That's where you're wrong. Speaking as a developer with a BA in English, I can tell you that your English, History, and Art classes will make you better at your job.
Back in the late 70s when I was a kid and thinking that maybe computer programmer might be a more feasible career path than train driver/astronaut/chocolate factory taste tester (and that, if I did nothing, I was probably going to end up working in Education*) the advice from IBM was "Go get a degree - any decent degree but not Computer Science - and then we'll teach you about computers."
I didn't dare to generalize, because I remembered that the UK schooling system is fundamentally different
Your basic point holds for the UK - "general" education (including compulsory English and Maths) through to major exams at age 16, followed by more advanced study in a smaller number of subjects at ages 16-18 (either in the same school or in a dedicated 16-18 college) followed by a single subject at University (unless you choose a combined degree).
Back in the day, 16-18 used to be 3-4 subjects and, if you were aiming for a maths/science/tech degree, you'd have dropped arts/language/humanity at this point and be doing two maths subjects and a science. Private schools do/did tend to make everybody do a "General Studies" course as well, but that's rare in state schools. Its a bit more flexible/diverse now, partly because you can study more subjects in the first year.
I get the impression that the 1st year of US university is a bit more like 16-18 education in the UK.
I always thought the reason so much time and energy is spent making sure phases are consistant was for the sanity and proper functioning of the grid itself.
Yes, but in addition to the constraints of efficient power transmission, national power grids are required to maintain a very accurate long-term average frequency, because many devices use the mains signal as a time base. The question is, now we have cheap radio-controlled clocks, internet-based time sync and the GPS network, when can the power grid be relieved of this dual function.
If only there were some way of keeping accurate time without relying on the power grid...
I don't know, maybe they could broadcast an accurate time signal via radio - doesn't need much bandwidth, so on a suitable frequency one transmitter could cover a huge area.
Or, perhaps, put a load of satellites with accurate atomic clocks in orbit - who knows, you might also be able to use this as some sort of navigation system. Alternatively, maybe its possible to produce some kind of "Protocol for Time on the Network" so that any internet-connected devices could get data from an atomic clock somewhere. Ideally, though its a bit ambitious, you could have all three.
Sadly, none of these things are feasible - the receiving end would need bulky, expensive equipment with dozens of vacuum tubes - before this could catch on you'd need to be able to build receivers small enough to be easily carried in a pocket and cheap enough for literally hundreds of users to buy- which is a pity, because then the mains grid could be saved the enormous complication of having to provide both efficient power transmission (by making short-term tweaks to frequency) and a long-term time-base service.
Of course, if these other options had already been available for many years, everybody would have upgraded by now, rather than waiting until the old system stopped working and then panicking.
They'll never get excited by very simple things like I have been.
Ah, yes, I remember buying* a "professional" game and thinking "Heck, who published this? If they'll sell this crap they'll probably sell something I can knock up in a weekend. I was right, and while I never joined the "whaddya mean you won't insure my Ferrari until I turn 18" club I did buy a Honda 70 (look - I had parents!) and my computer habit was pretty much self-funding from then on.
However, it would be interesting to put your assertion to the test, and see how satisfied kids would be with simple programming if *they* were in control. After all, some kids still paint pictures, take photos, make videos, form bands and don't seem worried that the output isn't as good as they see on TV. However, even back in the day. making a blob fly around the screen or coaxing a tune out of a Trash-80 clone didn't float everybody's boat.
(*Memory a bit hazy on the "buying" bit actually:-) )
If you mean a small, modestly-priced entry-level, but full-featured, laptop then they don't look very dead to me. Previously, you could have small (Sony Vaios and the like) you could have cheap (some rebadged no-name brick) but not both.
If you mean an ultra-small device that runs for a week of a couple of AAs and provides a great personal organizer plus a good-enough WP and spreadsheet - they died 10 years ago when Psion pulled out of the market (their sin: they didn't run MS word and the sync software kinda sucked).
The orignal Asus EEE, however, was subtly different from the "modern" netbook in that it was much more clearly positioned as a "third system" for web/email/note-taking/casual games, with near-instant startup, that was so cheap that you wouldn't cry too much when the kids dropped it in the fish pond. That concept seems to have gone away - and having carefully constructed a theoretical framework and analysed multiple sources of evidence to produce an in-depth analysis I think this was because, honestly, EEE PC was a bit crap and lots of people bought it for the kids that Xmas because Toys'R'us had sold out of Nintendo Wiis.
Seriously - the battery life sucked, the screen was tiny, the keyboard was uncomfortable and the trackpad was a joke. They'd gone for a custom Linux distro which didn't have much software in the official repository (yes, nerds could add the Debian repos, apt-get and pray but the machine wasn't really for nerds) which would have been excusable if everything they did offer had been carefully customized to be usable on the tiny screen, but they hadn't - they'd used "off-the-shelf" apps like Oo, Firefox, Thunderbird which filled the screen with toolbars or produced dialogue boxes bigger than the screen.
Plus, ASUS had a nice habit of Osbourne-ing themselves - by the time the EEE Mk2 had actually shown up in shops, the Mk3 had been announced. Forget any long-term development (e.g. more apps) of the original EEE format.
I had one, and was initially enthusiastic, but then the "buy cheap, buy twice" lesson started to cut in and it stayed on the shelf. A while later I got an iPod Touch, which proved much better as an instant-on web/email terminal because (a) the battery was better and (b) although the screen and on-screen keyboard were tiny, the browser and email client had been designed with that in mind. If only there was such a thing as a giant iPod touch with a ~9" screen... sure it would be in a different price bracket from the EEE so don't drop it in the pond, but 400 quid for something you actually use is better value than 180 for a shelf ornament.
Sure, the dumping of cheap XP on the market (part of the netbook craze was a kick-back at Vista bloat) and the way the Linux versions somehow ended up being more expensive, differently specced or just plain out-of-stock has a role to play, but the product itself had many flaws.
