Apple offers no instructions other than "bring your computer to an Apple Store and buy RAM from us" when it comes to upgrading a Mac Mini.
Spoken like a true hater.
This one short phrase gives away two very obvious things about where you're coming from.
Firstly, your immediate hostile response to unpalatable criticism (*1) and immediate categorisation/treatment of critic as enemy of cause- in other words, akin to a cult's attitude towards its critics. (Note also your later dismissal and attempt to deride this person "Seriously, what contribution does your post make to this discussion?").
Secondly, your use of language reminiscent of an adolescent mentality ("hater").
And the fact that this is going on during a computer discussion? No offence, but this is the stereotypical fanboy mindset. I wasn't remotely surprised when I looked up your other comments in this discussion to see if I had you right or not, and found out you'd posted 18 times(!)
(*1) He might be wrong; you might be right. Actually, you probably are. But the *way* you responded still says a lot about you.
"Can you believe it? When I go to the local steakhouse, they charge me more than twice what the meat itself actually cost! I can grill porterhouses for the whole family for half of the cost of going to the restaurant, and then there's the cost of gas! WTF! Restaurants suck!"
That's either a blatant strawman, or you didn't read the article- I don't care which.
The article compared getting an upgrade done by Apple to getting one done by Dell- *not* to buying the components yourselves. Score: 5, Insightful? My arse it is...
If you want to use a restaurant analogy, you're actually comparing very similar steaks being prepared in the same manner in different establishments, with one costing much more. But the similarity breaks down here because one could argue (rightly) that you're also paying for the surroundings in a restaurant, hence you pay more in a nicer restaurant. But with the computer, you already paid for the "nice" aspects (more attractive case, better OS) when you originally bought the computer, and there's nothing special about these particular upgrades with generic parts.
Unless of course, one considers having Apple themselves (rather than someone else) perform an otherwise identical upgrade to be worth the extra. Which I'm sure some obsessives^w diehard Apple fans might well do....
It is a well-known fact that the only two things that can damage a Model M are a Cyberdyne Systems Series 800 and a tyrannosaurus rex with a shoulder-mounted particle beam. So I wouldn't worry about it.
What would happen if Chuck Norris got pissed off and attacked his Model M?
Pretty much every Slashdotter who claims their service should be unlimited because the commercial says so should know better especially since so many work in the IT industry. They're using the commercials as their excuse for behavior they know crosses the line of acceptable use.
You're implying that they should *know* that they're being misled by the company? Well, quite(!)
Some might say that it's the company's problem if they're intentionally fudging things behind vague and obscure policies.
Just because I invite you to a party with unlimited food and drink doesn't mean you get to move in with me, eventually, you have to go home or I'm going to throw you out.
That's a poor analogy, not least because you're comparing a social event (driven mainly by social rules and without much underlying legalism) with a business contract.
Most people understand the rules of parties, that they don't last forever, and (as you yourself implied) there's no contract, and the owner of the house/etc can throw someone out of the party!
Most people don't abuse the hospitality at parties because they don't want to be assholes. It's really not the same thing at all.
All advertising tells you only partial truths to entice you to buy...
In this case, the small print effectively nullifies and renders false the claim that the service is "unlimited". It's misleading to the point of lying.
The people who insist that they have a full blown, pipe with no limits at all are the ones clinging to the advertising rather than the contract they likely signed.
And you think that isn't grounds for criticism of the company?
Still, at the end of the day, caveat emptor. I didn't trust the salesman to tell me what was in my cell phone contract, why would I trust an advertisement to tell me what's in my ISP contract?
As I said, in this case, the contract doesn't merely expand upon or add restrictions to the advertisement's claim, it basically nullifies it.
I don't know how you feel about misleading advertising, and consumer protection in general. I live in the UK where there are generally stronger laws about this than the US, and I'm quite happy with that. IMHO, the lengths to which a consumer (as opposed to a business) should reasonably be expected to go to to find out such things should not be excessive (e.g. on page 37 of a contract in impenetrable legalese) relative to the prominence of the claims in the advert.
Ever heard of rolling blackouts or the devices they want to install in CA to limit when you can use certain appliances?
IIRC, the "Smartest Guys in the Room" documentary about Enron had ex-employees stating that the company had deliberately engineered such shortages and blackouts for its own ends.
