anexprogrammer

That is exactly free speech. A right to express an unsavoury view without the system punishing you.

Never gave you a right not to be ignored by your neighbours, or not banned from the bar, or not having others nudge their friends to make sure they notice and avoid, etc. Free speech almost always came with consequences until the internet age.

Me, I'd rather emulate a few classic games. But it had me wondering for a while if I'd get any value from this, before deciding "no".

I find it interesting that so many of the people making YT videos and in the current Amiga community don't seem old enough to have been there first time around! So it can't be just nostalgia.

What I really want is someone to reimagine a 3000+ prototype[0] for this decade and a modern Intuition. Then I'd probably impulse spend a lot of $. Of course that would cost someone a lot of R&D spend! It's almost inconceivable anything could recapture the magic though. :)

There's an interview from a couple of years ago with the guy who made the X5000 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb6nbQSOAA0 and his Amiga addiction.

I started out doing real programming on an Amiga and I took a LONG time to retire it. Wasn't for lack of trying...

For years after if I needed to do something useful I used the Amiga over Win, on my first couple of very expensive PCs, because it was an order of magnitude more productive. It felt faster, with endless virtual screens, despite the ludicrous MHz/graphics gap. It was actually faster at most real world tasks except those needing raw CPU loads. It was far more reliable ripping or writing CDs etc. You generally plugged any Zorro card in and it just worked - none of the faffing with interrupt jumpers and Plug n Pray/BSOD. I used it over Linux/BSD as the sw wasn't there.

It took until the XP era, and much expense, before the Amiga became pointless. I was delighted when the Macbook Pro arrived... I'd sold the 4000 well before then.

I still miss many aspects of it. Not because I am somehow stuck in nostalgia for the 90s, MHz over GHz or scanlines and flicker fixers, but because I feel it was, in many ways a far better starting point for modern computing - mostly Intuition, but also the approach to everything in the hardware design (pre 4000 anyway). If only they had developed over the years since...

I suspect, had Commodore lasted, that they'd have gone an OSX-like route - new processor (this was already planned as there was no future in 68k series) and reimagining of Intuition on top of nix, maybe BSD. It already had a rather nix flavour, ARexx and so on. Hopefully on something more interesting than just PC clone hardware, though I doubt it these days.

[0] Dave Haynie designed a machine that was another leap forward in 90/91 whilst AA was still being worked on (I think): early spec PDF: http://www.thule.no/haynie/research/a3000p/docs/a3000p.pdf

Medhi Ali wanted to cut cost above all, and make some crap PCs, so the world got the piece of junk A4000 and AGA instead. Oh, and a cost-cutting A600 that cost more to produce than the A500.

For those who weren't around, Usenet was built on uucp in the early 80s. As messages were store and forward you had to wait a good while for your messages to propagate - many servers only connected daily! Oh, and better set cron to dial in often as messages didn't stay in the spool too long!

Usenet back then was spam free and you could usually end up talking to the creators of whatever you're discussing. I rather miss it.

Quite a few tech companies used private newsgroups for support, so you'd dial into those separately. As they were often techie to techie they worked rather well.

I first came across Usenet and uucp via the Amiga Developer programme. Amicron and uucp overnight all seemed a bit magic back in 87 compared to dialing into non-networked BBS's to browse, very, very slowly!

Well the luck of finding a place that can deal with a middle-aged apprentice means I'll be collecting those skills for a while yet! I came across the opportunity whilst looking for options and directions for degrees to drive the career change. Well, that and deciding quite what other field I wanted to land in. Opportunity arose, I leapt. :)

Sometimes I'm glorified handyman, sometimes more significant, almost alwats learning more about old methods and tech, or previous centuries' restorations. I'm still collecting pieces of paper, including for some required modern things like electrics, that usually feel like basic commmon sense, until you see the folks in the class who are barely grasping it.

There's opportunities for specialising more as I go on.

Europe is littered with old sites, some owned by the large conservation charities are pretty formal in recruitment and role. Some of the individual estates and smaller organisations are more flexible probably because some of the niche skills are needed only more rarely. So I'd probably have never got near the National Trust without a 5 year run up.

This has come up a few times!...

I left because I was utterly sick of churn, NIH, and the endless succession of this week's magic (javascript framework etc) bullet. OK. It's different. It's almost never better.

Also felt most of my efforts were NOT making the world a better place but tech was contributing HARD to the throwaway world we need to cease, not increase.

I now work maintaining and restoring an early Elizabethan estate. Some of the things I do might outlast me, and it seems a worthwile contribution to the world. Some of the work done will count in a century or two all being well.

