Uh... Prevented me being locked out, differently from situations like when Commodore died and took Amiga with it, or when IBM decided to drop OS/2?
If you ever invested time to learn and to program for a now-dead OS/API/whatever, you would know how it feels to face a closed door when it dies.
I think that Canonical has been in better situation than Mandriva... for years.
Also, there's the fact that Mandriva was always KDE-oriented, not Gnome.
Amiga programming was my job at the time and I think I only ever saw one of the 68040 Amigas in the real world. We certainly didn't buy any in our company.
Considering the constant "damn-Amiga yay-Atari ST" trolling of yours here, I wonder how bad you were as a programmer.
Other platforms and tech products would inspire similarly fanatical followings — most notably OS/2 and Linux
More revisionist bullshit on Slashdot. To set the record straight, Amiga users are nothing like Linux users. We weren't huge assholes. We were not obsessed with Free Software. We knew the shell was useful, but also knew a solid GUI was the future. We were in love with the hardware, not just the software.
Nah, let's be fair: fanatics of Amiga and OS/2 were really terrible.
Linux fanatics are manageable. I find Apple and BSD fanatics way more annoying.
BTW I've had Amigas up to an expanded A1200, PC with OS/2 2.0/2.1/3.0 and I've been using Linux as my main OS for years.
Re:Software patents and the death of the Amiga
on
The Amiga Turns 25
·
· Score: 1
It describes how Commodore lost a software patent fight over, believe it or not, blinking a cursor using XOR. They owed $10m as a result, and were also prohibited from bringing CD32 into the US. Since Commodore had bet large on the CD32, this was a fatal blow.
First time I hear that.
Any confirmation from an ex-Commodore engineer?
Commodore wanted it to be a 'serious' machine but it never stood a chance against IBM (eg. adding a hard disk to an Amiga and getting it to boot from it was a joke).
Yeah, it was to easy to setup it was a joke.
I remember installing the OS in A1200: boot the OS from floppy, click " install". Really hard.
Same thing with old hardware: A590 (hard disk + ram expansion) in an A500, same as above.
If they'd sold it on it's strengths it might have done better - ie. sell it to hacker types and compete with Atari/Nintendo's closed systems instead of taking on IBM.
I'm still not sure how Commodore managed to go from selling 50 million machines to bankruptcy in a couple of years.
Despite Commodore utter incompetence, it sold well because it was an excellent machine, expansible, with stereo sound, excellent video and a multitasking graphic OS.
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas
on
The Amiga Turns 25
·
· Score: 1
And (at least in the early days of the Amiga), don't forget the sound. Then again, before soundblaster cards, the bleeps and bloops of a PC speaker couldn't compare to a C64, let alone the Amiga...
Even when Sound Blaster appeared it was really bad. I had a Sound Blaster Pro and its PCM output was very noisy.
Only when Sound Blaster 16 appeared it began to sound "right", and only with 16bit output (I guess the 8bit output had the same circutry as old Sound Blasters?).
Not to mention that PCM back then output drained a lot of CPU.
And even during Sound Blaster 16 era, those cheaper Sound Blaster-compatible cards people bought sound horrible.
Oh, and when installing the sound card you had to set up the IRQs correctly, otherwise the PC would lock up while playing sounds.
I remember that each single PC game came with its own "sound setup" you had to configure. That was nightmarish, but PC users were used to that and found that "normal".
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas
on
The Amiga Turns 25
·
· Score: 1
Towards the end of the Amiga's lifetime the PC had 386 CPUs, VGA graphics and Soundblasters whereas the Amiga had stood still. Even if you managed to attach a hard disk to the stupid edge connector it still needed a floppy disk to bootstrap it.
The Amiga could do fancy scrolling effects but at the end of the day it was really only 16 color graphics in a plasticky box with no real sign that it was evolving into anything better.
If you stood it side by side with a PC in 1987 it was obvious which of the two was going to 'win'.
You're not just a troll, you're a liar.
Floppy disk boot was required only with ancient rom versions.
Even the oldest Amiga, the A1000, was able to display 4096 colors simultaneously.
