No I'm not. If you had taken the trouble to read the rest of my post, you would have seen that.
I'm not sure how the first paragraph (which is the "rest" of your post) of what you said contradicts my assertion. I read it, I just didn't need to include the whole thing to reply to it.
True, but compatibility is very flakey. AFAIK, the spirals on 99 minute CDs are very tightly packed, way beyond the CD spec, and some players won't read them because they're beyond the spec's absolute upper limit of 80 minutes.
IIRC 99 minute ones are worse than 90 minutes; probably not worth the hassle in either case.
I've also heard of proprietary methods that are able to squeeze more pits onto a standard CD, which are totally incompatible with ordinary CD players, and came out around the time DVDs were getting popular, so did nothing anyway. Interesting idea, though.
Probably not; my beef was with the assertion that something being digital (in *general*) inherently made cable quality a non-issue. With regards to the HDMI cable, you're probably right, and if you go back you'll see I agreed with that specific example. Though what you mean here
In fact, I highly doubt it's even mathematically possible.
is somewhat unclear. Have you actually considered the issue "mathematically"?!
Thanks for taking the time to reply to my post, which was made from the point-of-view of a typical Amiga owner, rather than an expert (please accept my apologies for any ignorance!).
My comments about the "flicker fixer" weren't (in themselves) a criticism of its lack of colours. Rather that what it *did* add was (AFAIK) essentially done by integrating an extra, add-on signal processor, which was (a) way too expensive a solution to have any prospect of migrating to the "affordable" Amigas and (b) a workaround for the problem rather than providing any improvement to the chipset itself.
And in turn, that's not meant as a criticism of the FF solution itself either, rather of the circumstances that made it necessary.
The C65 was a stupid idea
I've read a lot of die-hard C64 owners drooling over what might have been, but whatever its merits, Commodore were right not to release it; it just wouldn't have made commercial sense by that stage.
And despite what you see when the hardware comes out, it's not always really an engineering problem.
Oh, I'm in no doubt that most of the problems with the Amiga (and Commodore) were down to management. You can have lots of talented engineers, but with bad, short-termist and/or greedy management, it's going to be an uphill struggle.
Anyway, it sounds like you had a lot of nice stuff there; it's a shame most of it didn't get out.
Best Buy tried selling me an $80 monster HDMI cable that I absolutely needed to get a good picture, even though HDMI is digital and not analog. I don't know how I get by with my $6 HDMI cable.
I'm not defending them in this case. However, the *general principle* that "it's digital, therefore the quality of the cable doesn't matter" that I've seen more than once is misleading. If a digital cable is crap, it can still cause data to be transmitted incorrectly, which may cause glitches and/or drops in quality as it pastes over the gaps.
Sure, Best Buy are probably selling vastly overpriced cables that offer no advantage in this case, as are the chancers who sell gold-plated USB cables at ludicrous prices and the like, but that's beside the point.
I am well and truly old enough to have grown up and lived a lot of my adult life before the advent of the internet, and there's no reason why I can't do it again. I'm not saying we have to be luddites and unplug completely, but it is fair to say that a lot of us could do with getting out more.
You're naive to think "opting out" is that simple; the world has moved on and is now more built around the Internet. This will likely increase significantly in the next 10 years. It's not as if you can simply replicate living in the world of 20 to 40 (?) years ago simply by not using the Internet.
What if you are applying for a job, but don't have email?
Fancy renting a video (or even DVD)? You don't going to a shop to rent a ropey-quality VHS tape like we all used to do... but there are no rental stores because everyone else gets their films via download. You can't go into a shop and buy a computer game for similar reasons. Or music, for that matter.
Many services now include or are based around Internet access. What if the information you need is online, and assumes you have Internet access to obtan this?
And what constitutes "using the Internet" when (e.g.) all your phone calls are routed over it anyway, as they probably will be in some way, sooner rather than later? Or your cash machine transaction?
Doesn't make me too happy to say it, but the choice you have isn't going back to your old pre-Internet life; even if it's doable, it's much less convenient than that.
The flicker fixer was essentially a line doubler that took 15KHz 480i video and converted it to 31KHz 480p video.
