Yes they did make RAM expansions. Although I don't think the "official" C64 one came out until after the C128 was released. I think the C64 had a 256KB official expansion and the C128 a 512KB. Aside from Geos I don't think many programs took advantage of the expansion except that you could use it as a RAM-disk.
Game related more than computer... I remember the first time I saw Donkey Kong at a local convenience store. I remember saying "WOW! Now games will have stories!" The simple stupid story of King Kong translated into a video game. Just the fact that the game had characters and motivation for them (as basic as that was). Before that point most games just didn't. WHY AM I SHOOTING THE ASTEROIDS?
Sure it is nostalgia to a certain degree but with the Amiga I do think it's a bit more. The Mac had a more polished GUI but no command line or true multitasking. AmigaDOS was very advanced compared to MS/DOS. The coprocessors enabled it to shine in terms of graphics, animation and sound. It was easily the most responsive and snappy operating system of the time. I'm glad I had an Amiga because it made the transition to UNIX and Linux so much easier. I remembering learning MS/DOS in the early 90s and thinking, that's it? I don't think I'm just being misty eyed. I used Macs at work at the time and although System 7 was an improvement they were just so far behind the Amiga in so many ways. Unfortunately much as the early Mac OS had to be tossed the same would apply to Amiga DOS. Lack of memory protection and being so closely tied to the custom hardware chips meant that the Amiga couldn't evolve well. Still it was an amazing computer and an inspiration to so many.
Funny. I always wanted to be an artist. Thinking it was the natural commercial avenue I began a career in graphic design. Learning marketing, advertising, visual design to an audience etc. made me terribly cynical and killed any artistic expressiveness I had. I since moved on to various jobs involving programming, general IT and systems administration. Generally, I quite enjoy it more than graphic design.
I remember a few times seeing corrections posted for hex program listings. Geez. Talk about a pain in the rear waiting to find out it wasn't YOUR typo that caused the program to fail. I only bothered typing in one full machine language program. At least the BASIC ones allowed you to learn a little something when you entered them.
To be fair the Epyx Fast Load cartridge and later similar items helped a lot with the load times. I also remember someone releasing a 3 minute disk copier early on versus the standard 20 minute one. The 1541 was a pain in the arse but the built in 6502 was highly programmable and people squeezed every last bit of performance out of them. I even had a program which played the song "Daisy" on the disk drive by musically grinding the heads. *ouch* The worst offenders were the terrible copy protection routines that caused horribly slow loading and were unforgiving of any degree of head misalignment. I remember sitting and staring at the Electronic Arts logo color cycling for eternities of my childhood. I used a memory dump cartridge (anyone remember ISEPIC or the Super Snapshot series?) to save off the initial boot of EA games. The dumped file would load in seconds versus minutes.
Really? Most CP/M systems I saw were used in business.
As for poor mans Apple II. The C64 had better graphics resolution and more colors on screen than the Apple II. The C64 also supported sprite graphics. The Apple sound chip was terrible compared to the C64's SID chip. Base Apple's before the IIc shipped with less memory (16, 32 or 48k) than the C64. The C64 was developed later than the Apple II and benefitted from technology advances during those years. The Apple was much more expandable, featuring 8 expansion slots. The C64 could add peripherals but there was no way to add additional RAM, an 80 column display (outside of a visual hack) or other things like the popular Mockingboard sound card for Apple. Still, straight out of the box the C64 supported external speakers and could be hooked up to a TV set. Disk drives were an expensive yet common choice in the US but in the UK the cheap tape format was very popular. Yes the C64s greatest strength was the cost. It was about half the cost of an Apple II but you still got features better than what was available on a stock Apple at the time.
I'm not arguing about whether or not MS is a monopoly what I'm saying is basically the reason they can sell a crappy product like Vista is their presence in pre-installed computers. Pre-installation has always been the big way MS wins consumers. If 50% of the computers in a store ran Linux well maybe that would change. This is why the majority of the resistance you see to Vista is coming from the business sector where you have at least semi-technically savvy individuals driving the purchasing decision. They don't buy their computers from CompUSA they go to Dell and demand that they get XP instead of Vista.
