I suspect MySpace became so popular for the same reason as LiveJournal: users can pick skins for their personal pages, and for some strange reason American teenagers really dig unreadability.
I think a big part of it is that they offered primary features which weren't simply "social networking" - e.g., with LiveJournal you have a simple to use and fairly powerful system to post and read journals/"blogs". With MySpace I imagine being able to host music/videos helped.
The cunning thing is that these features are also combined with "social networking" which draws everyone else in. But Sixdegrees was social networking, and nothing else - so you go "Ooh, I have 1,000,000 people on my 6th degree", and then never log in again. I can't say I saw Friendster offering much either.
And what happens when you get into a disagreement with an "expert"? For many academic areas, and certainly for non-academic subjects, there are still differences of opinions and disagreements.
Deciding whether that bit about overclocking should be there or not shouldn't be a case of "It's true because I'm an Expert", but "Here's a reliable source which says that".
Well, that didn't stop Microsoft from trademarking its windowing gui as "Windows", or its disk operating system as "DOS".
But they lost their case against Lindows didn't they, based on that reasoning? And I seriously doubt they would succeed in a case against any of the operating systems which also use "DOS" in their name.
Sure, they may have a trademark, but that doesn't mean they can enforce it against those using the word.
And what will they have over Scholarpedia [scholarpedia.org]?
* Some articles for a start;) Well okay, Citizendium doesn't have anything yet, but as you say Scholarpedia is very slow moving - only a few articles seem to have been written. * Scholarpedia seems to mainly be "each article written by one person", where as my impression of Citizendium was that it was still a Wiki where articles are edited by a number of people - but it's a Wiki based on people who give their "credentials". This kind of ties in with the previous statement - it's hard to see how Scholarpedia will ever get anywhere all the while it just as a few academics writing articles (isn't this just Nupedia?) Citizendium can at least attempt to gain interest from a large number of contributors, which is what helped Wikipedia. * Scholarpedia isn't free ( http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Scholarpedia:G eneral_disclaimer - "You may display, print or download content on Scholarpedia only for academic, non-commercial use, provided that you cite Scholarpedia. You may not publish, distribute, retransmit, sell or provide access to the content of Scholarpedia, except as permitted under applicable law and as described here. You may not engage in systematic retrieval of content from Scholarpedia to create or compile, directly or indirectly, a collection, compilation, database, or directory without written permission from Scholarpedia. Nor may you mirror on your own site the home page or results pages of Scholarpedia.").
But yeah, it's a common sympton of the times. I was more trying to make the point that breaking the habit would've been more difficult with such a homogenous platform.
Ah but note that later Amiga games (after '95, same time as DirectX came about) started to become a lot more OS friendly, worked with graphics cards and so on. I agree about the issue being whether it's a homogenous platform, but by then it wasn't (as users had to rely on a variety of 3rd party upgrades). Given this was managed to some degree despite Commodore going bust, had they survived, I think it would have been even easier to break the habit, if they wanted to (e.g., releasing new machines with PCI slots, as Escom planned, or releasing an OS with graphics card libraries - this didn't come until OS3.5 released as late as 2000, and before then only available as 3rd party libraries). (Whether they would have wanted to, or would have kept with console style single-machines with chipsets is another matter, of course.)
We have a law like that in Sweden as well, the basic idea of the law could be described as "You can say you hate jews and wish they all died but you can't say 'kill all jews'"
But that's not a law like this - yes, inciting violence is illegal, but this law is about inciting hate. It's also been recently extended to covering religions.
Indeed, what he posted seems to be comparable to "wish they all died", rather than an actual incitement that people should kill them.
In a heated evolution debate, I can easily see someone saying that they hated creationists and wished they all died, but that could easily be considered illegal in the UK...
The problem is though that all liberties are compromises between the liberty of one group and another.
That's clearly not true - consider taking drugs in private, or private sexual acts between consenting adults.
Even with this example, it's not clear how someone else's liberty is infringed. I would have no problem if the charge was because of the verbal assault on the family (given the nature of the website he posted on, it's reasonable consider that the comment was targetted at them), but he was charged with inciting hatred.
