Function isn't everything, but perceived function may be. Steve is so committed to keeping Apple on the cutting edge, and to differentiating the MacOS from Windows, that he may be alienating Harry and Martha in the Bible Belt by putting on these stylish airs. And if they don't like how he looks, or how the computer looks (can they be separated?) then they're not going to take the next step and actually take OS X for a test drive. Hence the Apple retail stores - give everyone who's never really used a Mac at all a taste of what they're missing.
But the chic-ness of the brand is still there, and the truth is that there are many people who actively avoid being chic. They just want the polyester slacks and Keds and Ford Festivas, thank you very much. Steve is driving at the right idea - make the total user experience as easy and fun as possible. (And I think he's succeeding - look at how the "digital hub" meme has spread since he introduced it.) But by positioning Apple as the newest, coolest, trendiest brand, he is definitely not appealing to those who just want a beige box from Dell.
Still, I disagree with Katz when he says that Jobs hasn't addressed the public's lack of trust for the notoriously unreliable computer. I think OS X is a head-on assault on this - it's just that Apple has to yell a lot louder and longer than Microsoft to be heard on this point. Not to mention that Windows keeps undoing any progress Apple might ever make in convincing people to trust the PC. The old and new iMac designs are a direct attempt to remove the "computerness" of the computer, to make the appearance as non-threatening as possible and convince the user to approach and use without fear. I know my grandfather uses his original Bondi iMac to check his email all the time.
This is yet another instance of some pundit saying "Apple doesn't get it, and that's why they'll die off soon." How many times has this happened? And hey, aren't we still talking about Jobs, Apple, and that $4 billion they have in the bank? Another interpretation might be that it's always the pundits who aren't getting it...
What convinced me..
on
Apple PDA?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There's no trademark for iWalk under Apple's name anywhere. Try it yourself. Note that "iPod" appeared as a trademark on October 18, 2001 - not long before that device was announced.
Apple is very good about trademarking their brands. If this product even exists, it's a sure bet it's not called the "iWalk." And there's nothing else (aside from "Gigawire", which seems unlikely) that even suggests a PDA among the Apple trademarks.
What was the site? Was it so bad that you couldn't just sit down and show it to her, with you around? Why was she so curious to see it?
Seems to me that punishing her for being curious, even about something that's off limits to her, is only going to make her more curious and possibly even more deceitful. In my experience, grounding only serves to make kids cleverer at finding ways to sneak around and do the forbidden thing.
I think the better response would have been to talk to her about why she wanted to see the site, what she thought was in there, and then actually show her some of it (even if it's really perverted or "adult" - like Salon says, kids can handle a lot more than we give them credit for).
You know, I'm getting sick of people saying "You have to be 1 million percent dedicated to games, eat sleep, breathe, crap, vomit games and graphics and programming in order to be in the industry." I understand that this industry is relatively small, insular, and competitive, but why is this so different from any other job? I work for a company that makes digital multifunction devices - do I have to have a religious devotion to copiers that scan and fax and print in order to be good at it? NO.
I'm certain that there are people working in the video game industry right now who aren't absolutely obsessed with games and haven't been obsessed all their lives. They are balanced individuals who have spouses, outside interests, and lives outside of their work. And I wouldn't be surprised if they produced games that are as good or better than those from the houses where their version of project planning is to throw bologna at a whiteboard and draw dates around where it sticks. My company may be 8-to-5 and relatively boring, but in the past two years we've put out several major software releases on time (occasionally ahead of schedule) and with little overtime from most of the staff. AND we have lives and families outside of work. Why should games be any different from any other software? And why should the people who want to program them all have to be obsessed gaming maniacs who have no balance in their lives?
-Doug
To me, the concept of "pure research" is dangerously close to a bunch of geeks playing with their toys in a California lab...
Then again, without "pure research" PARC never would have profited from the GUI interfa....oh yeah. Damn.
I guess if I had a few million of them, they could clean my living room or something, but for now this looks like pure research and not much of anything useful.
Yeah, and in the future I foresee the need for only three or four computers in the world...
No one knows how life began on Earth, whether it was through naked genetic material drifting in a primordial sea or genetic material already encapsulated in membranes. But at some point, the researchers said, membranes became important.
