It's something for Amiga fans. For the most part, anyone that does not already want a portable Amiga can disregard this notice. You don't care, that's fine, don't trash talk those of us that do. I hate seeing Amiga news on Slashdot, while it does seem to be rather nerdy news, it's just not an accepted topic here. But being portable and relatively cheap for an Amiga platform today, maybe some who have drifted away might consider spending a few hundred bucks to check it out and enjoy Amiga again for a bit. No one thinks we'll be competing with Android on local superstore shelves with this thing. Amiga fans still around today may make Apple fans look like tremendously lucid normal people, but we aren't stupid to think we'll just walk into BestBuy or Fry's and sell millions of units. So don't go thinking this is anything we're expecting to see with this thing.

I myself would really prefer to see a higher performance laptop with optical drive, 15inch screen, and a Freescale AMP or the PA Semi chips they somehow got their hands on for the X1000 tower. I'd really prefer they port x86 or ARM so it's easy to get whatever hardware to run it on. But this is the only portable choice we've ever really had. As I haven't used a tower in years, they're buried in storage with no desk space to be hooked up on and I don't want to be tethred to said desk in some room anyway, I'm very happy about this tiny netbook thing. But that's my hobby interest. Nothing practical. Nothing useful to you. Just fun for me. And however many other Amiga fans are still around for it. And that's plenty good enough reason for me that this (will) exists.

I just hate it when my random number generator only returns a single value of 4

57% of Italian Households voted in this public measure. While democracy should trump all, is it wise to hold majority opinion so high that it slows down progress?"

interviewer: "The people voted to end nuclear power."
DC: "So?"

It's kind of nice to see a government that doesn't feel so much contempt for its people as to ignore their view of things.

I'd hope that whatever they voted on exactly offers periods of review to consider advances in nuclear power planting that make things safer, and have a path back to nuclear in the future if it makes sense again someday to them.

I'm not sure what habits are good or bad for web guys or software guys. I suppose there is likely some overlap.

I have two monitors.

Right now I'm auditing simulation tests for an SoC, we're updating an older design with current peripheral revisions, newer CPU core revision, DMA controller connections, memory configuration, etc.

I have a spec doc open, a test spreadsheet showing what tests came with the original design, and a shell with a dozen tabs showing the RTL netlist, individual test C code, chip configuration .h files and my audit result file, simulation GUI, test description GUI, and some other things. It's nice to have the C code on one screen while the test description GUI is on the other screen. Or the description GUI and the audit results each on a screen. Or the audit results and the test spreadsheet. Or the HDL code and the simulation waves. Or C code and simulation waves. I don't need individual screens for every window, but different combinations of do things work out well on two screens. I think that a single screen would be too confining. Lucky me I'm one of the last to get a second screen, so there's not really anyone to give one of mine to. :)

If the economy is so dependent on this that we would all suffer tremendously if they had to stop, how did we ever manage to do anything before this capability arrived?

OK, sure, I'd love an android phone, but I'm not willing to pay the hefty data plan fees.

I'd really been considering how to get a good android phone without a phone plan at all, and use it like an iTouch, only with wifi and no voice or cellular data whatsoever. The *pads are too big, I want something phone/iTouch sized that will fit in my normal sized pockets. Too bad the demoted the camera on this compared to it's Galaxy S phone cousin. I've not seen an amoled screen to know if I care that's gone too. I'd really like to see someone do as good of a product as the really good smartphones and just leave out the cellular part of it, without degrading any other features in the process. But at least this sort of thing is being seen now.

So, closed source is a problem. But there are other problems inherent to electronic voting that I don't think changing the license or opening the source will improve on.

As the summary says, there is no proof that a system behaves the same on voting day as it does on test day. How does open-source fix that? I don't think it does. Do you or me or any general public person get to audit the code on both days, and compare checksums or hashes on the binaries? How do we know that the test day binary wasn't swapped back in before the "after audit" to hide the fact that a malicious binary was running during voting?

If certifying equipment by registrars is optional, how does open-source fix that? I don't think it does. If something is optional, it doesn't matter what the code license is, only that the relevant people choose to exercise that option.

In general, how open-source do you want? Even GPL doesn't require that every citizen gets to see the sources. Only that those receiving the binary do. Who is it that receives the binary distribution such that they are also owed the sources? The registrars? The election officials at every polling place? None of them, because the machines are owned by the state, and only some state official gets to see it?

Even if a government election license states that anyone and everyone gets to see the sources, how can I know that what looks to me like acceptable source code is what is actually running when I cast my ballot?

In terms of tampering, how does open-source prevent that? I don't think it does. It really all comes down to how do we know what is running on that machine during times when we care. If someone can still use a standard file cabinet or hotel refrigerator key to swap compact flash cards back and forth, then it doesn't matter if your or I can parse the alleged source code or not.

I think there's a number of places where things can go wrong, and open source doesn't do much at all to affect most of those potential problems.

After all, the iPhone is simply one part of the overall fragmented smartphone market. People are confused, choosing not just between one Android phone and another vs choosing a consistent iPhone separate market, they also have to bother with confusion in choosing Android, iPhone, Blackberry, Windows 6, or Windows 7, etc. iPhone provides consistency on Apple devices, but that's a very particular corner of the smartphone market, and is only consistent with itself in the same way that all Droid X phones are consistent with other Droid X phones. It's all semantics, it's marketing, and it's B.S.

The people running this site have been trying to contact Paypal but get no response in trying to get things sorted out. amigans.net thread about this

Puts to shame those guys that still only toss a stick of dynamite in the lake during their fishing trip.

An old roommate of mine was from India, and he could order engineering textbooks from back home in India for equivalent of US$3 or $5 or so, the bookstore would sell the same title to me for $85 or so. Amazon wasn't up quite yet back then, but still not nearly as cheap as India anyway. My friend says the price difference must be due to lower quality of paper the Indian coy was printed on. Eh, sorry, your paper may be a bit floppier, but I don't think that difference is worth around US$80.

This could be a start for those of us not willing to pay monthly data plan fees to get a smart phone out of our dumb phone. I don't want to pay a hefty monthly fee just to own a smarter phone. Oh, wait, I have Verizon, no SIM slot. So I can't use it anyway. What about a microSD equivalent, with some brains as well as a radio and of course some flash memory?

So... Am I allowed to watch the SuperBowl? Or any TV shows? I have FIOS cable service... Or do I have to leave home to find a legal TV set?

Is my wife allowed to join me?

Can a few friends come watch too? Can they bring snacks, or does that count as a form of entry payment?

Oh, wait. I don't like football, so I'm not watching anyway. And we recently got married, are combining our houses, and my otherwise small living room is a large pile of everything we both own and we can't sit anywhere or see the giant screen anyway.

I'll look up the commercials on my laptop later.

But, what about the TV I do watch when things are cleared out? Caprica? Lost?

Why hasn't anyone gotten clever and made Firefox use Chrome's faster Javascript code? Porting it to Firefox and all that?

Animal rights group Peta has welcomed the laboratory grown meat announcing that "as far as we're concerned, if meat is no longer a piece of a dead animal there's no ethical objection while the Vegetarian Society remained skeptical.

Uh, well, whatever this stuff is, it is a piece of some animal out there. And at some point that particular animal will die of old age or some natural cause. And then, 100% of that laboratory-grown steak-clone is suddenly part of a dead animal. So... We gotta keep that cell donor animal alive on some crazy life support for eternity!