The Amiga never had a big FOSS scene, it was always much more centred around small time commercial and indie devs, with little open source and virtually no first party support. Who would have open sourced Amiga OS? Commodore? The people who paid for the IP after Commodore went bust? Not really sure what use the source would be anyway as it was very tied to the hardware architecture.
Most FOSS enthusiasts were on other platforms or started their own (Aros etc.), if someone had wanted a free TCP stack on Amiga they would have written it but it just wasn't that scene so indie devs stepped in with shareware stacks. (btw Amiga OS has come with a full TCP stack since 3.9).
Accusing indie devs of profiteering and gouging would be like accusing Notch of gouging for not releasing Minecraft as free open source, it's their work and if people want to pay for it they will.
The current Amiga scene is probably still the same, hence most Amiga devs feeling more protective over there work than FOSS enthusiasts, especially with paid bounties for Amiga ports of apps like Firefox. You can't criticise the Amiga scene for not being something it never was.
Windows and MacOS also had no default TCP stack in those days, and yet free stacks were available... Even "demo" versions would function, while demo versions of the amiga stacks would disconnect you after 30 minutes. You also had completely free operating systems such as bsd and early linux versions, which included a tcp stack by default.
At that point the Amiga user base was so small it's lucky there were usable stacks at all, no way a 3rd party company could make money releasing a free stack and not enough free software enthusiasts to release a decent free stack.
Netscape was available for free to non commercial users
At release Netscape was only supposed to be free for education and charity users, but yeah reading some more about it sounds like they were pretty loose with it. Again compared to Amiga's tiny tiny user base how would a commercial software company make anything free for non-commercial developing for Amiga given there were pretty much zero commercial users at that point?
there was also a highly elitist atmosphere, where anyone suspected of running warez copies of amiga software were often publicly attacked and/or turned away from amiga related sites and irc channels. there were many people who simply could not afford the ridiculous prices charged.
Yeah everyone was pretty desperate to keep the platform alive, including the few commercial and shareware devs left. If there were no commercial devs would anyone have released a TCP stack etc for free?
The effect this profiteering and gouging had, was to drive even more users away from the amiga. For the price of a complete set of internet tools on the amiga, it was possible to purchase a perfectly capable x86 system running windows or linux.
What rubbish, you could get a complete suite for about £60-80, not free but hardly gouging. Big items like TCP stack and Browser were always commercial, but there were plenty of usable free and bundled apps for everything else. Maybe if you bought literally every shareware internet tool available you might get up to the cost of a decent PC...
Without those commercial devs where would that software have come from? Microsoft could release free stuff because they already had a huge revenue stream (plus they wanted to undermine competition), Windows developers could release free for personal use stuff because the rest of the market was huge. Linux got a lot of free software because it had a huge free software enthusiast userbase.
Having recently taken the amiga out of storage to play with, the situation is even more ridiculous... Not only does all this software still enforce the 30 minute timeouts and nag you to purchase it, but you now cannot purchase it even if you wanted to!
Well duh, that's true of every single limited demo for no-longer available software. Authors could have released free version as abandonware but there's nothing to say they have to. Maybe now we have a huge FOSS scene we're feeling a bit entitled to free software in our old ages?
And it seems this trend continues, the port of firefox discussed in the article is only going to release the bare minimum of sourcecode required to satisfy the mozilla license, and will withhold everything else. What exactly is this supposed to achieve?
If they want to protect their little pet project they're within their rights to under the Mozilla license, they're still releasing it for free (beer).
Yes, the blatant attempts at profiteering were the final nail in the coffin for the Amiga... Back when i had a (relatively highend) Amiga, in order to connect it to the internet i would have needed to buy a tcp stack, and then buy a browser, even things like ftp, irc and telnet clients had a price tag attached! Even MS and Apple don't charge extra for basic things like that.
At time time (due to Commodore's bankruptcy) there was no first party networking stack, browser etc. so all these had to be provided by third parties, hence most of these things being commercial or shareware. Don't you remember when you had to pay for Netscape or IE on PC? And the big fuss everyone made of Microsoft bundling their browser with Windows?
Intelligent design was brought to you by cavemen thousands of years ago, long before the existence of the republican party. Do I really need to say that?
Intelligent design was NOT brought to us by cavemen, it is a very modern invention.
Cavemen brought us creationism, which is perfectly understandable given their lack of access to modern science. Intelligent design is a modern (1960s) attempt to prove creationism using false science.
One is a reasonable assumption based on the limited knowledge of the time, the other is a dangerous perversion of science to suit political ends.