Now, I agree ISPs should do a better job of explaining what the "real" limits are.
Bingo! They want to be able to sell their service as "unlimited" without actually having to provide that- they want to have their cake and eat it, but that's their problem.
I'm sure we'll both agree that it's unreasonable to expect a true "unlimited" service at the prices charged by some broadband providers. But it's also unreasonable for them to sell it as such when it isn't, and then rely on small-print and vaguely-worded "fair use" policies which they know *damn well* that most people won't see or notice.
If the government told you that you can go as fast as you want
Roads without speed limit signs (and there are a lot of them, at least here in NY) are limited to the state speed limit (55 in our case).
He didn't say or even imply otherwise. He came up with a hypothetical analogy which said "if [my emphasis] the government told you that you can go as fast as you want".
You can argue that this is or isn't a good analogy, but that's beside the point.
You'll complain that 99% of people don't get "ticketed" but that still doesn't change the fact that you were abusing the service. That 6 mbit or 10 mbit pipe isn't designed to be used at full capacity 24/7 by each subscriber, it's designed [etc]
You can argue all you like that their system isn't designed to be used like that. I'll mostly agree with you- we all know that most consumer broadband services couldn't deliver if they were used to their true "unlimited" capacity.
But again, this is beside the point- you *can't* accuse people of "abusing the service" if it was sold as "unlimited". Even- no, *especially*- if the limitations were stated via some obscure, vaguely-worded small-print in the contract, or some handwaving reference to a "see elsewhere" weasel-worded "fair use" policy.
Many ISPs promoted their services as "unlimited" because it sounded better, even though this relied upon most people not using anything like the full capacity they were given. If this situation changes, it's *their* problem for overselling something they can't deliver, not the customers' for "abusing the system". I'm not going to come up with another trite analogy to illustrate that:)
Frankly, I've nothing against the principle that (much) heavier users should pay for what they use and not expect to be subsidised. I'm not even entirely opposed to QoS being used so long as it's applied in a relatively neutral and fair manner, and doesn't lead to "second-class citizen" Internet access. I'm only opposed to it when used as some BS excuse to coerce user behaviour, favour the ISPs' vested interests and/or cover-up and weasel out of the limitations of an oversold Internet service, as it is at present.
It's terrible, I know, but you can't blame him- a deterministic universe forced him to.... ah, sod it, this is the one that's going to take the joke too far and get modded redundant;)
Also, just because someone hasn't had an accident in the past, it doesn't mean they won't have an accident in the future.
And that's how many insurance factors play out - the law of averages says that the longer you go without an accident the more likely you are to have one.
You seem to think you're agreeing here. But in fact, what he/she said not only *doesn't* imply what you say. It actually implies the complete opposite!
Think about it. He basically said that her not having an accident was random good luck. Assuming that this was truly the case, then her previous good luck would *have no effect* on whether she was lucky the next time (or by implication, whether she was unlucky).
Put it this way. If I toss a fair coin, and get the unlikely- but possible- fifty heads in a row, this has no effect on what the result of the next toss will be. The odds on getting heads or tails on that fifty-first toss are still exactly even, same as they would be on the first toss. The human tendency to believe otherwise in such cases is known as the gambler's fallacy.
Now here's the important part. If past good luck doesn't imply- and can't predict- whether she'll be lucky next time, it also can't say whether she'll be *unlucky* and have an accident next time!
The odds of tossing a coin and getting heads/tails are 50/50, and always remain so, independently. Doesn't matter how often you do it, there's no "memory" that would "favour" later tosses after (say) a long run of heads averaging that out.
Short version- your assertion that "the law of averages says that the longer you go without an accident the more likely you are to have one" is wrong.
Well, actually, if you want to be really pedantic, you could argue the following, but it doesn't really apply to this case, and it's unlikely that the insurance industry would use it:-
IF you know that the average is a fixed value, or if *your* chances of having an accident (or living longer, or whatever) are likely to have a knock-on effect on someone else then you may be correct. (This differs from the coin tossing above, because each coin toss was an independent event, which isn't the case here).
But even then- on the overall country/worldwide scale that insurance companies operate on, they would only be concerned with your individual effect on the overall picture- and that would be insignificant, like worrying about an apple's gravitational effect on the earth.
