You never noticed the full hardware specs for the Amiga, that were available from the start By the mid-80s the Atari 8-bit hardware was well-known, regardless of how unhelpful Atari had been in the early days. In addition, not only was it a far simpler machine full stop, but having been around for six years, its ins and outs and the techniques used to get the best out of it would be fairly well established.
The Amiga may have been well-documented, but it was a far more complex machine and being fairly new would have meant that people were still finding their way around it. Having a dictionary doesn't make you an expert in the English language.
Of course, all this assumes that we *are* talking about the mid-1980s, something which wasn't properly established, but seems likely. It's possible the guy could have been doing all this a couple of years back, just not very probable.
as well as the specs etc for the various API's? The guy was talking about assembly programming, so that wouldn't be applicable here.
I had been doing assembly on the IIe for a couple years before(enough to start hacking the kernel and working on my own DOS) I got my hands on an Atari 800 and then I discovered that all of the info on writing anything for the 800 was basically useless and, as you stated, contradictory. I had at least 2 books on assembly for the Atari and neither of them got me to first base. Eventually I just dropped it and bought an Amiga which was a lot easier to get into. WTF? The Amiga didn't come out until 1985, by which time the Atari 8-bit line had been around for years and was reasonably well-documented. (*1) Sure, in its early days, Atari (intentionally IIRC) did not release information about the 400/800 line, and caused problems for developers. However, AFAIK people mostly had them figured out by the mid-80s.
And I don't understand how the Amiga could be easier to get into than the 8-bit Ataris; being a 16/32-bit machine, it was far more complex and had fewer obvious routes to get "into" it.
The Amiga was neither the contemporary of, nor (at the time of its release) comparable in price with the Atari 800/XL/XE. Even if you did get your Atari then (and you meant "Amiga" rather than getting it confused with another machine), it wasn't the same mystery as it had been in earlier times.
(*1) The same year that the Amiga came out (1985), the third iteration of the same basic Atari 8-bit hardware (now sold as the XE line) hit the streets. The 400/800 had come out in 1979, the XL line in 1983... that was *years* earlier.
Except they run above ground and are called railways. And it is way cheaper to dig the holes for railways. There aren't any!!! Hah!, ha ha ha! This is just another way for others to spend our money in unneeded ways because it seems cool. The good news is that most cities (and indeed countries) already have extensive networks of underground tunnels. Unfortunately, for this purpose there are also some drawbacks to using the sewers...
Now that SCO actually have $100 million, doesn't this mean that Novell (or whoever) can actually claim the money they're owed but had until now been unlikely to see due to SCO's impending bankruptcy?
Much as I find this guy's behaviour odious (and consider that he probably got off lightly), why do I get the feeling that your allegedly "Simple. Fair. Proportional." solution to this problem is in fact just the usual Slashdotter's pseudo-logic being used to justify your underlying bloodthirsty desire to see this guy hang?
Or let me put it another way. You felt that the guy deserved to die for what he'd done and *then* you tried to justify it "logically"- I'm damn willing to bet that it wasn't the other way around as you imply.
(Prediction; going by past experience, this criticism of your argument and lack of desire to apply the death penalty here will be misconstrued and over-generalised by one or more fuckwits who think that I'm in favour of doing nothing or worse that I actually support this guy).
Do you know WHY Microsoft settled? It was looking dangerously close that they would lose Windows as a trademark entirely because of how generic it is, so they settled to make sure it didn't go to court. This is interesting; there's a potential game of strategy here. Lindows could have told MS to piss off because they reckoned it at best (for MS) it wouldn't have stood up in court and at worst it would have actually damaged MS as you suggest.
Had MS actually gone ahead with the threatened court case, I wonder whether they'd then have been able to pull out or demand some form of settlement (even if this involved *giving* money to Lindows) before any damaging judgement. Or whether Lindows would actually have been able to force MS to see through what they'd started. (Reminds me a bit of "The Merchant of Venice").
