>I mean think about it... any digital media player
>is basically a computer, and any media it plays
>is software. Trying to draw a distinction is a
>bit silly.
Well, I'm not so sure itmust absolutely be called "software". Are my mp3 song files "software", or are they "data" files? Is a.vcd encoded movie "software" or "data" files? Are the contents of VHS tapes considered to be analog computer software? I see a distinction between software and data. Anything on a DVD that is just encoded video content is a data file, not software.
Even though my DVD player (ie. digital media player), which is basically a computer, the software required to access the.vcd encoded movie data is built into the player firmware, and is not on every DVD disk. Very few of the DVDs I have include special "DVD-ROM" computer-only content, most of my DVD movies are just that and nothing more, and so the vast majority of my DVD collection cannot really be considered anything more than digitized video data.
Is there a strong, industry accepted definition of the term "software" out there that this DVD is software claim begs to be compared to?
I've been looking for a universal remote to replace the four I have now, but for the life of me I cannot find one that supports Apex DVD players. I'd like to have a nice remote supporting at least 8 devices, as I have a TV and VCR in another room that I wouldn't mind having in my main remote as well, and keep some room for later home theater expansion. Are there any suggestions for decent, affordable remotes like this that support Apex? I'd pay up to $90 or so, but I'd rather not pay the $300 that some super-hyper-mega-programmable remotes cost...
In the USA, we already have national ID cards. It's called a Social Security card... What are the chances that Oracle might possibly already be used to keep track of the Social Security system??
ABD reports that the planes attacking the world trade center towers in Manhattan were a Boeing 767 and 757, not sure which plane hit first. As seen on live TV, both towers have now collapsed, the World Trade center no longer exists. God only knows how many people were unable to escape the buildings before the collapse.
A third attack sent a plane into the Pentagon building in Washington DC. A portion of this buildnig has been destroyed, apparently the plane hit the side and penetrated into the inner courtyard area, the portion of the building hit has collapsed.
Earlier reports of a car-bomb outside the State building in Washington DC seem to be untrue, no such car-bomb has happened.
A fourth plane crash in the state of Pennsylvania has been reported to have happened, but no real details beyond that. At first it was said to have happened near Pittsburgh, but later said to have happened near Philadelphia.
A fifth plane had been reported unaccounted for after all airships in the USA were ordered to land immediately, a United Airlines flight. A plane has recently landed somewhere with the same origin as this missing United flight, but they were not yet certain if this was the same flight landing or not.
The FAA has grounded all flights in the USA and ordered all flights already in the air to land at the nearest airport immediately. Apparently Canada has ordered all Canadian flights grounded as well. This was done in the hopes of preventing any other possible hijacked kamikaze missions from completing.
> Besides, cheese is often placed in a mousetrap.
> This kind of technology feels like users are the
> ones being tempted by the cheese; what kind of
>trap are we getting into?
Imagine if the desperate dotcoms get overzealous in trying to improve their bottom line... If someone's mouse pointer lingers over something, this article says the surfer is interested in that thing. So the ecommerce site digs into Joe Normal's Passport records (thanks MS!) and charges one of these things to his credit card and ships it off. Joe Normal may have actually been interested in at least reading about that thing, but perhaps could not a tthe moment afford it, or was just curious but after reading found he wasn't actually interested after all. But this technology let the ecommerce site feel comfortable in taking his money without his explicit request to do so.
I wonder if MIT has taken into consideration another reason for shoving my pointer off to the right, to make another window over there the active one and get caught up in that task for a while, forgetting about the web page I left unattended for a while.
MIT surely doesn't intend for such dishonerable intentions to benefit from their research, but just imagine how many marketroids out there are drooling over the possibilities this sort of technology offers. They'll be selling you all kinds of stuff just because you got up to use the restroom and at the time your mouse pointer just happened to be sitting on top of something, and the couple minutes the pointer was there during your nature call someone decided you were interested and so sold you one and added you to a bunch of spam lists in that category...
>What did you expect? We're living in a democracy.
>It doesn't mean things will be OK, or even
>acceptable. It means that the country is
>(ideally) ruled by the majority of the people.
Unfortunately, the concept of rule of the majority is qietly fading away into a farcical front for the truth that the US government is being taken over by the big-money lobbyists. (MPAA, RIAA, etc.) Sure, we vote for vertain politicians, but who gives ludicrous amounts of money to their "campaign"?? You? Me? Or the MPAA? We individuals simply cannot compete with the campaign contribution power of the big-business conglomerates. If lobbying activities are not outlawed, then in the end we individuals will lose. People will eventually have no rights whatsoever, only huge corporations will have any rights. They will have all the rights. They will own us.
Now, while we attempt to educate the mindless sheep out there of what is going on with the DMCA, this FTAA thing, etc. we should also be working to outlaw lobbyist campaign (or any other politician purchases) money, which I think will go far in preventing new antifreedom laws from being passed, as politicians would again be at the mercy of the voter and not raping us of our rights in return for huge sums of cash from soul-less corporations.
