Amiga.org
Coffee House => Coffee House Boards => CH / General => Topic started by: Iggy on November 18, 2012, 10:04:18 PM
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Sorry, I've used these things for years.
And they STILL suck.
I wanted to post this under a legitimate forum, but I knew I'd get thrown in the sock drawer.
We had an idea, in the 80's, that something better could be built.
We tried (on more then one front - my company did it with only a handful of people) and eventually lost out in the market.
It still hasn't quite happened.
Cause PCs, even developed by brute force, still aren't that great.
WTF?!
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I have to disagree. This is a way old argument.
The principle design paradigms of the Amiga (multiprocessing hardware with dedicated units for sound, graphics etc.) has been fully adopted in the PC world for over 15 years. And it's been steadily improved over the years, with ever faster, cheaper and more modular components. With any old PC, virtually anything you dislike about it can be swapped out and replaced with an alternative that suits you better. Whether it's hardware, applications or the OS.
The problem is, most people's understanding of the "PeeCee" is some generic beige box running Windows.
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The principle design paradigms of the Amiga (multiprocessing hardware with dedicated units for sound, graphics etc.) has been fully adopted in the PC world for over 15 years. And it's been steadily improved over the years, with ever faster, cheaper and more modular components. With any old PC, virtually anything you dislike about it can be swapped out and replaced with an alternative that suits you better. Whether it's hardware, applications or the OS.
That presupposes the existence of a better PC-compatible alternative, though, and in my experience there usually isn't one. PC hardware used to have some interesting alternatives back in the day (Adlib/Sound Blaster versus Gravis UltraSound versus IBM MFC versus an external MIDI module, different and sometimes quite interestingly quirky early 3D accelerators,) but they've all long since been stamped into conformity with a single standard that's usually defined more around whatever the Windows API already provided than any consideration of what made for a good standard (do you remember when sound cards didn't all use that crappy-ass Roland patch set that newer versions of Windows won't even let you switch out?) GPUs are pretty much the last holdout, and even they now differ pretty much only in specs on the same handful of categories. It's a vast landscape of increasingly-indistinguishable options.
And you can swap out the OS, but there really aren't any good options; there aren't even any interesting options that aren't stuck in perpetual beta. Linux more or less works until you touch anything under the hood, or touch anything that touches anything under the hood, or look at it funny, at which point there's a healthy chance that the entire modern-UNIX house-of-cards will collapse and leave you staring at a command prompt and trying to put things back together using tools from the '70s. Windows used to be crashy as hell and has since gotten better, to the point where it's a damn solid workhorse OS, but it's also gotten exponentially bigger with every version, to the point where you need what would've been considered a high-end PC just six or seven years ago merely to run it these days.
PCs have evolved over the last thirty years, but they've never lost that fundamental kludge-ugliness, and what they've gained in reliability has mostly been obtained by hammering flat any feature that might once have made them interesting. Iggy is dead-on here.
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The problem is, most people's understanding of the "PeeCee" is some generic beige box running Windows.
.... with loads and loads of 'goodies' crapware installed :D
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Windows/Linux/Mac still can't do proper screens. Game, set, match.
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PCs have evolved over the last thirty years, but they've never lost that fundamental kludge-ugliness, and what they've gained in reliability has mostly been obtained by hammering flat any feature that might once have made them interesting. Iggy is dead-on here.
PC's aren't built to be interesting, hey are built to be useful, ubiquitous and replaceable. System API's allow hardware implementations to vary wildly provided they perform the same function. Nobody wants the old style X won't work with Y or without Z and don't forget to set jumpers A, B and C before rebooting and fiddling with your HIMEM.SYS nonsense. That wasn't interesting, it was simply frustrating.
However, and you are free to disagree, in achieving the goal of becoming the ubiquitous one-size fits all solution for most people's computing needs, a lot of clever ideas have been packed into a system built on an architecture that in any sane universe would have been drowned at birth. And the fact that it all works is very interesting.
Also, you mentioned just a handful of "uninteresting" operating systems. There are literally dozens of esoteric operating systems for PC hardware. MenuetOS was the last one I played with; an esoteric OS for people that want to write everything in assembler. And I didn't have to flatten anything to try it, I just made use of a bit of virtualization.
Don't get me wrong, the Amiga will always be my favourite, but I don't get the need to rant about perceived shortcomings of PC's in 2012. It's like raging about the inadequacies of your fridge or TV set.
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Windows/Linux/Mac still can't do proper screens. Game, set, match.
???
What is a proper screen?
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???
What is a proper screen?
