It's hard to understand how advanced the Amiga was unless you see it in action. Remember this demo was made using 1985 hardware using the following specs. I challenge you to recreate this demo using a PC or Mac on equal limitations:
- 0.007 gigahertz single-core processor - - 0.0005 gigabytes of memory - - 8 bit sound and 64 color video - - In other words very, very, very primitive. And yet powerful.
>>>the 3rd person shooter is a big step backward. Instead of feeling like you're actually in the game, you feel like you're controlling a marionette with slack wires. Walk up to a low wall in a third-person game and you don't know if your character is going to jump over it, use it for cover or just run into it and stand there. You end up making adjustments that necessarily detract from the experience. >>>
You guys take your gaming way too seriously.
(dusts off Commodore to play some Red Storm Rising)
>>>the average joe might think the IE 8 is better than Chrome 5 or FF 4.
Well in that case they must think Opera X 10.6 is the bestest browser out there! Are people running over to Opera? (checks). Nope. I suspect the number theory has no relevance to the average joe.
aside -
I don't find Opera as great as its proponents claim. It's okay for casual surfing but as soon as I visit Youtube the memory usage jumps to 500,000 kilobytes..... and my computer slows to a crawl. Meanwhile Firefox hovers around 300,000. Opera 10.0 worked well, but 10.6 appears to be suffering from bloat.
I'm still on 3.0. I see no reason to continue upgrading if what I have works just fine (holds-up copy of Office 97).
Plus upgrades often don't go as planned, like when my CWtv.com player stopped working after I moved from 2.5x to 3.0. And now I hear people are having problems with Youtube Downloaders after they jumped to 3.6.whatever last week. I follow two principles: If it aint broke; dont fix it. And KISS.
>>>To use a film clip in a TV show, for instance, you may need permission not only from the studio, but also from the actors, writers, and director, depending on how their contracts were negotiated.
Usually the studio retains all rights to show a TV show on air and on videotape, while the actors/writers get fixed residuals from each airing or sale. That eliminates the need to renegotiate every time you air an old episode. ----- The problem arises when a new technology comes along. Like DVDs. The music industry said the songs were licensed for TV and Videotapes, not for dvd, and therefore the music industry demanded more money for each song used. That forced the studios to renegotiate each-and-every song.
Likewise I think it's reasonable to say: The authors only licensed their creations for books and audio, not electronic editions. So they are free to sell those e-editions directly to amazon without the studio's prior permission.
>>>"with publishers arguing that the ebook rights belong to them, and authors and agents responding that, if not specifically granted, the digital rights remain with the author."
This is the same argument that the music industry made with DVDs. The songs were licenses for TV and Videotapes, not for dvd, and therefore the music industry demanded more money for each song used. Likewise I think it's reasonable to say: the authors only licensed for books and audio, not electronic editions.
You're both wrong. Both HD-DVD and Bluray allowed porn. When Sony heard the rumors that they were blocking porn they said it was nonsense. It was also nonsense that Betamax didn't allow porn (holds up playboy on beta).
Good point. A lot of the DVDs I download have been squeezed from ~5 gigabytes down to 0.7 GB or even 0.3 GB. The quality is not as good of course, but most of us don't really care. With an lossless movie on this 1000 GB blue-violet disc, the pirates would just squeeze it down to whatever size they need.
Maybe you can upload your digital pics to Google Mail, and hope they'll still be there in 40 years (crosses fingers). Or copy them to a USB drive and hope that USB is still a usable connector in 2050 (unlikely) or doesn't catch on fire.
I've lost a lot of stuff over the years due to computer rot, but fortunately most of it still exists thanks to anal-retentive persons uploading the files to places like HVSC (C64 music) and AmigaArchive. Emulation is fantastic - keeps the old memories alive. Unfortunately that won't help me preserve those old digital photos that I've lost..... like my cross-country 2000 trip that disappeared when Geocities disappeared.
>>>But if you think that FOX 8 and FOX NEWS have no affiliation and do not share similar views your nutty.
That means nothing. The local station could drop FOX tomorrow and switch to CW or Univision if they wished. They are independent and not puppets of the central network. ----- Besides FOX Broadcast and FOX Cable are separate businesses, so again there's virtually no influence.