Just use a big yellow plastic belt with lots of pockets in it, like Batman's utility belt. Or a bunch of calculator holsters... Might advertize just how geeky you might be, but would be a place for all your stuff.
So M$ is trying to say it's illegal for anyone to type new source code that will eventually go with their SDK, when the typist at the moment happens to be typing into a vi window sitting on a Linux desktop. Which would later be copied to a Windows machine for compilation with the sdk. An action that has abssolutely no influence over the licensing of M$'s SDK or even the typist's own written from scratch code. I wonder how this restriction of the EULA would hold up in court, if someone got caught typing code in vi on a Linux box, but did nothing other than that. Anything else would be identical to the same person typing the exact same code into notepad (yuck) or some other "M$ approved" text editor running on a Windows box, which would be perfectly legal according to the EULA. I don't at all understand their forbidding the use of certain text editor "tools", or what OS you run your text editor on. Yea, it's M$ and they would like to FUD people into typing their source code into Word running on Windows, but that doesn't have any sense to it at all, even by M$ standards. Telling me not to use a GPLed text editor to type my code into sounds like antitrust to me... But I'm not a lawyer, so what do I know.
No, you now have the Tao operating system with kludges to let it run ten year old software. Congratulations.
Uhm, no. DE doesn't run AmigaOS software from 10 years ago. Not 3 year old AmigaOS software or even brand new AmigaOS software either. AmigaDE only runs AmigaDE and Java software. It has no capability to run Motorola 68K code.
Maybe you don't, maybe other Amiga hatin'/. nazis don't, but some people do.
We don't WANT a new, unrelated hardware with the Amiga name slapped on it.
We WANT AmigaDOS 4.0 ported to modern hardware with a good mix of legacy software support and modern OS features.
Uhm, make up your mind. Do you want new hardware, or do you NOT want new, unrelated hardware with the Amiga name slapped on it? You can't have it both ways... Personally, I'd much rather have new hardware than not.
AmigaOS4.0+ is not totally contradictory to the DE announcements. They're seperate product lines developed by the same company. Companies can make more than one product you know... (All next week, on Ripley's believe it or not!) Heck, Even M$ does it. Amiga Inc. claims that AmigaDE will run on AmigaOS 5.x. That's ain't contradictory to the previous DE announcements, it's just additional stuff, not instead-of stuff.
And why does once owning 3 Amigas make you such a serious voice on this topic? I currently have 3 Amigas (2000, 1200, 4000T - my main computer at home) in operation, many not in operation (1000, 500s), but that doesn't make me any more special than you, or Joe Schmoe who never owned one, on this topic.
Allright..There's something i've been meaning to ask here. The biggest question that haunts the whole Amiga picture is: why bother?
Why not? Are you against competition in the market? Would you rather all "alternative" platforms gave up hope and M$ took over 100% of the market?
If Amiga Inc. had put the exact same product together that they are currently working on, but named it anything else, the/. nazis ould probably be all for it, as it's not M$, it's usable on multiple platforms, and makes life much easier when "porting" code to another machine/host OS. Why does/. like anything and everything out there (in the non-M$ category that is) except Amiga? I'd just like to know why other smallish platforms like QNX (another good product with a relatively small market share) and BeOS (a nearly dead company) get so much respect, but the word "Amiga" does not. Please explain... Why is it OK to ask what the best real estate web site is, or talk about some obscure book, but any true news happening related to the brand name "Amiga" immediately gets frowned upon so severely here???
With Microsoft owning most of the known universe, why should anyone bother with Linux? It's harder to install and configure than Windows is. It has less apps available to use. It has far far less games than Windows. Yet you're allowed to talk about Linux here but we dare not mention the A-word, when Amiga has less apps and games than Windows - just like Linux. How many Linux IPOs are now bankrupt? Amiga Inc. is still in business... How is the Linux market such a better place to be?
I mean it. There is a plethora of OS' at the moment, any one of which -could- be easily either used as-is, or extended to suit the purpose
of the Amiga.
You obviously don't know what Amiga Inc. are doing then. AmigaDE can be either a new OS or hosted on some other OS. Some PDAs or set-top type devices may get "native" AmigaDE, with no other OS involved. Others, like the Sharp Zaurus, and desktop class computers, will use some other OS and AmigaDE will sit on top of that, be it Linux or Windows or whatever. In this way it acts more like an API than an OS, an API available standalone, or on top of Windows, Linux, etc. to make cross-platform development easier, sortof like Java does. One advantage it has over Java is that it's not interpreted, DE code gets compiled natively to multiple instruction sets, so should run faster than JVMs do on x86, PowerPC, ARM, MIPs, etc.
