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[commodorejohn]

No, you lack objectivity. I know that because your argument is flawed and only serves to back up your bias.
 
You're suggesting that you are entitled to an opinion that is provably wrong.

You keep saying that I'm wrong, but all I'm seeing, looking back over this thread, is you telling me that my predictions are wrong because they haven't come to pass yet. Well yes, that's why they're predictions and not statements of fact at present time. You may think they're highly improbable while I think the opposite, but there's no way to say that either of us is wrong on that count until we observe how things play out.

[commodorejohn]

Your opinions are however based on your provably wrong gems, such as:
 

The problem is that I'm not the one implying that - Microsoft  is. They want everybody to move to Metro, whether on the desktop or on a  tablet, and they want everybody to get their "apps" from the Windows  Store so that they get a cut of it.

That is my analysis of their behavior. It's quite possibly wrong (though I don't think so.) What it isn't, at this stage, is provably false. You keep acting as though saying "no, you're wrong!" is proof of same, and if I disagree then I'm just not objective enough, but that's not how it works.

 

You justify every thing with "it's clear this is the way they are going", when to someone who is objective it's actually not clear at all. If you take what Microsoft have said at face value then you wouldn't be making these claims. If you're going to ignore what is here now & what Microsoft say about the future, then you deserve to be called on your paranoia.

If I took Microsoft at their word, I'd believe that open-source software is a code virus, infringes on 235 patents and no you can't see them, and that Linux, which doesn't cost anything, has a higher total cost of ownership than Windows (secret hidden qualifier: as long as your Linux machine is a high-priced IBM mainframe.) And that's just getting into the things they say, let alone the untrustworthy things they've done.

Call it paranoia if you want, but just because Google is supplanting them as the favorite most-surreptitiously-sinister tech monopoly, it doesn't make them suddenly worthy of blind trust.

[commodorejohn]

I don't know why I'm responding to a smerf post, but since he took the trouble to address part of it to me...

So while you guys are arguing about how awesome morphos and aros are, and trying to play the original doom on your so called great OS's, I will be playing the new Doom 3,

Doom 3 is a first-person science fiction horror video game developed by id Software and published by Activision. Doom 3 was first released for Microsoft Windows on August 3, 2004.

(emphasis mine)

(Also Doom 3 was thoroughly meh and had more gutless jump-scares than a PG slasher movie and less action than Zany Golf. Doesn't even come close to comparing to Doom and Doom II, let alone something like Quake.)

Yes, you all keep telling me how bad the PC with windows is, while I will just tell you that this is what Amiga should have been, but you all blew it by saying we want a PPC processor, which is a weak outdated piece of junk that might play the original doom.

Evidently you haven't really ever actually looked at any information on these architectures. PPC was competitive with x86 throughout the entirety of its Mac run, and depending on who you ask often even had an edge over it. 'Smatter of fact, the PowerBook G4 (1GHz TiBook) I'm typing this reply on right now is fully capable of running a modern web browser (TenFourFox 9) at a satisfactory clip, plays back low-def video without issue, and is just shy of meeting the recommended system requirements for your beloved Doom 3 - and it's not even one of the high-end models!

The only reason Apple even abandoned PPC in the first place was that IBM and Motorola kept dropping the ball on providing a steady upgrade path on a reliable timeframe - and even after they left, it's still remained a strong performer in non-PC markets, including consoles like the XBox 360, where - guess what - Doom 3 also runs.

Only words for you all -----> upgrade, upgrade, upgrade. Especially commodorejohn.

Why? My Core 2 Duo laptop running XP does everything I need, handles all my VSTs, runs all the games I want to play, short of Oblivion (which my P4 gaming rig - also running XP - handles with aplomb,) and employs a UI with which I am familiar from seven years of using Win95/98 and eight years of using XP, and which hasn't been unnecessarily mucked around with to justify the UI department's budget for the year. What would upgrading get me that I need but don't already have, and how would it justify the pain that I'd go through acclimating myself to the needless changes?

Microsoft wanting you to use the app store is just business, you know something Commodore (and probably commodorejohn) knew nothing about.

And once again the "that's just business" line gets trotted out. Hint: just because something makes sense from a business standpoint does not make it good for anybody but the business in question. Are Microsoft within their rights to do this? Probably (leaving aside questions of monopolies for another discussion.) Does that make it any good for me or any other Windows user, or the developers who are now going to have to fork out to Microsoft just to be able to distribute their software? NO.

[commodorejohn]

I assume that the only reason some are console exclusive is because of the piracy, perhaps Win8 will solve that problem. Hooray! Red Dead Redemption for PC!!!!

That's what they like to say. (But if piracy is so little of a problem on consoles, why do console titles still get DRM and why is there talk about next-gen consoles not using physical media?) Really I expect it has much more to do with only having one or two platforms to target, instead of a multiplicity of different hardware combinations; even in these days of standardized gaming hardware libraries, that stuff's still damn complex.

[commodorejohn]

Oh, it's definitely less complicated than it used to be, but weird issues do still have a way of cropping up when you have as many possible hardware combinations (and as many potential software setups) as PCs do.

[commodorejohn]

True, this is exactly why MS made the "Metro" interface. All of these problems are now gone. The desktop was a kludge stacked on kludge's .NET fixed some of these problems but a clean sheet was the way to go.

