Bill Gates was from a very well-off and (even more importantly) well-connected upper middle class background. His father was the president of a national bank, and his mother was a businesswoman who served on the board of the United Way charity along with... the CEO of IBM.
Now, I'm not claiming that Gates' success was solely due to this, but you can bet it clearly gave him a major advantage and opened some doors that might never be opened to the majority of Americans. His background was far more privileged than that of the ordinary American middle-class guy some believe him to be.
Out of curiosity, what's your reason for posting in the fixed-space "tt" typeface like that? Is there a good excuse or is it just an attention-grabbing tactic?
sorry, just hit reply, and that's the font that came up after preview/submit. I'm not normally a LOOK AT ME!!! type of guy. Well, I am. Just in this case it was inadvertent.
So you're claiming there's a bug in Slashdot that causes all your posts to appear in that typeface? Strange, because I've never heard anyone here actually complaining about that, despite you being far from the only person that does it.:-/
Out of curiosity, what's your reason for posting in the fixed-space "tt" typeface like that? Is there a good excuse or is it just an attention-grabbing tactic?
Those images of publicly viewable should be subject to automated searching for criminal evidence. If a billion cops could legitimately stand there watching and writing down notes, it's legit to replace them with sensors, networks, and AI.
There are two assumptions here. Firstly that anything you do in public is fair game, and secondly any activity that we accept when it's done the old-fashioned (and tedious) way is equally legitimate when it's done in a high-speed, automated manner.
Some- myself included- disagree with both these general premises. A hundred years ago, if you did something in public, people could see you and talk about you, but there wasn't the chance of some video of you doing something stupid hanging around forever, or someone in power easily being able to see you doing that.
In short, the implications of doing something in public have changed a lot, even in the past 30 years, and the social rules surrounding that date back to before this time. Even then, you generally couldn't have got away with (e.g.) stalking someone, even if they were doing it "in public", so it's not like there was ever *no* level of "privacy" towards people in public spaces.
Secondly, doing some surveillance activity in the old-fashioned, tedious manner by definition limited it to people the police had a reason to focus on. Doing it in an automated manner makes it possible to gather information on and track people in general, regardless of whether or not there is a fair reason to do this, and makes a police state or "surveillance society" possible in a way that doing it by hand doesn't.
In short, this is a case where a quantitative change in how much something can be done makes a *qualitative* change to its effects, i.e. it is *not* simply a case of letting the police do their old job faster- it fundamentally changes it. And this is why (IMHO) doing it the new way should *not* get a free pass because it's always been like that.... because it hasn't.
The spectrum wasn't really relevant as a programmer's machine. Sure, it was popular but most people who had one never wrote so much as a single line of code and Sinclair BASIC was primitive.
The sheer number of Spectrums out there meant that even if a low proportion of people actually programmed on them, that was still a large amount of people. I agree with you that a higher proportion of BBC owners probably used their machines for "serious" stuff (*), but that's still a higher proportion of a much smaller user base.
You also forget that people wanting to get the most out of the machine used assembly/machine code, not BASIC.
As for saying few homes had BBC micros, that is far from the truth.
Maybe I overstated this, but the fact was that the BBC was *not* dominant in the home market in the way that it was in schools, and was vastly outnumbered by the Spectrum.
Most of my friends had them,
"Your friends" are not necessarily a representative sample. This could reflect your social grouping (more affluent?) and the fact that as owners of the same computer you were more likely to be friends in the first place.
I can think of two people I knew that had a BBC, but that doesn't change the fact that way more people had Spectrums.
there were plenty of hobby mags for them and lots of software. Compare the mags of the time between platforms and say Acorn User had much more depth than Sinclair User did.
Which "time" are you talking about? The early 80s or the late 80s? There were significant numbers of hobbyist magazines for the Spectrum in its early days; it was only later on that it became almost exclusively a games machine. (I assume that this was due to hobbyists moving on to more powerful machines as they became available and the Spectrum failed to improve with the times (**)).
The Spectrum and C64 were both much the same, a game platform and not relevant to computer literacy in the way the BBC and the cheaper sibling the Electron were.
Your mention of the Electron being "relevant" to computer literacy when the Spectrum wasn't shows that you're either hopelessly biased or living in wish-fulfilment land.
The Electron was a relative commercial failure (***) and purely as a consequence of that its influence on computer literacy as a whole can't have been significant. Maybe it had the nice BBC Basic, but the fact remains that if few people owned them compared to the Spectrum's behemoth market share then it was unlikely to have been more influential!
Anyway, bottom line is, I'm not saying that the Spectrum was a great machine or that the majority of owners did anything other than play games on them, but you can't ignore it or downplay its importance simply because it wasn't as nice a machine as your beloved BBC.
(*) This is to some extent self-selecting anyway; the BBC was a great "serious" machine, but really not that great for arcade games- anyone with that much money whose main interest was games would have gone for the C64 instead.
(**) The Spectrum was able to rest on its laurels and become a cash cow with only minor spec improvements because its massive games software base trumped its limitations, but I assume this would be less important to hobbyists.
(***) My understanding is that on its launch, there was a large demand for the Electron, but production problems meant it could not be met, and by the time Acorn had enough, they'd missed the Christmas market, their potential customers had bought other machines instead and they were left with a large inventory of unsold Electrons that led to their downfall and takeover. I know that a moderate number of Electrons must have been sold, as software for it was available in the shops, but never in the same quantities as the Spectrum and C64.
