>Everyone they left back home will be dead and buried

Not if they've found an effective way to extend lifespans, or just back up consciousness and plop it into a fresh body as needed. Technology could make virtual immortality possible.

After a few millennia of immortality, you might want to hop into a starship traveling at 80-90% the speed of light and head off into the universe just to get away from your relatives and your ex...

Downtown LA is positively jumping after hours now compared to about a decade ago.

I lived in downtown LA in 2003-2004, and it was d-e-a-d dead after about 7:00PM every night. But I stayed there last summer for a week and its changed dramatically. A bunch of new apartment complexes have gone up on the edge of downtown, and a bunch of old office buildings have been converted into trendy (and surprisingly affordable, post real-estate meltdown) lofts. There are now pedestrians out wandering the sidewalks after 9:00PM and a slew of busy (in fact packed) restaurants like the vast Bottega Louie and Mas Malo draw in patrons from the entire metro area.

New bars, restaurants and clubs are opening all the time. At this pace within a decade Downtown LA could become the next Sunset Strip. All Los Angeles really needs to do now is attract a few hot tech firms to downtown. I wouldn't have thought that possible in 2004, but I could certainly see it happening now.

Yeah, I stuck with my Mega ST 2 until *1995*, finally replacing it with a Dell when Win '95 came out. The funny thing is, up until the last couple of years I didn't feel terribly limited, although the STs never got a decent word processor.

Of course, once Word 6 came out the best word processor on the PC went to crap, so moving to the PC and Offal 95 wasn't as much as an upgrade as it could have been.

One of the reasons why I was able to deal with having an ST as my primary machine for so long was a great little program called DC Desktop. It pretty much replaced the stock GEM desktop with a much sweeter interface, including a slew of custom icons, plus it sped the interface greatly. I was always surprised Atari didn't buy the company and incorporate the product into TOS...but I think we were all surprised by pretty much every boneheaded move the Tramiels made at Atari. I could never figure out how they could have gotten a machine that decent and that cheap out the door that quickly, and then bungle pretty much every single subsequent move.

I still miss my ST from time to time. Simpler but in many ways more productive interface than Windows 7, especially with all of the pointless, confusing changes Microsoft made in an attempt to "simplify" the user experience. To this day I haven't figured out the stupid "Libraries". Seems like they just invented another way to lose shit in the vast wastelands of your terabyte hard drive...

That should read "Shipments != sales". Apparently the technological wonder known as Slashdot can't handle greater and less than signs properly.

Shipments sales.

RIM shipped a lot of crap, too. But nobody could sell it, so it ended up being shipped back or given away.

I've never seen a Win 7 phone in the wild. It's all Android and iPhone here in California, with iPhones becoming more common in the past year or so after a big Android flood the year before.

Plus a lot of residual RIM suckage, of course. But nothing new.

Not three years - two and a quarter. The Trash-80 came out in August of 1977. The Atari 800 came out in November of 1979, and along with the 400 immediately dethroned the TRS-80 as the best selling computers. Radio Shack never regained their footing in the market, and for good reason. The Atari 8-bits made them look like junk, and while the CoCo at least sported decent processor performance when it came out in 1980, the graphics were crap. It couldn't even compete effectively with the VIC-20, let alone the Atari 8-bits or, later, the C64.

Luminance bandwidth isn't all there is to picture quality, something which should be obvious, although Beta's bandwidth was slightly higher than VHS's. In the early days VHS offered 240 lines of horizontal resolution, Beta 250. A marginal difference, but Beta also sported lower video noise and less luma/chroma crosstalk, due largely to head drum size and geometry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war#Picture_quality
http://www.betainfoguide.net/BetaBetter.html (although I think they get the luma bandwdith wrong)

It wasn't night and day, but Sony could have released decks with slower speeds early on and pretty much matched VHS playback times without degrading overall picture quality below VHS's. Unfortunately, they refused to do so until it was too late and VHS had effectively won the format war.

I've seen that argument before, but I don't really buy it.

