I really try to keep my MS bashing to a minimum. Really. But didn't their VP in charge of open source quit in disgust a while ago? I mean, I may be wrong. I hope I am. But it seems like whenever there may a stray bit of sunshine to shimmer on the Redmond Giant, it turns out to be gleaming on the blade sticking out of users backs.
I've never programmed in VB (due to MS loathing and distrust), but it always looked like a nice way to build macros for office, and quickly build prototypes. It would be great if they open sourced VB6 without their normal strings attached, like it can only be used in projects for Windows platforms after MS has "thoroughly inspected" the project. If they really do use an OSI approved license, I might actually use it on Linux. Gambas has tried to be the Linux equivalent to VB, but it has to stay different enough not to be stomped into oblivion.
You just answered your own question, and you still don't understand? "it comes with some dumbed down programming environment for people who don't want to use C/assembler."
Bingo!
How many people do you know that were taught assembler in school? I was taught because I was in an industrial electronics program, emphasis on industrial manufacturing and maintenance. I think they quit teaching assembler to CS students in the mid '80s, and quit teaching C soon after, shifting to C++/Java. How many people do you think were programming PCs when you had to flip switches, as compared to just typing it in and hitting enter?
CLUE: Make something convenient to use, and people will use it. Make it necessary, but inconvenient, and people won't. Are you sure you're smart enough to be allowed here?
To paraphrase Frank Herbert, in DUNE: "He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." A single point of failure is demanded by the political powers that be, so that they can control it. Just like the first royalty were highwaymen, they controlled the people by having the power/will to kill them.
Now, the PEOPLE want an internet that is always up, self-heals, and up-to-date. If one isn't provided for them, they will concoct their own. Witness PirateBox! This is a start, more will come. The technology is coming down in price, and is maturing, getting easier to implement. Smart high school kids can implement VPNs to privately share files, and now can create their own anonymous p2p wifi site with no fear of getting tagged by "the man".
Any bets that at the next hackercon, there will be multiple PirateBoxen floating around? There may be one hidden in the student union of your school right now, or library, or coffee shop...
This rant (most definitely a rant) is USA-centric and brings up several points that people don't want to think about. If that distresses you, you may wish to skip it.
Sorry, but a government that taxes the wealthy for the benefit of the majority is not going to happen. I'm afraid that sociologically, we may have hit a "tipping point" where the wealthy elite have taken control of the government/energy corporations (Illuminati for all you conspiracy theorists out there), and are driving the economy and public policy in such a way that it will separate the poor and what used to be the middle class from the wealthy, and reduce them to a point where it's all they can do just to survive. They're being driven into economic slavery, and when you're hungry enough, you'll gladly give up these "freedoms" to stay warm and have a good meal.
Yeah, I know it sounds very doom and gloom, but think... How many families do you know that still go on Sunday drives? Still have vacation homes in the country? Still have vacations, period? How many people now have advanced degrees, and aren't able to do much more than high school drop outs? Remember how our parents could travel all over the world on a moments notice, without being molested and intimidated by our own government "to protect us"? We used to protect ourselves, now we're not even supposed to do that. We've just supposed to be good victims, or be arrested and forced into slave labor in the privatized prison system.
The majority of our population is talented and skilled enough for factory work, which creates wealth from raw materials, but some traitors convinced us that getting rid of the factories and moving to a "service-based" economy was a good thing. Not for us, it hasn't been. The industrialization of the factories brought wealth to the majority of our population, and now that it's gone the majority of our population is living on the thin edge of poverty and living off the taxes of the fraction that are skilled enough to be valuable in a global arena. Yes, being on an even footing with the rest of the world meant we had to give up many advantages we enjoyed. The government quit being "for the people" a long time ago, and became "for the people that pay and/or scare us legislators".
They couldn't legally take away our rights overnight, like they would have wished, so they did it slowly, over time, making it seem reasonable, and they kept increasing the costs of our liberty. So it's "fiscally responsible" to stay home, watching the stupid reality shows, thinking that the boogey men are going to kill us if we don't hide behind our wonderful governmental overlords.
