Ah, I'm downstate, a couple of hours away from Chicago, cable has always been a thing down here. The cable company has been through various name changes/owners over the years, it was Sammon's communications back in the old days, but it is Mediacom now.
Yeah, I know it's not good form to reply to one's own post, but I wanted to add further commentary since my first internet access device was a WebTV so I'm probably a bit more familiar with the quirks of browsing on TV's than most.
Navigation is a killer when browing on TV's. WebTV's hotspot-arrow-key navigation was fine for simple sites in the early days of the net, but complex sites were difficult. Some would have a huge number of tiny hotspots to move between. So Silk using a mouse-ish pointer controlled with the remote's directional pad is much better. However the silk doesn't have pgup/pgdown functionality, just scrollup/scrolldown which is slower. And I didn't see any "quick jump to page top or bottom" feature either.
WebTV was designed in the days of SDTV so the webtv browser was not designed for horizontal scrolling. In fact it couldn't horizontally scroll and websites designed for wider screens worked less well on it. But now TV's are HD and widescreen so most sites will work better, unless they're bloated up like CNN Video. (which is also slow on Android Chrome)
But the fact that the WebTV came with a IR keyboard made certain functions easier. For example, it was far far easier to access bookmarks/recents/history on the WebTV because the WebTV keyboard had dedicated keys for certain functions. And as mentioned above easy accessible pgup/pgdown/jumptotop/jumptobottom functionality.
There also doesn't seem to be any "integration" with other features. For example, when you booted up a WebTV and it connected it would take you to your "WebTV home" a partly customizable portal like thing that had news blurbs with topics you chose, weather, links to news about the WebTV service, help info, etc etc. It looked like this:
While Silk on TV has a menu/info page with links to news videos and at least some bookmarks it's got nothing like that. Or anything like WebTV's Messenger or Community features (webtv specific newsgroups, USENET and IRC) WebTV wasn't just a browser it was also mail, chat, even some limited video and audio. For example, one could easily send a link via e-mail or send an IM while browsing. Though most things on webtv were treated as special web pages.
For example, WebTV's IRC interface was basically a WebTV hosted webTV specific web page that provided a simple IRC interface. Thusly one could not browse the web or read an e-mail while chatting. (Not taking into account customized IRC pages that could be made) IRC on a webtv looks like this:
But as a niche product without a large audience, there wasn't a huge incentive for REAL or Macromedia to help out WebTV to keep up with changing standards. I don't think any WebTV Plus unit got anything better than Flash 5 and the early units were stuck with Flash 3. WebTV users tended to complain a LOT about how WebTV networks weren't keeping up with the changing face of multimedia, especially the ones with the old classic boxes with their 2MB of RAM, 33.6K modems and only 1MB of flash storage. The plus units with their 8MB of RAM, 56K modems, and 1GB hard drives were better.
The Fire stick, however, is a media consumption device even if such functionality is compartmentalized into apps and being backed by Amazon means it keeps up with the internet.
One other thing I noticed is how the Fire stick doesn't use sound like the WebTV did. On a WebTV when you clicked a link, popped up the options menu or the IM thing or hit the bottom of a web page, there were various sound effects.
Ha it looks like Net4TV (once known as Web4TV voice) is still up:
First off it is silk, so meh. From what I can tell there's no multi-tab support. You can choose between bing, google or yahoo as search engines. You can turn on do not track and turn off javascript but there's no adblock. bloated sites can slow it down or lock it up, an example is CNN video. The browser's own search/bookmarks/info menu has links to cnn video. embedded youtube works fine. Even if you have a keyboard paired you'll still need the remote to click on links. It doesn't work well for long text entry because the on-screen keyboard stays up even if you're using a bluetooth one. so editing a post or say a webmail will be frustrating. Navigation uses a cursor style approach which works better than the hotspot centric approach the old WebTV's used. There's a text scaling option which you might need if you sit far away. There's no gopher support, I checked. As a TV web browser I would rate it slightly higher than the old webtv, I'll write more in depth about comparisons in another post. I wouldn't rate the experience as well as say the PS4's browser, which has multiple window support and doesn't show the OSK when typing in a text entry field. And it most certainly isn't as good as say a 10 tablet running chrome with a bluetooth keyboard. But it IS a web browser on your TV, which some people might find useful.
no cable tv, only 4 television channels: ABC, CBS, NBC (on VHF) and PBS (on UHF)
What, you live in the boondocks or something? CATV was already a thing in 1971. Locally it was usually set up as follows. Chicago and Peoria affiliates of ABC, CBS, NBC. Chicago and Urbana PBS affiliates, and two independent stations, usually WGN and WFLD, plus one local information channel where a camera panned back and forth between information boards and a clock.
a television set with actual (and only) knobs to change the channels.
