Take your unexpanded A1200, open a large directory (drawer) and grab and pull ~100 icons to another directory. The A1200 smoothly animates the drag. Any compareable Windows machine would croak immediately.
Yes, some current Windows versions *can* handle that, but only by removing/fading any icons more than X pixels from the mouse cursor!
PS. And if you have a brand new 3GHz+ computer which can just smoothly drag 100 icons across the screen, don't feel superior. The Amiga could do this with a 14 MHz processor, so your computer is about 200 times more inefficient. And the Amiga is now available at 600 MHz.
PPS. I know that the new Amiga has none of the HW acceleration the original had, and that it probably won't actually move icons smoother than the above 3GHz machine, I was just trying to make the PC crowd think a little about the abyssmal inefficency of their platform.
Unfortunately, they did more than this. They fixed a number of things that Java developers have screamed at Sun since day one, but which cannot be introduced into Java at this late day.
Example 1: Boxing
int i=17;
String s=i.toString();
i=String.valueOf(s);
OR
ArrayList al=new ArrayList();
int i=4711;
al.add(i);
Example 2: Simple(r) component creation.
Can't think of any more right now, but boxing in and of itself is good enough:-)
> The one good thing I've seen in all of this so called ".NET"
> is the language-agnosticism technic.
No, it isn't. Don't just brainlessly repeat marketing blahblah, neither MS's nor anybody elses.
In any place where a run-time behaviour plays a part, the specific implementation/design choices of the run-time environment, and its dynamic semantics, are quintessential.
There is no single runtime to host the wide scope of run-time semantics of the various programming languages.
Actually, there is one (that I know of). TAO elate is a machine code level 'VM'. It can host any language you can throw at it.
Which, IMHO, is the only way to make a runtime. KISS, remember?
If this page is at all correct, MusicCity are lying through their teeth.
Apparently the FastTrack protocol was upgraded a little more than two weeks ago. A grace period of two weeks was given, to allow users to upgrade their clients. Remember what the Morpheus requester said? "Your program is to old to connect the network."
Grokster, the third (and smallest) FastTrack licensee upgraded their client, Morpheus for some unimaginable reason did not.
Apparently this is a question of politics... Kazaa/FastTrack and Morpheus have had some sort of falling out. Morpheus have long been working on their 2.0 version. Gnucleus say that they have felt for some time that Morpheus is moving toward gnutella.
<speculation>
For some reason, Morpheus became pissed of with Kazaa, and to decided to devote a few man-years to constructing a new client + protocol upgrades which would let them move to the gnutella network without the users even noticing. Kazaa pulled a fast one and changed the protocol, without notifying (perhaps even keeping the docs from) Morpheus, and here we are...
</speculation>
For those of you who are interested in where those juicy 3.500.000 users are going, I have followed the IRC at MusicCity. At first, everyone was in a state of complete panic. Seriously, some of the reactions were quite unbelievable... My life is over! My life is over!!! or how about this one The FBI are at my door!!! Delete your files!!! Delete you files ***NOW***!!!!!:-)
Then, about half defected to Kazaa/Grokster, while the other half waited for the new version.
The new version arived, 1.500.000 persons installed it. Unfortunately, 95%+ thinked it utterly sucked and most of them are currently seeking desperately for a new system.
Note: numbers are based on dl stats at download.com. Currently 1,998,910 downloads of Kazaa this week, and 1,394,331 for the new Morpheus.
Doh! Thanks for giving me this ice shower... I'm feeling much saner now.
Seriously, look at when the multimedia craze started... A couple of years after Scala Multimedia, right?
I don't think slide projectors where the genesis of that?
I acknowledge your point that the word has been used earlier, but I do believe that the current meaning of the word comes from behaviour similar to the program Scala Multimedia
Why would Microsoft buy Amiga though, if it's really true (it kind of seems unlikely, given.NET presumably is a head-to-head rival to AmigaDE, they're not going to throw out the CLI now and replace it with DE surely?)
Because Elate is at the machine code level and thus allows true language agnosticity, which is a point that MS pushes hard for.NET, but can't deliver on?
Because the CLI could easily be layered upon Elate, and then run on most any handheld or desktop?
...Or are they just itching to get their hands on the AutoConfig(tm) patents that prevented P&P from being efficient? Seems a little late for that, but...