Desktop in one resolution, application in another. Non-Amigas still can't do it without reinitializing the whole display.
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Windows/Linux/Mac still can't do proper screens. Game, set, match.
Windows/Linux/Mac still have no MUI. Match 2, World Championship, The End.
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However, and you are free to disagree, in achieving the goal of becoming the ubiquitous one-size fits all solution for most people's computing needs, a lot of clever ideas have been packed into a system built on an architecture that in any sane universe would have been drowned at birth.
Can you give me some examples? Every clever or interesting thing I can think of about PCs got stamped out in standards transitions.
And the fact that it all works is very interesting.
No it isn't. A machine being in a state of proper function is a fine thing, but that doesn't make it interesting.
Also, you mentioned just a handful of "uninteresting" operating systems. There are literally dozens of esoteric operating systems for PC hardware. MenuetOS was the last one I played with; an esoteric OS for people that want to write everything in assembler.
What I said was "there aren't any interesting options that aren't stuck in perpetual beta." Or, more fairly to some of them, "that have enough of a software base to be generally useful." MenuetOS is neat as hell, I agree - it's just that when it comes to stuff you can use for your day-to-day computing needs, people are often stuck with the big, boring players that aren't very good but aren't bad enough to keep them from being the standards.
Don't get me wrong, the Amiga will always be my favourite, but I don't get the need to rant about perceived shortcomings of PC's in 2012. It's like raging about the inadequacies of your fridge or TV set.
Well, I can't speak for Iggy, but there's a couple reasons this often feels rant-worthy. First and foremost, 'round here, is the group of people who, despite being members of an Amiga forum, and typically professing to like the Amiga, respond to any thread about next-gen Amigoid systems, exercises in pushing the boundaries on classic Amigas, attempts to "switch over" to next-gen or classic Amigas for daily-driver use, hypotheticals about where the Amiga might have gone, or threads about the weather with ritual chanting of "THERE IS ONLY AND SHALL EVER MORE BE ONLY X86, DECLARED THE ONE TRUE ARCHITECTURE BY GOD HIMSELF THROUGH HIS PROPHET DON ESTRIDGE, BOW DOWN AND WORSHIP, O YE IGNORANT HEATHENS!" Often with an added chaser of "and anyway the Amiga was totally crap because it couldn't play Doom unexpanded, I don't know why you people here on an Amiga forum seem to like it so much."
But even aside from that specific annoyance, the whole attitude that "PCs are meant to be identical and boring" is pretty frustrating. It didn't used to be that way; people used to be interested in computers for their own sake, and consequently computers used to be really interesting. Back in the day, there was a veritable menagerie of quirky, interesting little systems to choose from - or you could use a common backplane standard to play mix-and-match in a way that modern PCs don't even begin to approach.
Then the IBM PC came along and triggered a mass extinction event; a few survivors hung behind or thrived in specialty markets for a while, but eventually it was just PCs as far as the eye could see. Even that wasn't so bad, back when PCs still had some interesting features, but that creeping homogeneity has all but completely overtaken the world of personal computing by now. Even Macs are PCs now! Hell, the most diversity we've had in years has been due to the hesitant, not-yet-fruitful dalliance of ARM hardware from the smartphone market with laptop form factors.
Some folks here remember those earlier days with fondness. Some of us weren't around for them, but wish we'd been. In either case, we're maybe not so gung-ho about standards and interoperability that we wouldn't like to see some variety in the market again - and you don't even need to want that to think that the IBM PC-compatible architecture is looking pretty icky after thirty years of progressive kludges. You can talk about how great standards are all you want, and I'm not going to claim you don't have a point, but it's like arguing that dinosaurs were just too big and inefficient and it's their own fault that they didn't survive changing climate conditions, for being too dependent on a predation cycle based around lush, plentiful vegetation - that may be true, but you're missing the point that dinosaurs were hella cool in a way that very few mammals are.
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Wow, you guys like wordy answers.
Stated more simply, Gates and company know how to imitate, assimilate, and absorb. So OS looks better but its one big, bloated, monolithic pig.
And Linux and Mac OSX suffer from the same problem.
And the number of transistors that have been thrown into the hardware is stupid high for perpetually diminishing returns.
And there is an alternative. It was there at the same time Linux started and should have received more consideration.
Micro kernal OS', Risc processors, and open standards that are documented.
We could have been there and we blew it.
Instead I'm being offered more new processors from the calculator processor manufacturing company and software from the vaporware OS guy's company.
Give them enough time and they'll polish the turd, but its still a polished turd.