Quick side-note: According to many students I know studying for a law-enforcement career, you are automatically ineligible if your IQ measures too high on their standardized tests. "Too high" is approx 90. Still less than average. They want morons with a desire to be in charge, and a taste for violence against the majority of the population. They don't have the high intelligence required for one of the remaining occupations, and aren't normally curious or smart enough to realize that the government and policies that they are enforcing are causing a majority of the problems they are "fighting" every day. They just know what they've been told to do, and they think that they are good heroic boys and girls for doing what they've been told.
These trends aren't "natural law" in the slightest. They've been carefully engineered. You think that the shambles our economy and government are in is just poor planning? That we don't know enough about economics, or good management practices, to set good policies? The original founding of this country was so well thought out, that it's taken over 200 years to subvert and twist it from the inside, by controlling the weak, greedy, and power hungry.
The worst part is that they aren't even trying to hide it anymore. The elite (Bilderburgs, Tri-lateral Commission, Illuminati, whatever name you want to give them) seem to operate on the principal that
It's not just junkies that don't bother cracking the encryption, the FBI just admitted in a case that they broke into a Russian mafia member's house, and found a long-ass password written down, and used that to crack into his machine to get the data. They have sufficient resources that they could "possibly" brute force crack the encryption, but even they find that it's much more efficient to just look for passwords that are written down.
When Gawker Media had their user data stolen, someone commented that he really didn't find his account at Lifehacker.com to be of high value to him, and didn't use a "strong" password to protect it. He ran a test using Ophcrack, and found that even "strong" passwords without dictionary words, mixed case, numerics, and punctuation marks, were being cracked in minutes. And don't ever think that if your data is *really* needed by "them" quickly, that they won't use a "lead pipe decrypter" on you. I know people in training for jobs as Federal agents, and they are more than ready to kick your ass for being a hassle to them. If they kick your ass hard enough, it's permanent, and you won't even be able to say "police brutality", let alone fight the "resisting arrest" charge.
You mean like the new Jaguar C-X75 concept car unveiled at the Paris auto show this year? Too bad the "concept" couldn't get built earlier, when it would have still been "new". And Jaguar has no plans at this time to actually build a car like this. Good Heavens! You want them to anger their back room business parters?
There's a small problem there: in order to destroy the software (competing technologies), they either have to be better (not freaking likely), or make the competition less appealing (which they are doing). Microsoft does that all the time: buy innovative technologies and either absorb them, or destroy them. The BIG difference here is that Microsoft goes after proprietary tech. Closed source has nowhere to run. Oracle is going after Open tech. Everyone has the source. They can lock up the name, but the source slides right out of their grip, like a greased wrestler.
The worst thing that could happen (for Oracle, anyways) is another company(ies) pick up the torch of "Corporate Sponsor(s)" and push the codebase to make it a REAL competitor in the marketplace. Microsoft won't be sitting on the sidelines while this plays out, either. Microsoft Office is their big moneymaker, and they'll protect it like cornered rats. They'll do their best to sabotage the open fork with poisoned presents or outright legal attacks (software patents). OOo will be protected by ranks of lawyers, and thus, a much harder and expensive target.
Oracle has a small window of opportunity here. They must run out the community, and release their own updated version to the market, before Libre Office gets organized, and gets corporate sponsors. I'd be guessing that Oracle has had their people working on the codebase for a while, and this is the visible move to kick out the old regime at the last second so the new code can't be taken by anyone else. I'd guess it to be a major change, too. Probably have a news release in a week or two.
I think Sony learned it's lesson about technical superiority with the MASSIVE market failure of Betamax vs VHS. Technical superiority will not defeat marketing. (and strong-arming and bribery, too!) They do seem to still have a problem of ethics. I mean, come on, it's FUCKING SONY! If they can't infect you with a rootkit, and cut your nuts off for trying to program on their platform without paying them a pound of flesh, you think that they'll willingly hook up with a company that has the motto of "Do No Evil"? They would probably prefer to be sodomized with razor wire.
