From what I've determined talking with folks at retail stores, the reason you see Windows on netbooks now instead of Linux is that the Windows netbooks outsold the Linux netbooks about a gazillion to one.
There's no point in a company offering a choice if not enough people pick it to be worth supporting.
It's too bad they're not using that Inferno stuff or whatever it's called now that was planned for the new Amiga OS 4 (or was it 5/6?). It is/was kind of an interesting design. It basically uses a VM assembly language to distribute all code and it's compiled on the fly for the local processor (sort of like a modern JIT'd language but lower level). Either that or use a BeOS-like system (Haiku or whatever). Either of those would be better than AROS. Hell, Linux would be better than AROS.
Even more to the point, AmigaOS 4.1 would be better than AROS.
Except that they don't have a license for AmigaOS 4.1, and it won't run on this hardware anyway.
Turbine no longer offers the Turbine Download Manager (which used Pando.)
Their download pages for Lord of the Rings Online and D&D Online still mention Pando and have a link to a Pando FAQ, but the only downloads are for the single-file, multi-gig installer.exe's.
I think they finally just gave up on getting it to actually work.
I used to use Linux a lot, back around Red Hat 5. Eventually something - I forget what, now - irritated me to no end and I switched to Windows 2000.
Recently I decided to give Ubuntu a try. Downloaded the.iso, ran the installer, booted up. Everything seemed to work okay. Then I ran the updater, which said it found lots of updates and wanted to install them. I let it. I rebooted.
And networking no longer worked. So, of course, I couldn't get online to figure out why it didn't work.
I could probably have fixed it with some tinkering, but THAT is the 'user experience' people still have issues with.
What, you never had the Wildnerness Survival Guide, or the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide, or the Manual of the Planes, or Oriental Adventures, or the Fiend Folio, or Unearthed Arcana?
I never said there were 50+ books not counting adventures and flavor texts.
Like most of the books for 4e are adventures and flavor texts.
I hate to tell you this, but I have well over 50 books for AD&D 2nd Edition, and there are at least as many in 1st Edition.
There have ALWAYS been a zillion supplements for D&D/AD&D. It's how the publisher makes money. They make more books. If all they sold were the PHB, Monster Manual, and DMG no one would ever need more than those three volumes.
There have _always_ been published adventures, campaign settings, and more optional rules than you can shake a quarterstaff at. At least with 3.5e/4e they tend to be reasonably consistant. (anyone remember when non-weapon proficiencies were introduced and one book said you had to roll _over_ the number and one said you had to roll _under_?)
I have one of those 'new Amigas'. It's not very fast (it'll play a DVD, barely) but I have a blast with it.
The OS looks like an Amiga, works like an Amiga, has draggable screens like an Amiga, and runs more of my old Amiga sofware than my Amiga 3000 Tower ever did. (Once you put a VGA card in an 'original' Amiga, all bets are off for running 'real' Amiga games.)
And it even crashes like an Amiga; often. The big difference? Nine times out of ten, I can recover from a Software Failure / Guru Meditation and at least save my documents and reboot.
I figure AmigaOS 4 is about what Commodore would have been putting out around, oh, 2000 or so had they not gone under. PowerPC CPU and all.
If anything, it's too little. Console game prices have NOT been keeping up with inflation.
They've gone up ten bucks in the last... what, 16 years? There are people playing these $60 games who weren't even born before the usual price was $50.
Pitfall! for the Atari 2600 was, I recall, $29.99. Adjusted for inflation, that's $67.80.
Now that I think of it, Pitfall! may have been $39.99. I recall it was very expensive and a major family purchase at the time.
On the other hand, if you don't want to pay $60 for a new console game, get a Wii. Most new Wii games are $50.
You're aware that Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies comes out this Sunday in the US, right?
From all I've seen the main quest is roughly as long as Dragon Warrior VII, with lots more sidequests. 100+ hours for the main game, more than a hundred sidequests, and more unlockable with downloads.
The graphics aren't as good as the Playstation 2 game (it's on the Nintendo DS, after all), but they're better than the Playstation game. And the DS remakes of 4, 5, and 6 basically use the same engine as 7 on the PS1.
