How are Myspace and OpenID remotely related? A decentralized social network would be nifty, but OpenID definitely isn't one. In the mean time, better social networks offer open APIs that let you access their friend data.
OpenID means you can comment on other people's blogs/pages without getting a log-in or doing so anonymously.
Note tht it wasn't that long ago that Apple's marketing relied on insisting that PowerMacs were PCs (and oddly claiming that anything other than Macs and PCs weren't personal computers, so that they could claim things like "First 64bit PC").
Granted Apple may benefit as much if not more from a pro-Apple bias
Indeed, on a similar note, the press loved the old MacOS, even though it never had preemptive multitasking. So I don't think it was pro-Microsoft in an anti-Apple sense (which is what one would presume given the content of the article), but rather pro-Apple-and-Microsoft, and all the alternative OSs largely got ignored.
Wikipedia, being anonymously edited, has no authority on any subject and must give you a reliable external source for any piece of information in its articles so that you can double check it with something that DOES have authority. Of course most of the time Wikipedia articles don't list any sources which makes them next to useless.
So Wikipedia has no authority, and is no good because it often but not always gives its sources - but every other source on the Internet, including the media, who spout bias rubbish or sometimes outright falsehoods, and never give their sources, that's okay?
The only difference here is that Wikipedia has its history available so that people can nitpick over any short term vandalism that appeared. No one seems to complain about the false information permanently displayed in tabloid articles.
And I think that we do, neither blogs (opinion) nor Wikipedia (rumor) replace news from organizations that have an interest in being first (or at least timely) and in being correct.
Wikipedia occasionaly makes mistakes, but it's way above the bias and falsehoods that pervade the rubbish which the media output. There's simply no comparison. Hell, even many blogs do a lot better (presumably you agree, else you wouldn't be reading Slashdot).
Firstly, it's not the Commodore company, so we won't see any of that from them. This company also doesn't own any rights to the Amiga.
It should also contain custom chip-based emulators of the Amiga 3000, 500, 1200 and C-128 (GO64 and all) I say chip-based and not software emulated because I want the emulated machines to also have hardware-level access to the HD and RAM and create their own partitions
I'm not sure you need a hardware emulator - I haven't tried it, but WinUAE claims to support Amiga formatted hard disks directly. And you certainly don't need "hardware-level" access to RAM - a RAM disk works fine in UAE, just like anything else which is stored in the emulated Amiga's memory.
(and imagine a 1gb ram-disk for an amiga? heh)
Imagine it? I've got it right here:) :
4.system39:> avail Type Available In-Use Maximum Largest chip 1980928 99840 2080768 1980832 fast 527353296 9517616 536870912 523710840 total 529334224 9617456 538951680 523710840
Well, that would be 1GB if I had more memory:) (The only snag is that WinUAE only lets you choose powers of 2 for the amount of RAM, and with some taken up by Windows, that means you can't use all the free memory for the emulated Amiga.)
Yes, everyone knows it's not the "real Commodore". It's a brand, just like any other brand.
I don't really see how the Commodore name would appeal to anyone who might be interested in these machines. Kids are unlikely to know anything about the original Commodore. And those who did grow up with the original are unlikely to be interested by such a machine. And if they were, they're likely to build an equivalent machine themselves.
Sure, but what the brand name does is awareness and free advertising. This is shown by the fact we're having this discussion at all, and all the widespread publicity they've got, simply for using the name. It may not make sense, but that's how it works in business and the world of brandnames. It's not that far different from Apple reusing the Mac brand for their new operating system OS X rather than calling it NeXT or whatever - whether a name is technically correct or not is less important to a company than using a name which has brand recognition. A closer example would be the "Atari" name.
Okay, I missed that in the article. My bad. It still doesn't make these PCs Commodores.
Well, Commodore made PCs you know back in the day, and my Amiga didn't even come with a Commodore 64 emulator - were they not real "Commodores" either?
