Word: three
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Blame it on Blair Witch. When a hit summer film revolves around three kids who run around the woods with cameras and don't even use the steadycam setting, it is only going to be a matter of time before something equally weird happens to home movies. The Project was famous for being filmed on a camera bought at (and returned to) Circuit City, edited on a $30,000 shoestring and promoted like hell on the Internet. This holiday season, however, millions of wannabes can go through exactly the same process for less than $3,000--cast party not included...
...camera? Right now, Canon and Sony have got the DV camcorder market sewed up. Each has a choice of cameras in the high-, medium- and low-price range. Expect to pay up to $4,199 and to get what you pay for. Real professional quality means a camera with three CCDs--that is, three separate prisms to capture red, green and blue light--and a shotgun microphone, like the one boasted by the $2,500 Canon GL-1. But, hey, who said anything about professional quality? This is the Blair Witch era, after all. Grain is chic. Save your pennies...
Evidently, NASA has been leaning toward the latter. Just three weeks before Polar Lander was set to arrive at Mars, a NASA panel issued its report on the Climate Orbiter failure in September. The prime cause of that disaster, as everyone now knows, was a truly dumb mistake: the spacecraft's builder, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, provided one set of specifications in old-fashioned English units, while its operators at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory were using metric...
...into an opportunity, finding ways to do more with less--and to all appearances, the strategy was working. The Mars Pathfinder Lander, built for a tenth the cost of its predecessors, riveted the nation's attention in 1997 with its live feed from the Red Planet's surface. And three years after its arrival Mars Global Surveyor is still sending back detailed photos and important data about the water-sculpted Martian landscape, including powerful evidence, released last week, that the planet's north pole was once covered by a vast ocean. It seemed that Goldin's management mantra--"faster, better...
...maybe not. With the Mars Polar Lander all but written off as a total loss, and the catastrophic failure of the Mars Climate Orbiter three months earlier, NASA is fast becoming the Dan Quayle of government agencies. Late-night comics have been roasting it mercilessly, while the Washington Post offered a Top 10 list of NASA excuses for the latest fiasco. (No. 10: Be patient. Mars Lander is trying to dial in on an AOL account.) Some cyberpranksters offered the Polar Lander for sale on eBay and got 16 bids...