And for you "Amiga is dead" nazis, DE doesn't run on the old Amiga hardware you're thinking of! It's totally unrelated to that! It's barely born yet... (though they claim t will eventually run on new Amiga hardware which is also yet to be released) DE currently only exists outside of Amiga Inc. as a Linux and/or Windows hosted development kit or in the Sharp Zaurus PDA.
"It's not dead, Jim, I've never seen anything quite like it"
And for all those Amiganoids out there: STOP PUSHING FOR AMIGA RELATED NEWS!!! Slashdot is a Linux site, nothing more!
Yea, that's why there's all that Linux related black hole/origin of the universe/what real estate web site is best news on/. right? It seems/. is a community happy to talk about anything except the new Amiga platform, which is not related to what they claim is "old and dead" in any way other than brand name on the label. AmigaDE is no more old and dead than any other brand new technology, which AmigaDE is. Now go and make Linux as easy to configure and use as my computer at home is, all you/. nazis, if you do then maybe I'll get it working right someday on my junker PC. It doesn't seem to like having two NE2000 cards installed.
USers need MS-OFFICE to stay in bussiness or keep their jobs. Explain to the CEO who sent you a.doc file, that you can't read it because you bought an amiga?
Uhm, I can't read M$.doc files at work, and they supplied my Sun Ultra 5 workstation... I don't even have a PC to use.
Besides, this PDA/Amiga news has nothing to do with anything you Linux nazis are thinking of. This platform isn't ancient, old or dead. It is currently only available in the Sharp Zaurus comercially, and as a development kit for developers. It's completely unrelated to Amiga hardware or the older AmigaOS in the same way that Windows, Linux, or Beos or QNX is unrelated to Amiga hardware or older AmigaOS.
I almost cringe when there's Amiga news posted to/. as all you morons all start crying "it's dead, forget it" when the news is completely unrelated to what you're whining about, other than the brand name on the label./.ers love talking about the latest science or useless Linux utilities, but any post with the word "amiga" in it is immediately bombarded with uneducated comments. This situation seriously degraded my opinion of the/. community, as you all have absolutely no respect for anything not Linux.
Guess what? I use an Amiga at home, I have plenty of apps and games, and am very happy with it. I don't really need Windows or Linux or BeOS to be happy, as I already am. Why replace something that still gets the job done well, "just because it's old"???
Your same argument works well against Linux BTW...
OK, so basically what is going on, is It's illegal for us to crack our way into www.microsoft.com and add our own links there, but it's perfectly OK for Microsoft to add links to our web pages? Sorry, but I don't think that's fair. If they can make any sort of edit at all to anyone else's pages, via any methods, which includes the addition of previously absent links ("beneficial" or not), then whoever has a web site altered in this fashion should be automatically granted the right to edit Microsoft's web pages. It's only fair.
I don't really agree that anything not free/open is evil and must absolutely fail. I believe there is a place for both free/open software and proprietary stuff. Besides, there's always AROS which is what this guy asks for, an open AmigaOS clone that even runs on x86 hardware.
I've used Linux. I've tried QNX. I use Solaris at work. I can't stand Windows. Guess what I use at home? My old Amiga A4000T, which was manufactured over two years AFTER Commodore went bankrupt. It's simply the most pleasant platform I've ever used, and regardless of what people consider dead or not, I'll use it until it won't turn on anymore. After that happens, I'll be using the new motherboard due for release soon. (Using the standard Mac ZIF modules to have a speedy CPU, pretty darn spiffy idea there... And I don't care if it costs more than an x86 PC hardware - I already have one of those and rarely use it.)
So, these magnets were invented in 1982. It only takes almost 20 years to decide to sue people? Come on... If this was a legit issue, why would they not have sued long ago?
I think there should be some sort of time limit on patent suits. If something is patented, the patent owner should have a set amount of time to sue potential infringers once the infringing product is on the market. If the patent owner delays suits beyond that time limit (like letting everyone saturate the market with infringing products and then sue for back-license dues) then the suit should have strict limitations of what it can ask for, in order to prevent "tricking" other companies into later owing gobs of money to the previously non-threatening patent holder.
I agree that having both native ports and Windows compatibility is good.
But, the market at large might lean on good compatibility too much, seeing it as too much work to make both Windows and Linux native versions when a Windows native version might run acceptably via Wine. Consider the old 8-bit days, the Commodore 64 was phenominally popular. Then they made the Commodore 128, which was a newer/better machine but had a switch on it to basically turn it into a C=64. The market trand was to keep writing C=64 software, which ran on the millions of older C=64 machines and also the new 128's. Not a great deal of C=128 native software was made, as the market was smaller then the combined C=64/128 markets for 64 native software.
This is the only problem I see with both compatibility and native ports: if compatibility is "too good", why write the software twice, when writing it once is almost as good?