If Lindows were in a position to freely refuse *or* accept any settlement by MS (regardless of how reasonable or unreasonable it was), they'd be able to effectively blackmail them for vast amounts ("Give us lots of money or we'll refuse your settlement and you'll lose your trademark!").
Of course, MS's lawyers are almost certainly too clever to get anywhere near a trap like that. Plus, there may be other tactics that they could use against Lindows (legal attrition, etc). Anyway, IANAL- just speculating for fun here.
Not the brightest rip-off artists in the book. Yeah they're so dumb that they're... making lots of money. If they hadn't used the name 'Scrabble', it wouldn't have been as popular, and they wouldn't have made as much money. Seems like it's you who isn't bright. Making money means nothing if they have to give it all to Mattel in damages. OTOH, if they'd played safe and skirted around the various IP laws, they might have made less money in the first place, but Mattel couldn't have sued them as easily.
OTOH, they could be clever, convince Mattel that it's in their interest to let them continue, and still come out with more than they would have by playing it safe. (Perhaps they even planned that in the first place... perhaps not, who knows?) But it's certainly not as simplistic, nor as risk free as you make out.
Trinitron is good stuff, it might not be 100Hz but it does makes 50Hz allot more enjoyable! What about Trinitron-based computer monitors? There must be some of them that run at at least 100Hz. Besides which, I'd assume that there's nothing inherent about the basic Trinitron design that limits its frequency range, only the specification of particular components and non-core details of specific implementations.
Oh... and one other thing. The TV still gives a picture as good as the day it was bought after approaching 15 years of (almost) continuous use, and I've *never* had it serviced or repaired in that time.
Sure, it's *relatively* heavy and moderately bulky, but that's not the same problem with 14" portables as it is with those horrendous large-screen CRTs. I'd pay to have my TV repaired over one of those cheap LCD portables any day. There's something I just hate about the look of them, particularly the matt-finish ones.
Yeah, I know it cuts down on reflections, but it just looks horrible for TV, and I don't like the colour on cheap LCD TVs. Maybe the way CRTs work sits better with (and covers up the flaws better than) cheap LCDs when used with existing standard-def TV signals- that could be because until recently most displays were CRTs, and the system was designed with that in mind.
Whatever.... that Sony's a damn good TV, even when (*especially* when) used with my digibox's RGB SCART signal.
That's the one thing that bothered me with trinitron monitors as they got more obvious with time. When I first got my Trinitron TV, I didn't realise that it was meant to have the faint horizontal line- I thought it was a fault and took it back. I got used to it pretty quickly though, even though I was also using it as a monitor for my Amiga (nice crisp picture with RGB SCART, although the dot pitch was coarse).
I've also got a Diamondtron-based monitor (a supposedly licensed version by Mitsubishi, although I was always under the impression that they made it after Sony's patent ran out). The faint lines (two in this case) aren't distracting in themselves under normal use. However, they *are* a minor nuisance when you're using Photoshop and you have to check to see if it's a genuine scratch on the image or just one of the bars.
I'm not sure what you mean by "they got more obvious with time", though. In what sense?
Even if your paid work isn't safety-critical, going without sleep needlessly puts lives at risk when you drive your car home. People are killed all the time when drivers fall asleep at the wheel. I don't drive. Good, they won't need speed limits or laws against drink-driving then either!
(Disclaimer: This isn't an argument against- nor in favour of- what you said. Just against your silly logic.)
Sir, I congratulate you. The way in which you seamlessly changed the topic to a totally unrelated one which you preferred to discuss was incredibly clever and subtle.
Oh no, hang on.... my mistake. It was neither! Are you the Republican equivalent of those people who use any excuse to make an offtopic attack on George Bush? Seems like it to me.
Of course he's none of these things! He's not from England. =) Well, "ned" is a primarily used in Scotland... "chav" is an import from down South(!)