Funny, yeah- but it also would have been a fair review of the original PC. The IBM PC/MS-DOS and their derivatives became the de facto standard for various reasons- IBM nametag guaranteed initial success, generic PC was easily cloned, MS retained right to sell OS to other companies, latter two leading to open market, competition and commoditisation. But none of these have anything to do with the fact that the original IBM PC was a great or interesting machine, because frankly it wasn't.
Unlike the iPod review where you could say Taco missed the point, your parody PC review would be a fair one without the benefit of hindsight.
The parent is pretty much right, with some qualifications- it's a shame they were modded troll. Because the IBM PC clones and derivatives won out in the long term, there's a tendency to look back along its path and view history solely along that line, judging it as if the winners were always destined to be so.
The original IBM PC may have been powerful in some respects, but it was also as dull as ditchwater from a (crude) graphics and a (keyboard beeper) sound point of view, as well as being massively too expensive for home users. The hardware spec wasn't radical- mostly designed from off the shelf parts, though the processor was admittedly powerful.
The damn operating system wasn't radical either- the first version of MS-DOS was (at best) very inspired by and (at worst) a blatant ripoff of the 8-bit CP/M crudely ported to the 16-bit 8086 processor that Microsoft bought in. It hacks me off when people get nostalgic about the configurability of MS-DOS, because such configurability was only needed to get round the convoluted and dated architecture of the OS. And when they look on 80s/early-90s PCs and justify such crudeness as if "that's just how things were then".
No they weren't. That's how computers running a repeatedly-patched and hacked ripoff of a 1970s 8-bit OS were. The Commodore Amiga had full pre-emptive (i.e. "proper" multitasking) 8 years before Windows NT and a full decade before the then-mainstream Windows 95 did it. But the people who used PCs mostly didn't know any better.
Yes, the PC ultimately won due to its generic nature, and in the very long term, I don't know that this was a bad thing. (Er, I'll wash my mouth out later!) Much as the Amiga was miles better in terms of design than the PC in its heyday, the de-facto open nature of the PC has led to cheap, plentiful hardware that supports lots of stuff, and I don't know if the Amiga's advantages at the time would ultimately have led to its present-day descendants being better than (say) the present-day PC.
However, this shouldn't blind us to the fact that the original IBM PC *in itself* was a frankly unremarkable machine running an already-dated OS that became a millstone round the computer industry's neck for the next 15 years.
It depends on where you were living I guess. I was in the UK at the time
You're right as far as pointing out that the UK was somewhat different. But some aspects of your summary are open to question.
Most seriously, the fact that you completely fail to even *mention* what was AFAIK far and away the best-selling computer in the UK during the 1980s- the ZX Spectrum- renders your summary misleading by itself. The Spectrum's influence on bedroom programmers is often credited (correctly or otherwise) with kickstarting the strength of the early UK software industry.
Yes, most of them were bought as games computers, and it had its limitations. But like it or loathe it, you can't accurately discuss the 1980s UK computer market without mentioning it.
The BBC Micro? It was a great machine in many respects. But it was also very expensive compared to the likes of the Spectrum, and way out of most people's reach. While very common in schools (and probably influential that way), it was *never* a common home machine. In terms of getting the masses computer literate something like the Spectrum *would* have been a more appropriate choice (as Clive Sinclair wanted it to be). In fact, the Spectrum pretty much *did* do that, despite Acorn's more expensive machine getting the BBC contract.
While it's true that the C64 was never as influential here as it was in the US, the fact that IIRC it was the second-most-supported computer (behind the Spectrum, naturally) by UK games software houses suggests that it was *very* far from an "also ran".
Depending on your usage, scroll lock is very useful at controlling a KVM.
Oh Christ, yeah... *this*.
I read the original comment thinking "yeah, I don't think I've *ever* used Scroll Lock" (aside from trying it out). Then I read your comment and realised that, actually, I use it *every sodding day* I'm at work!
To be fair though, this isn't really the original or intended usage- and I sort of keep it mentally separate from "actual" keyboard usage (which explains my original oversight), since it's a sort of hack enabling convenient switching of the KVM. And I'm pretty sure that they chose that key precisely because it's hardly ever used.
IIRC IBM sold their PC division because the whole desktop PC market had become very commoditised and low-margin. Nothing to do with the decline of the PC.
OTOH, if the summary is implying that the IBM guy has a vested interest in saying that the PC (which they no longer produce) has declined, I'm not convinced. What stake do they have in its obvious "successors"?
Oh, and BTW, this guy may have designed the *IBM* PC, but he did sure as hell did *not* design the personal computer as a general concept or format. It's not even like the IBM PC was a particularly radical example of a personal computer when it came out anyway- its later success was due to the way the market played out, not any particular technical "strengths" of the design.
Institutional investors (aka the 401k investors spending billions on your and my behalf) are required by law to only buy AAA rated investments. So now there will be a lot of them scrambling to find another investment to put their billions into so that they don't go to jail.
If "required by law to only buy AAA rated investments" is to be taken literally, they wouldn't need to sell their existing US governments bonds (or whatever) since they already own them. They just couldn't buy any new ones, which admittedly is a problem for the US government and a nuisance for them.
Grandparent post: It seems to me that S&P, along with the other credit rating agencies, lost a lot of credibility when they were giving AAA ratings to the guys holding bundles of sub-prime mortgages in the lead up to the financial crisis.
