these studies say what you want if you cherry pick the data or beginning and end points. Anyone familiar with other pre-1981 or post 1998 data?
Ehh? As I remember, Engelbart and co. at SRI put together everything but a bitmap monitor. They had all that was really important (since graphics was an obvious extension): (tiled) windows, mouse, chord keyboard (like a few piano keys), the whole paradigm.
Xerox added the graphical to it, and made Altos in small batches but in a total fairly large quantity. It was indeed Apple that had the first GUI to achieve commercial success (on their second try, after the Lisa), and for that they get credit, but they were implementing early '70s state of the art a decade later (about the usual lag from lab to industry).
I really don't know what you mean by "The Xerox machine was less GUI than it was anything else."; I'd say the GUI was the biggest thing it had going for it, given that it had a 16bit bit-slice processor with (argh) bank-switching of up to 4 64KB memory banks. (And it was probably a good price/performance PC for it's time, but preferred a PDP-11/45 with split I/D (65KB instructions, 56KB data, 8KB stack due to it's MMU) with a graphics system ... running UNIX (that was the choice I actually did make in 1980 :-)
As a side note, I've often thought that the relative granularity of objects in LISP and Smalltalk had to do in no small part with the fact that LISP was traditionally run on big address space machines (PDP-6/10/DEC 20, 1MB!!! :-), and Smalltalk on machines were it could be much more painful to access an object, encouraging larger objects.
Do not hire anyone you are not willing to fire, with the attendant consequences.
Unless you are a master at dealing with people, non-family/friend potential hires or employees will view such a situation with extreme skepticism at best. Me, I spot a business owner one family member to handle the money, but beyond that I never go to work for a company that has more family/friend employees unless I'm desperate.
In the three or so situations where I didn't realize ahead of time the situation (and one very early startup composed of a set of friends and one brother who was a brilliant programmer), I had very bad experiences, but then none of the managers were very experienced.
Bottom line is probably "how big do you want your company to become?" If you go the route of nepotism, you'll be very lucky if it ever gets big (unless you have a lot of talented relatives you can hire! :-) You simply won't be able to hire or retain "outsiders" as you need.
Note this is somewhat akin to "high trust" vs. "low trust" cultures. E.g. (not to single them out, but they're a familiar example), Chinese tend to keep a company inside the family; this limits the type and scope of their companies, and in cases like Wang putting his son in charge of R&D, can (help) kill a company. (It's not likely Wang the company would have survived the transition to PCs, but this sealed its fate (I had a friend working in their R&D at the time)).
Well, those are transports, not "tactical" planes (not counting the small number of gunships built on the base airframe).
Nope, the A-10 is doomed and to be replaced by the F-35. The only question is will they continue the A-10 Service Life Extension Plan (SLEP) out to 2008, which as I remember is the official retirement date. Remember, at the top the Air Force has never wanted this plane nor its mission.
There certainly have been strong rumors of that for a while; if so, it'll cause massive waves: what I've heard is that "if it isn't the F-22 we're not interested in it" is the overwhelming attitude of the current Pentagon etc. AF "leadership", which is overwhelmingly made of "fighter jocks".
It's supposed to replace the F-14, and let's face it, both it and the A-10 are old. Something has to replace them before their airframes can't be patched up any more, and in the case of the F-14, its mission is suffering akin to the Comanche; we don't expect to have to defend an aircraft carrier battle group against a horde of Backfire bombers. Note that F-14s were mostly/entirely used to drop bombs in the recent Gulf War, something this interceptor wasn't designed to do at all....
Anyway, we're in for interesting times; let's hope we have usable and useful planes (old or new) when we need them in earnest (oh, say, in The Battle for Taiwan around the turn of the decade...).
The F-35 will "replace" every tactical airplane in our inventory except the F-15, for which the F-22 is the replacement. Let us pray it is not going to turn out to be a fiasco as great as the '60s TFX, or more like the M14, which was an acceptable M1 Garand replacement, but didn't do well in replacing every other small arm from sub-machine gun to auto-rifle (i.e. the BAR).
It certainly won't replace the A-10; it's way too fragile. The Air Force simply isn't really interested in direct support of men on the ground --- and the reason the Army is so into helicopters is the "Treaty of Key West", which forbids them from having fixed wing (tactical, I think) aircraft weighting over 10,000 lb. (This was part of the separation of the Air Force from the Army.)
As for the attempted F-16 replacement of the A-10, I heard it foundered on trying to put a serious cannon on a pylon; this has always been difficult, and aside, from, say WWII era 40mm versions I don't remember anyone ever doing it with success (and those may have been firmly attached to the airframe).
You make a good general point: cartels (like OPEC) break down when competitors in or out of the cartel find it to their advantage to lower their prices.
The problem with your example is that Crucial is a unit of Micron, and I don't believe any of the others actually make chips (they (I assume) just make S/DIMMs using the chips from a limited number of fabricators, such as Micron). If that number is limited enough, a successful price fixing cartel can be pulled off:
Just how many primary, world-class (i.e. low cost and therefore have some pricing flexibility) chip manufacturers are there? (It's obviously in the interests of the higher cost manufacturers to keep prices high....)
IBM's R&D at the time was at least half the speed of its competitors (the PC division had been absorbed back into the rest of the company, as I remember); in classic IBM style, the Micro Channel was designed to pump twice as much data as what they initially shipped. What they didn't realize is that they didn't have a monopoly on fast bus design or fabrication, or a need to move slowly: others shipped faster busses sooner.
IBM also didn't realize that the PC open standard was critical (as I mentioned, they never shipped a "PC compatible" PC after the original base model, and only made a standards change stick with the AT). They created a monster with open bus standards and allowing "white room" BIOSes.