Actually, I'd always considered "ned" to be a more specific term- it supposedly stands for "non-educated delinquent" although this is probably a retronym- whereas "chav" really means the poor-people council estate subculture in general. Personally, I don't like "chav"- it seems to be used as an excuse to look down on poor people and tar them all as second-class citizens, a nice little excuse for middle-class types to shed their tolerant facade and expose the contempt and fear that lies under the surface.
Don't get me wrong; there are some genuinely nasty sociopathic little pricks out there (neds!), and I'll be the first to say that lots of them deserve nothing more than a serious beating. (Not to mention their parents). But I'm damned if I'm going to play along with the blanket anti-poor bullshit.
Honestly, I still don't understand chav subculture or its appeal......or even what makes it distinct. It doesn't seem to have spread across any bodies of water though. Really, it's just the UK equivalent of the US "white trash" thing. It's not some cultural movement, and I personally don't understand why people started going on about "chavs" all of a sudden around five years ago. It's not like such people weren't around before.
Oh, hang on, I just answered my own question when I edited my reply above... they're a convenient target for people who wouldn't consider racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. to be acceptable.
What we need to realized is that it's possible for blame to be fully assigned to multiple people. You're implying that I said otherwise. On the contrary, I stated quite explicitly:-
The fact that the police might or might not use excessive or unjustified force is an issue And then went on to say
but beside the point here- if this kid knows how they might behave, rightly or wrongly (and he damn well should by now) and is aware of the consequences for those involved, he's still committing a sociopathic and amoral act against innocent people In other words, the kid's phoney (and malicious) call doesn't excuse the police if they behave irresponsibly, but nor do the police's (potential) failings absolve him.
It's their job to deal with false tips. Of course- like it's their job to deal with all sorts of antisocial and malicious behaviour. And it doesn't remotely excuse those committing it.
And this is probably one reason why so many company employees are forced to behave like inflexible jobsworths and give a rote answer.
I'm not sure if what you say would stand up in a court of law, BTW. (Usual IANAL and YAPNALE (*) disclaimer for the following).
If you've asked 19 people representing the same company and got the same answer, and then the 20th misinterprets the company policy and says something different, it could be argued that you *knew* the company's policy and position, and that you were intentionally fishing with the intention of getting someone to give you a mistaken answer and then using this as "proof".
IMHO, I'd also question how you'd phrased the question you asked guy #20 (did you accidentally or *deliberately* mislead him) and how you interpreted his answer. The defence may well argue that you should have *known* by that stage that such employees would be bound by company policy- and that you also knew the company policy and were seeking to take advantage of one employee's genuine mistake.
I don't know the legal position on this, but I suspect that a court would consider you were operating in bad faith and that the employee's mistake was not legally binding.
In contrast to your (bad) analogy, this is *not* the same as repeatedly speaking to an employee regarding a contract and him changing his mind.
Regardless of all that, given these doubts, even if employee #20's undertaking was authorised and not mistaken, it'd be gross stupidity *not* to get it in writing. Even if oral agreements are technically binding, there's so much open to question (and prone to misunderstanding) that I doubt you'd be able to prove it in court.
The fact that the police might or might not use excessive or unjustified force is an issue, but beside the point here- if this kid knows how they might behave, rightly or wrongly (and he damn well should by now) and is aware of the consequences for those involved, he's still committing a sociopathic and amoral act against innocent people.
And no, he's not the "messenger". That would suggest lack of involvement- he's a warning sign, just like the Russian Mafia exploiting flaws in the banking system are warning signs of flaws. I don't see people justifying their behaviour as the act of a "messenger".
Oh, seriously. Just fuck off with the glorification bullshit already.
Just because there are holes in a system that he's inadvertently exposing through his exploits doesn't make him a hero any more than the Russian mafia are heroes for exposing flaws in the credit card system.
Morally, this tosser is no better than the scum who make phoney calls to the fire brigade and throw stones and objects at them. The consequences have the potential to be just as- and possibly more- serious.
