Why would I switch? The last switch I made was from the Atari 8-bit and ST to 68k Macs and UNIX machines. Hell the only reason I did that is because it was quite clear Atari Corp decided that they didn't give a crap about us or even doing any real business in the US in the early 90's.
Current environment consists of a couple macs, a couple hackintoshs and two BSD servers. And an Atari 600XL cuz Star Raiders rules.
I have NEVER been dependent on MS Windows for anything. Except playing IL2-Sturmovik which runs in WINE now. Unfortunately the new IL2:Cliffs of Dover is too DRM-laden and restricted for me to stomach it. Say no to Steam. Say no to requiring an internet connection simply for antipiracy checks. Say no to forcing users to only be able to play in one online community that may decide the game servers aren't making enough money anymore and shut it all down.
And now even Windows is full of DRM-laden horseshit sucking up precious cycles.
I guess a lot of us who were around in computing during the 80's and early 90's were used to seeing a dozen wonderful, well-engineered (most were anyway) unique OS's and platforms so I find really weird the notion that people hold that anything that isn't Microsoft is an "alternative". The only place I've ever been forced to use Windows is work and eventually even there I ended up switching to BSD w/ WINE.
I think the MAIN problem is that most computer users entering the workplace these days think computing started with Windows 95 and the Pentium.
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And for the record, the Atari ST had great business apps including full-function desktop publishing, word processors and spreadsheets that were much more capable than the MS-DOS apps in common use at the time and GUI oriented. Predating MS Office by quite some time and offering more compelling features than Office for some time after that.
The ST was a lot like the early compact macs but typically shipped with more RAM standard, MUCH better graphics capabilities (for example it had color....512 of 'em and higher mono resolution), better sound hardware, cheaper standard peripherals and cables, joystick ports, a better keyboard, SCSI(ish) HDD controller, MIDI and a very hackable cartridge bus. It wasn't until the Mac Plus which was released a year or two after the ST that the Mac got SOME of these features (better keyboard, SCSI, more RAM). Atari pissed me off, they released awesome things that held the lead for a short time until they couldn't figure out what they wanted to do with it and the product would stagnate and become irrelevant. Badass engineers but they couldn't keep up the pace with bigger companies.
The ST could also "emulate" a mac with a mutant cartridge called Spectre GCR that you stuck mac ROMs in. Mac software typically ran better in this environment at slightly higher resolution than the mac. Could also emulate a PC with a more complex cartridge. Even funnier is that the ST performed better than the early macs, could emulate the early macs, had decent games and the price of an ST with a Spectre GCR mac emulator WAS CHEAPER THAN A MAC. The ST alone without Spectre GCR was like 1/3rd the price of the Macintosh.
Indeed. Doing it all server side just seems like cheating, somehow..
Especially for folks like me who live in rural areas with very poor coverage. Voice recognition on my android phone is essentially useless and every time I'm in a position I could use it, I usually can't so it goes ignored.
Sad considering I was doing fairly accurate speaker-dependent voice recognition on a 25Mhz Mac LC III with like 16MB of RAM.
Speaker-independent algorithms have gotten a lot better and could probably be squeezed onto a smartphone without offloading to a server I would think. It would likely have to be written in C w/ a bit of ARM assembler thrown in to be remotely efficient. Would likely be laughable trying such a thing purely running in Dalvik. The idea of running everything in a Java VM with a perfectly good Linux kernel under there sickens me. I refuse to believe running a everything as a bastardized Java VM instance is more battery efficient than well-written native code. I think portability is not as much of a goal for Android these days as I've only seen ARM-based devices in the wild.
I imagine heavy use of local voice recognition software would eat batteries pretty quick if you want to try dictation or something.
The advantage of Google and Apple's approach is likely accuracy with lots of sample data to compare to.
Wow, a whole 2% annual growth, that's just mind-blowing. Definitive proof that stealing music doesn't hurt anyone.
2% growth in an industry that large is really quite significant actually.
Say, what do you sell for a living? Cars? I'm one of the people that's been stealing cars off your lot. You're losing money? Bullshit! You're insured! And your cars suck anyway! And you're an asshole!
Totally different. If you brought raw materials and made an exact copy of that car, the car lot owner couldn't really say shit. Ford might be able to take action if I sold or distributed copies but they couldn't do squat otherwise. Pirating music involves physically stealing nothing. It is just a near-perfect reproduction created on the pirate's own equipment. More like counterfeiting than stealing. And it's likely a sale you wouldn't otherwise have anyway.
Sorry folks, here in Canada, my band is postponing our annual nationwide tour because larger venues are doing less and less live music in favour of DJ bullshit (which many of them play pirated music) so we're now competing with Juno award winners for 200-500 seat venues. We now have to book a year in advance to get the key venues to make the tour profitable.
That's not because of pirates, that's because people haven't been going to shows because douchebags like you have been openly hostile toward them for getting your music heard by others.
When you treat your entire customer base like untrustworthy criminals, they tend to not want to be your customer anymore. When you do it publicly and openly, they even tend to unite against you and cost you as much money as possible because hating you becomes a cool thing to do socially. And as part of the backlash more people find bittorrent clients.
The funny thing is that I don't really pirate music. I just stopped buying any when I realized how corrupt and twisted the music industry is and how little the artists are actually compensated.
Piracy may have increased some but the hassle DRM and other tactics have introduced have really made people uneasy about buying CD's if they can't use them however they want with their hardware.
