Time to Move On

[Waccoon]

neofree:  1. Choose an existing or create a new Open PPC motherboard as the hardware for OS4.

They already chose an existing design for AmigaOne.  It was still buggy and expensive.

Make their own design?  Buggy and SUPER expensive.

C'mon, people gotta admit the new Intel Conroe processors are looking pretty good...

TheMagicM:  I think too many people are expecting a new piece of hardware to come out and then the "Amiga" will enjoy some sort of rebirth or out-of-the-dead experience. Its not going to happen.

Hardware is just a means to an end.  Unless there's real excitement about what the OS can do, it won't go anywhere.

Hyperion is bonkers if they think holding off for a good hardware rollout is going to make a slam-dunk showing.  They need to focus on things that will grab the geeks -- things other OSes can't do.  You know, like, make a brilliant new shell that makes Bash look like machine language, or something that FINALLY obsoletes FTP and NFS, in favor of transparrent connections, like what Plan9 was doing.  I'm shocked to see that MacOSX still uses NFS for logging into other computers though the window manager!  WTF?!

neofree:   My interest in Mac lately is you cant browse the net without getting clobbered with spyware or viruses.

I've been virus free for 10 years.  I don't recall having any spam problems for at least 2, probably longer.

Use Firefox or Opera, plus some common sense, and you won't have problems.  Period.

Oh yeah, and get rid of Norton if you have it.  In my experience, it will *destroy* your Windows machine.  I hate Norton Anything with a passion.

motorollin:  AInc/Hyperion/whoever he hell is developing AOS now are fools to be holding on to OS4. OS4 with a nice installer to allow it to run on a Mac would sell tonnes of copies.

There's too much idealism, not enough ideas.

irishmike:  The whole Amiga experience for me is to be able to play some games that I liked when I had DOS 6.22 running. The Miggie just actually runs them better.

No kidding.  I completely forgot how painful MS-DOS programs really were until I got DOSBox to run some old games.

irishmike:  plus, the whole idea of "Remember when computing was fun?" is why we still use our machines.

It was fun because it was all so new.  These days, you just have glossy interfaces covering up the warts.  I don't presume OS4 is any more "fun" than Windows.  The design is just too old.  No matter how much Windows aggrivates me, going from Win2K to OS3 is a brain numbing experience.

HellCoder:  If all complaining people get there heads together and start building the application they desire so much things will be alot better for them.

An OS is a platform for tools.  Without the right tools, it's a lot harder to write applications.

[Waccoon]

About a modern browser, forgot about that if it was possible it would be already done on 68k and MorphOS !

Indeed.  Lack of tools is one thing, but the OS has to conform to minimum standards, too.  Making software portable is developing for the lowest common denominator.  Abstraction layers for AmigaOS are pretty much emulators, not translators.

xeron:  OS4 runs all the system friendly apps i've ever thrown at it

How many of those are there?  ;-)

motorollin:  It works beautifully IMO, and is less of a mess than (for example) Linux.

Yeah, but how many hardware platforms does Linux support?  Can you run the latest OSX on a Mac that is 6+ years old?

Plus, high-level driver support is a joke.  All you need is one bad driver to wipe out a system.  Contrary to popular belief, Linux is no more immune to crashes than Windows if you have buggy drivers, and Linux has plenty of those.

Never confuse "clean" with "sparse".  Besides, Linux isn't clean by any standards.  I'd be more fair to compare OSX to BSD, its parent.  What has Apple done to improve BSD?  Or, have they merely stripped out the stuff they think they don't need?

motorollin:  I don't know what they're doing to make it unstable. None of my Macs have *ever* crashed or produced unexpected error messages.

My mini has.  A few lock-ups, too.  Even if there is Mach and UN*X underneath, at the GUI level, it's all proprietary closed-source code made by Apple.  It has plenty of bugs of its own.

I tried to play a DVD, and I got one of those infamous "negative number" error messages.  I tried to make a connection to my web server, and I got an error "-50".  Great work on the usability front, Apple.  Everyone knows negative numbers are the best way to handle unexpected results.  It also locked up during the NFS connection, once I did figure out why I was getting "-50".

If I didn't need the Mac for software testing, I'd sell it.  It's certainly no more stable than my Win2K system.

srg86:  Under the hood, there is a lot of overhead with the difference layers.

Lots of overhead is typical in a mircokernel OS.  Windows NT fits in this category, BTW.

There's really no hard speration between monolithic and microkernel unless the OS designer is a fanatical idealist.  I don't know why some people are so religious about the comparrison.

coldfish:  I doubt Apple would sit idley by as someone makes money hijacking their hardware?