Did the 68060 ever make mass production? After the A4k we were going to see, at various stages, HP-PA RISC chip based Amigas, 68060 Amigas, DEC Alpha (and then Motorola became involved with Alpha development as well), and PPC based Amigas. AGA was to be replaced with AAA, wasn't it?
Yep, there were 68060 Amigas - Escom brought out an '060 version of the A4000T (there were also '060 accelerators, and it was used in unofficial Amiga clones such as the Draco). There were also (eventually) PPC based Amigas (the AmigaOne), although a few years before that there were PPC accelerators for 68k Amigas. AAA was indeed Commodore's planned replacement for AGA.
But it still has nothing to do with Commodore. It's just a label slapped on an unreleated company to generate press.
Agreed - but at the same time, this is standard practice in business. Brandnames get sold on all the time, and it's not uncommon for company names to live on as brands, long after the original company has gone bust.
I realise that people may have other ways of measuring morality - but my point is that there is the difference between "morality" meaning whether something is right or wrong (which is the correct definition, and the definition which would mostly square up to how laws are decided), and "morality" becoming a reason in itself, which is what a lot of people seem to use it for.
Even then though, there are plenty of cases where the law does not match up to morality - there are many things which many would say are immoral but are not and they would say should not be illegal (e.g., cheating on someone).
to this point i think the best system we've devised to deal with that problem is democracy.
Although I'd say that democracy (especially true democracy, e.g., if something is put to a referundum) can be very bad at moral issues, because 51% of the population can regard any minority group as immoral. And then "democracy" becomes someone hundreds of miles away telling you what you can and can't do in the bedroom...
could you name a law that doesn't legislate morality?
Your point is correct - the problem I think is that the word "morality" is now often used in a different sense. Laws should be based on evidence of harm - in that case, it is still a moral issue, and we would say that something is immoral because there is evidence of harm.
However, somewhere along the way, morality stopped being an end state, and became a reason in itself. Consider the sort of people who say "It's wrong because it's immoral" (which really is a tautology), or in the case of law, "We should ban it because it's immoral". I think this is more what the OP meant, that this is a law based on some people's personal opinions (or often, religious belief).
Yes, laws should be passed on matters of morality, where whether they are moral or not is judged on evidence of harm. But what shouldn't happen is laws being passed simply because some people claim it's immoral.
This is currently the situation in the UK where the Government plans to criminalise possession of some consensual or simulated adult images - the Government in its consultation even went as far to say that there was no necessity to provide any evidence of harm whatsoever, the fact that some people thought that images were "abhorrent" was alone sufficient to criminalise private possession.
It's about time we sorted out the definition of "moon" too - how many moons does Jupiter have now? Even any old lump of rock counts now! How will our schoolchildren memories all of those? Please won't somebody think of the children!!!
Yeah, but, but they have that new e-petition service. Oh wait, they ignore that too, don't they?
They ignore it if they disagree with it, yes - but if a few people sign a petition saying X should be banned and the Government agrees, then the petition is suddenly cited as solid proof that it's what the public want...
Actually, she does. The Queen has the power to dissolve Parliament at any time and without giving a reason, and no Bill passes into law in the UK without her signature. She is also in supreme command of the Armed Forces, whose oath of loyalty is sworn to her, not to the Government or Parliament.
She may have those powers on paper, but it's debateable whether she'd have them in practice, or using them would result in the monarchy being overturned.
And this isn't really relevant to the point being made - the ID card scheme, or any of the other things Labour has done, is not the fault of the Queen, and overturning the monarchy won't help matters. On the contrary, if the Queen does have the powers you state, then overturning the monarchy would just remove that check on the Government, making matters worse.
Ah yes, right on cue, I was just thinking to myself "It's an article about civil liberties in the UK - where's that pointless off-topic comment about gun control?"
And by your logic, everytime there's an article about civil liberties in the US, I should say "Why are you guys worrying? Just use your guns!" Tell me, if people are apparentely losing rights in the US, why don't your guns sort it out?
Er, no, I didn't vote for Labour, and I suspect virtually all ID-opposers didn't, either. Even nationwide, Labour only got about 30something% of the vote.