Right now, the pirates have a much better DRM-free easily accessible product. Want to make more money? Give people what they want.
So you'll have to forgive me as I break ranks with other musicians who have placated piracy advocates. We're just being polite because our reputations require it. I've done over 100,000 miles of touring, I've seen members of hit bands looking for odds jobs because their back catalog doesn't sell,
Wow, sounds like those band members should have planned for financial difficulty a little better instead of assuming their art is better than it is and will sell. Never put your eggs into one basket. Either write crappy music that all the teeny boppers want to hear or write real music and be a starving artist. That's how it works.
I've seen the empty floors at Sony's NYC offices, I know excellent producers that are hopelessly in debt, and I know musicians that kick the shit out of current pop stars but can't get 1/10th the record deal they could have in the 80's.
You do not know what the fuck you're talking about.
Maybe because real music played on real instruments doesn't sell like it did in the 80's. It's not just piracy, people are actively boycotting the music industry. Cry me a river. Don't like it? Get a real f**king job.
And Sony deserves everything they have coming to them. Every ounce of it. They've screwed themselves as well as treated artists like shit for years.
I really doubt piracy now per capita is any worse than the heyday of recordable cassette tapes. Piracy is more a convenient scape goat for a poorly run industry that depends on ancient legislation and sleazily buying new legislation to remove our rights to secure
Unity is a problem in search of a solution. People assume that Linux is underused on the desktop because it's too hard to use which hasn't been the case for quite some time. It's not like such lame gimped interfaces haven't existed since the 80's..... anybody remember "At Ease" on the mac. Users hated it so much that developers think such environments should be the only interface on the machine. Environments like this work great in school computer labs but suck if you actually have a job to do.
They tried to make Linux appeal to grandma and in the process alienated their entire user base. The problem is grandma doesn't give a shit about Linux OR Windows and sees no benefit in trashing a working system to play with Linux.
People interested in Linux are NOT interested in a simple, plain, crippled, unconfigurable UI environment that is openly hostile toward power users. If they were they'd just use the Windows 7 license their machine came with.
Basically Ubuntu took every advantage Linux had over other operating systems and carefully hid it away. I don't run Linux because I'm too cheap for Windows, I run Linux/BSD because I like UNIX. When you take the UNIXy features away, you're left with a cheap Windows/mac knockoff with no real performance advantages and flaky application software that changes every 6 months at the whim of developers. Saying Windows is "expensive" is a joke because most users don't pay more than a couple bucks for that "free" copy that came with their machine. We do not need a "Windows alternative", we need a good OS. GNU/Linux WAS a good OS when the goal was to create a good free UNIX clone. When the goals switched to slapping together a Windows-like OS for grandma based on a free UNIX clone, things went downhill.
I've had good luck with open source OS's but generally open source desktop app software quality varies widely and the quality tends to depend on how interested a handful of folks are in keeping the project going in their spare time with whiny users pestering them for features. This is generally why I'm an OSX user on the desktop these days. UNIXy goodness plus solid desktop applications.
The general public cares nothing about operating systems or really even sees a reason to try another one, much less sees a reason to screw with disk partitioning they don't understand to set up a second environment that won't run any of their existing software without flaky emulation or a VM set up.
I also find it funny they call the environment "Unity" when it seems to have split the community in two.
At least it's not Unity or GNOME Shell. Like any other *NIX multiple DE's can be installed as well. I keep a lightweight WindowMaker session configured.
My point was the Atari 8-bit sitting next to it with hand-made upgrade PCB's soldered in which I still bash out 6502 asm on once in a while. Read carefully, it's a 600XL that came with 16KB of RAM and no monitor port. It now has 512K of bankswitched XRAM and 64K base. These machines had no suitable sockets for a RAM upgrade. Apparently YOU know nothing of 80's-style hackery. It also has an S-Video jack instead of just RF out now. It has an onboard Atari SIO->USB interface that I built.
And until you can point me to a MODERN machine that comes in KIT form, your analogy is purely nostalgic and dumb. And I do MAKE and CREATE things, I even have surface mount soldering equipment and a reflow oven. BUILDING implies pre-fabricated components so therefore my machine qualifies as homebuilt. If I had said "homebrew" or "homemade" you may have an argument but I think you're just out to prove what an arrogant little douche you are and play armchair badass. Also made most of the cables used to connect the various devices.
By your logic, your little Sinclair ZX-81 kit made you a pussy because REAL MEN use wirewrap and TTL to build processors. I doubt your old enough to ever remember the S100-bus CP/M boxes like the Altair, Cromemco, etc.
I know plenty about my hardware that runs OSX as well and had to go through great lengths to get most of it to actually function. Editing lots of XML property lists, chasing down what chipset is used in what component and actually hand-patching drivers in some cases.
OSX takes a LOT of effort to get running well on a PC, but the end result is worth it. In fact, it takes much more knowledge than most of you admin kiddie posers possess about low level intricacies of PCI, EFI and the underpinnings of OSX.
Until I see examples of your assembler code across 3 different architectures I'm calling bullshit on your wannabe-greybeard stance. I can produce several barring NDA issues.
My job isn't migrating overseas. I make about 40k working 2-4 hours a day on an as-I-feel-like-doing-something basis. I compete just fine. And I don't even have to step foot in a cubicle farm.
For the record I TAUGHT the knowledge you claim I don't have in a college setting. You sir, are an idiot who's jumped the gun.