I remember reading about a precursor to this tech back in the 80's. They could use selective filtering to pick an individual voice out of the background noise in a room full of partying coeds. Which always struck me as kind of strange. I mean, why just listen to drunk coeds when you could be "getting your groove on" with drunk coeds? That's always kept me doubting the reports...
Except that NASA is paid for by taxpayers, and answers to the taxpayers via their elected representatives.
Theoretically. Except that the elected representatives don't even answer to the taxpayers IRL (In Real Life).
However, for the head of NASA to spend tax dollars on something that the elected leadership has instructed them not to do is insubordination.
So? They are simply following the lead of their "leaders". They do whatever the hell they want, despite their constituents expressed desires, and then lie like rugs when it's time for re-election.
Imagine if the UK National Health System decided that doctors aren't being paid enough so they're going to start charging a fee to get priority service?
What does the UK Health System have to do with the US space administration? Besides, from some of the other comments I'm reading, that's exactly what they do.
However, you can't accept money from somebody and then tell them that they have no right to dictate your actions.
That's exactly what the American federal government has been doing for over a 100 years, since the civil war. You seem to think that you're "buying" civilization, with your taxes. Here's a clue: If I shove a gun in your face, and take your money, you're not going to tell me what to do with it. Taxes are much the same. It's paying "protection". As long as I'm pretending to actually give you something in return, you pay up much more easily and I don't have to wash the blood off my hands nearly as often.
I didn't say it was foolproof. If you have to resort to DRM, you're not winning. But how many people do you know that have the technical skills to remove a digital watermark embedded "somewhere" in a 10 MB pdf? It may also be encrypted, in different forms, in several locations.
Still care to wager that you can remove all of them? Ever heard of steganography? I could be embedding all your payment and shipping data in an embedded photo. No, that wouldn't help me track you if you printed it out and handed it to someone, but if you decided to just give them a copy, yes.
Copy protection and DRM are only speedbumps. They won't lock data away forever, and no matter what publishers and authors think, they shouldn't.
Bullshit. My wife worked on the "black boxen" (really orange for visibility in a wreck). She was always complaining because the internal tape mechanisms were the exact same as an old 8-track from the 70's, and with the tape constantly running the ferrite wore off. The boxes were full of black crap, and sometimes the rollers were so old, the rubber went gummy and fscked up all the tape. Lot's of the recorders came in totally inoperative, and had been that way for a long time.
She was so glad when they finally started making, and using, solid state drives.
A friend of mine once did that. He created a program back in the 80's that turned a 2 hour job into a 2 minute job, complete with making it easy to update as forms changed. This job was done millions of times a year, and under the then-current rules he would get a percentage of the money saved over 7 years. Did I mention that this was for the U.S. DOD? He was happy as hell, he was going to be a millionaire!
Until some bean counter said no, they were just going to take it "for the best interests of the country".
His DMS was pretty much undetectable. It wasn't completely in any one program. It had part of it embedded in one programs "dead code" that never executed, and then chained into some other program which called a couple generic libraries, and eventually would wind up deleting major databases and password lists.
He definitely qualified as "disgruntled", but not stupid. Before the trigger date rolled around, he sent it the "permanently dis-arm and dis-assemble" code.
Really happened? Maybe. Good story? Definitely. Will any PHBs learn anything from it? Doubtful, except maybe "screw your programmers mercilessly, they'll chicken out of retribution."
I always thought that a good form of copy protection for pdf ebooks would be to have an automated system take your credit card number, verify it, and embed it on every page of the pdf. Then I don't have to worry about you spreading the file. You get to do the policing for me, because you sure as hell don't want that number getting out into the wild. If I find a copy on P2P, then I'll know exactly who to look up in my database. See, simple.
If by "well-built" and "user-friendly" you mean "bug-stomped", well, that comes from a mature technology. Mature tech normally got that way by hammering the shit out of the innovative tech. Innovation, as you inadvertently pointed out, isn't everything. Hammering the bugs out of technology gives us safe, usable, dependable tech.
Cutting edge, or innovative, tech is always a little raw and buggy. You can't have innovation and "well-built" or "user-friendly" in the same device. They are polar opposites.