Before that they'd just been kicking around, drinking too much, starting failed oil companies, and buying up baseball teams. Now they think they're all powerful and influential. Damn membranes.
Whenever I get unsolicited phone calls, I always ask them to put me on the do-not-call list, which they are required to do by law. I figure that over time my name will be on fewer and fewer lists, or at the very least the number of lists I'm on will remain relatively constant over time and not increase. (After all, I am constantly filling out my info on the web, so I partly bring it on myself.)
NY state has initiated a statewide do-not-call list that any resident can sign up for. Beginning next April, telemarketers will be required by law to use this list before they start calling our homes. Why not have a similar list for spam? No guarantee they'll all follow it, but at least there would be legal recourse should you find yourself inundated with junk mail.
Of course, if this list were global it could grow to be absolutely huge, but then again it's just text, right? How bad could it be?:-)
Clearly Sony doesn't want IBM to pull something like this on their laptops at the next Olympics. There's no taping over that logo! Now the Vaio is as distinct looking as an iBook, albeit one that was designed for the colorblind. Purple was cooler.
How long until the third party vendors start coming out with replacement neon piping? Nothing like a slammin' Vaio to carry around the 'hood.
Re:You WILL love this... you WILL love this...
on
DoCoMos Finger Phone
·
· Score: 1
Apparently you don't recall the introduction of the Sony Walkman, when Sony hired attractive actors to walk around wearing headphones in order to get people accustomed to the idea that wearing them was stylish and not geeky as hell. It's testimony to their strategies that today we don't think twice about it.
Still think they can't rearrange our values and ideas? Welcome to the power of mass marketing, my friend. Just wait until they start convincing us that VR goggles are the height of chic.
Poke ear, duck head - who do you look like?
on
DoCoMos Finger Phone
·
· Score: 1
If you ever wanted to play "Secret Service Agent", now's your chance.
...that we already use a good many devices that are combinations themselves. My stereo can be an alarm clock. My phone has a minimal address book inside of it. My watch could be a calculator. My Palm is endlessly flexible.
Combination in itself is not bad, it's being able to integrate the form factor and functionality seamlessly and logically. It should also not be done in a kamikazi fashion - if my PDA becomes a phone, is it absolutely necessary to mash all of a PDA's features into the device? Depends on if it's a PDA first and a phone second, or vice versa.
The only problem that needs to be solved before phones can be PDAs is the screen size issue. If someone can figure out how to cram a large screen into, or onto, a stylishly small phone, we've got a potential winner. Fold-out screens would work, and could be done today with a hinge line in the center (or tomorrow with flexible displays).
But why put the screen on the phone? Why not in glasses? If it's cool to wear headphones or a headset with microphone, why not add an eyepiece to that ensemble and make that the chic look?
Of course, you'd run the risk of having your toaster or microwave make you watch an ad before you can open it and remove your food. Perhaps the "premium" appliances would be the ones that allowed you to dismiss these ads, or gave you more control over which tasks ran in the idle processes. The "free" appliances could be the equivalent of today's NadaPC, while the ones that cost money would be more useful and less idiot-proof.
I'm not sure I like the idea of my refrigerator being a neuron on the Borg collective, though. What if the government were to use the spare cycles to simulate fusion reactions for bomb research? I might have an ethical problem with that...
It would be tempting to combine the two functions into one, but I suspect that MS is smart enough to keep it simple the first time out. Online gaming and good games are hard enough to master on the first go 'round, and with their exceedingly late entry into the console market they can't afford to fsck things up at all.
That said, I do happen to know an MS "exec" who works on Xbox and also owns (and raves about) a TiVO. No joke.
God bless the teachers who try to hold class after caffeinated apples in the cafeteria. Or the bus drivers who watch helplessly as the kids raid their lunchbags for PB & Java sandwiches - just one or two quick bites before homeroom and they're loaded for bear...
On the bright side, Little League sports will see a huge boost in scoring. Little Ricky's batting average will skyrocket once he starts doing a few handfuls of caffeinated sunflower seeds before each at-bat.