I have a Macbook White (2009 - NVIDIA) and get some nerd cred....
then again my desktop is a homebuilt Core2 hackintosh with a serial VT420 as a second console. It also acts as a Disk emulator/fileserver/printserver for my Atari 8-bit (a 600XL) w/ 512K RAM expansion, S-Video port and IDE interface. Even have a 6502 assembler cross-compilation environment up and running in Eclipse.
Machine has several serial ports via a 4-port FTDI USB->serial box and I use them. The fact that it uses the FreeBSD userland for the most part makes things nice as well.
It also runs Logic well and typically has a MIDI controller and my Fender Mustang V digital tube modeling amp head plugged in via USB.
Some of us like OSX because we like UNIX -and- good commercial audio and graphics software. Native MS Office is nice too. Running OSX does NOT make you a nerd "poser". It means the spoiled, overpriveleged rich kids you know who begged daddy for a macbook pro are posers. It's a great highly hackable platform evolved from NeXTstep/OpenStep. It's UI-layer is much cooler than X11 as well. And it can run X11 apps nicely.... even comes with an X server that integrates into the native windowing system complete with 3D support.
The underpinnings aren't perfect but IMHO OSX is the ultimate desktop UNIX with good support from both commercial and open source developers. Unfortunately success commercially comes with the fact that idiots will want one too. I'm not sure I want "The Year of the Linux Desktop" because then Linux will start to suck more and more because everyone will demand a full-featured OS -AND- want it to be operable by a 2-yr-old with cerebral palsy without having to learn anything. Look at Metro. Look at Android. Look at Unity. For REAL users, all 3 are like handcuffs.
No, that's how you get them interested in HIGH-LEVEL programming. Not LOW-LEVEL programming and directly making the machine do something. Introducing them to binary, hex and basic computer science concepts AFTER showing them the level editor and lame scripting language is just going to convince them to never try to write a 3D engine, or learn efficient techniques for dealing with RAM, etc and you will get a deer-in-the-headlights look for most anything dealing with C++.
And yes, I've taught for a living.
The Home Computers were cool because you could make things happen by simply writing a byte to an appropriate memory address. Really killer things could be done with the Atari 8-bit chipset for example. The machines were simple enough that writing entire applications in Assembler was practical and encouraged.
Seriously if you want a PC to teach people cookie-cutter modern game programming with pre-written game engines get a cheap $75 Mini-ITX board. Personally, the fact that this board is capable of HW-accelerated OpenGL at all is incredible and good games could be written for it. Resource constrained environments are the best place to learn to write a game anyway I would think.
Sounds like you should be buying a mac, not a $25 home computer that runs Linux.
If it's supported out of the box by Linux, it's supported on the Raspberry Pi most likely. It sounds like you're not the target market. This is a simple machine designed specifically for kids and budding hackers to learn and experiment with such things. Not a replacement for your family PC, chances are that your kid needs Windows to run those goofy CD-ROMs with their textbook anyway.
Linux-compatible USB WiFi adapters not available in your area? Adding such components would drive up the price of the board to the point where you might as well buy a cheap chinese tablet that has those features already.
Think less PC, more Atari 8-bit. A cool, cheap mass-produced machine with a single port to attach peripherals. On the 8-bit it was SIO, here it's USB - it's modern replacement. I can't think of a single peripheral not available as a USB device.
I'm sure more RAM can be added with a different "PoP" module stacked on the CPU. If bigger ones aren't available yet, they will be. This thing is going to sell pretty damn well I think. Package-on-package....LOL.... reminds me of how a lot of people stacked DIPP's back in the day.
With a software stack written around this device it would perform great. OpenOffice would suck but an ARM-optimized office suite DESIGNED around severe RAM limitations would rock. CoD4 (if ported to ARM) would run like shit but a game written and designed for the limitations of the system could be phenomenal.
This isn't a PC, if you're expecting a PC you're better off spending another $50 and getting a Mini-ITX board. This is more like the "home computer revisited" with similar goals.
And the empire is obviously a derivative work from copyrighted Nazi documents and patented Nazi methodology and procedures. I would love to see Lucas just absolutely ass-raped in court. George is a douchenozzle.
That fact that more people in the past haven't told Lucas to go get f**ked and stand their ground is why things are as ridiculous as they are. When you can copyright object shapes and terms such as "Droid" and win in court, all hope is lost. It's gotten to the point where it's so insane, I just generally ignore modern copyright law. Doesn't mean I don't have morals and pirate everything I feel like however but in no way should stuff written over 30-40 years ago still be covered under copyright and the definition of "derivative work" should be looser and less vague. Technically EVERYTHING is a derivative work of SOMETHING.
Ummmm...... problem is that it's not us who get to pick the candidates. It's the wealthy elite belonging to a couple of clubs. Non-Republidem presidential candidates have been actively harassed and removed from the premises for even attempting to participate in debates. Happened to Michael Badnarik.
Secret societies and corporate backing/stringpulling have destroyed our form of government beyond repair. Corruption is visible and evident all the way down to the postal carriers. You will never remove the fungus without having ALL OF THEM dragged from their seats and prevented from ever returning. You would then have to make sure that anyone who owns stock, interest or receives funds from large megacorps or banks of any sort is denied public office for life. The question is what to do with the lawyers....... even mentioning my thoughts on this aspect is probably worth jail time.
LOL Black Death hasn't had a chance since we found a certain funky mold. Bioweapons potential probably little to laughable.