That bit about AutoConfig is interesting too... For those that have never experienced it, Amiga AutoConfig allowed all expansion (Zorro) cards to have drivers in ROMS on the cards. You would just plug in the card, reboot, and the driver would be uploaded and run.
This is all very tied to a single platform (Amiga in this case), but Sun has made a lot of progress in this field with JINI, where the drivers are made in Java, and there's also actual interface programs built in.
The coolest demonstration I ever saw was when some Sun guys hooked up a FireWire HD and a digital camera to the same box. Two little icons appeared in windows (Camera, HD). By double clicking on the Camera icon, a (Java, stored in the camera) interface appears, displaying the pictures in the camera in an explorer like way. Clicking the HD made the contents of it (from the Java program stored in the HD) also appear in a explorer like window.
Then, they just drag a picture from the camera to the HD...
True Plug-and-Play (on any system!) requires an architecture agnostic solution of this kind!
You will need a virtual language, and I guess Tao's version is as good as (or better than!) any...
I too used, and loved, a system now passed away. Zealots still continue to say that it will rise again, but I saw long ago that - "It's dead, Jim."
None of your pathetic hopes are going to bring Windows back, it's dead, dead, do you hear me?
The latest hope (and there's always a new one) is that Microsoft seems to be making a appearance at Amiga's booth at the Embedded Systems Show in San Francisco, CA, March 12 (booth #1602)...
Seriously, the above is true (except in reverse). Amiga will be displaying DE (+ more announcements?) at Microsoft's booth at the above fair, check out Amiga Network News, comment 7 (and horrified replies). MS buying AI? MS embracing (and extending...) Intent/DE? MS actually supporting Amiga? Find out in the next episode of Soap!
...when you heard amiga you were thinking "multimedia" before that term became a buzzword on a 486PC that had a cdrom.
Interesting side note: the term "multi-media" is in fact a trade mark, much like "Ping-Pong". It was first used as the name of the presentation program Scala MultiMedia, for the Amiga of course. One of the slickest presentation programs ever designed, in fact it still slaughters Powerpoint even on a 7.14 MHz A500...
They've since migrated to PC, check it out a www.scala.com. Try doing a site search for "Amiga"... They still write about it and somewhat support it (kudos to them!)
Apparently the explanation for this is that DE wasn't ready when the developer version was launched, so it won't be added until the consumer release.
Still, I'll believe it when I see it...
A developer website for DE/Intent on Zaurus is here. NB: if you want to play with DE on your Zaurus SL-5000D, you currently have to reflash the ROM, removing everyting in favour of DE.
...has anyone offered to train some of these people in setup and configuration of their servers?
Has anyone who is bilingual offered to translate the user manuals into Japanese, Chinese, or Korean?
Has anyone taken the time to explain to them that by lax secuitry / improper setup on the EMail server usually points to more problems with in their network?
So, the little yellow monkeys needs training from superior western intellects to clean up their act?;-)
The Asian computer people I've interacted with have often had scary levels of intellegence and education.
The problem isn't one of incomprehension, it's one of legal laxity. There simply is no incentive for a Chinese ISP do squat about security, because they'll never get reprimanded or fined for it (except for your angry mails, which are easier to filter than their spam:-)
Oh, and please don't use the term 'Asian' for this problem! It's a problem of China, Korea, Russia and a few eastern European countries.
Are you trying to be sarcastic, or are you just hopelessly out of
touch:-) ? Motorola announced that they would make ARM-based
DragonBalls more than 6 moths ago, and the final product has been out
for a few months. Probably the reason for this is that Palm forced
them to;-)
This feature (Screens) is one of the major reasons I still use my
Amiga daily (in fact, I'm writing this on it!)
An example: My Workbench (finder, ) runs in a medium-resolution
(800x600), 24-bit mode in order to make the icons the right size and
the text readable. My paint program is set to run in the highest
24-bit resolution my piss-poor gfx card can handle (1280x960). My C
IDE is set to run in 1600x1200, 256 colors.
I can launch both applications and toggle through the three screens
quickly with the screen depth gadget. In fact, I can launch a game and
still toggle screens (with a key press, since the game is
fullscreen).
In combination with MUI this
feature becomes even more usefull. You can set up any number of screen
definitions ahead of time, and select which applications go on what
screen. For instance, the graphics program and the picture viewer
could both share the high-res, 24 bit screen. The IDE and the text
viewer could share the extrememly high-res, 256 color screen.