Is he clever and talented? Probably, yeah, but since he's using his "skills" to fuck about with mostly decent people for his own amusement, fuck the prick and let him rot in prison.
While it's true they don't have to do business with you, most stores will accept a $50 rather than lose out on a $55 purchase. Ditto a $100 and lose out on a $101 purchase. They're evidently not that keen. Last time I tried to make a $53 purchase with large-value bills, they refused.
The cheek of it- my $50 bills are as good as anyone else's! As was the $3 bill...
That's because Photoshop (and photo editing in general) is a demanding little bastard, not because Windows XP is.
Now, I'll acknowledge that it's reasonable to expect an operating system to leave enough capacity for two or three applications to run, but beyond that you're starting to blame XP for the application's shortcomings (or demands). Ditto if a company wants to load up their laptop with auto-running crapware that MS didn't have anything to do with.
I ran XP quite happily with 256MB for over two years. I eventually bought more because (I thought) I needed more memory to run Oracle under *Linux*.
The stuff I'm doing now (Photoshop included, oddly enough) would do better with even more than the 768MB I have now, but that's not XP's fault. In fact, most recent apps need more memory, but unless SP1 and SP2 upped XP's demands significantly, that's not its fault.
The GP is right- 128MB *is* the "barely adequate" limit. (It supposedly runs in 64MB, but I really can't imagine how bad that would be). My laptop with 128MB was clearly hobbled by its memory- it was borderline usable for simple stuff, but thrashed horribly with much more. It's much improved and more usable (though not perfect) with 192MB.
And of course I'm not using ******* Photoshop CS3 on the laptop, but so what? Stop trying to blame the demands of heavy apps on XP. If PS ran under Windows 3.1, or any flavour of Linux, I doubt it'd make that much difference.
Slashdot Mirror
The Amiga may have been well-documented, but it was a far more complex machine and being fairly new would have meant that people were still finding their way around it. Having a dictionary doesn't make you an expert in the English language.
Of course, all this assumes that we *are* talking about the mid-1980s, something which wasn't properly established, but seems likely. It's possible the guy could have been doing all this a couple of years back, just not very probable. as well as the specs etc for the various API's? The guy was talking about assembly programming, so that wouldn't be applicable here.
And I don't understand how the Amiga could be easier to get into than the 8-bit Ataris; being a 16/32-bit machine, it was far more complex and had fewer obvious routes to get "into" it.
The Amiga was neither the contemporary of, nor (at the time of its release) comparable in price with the Atari 800/XL/XE. Even if you did get your Atari then (and you meant "Amiga" rather than getting it confused with another machine), it wasn't the same mystery as it had been in earlier times.
(*1) The same year that the Amiga came out (1985), the third iteration of the same basic Atari 8-bit hardware (now sold as the XE line) hit the streets. The 400/800 had come out in 1979, the XL line in 1983... that was *years* earlier.
Now that SCO actually have $100 million, doesn't this mean that Novell (or whoever) can actually claim the money they're owed but had until now been unlikely to see due to SCO's impending bankruptcy?
Much as I find this guy's behaviour odious (and consider that he probably got off lightly), why do I get the feeling that your allegedly "Simple. Fair. Proportional." solution to this problem is in fact just the usual Slashdotter's pseudo-logic being used to justify your underlying bloodthirsty desire to see this guy hang?
Or let me put it another way. You felt that the guy deserved to die for what he'd done and *then* you tried to justify it "logically"- I'm damn willing to bet that it wasn't the other way around as you imply.
(Prediction; going by past experience, this criticism of your argument and lack of desire to apply the death penalty here will be misconstrued and over-generalised by one or more fuckwits who think that I'm in favour of doing nothing or worse that I actually support this guy).