Do I regret leaving? Hell no. Best decision I ever made.

Still read HN because I am still interested in tech, but mostly not the 80% that the world seems to have settled on. I am extremely agin many of the uses, decisions and techs that give us the modern world. Exponentially increasing throwaway hardware on a finite planet? Surveillance? IoT? Security? Everything as a data slurping webapp? Disrupting perfectly sensible things that work nicely? Meh ^ 200.

I'd be glad to get involved in a project that I could believe made a significant substantive difference. Like if a Mr Musk phoned (not terribly likely) about alternative energy, climate change or some such...

> Hmm, this donut's a bit stale, I'm not prepared to pay anything for it thanks Mr.Tesco.

You go to the customer service desk, say "This doughnut is stale" show your receipt along with the partly eaten doughnut, then get a full refund or exchange as you prefer.

If you're doing it daily the rules will change. :)

The Amiga kernel and Intuition (the GUI).

Partly because it was just so damn clean and intuitive. Equivalent Windows apps were an order of magnitude larger, but seemed to offer less.

Partly because each was almost entirely the work of one - RJ Mical for Intuition, and Carl Sassenrath, who would later create Rebol mentioned below, for the kernel.

Lastly the whole was greater than the sum of very excellent parts.

Xwindows and Windows etc were an endless series of disappointments after cutting my teeth on Intuition. I often used to wonder what might have been had it continued to be developed... Or succeeded as it deserved.

In the case of Google, and to a lesser extent Microsoft, I don't have enough trust they'll keep their offering around to ever start using and relying on it.

Google and to a slightly lesser degree Microsoft have horrible histories of simply turning off successful services. Or "improving" them by replacing with something objectively worse.

..and despite the Readme implying it may not be stable yet and it being prerelease I've found it flawless for the 2 or 3 weeks I've been happily running it!

To start I'm probably outside the usual IoT demographic - it mostly doesn't deliver what I'd like. I looked at your campaign and thought it interesting, but didn't back it. Here's some entirely personal thoughts, make of them what you will - I don't expect to be very representative though! :)

I don't care to have my phone always around at home, couldn't care less about most apps. I even turn the phone off! Have always wanted not an Internet of Things but a local net, with a miniscule subset allowed near the net or usage slurping phone apps.

Was interested seeing MacOS app, hoping for a Pi or similar app further down. I liked that you can have say 3 remotes doing entirely different things or switching functions etc. Oh, bluetooth, iMac is usually in the other room to us in the evening (when I'm more likely to want a remote for something), so we're mainly out of Bluetooth range, and the Thinkpad is either on standby or being used.

Would have been more interested if a) the remote tethered to wifi to talk to the iMac, or better a low power Pi or similar hub so I don't need to care about iMac, phone and their apps just to remote music or lighting and b) there was a cheap n cheerful plastic option for the kitchen etc too. I'd probably look at a couple of plastic cheapies (to get dirty or lost etc) and one nice premium wooden one for the coffee table in main room.

Well there's been several pretty negative pieces on the Guardian front page in the last month. OK they're left of centre, so will undoubtedly have a view on the sexism aspect of recent events, but it's not been just those aspects they reported.

I think most also got picked up by Metro.co.uk and the Daily Mail etc - like the CEO argument - so reporting is well outside SV. Not forgetting the whole #deleteuber thing. A couple of months back the only mention of Uber outside of HN, Tech Crunch et al was reports of the driver self-employment case or expectation of driverless cars.

What I can't guess is how influenced non-techies are from current events. It does feel like they've hit a certain mass that those negative events are now being widely reported in the mainstream.

I'm the wrong side of the Alantic to be well up on the SV jobs market, but as I say, were it me I'd be concerned by the apparent change in mood. I'd have been equally concerned by the change in mood, and endless bad press, just after Ratners CEO called one of their products "cheap crap" as a joke [0] - 12 months later Britain's largest jewellery chain was no more.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/aug/22/gerald-ratn...

I've seen a few large, well-known places downgrade candidates from certain places by dint of ability or technology stack in use. Or to be honest, just plain prejudice. So they'd be less likely to get interviewed in the first place.

I'd far rather be an early, perhaps too early leaver, than stick around for six months to not job-hop only to find the Corp blew up. Now there's 3,000 Uber engineers on the market, and quite possibly a lot more bad press.

So for OP, consider carefully, including your insider perspective, before deciding either way! (I'd probably lean towards an exit as the bad PR does seem to have reached critical mass).