I have a spotless record going back 18 years and I'm paying for it because the numbers say I'm due for a claim.
Do you know for a fact that this is how the insurance companies do their numbers? I'm asking this because, although they may be amoral fuckers who'll do anything to tip the odds in their favour (and to weasel out of a claim), I don't see how it would benefit *them* to use incorrect mathematical models for their own purposes. They would want to know the correct answer- if only for their own benefit.
Wisdom of crowds only works when the crowd has some information about the situation.
Or when the crowd isn't a self-reinforcing/recruiting echo chamber for ignorant fuckwittery..... like the one-time alleged poster boy of the movement, Digg.
Can we assume that you *really* spent 4 1/2 years crafting this finely-worded masterpiece? Jesus, talk about matching the braindead racist stereotype, I bet it took you so long because the drool kept shorting out your keyboard.
To avoid the same fate as the GP, let me clarify that by WTFey I specifically meant that the article was full of fluff, light on details and generally pointless... Typical Wired science article, then. They give the superficial appearance of being in-depth, but in truth they're just longwinded, and the science in them is mainly unexplained gloss to be fetishised over. You read them and then ask yourself exactly what you've learned.
Wired science is for people who're into technology as a lifestyle, who like to kid themselves that they're interested in science but ultimately aren't. They aren't even particularly good "popular" science, because they're too far up their own arse.
This article isn't completely awful, which kind of makes it more frustrating. There's enough in there to get you interested, but you're left trying to figure out what conclusions it's exactly trying to draw and how much of it is actual science vs. (possibly the author's) pseudo-scientific technofetishism or pretentiousness.
You can be happy and financially secure; just think a little outside the box. Ironically, any use of that foul cliche "think outside the box" is an indication that the corporate world has sapped the last remaining original thought from your head, rendering you unable to.... ah, well, you get the idea:-/
Yes, because Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy and the rest weren't proprietary. Except that Compuserve, AOL and Prodigy had all been established (in those forms) years before the Internet broke through to mainstream awareness, let alone popularity.
MSN came out in mid-to-late 1995, by which time the Internet was already pretty well-known, had glossy magazines devoted to it and was the all-round latest cool thing.
It sounds laughable now, but I was genuinely worried at the time that this proprietary MSN crap would damage the popularity and growth of the Internet. They were forcing it via icons on the Windows 95 desktop, and although the Internet had made online culture cool and popular, and been an "open" success story, actual usage by the public was still quite niche by today's standards. It was by no means obvious that computerphobic Joe Public wouldn't see the icon on his desktop, get seduced by some shiny baubles and go for MSN, not realising what he'd lost.
(Remember, if you think computer literacy is bad today, it was vastly worse in the mid-1990s).
Everybody was trying to compete to control how you accessed the internet, not just Microsoft. By the time MSN came out, it had already been possible to buy "vanilla" Internet access for quite some time- either via TCP/IP (as normally happens today) or via a shell account (effectively using your computer as a terminal).
And the fact that AOL et al were still operating mainly walled gardens is beside the point- MS only went with the Internet when it was clear that things were going that way anyway. They might deserve credit in certain respects, but not this one, and to imply that we should thank Bill Gates for Google(!) Earth just grates.
Thanks to Microsoft we now have your grandma planning her round the world trip on Google Earth and poking you on Facebook, for better or for worse. Microsoft did bugger all with online services until the Internet started becoming popular with the general public. Even then their first response wasn't to embrace it wholeheartedly, but to launch MSN (in its original incarnation as a closed, proprietary network) instead.
Only when it was clear that the Internet was here to stay and that walled-garden rivals like MSN couldn't compete did MS go for it wholeheartedly. Thanking MS for the likes of Google Earth is giving them credit they don't deserve, in that area at any rate.
actually the 68000 cpu was 16 bit as in the a1000,a2000 a500(+) and a600 Umm.... I'm not too clear what point you're making.
The discussion we just had was over whether the 68000 should be considered a 16 or 32 bit CPU. If you're simply making the point that "the 68000 was a 16-bit CPU", that seems to be going round in circles.
If, on the other hand, you're pointing out that later Amigas had "full" 32-bit CPUs (i.e. internally and externally), then... fair enough, I should have thought about that!
