That including VoIP, video-conferencing, online game servers and anything realtime.

If such services exist, the firewall too should not be virtualized.

Most likely the US used what they got, and that rape accusation was very convenient.

If that API is so useful, why is not public then?

Yep, I remember that my (then new) A500 looked somewhat clunky even in 1990 (such great computer with such a depressing appearance.. oh well) , but it felt well built.

I got bought a A1200 in in 1993 (or early 1994).. yeah, made in Philippines.
It cost a _lot_ to me back since it wasn't produced in Brazil (imported computers were unpayable, really).
AFAIR I paid something like ~950 USD back then for a A1200 with user-installed HD, and that from a (ahem) friendly person often crossed the border, so it was cheaper. -- It's a relief that epoch is long gone.

So, back to the topic...
That A1200 I got _felt_ different from my previous A500, like it was made my a company trying to save every single nickel (yes, I know.. Commodore).
Heck, the A1200s were supposed to come with a non-1970s-looking-A500-like mouse but mine came with that ancient model, except it was not beige but white like the new machine.

That not being enough, my Philippines-made A1200 started to fail after ~1 month or less, in 2 months it was dead (1993's 950 USD was a _lot_ of money in Brazil, so I was rather distressed). Weeks later I managed to find a technician from Rio de Janeiro who bothered to _try_ to salvage that computer, and he managed to fix that after a massive resoldering job on the A1200 board. Back then he told me that "those new Amigas are all having problems" (due to low-quality production).

And about 1-2 years later the keyboard started to fail. My luck is that I managed to get another one from a dead A1200.


I loved the architecture, the software and stuff... But Commodore treated its costumers like trash.

IMO the NeXT workstations, though clearly based on the Xerox office computer from the 1970s, was far more deserving awe than anything Apple released during the 1980s, including both the Macintosh and the Lisa.

But that wasn't for the masses (actually, given the price tag for awfully underpowered bare models during the 1980s, I don't think that even Macs were as realistic as people like to remember).

For the rest of us, there were 8-bit computers such as C64, Spectrum, MSX etc; and great 16/32-bit machines one could actually afford, such as Amiga and Atari ST.

That's correct, and it's the "digital" and "unified database" thingies that scare me to death.

So it seems bad? It's even worse within historic contextualization.

The brazilian government has a disturbing, and increasingly stronger, tradition of imposed culture homogenization and control centralization.
That, so I understand, has roots from an old fear of country desintegration. We have disgraceful examples from a not-so-distant past (1940s, 1950s) when european migrants (most living in the southern region) were forbidden (or strongly discouraged) to publish local newspapers in their language, to teach such languages in local schools and even (that happened to germans descendants) books, if not entire libraries, were destroyed since the material is not in the "correct" language. Brazil had a massive influx of immigrants in the late 1800 early 1900, and yet that fact is, at best, a side note on History classes children attend. It is as it never happened and people simply existed as an cohesive nation.

Nowadays we may go to places where most people are, let's say, of ukrainian origin, have such physical appearance, but do not know anything about their ancestral language nor from which region they came from. Their culture was intentionally destroyed and a "brazilian culture" (being to national culture what Esperanto is to a natural language) was pushed down their throats.

The public administration is extremely centralized, by design. The brazilian "federal system" is not that, except for the name. The states in Brazil have less autonomy than the provinces in Canada (even disregarding Quebec). The brazilian constitution itself has absolute clausulas petreas (entrenchment clauses) on that matter, including absolute indissolubility of the so-called federation.

The fact the brazilian capital was moved to a fabricated city in the middle of nowhere, far from the dangers of popular revolt, says a lot.

Now we have IT developed to levels allowing storage and processing of every single citizen.
And not even that is news. Even IT specialists are not usually aware of the level of information concentration in Serpro.
It's immensely ironic to find intelectualized brazilians bashing the horrendous privacy laws from foreign countries, while oblivious to what is solidly stablished under their own noses.

More recently, the brazilian government realized that, even with all the brainwashing efforts, the economic mid-class suffered a big hit in the 1980s and 1990s and started to get somewhat smarter and, the most worrying, insatisfied.
Meanwhile the upper class have money and never cared about such things. The government is usually friendly, otherwise there's always the option to leave the country.
The lower-class, often uneducated, people is busy trying to survive and know nothing about anything. No danger here either, and any possible enlightening is kept under control with substandard education.
Few years ago the federal government started a brilliant strategy of economic empowerment of its low-class citizens (education be damned, nobody wants the cattle starting to think) with actions which include a program that, in practice, give free money to people (Note: Brazil's economy management improved immensely the last years, but it also had a dumb luck. The last years there's an influx of money clogging the government pipes so, for a while at least, it is viable to do such things).
At the same time the, now inconvenient, mid-class is being crushed by taxes, while being accused of low-class parasitism by clever populist propaganda from the very government. The last years it has been talked about a "new mid-class" with indirect suggestions of damnation/extinction of the former one.

Going back to the topic:
Does it seem likely that this new fabricated, and semi-educated, mid-class will care about privacy issues and concentration of power?
Specially now when the economy is doing so well that huge LCD HD TVs ("HD" = "very good, or something.. need a beer") are selling more than toilet paper?
Of couse not.

In the end the brazilian government with do whatever they want. They can, and they're fully aware of this.
And nobody will care, because it always have been this way, it's always been taught this say, and it's absolutely normal to everyone.

So is the design of things.
Prepare all your fingers to be scanned, and pray that the government do not see purpose for anal probes.

I live in medium sized building (16 floors) and we had a similar dilemma.

We bought one of those cheap chinese OEM CCTV DVRs (sold under several brands worldwide, the real source is a chinese company called Dahua), plus 8 cameras.
Notes:
Considering its price, the DVR works quite well, and has decent quality/framerate (30 fps / camera, 352x240). The bad thing is that the remote client software (optional usage) is Windows-only and buggy as hell.
We considered a desktop PC with a multi-channel vide capture card (it's far more flexible), but it's messier to install/maintain (bigger, with fans sucking dirt 24/7, someone may be tempted to occasionaly use as a desktop PC etc).

We installed the DVR in the entrance room, so the doorman/watcher (however it's called in English) can see what is going on AND we have all the activity recorded in case of need.
Problem: What if, for example, someone steps in with a gun and blows up the DVR? The videos are gone, and a periodic backup will not prevent this, since the most relevant video happened mere instants before, thus DVR-copy only. -- So, for the worst-case scenario (and right the most valuable one to have recorded video), the DVR seemed useless (the DVR has a built-in sync mechanism which is very unreliable, so it's worthless).

The dillema was solved with a free software called Tanidvr (Unixoid_OS-specific, command-line, and specific to that DVR family). Basically, we bought a computer to be used as a realtime backup server, installed in a locked room in a different floor. We also have a (intranet-only) HTTP server in order to easily download the videos, if necessary.
So, no matter what happens to the DVR, we have the video data up to the exact time (delay <1 second) the machine was destroyed.
A backup script was created for video fragmentation, and to recompress the H.264 stream to fit more days into the HD (with a quality/size the DVR is unable to provide).

Well, it works for us.

Those kids will learn very well that

Being monitored: restrict your behavior.
Absence of monitoring: you are free, do whatever you like.

Those will be good citizens, as long as you don't forget to keep them leashed all the time.

I'm waiting for vectorial screens, like 1920x1 and 2560x1, which will be the best to use since Samsumg/LG/etc will tell you so.

More like you're watching the movie while having an idle window the other side, so you won't feel that much guilty for not working at all.

Funny.. The CRT looked like 4:3 to me, with non-square pixels.

And to think that the total os packages in OSes such as FreeBSD and Debian are dangerously approaching the 16-bit PC limit...

It's quite depressing seeing MS - so scared to endorse or appear to endorse Linux somehow - avoiding mentioning Linux compatibility with they hardware.
I assume that Kinect's SDK is just a bunch a Windows libraries + documentation, with no useful low-level information (which would be interesting to have, since it would be from an official source).

Well, I don't buy anything (for personal usage) from Microsoft. For over 20 years, I've never really needed anything _specifically_ from them, being that HW or SW (no sacrifices nor piracy involved) the last one being Microsoft's Amiga Basic in 1991, paid indirectly since it came with the computer.

While I have no real use for Kinect (beyond as a tinkering toy), I would feel more encouraged to buy it if Microsoft wasn't such an industry ass.

That's what you get when you cheap enough to use the CPU as a video generator (thus getting 10% or less free for general programming, unless you suspend the video).
I appreciate Sinclair being concerned with costs... Still, good thing Sinclair did not consider a morse-code keyboard.

Looks interesting, though I didn't run this Lego program yet (and I cannot conform Wine compatibility).
Perhaps more interesting for some, is that it is freeware.