>>>without my provider telling me what sites I can and can't view
Sounds good in theory but that's not how the real world works.. Read Chile's "net neutrality" law. It now gives the government power to block anything they don't like - such as bittorrent (they consider it stealing), or pornography (bad for children), and who knows what else the politicians might decide is bad in future years. If a similar law passed here in the US the internet as we know it (free, libertarian) would become a locked-down network.
i.e. About as boring as the government censored TV stations (no language, no nudity, and must be family friendly).
Plus: Considering the FCC's recent proposal to swipe channels 25 through 69 from Free TV, I think it's reasonable to ask: Is the FCC protecting consumers? Or are they serving a different master called "megacorp", where megacorp is whatever corporation currently holds the FCC's attention (ATT and Comcast in this case).
>>>Can they even imagine a world where every single place you went, every single thing you did, was subject to a zillion different whims? Oh, no, don't shop there, the owner hates left handed people, red headed people, people taller than him...
Yes.
These people would be boycotted and driven out of business. As happened with Circuit City (poor treatment of customers == lost sales). And even if some dick who hated black people did manage to survive, so what? I'd sooner have a dick in my neighborhood that I can ignore, than some tyrant 2000 miles away forcing me to make decisions I don't want to do. (Such as fining me $950 because I don't want insurance.) And no I don't expect you to pay my bills - I'm not a thief. I'd sooner die than steal your money.
Freedom, despite a few flaws, is preferable to non-freedom and non-choice where others are running your life as if you were a Serf.
>>>You don't seem to have any idea how cable monopolies were established in the first place.
This isn't the 1980s anymore. TV can be run over hair-thin fibers that take virtually no room underground. That means it would be possible to have 20-30 of these lines running in parallel, and give the customer a choice between multiple providers. .
>>>socialize the infrastructure
Perhaps. I've proposed a couple times that government should run ~20 line bundles of fiber, and then just lease 1 fiber per company (comcast, cox, verizon, etc). In any case it means we don't need the FCC or their net neutrality law. Why? Because the power will be in the hands of the consumer, where it belongs. He/she can choose which companies they like or don't like. .
>>>it has to be done nationally
I disagree. The US government has no more business regulating my local neighborhood (2000 miles away) than the EU government does regulating downtown Paris or London. Let the Member State governments do the regulating themselves.
>>>I don't want to see 10 more wires hanging on the poles outside my house, or to have my street dug up 5 different times so someone can bury their own wires
Don't be stupid. (1) A bundle of 20 fibers has less thickness than an electrical cable. They are so thin you wouldn't even notice them. (2) When Verizon came to my coworker's neighborhood to install FiOS, they didn't dig up the street. They just ran their wires through the already existing metal pipes.
C'mon. I keep hearing these same excuses over-and-over from slashdotters, and I keep shooting them down. Companies do this crap all the time, running new wires, and you don't even notice it. Why? Because it's no big deal.
The only think standing in the way of Cox or some other competitor coming to my neighborhood is that damn Monopoly the government gave Comcast. They bribe the politicians in order to keep the market all to themselves.
>>>Net neutrality deals with the roads connecting those stores.
Not really. Net neutrality is not necessary in the case of stores. Nobody tells Grocery Store A they "must" carry Oreo cookies. Why? Because if I want Oreos and store A doesn't have them, then I just go to store B, C, D,... or P. Same would apply in a world where I could choose multiple internet providers. If Comcast is being a dick and won't let me access hulu.com, then I could switch to Cox, Time-warner, Verizon,... or Apple ISP instead.
Net neutrality is only necessary in a world where choice doesn't exist. But in a world where choice DOES exist, the consumer has the power to say "screw you" and take his business somewhere else.
I'd rather give power to the consumer, not some distant stranger 2000 miles away.
>>>A private network using public resources (the aforementioned Rights of Way).
Which still cost us nothing. There was no money given to Comcast, and no property given either, since the local government still retains the title and can revoke Comcast's lease anytime it feels like it. QED the original comment about "we gave comcast billions of dollars" is flat wrong.
The more people get assistance to wireless internet, the more people will be signing-up for it, and the more congested the wireless spectrum will become. The FCC should not be pushing more-and-more people to go wireless.
BTW what do the poor need assistance for? My dialup is only 7 dollars a month. Anybody can afford that and gain internet access.
>>>Corporate owned media like NBC should be regarded as right-leaning.
Baloney. It's pretty obvious that NBC and MSNBC (same new organization) is close friends with the Democrats and the Green Parties. Hence the nickname DNC-NBC and the frequent stories about how to "be more green". They even went so far as to show video of a black man carrying a rifle, and then label him a "white racist, probably Republican" in one of their reports.
