x=usr(1536)

You bring up a good point re: Atari's selectivity as to what they will and won't license the name for. I have an idea that a line of products falling under the categories of 'buzzing' and 'rubbery' would be the perfect complement to the existing range. Let me get my people on that one, stat.

With the appropriate adapters, it's pretty much irrelevant.

They're a licensing machine with zero quality control over what others are doing with the IP they've licensed. That can only go well for them. Oh, wait...

«Facile!» Colloquially, that's more directly translated into English as, "easy!", but I think it works. My French isn't as great as it used to be. More importantly, 'taco' is the same in both French and English.

Agreed with the sentiment. But there's a corollary to the above: just because you can, doesn't mean you should. The Spectre / Meltdown vulnerabilities are, in a large part, down to one of the worst marketing-driven shifts in computing of the past 20 years: the idea that 'commodity' (which in this case really means 'x86', 'x64', or 'nearest AMD equivalents') hardware can be made to do things as well as other architectures (Sun, SGI, PPC, etc.) do. Ditto ARM. In terms of raw performance, this assumption may be correct in many cases. It may even exceed the performance of those architectures in the same cases. But the underlying hardware on the Intel/AMD and ARM platforms in question were never designed from the ground up with the memory and execution compartmentalization that the other (more expensive) hardware platforms had built-in. In short, we started using hardware that was, from the birth of the first IBM PC, intended for desktop computing tasks in a single-user / single-tasking environment in ways that were never envisioned for that architecture to operate. Subsequent generations of Intel hardware attempted to graft on some of the features which would have mitigated or outright prevented the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, but (and in no small part) due to backwards-compatibility considerations, those bolt-on additions weren't as effective as they could have been had they been designed in from the start. Having said that, the one thing that has struck me throughout this particular round of vulnerabilities as being incredibly stupid is the approach of 'we'll fix the hardware problem through software!' Patch the OS all you want, folks; the underlying hardware is still going to be the problem. This isn't to knock the idea of improving the robustness of the OS' security posture - that's a Good Thing. But calling it a fix when it's impossible to reconfigure the logic on a die is, at best, disingenuous. It's a workaround, plain and simple. There's still billions of affected devices out there and many of them will still be there when, on a long enough timeline, their OSes have been outdated for long enough that new and unpatched exploit vectors are able to once again take advantage of the vulnerabilities in the hardware they're running on. Just because you can use commodity hardware to do certain things doesn't mean that you should. It also doesn't mean that commodity hardware should necessarily be designed the way that it is.

Can I get it with a W12?

No. With Apple, it began with firing an incompetent CEO, rehiring one in his place who understood how to direct the company's operations, and then - only then - came the products that people actually wanted to buy. Atari's leadership is so far removed from what Steve Jobs accomplished at Apple that there is no comparison whatsoever.

Quoted for irony.

Which, to be fair, is a valid one. The real problem is explaining security to end users and getting them to understand why it's important. An OS that's gone unpatched for the better part of a decade is basically ripe for the taking - and even one that's air-gapped can still be compromised; Stuxnet was a good (if extreme) example of that. The general end-user mindset of, "I don't have anything anyone would care about, so why do I need to care about security?" misses the point. The data on the machine is rarely valuable (though anyone hit with ransomware may likely disagree), but the ability of a mailicious actor to use the machine itself for other purposes typically is. Between end users who won't patch their machines or use up-to-date antimalware packages, buzzword-du-jour Internet of Things devices, home networking equipment that's stupidly easy to compromise, and devices connected directly to the Internet that never should have been in the first place, you've got a massive attack platform against everything else with an IP address just waiting to be leveraged. Yes, I am putting some - not all, but some - of the blame for this on end users. That's not to condemn them for a lack of technical expertise, but rather to ease some of the pain of having to repeatedly bang my head off the desk when they do things that they should know better than to do in the first place. The number of times I've heard, "I don't want to update my computer; it takes too long," followed by, "gee, the computer's acting really funny, do you think I have a virus?" is just depressing. (Note: I don't typically deal with end-user issues, but I do have a couple of decades' experience in Information Security at an enterprise level. Boneheaded decisions tend to be made less in that world due to the fiscal and regulatory ramifications of getting it wrong, but that doesn't mean that enterprise always gets it right, either. It's just that it usually gets it right more often than it gets it wrong, though there have been (and will continue to be) notable exceptions to that maxim.) This turned rantier than I expected, probably because I've been dealing with a patch management strategy overhaul recently and it's something that's in front of my eyes right now. But, still... Facepalm.

