I wonder if that means anything.

There was a time when the PPC was significantly better at multi-media processing tasks than most other processors. And Apple was historically a strong contender in graphic arts and video editing even before the PPC days. Those two things combined are why all those tatooed hippies were willing to pay so much for an Apple machine -- it actually *did* make them much more productive because the PPC hardware was good at media, the media apps were well done, and the connectivity to still and video cameras was much less hassle compared to the baling wire, bubble gum, and prayer it took to get video into a Windows machine.

Eventually Intel added various kinds of SIMD and media instructions to boost media performance, IBM's development tempo on the PPC fell behind and they weren't releasing new chips often enough, and the IBM fab process made the PPC chips rather power hungry. (A friend of mine had a PPC laptop, and has a bad back. One night he tweaked his back, took some gnarly pain meds for it, fell asleep with a PPC laptop on his legs, and ended up in the emergency room for burn treatment. They were that hot.)

Apple put a lot of work into making OS X portable. That went on for a long time and the effort must not be discounted. The first pay-off was being able to switch away from PPC -- to anything they wanted. Intel won that one. But they can build for other chips quite easily, witness tablet/laptops. Apple could decide tomorrow to switch away from Intel, and it would be relatively pain-free. That is the real lesson here -- portability pays dividends. Apple was on PPC in part because they were chasing good media processing -- Apple went to Intel because they were still chasing good media processing. Apple's new A8/M8 chips in the iPhone 6 have good media processing. There's a theme here....

There was a commercially available Smalltalk that ran just fine on the original Mac. Adding it to the Mac ROM image would have added less than 64K bytes to the image (originally 128K) so no way would it have doubled the costs. And it would not have precluded the 68000 C/assembly programs -- it would have provided the same hacker-friendly extension environment provided by BASIC on the Apple II as an addition. For a small incremental cost they could have enabled a huge eco-system of community-created applications -- that was a huge opportunity forgone.

One of the reasons Smalltalk ran well on the Mac is that the main thing that makes a system feel snappy is good rendering -- and of course it relied on the hand-tuned assembly rendering API in the ROMs. Sure, you may have noticed the speed on compute-intensive apps, but that really wasn't the bread-and-butter of the original Mac.

Jobs did learn his lesson, as you point out he corrected the oversight in the NeXT project. But Jobs is also on record as regretting ignoring Smalltalk on that fateful day at PARC, regarding it as a mistake.

Except that he didn't steal enough. He took what he could see: graphical display, windows, menus, pointing device. But he didn't understand what was under the hood, and missed a huge opportunity. The Smaltalk language was a huge part of the Alto system, and Jobs ignored it completely. If the original Macintosh had shipped with a Smalltalk interpreter in ROM, the world would be a hugely different place. Turning the world's hackers loose with Smalltalk on an original Mac would have made the Mac and Apple hugely successful, instead of sending Apple into an extended near-death experience. Trying to write an application for the original Mac was about as pleasant as repeatedly poking yourself in the eye with a sharp stick, and that was after shelling out large $$ for the dev system.

So, for how many years now has it been that computing on demand has existed? Enterprises use it, hobbyists use it. There is no reason public information can't be served from commercial web farms -- spin up enough instances to handle the traffic bubble, spin them down again when the panic subsides. And it's acutally pretty cheap -- cheaper than having the government maintain its own server farm. Now, there may be certain sensitive data sets that should not leave government servers -- OK, so the .gov could have it's own compute-on-demand farm someplace and agencies could use it as needed with appropriate cost-transfer bookkeeping. But when the whole purpose of a website is to disseminate public information, it's hard to argue a security need for having your own servers.

So, yeah, "be competent" is good advice. Unfortunately, procurement bureacracy is going to get in the way of even compentent IT staff getting anything accomplished in under two annual budget cycles.

Unfortunately, Maersk changed their corporate blue color before ordering these ships. Which means that the Lego color palette lost an interesting blue, as the new Maersk is essentially regular Lego light blue. The Lego EEE model is therefore a non-event. Curse you, Maersk. Can't you take the needs of Lego fans into account when making important decisions like this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

The doctrine of suppressive area fire came about with close quarters battle in jungle and urban settings, where the utility of aimed fire from a long stand-off distance is not in play much. In the treeless Canadian arctic, CQB is not a thing. The rate of fire with a smooth bolt action is not much worse than a semi-auto for a trained operator, and has bolt action has good cold weather reliability. Also... .308 has an awful lot of recoil for full-auto -- essentially unusable for most mortals. The selected rifle is designed for wide-open spaces, long distances, ultimate reliability, and serious stopping power at a distance. Kinda sounds like what you need in the Canadian arctic.

All of that savings is looking for a good place to be invested, which drives down the cost of capital for companies looking to expand, which increases employment. Increasing an economy's net savings is the best way known to drive growth. Encouraging dissavings and consumption is only short-term economic stimulus and is inflationary. ECON 101 -- take it.

???? Have you ever taken an economics class? Did you pass? *sheesh* Wealth taxes are the quickest way known to destroy an economy, economists of all political stripes agree on that one.

A progressive consumption tax is easy to collect. But not at point-of-sale, that's impractical. But, observe that when you fill out your income tax returns, all of the data reporters and most of the data necessary to compute your net consumption is available. Perhaps some of the data reporters would need to tweak their reports, but the data is easily available. Consumption = income - net_savings. It's that simple. Your dividends are already reported. Your interest income is already reported. Net change in cash into your investment vehicles is all that is necessary to compute consumption. Apply progressive tax table that the politicians can argue over endlessly and the final result is a system not materially different in complexity from the one we have now.

That's too harsh. I've pledged a lot of kickstarters, for things that I would like to see happen. But I'm selective -- I have enough experience as an engineer that I can sniff out the BS and avoid projects that are run by the clueless (there are a lot of those) and by the scammers (a few do exist). So far I've never had to suffer anything other than late delivery. But then again, I've suffered late delivery from people that worked for me also, so there ya go. I might even admit to being late on hardware deliveries myself. But you are too harsh when you lump all kickstarters together as scammers. The center of gravity tends towards well-meaning but inexperienced noobs with good ideas, who can envision about 60% of what they are getting themselves into.

And this is attached to the wrong comment. oooof. Having a bad post day today.

argh. wasn't logged in. parent post is mine.

Well, I actually have two friends that have Teslas, see other Teslas on the road often, and Leafs are common as dirt. That has a lot to do with the climate, commute patterns, and infrastructure here in Silicon Valley. That said, the Tesla is a fringe brand for many of the reasons that you say -- it is expensive, its infrastructure needs are scarce in most places, and if you live where cab climate control is necessary, prepare to sacrifice range for that. As Telsa moves down the price curve and Leaf moves up the range curve, they will become more popular and the infrastructure will follow.

Yahoo wasn't keeping up when it was brand new. I remember using Yahoo when Mosaic, compiled from sources by yourself, was the recommended procedure for installing a web browser on my workstation at work. Yahoo wasn't keeping up even at that time.