The reason these laws exist is that they're not merely tabletop dicusssions, they're incitements to violent acts. It's not illegal to hate someone because of race, creed, color, sexual orientation, height, weight or operating system, but when it moves into "You should kill this group.", then it's not just a thought, it's something serious, and dangerous.
That's not correct - yes, it's illegal to incite acts of violence (and that's quite reasonable), but that's not what he was convicted of. Laws about racial hatred (and also now religious hatred) are not about inciting violence, but about inciting hate.
(Does anyone know what he did post, by the way? Part of the problem with these laws is it's presumably illegal to reproduce the text, so we have no way of clarifying what the state has decided to outlaw.)
One could argue child pornography was freedom of expression, at least as long as the children weren't harmed. But luckily, society has agreed on giving the protection of children a higher priority than pedophiles' "right" to look at such material. Similarly, European societies have agreed on giving the protection of minorities a higher priority than racists' "right" to express their hatred against them -- because last time we didn't, it didn't turn out well.
Wait - surely we do argue that child pornography is freedom of expression, at least as long as the children aren't harmed, but the argument is that children are harmed (and this can be supported by evidence). Where is the harm in posting to websites?
If you read the article, it talks about child pornography as well, so I do not say it was unfair in this case.
So prosecute him for child pornography. That does not justify charging him or giving more severe sentences for other crimes.
In fact, does anyone not find it worrying that he got almost three years for posting a message, but only six months for the child porn?
(Although I'm also confused that he was charged with making child porn, surely if he actually abused the children, that would cover a far greater sentence? It doesn't say what his role in the production was...)
I have been to the Amiga web site on a number of occasions since and I am always so amazed at the sheer number of business mistakes and missed promises made by that company, yet the users will still have nothing bad said against them.
Not really true - I haven't actually seen a single comment in this thread supporting Amiga, Inc. I think even amongst Amiga fans, they are mostly annoyed at the OS4 vapourware. When I used to visit Amiga forums even a few years ago, opinions were sharply divided over whether Amiga, Inc were doing any good or not.
The company itself has been involved in legal battles, technological blunders, community alienation, etc. for the last 10 years.
Unlikely, since Amiga Inc were formed in 2000. The previous companies who managed the Amiga after Commodore's demise were PC companies (Escom and Gateway), and they were just as bad, if not worse (at least Amiga Inc got new PPC hardware out - the PC companies just fouled up even though things were much better for the Amiga back then).
I agree - if nothing else, it's sad to see the trolls coming out to make jokey comments about Amigas everytime there's a Slashdot article, even if there's nobody - even amongst Amiga fans - supporting what this company is doing.
It's sad that the company producing Pegasos / MorphOS didn't get to use the name. That platform may not have taken over the world, but they got something out a few years ago, and it's there for those that want it.
Did this comment slip out of a wormhole from a 1990 PC-vs-Amiga flamewar?
Really - whilst there may be plenty of Amiga or ex-Amiga fans here, if you read through this thread, I have yet to see anyone defending or supporting what this particular current company are planning. So in other words, your claim of fanboism is completely out of date, and a strawman.
And were there Amiga fanbois in the 1990s? Yes there were - just as there were for DOS/Windows, MacOS and Linux, the only difference being that those fanbois are still around to annoy people. (Yes, there are plenty of Windows fanbois.) It's absurd to suggest that they drove people away on any platform.
But what really worries me is that fanbois like yourself of other platforms are still here, 10-20 years later, still trying to keep up an anti-Amiga argument ("OMG who cares about bouncing balls") even though there is no one arguing this with you!
The old adage, "nobody has gotten fired for buying IBM." is a sad one, but people rather buy "standard" PCs than be stuck with they believe is a marginal platform, that may be a dinosaur.
Do me a favour and post that to the next Apple article.
You can do neat tricks when you know exactly what you write for - which is why Amiga games are also tied to working with the chipsets, firmware versions and memory configurations they were originally designed for.
To be fair, this is something true of many platforms (try getting DOS games working on modern PCs, or remember the Turbo button?). And it wasn't quite as bad as you make out (very few games were tied to memory configurations, for example).
It's worrying that this sort of comment gets Insightful and not Troll - for some reason even 12 years after Commodore's demise, Slashdot is still full of anti-Amiga trolls who want to criticse about things 20 years ago. Your argument assumes the Amiga was not part of the "real word", and hence is flawed.