I'm sure the stuff in the bioweapons labs would eat Black Death for lunch before promptly turning their attention on your juicy nervous and immune systems before causing you to vomit, defecate, bleed and scream out of every orifice. All of the above. All at once.
The only use I could think of is to generate a 'cillin resistant version of the centuries old classic to help out some poor struggling pharmaceutical companies and doctors. If that ever actually came to be.... god help you if you're one of the lower-middle-class-scum too broke to spend 50% of your salary on insurance and slightly too rich to get MedicAid. But apparently according to some, once they start machine gunning all the mexican terrorists trying to cross the border, our health care costs will go down! They PROMISE!
Ummm.... with 36 CCD sensors and the CPU to process the stream of images from them.... I seriously doubt the engineer was dumb enough NOT to at least make provisions for placing an 802.11 chipset in there.
The only problem with 360 panoramas like this is that viewing it requires you to use some Quicktime-VR sort of setup that always looks bad with the corner distortion and awkward controls.
I imagine the "real" intended use of this is for oppressive police/military units to toss into an area to map the room and identify potential threats easily. Things like where people are in relation to windows, any exits, how many have we wounded so far, etc.... I really doubt this will be a successful consumer product but as a product to make killing consumers easier, safer and more efficient I think it'll sell quite well.
Just toss it in a room and you've got the picture. Toss a grenade first and you get to see how effective it was without potentially gaining a third nostril in the process. Who cares about "corner distortion" and such in this situation. I imagine a modern dual or quadcore laptop would be potent enough to stitch the panorama together incredibly rapidly.
A neat toy I guess but I'm rapidly understanding the luddite mentality after the last few years and several spooky tech advances.
AKA The Atari ATW800.... based on INMOS Transputer RISC CPU's. Very cool, really wanted one when I was a kid. Figured they were vapor until years later when a few started popping up here and there on eBay.
Never had a Jaguar but always wanted one. I grew up with the Atari XL/XE-series and the ST though.
Wouldn't it make better sense to take the man-hours and dollars you're investing into a pipe-dream lunar domino's plan and put that money toward making sure you have some customers to serve there one day? Be an awful lonely store otherwise. Last I checked, moon rocks don't eat pizza.
From what I recall we couldn't make orbit much less the moon with current technology that's commissioned, built and ready to go. Unmothballing Apollo ain't gonna happen either. Wish it would....a slightly modernized Apollo would be a dream come true.... getting to ride to the moon on it would be ALL of my dreams coming true.
Heh I hope you're joking..... that's as bad as all the monkeys who wouldn't buy the Amiga or Atari ST because Lotus 1-2-3 and DOS wouldn't run without add-on hardware.
Quantum computers don't need to be programmable; they're best suited for solving a small set of specific problems.
The same things were said about the first electromechanical and electronic computers due to the extreme costs involved and limited initial interest commercially. I'm sure good old Konrad Zuse and Turing had to do an awful lot of convincing to sell people on the idea of funding such pipedreams. Remember, ENIAC was only programmable in an extremely limited fashion and didn't become truly "programmable" until much later and that program could only be read-only.
Quantum computing now looks like the stone age of early electronic computers and this argument between the need for or merits of various quantum memories is similar to old debates about the merits of drum memory, williams tube and mercury delay line memory systems back in the tube days.
Eventually a handful of companies or government agencies will decide they want a couple big experimental quantum computers and the tech will trickle down to the rest of us over the next 50 years. Whether we want it or not. Personally, I think the government has far more computing power than they ever should be trusted with as it is.
Don't consider x86 boxes other than maybe a 5150 or an XT something to be very nostalgic about but that's just me.
For my nostalgia fix I have various emulators for the Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, CP/M, PDP11, VAX, etc.... also have an upgraded Atari 800XL hooked up to the TV. Have a bunch of old DEC and Sun gear but most of it is put away these days.
Actually your "personal computer" these days has more in common with a mini or early UNIX workstation than it does any of the "home computers" such as the Atari 8-bit, C64, etc.
I was born in '82 but have a QBUS-based VAX I occasionally fire up. I didn't have a PC until 486's were cheap. I grew up with real computers with either MOS or Motorola CPU's. But the minicomputer era is every bit as interesting as the micro era. They just didn't have Star Raiders for the PDP11. I cut my teeth on home computers like the Atari 800 but large systems my parents couldn't afford still amazed me. Especially the early Sun Sparcstation at my father's work along with the massive Gould and Perkin Elmer systems.
I wish there was a little more steam behind recreating older architectures on expandable FPGA boards. I also wish copyrights weren't granted for longer periods than a typical language dialect lasts so these older relics could live forever instead of relying on bad scans of sales brochures and aging human memories that you'll probably also get sued for. And with the trend toward "recycling" (melting for scrap) old systems instead of true recycling (find the damn thing a use) is going to further ensure the genesis of a large piece of our culture will be lost to the ages.
I don't know about you but I don't bow to anyone and yet still have an income and basically do whatever I want. I have NEVER hesitated to stand up for my rights in any situation. Made school pretty miserable. Made employment tough to stomach at times until I decided to have a go at running a business. It makes life harder but I can honestly say I've never had to kiss ass for anything I have nor do I owe anyone anything. You probably have a nicer car than I do and better health benefits but at least I don't have to live on my knees. Maybe martyrdom has its benefits.
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Why would I switch? The last switch I made was from the Atari 8-bit and ST to 68k Macs and UNIX machines. Hell the only reason I did that is because it was quite clear Atari Corp decided that they didn't give a crap about us or even doing any real business in the US in the early 90's.