Had MS actually gone ahead with the threatened court case, I wonder whether they'd then have been able to pull out or demand some form of settlement (even if this involved *giving* money to Lindows) before any damaging judgement. Or whether Lindows would actually have been able to force MS to see through what they'd started. (Reminds me a bit of "The Merchant of Venice").
If Lindows were in a position to freely refuse *or* accept any settlement by MS (regardless of how reasonable or unreasonable it was), they'd be able to effectively blackmail them for vast amounts ("Give us lots of money or we'll refuse your settlement and you'll lose your trademark!").
Of course, MS's lawyers are almost certainly too clever to get anywhere near a trap like that. Plus, there may be other tactics that they could use against Lindows (legal attrition, etc). Anyway, IANAL- just speculating for fun here.
OTOH, they could be clever, convince Mattel that it's in their interest to let them continue, and still come out with more than they would have by playing it safe. (Perhaps they even planned that in the first place... perhaps not, who knows?) But it's certainly not as simplistic, nor as risk free as you make out.
My mistake; I meant "tag" in the sense that Slashdot has sections(!). Complete with a picture of Florida or something. :)
I think this is one case where Slashdot needs to copy Fark(!)..... we need a "Florida" tag. Now. :-)
Oh... and one other thing. The TV still gives a picture as good as the day it was bought after approaching 15 years of (almost) continuous use, and I've *never* had it serviced or repaired in that time.
Sure, it's *relatively* heavy and moderately bulky, but that's not the same problem with 14" portables as it is with those horrendous large-screen CRTs. I'd pay to have my TV repaired over one of those cheap LCD portables any day. There's something I just hate about the look of them, particularly the matt-finish ones.
Yeah, I know it cuts down on reflections, but it just looks horrible for TV, and I don't like the colour on cheap LCD TVs. Maybe the way CRTs work sits better with (and covers up the flaws better than) cheap LCDs when used with existing standard-def TV signals- that could be because until recently most displays were CRTs, and the system was designed with that in mind.
Whatever.... that Sony's a damn good TV, even when (*especially* when) used with my digibox's RGB SCART signal.
I've also got a Diamondtron-based monitor (a supposedly licensed version by Mitsubishi, although I was always under the impression that they made it after Sony's patent ran out). The faint lines (two in this case) aren't distracting in themselves under normal use. However, they *are* a minor nuisance when you're using Photoshop and you have to check to see if it's a genuine scratch on the image or just one of the bars.
I'm not sure what you mean by "they got more obvious with time", though. In what sense?
(Disclaimer: This isn't an argument against- nor in favour of- what you said. Just against your silly logic.)
Dude, if you were getting meaningful feedback from your blow-up doll about your insomnia, you damn well *did* need more sleep! :)
Sir, I congratulate you. The way in which you seamlessly changed the topic to a totally unrelated one which you preferred to discuss was incredibly clever and subtle.
Oh no, hang on.... my mistake. It was neither! Are you the Republican equivalent of those people who use any excuse to make an offtopic attack on George Bush? Seems like it to me.
Actually, I'd always considered "ned" to be a more specific term- it supposedly stands for "non-educated delinquent" although this is probably a retronym- whereas "chav" really means the poor-people council estate subculture in general. Personally, I don't like "chav"- it seems to be used as an excuse to look down on poor people and tar them all as second-class citizens, a nice little excuse for middle-class types to shed their tolerant facade and expose the contempt and fear that lies under the surface.
Don't get me wrong; there are some genuinely nasty sociopathic little pricks out there (neds!), and I'll be the first to say that lots of them deserve nothing more than a serious beating. (Not to mention their parents). But I'm damned if I'm going to play along with the blanket anti-poor bullshit. Honestly, I still don't understand chav subculture or its appeal...
Oh, hang on, I just answered my own question when I edited my reply above... they're a convenient target for people who wouldn't consider racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. to be acceptable.
And this is probably one reason why so many company employees are forced to behave like inflexible jobsworths and give a rote answer.
:)
I'm not sure if what you say would stand up in a court of law, BTW. (Usual IANAL and YAPNALE (*) disclaimer for the following).