(Normally, each application would either run on Workbench or on
its own custom screen.)
Screens are probably the hardest to reproduce likable feature of
AmigaOS, but there are tons of others:
Ram disk that automatically grows/shrinks as needed. Perfect
for those temp files.
Handlers in general, allowing you to very easily create disk-like
thingies.
A shell that's smart enough to realize that
when I type the name of a directory, I don't want to execute
the damn thing, I want to move to it!
Any sized icons.
Icons and disk drawers that remember their position/size. Of
course, the Mac has always had this, though apparently there're som
problems with OSX.
RDB partitioning system.
Assigns, esp. multi assigns.
The ability to run all my (100's) of old games:-)
A unique compromise between simplicity and power. Repeat
after me Bill and Linus and Steve: user
friendliness is not about creating a horrendously overcomplex system
and then trying to hide it from the users by pasting a cute graphical
shell on top!
Dozens more points I will not bore you with here.
All of these thing conspire to make me hang on to my dear Amiga,
year after year. And the fact that I bloody hate both Microsoft and
the PC hardware design.
_Dark Side_ (1988) was a follow-up of _Driller_ (1987). Those two
where probably the first games with solid 3d (unless there were som
early 3d Amiga games?)
Earlier non-filled games include _Mercenary_
(1987), _Elite_ (1986),
ported to almost every imaginable platform (though more of a
first-person space game than a
shooter).
Of course, _The
Sentinel_ (1986) needs a mention as well. The 3d is somewhat
limited, but its definitely solid... And it's a truly great game!
This reminds me a lot of the Amiga Hold-and-Modify graphics mode. In this mode a pixels color is calculated by 'holding' the last pixels color, and modifying either R,G or B. This would leed to color fringing at high contrast borders.
The USA has run rough-shood over every and any country incapable of
offering them any opposition for the last ~50 years. Superficialy,
they have always found Great Humanistic Reasons to do so. Scratch a
little on the surface, and the true reason is oil, oil, oil. I for one
am hoping the hydrogen economy will happen *soon*.
PS. And
americans wonder why the Arabs hate them?!
PPS. I love Americans. I just hate american
nationalism/corporationism and what it leads to.
From what I've heard, this is how the Incas use to breed carvers. They
would appoint certain newborns to become future carvers, and bind
wooden slabs to their heads, centimeters from the eyes.
The slabs would be kept on every day, all day, for years.
Eventually the kids would grow up to be profoundly nearsighted,
allowing them to work small carvings to fanatical detail.
So, keep track of bytes downloaded per byte uploaded over the last few weeks for every user.
Make the 50 users with the highest ratio appear in every client, with a smack the leech button. Nodes then offer less bandwith to much-smacked peers. Some dispensation should be made for new users.
Well, all you have to do is wait for the authors to keel over and start pushing up daisies... Reprints of their complete works will soon appear. Happened for Heinlein, same for Asimov, Dick.
Hmmm... There's a whole series of authors that are long overdue:
Clarke
Voight
Bester
etc etc etc
We have a lot of good classic SF reprints to look forward to over the next few years!;-)
Unfortunately, Amiga Technologies sold out to Gateway before it could be released.
Fortunately, Gateway then sold out to the new (and hopefully here for good) Amiga, Inc.
...and the Walker patents were sold on to Merlancia who plan to use it in their Radian PPC-based box slated for Q2 2002.
Merlancia is doing a whole slew of models, from power towers to STB's. They're primarily aimed at the new Amiga desktop OS (4.0), but they will actively support (sell preinstalled?) PPC-Linux.
As far as I know, when matter and anti-matter anhillate, it produces two gammas going in opposite directions
That's true for electon/positron annihilation. Proton annihilation produces mesons, I believe... And if you're annihilating whole chunks of antimatter at once, the energy levels are going to be so high that you'll get most any particle you can imagine (and some you might not!)
any of you/.'ers know something more about this
AmigaDE?
Well, now that you mention it:-)
The
AmigaDE (Digital Environment), as some people have already commented,
is really (currently) just TAO Elate®. However, Amiga is promising
(and have been, for months and months, without being able to show
anything, sigh) to add substantial value to Elate® (more on that
later.) However, Elate® is cool enough in and of itself:
Elate®
is a cross platform framework much like Java. It fixes some major
faults that both Java and C# has in common (if you can call.NET a
cross-platform framework...). Someone should tell Sun and Microsoft
both that if you are trying to construct a common platform that can be
run on any processor, any hardware, any OS, you should not make
it as large as possible, you should make it as slim and small
as possible...