PC in 1987 was mostly CGA with some people using EGA. It used DOS, was expensive and its sound was worse than of a 8-bit computer.
It was fun to write 'demos' on them though...
(So long as you had an Atari ST at the side to edit/assemble the 68000 code - using AmigaOS for work was a nasty experience)
An Atari ST troll here? Go back to the 1980s, loser.
Take a look at the programming language shootout. The C programs usually win the contest, but they do it by doing crazy things like looking up the cache size of the CPU and implementing their own version of malloc to fit a page size. The run of the mill C program is not like that.
For many or even most tasks stability and security is more important. Other languages provide those properties better than C.
That's an exaggeration, there's no need to check cache/page sizes in order to implement C code aware of such limitations. The good thing is that you can do that, and pretty much everything, if you need to.
About "cool features" that C does not have, frankly, many times it's more an issue of modularizing your code than the language saving your ass.
How many times I see spaghetti code written in a high-level language and the oh-so-cool-features did not help preventing that. Instead we get bad and mammoth-heavy code.
Even the best language cannot save a bad programmer.
you could say the same thing about software that calls functions in a GPL library, does software that dynamically links against a GPL library have to be GPL? Its calling functions in defined in GPL code.
Yes, if you're dynamically linking against a GPL library, and if you distribute your code, it must be under GPL.
That's why there's LGPL (Library GPL), which allows distribution of software which dynamically links with such code to be under a different license.
Something philosophically similar which could be created is some sort of "weird arch" Linux for code debugging purpuses.
Like something with 16bit chars and ints, non-0 NULLs... Perhaps running under an emulated invented weird architecture with strange byte order (non-LSB/MSB) and weird alignment issues.
I wonder how many software would break.
If you have a parallel port, an adapter is trivial to build for old joysticks using only passive components.
There are Linux drivers for such adapters. I guess there are drivers for Windows aswell.
hat's all nice and stuff, but many people (myself included) believe that they went too far and, basically, criminals are being treated like defenceless babies.
Fuck you. No, really...fuck you.
Such a valuable argument from someone too coward to even show his/her nickname here.
It is not possible to go too far in that direction. You take away just enough rights to prevent an anarchist nightmare, but no more. It's still evil that we must take away those rights, but the few assholes who want to hurt others for personal gain make it necessary to do so. Still, it is always very, very important that you're always aware that every law, regardless of how well-intentioned, causes you to slide a bit more into the slippery slope towards tyranny. So, when absolutely necessary in order to protect your society's way of life, you do it. Never do it just because some people are getting away with things you don't think they should...the price you're paying isn't worth it.
Look at you!
Do you know the Brazilian Laws? Do you have experience dealing with those laws?
Did you ever fought (like taking legal risks or even risking your neck) against something wrong?
You sound like those indoctrinated left-wing youngsters who believe in absolute truths.
Your political pamphlet-like text really shows.
Do you have the slightlest idea what is, like, putting your feet in the Federal Public Ministry to denounce financial corruption against people who can do you real harm?
Well, I do. And not only that.
Meanwhile, what were you doing? Rooting for Brazil in some Footbal World Cup game like 99,9% of brazilians?
Yeah, that - and your forum posts - helped mankind a lot. Thanks kiddo.
Grow up! Get some experience from the real world, then come back.
Because, really, it's way too easy to judge other people using a left-wing dogma.
Someone modded the parent "flamebait" but that's an interesting point IMO.
The "problem" in Brazil is that, even if you're willing to do thing in a not-quite-right way, that's seldom viable in practice - specially in high profile cases with lots of expensive lawyers.
Why is that? The current Brazilian Constitution (created in 1988) and several key laws give lots of rights to the accused ones.
That's all nice and stuff, but many people (myself included) believe that they went too far and, basically, criminals are being treated like defenceless babies.
One thing you can hear about the Federal Constitution is that it was created "under the (left-wing) political prisoner syndrome". That is, back in 1988 the politicians wanted to avoid human rights abuses like the ones from the 1960s and 1970s (during the militar government), but (though well intended) they went too far.
