The real reason HURD has moved so slowly (besides managerial incompetence) is that HURD has ceased to be a product with a deadline. HURD is now an operating system research project, with the goal of tinkering with it long enough to publish a paper on their findings or dilettante OS topic.
HURD was originally designed with the presumption that microkernel architecture would be more desirable (operate more efficiently) than a monolithic kernel (that has been the basis for almost every commercial OS since UNIX). You can't really make a breathtaking, next generation OS if the basis that it operates upon either works like crap, or requires different paradigms to communicate from kernel to OS tasks. The lost decade of the 2000's has been spent finding a "suitable" microkernel replacement to MACH. (Which is decidedly unsuitable, since it was designed in the 1980's, and is better off replaced, than kludged.) You can compound the failure with the fact that it has to conform to GNU's operating charter (translation: there might have been a suitable commercially developed microkernel, but if it didn't license it GNU v2.0 (now v3.0), it was unacceptable. That's okay; I'm only speaking hypothetically about the existence of a suitable microkernel for HURD.)
The most striking irony is that HURD may be the empirical demonstration that microkernel architecture is a research dead end, and there aren't any that can even match monolithic kernel designs. The other irony is that hypervisors, which to me seem to be a form of microkernel, have long outdistanced traditional microkernel efforts, although I couldn't tell you why they would still be unsuitable for HURD (besides the license).
Nevertheless, I was pretty shocked that the "core" developers are still actually documenting their progress. They're actually pasting in snippets of their IRC conversations into the wiki documentation (from days ago!).
So, yeah, there's a reason why the "core" people involved are telling volunteers to fuck off. If you can't speak Microkernel Chinese, they don't even want you generating background noise. I'd say the definition of clueless newbies would be someone from 15+ years ago trying to participate in HURD today.
"Where Late, the Sweet Birds Sang", by Kate Wilhelm
Post apocalyptic future, where remnants of humanity survive by cloning. You'll probably appreciate the novel less if you don't like "hard(ish)" science fiction. Should have a basic understanding of genetics and cloning. (Only one post here mentioned her name, but no specific recommendations.)
I dunno if this one counts. At one time, this work was put on the same famous scale as Dune, but since it hasn't been mentioned...
The llluminatus Trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.
You should have a collegiate level literary reading background, or you won't get ANY of the jokes. Its starts out with a mindboggling stream of consciousness, which introduces a hundred characters in the books, but they abandon the technique midway into the first chapter. (Call it a test to weed out the weak.)
Also, its not Isaac Bailey, its Elijah Bailey, of the "Caves of Steel" series. (Unless its some post 1980's Asimov sci-fi pulp continuation of the detective series theme...)
Damn you. I've read both of them, but its been so long ago, I've forgotten the names and titles as well. For some reason, I think the first one was written by Gordon Dickson. (Another guess would be Walter M. Miller, Jr., but I don't think it was him.) It was a short story, possibly a novella. And it was done a long time ago; 1950's-1960's era. The second one, I think it might have been "Protector" by Larry Niven. It ended up getting melded into the Ringworld mythos. But as I recall, the aliens got that way by becoming addicted to an alien root, so I'm thinking it could have been an earlier, derivative work by Niven.
1) There is nothing in Quantum Physics theory which directly invalidates anything postulated by Einstein in his significant scientific work. Einstein, the scientist, did nothing to disprove quantum physics. Einstein merely did not consider quantum scientists' findings as "scientific proof".
2) Only a scientist who is not human would not have human biases. I guess that means no human qualifies as a scientist. OR perhaps that all scientists are presumed to have biases, and is the process (scientific method) that is supposed to weed out incorrect conclusions tainted by bias. Einstein did not produce flawed research claiming to invalidate quantum theory.
3) The idea that Einstein could have contributed more to humanities' scientific knowledge by ACCEPTING most aspects of quantum theory AND THEN applying it to his later work is pure conjecture. Conjecture made by politicians who coincidentally are physicists who utilize quantum theory to further their own work. (hint, hint)
4) Einstein, with his beliefs, has done more to advance scientific knowledge than you, with your condescending viewpoint.
You're spot on, except you're not as cynical and bitter.
As Joseph Campbell once observed, civilizations are a collection of myths which everyone in the society accepts/believes. We were raised thinking that science worked like Star Trek, and that blinding genius was what made for great scientific breakthroughs. But what is "accepted" scientific fact? Its basically well designed, reproducible experiments that demonstrate the validity of a theory which is eventually accepted BY a body of academic peers supposedly trained to conduct and recognize that standards were met and valid. Guess what? No body of peers (mediocrities), no scientific validation.