If you've asked 19 people representing the same company and got the same answer, and then the 20th misinterprets the company policy and says something different, it could be argued that you *knew* the company's policy and position, and that you were intentionally fishing with the intention of getting someone to give you a mistaken answer and then using this as "proof".
IMHO, I'd also question how you'd phrased the question you asked guy #20 (did you accidentally or *deliberately* mislead him) and how you interpreted his answer. The defence may well argue that you should have *known* by that stage that such employees would be bound by company policy- and that you also knew the company policy and were seeking to take advantage of one employee's genuine mistake.
I don't know the legal position on this, but I suspect that a court would consider you were operating in bad faith and that the employee's mistake was not legally binding.
In contrast to your (bad) analogy, this is *not* the same as repeatedly speaking to an employee regarding a contract and him changing his mind.
Regardless of all that, given these doubts, even if employee #20's undertaking was authorised and not mistaken, it'd be gross stupidity *not* to get it in writing. Even if oral agreements are technically binding, there's so much open to question (and prone to misunderstanding) that I doubt you'd be able to prove it in court.
(*) You are probably not a lawyer either
The fact that the police might or might not use excessive or unjustified force is an issue, but beside the point here- if this kid knows how they might behave, rightly or wrongly (and he damn well should by now) and is aware of the consequences for those involved, he's still committing a sociopathic and amoral act against innocent people.
And no, he's not the "messenger". That would suggest lack of involvement- he's a warning sign, just like the Russian Mafia exploiting flaws in the banking system are warning signs of flaws. I don't see people justifying their behaviour as the act of a "messenger".
Oh, seriously. Just fuck off with the glorification bullshit already.
Just because there are holes in a system that he's inadvertently exposing through his exploits doesn't make him a hero any more than the Russian mafia are heroes for exposing flaws in the credit card system.
Morally, this tosser is no better than the scum who make phoney calls to the fire brigade and throw stones and objects at them. The consequences have the potential to be just as- and possibly more- serious.
Of course, this guy's a hacker- one of us, right. He's not some antisocial ned or chav from a council estate (who'd probably attack you and film it on their mobile phones). So that makes his actions alright, doesn't it? Way to go with the double standards.
Is he clever and talented? Probably, yeah, but since he's using his "skills" to fuck about with mostly decent people for his own amusement, fuck the prick and let him rot in prison.
A few generations before *that*: s/Chinese/American/g;
And I'm pretty sure us Europeans probably tried to make copies of some cool stuff that came from the East at one stage.
The cheek of it- my $50 bills are as good as anyone else's! As was the $3 bill...
That's because Photoshop (and photo editing in general) is a demanding little bastard, not because Windows XP is.
Now, I'll acknowledge that it's reasonable to expect an operating system to leave enough capacity for two or three applications to run, but beyond that you're starting to blame XP for the application's shortcomings (or demands). Ditto if a company wants to load up their laptop with auto-running crapware that MS didn't have anything to do with.
I ran XP quite happily with 256MB for over two years. I eventually bought more because (I thought) I needed more memory to run Oracle under *Linux*.
The stuff I'm doing now (Photoshop included, oddly enough) would do better with even more than the 768MB I have now, but that's not XP's fault. In fact, most recent apps need more memory, but unless SP1 and SP2 upped XP's demands significantly, that's not its fault.
The GP is right- 128MB *is* the "barely adequate" limit. (It supposedly runs in 64MB, but I really can't imagine how bad that would be). My laptop with 128MB was clearly hobbled by its memory- it was borderline usable for simple stuff, but thrashed horribly with much more. It's much improved and more usable (though not perfect) with 192MB.
And of course I'm not using ******* Photoshop CS3 on the laptop, but so what? Stop trying to blame the demands of heavy apps on XP. If PS ran under Windows 3.1, or any flavour of Linux, I doubt it'd make that much difference.