You need to quit letting your ego make your dictionary definitions. Face it: Apple isn't innovative. Neither are you, apparently. Linux isn't innovative, either. How it's being used may be. Haiku OS still is. Combustion engines generally aren't. A plasma gasification fuel system would be. Medical equipment, airplanes and helicopters aren't allowed to be, thank God.
Years ago, a deputy wanted to "arrest" my uncle to death. Literally. My uncle told him exactly where he lived, and come on over any time he wanted. My uncle was a military veteran and was eager to kill a lot of SOBs that were ruining the town he grew up in.
My uncle is now a feisty old man and I have no idea what happened to that dumb shit deputy.
This happened in a small town in Missouri.
Any worthless trolls who wish to call me a liar, may leave me a private message with their home address. I'll get back to them.
The All-in-one style has a proper name: a laptop. This is a laptop without an lcd. And it's not portable. So it's not even a good laptop. Nice design, but not a good machine.
If you want the true feel of a 64 get the C64 Direct-to-TV (abbreviated C64DTV). It's a C64 emulated in a chip, with 30 games, embedded in a joystick. Plug it into your TV and play. There are also numerous emulators (free), and you may find someone that has an original in their attic.
The original C64 was, and still is, prized for it's music synth capabilities using the SID chip. Many of the remaining functional C64s have been turned into music synthesizers/sequencers (Prophet64, MSSIAH, others). It's still quite the hackable platform. I remember back in the day (late '80s) some guys developed their own cartridge firmware/network stack and were running 8 of them in a parallel cluster. Neat toy.
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False Alarm. There are no plans for open sourcing VB6. Thanks for the good information, though.
I really try to keep my MS bashing to a minimum. Really. But didn't their VP in charge of open source quit in disgust a while ago? I mean, I may be wrong. I hope I am. But it seems like whenever there may a stray bit of sunshine to shimmer on the Redmond Giant, it turns out to be gleaming on the blade sticking out of users backs.
I've never programmed in VB (due to MS loathing and distrust), but it always looked like a nice way to build macros for office, and quickly build prototypes. It would be great if they open sourced VB6 without their normal strings attached, like it can only be used in projects for Windows platforms after MS has "thoroughly inspected" the project. If they really do use an OSI approved license, I might actually use it on Linux. Gambas has tried to be the Linux equivalent to VB, but it has to stay different enough not to be stomped into oblivion.
You just answered your own question, and you still don't understand?
"it comes with some dumbed down programming environment for people who don't want to use C/assembler."
Bingo!
How many people do you know that were taught assembler in school? I was taught because I was in an industrial electronics program, emphasis on industrial manufacturing and maintenance. I think they quit teaching assembler to CS students in the mid '80s, and quit teaching C soon after, shifting to C++/Java. How many people do you think were programming PCs when you had to flip switches, as compared to just typing it in and hitting enter?
CLUE: Make something convenient to use, and people will use it. Make it necessary, but inconvenient, and people won't. Are you sure you're smart enough to be allowed here?
You apparently don't know what fucking irrational is... or maybe you do. Hmmm....
To paraphrase Frank Herbert, in DUNE: "He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." A single point of failure is demanded by the political powers that be, so that they can control it. Just like the first royalty were highwaymen, they controlled the people by having the power/will to kill them.
Now, the PEOPLE want an internet that is always up, self-heals, and up-to-date. If one isn't provided for them, they will concoct their own. Witness PirateBox! This is a start, more will come. The technology is coming down in price, and is maturing, getting easier to implement. Smart high school kids can implement VPNs to privately share files, and now can create their own anonymous p2p wifi site with no fear of getting tagged by "the man".
Any bets that at the next hackercon, there will be multiple PirateBoxen floating around? There may be one hidden in the student union of your school right now, or library, or coffee shop...
Given the persuasiveness of the Internet it could be possible for a company the size of Google to isolate a country.
The internet doesn't have any inherent persuasiveness. Not any more than radio waves.
Tell that to the President of Zimbabwe.