Science always was, and particularly today, a relentless, and excruciating labor of many millions of ants, making progress by each crumb of discovered knowledge. It is a social hive that eventually culminates in something significant and new. When it does, its the queen that gets all the credit, even though she spent all her time popping out worker drones. You cannot even hope to get credit in the science/history books unless you happened to be at the top of the pile at the time, with powerful friends to validate you as the "discoverer".
What made "great" scientists recognized, in the previous century, was not mere genius or relentless work or even showmanship. The only ones that were noticed were the ones who realized the great collection of authorities in the field were dead wrong, and then had the guts and genius to prove they were wrong. They were cowboys like Einstein and Tesla. The days of the cowboys are gone. (And forget about working in a patent office part-time, while working on your breakthrough discovery. Then again, the pay and financial security of academicians/researchers are so bad, the next vanguard of scientists just may require a day job.)
The last scientist I can think of who went maverick and made her mark was Barbara McClintock. She had to stand by her research for decades while it was dismissed by her peers, until they couldn't continue to look stupid and wrong. And who the hell here even knew who she was when I mentioned her? Think of all the people who died in the previous decades from peptic ulcers until an internist conclusively demonstrated that ulcers were induced by bacteria, and simple antibiotics would cure the condition. The bacteria theory for ulcers was around for decades, but guess what? The wrong body of peers were the deans of Internal Medicine and editors of prestigious journals at the time. There are probably many scientific discoveries unknown to us, merely because the first guy to prove it just didn't have the right juice, or some bureaucratic body had a financial interest in dismissing the findings.
Assuming the study's conclusions are valid (and I don't believe anyone should take any studies' results for granted anymore), it only demonstrates that science has become more bureaucratic in the past decades; you need to go to the right schools, know the right people, and managed to get into the right "chairs" to be in position to get "credit" for a scientific endeavor. That takes time, which explains why "older" scientists are credited later in life today. This is not a good thing. Picture being Albert Pujols and never being "allowed" to play in the World Series because he wasn't on the roster of the Yankees, Red Sox, or Braves. In our case today, we are strangling our own advancement by our own bureaucracy (or societal pedigree).
"Without student loans, only children of the wealthy will be able to go to college."
Cut the crap. Many people who weren't wealthy were able to go to college, whether it was by GI Bill subsidy, scholarship, or going to a state university whose operation was subsidized by state taxpayers.
The current student loans regime is obviously a coercive means to place the people taking the loans into indentured servitude. Its obviously made that way by the compounding interest, and penalties for late payments. The banks can't lose because the USG guarantees the loans.
The solution is correcting the student loan program so it cannot become a usurious loan. There should be no increased penalties for late payments. It should just be a percentage taken out of the person's paycheck/salary (structured like a 30 year fixed loan). The collection aspect can be run under the IRS. If the person never makes more than the loan's principal & interest in their lifetime, the bank takes the loss. (The banks will merely have to hire better actuaries to figure out the likelihood of getting paid back by a particular candidate.) When less poor and untalented people get loans, that's great. That's less college tuition inflation, more marginal college bankruptcies, and increased quality of college graduate.
People, student loans systems have worked for decades. Its only in the 1990's and the 2005 Bankruptcy bill when the system began to fall apart. If you think ALL poor people are ENTITLED to a college education (like many European nations and other foreign countries), then try passing a bill to do that. Make the taxpayer foot the bill. Otherwise, stop advocating loan slavery.
But 200 years from now, two vaults of gold won't be worth much. We'll all be transacting in Federation credits, and that's not based material which is easily replicated.
In fact, 802.11n gets its maximal bandwidth by using BOTH channels to send network traffic. MIMO is designed to not care which channel a packet is coming from. Dual band simultaneous.
It annoys me that high end (and not so high end) 802.11N routers come with gigabit LAN ports, as if its an "indispensable" feature. When I place that wireless router, its going to be in an elevated location as close to the center of my residence. Usually, it will not be located anywhere close to wired equipment. Stringing 25ft CAT6 cable totally defeats the point of having a wireless router! So why make me pay extra for LAN chips and hardware? I'm still going to buy an 8 port Gb gateway/switch with a wifi router anyway.
Its not Japan outlawing computer virus research. Its only a "timely" story.
What's pathetic is France outlawing individual data encryption. No Frenchman should be criticizing the Japanese with THAT ridiculous law on the books, along with banning clothing.