In fact, clever tricks in hardware exist on all sorts of platforms, and they still do today. For example, 3D graphics programming today involves taking into account the advantages and bottlenecks of current graphics hardware, and these techniques may be redundant in future.
Yes, it's annoying that this doesn't scale, but think about it: does it really matter than a 1985 game doesn't scale well on hardware 10-20 years later, and you'd rather have that game performing more poorly on the 1985 hardware, so it scales better later on?
and also why it could never grow beyond said loud proud subculture.
Plenty of other OSs have "loud proud subcultures" (Linux, MacOS). And which OSs from the 80s have grown beyond that and are still around today?
What about all the issues with classic MacOS which meant Apple had to ditch it for a completely new OS (lack of memory protection, preemptive multitasking, etc)? But for some reason, we don't have trolls posting that to every Mac article (or if they did, it would be modded appropriately...)
Let's face it, people claimed that for all platforms. And since the DOS/Windows 9x has been phased out, and (now "classic") MacOS was ditched by Apple and replaced by a new one, they all turned out to be wrong. (I guess if someone advocated Next or NT, they'd have been better off, but few people did back then.)
Those were the days when you could actually have some fun computer advocacy, instead of it all being the same.
AmigaOS 4 is in beta, but will not be finished until hardware is available to run it on There is no hardware to run AmigaOS 4 on
To clarify - there was hardware at least (the AmigaOne), available for several years now - though it seems to be the case that this hardware is no longer available.
No email clients that support HTML mail, POP3 with SSL etc.
YAM claims to support POP3 with SSL, and I believe it can support HTML mail with an extension.
AROS is probably the best bet at the moment.
Don't forget Pegasos/MorphOS! (Though I'm happy with WinUAE, myself.) I agree it was a shame it wasn't open sourced.
Also note that although there haven't been commercial games for years (not that I'd be buying anything other than Windows/consoles if I wanted to play games), things have been released more recently than Quake (Quake 2 at least, and a few others I think).
Whatever this company is doing, it's "Amiga" in name only.
Actually this is far closer to original Amigas than current Macs are to classic Macs (which are both completely different in hardware, as well as a new OS).
Not that that's a good thing - it's probably good to make a clean break now and again. But I don't know why Amiga articles always summon up a load of "It's not an Amiga!" complaints, when no one bothers doing the same for Mac articles.
Star Trek, being fiction, obviously has flaws and loopholes. I think the Star Trek way is that they use energy-matter conversion, but the energy could come from anywhere, and it's the information which is transmitted (think of all the "lost in the pattern buffer" episodes).
I'm just saying - it's always been my impression that the popular usage of "teleport" was to refer to transmitting information, and reassembling matter at the other end in the same shape, even though that could be a different lump of matter, and not about transmitting the same physical pieces of matter.
Using "teleport" for quantum teleportation seems perfectly reasonable, and that isn't changed just because it doesn't exactly match what Star Trek does.
If Star Trek doesn't convince you, then think of all the philosophical issues and thought experiments surrounding teleportation: Is the new copy really you? What if the original isn't destroyed (yes, I realise that doesn't apply for quantum teleportation)? Clearly, none of these things would be problems at all if the matter was being physically transported. No one says "If you go through the wormhole, is the person coming out the other end really you?" These issues revolve around the idea of reconstructing a new version.
Put another way, if you tell somebody you are going to teleport a block of gold from box A to box B and then announce "and to begin, I will place a block of gold in each box", they will cry foul. Are you saying you wouldn't?
But I wouldn't have to, instead there'd just be a lump of any old random matter, or alternatively the machine needs energy to work which is converted into matter.
Let's do it your way: if I picked up the gold from box A and put it in box B, would you say that's teleportation? Of course not.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect MySpace became so popular for the same reason as LiveJournal: users can pick skins for their personal pages, and for some strange reason American teenagers really dig unreadability.
I think a big part of it is that they offered primary features which weren't simply "social networking" - e.g., with LiveJournal you have a simple to use and fairly powerful system to post and read journals/"blogs". With MySpace I imagine being able to host music/videos helped.
