Ahem. The Ataris only got the sound people because it had a built in MIDI port. Sound wise, the Amiga (as with pretty much everything else) was superior.
And as for "GEM of a desktop": where should I begin?
"The aerospace industry is entrenched in imperial units. The scientific community uses metric units."
That should probably read: The American aerospace industry is entrenched in imperial units. The American scientific community and everyone else uses metric units.
To be more specific, American "imperial" measurements are not actually standard Imperial units, and almost every engineering and science based organisation in the world uses metric units. The US should make a concerted effort to switch.
There was a great little game on the Sinclair Spectrum called Dictator that was set in the "Ritimban Republic". On the domestic front you had to balance the Military, Landowners and Peasants, but you also had to worry about an aggressive neighbouring country ("Leftoto"), the Soviets and the Americans. There's an online version here and a Q-BASIC port here, and I'm sure the original tape image can be found somewhere...
"...expecting a smaller, younger, and less-well-used project to attract more regular and frequent developers is usually unrealistic."
I would disagree. In my experience, early versions of open source projects will attract more patches as a result of their immaturity - they are less refined and any bugs that exist are more obvious and usually easier to fix. As time goes on the project becomes more defined feature-wise and only the hard to find/fix bugs are left.
I've just spent the last week or so installing and attempting to uninstall Oracle 9i and 9iAS over and over again. I have *never* seen a piece of software that is as user hostile and fragile as this. Comparing SQL with Access doesn't make much sense to me but bare this in mind whoever you go with. My colleagues at work have had much greater success with the 2 main open source DBs (MySQL and PostgreSQL).
I remember going to a museum in Denmark once where there were lots of American tourists. There was a map of Denmark and its surrounding countries where the land had been colored blue and the seas white, and the tourists behind me thought that the land was the sea and vice versa!
The difference is that we're dealing with the truth, and not spelling, here.
Exactly - whether it's code or legal analysis we're contributing to, in both cases the project leader can choose between ideas they agree with but had never thought of and ideas which they believe to be plain wrong (which helps them realise what they disagree with). What happens is that the contributors (both right and wrong) are helping the project leader reach their idealistic destination. If that doesn't make sense think of Hegel (thesis + antithesis -> antithesis) or Darwin (natural selection).
"The more readers I have, the better Groklaw gets, because no one person is as smart as the rest of the world, and each reader has knowledge and skills to contribute. And they do contribute. That is Groklaw's secret sauce. I don't even worry too much about errors. When they happen, someone notices within the first hour of a story going up, and I can just correct."
Once again the internet allows the process of peer review to work its magic, only instead of being applied to open source code, in this case it's being applied to legal analysis.
"We're rapidly heading for a world where computers are as common as pens or soccer balls -- and computer skills are as common as basic literacy or ball-kicking ability. And in that world, with or without an organized free software movement, I doubt that even 1/10 of 1% of all the people who "know how to program" will be able to get full-time jobs creating computer software."
Umm choice is a good thing. There are many weird and wonderful window managers out there, and I don't see why users who want a Qt based "desktop environment" should be forced to use a particular window manager.
Disclaimer. I'm not a KDE or GNOME user, I just use the best programs I can find whether they be Qt, GTK or anything else. Small programs that do one thing well is the UNIX way and anything that tries to force you into using an exclusive suite of programs is plain wrong.
I was pretty depressed when I saw Street Fighter II on the Amiga. A couple of months later I saw Elfmania. The gameplay was crap, but it proved that the Amiga was better then the SNES (and just as good as the Playstation version). Heck I even wrote my own floor scrolling routine and it used a tiny amount of processing compared with a stupid PC frame-buffer style implementation.
When I got my Amiga 500 in 1990 it came with Amiga Basic which was written by Microsoft. It was crap - a bad port of a basic that had been written for the Mac. It didn't support about 90% of the features of the system and it broke the Amiga programming guidelines in major ways so that when later machines came out it didn't work at all.
That said, I do recollect hearing the same story you mention.
Absolutely. Pre-emptive multitasking and probably the best palette based 2D architecture to this day in 1985! Along with the Atari ST, these machines were massively popular in Europe, but not as much in the US which might have caused the author to overlook it.
Commodores failure to sell the Amiga to the US consumer was almost criminal. Apparently IBM and Apple were genuinely scared when they saw the Amiga back in the mid-eighties, and were greatly relieved when they saw C= selling it as little more than a toy. They really didn't understand what they had in that machine.
Ahh, you mean mozex surely. The main problem with mozex is that the "source" you see is not the same as the source you see in the standard editor. I believe Mozilla sometimes radically alters incoming HTML - converting it into a format it prefers for rendering purposes.
The author of mozex says: Mozex is a very ugly hack, in the most negative sense of the word. Its functions should be included in Mozilla/Firebird. Mozex is not intended to become a "standard" tool and it definitely should go away as soon as possible.