There were premium high end TV's with push button controls in the early 70's. For most of those the buttons were only for VHF, UHF was a dial. Some TV's has buttons, but little dials on a panel BEHIND the buttons to choose what station (VHF or UHF the button tuned to)
Yet another Slashdot Open Source Aspie libertarian, sometimes I uncharitably think that you have to be an aspie to be a libertarian because anyone else would figure out that Objectivism is basically Selfish Asshattery at the expense of society as a hole.
But then Aspie Slashdot Libertarians tend to not believe in "society" in the first place.
I'm also finding it funny that you mention Ayn Rand and the demonization of meritocracy in the same paragraph. Because Ayn Rand got her start in professional writing in the US because of nepotism! Here she was a Russian immigrant and she just got handed a nice cushy writing job by a relative. Not only that but she came here on a TOURIST visa, thusly making her an ILLEGAL immigrant. Not only that, but the communist takeover was what opened universities to women in the first place they couldn't attend prior.
I also find it funny when Aspie Slashdot libertarians go on about meritocracy...as if it ever truly existed. It never has. People may claim things are a meritocracy, but we as a soceity are just pretending it is.
You may "want" a meritocracy, but you're not going to get it because too many people are asshats. Whether engaging in nepotism, racism, classism, sexism...whatever. As long as those exist, we can't have meritocracy.
I always recommend holding off for a few weeks on Fedora distro upgrades anyway. Servers are less busy and if there's a few package issues they'll have them ironed out by then.
Why anyone would waist money on those consoles when they already have a PC is a mystery to me.
The word you are looking for is "waste". Considering you made a mistake most native English speakers would NOT make, I'm suspecting English isn't your native language. And since English isn't your native language, you didn't experience consoles and computers like Americans did.
First thing, in the US console gaming predates computer gaming in the home. And even with the first of the personal computers, Apple II, Commodore PET, TRS 80, commercial games weren't a thing till after Commercial games had hit the big time on consoles.
Remember the first computer to sell a million machines was the Commodore VIC 20! That was the FIRST computer that I saw commercial games in stores for, cartridges...Scott Adams games IIRC.
Also in the US we didn't have special import duties that applied ONLY to entertainment devices and not computers. So unlike say maybe Hungary or UK, consoles cost less than computers....a lot less.
Also in the US, all the best home computer games came on floppy, not tape or cartridge So while lads in the UK were playing their copy of Dizzy or Paradroid they copied from a rich friend on a boombox, americans were playing Ultima, The Bard's Tale, Flight Simulator II, Earl Weaver Baseball..on disk drives, which added to the cost of the machines. Not only that, but load times were LOOONG, even with fast-loaders and god forbid you try to play a game like SSI's Pool of Radiance with a single disk drive.
We also got hardware earlier than you did, sometimes 2 years earlier, so while you might have compared the NES to your early Amiga in the states the NES was compared to machines like the Atari 2600, Colecovision or C64.
And sometimes, instead of just one "big" computer, what we need is a lot of "little" computers. So someone might have a PC AND a console, AND a phone, AND a tablet, AND a portable console like a Vita or 3DS.
And here in the US software pricing is consistent across platforms, so a game will cost EXACTLY the SAME on PC and console. It isn't like PC publishers in Europe who subsidize PC games for Po/Ru/Hu/Ro by charging less than what Americans pay.
Besides, some people just like the whole coherent console experience. No muss, no fuss, even with modern consoles.
Perhaps I should have said "digital optical audio" but are you being intentionally obtuse?
In this case the optical MEDIUM limits the QUALITY and KIND of the audio sent over it. Yeah there's big data with their optical links but we're talking about TOSLINK optical AUDIO here, not DATA
My receiver doesn't have HDMI output, that's why. I guess I didn't make that clear in this post.