This rant (most definitely a rant) is USA-centric and brings up several points that people don't want to think about. If that distresses you, you may wish to skip it.
Sorry, but a government that taxes the wealthy for the benefit of the majority is not going to happen. I'm afraid that sociologically, we may have hit a "tipping point" where the wealthy elite have taken control of the government/energy corporations (Illuminati for all you conspiracy theorists out there), and are driving the economy and public policy in such a way that it will separate the poor and what used to be the middle class from the wealthy, and reduce them to a point where it's all they can do just to survive. They're being driven into economic slavery, and when you're hungry enough, you'll gladly give up these "freedoms" to stay warm and have a good meal.
Yeah, I know it sounds very doom and gloom, but think... How many families do you know that still go on Sunday drives? Still have vacation homes in the country? Still have vacations, period? How many people now have advanced degrees, and aren't able to do much more than high school drop outs? Remember how our parents could travel all over the world on a moments notice, without being molested and intimidated by our own government "to protect us"? We used to protect ourselves, now we're not even supposed to do that. We've just supposed to be good victims, or be arrested and forced into slave labor in the privatized prison system.
The majority of our population is talented and skilled enough for factory work, which creates wealth from raw materials, but some traitors convinced us that getting rid of the factories and moving to a "service-based" economy was a good thing. Not for us, it hasn't been. The industrialization of the factories brought wealth to the majority of our population, and now that it's gone the majority of our population is living on the thin edge of poverty and living off the taxes of the fraction that are skilled enough to be valuable in a global arena. Yes, being on an even footing with the rest of the world meant we had to give up many advantages we enjoyed. The government quit being "for the people" a long time ago, and became "for the people that pay and/or scare us legislators".
They couldn't legally take away our rights overnight, like they would have wished, so they did it slowly, over time, making it seem reasonable, and they kept increasing the costs of our liberty. So it's "fiscally responsible" to stay home, watching the stupid reality shows, thinking that the boogey men are going to kill us if we don't hide behind our wonderful governmental overlords.
Quick side-note: According to many students I know studying for a law-enforcement career, you are automatically ineligible if your IQ measures too high on their standardized tests. "Too high" is approx 90. Still less than average. They want morons with a desire to be in charge, and a taste for violence against the majority of the population. They don't have the high intelligence required for one of the remaining occupations, and aren't normally curious or smart enough to realize that the government and policies that they are enforcing are causing a majority of the problems they are "fighting" every day. They just know what they've been told to do, and they think that they are good heroic boys and girls for doing what they've been told.
These trends aren't "natural law" in the slightest. They've been carefully engineered. You think that the shambles our economy and government are in is just poor planning? That we don't know enough about economics, or good management practices, to set good policies? The original founding of this country was so well thought out, that it's taken over 200 years to subvert and twist it from the inside, by controlling the weak, greedy, and power hungry.
The worst part is that they aren't even trying to hide it anymore. The elite (Bilderburgs, Tri-lateral Commission, Illuminati, whatever name you want to give them) seem to operate on the principal that
Your sarcasm is old. And broken. Please get some new sarcasm. In the fresh, minty flavor!
It's not just junkies that don't bother cracking the encryption, the FBI just admitted in a case that they broke into a Russian mafia member's house, and found a long-ass password written down, and used that to crack into his machine to get the data. They have sufficient resources that they could "possibly" brute force crack the encryption, but even they find that it's much more efficient to just look for passwords that are written down.
When Gawker Media had their user data stolen, someone commented that he really didn't find his account at Lifehacker.com to be of high value to him, and didn't use a "strong" password to protect it. He ran a test using Ophcrack, and found that even "strong" passwords without dictionary words, mixed case, numerics, and punctuation marks, were being cracked in minutes. And don't ever think that if your data is *really* needed by "them" quickly, that they won't use a "lead pipe decrypter" on you. I know people in training for jobs as Federal agents, and they are more than ready to kick your ass for being a hassle to them. If they kick your ass hard enough, it's permanent, and you won't even be able to say "police brutality", let alone fight the "resisting arrest" charge.