Please bug the developers of Mozilla to provide sane, documented and complex support for external programs as a part of Mozilla/Firebird.
What version are you using? I switched from 0.6 to 0.7 (on a Windows 2000 machine) and found numerous problems with scrolling in general. Most annoyingly some srollbars didn't show up and dropdown comboboxes had problems too.
I'm back on 0.6 now but will try 0.8 when it's released. I'm especially looking forward to 0.9 when they plan to allow the use of external editors for viewing source.
"Won't it be wonderful when Labor adopts the EU constutition without a vote by the people. I know you are all excited over than and can hardly wait.
I know you are all looking forward to getting the the Euro as a currency as well."
It's not so important to those of use working in IT, but our failure to join the Euro is hurting a lot of people who work in or are connected to the manufacturing sector (see here).
People bash the EU all the time, but it does us a lot of good - we weren't even guaranteed certain human rights until Europe introduced the European Convention on Human Rights:
"This is a separate, but just as influential element of European Law. For example, The Human Rights Act 1998 became law in the UK in October 2000 and guarantees some rights that people in the UK did not have previously, including certain rights to privacy."
"A European Commission official told the paper that EU governments are bound by a timetable set out by the US government after September 11.
Under the US Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002, countries whose citizens enjoy visa-free travel to the United States "must issue passports with biometric identifiers no later than Oct. 26, 2004," the IHT reports.
"The solution which is mostly likely is a chip in the passport containing fingerprints and eye scans," Pietro Petrucci, an EC spokesman told the paper."
"America remains the sweet land of liberty in comparison to the rest of the world."
Riiight. I know things aren't perfect in the UK but at least we haven't set up anything like what you have at Guantanamo Bay, where the usual notions of justice don't even apply:Confess or die, US tells jailed Britons
"...a lemming is a little mole-like creature that once in a while commits a mass cuicide."
This article points out that lemmings "do not, however, commit mass suicide by leaping off cliffs, a myth compounded 45 years ago by Walt Disney's White Wilderness film - which showed lemmings apparently going to their doom."
Slashdot Mirror
Ahem. The Ataris only got the sound people because it had a built in MIDI port. Sound wise, the Amiga (as with pretty much everything else) was superior.
And as for "GEM of a desktop": where should I begin?
"The aerospace industry is entrenched in imperial units. The scientific community uses metric units."
That should probably read: The American aerospace industry is entrenched in imperial units. The American scientific community and everyone else uses metric units.
To be more specific, American "imperial" measurements are not actually standard Imperial units, and almost every engineering and science based organisation in the world uses metric units. The US should make a concerted effort to switch.
There was a great little game on the Sinclair Spectrum called Dictator that was set in the "Ritimban Republic". On the domestic front you had to balance the Military, Landowners and Peasants, but you also had to worry about an aggressive neighbouring country ("Leftoto"), the Soviets and the Americans. There's an online version here and a Q-BASIC port here, and I'm sure the original tape image can be found somewhere...
But how are the Americans going to try Hussein without recognising the International Criminal Court in the Hague?
"...expecting a smaller, younger, and less-well-used project to attract more regular and frequent developers is usually unrealistic."
I would disagree. In my experience, early versions of open source projects will attract more patches as a result of their immaturity - they are less refined and any bugs that exist are more obvious and usually easier to fix. As time goes on the project becomes more defined feature-wise and only the hard to find/fix bugs are left.
3 button optical mouse
I've just spent the last week or so installing and attempting to uninstall Oracle 9i and 9iAS over and over again. I have *never* seen a piece of software that is as user hostile and fragile as this. Comparing SQL with Access doesn't make much sense to me but bare this in mind whoever you go with. My colleagues at work have had much greater success with the 2 main open source DBs (MySQL and PostgreSQL).
Does anyone remember the Rebel Netwinder? That was cooler than this but they still went bust.
I remember going to a museum in Denmark once where there were lots of American tourists. There was a map of Denmark and its surrounding countries where the land had been colored blue and the seas white, and the tourists behind me thought that the land was the sea and vice versa!
Wow, Americas bigger then I thought - over 50 states, each with over 60 million people!
Obligatory Software Wars link
Yeah, it shows how skewed (to the right obviously) Americans political system has become. Amusingly the word "Liberal" is derogatory in the US too.
The difference is that we're dealing with the truth, and not spelling, here.
Exactly - whether it's code or legal analysis we're contributing to, in both cases the project leader can choose between ideas they agree with but had never thought of and ideas which they believe to be plain wrong (which helps them realise what they disagree with). What happens is that the contributors (both right and wrong) are helping the project leader reach their idealistic destination. If that doesn't make sense think of Hegel (thesis + antithesis -> antithesis) or Darwin (natural selection).