Take Betamax. Development began in 1971 with JVC, Sony and Matsushita, but the partners broke up fairly early on. Sony worked on Betamax, Matsushita on VX and JVC worked on VHS. Heck, even Sanyo had their own format (V-Cord), which was radically different from the others. These formats happened because the technology had progressed to the point where they could be manufactured at a somewhat-affordable price point. Sony getting Betamax into the market didn't drive the others - everybody was already headed in that direction. Sony just got there first, arguably with the best format, apart from the playtime limitation which ultimately crippled them in the US. (Ironically, Betamax technically could have supported longer playtimes than VHS while maintaining superior picture quality, but Sony refused to release such a device until it was too late.)

Likewise, other folks were working on PDAs besides Apple, and if the Newton had never been released we'd have seen some other successful product materialize at about the same time as the Pilot did - right when the technology became available to produce such a device at an affordable price point.

None of those devices have the horsepower to compete with the Xbox 360, let alone the Wii U or whatever Microsoft has coming in 2015.

However, Apple has its own chipset designers. They could easily pump out a souped up ARM CPU coupled to a formidable graphics chipset. Not bleeding edge, but cheap and at least as good as the Xbox 360 or PS3, while also being largely compatible with the iPad and iPhone (making this "new" console very attractive to developers, and giving it an enormous library almost overnight).

I don't know if Apple will do such a thing, but they could, and they could do it on the cheap - well under a billion, which is peanuts in the console business. Even if it doesn't fly as a console, they could always re-purpose it as the next Apple TV (or as the core of their rumored television set).

And if it does take off, well, they'd not only make a lot of money off of it, they'd also be screwing both Microsoft and Sony, which would make a lot of folks in Cupertino very, very happy. In fact even if it isn't a rousing success, just having another viable player in the console space would drain resources at Microsoft and Sony.

Illiterate, much?

One of Apple's designers did a mockup of what they thought a Sony smartphone with the capabilities of the iPhone would look like, sporting circa-1983 Sony design cues:

http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/26/3189297/sony-inspired-iphone-design-images#3597459

It's a great riff on Sony's once iconic sense of design, now apparently long forgotten by the parent company.

Note that Apple couldn't have been "steeling" the iPhone's design from Sony, because the morons running Sony in 2005 had no products like the iPhone and, indeed, virtually nothing made by the company at that point utilized design cues from the company's 1980's heyday. Which is probably one of the reasons why Sony is circling the drain.

Also note that the final design of the iPhone looked nothing like those Sony-inspired prototypes. Everything from the shape to the buttons and switches was different. The iPhone actually ended up looking a lot more like something Rams would have designed for Braun (just as the iPod before it had).

Jobs never made it a secret he admired the '50s and '60s designs of Braun's Dieter Rams and Sony's Rams-inspired designs from the '70s and '80s. I think most people with a bit of taste probably do.

Sculley is unfairly maligned. He was the guy who pushed forward the Apple Newton..... had he not been in charge it would have been killed-off.

And that would have been a bad thing because?

The Newton was a flop. The guys who did the Palm Pilot got the PDA right, with a lot less hype and at a price folks could actually afford.

It's worse than that - Microsoft dumped something like $30 billion over the course of a decade into their home entertainment division, the vast majority of it spent on the Xbox and Xbox 360. They only started showing quarterly profits a couple of years ago - mostly from software, not hardware sales - and last I checked at the rate they're going it'll take them over a decade just to recoup their initial investment assuming software sales and prices hold up (which they haven't and won't on now-obsolete hardware). In other words, their investment in the console business will never even manage to break even.

Compare and contrast with Apple, which spent far, far less developing and launching both the iPhone and iPad, products which turned a profit almost immediately.

