They know it works fine? Like...really fine, on slower machines (and connections - it had bandwidth preserving functions for a long time, now there's even 2-3x compression via Opera Turbo)

The father of my buddy that I mentioned uses P4-era machine (with Celeron based on P4 even, from what I remember) with 256MB of RAM (and dial-up, in a huge city like Dnepropetrovsk). From what he says such machine isn't very atypical, upgrades are postponed much longer than in the "West". I don't have any trouble believing that Opera is a fully usable browser on them...since I have an old dual PII 266 with 192MB & win2k lying around - and latest versions of Opera still run fine when I try them (excluding Flash of course). Firefox (on mine) - no way.

And lately it even seems like Opera tries to make their GUI more approachable...

I don't know any of this. I'm surrendering my geek certificate (asymmetric) now.

You can access it by obtaining access through my 3 layers of NAT routing (Class /8, /16 and /24 private ranges on OpenWRT, Tomato and dd-wrt) to my DOS based BBS, then ride on the serial connection (E-7-1.5) to the PGP door... Peace of cake to all the Slashdotters out there!

This guy still uses his (updated) Amiga. Running AmigaOS 4.1, it looks real snappy.

Be sure to watch part 2 and 3 for a demo
part 2
part 3

Full screen applications had a title bar. You could actually drag that title bar up and down to reveal another screen. The clever part was that the overlapping screens could be running at a different colour depth and resolution. This meant that you could have the file manager running in a 4 colour mode, a 3D editor running in a 16 colour high res mode and a rendering preview running in a 12 bit low res colour mode. This gave you the best of all worlds in terms of speed/memory/and graphics quality. For example, on a PC of the time, you might have to run the whole thing in 16 colours for performance reasons.

It doesn't make much sense now as all applications tend to run in the highest resolution and colour depth that the monitor can display. Back in the Amiga days, if you'd had to do that, you'd end up running the file manager in the 12 bit colour mode, and end up with a somewhat unresponsive GUI.

The only possible benefit of the Amiga "screens" approach now would be that it was an OK way of managing full-screen applications. A lot of media creation applications work quite well like that.

Like a lot of machines that competed with Windows, it was great, but many of the old advantages (like being able to format a floppy disk without it seemly disturbing foreground operation) don't make much sense any more.

I worked with a team offering Y2K services for customers of a large computer company. We fixed alot of code and it would have been a much bigger problem than it was if it hadn't been taken seriously.

One tiny example, which showed up before 1/1/2000 was with a large nationwide toy chain. If you used a credit card with an expiration date after 1/1/2000 every register in that store hung. We found alot of issues that would have had news-making consequences if nothing had been done.

The fact that it was a non-event was because alot was done to fix the code before hand.

One interesting side note is that we hired a bunch of retired Cobol programmers because alot of the code we fixed was in Cobol. Although I hadn't done alot of Cobol programming myself, it became very clear to me that Cobol was at that point and probably still is the most effective Business programming language. Pretty amazing considering its age.

You say CE sucks. But what other operating system that 1. runs on ARM, 2. has a library of relevant apps even in genres not suitable for free software, and 3. is available for licensing to OEMs, should the maker of an ARM-based netbook use? Right now, it's choose 2 out of 3: drop 1 and you have Windows NT, drop 2 and you have Linux, drop 3 and you have iPhone OS.

> vim is more concerned with text editing.

Vim users often state this, but when I last compared Vim and Emacs, the latter was vastly superior for editing plain text lists [1] and tables [2], which are used extensively in my notes and other non-code documents.

With the exception of Vim being arguably more ergonomic, in what way is Vim superior to Emacs for editing text?

[1] http://orgmode.org/manual/Plain-lists.html
[2] http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/tables.php

Well he doesn't need an appeal. The real question -- the excessiveness of the verdict under (a) copyright law and (b) constitutional law -- hasn't been decided yet. The judge had earlier indicated she would be getting to that only after judgment had been entered, and a motion to set aside the judgment had been made. She has scheduled that for a January 4th deadline, with the RIAA getting 14 days from the making of such a motion to respond.

It may wind up being the RIAA that's going to "need an appeal".