They should get medals and thanks for the amount of wealth they brought to the US overall and to California in particular. Not assissine articles implying they're penny pinchers for not wanting to encourage communism.
> - Operating systems, for various kinds of workloads
I agree that OS is missing but OS for any workload that is not "desktop computer" or "laptop computer" in the EU, and anywhere in the world, is already dominated by Linux. Phones, routers, Internet of Things, servers, supercomputers, smartwatches, satelittes,... Whatever really. It's all Linux.
> With this and z-image-turbo, we've crossed a chasm.
And most of all: they're both local models. The cat is out of the box and it's never going back in. There's no censoring of this. No company that can pull the plug. Anyone with a semi-modern GPU can use these models.
It's still very good I'd say. It shows the relation between big oil and tech: it began in Texas (with companies like Texas Instruments) then shifted to SV (btw first 3D demo I saw on a SGI, running in real time, was a 3D model of... An oil rig). As it spans many years, it shows the Commodore 64, the BBSes, time-sharing, the PC clone wars, the discovery of the Internet, the nascent VC industry etc.
Everything is period correct and then the clothes and cars too: it's all very well done.
Is there a bit too much romance? Maybe. But it's still worth a watch.
I never really could get into the Cameron/Joe romance, it felt like it was initially inserted to get sexy people doing sexy things onto the show and then had to be a star crossed lovers thing after character tweaks in season 2.
But when they changed the characters to be passionate stubborn people eventually started to cling to each other as they together rode the whirlwind of change the show really found its footing for me. And they did so without throwing away the events of season 1, instead having the 'takers' go on redemption arcs.
My only real complaint after re-watching really was it needed maybe another half season. I think the show should have ended with the .com bust and I didn't like that Joe sort of ran away when it was clear he'd attached himself to the group as his family by the end of the show.
There was also a beige version released later (http://www.mainbyte.com/ti99/computers/ti99beige.html). I have both variants in my collection and they're both attractive machines, especially by the standards of the early 80s. The best part of the design was that it had a decent keyboard (unlike its predecessor the TI-99/4, which is much more rare - and for good reason). It also was the first home computer to have hardware graphics support in the form of TI's home-grown TMS9918 VDP chip which outlived the computer it was made for by many years. It was used in dozens of different 8-bit computer models from manufacturers around the world and spawned several improved variants, including the graphics chip in the Sega Master System console!
Unfortunately, the 99/4a was brutally hobbled by some bizarre design choices that nerfed its performance including forcing the 16-bit CPU onto an 8-bit system bus which halted the CPU to spread each 16-bit read/write into two sequential operations. This was made worse by the fact the CPU used a memory-to-memory architecture (even for most of its own registers) and all the memory was behind that '8-bit wall' - except for 256 bytes of 'fast scratchpad' (aka just 'normal memory' on other 8-bits). Plus the GROM was on PROM chips that were even slower than RAM, introducing more latency.
The whole GROM thing could have been a nice idea if it weren't for the 8-bit bus and slow PROM chip speed. Unfortunately, TI execs were more interested in finding a home for excess PROM chip inventory than making their home computer the best it could be. So, it was hard to extract high-performance game graphics from the system, requiring significant ingenuity from developers.
I convinced my grandfather to give me $30 to buy one at a garage sale while i was house sitting with him (he had emphysema and was 82 at the time) back in the early 90s. he lived as an adult through the depression, so it was a point of contention between him, me, and my mom. It only came with 1 cartridge iirc, and a brochure showing all the accoutrements you could add to it, speech module, joystick, and i forget what else.
turning it on and getting a BASIC prompt was real cool. never could save anything, though. I traded it in 1999 or so for an Apple IIc with monitor, with which i could save data.
coincidentally, i just mentioned owning a ti-99/4a to a friend yesterday, we were comparing notes about the first computers we actually owned, and that was it, for me. We had an atari (the wood paneled console one, carts, with keyboard built in, BASIC interpreter on ROM) in '87ish i guess, but i only had it for a couple of weeks before i accidentally blew it up with a cable trying to save something to a tape recorder. the tape recorder had a cable in the back that had a 1/8" TS plug, which apparently was a radio shack "universal power supply" and i guess i put 9VDC into the speaker port.
To save you either needed a cassette recorder, plugged into the machine with a special cable, then "SAVE CS1" and follow the instructions. (Start recording, the TI plays sound to the output port, which gets stored on tape. Use "LOAD CS1" to load from cassette, after rewinding to the start of the program.)
Or you needed an expansion box, with a floppy drive, in which case you could do "SAVE DSK1,PROGNAME" to save to "PROGNAME" on the first disk. I didn't have an expansion box.
> I never really thought of CB as a 'hero', or even really a protagonist.
Yup totally.
As an european I always saw, as a kid, Snoopy as the hero who had lots of humor and who was likable. I'd describe Charlie Brown as "invisible" as I barely remember him.
Doesn't matter: the types of people criticizing such a decision happens to also be the type of people who have zero compassion for the victims of crime. "Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent" and all that comes to mind.
Rehabilitation at all cost / dubious redemption is the subject of the satire movie "A clockwork orange".
HN shall upload and upvotes articles like these, implying inmates are suffering horrible injustice in red states. But same HN shall not upvote any article about a blonde woman ukrainian refugee getting slaughtered in the neck and dying while hearing the last words "take that white girl".
Poor criminal: he now has to go the prison's library to read and cannot receive books and magazines directly.
And most importantly and TFA mentions it several times: stripping unused drivers (and even the ability to load drivers/modules) and bloat brings very real security benefits.
I know you were responding about the boot times but that's just the icing on the cake.
> It has the economic size and stability but not the will right now.
The european union's GDP is a solid 50% behind the US (20 trillion vs 30 trillion). But more alarmingly the growth in the european union since the 2008 financial crisis has been totally anaemic: the growth doesn't even counter inflation and that growth only came at the cost of gigantic additional public debt. Meanwhile both the US and China's GDPs grew like mad.
I also dispute the stability of the EU: in many countries the people aren't happy at all and the far-right are winning elections everywhere. And it's only through tactics (like the center-right siding with the ultra far left in France to counter the far-right party who won the election) that parties that aren't the far-right are managing to prevent the far-right from reigning already.
For example in the European Parliament 36% of the 720 seats are for far-right parties. And that's after all the other parties colluding (including with the far left) to prevent the far right from having more seats.
And as people are more and more dissatisfied with the current situation in the EU, the far-right keep winning more and more voters (sounds familiar?).
> The Euro very well become a reserve currency in a multipolar world if Europeans decide they want to shoulder it.
The Euro is only 27 years old, is a badly conceived currency and may turn out to be one of the shortest lived currency ever. There's no way it's ready to take on the role of the USD. France's finances, the eurozone's 2nd biggest economy, are crumbling (gigantic public debt and insane public deficit) and may very well be overtaken by the International Monetary Fund (like it happened to Greece) soon.
Germany is trying very hard to ban its far-right AFD party from the elections for they know they could very well win. If I'm not mistaken the leader of the AFD said if they won, they're out of the EU. Think it cannot happen? UK left the EU already.
It's not just the EURO that may be the shortest-lived currency ever: the EU is actually in trouble.
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