As it stands, your carier does NAT themselves and gives your router one IP address, typically in the 10.0.0.0/8 address space. Your home router then does another layouer of NAT, and gives internal devices their own IP address range in the 1902.168.1.0/16 address space.
Not where I live, and that sounds quite limiting! Thank ${DEITY}, ISPs here in Finland assign their customers genuine public IPv4 addresses, usually via DHCP. Typically, you can even get several of them – the maximum on a consumer connection could be something like 5. (I’m using 2 right now.) Only something like the port 25 (SMTP) is blocked for inbound connections so you’re free to run a personal web server, SSH box, VPN to your home network, etc.
Finnish cellular carriers – as opposed to the actual fiber/copper/cable ISPs – have a different practice, though: they will usually NAT the 3G/4G customers by default, which is quite understandable, as you generally do not want inbound connections to a cellphone. Still, at least my carrier (Saunalahti) lets advanced customers choose a different APN which will give a public IPv4 address even for a 3G modem or a cellphone, which is quite nice and handy as well for some situations.
Applications (Office, Photoshop, etc) have a very short shelve life. Anything over a couple of years old is useless.
Languages (Perl, PHP, Ruby); throw away after a decade or so. It differs though; old C books may still apply, old Java books less so.
Theory (algorithms, methodologies); should be good for a long, long time.
Manuals for old, unique (non-PC) hardware platforms, peripherals, and programming environments may still have relevance to them, though.
There’s always the retrocomputing/historical angle where you’d want to preserve books such as a register-level hardware reference explaining the capabilities of an old 8-bit home computer model for an aspiring programmer, or a system administration guide for an old minicomputer, or programming manuals (entry-level or not) for such systems. Or user manuals for the seminal applications which were driving the sales of such systems.
Also: some people are very interested in preserving old product catalogs with pictures and technical information of what was available for such systems back in the day.
The lack of memory protection is due to the first models being designed around the plain Motorola 68000 CPU, which lacks a memory-management unit (MMU). Later models were available with beefier and more feature-rich processors from the 680x0 series, some of the including an MMU. You could also buy add-on “turbo cards” (processor cards taking over the functions of the main CPU, effectively replacing it with a faster one.) But by then it was too late. The OS relies heavily on shared libraries and message passing in flat, shared, unprotected memory space.
Otherwise, the Amiga hardware platform and AmigaOS – the first model/version having been released in 1985 – included concepts such as preemptive multitasking, windowed GUI toolkit in the system ROM (no “text mode” at all), overlapping “screens” in different resolutions and bit depths, hardware blitter and DMA-based I/O (including multichannel sampled stereo sound), drivers for devices and filesystems, the “AutoConfig” system for add-on devices (fulfilling the same role as PnP did later in the Wintel world), 8-bit ISO Latin-1 character encoding as standard, windowed command-line shells, shell scripting, inter-process scripting (ARexx), an OS-provided framework of multimedia “datatypes” (handlers/decoders/players for common file types), scalable fonts, clipboard, speech synthesizer as a standard OS feature, etc.
Ignoring Linux and OS/2 for a moment, in some ways it felt the Wintel camp only caught up ten years later when Windows 95 was released to the masses, and at that point, both the OS and the “IBM-compatible” PC hardware platform were still missing some key features and novel ideas that made the AmigaOS so great and elegant in its day.
One of the Compaq mid-tower lines used those drives. Quantum Bigfoot. I worked at Computer City at the time, and every time one of those towers came in for service, it was for a bad drive. [...] I always wondered if the problem was that the size of the platters just made them too unstable, or if the manufacturing process had flaws.
Quantum BigFoots (some early models) had a known data corruption problem which could be prevented (altogether, or from getting worse) by applying a firmware uprage from the revision A01.02 to A01.03, or later. Alas, a later version of the firmware cannot fix a drive which already has corrupted areas on its platter: it can only prevent further damage.
Your cell carrier doesn't count as an ISP for your smartphone? You don't get a publicly routable address on any cell network I've used.
At least Saunalahti in Finland offers publicly routable IPv4 addresses to their mobile customers. You have to activate the feature in the self-service portal and use the correct APN so generally only those who know what they're doing would do it, but it is all documented on their website. The feature is free of charge.
Similar community-driven projects have been carried out in other EU countries, such as Finland.
Here’s one such example from the region that geographically centers around Töysä – a small rural community of 3,000 people – and its neighboring towns/municipalities, some of which are a bit larger, but not much:
And yes, YouTube's autoplay is very annoying, espescially if you open the video in a new tab. I wish I knew how to just have it disabled globally.
There’s a GreaseMonkey “user script” called YousableTubeFix. If installed, it helps getting rid of many YouTube annoyances – including the completely needless autoplay feature.
WordStar,
one of the most influental word processors of its time. Even
today, several character-mode text editors make use some of the
shortcuts which originated on WordStar.
The CP/M
operating system itself, which was quite popular back in the
day and gave inspiration to PC-DOS/MS-DOS.
On the Commodore 64:
GEOS by Berkeley Softworks. Who would have thought the
venerable C64 could host a GUI system almost making it
comparable to the first Macintosh models (not quite, but
suprisingly close, given the 8-bit processor, memory limits
etc.) There was a host of serious productivity applications for
this environment.
Microrhythm: a digital drum machine based on the
undocumented sample playback features of the SID chip.
The SID audio chip, which was way more feature-rich than its
competitors of the time, and in some ways comparable to a “real”
synthesizer, giving actual character and resonance to computer
music, instead of just beeps and blips. Its creator, Bob Yannes,
later went on to found
Ensoniq, a
company which designed and manufactured actual musical
instruments (keyboards, samplers, etc.) The SID was a unique
piece of audio hardware which enabled the musical software of
the C64 to do its magic – and its legacy still lives on in the
form of numerous emulators, vast sound archives and libraries
(such as HVSC), custom-built
musical instruments based on the chip (such as the
SIDStation),
etc. This is one of those cases where a piece of hardware has
been inspirational and influental and enabled a number of
software applications which would have been pointless if it
weren’t for the hardware.
(The Ultimate)
SoundTracker by
Karsten Obarski, later followed by the even more popular,
more advanced clones or derivatives:
NoiseTracker
and ProTracker.
These started the whole computer music “tracker”
genre as we know it today – with four sound channels in a stereo
arrangement and digital instrument samples, no less.
Audio Master, one of the first digital audio sample editors
for an affordable personal computer. Supported stereo sound as
well. (Often accompanied by inexpensive audio digitizers
attached to the printer port.)
Deluxe
Paint by Dan Silva of
Electronic Arts – the first paint program for the Amiga.
Taking a different approach from its predecessors on other
platforms (which were mostly toys), the Deluxe Paint was a very
powerful bitmap graphics art package, featuring advanced
multi-color blitter-enhanced free-form brush handling features
and color cycli
I can't get over how fast that client is... after sitting through broadcast Teletext and waiting for pages to cycle round, it's interesting to see how much more usable the system becomes when it's responsive.
Many modern TV sets (from mid-to-late 1990s and onwards) and DVB set-top boxes can cache all Teletext magazines – including subpages – which makes browsing the content a breeze.
The DVB standard ETSI ETS 300 743 defines a method for transmitting Teletext data over a DVB (MPEG-TS) stream. This method is used in the DVB countries which maintain the old Teletext service alongside with the digital broadcasts. DVB set-top boxes and TV sets with an integrated DVB receiver/decoder commonly include a Teletext browser.
UK has chosen to abolish Teletext in favor of an MHEG-5 based information service – known as the “red button” service by the viewers. However, this does not mean it wouldn't have been technically possible to carry the full Ceefax Teletext service over DVB broadcasts in the UK as well: the local broadcasting companies just chose not to do it.
Broadcasters in some countries – such as Finland and Italy – have experimented with providing a similar information service through the more ambitious, Java-based MHP, instead of MHEG-5. But in Finland, at least, these experiments have failed due to unenthusiastic response from the STB makers and the general public. (The MHP services were probably introduced at a too early stage, and it was partially a PR failure as well.) Instead, regular Teletext service is still being broadcast on many local DVB channels using the method defined in ETSI ETS 300 743.
I wouldn't think there would be a big market for movies subtitled in Finnish - even in Finland I think most people can understand other languages (like English, or French, or German or the other Scandinavian languages)
Nearly all foreign TV shows and movies which are shown on Finnish TV channels are subtitled in Finnish – that’s the norm here. (Dubbing is normally never used here except for the content intended for kids under reading age. Also, the narrated sequences in some documentaries are sometimes re-narrated in Finnish whereas their on-screen dialogue remains subtitled. But those are pretty much the only exceptions.)
The same practices go for actual movies seen in a movie theater, and the shows and movies released on DVDs or Blu-Rays.
DivX Finland is mostly providing subtitles for the purposes of watching shows and movies which are not (yet) made available in Finland through official channels, or – as it might be the case with some more obscure foreign TV shows, for example – never will.
Some individuals who are fluent in some particular foreign language – usually English in the Finnish context – take pride in watching shows or movies of that language without subtitling. Yet, the norm here – which is also reflected in the default settings of the set-top boxes and TV sets – is that subtitles for translation are always on and visible. (The local TV channels show a lot of foreign content which specifically calls for translation. It just wouldn’t fly if they tried to provide it to the Finnish-speaking audience “as is”, with no effort to translate. People expect the translations to be there.)
Some Finnish-language shows may also have subtitles in Finnish for the benefit of the hard of hearing. But these subtitles, which are not about translation but transcription, are never seen by the normal folks as you need to fiddle with the settings of the TV to receive them. And only those who have the need will want to see them on their screen anyway. (There is also no legal requirement to provide such Finnish-on-Finnish transcription service, so the availability of such special-needs subtitles is pretty much limited to some select shows produced by YLE, the local public broadcaster.)
I was born in 1976 so I got to experience the rise and fall of inexpensive
mainstream 8-bit and 16/32-bit microcomputers during my school years.
Perhaps more significantly, I also got to experience “home computing” as a
hobby, rather than as daily necessity. Also, I belong to one of the generations
which were – already before entering school – significantly more knowledgeable
about computers than their parents. I suspect this is a condition which may no
longer necessarily hold true with the more recent generations...
I entered the first grade of elementary school in September 1983. I also got my
first computer, the Commodore 64, for the Christmas of that same year. It was
not my first experience of personal computers, however: during the previous
year, I had already got my feet wet on my friend’s VIC-20. (My friend was an
enthusiastic home computer hobbyist and he had taught me some BASIC programming, so I
knew a little bit about that, too – even before entering the school.)
As far as my school was concerned, computers didn’t really exist. They where nowhere to be seen in
the lower grades (1–6). They just didn’t belong to the curriculum for the
smaller kids. Most adults – including school teachers – were only trying to come
to terms with the rather frightening prospect they will yet need to learn about
these devil’s machines before retiring... The kids of my generation, though,
were eager to get a home computer for themselves during those years, which was
in no small part because they filled roughly the same spot as game consoles
today. But home computers were also favored by hobbyists and tinkerers, of
course, and I had the hobbyist/tinkerer mindset about it. Games were only of
secondary interest.
After a few years, my C64 setup had grown to include the Commodore 1541
diskette drive (I started out with the Datasette), the MPS-801 dot matrix
printer, and a copy of the GEOS graphical desktop environment – even a Commodore
1351 mouse, which was a rather rarely seen peripheral for the C64. Beginning
from the 3rd grade, I was actually using geoWrite (the standard word processor
which came with GEOS) for some of my school work. The teachers were a bit
baffled at receiving dot-matrix printouts on fan-fold paper from a 3rd grader
but generally their response was pretty good. On occasion, though, I was not
allowed to use the computer because the teacher insisted typing would not serve
the secondary purpose of the writing assignments: honing ones skills in cursive
handwriting. This was somewhat irritating considering I was rather more inclined
to write in block letters, anyway (and continue to do so to this date...)
Our class was assigned a class magazine project both during the 5th and the
6th grade. I brought my entire Commodore 64 setup in school to make it possible
to design the layout of the pages (partially) on a computer. My Finnish teacher
– who has now sadly passed away – was so excited about getting this primitive
form of computer-based desktop publishing in her class she called the local
paper and they made a story about it, with a picture and all. The second year I
did this I also brought in an Osborne I and another dot matrix printer which my
dad had salvaged from getting binned at his workplace. I let another kid type in
articles using WordStar on this other computer.
By the time I entered the 7th grade (1989), I found out the upper level
elementary school had two computer labs for teaching “automatic data
processing”. These were the only classrooms with computers in them in the whole
of school. (Later on, the music class and the art class received a computer each
as well.) The older one of the two computer labs was already considered obsolete
as it was only equipped with Apple IIs. The current focus of the computer
classes was on MS-DOS and IBM-compatible PCs. The typing class, however, used
the Apples for typing exercises. Otherwise they just sat there unused. (The
problem was, ho
I recall a rumor that Sun Microsystems was once interested in purchasing Commodore. Sun was supposedly interested in the home and entry workstation marketplace, and wanted the Amiga line for themselves. I wonder if there was any truth to it.
Just to complete the circle, according to Brian Bagnall’s book On The Edge – The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore, Jobs and Wozniak were, at one point in 1976, negotiating with Jack Tramiel about Commodore buying out Apple (and the Apple I design) to serve as the technological basis for what would later become the Commodore PET; Commodore’s first foray on the personal computer market. But the deal fell through because Tramiel wanted a bargain and he felt Jobs was asking way too much money for his garage company. At the same time, Mike Markkula started investing to Apple so things never got any further on that front.
Chuck Peddle and his team were already working on the PET at that time but Commodore wanted to have something to show on the January 1977 CES so they were short on time. Hacking their vision of a personal computer on top of a pre-existing 6502-based design, such as Wozniak’s Apple I kit, would have bought them some more time. In the end, Peddle’s team managed to put together a working prototype for the CES and Commodore was the first company to announce a personal computer for the mass-market. This created tremendous interest in the field and it was quite a breakthrough for personal computing, but according to the book, the January 1977 CES prototype was barely working and they only got it boot up properly on the very last day of the show. They still had a lot to do before it morphed into the actual production model for which they would start taking in orders later that year.
I assumed WHDLoad could handle pretty much anything, but I may be wrong.
The problem is, the Amiga has a vast library of software (primarily games and demoscene productions) that boots off directly from a floppy and employs custom disk-loading routines which start off from the bootblock. This was done back in the days when an HDD was seen as an expensive extra.
At the beginning, the assumption was that most people interested in games would be using the cheaper Amigas, possibly with no HDD, and they would only have a floppy drive or two at their disposal. (The early Amiga models did not come with HDDs as standard.) Custom trackloading routines were also used for copy protection and performance reasons: reading raw data off the tracks and copying it to the memory is faster than if you load the same data by means of files and a filesystem. And, of course, just powering on the machine and inserting a floppy was an intuitive, simple-to-use interface for starting games; akin to the cartridges on the game consoles.
(The AmigaOS itself, and software normally running under it - tools and utilities, shareware and productivity titles - were always made to be HDD-installable and they utilized a normal filesystem from the beginning, of course. But there's a staggering amount of old games and demos that go with their custom raw disk format and a custom trackloader.)
Now, WHDLoad - which is essentially a binary patch library for various Amiga software titles - remedies that problem for some titles, by making such older releases HDD-installable and their fixing potential compatibility problems with the newer Amigas and newer AmigaOS versions. The patches might even clean up some badly written software, making them allocate memory properly and even adding clean-up and "quit to the OS" functions, instead of requiring a reboot of the machine after you're done with the game. This is all good, and a great accomplishment, but WHDLoad needs a separate driver (called a "slave" in WHDLoad terms) written for each piece of software it "supports". So it's not a universal solution.
Also, since the Amiga floppy disk drive controller is very flexible in how it can be programmed, and the AmigaOS normally uses a floppy format that is incompatible, on the sector level, with standard PC floppy controllers (formatting 880 KB on a DD floppy and 1760 KB on an HD floppy), generic products such as the PLR Electronics 3 ½ floppy drive to USB flash drive reader are not likely to work on the Amiga.
There is an interesting hobbyist DIY hardware project called A Universal Floppy Disk Drive Emulator, however, which aims at making floppy drives redundant on Amigas and many other devices, by replacing them with a floppy disk drive emulator. It is basically the same idea as with the above-mentioned PLR Electronics product, but the project is hobbyist-driven and open, and also guaranteed to be compatible with the low-level sector format that the Amiga normally uses. You can find the schematics and the required software on the linked website.
I know that as late as 1995, NASA still had some satellites that were still controlled by some Commodore 64s in a warehouse near White Sands, New Mexico.
Are you sure those weren't actually Amigas? This page has some information - even photos and screenshots - about the usage of the Commodore Amiga at NASA.
1. Windows has two graphics/video backends, both have serious problems. The major container format is limited to 2GB, for example.
That hasn't been true since the introduction of the OpenDML AVI format, aka AVI 2.0, and the transition to DirectShow APIs (as opposed to the old "Video for Windows" subsystem.) This transition happened, for the most part, somewhere around the beginning of the decade.
How hard could it be to add an option "Candidate A, Candidate B,Spoil vote"
These e-voting machines had a separate "spoil vote" option. Or, rather, a "blank ballot" option. You could choose it by pressing a separate on-screen button instead of entering the candidate number.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (and other novels) by Jules Verne
The Barsoom (Mars) series by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Adventure series by Enid Blyton (at least The Mountain of Adventure)
House of Stairs and Interstellar Pig by William Sleator
The Tripods by John Christopher (well, Samuel Youd, actually...)
I don't see much reason to "protect" children from the "darker" stories. On the contrary, those are the ones that kept my interest in books going in the formative years - getting a glimpse of the adult world (however fictional); difficult and dangerous situations, strange ideologies and world orders (often written as satirical analogies of actual historical events or political ideas, which I was only to find out about later), visions of post-apocalyptic societies... something to give your imagination wings; going beyond the ordinary, mundane world and opening up new ways of thinking about things.
Now, there's quite a few features that AmigaDOS lacked that we would consider essential in this day and age. That would add to the bloat as well.
a) Printing. I think printers are terrible and foolish but some people can't live without them and have to have that paper copy. Does anyone remember the hype of computers bringing the paperless office? That was a few billion trees ago!
The printing support is there; it's just not particularly advanced. There are/were commercial packages to correct that, though.
b) Scalable Fonts. Amiga DOS had nothing like True Type
Not true. You probably used your Amiga back in the AmigaOS 1.x days? The later AmigaOS versions incorporated support for the scalable CompuGraphic fonts, licensed from Agfa. There are/were also add-on libraries to deal with PostScript and TrueType fonts.
c) Clear Type, font anti aliasing, scaling, etc. Amiga just had bitmap fonts. Fonts were blitted over and that was that.