Well, if this bill requires censorware with computers sold WITH an OS, then seperate the OS and computer in the sale. The dealer can set up everything and get the OS installed on the hard drive, but then remove the drive from the computer before, ship it seperately with a second invoice. Is there enough loophole in the bill for something like this? It basically gives you what you want, all you have to do yourself is to plug in the hard drive (or if you're unable then find a friend who can)
Where is the line drawn regarding "personal computer"? My employer is setting up a chip fab in Texas someplace, do the PCs there absolutely ahve to have censorware, increasing hte price? What about workstations? We're big on Sun solaris boxen as well... Does Texas distinguish between PCs and workstations? And what about the fact that "personal computer" and "PC" have come to mean wintel box?
Or perhaps linux dealers can market PC hardware with linux as workstation class machines, and slide around that "personal computer" terminology in the bill??
> Will there be a commision that defines what is
> spam and what is not? What if companies started
> putting in the fine print something like "...by
> agreeing to this you also agree to alow
> COMPANY_X to send you email with store
> information" or something along those
> lines. That was a lame example, but I am sure
> some sleazy lawyer could figure out a way to
> fool people into aggreeing to accept spam.
It should be requred that the "intended victim" recipient of spam specifically check a (default non-checked) box which must be clearely labeled something along the lines of "I agree to accept email advertizements from this specific company but not implicitly any other company by checking here). Or some other comparable, absolutely obvious opt-in, adn this should be absolutely specific to one company. To opt-in to many companys' "newsletters" one must specifically check all desired opt-in boxes specific to each individual company.
In my experience receiving lots of spam, regardless of the country codes on the emails, most of it points back to companies in the USA. Any American law should cover emails sent by or on behalf of any American company. This would not only protect us from American spam sent directly from an american email server/address or hiring an american marketing firm to do the actual spam using it's own email servers/addresses, but will also protect us from that company emailing us directly themselves using overseas email servers/addreses under their control, and also protect us from american companies from spamming us indirectly by hiring overseas marketing companies to do the actual spamming using their own overseas servers/addresses (or even american servers/addresses controlled by such marketing firm). (Enough babble in that last sentence??) What I envision is not just protection from those directly responsible for the email in my inbox, but also protection from anyone indirectly responsbile. So that no matter how many times the manufacturer/service company changes marketing firms, I should never again receive an email about that product or service, so long as that product/service company resides in the USA.
In addition, we in te USA should be allowed to tell the American marketing firms we don't want spam related to ANY of their past/current/future marketing clients, regardless of product or service, as in a global opt-out that pre-empts default "opt-ins" to any marketing lists created after we request removal.
Now, this likely wouldn't apply for protecting Americans from overseas product/service companies, or overseas marketing/smapping firms, but considering the distribution of spammers residing in each country, it should at least reduce the amount of crap in my inbox quite a bit. But I'm sure there's enough loopholes in any implementation of any law to keep spam going regardless. (like that loopholed injunction against MS packaging their OS and MSIE products together)
Who do you think will go up against the wall first when the revolution comes? MS or known spammers?
This comment was the most amusing thing I've seen in quite a long time. I wonder if MS has Weird Al's song "Everything You Know Is Wrong" playing over the PA system 24/7... Couldn't be far off...
Today, the corporations are pretty much in charge, haven't you noticed? Bush's attorney general will likely drop the MS antitrust case I fear, and did MS not give a rather respectable donation to the Bush campaign? (And also to Gore's campaign, just in case he won...) The lobbiests own the politicians. My biggest complaint is that we the general people don't have the kind of cash to lobby our elected officials with, so who's going to own the politicians, the big-money corporations, or me and my spare $50?? I think we should outlaw lobbiest activities, which is what will probably get these voting machines approved.
I don't quite understand why everyone keeps saying "let Amiga die" when posts of this new thing are made. This new "Amiga" SDK is as closely related to what people remember from "10 years ago" as Windows ME is. This new SDK environment is completely new, why let it die? Remember folks, the ONLY think this SDK has in common with what you're remembering from long ago is the NAME, and NOTHING ELSE. As an Amiga fan/obsessor/whatever, I'm concerned with them using the Amiga name for this totally "not-Amiga" thing. But the concept IS interesting in its own right. Perhaps we should all shun QNX for the soul fact that they were partnered with Amiga back when Amiga was owned with Gateway... Or we could realize that would be silly as QNX is a totally unrelated product from what you remember from "10 years ago". Besides, My old Amiga computer does a fine job with the things I use it for. Why toss it out and buy all the PC equivalent hardware/software just for the sake of having something you would respct??? I'm quite happy with my platform, thank you. Never did get Linux running on my junker 486 as a gateway between my high-bandwidth internet connection and my LAN, didn't want to recognize two identical NE2000 cards or install a freshly compiled kernel with a monolithic NE2000 driver (which I understood was how to use multiple identical network cards). Got my old A2000 running again and does a fine job at this task, why should I instead buy a PC???