Yea, that's what I thought. People are still treating the ratings agencies- who so obviously got it wrong- seriously after 2007/08?! (But see below)
Parent reply: Caveat emptor. If you don't do your own due diligence on your investments then don't complain about the consequences.
The question is how much do people actually believe these ratings in the first place, and how much are they privately sceptical but playing along? I can guess two "good" reasons the industry still supports them... neither of which are to do with their accuracy.
The first is that maintaining the pretence retains confidence in the market, even if that confidence is ultimately baseless.
If the industry was to openly accept that they were unreliable and couldn't predict financial crises like 07/08, and if there wasn't anything that could replace them (which there isn't, AFAICT), there's the danger that they- and people in general- would lose confidence and panic.
In this first case, I'm unclear how much of it would be intentional self-delusion by those in the industry, and how much is everyone knowing it's crap but keeping their mouths shut because it benefits no-one to say otherwise?
Secondly, they're a very useful back-covering mechanism for those in the industry, basically, the "no-one ever got fired for buying IBM" of the financial world. By which I mean one is *way* less likely to be hauled over the coals for a bad decision if they can point to the fact that an industry "respected" rating supported that choice. Or put another way, using them to demonstrate that "due diligence" was supposedly done.
This would work for individuals within companies, and for companies justifying themselves to investors and/or courts.
I don't know all of this for a fact, but it seems a sensible guess given the way that corporate behaviour and humans in general work.
How about you make a NEW superhero that is black or gay, or whatever, and for the superheroes that I grew up with just leave them the fuck alone! Where's your goddamn originality? Of course this is a fucking gimmick to make money, you stupid asshole!
The comic book industry already constantly messes about with their established superheroes and comes up with stupid ideas to keep people buying their ink-marked sheets of reconstituted dead tree, and has been doing so for donkeys years. (*)
These are what are known as "fucking gimmicks to make money".
So how is this one any different? Let me guess, when (e.g.) the current Superman traded places with one from a mirror universe created by the Green Goblin- the new Superman having a purple cape and his nose on upside down- it's an acceptable money-making gimmick, but when the character's black or gay it's "unoriginal" and messing about with the superheroes you grew up with?
(*) Yes, comic book history, chronology and all that "canon" bollocks that fanboys get obsessed with is, is essentially 50 years worth of ratings-chasing dicking about piled into an impenetrable mess.
If you're wanting to tell the story of a web slinger who just happens to be mixed race so you appeal to a broader audience, that's political correctness.
But the stereotypical representation of political correctness is that it panders to the views and interests of a minority at the expense of the majority, so how does the above tie in?
'Politically correct' now just means things that angry white men don't like.
Well, to some extent that's been the case since the term first became mainstream around 20 years ago, when it was popularised by those on the right adopting it as a *derogatory* term.
I'd argue that "political correctness" as the term is used today is essentially a strawman representation of its original meaning. That's not to say that the original phenomenon doesn't exist or is beyond criticism. However, it's risen to anti-popularity because it's a convenient but vaguely-used term that can be attached to any vaguely left-leaning idea that someone wants to dismiss or smear as loony-leftism. And also because defining your views as "politically incorrect" gives them an association of rebellious, tellin'-it-how-it-is charm, rather than the rantings of some bigoted twerp.
The article is from the Daily Mail, no surpise there.
The Daily Mail is the kind of paper that will attack some (wilfully misinterpreted if not downright untrue) intrusive "health and safety" regulation as "political correctness gone mad" (a la the above usage) one day. Then the next they'll be on about the latest everyday thing that's going to kill us all and molest our children and those social workers aren't doing anything about it. No contradiction there, obviously.
They're the same people who went to "Snakes on a Plane" expecting a life-changing, deep, inspiring experience. Instead they got snakes. On a plane. So they whined and complained and bitched and moaned.
Er, are you seriously suggesting that anyone went to see that film expecting anything other than an intentionally cheesy and tongue-in-cheek action film?!
As strawman arguments go, that's so badly constructed that it's more a pile of straw with a happy face painted on.:-)
Skimming money off billions of micro-transactions. Ahh, yes... forget investing in ideas and backing well managed companies... this is the way capitalism was envisioned.
Look, superman III had a lot of lessons to teach. It's really too bad on villains watched it...
Yeah, well if they're getting their ideas from Superman III, I'd be damn worried. Remember what happened *after* they moved on from simple money skimming and designed their own computer?
Posting near the top to state the bleeding obvious- 99% of Slashdotters are IANALs and many will offer advice that sounds sensible to them, but may turn out to be woefully misguided and possibly have unintended consequences and land you in hot water (e.g. advice like this). This is because the legal system does not always actually work like geeks think it does (regardless of whether it *should* work that way).
Bottom line- unless the person is a lawyer, or has actual experience of having gone through this (and the consequences that ensued), you should not be taking their advice. And as I said in the post linked above, the problem is sorting out the ones who *actually* know what they're talking about from the armchair lawyers arrogant enough to think that they do.
The DSL speeds have dropped over the past year though. We used to get a solid 3.5mbps down and 800kbps up, which is fine, but it's dropped to 2.5mbps down and 700kbps up... it's tough to stream video on two machines at once.
I can confirm this- the connection I'm using from what used to be Nildram (then Opal Internet, now TalkTalk Business) was upgraded at some point from 512Kbps to 2Mbps (during the the Tiscali era IIRC) I assume to remain competitive.
At some point during the past year, after the TalkTalk takeover of Tiscali, it dropped to 1Mbps, and the problems with timeouts and dropped connections if you try doing too much at once are way worse than they were back in the 512Kbps days.