HDMI ARC is the solution. In that scenario you hook your playback device directly to one of the displays HDMI ports and then hook the Display to the receiver via the displays HDMI ARC port.
What about Dust? If they had just not made it a PS3 exclusive they could still be selling subscriptions to it, and using it as a secondary facet to EVE Online today.
It was PS3 exclusive because Sony was/is very open to PC-Playstation interaction. As you know, Dust players could actually communicate with PC players of EVE in game. While Sony may not be friendly to PS4/Xbox One cross play they are VERY open to PC/PS4 cross play.
IIRC a CCP dev once mentioned going to Microsoft and they were interested in the shooter, but not interested in it connecting to Eve. They also didn't want the game to have the mouse/keyboard support it does. Microsoft has little interest in supporting multiple control options.
Sony has always supported devs if they want to offer multiple control options but leave it up to the dev to make the decision on whether to do so. This is why Half-Life on the PS2 has mouse and keyboard support but the Orange box on the PS3 doesn't.
It's also why War Thunder is on the PS4 but not the Xbox and why Elite Dangerous on PS4 has HOTAS support, but the Xbox One version doesn't.
Add to that Valkyrie with say a real flight themed set of joystick controls, plus a VR headset for looking around and things could be even better.
Unlike HDMI, TOSLINK does not have the bandwidth to carry the lossless versions of Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD Master Audio, or more than two channels of PCM audio.
HDMI supports uncompressed audio, 2.1, 5.1, 7.1 or even greater.
Simply put, Commodore was a late casualty of the console crash of 84 and the home computer price wars of that year.
Sure Commodore was able to take down Atari's 8 bits, TI and practically every other home computer, but it left them weakened. They couldn't market or support the Amiga as well as they needed to.
And at the same time they were under siege from DOS machines on the high end, and Nintendo and Sega on the low end.
The Amiga could never beat the "you'll never be fired for buying IBM" mindset, which leaked into the minds of home computer users as well. You had home users thinking "The Amiga isn't compatible with anything at the office and that means I can't bring any work home." There were also computer pundits in magazines and books saying. "Yeah the Amiga is nice, but it's not compatible with anything industry standard. It may be nice for video editing and maybe games, but Commodore support is horrible. If all you want to do is games, you're better off with a Nintendo or Sega anyway. For games AND productivity, you want a DOS/Windows machine"
And speaking of Nintendo and Sega...yeah the early Amiga's were better than the NES and Sega Master System.....but not so much with the SNES and Genesis. Remember the best selling Amiga was the 500 model of 1987! Sure it's got 4096 HAM for static images, but it can't match the color and sound of the SNES. And even if you have that Amiga, what games are you going to play? Cheap platformers/arcade style games from Europe where they hadn't figured out the Amiga was a dead end because the import duties made Nintendo and Sega hardware more expensive than it really was? Because of the piracy associated with Commodore platforms, the ports dried up. Cost was an issue too. Unlike the C64 the Amigas had built in disk drives which meant they could never get the price down enough.
I know 4-5 people on welfare. They all have cable TV ($140+/month)
Are you sure they're paying that much, because locally the cable company has a basic service for about $20.
///If you use EBT (food stamps) to buy anything but dried beans, rice, and canned tomatoes, you don't get welfare.
Really? You did know the largest demographic of poor people is children right? And what about people with disabilities? People who lost their jobs when a factory shut down? Rice and beans only for them as well?
I may sound like a Trumper here, but I work and pay my taxes and I'm fucking tired of supporting these leeches.
Nice dehumanization there. Did you ever think that they have also worked in the past? That they basically might be between jobs?
honestly writing a term paper on a tablet sounds impossible if you consider having to have references for formatting, looking at material to source, and having the paper open all on the same seven inch tablet. Sure, if you can split screen on such a cheap device, but doing any sort of word processing on this sounds like a complete and utter cramped mess.
I'm not so sure, especially not with a 10" tablet. And you CAN split the screen with Android Nougat. Besides people were doing wordprocessing on single-tasking machines without any networking back in the 70's and 80's.
My dad bought a Logitech Bluetooth keyboard and the specs claim it can last TWO YEARS between charging. It can pair to three different devices and you just switch between them on the keyboard. So awesome!