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>I mean think about it... any digital media player
.vcd encoded movie "software" or "data" files? Are the contents of VHS tapes considered to be analog computer software? I see a distinction between software and data. Anything on a DVD that is just encoded video content is a data file, not software.
.vcd encoded movie data is built into the player firmware, and is not on every DVD disk. Very few of the DVDs I have include special "DVD-ROM" computer-only content, most of my DVD movies are just that and nothing more, and so the vast majority of my DVD collection cannot really be considered anything more than digitized video data.
>is basically a computer, and any media it plays
>is software. Trying to draw a distinction is a
>bit silly.
Well, I'm not so sure itmust absolutely be called "software". Are my mp3 song files "software", or are they "data" files? Is a
Even though my DVD player (ie. digital media player), which is basically a computer, the software required to access the
Is there a strong, industry accepted definition of the term "software" out there that this DVD is software claim begs to be compared to?
I've been looking for a universal remote to replace the four I have now, but for the life of me I cannot find one that supports Apex DVD players. I'd like to have a nice remote supporting at least 8 devices, as I have a TV and VCR in another room that I wouldn't mind having in my main remote as well, and keep some room for later home theater expansion. Are there any suggestions for decent, affordable remotes like this that support Apex? I'd pay up to $90 or so, but I'd rather not pay the $300 that some super-hyper-mega-programmable remotes cost...
In the USA, we already have national ID cards. It's called a Social Security card... What are the chances that Oracle might possibly already be used to keep track of the Social Security system??
ABD reports that the planes attacking the world trade center towers in Manhattan were a Boeing 767 and 757, not sure which plane hit first. As seen on live TV, both towers have now collapsed, the World Trade center no longer exists. God only knows how many people were unable to escape the buildings before the collapse.
A third attack sent a plane into the Pentagon building in Washington DC. A portion of this buildnig has been destroyed, apparently the plane hit the side and penetrated into the inner courtyard area, the portion of the building hit has collapsed.
Earlier reports of a car-bomb outside the State building in Washington DC seem to be untrue, no such car-bomb has happened.
A fourth plane crash in the state of Pennsylvania has been reported to have happened, but no real details beyond that. At first it was said to have happened near Pittsburgh, but later said to have happened near Philadelphia.
A fifth plane had been reported unaccounted for after all airships in the USA were ordered to land immediately, a United Airlines flight. A plane has recently landed somewhere with the same origin as this missing United flight, but they were not yet certain if this was the same flight landing or not.
The FAA has grounded all flights in the USA and ordered all flights already in the air to land at the nearest airport immediately. Apparently Canada has ordered all Canadian flights grounded as well. This was done in the hopes of preventing any other possible hijacked kamikaze missions from completing.
> Besides, cheese is often placed in a mousetrap.
> This kind of technology feels like users are the
> ones being tempted by the cheese; what kind of
>trap are we getting into?
Imagine if the desperate dotcoms get overzealous in trying to improve their bottom line... If someone's mouse pointer lingers over something, this article says the surfer is interested in that thing. So the ecommerce site digs into Joe Normal's Passport records (thanks MS!) and charges one of these things to his credit card and ships it off. Joe Normal may have actually been interested in at least reading about that thing, but perhaps could not a tthe moment afford it, or was just curious but after reading found he wasn't actually interested after all. But this technology let the ecommerce site feel comfortable in taking his money without his explicit request to do so.
I wonder if MIT has taken into consideration another reason for shoving my pointer off to the right, to make another window over there the active one and get caught up in that task for a while, forgetting about the web page I left unattended for a while.
MIT surely doesn't intend for such dishonerable intentions to benefit from their research, but just imagine how many marketroids out there are drooling over the possibilities this sort of technology offers. They'll be selling you all kinds of stuff just because you got up to use the restroom and at the time your mouse pointer just happened to be sitting on top of something, and the couple minutes the pointer was there during your nature call someone decided you were interested and so sold you one and added you to a bunch of spam lists in that category...
>What did you expect? We're living in a democracy.
>It doesn't mean things will be OK, or even
>acceptable. It means that the country is
>(ideally) ruled by the majority of the people.
Unfortunately, the concept of rule of the majority is qietly fading away into a farcical front for the truth that the US government is being taken over by the big-money lobbyists. (MPAA, RIAA, etc.) Sure, we vote for vertain politicians, but who gives ludicrous amounts of money to their "campaign"?? You? Me? Or the MPAA? We individuals simply cannot compete with the campaign contribution power of the big-business conglomerates. If lobbying activities are not outlawed, then in the end we individuals will lose. People will eventually have no rights whatsoever, only huge corporations will have any rights. They will have all the rights. They will own us.
Now, while we attempt to educate the mindless sheep out there of what is going on with the DMCA, this FTAA thing, etc. we should also be working to outlaw lobbyist campaign (or any other politician purchases) money, which I think will go far in preventing new antifreedom laws from being passed, as politicians would again be at the mercy of the voter and not raping us of our rights in return for huge sums of cash from soul-less corporations.
