Synthetic fuel from green energy - News

[Simon Brown]

No. Not with Linux either.

[Simon Brown]

That was just one of the things being discussed and Woz did that in a shed/garage.

VisiCalc and Linux are nothing even remotely like trivia.

And neither were profitable.

[Nightjar]

Not one that can carry several hundred passengers.

There are ways to reduce drag, such as a micro perforated skin with suction to remove boundary layer turbulence and create laminar flow. However, all aircraft are a collection of compromises and that particular technology isn't really practical, even on conventionally powered aircraft.

[The Natural Philosopher]

You are absurd. Linux was nothing more than Unix without commercial strings attached.

[The Natural Philosopher]

without drag, there would be no lift. The same viscosity that is responsible for drag is what allows lift to be generated

[Chris Hogg]

So you talk in riddles. As I said, you are a smart-arse, and you have no concept of what is meant by a serious breakthrough. Sure, your hero Wozniak was a smart guy, but he wasn't unique; there were plenty of clever people assembling chips, sharing ideas and building microcomputers at that time*. There was nothing unique about him, or anything in the way of a serious breakthrough that any of them did. The serious breakthrough was the transistor itself, which made everything else possible.

• and

[dennis]

Apple was lucky, they had an application that people wanted enough to pay for. Others at the time lacked that one bit of software.

[Simon Brown]

We'll see...

It is in fact much more than that.

And that isn't true of VisiCalc anyway.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Apple were lucky. They were in the USA. The same product all other things being equal will sell ten times as many items as in the UK.

Without needing to be exported. Or be translated into 15 different languages.

[dennis]

Linux was and still is just a copy of something that already existed, its hardly a breakthrough to copy something. Open source is more of a breakthrough and some of the software produced because of it could be a breakthrough, Linux isn't.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Good grief. here is an idiot telling me my business.

[Simon Brown]

Everyone else understood what I meant there.

I didn't say his was a serious breakthrough, just that he did what he did in his shed/garage.

He isn't my hero. The Wright brothers aren't either.

No one ever said he was unique, just that he did what he did in his shed/garage, providing that the claim that it isn't done by individuals in their sheds anymore is wrong.

Never said otherwise.

Never said there was.

Never said there was.

Having fun thrashing that straw man ?

[Simon Brown]

It wasn?t one bit of software that saw Apple succeed.

[Simon Brown]

Linux isn't a copy of anything.

And that is what Linux is.

Wrong.

[Simon Brown]

When you get it wrong, everyone does.

[The Natural Philosopher]

It is a reverse engineered Unix, deliberately rewritten to avoid copyright issues.

Unix was the real invention, not Linux.

And that wasn't done in a shed either.

But even Unix was no more than a logical progression from one operating system to a better one.

All the key breakthroughs of the 20th century came about from a new understanding of quantum physics - atomic power and weapons, the transistor, the laser. These were true breakthroughs. Everything else is simply taking advantage of the things they offered - in the case of the transistor enormous computing power in a small package - to do things that people had been doing by hand for years.

No. that's a small part of what it is, Its WHY it is tho.

Wright.

[Huge]

W-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-ellll.

Unix was itself derived from a previous O/S, Multics.

But that's true enough.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I am well aware of that. Unix was an evolution, not a revolution.

Perhaps the first operating system, and the first high level programming languages were revolution, but even there, machine code-> assembler->macro assembler -> computer language is a fairly smooth evolutionary path as is libraries -> resident libraries -> operating system...

[Capitol]

Apples achievement was to attract enough finance to enable mass production of the toy.

[Huge]

I assumed you were. I was attempting to enlighten our resident idiot.