The digital divide is more about peer groups shitting on people for being smart. If you're black, female, mexican, or native american, your peers will treat you like shit for doing "white male" things like learning and getting smarter.
And how does a white male such as yourself become an expert on how those people think? Perhaps you are stereotyping to support your "I hate government and everybody but me is a parasite."
That tablet is $50 that could have been spent on crack, makeup, or rims for your 1995 Civic.
This is precisely why not having a cellphone with an internet plan makes you a second-class (or lower) citizen. It is taken for granted today that you will have this. If not, it makes it more difficult to do literally anything any more.
I have a phone without a data plan, but I wouldn't exactly call myself a second class citizen...not yet. But it's getting there.
My actual phone service is cheap, but to get a data plan the companies basically want to charge me 4 or 5 times as much.
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Ah, I'm downstate, a couple of hours away from Chicago, cable has always been a thing down here. The cable company has been through various name changes/owners over the years, it was Sammon's communications back in the old days, but it is Mediacom now.
Yeah, I know it's not good form to reply to one's own post, but I wanted to add further commentary since my first internet access device was a WebTV so I'm probably a bit more familiar with the quirks of browsing on TV's than most.
Navigation is a killer when browing on TV's. WebTV's hotspot-arrow-key navigation was fine for simple sites in the early days of the net, but complex sites were difficult. Some would have a huge number of tiny hotspots to move between. So Silk using a mouse-ish pointer controlled with the remote's directional pad is much better. However the silk doesn't have pgup/pgdown functionality, just scrollup/scrolldown which is slower. And I didn't see any "quick jump to page top or bottom" feature either.
WebTV was designed in the days of SDTV so the webtv browser was not designed for horizontal scrolling. In fact it couldn't horizontally scroll and websites designed for wider screens worked less well on it. But now TV's are HD and widescreen so most sites will work better, unless they're bloated up like CNN Video. (which is also slow on Android Chrome)
But the fact that the WebTV came with a IR keyboard made certain functions easier. For example, it was far far easier to access bookmarks/recents/history on the WebTV because the WebTV keyboard had dedicated keys for certain functions. And as mentioned above easy accessible pgup/pgdown/jumptotop/jumptobottom functionality.
There also doesn't seem to be any "integration" with other features. For example, when you booted up a WebTV and it connected it would take you to your "WebTV home" a partly customizable portal like thing that had news blurbs with topics you chose, weather, links to news about the WebTV service, help info, etc etc. It looked like this:
http://net4tv.com/voice/GRAPHI...
While Silk on TV has a menu/info page with links to news videos and at least some bookmarks it's got nothing like that. Or anything like WebTV's Messenger or Community features (webtv specific newsgroups, USENET and IRC) WebTV wasn't just a browser it was also mail, chat, even some limited video and audio. For example, one could easily send a link via e-mail or send an IM while browsing. Though most things on webtv were treated as special web pages.
For example, WebTV's IRC interface was basically a WebTV hosted webTV specific web page that provided a simple IRC interface. Thusly one could not browse the web or read an e-mail while chatting. (Not taking into account customized IRC pages that could be made) IRC on a webtv looks like this:
http://www.fun-lover.com/webtv...
But as a niche product without a large audience, there wasn't a huge incentive for REAL or Macromedia to help out WebTV to keep up with changing standards. I don't think any WebTV Plus unit got anything better than Flash 5 and the early units were stuck with Flash 3. WebTV users tended to complain a LOT about how WebTV networks weren't keeping up with the changing face of multimedia, especially the ones with the old classic boxes with their 2MB of RAM, 33.6K modems and only 1MB of flash storage. The plus units with their 8MB of RAM, 56K modems, and 1GB hard drives were better.
The Fire stick, however, is a media consumption device even if such functionality is compartmentalized into apps and being backed by Amazon means it keeps up with the internet.
One other thing I noticed is how the Fire stick doesn't use sound like the WebTV did. On a WebTV when you clicked a link, popped up the options menu or the IM thing or hit the bottom of a web page, there were various sound effects.
Ha it looks like Net4TV (once known as Web4TV voice) is still up:
http://www.net4tv.com/voice/in...
