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Comment Re:Blurry text (Score 4, Insightful) 167

Reading from the screen is not hard. Even on old TV sets. Teletext exists since ages and nobody complains about it being unreadable. In fact in today technological society there are already more people reading more from screens of some kind, than from paper. With such cheap device as the one in the article, the ratio of people reading from screen versus the people reading from paper will increase even more in favour of the ones readering from screen.
Wikipedia

A $20 8-Bit Wikipedia Reader For Your TV 167

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Wired about another entry in the ongoing quest for low-tech-high-tech educational tools to take advantage of distributed knowledge: "The Humane Reader, a device designed by computer consultant Braddock Gaskill, takes two 8-bit microcontrollers and packages them in a 'classic style console' that connects to a TV. The device includes an optional keyboard, a micro-SD Card reader and a composite video output. It uses a standard micro-USB cellphone charger for power. In all, it can hold the equivalent of 5,000 books, including an offline version of Wikipedia, and requires no internet connection. The Reader will cost $20 when 10,000 or more of it are manufactured. Without that kind of volume, each Reader will cost about $35."

Comment Re:It's not the size of the display that matters.. (Score 1) 375

I prefer only one display. And I will provide reasons for this: If I have several displays, I have to move my head too much, because I wear glasses. With my LG M228WA 22 inch TFT monitor I feel pretty comfortable, but when I turn the laptop near to it, I have to move head too often. If put two equal sized displays, I still have to move head. My neck will be in pain only after an hour of extensive usage of two displays. Another reason to not need several physical displays is because I use AmigaOS, where I can switch between different screens with different resolutions by only pressing Amiga+M and Amiga+N to go back to Workbench. Yet another reason for not having several displays is because I don't like parasitic lights coming from different directions. Even when I don't wear the glasses, which have antireflective layers, the light coming from the display I am not watching at the moment is annoying. Of course if you are a stock trader and need to watch every change of the indexes in real time and your peripheral vision is quite trained to spot every change, several displays are good, because this will help your job.

Comment Today's gaming is not fun anymore. (Score 4, Interesting) 422

The newest games are crappy recycles of old games. Same ideas recycled over and over again for ages. There is almost nothing new in the gaming industry and nobody takes the risk to experiment with innovative ideas. That is why the retro gaming scene gained so much popularity. Especially in Europe there are lots of fans of the retro games produced before year 2000. I have seen people in the train playing Super Mario on NES emulator on their ultra fast laptops. Some people does not have a single PC game installed on their Windows or Linux computers, but wide variety of emulators for gaming. This speaks magnitudes about the appeal of the recent games.

Comment There is lot of money in the porn. Fact. (Score 2, Interesting) 132

The porn is multibillion industry, where small investments are returned pretty fast. Why shall China ban this industry, if it makes them billions? Since India is taking over China's dominance in cheap labour and mass production, they are looking for alternatives to feed all these people. If they find a way, this is good for them. I think the owners of these sitesm viewable from China, paid lots of money to someone with high rank in the Internet censorship there.

Comment Proud Amiga user since 1993. (Score 4, Interesting) 289

The Amiga turned 25 and I am extensively using Amigas since 1993. That's seventeen years. Things changed a lot since the early 1990-ies. First it was the BBSes, where an Amiga with modem more than fine. Then the Internet era came, where I was connecting to the Internet and downloading games and scene demo off Aminet and enjoying them. Then the 68000 line of processors was getting old and slow, but hopefully the PowerPC accelerators came to give the old machines an enormous speed boost. Then new machines appeared based on faster, more powerful and newer processors. And now in 2010 we have more new Amiga machines coming - the Sam 460 and the Amiga X1000. My Amiga history and experience is excellent, so I have no reasons to move to other platforms. Cheers
Amiga

The Amiga Turns 25 289

retsamxaw reminds us that yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the Amiga. "[The Amiga] debuted to rave reviews and great expectations — heck, InfoWorld said it might be the 'third milestone' in personal computing after the Apple II and the IBM PC. ... Commodore was a famously parsimonious outfit, but it splurged on the Amiga's introduction. The highlight of that Lincoln Center product launch was a demo in which pop art legend Andy Warhol used an Amiga to 'paint' Blondie's Debbie Harry. The exercise didn't prove much of anything other than that Warhol was able to use the paint program's fill command, but it was heady stuff... Other platforms and tech products would inspire similarly fanatical followings — most notably OS/2 and Linux... But Amiga nuts of the 1980s and early 1990s... remain the ultimate fanboys, even though it hadn't yet occurred to anyone to hurl that word at computer users."

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