And people are protesting - it's just a shame there aren't enough people to care. You do realise that different people have different opinions? That other people don't protest does not imply that those people against it don't care.
Your comment makes about as much sense as saying we should never care about the US Government's actions here on Slashdot, because they were elected!
Sure, he can play the story over again to explore the different branches, but who except hardcore fans wants to do that?
Maybe it's just me, but I would consider it perfectly reasonable to expect to play a game more than once, and I'm certainly no hardcore gamer.
In fact, I would say the opposite, that a linear game increases the problem of paying for development that a single player doesn't experience - since with a linear game, I have less desire to play the game more than once, in which case I will miss out on any alternative choices I could have made (most commonly in RPGs, there's the choice of character - so for example, I play as a warrior-type person, and then all the development of an extensive magic system goes to waste).
Games which have non-linear gameplay I will play again and again, and in doing so, experience every possible choice that is available.
This applies to other types of games, e.g., consider Civilization: if I only ever played one game, then I'd only play as one race, but since the game is varied enough to play again and again, I explore out every possible option.
In summary, I'd say the optimal cases for minimising development waste are either being highly non-linear, or being entirely linear, since a mostly-linear-with-some-non-linear tends to cause all the non-linear elements to be missed.
An entirely linear game is not what I would call a game, more a story.
As others have said, I think it's an issue of sentience. Although don't forget the large number of (usually anti-porn/pro-censorship) people who will claim that such a thing should be illegal on the basis that it will turn ordinary people into rapists...
I think the big problem will be if we have human-level AI before we work out what sentience is and what causes it.
Talking of ex-wives, I was confused by this comment in the article:
"Imagine if some people treat androids as if the machines were their wives,"
Like, what, is this supposed to be an example of someone treating their android badly? I'm completely lost as to what the implication is here. Or maybe he's saying we mustn't date robots?
There most probably are sentient, intelligent, non-human beings today (Great apes, maybe dolphins), but factually they don't have any more rights than other mammals, or birds.
He didn't say they should have more rights, just that it should have some rights. The fact that we give rights to animals backs up this point.
Animal abuse is illegal in many jurisdictions, it's quite thinkable that we'll have robots that are as intelligent as most pets.
And I've got a coat with as much fur as most pets.
Personally I don't support animal rights based on how clever they are (or how much fur they have), I do so from a belief that they may be sentient - capable of experiencing pain.
The Amiga, as swell a design as it might have been, was too expensive to be a gamer (like the C64/128) and too outside the mainstream to be a viable competitor to the PC or Mac. And for almost two decades now, the Amiga fanboys have been wistfully stroking themselves to fond memories of Guru Meditations to realize that it was an overly complex design that was a business nightmare for its creators. Too expensive to build, too expensive to sell, margins sliced to the bone to make them "affordable." Visionary, we can debate, but absolute crap business sense.
Maybe in the US, but the Amiga sold well in Europe, becoming the mainstream home computer for a time. PCs and Macs sold more in raw numbers, but then the business market was much bigger than the home market back then (and Macs were only used in niche markets like DTP).
I'm not sure what you mean by "too expensive" - the high end models perhaps, but the low end models were far cheaper than PCs or Macs (which probably contributed to their popularity for home machines; it was Macs that were more overly expensive), and they were profitable. Commodore were bad at marketing, but I'm not sure that calling a platform that lasts 9 years - and then several years beyond that with no parent company - is "absolute crap business sense" in any meaningful sense.
And that's the problem with it. The US document merely recognizes that and other freedoms.
Er, you've lost me? I meant "give" in the legal sense, and as the other reply points out, the constitution uses the term "recognise" anyway. I obviously wasn't quoting word for word when I wrote that.
Slashdot Mirror
How are Myspace and OpenID remotely related? A decentralized social network would be nifty, but OpenID definitely isn't one. In the mean time, better social networks offer open APIs that let you access their friend data.
