PC still playing Amiga catchup

[stefcep2]

If we are discussing PC:s here, that's still not an assumption we can make as long as anyone uses anything other than Windows. Running Windows or not is totally irrelevant to this topic ("PC still playing Amiga catchup").

Like i said anal people on Amiga.org, but I've dealt with the Linux fan boys as well.

Let's for the sake of the argument assume that Amiga OS is the most popular OS, and Windows XP is in far minority. How quickly do you think the system would be taken down by malware, and how much extra protection would be needed? Any 14 year old could write an Amiga program to fuck the whole system up.

yeah BUT ITS ISN"T AN THEY DON"T.  Imagine if we could get OS 3.1 running natively on quadcore machine.  We can't so we have to deal with reality, not what if fantasy..


QUOTE=Linde;509138]
And no, an antivirus program is no excuse for a 20 minute boot time. That is more likely the result of an incompetent user. Aside from the built-in firewall I use the free avast antivirus for virus protection, and there's no noticeable slowdown or startup delays.[/QUOTE]
  No.  ALL PC's get slower the more you use them; the registry gets clogged with shit, the hard drive gets badly fragmented and malware does god-knows what.  the Amiga GUI deosn't slow down as it gets used more.

[stefcep2]

Well, since there is no antivirus in Amiga, no protection, no user level (yes, any program will run as root level), how time do you think it would take to just format your harddrive by some virus ?

This argument is void. If Amiga suffered maybe 1/100th of the attacks targeted to Windows, how secure would it be ?

But Amiga doesn't, and Windows does.  Thats REALITY.

If as many people used Linux as they do windows, would Linux's argument that its more secure than windows still be valid?

[stefcep2]

The same entity that appointed you the saviour of the Amiga.

PFFFT.

You wan't to know about the real world. In the real world people use PCs and MAC. The Amiga need a hell of a lot of catching up to do before it can even be taken as a serious platform at all. How much more real do you want it? Learn to accept reality my friend.

No shit Sherlock.  Can you READ? What does: "3. PC =x86 hardware running Windows for anywhere between 90 and 95% of the worlds computers." mean to you?

There was no question. Just an unqualified statement. Read the title again.

I see, so its now a question of grammar.  Maybe we could add a full stop at the end followed by the word "Discuss."

It's only zealotry that has led you to conflate this issue into an unrecognisable mess and introduce criteria and questions where there were none.

translation: " couldn't be arsed reading and understanding all of the posts in the thread nor think beyond the obvious"

It seem you still can't make the simple distinction between hardware and software. :roflmao:

PC hardware without software does nothing.  Its pointless separating the two.

Aww. Why only one? Knock yourself out we're all listening intently. Don't say you are running out of steam already? Oh yes your health. OK step back then.

Because it only takes ONE to show the PC is still playing catchup.  But WAIT.  There was MORE..

Back to software are we? The company I work for needs to exchange MS Office ducuments and run a decent web browser as a bare minimum.

YOU might.  The user examples I gave don't, some people who need to quickly sample a music riff in the middle of the night just need a fast booting A1200.

I'm sorry sttuffing a load of hobby home computers in our offices is not goung to make us more productive.

We run LAMP servers and can even use basic specced machines for that. Unfortunately a stock AMIGA 1200 just wont cut the mustard there. (You are the one that wants to stick to basics and not use "souped up machines" so you at least use your own criteria in this one.)

And I bet you can't do gene sequencing/process nuclear physics data/analyse climate models as fast as Big Blue with your XP network either.  Whats your point?

So you are writing a 10000 word proposal and you hit the off button you won't lose any data on an Amiga? Wow! That's amazing! The business world should really be told about this breakthrough. I don't think you are evangelising it enough. :eek:

1. Never had to write 10,000 words of anything.  2. Even a cardigan-wearing gronk would know to SAVE his file before he switches off his computer.  3.  how would the same data not be lost on the PC if you don't save it first?

Come on. You are clutching at straws here. Not having to shutdown safely is hardly a feature that is going to affect our servers which haven't been shut down for years. We don't miss it one bit.