The cunning thing is that these features are also combined with "social networking" which draws everyone else in. But Sixdegrees was social networking, and nothing else - so you go "Ooh, I have 1,000,000 people on my 6th degree", and then never log in again. I can't say I saw Friendster offering much either.
And what happens when you get into a disagreement with an "expert"? For many academic areas, and certainly for non-academic subjects, there are still differences of opinions and disagreements.
Deciding whether that bit about overclocking should be there or not shouldn't be a case of "It's true because I'm an Expert", but "Here's a reliable source which says that".
Well, that didn't stop Microsoft from trademarking its windowing gui as "Windows", or its disk operating system as "DOS".
But they lost their case against Lindows didn't they, based on that reasoning? And I seriously doubt they would succeed in a case against any of the operating systems which also use "DOS" in their name.
Sure, they may have a trademark, but that doesn't mean they can enforce it against those using the word.
And what will they have over Scholarpedia [scholarpedia.org]?
;) Well okay, Citizendium doesn't have anything yet, but as you say Scholarpedia is very slow moving - only a few articles seem to have been written.G eneral_disclaimer - "You may display, print or download content on Scholarpedia only for academic, non-commercial use, provided that you cite Scholarpedia. You may not publish, distribute, retransmit, sell or provide access to the content of Scholarpedia, except as permitted under applicable law and as described here. You may not engage in systematic retrieval of content from Scholarpedia to create or compile, directly or indirectly, a collection, compilation, database, or directory without written permission from Scholarpedia. Nor may you mirror on your own site the home page or results pages of Scholarpedia.").
* Some articles for a start
* Scholarpedia seems to mainly be "each article written by one person", where as my impression of Citizendium was that it was still a Wiki where articles are edited by a number of people - but it's a Wiki based on people who give their "credentials". This kind of ties in with the previous statement - it's hard to see how Scholarpedia will ever get anywhere all the while it just as a few academics writing articles (isn't this just Nupedia?) Citizendium can at least attempt to gain interest from a large number of contributors, which is what helped Wikipedia.
* Scholarpedia isn't free ( http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Scholarpedia:
But yeah, it's a common sympton of the times. I was more trying to make the point that breaking the habit would've been more difficult with such a homogenous platform.
Ah but note that later Amiga games (after '95, same time as DirectX came about) started to become a lot more OS friendly, worked with graphics cards and so on. I agree about the issue being whether it's a homogenous platform, but by then it wasn't (as users had to rely on a variety of 3rd party upgrades). Given this was managed to some degree despite Commodore going bust, had they survived, I think it would have been even easier to break the habit, if they wanted to (e.g., releasing new machines with PCI slots, as Escom planned, or releasing an OS with graphics card libraries - this didn't come until OS3.5 released as late as 2000, and before then only available as 3rd party libraries). (Whether they would have wanted to, or would have kept with console style single-machines with chipsets is another matter, of course.)
We have a law like that in Sweden as well, the basic idea of the law could be described as "You can say you hate jews and wish they all died but you can't say 'kill all jews'"
But that's not a law like this - yes, inciting violence is illegal, but this law is about inciting hate. It's also been recently extended to covering religions.
Indeed, what he posted seems to be comparable to "wish they all died", rather than an actual incitement that people should kill them.
In a heated evolution debate, I can easily see someone saying that they hated creationists and wished they all died, but that could easily be considered illegal in the UK...
The problem is though that all liberties are compromises between the liberty of one group and another.
That's clearly not true - consider taking drugs in private, or private sexual acts between consenting adults.
Even with this example, it's not clear how someone else's liberty is infringed. I would have no problem if the charge was because of the verbal assault on the family (given the nature of the website he posted on, it's reasonable consider that the comment was targetted at them), but he was charged with inciting hatred.
Assault is the _threat_ of violence. Battery is committing the violence. Why shouldn't the threat of violence to a _group_ be a crime?
Threats of violence to a group are illegal, and would be treated as assault also.
But this law is about inciting hate.
Yeah, an AC on Slashdot says it's never happened, so it must be true!
(It's been reported elsewhere, I just supplied a direct link.)