Still gonna need the desktop but development of metro apps will be hardware agnostic more or less.

That's complete nonsense. Windows has had hardware-agnostic APIs for years now. It's the quirks of driver interactions and system addons that cause bizarre behavior that makes PC debugging hectic. Metro (or any other aspect of Win8) will do jack to fix that.

[commodorejohn]

My bet is Metro style apps will run without problems in 10 years from now on the latest version of Windows. Will bump thread in a decade to confirm.

I guess we'll see - but the question for most people is how they'll run in the meantime...

[commodorejohn]

In ten years we will find out. I will also bump the thread "Any more news on the laptop" to see if we have any more information on it as well.

I'm betting that'll be a "no" :lol:

[commodorejohn]

I no longer give a rats about Linux and just use my time to DO things I need to do, rather than maintaining Linux's failings and annoyances.

This. As they say, "Linux is free, as long as your time has no value..."

[commodorejohn]

Nobody but you says this.

http://www.google.com/search?q=linux+is+free+as+long+as+your+time+has+no+value

[commodorejohn]

The market has consistently rejected open operating systems.  Linux, BSD, etc have failed to gather more than a small fraction of desktops.  People like closed systems, end of story.  Even Android, which is a Unix distro and open source has locked down the OS.

The market has rejected open systems because the current open systems suck for anybody who A. doesn't like to make a hobby out of OS maintenance, or B. needs more than the default install and a few packages out of the tidiest corner of x distro's repository. Once open-source manages to come up with something that's as usable out-of-the-box as the commercial alternatives and doesn't require a correspondence course to maintain, then we'll find out what the market thinks about it.

[commodorejohn]

A.  not true.
B.  not true either.

I'm guessing that the last time you tried installing a linux, it was more than 5 years ago and was a distro like gentoo or slax or LFS.

As I said in the two-part rant I wrote when I finally gave up this past November, I've been trying for the last...oh, seven or eight years to get into Linux, and with multiple distros, none of which have been tech-head stuff like Slackware. If you want to insist that what I'm saying is false, that's your business, but I am speaking from personal experience here - Linux is just plain not suitable for people who want to install and use more than a web browser, LibreOffice, and a handful of whatever games come in the repository that don't require mutually exclusive sound libraries unless you build them from source.

I've tried moderately technical distros like Fedora and run up against the fact that Linux, as an operating system (so let's not get bogged down in "it's just a kernel,") has as its underpinnings a writhing, labyrinthine mess of intricately inter-dependent toolkits, libraries, and scripts, any one of which can fail without warning or explanation the moment you change anything in any part of the system. I've tried "friendly" distros like Ubuntu (ugh) or Debian (yay,) and all they do is sweep that mess under the rug of a very nice package manager and pretend it's not there, until something goes wrong, somewhere in the works, and failure symptoms start crawling out of the walls and you realize, like a Lovecraft protagonist, that the madness was here the whole time.

Unix is forty years of cruft accumulated in turning an operating system for time-sharing mainframes with VT-100s into an operating system that can do modern desktop kind of stuff. Linux is those forty years of Unix cruft painstakingly ported to PC, and apparently at no point in the process did anybody stop and say "hey, guys, maybe some of this stuff is more complicated than it needs to be?" Except: oh wait, lots of people said that the whole time and nobody listened to them. Because the people behind Linux (and yes, I know there is no central agency - that's the problem, it's a whole culture of this disease) don't care about simplifying the needlessly complex. They thrive on needless complexity. They codify it, canonize it, worship it, appoint themselves its high priests and make their living handing down bits of its functionality to the unwashed masses, and call you a heretic if you question it.

It's too damn complicated and it's never going to get fixed until the people who steer it finally own up to that. Google had the sense to do it, but that only helps people on Android systems. As for Linux at large, the biggest change it's looking at at any time in the near future is Wayland - and don't get me wrong, XWindows is a ripe candidate for an overhaul, but that does nothing to address all of the other insane complexity.

[commodorejohn]

(very many words)

It seems to me that many people think of Linux as being for tinkerers and people who like to play with the insides of their OS. But for me, I spent more time fighting against the OS than playing in it. I can tinker with AmigaOS, and it lets me do it. With Linux, it fights me all the way.

That's why - for me - Linux still isn't accepted by the general public. Like it or loathe it, Windows "just works" these days, and where it doesn't work, most of the time it tells you why and gives you a solution. That's what's missing from Linux. The other extreme is AmigaOS - things often don't work, because you're missing this or that - but it's easy to find out with a little knowledge of the OS why it doesn't work, and fix it. Hence for me, Windows = best option for Joe Public, AmigaOS = best option for tinkering hobbyist.

Well said.

[commodorejohn]

Only feature I've ever used on my feature phone is the alarm clock. I don't even have text-messaging. Suits me fine.

[commodorejohn]

You're a bad consumer. Please turn on your TV for re-education.

I'm afraid I never bought an HDTV converter box...I may have to report to the Ministry of Consumer Re-Education directly... :eek:

[commodorejohn]

Oh my.  Please tell me you at least watch the Hulu Plus and let them know which ads are applicable to you!

...umm...uh...no?