Current environment consists of a couple macs, a couple hackintoshs and two BSD servers. And an Atari 600XL cuz Star Raiders rules.
I have NEVER been dependent on MS Windows for anything. Except playing IL2-Sturmovik which runs in WINE now. Unfortunately the new IL2:Cliffs of Dover is too DRM-laden and restricted for me to stomach it. Say no to Steam. Say no to requiring an internet connection simply for antipiracy checks. Say no to forcing users to only be able to play in one online community that may decide the game servers aren't making enough money anymore and shut it all down.
And now even Windows is full of DRM-laden horseshit sucking up precious cycles.
I guess a lot of us who were around in computing during the 80's and early 90's were used to seeing a dozen wonderful, well-engineered (most were anyway) unique OS's and platforms so I find really weird the notion that people hold that anything that isn't Microsoft is an "alternative". The only place I've ever been forced to use Windows is work and eventually even there I ended up switching to BSD w/ WINE.
I think the MAIN problem is that most computer users entering the workplace these days think computing started with Windows 95 and the Pentium.
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And for the record, the Atari ST had great business apps including full-function desktop publishing, word processors and spreadsheets that were much more capable than the MS-DOS apps in common use at the time and GUI oriented. Predating MS Office by quite some time and offering more compelling features than Office for some time after that.
The ST was a lot like the early compact macs but typically shipped with more RAM standard, MUCH better graphics capabilities (for example it had color....512 of 'em and higher mono resolution), better sound hardware, cheaper standard peripherals and cables, joystick ports, a better keyboard, SCSI(ish) HDD controller, MIDI and a very hackable cartridge bus. It wasn't until the Mac Plus which was released a year or two after the ST that the Mac got SOME of these features (better keyboard, SCSI, more RAM). Atari pissed me off, they released awesome things that held the lead for a short time until they couldn't figure out what they wanted to do with it and the product would stagnate and become irrelevant. Badass engineers but they couldn't keep up the pace with bigger companies.
The ST could also "emulate" a mac with a mutant cartridge called Spectre GCR that you stuck mac ROMs in. Mac software typically ran better in this environment at slightly higher resolution than the mac. Could also emulate a PC with a more complex cartridge. Even funnier is that the ST performed better than the early macs, could emulate the early macs, had decent games and the price of an ST with a Spectre GCR mac emulator WAS CHEAPER THAN A MAC. The ST alone without Spectre GCR was like 1/3rd the price of the Macintosh.
Indeed. Doing it all server side just seems like cheating, somehow ..
Especially for folks like me who live in rural areas with very poor coverage. Voice recognition on my android phone is essentially useless and every time I'm in a position I could use it, I usually can't so it goes ignored.
Sad considering I was doing fairly accurate speaker-dependent voice recognition on a 25Mhz Mac LC III with like 16MB of RAM.
Speaker-independent algorithms have gotten a lot better and could probably be squeezed onto a smartphone without offloading to a server I would think. It would likely have to be written in C w/ a bit of ARM assembler thrown in to be remotely efficient. Would likely be laughable trying such a thing purely running in Dalvik. The idea of running everything in a Java VM with a perfectly good Linux kernel under there sickens me. I refuse to believe running a everything as a bastardized Java VM instance is more battery efficient than well-written native code. I think portability is not as much of a goal for Android these days as I've only seen ARM-based devices in the wild.
I imagine heavy use of local voice recognition software would eat batteries pretty quick if you want to try dictation or something.
The advantage of Google and Apple's approach is likely accuracy with lots of sample data to compare to.
Wow, a whole 2% annual growth, that's just mind-blowing. Definitive proof that stealing music doesn't hurt anyone.
2% growth in an industry that large is really quite significant actually.
Say, what do you sell for a living? Cars? I'm one of the people that's been stealing cars off your lot. You're losing money? Bullshit! You're insured! And your cars suck anyway! And you're an asshole!
Totally different. If you brought raw materials and made an exact copy of that car, the car lot owner couldn't really say shit. Ford might be able to take action if I sold or distributed copies but they couldn't do squat otherwise. Pirating music involves physically stealing nothing. It is just a near-perfect reproduction created on the pirate's own equipment. More like counterfeiting than stealing. And it's likely a sale you wouldn't otherwise have anyway.
Sorry folks, here in Canada, my band is postponing our annual nationwide tour because larger venues are doing less and less live music in favour of DJ bullshit (which many of them play pirated music) so we're now competing with Juno award winners for 200-500 seat venues. We now have to book a year in advance to get the key venues to make the tour profitable.
That's not because of pirates, that's because people haven't been going to shows because douchebags like you have been openly hostile toward them for getting your music heard by others.
When you treat your entire customer base like untrustworthy criminals, they tend to not want to be your customer anymore. When you do it publicly and openly, they even tend to unite against you and cost you as much money as possible because hating you becomes a cool thing to do socially. And as part of the backlash more people find bittorrent clients.
The funny thing is that I don't really pirate music. I just stopped buying any when I realized how corrupt and twisted the music industry is and how little the artists are actually compensated.
Piracy may have increased some but the hassle DRM and other tactics have introduced have really made people uneasy about buying CD's if they can't use them however they want with their hardware.
Right now, the pirates have a much better DRM-free easily accessible product. Want to make more money? Give people what they want.
