Anyway, AFAIK, the QL partly flopped because Sinclair aimed at the business market instead of hobbyists.
Even then (apparently), IBM PC compatibility was quickly becoming more important to such people. Also, I'm assuming that the quirkiness and flakiness of Sinclair products would have been less tolerable to business users in the quickly-maturing mid 80s market
The IBM PC was the natural upgrade path from CP/M.
The big names in business software all had product out for the IBM by 1982.
Two built-in ZX [85 KB] Microdrive tape-loop cartridge drives provided mass storage [for the QL], in place of the more expensive floppy disk drives found on similar systems of the era.
My father buys drugs from a company like the ones they mention in the ads. He can't afford drugs here in the USA even though the ones he gets from Canada are exactly the same, yet cost one tenth the price.
Is he buying drugs in the amounts his doctors would have prescribed?
Is he receiving the drugs his doctors would have prescribed?
I was ready to rail against this, but after reading the article, it's all shit.
I can see 500 million reasons to believe it's all true.
The Wall Street Journal has an excellent page-one story today on how federal agents caught Google deliberately breaking the law so it could make money off sites selling drugs online. That case ended with a settlement in which Google avoided criminal prosecution by paying the feds more than half a billion dollars.
And this is why lobbying and campaign contributions need to be outlawed.
The true cellar-dwelling geek --- the mushroom maiden --- with no social or political life whatsoever --- has no need of organizations and lobbyists to represent and protect his interests.
The politician aligns with interests that are important to his home district. There are people he has to know, people he has to listen to whether they support his campaign or not.
The congreswoman for Redwood City won't give a damn if Anonymous hacks her website.
But she will know to the dime how much Dreamworks Animation (400 employees), Oracle (6700) and Electronic Arts (3159) contribute to the local economy --- and they will get a hearing.
In almost no other case does the US government get involved in protecting private property to the extent they rush in and protect the music and film industry. Have your patent ripped off, or your house broken into, they won't even listen to you. Its up to you to defend your patent at your own expense, and you can file a police report about the burglary, but you will likely never see your property again.
Civics 101.
In the American federal system, almost all crimes are defined and prosecuted under state law.
Crimes with an interstate or foreign dimension and crimes with a federal Constitutional dimension tend to become a federal responsibility.
The federal government defends copyrights as a federally granted property right.
In a sense, all property can be defined as a set of rights and privileges the state is willing to defend. Take your patent case into court and win and the federal government will enforce the judgment.
The Secret Service was organized to fight counterfeiting.
Surprising, isn't it, that the federal government should give a damn about such mundane things as the value of the currency, economic development, and a favorable balance of trade?
The animated feature from Pixar or Dreamworks will cost about $200 million to produce and if succesful may lead to a billion-dollar global franchise like "Shrek."
Clean industry. Skilled labor. High tech.
There is the potential political bonus of a viable cultural export. The US has for generations has been a net exporter of culture.
All of which implies that the entertainment industry will continue to get a hearing whether the geek likes it or not.
Why? Because the *AA's are criminal organizations, and copyright is and never will be a property right, but since we don't have the money to enforce the Constitution (we being the normal people)... corporations will assfuck us while the government holds us down.
In Article 6 the Constitution and Treaties made under the authority of the United States are defined as the supreme law of the land.
Legislation passed to implement a treaty doesn't need any other authority than the treaty itself. Meaning that the Congress can legally bring US copyright laws into compliance with international standards.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, known as the Copyright Clause, empowers the United States Congress:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
The Founders were allergic to imposing policy decisions on the future Congress and Executive.
That is why the federal Constitution is an essentially structural document condensed to a bare 7,500 words and the Alabama state constitution clocks up 357,157 words.
"Limited times" means whatever the Congress and Executive agree it should mean. No more and no less.
Copyrights can be freely traded or sold. Copyright can be inherited. Income from copyrights can be taxed. The market value and legal ownership of a copyight has meaning in many situations.
Tresspassers can be prosecuted under both civil and criminal law.
This sure as hell looks like property to me.
The "AAs" are trade associations.
They are effective because they have organization, discipline and resources. They are effective because their members are economically significant in states like California, New York, and so on.