Well, they want publicity for their cause, which is for the ethical treatment of animals. What's wrong with that? Why is it trolling?
It's trolling because their intent seems to be to make the most outrageous stand they can (often making themselves look crazy in the process), rather than to actually succeed with any particular action directly.
Take the whale slavery campaign, if they had just done a normal campaign against keeping whales captive no-one would bother reporting it because there are plenty of identical campaigns all the time, but by going with something outrageous that obviously won't work (claiming 13th amendment) they get a load of headlines from it, mostly people calling them nuts but it sure gets their name out there.
I'm sure they will release documentation in good time, but even before that it would be easy to add additional custom hardware interfaces through USB in the form of Arduino or other USB supporting hardware platforms.
Also the idea behind the project is not to be a cheap terminal for 3rd world countries (tho it would serve this purpose very well) but as an ultra cheap programmable computer for English school children to encourage more programming in IT lessons and bedroom coding like in the days of the ZX spectrum and C64.
I think the problem is that things with little to no scientific evidence (eg. intelligent design) are being taught as having as much scientific evidence as well researched and universally accepted theories (eg. evolution).
Now climate change is more disputed than evolution, but that doesn't mean that misrepresentations about the science behind it should be taught in schools.
Iraq was heavily supported by the US in its war against Iran, including arming Iraq with chemical weapons and turning a blind eye to atrocities against Iran and its own people. When Iraq consulted the US about invading Kuwait they were told that "[The US] took no position on these Arab affairs", basically telling them it was ok to go ahead and invade.
Your conservative revision of history is appalling. You are the type of person who believes that the USA has never supported tyrants and has never taken part in unjustified aggression.
It's easy, quit threatening people and play nice with the world, quit having a childlike temper tantrum and pretending that you have only ever been a force for good in the world.
There are 2 exploits here, one is in Safari which allows someone to at least crash the machine, the other is in win32k.sys which allows a user space program to take over the kernel (privilege escalation bug)
The win32k.sys bug is far more serious as it would give any program even run under a limited user account complete access to the system
Third party votes in America are usually anywhere from 1% to 10% of the vote depending on who's being elected. I think we have a grand total of 1 senator who isn't a Republican or Democrat (he's an Independent.)
Don't forget that this is skewed by the voting system as many people will vote for the lesser of two evils instead of voting for their true preference, so I'd expect under a proportional system for there to be a large increase in votes to 3rd parties.
There is no such thing. Even in places where there is a strong commitment to public transportation and cities are designed with it in mind, it still performs poorly.
Define "performs poorly". Many European cities and countries have a very good public transport infrastructure and even in England with it's somewhat neglected public transport system it's easy to live without owning a car everywhere except rural towns.
Given that most post-processing in film has been digital for decades but digital projectors have only just started to become widespread, I'd say we already have perfectly good ways to produce 35mm prints from a digital source.
iCloud for music is excellent. Especially with the service that scans your MP3 stash and allows you to download AAC files on the go. This functionality is something Android lacks. Same with downloading movies.
How about Spotify? It doesn't automatically scan your mp3 collection, but you have access to their whole library and all the playlists you create on the desktop application are shared with your mobile.
I've never heard of octopuses rearranging bones to create art, nor can I find anything online about octopuses doing this, where are they getting this from?
... so they can have whatever rules they like. It's not illegal but security are within their rights to prohibit any activity they feel like.
On a public road however you are allowed to photograph anything you like. 6 photographers did an experiment in central London by photographing important buildings. They were hassled by building security, who then called the police, who then had to tell the building security that the photographers were on public property and thus couldn't be prevented from taking photos.
To a degree, but if everyone stuck to this mindset then everyone would still only be using the first language they ever learnt. It's like saying that no-one will ever use Java or C# because they know PHP and it's "good enough".
Dart has many nice features that would be very useful for large multi-developer projects (typing, static checking etc.) which would easily offset the time for developers to familiarise (one of the design goals of Dart is that it is easy to learn from a javascript background anyway).
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The Amiga never had a big FOSS scene, it was always much more centred around small time commercial and indie devs, with little open source and virtually no first party support. Who would have open sourced Amiga OS? Commodore? The people who paid for the IP after Commodore went bust? Not really sure what use the source would be anyway as it was very tied to the hardware architecture.
Most FOSS enthusiasts were on other platforms or started their own (Aros etc.), if someone had wanted a free TCP stack on Amiga they would have written it but it just wasn't that scene so indie devs stepped in with shareware stacks. (btw Amiga OS has come with a full TCP stack since 3.9).