OpenID means you can comment on other people's blogs/pages without getting a log-in or doing so anonymously.
Because "PC" has come to mean "Windows box."
Note tht it wasn't that long ago that Apple's marketing relied on insisting that PowerMacs were PCs (and oddly claiming that anything other than Macs and PCs weren't personal computers, so that they could claim things like "First 64bit PC").
Granted Apple may benefit as much if not more from a pro-Apple bias
Indeed, on a similar note, the press loved the old MacOS, even though it never had preemptive multitasking. So I don't think it was pro-Microsoft in an anti-Apple sense (which is what one would presume given the content of the article), but rather pro-Apple-and-Microsoft, and all the alternative OSs largely got ignored.
Wikipedia, being anonymously edited, has no authority on any subject and must give you a reliable external source for any piece of information in its articles so that you can double check it with something that DOES have authority. Of course most of the time Wikipedia articles don't list any sources which makes them next to useless.
So Wikipedia has no authority, and is no good because it often but not always gives its sources - but every other source on the Internet, including the media, who spout bias rubbish or sometimes outright falsehoods, and never give their sources, that's okay?
The only difference here is that Wikipedia has its history available so that people can nitpick over any short term vandalism that appeared. No one seems to complain about the false information permanently displayed in tabloid articles.
And I think that we do, neither blogs (opinion) nor Wikipedia (rumor) replace news from organizations that have an interest in being first (or at least timely) and in being correct.
Wikipedia occasionaly makes mistakes, but it's way above the bias and falsehoods that pervade the rubbish which the media output. There's simply no comparison. Hell, even many blogs do a lot better (presumably you agree, else you wouldn't be reading Slashdot).
Firstly, it's not the Commodore company, so we won't see any of that from them. This company also doesn't own any rights to the Amiga.
:) (The only snag is that WinUAE only lets you choose powers of 2 for the amount of RAM, and with some taken up by Windows, that means you can't use all the free memory for the emulated Amiga.)
It should also contain custom chip-based emulators of the Amiga 3000, 500, 1200 and C-128 (GO64 and all) I say chip-based and not software emulated because I want the emulated machines to also have hardware-level access to the HD and RAM and create their own partitions
I'm not sure you need a hardware emulator - I haven't tried it, but WinUAE claims to support Amiga formatted hard disks directly. And you certainly don't need "hardware-level" access to RAM - a RAM disk works fine in UAE, just like anything else which is stored in the emulated Amiga's memory.
(and imagine a 1gb ram-disk for an amiga? heh)
Imagine it? I've got it right here:) :
4.system39:> avail
Type Available In-Use Maximum Largest
chip 1980928 99840 2080768 1980832
fast 527353296 9517616 536870912 523710840
total 529334224 9617456 538951680 523710840
Well, that would be 1GB if I had more memory
Yes, everyone knows it's not the "real Commodore". It's a brand, just like any other brand.
I don't really see how the Commodore name would appeal to anyone who might be interested in these machines. Kids are unlikely to know anything about the original Commodore. And those who did grow up with the original are unlikely to be interested by such a machine. And if they were, they're likely to build an equivalent machine themselves.
Sure, but what the brand name does is awareness and free advertising. This is shown by the fact we're having this discussion at all, and all the widespread publicity they've got, simply for using the name. It may not make sense, but that's how it works in business and the world of brandnames. It's not that far different from Apple reusing the Mac brand for their new operating system OS X rather than calling it NeXT or whatever - whether a name is technically correct or not is less important to a company than using a name which has brand recognition. A closer example would be the "Atari" name.
Make me a 68060 based Amiga laptop with the AGA chipset, with a 1472 x 566 pixel TFT, and I'm sold. :)
:)
You could have that now - slap WinUAE onto a laptop, and it'll run Amiga software way faster than any 68060 Amiga ever would
Okay, I missed that in the article. My bad. It still doesn't make these PCs Commodores.
Well, Commodore made PCs you know back in the day, and my Amiga didn't even come with a Commodore 64 emulator - were they not real "Commodores" either?