Countless analogies to computer security can be made - banks being one of them, my house being another. There's nothing inherently insecure about my house - strong doors with locks, a security system, new windows, a fenced-in backyard - but one open window allowed my wife to "break in" when she accidentally locked herself out. All it takes is one slip-up, and all other security measures are nullified.
Still, my house is only one house, on one street, in one neighborhood in this city, and I count on that "anonymity" to provide a measure of safety. All that's necessary is to provide potential thieves ("house hackers?") with sufficient motivation to either overlook the house or move on to an easier target (hence the Security System sign in the front). It's a play on human nature - count on the baddies to take the path of least resistance, and don't call attention to yourself by parading how many secrets you have locked up or how confidential your data is.
Net privacy may be a concern, but net anonymity is also good cover. My real name is so commonplace and vanilla that I use it frequently as my login - tempting fate perhaps, but do a search on it in any database and you'll be swamped with results. Which one is me? I'll never tell...
Apart from the four conceivable scenarios to explain Fermi's paradox (interstellar travel is unfeasible, the aliens haven't gotten here yet, the aliens have chosen not to use interstellar travel, or they're here but not interfering), what if we were just looking in the wrong place for signs of intelligent life? What if the other advanced civilizations:
are as rare as Crawford maintains, based on the unlikelihood that simple life forms evolve into more complex ones
are in all probability very, very far away from our galaxy and therefore more difficult to detect by conventional means
have been broadcasting (purposely or inadvertantly) in a different medium than the ones we consider likely.
For example, a truly advanced civilization may have learned how to propogate messages through "gravity waves" or the extra dimensions (six, IIRC) that superstring theorists postulate must exist, or using the "spooky action at a distance"property of quantum particles. And these are only the examples we know enough to guess at.
Obviously we have good reasons to be searching the radio frequencies for signs of intelligence - after all, such frequencies are commonly emitted by all sorts of cosmic objects and can be used fairly easily to transmit messages over long distances. But perhaps the very fact that these frequencies are clogged already would lead other (more?) advanced civilizations to avoid them and look for other, clearer means of transmission.
Coupled with Crawford's theory that intelligent life has a low probability of evolving out of simpler life forms (i.e. bacteria or protozoa), and the follow-on assumption that such civilizations would thus be spread very thinly around the universe, this hypothesis could be a plausible explanation for why we haven't found anything yet. After all, we've only just started looking.
I think you are falling prey to the "everyone is like me" assumption, which when it comes to computers just isn't true. Not everyone has the intelligence, persistence, or curiosity to care about the intricacies of their computer hardware or software - they just want to use it like they use their microwave or dishwasher. Computers are just now passing between the "hobbyist" and "appliance" stage, as demonstrated by the current round of idiot boxes that rhyme with "hijack."
True, many kids will grow up with a far deeper connection to the computer and the logical thinking that understanding such devices demands, but there will always be the non-power users who simply don't care to learn. It's kind of like cars today - personally, but I don't give a tinker's damn about my car or how it runs. Let someone else take care of changing the oil, tires, and fluids - I'm not interested. Listening to/. members talk about Linux vs. Mac is a little like listening to a group of auto freaks make fun of the losers who buy those silly pre-built cars.
Don't forget that the voice of the typical Mac home user is way underrepresented on these boards - they're just not interested in this stuff like we are. So a lot of this boils down to a one-sided discussion where the mechanics all decide they must be right since nobody seems to be disagreeing.
Dated June 1, 1981. Imagine the time when the Usenet was small enough to sum up in a single ASCII post. It even fits onto one screen. I'm not savvy enough to break it down and analyze it, but someone out there might be able to make a few insightful comments.
Speaking of age, Good God - what is the average age of the typical/. member? With everyone dating themselves by saying "I was only X years old when these were written" or "I was but a zygote back then," I'm beginning to feel ancient. I like to think that those who post span all age groups, but perhaps it's more skewed toward Generation Y (or whatever - people younger than my generation) than I thought. (For the record, I turned 8 in 1981, old enough to remember but larval enough to be totally unaware of computers until a few years later.)