Was with Nildram, they got picked up by TT (after a long series of other mergers), service hit the rocks within a week or two, dire throttling issues even on normal use, service not available far too often. After nearly 10 years of service with Nildram and no complaints at all we swapped (*to* Virgin) overnight.
Nildram used to be really good- I formerly recommended it because although not the cheapest, it was reliable and consistently rated very highly by its users. Even after Tiscali took over it didn't go downhill as much as I'd feared.
However, it's now a total dog. The Nildram account I was using had silently been upgraded from 512Kbps to 2Mbps then at some point after the TalkTalk takeover was clearly downgraded to 1Mbps- I know, because I noticed it being slower and checked, and it was consistently just under the 1Mbps mark. This was around the time it started being total fucking shit, with timeouts and other problems happening if you were trying to do too much at once (which wasn't a problem even back when Nildram was 512Mbps).
BTW, Nildram- which was under the "Opal Internet" brand at one stage- is now "Talk Talk Business", so avoid it whatever name it goes under.
Personally above 200gb, I tend to err on the side of power consumption for my laptop any more. As it is, with 4gb of ram most of what I do doesn't touch the disk when I'm on battery. Of course if all other things are equal I will pick the larger drive just because it gives me more for my money.
What's up with you and other people routinely posting comments in that fixed-space "tt" font (rather than the default) for no apparent reason? Is there some rationale I've missed, or is it just an annoyingly lame attempt to get attention?
2 unpannable left channels, and 2 unpannable right channels. Do you see the limitation of this vs 16 pannable channels?
I wasn't claiming that it was as good as the supposed Apple II spec. I was claiming that the Amiga was basically a 4 (mono) channel machine.
As indicated in some of the text that appears on screen, they are using 13 samples on 10 channels (at 2:15 into the video). Note that the power bars arent simply triggered.. thats the actual amplitude of each audio sample as its being played as well. Thats what the IIgs was doing while the Amiga was flailing around with 4 channels.
What, you think I wouldn't believe you without the bouncy bars to "prove" that it had 10 channels? Relax- I believe you(!) In all honesty though, that's a very dry and relatively uninteresting demo that smacks of wanting to "prove" technical superiority rather than let it demonstrate itself.
Maybe I'm suffering from heightened expectations (and also having to judge it with my spoiled 2011 ears rather than the square-wave era 80s ears that first heard the Amiga), but I didn't find the audio in the demo that impressive. Perhaps it was the demo cliche techno-influenced track that didn't really show the chip off, but I'd have been expected the difference between 4 and 10 or 16 channels to sound more significant. I suspect the chip's strengths might be better demonstrated by less minimalist, more layered-type material? I wouldn't judge the soundchip solely by one demo (that one or otherwise), but that *was* the one you chose.
You talk about "flailing around" (with derogatory implication) but listening to Amiga demos 20 years on, I'm still impressed with the quality of some tracker modules when I remember they were done in 4 channels. Everything else equal, of course 16 channels would be better, but flailing? Nope.
As for the graphics, not remotely impressed considering you claimed the Apple IIGS's graphics "trumped" the Amiga. Frankly, the wireframes wouldn't be interesting on the ST, let alone the Amiga, and the rudimentary filled 3D objects weren't impressive either.
You could use it as two-channel stereo, but it was typically treated as four channel mono.
With that sort of logic, one could say that the PC had the best graphics because of add-on boards such as TARGA.
Not the same at all. My point was that the MIDI *interface* itself was basically a couple of generic DIN sockets and some interfacing components- hardly comparable to what would have then been a massively expensive high-end graphics card.
The interface wasn't a major technological feat in itself (which is why one could pick up an Amiga MIDI interface add-on relatively cheaply). What was more relevant was the fact they were already included in an affordable 16-bit computer able to run (relatively) powerful software.
The ST's affordability versus the early Amiga probably helped it too (and given that the Amiga's somewhat more impressive onboard hardware wasn't a big deal if MIDI was your primary interest- unlike, say, graphics or games- there was probably no big reason for the market to switch later).
The ST had the midi software because the MIDI interface was stock.
Absolutely. As I said, that was a smart move by Atari, just not one that was technologically that big a deal in itself. And its internal sound *was* undeniably pitiful- I know because I owned one of the things before I happily replaced it with an Amiga.:-)
OMG - The Amiga's 4 channels are wavetable. Thats the TERM used for the technology, but I am not surprised that you didn't know that.
If you want to be pedantic, this article suggests that "wavetable synthesis" is quite distinct from straight sample-based sound.
I might not have been technically correct, but I wasn't the one being pedantic. If *you* want to be pedantic and insist on precise and correct meanings, I'll happily nitpick any mistakes though. (^_^)
At any rate, if the Apple IIGS was capable of playing any samples on 16 or 32 channels (rather than being restricted in what waveforms it can play back and what it can do with them), then I'll happily agree that it ought to be better than the Amiga in that area. But I would certainly want to double-check any "facts" that you presented from a more reputable source before committing to that opinion!
BTW, are you still claiming that the NES is more powerful than the Amiga?:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Gates
Bill Gates was from a very well-off and (even more importantly) well-connected upper middle class background. His father was the president of a national bank, and his mother was a businesswoman who served on the board of the United Way charity along with... the CEO of IBM.
Now, I'm not claiming that Gates' success was solely due to this, but you can bet it clearly gave him a major advantage and opened some doors that might never be opened to the majority of Americans. His background was far more privileged than that of the ordinary American middle-class guy some believe him to be.