Or just cut off someones finger minutes before you use it. I think I just grossed myself out...
You mean like the new Jaguar C-X75 concept car unveiled at the Paris auto show this year? Too bad the "concept" couldn't get built earlier, when it would have still been "new". And Jaguar has no plans at this time to actually build a car like this. Good Heavens! You want them to anger their back room business parters?
You wouldn't, by any chance, happen to be a project manager, would you? :)
There's a small problem there: in order to destroy the software (competing technologies), they either have to be better (not freaking likely), or make the competition less appealing (which they are doing). Microsoft does that all the time: buy innovative technologies and either absorb them, or destroy them. The BIG difference here is that Microsoft goes after proprietary tech. Closed source has nowhere to run. Oracle is going after Open tech. Everyone has the source. They can lock up the name, but the source slides right out of their grip, like a greased wrestler.
The worst thing that could happen (for Oracle, anyways) is another company(ies) pick up the torch of "Corporate Sponsor(s)" and push the codebase to make it a REAL competitor in the marketplace. Microsoft won't be sitting on the sidelines while this plays out, either. Microsoft Office is their big moneymaker, and they'll protect it like cornered rats. They'll do their best to sabotage the open fork with poisoned presents or outright legal attacks (software patents). OOo will be protected by ranks of lawyers, and thus, a much harder and expensive target.
Oracle has a small window of opportunity here. They must run out the community, and release their own updated version to the market, before Libre Office gets organized, and gets corporate sponsors. I'd be guessing that Oracle has had their people working on the codebase for a while, and this is the visible move to kick out the old regime at the last second so the new code can't be taken by anyone else. I'd guess it to be a major change, too. Probably have a news release in a week or two.
I think Sony learned it's lesson about technical superiority with the MASSIVE market failure of Betamax vs VHS. Technical superiority will not defeat marketing. (and strong-arming and bribery, too!) They do seem to still have a problem of ethics. I mean, come on, it's FUCKING SONY! If they can't infect you with a rootkit, and cut your nuts off for trying to program on their platform without paying them a pound of flesh, you think that they'll willingly hook up with a company that has the motto of "Do No Evil"? They would probably prefer to be sodomized with razor wire.
I remember reading about a precursor to this tech back in the 80's. They could use selective filtering to pick an individual voice out of the background noise in a room full of partying coeds. Which always struck me as kind of strange. I mean, why just listen to drunk coeds when you could be "getting your groove on" with drunk coeds? That's always kept me doubting the reports...
Except that NASA is paid for by taxpayers, and answers to the taxpayers via their elected representatives.
Theoretically. Except that the elected representatives don't even answer to the taxpayers IRL (In Real Life).
However, for the head of NASA to spend tax dollars on something that the elected leadership has instructed them not to do is insubordination.
So? They are simply following the lead of their "leaders". They do whatever the hell they want, despite their constituents expressed desires, and then lie like rugs when it's time for re-election.
Imagine if the UK National Health System decided that doctors aren't being paid enough so they're going to start charging a fee to get priority service?
What does the UK Health System have to do with the US space administration? Besides, from some of the other comments I'm reading, that's exactly what they do.
However, you can't accept money from somebody and then tell them that they have no right to dictate your actions.
That's exactly what the American federal government has been doing for over a 100 years, since the civil war. You seem to think that you're "buying" civilization, with your taxes. Here's a clue: If I shove a gun in your face, and take your money, you're not going to tell me what to do with it. Taxes are much the same. It's paying "protection". As long as I'm pretending to actually give you something in return, you pay up much more easily and I don't have to wash the blood off my hands nearly as often.
I didn't say it was foolproof. If you have to resort to DRM, you're not winning. But how many people do you know that have the technical skills to remove a digital watermark embedded "somewhere" in a 10 MB pdf? It may also be encrypted, in different forms, in several locations.
Still care to wager that you can remove all of them? Ever heard of steganography? I could be embedding all your payment and shipping data in an embedded photo. No, that wouldn't help me track you if you printed it out and handed it to someone, but if you decided to just give them a copy, yes.
