When my father was in the air force, he was on a base that maintained SR-71's. He applied to the program for SR-71 maintenance, and they had to do a background check since it was a secret program.
When the background check came back, they denied him clearance on the grounds that he lied on his air force enlistment papers. The lie? He said that his mother was born in Germany when in actual fact, she was born in Austria.
The funny thing is, he didn't know she was born in Austria, and she didn't know she was born in Austria. The background check revealed that she was adopted by a german family, another fact that she didn't know her whole life up until that point.
One of my favorite activities in my Amiga days was to hexedit the saved game files in RPGs, etc. Of course setting the money to "FFFFFFFF" was always nice, but I really liked finding where the inventory items were and systematically putting new items in there. Sometimes I'd find some awesome weapons/items that never appeared in the game map, but were coded in anyway.
The movie's most redeeming quality is that, being two hours long and somehow compelling Katz to watch it twice kept "jonkatz" posts off of Slashdot for four whole hours.
I can't believe many people are getting caught up in this total marketing scam. The only thing they are taking from the old Amiga is the name. I mean, it's great that they are trying to build a new platform and all, but why call it the Amiga? What does the old Amiga of 1984 have to do with this thing at all?
No Kidding. The original Amiga was designed around specialized custom hardware (Denise, etc.), so that it could blow away other platforms in applications and games that were heavy on graphics and sound.
The thrust of the "New Amiga" it seems is the exact opposite. General hardware? Why not just call it JavaOS or something like that?
In my heart and mind, a "New Amiga" for today's marketplace would be built around something like the (newly-opened) Sony Emotion Engine (perhaps even as a coprocessor to a PPC core in a sort of non-symmetric multiprocessing arrangement), with NVidia graphics and a 16 audio channels worth of high-caliber TI DSP's right on the Mobo. Give it RGB, SV, NTSC, and PAL video outs.
Make it expandible but keep it in a small box (no towers full of empty space). Don't waste money on making it too expandible; solder where it will save a buck. Chances are when a component of your machine goes obsolete, so does the whole system. (Look at patterns of upgrades today. It's very common to buy a new system, since incremental upgrading will always run into incompatiobilities eventually.)
Allow it to boot without a keyboard, for crying out loud. The machine should be as comfortable in the role of a gaming machine as music or video studio. Put it together and whaddaya got? A relatively cheap (in bang for the buck) machine that produces the same kid-at-Christmas feeling we all got from our original Amigas.
You can say that it would never fly today because of blah blah blah, but at least it would deserve the Amiga name.
Bingo Foo
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Re:DeCSS is neither for Linux, nor for piracy
on
DeCSS Update
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· Score: 1
Now it is also true, that libertarian societies are rare...
True, but your definition of libertarian (as I get it from the context of your post) is incorrect. The creator, owner, seller, and buyer all have rights that they selfisly protect in a libertarian society. Are you saying that creators and sellers should not be allowed the same pursuit of self-interest that the buyers are?
Bingo Foo
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Re:The only thing to be done...
on
DeCSS Update
·
· Score: 1
There is only one thing left to do... stop watching MPAA movies entirely.
Exactly. Real market pressures are the best way to effect this change.
The problem here is that MPAA members constitue a colluding monopoly, since regardless of market pressures (witness the/. outcry), no member can break ranks to sell DVDs under different (more open) licensing without being subject to other anticompetitive practices by the remaining MPAA members.
Bingo Foo
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Re:DeCSS is neither for Linux, nor for piracy
on
DeCSS Update
·
· Score: 1
One of the basic principles of our society is that people have the right to use and dispose of their personal possessions however they see fit. The recent trend toward licensure of goods instead of sales threatens to undermine that principle by stripping the common man of his ability to own any possesions at all; instead he will license them and use them at the suffrance of the companies who retain ownership.
But merchants have a right to sell what they choose to sell. If a merchant wants to sell a license to information instead of the information itself, what's to stop them?
Look at how major software packages are sold/licensed. Where I work, we use a large 3D modeling and meshing package. We can buy a license for the software at an annual cost of $20k, entitling us to upgrades during that period, or we can buy the software itself for $100k, enabling us to use it permanently, but we get no upgrades for that cost.
The vendor does not have to provde both of those options, but they choose to. Would your argument change if you could buy a limited [time|place|platform] license to view a DVD for $20 or the DVD and rights to its contents for $100? (with restrictions on redistribution, of course).
I have a feeling even if media manufacturers/distributors moved to this model of sales,/.'ers and Napster theives would whine about outpricing our inalienable rights to "use" our posessions, etc.
Remember that MPAA/RIAA members do own the copyright on their movies and music, and they are not obligated to distribute or sell them to you at all. Bingo Foo
Does SGI have any plans to have a uniform set of desktop and media tools (4dwm, Indigo Magic, toolchest, fm, media convert, etc) between their linux and IRIX distributions in the future? ... Slightly-modified KDE or GNOME won't impress me.