Though it has to be said that until late 1992 (*), all but the very expensive A3000 were 68000-based as default.
Yes... the CDTV was based on the 68000, in fact the basic hardware was very similar to the original A500, and changed little since the original A1000. It didn't even include Kickstart 2!
(*) By which time the Amiga market was already starting to decline under the onslaught of cheap PCs from one side and Mega Drives and SNESs on the other. The A1200 was okay, but it was too little too late. If they'd released something like it 18 months before, the Amiga might've done better, but they relied on the same basic hardware for over six years.
If you're going to count an Edinburgh-based company towards big names in Dundee, can I count London-based companies towards Cambridge? The distances (by road, at least) are within a few percent. Rockstar North was founded and originally based in Dundee, back when it was known as DMA Design. It only moved to Edinburgh later on.
Yeah, but they'd be wrong;) Joking aside, the Amiga and ST were widely-considered to be 16-bit computers by the standards of the day. Your comment about the Pentium shows that things have changed, but it also shows that the situation is more complicated than simple naming conventions imply.
Personally, I'd agree that the "32-bit" classification is more helpful when describing the 68000, but it doesn't give away the whole story, and it wasn't how it was described back then.
[The 68000's] ISA had instructions that would operate on 32-bit wide data (add.l, for example). That's what I meant when I said it was 32-bit internally.
I was wondering why all the games seems so puerile. Actually, I doubt they get much input into the design (hence the working on the minutae comment)- that's probably done by the higher-ups and largely driven by the marketing people who sell stuff that's more likely to sell.
It was a 32-bit computer. That depends how you define "32-bit". The 68000 was internally 32-bit, but its data bus was still only 16-bits. (Sinclair's QL, which was hyped by them as a "32 bit" computer was considered by others to be an 8-bit machine because its 68008 only had an *8* bit data bus).
Supposedly "(Atari) ST" stands for "Sixteen/Thirty-two", contradicting the "Sam Tramiel" acronym.
Anyway, I live in the UK, and I can assure you that the Amiga was definitely more popular here later on, because I made the mistake of buying an ST when everyone else had moved onto the Amiga.
...would want to work in the games industry anyway?
It's generally reckoned to have some of the worst pay and the longest hours.
From what I've heard, the actual coding in commercial games is (contrary to what people expect) tedious and unrewarding minutae.
Couple that with the volatile and flaky nature of the games business that can (and does) see formerly successful companies go under very quickly after their latest game doesn't do quite as well as they'd hoped.
Anyone getting into the business is competing against naive entrants in their late-teens/early-twenties; the type who are willing (and able) to work for peanuts to do what (they think) they love, until they get burnt out and are replaced by more newbies.
I'm glad that I've never had any desire to work in computer games, because unless you're truly passionate about it and have your eyes wide open as to what it involves, it sounds like a no-brainer to avoid it.
Also of note, I'm Canadian, and I would love to paint the British in a better light, but that experience was just horrible. Hope your "experience" isn't akin to that of the Canadian woman living in the UK who got a TV series on the basis of basically saying "All British men are crap in bed and repressed assholes", despite (a) Having got the majority of her "experience" from working at a right-wing tabloid newspaper and (b) Never actually having slept with any of them anyway!
I haven't read TFA Hmm.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple offers no instructions other than "bring your computer to an Apple Store and buy RAM from us" when it comes to upgrading a Mac Mini.
Spoken like a true hater.
This one short phrase gives away two very obvious things about where you're coming from.
Firstly, your immediate hostile response to unpalatable criticism (*1) and immediate categorisation/treatment of critic as enemy of cause- in other words, akin to a cult's attitude towards its critics. (Note also your later dismissal and attempt to deride this person "Seriously, what contribution does your post make to this discussion?").
Secondly, your use of language reminiscent of an adolescent mentality ("hater").
And the fact that this is going on during a computer discussion? No offence, but this is the stereotypical fanboy mindset. I wasn't remotely surprised when I looked up your other comments in this discussion to see if I had you right or not, and found out you'd posted 18 times(!)
(*1) He might be wrong; you might be right. Actually, you probably are. But the *way* you responded still says a lot about you.