Didn't you hear? Al Gore announced yesterday that he invented the first OS, Gorux. Like its precursor, ClintONIAC, it ran with periods of brilliance but got bogged down when the software was tinkered with.
If they can build two, why not more? Why not mass-produce these probes, so the costs get lower each time, and small improvements can be made on the line for each successive "model." If Motorola can build 100+ Iridium satellites in Arizona (never mind the fate of those), NASA could shuck out the dough to build an interplanetary probe assembly line of sorts.
Obviously they're constrained by cost and manpower, but why stop at just two? Eventually, the probe Mark IV would be manned, and from there it's another hop to setting up a permanent station on Mars. Sounds easy, no?
Re:Arrogant, or just apathetic?
on
Selfish Society
·
· Score: 1
Yes, I second this - Cyberselfish, which I'm in the middle of now, illustrates quite clearly that most of the Libertarian movement seems to think that every political and corporate institution formed to date is fundamentally silly and unnecessary, and therefore should be criticized endlessly. One senses a profound lack of understanding of why or how any of these institutions came to be, and I'd be willing to be that if the Libertarians got their way and managed to vanquish the evils of organization, they would end up recreating them in the end out of their own ignorance of history. It's sort of the same as the school vouchers solution - "We don't like these public schools that are run by incompetent dummies, so we're going to start our own parallel school districts run by different incompetent dummies. That should solve it!"
There is litle to be served by ignoring the system, because the system is there as a result of human nature and will continue to be there so long as society is run by humans. If you are clever enough, you can effect much more change by working within the system and building credibility to the level that the powers-that-be will respect and respond to. But if you present yourself as an individualist who prefers to be removed from mainstream culture and disrespect the existing structures, however inefficient and moronic they may be, you are doomed to the fringes of relevant discussion.
I'm not claiming to understand exactly how the system works, or what is the best way to advance the agenda of the techno-intelligentsia. What I'm suggesting to the Libertarian contingent is that they don't either, and they shouldn't criticize what they don't understand.
Theoretically, it's better to launch from orbit than it is from Earth, since you don't have to achieve escape velocity from the Earth's gravity and therefore need much less fuel. However, IIRC from Zubrin's "Entering Space," the cost of building a Mars ship at the ISS itself would probably be prohibitive at this point - you're better off assembling the vessel on earth, and perhaps using the ISS as a way station to refuel in orbit before heading for Mars. That way the ship would only have to carry enough fuel to leave Earth, decreasing launch weight dramatically and allowing for a greater amount of payload (human and otherwise).
A better solution might be to establish a moon base that manufactures rocket fuel, or at least stores it. That way we could launch directly from there. But we're still far from being ready for that.
Slashdot Mirror
But the chic-ness of the brand is still there, and the truth is that there are many people who actively avoid being chic. They just want the polyester slacks and Keds and Ford Festivas, thank you very much. Steve is driving at the right idea - make the total user experience as easy and fun as possible. (And I think he's succeeding - look at how the "digital hub" meme has spread since he introduced it.) But by positioning Apple as the newest, coolest, trendiest brand, he is definitely not appealing to those who just want a beige box from Dell.
Still, I disagree with Katz when he says that Jobs hasn't addressed the public's lack of trust for the notoriously unreliable computer. I think OS X is a head-on assault on this - it's just that Apple has to yell a lot louder and longer than Microsoft to be heard on this point. Not to mention that Windows keeps undoing any progress Apple might ever make in convincing people to trust the PC. The old and new iMac designs are a direct attempt to remove the "computerness" of the computer, to make the appearance as non-threatening as possible and convince the user to approach and use without fear. I know my grandfather uses his original Bondi iMac to check his email all the time.
This is yet another instance of some pundit saying "Apple doesn't get it, and that's why they'll die off soon." How many times has this happened? And hey, aren't we still talking about Jobs, Apple, and that $4 billion they have in the bank? Another interpretation might be that it's always the pundits who aren't getting it...
Apple is very good about trademarking their brands. If this product even exists, it's a sure bet it's not called the "iWalk." And there's nothing else (aside from "Gigawire", which seems unlikely) that even suggests a PDA among the Apple trademarks.
Thank God.
What was the site? Was it so bad that you couldn't just sit down and show it to her, with you around? Why was she so curious to see it?