Accusing indie devs of profiteering and gouging would be like accusing Notch of gouging for not releasing Minecraft as free open source, it's their work and if people want to pay for it they will.
The current Amiga scene is probably still the same, hence most Amiga devs feeling more protective over there work than FOSS enthusiasts, especially with paid bounties for Amiga ports of apps like Firefox. You can't criticise the Amiga scene for not being something it never was.
Windows and MacOS also had no default TCP stack in those days, and yet free stacks were available... Even "demo" versions would function, while demo versions of the amiga stacks would disconnect you after 30 minutes.
You also had completely free operating systems such as bsd and early linux versions, which included a tcp stack by default.
At that point the Amiga user base was so small it's lucky there were usable stacks at all, no way a 3rd party company could make money releasing a free stack and not enough free software enthusiasts to release a decent free stack.
Netscape was available for free to non commercial users
At release Netscape was only supposed to be free for education and charity users, but yeah reading some more about it sounds like they were pretty loose with it. Again compared to Amiga's tiny tiny user base how would a commercial software company make anything free for non-commercial developing for Amiga given there were pretty much zero commercial users at that point?
there was also a highly elitist atmosphere, where anyone suspected of running warez copies of amiga software were often publicly attacked and/or turned away from amiga related sites and irc channels. there were many people who simply could not afford the ridiculous prices charged.
Yeah everyone was pretty desperate to keep the platform alive, including the few commercial and shareware devs left. If there were no commercial devs would anyone have released a TCP stack etc for free?
The effect this profiteering and gouging had, was to drive even more users away from the amiga. For the price of a complete set of internet tools on the amiga, it was possible to purchase a perfectly capable x86 system running windows or linux.
What rubbish, you could get a complete suite for about £60-80, not free but hardly gouging. Big items like TCP stack and Browser were always commercial, but there were plenty of usable free and bundled apps for everything else. Maybe if you bought literally every shareware internet tool available you might get up to the cost of a decent PC...
Without those commercial devs where would that software have come from? Microsoft could release free stuff because they already had a huge revenue stream (plus they wanted to undermine competition), Windows developers could release free for personal use stuff because the rest of the market was huge. Linux got a lot of free software because it had a huge free software enthusiast userbase.
Having recently taken the amiga out of storage to play with, the situation is even more ridiculous... Not only does all this software still enforce the 30 minute timeouts and nag you to purchase it, but you now cannot purchase it even if you wanted to!
Well duh, that's true of every single limited demo for no-longer available software. Authors could have released free version as abandonware but there's nothing to say they have to. Maybe now we have a huge FOSS scene we're feeling a bit entitled to free software in our old ages?
And it seems this trend continues, the port of firefox discussed in the article is only going to release the bare minimum of sourcecode required to satisfy the mozilla license, and will withhold everything else. What exactly is this supposed to achieve?
If they want to protect their little pet project they're within their rights to under the Mozilla license, they're still releasing it for free (beer).
I hope you also read through the entire source code. And compiled the compiler you used. And hand assembled the compiler you compiled the compiler with :)
Of course it's fast, programs are virtually running on the bare metal with minimal OS features/interference to slow things down.
Fun to mess around with but these days hardware has caught up with features expected of a modern (complex) OS.
Yes, the blatant attempts at profiteering were the final nail in the coffin for the Amiga...
Back when i had a (relatively highend) Amiga, in order to connect it to the internet i would have needed to buy a tcp stack, and then buy a browser, even things like ftp, irc and telnet clients had a price tag attached! Even MS and Apple don't charge extra for basic things like that.
At time time (due to Commodore's bankruptcy) there was no first party networking stack, browser etc. so all these had to be provided by third parties, hence most of these things being commercial or shareware. Don't you remember when you had to pay for Netscape or IE on PC? And the big fuss everyone made of Microsoft bundling their browser with Windows?
Intelligent design was brought to you by cavemen thousands of years ago, long before the existence of the republican party. Do I really need to say that?
Intelligent design was NOT brought to us by cavemen, it is a very modern invention.
Cavemen brought us creationism, which is perfectly understandable given their lack of access to modern science. Intelligent design is a modern (1960s) attempt to prove creationism using false science.
One is a reasonable assumption based on the limited knowledge of the time, the other is a dangerous perversion of science to suit political ends.
Well, they want publicity for their cause, which is for the ethical treatment of animals. What's wrong with that? Why is it trolling?
It's trolling because their intent seems to be to make the most outrageous stand they can (often making themselves look crazy in the process), rather than to actually succeed with any particular action directly.