The reason these laws exist is that they're not merely tabletop dicusssions, they're incitements to violent acts. It's not illegal to hate someone because of race, creed, color, sexual orientation, height, weight or operating system, but when it moves into "You should kill this group.", then it's not just a thought, it's something serious, and dangerous.
That's not correct - yes, it's illegal to incite acts of violence (and that's quite reasonable), but that's not what he was convicted of. Laws about racial hatred (and also now religious hatred) are not about inciting violence, but about inciting hate.
(Does anyone know what he did post, by the way? Part of the problem with these laws is it's presumably illegal to reproduce the text, so we have no way of clarifying what the state has decided to outlaw.)
One could argue child pornography was freedom of expression, at least as long as the children weren't harmed. But luckily, society has agreed on giving the protection of children a higher priority than pedophiles' "right" to look at such material. Similarly, European societies have agreed on giving the protection of minorities a higher priority than racists' "right" to express their hatred against them -- because last time we didn't, it didn't turn out well.
Wait - surely we do argue that child pornography is freedom of expression, at least as long as the children aren't harmed, but the argument is that children are harmed (and this can be supported by evidence). Where is the harm in posting to websites?
Maybe not in general, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen: http://anniesj.livejournal.com/331112.html
If you read the article, it talks about child pornography as well, so I do not say it was unfair in this case.
So prosecute him for child pornography. That does not justify charging him or giving more severe sentences for other crimes.
In fact, does anyone not find it worrying that he got almost three years for posting a message, but only six months for the child porn?
(Although I'm also confused that he was charged with making child porn, surely if he actually abused the children, that would cover a far greater sentence? It doesn't say what his role in the production was...)
I have been to the Amiga web site on a number of occasions since and I am always so amazed at the sheer number of business mistakes and missed promises made by that company, yet the users will still have nothing bad said against them.
Not really true - I haven't actually seen a single comment in this thread supporting Amiga, Inc. I think even amongst Amiga fans, they are mostly annoyed at the OS4 vapourware. When I used to visit Amiga forums even a few years ago, opinions were sharply divided over whether Amiga, Inc were doing any good or not.
The company itself has been involved in legal battles, technological blunders, community alienation, etc. for the last 10 years.
Unlikely, since Amiga Inc were formed in 2000. The previous companies who managed the Amiga after Commodore's demise were PC companies (Escom and Gateway), and they were just as bad, if not worse (at least Amiga Inc got new PPC hardware out - the PC companies just fouled up even though things were much better for the Amiga back then).
I agree - if nothing else, it's sad to see the trolls coming out to make jokey comments about Amigas everytime there's a Slashdot article, even if there's nobody - even amongst Amiga fans - supporting what this company is doing.
It's sad that the company producing Pegasos / MorphOS didn't get to use the name. That platform may not have taken over the world, but they got something out a few years ago, and it's there for those that want it.
Did this comment slip out of a wormhole from a 1990 PC-vs-Amiga flamewar?
Really - whilst there may be plenty of Amiga or ex-Amiga fans here, if you read through this thread, I have yet to see anyone defending or supporting what this particular current company are planning. So in other words, your claim of fanboism is completely out of date, and a strawman.
And were there Amiga fanbois in the 1990s? Yes there were - just as there were for DOS/Windows, MacOS and Linux, the only difference being that those fanbois are still around to annoy people. (Yes, there are plenty of Windows fanbois.) It's absurd to suggest that they drove people away on any platform.
But what really worries me is that fanbois like yourself of other platforms are still here, 10-20 years later, still trying to keep up an anti-Amiga argument ("OMG who cares about bouncing balls") even though there is no one arguing this with you!
The old adage, "nobody has gotten fired for buying IBM." is a sad one, but people rather buy "standard" PCs than be stuck with they believe is a marginal platform, that may be a dinosaur.
Do me a favour and post that to the next Apple article.
You can do neat tricks when you know exactly what you write for - which is why Amiga games are also tied to working with the chipsets, firmware versions and memory configurations they were originally designed for.
To be fair, this is something true of many platforms (try getting DOS games working on modern PCs, or remember the Turbo button?). And it wasn't quite as bad as you make out (very few games were tied to memory configurations, for example).
Nothing. It's like Atari. It's like any name which can be traded long after the people responsible for the name have been sacked, resigned, died etc.