So in theory that is a 34% drop in emissions then.
...approximately 66% of electricity currently generated in the US is generated by fossil fuels (assuming GP is correct). If there is any significant uptake of electric cars, more generating capacity is going to be needed. The question is, will that be C02-and-other-crap-belching fossil-fuel based or perfectly-safe-if-nothing-goes wrong nuclear? May the best lobbyist win.
I see plenty of TV adverts for games that are very clearly aimed at women - Nintendo in particular has made a big push in this direction (and families, and older people of both sexes). I'm not qualified to say whether these really meet the needs of women, but its clear that the manufacturers think they do.
Presumably TFA has some narrow definition of gaming that excludes casual games, Sims-a-like, pet simulators, fitness trainers, online bingo etc. That just leaves one of this year's biggest game releases (Portal 2) which featured a female protagonist, and a female (ish) big bad making bitchy comments about our hero's weight.
Now, if it turns out that women are rejecting this pink fluffy stereotypical family-friendly stuff, and want more subtle changes to game design, that's a different story.
Perhaps Duke Nukem would have got a better critical reception if they'd taken a tip from the "Smack my Bitch Up" video and, right at the end, panned the camera round to reveal that Duke was actually a woman...?
A few generations until seeing a paper book is as rare as seeing a lion?
Fortunately, books are rather easier to keep and care for than lions, so more people will be inclined to keep them around the house. They don't make particularly good rugs, and you don't have to take out the innards to hang them on the wall. Plus they don't have any uses in Chinese medicine* (apart from ones about Chinese medicine) so unless everything goes Fahrenheit 451 on us, they probably won't be hunted to extinction.
My guess is that high-value hardbacks and "coffee-table" books will hang around indefinitely, if only as gifts and presentation items. Getting your favorite author to sign the back of your Amazon receipt doesn't really cut it. Its paperbacks and (especially) reference books that may disappear rapidly.
I'll probably get computer reference books on Kindle from now on - they're one of the few genres that are actually usefully cheaper as eBooks and I'm unlikely to want to read them in 20 years time - unlike novels.
Has anybody in the UK/EU started a campaign to get VAT taken off eBooks yet, to stop the nonsense of eBooks costing more than hardbacks, or is everybody just resigned to the idea that it will never happen?
(* Dear pedants - yes I know that's actually tigers, but the Chinese are expanding into Africa big time and I'm sure lion's dick is every bit as good an aphrodisiac as tigers'...)
Commodore, like Apple, thought that IBM compatibility was a trend they could buck.
Well, for a while, IBM PC and the first clones were priced out of the home/hobbyist/small office market and systems like the Amiga, Atari ST and (in the UK) Acorn and Amstrad did quite well. The killer was a bit later, when the "commodity hardware" market got going and a complete PC clone cost less than a plug-in x86 card for an Amiga or Acorn.
I think if these firms hadn't bucked the trend, the modern PC market would be horribly stagnant, because so many of the things we do with modern PCs started (or at least were first bought to market) with these system's brief moment in the sun (which usually ended a couple of years later when the PC world caught up and undercut them on price).
The PC's main contribution was, ultimately, commoditization of hardware, and that's nothing to be sneezed at if you like paying $500 instead of $1500 for a computer, but virtually every other feature and application of the modern PC (including the initial price drop from $20k+ to $1500) was assimilated from somewhere else.
The one thing Commodore should have pushed in Amiga productivity applications was multitasking. They had true, seamless multitasking at a time when the Mac was just getting 512k and Switcher, and PCs were stuck with TSRs.
I think that's a nerds-eye view. True multitasking on PCs, at the time, was a solution looking for a problem: the sort of collaborative task switching used by classic Mac OS, GEM, early Windows etc. was perfectly good at letting you switch between WP and spreadsheets, which was 99% of what users wanted. Bouncing balls around the screen was impressive (since it obviously heralded really good games) but who cared that they kept bouncing while you used the wordprocessor?. If God had intended PC users to multitask, he'd have given them Unix. Pretty much every year since about 1983 has been "the year when Unix will take off on the desktop" - it took about 20 years for Apple to actually make that happen.
Now, today, we've found all sorts of problems to that solution - like running servers, recording TV, downloading torrents, backing up, fetching mail, playing music (most of which did not make their debut on PC compatibles BTW) and we've got multicore processors and stacks of RAM to help. However, it probably hasn't escaped your notice that in current OSs there's a tendency towards full-screen, self-contained apps... which, if you set aside the conspiracy theories, is based on observations of the way most non-techie users prefer to work (I blame Windows MDI).
OT, talking of the Amiga, I knew that demo of the Windows 8 UI reminded me of something...
By way of comparison, look at Commodore's much later ads for their 68000-based Amiga computer: "ONLY AMIGA MAKES IT POSSIBLE!" You couldn't even be bothered to line up some of the major applications already out there and port them to your new platform.
Couple of things to bear in mind: First: MS-DOS was basically a CP/M clone, and not only were Wordstar and its contemporaries written for CP/M, but written at a time when it was essential to make the hardware-dependent parts easily modifiable - something that was rapidly lost as soon as software started becoming PC only. So, porting Wordstar to the PC was hardly the Manhatten project. AmigaDOS was, AFAIK, a full-blown, minicomputer-class multitasking OS and nothing like CP/M or DOS - and by that time a lot of "popular software" was hard-coded for IBM PC hardware.
Second: there was a lot of hype surrounding the PC launch, and a general premonition that IBM would rapidly dominate the market. I doubt that software houses needed much persuasion to port their software, at their own expense (nobody ever got fired for writing for IBM!) - Commodore would have had to be far more persuasive.
Third: the Unique Selling Point of the Amiga was always going to be games, graphics and music - it was massive overkill for office software (and, by that time, most businesses wouldn't even consider anything non-PC). You didn't buy an Amiga because you wanted a Word Processor - you bought an Amiga because you wanted a Fairlight CMI and a Quantel Paintbox but didn't have 100 grand to spare... What was it going to do with Wordstar? Wrap it round a sphere and bounce it about the screen?