Take the whale slavery campaign, if they had just done a normal campaign against keeping whales captive no-one would bother reporting it because there are plenty of identical campaigns all the time, but by going with something outrageous that obviously won't work (claiming 13th amendment) they get a load of headlines from it, mostly people calling them nuts but it sure gets their name out there.
Yes, PETA is trying to get antislavery law to be applied against animals, which if successful will seriously change everything...
No, PETA is just trolling the media for lots of free publicity. They're very good at it.
Works fine here, must just be your connection. I don't think Slashdot traffic will be taking The Telegraph's website down any time soon :)
Name a single low-cost micro-controller system that is sold in kit form with stacked BGA components.
Complain to Broadcom, as they're the ones forcing the use of these, not the Raspberry Pi guys.
I'm sure they will release documentation in good time, but even before that it would be easy to add additional custom hardware interfaces through USB in the form of Arduino or other USB supporting hardware platforms.
Also the idea behind the project is not to be a cheap terminal for 3rd world countries (tho it would serve this purpose very well) but as an ultra cheap programmable computer for English school children to encourage more programming in IT lessons and bedroom coding like in the days of the ZX spectrum and C64.
I think the problem is that things with little to no scientific evidence (eg. intelligent design) are being taught as having as much scientific evidence as well researched and universally accepted theories (eg. evolution).
Now climate change is more disputed than evolution, but that doesn't mean that misrepresentations about the science behind it should be taught in schools.
Iraq was heavily supported by the US in its war against Iran, including arming Iraq with chemical weapons and turning a blind eye to atrocities against Iran and its own people. When Iraq consulted the US about invading Kuwait they were told that "[The US] took no position on these Arab affairs", basically telling them it was ok to go ahead and invade.
Your conservative revision of history is appalling. You are the type of person who believes that the USA has never supported tyrants and has never taken part in unjustified aggression.
It's easy, quit threatening people and play nice with the world, quit having a childlike temper tantrum and pretending that you have only ever been a force for good in the world.
There are 2 exploits here, one is in Safari which allows someone to at least crash the machine, the other is in win32k.sys which allows a user space program to take over the kernel (privilege escalation bug)
The win32k.sys bug is far more serious as it would give any program even run under a limited user account complete access to the system
You don't need to use photoshop to [make burgers look good on camera](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUjz_eiIX8k)
Third party votes in America are usually anywhere from 1% to 10% of the vote depending on who's being elected. I think we have a grand total of 1 senator who isn't a Republican or Democrat (he's an Independent.)
Don't forget that this is skewed by the voting system as many people will vote for the lesser of two evils instead of voting for their true preference, so I'd expect under a proportional system for there to be a large increase in votes to 3rd parties.
There is no such thing. Even in places where there is a strong commitment to public transportation and cities are designed with it in mind, it still performs poorly.
Define "performs poorly". Many European cities and countries have a very good public transport infrastructure and even in England with it's somewhat neglected public transport system it's easy to live without owning a car everywhere except rural towns.
For example, want to reduce CO2 from transport? Well you better man transport unaffordable to the masses. Little changes won't work.
How about we make a far greener public transport system more affordable and practical?
You could create an array of cameras to capture highspeed video
Given that most post-processing in film has been digital for decades but digital projectors have only just started to become widespread, I'd say we already have perfectly good ways to produce 35mm prints from a digital source.
iCloud for music is excellent. Especially with the service that scans your MP3 stash and allows you to download AAC files on the go. This functionality is something Android lacks. Same with downloading movies.
How about Spotify? It doesn't automatically scan your mp3 collection, but you have access to their whole library and all the playlists you create on the desktop application are shared with your mobile.
I've never heard of octopuses rearranging bones to create art, nor can I find anything online about octopuses doing this, where are they getting this from?
... so they can have whatever rules they like. It's not illegal but security are within their rights to prohibit any activity they feel like.
On a public road however you are allowed to photograph anything you like. 6 photographers did an experiment in central London by photographing important buildings. They were hassled by building security, who then called the police, who then had to tell the building security that the photographers were on public property and thus couldn't be prevented from taking photos.
To a degree, but if everyone stuck to this mindset then everyone would still only be using the first language they ever learnt. It's like saying that no-one will ever use Java or C# because they know PHP and it's "good enough".
Dart has many nice features that would be very useful for large multi-developer projects (typing, static checking etc.) which would easily offset the time for developers to familiarise (one of the design goals of Dart is that it is easy to learn from a javascript background anyway).