That sounds about right, yes. Sounds like I thought, a rather kludgey *and* expensive added-on workaround for limitations that should have been fixed in the main chipset itself. Hence, I assume, why such features never made it into the mainstream Amigas.
The C64 was almost a decade old. It never would have sold as-is, except in maybe in emerging markets.
That was what I had in mind.
The C128 was simply too complex and too expensive to manufacture.
I wasn't suggesting that.
A new computer with the WDC 65816, 256KB of memory, the VIC-III and six-channel SID might have been manufactured for close to $100,
Perhaps...
well within the target price of the original Amiga 300 vision.
By the early-90s (circa 1991), the 8-bit market was already practically at its end, and the Amiga at its commercial peak.
Despite being a 16-bit computer, the C65 would still have essentially been a "super C64", but in Europe, the Amiga was *already* the machine that (mainstream, non-hardcore) users would have moved onto.
The C65 might have been a good idea when the C64 market was still healthy, the Amiga still too expensive for many people and C64 compatibility was a big deal. However, by the early 90s, there wouldn't have been sufficient gap in the market for it. Even if it was cheaper than the low-end Amigas, that would have been without disk drives, etc., and it would have been stuck between two stools- not being as good as the Amiga, and being more expensive than the C64 with little software supporting the specific features.
It would have confused the market, trying to release a semi-new format that was essentially an extension of one that was almost dead, and whose next-generation successors were already in their mid-to-late prime. It wouldn't have got mainstream support, either from businesses or from mainstream users.
(What made the likes of the C64 successful was its massive mainstream success. Support from a small number of hardcore users can keep niche formats alive, but it's *never* a substitute for mainstream success).
As far as emerging markets go, it's usually better to exploit these by being able to sell your existing "legacy" (bleh!) hardware line very cheaply.
Sorry to have to say this, but I believe that from an impartial point-of-view, the C65 would not have been a success by the early-90s, and Commodore were right not to go with it.
Commodore put the gun to their head in 1990 with the introduction of the Amiga 3000.
What was with that "flicker fixer" thing it apparently used? IIRC this took the standard Amiga video output (standard interlaced NTSC/PAL video rates) and converted it to non-flickery video output- I assume at similar frequencies to VGA and the like.
But this sounds like a glorified (and expensive) kludge to work round the fact that the same five-year-old core chipset hadn't been improved to work at the non-interlaced resolutions expected of newer professional computers. In other words, a dead-end that offered nothing to the mainstream Amiga lines.
It may have had a faster processor, but they didn't do the same with the mainstream Amigas.
They pulled the trigger two years later with the release of the Amiga 600.
That was stupid as well; it was initially sold as the replacement for the A500. But that replacement should have been the A1200, which came out six months after that. (And in Europe the A500 had already been replaced just six months previously by the A500 Plus!). It was obviously designed as a lower-end machine, and putting it out like that just muddied the water at a time when they were starting to lose ground to the PC and 16-bit consoles and couldn't afford to do that.
And as for the so-called "Amiga 300" Commodore was looking for, they could have just released the never released Commodore 65 with a WDC 65816 at its heart instead. Cheap enough for emerging markets and Wal-Mart.
No, the "Amiga 300" pricepoint should have been served by an Amiga, or they should have continued to sell the existing C64 at a bargain price. For all that C64 fanatics get misty-eyed at the thought of the C65, that era was over, and by that time would have overlapped too much with the low-end Amigas and confused the market anyway.
In its defence, IIRC the Atari ST *was* arguably more popular than the Amiga in its early years. The Amiga overtook it later as its price came down closer to that of the ST, but it was quite expensive when it first came out.
Nonsense. The Amiga went into decline only after Commodore went bust.
No. As an Amiga owner at the time, I can tell you that it was quite visibly and clearly losing ground to both the PC (at the high end) and SNES and Mega Drive (at the other) for some time before that.
It was no longer the "lead" machine for innovative new software, mainstream companies were ditching the platform and the focus had quite clearly shifted elsewhere.
And the Amiga wasn't to blame for Commodore going bust either.
There is *some* truth in that; though some people paint the likes of the CD32 console as a flop, IIRC it sold passably. It probably didn't *have* to do that well, given that it was basically a cash cow with little new development cost.