It should be obvious that the "public" stock markets are a crooked casino run by the investment banks. They own the cops; all the alphabet agencies that claim to "regulate" trading activity. They own all the politicians, who make the laws that determine whether illicit activity is permitted. They even own the Supreme Court, who says a batch of numbers controlled by an oligarchy is a human being in the eyes of the law and the courts. If you're a single person who raises a flag, the SEC will freeze your assets and try to haul you into court. If you're big enough to be a Madoff, then you get to run your scam until you piss off the wrong people. If you're Goldman Sachs, you're untouchable.
The "public" stock market is meaningless. Its not even where all the "big" action is happening. All the real money making is in the derivatives floor. And most of that are private transactions between banks. That doesn't even include the shadow stock market located outside of NY. That's the place where thousands of transactions are being made at hundredths of a second. What is the economic utility in making trading decisions faster than 1 second, before a human being can even initiate a buy/sell decision? And finally, the real money is made on the commodities floor, where collusion between the oil companies, investment banks, and high end speculators can drive up the price of consumer oil by $1/gal. in the middle of an oil GLUT.
Who gives a damn about Linkedin getting an overvalued IPO? The "public" stock market is meaningless compared the trading activity happening outside of the exchanges. The Facebook IPO didn't even happen on the trading floor! It was a "private" sale to avoid gov't regulators. The NYSE significance is trivial to the global economy. That's why the US gov't is going to allow it to be bought by foreign owners. You can pore through company statements, do your due diligence, read the Wall Street Journal, it doesn't matter. What you and the peons think a company's valuation and quality of its leadership is irrelevant. It'll get wiped down to peanuts by the single flick of an unreported derivatives trade.
1) Eucalyptus will be supported for as long as Ubuntu versions are supported. So, for 10.04 LTS server, that will be until 2015. (barring some catastrophic dissolution of the Eucalyptus company.)
2) Eucalyptus is not dependent upon Ubuntu for its existence. Amazon is currently the largest cloud vendor using eucalyptus tools to interface with its services. If Amazon drops eucalyptus (ha ha), then you can start the death clock. You're not going to be able to get openstack to nicely merge stuff with EC2, so its not likely openstack will supplant eucalyptus anytime soon.
3) Canonical has no announced plans to remove eucalyptus from its distributions. Most likely, eucalyptus will be in 12.04, and that means it'll be around for at least 2017.
1) 7zip is THE application for lossless, maximal compression. Speeding up 7z is a simple matter of setting for increased speed (decreased compression).
2) Error correction & recovery is done with parchive, not RAR. Even if winrar has a tweak that works in conjunction with parchive (which I am unaware of), rar archives are not more error resistant than 7zip.
Odd. I don't understand why people even use RAR anymore when there's 7z. I don't see this horde of clueless users dying for shredded archiving. And as far as I know, RAR isn't this gratifying user experience.
Actually, that would suck, and you don't know what you're talking about.
The C64 OS was a marvel of geek efficiency. If anything, the fact that C64 could run whole BASIC programs detracts from its elegance.
But the C language is an outdated, 3rd generation compiler language. It doesn't support new programming concepts. Its like trying to push for a return to COBOL.
Now, if you still have a working C64, what would be geek cool is run it using the FORTH language. Granted, FORTH is obsolete as well, but much better for writing for embedded devices than BASIC.
Plus, the Amiga was so overpriced, it never developed much of a nostalgia market. Cheaper than a Mac, at the time, but Apple was going through its retarded management as well.
You're being a little unfair to the fake-Commodore company.
The Commodore 64 was always about marketing hype. Trammiel rightly thought he could stick a piece of crap into every home if it was cheap enough. For many years, he was successful. He just couldn't get over the hump of competing with REAL computers for cheap.
No, the sad thing about fake-Commodore is that they really could have brought back the retro-product if it was cheap enough. It still would have been overpriced at $150, but fans could just use it to jury rig any low-end computing device, like an (overpriced) cheap Net TV, DVD player, and retro game machine. But an obsolete PC starting at $250?!?!? Just stupid, on their part.
Slashdot Mirror
In which "era" do you base your impression?
The real reason HURD has moved so slowly (besides managerial incompetence) is that HURD has ceased to be a product with a deadline. HURD is now an operating system research project, with the goal of tinkering with it long enough to publish a paper on their findings or dilettante OS topic.