The result is that it made criminal prosecution very hard in Brazil.
I'm guessing there's laws against it in the U.S. too, that didn't stop them. What makes you think they're beyond it in South America? The fact that you live there, perhaps? Quite narcissistic, but that seems to be the norm for Brazilians.
It seems that, in your opinion, all south american countries are barbaric lands where no laws are to be taken seriously.
That's incredibly arrogant of yours. Because of things like that, the rest of the World put all US citizens (including the good ones) in the same basket and call them assholes.
Even you completely disregard the morality (or immorality) of laws, good/bad/weak/silly laws are to be enforced and there are practical issues:
If they torture the guy in order to obtain the information, the next day that bastard will make a public scandal, cry his human rights were violated etc, and his lawyers will invoke every conceiveable law and the process will stall, badly.
Then his lawyers will spread doubt about any other evidence previously collected. They will make a party out of it and, in the end, the guy may be considered innocent.
So, even if you're willing to torture the guy, it's not practical.
Who would drop $15 on a CD just to see if it was god or not?
Yes, I wouldn't pay just to find out if it was god or not. I really don't care if they put Vishnu in a cd case. I mean he's one of many. I feel like I'd have to buy a lot of them to collect the whole set. But, if it was God, in there? There's only One, so that might be less expensive a proposition. I don't know I might. Depends on the odds. Do on out of every ten CD's contain God, or one out of every Billion?
Would yout want business with a god that can be contained inside a ~1GB plastic disc?
Slashdot Mirror
"What has freedom ever done for me"
Uh... Prevented me being locked out, differently from situations like when Commodore died and took Amiga with it, or when IBM decided to drop OS/2?
If you ever invested time to learn and to program for a now-dead OS/API/whatever, you would know how it feels to face a closed door when it dies.
I think that Canonical has been in better situation than Mandriva... for years.
Also, there's the fact that Mandriva was always KDE-oriented, not Gnome.
So Drupal is bad in your opinion.
What do you think is the "good" option instead?
The Atari ST had built-in hard disk support in 1985.
The A1200 wasn't launched until 1992 - much too late to make any difference.
Funny, I mentioned a A500 being expanded in GP post.
You obviously have serious issues understanding what people write.
Amiga programming was my job at the time and I think I only ever saw one of the 68040 Amigas in the real world. We certainly didn't buy any in our company.
Considering the constant "damn-Amiga yay-Atari ST" trolling of yours here, I wonder how bad you were as a programmer.
Other platforms and tech products would inspire similarly fanatical followings — most notably OS/2 and Linux
More revisionist bullshit on Slashdot. To set the record straight, Amiga users are nothing like Linux users. We weren't huge assholes. We were not obsessed with Free Software. We knew the shell was useful, but also knew a solid GUI was the future. We were in love with the hardware, not just the software.
Nah, let's be fair: fanatics of Amiga and OS/2 were really terrible.
Linux fanatics are manageable. I find Apple and BSD fanatics way more annoying.
BTW I've had Amigas up to an expanded A1200, PC with OS/2 2.0/2.1/3.0 and I've been using Linux as my main OS for years.
It describes how Commodore lost a software patent fight over, believe it or not, blinking a cursor using XOR. They owed $10m as a result, and were also prohibited from bringing CD32 into the US. Since Commodore had bet large on the CD32, this was a fatal blow.
First time I hear that.
Any confirmation from an ex-Commodore engineer?
Commodore wanted it to be a 'serious' machine but it never stood a chance against IBM (eg. adding a hard disk to an Amiga and getting it to boot from it was a joke).
Yeah, it was to easy to setup it was a joke.
I remember installing the OS in A1200: boot the OS from floppy, click " install". Really hard.
Same thing with old hardware: A590 (hard disk + ram expansion) in an A500, same as above.
If they'd sold it on it's strengths it might have done better - ie. sell it to hacker types and compete with Atari/Nintendo's closed systems instead of taking on IBM.
I'm still not sure how Commodore managed to go from selling 50 million machines to bankruptcy in a couple of years.
Despite Commodore utter incompetence, it sold well because it was an excellent machine, expansible, with stereo sound, excellent video and a multitasking graphic OS.
And (at least in the early days of the Amiga), don't forget the sound. Then again, before soundblaster cards, the bleeps and bloops of a PC speaker couldn't compare to a C64, let alone the Amiga...
Even when Sound Blaster appeared it was really bad. I had a Sound Blaster Pro and its PCM output was very noisy.
Only when Sound Blaster 16 appeared it began to sound "right", and only with 16bit output (I guess the 8bit output had the same circutry as old Sound Blasters?).
Not to mention that PCM back then output drained a lot of CPU.
And even during Sound Blaster 16 era, those cheaper Sound Blaster-compatible cards people bought sound horrible.
Oh, and when installing the sound card you had to set up the IRQs correctly, otherwise the PC would lock up while playing sounds.
I remember that each single PC game came with its own "sound setup" you had to configure. That was nightmarish, but PC users were used to that and found that "normal".
Towards the end of the Amiga's lifetime the PC had 386 CPUs, VGA graphics and Soundblasters whereas the Amiga had stood still. Even if you managed to attach a hard disk to the stupid edge connector it still needed a floppy disk to bootstrap it.
The Amiga could do fancy scrolling effects but at the end of the day it was really only 16 color graphics in a plasticky box with no real sign that it was evolving into anything better.
If you stood it side by side with a PC in 1987 it was obvious which of the two was going to 'win'.
You're not just a troll, you're a liar.
Floppy disk boot was required only with ancient rom versions.
Even the oldest Amiga, the A1000, was able to display 4096 colors simultaneously.
PC in 1987 was mostly CGA with some people using EGA. It used DOS, was expensive and its sound was worse than of a 8-bit computer.
It was fun to write 'demos' on them though...
(So long as you had an Atari ST at the side to edit/assemble the 68000 code - using AmigaOS for work was a nasty experience)
An Atari ST troll here? Go back to the 1980s, loser.
Take a look at the programming language shootout. The C programs usually win the contest, but they do it by doing crazy things like looking up the cache size of the CPU and implementing their own version of malloc to fit a page size. The run of the mill C program is not like that.
For many or even most tasks stability and security is more important. Other languages provide those properties better than C.
That's an exaggeration, there's no need to check cache/page sizes in order to implement C code aware of such limitations. The good thing is that you can do that, and pretty much everything, if you need to.
About "cool features" that C does not have, frankly, many times it's more an issue of modularizing your code than the language saving your ass.
How many times I see spaghetti code written in a high-level language and the oh-so-cool-features did not help preventing that. Instead we get bad and mammoth-heavy code.
Even the best language cannot save a bad programmer.
you could say the same thing about software that calls functions in a GPL library, does software that dynamically links against a GPL library have to be GPL? Its calling functions in defined in GPL code.
Yes, if you're dynamically linking against a GPL library, and if you distribute your code, it must be under GPL.
That's why there's LGPL (Library GPL), which allows distribution of software which dynamically links with such code to be under a different license.
Static linking is another story though.
Something philosophically similar which could be created is some sort of "weird arch" Linux for code debugging purpuses.
Like something with 16bit chars and ints, non-0 NULLs... Perhaps running under an emulated invented weird architecture with strange byte order (non-LSB/MSB) and weird alignment issues.
I wonder how many software would break.
Indeed. The brazilian constitution is so long, it's almost like they wanted to cram all possible laws in the same text.
If you have a parallel port, an adapter is trivial to build for old joysticks using only passive components.
There are Linux drivers for such adapters. I guess there are drivers for Windows aswell.
snoopy, you overoptimistic dog!
Except that you cannot tile the plane with pentagons.
Yes, you can!
Lanczos resampling looks nice too.
doesn't opera mobile go through a proxy server allowing it to compress
the datastream and speed things up?
(...)
do the other browsers provide this advantage? not that i've heard...
There are generic web accelerators which may be used with any proxy, including mobile-phone ones (not my site, before anyone asks).