The Selectric-style keyboard, for example, was a big hit with business users, as was their fairly high resolution Monochrome Display.
I suspect the main reason the PC got as many good reviews as it did was that a lot of journalists loved the keyboard:-)
You should also remember, though, that the IBM PC was expensive compared with other personal computers of the day, Other systems were designed around standard TV frequency displays for a reason. It was only after began, the clone wars had, that IBM PC technology started to become affordable by the masses, and that has as much to do with the general trend towards cheaper electronics as anything that IBM did.
ISTR also that the the IBM high-res display flickered like a fricking Sinclair ZX-80 every time it scrolled...
And they are almost always used with chipsets that are hardware compatible with the IBM PC/AT... Apple would be no exceptions.
...except Apple didn't start using Intel until long after AT compatibility was irrelevant, and the x86 had evolved into a half-decent 32-bit, multicore chip. The fact that it has a near-redundant "appendix" that can run old PC/AT code is pretty irrelevant. Its now widely reported that Apple are at least thinking about switching to ARM on some systems...
And, the 3.5" floppy (the Apple Mac had already gone that way, but you could argue that they used a different, variable speed format).
So far, the "more closed" PS/2 is looking more influential (in terms of features that even turn up in modern non-PC systems) than the "open" (on paper) original PC.:-)
But, seriously, nobody is trying to claim that the IBM PC was not massively influential or didn't dominate the market for years - the nonsense is the claim that it was the "first true personal computer". It wasn't - it was an incremental development of existing CP/M business PC systems.
IBM was the first computer manufacturer that brought all the elements together,
Back in reality, IBM was the computer manufacturer with a monopolistic track record that ignored PCs for years, then panicked and brought-out a "me too" system running a clone of the already-industry-standard CP/M with a kludgey not-quite-true 16-bit processor. They then used their industry muscle to take over the corporate microcomputing market (and extinguish the previous CP/M practice of designing software to be easily patched to run on diverse systems) - then got their underpants pulled up over their heads when someone found a legal way of cloning their proprietary firmware (without which, however many bloody circuit diagrams they published, nobody else could have made a software-compatible PC).
Consequently, we got stuck with CP/M functionality and paged RAM for a decade, just when CP/M was reaching its sell-by date and proper 32-bit processors were becoming available.
That's the way I remember it, anyway - and unlike your version, my version doesn't require airbrushing CP/M systems, the S-100 bus, RS232, Shugart (disc interface), Centronics (printer interface) and all the other de-facto, pre-IBM standards out of history.
Hint: one reason why some cheaper systems like the Trash 80 and Vic had proprietary connectors is that they were a fraction of the price of an IBM PC and adding (e.g.) a floppy disc interface, or even a proper "standard" expansion bus costs money. Floppy drive connectors, for example, were perfectly standard by the early 80s, but not much good unless your computer had a disc controller.
but the "PC compatible" architecture's primary competitor on the desktop was, just about 14 years ago, still rolling-out computers that had an oddball monitor connector, used proprietary expansion cards, ran a proprietary OS, and had proprietary connectors for almost all their peripherals.
...would that be the proprietary "localtalk" connectors that implemented low-cost local area networking and printer sharing years before Ethernet became affordable? Or the monitor connectors that ensured that, whatever monitor you used, on-screen, 1 pixel = 1 point when doing DTP work? Or the desktop bus system that allowed keyboards, mice, tablets etc. to be daisy-chained rather than each having to have a lead going back to the computer? Or is "SCSI" the non-standard disc interface you're talking about? Standardisation is fine provided you've finished innovating.
Sorry. CP/M didn't exist. Its an urban myth perpetuated by conspiracy theorists and IBM deniers who like to pretend that there was some sort of industry standard for personal computing before the coming of Big Blue.
This "CP/M" nonsense belongs in the same category as pre-Colombian discovery of the Americas, evolution, and the existence of third-party expansions for any personal computer made before 1981.
You'll notice that when these CP/M crackpots talk about their mythical OS in detail, they're just describing something almost identical to MS-DOS with a few quirkily-renamed commands (suggesting that anybody would call a "copy" command "PIP" or a debugging tool "DDT" hardly adds to the credibility of this myth).
Sure you may be able to say technically the first home computer that could be called personal wasn't an IBM, but does anyone run 6502 MOSFET chips anymore?
Of course not, any more than anybody runs Intel 8088 chips anymore, uses an ISA expansion bus, Shugart disc interfaces etc. I even believe that modern systems can have more than 640K of RAM...
The 6502 might not have had any official surviving children (ISTR there was a 16-bit variant used in the Apple II GS), but its pretty well documented that it was a major influence on the design of the ARM.
Hell even Apple now is IBM PC compatible.
No, Apple uses chips based on the modern x86-32 and x86-64 architectures. I don't think the fact that these have legacy backwards-compatibility with the 8088 was a major influence on Apple's decision to switch. That has more to do with IBM and Motorola's failure to manufacture a mobile version of the PPC G5, at a time when Apple was doing rather well with non-Intel based machines...
As someone who lived through that time
You must have been very, very drunk, because you don't remember it very well.
Folks seem to forget that before the 5150 NOTHING worked together, [snip] As someone who had a Trash80 and a VIC20
Which is why, pre-PC, serious commercial microcomputer users tended to use one of the many CP/M-based systems rather than VIC20s, to the extent that there were even kludges available to run CP/M on Trash-80s and Apple IIs (the latter requiring a Z80 system on an expansion card). This is what IBM-lovers like to airbrush out of history because the "revolutionary" IBM PC was really just a "me too" CP/M-86 machine (MS-DOS/PC-DOS being, effectively, a clone of CP/M).
Now thanks to the failure of the IBM PS/2 and MicroChannel architecture you can buy...