So you'll have to forgive me as I break ranks with other musicians who have placated piracy advocates. We're just being polite because our reputations require it. I've done over 100,000 miles of touring, I've seen members of hit bands looking for odds jobs because their back catalog doesn't sell,
Wow, sounds like those band members should have planned for financial difficulty a little better instead of assuming their art is better than it is and will sell. Never put your eggs into one basket. Either write crappy music that all the teeny boppers want to hear or write real music and be a starving artist. That's how it works.
I've seen the empty floors at Sony's NYC offices, I know excellent producers that are hopelessly in debt, and I know musicians that kick the shit out of current pop stars but can't get 1/10th the record deal they could have in the 80's.
You do not know what the fuck you're talking about.
Maybe because real music played on real instruments doesn't sell like it did in the 80's. It's not just piracy, people are actively boycotting the music industry. Cry me a river. Don't like it? Get a real f**king job.
And Sony deserves everything they have coming to them. Every ounce of it. They've screwed themselves as well as treated artists like shit for years.
I really doubt piracy now per capita is any worse than the heyday of recordable cassette tapes. Piracy is more a convenient scape goat for a poorly run industry that depends on ancient legislation and sleazily buying new legislation to remove our rights to secure
Sorry, meant "solution in search of a problem" in that first line.
Unity is a problem in search of a solution. People assume that Linux is underused on the desktop because it's too hard to use which hasn't been the case for quite some time. It's not like such lame gimped interfaces haven't existed since the 80's..... anybody remember "At Ease" on the mac. Users hated it so much that developers think such environments should be the only interface on the machine. Environments like this work great in school computer labs but suck if you actually have a job to do.
They tried to make Linux appeal to grandma and in the process alienated their entire user base. The problem is grandma doesn't give a shit about Linux OR Windows and sees no benefit in trashing a working system to play with Linux.
People interested in Linux are NOT interested in a simple, plain, crippled, unconfigurable UI environment that is openly hostile toward power users. If they were they'd just use the Windows 7 license their machine came with.
Basically Ubuntu took every advantage Linux had over other operating systems and carefully hid it away. I don't run Linux because I'm too cheap for Windows, I run Linux/BSD because I like UNIX. When you take the UNIXy features away, you're left with a cheap Windows/mac knockoff with no real performance advantages and flaky application software that changes every 6 months at the whim of developers. Saying Windows is "expensive" is a joke because most users don't pay more than a couple bucks for that "free" copy that came with their machine. We do not need a "Windows alternative", we need a good OS. GNU/Linux WAS a good OS when the goal was to create a good free UNIX clone. When the goals switched to slapping together a Windows-like OS for grandma based on a free UNIX clone, things went downhill.
I've had good luck with open source OS's but generally open source desktop app software quality varies widely and the quality tends to depend on how interested a handful of folks are in keeping the project going in their spare time with whiny users pestering them for features. This is generally why I'm an OSX user on the desktop these days. UNIXy goodness plus solid desktop applications.
The general public cares nothing about operating systems or really even sees a reason to try another one, much less sees a reason to screw with disk partitioning they don't understand to set up a second environment that won't run any of their existing software without flaky emulation or a VM set up.
I also find it funny they call the environment "Unity" when it seems to have split the community in two.
At least it's not Unity or GNOME Shell. Like any other *NIX multiple DE's can be installed as well. I keep a lightweight WindowMaker session configured.
My point was the Atari 8-bit sitting next to it with hand-made upgrade PCB's soldered in which I still bash out 6502 asm on once in a while. Read carefully, it's a 600XL that came with 16KB of RAM and no monitor port. It now has 512K of bankswitched XRAM and 64K base. These machines had no suitable sockets for a RAM upgrade. Apparently YOU know nothing of 80's-style hackery. It also has an S-Video jack instead of just RF out now. It has an onboard Atari SIO->USB interface that I built.
And until you can point me to a MODERN machine that comes in KIT form, your analogy is purely nostalgic and dumb. And I do MAKE and CREATE things, I even have surface mount soldering equipment and a reflow oven. BUILDING implies pre-fabricated components so therefore my machine qualifies as homebuilt. If I had said "homebrew" or "homemade" you may have an argument but I think you're just out to prove what an arrogant little douche you are and play armchair badass. Also made most of the cables used to connect the various devices.
By your logic, your little Sinclair ZX-81 kit made you a pussy because REAL MEN use wirewrap and TTL to build processors. I doubt your old enough to ever remember the S100-bus CP/M boxes like the Altair, Cromemco, etc.
I know plenty about my hardware that runs OSX as well and had to go through great lengths to get most of it to actually function. Editing lots of XML property lists, chasing down what chipset is used in what component and actually hand-patching drivers in some cases.
OSX takes a LOT of effort to get running well on a PC, but the end result is worth it. In fact, it takes much more knowledge than most of you admin kiddie posers possess about low level intricacies of PCI, EFI and the underpinnings of OSX.
Until I see examples of your assembler code across 3 different architectures I'm calling bullshit on your wannabe-greybeard stance. I can produce several barring NDA issues.
My job isn't migrating overseas. I make about 40k working 2-4 hours a day on an as-I-feel-like-doing-something basis. I compete just fine. And I don't even have to step foot in a cubicle farm.
For the record I TAUGHT the knowledge you claim I don't have in a college setting. You sir, are an idiot who's jumped the gun.
I have a Macbook White (2009 - NVIDIA) and get some nerd cred....
then again my desktop is a homebuilt Core2 hackintosh with a serial VT420 as a second console. It also acts as a Disk emulator/fileserver/printserver for my Atari 8-bit (a 600XL) w/ 512K RAM expansion, S-Video port and IDE interface. Even have a 6502 assembler cross-compilation environment up and running in Eclipse.