And Macintosh / MacOS too. There was a reason Apple kept the "Macintosh" name, and didn't call the OS X machines NeXT, or something else entirely.
All of that could, of course, be said for a Mac ("classic", not OS X). Do I see people posting that to every Apple article?
It's worrying that this sort of comment gets Insightful and not Troll - for some reason even 12 years after Commodore's demise, Slashdot is still full of anti-Amiga trolls who want to criticse about things 20 years ago. Your argument assumes the Amiga was not part of the "real word", and hence is flawed.
In fact, clever tricks in hardware exist on all sorts of platforms, and they still do today. For example, 3D graphics programming today involves taking into account the advantages and bottlenecks of current graphics hardware, and these techniques may be redundant in future.
Yes, it's annoying that this doesn't scale, but think about it: does it really matter than a 1985 game doesn't scale well on hardware 10-20 years later, and you'd rather have that game performing more poorly on the 1985 hardware, so it scales better later on?
and also why it could never grow beyond said loud proud subculture.
Plenty of other OSs have "loud proud subcultures" (Linux, MacOS). And which OSs from the 80s have grown beyond that and are still around today?
What about all the issues with classic MacOS which meant Apple had to ditch it for a completely new OS (lack of memory protection, preemptive multitasking, etc)? But for some reason, we don't have trolls posting that to every Mac article (or if they did, it would be modded appropriately...)
Let's face it, people claimed that for all platforms. And since the DOS/Windows 9x has been phased out, and (now "classic") MacOS was ditched by Apple and replaced by a new one, they all turned out to be wrong. (I guess if someone advocated Next or NT, they'd have been better off, but few people did back then.)
Those were the days when you could actually have some fun computer advocacy, instead of it all being the same.
AmigaOS 4 is in beta, but will not be finished until hardware is available to run it on
There is no hardware to run AmigaOS 4 on
To clarify - there was hardware at least (the AmigaOne), available for several years now - though it seems to be the case that this hardware is no longer available.
No email clients that support HTML mail, POP3 with SSL etc.
YAM claims to support POP3 with SSL, and I believe it can support HTML mail with an extension.
AROS is probably the best bet at the moment.
Don't forget Pegasos/MorphOS! (Though I'm happy with WinUAE, myself.) I agree it was a shame it wasn't open sourced.
Also note that although there haven't been commercial games for years (not that I'd be buying anything other than Windows/consoles if I wanted to play games), things have been released more recently than Quake (Quake 2 at least, and a few others I think).
Whatever this company is doing, it's "Amiga" in name only.
Actually this is far closer to original Amigas than current Macs are to classic Macs (which are both completely different in hardware, as well as a new OS).
Not that that's a good thing - it's probably good to make a clean break now and again. But I don't know why Amiga articles always summon up a load of "It's not an Amiga!" complaints, when no one bothers doing the same for Mac articles.
Star Trek, being fiction, obviously has flaws and loopholes. I think the Star Trek way is that they use energy-matter conversion, but the energy could come from anywhere, and it's the information which is transmitted (think of all the "lost in the pattern buffer" episodes).
I'm just saying - it's always been my impression that the popular usage of "teleport" was to refer to transmitting information, and reassembling matter at the other end in the same shape, even though that could be a different lump of matter, and not about transmitting the same physical pieces of matter.
Using "teleport" for quantum teleportation seems perfectly reasonable, and that isn't changed just because it doesn't exactly match what Star Trek does.
If Star Trek doesn't convince you, then think of all the philosophical issues and thought experiments surrounding teleportation: Is the new copy really you? What if the original isn't destroyed (yes, I realise that doesn't apply for quantum teleportation)? Clearly, none of these things would be problems at all if the matter was being physically transported. No one says "If you go through the wormhole, is the person coming out the other end really you?" These issues revolve around the idea of reconstructing a new version.
Put another way, if you tell somebody you are going to teleport a block of gold from box A to box B and then announce "and to begin, I will place a block of gold in each box", they will cry foul. Are you saying you wouldn't?
But I wouldn't have to, instead there'd just be a lump of any old random matter, or alternatively the machine needs energy to work which is converted into matter.
Let's do it your way: if I picked up the gold from box A and put it in box B, would you say that's teleportation? Of course not.