It's also a well-known fact the while corporations may own the media, their reporters almost all identify themselves as Democrat or liberal. They create stores that reflect that bias. (Same as the Republicans at FOX create stories reflecting their bias.)
>>>apart from the fact that FOX 8 is affiliated with the Fox network
Which means almost nothing. Being the station is not owned by FOX, they could decide tomorrow that FOX sucks, and switch to CW or MyNetTV or Univision instead. They are not tied down or controlled - they can do as they please.
An irrelevant distinction. The national government has also been known to hand-out monopolies to favored corporations, and thereby take-away the freedom of choice from citizens.
>>>The reason HD-DVD didn't take off was because they didn't allow porn.
You can tell Slashdot's moderation system is boekn when someone gets modded "informative" for telling a lie. HD-DVD allowed porn. In fact many sites offered a package deal - Buy the HD and get both HDDVD and Bluray discs (in the same package).
From Summary: >>>"capable of holding more than 50 high-quality movie titles"
So short-sighted. These new discs would hold 50GB times 20 == 1000 gigabytes. It would be possible to hold an entire movie without having to use lossy compression. The picture would be flawless.
USA Today, New York Times, and several other newspapers did an actual physical count of the Florida ballots. And with differing methods (handing chads as votes, or as rejects). They were trying to prove the Gore won.
They were surprised to discover that not only did Bush still win Florida, but the actual gap between the two grew wider than the official tally. i.e. "Evidence" shows Bush won that state.
>>>When the idiots don't realize the Communists fought against the Nazis.
There's no stronger fight than brother against brother. They were originally partners (prior to 1920s) and only split later on..The only difference between the National Socialists and the Communists is that the Natsi Party wanted to keep companies privatized. The Communist Party did not. In all other aspects they are almost identical - strong centralized power. - Elimination of undesirable populations. - Rise of a cult figure (Mussolini and Stalin respectively). Control of the media to spread propaganda. 5 or 10 year economic plans.
Slashdot Mirror
It's hard to understand how advanced the Amiga was unless you see it in action. Remember this demo was made using 1985 hardware using the following specs. I challenge you to recreate this demo using a PC or Mac on equal limitations:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-JFJ8Hjo_g
- 0.007 gigahertz single-core processor
-
- 0.0005 gigabytes of memory
-
- 8 bit sound and 64 color video
-
- In other words very, very, very primitive. And yet powerful.
>>>the 3rd person shooter is a big step backward. Instead of feeling like you're actually in the game, you feel like you're controlling a marionette with slack wires. Walk up to a low wall in a third-person game and you don't know if your character is going to jump over it, use it for cover or just run into it and stand there. You end up making adjustments that necessarily detract from the experience.
>>>
You guys take your gaming way too seriously.
(dusts off Commodore to play some Red Storm Rising)
>>>the average joe might think the IE 8 is better than Chrome 5 or FF 4.
Well in that case they must think Opera X 10.6 is the bestest browser out there! Are people running over to Opera? (checks). Nope. I suspect the number theory has no relevance to the average joe.
aside -
I don't find Opera as great as its proponents claim. It's okay for casual surfing but as soon as I visit Youtube the memory usage jumps to 500,000 kilobytes..... and my computer slows to a crawl. Meanwhile Firefox hovers around 300,000. Opera 10.0 worked well, but 10.6 appears to be suffering from bloat.
I'm still on 3.0. I see no reason to continue upgrading if what I have works just fine (holds-up copy of Office 97).
Plus upgrades often don't go as planned, like when my CWtv.com player stopped working after I moved from 2.5x to 3.0. And now I hear people are having problems with Youtube Downloaders after they jumped to 3.6.whatever last week. I follow two principles: If it aint broke; dont fix it. And KISS.
>>>To use a film clip in a TV show, for instance, you may need permission not only from the studio, but also from the actors, writers, and director, depending on how their contracts were negotiated.
Usually the studio retains all rights to show a TV show on air and on videotape, while the actors/writers get fixed residuals from each airing or sale. That eliminates the need to renegotiate every time you air an old episode. ----- The problem arises when a new technology comes along. Like DVDs. The music industry said the songs were licensed for TV and Videotapes, not for dvd, and therefore the music industry demanded more money for each song used. That forced the studios to renegotiate each-and-every song.
Likewise I think it's reasonable to say: The authors only licensed their creations for books and audio, not electronic editions. So they are free to sell those e-editions directly to amazon without the studio's prior permission.