The production budget of a Pixar or Dreamworks feature is $200 million. Sequels may take that --- essentially local --- investment to $1 billion dollars.
If they ignore you, the sense of the law erodes. If they arrest you, you become a martyr. Either way you win.
Or maybe you just go to jail when the Dotcom bubble bursts.
A conviction against Kim Schmitz (or one of the other listed MegaUpload associates) means that more than $175 million stashed away in 64 bank accounts around the world becomes U.S. government property.
Some of the automobiles listed for forfeiture include an amazing mix of exotic vehicles:
2008 Rolls-Royce Phantom Drop Head Coupe
2010 Maserati GranCabrio
16 various modern Mercedes-Benz vehicles (including many CLK and CL series)
1989 Lamborghini LM002
1959 Cadillac Series 62 convertible
1957 Cadillac El Dorado
Harley Davidson motorcycle
Von Dutch Kustom motor bike
Two 2010 Mini Cooper S coupes
2010 Sea-Doo GTX jet ski
All those people who dare opposing unjust laws! They are just provoking an unreasonable response! The world would have been a much better place if that Rosa Parks had just sat in the back of the bus, like she was told.
There was nothing anonymous about Rosa Parks.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott was successful because it was backed by the bus company's paying customers. The geek pursuing his free movie fix has no such leverage.
The boycott gained a broader legitimacy because blacks were willing to risk put their jobs at risk --- not to mention the uncertainties of the Montgomery lock-up.
There would be worse to come:
After the boycott was over, and the buses in Montgomery were desegregated, occasionally buses would get ambushed and shot at. One such shooting, on January 10, 1957, was followed by bombings at Montgomery's Bell Street Baptist Church, the Mount Olive Baptist Church, the Hutchinson Street Baptist Church, and the First Baptist Church and its parsonage
Is that 100,000 tons at Earth-normal gravity or at this much smaller planet's (although possibly denser?) gravity?
Is this anything worth worrying about when no matter how you calculate the loss the planet will still be around for at least another two or three hundred million years?
Bespoke your heart out on Sketchup, send it to be validated by a building code / physics model, and off to the printer. A room shaped like Einstein's hollowed out head? A bas-relief tribute to your dog on the living room wall? No problem!
Until you try to finance the project.
Until you put your wildly eccentric house up for sale.
Then you will discover very quickly that no one else shares you enthusiasm for architectural follies.
Concrete houses was Edison's great dream a hundred years ago; cheap and mass producable. They never caught on then. Why would we think they'd catch on now?
Edison displayed a model of an attractive and plausible middle class home --- which was too expensive and complex to build. The final design was charmless and dispiriting.
The simplest sort of remodeling or repair work was difficult.
Hmm. I can see the trolls are multiplying on/. again. Is it because it's an election year, or did a bunch of 14 year-olds guess the password to their parent's AOL account?
That insults both the 14 year old and AOL ---
which as I remember it from the dial-up days tended to keep things civil.
Well guess what: at each and every job interview I've been to, I lied and pretended I enjoyed working with others, when in reality I like being left the fuck alone to do a good job.
The obvious questions that come to mind are how many jobs and how many interviews? Is all that BS you've been peddling getting what you need and what you want?
And this, boys and girls, is how we end up with Windows 7/64 guzzling two gigs of memory after start-up.
RAM is there to be used, not hoarded.
In short, Windows 7 (unlike XP and earlier Windows versions) goes by the philosophy that empty RAM is wasted RAM and tries to keep it as full as possible, without impacting performance.
Never once did a real major OEM offer up a PC preloaded with Linux at a price advantage over Windows.
Walmart with a reputation for ruthless bargaining with suppliers, enormous purchasing power and absolute dominance of big box retail spent about ten years trying to deliver a credible ---competitive --- OEM Linux alternative to OEM Windows.
Nothing ever came of it.
The economies of scale in OEM Windows with an installed base of perhaps one billion units were devastating.
Nobody even sold a dual boot, even as an option. That wouldn't have even cost them anything.
You have got to be kidding.
Boot Camp is an admisssion that you have to support Windows in the corporate market.