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Desktop in one resolution, application in another. Non-Amigas still can't do it without reinitializing the whole display.
Does this really matter? I can't think of any programs I use on a daily basis that don't pull my desktop resolution.
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Can you give me some examples? Every clever or interesting thing I can think of about PCs got stamped out in standards transitions.
If you can honestly look at a modern PC motherboard and associated components and not see 2 decades worth of accumulated cleverness in the component parts and their interconnections then there's no point in me even trying to point any out. You simply don't, or won't appreciate it. Which is your prerogative.
My first experience of a PC was a typical, cost-reduced 8086 green screen affair. The one I am typing on couldn't be further from it. The *only* thing it has in common is a subset the instruction set the processor uses.
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Does this really matter? I can't think of any programs I use on a daily basis that don't pull my desktop resolution.
x86/x64 based PCs can display to multiple monitors at their optimum or differing resolutions. It's a bit of a moot point in 2012 with full Hi Def digital displays. The operating system supports what is needed. Screens were cool in the 80's but they were really a feature gimic rather than anything productive or useful. IMO.
One of my hates however is the term "PC". As per the thread title. It used to be IBM PC and then got shortened to PC. Every computer I owned in the 80s and early 90s had the word Personal Computer written on it. None of them being IBM related. I guess PC was a term coined by Mac zealots who figured everything non-Mac was PC. Does that make Macs Impersonal PCs? :)
Arrh they have a lot to be blamed for.
@Karlos don't forget the interupts even though they're APIC? now the origins are the same.
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If you can honestly look at a modern PC motherboard and associated components and not see 2 decades worth of accumulated cleverness in the component parts and their interconnections then there's no point in me even trying to point any out. You simply don't, or won't appreciate it. Which is your prerogative.
My first experience of a PC was a typical, cost-reduced 8086 green screen affair. The one I am typing on couldn't be further from it. The *only* thing it has in common is a subset the instruction set the processor uses.
Wow, you had a "real" PC.
My first experience was soldering together a 6800 based system.
Man the circuit boards were crude.
Even unpopulated, a current circuit board is a complex thing of beauty with about 90% of its secrets hidden in its inner layers.
That's why it always cracks me up when someone discusses "making boards".
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Though my current computer is sufficiently fast, I cannot but think that it needs a lot of power to drive current OS'es.
As BeOS showed, there can be a full pre-emptive multitasking OS with a GUI that is really fast on the PC.
So I'm very curious of what they make of Wayland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_%28display_server_protocol%29) as the only resource-hungry aspect of Linux is the x-windows system.
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If you can honestly look at a modern PC motherboard and associated components and not see 2 decades worth of accumulated cleverness in the component parts and their interconnections then there's no point in me even trying to point any out. You simply don't, or won't appreciate it. Which is your prerogative.
That's not an answer to the question, that's you telling me that I don't want an answer to the question, and I'll be the decider of my own motivations, thank you. If I wasn't interested in hearing your view on it, I certainly wouldn't have wasted my time asking.
So I'm very curious of what they make of Wayland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_%28display_server_protocol%29) as the only resource-hungry aspect of Linux is the x-windows system.
Wayland has some good ideas at the core, and yes, XWindows is ripe for replacement. Problem is, as far as I've read it sounds like they're betting everything on GPU acceleration, which is only good if you have working GPU acceleration. In Linux, that depends largely on what exact core of whose basic architecture your GPU uses, and the open-source driver projects for even the big names in video cards are pretty scattershot in their support.
Wayland claims that'll be taken care of by a software fallback layer. Ideally that would mean no worse performance than a non-compositing window manager, which would be pretty fine. Unfortunately, what they're planning to do is run the compositing window manager through the Mesa software renderer. Which, if you've ever used it for anything more complex than a spinning-teapot demo, is a sluggish agony. So if your laptop has an unsupported chipset, the question will be whether or not the pain of maintaining and using X is worse than the pain of using Wayland on a software emulation of hardware acceleration.
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That's not an answer to the question, that's you telling me that I don't want an answer to the question, and I'll be the decider of my own motivations, thank you. If I wasn't interested in hearing your view on it, I certainly wouldn't have wasted my time asking.
Your question seemed rhetorical. For your consideration, first I'll submit the GPU. First there was the dumb, often segmented framebuffer. Then there was some fixed 2D functionality in EGA and VGA (that few people ever explored). Then there was the fixed function 3D accelerator. Which became ever more powerful until eventually, multiple texture pipelines just wasn't enough and T&L was added. Then shaders and before you know it, the massively parallel turing-complete high-performance processing cluster that is the modern GPU was born. Virtually all of these represent different eras in graphics processing technology and were the result of numerous innovations over the previous era. And it's still going on. It's just that most people simply don't appreciate what is changing at the machine level behind their APIs. Instead, they see prettier graphics but don't realize the revolutions in hardware that have enabled it.