Because he himself has said that is his political affiliation.
First off it is silk, so meh. From what I can tell there's no multi-tab support. You can choose between bing, google or yahoo as search engines. You can turn on do not track and turn off javascript but there's no adblock. bloated sites can slow it down or lock it up, an example is CNN video. The browser's own search/bookmarks/info menu has links to cnn video. embedded youtube works fine. Even if you have a keyboard paired you'll still need the remote to click on links. It doesn't work well for long text entry because the on-screen keyboard stays up even if you're using a bluetooth one. so editing a post or say a webmail will be frustrating. Navigation uses a cursor style approach which works better than the hotspot centric approach the old WebTV's used. There's a text scaling option which you might need if you sit far away. There's no gopher support, I checked. As a TV web browser I would rate it slightly higher than the old webtv, I'll write more in depth about comparisons in another post. I wouldn't rate the experience as well as say the PS4's browser, which has multiple window support and doesn't show the OSK when typing in a text entry field. And it most certainly isn't as good as say a 10 tablet running chrome with a bluetooth keyboard. But it IS a web browser on your TV, which some people might find useful.
no cable tv, only 4 television channels: ABC, CBS, NBC (on VHF) and PBS (on UHF)
What, you live in the boondocks or something? CATV was already a thing in 1971. Locally it was usually set up as follows. Chicago and Peoria affiliates of ABC, CBS, NBC. Chicago and Urbana PBS affiliates, and two independent stations, usually WGN and WFLD, plus one local information channel where a camera panned back and forth between information boards and a clock.
a television set with actual (and only) knobs to change the channels.
There were premium high end TV's with push button controls in the early 70's. For most of those the buttons were only for VHF, UHF was a dial. Some TV's has buttons, but little dials on a panel BEHIND the buttons to choose what station (VHF or UHF the button tuned to)
Yet another Slashdot Open Source Aspie libertarian, sometimes I uncharitably think that you have to be an aspie to be a libertarian because anyone else would figure out that Objectivism is basically Selfish Asshattery at the expense of society as a hole.
But then Aspie Slashdot Libertarians tend to not believe in "society" in the first place.
I'm also finding it funny that you mention Ayn Rand and the demonization of meritocracy in the same paragraph. Because Ayn Rand got her start in professional writing in the US because of nepotism! Here she was a Russian immigrant and she just got handed a nice cushy writing job by a relative. Not only that but she came here on a TOURIST visa, thusly making her an ILLEGAL immigrant. Not only that, but the communist takeover was what opened universities to women in the first place they couldn't attend prior.
I also find it funny when Aspie Slashdot libertarians go on about meritocracy...as if it ever truly existed. It never has. People may claim things are a meritocracy, but we as a soceity are just pretending it is.
You may "want" a meritocracy, but you're not going to get it because too many people are asshats. Whether engaging in nepotism, racism, classism, sexism...whatever. As long as those exist, we can't have meritocracy.
http://code.gov/
http://18f.gsa.gov/
The Fedora equivalent to Ubuntu LTS would be the official Red Hat releases or CentOS.
I always recommend holding off for a few weeks on Fedora distro upgrades anyway. Servers are less busy and if there's a few package issues they'll have them ironed out by then.
Well, not "all" PS4 and Xbox games are on PC.
Why anyone would waist money on those consoles when they already have a PC is a mystery to me.
The word you are looking for is "waste". Considering you made a mistake most native English speakers would NOT make, I'm suspecting English isn't your native language. And since English isn't your native language, you didn't experience consoles and computers like Americans did.
First thing, in the US console gaming predates computer gaming in the home. And even with the first of the personal computers, Apple II, Commodore PET, TRS 80, commercial games weren't a thing till after Commercial games had hit the big time on consoles.
This was an Atari TV ad from December 1977:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Remember the first computer to sell a million machines was the Commodore VIC 20! That was the FIRST computer that I saw commercial games in stores for, cartridges...Scott Adams games IIRC.
Also in the US we didn't have special import duties that applied ONLY to entertainment devices and not computers. So unlike say maybe Hungary or UK, consoles cost less than computers....a lot less.