Retailers hate maintaining expensive dual inventory and support structures for the convenience of perhaps one percent of their customers.
Ordinary users don't want to maintain two operating systems, two software libraries and two skill sets.
In what way is this different to any other form of extorting money with menaces?
Microsoft licenses a patent portfolio to the richest, most powerful and most secretive manufacturing cartels on the planet.
Enterprises which collectively have centuries of experience in playing corporate hardball. Enterprises which --- in all probabilty ---- have been licensing and cross-licensing tech with Microsoft for some thirty years now.
Google doesn't raise a finger in protest ---- but the Geek --- in his impotence --- goes ballistic.
Mostly because office software is so ridiculously crufty that the only way to make it more usable is by offering *less* features.
The office suite is complex because it is put into daily use by tens or hundreds of millions of clerical workers, each with their own requirements and skill sets. Full time staff. Office Temps. Senior Volunteers and so on.
This all seems idiotic and totally the wrong direction to me, but there's no way of denying the fact that for whatever reason, Joe Sixpack prefers a more authoritarian and more proprietary approach to the internet, as opposed to a more equal/peer-to-peer and open-standard approach.
The proprietary product designed for the masses replaced jany number of argon-filled apps with clumsy UIs that only the techie ever found easy to use.
Looking at all the writers who never won the Nobel Prize for Literature, I'd say Tolkien is in very good company.
Simply look at the writers who lost out in 1961:
Swedish reporter Andreas Ekstrom delved into 1961's previously classified documents on their release this week, to find the jury passed over names including Lawrence Durrell, Robert Frost, Graham Greene, EM Forster and Tolkien to come up with their eventual winner, Yugoslavian writer Ivo Andric.
Greene, who never won the Nobel, was 1961's runner-up, with Danish writer Karen Blixen, author of Out of Africa, coming in third.
a local thrift store had a compaq pentium I machine that booted up to a 98 bluescreen and wanted 100$, and some dumb shit bought it. Meanwhile across town at the habitat for humanity reuse center...they were selling 2ghz p4 pizza boxes for 5 bucks each, and they sat there for months
Because no one knew they were there for sale ---
while the thrift store has a daily walk-in trade and maybe a weekly add in the local shopping papers?
The only benefit that OLPC provided over commercial projects to sell low-cost computers was the open-source nature of Sugar OS specifically designed to teach children about how computers worked and how they could be programmed, thus teaching fishing instead of giving fish.
The only buyer for the OLPC is the third world education minister.
It is his job to decide whether it is more important to teach a kid how to program or to teach him how to read.
There may be not time enough to do both.
He has to think about how many of his kids he can realistically hope to place in advanced academic and vocational programs. He has to ask whether Sugar will prepare these students for the standard desktop and apps used in the higher grades.
Sure they can use Microsoft Word but would be stupefied if LibreOffice or Google Docs were put before them.
In any other conrtext, the geek would be claiming that anyone familiar with MS Office can be instantly productive in LibreOffice or Google Docs.
When a student consistently turns in well-written papers using Word and meaningful spreadsheets and charts when working in Excel I have to assume that his understanding of MS Office goes beyond memorizing its menus and keyboard shortcuts.
If an attractive lady(teacher, babysitter, whatever) approached me when I was 12 and asked me to have sex with her, and videotape it, I would have said, "fuck yeah" - especially if she plied me with a little booze.
...it would to this day have been one of the fondest days of my life.
Perhaps.
Or maybe you are just indulging yourself in an older man's fantasy of rape and seduction, with no real understanding of what the experience would have been like for a twelve year old boy.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, AFAIK, the QL partly flopped because Sinclair aimed at the business market instead of hobbyists.
Even then (apparently), IBM PC compatibility was quickly becoming more important to such people. Also, I'm assuming that the quirkiness and flakiness of Sinclair products would have been less tolerable to business users in the quickly-maturing mid 80s market
The IBM PC was the natural upgrade path from CP/M.
The big names in business software all had product out for the IBM by 1982.
Two built-in ZX [85 KB] Microdrive tape-loop cartridge drives provided mass storage [for the QL], in place of the more expensive floppy disk drives found on similar systems of the era.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_QL
My father buys drugs from a company like the ones they mention in the ads. He can't afford drugs here in the USA even though the ones he gets from Canada are exactly the same, yet cost one tenth the price.