You can pick any component in your typical PC and see the same development. Many times, there's a complete shift in the way things work in order to overcome some fundamental limitation. In the distant past, people would laugh at the notion of using serial interfaces between system components on a mainboard (with a few esoteric transputer systems excluded). Then, as bus speeds reach a certain level, people realised that shovelling increasingly wide machine words around parallel tracks on a motherboard is both space inefficient and prone to error as the speed goes up. Simply put, the length of individual tracks becomes problematic for signal propagation. Revising everything to use multiple high speed serial links and point-to-point transfer, instead of wide transfers is an extremely clever solution that we would have scoffed at 20 years ago.
To think of all these changes as mere evolution of the same old 8086 architecture (ie, nothing new, just faster) is nothing short of disingenuous. It takes a lot to deliver all that brute force and a lot of changes to keep delivering it.
I'd say the only thing that hasn't really kept up is the software. For example, we now have many-core systems capable of dramatic throughput but lots of applications with poor concurrency support, incapable of realizing their potential. OK, sometimes that's just the way it goes as not everything can be parallelised, but we're still lagging behind in terms of how we go about designing software for such scalability in the first place.
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...the only resource-hungry aspect of Linux is the x-windows system.
From what perspective?
CPU load?
Because, in that regard it would be one of the largest drags.
But depending on what you're doing, Linux based systems can have a lot of other resource hungry drags.
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Does this really matter? I can't think of any programs I use on a daily basis that don't pull my desktop resolution.
Games, VMWare, other emulators. I wouldn't mind so much if not for the fact that when flipping back to the desktop, all of my windows and icons have been squished and repositioned to fit the resolution of the program I was just running. And it's slow as hell.
Besides, I much prefer running a somewhat low-res desktop with high-res programs opening on their own screen. Left Amiga+M is instantaneous and depends only on the monitor resyncing. On Windows, try Alt+Tabbing to PowerPoint after you've been working in another program for a while and see how long it takes. Try Alt+Tabbing back from a game to look at another window - if it even lets you.
Oh, on a related matter, my usual old chestnut: the ability to have the active window not be the frontmost one - how the Windows/Mac/Linux world hasn't gotten to this one yet is mind-boggling.
Amiga: We still got it (in some areas) :)
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Amiga: We still got it (in some areas) :)
And that's if you just sift through the left over decayed parts.
We could still own it all!
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Games, VMWare, other emulators. I wouldn't mind so much if not for the fact that when flipping back to the desktop, all of my windows and icons have been squished and repositioned to fit the resolution of the program I was just running. And it's slow as hell.
weird. I don't get this behavior when I quit out of some game that changes the screen res.
Besides, I much prefer running a somewhat low-res desktop with high-res programs opening on their own screen. Left Amiga+M is instantaneous and depends only on the monitor resyncing. On Windows, try Alt+Tabbing to PowerPoint after you've been working in another program for a while and see how long it takes. Try Alt+Tabbing back from a game to look at another window - if it even lets you.
I don't think I do that at all.
Oh, on a related matter, my usual old chestnut: the ability to have the active window not be the frontmost one - how the Windows/Mac/Linux world hasn't gotten to this one yet is mind-boggling.
Amiga: We still got it (in some areas) :)
Well, on the linux side, you can make your windows do whatever the hell you want to. If you want focus to be explicit, you can set it that way. Also, I have always hated active window not being in the forefront.
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Cause PCs, even developed by brute force, still aren't that great.
Nothing wrong with PCs. Cheap and fast. Don't care how they work, as long as they do what I want, and that they do :) Are they boring? Sure. Does it matter? No :)
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weird. I don't get this behavior when I quit out of some game that changes the screen res.
I don't think I do that at all.
You're one lucky ducky! :)
I don't think it's ever *not* happened to me.
Well, on the linux side, you can make your windows do whatever the hell you want to. If you want focus to be explicit, you can set it that way. Also, I have always hated active window not being in the forefront.
I was not aware of this. Which window manager lets you do this (in case I ever put another Linux box together)?
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I was not aware of this. Which window manager lets you do this (in case I ever put another Linux box together)?