Seems to me that punishing her for being curious, even about something that's off limits to her, is only going to make her more curious and possibly even more deceitful. In my experience, grounding only serves to make kids cleverer at finding ways to sneak around and do the forbidden thing.
I think the better response would have been to talk to her about why she wanted to see the site, what she thought was in there, and then actually show her some of it (even if it's really perverted or "adult" - like Salon says, kids can handle a lot more than we give them credit for).
Your response was a bit too harsh.
Ah. 42. Never mind.
You know, I'm getting sick of people saying "You have to be 1 million percent dedicated to games, eat sleep, breathe, crap, vomit games and graphics and programming in order to be in the industry." I understand that this industry is relatively small, insular, and competitive, but why is this so different from any other job? I work for a company that makes digital multifunction devices - do I have to have a religious devotion to copiers that scan and fax and print in order to be good at it? NO.
I'm certain that there are people working in the video game industry right now who aren't absolutely obsessed with games and haven't been obsessed all their lives. They are balanced individuals who have spouses, outside interests, and lives outside of their work. And I wouldn't be surprised if they produced games that are as good or better than those from the houses where their version of project planning is to throw bologna at a whiteboard and draw dates around where it sticks. My company may be 8-to-5 and relatively boring, but in the past two years we've put out several major software releases on time (occasionally ahead of schedule) and with little overtime from most of the staff. AND we have lives and families outside of work. Why should games be any different from any other software? And why should the people who want to program them all have to be obsessed gaming maniacs who have no balance in their lives? -Doug
To me, the concept of "pure research" is dangerously close to a bunch of geeks playing with their toys in a California lab... Then again, without "pure research" PARC never would have profited from the GUI interfa....oh yeah. Damn.
I guess if I had a few million of them, they could clean my living room or something, but for now this looks like pure research and not much of anything useful.
Yeah, and in the future I foresee the need for only three or four computers in the world...
No one knows how life began on Earth, whether it was through naked genetic material drifting in a primordial sea or genetic material already encapsulated in membranes. But at some point, the researchers said, membranes became important.
Before that they'd just been kicking around, drinking too much, starting failed oil companies, and buying up baseball teams. Now they think they're all powerful and influential. Damn membranes.
Whenever I get unsolicited phone calls, I always ask them to put me on the do-not-call list, which they are required to do by law. I figure that over time my name will be on fewer and fewer lists, or at the very least the number of lists I'm on will remain relatively constant over time and not increase. (After all, I am constantly filling out my info on the web, so I partly bring it on myself.)
:-)
NY state has initiated a statewide do-not-call list that any resident can sign up for. Beginning next April, telemarketers will be required by law to use this list before they start calling our homes. Why not have a similar list for spam? No guarantee they'll all follow it, but at least there would be legal recourse should you find yourself inundated with junk mail. Of course, if this list were global it could grow to be absolutely huge, but then again it's just text, right? How bad could it be?
Clearly Sony doesn't want IBM to pull something like this on their laptops at the next Olympics. There's no taping over that logo! Now the Vaio is as distinct looking as an iBook, albeit one that was designed for the colorblind. Purple was cooler.
How long until the third party vendors start coming out with replacement neon piping? Nothing like a slammin' Vaio to carry around the 'hood.
Apparently you don't recall the introduction of the Sony Walkman, when Sony hired attractive actors to walk around wearing headphones in order to get people accustomed to the idea that wearing them was stylish and not geeky as hell. It's testimony to their strategies that today we don't think twice about it. Still think they can't rearrange our values and ideas? Welcome to the power of mass marketing, my friend. Just wait until they start convincing us that VR goggles are the height of chic.
If you ever wanted to play "Secret Service Agent", now's your chance.
...do you ever get that "not so fresh" feeling?
...that we already use a good many devices that are combinations themselves. My stereo can be an alarm clock. My phone has a minimal address book inside of it. My watch could be a calculator. My Palm is endlessly flexible.
Combination in itself is not bad, it's being able to integrate the form factor and functionality seamlessly and logically. It should also not be done in a kamikazi fashion - if my PDA becomes a phone, is it absolutely necessary to mash all of a PDA's features into the device? Depends on if it's a PDA first and a phone second, or vice versa.
