What bothers me is that they could have successfully put out a much more marketable product for much cheaper if they had made more of an intelligent effort.
The odd thing is the C64 unit started near instanteously. You'd think vendors would want to sell that "instantaneous" feature for their computing devices today.
Find me these people "giving away" these 1541 floppy drives.
My problem is that my freaking 1541 died while sitting in a box! Went in working, 5 years later, took it out, and it was catatonic. An EE acquaintance and C64 buff thought the ROM chip went bad, and I probably could scrounge around for a replacement EEPROM, but screw that.
Many things about the C64 I have nostalgia towards, but the 1541 drive wasn't one of them. Took forever to load, even with those "fastload" cartridges. I do remember cutting notches in the floppies, to write on both sides (ha ha).
Re:As long as I can still play my old favourites
on
The New Commodore 64
·
· Score: 1
Ah! You beat me with Raid on Bungeling Bay!
And I even forgot Choplifter...
Re:As long as I can still play my old favourites
on
The New Commodore 64
·
· Score: 1
I can beat all of that. Who remembers... Raid on Bungeling Bay?
There was another "awesome" game, which had amazing graphics (for a C64), but retarded gameplay. It was shooting flying saucers over the US capitol. I can't remember the name.
I was more of an Ultima III fan, than Ultima II.
Loderunner ran pretty good on the C64. And believe it or not, Microsoft(?) even had a semi-functional flight simulator that ran on the C64.
In previous decades, I thought of the Commodore 64 as the most awesome 6502 breadboard. It even came with a functional OS, rather than toggle switches and LEDs! Then again, my love was the Z80 chip, on the Timex/Sinclair 1000s.
I still don't know what to make of the Arduino crowd...
Wow, I never bothered trying to port my 5.25" collection. I had read that it would be hopeless after 10 years.
(Remember those huge mainframes with the huge reel tapes? There was a whole employment niche where tape operators spent most of their time taking a tape off of a rack, after sitting for few years, and rewriting it to another tape. All because the magnetic degradation would guarantee data loss without recopying it within a certain period of time.)
Did you have a fetish about the magnetic media you bought?
Oh cut the crap. Yer lying, or your parents liked dumping "expensive" toys on you as a toddler.
Lessee, I got my Commode Door 64 when I was 18. It was $500, $250 for the unit, $250 for the 1541 floppy drive. I got it at the "Toys R Us", which I'm not even sure it exists anymore. Figger it was around 1983. Then guess it had a "popular" product life of roughly 8 years. You would have had to have gotten it as a hand-me-down, and then developed a technofetish for 6502 8bit processing in the 1990's, while every other sane teenager would be playing Nintendo, or working a Windoze 95.
Sorry, I'm not buying it. Unless you were a very, very weird kid. Something to make even us C64 weirdos cringe at.
Modern modular design. Make the keyboard on top of the computer form factor, then make the keyboard detachable from the "computer". If you spill on the keyboard, remove it, and swap in a new part (or clean it).
I think the new C64's have usb ports. Trivial peripheral.
No, what pisses me off is the retarded cost to buy one. As people have pointed out, its a nostalgia purchase, but no way I'm forking over $250 for a "fake" C64, when I can get a color Nook for that price.
The engineers REALLY had to aim for a $100 model, similar to what the OLPC guys do. Make the margin off of NOT providing a screen. Just have HDMI/DVI ports and charge for a DVI/VGA adapter. (Or even go more retro, and use an SVIDEO/CGI(?) connector). Make the DVD drive a chargeable option. As long as I have USB ports, I can live without the nostalgia of the 1541 drive, to have EVERY C64 game stored on a USB stick.
Its useful as a cheap, non-screen netbook, pop in a DVD to make it a DVD player, use the net to stream TV on it. Your kids will look at you like you're retarded, but f**k'em. Its only $100, and its nostalgia.
Apparently, you know nothing about current technology. Writing up a SID emulator as an audio device should be trivial. What's sick is that I don't think it would even tax modern "economy" processors. I'm surprised it hasn't been done already.
You are not properly shopping for laptops. Recently, Dell was selling full-blown laptops running on Core i3's, with the perks, for $400 (kick it up a little higher for accessories, s&h, and tax).