Also in the US, all the best home computer games came on floppy, not tape or cartridge So while lads in the UK were playing their copy of Dizzy or Paradroid they copied from a rich friend on a boombox, americans were playing Ultima, The Bard's Tale, Flight Simulator II, Earl Weaver Baseball..on disk drives, which added to the cost of the machines. Not only that, but load times were LOOONG, even with fast-loaders and god forbid you try to play a game like SSI's Pool of Radiance with a single disk drive.
We also got hardware earlier than you did, sometimes 2 years earlier, so while you might have compared the NES to your early Amiga in the states the NES was compared to machines like the Atari 2600, Colecovision or C64.
And sometimes, instead of just one "big" computer, what we need is a lot of "little" computers. So someone might have a PC AND a console, AND a phone, AND a tablet, AND a portable console like a Vita or 3DS.
And here in the US software pricing is consistent across platforms, so a game will cost EXACTLY the SAME on PC and console. It isn't like PC publishers in Europe who subsidize PC games for Po/Ru/Hu/Ro by charging less than what Americans pay.
Besides, some people just like the whole coherent console experience. No muss, no fuss, even with modern consoles.
Perhaps I should have said "digital optical audio" but are you being intentionally obtuse?
In this case the optical MEDIUM limits the QUALITY and KIND of the audio sent over it. Yeah there's big data with their optical links but we're talking about TOSLINK optical AUDIO here, not DATA
My receiver doesn't have HDMI output, that's why. I guess I didn't make that clear in this post.
HDMI ARC is the solution. In that scenario you hook your playback device directly to one of the displays HDMI ports and then hook the Display to the receiver via the displays HDMI ARC port.
Instead of:
You have:
Of course if you have a modern receiver it is usually
Now show me a modern, HDMI-equipped receiver that sounds anywhere as near as good as my circa 1998 NAD T750.
I see you got burned by being a surround sound early adopter, but I bet you can easily find a modern receiver that's just as good as that one.
What about Dust? If they had just not made it a PS3 exclusive they could still be selling subscriptions to it, and using it as a secondary facet to EVE Online today.
It was PS3 exclusive because Sony was/is very open to PC-Playstation interaction. As you know, Dust players could actually communicate with PC players of EVE in game. While Sony may not be friendly to PS4/Xbox One cross play they are VERY open to PC/PS4 cross play.
IIRC a CCP dev once mentioned going to Microsoft and they were interested in the shooter, but not interested in it connecting to Eve. They also didn't want the game to have the mouse/keyboard support it does. Microsoft has little interest in supporting multiple control options.
Sony has always supported devs if they want to offer multiple control options but leave it up to the dev to make the decision on whether to do so. This is why Half-Life on the PS2 has mouse and keyboard support but the Orange box on the PS3 doesn't.
It's also why War Thunder is on the PS4 but not the Xbox and why Elite Dangerous on PS4 has HOTAS support, but the Xbox One version doesn't.
Add to that Valkyrie with say a real flight themed set of joystick controls, plus a VR headset for looking around and things could be even better.
The PSVR version of Valkyrie has HOTAS support.
Digital optical is utterly inferior to HDMI Audio. It only supports 2 channels uncompressed, anything other than that. 2.1, 5.1, 7.1 is compressed.
From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Unlike HDMI, TOSLINK does not have the bandwidth to carry the lossless versions of Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD Master Audio, or more than two channels of PCM audio.
HDMI supports uncompressed audio, 2.1, 5.1, 7.1 or even greater.
.
Simply put, Commodore was a late casualty of the console crash of 84 and the home computer price wars of that year.
Sure Commodore was able to take down Atari's 8 bits, TI and practically every other home computer, but it left them weakened. They couldn't market or support the Amiga as well as they needed to.
And at the same time they were under siege from DOS machines on the high end, and Nintendo and Sega on the low end.