Machine has several serial ports via a 4-port FTDI USB->serial box and I use them. The fact that it uses the FreeBSD userland for the most part makes things nice as well.
It also runs Logic well and typically has a MIDI controller and my Fender Mustang V digital tube modeling amp head plugged in via USB.
Some of us like OSX because we like UNIX -and- good commercial audio and graphics software. Native MS Office is nice too. Running OSX does NOT make you a nerd "poser". It means the spoiled, overpriveleged rich kids you know who begged daddy for a macbook pro are posers. It's a great highly hackable platform evolved from NeXTstep/OpenStep. It's UI-layer is much cooler than X11 as well. And it can run X11 apps nicely.... even comes with an X server that integrates into the native windowing system complete with 3D support.
The underpinnings aren't perfect but IMHO OSX is the ultimate desktop UNIX with good support from both commercial and open source developers. Unfortunately success commercially comes with the fact that idiots will want one too. I'm not sure I want "The Year of the Linux Desktop" because then Linux will start to suck more and more because everyone will demand a full-featured OS -AND- want it to be operable by a 2-yr-old with cerebral palsy without having to learn anything. Look at Metro. Look at Android. Look at Unity. For REAL users, all 3 are like handcuffs.
Why not focus on funding the construction and launching of a spacecraft worth slapping a tractor beam ON first.
No, that's how you get them interested in HIGH-LEVEL programming. Not LOW-LEVEL programming and directly making the machine do something. Introducing them to binary, hex and basic computer science concepts AFTER showing them the level editor and lame scripting language is just going to convince them to never try to write a 3D engine, or learn efficient techniques for dealing with RAM, etc and you will get a deer-in-the-headlights look for most anything dealing with C++.
And yes, I've taught for a living.
The Home Computers were cool because you could make things happen by simply writing a byte to an appropriate memory address. Really killer things could be done with the Atari 8-bit chipset for example. The machines were simple enough that writing entire applications in Assembler was practical and encouraged.
Seriously if you want a PC to teach people cookie-cutter modern game programming with pre-written game engines get a cheap $75 Mini-ITX board. Personally, the fact that this board is capable of HW-accelerated OpenGL at all is incredible and good games could be written for it. Resource constrained environments are the best place to learn to write a game anyway I would think.
Sounds like you should be buying a mac, not a $25 home computer that runs Linux.
If it's supported out of the box by Linux, it's supported on the Raspberry Pi most likely. It sounds like you're not the target market. This is a simple machine designed specifically for kids and budding hackers to learn and experiment with such things. Not a replacement for your family PC, chances are that your kid needs Windows to run those goofy CD-ROMs with their textbook anyway.
Linux-compatible USB WiFi adapters not available in your area? Adding such components would drive up the price of the board to the point where you might as well buy a cheap chinese tablet that has those features already.
Think less PC, more Atari 8-bit. A cool, cheap mass-produced machine with a single port to attach peripherals. On the 8-bit it was SIO, here it's USB - it's modern replacement. I can't think of a single peripheral not available as a USB device.
I'm sure more RAM can be added with a different "PoP" module stacked on the CPU. If bigger ones aren't available yet, they will be. This thing is going to sell pretty damn well I think. Package-on-package....LOL.... reminds me of how a lot of people stacked DIPP's back in the day.
With a software stack written around this device it would perform great. OpenOffice would suck but an ARM-optimized office suite DESIGNED around severe RAM limitations would rock. CoD4 (if ported to ARM) would run like shit but a game written and designed for the limitations of the system could be phenomenal.
This isn't a PC, if you're expecting a PC you're better off spending another $50 and getting a Mini-ITX board. This is more like the "home computer revisited" with similar goals.
And the empire is obviously a derivative work from copyrighted Nazi documents and patented Nazi methodology and procedures. I would love to see Lucas just absolutely ass-raped in court. George is a douchenozzle.
That fact that more people in the past haven't told Lucas to go get f**ked and stand their ground is why things are as ridiculous as they are. When you can copyright object shapes and terms such as "Droid" and win in court, all hope is lost. It's gotten to the point where it's so insane, I just generally ignore modern copyright law. Doesn't mean I don't have morals and pirate everything I feel like however but in no way should stuff written over 30-40 years ago still be covered under copyright and the definition of "derivative work" should be looser and less vague. Technically EVERYTHING is a derivative work of SOMETHING.
Ummmm...... problem is that it's not us who get to pick the candidates. It's the wealthy elite belonging to a couple of clubs. Non-Republidem presidential candidates have been actively harassed and removed from the premises for even attempting to participate in debates. Happened to Michael Badnarik.
Secret societies and corporate backing/stringpulling have destroyed our form of government beyond repair. Corruption is visible and evident all the way down to the postal carriers. You will never remove the fungus without having ALL OF THEM dragged from their seats and prevented from ever returning. You would then have to make sure that anyone who owns stock, interest or receives funds from large megacorps or banks of any sort is denied public office for life. The question is what to do with the lawyers....... even mentioning my thoughts on this aspect is probably worth jail time.
LOL Black Death hasn't had a chance since we found a certain funky mold. Bioweapons potential probably little to laughable.
I'm sure the stuff in the bioweapons labs would eat Black Death for lunch before promptly turning their attention on your juicy nervous and immune systems before causing you to vomit, defecate, bleed and scream out of every orifice. All of the above. All at once.
