Atari made a point of doing "everything the Amiga could do". It was mainly because Jack Tramiel of Atari held a grudge against his former company (Commodore).

But the Atari computers didn't have the graphics co-processors or heavyweight DMA capabilities that the Amiga did. So they did what the Amiga did, but they had to make the CPU do all the work instead of being able to dump bit-blits and the like off onto the secondary processors.

The C64 and TI computers had hardware sprites, but not full bit-blit, and I don't think that either of them had the ability to do the framebuffer-hopping that allowed you to smoothly pull one display down over another while animation was in full swing.

We really didn't see that outside the Amiga until PCI bus graphics cards started loading up on processors. And even then, I saw pictures "tear" when they scrolled for years.

Based on past results, I think you entirely underestimate what can happen in less time than you can say "whiplash".

Sane is debatable, but "intelligent" and "decent" gave us Jimmy Carter. We've been happier since we dropped those qualifications. Not logical, perhaps, but true nonetheless.

Besides, if we had decent people as presidents, how could politicians spend millions of dollars on pointless investigations while decrying how government wastes money?

I don't suppose you could provide some documentation on that?

Because there was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in any of the various generations of Developer Guides or AmigaNews bulletins I have about kludging apps for co-operative multi-tasking, and I was one of the people who taught people how to use pre-emptive multi-tasking on the Amiga. I used the same design methods that had worked for me on multi-processing IBM mainframes and lived to tell the tale.

I cannot recall offhand any MC68000 instructions that in fact could be broken by interrupts the way a System/370 MVCL instruction could be (had it itself not supported interruptions). I do believe that there were spin-lock instructions in the MC68000 instruction set, though. So if you could mention a few, I'd appreciate it.

There were certainly OS resources that ran interrupt-disabled, but no more so than IBM's OS/MVS or Linux. And the Amiga supported the ability of higher-priority interrupts to kick in while lower-priority interrupt services were executing, which is something that I'm not sure the IBM hardware could handle until about the time the PCI bus took over. And certainly the IBM/Microsoft OS's weren't up to the task until quite late in the century.

The Amiga's various co-processors did perform instructions sufficiently complex that interruptability would be an issue, but they were essentially co-processors assigned and scheduled as resources, not task-switching units in their own right.

Nah, it'll be an integral part of the next systemd release along with emacs, ntp, and the web browser.

Phone tag! You're it!

But your call is very important to us! (crappy lo-fi music continues)

Screenplay by Richard (Omega Man/Last Man on Earth) Matheson.

I'm not normally a proponent of this sort of work-life imbalance. But we're talking video games here, and the cliché is that long crunches are how (some of) the customers actually do use the product.

Abstractly, getting paid straight time for overtime stretches with possible health effects to boot should command a premium. Realistically, I fear that the people involved are getting part of their "pay" in early-release game experience instead of something that can pay their rent or build towards retirement.

Companies won't care if they drive employees away, though. Not unless the rate of new (and cheap) applicants drops below the rate at which people leave.

"Three men can keep a secret if two of them are dead".

Benjamin Franklin, old Russian proverb, I dunno.

Snowden determined the "when" more that the "what".

And innocent people have nothing to fear.

Hey, guess what. YOU don't get to determine what's "innocent".

Back in the 1800s, Heroin was a commercial product, cocaine was legal and you could stockpile weed without ending up in prison. These days, buying fertilizer can get you in trouble. For decades, alcohol was illegal There is virtually nothing so innocuous that some group cannot get all worked up about and make illegal and suddenly all your records about your little hobby can be used to put you away. Not just the obvious vices, but things like photography, home vegetables, choir practice and more.

If the government becomes too powerful, they'll track back through your "anonymous" shielding and nuke you and your silly little gun collection on the spot.

The best alternative would be to work to get those yokels out of power, and pointing guns at people isn't likely to help that.

The worst alternative would be a well-regulated and large militia set up in opposition, but a handful of swamp-runners running around like fantasy heroes isn't going to restore the USA as we knew it.

As long as they're not naked.

Personally, I felt safer overall back when I could simply walk through the gates and onto the plane without being run through a wringer by own country on a domestic flight. Hell, it's not like I'm likely to be on more than one flight that gets blown up or whatever. The TSA gets you every time.

Actually, as has been noted before, if terrorists weren't so obsessed by the airplanes themselves, that massive chokepoint that has replaced the distributed individual waiting areas is prime target material.

Forget it. Landru is a Commie Socialist! We'd rather vote for the Great Old Ones!