"The more readers I have, the better Groklaw gets, because no one person is as smart as the rest of the world, and each reader has knowledge and skills to contribute. And they do contribute. That is Groklaw's secret sauce. I don't even worry too much about errors. When they happen, someone notices within the first hour of a story going up, and I can just correct."
Once again the internet allows the process of peer review to work its magic, only instead of being applied to open source code, in this case it's being applied to legal analysis.
Bravo Pamela.
This is good too. The last paragraph reads:
"We're rapidly heading for a world where computers are as common as pens or soccer balls -- and computer skills are as common as basic literacy or ball-kicking ability. And in that world, with or without an organized free software movement, I doubt that even 1/10 of 1% of all the people who "know how to program" will be able to get full-time jobs creating computer software."
Umm choice is a good thing. There are many weird and wonderful window managers out there, and I don't see why users who want a Qt based "desktop environment" should be forced to use a particular window manager.
Disclaimer. I'm not a KDE or GNOME user, I just use the best programs I can find whether they be Qt, GTK or anything else. Small programs that do one thing well is the UNIX way and anything that tries to force you into using an exclusive suite of programs is plain wrong.
I was pretty depressed when I saw Street Fighter II on the Amiga. A couple of months later I saw Elfmania. The gameplay was crap, but it proved that the Amiga was better then the SNES (and just as good as the Playstation version). Heck I even wrote my own floor scrolling routine and it used a tiny amount of processing compared with a stupid PC frame-buffer style implementation.
When I got my Amiga 500 in 1990 it came with Amiga Basic which was written by Microsoft. It was crap - a bad port of a basic that had been written for the Mac. It didn't support about 90% of the features of the system and it broke the Amiga programming guidelines in major ways so that when later machines came out it didn't work at all.
That said, I do recollect hearing the same story you mention.
Absolutely. Pre-emptive multitasking and probably the best palette based 2D architecture to this day in 1985! Along with the Atari ST, these machines were massively popular in Europe, but not as much in the US which might have caused the author to overlook it.
Commodores failure to sell the Amiga to the US consumer was almost criminal. Apparently IBM and Apple were genuinely scared when they saw the Amiga back in the mid-eighties, and were greatly relieved when they saw C= selling it as little more than a toy. They really didn't understand what they had in that machine.
Ahh, you mean mozex surely. The main problem with mozex is that the "source" you see is not the same as the source you see in the standard editor. I believe Mozilla sometimes radically alters incoming HTML - converting it into a format it prefers for rendering purposes.
The author of mozex says:
Mozex is a very ugly hack, in the most negative sense of the word. Its functions should be included in Mozilla/Firebird. Mozex is not intended to become a "standard" tool and it definitely should go away as soon as possible.
Please bug the developers of Mozilla to provide sane, documented and complex support for external programs as a part of Mozilla/Firebird.
What version are you using? I switched from 0.6 to 0.7 (on a Windows 2000 machine) and found numerous problems with scrolling in general. Most annoyingly some srollbars didn't show up and dropdown comboboxes had problems too.
I'm back on 0.6 now but will try 0.8 when it's released. I'm especially looking forward to 0.9 when they plan to allow the use of external editors for viewing source.
"Won't it be wonderful when Labor adopts the EU constutition without a vote by the people. I know you are all excited over than and can hardly wait.
I know you are all looking forward to getting the the Euro as a currency as well."
It's not so important to those of use working in IT, but our failure to join the Euro is hurting a lot of people who work in or are connected to the manufacturing sector (see here).
People bash the EU all the time, but it does us a lot of good - we weren't even guaranteed certain human rights until Europe introduced the European Convention on Human Rights:
"This is a separate, but just as influential element of European Law. For example, The Human Rights Act 1998 became law in the UK in October 2000 and guarantees some rights that people in the UK did not have previously, including certain rights to privacy."
I think alot of this is being driven by the US demanding that anyone visiting their country has biometric information in thier passports.
This article sums up the current situation:
"A European Commission official told the paper that EU governments are bound by a timetable set out by the US government after September 11.
Under the US Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002, countries whose citizens enjoy visa-free travel to the United States "must issue passports with biometric identifiers no later than Oct. 26, 2004," the IHT reports.
"The solution which is mostly likely is a chip in the passport containing fingerprints and eye scans," Pietro Petrucci, an EC spokesman told the paper."
"America remains the sweet land of liberty in comparison to the rest of the world."
Riiight. I know things aren't perfect in the UK but at least we haven't set up anything like what you have at Guantanamo Bay, where the usual notions of justice don't even apply:Confess or die, US tells jailed Britons
"...a lemming is a little mole-like creature that once in a while commits a mass cuicide."
This article points out that lemmings "do not, however, commit mass suicide by leaping off cliffs, a myth compounded 45 years ago by Walt Disney's White Wilderness film - which showed lemmings apparently going to their doom."