As far as I'm aware, C='s bankruptcy was more due to very dubious business shenanigans by its management (that apparently would have been illegal had they still been legally based in the US).
It's probably fairer to guess that their lack of development, promotion, etc. of the Amiga caught up with it, and that it was no longer generating sufficient income to make up for what else was going on at the company.
That was one of the technical improvements, yes. Not just 24-bit high-end cards, but 256-colour (indexed) VGA becoming the standard for "ordinary" PCs when the Amiga's regular graphics mode (and hence most games) still only had 32. There were other issues like complete PC systems with hard drives and monitors working out cheaper, and for all its custom chip brilliance, the 68000 at the Amiga's heart was dated underpowered compared to newer PC processors. As you (and I) said, Commodore sat on their backsides for years.
HAM (the original Amiga's 4096 colour mode, albeit with some restrictions) was brilliant for the time. It's a shame that it wasn't generally practical for fast-moving games.
The A1200 matched VGA with 256 colour indexed graphics and improved HAM mode, but as I said, it came out just a bit too late.
HTML hardly constitutes "programming" in any reasonable sense. That's not to disparage knowing it as a skill, but regardless of what some people think, it's not programming.
I've signed up as a mentor to teach programming to an interested High School senior, so it isn't a 12 year old. I chose C because, frankly, it is what I know best.
I'm not going to rubbish C, because I think it's a very good high-level way of doing relatively low-level programming. But... the string functionality in ANSI C (C89)- which I assume is still the most common version- is *not* its strong point. I certainly wouldn't use it for primarily text-oriented projects (unless they were *very* performance-oriented) and this may be a drawback for newcomers.
Who gives a fuck what Dijkstra says? Modern variants of BASIC are nothing like the '70's and '80's BASICs he was complaining about. A lot of programmers made and still make a good living in VB.
Yeah, and VB.Net doesn't appear to be significantly easier than (say) C#, while having much clunkier- and more nonstandard- syntax. So unless you already know Visual Basic, there's no compelling argument in favour of it.
I assume that Visual Basic was originally intended for people who'd learned with old-school 8-bit BASICs, to provide an easier ramp than the sudden leap up to the likes of C++. Over the years it appears to have acquired more serious features which the people *who were already using Visual Basic* learned bit by bit rather than having to enter the icy-cold waters of... whatever other language. That may lead them into thinking that it's somehow "easier", because it has a thread leading back to BASIC that they followed. But in truth, if you haven't learned your trade via that path- and no new programmers will, nor have any good reason to do that- it doesn't look much simpler than any other language.
A lot of programmers made and still make a good living in VB.
That doesn't prove that it is- or was- the best language, only that it is- or was- popular, possibly due to existing installations, possibly to to large number of programmers knowing VB for the reasons given above.
Leaving aside the jokes, has anyone else noticed that "the noughties" as the supposed name for this decade only seems to have cropped up- or at least been "standardised" on- in the past year or so.
For most of it, there didn't seem to be any strong name, though IIRC "2000s" was possibly the most common. Of course, while that name may have been fine when we were within the first ten years of the millennium (*), it's possibly less precise once it has two potential meanings. Though it didn't stop the "1900s" being the most common term for the first decade (*) of the 20th century.
Anyway, the "noughties" is still a ******* stupid name, and I personally hate it.
(*) Pedants, you know what I mean. Shut up in advance, thanks!:-)
From what I heard when the (now abandoned) Koenigsegg bid was accounced, the problem with selling off Saab is that it was already very reliant on GM Europe's engineering rights and expertise.
As (I think it was) the BBC put it a day or two ago, there wasn't really enough left of Saab to make it a viable business.
There are some signs that some parties are still interested in Saab, but I'm pretty sceptical about the involvement of Beijing Automotive, since my gut reaction is that they probably want the rights, technology and machinery to incorporate into their own business in China, rather than keeping Saab going in good faith.
The flying master of Anakin (don't remember his name now) a "troyariam" or something like this, was criticized because racism against jews. (for his nose, and that he always wanted money).