Did the 68060 ever make mass production? After the A4k we were going to see, at various stages, HP-PA RISC chip based Amigas, 68060 Amigas, DEC Alpha (and then Motorola became involved with Alpha development as well), and PPC based Amigas. AGA was to be replaced with AAA, wasn't it?
Yep, there were 68060 Amigas - Escom brought out an '060 version of the A4000T (there were also '060 accelerators, and it was used in unofficial Amiga clones such as the Draco). There were also (eventually) PPC based Amigas (the AmigaOne), although a few years before that there were PPC accelerators for 68k Amigas. AAA was indeed Commodore's planned replacement for AGA.
But it still has nothing to do with Commodore. It's just a label slapped on an unreleated company to generate press.
Agreed - but at the same time, this is standard practice in business. Brandnames get sold on all the time, and it's not uncommon for company names to live on as brands, long after the original company has gone bust.
I realise that people may have other ways of measuring morality - but my point is that there is the difference between "morality" meaning whether something is right or wrong (which is the correct definition, and the definition which would mostly square up to how laws are decided), and "morality" becoming a reason in itself, which is what a lot of people seem to use it for.
Even then though, there are plenty of cases where the law does not match up to morality - there are many things which many would say are immoral but are not and they would say should not be illegal (e.g., cheating on someone).
to this point i think the best system we've devised to deal with that problem is democracy.
Although I'd say that democracy (especially true democracy, e.g., if something is put to a referundum) can be very bad at moral issues, because 51% of the population can regard any minority group as immoral. And then "democracy" becomes someone hundreds of miles away telling you what you can and can't do in the bedroom...
could you name a law that doesn't legislate morality?
Your point is correct - the problem I think is that the word "morality" is now often used in a different sense. Laws should be based on evidence of harm - in that case, it is still a moral issue, and we would say that something is immoral because there is evidence of harm.
However, somewhere along the way, morality stopped being an end state, and became a reason in itself. Consider the sort of people who say "It's wrong because it's immoral" (which really is a tautology), or in the case of law, "We should ban it because it's immoral". I think this is more what the OP meant, that this is a law based on some people's personal opinions (or often, religious belief).
Yes, laws should be passed on matters of morality, where whether they are moral or not is judged on evidence of harm. But what shouldn't happen is laws being passed simply because some people claim it's immoral.
This is currently the situation in the UK where the Government plans to criminalise possession of some consensual or simulated adult images - the Government in its consultation even went as far to say that there was no necessity to provide any evidence of harm whatsoever, the fact that some people thought that images were "abhorrent" was alone sufficient to criminalise private possession.
It's about time we sorted out the definition of "moon" too - how many moons does Jupiter have now? Even any old lump of rock counts now! How will our schoolchildren memories all of those? Please won't somebody think of the children!!!
Yeah, but, but they have that new e-petition service. Oh wait, they ignore that too, don't they?
They ignore it if they disagree with it, yes - but if a few people sign a petition saying X should be banned and the Government agrees, then the petition is suddenly cited as solid proof that it's what the public want...
Actually, she does. The Queen has the power to dissolve Parliament at any time and without giving a reason, and no Bill passes into law in the UK without her signature. She is also in supreme command of the Armed Forces, whose oath of loyalty is sworn to her, not to the Government or Parliament.
She may have those powers on paper, but it's debateable whether she'd have them in practice, or using them would result in the monarchy being overturned.
And this isn't really relevant to the point being made - the ID card scheme, or any of the other things Labour has done, is not the fault of the Queen, and overturning the monarchy won't help matters. On the contrary, if the Queen does have the powers you state, then overturning the monarchy would just remove that check on the Government, making matters worse.
Ah yes, right on cue, I was just thinking to myself "It's an article about civil liberties in the UK - where's that pointless off-topic comment about gun control?"
And by your logic, everytime there's an article about civil liberties in the US, I should say "Why are you guys worrying? Just use your guns!" Tell me, if people are apparentely losing rights in the US, why don't your guns sort it out?