Before it was FB/Internet/Phone games, it was TV, so we're perhaps just continuing further down a well worn path.

See Roger Water's underrated Amused to Death album or the book that inspired it Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness.

Hah. We got rid of the tv a decade or more ago. Though being pretentious wasn't part of the decision. :)

...and how much steel goes into your typical 50 or 60,000 ton oil rig? They're mostly steel after all.

Given we're starting from nearly all fossil of course fossil fuel needs to burn to do just about anything. So long as there is a sensible pay-back period, and reasonable life beyond, what's it matter? Come replacement time hopefully the steel will be smelted with entirely renewable electricity.

If we reach that point having to keep using some coal and oil for coke and other products we cannot get elsewhere is going to be environmentally trivial comparatively.

Would you prefer to stay away from renewables and stay on fossil?

Surprisingly the Daily Mail has a much more extensive write up of the vehicle and drone [0], along with plenty of photos. Normally I'd avoid linking to the Mail!

Jag's SVO group does some remarkable vehicles from the gorgeous F-Type Project 7, to bullet proof Range Rovers.

[0] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4288250/Red-Cross-he...

> So? Millions of users do want it, judging from the huge popularity of Dropbox

Yet just about everyone uses local FS with cloud for backup or sharing of a small subset. Giving us an odd cloud first strategy seems more suited for a phone or severely storage constrained devices.

> Again, irrelevant. Lots of Mac users, and tons of pundits HAVE asked for a "new proprietary filesystem" to replace HFS+

Seem to remember that most of that conversation was of ZFS. They even got a long way into the ZFS port before abandoning. HFS+ has been getting long in the tooth for years, so a better FS is long overdue! So now we're getting APFS that explicitly doesn't checksum user data[0]! With current storage size, that's disappointing to understate it hugely.

> until Intel delivers boards that accept 32GB low-power RAM

It's funny, if Apple had not significantly reduced the Wh of MBP batteries in the latest generation we could easily have had both. Probably a longer overall life. Teardowns show a lot of empty space around current batteries.

[0] http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2016/06/19/apfs-part5/#apfs-data

Did you ever hear of a man losing his job, or getting ill, then shortly after his wife leaving? It's quite common.

It's very much both sex's perspective of role. Clichéd it may be, but there's a truth behind women preferring men with money, power or strength, or a combination of all.

Except no.

Plastic milk containers and bottles have to be thoroughly washed before recycling as the plastic is incredibly easy to corrupt with contaminants. Every roadside recycling scheme I've been a part of has required all tins, bottles and glass to be washed before recycling. (Seems pointless in the case of tins as the food debris will be burnt off along with paint etc as the metals are melted).

PET washing in a recycling line needs to be higher temperature as they also use the washing to disolve the glues used for outside labels etc.

The integrated washing of all bottles joining a reusable glass bottle line likely used a fraction of the cleaning energy now expended.

There's been a number of pieces that bread prices, or water, can be indicators of likely conflict. It's also revealing that so many regimes subsidise wheat prices.

Try this [0] Mother Jones piece on "Bread Prices, A Measure of Political Stability", or one from the Conversation [1].

There was a BBC documentary of 10 years ago. I can't remember the title so haven't found a web link.

[0] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/07/climate-change-f...

[1] http://theconversation.com/food-security-how-drought-and-ris...

Mozilla is growing, experimenting more, and can acquire startups.

Mozilla doesn't have the resources to continue with Thunderbird.

I am increasingly baffled by their decisions and how they relate to the strategic plans [0] they've been producing for a while. Despite the worthy words in their plan they seem to have no sense of direction. That saddens me.

That said I'm happier having Pocket as an open source part of Mozilla/Firefox than a surprise integration of a commercial app.

[0] https://wiki.mozilla.org/MoFo_2020

Sometime in the 80s or 90s there was interest in introducing the same as plastic was starting to be used for more bottles. From memory it was very popular with the public at the time. Nothing ever came of it, so presumably the Thatcher govt considered it an unfair imposition on businesses.

So now we have towns and hedgerows full of discarded plastic bottles.

We're still asking the wrong question.

The frustrating thing is we were doing miles better in the 80s, even though to be evironmentally aware then meant you were thought of as some sort of hippie or anarchist type.

Lots of supermarkets still sold milk in glass bottles as used by milkmen. You returned the empties to the store/milkman and they could be reused indefinitely. Milkmen delivering to door were still common.