You know that bar of soap you use in the morning? If you thought it looked smaller, it is.
Yeah, well I hate to break it to you, but that's what happens to soap when you use it- it gets smaller!
Out of curiosity, what's your reason for posting in the fixed-space "tt" typeface like that? Is there a good excuse or is it just an attention-grabbing tactic?
sorry, just hit reply, and that's the font that came up after preview/submit. I'm not normally a LOOK AT ME!!! type of guy. Well, I am. Just in this case it was inadvertent.
So you're claiming there's a bug in Slashdot that causes all your posts to appear in that typeface? Strange, because I've never heard anyone here actually complaining about that, despite you being far from the only person that does it. :-/
Out of curiosity, what's your reason for posting in the fixed-space "tt" typeface like that? Is there a good excuse or is it just an attention-grabbing tactic?
Those images of publicly viewable should be subject to automated searching for criminal evidence. If a billion cops could legitimately stand there watching and writing down notes, it's legit to replace them with sensors, networks, and AI.
There are two assumptions here. Firstly that anything you do in public is fair game, and secondly any activity that we accept when it's done the old-fashioned (and tedious) way is equally legitimate when it's done in a high-speed, automated manner.
Some- myself included- disagree with both these general premises. A hundred years ago, if you did something in public, people could see you and talk about you, but there wasn't the chance of some video of you doing something stupid hanging around forever, or someone in power easily being able to see you doing that.
In short, the implications of doing something in public have changed a lot, even in the past 30 years, and the social rules surrounding that date back to before this time. Even then, you generally couldn't have got away with (e.g.) stalking someone, even if they were doing it "in public", so it's not like there was ever *no* level of "privacy" towards people in public spaces.
Secondly, doing some surveillance activity in the old-fashioned, tedious manner by definition limited it to people the police had a reason to focus on. Doing it in an automated manner makes it possible to gather information on and track people in general, regardless of whether or not there is a fair reason to do this, and makes a police state or "surveillance society" possible in a way that doing it by hand doesn't.
In short, this is a case where a quantitative change in how much something can be done makes a *qualitative* change to its effects, i.e. it is *not* simply a case of letting the police do their old job faster- it fundamentally changes it. And this is why (IMHO) doing it the new way should *not* get a free pass because it's always been like that.... because it hasn't.
The spectrum wasn't really relevant as a programmer's machine. Sure, it was popular but most people who had one never wrote so much as a single line of code and Sinclair BASIC was primitive.
The sheer number of Spectrums out there meant that even if a low proportion of people actually programmed on them, that was still a large amount of people. I agree with you that a higher proportion of BBC owners probably used their machines for "serious" stuff (*), but that's still a higher proportion of a much smaller user base.
You also forget that people wanting to get the most out of the machine used assembly/machine code, not BASIC.
As for saying few homes had BBC micros, that is far from the truth.
Maybe I overstated this, but the fact was that the BBC was *not* dominant in the home market in the way that it was in schools, and was vastly outnumbered by the Spectrum.
Most of my friends had them,
"Your friends" are not necessarily a representative sample. This could reflect your social grouping (more affluent?) and the fact that as owners of the same computer you were more likely to be friends in the first place.
I can think of two people I knew that had a BBC, but that doesn't change the fact that way more people had Spectrums.
there were plenty of hobby mags for them and lots of software. Compare the mags of the time between platforms and say Acorn User had much more depth than Sinclair User did.
Which "time" are you talking about? The early 80s or the late 80s? There were significant numbers of hobbyist magazines for the Spectrum in its early days; it was only later on that it became almost exclusively a games machine. (I assume that this was due to hobbyists moving on to more powerful machines as they became available and the Spectrum failed to improve with the times (**)).
The Spectrum and C64 were both much the same, a game platform and not relevant to computer literacy in the way the BBC and the cheaper sibling the Electron were.
Your mention of the Electron being "relevant" to computer literacy when the Spectrum wasn't shows that you're either hopelessly biased or living in wish-fulfilment land.
The Electron was a relative commercial failure (***) and purely as a consequence of that its influence on computer literacy as a whole can't have been significant. Maybe it had the nice BBC Basic, but the fact remains that if few people owned them compared to the Spectrum's behemoth market share then it was unlikely to have been more influential!
Anyway, bottom line is, I'm not saying that the Spectrum was a great machine or that the majority of owners did anything other than play games on them, but you can't ignore it or downplay its importance simply because it wasn't as nice a machine as your beloved BBC.
(*) This is to some extent self-selecting anyway; the BBC was a great "serious" machine, but really not that great for arcade games- anyone with that much money whose main interest was games would have gone for the C64 instead.
(**) The Spectrum was able to rest on its laurels and become a cash cow with only minor spec improvements because its massive games software base trumped its limitations, but I assume this would be less important to hobbyists.
(***) My understanding is that on its launch, there was a large demand for the Electron, but production problems meant it could not be met, and by the time Acorn had enough, they'd missed the Christmas market, their potential customers had bought other machines instead and they were left with a large inventory of unsold Electrons that led to their downfall and takeover. I know that a moderate number of Electrons must have been sold, as software for it was available in the shops, but never in the same quantities as the Spectrum and C64.
I distinctly remember it like this:
Less space than a Cray. CGA at best. Lame.
