Thus wrote alienrelics@...:
> > > So I'm a bit jumpy. I've had a few lately take my humor as if I
> > > meant it. Even as obvious as that one was.
> >
> > Only on the second look. That was why I had to laugh, it was
> > cleverly
> > disguised and almost dropped me into despair.
>
> I've been told I have a rather dry sense of humor, but then I do
> pratfalls, too.

Not very likely in this list - seems completely empty, apart from the two
of us.



> > The management of C= was a real PITA - without them the Amiga
> > would be in
> > a better position now, and maybe C= could have survived. "Get out
> > of this
> > world with Amiga - follow NASA."
>
> If it happened now, Medhi Ali and Irving Gould would be in court
> next to Enron and Tyco executives.

I seem to remember that there was a case brought against them - but it
seems to have fizzled, just like that case against micro$oft...



> > Now you almost lost me - did that RAM pack really have a voltage
> > ragulator
> > inside? I had no idea - but I did consider doing the same, I mean
> > doing
> > the ribbon cable trick, just that I was too lazy for these
> > things. I'm
>
> Sorry, that was ambiguous. I meant the 5V regulator in the bottom
> of the ZX-81.

Well, I never even saw that one. So you could have just let me believe it
was in the RAM pack... ;-)



> > more of a software person. As in: How many programmers does it
> > take to
> > change a lightbulb?
>
> None but the burnt out bulbs must be Microsoft bulbs. Microsoft
> embraced and extended darkness as a standard, so darkness is now
> protected under the DMCA so it is against the law for anyone but
> Microsoft to change the bulb. Hmm... that was a long way to go for
> very little punch line, wasn't it? ;')

The actual answer was: "None, that's a hardware problem." But I do
remember the one about darkness being declared a new standard by M$.



> > I just find it a bit sad that they are now trying to turn OS4
> > into
> > something like Linux - with all the overheads that will produce.
> > Their
> > excuse is that memory protection is "more advanced". I believe
> > that
> > writing proper software that doesn't poke indiscriminately into
> > public
> > memory and crash the machine, is more advanced.
>
> Yeah, Linux on my wife's 450MHz with 256M of RAM is glacially slow,
> I think a bit slower even than MS W98. Yet when I boot up WinUAE,
> it flies as an Amiga.
>
> A friend of mine used to be an Amiga developer. He was anal about
> not allowing any software that breaks memory rules. He had Amigas
> that hadn't been rebooted in years!

Actually I still use a text editor that has never crashed yet, and that is
since '89. Also Microdot, my email prog is quite stable, hasn't crashed
either. But apart from the odd time when I was batch-converting AIFFs from
CDs into mp3s, that ran on for several days, I tend to switch off every
day. But those times I carried on getting my mail and newsgroups every day
while the machine just ran on without a hitch.



> > Yep, I often play mp3s while doing other things - without it
> > intruding in
> > the slightest - but then I have a Delfina DSP card with the
> > decoder
> > running on the DSP. Original Amiga psychology to use custom chips
> > for
> > custom jobs.
>
> And people don't realize that every Wintel clone out there is
> filled with Commodore patents for Amiga designs.

Since C= isn't around any more, they can get away with it. And now all the
hardware patents remain with Gateway, AFAIK, as amiga.com only bought the
software off them. It seems that Gateway don't care much either.


C'ya,

--

Paul :.................: strandedUFO : http://www.sufo.estates.co.uk :.: