Looks like they should have had a "Brown M&Ms" clause in the contract for just that reason.

And if anyone doesn't get the reference (or even more so if you think you do, but don't get what the archetypal ludicrously demanding rock band rider has to do with tunnel boring), read the linked article.

And don't believe that old fallacy that it's the banks that pick up the tab either- as pointed out here, it's the retailer that almost always has to pick up the tab in such cases.

The banks simply yank back any fraudulent transactions and leave the business out of pocket- not them. This is why banks- in the UK at least- do not give a fuck about individual instances of credit card theft and fraud. They're not the ones having to pay for it.

If you're a retailer who knows with near-certainty that a credit card has been stolen and is being used fraudulently, it's virtually impossible to get the information passed on to the legitimate owner of the card. Generally speaking, nothing will be done at this stage, and nothing will happen until the legitimate owner notices fraudulent transactions on their statement, and contacts the credit card company.

Of course, that is usually *long* after the attempted fraud has taken place, along with later (possibly successful) attempts that could have been stopped, but weren't. The fraudsters are long gone, and it's the businesses that are left out of pocket.

The banks will bleat that there are too many cases of credit card theft and fraud to keep track of all these reports, even if the information is handed to them on a plate. Of course, you can bet that they'd manage to do so very quickly (by employing more dedicated staff) if they were having to foot the bill for the fraud themselves- but of course, they're not.

It's also worth noting that (again, in the UK), it's *very* difficult to get the police to do anything about even bleeding obvious cases of mail order credit card fraud, i.e. ones where the fraudulent delivery address has to be openly given. Even when details including the exact address- typically in London- are passed on to the police, nothing well be done. Same excuse, and same outcome- by the time anything happens, the fraudsters are long gone and not worth chasing up. Makes it quite easy to commit fraud; simply rent an address for a relatively short period, have the goods openly and directly delivered there safe in the knowledge that, even though the police will likely be notified, they'll be long gone before anything is done.

The customers mostly still believe- as shown here- that the banks cover the cost, so probably aren't upset as (if they think about it at all) they believe that the banks are having to foot the bill for their own incompetence. Not the case.

Personally, I'm in favour of publicising cases like this one and pointing out that the banks' nonchalance regarding people's credit cards (and by extension, personal details and- to some extent- identity theft) could have serious repercussions for them beyond the money that customers will have refunded. And pointing out that- regardless of their hypocritical (and often nickel-and-diming) identity protection schemes, it's the banks- with their self-serving laziness and disregard for credit card misuse- who are to blame for putting them at risk like this.

Plus ca change...

I am intrigued by your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Taking the highlighted section above at face value, logically that would mean that they were legally able to claim "We have never had any involvement with the NSA" when the complete opposite was the case.

While this may come across as smartassery in other situations, I've no doubt that in this case some weasel of a lawyer could- and would- use this in defending a company caught in flagrante with the NSA. This renders *any* company that *might* plausibly be involved with the NSA (including virtually all American ones) as suspicious.

Near enough... he was saving mental energy by settling for the approximately correct answer.

"Yo Dawg".

I remember at the time (mid-2000s?) *before* the original Core line came out, at least one article in Personal Computer World magazine extolled the virtues of the Pentium M. They quite seriously suggested it was worth considering for use in a desktop system. (IIRC, there were desktop motherboards that supported the Pentium M, the only issue was that you had to take more care with the heatsink and cooling than you would with a Pentium 4- or something like that).

Also, the rights to the various Amiga and Commodore IPs (names, hardware and software all separate) have been split up, passed around like a bad game of pass the parcel, sublicensed and disputed; I won't go into the details because (a) I can't be bothered and (b) I'm not sure myself! :-)

But... yeah. Technically, last time I heard you can still buy a "modern" AmigaOne and run the new versions of AmigaOS on it.