"Can you believe it? When I go to the local steakhouse, they charge me more than twice what the meat itself actually cost! I can grill porterhouses for the whole family for half of the cost of going to the restaurant, and then there's the cost of gas! WTF! Restaurants suck!"
That's either a blatant strawman, or you didn't read the article- I don't care which.
The article compared getting an upgrade done by Apple to getting one done by Dell- *not* to buying the components yourselves. Score: 5, Insightful? My arse it is...
If you want to use a restaurant analogy, you're actually comparing very similar steaks being prepared in the same manner in different establishments, with one costing much more. But the similarity breaks down here because one could argue (rightly) that you're also paying for the surroundings in a restaurant, hence you pay more in a nicer restaurant. But with the computer, you already paid for the "nice" aspects (more attractive case, better OS) when you originally bought the computer, and there's nothing special about these particular upgrades with generic parts.
Unless of course, one considers having Apple themselves (rather than someone else) perform an otherwise identical upgrade to be worth the extra. Which I'm sure some obsessives^w diehard Apple fans might well do....
It is a well-known fact that the only two things that can damage a Model M are a Cyberdyne Systems Series 800 and a tyrannosaurus rex with a shoulder-mounted particle beam. So I wouldn't worry about it.
What would happen if Chuck Norris got pissed off and attacked his Model M?
Pretty much every Slashdotter who claims their service should be unlimited because the commercial says so should know better especially since so many work in the IT industry. They're using the commercials as their excuse for behavior they know crosses the line of acceptable use.
You're implying that they should *know* that they're being misled by the company? Well, quite(!)
Some might say that it's the company's problem if they're intentionally fudging things behind vague and obscure policies.
Just because I invite you to a party with unlimited food and drink doesn't mean you get to move in with me, eventually, you have to go home or I'm going to throw you out.
That's a poor analogy, not least because you're comparing a social event (driven mainly by social rules and without much underlying legalism) with a business contract.
Most people understand the rules of parties, that they don't last forever, and (as you yourself implied) there's no contract, and the owner of the house/etc can throw someone out of the party!
Most people don't abuse the hospitality at parties because they don't want to be assholes. It's really not the same thing at all.
All advertising tells you only partial truths to entice you to buy...
In this case, the small print effectively nullifies and renders false the claim that the service is "unlimited". It's misleading to the point of lying.
The people who insist that they have a full blown, pipe with no limits at all are the ones clinging to the advertising rather than the contract they likely signed.
And you think that isn't grounds for criticism of the company?
Still, at the end of the day, caveat emptor. I didn't trust the salesman to tell me what was in my cell phone contract, why would I trust an advertisement to tell me what's in my ISP contract?
As I said, in this case, the contract doesn't merely expand upon or add restrictions to the advertisement's claim, it basically nullifies it.
I don't know how you feel about misleading advertising, and consumer protection in general. I live in the UK where there are generally stronger laws about this than the US, and I'm quite happy with that. IMHO, the lengths to which a consumer (as opposed to a business) should reasonably be expected to go to to find out such things should not be excessive (e.g. on page 37 of a contract in impenetrable legalese) relative to the prominence of the claims in the advert.
Ever heard of rolling blackouts or the devices they want to install in CA to limit when you can use certain appliances?
IIRC, the "Smartest Guys in the Room" documentary about Enron had ex-employees stating that the company had deliberately engineered such shortages and blackouts for its own ends.
Now, I agree ISPs should do a better job of explaining what the "real" limits are.
Bingo! They want to be able to sell their service as "unlimited" without actually having to provide that- they want to have their cake and eat it, but that's their problem.
I'm sure we'll both agree that it's unreasonable to expect a true "unlimited" service at the prices charged by some broadband providers. But it's also unreasonable for them to sell it as such when it isn't, and then rely on small-print and vaguely-worded "fair use" policies which they know *damn well* that most people won't see or notice.
If the government told you that you can go as fast as you want
Roads without speed limit signs (and there are a lot of them, at least here in NY) are limited to the state speed limit (55 in our case).
He didn't say or even imply otherwise. He came up with a hypothetical analogy which said " if [my emphasis] the government told you that you can go as fast as you want".
You can argue that this is or isn't a good analogy, but that's beside the point.