HURD was originally designed with the presumption that microkernel architecture would be more desirable (operate more efficiently) than a monolithic kernel (that has been the basis for almost every commercial OS since UNIX). You can't really make a breathtaking, next generation OS if the basis that it operates upon either works like crap, or requires different paradigms to communicate from kernel to OS tasks. The lost decade of the 2000's has been spent finding a "suitable" microkernel replacement to MACH. (Which is decidedly unsuitable, since it was designed in the 1980's, and is better off replaced, than kludged.) You can compound the failure with the fact that it has to conform to GNU's operating charter (translation: there might have been a suitable commercially developed microkernel, but if it didn't license it GNU v2.0 (now v3.0), it was unacceptable. That's okay; I'm only speaking hypothetically about the existence of a suitable microkernel for HURD.)
The most striking irony is that HURD may be the empirical demonstration that microkernel architecture is a research dead end, and there aren't any that can even match monolithic kernel designs. The other irony is that hypervisors, which to me seem to be a form of microkernel, have long outdistanced traditional microkernel efforts, although I couldn't tell you why they would still be unsuitable for HURD (besides the license).
Nevertheless, I was pretty shocked that the "core" developers are still actually documenting their progress. They're actually pasting in snippets of their IRC conversations into the wiki documentation (from days ago!).
So, yeah, there's a reason why the "core" people involved are telling volunteers to fuck off. If you can't speak Microkernel Chinese, they don't even want you generating background noise. I'd say the definition of clueless newbies would be someone from 15+ years ago trying to participate in HURD today.
After looking at the article, the number is 17,352. The original poster botched the cut-and-paste.
"Where Late, the Sweet Birds Sang", by Kate Wilhelm
Post apocalyptic future, where remnants of humanity survive by cloning. You'll probably appreciate the novel less if you don't like "hard(ish)" science fiction. Should have a basic understanding of genetics and cloning. (Only one post here mentioned her name, but no specific recommendations.)
I dunno if this one counts. At one time, this work was put on the same famous scale as Dune, but since it hasn't been mentioned...
The llluminatus Trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.
You should have a collegiate level literary reading background, or you won't get ANY of the jokes. Its starts out with a mindboggling stream of consciousness, which introduces a hundred characters in the books, but they abandon the technique midway into the first chapter. (Call it a test to weed out the weak.)
Also, its not Isaac Bailey, its Elijah Bailey, of the "Caves of Steel" series. (Unless its some post 1980's Asimov sci-fi pulp continuation of the detective series theme...)
Damn you. I've read both of them, but its been so long ago, I've forgotten the names and titles as well. For some reason, I think the first one was written by Gordon Dickson. (Another guess would be Walter M. Miller, Jr., but I don't think it was him.) It was a short story, possibly a novella. And it was done a long time ago; 1950's-1960's era. The second one, I think it might have been "Protector" by Larry Niven. It ended up getting melded into the Ringworld mythos. But as I recall, the aliens got that way by becoming addicted to an alien root, so I'm thinking it could have been an earlier, derivative work by Niven.
1) There is nothing in Quantum Physics theory which directly invalidates anything postulated by Einstein in his significant scientific work. Einstein, the scientist, did nothing to disprove quantum physics. Einstein merely did not consider quantum scientists' findings as "scientific proof".
2) Only a scientist who is not human would not have human biases. I guess that means no human qualifies as a scientist. OR perhaps that all scientists are presumed to have biases, and is the process (scientific method) that is supposed to weed out incorrect conclusions tainted by bias. Einstein did not produce flawed research claiming to invalidate quantum theory.
3) The idea that Einstein could have contributed more to humanities' scientific knowledge by ACCEPTING most aspects of quantum theory AND THEN applying it to his later work is pure conjecture. Conjecture made by politicians who coincidentally are physicists who utilize quantum theory to further their own work. (hint, hint)
4) Einstein, with his beliefs, has done more to advance scientific knowledge than you, with your condescending viewpoint.
I was referring to the contemporary climate for science. My criticisms did not extend towards the period before 20th century.
You're spot on, except you're not as cynical and bitter.
As Joseph Campbell once observed, civilizations are a collection of myths which everyone in the society accepts/believes. We were raised thinking that science worked like Star Trek, and that blinding genius was what made for great scientific breakthroughs. But what is "accepted" scientific fact? Its basically well designed, reproducible experiments that demonstrate the validity of a theory which is eventually accepted BY a body of academic peers supposedly trained to conduct and recognize that standards were met and valid. Guess what? No body of peers (mediocrities), no scientific validation.
