What the Amiga was was an inexpensive machine with fantastic graphics and sound (for the mid 80's), the ability to be plugged into a television, and a pretty good multitasking OS was a neat bonus. The only other company to make such a cool general purpose computer were Silicon Graphics.
A new OS is quite nice, and there were aspects of the Amiga's UI that I'm still fond of, but unless you have a complete machine, I'm not at all interested.
Bonuses weren't expected or given, but there was a health plan (which is not neccesary, but a nice luxury in Socialist Europe), decent salary, commmitment to limitations on working time and a flexible holiday package.
I was happy one year when I got a bottle of Champagne.
The thing is, this sort of thing is really fairly inexpensive - $50 or so. It works out to a fraction of an employee's weekly salary, and only has to be given once a year, but some reasonably expensive, slighlty extravagent food or drink is usually appreciated, and rarely offends.
Libraries have had computerised inventory systems allowing people to check books in and out for an extremely long time. But they always use technology to fill a need. They don;t go overboard, and aren't fooled by hype from well dressed marketing people. They see technology as a tool and don't expect it to do more than it is designed to do. As a result, they tend to be pretty succesful.
Other government departments seem to do the exact opposite.
Perhaps we should get the nations librarians to run government IT departments.
The RIAA are claiming for damages. Not punishment.
A similar example would be if I broke your window, regardless of intent, you could sue me for the replacement of the cost of the window if you could prove it was me. If I intended to break your window, but kept missing when throwing rocks, then you haven't suffered any harm so couldn't sue me.
One that actually believes you have to be shown to sharing copyrighted material before being found guilty of it.
Well, I'd hope that most judges would expect a certain amount of proof before awarding a multi billion dollar judgement against an individual. When you're asking for the life ruining damages the RIAA are demanding, a judge isn't going to rush the case so he can get away and play a few rounds of golf.
Yeah. I know. The speech synth is just a voiceover. Exactly the same as hearing the voice of a letter writer when someone reads. But it's the most common complaint so I thought I'd best mention it to stop people nitpicking.
Though the solution to gain access was almost too simple,
Someone managed to gain access to Prestel using the user ID 2222222222 and the password 1234, so this sort of backdoor isn't completely outside the realm of possibility.
It was called hacking - nowdays its a dying art:-(
Wasn't it called phreaking;)
No, possibly not... But I remember a comment from an older geek; "My programming language was solder". There's just not as much you can do with home electronics anymore in that respect.
Except, Wargames was pretty good in terms of research and accuracy. The AI philosophy (learn from its mistakes) looks a bit outdated now but was pretty much what researchers were looking at at the time. The voice synthesis on every terminal in the world was a bit daft, and a few bits and pieces were a lttle hokey, but we didn't have the usual computer cliches. There was no "Running Virus" with progress bar. No 72 point lettering. No magic mechanism to break the password. Broderick's character actually had to spend ages rummaging through information just to get past the login. I'll admit that some of this was hokey but it's the least hokey computer movie ever by a long shot.
If they can manage a similar level of realism for Wargames 2, then it would be interesting. Somehow, I doubt they'll do that. I expect to see loads of pointless explosions, a whole bunch of meaningless jargon, and lots of computer nerds totally bamboozled by the genius of some 16 year old kid.
The arbitrators use some pretty bizarre logic when it comes to "sucks" domains. And then act all surprised when various national domain name registrars decide that they're not going to use the same arbitration scheme.
Don't know about them, but I am, yes. I've played bowling, tennis and baseball for a couple hours each and I have no idea how you could let go of the Wiimote.
Maybe these people are baseball players, and their instinct when pitching is to let go of the ball.
As long as it respects basic internet rules of conduct (including respecting robots.txt), then this is ethically neutral.
It all depends on how it's used. Many companies would prefer to avoid coypyright infringing material, and will take it down if the existence is pointed out to them. Many companies will simply be asking others to remove material which clearly and flagrantly breaches their copyright. This is perfectly reasonable behaviour.
A cost of entry to the market that they anticipated. They're now making money on each 360 sold. I don't care much for MS and their heavy-handed tactics, but they do have a knack for planning farther into the future than most companies.
Yes. People keep always overlook this. $4 billion is money well spent. They could have paid a comparable amount and bought Sega's console division but they'd still have had similar problems getting the market to trust them.
But if not, you probably won't see many cross-platform titles make their way to the Wii, which in turn will hurt sales, which in turn discourages developers from making games for it... Vicious circle.
I think Nintendo is really targetting a slightly different market, a chunk of which will already have a PS3 or Xbox360. The specs of the Wii really aren't close to the others but neither is the price. I don't thin people are going to choose one or the other. They'll see a purchase of a Wii to be a totally independent decision.
There's some pretty abysmal software out there. Some of the more specialised software really makes me yearn for Microsoft. We had some pretty terrible bug tracking software that really made any piece of MS software look fantastic.