(*) Though that may be for values of "active" comparable to the rate of flow of glass in medieval windows. And yes, I know that's possibly a myth. :-)
(**) To be fair, this is mentioned on Slashdot at regular intervals, so it's possible that many of you are aware of this anyway. The rights to the Amiga name, to manufacture the hardware and to the OS http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2710941&cid=39268663

HAM was around almost two years before VGA debuted (with the PS/2 in April 1987)! (*)

The downside was that it was hard to use for animated graphics, since the colour of most pixels were modified shades of the one to their left, meaning one had to take into account surrounding pixels when moving an object to avoid miscoloured streaking. Few action games used it, though I'm still convinced more games could have exploited HAM if the problem had been analysed methodically and restrictions on the use of base colours and general shading worked out to minimise artifacts and keep calculations workable.

Possibly this wasn't really considered because in Europe (where the Amiga was popular), most 16-bit games were also written for the Atari ST (***) and this would have made them harder to adapt. Hence most used the regular 32-colours-from-4096 or occasionally, the sort-of-64-colour "halfbrite" modes.

(*) AFAICT the best widespread PC adaptor around when the Amiga launched was EGA (i.e. 16 colours from 64). IBM *did* apparently have a graphics adaptor comparable to VGA in 1984, but the card alone was four times the price the Amiga cost when it launched the following year(!)

(**) HAM gave 12-bit colour using only 6 bits per pixel. One could either choose from 16 "base colours" (chosen from a palette of 4096 RGB colours) or choose to modify the red, green or blue component of the pixel to its immediate left, meaning that it could take up to 3 pixel positions to get an exact value; this led to fringing, which could be minimsed by choosing the base colours wisely (and by dynamically changing the base colours on every line with software assistance).

(***) Apparently there was a program for the Atari ST that gave it a software-assisted 512 colour display, but I don't know how restricted *that* was; apparently there were timing issues.

Yes- Dave Haynie, who was still there at that time made a comment a while back that pretty much confirms this, saying that the C65 (which he didn't think was a good idea either) was essentially driven by one guy and that "it was strange times at Commodore near the end"

Anyway, thanks for all the interesting feedback!

The Amiga 500 had a bloody great specification for its time. The Amiga's problem later on was that C= rested on their laurels too long and didn't invest enough in developing it until the PC had caught up (even if the latter's architecture and OS was still horrid) and the Mega Drive and SNES matched it for 2D parallax gaming.

As I mentioned, the A600 was (AFAIK) meant to be the A300, a cost-reduced budget machine. If it had been something else it wouldn't have meaningfully been the same machine. More importantly, it only really existed due to the past success of the A500 years previously; any high-end "A600" in your alternate past-future wouldn't be analogous to the one we saw, except in name!

Speculating as to what the A600 might have been therefore isn't just pointless, it's meaningless; like asking whether Germany would have won WWII if the Roman Empire had never existed. Europe- if not world history- would likely be totally different, a state analogous to Germany might not even exist, the politics would be totally different, and it's unlikely that the Nazis would have risen in *that* place at *that* time in that situation, so even WWII itself wouldn't have existed though other conflicts would have.

They probably wouldn't have been able to afford a new C512. And (if it was cheaper but less capable as implied), C= would have been foregoing many people who bought- and *were* able to afford- the Amiga in Western Europe (making it the most popular computer of its era) for lower-value sales in Eastern Europe. And I'm not convinced that they wouldn't have preferred a used A500 unless the C512 was really close in spec.

Anyway, this is all getting rather academic and speculative, so we'll just have to disagree on this one. :-)

I'm not sure what aspect of my comment this relates to, so I'll just say that (assuming you *are* Bil Herd and not an imposter!) there wasn't any disparagement towards the C64 or C128's success (or any other Commodore machine's) intended. It's simply that I don't believe that releasing the C65 (i.e. a semi-new 8-bit machine) would have made any commercial sense by 1991, regardless of how good it was.

Then again, since your article on the 1985 C128 refers to that machine as "one last 8 bit computer", it's possible that I misunderstood what you meant anyway.