Wow, what kind of drugs were you on when you wrote this?
If the hard drive requires reformatting, some registered programs must be re-registered.
Huh? If the hard drive requires reformatting, you're going to have a blank hard drive. Thats on any system, as far as I know. You won't have any software left on it, registered or not. If you didn't bother to back up your software and any license keys for shareware/commercial software, then the problem isn't the OS, its you being an idiot.
More effort has gone into hiding data and information than has gone into making it easy to work with.
This is true of much commercial software, new and old. However, there are plenty of cutting edge modern OSes and other software that this makes your claim completely untrue. You ever hear of Linux, bud? Open source is about as unhidden as you can get.
Modern software designers have never heard of buttons called Use and Test, and have no concept of what the word Cancel actually means.
I don't think you have any concept of what you're trying to say here... at least, it doesn't make any sense to me.
The desktop is at the highest position in the device hierarchy, yet it's really a subdirectory on the boot drive. The hierarchy should have the drives at the top and work its way inward, not take some arbitrary starting point and pretend it's the top.
You seem to think that the user interface needs to exactly map to the filesystem. That may be one approach, but its probably not the best one unless you're using something like DOS or a textmode Unix OS. Or are you even saying its the filesystem... I see you say "device hierarchy." If that's the case, wouldn't the CPU be the top?
For that matter, I don't think Amigas even fit your idea. The main WorkBench screen doesn't correspond to the boot drive.
The more I think about this paragraph of yours, the less sense it makes.
Modern OS users seem oblivious of the difference between Screens and Windows. Here's a hint: if the entity being referred to can be moved or resized, then it isn't a Screen (unless it can only be dragged upward and downward, and then it's not Windows.
Huh? If you run X on a unix system (whether plain or under a system like KDE, Gnome, CDE, or whatever) you have multiple virtual screens (multiple actual screens means separate monitors) with 0 or more windows on them. The idea of draggable screens is an Amiga concept, but its hardly the only way of handling multiple screens. Also, I'm fairly sure all but the most dumb users can tell a screen from a window.
Ever intend to drag the contents of a window which may be positioned close to the window's edge, and instead get the pointer too close to the border, drag it and inadvertently resize the window? Wouldn't be so bad if you could cancel it before letting go of the mouse button.
No, but then I'm not an idiot. On my Linux system, if I drag a window off the edge of a screen, it moves it to the next screen over (in any of the 4 directions I choose).
Most, if not all Windows-only users who know what wildcards are think that *.* and ? are perfectly adequate wildcards.
For most people's purposes, they are perectly adequate. While Amiga's CLI has more wildcards, how often do most people need the fancier ones? And if you want to do dickwaving, the regexps available for unix OSes are a whole lot more powerful than Amiga's. But again, so what? 99% of the time * and ? are all you need.
Microsoft tells us where we are to save all of our data. What ever would we do without them helping us with such difficult decisions? Heaven forbid we try to save our stuff in a place that differs from the norm.
Even if that were true (which it is not), equating Microsoft with all modern OSes is pretty silly.
Modern operating systems are programmed to be task-oriented rather than user-oriented, giving more importance to what the computer wants to do and less to what the user wants to do.
That makes no sense.
If the application is busy, accessing menus is impossible.
Depends on the application/OS I suppose, but I almost never encounter this on any modern OSes I've used.
Let's put the close gadget right next to the "minimize/maximize" gadgets. Who cares if the user clicks the wrong one and loses all their work. We'll just have extra "are you sure" requesters to ensure the user feels both protected and annoyed.
I can put my gadgets anywhere I want on my Linux windows... left, right, center, whatever. I can choose which gadgets I want, define my own, and pick what they look like. I think even Windows XP lets you have *some* control over gadgets nowadays (I don't use Windows often, so I'm not sure). As much as I love my Amiga, its pretty deficient in your control over window gadgets.
Why are the scroll bar arrows separated by the scroll bar? Isn't the idea of scroll arrows to keep from having to move the mouse while scrolling?
I think on most modern OSes, more people probably use their mouse wheel or Page Up/Down buttons than clicking on scroll arrows. I don't think I've ever clicked on the arrows on my scroll bar in Linux... ever.
When the system is busy, the entire GUI appears frozen. Often there is no indication that this is normal. The system simply fails to respond.
Never happens on my system. Even on Windows, you've got to be running abnormally heavy load before it gets that hung up. I've seen my Amiga get frozen up like that more than even Windows systems.