Again, that bit about scalability and bitmap fonts is just not true. (Subpixel antialiasing support [and font antialiasing support in general] might be lacking, I give you that.)
d) 3d graphics.
Depends on what you mean by that.
e) Better sound. Amiga's 4 channel 8 bit sound would a bit dated by today's standard. Although, I loved how easy it was to program.
There are/were add-on sound cards. Even the built-in sound hardware can be manipulated to output 14-bit audio, although that's a bit of a hack.
The existing Amiga hardware is dated and obsolete (I mean, what would you expect from a hardware platform whose active development stopped in 1994?) and the OS lacks features, abstractions and protections that would be expected and needed in the modern world, but issues you complain about seem to be a bit off... either fixed already 15 years ago, or easily fixable, if there was a modern platform on which to run the OS. The deepest design issue with AmigaOS is the lack of memory protection: any app can crash the system the hard way. There is no easy way to fix that, expect by creating some sort of sandbox/emulator/virtual machine for the old apps and requiring new apps to be written by new rules.
But it's all fairly academic now. AmigaOS could have been brought up-to-date, just like Windows 3.x and the original MacOS were, had there been constant development and revisions over all these years... but where's the incentive to do that now? If someone wants a new, modern AmigaOS, it's easier to write such a system from scratch - borrowing only the good features and ideas from the "old" AmigaOS - than build it upon the old API and libraries.
But can I run eclipse on it? and fit the gcc/g++ toolchain and all the intermediate build files for my projects on its flash storage?
Why run those kind of things directly on that kind of tiny machine? The Eee is about ultra-lightweight portability. Run the heavy apps on your desktop PC, and use the Eee as a graphical terminal - harnessing the processor power and storage capacity of a much more capable machine with VNC or rdesktop, or whatever. Then you can even be running things like AutoCAD or large cross-compile toolchains seemingly "on" your Eee.
Slashdot Mirror
As it stands, your carier does NAT themselves and gives your router one IP address, typically in the 10.0.0.0/8 address space. Your home router then does another layouer of NAT, and gives internal devices their own IP address range in the 1902.168.1.0/16 address space.
Not where I live, and that sounds quite limiting! Thank ${DEITY}, ISPs here in Finland assign their customers genuine public IPv4 addresses, usually via DHCP. Typically, you can even get several of them – the maximum on a consumer connection could be something like 5. (I’m using 2 right now.) Only something like the port 25 (SMTP) is blocked for inbound connections so you’re free to run a personal web server, SSH box, VPN to your home network, etc.
Finnish cellular carriers – as opposed to the actual fiber/copper/cable ISPs – have a different practice, though: they will usually NAT the 3G/4G customers by default, which is quite understandable, as you generally do not want inbound connections to a cellphone. Still, at least my carrier (Saunalahti) lets advanced customers choose a different APN which will give a public IPv4 address even for a 3G modem or a cellphone, which is quite nice and handy as well for some situations.
Applications (Office, Photoshop, etc) have a very short shelve life. Anything over a couple of years old is useless. Languages (Perl, PHP, Ruby); throw away after a decade or so. It differs though; old C books may still apply, old Java books less so. Theory (algorithms, methodologies); should be good for a long, long time.
Manuals for old, unique (non-PC) hardware platforms, peripherals, and programming environments may still have relevance to them, though.
There’s always the retrocomputing/historical angle where you’d want to preserve books such as a register-level hardware reference explaining the capabilities of an old 8-bit home computer model for an aspiring programmer, or a system administration guide for an old minicomputer, or programming manuals (entry-level or not) for such systems. Or user manuals for the seminal applications which were driving the sales of such systems.
Also: some people are very interested in preserving old product catalogs with pictures and technical information of what was available for such systems back in the day.
It was also single-user, was it not?
That is correct. Single-user designs were the norm with personal computers of the era. There are some ways around this (, for example) but they're sort of limited.
The lack of memory protection is due to the first models being designed around the plain Motorola 68000 CPU, which lacks a memory-management unit (MMU). Later models were available with beefier and more feature-rich processors from the 680x0 series, some of the including an MMU. You could also buy add-on “turbo cards” (processor cards taking over the functions of the main CPU, effectively replacing it with a faster one.) But by then it was too late. The OS relies heavily on shared libraries and message passing in flat, shared, unprotected memory space.
Otherwise, the Amiga hardware platform and AmigaOS – the first model/version having been released in 1985 – included concepts such as preemptive multitasking, windowed GUI toolkit in the system ROM (no “text mode” at all), overlapping “screens” in different resolutions and bit depths, hardware blitter and DMA-based I/O (including multichannel sampled stereo sound), drivers for devices and filesystems, the “AutoConfig” system for add-on devices (fulfilling the same role as PnP did later in the Wintel world), 8-bit ISO Latin-1 character encoding as standard, windowed command-line shells, shell scripting, inter-process scripting (ARexx), an OS-provided framework of multimedia “datatypes” (handlers/decoders/players for common file types), scalable fonts, clipboard, speech synthesizer as a standard OS feature, etc.
Ignoring Linux and OS/2 for a moment, in some ways it felt the Wintel camp only caught up ten years later when Windows 95 was released to the masses, and at that point, both the OS and the “IBM-compatible” PC hardware platform were still missing some key features and novel ideas that made the AmigaOS so great and elegant in its day.
One of the Compaq mid-tower lines used those drives. Quantum Bigfoot. I worked at Computer City at the time, and every time one of those towers came in for service, it was for a bad drive. [...] I always wondered if the problem was that the size of the platters just made them too unstable, or if the manufacturing process had flaws.
Quantum BigFoots (some early models) had a known data corruption problem which could be prevented (altogether, or from getting worse) by applying a firmware uprage from the revision A01.02 to A01.03, or later. Alas, a later version of the firmware cannot fix a drive which already has corrupted areas on its platter: it can only prevent further damage.
Your cell carrier doesn't count as an ISP for your smartphone? You don't get a publicly routable address on any cell network I've used.
At least Saunalahti in Finland offers publicly routable IPv4 addresses to their mobile customers. You have to activate the feature in the self-service portal and use the correct APN so generally only those who know what they're doing would do it, but it is all documented on their website. The feature is free of charge.
Similar community-driven projects have been carried out in other EU countries, such as Finland.
Here’s one such example from the region that geographically centers around Töysä – a small rural community of 3,000 people – and its neighboring towns/municipalities, some of which are a bit larger, but not much:
Verkko-osuuskunta Kuuskaista (The Network Co-operative Kuuskaista)
6net+ core network (a PowerPoint presentation)
And yes, YouTube's autoplay is very annoying, espescially if you open the video in a new tab. I wish I knew how to just have it disabled globally.
There’s a GreaseMonkey “user script” called YousableTubeFix. If installed, it helps getting rid of many YouTube annoyances – including the completely needless autoplay feature.
Under-appreciated, you say?
On CP/M:
On the Commodore 64:
On the Amiga platform:
Many modern TV sets (from mid-to-late 1990s and onwards) and DVB set-top boxes can cache all Teletext magazines – including subpages – which makes browsing the content a breeze.
The DVB standard ETSI ETS 300 743 defines a method for transmitting Teletext data over a DVB (MPEG-TS) stream. This method is used in the DVB countries which maintain the old Teletext service alongside with the digital broadcasts. DVB set-top boxes and TV sets with an integrated DVB receiver/decoder commonly include a Teletext browser.
UK has chosen to abolish Teletext in favor of an MHEG-5 based information service – known as the “red button” service by the viewers. However, this does not mean it wouldn't have been technically possible to carry the full Ceefax Teletext service over DVB broadcasts in the UK as well: the local broadcasting companies just chose not to do it.
Broadcasters in some countries – such as Finland and Italy – have experimented with providing a similar information service through the more ambitious, Java-based MHP, instead of MHEG-5. But in Finland, at least, these experiments have failed due to unenthusiastic response from the STB makers and the general public. (The MHP services were probably introduced at a too early stage, and it was partially a PR failure as well.) Instead, regular Teletext service is still being broadcast on many local DVB channels using the method defined in ETSI ETS 300 743.
I wouldn't think there would be a big market for movies subtitled in Finnish - even in Finland I think most people can understand other languages (like English, or French, or German or the other Scandinavian languages)
Nearly all foreign TV shows and movies which are shown on Finnish TV channels are subtitled in Finnish – that’s the norm here. (Dubbing is normally never used here except for the content intended for kids under reading age. Also, the narrated sequences in some documentaries are sometimes re-narrated in Finnish whereas their on-screen dialogue remains subtitled. But those are pretty much the only exceptions.)
The same practices go for actual movies seen in a movie theater, and the shows and movies released on DVDs or Blu-Rays.
DivX Finland is mostly providing subtitles for the purposes of watching shows and movies which are not (yet) made available in Finland through official channels, or – as it might be the case with some more obscure foreign TV shows, for example – never will.
Some individuals who are fluent in some particular foreign language – usually English in the Finnish context – take pride in watching shows or movies of that language without subtitling. Yet, the norm here – which is also reflected in the default settings of the set-top boxes and TV sets – is that subtitles for translation are always on and visible. (The local TV channels show a lot of foreign content which specifically calls for translation. It just wouldn’t fly if they tried to provide it to the Finnish-speaking audience “as is”, with no effort to translate. People expect the translations to be there.)
Some Finnish-language shows may also have subtitles in Finnish for the benefit of the hard of hearing. But these subtitles, which are not about translation but transcription, are never seen by the normal folks as you need to fiddle with the settings of the TV to receive them. And only those who have the need will want to see them on their screen anyway. (There is also no legal requirement to provide such Finnish-on-Finnish transcription service, so the availability of such special-needs subtitles is pretty much limited to some select shows produced by YLE, the local public broadcaster.)
I was born in 1976 so I got to experience the rise and fall of inexpensive mainstream 8-bit and 16/32-bit microcomputers during my school years. Perhaps more significantly, I also got to experience “home computing” as a hobby, rather than as daily necessity. Also, I belong to one of the generations which were – already before entering school – significantly more knowledgeable about computers than their parents. I suspect this is a condition which may no longer necessarily hold true with the more recent generations...
I entered the first grade of elementary school in September 1983. I also got my first computer, the Commodore 64, for the Christmas of that same year. It was not my first experience of personal computers, however: during the previous year, I had already got my feet wet on my friend’s VIC-20. (My friend was an enthusiastic home computer hobbyist and he had taught me some BASIC programming, so I knew a little bit about that, too – even before entering the school.)
As far as my school was concerned, computers didn’t really exist. They where nowhere to be seen in the lower grades (1–6). They just didn’t belong to the curriculum for the smaller kids. Most adults – including school teachers – were only trying to come to terms with the rather frightening prospect they will yet need to learn about these devil’s machines before retiring... The kids of my generation, though, were eager to get a home computer for themselves during those years, which was in no small part because they filled roughly the same spot as game consoles today. But home computers were also favored by hobbyists and tinkerers, of course, and I had the hobbyist/tinkerer mindset about it. Games were only of secondary interest.
After a few years, my C64 setup had grown to include the Commodore 1541 diskette drive (I started out with the Datasette), the MPS-801 dot matrix printer, and a copy of the GEOS graphical desktop environment – even a Commodore 1351 mouse, which was a rather rarely seen peripheral for the C64. Beginning from the 3rd grade, I was actually using geoWrite (the standard word processor which came with GEOS) for some of my school work. The teachers were a bit baffled at receiving dot-matrix printouts on fan-fold paper from a 3rd grader but generally their response was pretty good. On occasion, though, I was not allowed to use the computer because the teacher insisted typing would not serve the secondary purpose of the writing assignments: honing ones skills in cursive handwriting. This was somewhat irritating considering I was rather more inclined to write in block letters, anyway (and continue to do so to this date...)
Our class was assigned a class magazine project both during the 5th and the 6th grade. I brought my entire Commodore 64 setup in school to make it possible to design the layout of the pages (partially) on a computer. My Finnish teacher – who has now sadly passed away – was so excited about getting this primitive form of computer-based desktop publishing in her class she called the local paper and they made a story about it, with a picture and all. The second year I did this I also brought in an Osborne I and another dot matrix printer which my dad had salvaged from getting binned at his workplace. I let another kid type in articles using WordStar on this other computer.
By the time I entered the 7th grade (1989), I found out the upper level elementary school had two computer labs for teaching “automatic data processing”. These were the only classrooms with computers in them in the whole of school. (Later on, the music class and the art class received a computer each as well.) The older one of the two computer labs was already considered obsolete as it was only equipped with Apple IIs. The current focus of the computer classes was on MS-DOS and IBM-compatible PCs. The typing class, however, used the Apples for typing exercises. Otherwise they just sat there unused. (The problem was, ho
You mean Asterix and his sidekick Obelix, I think.
Lucky Luke, Cubitus, Spike & Suzy, and Tintin could also be worth a look, as well as the classic Donald Duck / Scrooge McDuck comic book stories written by Carl Barks and Don Rosa
I recall a rumor that Sun Microsystems was once interested in purchasing Commodore. Sun was supposedly interested in the home and entry workstation marketplace, and wanted the Amiga line for themselves. I wonder if there was any truth to it.
Just to complete the circle, according to Brian Bagnall’s book On The Edge – The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore , Jobs and Wozniak were, at one point in 1976, negotiating with Jack Tramiel about Commodore buying out Apple (and the Apple I design) to serve as the technological basis for what would later become the Commodore PET; Commodore’s first foray on the personal computer market. But the deal fell through because Tramiel wanted a bargain and he felt Jobs was asking way too much money for his garage company. At the same time, Mike Markkula started investing to Apple so things never got any further on that front.
Chuck Peddle and his team were already working on the PET at that time but Commodore wanted to have something to show on the January 1977 CES so they were short on time. Hacking their vision of a personal computer on top of a pre-existing 6502-based design, such as Wozniak’s Apple I kit, would have bought them some more time. In the end, Peddle’s team managed to put together a working prototype for the CES and Commodore was the first company to announce a personal computer for the mass-market. This created tremendous interest in the field and it was quite a breakthrough for personal computing, but according to the book, the January 1977 CES prototype was barely working and they only got it boot up properly on the very last day of the show. They still had a lot to do before it morphed into the actual production model for which they would start taking in orders later that year.
I assumed WHDLoad could handle pretty much anything, but I may be wrong.
The problem is, the Amiga has a vast library of software (primarily games and demoscene productions) that boots off directly from a floppy and employs custom disk-loading routines which start off from the bootblock. This was done back in the days when an HDD was seen as an expensive extra.
At the beginning, the assumption was that most people interested in games would be using the cheaper Amigas, possibly with no HDD, and they would only have a floppy drive or two at their disposal. (The early Amiga models did not come with HDDs as standard.) Custom trackloading routines were also used for copy protection and performance reasons: reading raw data off the tracks and copying it to the memory is faster than if you load the same data by means of files and a filesystem. And, of course, just powering on the machine and inserting a floppy was an intuitive, simple-to-use interface for starting games; akin to the cartridges on the game consoles.
(The AmigaOS itself, and software normally running under it - tools and utilities, shareware and productivity titles - were always made to be HDD-installable and they utilized a normal filesystem from the beginning, of course. But there's a staggering amount of old games and demos that go with their custom raw disk format and a custom trackloader.)
Now, WHDLoad - which is essentially a binary patch library for various Amiga software titles - remedies that problem for some titles, by making such older releases HDD-installable and their fixing potential compatibility problems with the newer Amigas and newer AmigaOS versions. The patches might even clean up some badly written software, making them allocate memory properly and even adding clean-up and "quit to the OS" functions, instead of requiring a reboot of the machine after you're done with the game. This is all good, and a great accomplishment, but WHDLoad needs a separate driver (called a "slave" in WHDLoad terms) written for each piece of software it "supports". So it's not a universal solution.
Also, since the Amiga floppy disk drive controller is very flexible in how it can be programmed, and the AmigaOS normally uses a floppy format that is incompatible, on the sector level, with standard PC floppy controllers (formatting 880 KB on a DD floppy and 1760 KB on an HD floppy), generic products such as the PLR Electronics 3 ½ floppy drive to USB flash drive reader are not likely to work on the Amiga.
There is an interesting hobbyist DIY hardware project called A Universal Floppy Disk Drive Emulator, however, which aims at making floppy drives redundant on Amigas and many other devices, by replacing them with a floppy disk drive emulator. It is basically the same idea as with the above-mentioned PLR Electronics product, but the project is hobbyist-driven and open, and also guaranteed to be compatible with the low-level sector format that the Amiga normally uses. You can find the schematics and the required software on the linked website.
I know that as late as 1995, NASA still had some satellites that were still controlled by some Commodore 64s in a warehouse near White Sands, New Mexico.
Are you sure those weren't actually Amigas? This page has some information - even photos and screenshots - about the usage of the Commodore Amiga at NASA.
1. Windows has two graphics/video backends, both have serious problems. The major container format is limited to 2GB, for example.
That hasn't been true since the introduction of the OpenDML AVI format, aka AVI 2.0, and the transition to DirectShow APIs (as opposed to the old "Video for Windows" subsystem.) This transition happened, for the most part, somewhere around the beginning of the decade.
Wikipedia lists Knightlore as being published in 1984, which means Zaxxon beat it by 2 years...
There's also Q*bert - likewise from 1982 - as well as Congo Bongo and Sinbad Mystery , which were both released in 1983.
Knightlore might have been the first isometric 3D multiscreen action adventure game, though.
I think you're confusing ATMs with smart card readers. All of the ATMs that I have used swallow the whole card.
Finnish ATMs have two card reader slots:
How hard could it be to add an option "Candidate A, Candidate B ,Spoil vote"
These e-voting machines had a separate "spoil vote" option. Or, rather, a "blank ballot" option. You could choose it by pressing a separate on-screen button instead of entering the candidate number.
The EeePC 701, at least, powers up fine without a battery.
I don't see much reason to "protect" children from the "darker" stories. On the contrary, those are the ones that kept my interest in books going in the formative years - getting a glimpse of the adult world (however fictional); difficult and dangerous situations, strange ideologies and world orders (often written as satirical analogies of actual historical events or political ideas, which I was only to find out about later), visions of post-apocalyptic societies... something to give your imagination wings; going beyond the ordinary, mundane world and opening up new ways of thinking about things.
Why run those kind of things directly on that kind of tiny machine? The Eee is about ultra-lightweight portability. Run the heavy apps on your desktop PC, and use the Eee as a graphical terminal - harnessing the processor power and storage capacity of a much more capable machine with VNC or rdesktop, or whatever. Then you can even be running things like AutoCAD or large cross-compile toolchains seemingly "on" your Eee.
Not sure about the Pringle's cans, but how about an optical DIY 10 Mbps link to the nearest neighbor?