I think this is what you may be after.
http://bertrandbenoit.blogspot.com/2011/09/change-window-behavior-to-prevent-focus.html
Granted, I don't muck around with windowing behavior (the GUI is really just there to let me run non-console programs...half the time I work in DWM), but in most modern OSes they call it "focus" and most DEs have ways of mucking about with it.
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My PC is only a low-life bitch slave.
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I think this is what you may be after.
http://bertrandbenoit.blogspot.com/2011/09/change-window-behavior-to-prevent-focus.html
Granted, I don't muck around with windowing behavior (the GUI is really just there to let me run non-console programs...half the time I work in DWM), but in most modern OSes they call it "focus" and most DEs have ways of mucking about with it.
Thanks. I think the behavior in that article is slightly different from what I'd like to see, but I'll keep it bookmarked for future reference.
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Besides, I much prefer running a somewhat low-res desktop with high-res programs opening on their own screen.
Scalable fonts. There's just no reason to subject your eyes to low resolution any more.
Left Amiga+M is instantaneous and depends only on the monitor resyncing. On Windows, try Alt+Tabbing to PowerPoint after you've been working in another program for a while and see how long it takes. Try Alt+Tabbing back from a game to look at another window - if it even lets you.
Maybe on Windows, but these days on my Linux laptop, switching between apps is instantaneous, even with a relatively anaemic integrated Intel GPU.
Oh, on a related matter, my usual old chestnut: the ability to have the active window not be the frontmost one - how the Windows/Mac/Linux world hasn't gotten to this one yet is mind-boggling.
They have. A large number of Linux windows managers have been able to support this since the mid 90's (inclduding "AmiWM" which tries to make X Windows look like AmigaOS), it's just not popular with users and so pretty much none ship with it enabled by default, and it's a "dying" option.
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x86/x64 based PCs can display to multiple monitors at their optimum or differing resolutions. It's a bit of a moot point in 2012 with full Hi Def digital displays. The operating system supports what is needed. Screens were cool in the 80's but they were really a feature gimic rather than anything productive or useful. IMO.
I loved screens for how it saved screen real estate, and I've got my desktop and laptop set up to run most stuff maximized and switch between them with a key combo just like I used to on my Amiga. With recent Ubuntu introducing a global menu too, it's slowly getting there ;)
But the multi-resolution aspect of it is pretty moot today, I agree.
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Scalable fonts. There's just no reason to subject your eyes to low resolution any more.
I like lower resolutions, myself.
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The resolution-changing wizardry of the Amiga would be completely lost on modern fixed-pixel displays.
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Wayland has some good ideas at the core, and yes, XWindows is ripe for replacement. Problem is, as far as I've read it sounds like they're betting everything on GPU acceleration, which is only good if you have working GPU acceleration. In Linux, that depends largely on what exact core of whose basic architecture your GPU uses, and the open-source driver projects for even the big names in video cards are pretty scattershot in their support.
Wayland claims that'll be taken care of by a software fallback layer. Ideally that would mean no worse performance than a non-compositing window manager, which would be pretty fine. Unfortunately, what they're planning to do is run the compositing window manager through the Mesa software renderer. Which, if you've ever used it for anything more complex than a spinning-teapot demo, is a sluggish agony. So if your laptop has an unsupported chipset, the question will be whether or not the pain of maintaining and using X is worse than the pain of using Wayland on a software emulation of hardware acceleration.
See it this way: for Workbench to run at all, you need an Amiga, for Linux you need certain well-supported hardware and their proprietary drivers to run nicely. Basically, the Apple way.
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See it this way: for Workbench to run at all, you need an Amiga, for Linux you need certain well-supported hardware and their proprietary drivers to run nicely. Basically, the Apple way.
That's true enough, though it would help if advocates didn't like to keep repeating lines about how Linux runs on anything and makes sweet wizardly love to your old hardware. Well, not if your old hardware isn't within a certain specific subset of all available hardware, it doesn't...
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Maybe on Windows, but these days on my Linux laptop, switching between apps is instantaneous, even with a relatively anaemic integrated Intel GPU.
You don't even need a GPU for this, a Pentium 1 could do it.
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That's true enough, though it would help if advocates didn't like to keep repeating lines about how Linux runs on anything and makes sweet wizardly love to your old hardware. Well, not if your old hardware isn't within a certain specific subset of all available hardware, it doesn't...
I wholly agree.
Then again it's free. Though a system test or "linux compatible badge" would be nice for inexperienced users.
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I like lower resolutions, myself.
You might wanna try Wadjet Eye games (http://www.gog.com/catalogue?search=Wadjet+Eye+Games)
Absolute top quality low res atmospheric adventures :)