The console business has been a disaster for Microsoft since the beginning, and it's been a world of hurt for Sony since the launch of the PS3. The problem is, both Microsoft and Sony spent massive fortunes developing and subsidizing the "bleeding edge" hardware for their latest generation of consoles. By the time manufacturing costs came down to the point where they could realize hefty profits on both hardware and software sales for their platforms, Nintendo had stolen a good chunk of the market away with the cheaper Wii. Worse, all three consoles are now effectively obsolete, and they (and their software vendors) are competing with mobile devices from Apple and the Android vendors for consumers' dollars. And the mobile devices are crushing the consoles in the race for consumer dollars.

The Xbox 360 was supposed to last Microsoft until 2015, but if the Wii U is a success later this year, it'll likely decimate both hardware and software sales of Microsoft's outdated console. While Microsoft could unload another $20 billion designing, manufacturing and subsidizing a next-gen console, I just don't see how they can hope to ever turn a profit on that business. It's a lose-lose situation for Microsoft in the console business. If they don't shell out another $20 billion, they effectively drop out and never make their investment back. If they shell out $20 billion, they'll probably still end up an also-ran and never make their money back.

Of course, they could do something less elaborate with their next gen console, but they'll have already lost prime mover advantage to Nintendo, and lackluster hardware will rapidly be eclipsed by ever-cheaper PCs and increasingly capable mobile devices. In other words, their "next gen" system would have a shelf life of about 3 years. They'd have to produce something really cheap to make those numbers pan out, and it's hard to see developers expending a lot of effort on a platform they know is gonna be dead in under 5 years.

And of course Apple could completely wreck Microsoft's console business by using the firehose of cash they're getting from their mobile business to produce their own console. Subsidize a halfway decent box and follow the iPhone's cheap software strategy - keep the price of most titles under $20 - and you'd cripple Microsoft. They'd hemorrhage billions before being forced out of the market with their tail between their legs.

I think Microsoft's even more screwed than the conventional wisdom thinks they are. Their mobile strategy is a shambles, their console business will never turn a profit (and could end up costing them another $10-$20 billion), they're an also-ran in the cloud, and their OS and office applications monopolies are increasingly threatened by Apple in the home, and by Linux and cloud-based applications in the workplace.

Their patent portfolio is formidable, but then, so was Kodak's.

I think they have about 5 years left to turn it around before they begin a rapid slide into irrelevance, and I don't think there's a snowball's chance in hell that Ballmer could lead such a turnaround.

It really does not matter whether you would wish to fly out of those airports. They exist and they compete with the "one airport" you claim has no competition.

You listed airports in Yuma, Prescott and *Flagstaff* as being competition for Sky Harbor airport in Phoenix?

Sky Harbor Airport to Prescott's airport is a 107 mile drive into the mountains of central Arizona. Just shy of 2 hours in no traffic, and that assumes you don't live east or south of Sky Harbor, which I'd imagine close to 1/3rd of the population of the Phoenix metro area do. A more realistic travel time is on the order of 3 hours.

Sky Harbor to Flagstaff's Pulliam Airport is even worse, a 145 mile drive to a city nestled in some of the tallest mountains in the state, about a mile higher than Phoenix. 2.5 hours minimum - more like 3.5-4 during commute hours. Nobody in their right mind would consider that "competition" even if Pulliam were an appreciable fraction the size of Sky Harbor, which it's not.

Sky Harbor Airport to Yuma Airport is a 189 mile drive. 3 hours, 22 minutes in no traffic, 4+ in traffic. Not as many mountains to deal with, but hot, desolate and isolated. And 4 hours assumes you don't live east or north of Sky Harbor, which I'd imagine over half of the people in the Phoenix metro area do, in which case you'd have to cross over the congested downtown area, adding who knows how much time to the trip.

None of these airports would represent competition for Sky Harbor *even if they offered a similar menu of flights*, which none of them do. Being small airports, they also cost substantially more to fly into and out of than Sky Harbor, which is a hub for Southwest. And we won't even mention how much the gas for those trips would cost in the average automobile. Flights would have to be dramatically cheaper out of those distant airports in order to compete with Sky Harbor just on price, assuming flights to your desired destination were available in the first place, which they aren't.