I bought one in January. It's absolutely spectacular. It's quite possibly the best computer I have ever owned.

No. Calling it a MAME device is not even beginning to do it justice. Sure, I have something like 40,000 MAME ROMS loaded on mine, but that's just one SD card. Another SD card is a truecrypt volume. Another contains 40 years worth of X-Men comics. Another has all the SCUMM games, a ridiculous number of C64 games, and a bunch of Playstation games. I've just started playing with some of the audio production apps - soon I'll figure out how to use the pandora as a MIDI controller, that'll be cool. Chromium runs well for web browsing as long as you limit the number of tabs you have open. Office apps like Libreoffice and dia run well. But for me, I think that the terminal, scite, and ssh are the killer apps - some things aren't available on the pandora (which actually means "I haven't bothered trying to compile them yet"), sometimes I want to offload processing to a faster machine. And sometimes I need to restart my webserver... actually, the real killer "app" is the hardware keyboard.

The range of software available in the repos is staggering given the system specs (it runs blender! :O), and the quality generally high. The native games available should not be trivialised, either - special mentions go to asciiportal, boson-x, audiorace, pewpew2, and the arkanoid remake. Some of these are huge time sinks.

$600?!? pah! In AU, where we try to stay at least 10 years behind the rest of the world, it's nearly AU$800 once you throw in some accessories and shipping, but I really think it was worth every penny.

Yes, it's not as impressive in specs today as it was when it was designed. They got screwed and they had production problems, so it took a lot longer to get built than it should have. But they did manage to bring it to market eventually and they've done as much as they can to get units to the people who preordered. And they've been fairly transparent about all this, so I think that they're credible. On the other hand, I would have been really annoyed if I'd preordered and I'm glad I didn't.

People ask me what it is, and I describe it as a full computer which can do most things their laptop can do - it's the best way I've found to describe it. Flexibility is the key - I was running the JACK audio framework and a couple of software synthesizers last night and started to run out of memory, so I switched to my terminal and enabled the swap partition on my SD card. Problem solved.

It's not just a MAME machine!

I like some of the changes you 've made, but I disagree with your philosophy of standing for things. Due to this, I'm starting up a new WaylandX-ex ((https://github.com/waylandx) project on github to avoid these political issues. Join me instead!

I tried this on my bosses mac but couldn't wind the 'win' key - can you help?

Um, yes, It *WILL* happen sooner or later.

I was being conservative, and they don't say what they're using. Based on my experience with people (they're often incompetent morons), CRC16 wouldn't suprise me.

Well, technically, after enough time somebody *will* eventually try to upload a perfectly legitimate file which just happens by coincidence to have the same hash as something that was taken down, and that uploader will get an erroneous error message blocking them from sharing their own work.

So you don't have to be distributing copyrighted material for this to be a problem, but probability is on your side - it's probably not likely to happen for decades or centuries, depending on the hashing algorithm used. But it just might happen to you tomorrow.

Or maybe he's somebody who:
* cares about real-estate on his screen and the density of information displayed vs shininess. Those borders and "modern" task bar are huge!
* is interested in having a UI that responds in a timely manner rather than having pretty but utterly useless animations that make him wait half a second every time he clicks on something.
* wants to use less memory for caching pretty animations and more for the programs he's running
* wants his processor to be working on the task he has assigned it rather than showing him shiny animations
* feels like it's more important to make something stable than pretty
* feels like it's more important to make something efficient than pretty
* feels like it's more important to make something compatible than pretty

That's all very interesting and I'm really happy for you that you're able to follow a conversation and then summarise it, but everything you said is totally irrelevant to the point I was making. In fact, it doesn't even address my statement except to insult me. Those are some magnificent debating skills you have there - are you planning on going into politics one day?

How does any of that make the "freedom is more important than safety" quote imply that safety is not important? Please provide an explanation of how the phrase "freedom is more important than safety" indicates an absolute value for safety. Alternatively, you could just shut the hell up - that might prevent you from looking any stupider.

Now you owe me 2 IQ points in addition the AC's 5, and I'm going to stop reading this thread before I'm dragged even further down to your level of intelligence - another 200 or so posts like this and I'll be as dumb as you.

Or: "chlamydia - the best of the venereal diseases!"

Agreed.

I've been looking for a democratic country to move to, but I can't think of any...

Oh... my... god... That's so retarded that reading it made me a little but stupider. You owe me 5 IQ points, and I want them back. My brain hurts.

Please go learn your englishes and gramatticals to make sure that you understand the statement, then please go learn about logic so that you understand its implications. It'll help you a lot!