A couple of supermarkets had bio-degradeable carrier bags that were just as good as plastic, they just had a slightly different (nicer tbh) texture. They had mysteriously disppeared by the 90s, so presumably cost a fraction more.

Most products had yet to succumb to the insanity of plastic and packaging. Lots of pop (soda) came in glass bottles or cans, just a few preferred plastic. Sealed packs of 3 slices of ham or one apple were still in some dystopian future. Paper, card and greaseproof paper were still common packaging.

A typical family would get nowhere near the amount of waste an average family generates in these "environmentally aware" times.

Personally I yearn for a dumb-ish phone. That's as much due to form-factor as features. Essentially the entire market is candy bar touch sensitive, sealed battery and so on.

I can't be unique in wanting something that's not a candy bar? I've passed peak smartphone - and toned down my app use. I'll accept a few different formats as alternative.

Yet again, after a ludicrously short time, my sealed in smartphone battery was getting tired. I was hoping Blackberry was finally going to make the "obvious" handset change - a Classic with Android. They announced they were exiting handsets instead. The Far East gets a selection of Android flip phones, mostly very expensive premium, never coming near Europe. So I settled on getting a LG V20 when it released as it at least keeps SD and removable battery. Then LG decided EU doesn't get those.

So when my "smart" phone died, I got my old V8 Motorola (The Linux based flip follow on to the v3) out the drawer. It's fantastic. It gets more signal and clearer calls than any smartphone I have owned, and the original (12 year old?) battery gives weeks of standby. It has ergonomics. Of course the camera is awful, and there's next to no storage.

Seriously, give me that form factor with modern storage, Android and keep the a tiny screen that only comes on when you flip open. I don't need a huge screen to run a chat app, or listen to "turn left in 100 yards", or book a taxi. I can't think of a single app I use that needs a 4"+ screen. The miniscule external v8 screen is perfect for notifications and music player use. Should get decent standby life...

Nope, the entirity of global capitalism offers me 23,509 near identical candy bars in a simulation of choice.

Quite. The smell was strong from the very first announcement. Didn't stop the media proudly telling us how wonderful and flexible this was. Frankly the whole thing stank and you can be fairly sure the navy wanted cats. Sandy Woodward and Alan West certainly did.

No matter we were going to have 150 F35s by 2012. We've got what, five so far?

That is hilarious and depressing in equal measure. One of the much trumpeted features of the QE class is they were going to be modular and upgradable to cats and traps for little cost. When new govt tried to exercise that option turns out the upgrade would increase the cost of a ship by about a third or thereabouts.

It's also depressing how little we learned from the air war over the Falklands. Presumably because it was the Fleet Air Arm rather than the RAF. RAF contribution was the Vulcan raid which was a) ludicrous and b) needed our entire tanker fleet airborne to get one (ONE!) Vulcan, equipped with a 1948 design bomb sight, there.

Meanwhile the Harriers turned out to be rather good dogfighters as they could essentially be put in reverse (viffing [1]). Rather than selling them off to the USMC we should have kept them, and worked on modern replacements. There was even a supersonic Harrier design produced at the same time Hawker were flying the Harrier prototype.

Meant the Harrier was the most impressive display aircraft ever. Flying sideways, check. Bowing to the crowd, check.

[1] http://jalopnik.com/5715656/the-eeriness-of-viffing-a-harrie...

The video that should be in the article can be seen here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcPEvwHWu4g

Chile had a key role in helping out the Brits in the Falklands.

The US, or more specifically Reagan, offered Thatcher use of a carrier or two if one of ours was lost. Supposedly it was going to be navy to navy with as little involvement of politics as possible. Oh, and they sold us a bunch of extra sidewinders at zero notice.

I don't think I ever signed an agency contract without heavily adjusting some clauses.

I would simply state I can't sign as is. The only times I got pushback (rare) an annotated letter from accountant or PCG (now IPSE I think) contract review and the agency buckled. I also demanded proof that the agency-client contract matched on IR35 terms. Was never once caught by it.

Does the agent want to lose commission? Does the agency want me telling the client direct why I've changed my acceptance?

I realise regulation and the market has changed some since I last contracted, hmm, 8 or 9 years ago. Still can't imagine signing any agency contract as-is, they were always horribly one-sided affairs.

My workflow is usually to lose interest and motivation right around the time I have it rough, ready and working. Rather than do the last polish and site to release I would end up doing other hobbies.

It's been frusrtating.

Worked for me in same conditions. I'm running uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger that may have affected it.

Doesn't always work lately though - I sometimes get the snippet and sign in to read prompt.