I was trying to rememember the name of the race in the Phantom Menace that was accused of being Japanese stereotypes; a bit of detective work reveals they were the "Neimoidians".
Basically, I think Lucas was trying to shove so many stereotypes in there that he offended everyone equally and thus couldn't be accused of racism;-)
I think racism in this case ir like p0rn, it is in the eye of the observer.
Let's just say that some porn is blatantly... porn, regardless of that "eye of the beholder" thing. If it's called "ATM Bitches 13" and the cover features a really bad montage of sexual positions and really tacky Photoshop-effect lettering then it's likely intended as porn.
Salt? Good... what does it matter that too much causes health problems?
Thing about salt is one's taste for what a "normal" level of saltiness is can be changed without a massive amount of hassle. I tend not to normally add salt to my food- granted, there's often a lot still in it- and I find that I notice saltiness in commercially-made foods more.
If it requires a short period of finding less salt on your food slightly bland in order to prolong your life quite a bit, then it's worth it IMHO.
My point? What I said about Adventure- and the hardware it was played on- having to have been old when you played it would have been true, which somewhat damages your argument about it only being good at the time. It was obviously good enough for you 10 years later!
I'm 26 in a couple months [..] Lets be honest, much as we all gush over Adventure on the 2600, it's a crap game.
"We"? I'm over 8 years older than you, and I'm only just old enough to have potentially played the VCS during its glory days (I didn't much actually, mainly because I never owned one, but I'm just old enough to have done so). Even if you'd got a bargain-basement 2600 at the tail-end of its life (late-80s), it still would have looked dated compared to other consoles that were available by that time, and Adventure, being a very old game, would have looked particularly crude by late-80s standards.
Slashdot Mirror
No I'm not. If you had taken the trouble to read the rest of my post, you would have seen that.
I'm not sure how the first paragraph (which is the "rest" of your post) of what you said contradicts my assertion. I read it, I just didn't need to include the whole thing to reply to it.
You can get 99 minute (880 MB) CD-R.
True, but compatibility is very flakey. AFAIK, the spirals on 99 minute CDs are very tightly packed, way beyond the CD spec, and some players won't read them because they're beyond the spec's absolute upper limit of 80 minutes.
IIRC 99 minute ones are worse than 90 minutes; probably not worth the hassle in either case.
I've also heard of proprietary methods that are able to squeeze more pits onto a standard CD, which are totally incompatible with ordinary CD players, and came out around the time DVDs were getting popular, so did nothing anyway. Interesting idea, though.
In fact, I highly doubt it's even mathematically possible.
is somewhat unclear. Have you actually considered the issue "mathematically"?!
My comments about the "flicker fixer" weren't (in themselves) a criticism of its lack of colours. Rather that what it *did* add was (AFAIK) essentially done by integrating an extra, add-on signal processor, which was (a) way too expensive a solution to have any prospect of migrating to the "affordable" Amigas and (b) a workaround for the problem rather than providing any improvement to the chipset itself.
And in turn, that's not meant as a criticism of the FF solution itself either, rather of the circumstances that made it necessary.
The C65 was a stupid idea
I've read a lot of die-hard C64 owners drooling over what might have been, but whatever its merits, Commodore were right not to release it; it just wouldn't have made commercial sense by that stage.
And despite what you see when the hardware comes out, it's not always really an engineering problem.
Oh, I'm in no doubt that most of the problems with the Amiga (and Commodore) were down to management. You can have lots of talented engineers, but with bad, short-termist and/or greedy management, it's going to be an uphill struggle.
Anyway, it sounds like you had a lot of nice stuff there; it's a shame most of it didn't get out.
Best Buy tried selling me an $80 monster HDMI cable that I absolutely needed to get a good picture, even though HDMI is digital and not analog. I don't know how I get by with my $6 HDMI cable.
I'm not defending them in this case. However, the *general principle* that "it's digital, therefore the quality of the cable doesn't matter" that I've seen more than once is misleading. If a digital cable is crap, it can still cause data to be transmitted incorrectly, which may cause glitches and/or drops in quality as it pastes over the gaps.
Sure, Best Buy are probably selling vastly overpriced cables that offer no advantage in this case, as are the chancers who sell gold-plated USB cables at ludicrous prices and the like, but that's beside the point.