Is he buying drugs in the amounts his doctors would have prescribed?
Is he receiving the drugs his doctors would have prescribed?
I was ready to rail against this, but after reading the article, it's all shit.
I can see 500 million reasons to believe it's all true.
The Wall Street Journal has an excellent page-one story today on how federal agents caught Google deliberately breaking the law so it could make money off sites selling drugs online. That case ended with a settlement in which Google avoided criminal prosecution by paying the feds more than half a billion dollars.
The Journal Takes Us Inside the Google Drugs Sting
And this is why lobbying and campaign contributions need to be outlawed.
The true cellar-dwelling geek --- the mushroom maiden --- with no social or political life whatsoever --- has no need of organizations and lobbyists to represent and protect his interests.
The politician aligns with interests that are important to his home district. There are people he has to know, people he has to listen to whether they support his campaign or not.
The congreswoman for Redwood City won't give a damn if Anonymous hacks her website.
But she will know to the dime how much Dreamworks Animation (400 employees), Oracle (6700) and Electronic Arts (3159) contribute to the local economy --- and they will get a hearing.
In almost no other case does the US government get involved in protecting private property to the extent they rush in and protect the music and film industry. Have your patent ripped off, or your house broken into, they won't even listen to you. Its up to you to defend your patent at your own expense, and you can file a police report about the burglary, but you will likely never see your property again.
Civics 101.
In the American federal system, almost all crimes are defined and prosecuted under state law.
Crimes with an interstate or foreign dimension and crimes with a federal Constitutional dimension tend to become a federal responsibility.
CHINESE NATIONAL PLEADS GUILTY TO ECONOMIC ESPIONAGE AND THEFT OF TRADE SECRETS
The federal government defends copyrights as a federally granted property right.
In a sense, all property can be defined as a set of rights and privileges the state is willing to defend. Take your patent case into court and win and the federal government will enforce the judgment.
The Secret Service was organized to fight counterfeiting.
Surprising, isn't it, that the federal government should give a damn about such mundane things as the value of the currency, economic development, and a favorable balance of trade?
The animated feature from Pixar or Dreamworks will cost about $200 million to produce and if succesful may lead to a billion-dollar global franchise like "Shrek."
Clean industry. Skilled labor. High tech.
There is the potential political bonus of a viable cultural export. The US has for generations has been a net exporter of culture.
All of which implies that the entertainment industry will continue to get a hearing whether the geek likes it or not.
Why? Because the *AA's are criminal organizations, and copyright is and never will be a property right, but since we don't have the money to enforce the Constitution (we being the normal people)... corporations will assfuck us while the government holds us down.
In Article 6 the Constitution and Treaties made under the authority of the United States are defined as the supreme law of the land.
Legislation passed to implement a treaty doesn't need any other authority than the treaty itself. Meaning that the Congress can legally bring US copyright laws into compliance with international standards.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, known as the Copyright Clause, empowers the United States Congress:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
The Founders were allergic to imposing policy decisions on the future Congress and Executive.
That is why the federal Constitution is an essentially structural document condensed to a bare 7,500 words and the Alabama state constitution clocks up 357,157 words.
"Limited times" means whatever the Congress and Executive agree it should mean. No more and no less.
Copyrights can be freely traded or sold. Copyright can be inherited. Income from copyrights can be taxed. The market value and legal ownership of a copyight has meaning in many situations.
Tresspassers can be prosecuted under both civil and criminal law.
This sure as hell looks like property to me.
The "AAs" are trade associations.
They are effective because they have organization, discipline and resources. They are effective because their members are economically significant in states like California, New York, and so on.
The production budget of a Pixar or Dreamworks feature is $200 million. Sequels may take that --- essentially local --- investment to $1 billion dollars.
If they ignore you, the sense of the law erodes. If they arrest you, you become a martyr. Either way you win.
Or maybe you just go to jail when the Dotcom bubble bursts.
A conviction against Kim Schmitz (or one of the other listed MegaUpload associates) means that more than $175 million stashed away in 64 bank accounts around the world becomes U.S. government property.