If your idea of a piece of junk is something that won't run the bleeding-edge graphics game, then yes, they are junk. Whatever was around before the Core i3's, yes, they probably were junk. My Core i5 laptop from a year ago is not a piece of junk, and these new suckers are just as powerful for $350 less. (Rrrrrrrrrr.)
Not because he may be wrong about.Net developers, but because its not his job to determine the best qualified software developers in his company. Its his CIO/COO's job to determine what kind of software developers the company should acquire. Do you want your CEO picking the programmers he's never going to supervise or interact with? Or focusing on getting investment capital and increasing the value of the company?
In any case, a trivial issue. Less.Net programmers for his startup, more.Net programmers for companies that care more about the quality of the employee.
Yes, they created the Federal Reserve to prop up the banks that failed due to rapacious speculation. That function is NOT what makes the Federal Reserve a criminal agency. Its when the Fed is entrusted to regulate financial activity and fails to do so, and when the Fed jeopardizes the entire banking system by manipulating rules to bail out bankers; that's when its criminal. It was the Federal gov't, namely Treasury, which gave away taxpayer's money to AIG shareholders AT 100% inflated value. And TARP funds, without requiring recipients to reform the practices that led their institutions to financial ruin.
If I only had mod points available for you. You are so right. The majority of those subprime loans were made into derivatives BY the investment banks, not Fannie and Freddy. Once again we focus on the small-time Madoff's of the world, and ignore the master thieves like Blankfein.
It was different during the period where the Glass/Stegall act was still in effect. In seventy years, the economy has not been threatened by a bank collapse. (The closest was the S&L failures, and that was trivial compared to 2007.) Wall Street didn't have UNREGULATED financial derivatives trading in which to suck available capital. They had to direct that capital towards business loans, business stock investment and mortgages.
The finance industry also bribed/lobbied politicians and bureaucrats to allow them to break financial laws and commit fraud with impunity. This destroys the middle class (the poor aren't buying houses), and steals the retirement funds of every worker. That, I find, is the most egregious disgrace of our society, and lasting evil of the banking industry.
1) Typing responses to Slashdot. Tablets suck for typing. 2) Typing papers in the Library or a location outside of your dorm room. (Student) 3) Typing memos, papers, or work in a hotel, airport terminal, or customer location. 4) Running a PC application that won't run on an android tablet or iPad.
While I love running 720p movies on my 14" laptop, I certainly wouldn't choose a laptop for watching TV or movies at home. That's what your desktop is for.
One 14" laptop is still cheaper than desktop w/ 24" screen + overpriced, undercapable tablet.
Why on earth would you want an expensive warranty on an obsolete machine? As other posters have suggested, buy your laptop every two years. You don't need a warranty longer than two years, and in most cases, that machine will feel ancient and obsolete by 4 years.
[quote]If she wants to do -heavy- photo editing, you'll want a slightly beefier CPU. Not a Core i3, but a Core i5.[/quote]
A Core i5 is not "beefier" than an i3. They're both dual cores. The i5 can operate 10% faster when loaded, but that's meaningless if the i3's top clock is the same speed as the i5's turboboosted. The i3's will invariably be cheaper than the i5's. If you're going to get an i5, it better be the quad core one without the graphics on a chip, and only because its cheaper than a comparable i7 (which is soon becoming . Don't fall for marketing hype.
And your approach is all wrong for the purchaser (the wife). You're presuming she's a geek that will meltdown if one feature is missing or substandard. I have yet to meet the chick that zeroed in on technical specs like that. All they care about is if the laptop does what they want reasonably well. And other aesthetic features which defy characterization. (roll eyes)
Yes, I concur. Not just hardware, but software changes so quickly now, 4 years is an eternity. You're going to be reconstructing your software environment, at some point; why not lump the work with a new machine? It forces one to be more assiduous about managing personal data. I make it a point to create two partitions on a harddrive; one for the OS, the other to hold data. (On Windoze 7, you can move the location of your desktop and media folders. And application data directories like Firefox.) It allows one to restore the OS if it gets borked by a virus, and not jeopardize your data. If the harddrive dies, it will still be easier to restore the backed up data.
While I agree with the general gist of your post, you are dead wrong about $600 i3 two years ago. They weren't released to OEM vendors until January 2010. (I know, because I got my i5 for $700 a year ago.)
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What bothers me is that they could have successfully put out a much more marketable product for much cheaper if they had made more of an intelligent effort.