Possibly, if the company in question is a commercial entity.

motorollin:  I don't think Apple would care as long as they are selling hardware. The OS people choose to use on it is nothing to do with them.

I don't agree.  Apple is far, far more aware of their brand image than most other PC companies.  They can't do anything to the free software guys, but they get pissy when commercial companies move into their territory, even if it may increase hardware sales.

Besides, more and more, Apple is becoming a service-based company.

Put it another way: If Hyperion decided to port OS4 to Intel, would they have to pay Dell, Lenovo, Toshiba, and all the other manufacturers of IBM Compatible hardware a license fee? I don't think so.

Define "IBM Compatible".  ISA is long gone.

Modern PCs are based on open standards.  Very few single companies can claim ownership of the platform, and many have contracts not to sue the pants off each other (Intel and AMD, for example).  It's relatively easy to get hardware documentation.  Even Macs are just PCs in a different box, though there's more weird stuff going on at the firmware level AFAIK.

[Waccoon]

Can you run the latest OSX on a Mac that is 6+ years old?

motorollin:  Why would you want to?

Funny how people lambast Microsoft if the latest version of Windows won't work on such an old computer, but Mac people have no trouble buying brand new hardware all the time.

motorollin:  I really don't understand why you are getting problems like that. I have never had a message like that, and have been using Macs for several years.

I've been using Macs since '95.  I was also the system admin for a fleet of Macs at my college newspaper office.  Oh, the horror stories I could tell -- especially about OS8.  A clean install of that system was a non-stop crashfest.  Just putting an audio CD in the drive caused a lock-up (the 8.1 "superpatch" released 6 months later finally fixed that).

Apple only puts effort into the stuff that matters to casual users.  At the low-level, MacOS and OSX have always spit out tons of indecipherable error numbers.

Sorry, but I'm really sick of people telling me they have no problems with their Macs, but simply putting any DVD in the drive of my mini gave me "error -5862" or some similar crud, with no way to figure out what the problem was.  After lots of google searches, I eventually found out that the problem was a region mis-configuration.  My DVD region was set to 0 (unset), even though the machine is a US model.  WTF?  Was it just not initialized properly at the factory?  According to several forums I've read, I'm not the only one that has had this problem.

I mean, how is it I can use an install of Windows for years at a time, get one BSOD every 6 months, and never get a virus, but my Mac mini crashes just by trying to make an NFS connection and I regularly get error messages I can't decode?

Colin Camper:  I can argue with that! You are accessing the internet are you? Even through NAT you cannot access many websites before you start picking up spyware/malware.

I've been doing it for 10+ years with no problems.  I've never, ever had a virus, and I don't have anti-virus software on my machine (well, OK, I install something about once a year to actually LOOK for stuff, but I never find anything).

Meanwhile, people ask me to repair their computers all the time, and all I find is spyware and viruses... and AOL.  Everybody uses AOL and AIM!  Blech!

Bottom line: you cannot hold the OS responsible for 3rd party software.

On this note, I find it interesting that people brag about security on UNIX.  So long as an application (like a web browser) can access your Home folder, your data is at risk.  It doesn't matter if you are running as root/administrator or not.  The OS is replacable.  Your data is not.

Moving on or not, the computer industry is not making much progress.

srg86:  All it needs is a good firewall (mine is in my router), decent antivirus (I use avast!) and don't look at attachments of e-mails from people you don't know.

I have a NAT, and that's it.  I've found that anti-virus software generally pokes around too much in kernel mode and will make your system unstable.  Especially Norton.  I don't trust any software that tries to protect me automatically.

I must say, though, that Outlook Express is pretty braindead when it comes to attachments, such as the infamous "file.doc {50 spaces} .pif"

bloodline:  I've never had a Windows installation that hasn't needed a complete reinstall after about 12 to 18 Months...

Win95 was a nightmare.  I had to re-install it every 3-6 months.  My current system, Win2K, hasn't been re-installed in four years and I use it every day for both gaming and programming.  Oh yeah, and with an Apache/MySQL combo in the background, it still boots in ~20 seconds.

My ex-boss just bought a new Prescott-based computer for his store, and it takes more than two minutes to boot up.  It's a Hewlett Packard, loaded with background processes and Norton Internet Security.  Need I say more?

I wonder how long it'll be before he calls me, asking me to re-install it.  He didn't get the "backup CD" option, either, so it will only re-install by copying one hard drive partition onto another (another terrific, modern innovation.  Ugh.)