A yen is worth about a US cent, and the Japanese economy does pretty well. It makes things a little simpler not to subdivide the unit. Well, marginally. Hardly worth caring about. It would have helped that guy who had the argument with Verizon about 0.002 cents being $0.002.
Well, this is something of a puff piece. When you get comments like, "Her efforts in 2006 have sought to leverage the synergy between the new generation of consoles", I think a lot of these people wrote their own blurb. The marketing people talk about these terms like synergy and partnership, the execs tak about upswings, figures, markets, and agressive targets (rather jargonny again, but I think these terms mean something to the suits).
But I think you underestimate how much influence the execs can have. Maybe less so in the big PLCs, but a few of these developers are fairly small shops, where the CEO knows exactly what's going on and is directly involved in the individual projects.
Well, I suppose the argument is that if someone is looking at underage children then their intention is to do something illegal. The fact that they didn't is not really much of a defence. There is a parallel with other crimes. If I try to murder someone, even if my plan couldn't possibly work, I would stil be charged with attempted murder.
Would that be considered illegal because it "simulates" an underage girl?
Yup.
It's a simple answer. Possibly not the one you were expecting. I'm not sure what the law is at the moment, but there's always demand for it to apply to photographs of somone who "is or appears to be under 18" largely because this makes it easier to prosecute without having the inconvenient defence of the photo being of someone of legal age.
I make no attempt to defend this asttitude but it seems to be a common attitude.
You have to choose exactly what level of free you want.
The GPL has clauses in it that seek to prevent people from making it non-free. That's fair enough, but it's a compromise. You could make the licence more free by removing these clauses. That would enable others to limit your freedom. Linus seems to tend towards offering more freedom to make Linux less free.
But does a no-binaries patch matter? Those who want to add binary-only modules are free to customise the kernel to allow this. I hope this patch remains available. choice is good.
Plane toilets are small and cramped little things. The facilities in the airport are probably much more suitable, spacious and still past the security checkpoint. Plus you could get a dozen people smuggling different components that far, and dress up as maintenece people so they can close the toilet and keep other people away.
Still not plausible but if you're going to rubbish the idea, rubbish the least implausible version of it.
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Indeed. And the OS was only a small part of it.
What the Amiga was was an inexpensive machine with fantastic graphics and sound (for the mid 80's), the ability to be plugged into a television, and a pretty good multitasking OS was a neat bonus. The only other company to make such a cool general purpose computer were Silicon Graphics.
A new OS is quite nice, and there were aspects of the Amiga's UI that I'm still fond of, but unless you have a complete machine, I'm not at all interested.
I worked for a large chipmaker.
Bonuses weren't expected or given, but there was a health plan (which is not neccesary, but a nice luxury in Socialist Europe), decent salary, commmitment to limitations on working time and a flexible holiday package.
You need to find a new job.
I was happy one year when I got a bottle of Champagne.
The thing is, this sort of thing is really fairly inexpensive - $50 or so. It works out to a fraction of an employee's weekly salary, and only has to be given once a year, but some reasonably expensive, slighlty extravagent food or drink is usually appreciated, and rarely offends.
Libraries have had computerised inventory systems allowing people to check books in and out for an extremely long time. But they always use technology to fill a need. They don;t go overboard, and aren't fooled by hype from well dressed marketing people. They see technology as a tool and don't expect it to do more than it is designed to do. As a result, they tend to be pretty succesful.
Other government departments seem to do the exact opposite.
Perhaps we should get the nations librarians to run government IT departments.
The RIAA are claiming for damages. Not punishment.
A similar example would be if I broke your window, regardless of intent, you could sue me for the replacement of the cost of the window if you could prove it was me. If I intended to break your window, but kept missing when throwing rocks, then you haven't suffered any harm so couldn't sue me.
One that actually believes you have to be shown to sharing copyrighted material before being found guilty of it.
Well, I'd hope that most judges would expect a certain amount of proof before awarding a multi billion dollar judgement against an individual. When you're asking for the life ruining damages the RIAA are demanding, a judge isn't going to rush the case so he can get away and play a few rounds of golf.
Yeah. I know. The speech synth is just a voiceover. Exactly the same as hearing the voice of a letter writer when someone reads. But it's the most common complaint so I thought I'd best mention it to stop people nitpicking.
Sony will never use the full spin power that their marketting department is capable of.
Though the solution to gain access was almost too simple,
Someone managed to gain access to Prestel using the user ID 2222222222 and the password 1234, so this sort of backdoor isn't completely outside the realm of possibility.
Not at all. Didn't you see the film? It would go something like this:
MGM: We'll go top left.
Geek: I'm not playing.
MGM: Hah! We win.
Geek: The only way to win is not to play. So I win!!!!1!!
Poor guy. His last named character was in "weenie Wednesday". His career has been all downhill since then.
It was called hacking - nowdays its a dying art :-(
;)
Wasn't it called phreaking
No, possibly not... But I remember a comment from an older geek; "My programming language was solder". There's just not as much you can do with home electronics anymore in that respect.
