But the Enemy of My Enemy is my Friend. Right?

More to the point would be to compare this to the number of arrests for similar events with less intrusive measures.

Just because the customer purchases a product doesn't mean that he/she cannot simulatenously be a product. Which is manifestly what's going on here.

And they apparently did use "1984" as an instruction manual.

It's a Comfort to me. Like a Big Brother watching over me wherever I go!

One of the reasons I rented was that I'm tired of having old units accumulate.

In reality, however, I rent so long that by the time I'm done with the equipment they don't want it back anyway. I would have saved money by buying it and I'd still have an old unit cluttering up the place when I was done with it.

The full text should have read:

Seriously. What went wrong? Employers used to not think they were entitled to perfectly-shaped disposable cogs. They not only brought new hires' skills in line with their needs, they imbued them with the corporate culture and philosophy, ensured that they were kept trained or retrained, and in exchange avoided the continual expenses that come from bringing a new, untried person who doesn't even know where the paper clips are kept. And, as an added bonus, the employee might feel loyal enough to put a little more of themself into the company's ongoing fortunes.

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.