You'll complain that 99% of people don't get "ticketed" but that still doesn't change the fact that you were abusing the service. That 6 mbit or 10 mbit pipe isn't designed to be used at full capacity 24/7 by each subscriber, it's designed [etc]
You can argue all you like that their system isn't designed to be used like that. I'll mostly agree with you- we all know that most consumer broadband services couldn't deliver if they were used to their true "unlimited" capacity.
:)
But again, this is beside the point- you *can't* accuse people of "abusing the service" if it was sold as "unlimited". Even- no, *especially*- if the limitations were stated via some obscure, vaguely-worded small-print in the contract, or some handwaving reference to a "see elsewhere" weasel-worded "fair use" policy.
Many ISPs promoted their services as "unlimited" because it sounded better, even though this relied upon most people not using anything like the full capacity they were given. If this situation changes, it's *their* problem for overselling something they can't deliver, not the customers' for "abusing the system". I'm not going to come up with another trite analogy to illustrate that
Frankly, I've nothing against the principle that (much) heavier users should pay for what they use and not expect to be subsidised. I'm not even entirely opposed to QoS being used so long as it's applied in a relatively neutral and fair manner, and doesn't lead to "second-class citizen" Internet access. I'm only opposed to it when used as some BS excuse to coerce user behaviour, favour the ISPs' vested interests and/or cover-up and weasel out of the limitations of an oversold Internet service, as it is at present.
Thank you for thinking of the underage donkeys.
It's terrible, I know, but you can't blame him- a deterministic universe forced him to.... ah, sod it, this is the one that's going to take the joke too far and get modded redundant ;)
Also, just because someone hasn't had an accident in the past, it doesn't mean they won't have an accident in the future.
And that's how many insurance factors play out - the law of averages says that the longer you go without an accident the more likely you are to have one.
You seem to think you're agreeing here. But in fact, what he/she said not only *doesn't* imply what you say. It actually implies the complete opposite!
Think about it. He basically said that her not having an accident was random good luck. Assuming that this was truly the case, then her previous good luck would *have no effect* on whether she was lucky the next time (or by implication, whether she was unlucky).
Put it this way. If I toss a fair coin, and get the unlikely- but possible- fifty heads in a row, this has no effect on what the result of the next toss will be. The odds on getting heads or tails on that fifty-first toss are still exactly even, same as they would be on the first toss. The human tendency to believe otherwise in such cases is known as the gambler's fallacy.
Now here's the important part. If past good luck doesn't imply- and can't predict- whether she'll be lucky next time, it also can't say whether she'll be *unlucky* and have an accident next time!
The odds of tossing a coin and getting heads/tails are 50/50, and always remain so, independently. Doesn't matter how often you do it, there's no "memory" that would "favour" later tosses after (say) a long run of heads averaging that out.
Short version- your assertion that "the law of averages says that the longer you go without an accident the more likely you are to have one" is wrong.
Well, actually, if you want to be really pedantic, you could argue the following, but it doesn't really apply to this case, and it's unlikely that the insurance industry would use it:-
IF you know that the average is a fixed value, or if *your* chances of having an accident (or living longer, or whatever) are likely to have a knock-on effect on someone else then you may be correct. (This differs from the coin tossing above, because each coin toss was an independent event, which isn't the case here).
But even then- on the overall country/worldwide scale that insurance companies operate on, they would only be concerned with your individual effect on the overall picture- and that would be insignificant, like worrying about an apple's gravitational effect on the earth.
I have a spotless record going back 18 years and I'm paying for it because the numbers say I'm due for a claim.
Do you know for a fact that this is how the insurance companies do their numbers? I'm asking this because, although they may be amoral fuckers who'll do anything to tip the odds in their favour (and to weasel out of a claim), I don't see how it would benefit *them* to use incorrect mathematical models for their own purposes. They would want to know the correct answer- if only for their own benefit.
Wisdom of crowds only works when the crowd has some information about the situation.
Or when the crowd isn't a self-reinforcing/recruiting echo chamber for ignorant fuckwittery..... like the one-time alleged poster boy of the movement, Digg.
I notice that this is only your second comment, and that the first was at the end of 2003(!!)