Sounds like a remake.
Except, Wargames was pretty good in terms of research and accuracy. The AI philosophy (learn from its mistakes) looks a bit outdated now but was pretty much what researchers were looking at at the time. The voice synthesis on every terminal in the world was a bit daft, and a few bits and pieces were a lttle hokey, but we didn't have the usual computer cliches. There was no "Running Virus" with progress bar. No 72 point lettering. No magic mechanism to break the password. Broderick's character actually had to spend ages rummaging through information just to get past the login. I'll admit that some of this was hokey but it's the least hokey computer movie ever by a long shot.
If they can manage a similar level of realism for Wargames 2, then it would be interesting. Somehow, I doubt they'll do that. I expect to see loads of pointless explosions, a whole bunch of meaningless jargon, and lots of computer nerds totally bamboozled by the genius of some 16 year old kid.
Is it wrong of me to judge the movie so soon?
The arbitrators use some pretty bizarre logic when it comes to "sucks" domains. And then act all surprised when various national domain name registrars decide that they're not going to use the same arbitration scheme.
Don't know about them, but I am, yes. I've played bowling, tennis and baseball for a couple hours each and I have no idea how you could let go of the Wiimote.
Maybe these people are baseball players, and their instinct when pitching is to let go of the ball.
As long as it respects basic internet rules of conduct (including respecting robots.txt), then this is ethically neutral.
It all depends on how it's used. Many companies would prefer to avoid coypyright infringing material, and will take it down if the existence is pointed out to them. Many companies will simply be asking others to remove material which clearly and flagrantly breaches their copyright. This is perfectly reasonable behaviour.
A cost of entry to the market that they anticipated. They're now making money on each 360 sold. I don't care much for MS and their heavy-handed tactics, but they do have a knack for planning farther into the future than most companies.
Yes. People keep always overlook this. $4 billion is money well spent. They could have paid a comparable amount and bought Sega's console division but they'd still have had similar problems getting the market to trust them.
But if not, you probably won't see many cross-platform titles make their way to the Wii, which in turn will hurt sales, which in turn discourages developers from making games for it... Vicious circle.
I think Nintendo is really targetting a slightly different market, a chunk of which will already have a PS3 or Xbox360. The specs of the Wii really aren't close to the others but neither is the price. I don't thin people are going to choose one or the other. They'll see a purchase of a Wii to be a totally independent decision.
There's some pretty abysmal software out there. Some of the more specialised software really makes me yearn for Microsoft. We had some pretty terrible bug tracking software that really made any piece of MS software look fantastic.
A yen is worth about a US cent, and the Japanese economy does pretty well. It makes things a little simpler not to subdivide the unit. Well, marginally. Hardly worth caring about. It would have helped that guy who had the argument with Verizon about 0.002 cents being $0.002.
Well, this is something of a puff piece. When you get comments like, "Her efforts in 2006 have sought to leverage the synergy between the new generation of consoles", I think a lot of these people wrote their own blurb. The marketing people talk about these terms like synergy and partnership, the execs tak about upswings, figures, markets, and agressive targets (rather jargonny again, but I think these terms mean something to the suits).
But I think you underestimate how much influence the execs can have. Maybe less so in the big PLCs, but a few of these developers are fairly small shops, where the CEO knows exactly what's going on and is directly involved in the individual projects.
Well, I suppose the argument is that if someone is looking at underage children then their intention is to do something illegal. The fact that they didn't is not really much of a defence. There is a parallel with other crimes. If I try to murder someone, even if my plan couldn't possibly work, I would stil be charged with attempted murder.
Would that be considered illegal because it "simulates" an underage girl?
Yup.
It's a simple answer. Possibly not the one you were expecting. I'm not sure what the law is at the moment, but there's always demand for it to apply to photographs of somone who "is or appears to be under 18" largely because this makes it easier to prosecute without having the inconvenient defence of the photo being of someone of legal age.
I make no attempt to defend this asttitude but it seems to be a common attitude.
You have a better grasp of how my mind works than I do. I typed 1976 then changed it to 73 and couldn't think why.
And yes it is a cool show and I do watch it.
You have to choose exactly what level of free you want.
The GPL has clauses in it that seek to prevent people from making it non-free. That's fair enough, but it's a compromise. You could make the licence more free by removing these clauses. That would enable others to limit your freedom. Linus seems to tend towards offering more freedom to make Linux less free.
But does a no-binaries patch matter? Those who want to add binary-only modules are free to customise the kernel to allow this. I hope this patch remains available. choice is good.
Plane toilets are small and cramped little things. The facilities in the airport are probably much more suitable, spacious and still past the security checkpoint. Plus you could get a dozen people smuggling different components that far, and dress up as maintenece people so they can close the toilet and keep other people away.
Still not plausible but if you're going to rubbish the idea, rubbish the least implausible version of it.