Copy protection and DRM are only speedbumps. They won't lock data away forever, and no matter what publishers and authors think, they shouldn't.
Bullshit. My wife worked on the "black boxen" (really orange for visibility in a wreck). She was always complaining because the internal tape mechanisms were the exact same as an old 8-track from the 70's, and with the tape constantly running the ferrite wore off. The boxes were full of black crap, and sometimes the rollers were so old, the rubber went gummy and fscked up all the tape. Lot's of the recorders came in totally inoperative, and had been that way for a long time.
She was so glad when they finally started making, and using, solid state drives.
A friend of mine once did that. He created a program back in the 80's that turned a 2 hour job into a 2 minute job, complete with making it easy to update as forms changed. This job was done millions of times a year, and under the then-current rules he would get a percentage of the money saved over 7 years. Did I mention that this was for the U.S. DOD? He was happy as hell, he was going to be a millionaire!
Until some bean counter said no, they were just going to take it "for the best interests of the country".
His DMS was pretty much undetectable. It wasn't completely in any one program. It had part of it embedded in one programs "dead code" that never executed, and then chained into some other program which called a couple generic libraries, and eventually would wind up deleting major databases and password lists.
He definitely qualified as "disgruntled", but not stupid. Before the trigger date rolled around, he sent it the "permanently dis-arm and dis-assemble" code.
Really happened? Maybe. Good story? Definitely. Will any PHBs learn anything from it? Doubtful, except maybe "screw your programmers mercilessly, they'll chicken out of retribution."
I always thought that a good form of copy protection for pdf ebooks would be to have an automated system take your credit card number, verify it, and embed it on every page of the pdf. Then I don't have to worry about you spreading the file. You get to do the policing for me, because you sure as hell don't want that number getting out into the wild. If I find a copy on P2P, then I'll know exactly who to look up in my database. See, simple.
If by "well-built" and "user-friendly" you mean "bug-stomped", well, that comes from a mature technology. Mature tech normally got that way by hammering the shit out of the innovative tech. Innovation, as you inadvertently pointed out, isn't everything. Hammering the bugs out of technology gives us safe, usable, dependable tech.
Cutting edge, or innovative, tech is always a little raw and buggy. You can't have innovation and "well-built" or "user-friendly" in the same device. They are polar opposites.
You need to quit letting your ego make your dictionary definitions. Face it: Apple isn't innovative. Neither are you, apparently. Linux isn't innovative, either. How it's being used may be. Haiku OS still is. Combustion engines generally aren't. A plasma gasification fuel system would be. Medical equipment, airplanes and helicopters aren't allowed to be, thank God.
This looks like an epic fail looking for a place to happen. It couldn't happen to a nicer industry.
Great. Another excuse for BIG HAIR from the 80's to make a comeback.
Just had to wait and tell us after I lost all mine.
I've only seen street law, biggest gun wins.
Years ago, a deputy wanted to "arrest" my uncle to death. Literally. My uncle told him exactly where he lived, and come on over any time he wanted. My uncle was a military veteran and was eager to kill a lot of SOBs that were ruining the town he grew up in.
My uncle is now a feisty old man and I have no idea what happened to that dumb shit deputy.
This happened in a small town in Missouri.
Any worthless trolls who wish to call me a liar, may leave me a private message with their home address. I'll get back to them.
The All-in-one style has a proper name: a laptop. This is a laptop without an lcd. And it's not portable. So it's not even a good laptop. Nice design, but not a good machine.
If you want the true feel of a 64 get the C64 Direct-to-TV (abbreviated C64DTV). It's a C64 emulated in a chip, with 30 games, embedded in a joystick. Plug it into your TV and play. There are also numerous emulators (free), and you may find someone that has an original in their attic.
The original C64 was, and still is, prized for it's music synth capabilities using the SID chip. Many of the remaining functional C64s have been turned into music synthesizers/sequencers (Prophet64, MSSIAH, others). It's still quite the hackable platform. I remember back in the day (late '80s) some guys developed their own cartridge firmware/network stack and were running 8 of them in a parallel cluster. Neat toy.