No bloody A, B, G, or N.
Please don't tell me the card model number was 1701.
hat's all nice and stuff, but many people (myself included) believe that they went too far and, basically, criminals are being treated like defenceless babies.
Fuck you. No, really...fuck you.
Such a valuable argument from someone too coward to even show his/her nickname here.
It is not possible to go too far in that direction. You take away just enough rights to prevent an anarchist nightmare, but no more. It's still evil that we must take away those rights, but the few assholes who want to hurt others for personal gain make it necessary to do so. Still, it is always very, very important that you're always aware that every law, regardless of how well-intentioned, causes you to slide a bit more into the slippery slope towards tyranny. So, when absolutely necessary in order to protect your society's way of life, you do it. Never do it just because some people are getting away with things you don't think they should...the price you're paying isn't worth it.
Look at you!
Do you know the Brazilian Laws? Do you have experience dealing with those laws?
Did you ever fought (like taking legal risks or even risking your neck) against something wrong?
You sound like those indoctrinated left-wing youngsters who believe in absolute truths.
Your political pamphlet-like text really shows.
Do you have the slightlest idea what is, like, putting your feet in the Federal Public Ministry to denounce financial corruption against people who can do you real harm?
Well, I do. And not only that.
Meanwhile, what were you doing? Rooting for Brazil in some Footbal World Cup game like 99,9% of brazilians?
Yeah, that - and your forum posts - helped mankind a lot. Thanks kiddo.
Grow up! Get some experience from the real world, then come back.
Because, really, it's way too easy to judge other people using a left-wing dogma.
Someone modded the parent "flamebait" but that's an interesting point IMO.
The "problem" in Brazil is that, even if you're willing to do thing in a not-quite-right way, that's seldom viable in practice - specially in high profile cases with lots of expensive lawyers.
Why is that? The current Brazilian Constitution (created in 1988) and several key laws give lots of rights to the accused ones.
That's all nice and stuff, but many people (myself included) believe that they went too far and, basically, criminals are being treated like defenceless babies.
One thing you can hear about the Federal Constitution is that it was created "under the (left-wing) political prisoner syndrome". That is, back in 1988 the politicians wanted to avoid human rights abuses like the ones from the 1960s and 1970s (during the militar government), but (though well intended) they went too far.
The result is that it made criminal prosecution very hard in Brazil.
I'm guessing there's laws against it in the U.S. too, that didn't stop them. What makes you think they're beyond it in South America? The fact that you live there, perhaps? Quite narcissistic, but that seems to be the norm for Brazilians.
It seems that, in your opinion, all south american countries are barbaric lands where no laws are to be taken seriously.
That's incredibly arrogant of yours. Because of things like that, the rest of the World put all US citizens (including the good ones) in the same basket and call them assholes.
Even you completely disregard the morality (or immorality) of laws, good/bad/weak/silly laws are to be enforced and there are practical issues:
If they torture the guy in order to obtain the information, the next day that bastard will make a public scandal, cry his human rights were violated etc, and his lawyers will invoke every conceiveable law and the process will stall, badly.
Then his lawyers will spread doubt about any other evidence previously collected. They will make a party out of it and, in the end, the guy may be considered innocent.
So, even if you're willing to torture the guy, it's not practical.
That's not offtopic. If they want the info bad enough, that is what they will do. And nobody will be able to prove a damn thing.
In Brazil, proofs produced by illegal means cannot be used (Federal Constitution, Art. 5, Inc. LVI).
Also, commiting a crime in order to produce proofs is aggravated up to a 1/3 (Decree-Law 2.848, Art. 342, Par. 1).
Yes, I wouldn't pay just to find out if it was god or not. I really don't care if they put Vishnu in a cd case. I mean he's one of many. I feel like I'd have to buy a lot of them to collect the whole set. But, if it was God, in there? There's only One, so that might be less expensive a proposition. I don't know I might. Depends on the odds. Do on out of every ten CD's contain God, or one out of every Billion?
Would yout want business with a god that can be contained inside a ~1GB plastic disc?