Just use a big yellow plastic belt with lots of pockets in it, like Batman's utility belt. Or a bunch of calculator holsters... Might advertize just how geeky you might be, but would be a place for all your stuff.
So M$ is trying to say it's illegal for anyone to type new source code that will eventually go with their SDK, when the typist at the moment happens to be typing into a vi window sitting on a Linux desktop. Which would later be copied to a Windows machine for compilation with the sdk. An action that has abssolutely no influence over the licensing of M$'s SDK or even the typist's own written from scratch code. I wonder how this restriction of the EULA would hold up in court, if someone got caught typing code in vi on a Linux box, but did nothing other than that. Anything else would be identical to the same person typing the exact same code into notepad (yuck) or some other "M$ approved" text editor running on a Windows box, which would be perfectly legal according to the EULA. I don't at all understand their forbidding the use of certain text editor "tools", or what OS you run your text editor on. Yea, it's M$ and they would like to FUD people into typing their source code into Word running on Windows, but that doesn't have any sense to it at all, even by M$ standards. Telling me not to use a GPLed text editor to type my code into sounds like antitrust to me... But I'm not a lawyer, so what do I know.
No, you now have the Tao operating system with kludges to let it run ten year old software. Congratulations.
Uhm, no. DE doesn't run AmigaOS software from 10 years ago. Not 3 year old AmigaOS software or even brand new AmigaOS software either. AmigaDE only runs AmigaDE and Java software. It has no capability to run Motorola 68K code.
Kiki was in the group that left Newtek to make Play! Inc.
We don't WANT Amiga DE.
/. nazis don't, but some people do.
Maybe you don't, maybe other Amiga hatin'
We don't WANT a new, unrelated hardware with the Amiga name slapped on it.
We WANT AmigaDOS 4.0 ported to modern hardware with a good mix of legacy software support and modern OS features. Uhm, make up your mind. Do you want new hardware, or do you NOT want new, unrelated hardware with the Amiga name slapped on it? You can't have it both ways... Personally, I'd much rather have new hardware than not.
AmigaOS4.0+ is not totally contradictory to the DE announcements. They're seperate product lines developed by the same company. Companies can make more than one product you know... (All next week, on Ripley's believe it or not!) Heck, Even M$ does it. Amiga Inc. claims that AmigaDE will run on AmigaOS 5.x. That's ain't contradictory to the previous DE announcements, it's just additional stuff, not instead-of stuff.
And why does once owning 3 Amigas make you such a serious voice on this topic? I currently have 3 Amigas (2000, 1200, 4000T - my main computer at home) in operation, many not in operation (1000, 500s), but that doesn't make me any more special than you, or Joe Schmoe who never owned one, on this topic.
Allright..There's something i've been meaning to ask here. The biggest question that haunts the whole Amiga picture is: why bother?
/. nazis ould probably be all for it, as it's not M$, it's usable on multiple platforms, and makes life much easier when "porting" code to another machine/host OS. Why does /. like anything and everything out there (in the non-M$ category that is) except Amiga? I'd just like to know why other smallish platforms like QNX (another good product with a relatively small market share) and BeOS (a nearly dead company) get so much respect, but the word "Amiga" does not. Please explain... Why is it OK to ask what the best real estate web site is, or talk about some obscure book, but any true news happening related to the brand name "Amiga" immediately gets frowned upon so severely here???
Why not? Are you against competition in the market? Would you rather all "alternative" platforms gave up hope and M$ took over 100% of the market?
If Amiga Inc. had put the exact same product together that they are currently working on, but named it anything else, the
With Microsoft owning most of the known universe, why should anyone bother with Linux? It's harder to install and configure than Windows is. It has less apps available to use. It has far far less games than Windows. Yet you're allowed to talk about Linux here but we dare not mention the A-word, when Amiga has less apps and games than Windows - just like Linux. How many Linux IPOs are now bankrupt? Amiga Inc. is still in business... How is the Linux market such a better place to be?
I mean it. There is a plethora of OS' at the moment, any one of which -could- be easily either used as-is, or extended to suit the purpose of the Amiga.
You obviously don't know what Amiga Inc. are doing then. AmigaDE can be either a new OS or hosted on some other OS. Some PDAs or set-top type devices may get "native" AmigaDE, with no other OS involved. Others, like the Sharp Zaurus, and desktop class computers, will use some other OS and AmigaDE will sit on top of that, be it Linux or Windows or whatever. In this way it acts more like an API than an OS, an API available standalone, or on top of Windows, Linux, etc. to make cross-platform development easier, sortof like Java does. One advantage it has over Java is that it's not interpreted, DE code gets compiled natively to multiple instruction sets, so should run faster than JVMs do on x86, PowerPC, ARM, MIPs, etc. And for you "Amiga is dead" nazis, DE doesn't run on the old Amiga hardware you're thinking of! It's totally unrelated to that! It's barely born yet... (though they claim t will eventually run on new Amiga hardware which is also yet to be released) DE currently only exists outside of Amiga Inc. as a Linux and/or Windows hosted development kit or in the Sharp Zaurus PDA.