There, put that right for you.
your printer still plugs in,
Nice to know that IBM invented the Centronics and RS232 interfaces, and that anybody who remembers using those on non-IBM computers is delusional.
you don't need IRQs or futzing or hoping you have the right slots
You seem to think IBM invented the PCI bus. They didn't - the original ISA bus had "IRQs or futzing or hoping you have the right slots" up the wazzoo.
Now if we could only get the same thing in the mobile space, to where laptops had standard motherboards like ATX and mATX
If only people didn't want their mobiles to be slim, and light, and, well, mobile...
...apart from Sendmail, the Berkeley TCP/IP stack, the original httpd (and then Apache), BIND... the infrastructure of the whole fracking Internet really.
Having a kernel to run the GNU tools on is handy, as is having a free, industrial strength C/C++ compiler.
What they've done for the non-technical user is a bit of a harder one, though.
Now go find the price of a single blank blu-ray disc (or a pack and divide by the number in the pack).
Duh!
Software manufacturers don't order a stack of blank discs from NewEgg, sit down and start copying (unless its a small run of beta test versions or something) - they get them stamped out from a master (same general principle as vinyl records - just higher precision). The structure of mass-produced optical "ROM" discs is completely different to recordable media.
What you need to do is go and get a quote for bulk, pressed optical discs (CD/DVD/BR-ROMs not recordable discs) - you'll usually find it will consist of a fairly steep, fixed, mastering/set-up charge plus a few tens of cents per disc. For small runs (a few hundred) it will be cheaper to use recordable media but once you get to 1000+, pressed discs are way cheaper, per unit, than recordable media.
In the olden days, there were things called "mask programmed ROMs" - read-only memory chips with baked-in data which were cheap to produce in large quantities - I guess they still exist but AFAIK they haven't kept up with Flash RAM in terms of density, or with optical ROM discs in terms of cost (big market for bulk CD manufacturing "micro" plants - ROMs need a chip fab).
I confirm, you are not a lawyer. Breaching contracts and having our clients let go off scott free is the basis of our business.
I'm sure the contract will actually say that Oracle definitely might promise unconditionally (subject to conditions) to support itanium (for a given, and very long, definition of "support") except as provided in Annexes II, IV, XVII, XXIVI (and any subsequent annexes) until such time as they cease to support it (which shall not be before such time has elapsed) unless otherwise compelled not to by a reasonable cause to discontinue support (including such reasonable causes as might be deemed unreasonable by the party who is not party to the cause). Except they'll probably do that by listing all the things that they won't support then excluding the ones that they do. Or vice versa.
...which may be hard for a layperson to understand, but is actually a shining example of how precise and unambiguous legal language can be, as evidenced by the fact that none of these expensively-drawn-up contracts ever end up being contested in court.
For media distribution, it is getting to the point where some form of memory card may be the answer.
I suspect bulk-pressed optical discs (as opposed to writable media) are still considerably cheaper - and faster to manufacture - than 8GB+ memory cards.
As others have pointed out, they're skimping on the licenses for DVD/BluRay video playback capability - its quite likely that the drives will still, physically, be BluRay mechanisms.
Obviously, you're lucky. Most people who've been working with computers for any length of time have encountered "software rot" or "bit decay" whereby any piece of software left unused for more than a year or two will spontaneously develop random syntax errors and bugs.
This is quite distinct from actual corruption caused by media damage - which tends to be obvious, usually sufficient to stop your code compiling. In contrast, "software rot" is caused by quantum fluctuations in the morphic resonance field of the code, so the effects manifest as plausible programming errors (such as failing to initialize a variable in C and assuming it was 0) and can only be spotted because you're sure that you were never that sloppy.
In the case of document files, bit decay manifests as spelling, punctuation and grammar errors or redundancies resulting from the same thing being said twice. In a music file, the most common effect is that that song that you really liked, and played all the time at college, fails to evoke the same sense of enjoyment, and Rick Astley just doesn't seem to be as good a singer as you remember him to be.
Don't buy the extra stuff that costs money... [snip] the choice is yours.
True, but a "well" designed free-to-play game will quickly lose its playability if you don't regularly open your wallet - either because you can't progress or because the endless pressure to buy stuff spoils the game.
So, yeah, don't whine if you're stupid enough to pay out a fortune, but also don't confuse "free-to-pay" with properly free or just plain good value.
Plus, just because some people are stupid enough to fall for the sort of pressure these games exert, doesn't necessarily make it a nice thing to do.
I doubt that Apple will allow any scripting language on iOS anytime soon, or later, possibly never...
...but I think it will take a little longer than one might expect before they're fully supported on all mobile platforms
Except iOS already supports Javascript and browser components with a (reasonable approximation of) HTML5 (given that W3C are going to faff with the draft standard for a few years yet), I'm pretty sure that JS+HTML5 has always been on the list of Apple-sanctioned languages for Apps (which they've relaxed a bit now, anyway) and, anyway, you can run JS/HTML5 apps in the browser. Plus, pop in a "manifest" file and they can be "installed" with their own desktop icon and run full-screen with no browser furniture without having to go via the App store.
Android and ChromeOS have pretty good Javascript+HTML"5" too (they're all based on the same Webkit foundation that iOS uses, modulo a bit of version skew and different Javascript engines). Yeah, the touch interface hasn't quite standardized between Android and iOS yet, but dealing with that sort of thing is meat and drink to JS developers, and most JS application frameworks deal with it.
'course, I'm not saying MS won't jinx this by the old "embracing, extend, extinguish" maneuver, but this isn't like the corporate desktop where they inherited an unassailable monopoly from IBM - in the mobile market the jury is still out as to who might get "extinguished" if they try that.
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That's where you're wrong. Speaking as a developer with a BA in English, I can tell you that your English, History, and Art classes will make you better at your job.
Back in the late 70s when I was a kid and thinking that maybe computer programmer might be a more feasible career path than train driver/astronaut/chocolate factory taste tester (and that, if I did nothing, I was probably going to end up working in Education*) the advice from IBM was "Go get a degree - any decent degree but not Computer Science - and then we'll teach you about computers."