Some of the automobiles listed for forfeiture include an amazing mix of exotic vehicles:
2008 Rolls-Royce Phantom Drop Head Coupe
2010 Maserati GranCabrio
16 various modern Mercedes-Benz vehicles
(including many CLK and CL series)
1989 Lamborghini LM002
1959 Cadillac Series 62 convertible
1957 Cadillac El Dorado
Harley Davidson motorcycle
Von Dutch Kustom motor bike
Two 2010 Mini Cooper S coupes
2010 Sea-Doo GTX jet ski
What MegaUpload founders stand to lose
All those people who dare opposing unjust laws! They are just provoking an unreasonable response! The world would have been a much better place if that Rosa Parks had just sat in the back of the bus, like she was told.
There was nothing anonymous about Rosa Parks.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott was successful because it was backed by the bus company's paying customers. The geek pursuing his free movie fix has no such leverage.
The boycott gained a broader legitimacy because blacks were willing to risk put their jobs at risk --- not to mention the uncertainties of the Montgomery lock-up.
There would be worse to come:
After the boycott was over, and the buses in Montgomery were desegregated, occasionally buses would get ambushed and shot at. One such shooting, on January 10, 1957, was followed by bombings at Montgomery's Bell Street Baptist Church, the Mount Olive Baptist Church, the Hutchinson Street Baptist Church, and the First Baptist Church and its parsonage
First Baptist Church (Montgomery, Alabama)
The Montgomery boycott dragged on for 381 days. It takes that kind of staying power to win any meaningful victories in politics.
The more I read about this the more I believe it's all a cover up by the government or some other pro SOPA force.
The wonderful thing about a conspiracy theory is that it can made to fit any set of facts.
Is that 100,000 tons at Earth-normal gravity or at this much smaller planet's (although possibly denser?) gravity?
Is this anything worth worrying about when no matter how you calculate the loss the planet will still be around for at least another two or three hundred million years?
Bespoke your heart out on Sketchup, send it to be validated by a building code / physics model, and off to the printer. A room shaped like Einstein's hollowed out head? A bas-relief tribute to your dog on the living room wall? No problem!
Until you try to finance the project.
Until you put your wildly eccentric house up for sale.
Then you will discover very quickly that no one else shares you enthusiasm for architectural follies.
Concrete houses was Edison's great dream a hundred years ago; cheap and mass producable.
They never caught on then. Why would we think they'd catch on now?
Edison displayed a model of an attractive and plausible middle class home --- which was too expensive and complex to build. The final design was charmless and dispiriting.
The simplest sort of remodeling or repair work was difficult.
WHY DOLORES CHUMSKY HATES THOMAS EDISON
Hmm. I can see the trolls are multiplying on /. again. Is it because it's an election year, or did a bunch of 14 year-olds guess the password to their parent's AOL account?
That insults both the 14 year old and AOL ---
which as I remember it from the dial-up days tended to keep things civil.
Well guess what: at each and every job interview I've been to, I lied and pretended I enjoyed working with others, when in reality I like being left the fuck alone to do a good job.
The obvious questions that come to mind are how many jobs and how many interviews? Is all that BS you've been peddling getting what you need and what you want?
And this, boys and girls, is how we end up with Windows 7/64 guzzling two gigs of memory after start-up.
RAM is there to be used, not hoarded.
In short, Windows 7 (unlike XP and earlier Windows versions) goes by the philosophy that empty RAM is wasted RAM and tries to keep it as full as possible, without impacting performance.
Windows 7 memory usage: What's the best way to measure? [Feb 25, 2010]
Never once did a real major OEM offer up a PC preloaded with Linux at a price advantage over Windows.
Walmart with a reputation for ruthless bargaining with suppliers, enormous purchasing power and absolute dominance of big box retail spent about ten years trying to deliver a credible ---competitive --- OEM Linux alternative to OEM Windows.
Nothing ever came of it.
The economies of scale in OEM Windows with an installed base of perhaps one billion units were devastating.
Nobody even sold a dual boot, even as an option. That wouldn't have even cost them anything.