Java and C# both have very high level concepts
built right into their VMs, like OOP and advanced memory handling
(garbage allocation), not to mention retrospection. TAO, OTOH has
taken a very minimal approach to the problem. They have defined a
virtual processor, with a virtual machine code. When an 'object file'
written in this VP (virtual processor) code is loaded, it is
statically converted to the machine code of the host processor
and cached on disk.
The code translation
algorithm is so simple that one of their first (small but complete)
VP->x86 translators was < 1kB. As mentioned the code is cached on
disk, meaning that the next time the program is started, the cached
native machine code version is run.
Elate® does have a few
bells-and-whistles above pure machine-codeness though... An Elate® VP
object file is called a 'ToolBox' (library). It contains Tools
(functions). Each ToolBox has its own name space, meaning that you can
have same-named tools (functions), if they are in different ToolBoxes
(libraries).
All this was about Elate®, what about Amiga?
Well, they intend to do three things:
1: Elate is very basic.
It does not contain many of the things you would expect in a modern
OS. So Amiga will provide AFC, the Amiga Foundation Classes, a class
hierarchiy covering most everything.
2: Amiga will provide
content (buzzword joy!) for the Amiga-enabled platforms. In reailty
this means that a few months ago, Amiga pleaded (not too strong a
word) on every Amiga news channel for any remaining developers to
write PDA-ish games for DE (Elate). Some have. Some of these games
are even great!
3: Amiga will provide a content distribution
system, where you can easily buy single programs on the Internet (from
your PDA-ish device) and have them installed. A feotal version of this
is the DE Shop.
Oh, and as side note, the TAO Java Engine compiles Java classes into VP code, and then into native ML. It is one of the best performing JVMs in the world.
A little known fact is that Sweden independently cracked the Enigma code, and in a much more impressive way than the Brits...
In 1940 Arne Beurling, professor of mathematics at Uppsala University, was given two days worth of intercepted transmissions by our equivalent of NSA, and cracked the code in two weeks, using pen and paper, without knowing the mechanics of the encoder!
A truly superhuman feat of mathematics... His work allowed the Swedish defence to build replicas of the G-writer, and by 1942 we were routinely cracking all the Enigma-encoded telegraph transmission being routed through Sweden.
Re:It's a fake and here is why
on
Apple PDA?
·
· Score: 1
So, not only is Apple doing a kick-ass palmtop, it's also got
steadycam technology!? I've got to get me one of those!
Slashdot Mirror
Try the following:
Take your unexpanded A1200, open a large directory (drawer) and grab and pull ~100 icons to another directory. The A1200 smoothly animates the drag. Any compareable Windows machine would croak immediately.
Yes, some current Windows versions *can* handle that, but only by removing/fading any icons more than X pixels from the mouse cursor!
PS. And if you have a brand new 3GHz+ computer which can just smoothly drag 100 icons across the screen, don't feel superior. The Amiga could do this with a 14 MHz processor, so your computer is about 200 times more inefficient. And the Amiga is now available at 600 MHz.
PPS. I know that the new Amiga has none of the HW acceleration the original had, and that it probably won't actually move icons smoother than the above 3GHz machine, I was just trying to make the PC crowd think a little about the abyssmal inefficency of their platform.
Of course they modeled it on Java.
Unfortunately, they did more than this. They fixed a number of things that Java developers have screamed at Sun since day one, but which cannot be introduced into Java at this late day.
Example 1: Boxing
Example 2: Simple(r) component creation.
Can't think of any more right now, but boxing in and of itself is good enough :-)
Oh yeah, C++ style type/class conversions.
> The one good thing I've seen in all of this so called ".NET"
> is the language-agnosticism technic.
No, it isn't. Don't just brainlessly repeat marketing blahblah, neither MS's nor anybody elses.
In any place where a run-time behaviour plays a part, the specific implementation/design choices of the run-time environment, and its dynamic semantics, are quintessential.
There is no single runtime to host the wide scope of run-time semantics of the various programming languages.
Actually, there is one (that I know of). TAO elate is a machine code level 'VM'. It can host any language you can throw at it.
Which, IMHO, is the only way to make a runtime. KISS, remember?
