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From the conclusion of the same report:

...CCTV cameras in Glasgow city centre did not appear to have a major impact on crime... and ...there was no evidence to suggest that the cameras had reduced crime overall in the city centre. (These were taken out of context, go read the report yourself to see a slightly wider context)

Glasgow has been one of the best cities in Britain for combatting its street crime, with more police on the streets, rewards programs, a big push against hard drugs, and more money to aid prosecutions. Glasgow's crime levels have bucked the major trend in the UK for low level street crime, not due to cameras, but because the city council wanted to clean up the image of the city.

camera operators usually focus on minorities or young people in "hostile" outfits

My biggest concerns of camera surveillance are along the lines of operators trained by a mostly white police force saying "Look, he's wearing a Man-U stripe, damn baby rapist, lets track his every move", as well as "track only blacks and asians, because they are the most likely to commit crimes". Since I work in security, I do notice the cameras, and I do have opportunities to observe the operators being biased. It is quite disturbing to watch cameras track you every where you go when you clearly aren't breaking any laws.

the AC

micheal said:
The story mentions the slow slide in Great Britain when the public became convinced that surveillance would prevent crimes...

We must have read different articles. I looked at the links to Scottish crime statistics in the Wired article and although critical it admits that the incidences of certain crimes have dropped and the loss of life has been prevented on several occassions by the surveillance cameras.

I am opposed to surveillance cameras for a number of reasons chief of which is the one mentioned in the article (camera operators usually focus on minorities or young people in "hostile" outfits) as well as the loss of privacy but even I don't delude myself into thinking that they don't prevent crime.

If you want to oppose to installation of cameras, complain about the potential rights violations or 4th ammendment violations. of course with the growing rise of reality television in the U.S. if there ever was a time that this kind of action would be gotten away with, this is it. Trying to pretend that crime isn't prevented is hiding your head in the sand and won't win you any supporters if the battle against them is fought in the U.S.

This document shalt be referenced to as the Atari Pink Book

Tempest evidentally had an option for a Two-Game minimum(it's mentioned at the bottom). Interesting "feature". It would be neat to see the history of a credit. When did it become acceptable to have $.50 games. Some games now cost more than a dollar. How common was the two-game minimum? Being 6 in 83, I don't remember it all that much ;-)

anyone ever compiled this sort of thing? would anyone other than me care?

Please don't lump the Amiga and Atari ST together.

The Amiga was a *very* similar m68k-based unix-like platform to NeXT (except amiga had no true memory protection (big downer that, but it meant that the AmigaOS had near-realtime latencies and could use extremely fast message passing-by-reference to shunt data around.)).

At a fraction of the price, it was just marketed by complete buffoons. CBM management actually managed to screw up a deal for the amiga A3000UX to become the low end Sun (or was it DEC?) workstation, but the Amiga still managed to dominate the video producton industry for a decade, despite CBM marketing's repeated attempts to sell it as a "games computer" in toy stores.

The Amiga division was making a profit even as the parent company folded, but blithering-idiot CBM management continously pumped money out of amiga R&D and into marketing their over-hyped, under-specced CBM PC line.

There's still features from AmigaOS I miss on Linux, mainly to do with the way the filesystem works (Assigns and Device handlers to let you cd into TCP connections, shell archives, windows and the like), the extra "screen" layer of UI abstraction that Enlightenment tries to emulate (the Rasterman is an ex-Amiga hacker), the system-wide REXX scripting, the way applications didn't spread themselves across about 10 different directories, and a load of other little niggling things, many of which are available as patches and add-ons into Linux, but on the Amiga, they all worked together seamlessly.

The same can not really be said of the ST.

The ST was kludged together from off-the-shelf parts in a cynical business decision by Atari, after CBM bought Amiga out from under their noses.

Please see www.blizzard.u-net.com/AtoZ/history .html
for a history of the amiga, www.amiga.org for amiga news, and www.amiga.com for information about the Tao/Amiga Virtual Processor technology.

Nice to see that Cuneiform wasn't on the list. I tend to get most of my music lately from either Cuneiform or other labels available from Wayside Music (Cuneiform used to be the ``house'' label; much the same as WaxTrax (sp?) was a label started by the record store of the same name in Chicago.) I doubt that labels like ReR and other foreign labels would be RIAA members.

BTW, Is this the VAXman from Fermilab? (Just curious.)
--

http://www.close.u-net.com

--
Mikael "MC" Cardell
Defender of the Sacred GNU, Temple of the Moby Hack
ICBM: N 58.414904, E 15.610734

HONG KONG CAPITALISM:

You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly-listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt / equity swap with associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax deduction for keeping five cows. The milk rights of six cows are transferred via a Panamanian intermediary to a Cayman Islands company secretly owned by the majority shareholder, who sells the rights to all seven cows' milk back to the listed company. The annual report says that the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. Meanwhile, you kill the two cows because the feng shiu is bad.

Thanks for that info, that's very useful.

Will somebody please moderate this post up?

Here are the hyperlinks:

• http://www.docbook.org
• http://www.bruceeckel.com
• http://www.software.u-net.com (the tutorial is here)

Thanks for that info, that's very useful.

Will somebody please moderate this post up?

Here are the hyperlinks:

• http://www.docbook.org
• http://www.bruceeckel.com
• http://www.software.u-net.com (the tutorial is here)

The guy who introduced the UK to personal computing is going to make a Linux box? I'll buy one :-)

Note to Sinclair fans: in my final year at university, I wrote an essay about Sinclair computers as part of my History of Computing course. It's on the Web at http://www.nysa.u-net.com/essay.html. The ending's a bit rubbish, 'coz I exceeded my word count, but you might want to give it a read anyway (shameless plug mode off).

Haven't used SFS (though I've heard a lot of good things about it); however, I do use PFS2 on my Amiga's hard drive and Zip disks. It's a similar idea to SFS; a file system that is organized in a less stupid way than FFS, and promises data coherency no matter what horrible things you do to your machine. It works perfectly; when the Amiga crashes in the middle of a write (which happens a lot to me, since there's no memory protection and I do a lot of silly things), it boots straight back up again. No corrupted filesystems, no waits while the filesystem is revalidated.

It's waaaaaaaay faster than FFS too, and has a hidden directory in the root of each filesystem which stores copies of the last thirty deleted files, so people who rm first and think later (like me) don't have to spend ages trawling through backups ;-)

I strongly recommend Amigans who still use FFS to check it out. UK Amigans can buy it from Ramjam Consultants.