You have got to be kidding.
Boot Camp is an admisssion that you have to support Windows in the corporate market.
Retailers hate maintaining expensive dual inventory and support structures for the convenience of perhaps one percent of their customers.
Ordinary users don't want to maintain two operating systems, two software libraries and two skill sets.
Dual boot into Linux?
Doesn't sell worth s***t.
In what way is this different to any other form of extorting money with menaces?
Microsoft licenses a patent portfolio to the richest, most powerful and most secretive manufacturing cartels on the planet.
Enterprises which collectively have centuries of experience in playing corporate hardball. Enterprises which --- in all probabilty ---- have been licensing and cross-licensing tech with Microsoft for some thirty years now.
Google doesn't raise a finger in protest ---- but the Geek --- in his impotence --- goes ballistic.
Mostly because office software is so ridiculously crufty that the only way to make it more usable is by offering *less* features.
The office suite is complex because it is put into daily use by tens or hundreds of millions of clerical workers, each with their own requirements and skill sets. Full time staff. Office Temps. Senior Volunteers and so on.
He went so far as to say that everything's faster with a GUI, and we all know that isn't true.
It may be true for the geek who has mastered the grammar and syntax of the command line or memorized all the keyboard shorcuts.
Is it Slash foward or Slash back?
The GUI will tell you --- maybe even show you --- "What Is Going To Happen Next."
It can and should give you a graceful line of retreat, more than one chance to recover from a mistake.
"Continue? Yes or No?"
"Undo This."
This all seems idiotic and totally the wrong direction to me, but there's no way of denying the fact that for whatever reason, Joe Sixpack prefers a more authoritarian and more proprietary approach to the internet, as opposed to a more equal/peer-to-peer and open-standard approach.
The proprietary product designed for the masses replaced jany number of argon-filled apps with clumsy UIs that only the techie ever found easy to use.
Looking at all the writers who never won the Nobel Prize for Literature, I'd say Tolkien is in very good company.
Simply look at the writers who lost out in 1961:
Swedish reporter Andreas Ekstrom delved into 1961's previously classified documents on their release this week, to find the jury passed over names including Lawrence Durrell, Robert Frost, Graham Greene, EM Forster and Tolkien to come up with their eventual winner, Yugoslavian writer Ivo Andric.
Greene, who never won the Nobel, was 1961's runner-up, with Danish writer Karen Blixen, author of Out of Africa, coming in third.
a local thrift store had a compaq pentium I machine that booted up to a 98 bluescreen and wanted 100$, and some dumb shit bought it. Meanwhile across town at the habitat for humanity reuse center...they were selling 2ghz p4 pizza boxes for 5 bucks each, and they sat there for months
Because no one knew they were there for sale ---
while the thrift store has a daily walk-in trade and maybe a weekly add in the local shopping papers?
The only benefit that OLPC provided over commercial projects to sell low-cost computers was the open-source nature of Sugar OS specifically designed to teach children about how computers worked and how they could be programmed, thus teaching fishing instead of giving fish.
The only buyer for the OLPC is the third world education minister.
It is his job to decide whether it is more important to teach a kid how to program or to teach him how to read.
There may be not time enough to do both.
He has to think about how many of his kids he can realistically hope to place in advanced academic and vocational programs. He has to ask whether Sugar will prepare these students for the standard desktop and apps used in the higher grades.
Sure they can use Microsoft Word but would be stupefied if LibreOffice or Google Docs were put before them.
In any other conrtext, the geek would be claiming that anyone familiar with MS Office can be instantly productive in LibreOffice or Google Docs.
When a student consistently turns in well-written papers using Word and meaningful spreadsheets and charts when working in Excel I have to assume that his understanding of MS Office goes beyond memorizing its menus and keyboard shortcuts.
If an attractive lady(teacher, babysitter, whatever) approached me when I was 12 and asked me to have sex with her, and videotape it, I would have said, "fuck yeah" - especially if she plied me with a little booze.
...it would to this day have been one of the fondest days of my life.
Perhaps.
Or maybe you are just indulging yourself in an older man's fantasy of rape and seduction, with no real understanding of what the experience would have been like for a twelve year old boy.