Our Amiga Office (Photos)

[commodorejohn]

Hot diggity damn! Nice setup.

...I need to get cracking on my MSXDev project so's I can get finished and get on to one of my planned Amiga projects...

[commodorejohn]

I must say that nowadays I hate Google more than Microsoft and Apple. ... Google after Eric Schmidt is completely LOST. Larry Page is just too small for the CEO position.

I don't hate them, yet, but I do agree they've lost their way. Many of the tools like GMail are great, but the way they're trying to push integration between them whether you like it or not so that they can become all things to all people does not speak well for their future.

(And they're getting increasingly more sinister with this whole collecting-information deal...come on, guys, I don't think "minor cartoon supervillain" is the image you were going for.)

(And quit frickin' changing things around and not giving me the option to switch back! I'm having to use the mobile search page because they decided they really, really wanted to be Bing! and abandoned the simple, unadorned results-list interface that served them well for a freaking decade, and GMail is perma-toggled into simple HTML mode because they wouldn't stop shuffling crap around...)

Windows 8 and the integration between tablet and a regular PC is the way to go. "Tablets are PCs" and "Phones are phones". (even Apple is now moving to that)

No. Tablets are a dead end; they don't have the ultra-portability of smartphones and they don't have the capability or the keyboard of a netbook or laptop. The whole "tablets will replace PCs" thing is a Wired pipe-dream and a marketing scam, and won't last when the initial infatuation is over.

Micro$haft will never be ahead, hopefully ever again. I'm hoping after Jobs dies Wozniak will return, he is the real genius.

Oh, I wish. Woz is one of those people who' so cool you can't believe he's actually a real person and not some larger-than-life nerd archetype...

[commodorejohn]

M$ says that, you'll drag the "classic" windows environment from the left (see video), put your Windows 8 tablet on the stand and start using it with your wireless keyboard and mouse as a regular PC.

Or, you know, you could either not start work on the tablet to begin with, or use a laptop or netbook (my Eee is every bit as portable and couch-friendly as anybody's slab.) The Windows 8 video is another example of how Microsoft's marketing division has no connection to the way real people think, speak, or act, like that nightmarish "Windows 7 launch party" video where a bunch of actors try to be cheery but come off like they're being forced to play-act The Brady Bunch while being held at gunpoint by unfathomable space-beings from the beyond.

[commodorejohn]

Focusing only on the "couch-friendly" experience: The world disagrees with your opinion. Right or Wrong is subjective here and pretty much 99% of regular people prefer tablets for the couch experience.

I'd like to see some numbers on that "99%." The surveys I found show both netbooks and full-sized laptops holding fairly steady while tablets increase and desktops take a bigger hit, (they go on to predict tablet dominance, but we'll see how that plays out,) which suggests less that tablets are eating into netbook sales and more that people are moving away from desktops for general-purpose computing and checking out the new slabby thing everybody's talking about. It's possible I'm mistaken, but I think once the nerd infatuation with having the Next Generation data pads wears off, we'll see things shifting back towards machines with real keyboards and decent-sized hard drives.

M$ wants (and will) create an unique device that acts like a tablet on the couch and instantly transforms into a desktop simple by putting it into a stand. Plus: runs any Windows software, WinUAE included.

"Unique?" Docking stations are nothing new, they've been around almost as long as laptops have. It's just that people generally don't bother with them because they're more trouble than they're worth, especially now that laptop keyboards and screens are of a usable size.

(Also, for those keeping score, my Eee also runs any Windows software...)

[commodorejohn]

You're right too. I am now giving up on it all. I was only in it for the money, obviously.

It still baffles me how many people in this community cannot wrap their heads around any criteria for success other than "make a lot of money." Jeez, you'd think they'd be grateful anybody's still paying the platform any attention...

Here's hoping for some fine releases that are fun to develop, and maybe a little cash on the side

[commodorejohn]

Can't comment on OSX.

10.4 seems to run pretty handily on a 1GHz system with 1GB RAM and a 64MB video card (had to put it on a recycle-center rescue because OS9 wouldn't work :/ Oh well.) Can't speak for any later versions, though.

[commodorejohn]

I hope you will be around when we get our new development forum started, it won't specifically be for Underground Arcade this time, but a special Amiga project and development forum.

Ooh, the dev forum is coming back? Glee!

[commodorejohn]

Presumably they'll just develop  a C++ compiler for Dalvik?

[commodorejohn]

Sure, I have some already in the gallery, I took this one after I got my new monitor and started using 1280x720:

You can do an amazing amount with a well-chosen palette, a good dither algorithm, and a sufficiently high resolution.

(I need to take a stab at implementing Atkinson dither for paletted image conversion sometime...it produces such lovely results in B&W, it'd be interesting to see if it works as well in color.)

[commodorejohn]

I'm not familar with those bad costumes of calling the attention of men with indecent clothing
those bad habits are for chats like badoo.. but not for Amiga.org

Says who? I think it works quite nicely here, what with our obsession with products of the early '90s...

Dude, this ain't the 15th century.

Of course not. If it were, people might be less oversensitive about this stuff.

It is kind of weird for a young woman to post pictures of herself half naked on a board predominately populated by older men.

You have some rather restrictive definitions of "half naked..." I've seen pedestrians less covered than that, and I don't even live in a particularily free-and-easy part of the US like San Francisco or New Orleans.