His statement was "Freedom is more important than safety". This does not make any implications about how important safety is, except that it's less important than freedom. The statement contains no other information and implies no other context. It's a very simple, straightforward, and concise statement, which also happens to be true.
You are either a complete idiot or completely full of shit to say that it implies anything about the value of safety. If he'd said something like "Freedom is more important than safety and nobody cares about safety" then you might have a point and not look like a complete fuckwit. But that's not what he said, so you do, and my brain hurts.

Now please, for the love of the flying spaghetti monster, do as you've been told and vanish, satisfied in the fact that you've caused me a small amount of permanent brain damage.

You're talking about software licensing, which is not the same as buying media (music/video/etc).

When I buy music, I have the right to make a backup copy, or to transfer it to another medium. The copyright laws were written before software was a consideration, so they don't tend to mention it specifically and therefore it's handled differently in some ways (e.g different licenses), but it's generally accepted that by extension this also holds true for digital media - e.g I'm allowed to take all my old C64 disks, convert them to disk images on my PC, and run them in an emulator. Any term in a license agreement which tries to stop you from doing so is an unfair contract condition and unenforceable, at least where I live. Sucks to be you if the US is different.

Wow, you have a short memory!

I've seen this firsthand, so don't try to tell me it never happened: 100th window by Massive attack. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cactus_Data_Shield

Early Ipods would format themselves if you plugged them into your second computer. I've seen this firsthand, too.

The first-gen DRM was quite draconian - the only reason they don't try to stop you doing these things now is that they realised very quickly that by doing things like installing rootkits they were making enemies and encouraging people to just download the version with no crap attached that was free and available on the web about 18 nanoseconds after the release - it was a far superior experience to using their crapware.

you seem to be implying that you're quite happy to just settle for whatever rights the license holders decide you can have, regardless of whether they're reasonable or not? You think all the terms in those license agreements are enforceable in every jurisdiction? lol. When apple show up to turn you into a human centipad and say that you agreed to it, you'll just go with them?

Ummm, No: What rights you have depends on your local laws. Sounds to me like you should read up on your rights.

It has never been considered copyright infringement to make a backup of something or to transfer it to another medium. DRM attempts to prevent exactly this. this is established all over the place. For me, the following excerpt from wikipedia seems relevant:

What DRM really does is two things: 1) waste resources on your computer providing absolutely nothing desirable and nothing that can't be bypassed in seconds, shortening its lifespan and increasing its energy consumption, and 2) piss off legitimate users who want to do things they're legally allowed to do, turning their customers into their enemies. Good job!

You shouldn't be - it's propaganda - this line of argument diverts the discussion away from the more serious issues.

That's exactly what it's intended to do, by the way, it's a classic trick of the trade - Goebbels would be ever so proud.

I would argue that the unrealistic stance to take is that spying is necessary - let me ask you this: why is surveillance necessary? why do you need foreign intelligence?

Are you worried about an invading army showing up on your shores tomorrow? who? You don't think you'd detect them with your radars, sonars, satellites, etc?

Maybe you need to spy so that you can get the competitive edge in business - you know, get mcdonalds into antarctica and secure those lucrative jet fighter contracts for boeing. You don't think that the US and US companies could just get along by playing fair with everyone else? You don't have a reputation for superior engineering and good manufacturing - you need to play dirty to survive? Having a reputation as "the country that always plays fair" wouldn't be worth anything at all in financial terms?

Aha, I've got it! you're worried about a sudden nuclear attack - those pesky french could always nuke Washington tomorrow, so you need to spy! You don't think that making a noble gesture like proposing a total blanket ban on nuclear weapons worldwide and offering to completely dismantle your stockpile would help relieve tensions? You really think the North Koreans would bother nuking you if you dismantled your entire stockpile? I think you'd find they just might dismantle theirs and start feeding their people a little better or risk revolution when the amazing and unprecedented news that the US just disarmed gets through to the people. Of course we'd need to send in weapons inspectors to make sure that you weren't being sneaky.

Oh, I know - it's the same answer as everything else - you're worried about terrorists killing thousands of your civillians!

Assuming that this is a real threat (something of which I've seen absolutely no evidence ever), has it not occurred to you that there might be other ways of addressing the issue that don't involve taking morally repugnant actions?

Maybe you could ask them "why do you hate our freedom?" and they'll explain that it's not your freedom they hate, it's the fact that you aid their enemies and topple their governments so that you can get cheap oil. If you guys stopped being assholes, this "problem" would go away all by itself. A great way to start having this conversation would be to start talking about redressing crimes committed by previous administrations - the terrorist threat you foam at the mouth about would lose a metric fucktonne of momentum overnight if you'd charge dubya for the war crimes he committed, for example. "Terrorist problem" solved, zero new evil done.

History does not suggest that we cannot better ourselves.