A few weeks ago I had pushy BB salesmen try to sell me a warranty plan on a $20 card reader, for crying out loud.
Come to think of it... you were paying $20 for a card reader?
I am well and truly old enough to have grown up and lived a lot of my adult life before the advent of the internet, and there's no reason why I can't do it again. I'm not saying we have to be luddites and unplug completely, but it is fair to say that a lot of us could do with getting out more.
You're naive to think "opting out" is that simple; the world has moved on and is now more built around the Internet. This will likely increase significantly in the next 10 years. It's not as if you can simply replicate living in the world of 20 to 40 (?) years ago simply by not using the Internet.
What if you are applying for a job, but don't have email?
Fancy renting a video (or even DVD)? You don't going to a shop to rent a ropey-quality VHS tape like we all used to do... but there are no rental stores because everyone else gets their films via download. You can't go into a shop and buy a computer game for similar reasons. Or music, for that matter.
Many services now include or are based around Internet access. What if the information you need is online, and assumes you have Internet access to obtan this?
And what constitutes "using the Internet" when (e.g.) all your phone calls are routed over it anyway, as they probably will be in some way, sooner rather than later? Or your cash machine transaction?
Doesn't make me too happy to say it, but the choice you have isn't going back to your old pre-Internet life; even if it's doable, it's much less convenient than that.
The flicker fixer was essentially a line doubler that took 15KHz 480i video and converted it to 31KHz 480p video.
That sounds about right, yes. Sounds like I thought, a rather kludgey *and* expensive added-on workaround for limitations that should have been fixed in the main chipset itself. Hence, I assume, why such features never made it into the mainstream Amigas.
The C64 was almost a decade old. It never would have sold as-is, except in maybe in emerging markets.
That was what I had in mind.
The C128 was simply too complex and too expensive to manufacture.
I wasn't suggesting that.
A new computer with the WDC 65816, 256KB of memory, the VIC-III and six-channel SID might have been manufactured for close to $100,
Perhaps...
well within the target price of the original Amiga 300 vision.
By the early-90s (circa 1991), the 8-bit market was already practically at its end, and the Amiga at its commercial peak.
Despite being a 16-bit computer, the C65 would still have essentially been a "super C64", but in Europe, the Amiga was *already* the machine that (mainstream, non-hardcore) users would have moved onto.
The C65 might have been a good idea when the C64 market was still healthy, the Amiga still too expensive for many people and C64 compatibility was a big deal. However, by the early 90s, there wouldn't have been sufficient gap in the market for it. Even if it was cheaper than the low-end Amigas, that would have been without disk drives, etc., and it would have been stuck between two stools- not being as good as the Amiga, and being more expensive than the C64 with little software supporting the specific features.
It would have confused the market, trying to release a semi-new format that was essentially an extension of one that was almost dead, and whose next-generation successors were already in their mid-to-late prime. It wouldn't have got mainstream support, either from businesses or from mainstream users.
(What made the likes of the C64 successful was its massive mainstream success. Support from a small number of hardcore users can keep niche formats alive, but it's *never* a substitute for mainstream success).
As far as emerging markets go, it's usually better to exploit these by being able to sell your existing "legacy" (bleh!) hardware line very cheaply.
Sorry to have to say this, but I believe that from an impartial point-of-view, the C65 would not have been a success by the early-90s, and Commodore were right not to go with it.
Commodore put the gun to their head in 1990 with the introduction of the Amiga 3000.
What was with that "flicker fixer" thing it apparently used? IIRC this took the standard Amiga video output (standard interlaced NTSC/PAL video rates) and converted it to non-flickery video output- I assume at similar frequencies to VGA and the like.
But this sounds like a glorified (and expensive) kludge to work round the fact that the same five-year-old core chipset hadn't been improved to work at the non-interlaced resolutions expected of newer professional computers. In other words, a dead-end that offered nothing to the mainstream Amiga lines.
It may have had a faster processor, but they didn't do the same with the mainstream Amigas.
They pulled the trigger two years later with the release of the Amiga 600.