>>>"with publishers arguing that the ebook rights belong to them, and authors and agents responding that, if not specifically granted, the digital rights remain with the author."
This is the same argument that the music industry made with DVDs. The songs were licenses for TV and Videotapes, not for dvd, and therefore the music industry demanded more money for each song used. Likewise I think it's reasonable to say: the authors only licensed for books and audio, not electronic editions.
>>>It needs to at least be big enough to take on corporate interests on my behalf.
Or a smaller government could just revoke all corporate licenses. Bam. No more corporations for you to be afraid of.
You're both wrong. Both HD-DVD and Bluray allowed porn. When Sony heard the rumors that they were blocking porn they said it was nonsense. It was also nonsense that Betamax didn't allow porn (holds up playboy on beta).
>>>They'd just compress it.
Good point. A lot of the DVDs I download have been squeezed from ~5 gigabytes down to 0.7 GB or even 0.3 GB. The quality is not as good of course, but most of us don't really care. With an lossless movie on this 1000 GB blue-violet disc, the pirates would just squeeze it down to whatever size they need.
I have a gadget that you hold up to your eye, insert a slide, and view the picture. It's very handy.
Maybe you can upload your digital pics to Google Mail, and hope they'll still be there in 40 years (crosses fingers). Or copy them to a USB drive and hope that USB is still a usable connector in 2050 (unlikely) or doesn't catch on fire.
I've lost a lot of stuff over the years due to computer rot, but fortunately most of it still exists thanks to anal-retentive persons uploading the files to places like HVSC (C64 music) and AmigaArchive. Emulation is fantastic - keeps the old memories alive. Unfortunately that won't help me preserve those old digital photos that I've lost..... like my cross-country 2000 trip that disappeared when Geocities disappeared.
>>>But if you think that FOX 8 and FOX NEWS have no affiliation and do not share similar views your nutty.
That means nothing. The local station could drop FOX tomorrow and switch to CW or Univision if they wished. They are independent and not puppets of the central network. ----- Besides FOX Broadcast and FOX Cable are separate businesses, so again there's virtually no influence.
>>>without my provider telling me what sites I can and can't view
Sounds good in theory but that's not how the real world works.. Read Chile's "net neutrality" law. It now gives the government power to block anything they don't like - such as bittorrent (they consider it stealing), or pornography (bad for children), and who knows what else the politicians might decide is bad in future years. If a similar law passed here in the US the internet as we know it (free, libertarian) would become a locked-down network.
i.e. About as boring as the government censored TV stations (no language, no nudity, and must be family friendly).
Plus: Considering the FCC's recent proposal to swipe channels 25 through 69 from Free TV, I think it's reasonable to ask: Is the FCC protecting consumers? Or are they serving a different master called "megacorp", where megacorp is whatever corporation currently holds the FCC's attention (ATT and Comcast in this case).
>>>Can they even imagine a world where every single place you went, every single thing you did, was subject to a zillion different whims? Oh, no, don't shop there, the owner hates left handed people, red headed people, people taller than him ...
Yes.
These people would be boycotted and driven out of business. As happened with Circuit City (poor treatment of customers == lost sales). And even if some dick who hated black people did manage to survive, so what? I'd sooner have a dick in my neighborhood that I can ignore, than some tyrant 2000 miles away forcing me to make decisions I don't want to do. (Such as fining me $950 because I don't want insurance.) And no I don't expect you to pay my bills - I'm not a thief. I'd sooner die than steal your money.
Freedom, despite a few flaws, is preferable to non-freedom and non-choice where others are running your life as if you were a Serf.
>>>You don't seem to have any idea how cable monopolies were established in the first place.
This isn't the 1980s anymore. TV can be run over hair-thin fibers that take virtually no room underground. That means it would be possible to have 20-30 of these lines running in parallel, and give the customer a choice between multiple providers.
.
>>>socialize the infrastructure
Perhaps. I've proposed a couple times that government should run ~20 line bundles of fiber, and then just lease 1 fiber per company (comcast, cox, verizon, etc). In any case it means we don't need the FCC or their net neutrality law. Why? Because the power will be in the hands of the consumer, where it belongs. He/she can choose which companies they like or don't like.
.
>>>it has to be done nationally
I disagree. The US government has no more business regulating my local neighborhood (2000 miles away) than the EU government does regulating downtown Paris or London. Let the Member State governments do the regulating themselves.