For the most part when people buy Vista they get it pre-installed on a computer they buy at a store like CompUSA. They want a computer, they go to the store, they look at things like price tag. They don't have any sort of OS religion aside from maybe that they've had Windows before so they know what to expect. Vista is just the new version of Windows. Apple for example doesn't even compete in the low end PC market. There is no $500 Mac laptop or $500 Mac PC (I'm talking about bundles with monitor and printer as are common). Linux has just about 0% presence on the store floor. As sales of the cheap gOS based Linux computer at Walmart have shown, people WILL purchase a Linux desktop. The truth is that there just are hardly any computers with pre-installed Linux available unless you know where to look. Not to mention the HUGE amount of 3rd party software and hardware available in stores for Windows computers. Most people may not realize that a lot of the software on the store shelves has comparable free alternatives. And even if there is a free alternative it most likely is not aimed at a not very computer savvy consumer. Something like Photoshop Elements is a lot easier for the average person to use than GIMP. Apple and Linux don't really represent choice to the average consumer who buys a computer at Walmart or CompUSA or any other large chain. They simply aren't there at the same price point in the same numbers.
I don't really like the mighty mouse much. The behavior of the right button seems odd. If my finger is resting on the left button, the right button does left click. Also the side buttons don't have a good tactile click response.
As for not needing the right click in Mac OS... well I've always found (since OS 6) that experienced Mac users tend to use a lot of keyboard shortcuts. The right click menu alleviates some of this and makes trips to the menu bar less frequent. It isn't a must have but it helps.
22% overweight. So what's changed in the past 10 years? Is it increased affluence due to a booming economy?
I've known plenty of fat Asians here in Hawaii. Also on average the Caucasian population seems thinner than on the U.S. mainland. More excercise due to year round outdoor activities?
As you see, he notes using pirated software. Which kind of negates the free aspect of Linux and shows that he doesn't care about the legal part.
I use different operating systems for different reasons (WinXp, OSX, Ubuntu, RH Enterprise). I've been really impressed with how far Linux has come. Ubuntu could very easily provide everything a lot of users need. Most people I know basically use their home computers for web, email, im, word processing, spreadsheets, light photo editing/management, listening to digital music. Ubuntu can do all that and a lot more.
I think it's more unusual that sshd isn't installed by default. I guess the overall deal with ubuntu server is to go completely minimal and let you configure it yourself. Which isn't a bad idea.
Partially cloudy, scattered showers on the windward side, highs in the mid 80s. I live in Hawaii, 90% of the time weathermen who live hear have it easy.
Losing your virginity is like writing your first "hello world" program. Sex is incredibly variable and complex. Sex is much more than just mechanics. Sex is different with different people due to each persons emotional and intellectual makeup. Yes sometimes sex can be purely primal. Sometimes getting out of your thinking head and into that space can be amazing. Sometimes it's down right violent. Sometimes it's intimate and beautiful. I'm not saying that it's the end all and be all of existence but to shrug it off and say "oh it's not all that" when you haven't actually experienced the depth of the act is silly. Why don't you just accept that you're relatively ignorant on the topic and leave it at that?
You play Custer of the US Cavalry. You're goal is to screw a native American woman who is bound to a stake. Meanwhile other native Americans shoot arrows at you. Given the actual history of Custer it would certainly seem like such an event would be considered rape. Sure the box didn't use the word but even the imagery there is of a scared native American girl and a leering perverted looking Custer.
The Amiga performed much better with at least 1MB of RAM. The upgrade to 512KB on the original Amiga 1000 was almost mandatory as a lot of applications required it. On the Amiga 500 the expansion to 1MB was very popular as something simple such as adding a second disk drive could use up a little memory and make programs wanting the 512KB not run.
I in the US your age has something to do with it. If you ask me about video games in the 80s in the US, I'm going to say Atari 2600 and the arcades. Being 34 years old I was the perfect age during the early video game boom in the US. When the video game market crashed, unlike the majority of people I kept playing. Only now it was on the Commodore 64 and later the Amiga. After playing more complicated RPGs and strategy games I didn't have much interest in consoles. I did end up playing Nintendo quite a bit as my girlfriend had one but it isn't the defining gaming experience of the 80s for me.
The iPhone plans are setup differently just as the BlackBerry plan is. AT&T has a hodge podge of different services and the data plans all have a different mix. The biggest difference with the base iPhone plan is that it only includes 200 SMS messages. The unlimited data plan I have is a little more expensive but has 1500 messages. If you go to unlimited messages with an iPhone you are paying $20 extra a month on the plan. None of the plans are split based on 3G or Edge being a feature. AT&T phones like the Samsung Blackjack are 3G capable but do not require the Blackberry plans just the regular data ones.
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Yes they did make RAM expansions. Although I don't think the "official" C64 one came out until after the C128 was released. I think the C64 had a 256KB official expansion and the C128 a 512KB. Aside from Geos I don't think many programs took advantage of the expansion except that you could use it as a RAM-disk.
http://askville.amazon.com/lyric-hit-shift-O-quote-dollar/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=2395018
Game related more than computer... I remember the first time I saw Donkey Kong at a local convenience store. I remember saying "WOW! Now games will have stories!" The simple stupid story of King Kong translated into a video game. Just the fact that the game had characters and motivation for them (as basic as that was). Before that point most games just didn't. WHY AM I SHOOTING THE ASTEROIDS?