I wouldn't be too terribly surprised to see DQ8 get remade for the 3DS.
The problem with raising prices on mail is that it would reduce the volume of mail sent.
While that theoretically isn't a problem - if there's less mail being sent, there's less cost to the Post Office to move it around, right? - in practice it is, because the USPS isn't allowed to downsize.
It takes an act of Congress to change anything meaningful in the USPS.
So while increasing the cost of sending junk mail, and therefore reducing the amount of mail sent, and reducing costs by that amount, might be more profitable... reducing the volume of mail won't actually permit that cost reduction.
Also, part of the reason junk mail postage is so much lower than letter postage is that the junk mailers presort the junk mail for the post office ahead of time. (That's what CAR RT PRESORT on the labels means.) It's already divvied up in bundles for each mailman, by route. That cuts down labor and processing immensely, so they get a big discount.
The Commodore 64 was not replaced by the 128. The 128 was produced along side the C64, but never sold very well.
The Commodore 64 was still in production when Commodore went bankrupt in 1994, and I believe it was produced by licensees for at _least_ another ten years, basically unchanged. (As the "Commander 64" in Turkey, and other such operations.)
Other than minor cost-reduction changes to the chipset and casing, the Commodore 64 was produced basically unchanged from 1982 to 1994. Over 30 *million* were sold.
I graduated high school in '91. I knew about a hundred kids with Commodore 64s; one with a 128; and two with Amigas. By then the C64 was so cheap everyone could afford one, even kids that had to save up their allowance or some such. I think my last C64, a replacement for one that got Coca-Cola'd, was $99.
Amigas were several hundred dollars and really needed a monitor, instead of a TV. Too much money!
Wait, what? The GameCube was low in power for its generation? It wasn't as powerful as the Xbox, but it's easily more so than the Playstation 2. I've got a few games on both the PS2 and Cube, and the Cube version always looks better. Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance and Serious Sam: The Next Generation spring to mind.
Nintendo isn't really all that worried about Wii piracy. It's out there, but their main problem is DS piracy. Pirating DS games is trivial; it takes a $25 custom cartridge, and an SDHC card to load the copied games onto. Add in that DS games are all under 256 megs, most under 128, and they're easy to download even on a slow internet connection.
I have one of those pirate carts; all the games on it are ones I legally own. I use it because it lets me carry around all my games on one cartridge. And I can watch movies on it.
But most people with one just download the torrents of every single DS game ever, and don't buy games.
I used to work at an answering service that used ANI to ID incoming calls. The system had been in place for decades, long before CallerID was around, or at least common.
Toward the end of the '90s, if people blocked their Caller ID, sometimes the ANI started coming up as all 0s. Not always, but fairly often.
So 'ANI is not blocked when caller-id is' depends on the telephone company implementing it.
The cause of this was apparently a huge pothole on the street outside the factory where they were making the A500s. The truck would hit the pothole hard enough to jar chips loose from the motherboard. Later Amiga 500s had a clip to hold those chips in place.
(Apparently the pothole was on public roadway, so the company couldn't just fix it.)
The white plastic Apple keyboard was okay. Not great, but not bad. The aluminum one I have now is actually fantastic. I find myself making far fewer typos, possibly because there's a decent amount of space between the keys so it's hard to hit an adjacent one accidentially.
I'd rather use this flat aluminum Apple keyboard than an IBM Model M any day of the week.... or every day of the week, even.
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From what I've determined talking with folks at retail stores, the reason you see Windows on netbooks now instead of Linux is that the Windows netbooks outsold the Linux netbooks about a gazillion to one.
There's no point in a company offering a choice if not enough people pick it to be worth supporting.
I'd really love to see an ARM laptop with a 40-50 hour battery life!
But all the ARM laptops I see have a battery life not all that much longer than Intel-based laptops.
My Asus Eee 901 with SSD gets 6 to 7 hours on a charge, and that's an older model. I bet the newer Atoms do better.
SSDs _are_ flash drives.
They're considerably faster than the ones you plug into a USB port, but they're basically the same thing.