(* and I was right...)
I didn't dare to generalize, because I remembered that the UK schooling system is fundamentally different
Your basic point holds for the UK - "general" education (including compulsory English and Maths) through to major exams at age 16, followed by more advanced study in a smaller number of subjects at ages 16-18 (either in the same school or in a dedicated 16-18 college) followed by a single subject at University (unless you choose a combined degree).
Back in the day, 16-18 used to be 3-4 subjects and, if you were aiming for a maths/science/tech degree, you'd have dropped arts/language/humanity at this point and be doing two maths subjects and a science. Private schools do/did tend to make everybody do a "General Studies" course as well, but that's rare in state schools. Its a bit more flexible/diverse now, partly because you can study more subjects in the first year.
I get the impression that the 1st year of US university is a bit more like 16-18 education in the UK.
I always thought the reason so much time and energy is spent making sure phases are consistant was for the sanity and proper functioning of the grid itself.
Yes, but in addition to the constraints of efficient power transmission, national power grids are required to maintain a very accurate long-term average frequency, because many devices use the mains signal as a time base. The question is, now we have cheap radio-controlled clocks, internet-based time sync and the GPS network, when can the power grid be relieved of this dual function.
If only there were some way of keeping accurate time without relying on the power grid...
I don't know, maybe they could broadcast an accurate time signal via radio - doesn't need much bandwidth, so on a suitable frequency one transmitter could cover a huge area.
Or, perhaps, put a load of satellites with accurate atomic clocks in orbit - who knows, you might also be able to use this as some sort of navigation system. Alternatively, maybe its possible to produce some kind of "Protocol for Time on the Network" so that any internet-connected devices could get data from an atomic clock somewhere. Ideally, though its a bit ambitious, you could have all three.
Sadly, none of these things are feasible - the receiving end would need bulky, expensive equipment with dozens of vacuum tubes - before this could catch on you'd need to be able to build receivers small enough to be easily carried in a pocket and cheap enough for literally hundreds of users to buy- which is a pity, because then the mains grid could be saved the enormous complication of having to provide both efficient power transmission (by making short-term tweaks to frequency) and a long-term time-base service.
Of course, if these other options had already been available for many years, everybody would have upgraded by now, rather than waiting until the old system stopped working and then panicking.
They'll never get excited by very simple things like I have been.
Ah, yes, I remember buying* a "professional" game and thinking "Heck, who published this? If they'll sell this crap they'll probably sell something I can knock up in a weekend. I was right, and while I never joined the "whaddya mean you won't insure my Ferrari until I turn 18" club I did buy a Honda 70 (look - I had parents!) and my computer habit was pretty much self-funding from then on.
However, it would be interesting to put your assertion to the test, and see how satisfied kids would be with simple programming if *they* were in control. After all, some kids still paint pictures, take photos, make videos, form bands and don't seem worried that the output isn't as good as they see on TV. However, even back in the day. making a blob fly around the screen or coaxing a tune out of a Trash-80 clone didn't float everybody's boat.
(*Memory a bit hazy on the "buying" bit actually :-) )
What do you mean by netbook?
If you mean a small, modestly-priced entry-level, but full-featured, laptop then they don't look very dead to me. Previously, you could have small (Sony Vaios and the like) you could have cheap (some rebadged no-name brick) but not both.
If you mean an ultra-small device that runs for a week of a couple of AAs and provides a great personal organizer plus a good-enough WP and spreadsheet - they died 10 years ago when Psion pulled out of the market (their sin: they didn't run MS word and the sync software kinda sucked).
The orignal Asus EEE, however, was subtly different from the "modern" netbook in that it was much more clearly positioned as a "third system" for web/email/note-taking/casual games, with near-instant startup, that was so cheap that you wouldn't cry too much when the kids dropped it in the fish pond. That concept seems to have gone away - and having carefully constructed a theoretical framework and analysed multiple sources of evidence to produce an in-depth analysis I think this was because, honestly, EEE PC was a bit crap and lots of people bought it for the kids that Xmas because Toys'R'us had sold out of Nintendo Wiis.
Seriously - the battery life sucked, the screen was tiny, the keyboard was uncomfortable and the trackpad was a joke. They'd gone for a custom Linux distro which didn't have much software in the official repository (yes, nerds could add the Debian repos, apt-get and pray but the machine wasn't really for nerds) which would have been excusable if everything they did offer had been carefully customized to be usable on the tiny screen, but they hadn't - they'd used "off-the-shelf" apps like Oo, Firefox, Thunderbird which filled the screen with toolbars or produced dialogue boxes bigger than the screen.
Plus, ASUS had a nice habit of Osbourne-ing themselves - by the time the EEE Mk2 had actually shown up in shops, the Mk3 had been announced. Forget any long-term development (e.g. more apps) of the original EEE format.
I had one, and was initially enthusiastic, but then the "buy cheap, buy twice" lesson started to cut in and it stayed on the shelf. A while later I got an iPod Touch, which proved much better as an instant-on web/email terminal because (a) the battery was better and (b) although the screen and on-screen keyboard were tiny, the browser and email client had been designed with that in mind. If only there was such a thing as a giant iPod touch with a ~9" screen... sure it would be in a different price bracket from the EEE so don't drop it in the pond, but 400 quid for something you actually use is better value than 180 for a shelf ornament.
Sure, the dumping of cheap XP on the market (part of the netbook craze was a kick-back at Vista bloat) and the way the Linux versions somehow ended up being more expensive, differently specced or just plain out-of-stock has a role to play, but the product itself had many flaws.
So in theory that is a 34% drop in emissions then.
...approximately 66% of electricity currently generated in the US is generated by fossil fuels (assuming GP is correct). If there is any significant uptake of electric cars, more generating capacity is going to be needed. The question is, will that be C02-and-other-crap-belching fossil-fuel based or perfectly-safe-if-nothing-goes wrong nuclear? May the best lobbyist win.