Science always was, and particularly today, a relentless, and excruciating labor of many millions of ants, making progress by each crumb of discovered knowledge. It is a social hive that eventually culminates in something significant and new. When it does, its the queen that gets all the credit, even though she spent all her time popping out worker drones. You cannot even hope to get credit in the science/history books unless you happened to be at the top of the pile at the time, with powerful friends to validate you as the "discoverer".
What made "great" scientists recognized, in the previous century, was not mere genius or relentless work or even showmanship. The only ones that were noticed were the ones who realized the great collection of authorities in the field were dead wrong, and then had the guts and genius to prove they were wrong. They were cowboys like Einstein and Tesla. The days of the cowboys are gone. (And forget about working in a patent office part-time, while working on your breakthrough discovery. Then again, the pay and financial security of academicians/researchers are so bad, the next vanguard of scientists just may require a day job.)
The last scientist I can think of who went maverick and made her mark was Barbara McClintock. She had to stand by her research for decades while it was dismissed by her peers, until they couldn't continue to look stupid and wrong. And who the hell here even knew who she was when I mentioned her? Think of all the people who died in the previous decades from peptic ulcers until an internist conclusively demonstrated that ulcers were induced by bacteria, and simple antibiotics would cure the condition. The bacteria theory for ulcers was around for decades, but guess what? The wrong body of peers were the deans of Internal Medicine and editors of prestigious journals at the time. There are probably many scientific discoveries unknown to us, merely because the first guy to prove it just didn't have the right juice, or some bureaucratic body had a financial interest in dismissing the findings.
Assuming the study's conclusions are valid (and I don't believe anyone should take any studies' results for granted anymore), it only demonstrates that science has become more bureaucratic in the past decades; you need to go to the right schools, know the right people, and managed to get into the right "chairs" to be in position to get "credit" for a scientific endeavor. That takes time, which explains why "older" scientists are credited later in life today. This is not a good thing. Picture being Albert Pujols and never being "allowed" to play in the World Series because he wasn't on the roster of the Yankees, Red Sox, or Braves. In our case today, we are strangling our own advancement by our own bureaucracy (or societal pedigree).
"Without student loans, only children of the wealthy will be able to go to college."
Cut the crap. Many people who weren't wealthy were able to go to college, whether it was by GI Bill subsidy, scholarship, or going to a state university whose operation was subsidized by state taxpayers.
The current student loans regime is obviously a coercive means to place the people taking the loans into indentured servitude. Its obviously made that way by the compounding interest, and penalties for late payments. The banks can't lose because the USG guarantees the loans.
The solution is correcting the student loan program so it cannot become a usurious loan. There should be no increased penalties for late payments. It should just be a percentage taken out of the person's paycheck/salary (structured like a 30 year fixed loan). The collection aspect can be run under the IRS. If the person never makes more than the loan's principal & interest in their lifetime, the bank takes the loss. (The banks will merely have to hire better actuaries to figure out the likelihood of getting paid back by a particular candidate.) When less poor and untalented people get loans, that's great. That's less college tuition inflation, more marginal college bankruptcies, and increased quality of college graduate.
People, student loans systems have worked for decades. Its only in the 1990's and the 2005 Bankruptcy bill when the system began to fall apart. If you think ALL poor people are ENTITLED to a college education (like many European nations and other foreign countries), then try passing a bill to do that. Make the taxpayer foot the bill. Otherwise, stop advocating loan slavery.
I wish I had moderator points to give you. I never understood why armchair economists cannot understand this obvious fact.
But 200 years from now, two vaults of gold won't be worth much. We'll all be transacting in Federation credits, and that's not based material which is easily replicated.
Fiat currency units can be produced at-will (a gov't with a printing press). Precious metal availability is limited what is in existence.
Only Austrian school economists thinks there is an inherent value to precious metals.
...than piss away taxpayers money suing a NASA employee for a relic that won't even cover the cost of one DOJ prosecutor?
NASA can make an example of the next astronaut when there's actually a manned program to produce a lawsuit.
Nippon is the Japanese word for Japanese (people). There's nothing derogatory or offensive with the usage.
Nips does not exist in the Japanese language, and was used as a slur in Anglo cultures, particularly pre-1960's. Nips is non-PC.
In fact, 802.11n gets its maximal bandwidth by using BOTH channels to send network traffic. MIMO is designed to not care which channel a packet is coming from. Dual band simultaneous.
It annoys me that high end (and not so high end) 802.11N routers come with gigabit LAN ports, as if its an "indispensable" feature. When I place that wireless router, its going to be in an elevated location as close to the center of my residence. Usually, it will not be located anywhere close to wired equipment. Stringing 25ft CAT6 cable totally defeats the point of having a wireless router! So why make me pay extra for LAN chips and hardware? I'm still going to buy an 8 port Gb gateway/switch with a wifi router anyway.