Sure it is nostalgia to a certain degree but with the Amiga I do think it's a bit more. The Mac had a more polished GUI but no command line or true multitasking. AmigaDOS was very advanced compared to MS/DOS. The coprocessors enabled it to shine in terms of graphics, animation and sound. It was easily the most responsive and snappy operating system of the time.
I'm glad I had an Amiga because it made the transition to UNIX and Linux so much easier. I remembering learning MS/DOS in the early 90s and thinking, that's it?
I don't think I'm just being misty eyed. I used Macs at work at the time and although System 7 was an improvement they were just so far behind the Amiga in so many ways.
Unfortunately much as the early Mac OS had to be tossed the same would apply to Amiga DOS. Lack of memory protection and being so closely tied to the custom hardware chips meant that the Amiga couldn't evolve well.
Still it was an amazing computer and an inspiration to so many.
Funny. I always wanted to be an artist. Thinking it was the natural commercial avenue I began a career in graphic design. Learning marketing, advertising, visual design to an audience etc. made me terribly cynical and killed any artistic expressiveness I had.
I since moved on to various jobs involving programming, general IT and systems administration. Generally, I quite enjoy it more than graphic design.
I see your 49152 and raise you 64738.
I remember a few times seeing corrections posted for hex program listings. Geez. Talk about a pain in the rear waiting to find out it wasn't YOUR typo that caused the program to fail.
I only bothered typing in one full machine language program. At least the BASIC ones allowed you to learn a little something when you entered them.
To be fair the Epyx Fast Load cartridge and later similar items helped a lot with the load times. I also remember someone releasing a 3 minute disk copier early on versus the standard 20 minute one. The 1541 was a pain in the arse but the built in 6502 was highly programmable and people squeezed every last bit of performance out of them. I even had a program which played the song "Daisy" on the disk drive by musically grinding the heads. *ouch*
The worst offenders were the terrible copy protection routines that caused horribly slow loading and were unforgiving of any degree of head misalignment. I remember sitting and staring at the Electronic Arts logo color cycling for eternities of my childhood. I used a memory dump cartridge (anyone remember ISEPIC or the Super Snapshot series?) to save off the initial boot of EA games. The dumped file would load in seconds versus minutes.
Really? Most CP/M systems I saw were used in business.
As for poor mans Apple II. The C64 had better graphics resolution and more colors on screen than the Apple II. The C64 also supported sprite graphics. The Apple sound chip was terrible compared to the C64's SID chip. Base Apple's before the IIc shipped with less memory (16, 32 or 48k) than the C64.
The C64 was developed later than the Apple II and benefitted from technology advances during those years.
The Apple was much more expandable, featuring 8 expansion slots. The C64 could add peripherals but there was no way to add additional RAM, an 80 column display (outside of a visual hack) or other things like the popular Mockingboard sound card for Apple.
Still, straight out of the box the C64 supported external speakers and could be hooked up to a TV set. Disk drives were an expensive yet common choice in the US but in the UK the cheap tape format was very popular.
Yes the C64s greatest strength was the cost. It was about half the cost of an Apple II but you still got features better than what was available on a stock Apple at the time.
Remember that whole Pixar/Disney thing? Steve Jobs money doesn't just come from Apple.
I'm not arguing about whether or not MS is a monopoly what I'm saying is basically the reason they can sell a crappy product like Vista is their presence in pre-installed computers.
Pre-installation has always been the big way MS wins consumers. If 50% of the computers in a store ran Linux well maybe that would change.
This is why the majority of the resistance you see to Vista is coming from the business sector where you have at least semi-technically savvy individuals driving the purchasing decision. They don't buy their computers from CompUSA they go to Dell and demand that they get XP instead of Vista.
For the most part when people buy Vista they get it pre-installed on a computer they buy at a store like CompUSA. They want a computer, they go to the store, they look at things like price tag. They don't have any sort of OS religion aside from maybe that they've had Windows before so they know what to expect. Vista is just the new version of Windows.
Apple for example doesn't even compete in the low end PC market. There is no $500 Mac laptop or $500 Mac PC (I'm talking about bundles with monitor and printer as are common).
Linux has just about 0% presence on the store floor. As sales of the cheap gOS based Linux computer at Walmart have shown, people WILL purchase a Linux desktop. The truth is that there just are hardly any computers with pre-installed Linux available unless you know where to look.
Not to mention the HUGE amount of 3rd party software and hardware available in stores for Windows computers. Most people may not realize that a lot of the software on the store shelves has comparable free alternatives. And even if there is a free alternative it most likely is not aimed at a not very computer savvy consumer. Something like Photoshop Elements is a lot easier for the average person to use than GIMP.
Apple and Linux don't really represent choice to the average consumer who buys a computer at Walmart or CompUSA or any other large chain. They simply aren't there at the same price point in the same numbers.
"love how I confuse ctrl-c|v with command/apple-c|v"
True, but one nice thing is the command key copy and paste work nice in a terminal where ctrl-c is a no no.
There are companies moving in this direction. For example check out:
http://www.fusionio.com/
Up to 640GB NAND flash. Supposedly 700 MB/s transfer rate.
I don't really like the mighty mouse much. The behavior of the right button seems odd. If my finger is resting on the left button, the right button does left click. Also the side buttons don't have a good tactile click response.
As for not needing the right click in Mac OS... well I've always found (since OS 6) that experienced Mac users tend to use a lot of keyboard shortcuts. The right click menu alleviates some of this and makes trips to the menu bar less frequent. It isn't a must have but it helps.
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200410/13/eng20041013_160062.html
22% overweight. So what's changed in the past 10 years? Is it increased affluence due to a booming economy?
I've known plenty of fat Asians here in Hawaii. Also on average the Caucasian population seems thinner than on the U.S. mainland. More excercise due to year round outdoor activities?
As you see, he notes using pirated software. Which kind of negates the free aspect of Linux and shows that he doesn't care about the legal part.
I use different operating systems for different reasons (WinXp, OSX, Ubuntu, RH Enterprise). I've been really impressed with how far Linux has come. Ubuntu could very easily provide everything a lot of users need. Most people I know basically use their home computers for web, email, im, word processing, spreadsheets, light photo editing/management, listening to digital music. Ubuntu can do all that and a lot more.
Well...
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop
I think it's more unusual that sshd isn't installed by default. I guess the overall deal with ubuntu server is to go completely minimal and let you configure it yourself. Which isn't a bad idea.
Partially cloudy, scattered showers on the windward side, highs in the mid 80s. I live in Hawaii, 90% of the time weathermen who live hear have it easy.
"This is partly due to RAM (when I'm in Windows, it's got a full 2 gigs, when in OS X it has to share so it gets about a gig)"
It has nothing to do with RAM. 1GB is plenty for Half Life 2. It's not longer a new game by a long shot.
Losing your virginity is like writing your first "hello world" program. Sex is incredibly variable and complex. Sex is much more than just mechanics. Sex is different with different people due to each persons emotional and intellectual makeup.
Yes sometimes sex can be purely primal. Sometimes getting out of your thinking head and into that space can be amazing. Sometimes it's down right violent. Sometimes it's intimate and beautiful.
I'm not saying that it's the end all and be all of existence but to shrug it off and say "oh it's not all that" when you haven't actually experienced the depth of the act is silly. Why don't you just accept that you're relatively ignorant on the topic and leave it at that?
You play Custer of the US Cavalry. You're goal is to screw a native American woman who is bound to a stake. Meanwhile other native Americans shoot arrows at you.
Given the actual history of Custer it would certainly seem like such an event would be considered rape. Sure the box didn't use the word but even the imagery there is of a scared native American girl and a leering perverted looking Custer.
The Amiga performed much better with at least 1MB of RAM. The upgrade to 512KB on the original Amiga 1000 was almost mandatory as a lot of applications required it. On the Amiga 500 the expansion to 1MB was very popular as something simple such as adding a second disk drive could use up a little memory and make programs wanting the 512KB not run.
I in the US your age has something to do with it. If you ask me about video games in the 80s in the US, I'm going to say Atari 2600 and the arcades. Being 34 years old I was the perfect age during the early video game boom in the US.
When the video game market crashed, unlike the majority of people I kept playing. Only now it was on the Commodore 64 and later the Amiga. After playing more complicated RPGs and strategy games I didn't have much interest in consoles.
I did end up playing Nintendo quite a bit as my girlfriend had one but it isn't the defining gaming experience of the 80s for me.
The iPhone plans are setup differently just as the BlackBerry plan is. AT&T has a hodge podge of different services and the data plans all have a different mix. The biggest difference with the base iPhone plan is that it only includes 200 SMS messages. The unlimited data plan I have is a little more expensive but has 1500 messages. If you go to unlimited messages with an iPhone you are paying $20 extra a month on the plan.
None of the plans are split based on 3G or Edge being a feature. AT&T phones like the Samsung Blackjack are 3G capable but do not require the Blackberry plans just the regular data ones.