I see plenty of TV adverts for games that are very clearly aimed at women - Nintendo in particular has made a big push in this direction (and families, and older people of both sexes). I'm not qualified to say whether these really meet the needs of women, but its clear that the manufacturers think they do.
Presumably TFA has some narrow definition of gaming that excludes casual games, Sims-a-like, pet simulators, fitness trainers, online bingo etc. That just leaves one of this year's biggest game releases (Portal 2) which featured a female protagonist, and a female (ish) big bad making bitchy comments about our hero's weight.
Now, if it turns out that women are rejecting this pink fluffy stereotypical family-friendly stuff, and want more subtle changes to game design, that's a different story.
Perhaps Duke Nukem would have got a better critical reception if they'd taken a tip from the "Smack my Bitch Up" video and, right at the end, panned the camera round to reveal that Duke was actually a woman...?
A few generations until seeing a paper book is as rare as seeing a lion?
Fortunately, books are rather easier to keep and care for than lions, so more people will be inclined to keep them around the house. They don't make particularly good rugs, and you don't have to take out the innards to hang them on the wall. Plus they don't have any uses in Chinese medicine* (apart from ones about Chinese medicine) so unless everything goes Fahrenheit 451 on us, they probably won't be hunted to extinction.
My guess is that high-value hardbacks and "coffee-table" books will hang around indefinitely, if only as gifts and presentation items. Getting your favorite author to sign the back of your Amazon receipt doesn't really cut it. Its paperbacks and (especially) reference books that may disappear rapidly.
I'll probably get computer reference books on Kindle from now on - they're one of the few genres that are actually usefully cheaper as eBooks and I'm unlikely to want to read them in 20 years time - unlike novels.
Has anybody in the UK/EU started a campaign to get VAT taken off eBooks yet, to stop the nonsense of eBooks costing more than hardbacks, or is everybody just resigned to the idea that it will never happen?
(* Dear pedants - yes I know that's actually tigers, but the Chinese are expanding into Africa big time and I'm sure lion's dick is every bit as good an aphrodisiac as tigers'...)
Commodore, like Apple, thought that IBM compatibility was a trend they could buck.
Well, for a while, IBM PC and the first clones were priced out of the home/hobbyist/small office market and systems like the Amiga, Atari ST and (in the UK) Acorn and Amstrad did quite well. The killer was a bit later, when the "commodity hardware" market got going and a complete PC clone cost less than a plug-in x86 card for an Amiga or Acorn.
I think if these firms hadn't bucked the trend, the modern PC market would be horribly stagnant, because so many of the things we do with modern PCs started (or at least were first bought to market) with these system's brief moment in the sun (which usually ended a couple of years later when the PC world caught up and undercut them on price).
The PC's main contribution was, ultimately, commoditization of hardware, and that's nothing to be sneezed at if you like paying $500 instead of $1500 for a computer, but virtually every other feature and application of the modern PC (including the initial price drop from $20k+ to $1500) was assimilated from somewhere else.
The one thing Commodore should have pushed in Amiga productivity applications was multitasking. They had true, seamless multitasking at a time when the Mac was just getting 512k and Switcher, and PCs were stuck with TSRs.
I think that's a nerds-eye view. True multitasking on PCs, at the time, was a solution looking for a problem: the sort of collaborative task switching used by classic Mac OS, GEM, early Windows etc. was perfectly good at letting you switch between WP and spreadsheets, which was 99% of what users wanted. Bouncing balls around the screen was impressive (since it obviously heralded really good games) but who cared that they kept bouncing while you used the wordprocessor?. If God had intended PC users to multitask, he'd have given them Unix. Pretty much every year since about 1983 has been "the year when Unix will take off on the desktop" - it took about 20 years for Apple to actually make that happen.
Now, today, we've found all sorts of problems to that solution - like running servers, recording TV, downloading torrents, backing up, fetching mail, playing music (most of which did not make their debut on PC compatibles BTW) and we've got multicore processors and stacks of RAM to help. However, it probably hasn't escaped your notice that in current OSs there's a tendency towards full-screen, self-contained apps... which, if you set aside the conspiracy theories, is based on observations of the way most non-techie users prefer to work (I blame Windows MDI).
OT, talking of the Amiga, I knew that demo of the Windows 8 UI reminded me of something...
By way of comparison, look at Commodore's much later ads for their 68000-based Amiga computer: "ONLY AMIGA MAKES IT POSSIBLE!" You couldn't even be bothered to line up some of the major applications already out there and port them to your new platform.
Couple of things to bear in mind: First: MS-DOS was basically a CP/M clone, and not only were Wordstar and its contemporaries written for CP/M, but written at a time when it was essential to make the hardware-dependent parts easily modifiable - something that was rapidly lost as soon as software started becoming PC only. So, porting Wordstar to the PC was hardly the Manhatten project. AmigaDOS was, AFAIK, a full-blown, minicomputer-class multitasking OS and nothing like CP/M or DOS - and by that time a lot of "popular software" was hard-coded for IBM PC hardware.
Second: there was a lot of hype surrounding the PC launch, and a general premonition that IBM would rapidly dominate the market. I doubt that software houses needed much persuasion to port their software, at their own expense (nobody ever got fired for writing for IBM!) - Commodore would have had to be far more persuasive.
Third: the Unique Selling Point of the Amiga was always going to be games, graphics and music - it was massive overkill for office software (and, by that time, most businesses wouldn't even consider anything non-PC). You didn't buy an Amiga because you wanted a Word Processor - you bought an Amiga because you wanted a Fairlight CMI and a Quantel Paintbox but didn't have 100 grand to spare... What was it going to do with Wordstar? Wrap it round a sphere and bounce it about the screen?
The Selectric-style keyboard, for example, was a big hit with business users, as was their fairly high resolution Monochrome Display.
I suspect the main reason the PC got as many good reviews as it did was that a lot of journalists loved the keyboard :-)
You should also remember, though, that the IBM PC was expensive compared with other personal computers of the day, Other systems were designed around standard TV frequency displays for a reason. It was only after began, the clone wars had, that IBM PC technology started to become affordable by the masses, and that has as much to do with the general trend towards cheaper electronics as anything that IBM did.
ISTR also that the the IBM high-res display flickered like a fricking Sinclair ZX-80 every time it scrolled...
And they are almost always used with chipsets that are hardware compatible with the IBM PC/AT... Apple would be no exceptions.
...except Apple didn't start using Intel until long after AT compatibility was irrelevant, and the x86 had evolved into a half-decent 32-bit, multicore chip. The fact that it has a near-redundant "appendix" that can run old PC/AT code is pretty irrelevant. Its now widely reported that Apple are at least thinking about switching to ARM on some systems...
And, the 3.5" floppy (the Apple Mac had already gone that way, but you could argue that they used a different, variable speed format).
So far, the "more closed" PS/2 is looking more influential (in terms of features that even turn up in modern non-PC systems) than the "open" (on paper) original PC. :-)
But, seriously, nobody is trying to claim that the IBM PC was not massively influential or didn't dominate the market for years - the nonsense is the claim that it was the "first true personal computer". It wasn't - it was an incremental development of existing CP/M business PC systems.
And yet, that would be the same PS/2 that gave us the mini-DIN connector in the context of connecting keyboards and mice
[sarcasm]Gosh. What a legacy.[/sarcasm]
Actually, didn't the PS/2 also give us the immortal VGA D-connector?
IBM was the first computer manufacturer that brought all the elements together,
Back in reality, IBM was the computer manufacturer with a monopolistic track record that ignored PCs for years, then panicked and brought-out a "me too" system running a clone of the already-industry-standard CP/M with a kludgey not-quite-true 16-bit processor. They then used their industry muscle to take over the corporate microcomputing market (and extinguish the previous CP/M practice of designing software to be easily patched to run on diverse systems) - then got their underpants pulled up over their heads when someone found a legal way of cloning their proprietary firmware (without which, however many bloody circuit diagrams they published, nobody else could have made a software-compatible PC).
Consequently, we got stuck with CP/M functionality and paged RAM for a decade, just when CP/M was reaching its sell-by date and proper 32-bit processors were becoming available.
That's the way I remember it, anyway - and unlike your version, my version doesn't require airbrushing CP/M systems, the S-100 bus, RS232, Shugart (disc interface), Centronics (printer interface) and all the other de-facto, pre-IBM standards out of history.
Hint: one reason why some cheaper systems like the Trash 80 and Vic had proprietary connectors is that they were a fraction of the price of an IBM PC and adding (e.g.) a floppy disc interface, or even a proper "standard" expansion bus costs money. Floppy drive connectors, for example, were perfectly standard by the early 80s, but not much good unless your computer had a disc controller.
but the "PC compatible" architecture's primary competitor on the desktop was, just about 14 years ago, still rolling-out computers that had an oddball monitor connector, used proprietary expansion cards, ran a proprietary OS, and had proprietary connectors for almost all their peripherals.
...would that be the proprietary "localtalk" connectors that implemented low-cost local area networking and printer sharing years before Ethernet became affordable? Or the monitor connectors that ensured that, whatever monitor you used, on-screen, 1 pixel = 1 point when doing DTP work? Or the desktop bus system that allowed keyboards, mice, tablets etc. to be daisy-chained rather than each having to have a lead going back to the computer? Or is "SCSI" the non-standard disc interface you're talking about? Standardisation is fine provided you've finished innovating.
CP/M was pretty open too.
Sorry. CP/M didn't exist. Its an urban myth perpetuated by conspiracy theorists and IBM deniers who like to pretend that there was some sort of industry standard for personal computing before the coming of Big Blue.
This "CP/M" nonsense belongs in the same category as pre-Colombian discovery of the Americas, evolution, and the existence of third-party expansions for any personal computer made before 1981.
You'll notice that when these CP/M crackpots talk about their mythical OS in detail, they're just describing something almost identical to MS-DOS with a few quirkily-renamed commands (suggesting that anybody would call a "copy" command "PIP" or a debugging tool "DDT" hardly adds to the credibility of this myth).
Sure you may be able to say technically the first home computer that could be called personal wasn't an IBM, but does anyone run 6502 MOSFET chips anymore?
Of course not, any more than anybody runs Intel 8088 chips anymore, uses an ISA expansion bus, Shugart disc interfaces etc. I even believe that modern systems can have more than 640K of RAM...
The 6502 might not have had any official surviving children (ISTR there was a 16-bit variant used in the Apple II GS), but its pretty well documented that it was a major influence on the design of the ARM.
Hell even Apple now is IBM PC compatible.
No, Apple uses chips based on the modern x86-32 and x86-64 architectures. I don't think the fact that these have legacy backwards-compatibility with the 8088 was a major influence on Apple's decision to switch. That has more to do with IBM and Motorola's failure to manufacture a mobile version of the PPC G5, at a time when Apple was doing rather well with non-Intel based machines...
As someone who lived through that time
You must have been very, very drunk, because you don't remember it very well.
Folks seem to forget that before the 5150 NOTHING worked together, [snip] As someone who had a Trash80 and a VIC20
Which is why, pre-PC, serious commercial microcomputer users tended to use one of the many CP/M-based systems rather than VIC20s, to the extent that there were even kludges available to run CP/M on Trash-80s and Apple IIs (the latter requiring a Z80 system on an expansion card). This is what IBM-lovers like to airbrush out of history because the "revolutionary" IBM PC was really just a "me too" CP/M-86 machine (MS-DOS/PC-DOS being, effectively, a clone of CP/M).
Now thanks to the failure of the IBM PS/2 and MicroChannel architecture you can buy...
