Philosophical Question - Amiguing

[hbarcellos]

Question is:

-> Why do we(1) keep trying to cultivate the Amiga, knowing that, most probably it's some kind of nostalgic feeling about the surrounding of our life experiences(2) when we first had the original Amigas?

(1) I include myself on it.
(2) Youth, already deceased family members, places, childhood, teenage, ex girlfriends, ...

[hbarcellos]

Nothing to do with nostalgia for me.... AmigaOS is the only OS I know that I enjoy coding for, using and generally playing around with. Simple as that.

...and you never ask yourself why? Why AmigaOS is the only OS you enjoyed coding/using/playing around with?

C'mon, there are several other flavor of OSes out there, that you can do everything you did with an Amiga and much more....

Wouldn't you call that... nostalgia?


*PS* I'm playing the Devil's Advocate here, ok?

[hbarcellos]

Why? If you'd ever tried coding for Windows or Linux you'd understand
AmigaOS is fast, responsive, configurable and does what I tell it to in a nice understandable way that no other OS does for me.

As a matter of fact, I did. Even working in a management position nowadays, I have a significant coding experience ranging from Z80/8086 ASM (MSX/PC)/ to ObjectiveC with even some Mainframe Natural Adabas in the middle.

About being fast, responsive and configurable, have you ever tried Windows XP on a really fast machine? How about even Windows 8 on one of those extreme SSDs machines? I can tell you by own experience, boots faster than my 040 A1200.
And then, you can go as roots as you want, ranging from TASM, TCC, GCC, Visual C 6.0 or even the newer Visual Studio...

What get's my attention is the word you used "Understandable". And/or the word "me" at the end.

...again... Nostalgia? Because, I agree with your feelings, but, I suspect the cause is nostalgia.

[hbarcellos]

Have you ever tried to do a List, Rename, Delete, or Copy with those other OSes?

Yep, I just press F2.

In 2013 all Amiga MUI software is vastly superior to all WinozeXP, Windows 7, and Linux software.  Amiga MUI software allows the user to actually change the damn fonts (or just change the size) to a readable size/style without having the text flow outside the window like always happens on my WindozeXP box.  Software on Windoze and Linux is downright user hostile in its Nazi-Stalinist-Dictatorial GUIs of "Do it the way I hardcoded it OR DIE!"
Amiga MUI software allows every aspect of the GUI to be user controlled and customized and is lightyears ahead of Linux, Unix, BSD, WindowsXP, Windows7, etc. in 2013.

Well, I'm not a hardcore modder of the OS look & feel. But, common sense tells me that assuming that: 1) You can code in ASM and +  2) Linux/kde/gnome/xfce, for example, are all Open Source and Amiga is not = You can probably customize every little tiny aspect of a linux box way more than you could dream on an Amiga.

Or how about filesearching.  I had a 2TB harddrive that I had to repeatedly search for the existence of files.  I had to do hundreds of searches.  It was ridiculously slow.  Every search took 24 to 30 minutes on my 1500 Mhz PC.

So I used a search program (with fancy pattern matching) that I wrote in asm on the Amiga back around 1990 for BBSes.  It completed each search in around 7 seconds on my 50Mhz 060.

So, I bet you tried to adapt your ASM code to 8086, right? It was still 257x slower than your WindozeXP?? Or you just refuse to code for 8086?

And finally, I couldn't agree more with Art:

If it's about nostalgia, I don't think it is any less valid.

We all have our reasons. What's important is not finding a common cause for it.

[hbarcellos]

There are a lot of examples everywhere:


Can you find someone saying that this car is faster than a Bugatti Veyron? (a.k. Mr. ChaosLord)

But I bet there are several saying that the experience of driving one of those is better.

[hbarcellos]

No but if you would put in the same engine as the bugati then you would blast the bugati from the road :-)

the difference is efficency. Of course you have today much better hardware (or using your analogy a much better engine) so efficency is not needed anymore. And you have direct access to the "engine" without layers between so you can add some PS :-)

Hmmm, there are other improvements as well, not only the engine.
About "Direct Access", I agree. But the reason why they don't do that anymore (IMHO) (Windows, at least) is because they have to support a very large selection of hardware. It's impossible to do unless you have some abstraction layers. But, I think we might be moving away from that. Apple seems to be heading to that direction constructing iOS. At a certain level, they know exactly what to expect and they would be able to use more the true power of the hardware...

[hbarcellos]

It has been conclusively proven that in the presence of sense memory surrounding a subject matter, be it positive or negative, a person can never form an objective assessment related to the same subject matter. It has to do with how the amygdala consolidates emotion originating in the limbic brain with other related aspects from higher level brain functions into the hippocampus.

The limbic brain is very simple, there aren't multiple areas for the different kinds of love one may feel i.e. love of a partner, love of a child, love of a friend or family member, love of a pet, or love of inanimate objects. All those hit the same area. Of course with differing intensity and also filtered through some of the higher brains to provide context. Same goes for dislike or hate. And with animals and inanimate objects like a car or a computer we assist this emotional bond through anthropomorphism.

We can certainly discuss things objectively and we can produce written materials that read objectively, when we think about them in absence of any emotional context. But the instant we start adding adjectives describing emotions like 'I enjoy' or 'it's fun', we are automatically applying a subjective view.

I'm still reading, but I already liked! +1
Who are you, a psychologist/Psychiatrist? Good pragmatic objective view of emotions.
Where you took that from? I want to read more...

[hbarcellos]

I don't need science to tell me how I feel. The very notion is absurd.

Although I understand your point, I think I disagree with your direction.
Reminds me of that old question: "Do we have free will?"

Something else that comes to my mind, making a parallel with computing, and specially with some of the subjects discussed here is:
- Some people are able to go deeper into the software layers. Even trying to make some "direct access", just like Amiga back in the days (Like coding in ASM), while some others, are still living their lives in a JVM.

[hbarcellos]

I don't even know how that would help.

Either everything is deterministic, in which case no. Or some things are non-deterministic, in which case... still no. Being ruled by the "roll of a dice" is no more free than being ruled by cold, hard logic.

Actually I think it's logic that sets us free, not any ability to act arbitrarily. If you do something at random, it's not really a "choice", is it? It's not a decision unless you *made* it, by thinking. But the difference between thinking and simply calculating, like a machine...

A machine is a fixed process. A mind is a self-modifying process. We create ourselves as we go along, with a little help from randomness to shake us out of local minima.

But someone just had to ask, didn't they?

I'm confused, for sure, but I think that there are no such thing as random. Anywhere.
Some things might be "sufficient random", like the "roll of a dice" you used, but, yet, you might came up with googol variables that might be used to calculate the expected result.
If that can be accepted as a fact, we should restrict the discussion to a non-deterministic universe.

[hbarcellos]

Jumping in for a moment...

I, personally, believe that the Universe is entirely deterministic but in order to predict it, one must know all the variables. I also believe that knowing all the variables is virtually impossible, making the Universe, for all intents and purposes, random. Such is the conumdrum of our existance. Another conundrum is the dertministic vs. free will paradox, to which I usually say "who cares? Enjoy the ride!"

Well, I refuse to comment anything about religion, god, or soul... I prefer Einstein's true vision about it, but, about the "Who Cares", I would call it curiosity. I am actually enjoying the ride. And, maybe, the ride is even better when you go deeper and try to understand some key fundamentals of our existence.
Maybe the true ride can only be enjoyed by "Freigeist"