Pigs... In chain mail... Mmmmmmmm... I don't care if they're chauvinists, I want them, *now*!
If this page is at all correct, MusicCity are lying through their teeth.
Apparently the FastTrack protocol was upgraded a little more than two weeks ago. A grace period of two weeks was given, to allow users to upgrade their clients. Remember what the Morpheus requester said? "Your program is to old to connect the network."
Grokster, the third (and smallest) FastTrack licensee upgraded their client, Morpheus for some unimaginable reason did not.
Apparently this is a question of politics... Kazaa/FastTrack and Morpheus have had some sort of falling out. Morpheus have long been working on their 2.0 version. Gnucleus say that they have felt for some time that Morpheus is moving toward gnutella.
<speculation>
For some reason, Morpheus became pissed of with Kazaa, and to decided to devote a few man-years to constructing a new client + protocol upgrades which would let them move to the gnutella network without the users even noticing. Kazaa pulled a fast one and changed the protocol, without notifying (perhaps even keeping the docs from) Morpheus, and here we are...
</speculation>
For those of you who are interested in where those juicy 3.500.000 users are going, I have followed the IRC at MusicCity. At first, everyone was in a state of complete panic. Seriously, some of the reactions were quite unbelievable... My life is over! My life is over!!! or how about this one The FBI are at my door!!! Delete your files!!! Delete you files ***NOW***!!!!! :-)
Then, about half defected to Kazaa/Grokster, while the other half waited for the new version.
The new version arived, 1.500.000 persons installed it. Unfortunately, 95%+ thinked it utterly sucked and most of them are currently seeking desperately for a new system.
Note: numbers are based on dl stats at download.com. Currently 1,998,910 downloads of Kazaa this week, and 1,394,331 for the new Morpheus.
Doh! Thanks for giving me this ice shower... I'm feeling much saner now.
Seriously, look at when the multimedia craze started... A couple of years after Scala Multimedia, right?
I don't think slide projectors where the genesis of that?
I acknowledge your point that the word has been used earlier, but I do believe that the current meaning of the word comes from behaviour similar to the program Scala Multimedia
...so spank me!
Why would Microsoft buy Amiga though, if it's really true (it kind of seems unlikely, given .NET presumably is a head-to-head rival to AmigaDE, they're not going to throw out the CLI now and replace it with DE surely?)
That bit about AutoConfig is interesting too... For those that have never experienced it, Amiga AutoConfig allowed all expansion (Zorro) cards to have drivers in ROMS on the cards. You would just plug in the card, reboot, and the driver would be uploaded and run.
This is all very tied to a single platform (Amiga in this case), but Sun has made a lot of progress in this field with JINI, where the drivers are made in Java, and there's also actual interface programs built in.
The coolest demonstration I ever saw was when some Sun guys hooked up a FireWire HD and a digital camera to the same box. Two little icons appeared in windows (Camera, HD). By double clicking on the Camera icon, a (Java, stored in the camera) interface appears, displaying the pictures in the camera in an explorer like way. Clicking the HD made the contents of it (from the Java program stored in the HD) also appear in a explorer like window.
Then, they just drag a picture from the camera to the HD...
True Plug-and-Play (on any system!) requires an architecture agnostic solution of this kind!
You will need a virtual language, and I guess Tao's version is as good as (or better than!) any...
I too used, and loved, a system now passed away. Zealots still continue to say that it will rise again, but I saw long ago that - "It's dead, Jim."
None of your pathetic hopes are going to bring Windows back, it's dead, dead, do you hear me?
The latest hope (and there's always a new one) is that Microsoft seems to be making a appearance at Amiga's booth at the Embedded Systems Show in San Francisco, CA, March 12 (booth #1602)...
Seriously, the above is true (except in reverse). Amiga will be displaying DE (+ more announcements?) at Microsoft's booth at the above fair, check out Amiga Network News, comment 7 (and horrified replies). MS buying AI? MS embracing (and extending...) Intent/DE? MS actually supporting Amiga? Find out in the next episode of Soap!Interesting side note: the term "multi-media" is in fact a trade mark, much like "Ping-Pong". It was first used as the name of the presentation program Scala MultiMedia, for the Amiga of course. One of the slickest presentation programs ever designed, in fact it still slaughters Powerpoint even on a 7.14 MHz A500...
They've since migrated to PC, check it out a www.scala.com. Try doing a site search for "Amiga"... They still write about it and somewhat support it (kudos to them!)