The Amiga could never beat the "you'll never be fired for buying IBM" mindset, which leaked into the minds of home computer users as well. You had home users thinking "The Amiga isn't compatible with anything at the office and that means I can't bring any work home." There were also computer pundits in magazines and books saying. "Yeah the Amiga is nice, but it's not compatible with anything industry standard. It may be nice for video editing and maybe games, but Commodore support is horrible. If all you want to do is games, you're better off with a Nintendo or Sega anyway. For games AND productivity, you want a DOS/Windows machine"
And speaking of Nintendo and Sega...yeah the early Amiga's were better than the NES and Sega Master System.....but not so much with the SNES and Genesis. Remember the best selling Amiga was the 500 model of 1987! Sure it's got 4096 HAM for static images, but it can't match the color and sound of the SNES. And even if you have that Amiga, what games are you going to play? Cheap platformers/arcade style games from Europe where they hadn't figured out the Amiga was a dead end because the import duties made Nintendo and Sega hardware more expensive than it really was? Because of the piracy associated with Commodore platforms, the ports dried up. Cost was an issue too. Unlike the C64 the Amigas had built in disk drives which meant they could never get the price down enough.
I know 4-5 people on welfare. They all have cable TV ($140+/month)
Are you sure they're paying that much, because locally the cable company has a basic service for about $20.
///If you use EBT (food stamps) to buy anything but dried beans, rice, and canned tomatoes, you don't get welfare.
Really? You did know the largest demographic of poor people is children right? And what about people with disabilities? People who lost their jobs when a factory shut down? Rice and beans only for them as well?
I may sound like a Trumper here, but I work and pay my taxes and I'm fucking tired of supporting these leeches.
Nice dehumanization there. Did you ever think that they have also worked in the past? That they basically might be between jobs?
honestly writing a term paper on a tablet sounds impossible if you consider having to have references for formatting, looking at material to source, and having the paper open all on the same seven inch tablet. Sure, if you can split screen on such a cheap device, but doing any sort of word processing on this sounds like a complete and utter cramped mess.
I'm not so sure, especially not with a 10" tablet. And you CAN split the screen with Android Nougat. Besides people were doing wordprocessing on single-tasking machines without any networking back in the 70's and 80's.
My dad bought a Logitech Bluetooth keyboard and the specs claim it can last TWO YEARS between charging. It can pair to three different devices and you just switch between them on the keyboard. So awesome!
The K480 with the dial? That thing is awesome.
https://www.logitech.com/en-us...
Though I only paid $11 for it, not $49, on clearance at Wal-Mart. I don't know why they weren't selling, it's very nice for a bluetooth keyboard.
They must be paired up at every use
No, they don't, as long as you don't pair them to a different device. And there are even exceptions to that.
are usually much too small
Bigger ones are available.
and are just one more battery powered device that needs to be kept charged.
Bluetooth keyboards last a LONG time on a charge, not even taking into account the ones that use AAA or AA batteries.
Add that to the fact that many schools require homework to be printed out,
Printers that support Cloud printing or bluetooth printing are a thing.
or submitted in certain propitiatory file formats and that lets out doing homework.
Google Docs and android office suites are a thing
browsing nineties level websites,
I use Gopher you insensitive clod.
The digital divide is more about peer groups shitting on people for being smart. If you're black, female, mexican, or native american, your peers will treat you like shit for doing "white male" things like learning and getting smarter.
And how does a white male such as yourself become an expert on how those people think? Perhaps you are stereotyping to support your "I hate government and everybody but me is a parasite."
That tablet is $50 that could have been spent on crack, makeup, or rims for your 1995 Civic.
So nasty stereotyping it is.
This is precisely why not having a cellphone with an internet plan makes you a second-class (or lower) citizen. It is taken for granted today that you will have this. If not, it makes it more difficult to do literally anything any more.
I have a phone without a data plan, but I wouldn't exactly call myself a second class citizen...not yet. But it's getting there.
My actual phone service is cheap, but to get a data plan the companies basically want to charge me 4 or 5 times as much.
It is even possible to use Pgp on your phone. I use Gmail IMAP via k9 mail with openpgp.
Wow, talking about that superiority that earned Americans so much stereotyping and hate throughout recent history.
Considering the fact that personal computing, console gaming and computer gaming were ALL invented here....maybe you should stop playing games then.
Yes, consoles and console games are expensive around here.
Have you ever wondered why? Have you ever thought that the higher prices for console games and hardware is artificial protectionism?
Yes, PC games are more widely available and generally much cheaper if you look in the right place.
your cheap PC games are essentially being subsidized by Americans.
And yes, my 18 dollars a month Gigabit Fiber internet connection allows me to install a large game in 5 minutes.
From a government owned and/or subsidized ISP?