"It's not dead, Jim, I've never seen anything quite like it"
And for all those Amiganoids out there: STOP PUSHING FOR AMIGA RELATED NEWS!!! Slashdot is a Linux site, nothing more!
/. right? It seems /. is a community happy to talk about anything except the new Amiga platform, which is not related to what they claim is "old and dead" in any way other than brand name on the label. AmigaDE is no more old and dead than any other brand new technology, which AmigaDE is. Now go and make Linux as easy to configure and use as my computer at home is, all you /. nazis, if you do then maybe I'll get it working right someday on my junker PC. It doesn't seem to like having two NE2000 cards installed.
Yea, that's why there's all that Linux related black hole/origin of the universe/what real estate web site is best news on
USers need MS-OFFICE to stay in bussiness or keep their jobs. Explain to the CEO who sent you a .doc file, that you can't read it because you bought an amiga?
Uhm, I can't read M$ .doc files at work, and they supplied my Sun Ultra 5 workstation... I don't even have a PC to use.
Besides, this PDA/Amiga news has nothing to do with anything you Linux nazis are thinking of. This platform isn't ancient, old or dead. It is currently only available in the Sharp Zaurus comercially, and as a development kit for developers. It's completely unrelated to Amiga hardware or the older AmigaOS in the same way that Windows, Linux, or Beos or QNX is unrelated to Amiga hardware or older AmigaOS.
I almost cringe when there's Amiga news posted to /. as all you morons all start crying "it's dead, forget it" when the news is completely unrelated to what you're whining about, other than the brand name on the label. /.ers love talking about the latest science or useless Linux utilities, but any post with the word "amiga" in it is immediately bombarded with uneducated comments. This situation seriously degraded my opinion of the /. community, as you all have absolutely no respect for anything not Linux.
Guess what? I use an Amiga at home, I have plenty of apps and games, and am very happy with it. I don't really need Windows or Linux or BeOS to be happy, as I already am. Why replace something that still gets the job done well, "just because it's old"???
Your same argument works well against Linux BTW...
OK, so basically what is going on, is It's illegal for us to crack our way into www.microsoft.com and add our own links there, but it's perfectly OK for Microsoft to add links to our web pages? Sorry, but I don't think that's fair. If they can make any sort of edit at all to anyone else's pages, via any methods, which includes the addition of previously absent links ("beneficial" or not), then whoever has a web site altered in this fashion should be automatically granted the right to edit Microsoft's web pages. It's only fair.
I don't really agree that anything not free/open is
evil and must absolutely fail. I believe there is a place
for both free/open software and proprietary stuff.
Besides, there's always AROS which is what this guy
asks for, an open AmigaOS clone that even runs on
x86 hardware.
I've used Linux. I've tried QNX. I use Solaris at work.
I can't stand Windows. Guess what I use at home? My old
Amiga A4000T, which was manufactured over two years AFTER
Commodore went bankrupt. It's simply the most pleasant platform
I've ever used, and regardless of what people consider dead
or not, I'll use it until it won't turn on anymore. After that
happens, I'll be using the new motherboard due for release
soon. (Using the standard Mac ZIF modules to have a speedy CPU,
pretty darn spiffy idea there... And I don't care if it costs
more than an x86 PC hardware - I already have one of those
and rarely use it.)
So, these magnets were invented in 1982. It only takes almost 20 years to decide to sue people? Come on... If this was a legit issue, why would they not have sued long ago?
I think there should be some sort of time limit on patent suits. If something is patented, the patent owner should have a set amount of time to sue potential infringers once the infringing product is on the market. If the patent owner delays suits beyond that time limit (like letting everyone saturate the market with infringing products and then sue for back-license dues) then the suit should have strict limitations of what it can ask for, in order to prevent "tricking" other companies into later owing gobs of money to the previously non-threatening patent holder.
I agree that having both native ports and Windows compatibility is good.
But, the market at large might lean on good compatibility too much, seeing it as too much work to make both Windows and Linux native versions when a Windows native version might run acceptably via Wine. Consider the old 8-bit days, the Commodore 64 was phenominally popular. Then they made the Commodore 128, which was a newer/better machine but had a switch on it to basically turn it into a C=64. The market trand was to keep writing C=64 software, which ran on the millions of older C=64 machines and also the new 128's. Not a great deal of C=128 native software was made, as the market was smaller then the combined C=64/128 markets for 64 native software.
This is the only problem I see with both compatibility and native ports: if compatibility is "too good", why write the software twice, when writing it once is almost as good?