That was stupid as well; it was initially sold as the replacement for the A500. But that replacement should have been the A1200, which came out six months after that. (And in Europe the A500 had already been replaced just six months previously by the A500 Plus!). It was obviously designed as a lower-end machine, and putting it out like that just muddied the water at a time when they were starting to lose ground to the PC and 16-bit consoles and couldn't afford to do that.
And as for the so-called "Amiga 300" Commodore was looking for, they could have just released the never released Commodore 65 with a WDC 65816 at its heart instead. Cheap enough for emerging markets and Wal-Mart.
No, the "Amiga 300" pricepoint should have been served by an Amiga, or they should have continued to sell the existing C64 at a bargain price. For all that C64 fanatics get misty-eyed at the thought of the C65, that era was over, and by that time would have overlapped too much with the low-end Amigas and confused the market anyway.
In its defence, IIRC the Atari ST *was* arguably more popular than the Amiga in its early years. The Amiga overtook it later as its price came down closer to that of the ST, but it was quite expensive when it first came out.
Nonsense. The Amiga went into decline only after Commodore went bust.
No. As an Amiga owner at the time, I can tell you that it was quite visibly and clearly losing ground to both the PC (at the high end) and SNES and Mega Drive (at the other) for some time before that.
It was no longer the "lead" machine for innovative new software, mainstream companies were ditching the platform and the focus had quite clearly shifted elsewhere.
And the Amiga wasn't to blame for Commodore going bust either.
There is *some* truth in that; though some people paint the likes of the CD32 console as a flop, IIRC it sold passably. It probably didn't *have* to do that well, given that it was basically a cash cow with little new development cost.
As far as I'm aware, C='s bankruptcy was more due to very dubious business shenanigans by its management (that apparently would have been illegal had they still been legally based in the US).
It's probably fairer to guess that their lack of development, promotion, etc. of the Amiga caught up with it, and that it was no longer generating sufficient income to make up for what else was going on at the company.
That was one of the technical improvements, yes. Not just 24-bit high-end cards, but 256-colour (indexed) VGA becoming the standard for "ordinary" PCs when the Amiga's regular graphics mode (and hence most games) still only had 32. There were other issues like complete PC systems with hard drives and monitors working out cheaper, and for all its custom chip brilliance, the 68000 at the Amiga's heart was dated underpowered compared to newer PC processors. As you (and I) said, Commodore sat on their backsides for years.
HAM (the original Amiga's 4096 colour mode, albeit with some restrictions) was brilliant for the time. It's a shame that it wasn't generally practical for fast-moving games.
The A1200 matched VGA with 256 colour indexed graphics and improved HAM mode, but as I said, it came out just a bit too late.
Thorium will also produce dangerous, radioactive by products,
And Uranium produces candy canes and puppies?
Yes, of course it does! Unfortunately they're *highly radioactive* candy canes and puppies.
Oh yeah, it was probably more user-friendly than the competition *at the time*. Credit granted. Now? Not so much.
HTML fascinated the hell out of me, so i tried it
HTML hardly constitutes "programming" in any reasonable sense. That's not to disparage knowing it as a skill, but regardless of what some people think, it's not programming.
made some Pokemon websites
Okay, now you've definitely blown your case. ;-)
I've signed up as a mentor to teach programming to an interested High School senior, so it isn't a 12 year old. I chose C because, frankly, it is what I know best.
I'm not going to rubbish C, because I think it's a very good high-level way of doing relatively low-level programming. But... the string functionality in ANSI C (C89)- which I assume is still the most common version- is *not* its strong point. I certainly wouldn't use it for primarily text-oriented projects (unless they were *very* performance-oriented) and this may be a drawback for newcomers.
Who gives a fuck what Dijkstra says? Modern variants of BASIC are nothing like the '70's and '80's BASICs he was complaining about. A lot of programmers made and still make a good living in VB.
Yeah, and VB.Net doesn't appear to be significantly easier than (say) C#, while having much clunkier- and more nonstandard- syntax. So unless you already know Visual Basic, there's no compelling argument in favour of it.