>>>I don't want to see 10 more wires hanging on the poles outside my house, or to have my street dug up 5 different times so someone can bury their own wires
Don't be stupid. (1) A bundle of 20 fibers has less thickness than an electrical cable. They are so thin you wouldn't even notice them. (2) When Verizon came to my coworker's neighborhood to install FiOS, they didn't dig up the street. They just ran their wires through the already existing metal pipes.
C'mon. I keep hearing these same excuses over-and-over from slashdotters, and I keep shooting them down. Companies do this crap all the time, running new wires, and you don't even notice it. Why? Because it's no big deal.
The only think standing in the way of Cox or some other competitor coming to my neighborhood is that damn Monopoly the government gave Comcast. They bribe the politicians in order to keep the market all to themselves.
>>>Net neutrality deals with the roads connecting those stores.
Not really. Net neutrality is not necessary in the case of stores. Nobody tells Grocery Store A they "must" carry Oreo cookies. Why? Because if I want Oreos and store A doesn't have them, then I just go to store B, C, D, ... or P. Same would apply in a world where I could choose multiple internet providers. If Comcast is being a dick and won't let me access hulu.com, then I could switch to Cox, Time-warner, Verizon, ... or Apple ISP instead.
Net neutrality is only necessary in a world where choice doesn't exist. But in a world where choice DOES exist, the consumer has the power to say "screw you" and take his business somewhere else.
I'd rather give power to the consumer, not some distant stranger 2000 miles away.
>>>A private network using public resources (the aforementioned Rights of Way).
Which still cost us nothing. There was no money given to Comcast, and no property given either, since the local government still retains the title and can revoke Comcast's lease anytime it feels like it. QED the original comment about "we gave comcast billions of dollars" is flat wrong.
The more people get assistance to wireless internet, the more people will be signing-up for it, and the more congested the wireless spectrum will become. The FCC should not be pushing more-and-more people to go wireless.
BTW what do the poor need assistance for? My dialup is only 7 dollars a month. Anybody can afford that and gain internet access.
>>>Corporate owned media like NBC should be regarded as right-leaning.
Baloney. It's pretty obvious that NBC and MSNBC (same new organization) is close friends with the Democrats and the Green Parties. Hence the nickname DNC-NBC and the frequent stories about how to "be more green". They even went so far as to show video of a black man carrying a rifle, and then label him a "white racist, probably Republican" in one of their reports.
It's also a well-known fact the while corporations may own the media, their reporters almost all identify themselves as Democrat or liberal. They create stores that reflect that bias. (Same as the Republicans at FOX create stories reflecting their bias.)
>>>apart from the fact that FOX 8 is affiliated with the Fox network
Which means almost nothing. Being the station is not owned by FOX, they could decide tomorrow that FOX sucks, and switch to CW or MyNetTV or Univision instead. They are not tied down or controlled - they can do as they please.
>>>Your local government did that
An irrelevant distinction. The national government has also been known to hand-out monopolies to favored corporations, and thereby take-away the freedom of choice from citizens.
>>>The reason HD-DVD didn't take off was because they didn't allow porn.
You can tell Slashdot's moderation system is boekn when someone gets modded "informative" for telling a lie. HD-DVD allowed porn. In fact many sites offered a package deal - Buy the HD and get both HDDVD and Bluray discs (in the same package).
From Summary:
>>>"capable of holding more than 50 high-quality movie titles"
So short-sighted. These new discs would hold 50GB times 20 == 1000 gigabytes. It would be possible to hold an entire movie without having to use lossy compression. The picture would be flawless.
False.
USA Today, New York Times, and several other newspapers did an actual physical count of the Florida ballots. And with differing methods (handing chads as votes, or as rejects). They were trying to prove the Gore won.
They were surprised to discover that not only did Bush still win Florida, but the actual gap between the two grew wider than the official tally. i.e. "Evidence" shows Bush won that state.
>>>When the idiots don't realize the Communists fought against the Nazis.
There's no stronger fight than brother against brother. They were originally partners (prior to 1920s) and only split later on..The only difference between the National Socialists and the Communists is that the Natsi Party wanted to keep companies privatized. The Communist Party did not. In all other aspects they are almost identical - strong centralized power. - Elimination of undesirable populations. - Rise of a cult figure (Mussolini and Stalin respectively). Control of the media to spread propaganda. 5 or 10 year economic plans.
And on and on and on