Well, if this bill requires censorware with computers sold WITH an OS, then seperate the OS and computer in the sale. The dealer can set up everything and get the OS installed on the hard drive, but then remove the drive from the computer before, ship it seperately with a second invoice. Is there enough loophole in the bill for something like this? It basically gives you what you want, all you have to do yourself is to plug in the hard drive (or if you're unable then find a friend who can) Where is the line drawn regarding "personal computer"? My employer is setting up a chip fab in Texas someplace, do the PCs there absolutely ahve to have censorware, increasing hte price? What about workstations? We're big on Sun solaris boxen as well... Does Texas distinguish between PCs and workstations? And what about the fact that "personal computer" and "PC" have come to mean wintel box? Or perhaps linux dealers can market PC hardware with linux as workstation class machines, and slide around that "personal computer" terminology in the bill??
> Will there be a commision that defines what is
> spam and what is not? What if companies started
> putting in the fine print something like "...by
> agreeing to this you also agree to alow
> COMPANY_X to send you email with store
> information" or something along those
> lines. That was a lame example, but I am sure
> some sleazy lawyer could figure out a way to
> fool people into aggreeing to accept spam.
It should be requred that the "intended victim" recipient of spam specifically check a (default non-checked) box which must be clearely labeled something along the lines of "I agree to accept email advertizements from this specific company but not implicitly any other company by checking here). Or some other comparable, absolutely obvious opt-in, adn this should be absolutely specific to one company. To opt-in to many companys' "newsletters" one must specifically check all desired opt-in boxes specific to each individual company.
In my experience receiving lots of spam, regardless of the country codes on the emails, most of it points back to companies in the USA. Any American law should cover emails sent by or on behalf of any American company. This would not only protect us from American spam sent directly from an american email server/address or hiring an american marketing firm to do the actual spam using it's own email servers/addresses, but will also protect us from that company emailing us directly themselves using overseas email servers/addreses under their control, and also protect us from american companies from spamming us indirectly by hiring overseas marketing companies to do the actual spamming using their own overseas servers/addresses (or even american servers/addresses controlled by such marketing firm). (Enough babble in that last sentence??) What I envision is not just protection from those directly responsible for the email in my inbox, but also protection from anyone indirectly responsbile. So that no matter how many times the manufacturer/service company changes marketing firms, I should never again receive an email about that product or service, so long as that product/service company resides in the USA.
In addition, we in te USA should be allowed to tell the American marketing firms we don't want spam related to ANY of their past/current/future marketing clients, regardless of product or service, as in a global opt-out that pre-empts default "opt-ins" to any marketing lists created after we request removal.
Now, this likely wouldn't apply for protecting Americans from overseas product/service companies, or overseas marketing/smapping firms, but considering the distribution of spammers residing in each country, it should at least reduce the amount of crap in my inbox quite a bit. But I'm sure there's enough loopholes in any implementation of any law to keep spam going regardless. (like that loopholed injunction against MS packaging their OS and MSIE products together)
Who do you think will go up against the wall first when the revolution comes? MS or known spammers?
This comment was the most amusing thing I've seen in quite a long time. I wonder if MS has Weird Al's song "Everything You Know Is Wrong" playing over the PA system 24/7... Couldn't be far off...
Today, the corporations are pretty much in charge, haven't you noticed? Bush's attorney general will likely drop the MS antitrust case I fear, and did MS not give a rather respectable donation to the Bush campaign? (And also to Gore's campaign, just in case he won...) The lobbiests own the politicians. My biggest complaint is that we the general people don't have the kind of cash to lobby our elected officials with, so who's going to own the politicians, the big-money corporations, or me and my spare $50?? I think we should outlaw lobbiest activities, which is what will probably get these voting machines approved.
I don't quite understand why everyone keeps saying "let Amiga die" when posts of this new thing are made. This new "Amiga" SDK is as closely related to what people remember from "10 years ago" as Windows ME is. This new SDK environment is completely new, why let it die? Remember folks, the ONLY think this SDK has in common with what you're remembering from long ago is the NAME, and NOTHING ELSE. As an Amiga fan/obsessor/whatever, I'm concerned with them using the Amiga name for this totally "not-Amiga" thing. But the concept IS interesting in its own right. Perhaps we should all shun QNX for the soul fact that they were partnered with Amiga back when Amiga was owned with Gateway... Or we could realize that would be silly as QNX is a totally unrelated product from what you remember from "10 years ago". Besides, My old Amiga computer does a fine job with the things I use it for. Why toss it out and buy all the PC equivalent hardware/software just for the sake of having something you would respct??? I'm quite happy with my platform, thank you. Never did get Linux running on my junker 486 as a gateway between my high-bandwidth internet connection and my LAN, didn't want to recognize two identical NE2000 cards or install a freshly compiled kernel with a monolithic NE2000 driver (which I understood was how to use multiple identical network cards). Got my old A2000 running again and does a fine job at this task, why should I instead buy a PC???