Its not Japan outlawing computer virus research. Its only a "timely" story.
What's pathetic is France outlawing individual data encryption. No Frenchman should be criticizing the Japanese with THAT ridiculous law on the books, along with banning clothing.
It should be obvious that the "public" stock markets are a crooked casino run by the investment banks. They own the cops; all the alphabet agencies that claim to "regulate" trading activity. They own all the politicians, who make the laws that determine whether illicit activity is permitted. They even own the Supreme Court, who says a batch of numbers controlled by an oligarchy is a human being in the eyes of the law and the courts. If you're a single person who raises a flag, the SEC will freeze your assets and try to haul you into court. If you're big enough to be a Madoff, then you get to run your scam until you piss off the wrong people. If you're Goldman Sachs, you're untouchable.
The "public" stock market is meaningless. Its not even where all the "big" action is happening. All the real money making is in the derivatives floor. And most of that are private transactions between banks. That doesn't even include the shadow stock market located outside of NY. That's the place where thousands of transactions are being made at hundredths of a second. What is the economic utility in making trading decisions faster than 1 second, before a human being can even initiate a buy/sell decision? And finally, the real money is made on the commodities floor, where collusion between the oil companies, investment banks, and high end speculators can drive up the price of consumer oil by $1/gal. in the middle of an oil GLUT.
Who gives a damn about Linkedin getting an overvalued IPO? The "public" stock market is meaningless compared the trading activity happening outside of the exchanges. The Facebook IPO didn't even happen on the trading floor! It was a "private" sale to avoid gov't regulators. The NYSE significance is trivial to the global economy. That's why the US gov't is going to allow it to be bought by foreign owners. You can pore through company statements, do your due diligence, read the Wall Street Journal, it doesn't matter. What you and the peons think a company's valuation and quality of its leadership is irrelevant. It'll get wiped down to peanuts by the single flick of an unreported derivatives trade.
1) Eucalyptus will be supported for as long as Ubuntu versions are supported. So, for 10.04 LTS server, that will be until 2015. (barring some catastrophic dissolution of the Eucalyptus company.)
2) Eucalyptus is not dependent upon Ubuntu for its existence. Amazon is currently the largest cloud vendor using eucalyptus tools to interface with its services. If Amazon drops eucalyptus (ha ha), then you can start the death clock. You're not going to be able to get openstack to nicely merge stuff with EC2, so its not likely openstack will supplant eucalyptus anytime soon.
3) Canonical has no announced plans to remove eucalyptus from its distributions. Most likely, eucalyptus will be in 12.04, and that means it'll be around for at least 2017.
You can try this one instead.
1) 7zip is THE application for lossless, maximal compression. Speeding up 7z is a simple matter of setting for increased speed (decreased compression).
2) Error correction & recovery is done with parchive, not RAR. Even if winrar has a tweak that works in conjunction with parchive (which I am unaware of), rar archives are not more error resistant than 7zip.
Odd. I don't understand why people even use RAR anymore when there's 7z. I don't see this horde of clueless users dying for shredded archiving. And as far as I know, RAR isn't this gratifying user experience.
Actually, that would suck, and you don't know what you're talking about.
The C64 OS was a marvel of geek efficiency. If anything, the fact that C64 could run whole BASIC programs detracts from its elegance.
But the C language is an outdated, 3rd generation compiler language. It doesn't support new programming concepts. Its like trying to push for a return to COBOL.
Now, if you still have a working C64, what would be geek cool is run it using the FORTH language. Granted, FORTH is obsolete as well, but much better for writing for embedded devices than BASIC.
Plus, the Amiga was so overpriced, it never developed much of a nostalgia market. Cheaper than a Mac, at the time, but Apple was going through its retarded management as well.
You're being a little unfair to the fake-Commodore company.
The Commodore 64 was always about marketing hype. Trammiel rightly thought he could stick a piece of crap into every home if it was cheap enough. For many years, he was successful. He just couldn't get over the hump of competing with REAL computers for cheap.
No, the sad thing about fake-Commodore is that they really could have brought back the retro-product if it was cheap enough. It still would have been overpriced at $150, but fans could just use it to jury rig any low-end computing device, like an (overpriced) cheap Net TV, DVD player, and retro game machine. But an obsolete PC starting at $250?!?!? Just stupid, on their part.