Don't compare the ZX Specturm with 16KB to the C64.
Why not? For the purposes of the argument being made with respect to the UK market, they were both in the same boat.
Besides which, there were two versions of the Spectrum when originally released; the aforementioned 16K model, and an otherwise identical 48K model. The 16K spec was rendered increasingly irrelevant as time went on and the 48K version became the de facto "base model" required for Spectrum games.
Still wasn't as good a machine overall as the C64 (BASIC and faster CPU aside), but that's neither here nor there.
Shame so many of them chose death over sharing, isn't it? Even if they still die, their platform could live on indefinitely.
Assuming a company's only aim is to make money, then whatever happens to their products after they die is essentially irrelevant in that respect. (*)
Of course, I'm sure that there are those working within a company (more likely to be in engineering and development) that feel otherwise. But ultimately this will be overridden by those in sales, marketing et al, unless it offers a clear benefit to the company.
Yes, some companies will offer well-backed guarantees or promises about what happens with respect to various things should they go under (e.g. release of source code). But even that is ultimately a means to attract more paying customers- by providing a level of certainty that is valuable to them- while the company is still in existence.
(*) Unless, of course, those in power have a conflict of interest and something to gain from the company's demise.
Somehow I fondly remember VMS running on HP hardware back in the 90s. A local university had a dialup guest account. It was fun. Going back to the DOS prompt after a finished session always made me hurt and long for something better than DOS.
"Somehow" is that you're hallucinating. VMS didn't run on any HP hardware until 2002. Prior to that it only ran on DEC and Compaq hardware.
"Neither Americans nor the rest of the world signed up for a fucking security agency which is no longer under anyone's control except people who feel they can do anything they want."
Uh, the CIA has been pretty much like this since its inception during World War II as the OSS and the CIA immediately after. It was reined in briefly by the Churck and Pike Committees in the 70's but that oversight and those reforms were pretty much rolled back by Reagan. Sure, they got to reach new lows after 9/11 with no hold barred torture, but the CIA has been torturing people through proxies for its entire history, so that wasn't exactly new either.
Not exactly sure why everyone is acting like this is some kind of revelation or anything new, other than its kind of amazing Brennan was foolish enough to admit to it. I predict his career at the CIA will soon come to an end, and he will be replaced with someone with larger brass balls.
The chances you all are gonna change any of this airing your indignation on
Besides, not having a specification is what led to PHP being such an ad-hoc mess in the first place.
Yeah, but unfortunately it's *way* to late in the day to avoid having to retain (and, ironically, formalise) the ad-hoc mess without breaking countless existing programs.
The most notorious example being one of the simplest, but also the most obviously naff; the fact that the ternary "?:" operator has incorrect precedence in PHP (compared to every other C-derived-syntax language). This quite obviously *was* a fsck-up early on (IIRC they said as much), but will always have to be kept in, an unwelcome reminder of PHP's amateur, ad-hoc origins that'll look bad to anyone learning the language, regardless of how well it improves in other areas.
is the electron ACTUALLY doing that, or was that simply a mathematical/logical proof that correlates highly with what we see?
Ummm. physics has been all about testing for discrepancies between the two for at least a century now. There's a nobel prize waiting for anyone who can show an electron not behaving itself in accordance with the standard model.
Apple claims developers have made $15B since 2008. That's 6 years. If you divided it out equally, that $2.5B per year. In contrast, Adobe alone takes in $4B a year in revenues. Even if you assume that the market has grown substantially and 2013 developer payouts were half, that's still $7.5 billion.
The iOS marketplace is still a lot smaller than the general software marketplace in terms of revenue thanks to the ridiculously low prices Apple has pushed on app developers.
The hardest part of climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom.