"another factor could be that, because mammals were at the bottom of the food chain, they tended to be nocturnal and live in burrows."
This isn't actually the case. We know that there were mammals which reached 20kg during the Cretaceous, and they were carnivores who would have had no problem killing and consuming one of the many dinosaur species that were smaller and lighter than them, and we also know from fossil evidence that they definitely did prey on the young of some larger dinosaur species.
"lastly, insects would have provided a valuable new food source for primitive mammals. dinosaurs may have grown too large to do the same."
The first known dinosaur was an insectivore, and insectivorous species were common during their entire tenure on Earth. Several of the caenagnathids for example are believed to be have been insectivores, and their entire family only existed in the late Cretaceous.
Not all Cretaceous mammals were mouse-sized, and not all Cretaceous dinosaurs were big. We have fossils of Cretaceous mammals that weighed 20Kg when they lived, and significantly more fossils of a fair number of Cretaceous dinosaur species that weighed less than 6Kg and hunted insects, so you'd need an insect that drank the blood of little dinosaurs while leaving significantly bigger mammals alone, but was also capable of penetrating the hide of a triceratops.
"Well, most cars are sold to people who don't read motoring magazines or websites - yet the average person doesn't buy the cheapest car possible. Same with electrical appliances or clothing. It's probably symptomatic of the immaturity of the computer market."
Immaturity is certainly a factor, but the same can be said for MP3 players, digital cameras, mobile phones, and many other products which use computer-related technologies, yet there seems to be far less of tendency to make purchasing decisions solely on price with these devices.
My take on it is that the fact just about everything aimed at consumers comes with Windows has resulted in a levelling effect which makes it difficult for the non-technical to see why one system with Windows on it costs a lot more than a different one that appears to be identical in all obvious respects (same sized screen, same keyboard, same mouse, similar box, etc.). Add in the sort of utterly clueless sales bods that are endemic in consumer-land, and you have a recipe for the sort of confusion that results in people selecting on price because it's the only thing they've got to judge things by.
"Also, even though many manufacturers make cheap, crappy computers, is there any evidence that those are bought the most frequently?"
Walk into the sorts of places that most consumers frequent or read the advertising in publications aimed at them (and more frequently now on TV as well), and you'll see the evidence for yourself.
"I'd think most people would go at least a couple of models up from the very cheapest - at least buy more RAM or something."
Why would people who don't know have any clear idea of what RAM is bother to buy more of it? Consumers are used to things being a unit with a fixed specification, so the fact that computers aren't the same doesn't even occur to the majority of those who buy them from the same place that sells fridges, TVs, and lots of other examples of electrical and electronic stuff that can only be upgraded by buying a new one.
"This is also evidenced by the popularity of laptops, which are rapidly overtaking the cheaper option - a clunky desktop."
The popularity of laptops comes from the fact that even the technically challenged can immediately see the difference between a small, portable, all-in-one device that can run on batteries and is amenable to being folded up and put away when not in use, and a big metal box, a monitor, a keyboard, and a mouse that together take up a lot of space, require a mains supply to use, and are connected together by cables.
"Not to mention that dinosaurs wouldn't have been able to figure out what was causing their deaths the way humans did with the plague."
Humans didn't figure out what was causing their deaths when bubonic and pneumonic plagues were wiping out loads of Europeans. The two prevailing theories were:
"they did manage to have enough surplus to trade for what they needed"
Most of their exports were products that came from hunting animals that live quite happily in extremely cold conditions, e.g. seals, walrus, narwhal (prized for their ivory), and whale products. Another notable export was the gyrfalcon, a trainable hunting bird that was highly prized in much of Northern Europe; the Greenlanders caught so many of them that they became extremely difficult to find during the 14th century.
"I've always gathered that part of the reason they died out is that unlike the natives, they weren't willing to switch to a hunter-gatherer economy based largely on seals, walruses and whales."
The only "natives" of Greenland when the Norse arrived were a few of the so-called "Late Dorset" peoples, who only arrived about a century before the Vikings did (although they'd settled the place previously, they died out in Greenland during the 2nd century AD, but persisted in North America). They were technologically primitive, and restricted to the north-west region of the island, so there wasn't much contact between them and the Vikings, let alone competition. It was therefore the Inuit who seem to have been responsible for their demise, which not only corresponds with the Inuit arrival there (early 13th century), but is also mentioned in Inuit legends.
As to not being able (or willing) to adapt to a hunting culture, that's certainly one of the prevailing theories, but there are some notable holes in it, e.g:
1) Unlike the Esquimaux peoples such as the Dorset Cultures and Inuit, the Norse weren't capable of remaining healthy for long periods on a diet that consists almost entirely of meat and fish, so they'd have died out even if they had adopted the Inuit life style.
2) It's extremely difficult to support large, fixed settlements with hunting and gathering even in the most favourable conditions, let alone the arctic circle in the opening years of the "Little Ice Age". The fact that the beginning of civilisation corresponds with the invention of agriculture isn't a coincidence, just as the penchant for hunter-gatherers to live in small migratory groups isn't a coincidence. And although the prevailing image of Vikings is a bunch of barbarians whose main occupation was raping and pillaging, the truth of the matter is that they were a civilisation that, like other civilisations, could not continue to exist without agriculture and trade.
So despite what some (but by no means all, or even the majority) of historians say, it wouldn't have been possible for the Greenland Vikings to survive in any significant numbers by adopting an Inuit life style, and those few that did manage to avoid dying would have have suffered from scurvy, rickets, and various other malnutrition-related diseases.
"That article you cited mentioned how shipping gradually died out. As the climate was getting colder, the passage would get harder, until even such hardy seafarers as the Norse would find it difficult, so that's no surprise."
The decline in shipping to Greenland was due cultural changes in Scandinavia rather than the weather. Christianity and feudalism produced much stronger ties between what had been the old Viking lands (who became unified into much larger kingdoms) and their similarly Christian and feudal European neighbours, who were accessible via easier (i.e. cheaper) trade routes. The only notable effect that the weather had was that colder waters around Northern Europe produced more plankton that krill feed on, so whales moved further south, which made it cheaper for the Nordic countries to hunt them directly instead of importing whale products from Greenland.
NB: Greenland currently has a population of over 56,000, which is 11 times greater than the Viking colonies had at their height.
"Any idea before it's economically practical again, as it was in the Viking times?"
Sea levels around Greenland are already higher than they were during Viking times, hence the fact that some of their settlements are now partially underwater. It should also be noted that the place wasn't very economically viable during the warmest part of the Early Mediaeval Warm Period; it only had around 5,000 inhabitants at its height, and archaeological evidence shows that the ecosystem wasn't capable of sustaining them for very long, because their cattle caused significant amounts of topsoil erosion through overgrazing.
An pleasantly concise article which shows that there was far more to the rather tragic end of the Greenland Vikings than climate change is here:
I happen to have a lot more faith in palaeoclimactic information derived from multiple high and low resolution proxy measurements than stuff that's based on instrumental data which is only available for around 200 years' worth of data, and becomes increasingly sparse and inaccurate as one moves back through those 200 years.
"if the holders didn't invent it, the patents aren't valid and people don't need to license them."
You don't have to license if you can prove in court that the patent holder didn't invent it, and that can be an expensive process in a system which assumes that granted patents are valid, and put the onus on the defendant to prove otherwise. That's why even big companies often choose to pay royalties instead of fighting patents in court; if the rates are reasonable, paying them is the cheaper option.
"Besides, HP probably already has patent cross-licensing agreements with Apple."
I don't know whether they have any deals concerning Apple's multi-touch patents, which are after all rather new, although they doubtless have cross-licensing deals on various others.
"Patents are primarily being used from protecting creaky old behemoths like Apple, Microsoft, and HP from innovative small competitors."
They're also notably being used by drug companies to register new uses for their existing drugs that somebody other than the drug company discovered, and by trolls to get overly broad patents on things that already exist so they can shake down companies which actually produce stuff (and in some cases were the original inventors) in Texas courts, where the habitual wearing of cowboy hats since childhood has restricted the blood flow to peoples' brains until they've atrophied to the point where they're not capable of out-thinking a planarian.
"MS has already stripped ISO of legitimate credibility, by proving that it can be bought."
ISO stripped itself of legitimate credibility by proving that that not only can it be bought, but bought in a way that's so blindingly obvious it would be comical if it wasn't so tragic.
"Apparently you've fallen for the Microsoft FUD about Amiga and Atari ST systems."
No, I have not. I spent the best part of five years programming both systems professionally, have several different models of each, and am therefore very familiar indeed with their respective capabilities and limitations.
"A little known fact about them is that they didn't require as much RAM or processor speed to get things done while PC clones needed faster Intel processors and more than 512K of RAM to at least get a decent speed in the 1980s to do the same thing an Amiga or Atari ST could do in 256K of RAM with an 8Mhz 68000 processor."
It's not "little-known fact" that machines with significant amounts of stuff in ROM require less RAM to run software than those with minimal ROMs. Note also that (1) PC clones running DOS (and early versions of Windows) couldn't directly address more than 640K of RAM, so it wasn't possible for software to make use significantly greater quantities of RAM than the amount that shipped with most Amigas (i.e. all except the 1000) and all STs; and (2) few PCs sold to consumers during the mid to late 1980s had clock speeds that were greater than those of the Amiga or ST.
"Besides the Atari ST and Amiga had MS-DOS and Macintosh emulators"
I used them, and they ran DOS software at about 1/10th the speed of the original 4.77MHz IBM PC, which wasn't a fast machine by any stretch of the imagination, so nobody with any degree of objectivity would even attempt to pretend that these were a realistic alternative for those who wanted (or were required) to use IBM PC programs.
"I think you are reading Microsoft FUD because they try to rewrite history because the Internet existed as the Arpanet before 1994"
And I think you're trying to divert attention from the fact that you wrote a pile of utter shite by building straw men, because I didn't say the ARAPNET, and indeed the Internet didn't exist before 1994.
"we used Telnet, Gopher, FTP, Newsgroups, and email with a text based interface that any dumb terminal BBS software and modem could connect to."
Including Amigas and Atari STs. So your point in writing this is what, precisely?
"There was a DOS version of AOL in 1991"
There was indeed. And this proves what?
"but before that was a CompuServe which had a $500 rebate for MS-DOS computers bundled with Procomm or Vidtext terminal software to get on CompuServe and access the Arpanet and CompuServe resources in the 1980's"
1) Please provide some evidence for the assertion that Compuserve (or anyone else) offered $500 rebates solely on MS-DOS based computers before 1999.
2) The only ARPANET/Internet service Compuserve offered during the 1980s was EMAIL, and that wasn't available until 1989.
"Winsock and Trumpet did not come out until the 1990's when the world wide web was invented because the Mosaic web browser needed it, but the Lynx based text only web browser used MS-DOS based dial-up SLIP and PPP and all one needed to do was use Procomm and telnet to a Unix system that hosted Lynx "
The Internet-enabled version of Lynx (Lynx 2.0 -- 1.0 was a hypertext browser for viewing internal documents at the University of Kansas) came out month _after_ Mosaic, and neither appeared until 1993. Note also that Mosaic was originally for Unix, not Windows. So once again you're writing a bunch of revisionist tripe that doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
"Obviously I am dealing with someone that wasn't even born when these technologies were invented and got most of his info off of Microsoft web sites and Microsoft FUD sites via Google or some other search engine"
More meaningless pontificating on subjects you obviously know nothing whatsoever about.
"because the true history of the Amiga and Atari ST happened before the world wide web was invented"
Given that that's what I've been saying all along, I'm very glad indeed that you've stopped trying to pretend that the Internet is the reason they failed.
"Like most of your comments, you are grossly incorrect."
Balderdash.
"The Commodore 64 helped get AOL started in 1983 [informationweek.com]"
None of the companies prior to 1991 was AOL -- they were other companies who offered online services which would later _become_ AOL. Furthermore, as the article you cite points out, the service wasn't available to ordinary IBM PC/clone users until 1993, so as I said before, it had no relevance whatsoever to the decline of the Amiga or Atari ST.
"Apple and Microsoft made a deal with AOL to not support the Commodore machines anymore after that AOL rebate was made"
Please cite some evidence for this claim.
"You are obviously an Amiga and Atari hater that doesn't know jack squat about their history"
I'm definitely a Commodore and Atari hater, but that comes from having loved both the Amiga and ST (I made an excellent living writing software for both during the mid to late 1980s), and therefore heartily resent both companies for squandering the opportunity to settle (at least the domestic) market on something significantly better than the horrid, segmented, memory-limited IBM PC architecture running a rip-off of CP/M 2.2.
"Around 1995 Windows 95 sunk both of them"
This is a blatant piece of historical revisionism, because Atari ceased production of all ST models in 1993 to concentrate on their Jaguar games console, and Commodore went bankrupt in April of 1994 after several years of financial difficulty. It was therefore impossible for Windows-95, which wasn't available until August of 1995, to have played any role in the demise of either system.
"PC Clones got so cheap and so fast that Atari and Commodore could not get the 68K series processors to match what Intel put out"
The problem was actually one of designing low-cost hardware to take advantage of the newer Motorola CPUs during the life of the Amiga and ST rather than any difference in performance (Motorola's chips were in reality usually better than Intel's during the 1980s and early 1990s, and were also much nicer to write software for). This wasn't so much of a problem for PC manufacturers because there were enough business power-users to provide a market for new, pricey systems that had a performance advantage over those of other PC manufacturers. However, as both Commodore and Atari found to their cost in 1990 when both launched expensive 68030-based systems aimed at professionals, the business market has a high entry barrier for companies who many people primarily associated with games machines.
"Even Gateway tried to sell the Amiga"
Gateway never sold Amigas. They bought the company for its IP, and formed a separate entity (Amiga Inc.) to license it to third parties, but despite some noise at the beginning about their intent to do so, they didn't manufacture Amigas or sell them.
"after Microsoft threatened to take away their Windows OEM license, they dropped it like a hot potato and sold it."
Please provide some evidence for Gateway selling off Amiga Inc. because of Microsoft rather than due to the fact that it was losing money, just like it did for the companies who acquired the Amiga name and IP prior to Gateway's acquisition.
"Microsoft has the monopoly on what third parties can write drivers for and business software for"
It has no monopoly whatsoever on what others _can_ write business software and drivers for, hence the fact that there's a thriving third-party peripheral and business software market for Macs (including offerings from MS themselves), several graphics card manufacturers offer drivers for Linux, and enterprise software companies such as Oracle support a wide range of platforms.
"Why would selling the most of something necessarily be synonymous with having the cheapest of something? "
It isn't necessarily synonymous.
"Most people don't want to buy the cheapest of something, and only do so if they are forced to by economic means, or if the cheapest is also the best quality product."
If this is really the case, then (a) why do so many manufacturers make whole ranges of really cheap, crappy computers with prices that are further subsisdised by large amounts of bloatware, and (b) why do so many retailers carry said cheap, crappy computers with prices that are further subsidised by large amounts of bloatware?
Clue: the vast bulk of consumer computers are sold to people who will never read Slashdot.
Oh dear. I thought I was the only one who hadn't managed to repress awful memories of acts such as The Wombles, Gilbert O'Sullivan, The Bay City Rollers, and Little Jimmy Osmond.
"Didn't your dad teach you to keep a pair of knitting needles at a dull red heat specifically for driving into your ears in such circumstances?"
That wouldn't have stopped me seeing them, and many of the dreadful memories are visual as well as auditory. Oh the humanity...
"Which makes me think it's either a very slim/no chance of life on other planets or they're not returning our calls."
Or it could simply be that it simply be that the thought of using radio waves to communicate over interstellar distances hasn't occurred to anyone else because they all discovered a superior method before developing radio.
IMO it's the height of arrogance to assume that beings who evolved entirely independently of Earth would have developed the same technologies we did in the same order, or that there aren't things which may be perfectly obvious to others that we haven't discovered, and vice-versa.
"I'm also a big believer in Ice Ages, as in, there have been several and the last one might not be the last one."
The last ice age is the current one, i.e. we're still in an ice age, but our civilisation has the luck to be in one of its interglacial periods, and the best data we have indicates that this one is a 28,000 year interglacial rather than one of the much more common (and somewhat cooler) 10,000 year items. Even better for us is the fact that we're only 11,000 to 13,000 years into it, so we've got at least 15,000 years or so of this interglacial to go.
Note that while the cyclic nature of glacial and interglacial periods is supported by lots of evidence, nobody actually _knows_ why the cycles are as they are, or why they were different lengths during other ice ages. Orbital (Milkanovitch) forcing, precession, and tilt all have correspondences with glacial / interglacial cycles, but they don't fully explain all the known data, so there are several theories which try to integrate these factors with others.
NB: theories about the causes of glacial / interglacial cycles within an ice age are unrelated to those which attempt to explain why ice ages occur.
"You don't need to buy so many 32 and 64 CPU monsters."
Where did I say anything the contrary?
"A single big Unix box (or even a smaller unix) box tends to be able to do more work than multiple Windows boxes that are really just glorified PCs."
What in my posts says that Windows is good for anything?
"Yes, it's a great tragedy that we aren't filling more landfills by creating senseless server churn and buying systems that require you multiply the number of (win32) boxes you're using."
You're ranting to yourself here, because I didn't say anything positive about Windows at all, and certainly didn't suggest that it was a suitable replacement for Unix systems.
"however pretty safe to say if they are #1 overall, they are also selling the most econobox type PCs."
That's not necessarily the case, although HP do seem to shift a lot of "cheapie" systems loaded to the gills with bloatware. Don't forget that 80% of the PCs and laptops sold every year go to corporate customers, so it's theoretically possible to have a dominant sales position without offering anything whatsoever to consumers and small businesses.
"Wombles were cute, cuddly and useful, as well as being geographically educational."
They were also a horrid 1970s pop group whose members wore Womble costumes. I am sadly old enough to remember them, and still bear the emotional scars.
"Are you kidding? There's massess of masses of Solaris, HPUX, etc. out there and companies aren't moving."
Nor are they buying much in the way of new systems with Solaris or HPUX on them, hence Sun's recent open sourcing of Solaris, and HP demonstrating Linux and Windows running on SuperDome systems.
"HPUX 11.11 is ancient but still powers entire data centres and there's no inclination to move.. because it's solid, works and has uptime measured in years."
This confirms rather than refutes my assertion, because the health of a system is judged by the number of new sales, not how many old ones are still chugging along -- there are after all a fair number of VAX (and even some PDP-11s) and IBM 370 systems still being used in companies.
How precisely does following a leader based on signals they give qualify as mimicking a human ability? Ants, bees, and sardines can do this without colliding with whoever is in front or those going in the opposite direction, with bees and sardines managing to do it in three dimensions. Anyone who has seen ducks and geese migrating in neat triangular formations knows that birds also follow leaders quite happily, possibly because nobody's bothered to tell them that it's a human ability which creatures with tiny brains like theirs aren't capable of.
Slashdot Mirror
"Actually, there is no evidence that insects of the late Cretaceous got that large."
And even if there was a mosquito of that size, it wouldn't have bothered the many species of dinosaurs that were smaller than the insect itself.
"another factor could be that, because mammals were at the bottom of the food chain, they tended to be nocturnal and live in burrows."
This isn't actually the case. We know that there were mammals which reached 20kg during the Cretaceous, and they were carnivores who would have had no problem killing and consuming one of the many dinosaur species that were smaller and lighter than them, and we also know from fossil evidence that they definitely did prey on the young of some larger dinosaur species.
"lastly, insects would have provided a valuable new food source for primitive mammals. dinosaurs may have grown too large to do the same."
The first known dinosaur was an insectivore, and insectivorous species were common during their entire tenure on Earth. Several of the caenagnathids for example are believed to be have been insectivores, and their entire family only existed in the late Cretaceous.
"IIRC, flowering plants evolved during the Eocene, ~10 My after the K-T impact. This includes grasses."
The oldest know fossil of a flowering plant is about 125 million years old, so they certainly didn't evolve in the Eocene.
http://www.xs4all.nl/~steurh/engplant/eblad4.html
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/170/3957/547
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowering_plant
Grasses were also around during the Cretaceous, and herbivorous dinosaurs ate them:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/310/5751/1177
Not all Cretaceous mammals were mouse-sized, and not all Cretaceous dinosaurs were big. We have fossils of Cretaceous mammals that weighed 20Kg when they lived, and significantly more fossils of a fair number of Cretaceous dinosaur species that weighed less than 6Kg and hunted insects, so you'd need an insect that drank the blood of little dinosaurs while leaving significantly bigger mammals alone, but was also capable of penetrating the hide of a triceratops.
"Well, most cars are sold to people who don't read motoring magazines or websites - yet the average person doesn't buy the cheapest car possible. Same with electrical appliances or clothing. It's probably symptomatic of the immaturity of the computer market."
Immaturity is certainly a factor, but the same can be said for MP3 players, digital cameras, mobile phones, and many other products which use computer-related technologies, yet there seems to be far less of tendency to make purchasing decisions solely on price with these devices.
My take on it is that the fact just about everything aimed at consumers comes with Windows has resulted in a levelling effect which makes it difficult for the non-technical to see why one system with Windows on it costs a lot more than a different one that appears to be identical in all obvious respects (same sized screen, same keyboard, same mouse, similar box, etc.). Add in the sort of utterly clueless sales bods that are endemic in consumer-land, and you have a recipe for the sort of confusion that results in people selecting on price because it's the only thing they've got to judge things by.
"Also, even though many manufacturers make cheap, crappy computers, is there any evidence that those are bought the most frequently?"
Walk into the sorts of places that most consumers frequent or read the advertising in publications aimed at them (and more frequently now on TV as well), and you'll see the evidence for yourself.
"I'd think most people would go at least a couple of models up from the very cheapest - at least buy more RAM or something."
Why would people who don't know have any clear idea of what RAM is bother to buy more of it? Consumers are used to things being a unit with a fixed specification, so the fact that computers aren't the same doesn't even occur to the majority of those who buy them from the same place that sells fridges, TVs, and lots of other examples of electrical and electronic stuff that can only be upgraded by buying a new one.
"This is also evidenced by the popularity of laptops, which are rapidly overtaking the cheaper option - a clunky desktop."
The popularity of laptops comes from the fact that even the technically challenged can immediately see the difference between a small, portable, all-in-one device that can run on batteries and is amenable to being folded up and put away when not in use, and a big metal box, a monitor, a keyboard, and a mouse that together take up a lot of space, require a mains supply to use, and are connected together by cables.
"Not to mention that dinosaurs wouldn't have been able to figure out what was causing their deaths the way humans did with the plague."
Humans didn't figure out what was causing their deaths when bubonic and pneumonic plagues were wiping out loads of Europeans. The two prevailing theories were:
1) It was God's judgement.
2) Bad air carried it.
"they did manage to have enough surplus to trade for what they needed"
Most of their exports were products that came from hunting animals that live quite happily in extremely cold conditions, e.g. seals, walrus, narwhal (prized for their ivory), and whale products. Another notable export was the gyrfalcon, a trainable hunting bird that was highly prized in much of Northern Europe; the Greenlanders caught so many of them that they became extremely difficult to find during the 14th century.
"I've always gathered that part of the reason they died out is that unlike the natives, they weren't willing to switch to a hunter-gatherer economy based largely on seals, walruses and whales."
The only "natives" of Greenland when the Norse arrived were a few of the so-called "Late Dorset" peoples, who only arrived about a century before the Vikings did (although they'd settled the place previously, they died out in Greenland during the 2nd century AD, but persisted in North America). They were technologically primitive, and restricted to the north-west region of the island, so there wasn't much contact between them and the Vikings, let alone competition. It was therefore the Inuit who seem to have been responsible for their demise, which not only corresponds with the Inuit arrival there (early 13th century), but is also mentioned in Inuit legends.
As to not being able (or willing) to adapt to a hunting culture, that's certainly one of the prevailing theories, but there are some notable holes in it, e.g:
1) Unlike the Esquimaux peoples such as the Dorset Cultures and Inuit, the Norse weren't capable of remaining healthy for long periods on a diet that consists almost entirely of meat and fish, so they'd have died out even if they had adopted the Inuit life style.
2) It's extremely difficult to support large, fixed settlements with hunting and gathering even in the most favourable conditions, let alone the arctic circle in the opening years of the "Little Ice Age". The fact that the beginning of civilisation corresponds with the invention of agriculture isn't a coincidence, just as the penchant for hunter-gatherers to live in small migratory groups isn't a coincidence. And although the prevailing image of Vikings is a bunch of barbarians whose main occupation was raping and pillaging, the truth of the matter is that they were a civilisation that, like other civilisations, could not continue to exist without agriculture and trade.
So despite what some (but by no means all, or even the majority) of historians say, it wouldn't have been possible for the Greenland Vikings to survive in any significant numbers by adopting an Inuit life style, and those few that did manage to avoid dying would have have suffered from scurvy, rickets, and various other malnutrition-related diseases.
"That article you cited mentioned how shipping gradually died out. As the climate was getting colder, the passage would get harder, until even such hardy seafarers as the Norse would find it difficult, so that's no surprise."
The decline in shipping to Greenland was due cultural changes in Scandinavia rather than the weather. Christianity and feudalism produced much stronger ties between what had been the old Viking lands (who became unified into much larger kingdoms) and their similarly Christian and feudal European neighbours, who were accessible via easier (i.e. cheaper) trade routes. The only notable effect that the weather had was that colder waters around Northern Europe produced more plankton that krill feed on, so whales moved further south, which made it cheaper for the Nordic countries to hunt them directly instead of importing whale products from Greenland.
NB: Greenland currently has a population of over 56,000, which is 11 times greater than the Viking colonies had at their height.
"Any idea before it's economically practical again, as it was in the Viking times?"
Sea levels around Greenland are already higher than they were during Viking times, hence the fact that some of their settlements are now partially underwater. It should also be noted that the place wasn't very economically viable during the warmest part of the Early Mediaeval Warm Period; it only had around 5,000 inhabitants at its height, and archaeological evidence shows that the ecosystem wasn't capable of sustaining them for very long, because their cattle caused significant amounts of topsoil erosion through overgrazing.
An pleasantly concise article which shows that there was far more to the rather tragic end of the Greenland Vikings than climate change is here:
http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/greenland
I hope it helps to answer some of your questions.
"Things were much warmer [during the Early Mediaeval Warm]"
The latest palaeloclimactic data indicates that current global temperatures are higher than they were during the Early Mediaeval Warm:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/paleolast.html
I happen to have a lot more faith in palaeoclimactic information derived from multiple high and low resolution proxy measurements than stuff that's based on instrumental data which is only available for around 200 years' worth of data, and becomes increasingly sparse and inaccurate as one moves back through those 200 years.
"if the holders didn't invent it, the patents aren't valid and people don't need to license them."
You don't have to license if you can prove in court that the patent holder didn't invent it, and that can be an expensive process in a system which assumes that granted patents are valid, and put the onus on the defendant to prove otherwise. That's why even big companies often choose to pay royalties instead of fighting patents in court; if the rates are reasonable, paying them is the cheaper option.
"Besides, HP probably already has patent cross-licensing agreements with Apple."
I don't know whether they have any deals concerning Apple's multi-touch patents, which are after all rather new, although they doubtless have cross-licensing deals on various others.
"Patents are primarily being used from protecting creaky old behemoths like Apple, Microsoft, and HP from innovative small competitors."
They're also notably being used by drug companies to register new uses for their existing drugs that somebody other than the drug company discovered, and by trolls to get overly broad patents on things that already exist so they can shake down companies which actually produce stuff (and in some cases were the original inventors) in Texas courts, where the habitual wearing of cowboy hats since childhood has restricted the blood flow to peoples' brains until they've atrophied to the point where they're not capable of out-thinking a planarian.
"MS has already stripped ISO of legitimate credibility, by proving that it can be bought."
ISO stripped itself of legitimate credibility by proving that that not only can it be bought, but bought in a way that's so blindingly obvious it would be comical if it wasn't so tragic.
"Apparently you've fallen for the Microsoft FUD about Amiga and Atari ST systems."
No, I have not. I spent the best part of five years programming both systems professionally, have several different models of each, and am therefore very familiar indeed with their respective capabilities and limitations.
"A little known fact about them is that they didn't require as much RAM or processor speed to get things done while PC clones needed faster Intel processors and more than 512K of RAM to at least get a decent speed in the 1980s to do the same thing an Amiga or Atari ST could do in 256K of RAM with an 8Mhz 68000 processor."
It's not "little-known fact" that machines with significant amounts of stuff in ROM require less RAM to run software than those with minimal ROMs. Note also that (1) PC clones running DOS (and early versions of Windows) couldn't directly address more than 640K of RAM, so it wasn't possible for software to make use significantly greater quantities of RAM than the amount that shipped with most Amigas (i.e. all except the 1000) and all STs; and (2) few PCs sold to consumers during the mid to late 1980s had clock speeds that were greater than those of the Amiga or ST.
"Besides the Atari ST and Amiga had MS-DOS and Macintosh emulators"
I used them, and they ran DOS software at about 1/10th the speed of the original 4.77MHz IBM PC, which wasn't a fast machine by any stretch of the imagination, so nobody with any degree of objectivity would even attempt to pretend that these were a realistic alternative for those who wanted (or were required) to use IBM PC programs.
"I think you are reading Microsoft FUD because they try to rewrite history because the Internet existed as the Arpanet before 1994"
And I think you're trying to divert attention from the fact that you wrote a pile of utter shite by building straw men, because I didn't say the ARAPNET, and indeed the Internet didn't exist before 1994.
"we used Telnet, Gopher, FTP, Newsgroups, and email with a text based interface that any dumb terminal BBS software and modem could connect to."
Including Amigas and Atari STs. So your point in writing this is what, precisely?
"There was a DOS version of AOL in 1991"
There was indeed. And this proves what?
"but before that was a CompuServe which had a $500 rebate for MS-DOS computers bundled with Procomm or Vidtext terminal software to get on CompuServe and access the Arpanet and CompuServe resources in the 1980's"
1) Please provide some evidence for the assertion that Compuserve (or anyone else) offered $500 rebates solely on MS-DOS based computers before 1999.
2) The only ARPANET/Internet service Compuserve offered during the 1980s was EMAIL, and that wasn't available until 1989.
"Winsock and Trumpet did not come out until the 1990's when the world wide web was invented because the Mosaic web browser needed it, but the Lynx based text only web browser used MS-DOS based dial-up SLIP and PPP and all one needed to do was use Procomm and telnet to a Unix system that hosted Lynx "
The Internet-enabled version of Lynx (Lynx 2.0 -- 1.0 was a hypertext browser for viewing internal documents at the University of Kansas) came out month _after_ Mosaic, and neither appeared until 1993. Note also that Mosaic was originally for Unix, not Windows. So once again you're writing a bunch of revisionist tripe that doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
"Obviously I am dealing with someone that wasn't even born when these technologies were invented and got most of his info off of Microsoft web sites and Microsoft FUD sites via Google or some other search engine"
More meaningless pontificating on subjects you obviously know nothing whatsoever about.
"because the true history of the Amiga and Atari ST happened before the world wide web was invented"
Given that that's what I've been saying all along, I'm very glad indeed that you've stopped trying to pretend that the Internet is the reason they failed.
"and after the world w
"Like most of your comments, you are grossly incorrect."
Balderdash.
"The Commodore 64 helped get AOL started in 1983 [informationweek.com]"
None of the companies prior to 1991 was AOL -- they were other companies who offered online services which would later _become_ AOL. Furthermore, as the article you cite points out, the service wasn't available to ordinary IBM PC/clone users until 1993, so as I said before, it had no relevance whatsoever to the decline of the Amiga or Atari ST.
"Apple and Microsoft made a deal with AOL to not support the Commodore machines anymore after that AOL rebate was made"
Please cite some evidence for this claim.
"You are obviously an Amiga and Atari hater that doesn't know jack squat about their history"
I'm definitely a Commodore and Atari hater, but that comes from having loved both the Amiga and ST (I made an excellent living writing software for both during the mid to late 1980s), and therefore heartily resent both companies for squandering the opportunity to settle (at least the domestic) market on something significantly better than the horrid, segmented, memory-limited IBM PC architecture running a rip-off of CP/M 2.2.
"Around 1995 Windows 95 sunk both of them"
This is a blatant piece of historical revisionism, because Atari ceased production of all ST models in 1993 to concentrate on their Jaguar games console, and Commodore went bankrupt in April of 1994 after several years of financial difficulty. It was therefore impossible for Windows-95, which wasn't available until August of 1995, to have played any role in the demise of either system.
"PC Clones got so cheap and so fast that Atari and Commodore could not get the 68K series processors to match what Intel put out"
The problem was actually one of designing low-cost hardware to take advantage of the newer Motorola CPUs during the life of the Amiga and ST rather than any difference in performance (Motorola's chips were in reality usually better than Intel's during the 1980s and early 1990s, and were also much nicer to write software for). This wasn't so much of a problem for PC manufacturers because there were enough business power-users to provide a market for new, pricey systems that had a performance advantage over those of other PC manufacturers. However, as both Commodore and Atari found to their cost in 1990 when both launched expensive 68030-based systems aimed at professionals, the business market has a high entry barrier for companies who many people primarily associated with games machines.
"Even Gateway tried to sell the Amiga"
Gateway never sold Amigas. They bought the company for its IP, and formed a separate entity (Amiga Inc.) to license it to third parties, but despite some noise at the beginning about their intent to do so, they didn't manufacture Amigas or sell them.
"after Microsoft threatened to take away their Windows OEM license, they dropped it like a hot potato and sold it."
Please provide some evidence for Gateway selling off Amiga Inc. because of Microsoft rather than due to the fact that it was losing money, just like it did for the companies who acquired the Amiga name and IP prior to Gateway's acquisition.
"Microsoft has the monopoly on what third parties can write drivers for and business software for"
It has no monopoly whatsoever on what others _can_ write business software and drivers for, hence the fact that there's a thriving third-party peripheral and business software market for Macs (including offerings from MS themselves), several graphics card manufacturers offer drivers for Linux, and enterprise software companies such as Oracle support a wide range of platforms.
"Why would selling the most of something necessarily be synonymous with having the cheapest of something? "
It isn't necessarily synonymous.
"Most people don't want to buy the cheapest of something, and only do so if they are forced to by economic means, or if the cheapest is also the best quality product."
If this is really the case, then (a) why do so many manufacturers make whole ranges of really cheap, crappy computers with prices that are further subsisdised by large amounts of bloatware, and (b) why do so many retailers carry said cheap, crappy computers with prices that are further subsidised by large amounts of bloatware?
Clue: the vast bulk of consumer computers are sold to people who will never read Slashdot.
"I do too remember them."
Oh dear. I thought I was the only one who hadn't managed to repress awful memories of acts such as The Wombles, Gilbert O'Sullivan, The Bay City Rollers, and Little Jimmy Osmond.
"Didn't your dad teach you to keep a pair of knitting needles at a dull red heat specifically for driving into your ears in such circumstances?"
That wouldn't have stopped me seeing them, and many of the dreadful memories are visual as well as auditory. Oh the humanity...
"Which makes me think it's either a very slim/no chance of life on other planets or they're not returning our calls."
Or it could simply be that it simply be that the thought of using radio waves to communicate over interstellar distances hasn't occurred to anyone else because they all discovered a superior method before developing radio.
IMO it's the height of arrogance to assume that beings who evolved entirely independently of Earth would have developed the same technologies we did in the same order, or that there aren't things which may be perfectly obvious to others that we haven't discovered, and vice-versa.
"earth age, 4.6 billion, Universe, 13.7 billion, life on earth, 500 million"
Life on Earth has actually been around for at least 3.5 billion years.
"I'm also a big believer in Ice Ages, as in, there have been several and the last one might not be the last one."
The last ice age is the current one, i.e. we're still in an ice age, but our civilisation has the luck to be in one of its interglacial periods, and the best data we have indicates that this one is a 28,000 year interglacial rather than one of the much more common (and somewhat cooler) 10,000 year items. Even better for us is the fact that we're only 11,000 to 13,000 years into it, so we've got at least 15,000 years or so of this interglacial to go.
Note that while the cyclic nature of glacial and interglacial periods is supported by lots of evidence, nobody actually _knows_ why the cycles are as they are, or why they were different lengths during other ice ages. Orbital (Milkanovitch) forcing, precession, and tilt all have correspondences with glacial / interglacial cycles, but they don't fully explain all the known data, so there are several theories which try to integrate these factors with others.
NB: theories about the causes of glacial / interglacial cycles within an ice age are unrelated to those which attempt to explain why ice ages occur.
"You don't need to buy so many 32 and 64 CPU monsters."
Where did I say anything the contrary?
"A single big Unix box (or even a smaller unix) box tends
to be able to do more work than multiple Windows boxes
that are really just glorified PCs."
What in my posts says that Windows is good for anything?
"Yes, it's a great tragedy that we aren't filling more
landfills by creating senseless server churn and buying
systems that require you multiply the number of (win32)
boxes you're using."
You're ranting to yourself here, because I didn't say anything positive about Windows at all, and certainly didn't suggest that it was a suitable replacement for Unix systems.
I fail to see anything in your post that's even vaguely relevant to mine.
"Whereas in some countries, I believe your property includes the sidewalk"
And in some, it's your property when any maintenance is required, but belongs to the council if you want to do anything else with it.
"however pretty safe to say if they are #1 overall, they are also selling the most econobox type PCs."
That's not necessarily the case, although HP do seem to shift a lot of "cheapie" systems loaded to the gills with bloatware. Don't forget that 80% of the PCs and laptops sold every year go to corporate customers, so it's theoretically possible to have a dominant sales position without offering anything whatsoever to consumers and small businesses.
"Wombles were cute, cuddly and useful, as well as being geographically educational."
They were also a horrid 1970s pop group whose members wore Womble costumes. I am sadly old enough to remember them, and still bear the emotional scars.
"Are you kidding? There's massess of masses of Solaris, HPUX, etc. out there and companies aren't moving."
Nor are they buying much in the way of new systems with Solaris or HPUX on them, hence Sun's recent open sourcing of Solaris, and HP demonstrating Linux and Windows running on SuperDome systems.
"HPUX 11.11 is ancient but still powers entire data centres and there's no inclination to move.. because it's solid, works and has uptime measured in years."
This confirms rather than refutes my assertion, because the health of a system is judged by the number of new sales, not how many old ones are still chugging along -- there are after all a fair number of VAX (and even some PDP-11s) and IBM 370 systems still being used in companies.
How precisely does following a leader based on signals they give qualify as mimicking a human ability? Ants, bees, and sardines can do this without colliding with whoever is in front or those going in the opposite direction, with bees and sardines managing to do it in three dimensions. Anyone who has seen ducks and geese migrating in neat triangular formations knows that birds also follow leaders quite happily, possibly because nobody's bothered to tell them that it's a human ability which creatures with tiny brains like theirs aren't capable of.