I assume that Visual Basic was originally intended for people who'd learned with old-school 8-bit BASICs, to provide an easier ramp than the sudden leap up to the likes of C++. Over the years it appears to have acquired more serious features which the people *who were already using Visual Basic* learned bit by bit rather than having to enter the icy-cold waters of... whatever other language. That may lead them into thinking that it's somehow "easier", because it has a thread leading back to BASIC that they followed. But in truth, if you haven't learned your trade via that path- and no new programmers will, nor have any good reason to do that- it doesn't look much simpler than any other language.
A lot of programmers made and still make a good living in VB.
That doesn't prove that it is- or was- the best language, only that it is- or was- popular, possibly due to existing installations, possibly to to large number of programmers knowing VB for the reasons given above.
Yeah, how /do/ people pronounce this decade?
The naughties.
Leaving aside the jokes, has anyone else noticed that "the noughties" as the supposed name for this decade only seems to have cropped up- or at least been "standardised" on- in the past year or so.
For most of it, there didn't seem to be any strong name, though IIRC "2000s" was possibly the most common. Of course, while that name may have been fine when we were within the first ten years of the millennium (*), it's possibly less precise once it has two potential meanings. Though it didn't stop the "1900s" being the most common term for the first decade (*) of the 20th century.
Anyway, the "noughties" is still a ******* stupid name, and I personally hate it.
(*) Pedants, you know what I mean. Shut up in advance, thanks! :-)
From what I heard when the (now abandoned) Koenigsegg bid was accounced, the problem with selling off Saab is that it was already very reliant on GM Europe's engineering rights and expertise.
As (I think it was) the BBC put it a day or two ago, there wasn't really enough left of Saab to make it a viable business.
There are some signs that some parties are still interested in Saab, but I'm pretty sceptical about the involvement of Beijing Automotive, since my gut reaction is that they probably want the rights, technology and machinery to incorporate into their own business in China, rather than keeping Saab going in good faith.
The flying master of Anakin (don't remember his name now) a "troyariam" or something like this, was criticized because racism against jews. (for his nose, and that he always wanted money).
I was trying to rememember the name of the race in the Phantom Menace that was accused of being Japanese stereotypes; a bit of detective work reveals they were the "Neimoidians".
Basically, I think Lucas was trying to shove so many stereotypes in there that he offended everyone equally and thus couldn't be accused of racism ;-)
I think racism in this case ir like p0rn, it is in the eye of the observer.
Let's just say that some porn is blatantly... porn, regardless of that "eye of the beholder" thing. If it's called "ATM Bitches 13" and the cover features a really bad montage of sexual positions and really tacky Photoshop-effect lettering then it's likely intended as porn.
Salt? Good... what does it matter that too much causes health problems?
Thing about salt is one's taste for what a "normal" level of saltiness is can be changed without a massive amount of hassle. I tend not to normally add salt to my food- granted, there's often a lot still in it- and I find that I notice saltiness in commercially-made foods more.
If it requires a short period of finding less salt on your food slightly bland in order to prolong your life quite a bit, then it's worth it IMHO.
Ruger isn't that big of a company. I actually met their CEO once upon a time. Guess what? He was flying commercial.
Doesn't necessarily mean much. The founder of Ikea is apparently worth $22 billion, and drives a 15-year-old Volvo.
think it's because I'm used to my movies being at 24fps and my TV at 30 (more or less),
If you're watching traditional-style interlaced video on your TV, it's 60 fields per second, not 30 frames; that's partly why it looks different.
Film is still effectively 24fps on your TV, not 30, since 2:3 pulldown doesn't interpolate, only duplicates and/or overlaps frames.
My point? What I said about Adventure- and the hardware it was played on- having to have been old when you played it would have been true, which somewhat damages your argument about it only being good at the time. It was obviously good enough for you 10 years later!
I'm 26 in a couple months [..] Lets be honest, much as we all gush over Adventure on the 2600, it's a crap game.
"We"? I'm over 8 years older than you, and I'm only just old enough to have potentially played the VCS during its glory days (I didn't much actually, mainly because I never owned one, but I'm just old enough to have done so). Even if you'd got a bargain-basement 2600 at the tail-end of its life (late-80s), it still would have looked dated compared to other consoles that were available by that time, and Adventure, being a very old game, would have looked particularly crude by late-80s standards.