The only problem that needs to be solved before phones can be PDAs is the screen size issue. If someone can figure out how to cram a large screen into, or onto, a stylishly small phone, we've got a potential winner. Fold-out screens would work, and could be done today with a hinge line in the center (or tomorrow with flexible displays).
But why put the screen on the phone? Why not in glasses? If it's cool to wear headphones or a headset with microphone, why not add an eyepiece to that ensemble and make that the chic look?
Bottom line - solve the interface dilemma.
Of course, you'd run the risk of having your toaster or microwave make you watch an ad before you can open it and remove your food. Perhaps the "premium" appliances would be the ones that allowed you to dismiss these ads, or gave you more control over which tasks ran in the idle processes. The "free" appliances could be the equivalent of today's NadaPC, while the ones that cost money would be more useful and less idiot-proof.
I'm not sure I like the idea of my refrigerator being a neuron on the Borg collective, though. What if the government were to use the spare cycles to simulate fusion reactions for bomb research? I might have an ethical problem with that...
It would be tempting to combine the two functions into one, but I suspect that MS is smart enough to keep it simple the first time out. Online gaming and good games are hard enough to master on the first go 'round, and with their exceedingly late entry into the console market they can't afford to fsck things up at all.
That said, I do happen to know an MS "exec" who works on Xbox and also owns (and raves about) a TiVO. No joke.
God bless the teachers who try to hold class after caffeinated apples in the cafeteria. Or the bus drivers who watch helplessly as the kids raid their lunchbags for PB & Java sandwiches - just one or two quick bites before homeroom and they're loaded for bear... On the bright side, Little League sports will see a huge boost in scoring. Little Ricky's batting average will skyrocket once he starts doing a few handfuls of caffeinated sunflower seeds before each at-bat.
Countless analogies to computer security can be made - banks being one of them, my house being another. There's nothing inherently insecure about my house - strong doors with locks, a security system, new windows, a fenced-in backyard - but one open window allowed my wife to "break in" when she accidentally locked herself out. All it takes is one slip-up, and all other security measures are nullified.
Still, my house is only one house, on one street, in one neighborhood in this city, and I count on that "anonymity" to provide a measure of safety. All that's necessary is to provide potential thieves ("house hackers?") with sufficient motivation to either overlook the house or move on to an easier target (hence the Security System sign in the front). It's a play on human nature - count on the baddies to take the path of least resistance, and don't call attention to yourself by parading how many secrets you have locked up or how confidential your data is.
Net privacy may be a concern, but net anonymity is also good cover. My real name is so commonplace and vanilla that I use it frequently as my login - tempting fate perhaps, but do a search on it in any database and you'll be swamped with results. Which one is me? I'll never tell...
- are as rare as Crawford maintains, based on the unlikelihood that simple life forms evolve into more complex ones
- are in all probability very, very far away from our galaxy and therefore more difficult to detect by conventional means
- have been broadcasting (purposely or inadvertantly) in a different medium than the ones we consider likely.
For example, a truly advanced civilization may have learned how to propogate messages through "gravity waves" or the extra dimensions (six, IIRC) that superstring theorists postulate must exist, or using the "spooky action at a distance"property of quantum particles. And these are only the examples we know enough to guess at.Obviously we have good reasons to be searching the radio frequencies for signs of intelligence - after all, such frequencies are commonly emitted by all sorts of cosmic objects and can be used fairly easily to transmit messages over long distances. But perhaps the very fact that these frequencies are clogged already would lead other (more?) advanced civilizations to avoid them and look for other, clearer means of transmission.
Coupled with Crawford's theory that intelligent life has a low probability of evolving out of simpler life forms (i.e. bacteria or protozoa), and the follow-on assumption that such civilizations would thus be spread very thinly around the universe, this hypothesis could be a plausible explanation for why we haven't found anything yet. After all, we've only just started looking.
I think you are falling prey to the "everyone is like me" assumption, which when it comes to computers just isn't true. Not everyone has the intelligence, persistence, or curiosity to care about the intricacies of their computer hardware or software - they just want to use it like they use their microwave or dishwasher. Computers are just now passing between the "hobbyist" and "appliance" stage, as demonstrated by the current round of idiot boxes that rhyme with "hijack."
/. members talk about Linux vs. Mac is a little like listening to a group of auto freaks make fun of the losers who buy those silly pre-built cars.
True, many kids will grow up with a far deeper connection to the computer and the logical thinking that understanding such devices demands, but there will always be the non-power users who simply don't care to learn. It's kind of like cars today - personally, but I don't give a tinker's damn about my car or how it runs. Let someone else take care of changing the oil, tires, and fluids - I'm not interested. Listening to
Don't forget that the voice of the typical Mac home user is way underrepresented on these boards - they're just not interested in this stuff like we are. So a lot of this boils down to a one-sided discussion where the mechanics all decide they must be right since nobody seems to be disagreeing.
Complete map of the Usenet in a single post.
/. member? With everyone dating themselves by saying "I was only X years old when these were written" or "I was but a zygote back then," I'm beginning to feel ancient. I like to think that those who post span all age groups, but perhaps it's more skewed toward Generation Y (or whatever - people younger than my generation) than I thought. (For the record, I turned 8 in 1981, old enough to remember but larval enough to be totally unaware of computers until a few years later.)
Dated June 1, 1981. Imagine the time when the Usenet was small enough to sum up in a single ASCII post. It even fits onto one screen. I'm not savvy enough to break it down and analyze it, but someone out there might be able to make a few insightful comments.
Speaking of age, Good God - what is the average age of the typical
Didn't you hear? Al Gore announced yesterday that he invented the first OS, Gorux. Like its precursor, ClintONIAC, it ran with periods of brilliance but got bogged down when the software was tinkered with.
If they can build two, why not more? Why not mass-produce these probes, so the costs get lower each time, and small improvements can be made on the line for each successive "model." If Motorola can build 100+ Iridium satellites in Arizona (never mind the fate of those), NASA could shuck out the dough to build an interplanetary probe assembly line of sorts.
Obviously they're constrained by cost and manpower, but why stop at just two? Eventually, the probe Mark IV would be manned, and from there it's another hop to setting up a permanent station on Mars. Sounds easy, no?
Yes, I second this - Cyberselfish, which I'm in the middle of now, illustrates quite clearly that most of the Libertarian movement seems to think that every political and corporate institution formed to date is fundamentally silly and unnecessary, and therefore should be criticized endlessly. One senses a profound lack of understanding of why or how any of these institutions came to be, and I'd be willing to be that if the Libertarians got their way and managed to vanquish the evils of organization, they would end up recreating them in the end out of their own ignorance of history. It's sort of the same as the school vouchers solution - "We don't like these public schools that are run by incompetent dummies, so we're going to start our own parallel school districts run by different incompetent dummies. That should solve it!"
There is litle to be served by ignoring the system, because the system is there as a result of human nature and will continue to be there so long as society is run by humans. If you are clever enough, you can effect much more change by working within the system and building credibility to the level that the powers-that-be will respect and respond to. But if you present yourself as an individualist who prefers to be removed from mainstream culture and disrespect the existing structures, however inefficient and moronic they may be, you are doomed to the fringes of relevant discussion.
I'm not claiming to understand exactly how the system works, or what is the best way to advance the agenda of the techno-intelligentsia. What I'm suggesting to the Libertarian contingent is that they don't either, and they shouldn't criticize what they don't understand.
Theoretically, it's better to launch from orbit than it is from Earth, since you don't have to achieve escape velocity from the Earth's gravity and therefore need much less fuel. However, IIRC from Zubrin's "Entering Space," the cost of building a Mars ship at the ISS itself would probably be prohibitive at this point - you're better off assembling the vessel on earth, and perhaps using the ISS as a way station to refuel in orbit before heading for Mars. That way the ship would only have to carry enough fuel to leave Earth, decreasing launch weight dramatically and allowing for a greater amount of payload (human and otherwise).
A better solution might be to establish a moon base that manufactures rocket fuel, or at least stores it. That way we could launch directly from there. But we're still far from being ready for that.