Can we assume that you *really* spent 4 1/2 years crafting this finely-worded masterpiece? Jesus, talk about matching the braindead racist stereotype, I bet it took you so long because the drool kept shorting out your keyboard.
Wired science is for people who're into technology as a lifestyle, who like to kid themselves that they're interested in science but ultimately aren't. They aren't even particularly good "popular" science, because they're too far up their own arse.
This article isn't completely awful, which kind of makes it more frustrating. There's enough in there to get you interested, but you're left trying to figure out what conclusions it's exactly trying to draw and how much of it is actual science vs. (possibly the author's) pseudo-scientific technofetishism or pretentiousness.
MSN came out in mid-to-late 1995, by which time the Internet was already pretty well-known, had glossy magazines devoted to it and was the all-round latest cool thing.
It sounds laughable now, but I was genuinely worried at the time that this proprietary MSN crap would damage the popularity and growth of the Internet. They were forcing it via icons on the Windows 95 desktop, and although the Internet had made online culture cool and popular, and been an "open" success story, actual usage by the public was still quite niche by today's standards. It was by no means obvious that computerphobic Joe Public wouldn't see the icon on his desktop, get seduced by some shiny baubles and go for MSN, not realising what he'd lost.
(Remember, if you think computer literacy is bad today, it was vastly worse in the mid-1990s). Everybody was trying to compete to control how you accessed the internet, not just Microsoft. By the time MSN came out, it had already been possible to buy "vanilla" Internet access for quite some time- either via TCP/IP (as normally happens today) or via a shell account (effectively using your computer as a terminal).
And the fact that AOL et al were still operating mainly walled gardens is beside the point- MS only went with the Internet when it was clear that things were going that way anyway. They might deserve credit in certain respects, but not this one, and to imply that we should thank Bill Gates for Google(!) Earth just grates.
...the full 2-hour-long version of Loituma girl. I always felt that truncating this rich experience to a mere 10 minutes was a travesty.
Only when it was clear that the Internet was here to stay and that walled-garden rivals like MSN couldn't compete did MS go for it wholeheartedly. Thanking MS for the likes of Google Earth is giving them credit they don't deserve, in that area at any rate.
The discussion we just had was over whether the 68000 should be considered a 16 or 32 bit CPU. If you're simply making the point that "the 68000 was a 16-bit CPU", that seems to be going round in circles.
If, on the other hand, you're pointing out that later Amigas had "full" 32-bit CPUs (i.e. internally and externally), then... fair enough, I should have thought about that!
Though it has to be said that until late 1992 (*), all but the very expensive A3000 were 68000-based as default.
Yes... the CDTV was based on the 68000, in fact the basic hardware was very similar to the original A500, and changed little since the original A1000. It didn't even include Kickstart 2!
(*) By which time the Amiga market was already starting to decline under the onslaught of cheap PCs from one side and Mega Drives and SNESs on the other. The A1200 was okay, but it was too little too late. If they'd released something like it 18 months before, the Amiga might've done better, but they relied on the same basic hardware for over six years.
Personally, I'd agree that the "32-bit" classification is more helpful when describing the 68000, but it doesn't give away the whole story, and it wasn't how it was described back then. [The 68000's] ISA had instructions that would operate on 32-bit wide data (add.l, for example). That's what I meant when I said it was 32-bit internally.
Supposedly "(Atari) ST" stands for "Sixteen/Thirty-two", contradicting the "Sam Tramiel" acronym.
Anyway, I live in the UK, and I can assure you that the Amiga was definitely more popular here later on, because I made the mistake of buying an ST when everyone else had moved onto the Amiga.
...would want to work in the games industry anyway?
It's generally reckoned to have some of the worst pay and the longest hours.
From what I've heard, the actual coding in commercial games is (contrary to what people expect) tedious and unrewarding minutae.
Couple that with the volatile and flaky nature of the games business that can (and does) see formerly successful companies go under very quickly after their latest game doesn't do quite as well as they'd hoped.
Anyone getting into the business is competing against naive entrants in their late-teens/early-twenties; the type who are willing (and able) to work for peanuts to do what (they think) they love, until they get burnt out and are replaced by more newbies.
I'm glad that I've never had any desire to work in computer games, because unless you're truly passionate about it and have your eyes wide open as to what it involves, it sounds like a no-brainer to avoid it.