There shouldn't be a problem with Windows seeing all the space in a NAS.
However, the NAS itself may well not support the 3TB drive.
Perhaps because the 'proper' replacement for something like a G5 Tower is a Mac Pro, and those are a hellalotta monies.
(If you had a full-tower machine, you're probably not going to want a Mac mini or an iMac.)
It depends on the video. On my Mac, VLC uses vastly more CPU to play an H.264 file than Quicktime does.
And with Perian (http://perian.org/) installed, Quicktime plays mkv files without issue.
Even more to the point, AmigaOS 4.1 would be better than AROS.
Except that they don't have a license for AmigaOS 4.1, and it won't run on this hardware anyway.
AROS won't even run actual Amiga programs.
Turbine no longer offers the Turbine Download Manager (which used Pando.)
Their download pages for Lord of the Rings Online and D&D Online still mention Pando and have a link to a Pando FAQ, but the only downloads are for the single-file, multi-gig installer .exe's.
I think they finally just gave up on getting it to actually work.
I used to use Linux a lot, back around Red Hat 5. Eventually something - I forget what, now - irritated me to no end and I switched to Windows 2000.
Recently I decided to give Ubuntu a try. Downloaded the .iso, ran the installer, booted up. Everything seemed to work okay. Then I ran the updater, which said it found lots of updates and wanted to install them. I let it. I rebooted.
And networking no longer worked. So, of course, I couldn't get online to figure out why it didn't work.
I could probably have fixed it with some tinkering, but THAT is the 'user experience' people still have issues with.
What, you never had the Wildnerness Survival Guide, or the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide, or the Manual of the Planes, or Oriental Adventures, or the Fiend Folio, or Unearthed Arcana?
I never said there were 50+ books not counting adventures and flavor texts.
Like most of the books for 4e are adventures and flavor texts.
You know.
Optional.
I hate to tell you this, but I have well over 50 books for AD&D 2nd Edition, and there are at least as many in 1st Edition.
There have ALWAYS been a zillion supplements for D&D/AD&D. It's how the publisher makes money. They make more books. If all they sold were the PHB, Monster Manual, and DMG no one would ever need more than those three volumes.
There have _always_ been published adventures, campaign settings, and more optional rules than you can shake a quarterstaff at. At least with 3.5e/4e they tend to be reasonably consistant. (anyone remember when non-weapon proficiencies were introduced and one book said you had to roll _over_ the number and one said you had to roll _under_?)
I have one of those 'new Amigas'. It's not very fast (it'll play a DVD, barely) but I have a blast with it.
The OS looks like an Amiga, works like an Amiga, has draggable screens like an Amiga, and runs more of my old Amiga sofware than my Amiga 3000 Tower ever did. (Once you put a VGA card in an 'original' Amiga, all bets are off for running 'real' Amiga games.)
And it even crashes like an Amiga; often. The big difference? Nine times out of ten, I can recover from a Software Failure / Guru Meditation and at least save my documents and reboot.
I figure AmigaOS 4 is about what Commodore would have been putting out around, oh, 2000 or so had they not gone under. PowerPC CPU and all.
$60 is not 'way too much' for a console game.
If anything, it's too little. Console game prices have NOT been keeping up with inflation.
They've gone up ten bucks in the last... what, 16 years? There are people playing these $60 games who weren't even born before the usual price was $50.
Pitfall! for the Atari 2600 was, I recall, $29.99. Adjusted for inflation, that's $67.80.
Now that I think of it, Pitfall! may have been $39.99. I recall it was very expensive and a major family purchase at the time.
On the other hand, if you don't want to pay $60 for a new console game, get a Wii. Most new Wii games are $50.
You're aware that Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies comes out this Sunday in the US, right?
From all I've seen the main quest is roughly as long as Dragon Warrior VII, with lots more sidequests. 100+ hours for the main game, more than a hundred sidequests, and more unlockable with downloads.
The graphics aren't as good as the Playstation 2 game (it's on the Nintendo DS, after all), but they're better than the Playstation game. And the DS remakes of 4, 5, and 6 basically use the same engine as 7 on the PS1.