There, put that right for you.
your printer still plugs in,
Nice to know that IBM invented the Centronics and RS232 interfaces, and that anybody who remembers using those on non-IBM computers is delusional.
you don't need IRQs or futzing or hoping you have the right slots
You seem to think IBM invented the PCI bus. They didn't - the original ISA bus had "IRQs or futzing or hoping you have the right slots" up the wazzoo.
Now if we could only get the same thing in the mobile space, to where laptops had standard motherboards like ATX and mATX
If only people didn't want their mobiles to be slim, and light, and, well, mobile...
...apart from Sendmail, the Berkeley TCP/IP stack, the original httpd (and then Apache), BIND... the infrastructure of the whole fracking Internet really.
Having a kernel to run the GNU tools on is handy, as is having a free, industrial strength C/C++ compiler.
What they've done for the non-technical user is a bit of a harder one, though.
Now go find the price of a single blank blu-ray disc (or a pack and divide by the number in the pack).
Duh!
Software manufacturers don't order a stack of blank discs from NewEgg, sit down and start copying (unless its a small run of beta test versions or something) - they get them stamped out from a master (same general principle as vinyl records - just higher precision). The structure of mass-produced optical "ROM" discs is completely different to recordable media.
What you need to do is go and get a quote for bulk, pressed optical discs (CD/DVD/BR-ROMs not recordable discs) - you'll usually find it will consist of a fairly steep, fixed, mastering/set-up charge plus a few tens of cents per disc. For small runs (a few hundred) it will be cheaper to use recordable media but once you get to 1000+, pressed discs are way cheaper, per unit, than recordable media.
In the olden days, there were things called "mask programmed ROMs" - read-only memory chips with baked-in data which were cheap to produce in large quantities - I guess they still exist but AFAIK they haven't kept up with Flash RAM in terms of density, or with optical ROM discs in terms of cost (big market for bulk CD manufacturing "micro" plants - ROMs need a chip fab).
I confirm, you are not a lawyer. Breaching contracts and having our clients let go off scott free is the basis of our business.
I'm sure the contract will actually say that Oracle definitely might promise unconditionally (subject to conditions) to support itanium (for a given, and very long, definition of "support") except as provided in Annexes II, IV, XVII, XXIVI (and any subsequent annexes) until such time as they cease to support it (which shall not be before such time has elapsed) unless otherwise compelled not to by a reasonable cause to discontinue support (including such reasonable causes as might be deemed unreasonable by the party who is not party to the cause). Except they'll probably do that by listing all the things that they won't support then excluding the ones that they do. Or vice versa.
...which may be hard for a layperson to understand, but is actually a shining example of how precise and unambiguous legal language can be, as evidenced by the fact that none of these expensively-drawn-up contracts ever end up being contested in court.
For media distribution, it is getting to the point where some form of memory card may be the answer.
I suspect bulk-pressed optical discs (as opposed to writable media) are still considerably cheaper - and faster to manufacture - than 8GB+ memory cards.
As others have pointed out, they're skimping on the licenses for DVD/BluRay video playback capability - its quite likely that the drives will still, physically, be BluRay mechanisms.
Obviously, you're lucky. Most people who've been working with computers for any length of time have encountered "software rot" or "bit decay" whereby any piece of software left unused for more than a year or two will spontaneously develop random syntax errors and bugs.
This is quite distinct from actual corruption caused by media damage - which tends to be obvious, usually sufficient to stop your code compiling. In contrast, "software rot" is caused by quantum fluctuations in the morphic resonance field of the code, so the effects manifest as plausible programming errors (such as failing to initialize a variable in C and assuming it was 0) and can only be spotted because you're sure that you were never that sloppy.
In the case of document files, bit decay manifests as spelling, punctuation and grammar errors or redundancies resulting from the same thing being said twice. In a music file, the most common effect is that that song that you really liked, and played all the time at college, fails to evoke the same sense of enjoyment, and Rick Astley just doesn't seem to be as good a singer as you remember him to be.
Don't buy the extra stuff that costs money... [snip] the choice is yours.
True, but a "well" designed free-to-play game will quickly lose its playability if you don't regularly open your wallet - either because you can't progress or because the endless pressure to buy stuff spoils the game.
So, yeah, don't whine if you're stupid enough to pay out a fortune, but also don't confuse "free-to-pay" with properly free or just plain good value.
Plus, just because some people are stupid enough to fall for the sort of pressure these games exert, doesn't necessarily make it a nice thing to do.
A few moment's silence, pray, for the demise of an Internet meme?
How do we now describe the expected delivery date of vaporware without resorting to mundane terms like "hell freezing over" or "Real Soon Now..."?
This is nearly as bad as finding out what step 3 is in the underpant gnomes' business plan.
I doubt that Apple will allow any scripting language on iOS anytime soon, or later, possibly never...
...but I think it will take a little longer than one might expect before they're fully supported on all mobile platforms
Except iOS already supports Javascript and browser components with a (reasonable approximation of) HTML5 (given that W3C are going to faff with the draft standard for a few years yet), I'm pretty sure that JS+HTML5 has always been on the list of Apple-sanctioned languages for Apps (which they've relaxed a bit now, anyway) and, anyway, you can run JS/HTML5 apps in the browser. Plus, pop in a "manifest" file and they can be "installed" with their own desktop icon and run full-screen with no browser furniture without having to go via the App store.
Android and ChromeOS have pretty good Javascript+HTML"5" too (they're all based on the same Webkit foundation that iOS uses, modulo a bit of version skew and different Javascript engines). Yeah, the touch interface hasn't quite standardized between Android and iOS yet, but dealing with that sort of thing is meat and drink to JS developers, and most JS application frameworks deal with it.
'course, I'm not saying MS won't jinx this by the old "embracing, extend, extinguish" maneuver, but this isn't like the corporate desktop where they inherited an unassailable monopoly from IBM - in the mobile market the jury is still out as to who might get "extinguished" if they try that.