I can remember only one company that licensed the Micro Channel (ALR, I think), and the one MC computer of theirs that I used ... wasn't up to their normal standards, let alone anything really good. (Until I replaced it, the company I worked for was dependant on a driver that only supported a IBM MC SCSI card.)
Ah. Point taken, along with binaryDigit's clarifications.
However, I'd say we should keep in mind our various definitions of "flop". E.g. I would call Transmeta a "hype flop", in that they may have a very nice business (or not, I don't know), but it didn't live up the to hype. (Then again, the hype put them on the map. :-)
I'm 100% agreed with binaryDigit in "calling most attempts to create a next generation OS a flop", I just think most of these OS "flops" are not "biggest flops" except for OS/2, simply because they never got very big to begin with. I'd say that (for now) the idea of creating a next generation OS is a "biggest flop"; the market does not seem to be ready --- but note what MS is saying about Longhorn....
(And this includes Linux, which is a very nice Unix like OS and not a "flop", but can't be called "next generation", I think. Thinking about it in terms of Clayton Christensen's "disruptive technologies" is useful; Linux is disruptive, especially due to its development model and the business models it allows, but by definition that doesn't make it "next generation" in the way I think we mean.)
OS/2 is most certainly a big flop (although not a horrible product as others have pointed out); it had the potential to defeat or niche MS Windows. If e.g IBM had listened to Microsoft (!) and wrote OS/2 early on for the 386, things would be different; This is another piece of fallout from IBM's "the AT is the last PC you'll need to buy for a long while" decision, and given the massive nightmares and performance penalties in writing for 286 protected mode, that plus the decision to do it in assembler doomed it from the start.
Errr, I take it you don't remember that in 1980 (the last year of Carter) the inflation rate was (from memory) 13%, and the prime rate 20-22%? Remember "stagflation"? Low/no growth, coupled with high unemployment and inflation (which '"keynesian" economics' and most especially the Phillips curve said was impossible, in my understanding). (Not that Carter gets all the blame, in fact, he started both deregulation and as I remember capital gains tax rate cuts, and of course JFK was the original "supply side" tax cutter.)
Until the Reagan tax cuts were fully phased in (note that phasing in big tax cuts it a guaranteed way to create or prolong a recession, as people wait to create taxable events), the '80s were very bad (e.g. my parents' company almost went under due to the stress of borrowing costs), and few including myself believe that Reagan could turn things around.
I was really disappointed to read this in the article. First, it wasn't true. There were a lot of such restrictions in the early implementations, but by the time that TCP was spec'd, there were already cases of interconnected hardware and software from different vendors. [...]
Err, I think you may both be right; there were both IMPs, Interface Message Processors, minicomputers made by Honeywell as I remember (and the software that ran on them) and the computers that connected to IMPs. And "NCP", the pre-TCP protocol, may have run only on the IMPs, and may have imposed limits on what the connecting computers could do.
For most of the items, I agree; many are qualified successes (very qualified in some cases), or hype more than product flops, which would include the .COM bubble; I think there are too many successful .COMs to call that a flop.
But binaryDigit is spot on with his last three:
Windows version Lotus 1-2-3, it's failure helped to change the landscape of application isv's and helped to firmly root Office as defacto.
I would go further and say the failure of all the competitors of Office to deliver timely or sufficiently bug free Windows versions of their products. One of Microsoft's "secrets of success" is that they consistently write software that basicly works (stop laughing, now! :-).
(By that I mean it didn't GP fault so quickly you couldn't even run a demo. Or in the case of Word Perfect, which had an amazing lock on the market, delivering a version that was totally obnoxious to use (e.g. the pictures dropping to the bottom of the document). I had a loyal WP friend at the time who gave up in disgust.)
Apple Lisa/III. Nuff said.
Not the Lisa, if for no other reason than it translated into lessons learned the hard way for the Mac. The Apple III, on the other hand, was critical . Thanks to VisiCalc, Apple had gained a degree of respectability with businesses, which they could have in theory build upon with a credible serious business machine.
Thank goodness we were spared the horrors of memory bank switching (something that crippled the Xerox Alto), but Apple's abject failure to execute (right down to sockets that were so cheap chips were frequently rattling loose in the case upon arrival at the dealer) gave IBM a free shot at capturing the next generation PC market ... and the rest is history. (The critical historical strategic failure for Apple has always been to target profit margin before quantity in an area where network effects are overwhelming.)
PCJr, NOTHING compared to PS/2, the system that helped IBM lose the PC market.
The PCJr. was a credibility flop, although there's a strong argument that using off the shelf components was the fatal flaw for IBM, since it removed the IBM mystique. However, I don't single out the PCjr since except for the AT all of IBM's follow ons to the original PC were flops (as I remember, none of them were even "PC compatible"!).
I'm not sure I'd count the PS/2; it was a flop as an attempt to recapture control of the PC market, but I'd argue that the failure to counter or preempt the Compaq 386 cemented IBM's loss of control. (It was said that IBM had promised its customers that the AT was the last PC they'd have to buy for a long time ... that was a/the critical mistake in what turned out to be their end game.)
Could be --- but it won't matter for the Congress. Due to the principle of separation of powers, the Congress pretty much has to be exempt from FOIA or anything else enforced by the Executive branch. Can anyone confirm this?
(That's the good explanation for why they are "above the law". They have to be to help prevent abuses by the Executive branch. The powers of the "purse" and ultimately impeachment back this up, but this tends to stop things before it gets ugly --- an imperfect but stable system.)