Funny, yeah- but it also would have been a fair review of the original PC. The IBM PC/MS-DOS and their derivatives became the de facto standard for various reasons- IBM nametag guaranteed initial success, generic PC was easily cloned, MS retained right to sell OS to other companies, latter two leading to open market, competition and commoditisation. But none of these have anything to do with the fact that the original IBM PC was a great or interesting machine, because frankly it wasn't.
Unlike the iPod review where you could say Taco missed the point, your parody PC review would be a fair one without the benefit of hindsight.
The parent is pretty much right, with some qualifications- it's a shame they were modded troll. Because the IBM PC clones and derivatives won out in the long term, there's a tendency to look back along its path and view history solely along that line, judging it as if the winners were always destined to be so.
The original IBM PC may have been powerful in some respects, but it was also as dull as ditchwater from a (crude) graphics and a (keyboard beeper) sound point of view, as well as being massively too expensive for home users. The hardware spec wasn't radical- mostly designed from off the shelf parts, though the processor was admittedly powerful.
The damn operating system wasn't radical either- the first version of MS-DOS was (at best) very inspired by and (at worst) a blatant ripoff of the 8-bit CP/M crudely ported to the 16-bit 8086 processor that Microsoft bought in. It hacks me off when people get nostalgic about the configurability of MS-DOS, because such configurability was only needed to get round the convoluted and dated architecture of the OS. And when they look on 80s/early-90s PCs and justify such crudeness as if "that's just how things were then".
No they weren't. That's how computers running a repeatedly-patched and hacked ripoff of a 1970s 8-bit OS were. The Commodore Amiga had full pre-emptive (i.e. "proper" multitasking) 8 years before Windows NT and a full decade before the then-mainstream Windows 95 did it. But the people who used PCs mostly didn't know any better.
Yes, the PC ultimately won due to its generic nature, and in the very long term, I don't know that this was a bad thing. (Er, I'll wash my mouth out later!) Much as the Amiga was miles better in terms of design than the PC in its heyday, the de-facto open nature of the PC has led to cheap, plentiful hardware that supports lots of stuff, and I don't know if the Amiga's advantages at the time would ultimately have led to its present-day descendants being better than (say) the present-day PC.
However, this shouldn't blind us to the fact that the original IBM PC *in itself* was a frankly unremarkable machine running an already-dated OS that became a millstone round the computer industry's neck for the next 15 years.
It depends on where you were living I guess. I was in the UK at the time
You're right as far as pointing out that the UK was somewhat different. But some aspects of your summary are open to question.
Most seriously, the fact that you completely fail to even *mention* what was AFAIK far and away the best-selling computer in the UK during the 1980s- the ZX Spectrum- renders your summary misleading by itself. The Spectrum's influence on bedroom programmers is often credited (correctly or otherwise) with kickstarting the strength of the early UK software industry.
Yes, most of them were bought as games computers, and it had its limitations. But like it or loathe it, you can't accurately discuss the 1980s UK computer market without mentioning it.
The BBC Micro? It was a great machine in many respects. But it was also very expensive compared to the likes of the Spectrum, and way out of most people's reach. While very common in schools (and probably influential that way), it was *never* a common home machine. In terms of getting the masses computer literate something like the Spectrum *would* have been a more appropriate choice (as Clive Sinclair wanted it to be). In fact, the Spectrum pretty much *did* do that, despite Acorn's more expensive machine getting the BBC contract.
While it's true that the C64 was never as influential here as it was in the US, the fact that IIRC it was the second-most-supported computer (behind the Spectrum, naturally) by UK games software houses suggests that it was *very* far from an "also ran".
Depending on your usage, scroll lock is very useful at controlling a KVM.
Oh Christ, yeah... *this*.
I read the original comment thinking "yeah, I don't think I've *ever* used Scroll Lock" (aside from trying it out). Then I read your comment and realised that, actually, I use it *every sodding day* I'm at work!
To be fair though, this isn't really the original or intended usage- and I sort of keep it mentally separate from "actual" keyboard usage (which explains my original oversight), since it's a sort of hack enabling convenient switching of the KVM. And I'm pretty sure that they chose that key precisely because it's hardly ever used.
IIRC IBM sold their PC division because the whole desktop PC market had become very commoditised and low-margin. Nothing to do with the decline of the PC.
OTOH, if the summary is implying that the IBM guy has a vested interest in saying that the PC (which they no longer produce) has declined, I'm not convinced. What stake do they have in its obvious "successors"?
Oh, and BTW, this guy may have designed the *IBM* PC, but he did sure as hell did *not* design the personal computer as a general concept or format. It's not even like the IBM PC was a particularly radical example of a personal computer when it came out anyway- its later success was due to the way the market played out, not any particular technical "strengths" of the design.
Was I the only person who read the headline and briefly mistook "Mozilla's Nightingale" for the name of yet another project they were starting up?
I'm sure Bob Seamonkey and Jill Firefox can sympathise.
Institutional investors (aka the 401k investors spending billions on your and my behalf) are required by law to only buy AAA rated investments. So now there will be a lot of them scrambling to find another investment to put their billions into so that they don't go to jail.
If "required by law to only buy AAA rated investments" is to be taken literally, they wouldn't need to sell their existing US governments bonds (or whatever) since they already own them. They just couldn't buy any new ones, which admittedly is a problem for the US government and a nuisance for them.
Grandparent post: It seems to me that S&P, along with the other credit rating agencies, lost a lot of credibility when they were giving AAA ratings to the guys holding bundles of sub-prime mortgages in the lead up to the financial crisis.
