mac and pc sucks!!!!

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This is a new world to me.  Which gamepad would be considered the best for a serious gamer?

Given how much Modern warfare 2 for the consoles and the halo stuff has sold, I'd say the majority of FPS gamers play with a gamepad these days.

Gaming changes constantly

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Yep, this board and the community in general is about a bunch of old farts complaining that the young ones just don't know how good things were back then....

Whippersnappers......

Love this thread!

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Today's computers be they Macs or PCs are able to do video, image and sound editing that one could not even dream about on the Amiga.  Operating systems have become more complex because there's more complex activities for them to do.

Amiga boards live in a sort of alternate reality world where Macs, PCs and Linux boxes have not changed in two decades.  Where people seem to attach almost magical characteristics to IBM's Power architecture.  Where a small cabal of maybe a thousand Amiga Illuminati know more than the billions of other people who use computers, especially than the computer scientists, engineers, academics, et al, who instead of worrying about measuring the bounce of a joystick are wasting their time developing complex solution to world problems.  Don't they know that they could just write that app in Amiga Basic?

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@Arkhan

I wasn't speaking about the retro enthusiasts, rather I was thinking of those who seem to think that the world is awaiting an Amiga saviour to rise from the grave.  I still play with my 3000 or a UAE emulator, they're reminders of the past, of where I came from.  It's a bit like tinkering with old cars, it's fun.  It's a hobby.  That's great, I have friends who spend a fortune to set up amateur radio stations to contact people that would be easier and cheaper contacted by mobile phone.  THat's great too, but none of them really think the mobile phone network will be replaced with a 2 metre handheld any time soon.

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Ah Butterfly BSD, I haven't really kept up on the BSD scene, how's Matt doing with his distro?  ANything new and exciting in it?

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What's wrong with 4000+ character file names?  So long as you have space on the drive why should the OS care?  Some people like to include a fair bit of a description in the file name, what's wrong with that?

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@Linde

I think it's hard for people to accept that AmigaOS is really out of step with the current century and that there aren't millions of people waiting for it.  They need to chill out and just enjoy their hobby instead of being so fundamentalist.  

The Amiga is a great toy, I enjoy playing with it, but it isn't ever going to replace my MacPro as a production machine.  Nor would I want it too.  When I'm on my Amiga it's impossible to do serious work, that's a plus in my book!

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Portal!!!!!

Now we can all sing along with Eric Swartz's Portal video!!!!

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@Amiga_Nut

1989 is calling, they want your view of information technology back....

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Frankly I've never experienced speed issues.  Now granted I have 8 cores running at 3.2 GHz each, but even my wife's computer, a basic i5, is snappy.  Perhaps you don't have enough RAM.  Nowadays I wouldn't recommend less than 4 GB and 8 or 16 GB on a serious machine.  It's pretty cheap nowadays anyway.

I have Linux servers that have been running continuously for over a year and still as snappy as the day I installed them.  I'm not a big fan of Linux GUIs but KDE is pretty feature rich.  But again RAM is the key, KDE is slow as paint drying if you have only a gig or so of RAM.

Windows 7 has done a lot to restore the public's trust in Microsoft.  It's stable and just runs.  But again you need 4 gigs and a multicore machine.  

If you have old machines like P4s, I'd recommend puppy linux or XP.  

My main concern has always been apps, an OS is nothing more than a program loader, 4 gigs and a decent multicore will let you run Adobe's magic quite nicely.  CS5, at least on a modern Mac, is downright snappy.  Much faster than CS4.  Computers are means to an end, they aren't an end in themselves.  You wouldn't but a Tat Nano to start a moving business, why would you buy an underpowered computer to do video editing and 3D rendering?

For some it might be.  Others may just look at their PC (with Winblows or some half arsed Linux variant) or their style over substance Mac and wonder why with all these hardware resources the same SIMPLE things take longer than they did in 1989.  Why all these little delays, little stutters, why when I click a button there is a delay in that registering on screen, or why a window waits to close after I have clicked its close gadget, and then is drawn half corrupted as it closes, why can a 14 mz 68020 with 2 meg ram brings up a simple one line text file in ed faster than a 2400 mhz 4096 meg ram with uber-fast hard drive using "text editor" in Ubuntu.  To you that might not matter, beacsue you can still do your "work" that an amiga simply cannot, and if that makes your computing experience a happy one, then good for you. To me it just FEELS shit.

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My first computer was a home build Z-80 CP/M machine, it ran an OS, Word Processor (Word Star) and held the documents on a single sided 5.25 inch floppy.  But it cost me more dollars than a quadcore PC homebrew with a TB HD would cost today....

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Well, when I run Windows 7, which is rare nowadays, I usually turn everything on.  You can run it on an atom, that's true.  Before my wife became a Mac person we tried to get it to run on her elderly P4 machine and it just spun the disk drive an inordinate amount of time, haven't a clue why, but it did manage to sell her on OS X, so why question providence?

The same thing with cars, we bought a new Tarago not too long ago, it's full of electronics and other bits that I haven't a clue what they do. it's all just part of modern life.  

I fly on jets when I travel, now the the Wright Brother's aircraft was far easier to understand, you can identify individual parts, no bloat there.  but at 100 m a flight it would take a heck of a long time to hit the tourist beaches in Vietnam or Indonesia...

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Exactly an OS is not an end in itself.  The OS loads programs and provides the resources those programs need and do it efficiently enough to provide a satisfactory user experience.  

Windows does that in the gaming world.  It also provides a relatively inexpensive platform to do production work on, video, sound, image manipulation, 3D rendering, etc all work just fine in Windows.  

Nobody gives a f### how many times you can read the bounce of a joystick or how many icons you can fit on your screen.  You have a computer to accomplish certain tasks and to a large extent the OS is irrelevant.  I sometimes use a PC to do photoshop and it really isn't all that different an experience to my Mac.

If PCs were so bad and Amigas so good why are there a billion or more PC users and a few hundred Amiga users?  I work in a university, do you know what sits on the desks of Computer Science faculty here?  About 50% Macs and 50% PCs, not one uses a Linux box as their primary machine.  Not one.  And you want to get a chuckle from them?  Suggest that they put an Amiga on their desk.  No powerpoint, no word, no photoshop, no .....

Computers are about getting things done.

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Windows 7 now has a Dock, like OS X, so you put your frequently used programs there.  My only bad experience with Windows 7 was with my wife's PC, and I think that's largely because it was an ancient chip (P4).

The reason I brought up the IT department here on campus is because they teach operating system design, and by and at large Microsoft and Apple are pretty much on the right track, design wise.  Sure the registry was a mistake, but not a fatal one.  How many windows users see a BSOD nowadays?  The guru is my friend and companion in AmigaOS, and he makes frequent visits.  I don't consider myself having properly played with one of my Amigas if the guru doesn't show up at least once.

There is no blanket dissatisfaction in the Windows world, even Vista, which was a mistake, still left Mac with only 8% of the US market and a far smaller percentage here.  There's no rush to Linux, AROS or Haiku, even though they run on industry standard platforms.

The Amiga is single user, without adequate security, without memory protection, without broad hardware support.  The Gui looks almost cartoon like compared to modern GUIs.

There is no application for the Amiga like MS Office, Photoshop, Premiere, Final Cut, or InDesign or even a decent email client (yes I still use an email client).  The version of Lightwave for the Amiga is so old you can't do more than 1/3 of the stuff you can on a modern version.

And that's it, you buy a computer to run programs, if it doesn't have any programs then what's the point?