I was told by an sgi rep that there are no plans to port the Indigo Magic Desktop to Linux. Part of the problem is the custom motif-based widgets (hooray for the drop-pocket!!!) that make up the apps are tied up in closed source licensing.
I have scoured search engines for a couple years now looking for someone porting at least the look and feel of those thoughtful, if oversized, widgets to an OSS toolkit. No luck so far.
Have you ever heard of private networks? You can have a TCP/IP network with its own internal numbering and no connection to the outside internet. What router did you think would pass your packets to the satellite's uplink antenna?
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When the background check came back, they denied him clearance on the grounds that he lied on his air force enlistment papers. The lie? He said that his mother was born in Germany when in actual fact, she was born in Austria.
The funny thing is, he didn't know she was born in Austria, and she didn't know she was born in Austria. The background check revealed that she was adopted by a german family, another fact that she didn't know her whole life up until that point.
Bingo Foo
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Bingo Foo
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Bingo Foo
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> It is pronounced ah-mee-gah.
You mean it's not "am-I-gay?"
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No Kidding. The original Amiga was designed around specialized custom hardware (Denise, etc.), so that it could blow away other platforms in applications and games that were heavy on graphics and sound.
The thrust of the "New Amiga" it seems is the exact opposite. General hardware? Why not just call it JavaOS or something like that?
In my heart and mind, a "New Amiga" for today's marketplace would be built around something like the (newly-opened) Sony Emotion Engine (perhaps even as a coprocessor to a PPC core in a sort of non-symmetric multiprocessing arrangement), with NVidia graphics and a 16 audio channels worth of high-caliber TI DSP's right on the Mobo. Give it RGB, SV, NTSC, and PAL video outs.
Make it expandible but keep it in a small box (no towers full of empty space). Don't waste money on making it too expandible; solder where it will save a buck. Chances are when a component of your machine goes obsolete, so does the whole system. (Look at patterns of upgrades today. It's very common to buy a new system, since incremental upgrading will always run into incompatiobilities eventually.)
Allow it to boot without a keyboard, for crying out loud. The machine should be as comfortable in the role of a gaming machine as music or video studio. Put it together and whaddaya got? A relatively cheap (in bang for the buck) machine that produces the same kid-at-Christmas feeling we all got from our original Amigas.
You can say that it would never fly today because of blah blah blah, but at least it would deserve the Amiga name.
Bingo Foo
----
True, but your definition of libertarian (as I get it from the context of your post) is incorrect. The creator, owner, seller, and buyer all have rights that they selfisly protect in a libertarian society. Are you saying that creators and sellers should not be allowed the same pursuit of self-interest that the buyers are?
Bingo Foo
----
Exactly. Real market pressures are the best way to effect this change.
The problem here is that MPAA members constitue a colluding monopoly, since regardless of market pressures (witness the /. outcry), no member can break ranks to sell DVDs under different (more open) licensing without being subject to other anticompetitive practices by the remaining MPAA members.
Bingo Foo
----
But merchants have a right to sell what they choose to sell. If a merchant wants to sell a license to information instead of the information itself, what's to stop them?
Look at how major software packages are sold/licensed. Where I work, we use a large 3D modeling and meshing package. We can buy a license for the software at an annual cost of $20k, entitling us to upgrades during that period, or we can buy the software itself for $100k, enabling us to use it permanently, but we get no upgrades for that cost.
The vendor does not have to provde both of those options, but they choose to. Would your argument change if you could buy a limited [time|place|platform] license to view a DVD for $20 or the DVD and rights to its contents for $100? (with restrictions on redistribution, of course).
I have a feeling even if media manufacturers/distributors moved to this model of sales, /.'ers and Napster theives would whine about outpricing our inalienable rights to "use" our posessions, etc.
Remember that MPAA/RIAA members do own the copyright on their movies and music, and they are not obligated to distribute or sell them to you at all. Bingo Foo
----
Works for me.
No, but at least they are not designed for Microsoft's SOL operating systems.
Slightly-modified KDE or GNOME won't impress me.
I was told by an sgi rep that there are no plans to port the Indigo Magic Desktop to Linux. Part of the problem is the custom motif-based widgets (hooray for the drop-pocket!!!) that make up the apps are tied up in closed source licensing.
I have scoured search engines for a couple years now looking for someone porting at least the look and feel of those thoughtful, if oversized, widgets to an OSS toolkit. No luck so far.
This guy gets karma for plagarizing? Cite brunching shuttlecocks, at least.
Have you ever heard of private networks? You can have a TCP/IP network with its own internal numbering and no connection to the outside internet. What router did you think would pass your packets to the satellite's uplink antenna?