Yea, that's what I thought. People are still treating the ratings agencies- who so obviously got it wrong- seriously after 2007/08?! (But see below)
Parent reply: Caveat emptor. If you don't do your own due diligence on your investments then don't complain about the consequences.
The question is how much do people actually believe these ratings in the first place, and how much are they privately sceptical but playing along? I can guess two "good" reasons the industry still supports them... neither of which are to do with their accuracy.
The first is that maintaining the pretence retains confidence in the market, even if that confidence is ultimately baseless.
If the industry was to openly accept that they were unreliable and couldn't predict financial crises like 07/08, and if there wasn't anything that could replace them (which there isn't, AFAICT), there's the danger that they- and people in general- would lose confidence and panic.
In this first case, I'm unclear how much of it would be intentional self-delusion by those in the industry, and how much is everyone knowing it's crap but keeping their mouths shut because it benefits no-one to say otherwise?
Secondly, they're a very useful back-covering mechanism for those in the industry, basically, the "no-one ever got fired for buying IBM" of the financial world. By which I mean one is *way* less likely to be hauled over the coals for a bad decision if they can point to the fact that an industry "respected" rating supported that choice. Or put another way, using them to demonstrate that "due diligence" was supposedly done.
This would work for individuals within companies, and for companies justifying themselves to investors and/or courts.
I don't know all of this for a fact, but it seems a sensible guess given the way that corporate behaviour and humans in general work.
How about you make a NEW superhero that is black or gay, or whatever, and for the superheroes that I grew up with just leave them the fuck alone! Where's your goddamn originality? Of course this is a fucking gimmick to make money, you stupid asshole!
The comic book industry already constantly messes about with their established superheroes and comes up with stupid ideas to keep people buying their ink-marked sheets of reconstituted dead tree, and has been doing so for donkeys years. (*)
These are what are known as "fucking gimmicks to make money".
So how is this one any different? Let me guess, when (e.g.) the current Superman traded places with one from a mirror universe created by the Green Goblin- the new Superman having a purple cape and his nose on upside down- it's an acceptable money-making gimmick, but when the character's black or gay it's "unoriginal" and messing about with the superheroes you grew up with?
(*) Yes, comic book history, chronology and all that "canon" bollocks that fanboys get obsessed with is, is essentially 50 years worth of ratings-chasing dicking about piled into an impenetrable mess.
If you're wanting to tell the story of a web slinger who just happens to be mixed race so you appeal to a broader audience, that's political correctness.
But the stereotypical representation of political correctness is that it panders to the views and interests of a minority at the expense of the majority, so how does the above tie in?
'Politically correct' now just means things that angry white men don't like.
Well, to some extent that's been the case since the term first became mainstream around 20 years ago, when it was popularised by those on the right adopting it as a *derogatory* term.
Before that it was primarily restricted to left-wing academics in the field, and even then it's unclear if more than a handful ever used it in a non-ironic sense.
I'd argue that "political correctness" as the term is used today is essentially a strawman representation of its original meaning. That's not to say that the original phenomenon doesn't exist or is beyond criticism. However, it's risen to anti-popularity because it's a convenient but vaguely-used term that can be attached to any vaguely left-leaning idea that someone wants to dismiss or smear as loony-leftism. And also because defining your views as "politically incorrect" gives them an association of rebellious, tellin'-it-how-it-is charm, rather than the rantings of some bigoted twerp.
The article is from the Daily Mail, no surpise there.
The Daily Mail is the kind of paper that will attack some (wilfully misinterpreted if not downright untrue) intrusive "health and safety" regulation as "political correctness gone mad" (a la the above usage) one day. Then the next they'll be on about the latest everyday thing that's going to kill us all and molest our children and those social workers aren't doing anything about it. No contradiction there, obviously.
They're the same people who went to "Snakes on a Plane" expecting a life-changing, deep, inspiring experience. Instead they got snakes. On a plane. So they whined and complained and bitched and moaned.
Er, are you seriously suggesting that anyone went to see that film expecting anything other than an intentionally cheesy and tongue-in-cheek action film?!
:-)
As strawman arguments go, that's so badly constructed that it's more a pile of straw with a happy face painted on.
Skimming money off billions of micro-transactions. Ahh, yes... forget investing in ideas and backing well managed companies... this is the way capitalism was envisioned.
Look, superman III had a lot of lessons to teach. It's really too bad on villains watched it...
Yeah, well if they're getting their ideas from Superman III, I'd be damn worried. Remember what happened *after* they moved on from simple money skimming and designed their own computer?
Posting near the top to state the bleeding obvious- 99% of Slashdotters are IANALs and many will offer advice that sounds sensible to them, but may turn out to be woefully misguided and possibly have unintended consequences and land you in hot water (e.g. advice like this). This is because the legal system does not always actually work like geeks think it does (regardless of whether it *should* work that way).
Bottom line- unless the person is a lawyer, or has actual experience of having gone through this (and the consequences that ensued), you should not be taking their advice. And as I said in the post linked above, the problem is sorting out the ones who *actually* know what they're talking about from the armchair lawyers arrogant enough to think that they do.
The DSL speeds have dropped over the past year though. We used to get a solid 3.5mbps down and 800kbps up, which is fine, but it's dropped to 2.5mbps down and 700kbps up... it's tough to stream video on two machines at once.
I can confirm this- the connection I'm using from what used to be Nildram (then Opal Internet, now TalkTalk Business) was upgraded at some point from 512Kbps to 2Mbps (during the the Tiscali era IIRC) I assume to remain competitive.