Apparently the explanation for this is that DE wasn't ready when the developer version was launched, so it won't be added until the consumer release.
Still, I'll believe it when I see it...
A developer website for DE/Intent on Zaurus is here. NB: if you want to play with DE on your Zaurus SL-5000D, you currently have to reflash the ROM, removing everyting in favour of DE.
Has anyone who is bilingual offered to translate the user manuals into Japanese, Chinese, or Korean?
Has anyone taken the time to explain to them that by lax secuitry / improper setup on the EMail server usually points to more problems with in their network?
So, the little yellow monkeys needs training from superior western intellects to clean up their act? ;-)
The Asian computer people I've interacted with have often had scary levels of intellegence and education.
The problem isn't one of incomprehension, it's one of legal laxity. There simply is no incentive for a Chinese ISP do squat about security, because they'll never get reprimanded or fined for it (except for your angry mails, which are easier to filter than their spam :-)
Oh, and please don't use the term 'Asian' for this problem! It's a problem of China, Korea, Russia and a few eastern European countries.
Wow, no one saw THAT coming!
Are you trying to be sarcastic, or are you just hopelessly out of touch :-) ? Motorola announced that they would make ARM-based
DragonBalls more than 6 moths ago, and the final product has been out
for a few months. Probably the reason for this is that Palm forced
them to ;-)
Take a look a Motorolas web pages for the DragonBall MC9328MX1 processor.This feature (Screens) is one of the major reasons I still use my Amiga daily (in fact, I'm writing this on it!)
An example: My Workbench (finder, ) runs in a medium-resolution (800x600), 24-bit mode in order to make the icons the right size and the text readable. My paint program is set to run in the highest 24-bit resolution my piss-poor gfx card can handle (1280x960). My C IDE is set to run in 1600x1200, 256 colors.
I can launch both applications and toggle through the three screens quickly with the screen depth gadget. In fact, I can launch a game and still toggle screens (with a key press, since the game is fullscreen).
In combination with MUI this feature becomes even more usefull. You can set up any number of screen definitions ahead of time, and select which applications go on what screen. For instance, the graphics program and the picture viewer could both share the high-res, 24 bit screen. The IDE and the text viewer could share the extrememly high-res, 256 color screen. (Normally, each application would either run on Workbench or on its own custom screen.)
Screens are probably the hardest to reproduce likable feature of AmigaOS, but there are tons of others:
All of these thing conspire to make me hang on to my dear Amiga, year after year. And the fact that I bloody hate both Microsoft and the PC hardware design.
_Dark Side_ (1988) was a follow-up of _Driller_ (1987). Those two where probably the first games with solid 3d (unless there were som early 3d Amiga games?)
Earlier non-filled games include _Mercenary_ (1987), _Elite_ (1986), ported to almost every imaginable platform (though more of a first-person space game than a shooter).
Of course, _The Sentinel_ (1986) needs a mention as well. The 3d is somewhat limited, but its definitely solid... And it's a truly great game!
This reminds me a lot of the Amiga Hold-and-Modify graphics mode. In this mode a pixels color is calculated by 'holding' the last pixels color, and modifying either R,G or B. This would leed to color fringing at high contrast borders.
Funny how history repeats itself...
ObFunny:
<homer>Mmmm.... HAM.... Gaaaaaarh...</homer>
Thank you for saying it better than I ever could.
The USA has run rough-shood over every and any country incapable of offering them any opposition for the last ~50 years. Superficialy, they have always found Great Humanistic Reasons to do so. Scratch a little on the surface, and the true reason is oil, oil, oil. I for one am hoping the hydrogen economy will happen *soon*.
PS. And americans wonder why the Arabs hate them?!
PPS. I love Americans. I just hate american nationalism/corporationism and what it leads to.
From what I've heard, this is how the Incas use to breed carvers. They would appoint certain newborns to become future carvers, and bind wooden slabs to their heads, centimeters from the eyes.
The slabs would be kept on every day, all day, for years. Eventually the kids would grow up to be profoundly nearsighted, allowing them to work small carvings to fanatical detail.
So, keep track of bytes downloaded per byte uploaded over the last few weeks for every user. Make the 50 users with the highest ratio appear in every client, with a smack the leech button. Nodes then offer less bandwith to much-smacked peers. Some dispensation should be made for new users.