Er, no, I didn't vote for Labour, and I suspect virtually all ID-opposers didn't, either. Even nationwide, Labour only got about 30something% of the vote.
And people are protesting - it's just a shame there aren't enough people to care. You do realise that different people have different opinions? That other people don't protest does not imply that those people against it don't care.
Your comment makes about as much sense as saying we should never care about the US Government's actions here on Slashdot, because they were elected!
Plus of course, I don't recall the US being fined $5,000 a day for all this time it's no longer been putting a man on the moon...
Sure, he can play the story over again to explore the different branches, but who except hardcore fans wants to do that?
Maybe it's just me, but I would consider it perfectly reasonable to expect to play a game more than once, and I'm certainly no hardcore gamer.
In fact, I would say the opposite, that a linear game increases the problem of paying for development that a single player doesn't experience - since with a linear game, I have less desire to play the game more than once, in which case I will miss out on any alternative choices I could have made (most commonly in RPGs, there's the choice of character - so for example, I play as a warrior-type person, and then all the development of an extensive magic system goes to waste).
Games which have non-linear gameplay I will play again and again, and in doing so, experience every possible choice that is available.
This applies to other types of games, e.g., consider Civilization: if I only ever played one game, then I'd only play as one race, but since the game is varied enough to play again and again, I explore out every possible option.
In summary, I'd say the optimal cases for minimising development waste are either being highly non-linear, or being entirely linear, since a mostly-linear-with-some-non-linear tends to cause all the non-linear elements to be missed.
An entirely linear game is not what I would call a game, more a story.
As others have said, I think it's an issue of sentience. Although don't forget the large number of (usually anti-porn/pro-censorship) people who will claim that such a thing should be illegal on the basis that it will turn ordinary people into rapists...
I think the big problem will be if we have human-level AI before we work out what sentience is and what causes it.
Talking of ex-wives, I was confused by this comment in the article:
"Imagine if some people treat androids as if the machines were their wives,"
Like, what, is this supposed to be an example of someone treating their android badly? I'm completely lost as to what the implication is here. Or maybe he's saying we mustn't date robots?
There most probably are sentient, intelligent, non-human beings today (Great apes, maybe dolphins), but factually they don't have any more rights than other mammals, or birds.
He didn't say they should have more rights, just that it should have some rights. The fact that we give rights to animals backs up this point.
Animal abuse is illegal in many jurisdictions, it's quite thinkable that we'll have robots that are as intelligent as most pets.
And I've got a coat with as much fur as most pets.
Personally I don't support animal rights based on how clever they are (or how much fur they have), I do so from a belief that they may be sentient - capable of experiencing pain.
The Amiga, as swell a design as it might have been, was too expensive to be a gamer (like the C64/128) and too outside the mainstream to be a viable competitor to the PC or Mac. And for almost two decades now, the Amiga fanboys have been wistfully stroking themselves to fond memories of Guru Meditations to realize that it was an overly complex design that was a business nightmare for its creators. Too expensive to build, too expensive to sell, margins sliced to the bone to make them "affordable." Visionary, we can debate, but absolute crap business sense.
Maybe in the US, but the Amiga sold well in Europe, becoming the mainstream home computer for a time. PCs and Macs sold more in raw numbers, but then the business market was much bigger than the home market back then (and Macs were only used in niche markets like DTP).
I'm not sure what you mean by "too expensive" - the high end models perhaps, but the low end models were far cheaper than PCs or Macs (which probably contributed to their popularity for home machines; it was Macs that were more overly expensive), and they were profitable. Commodore were bad at marketing, but I'm not sure that calling a platform that lasts 9 years - and then several years beyond that with no parent company - is "absolute crap business sense" in any meaningful sense.
In what sense was the design "overly complex"?
And that's the problem with it. The US document merely recognizes that and other freedoms.
Er, you've lost me? I meant "give" in the legal sense, and as the other reply points out, the constitution uses the term "recognise" anyway. I obviously wasn't quoting word for word when I wrote that.