The odd thing is the C64 unit started near instanteously. You'd think vendors would want to sell that "instantaneous" feature for their computing devices today.
Find me these people "giving away" these 1541 floppy drives.
My problem is that my freaking 1541 died while sitting in a box! Went in working, 5 years later, took it out, and it was catatonic. An EE acquaintance and C64 buff thought the ROM chip went bad, and I probably could scrounge around for a replacement EEPROM, but screw that.
Many things about the C64 I have nostalgia towards, but the 1541 drive wasn't one of them. Took forever to load, even with those "fastload" cartridges. I do remember cutting notches in the floppies, to write on both sides (ha ha).
Ah! You beat me with Raid on Bungeling Bay!
And I even forgot Choplifter...
I can beat all of that. Who remembers... Raid on Bungeling Bay?
There was another "awesome" game, which had amazing graphics (for a C64), but retarded gameplay. It was shooting flying saucers over the US capitol. I can't remember the name.
I was more of an Ultima III fan, than Ultima II.
Loderunner ran pretty good on the C64. And believe it or not, Microsoft(?) even had a semi-functional flight simulator that ran on the C64.
In previous decades, I thought of the Commodore 64 as the most awesome 6502 breadboard. It even came with a functional OS, rather than toggle switches and LEDs! Then again, my love was the Z80 chip, on the Timex/Sinclair 1000s.
I still don't know what to make of the Arduino crowd...
Wow, I never bothered trying to port my 5.25" collection. I had read that it would be hopeless after 10 years.
(Remember those huge mainframes with the huge reel tapes? There was a whole employment niche where tape operators spent most of their time taking a tape off of a rack, after sitting for few years, and rewriting it to another tape. All because the magnetic degradation would guarantee data loss without recopying it within a certain period of time.)
Did you have a fetish about the magnetic media you bought?
Ah, the look on your kids face (as you demonstrate the C64 graphics), when he thinks to himself, "Is my Dad retarded?"
Priceless.
Oh cut the crap. Yer lying, or your parents liked dumping "expensive" toys on you as a toddler.
Lessee, I got my Commode Door 64 when I was 18. It was $500, $250 for the unit, $250 for the 1541 floppy drive. I got it at the "Toys R Us", which I'm not even sure it exists anymore. Figger it was around 1983. Then guess it had a "popular" product life of roughly 8 years. You would have had to have gotten it as a hand-me-down, and then developed a technofetish for 6502 8bit processing in the 1990's, while every other sane teenager would be playing Nintendo, or working a Windoze 95.
Sorry, I'm not buying it. Unless you were a very, very weird kid. Something to make even us C64 weirdos cringe at.
Modern modular design. Make the keyboard on top of the computer form factor, then make the keyboard detachable from the "computer". If you spill on the keyboard, remove it, and swap in a new part (or clean it).
I think the new C64's have usb ports. Trivial peripheral.
No, what pisses me off is the retarded cost to buy one. As people have pointed out, its a nostalgia purchase, but no way I'm forking over $250 for a "fake" C64, when I can get a color Nook for that price.
The engineers REALLY had to aim for a $100 model, similar to what the OLPC guys do. Make the margin off of NOT providing a screen. Just have HDMI/DVI ports and charge for a DVI/VGA adapter. (Or even go more retro, and use an SVIDEO/CGI(?) connector). Make the DVD drive a chargeable option. As long as I have USB ports, I can live without the nostalgia of the 1541 drive, to have EVERY C64 game stored on a USB stick.
Its useful as a cheap, non-screen netbook, pop in a DVD to make it a DVD player, use the net to stream TV on it. Your kids will look at you like you're retarded, but f**k'em. Its only $100, and its nostalgia.
Apparently, you know nothing about current technology. Writing up a SID emulator as an audio device should be trivial. What's sick is that I don't think it would even tax modern "economy" processors. I'm surprised it hasn't been done already.
You are not properly shopping for laptops. Recently, Dell was selling full-blown laptops running on Core i3's, with the perks, for $400 (kick it up a little higher for accessories, s&h, and tax).
If your idea of a piece of junk is something that won't run the bleeding-edge graphics game, then yes, they are junk. Whatever was around before the Core i3's, yes, they probably were junk. My Core i5 laptop from a year ago is not a piece of junk, and these new suckers are just as powerful for $350 less. (Rrrrrrrrrr.)