This has all been discused in the recent article about punishment as guarantee for altruism
Well, all you have to do is wait for the authors to keel over and start pushing up daisies... Reprints of their complete works will soon appear. Happened for Heinlein, same for Asimov, Dick.
Hmmm... There's a whole series of authors that are long overdue:
- Clarke
- Voight
- Bester
- etc etc etc
We have a lot of good classic SF reprints to look forward to over the next few years!Unfortunately, Amiga Technologies sold out to Gateway before it could be released.
Fortunately, Gateway then sold out to the new (and hopefully here for good) Amiga, Inc.
...and the Walker patents were sold on to Merlancia who plan to use it in their Radian PPC-based box slated for Q2 2002.
Merlancia is doing a whole slew of models, from power towers to STB's. They're primarily aimed at the new Amiga desktop OS (4.0), but they will actively support (sell preinstalled?) PPC-Linux.
As far as I know, when matter and anti-matter anhillate, it produces two gammas going in opposite directions
That's true for electon/positron annihilation. Proton annihilation produces mesons, I believe... And if you're annihilating whole chunks of antimatter at once, the energy levels are going to be so high that you'll get most any particle you can imagine (and some you might not!)
Wow, a real live norsk person on Slashdot!
I, by virtue of being Swedish :-), made my way through most of the
original text, but there are some things my mind just can't parse...
Could you, or an equivalent Norweigian spare a few moments to puzzle out the following terms:
any of you /.'ers know something more about this
AmigaDE?
Well, now that you mention it :-)
The AmigaDE (Digital Environment), as some people have already commented, is really (currently) just TAO Elate®. However, Amiga is promising (and have been, for months and months, without being able to show anything, sigh) to add substantial value to Elate® (more on that later.) However, Elate® is cool enough in and of itself:
Elate® is a cross platform framework much like Java. It fixes some major faults that both Java and C# has in common (if you can call .NET a
cross-platform framework...). Someone should tell Sun and Microsoft
both that if you are trying to construct a common platform that can be
run on any processor, any hardware, any OS, you should not make
it as large as possible, you should make it as slim and small
as possible...
Java and C# both have very high level concepts built right into their VMs, like OOP and advanced memory handling (garbage allocation), not to mention retrospection. TAO, OTOH has taken a very minimal approach to the problem. They have defined a virtual processor, with a virtual machine code. When an 'object file' written in this VP (virtual processor) code is loaded, it is statically converted to the machine code of the host processor and cached on disk.
The code translation algorithm is so simple that one of their first (small but complete) VP->x86 translators was < 1kB. As mentioned the code is cached on disk, meaning that the next time the program is started, the cached native machine code version is run.
Elate® does have a few bells-and-whistles above pure machine-codeness though... An Elate® VP object file is called a 'ToolBox' (library). It contains Tools (functions). Each ToolBox has its own name space, meaning that you can have same-named tools (functions), if they are in different ToolBoxes (libraries).
All this was about Elate®, what about Amiga? Well, they intend to do three things:
1: Elate is very basic. It does not contain many of the things you would expect in a modern OS. So Amiga will provide AFC, the Amiga Foundation Classes, a class hierarchiy covering most everything.
2: Amiga will provide content (buzzword joy!) for the Amiga-enabled platforms. In reailty this means that a few months ago, Amiga pleaded (not too strong a word) on every Amiga news channel for any remaining developers to write PDA-ish games for DE (Elate). Some have. Some of these games are even great!
3: Amiga will provide a content distribution system, where you can easily buy single programs on the Internet (from your PDA-ish device) and have them installed. A feotal version of this is the DE Shop.
Oh, and as side note, the TAO Java Engine compiles Java classes into VP code, and then into native ML. It is one of the best performing JVMs in the world.
A little known fact is that Sweden independently cracked the Enigma code, and in a much more impressive way than the Brits...
In 1940 Arne Beurling, professor of mathematics at Uppsala University, was given two days worth of intercepted transmissions by our equivalent of NSA, and cracked the code in two weeks, using pen and paper, without knowing the mechanics of the encoder!
A truly superhuman feat of mathematics... His work allowed the Swedish defence to build replicas of the G-writer, and by 1942 we were routinely cracking all the Enigma-encoded telegraph transmission being routed through Sweden.
So, not only is Apple doing a kick-ass palmtop, it's also got steadycam technology!? I've got to get me one of those!