The only use I could think of is to generate a 'cillin resistant version of the centuries old classic to help out some poor struggling pharmaceutical companies and doctors. If that ever actually came to be.... god help you if you're one of the lower-middle-class-scum too broke to spend 50% of your salary on insurance and slightly too rich to get MedicAid. But apparently according to some, once they start machine gunning all the mexican terrorists trying to cross the border, our health care costs will go down! They PROMISE!
Ummm.... with 36 CCD sensors and the CPU to process the stream of images from them.... I seriously doubt the engineer was dumb enough NOT to at least make provisions for placing an 802.11 chipset in there.
The only problem with 360 panoramas like this is that viewing it requires you to use some Quicktime-VR sort of setup that always looks bad with the corner distortion and awkward controls.
I imagine the "real" intended use of this is for oppressive police/military units to toss into an area to map the room and identify potential threats easily. Things like where people are in relation to windows, any exits, how many have we wounded so far, etc.... I really doubt this will be a successful consumer product but as a product to make killing consumers easier, safer and more efficient I think it'll sell quite well.
Just toss it in a room and you've got the picture. Toss a grenade first and you get to see how effective it was without potentially gaining a third nostril in the process. Who cares about "corner distortion" and such in this situation. I imagine a modern dual or quadcore laptop would be potent enough to stitch the panorama together incredibly rapidly.
A neat toy I guess but I'm rapidly understanding the luddite mentality after the last few years and several spooky tech advances.
You jest but Atari really was working on a deskside "supercomputer"....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Abaq
AKA The Atari ATW800.... based on INMOS Transputer RISC CPU's. Very cool, really wanted one when I was a kid. Figured they were vapor until years later when a few started popping up here and there on eBay.
Never had a Jaguar but always wanted one. I grew up with the Atari XL/XE-series and the ST though.
Wouldn't it make better sense to take the man-hours and dollars you're investing into a pipe-dream lunar domino's plan and put that money toward making sure you have some customers to serve there one day? Be an awful lonely store otherwise. Last I checked, moon rocks don't eat pizza.
From what I recall we couldn't make orbit much less the moon with current technology that's commissioned, built and ready to go. Unmothballing Apollo ain't gonna happen either. Wish it would....a slightly modernized Apollo would be a dream come true.... getting to ride to the moon on it would be ALL of my dreams coming true.
Heh I hope you're joking..... that's as bad as all the monkeys who wouldn't buy the Amiga or Atari ST because Lotus 1-2-3 and DOS wouldn't run without add-on hardware.
Quantum computers don't need to be programmable; they're best suited for solving a small set of specific problems.
The same things were said about the first electromechanical and electronic computers due to the extreme costs involved and limited initial interest commercially. I'm sure good old Konrad Zuse and Turing had to do an awful lot of convincing to sell people on the idea of funding such pipedreams. Remember, ENIAC was only programmable in an extremely limited fashion and didn't become truly "programmable" until much later and that program could only be read-only.
Quantum computing now looks like the stone age of early electronic computers and this argument between the need for or merits of various quantum memories is similar to old debates about the merits of drum memory, williams tube and mercury delay line memory systems back in the tube days.
Eventually a handful of companies or government agencies will decide they want a couple big experimental quantum computers and the tech will trickle down to the rest of us over the next 50 years. Whether we want it or not. Personally, I think the government has far more computing power than they ever should be trusted with as it is.
Is this coming from an official "Garbage Scow Captain"?
Speaking of which I can't believe the modern "Atari" trashed my favorite childhood game recently with that horribly s***ty remake.
Pentium Pro = "Simpler times"... um... k...
Don't consider x86 boxes other than maybe a 5150 or an XT something to be very nostalgic about but that's just me.
For my nostalgia fix I have various emulators for the Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, CP/M, PDP11, VAX, etc.... also have an upgraded Atari 800XL hooked up to the TV. Have a bunch of old DEC and Sun gear but most of it is put away these days.
Actually your "personal computer" these days has more in common with a mini or early UNIX workstation than it does any of the "home computers" such as the Atari 8-bit, C64, etc.
I was born in '82 but have a QBUS-based VAX I occasionally fire up. I didn't have a PC until 486's were cheap. I grew up with real computers with either MOS or Motorola CPU's. But the minicomputer era is every bit as interesting as the micro era. They just didn't have Star Raiders for the PDP11. I cut my teeth on home computers like the Atari 800 but large systems my parents couldn't afford still amazed me. Especially the early Sun Sparcstation at my father's work along with the massive Gould and Perkin Elmer systems.
I wish there was a little more steam behind recreating older architectures on expandable FPGA boards. I also wish copyrights weren't granted for longer periods than a typical language dialect lasts so these older relics could live forever instead of relying on bad scans of sales brochures and aging human memories that you'll probably also get sued for. And with the trend toward "recycling" (melting for scrap) old systems instead of true recycling (find the damn thing a use) is going to further ensure the genesis of a large piece of our culture will be lost to the ages.
I don't know about you but I don't bow to anyone and yet still have an income and basically do whatever I want. I have NEVER hesitated to stand up for my rights in any situation. Made school pretty miserable. Made employment tough to stomach at times until I decided to have a go at running a business. It makes life harder but I can honestly say I've never had to kiss ass for anything I have nor do I owe anyone anything. You probably have a nicer car than I do and better health benefits but at least I don't have to live on my knees. Maybe martyrdom has its benefits.