Progress bars that use 10 - 20 pixel wide segments have been widely adopted by many applications in modern operating systems, foregoing a more comfortable and informative pixel-wide segment.
Uh... what?
How can a computer crash so hard that it no longer accepts input from the keyboard?
Maybe you forgot to plug your keyboard in.
There's usually no clean way to cancel an errant mouse click.
There's no clean way to cancel an errant "Bikers are stupid pussies!" shouted in a biker bar either. Whats your point? Mistakes are mistakes, you can't blame the OS for something stupid you did. That's entirely on you.
If the user intends to drag-and-drop something, clicks and starts to drag it, then realizes before dropping that it shouldn't be dropped, most operating systems won't let the user cancel it easily without the risk of dropping it in a potentially dangerous place.
You know you can just drag it back to its original location, right?
Buy it, use it, throw it away.
Huh?
Modern operating systems don't support two-image icons.
Just plain wrong. Many systems have 2 image icons, and even animated icons.
Just try renaming a "folder" or a file while it's being accessed in any capacity by any other application.
I do that plenty of times. Linux has a pretty good filesystem that internally manages files by inode, so changing a file's name while its in use (even while you're still downloading it) often works just fine.
Students in today's "I.T." studies are being taught to underwrite software, leave behind bugs and use poor implementation methods in the name of job security. Students I've spoken to will attest to this new ideology.
If by "I.T." you mean Idiot Tech, then OK... but if you're talking about the actual real world, I'm pretty sure that doesn't happen. By the way, I'm a software developer and have been for years. I'm pretty sure someone who deliberately wrote bugs and bad software would be, y'know, FIRED.
Windows don't conform to a user-defined default position and instead either recall the last used size and position or default to what the programmers feel is appropriate for all users.
Mine do. I can think of several ways to do that too (X resources files, window properties in KDE, -geometry arguments, etc).
Scroll gadgets snap to their original position if the mouse is moved an abstract distance from them.
I think that is the result of whatever hallucinogenic drug you've been sprinkling on your Corn Flakes for breakfast.
PCs are 70s technology.
How so? I sure don't remember any Pentiums back then. If you're saying that because they evolved from old 8080 systems in the 70s... well, the 68000 was developed in the 70s. Not developed from 70s technology, but actually developed IN the 70s. The first 68000 was made in 1979.
The Y2K problem is clear evidence that the original designers of the PC never imagined that it would still be used beyond the 20th Century.
The Y2K problem mostly applied to obsolete software that should've been replaced long ago. It also turned out not to affect much of anything, and was in large part a scheme for consultants to make a bunch of money by scaring corporate managers. It also has nothing to do with modern OSes.
Complete incompatibility with other platforms. Initially Microsoft will announce and release a new format and open the source to developers. Then after it's been widely adopted, Microsoft changes the format and withholds
the sources.
Let me know when you've got Deluxe Paint IV running on Windows without using an Amiga emulator, or when you've figured out a way to put a Zorro II card into my Linux PC.
If DOS is really gone from Windows, why can't I put backslashes and colons in file names?
Probably because you're ignorant of escaping reserved characters.
More often than not, the Microsoft Wizard is less helpful than just allowing the user to configure something manually.
Again, Windows is not all modern OSes. And even in Windows, there are often ways to bypass the wizards and configure things manually.
when the source file is located on a network or a drive that spins down, the whole start menu freezes while the drive spins up or the network connection is made.
Windows is not all modern OSes. Also, if the situation you describe happens, that is an issue with a stupid system or network administrator, not the OS.
It's become common practice not to include any form of documentation within installation packages.
You know those files named like "README" that come with most software? You're supposed to, like, read them.
Any clicks on a specific letter of text existing in a text gadget is ignored in favor of Windows' desire to highlight the entire line, requiring a second click to put the cursor where the user originally intended on the first click.
I don't know/care about Windows, but on my Linux system, mouse highlighting is extremely configurable.
Instead of naming system files something useful, they're given cryptic 8.3 file names in combinations of numbers and letters even though the OS has supported long file names for over a decade.
I don't need 8.3 file names on my Linux system. Never have. Windows uses them internally but most users never see that since most interfaces translate the names to long names transparently... even at the command line, it will recognize long names. I'm pretty sure Macs dont need 8.3 filenames, and theres plenty of other modern OSes that don't need these.
While Amiga's filenames were greatly superior to DOS back in the late 80s and early 90s, coming from the unix world I kind of think the case insensitivity of Amiga filenames can be problematic sometimes. Also, compared to modern long filenames, Amiga's are pretty short.