Or you could have a taco instead! Have a taco. I found some for €1.50!

Those are unnecessary when you're one of these guys:

Del Taco. They're my nearest local exchange and, conveniently, generally provide the best return on rate. On a related note: I like to spread my currency investments against a basket of Tacocoin. I find that it helps to weather fluctuations in the market more successfully and makes me more handsome.

Is there a market for it? Yes, but it's small. Is there money to be made in it? Not really. More: What's important to understand is that arcade games are a constant expense. First you purchase them. Then you turn them on in the morning, hoping that they'll make money while they spend it sucking down electricity. When they break, you have to pay someone (either on-staff or from outside) to fix them, and they're not taking in any money while that happens. They're also perpetually eating up floorspace that could be replaced with something that does make money, like another table with people sitting at it buying drinks. These factors have been around since the first penny arcades came to be, and are some of the significant ones as to why barcades exist: food and drink makes money, games don't. Going back to your theater example for a moment: ever notice how modern large-chain theaters generally put the arcade games that they do have in their own small room off of the main lobby? Have you ever wondered why that is? It's because (in amongst the many calculations that they do when building a place like these) revenue per square foot is factored into both the projected and performance calculations for that location. They know that the games are going to be a sinkhole, financially-speaking, but they keep a small percentage of people within the building for a certain period of time. Someone will kill a few minutes playing a game before their movie starts rather than going to the Starbucks across the street; with any luck, that will lead to them buying a Coke at the concession stand. The square footage that the game room occupies is basically a loss leader. If anything, it's about as saturated as it's going to get. Most people just don't care, and, barring a fad that creates a bubble of interest that later bursts, it's probably going to stay fairly constant. Well, until those of us old enough to have been playing games in the '70s and '80s start dying off, at which point our kids and grand-kids are going to have to figure out how to finally dispose of all of those Pac-Man cabinets that nobody cares about anymore.

No. Your descriptions of the email exchanges that you've had with Atari so far have all included a mention of the fact that you hold stock in the company. Whether or not this is actually the case is something for which we have no evidence to the contrary because correspondence that isn't related to their stock hasn't been discussed, but for my question I'm sticking with what we've actually seen so far rather than notional communication. So if you were to send them a message that didn't identify you as a stockholder and did so through channels available to the general public (since you indicated that you have internal contacts there), would you get a response to your question? Boilerplate responses don't count. I'm talking about a response from an actual human being. And no loading the dice by writing a message gushing about how amazing the Ataribox is and you can't wait to play. I mean an enquiry made in a neutral tone requesting more information as to when they'll have something on the shelves. BEGIN JAB: How much is that in tacos? END JAB

SHA-256 or death

Yes, but will they still respond if you dump your penny stocks?

Glad to see someone got it

IIRC, they sunk something like $76 million into the acquisition, doubling that amount trying to keep them afloat. That said, they made awesome commercials. My guess is that a large chunk of that change went into the amount of cocaine necessary to get Shadoe Stevens into the role:

Even the whois info for ataribox.com is (still) run through domainsbyproxy.com. I'd been hoping to at least send an email to the admin contact, or set up a call with Jack Tramiel three-wayed onto their contact number. But they ruined it for me. Ataribox, you're no fun.

No.

HabanerOS was leaked to Usenet, made it over to the usual torrent sites, and is now available all over the Internet. And this is why companies back in the day didn't want to release software on Atari platforms. For shame, for shame. We've learned so very little in the intervening years.

Check this thread; it should have pretty much everything you need to know. The tricky part is going to be getting the output level to the cassette correct. Too loud or too quiet and the tape won't load.

And highly-addictive. The first bottle of the Mayan variety that we found is long-gone; we're now on the second of three additional ones we ordered from Amazon. I'm convinced that heroin is an unlisted ingredient.