I wouldn't be too terribly surprised to see DQ8 get remade for the 3DS.
The problem with raising prices on mail is that it would reduce the volume of mail sent.
While that theoretically isn't a problem - if there's less mail being sent, there's less cost to the Post Office to move it around, right? - in practice it is, because the USPS isn't allowed to downsize.
It takes an act of Congress to change anything meaningful in the USPS.
So while increasing the cost of sending junk mail, and therefore reducing the amount of mail sent, and reducing costs by that amount, might be more profitable... reducing the volume of mail won't actually permit that cost reduction.
Also, part of the reason junk mail postage is so much lower than letter postage is that the junk mailers presort the junk mail for the post office ahead of time. (That's what CAR RT PRESORT on the labels means.) It's already divvied up in bundles for each mailman, by route. That cuts down labor and processing immensely, so they get a big discount.
If you need Saturday free to run errands, then you should be IN FAVOR of ending Saturday mail delivery.
That way you can go run your errands, instead of sitting at the house waiting for the mailman to come.
The archive is right here. http://drdemento.com/online.html
It's not complete, and it's not free, but it's there!
The Commodore 64 was not replaced by the 128. The 128 was produced along side the C64, but never sold very well.
The Commodore 64 was still in production when Commodore went bankrupt in 1994, and I believe it was produced by licensees for at _least_ another ten years, basically unchanged. (As the "Commander 64" in Turkey, and other such operations.)
Other than minor cost-reduction changes to the chipset and casing, the Commodore 64 was produced basically unchanged from 1982 to 1994. Over 30 *million* were sold.
I graduated high school in '91. I knew about a hundred kids with Commodore 64s; one with a 128; and two with Amigas. By then the C64 was so cheap everyone could afford one, even kids that had to save up their allowance or some such. I think my last C64, a replacement for one that got Coca-Cola'd, was $99.
Amigas were several hundred dollars and really needed a monitor, instead of a TV. Too much money!
Wait, what? The GameCube was low in power for its generation? It wasn't as powerful as the Xbox, but it's easily more so than the Playstation 2. I've got a few games on both the PS2 and Cube, and the Cube version always looks better. Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance and Serious Sam: The Next Generation spring to mind.
Nintendo isn't really all that worried about Wii piracy. It's out there, but their main problem is DS piracy. Pirating DS games is trivial; it takes a $25 custom cartridge, and an SDHC card to load the copied games onto. Add in that DS games are all under 256 megs, most under 128, and they're easy to download even on a slow internet connection.
I have one of those pirate carts; all the games on it are ones I legally own. I use it because it lets me carry around all my games on one cartridge. And I can watch movies on it.
But most people with one just download the torrents of every single DS game ever, and don't buy games.
THAT's what Nintendo wants to stop.
As a US citizen, you are not required to carry identification.
I used to work at an answering service that used ANI to ID incoming calls. The system had been in place for decades, long before CallerID was around, or at least common.
Toward the end of the '90s, if people blocked their Caller ID, sometimes the ANI started coming up as all 0s. Not always, but fairly often.
So 'ANI is not blocked when caller-id is' depends on the telephone company implementing it.
Superman used to time travel pretty frequently. He'd fly faster than ths speed of light - either on his own, or in a Kryptonian rocket.
He could apparently travel either direction in time this way.
The cause of this was apparently a huge pothole on the street outside the factory where they were making the A500s. The truck would hit the pothole hard enough to jar chips loose from the motherboard. Later Amiga 500s had a clip to hold those chips in place.
(Apparently the pothole was on public roadway, so the company couldn't just fix it.)
The white plastic Apple keyboard was okay. Not great, but not bad. The aluminum one I have now is actually fantastic. I find myself making far fewer typos, possibly because there's a decent amount of space between the keys so it's hard to hit an adjacent one accidentially.
I'd rather use this flat aluminum Apple keyboard than an IBM Model M any day of the week. ... or every day of the week, even.
Unfortunatly, even the best trackpad isn't as nice to use as a mediocre Trackpoint.