Not because he may be wrong about .Net developers, but because its not his job to determine the best qualified software developers in his company. Its his CIO/COO's job to determine what kind of software developers the company should acquire. Do you want your CEO picking the programmers he's never going to supervise or interact with? Or focusing on getting investment capital and increasing the value of the company?
In any case, a trivial issue. Less .Net programmers for his startup, more .Net programmers for companies that care more about the quality of the employee.
Yes, they created the Federal Reserve to prop up the banks that failed due to rapacious speculation. That function is NOT what makes the Federal Reserve a criminal agency. Its when the Fed is entrusted to regulate financial activity and fails to do so, and when the Fed jeopardizes the entire banking system by manipulating rules to bail out bankers; that's when its criminal. It was the Federal gov't, namely Treasury, which gave away taxpayer's money to AIG shareholders AT 100% inflated value. And TARP funds, without requiring recipients to reform the practices that led their institutions to financial ruin.
If I only had mod points available for you. You are so right. The majority of those subprime loans were made into derivatives BY the investment banks, not Fannie and Freddy. Once again we focus on the small-time Madoff's of the world, and ignore the master thieves like Blankfein.
It was different during the period where the Glass/Stegall act was still in effect. In seventy years, the economy has not been threatened by a bank collapse. (The closest was the S&L failures, and that was trivial compared to 2007.) Wall Street didn't have UNREGULATED financial derivatives trading in which to suck available capital. They had to direct that capital towards business loans, business stock investment and mortgages.
The finance industry also bribed/lobbied politicians and bureaucrats to allow them to break financial laws and commit fraud with impunity. This destroys the middle class (the poor aren't buying houses), and steals the retirement funds of every worker. That, I find, is the most egregious disgrace of our society, and lasting evil of the banking industry.
But it keeps giving me those damn static electricity shocks!
(and its an early model Core2. Adequate for websurfing, but lately I've been cursing out Apple for not optimizing software performance....)
Man I wish I had a mod point to give you.
1) Typing responses to Slashdot. Tablets suck for typing.
2) Typing papers in the Library or a location outside of your dorm room. (Student)
3) Typing memos, papers, or work in a hotel, airport terminal, or customer location.
4) Running a PC application that won't run on an android tablet or iPad.
While I love running 720p movies on my 14" laptop, I certainly wouldn't choose a laptop for watching TV or movies at home. That's what your desktop is for.
One 14" laptop is still cheaper than desktop w/ 24" screen + overpriced, undercapable tablet.
Why on earth would you want an expensive warranty on an obsolete machine?
As other posters have suggested, buy your laptop every two years. You don't need a warranty longer than two years, and in most cases, that machine will feel ancient and obsolete by 4 years.
[quote]If she wants to do -heavy- photo editing, you'll want a slightly beefier CPU. Not a Core i3, but a Core i5.[/quote]
A Core i5 is not "beefier" than an i3. They're both dual cores. The i5 can operate 10% faster when loaded, but that's meaningless if the i3's top clock is the same speed as the i5's turboboosted. The i3's will invariably be cheaper than the i5's. If you're going to get an i5, it better be the quad core one without the graphics on a chip, and only because its cheaper than a comparable i7 (which is soon becoming . Don't fall for marketing hype.
And your approach is all wrong for the purchaser (the wife). You're presuming she's a geek that will meltdown if one feature is missing or substandard. I have yet to meet the chick that zeroed in on technical specs like that. All they care about is if the laptop does what they want reasonably well. And other aesthetic features which defy characterization. (roll eyes)
Bloat? Let me guess, you're not an ubuntu, redhat, or SuSe user. (Gentoo? Slackware? LFS?)
Yes, I concur. Not just hardware, but software changes so quickly now, 4 years is an eternity. You're going to be reconstructing your software environment, at some point; why not lump the work with a new machine? It forces one to be more assiduous about managing personal data. I make it a point to create two partitions on a harddrive; one for the OS, the other to hold data. (On Windoze 7, you can move the location of your desktop and media folders. And application data directories like Firefox.) It allows one to restore the OS if it gets borked by a virus, and not jeopardize your data. If the harddrive dies, it will still be easier to restore the backed up data.
While I agree with the general gist of your post, you are dead wrong about $600 i3 two years ago. They weren't released to OEM vendors until January 2010. (I know, because I got my i5 for $700 a year ago.)