At some point during the past year, after the TalkTalk takeover of Tiscali, it dropped to 1Mbps, and the problems with timeouts and dropped connections if you try doing too much at once are way worse than they were back in the 512Kbps days.
Was with Nildram, they got picked up by TT (after a long series of other mergers), service hit the rocks within a week or two, dire throttling issues even on normal use, service not available far too often. After nearly 10 years of service with Nildram and no complaints at all we swapped (*to* Virgin) overnight.
Nildram used to be really good- I formerly recommended it because although not the cheapest, it was reliable and consistently rated very highly by its users. Even after Tiscali took over it didn't go downhill as much as I'd feared.
However, it's now a total dog. The Nildram account I was using had silently been upgraded from 512Kbps to 2Mbps then at some point after the TalkTalk takeover was clearly downgraded to 1Mbps- I know, because I noticed it being slower and checked, and it was consistently just under the 1Mbps mark. This was around the time it started being total fucking shit, with timeouts and other problems happening if you were trying to do too much at once (which wasn't a problem even back when Nildram was 512Mbps).
BTW, Nildram- which was under the "Opal Internet" brand at one stage- is now "Talk Talk Business", so avoid it whatever name it goes under.
Personally above 200gb, I tend to err on the side of power consumption for my laptop any more. As it is, with 4gb of ram most of what I do doesn't touch the disk when I'm on battery. Of course if all other things are equal I will pick the larger drive just because it gives me more for my money.
What's up with you and other people routinely posting comments in that fixed-space "tt" font (rather than the default) for no apparent reason? Is there some rationale I've missed, or is it just an annoyingly lame attempt to get attention?
2 unpannable left channels, and 2 unpannable right channels. Do you see the limitation of this vs 16 pannable channels?
I wasn't claiming that it was as good as the supposed Apple II spec. I was claiming that the Amiga was basically a 4 (mono) channel machine.
As indicated in some of the text that appears on screen, they are using 13 samples on 10 channels (at 2:15 into the video). Note that the power bars arent simply triggered.. thats the actual amplitude of each audio sample as its being played as well. Thats what the IIgs was doing while the Amiga was flailing around with 4 channels.
What, you think I wouldn't believe you without the bouncy bars to "prove" that it had 10 channels? Relax- I believe you(!) In all honesty though, that's a very dry and relatively uninteresting demo that smacks of wanting to "prove" technical superiority rather than let it demonstrate itself.
Maybe I'm suffering from heightened expectations (and also having to judge it with my spoiled 2011 ears rather than the square-wave era 80s ears that first heard the Amiga), but I didn't find the audio in the demo that impressive. Perhaps it was the demo cliche techno-influenced track that didn't really show the chip off, but I'd have been expected the difference between 4 and 10 or 16 channels to sound more significant. I suspect the chip's strengths might be better demonstrated by less minimalist, more layered-type material? I wouldn't judge the soundchip solely by one demo (that one or otherwise), but that *was* the one you chose.
You talk about "flailing around" (with derogatory implication) but listening to Amiga demos 20 years on, I'm still impressed with the quality of some tracker modules when I remember they were done in 4 channels. Everything else equal, of course 16 channels would be better, but flailing? Nope.
As for the graphics, not remotely impressed considering you claimed the Apple IIGS's graphics "trumped" the Amiga. Frankly, the wireframes wouldn't be interesting on the ST, let alone the Amiga, and the rudimentary filled 3D objects weren't impressive either.
But nice-looking sound chip, definitely.
The Amiga's 4 channel (actually 2 channel stereo)
You could use it as two-channel stereo, but it was typically treated as four channel mono.
With that sort of logic, one could say that the PC had the best graphics because of add-on boards such as TARGA.
Not the same at all. My point was that the MIDI *interface* itself was basically a couple of generic DIN sockets and some interfacing components- hardly comparable to what would have then been a massively expensive high-end graphics card.
The interface wasn't a major technological feat in itself (which is why one could pick up an Amiga MIDI interface add-on relatively cheaply). What was more relevant was the fact they were already included in an affordable 16-bit computer able to run (relatively) powerful software. The ST's affordability versus the early Amiga probably helped it too (and given that the Amiga's somewhat more impressive onboard hardware wasn't a big deal if MIDI was your primary interest- unlike, say, graphics or games- there was probably no big reason for the market to switch later).
The ST had the midi software because the MIDI interface was stock.
Absolutely. As I said, that was a smart move by Atari, just not one that was technologically that big a deal in itself. And its internal sound *was* undeniably pitiful- I know because I owned one of the things before I happily replaced it with an Amiga. :-)
OMG - The Amiga's 4 channels are wavetable. Thats the TERM used for the technology, but I am not surprised that you didn't know that.
If you want to be pedantic, this article suggests that "wavetable synthesis" is quite distinct from straight sample-based sound.
:-)
I might not have been technically correct, but I wasn't the one being pedantic. If *you* want to be pedantic and insist on precise and correct meanings, I'll happily nitpick any mistakes though. (^_^)
At any rate, if the Apple IIGS was capable of playing any samples on 16 or 32 channels (rather than being restricted in what waveforms it can play back and what it can do with them), then I'll happily agree that it ought to be better than the Amiga in that area. But I would certainly want to double-check any "facts" that you presented from a more reputable source before committing to that opinion!
BTW, are you still claiming that the NES is more powerful than the Amiga?