Never said anything about not having shutdown safely being anything to YOUR f'en servers. The point about safely switching off was to counter a previous argument that Amiga can corrupt your drive if you shut down mid-write, but if you could be arsed reading the thread, you'd know this. Being able to flick a switch and shutdown instantly means people can leave their PC straight away, instead of coming home to find their PC has been in shutdown mode for 8 hours due to some silly  process that has blocked the shut down,  but they couldn't wait to be around the PC to see it shutdown.


You're work in a server-client environment.  Many people at home don't, many people shut down their PC's daily, to them it matters..Its a feature that many PC user would be glad to have, but no YOU might not care, but so what, it DOESN"T CHANGE THE FACT THAT PC's STILL CAN"T DO IT.

Sure not being able to serve DHTML web pages at all is a bit too secure to be useful at all.

I'm sure i couldn't give a toss about serving DHTML on an A1200

Good luck to them. Those examples hardly put PCs to shame.

VERY good luck to them: it cost them a few hundred dollars and no tech support costs.  An equivalent PC set up would cost many $1000's for the dentist, and tens of thousands for the aged-care facility to achieve the same.

I can do more than that on my mobile phone.

Really?  you can run a public touch screen /multi screen display from your phone?  Which phone?  which software? which screens?

The Amiga needs billions of dollars of investment to be a serious contender and catch up with to the established platforms.

And this is relevant because......?

But it runs the majority of the worlds website including all major Amiga websites. (This one included) so it has it's uses and is far more advanced as a platform than the limited Amiga.

Just because I don't like linux doesnt mean I will deny it's capabilities and usefulness.

i highlighted linux's hardware recognition/configuration issues which simply don't exist to anywhere near the same degree with classic Amiga. That's all thats is needed in the context fo the discussion.

Funny I had similar problems trying to get one of my A1200s up to scratch.

provided you installed from original operating system disks then you had defective ie broken hardware.  


 

Send me a ticket please. Cloud cuckoo land sounds like quite an inviting place.

i think you boarded the plane a long time ago..
 

My current user experience with PCs is fine. It's better and more productive for me than trying to force an ancient (but elegant) Amiga system to try and do it for me.

I don't need to catch up with anything.

good for you.

(1) Oh crap my TV boots up instantly. tell the PC using world that they need to catch up :eek:

It makes no frigging difference in the Real World. It's how useful it is after boot up that matters to most sane peopl

It matters to Microsoft who are highlighting Win 7's improved boot and shut down times, it matters to the many reviewers of Win 7 who highlight this as well. Ask a PC user: would you like to boot in 5 seconds and shutdown with the flick of a switch?

So your argument is:  yeah Amiga's boot faster, but i run from a server, I never shut down, i can do more than an Amiga so i don't care.  Good for you.  But none of that makes  your PC boot any faster.  And admit it you'd really like a PC that boots in 5 seconds and shuts down instantly, wouldn't you?  And admit it your pC can't do this.

(2) Security through obscurity eh?  Sh!t !!! I think we need to make all PCs obscure to CATCH UP with the Amiga. :eek:

Since when has obscurity been a sought after feature? :crazy:

CRAZY but thats REALITY:  I can get on the net, open all sorts of malicous email with ZERO anti-malware software and it has NO EFFECT on my Amiga.  Your PC can't. How, why- is irrelevant.  ITS THE REALITY.

(3) I'm sorry to say that the PCs I use daily are a heck of a lot more responsive and useful to me than my A1200 could ever be. I could use an Amiga to do some of my tasks but I'd probably get fired for taking hours too long on tasks that should really be completed in minutes.

On my A1200, i get far less wait-cursers, and when i click on a mouse button i always get an instant response, and when i move my mouse the pointer always moves with it.  That doesn't always happen with my PC.

Look! a tool is a tool alright.

Agreed.  And sometimes my Amiga is still the better tool for some jobs that I-and others- want to do.

What I don't do is lie to myself that they are the worlds answer to poverty as well as the kitchen sink.

Well NOW your plane to LaLaLand has landed on the tarmac..

[stefcep2]

I throw my opine in here I guess....


Amiga is light years behind the PC.  We don't need to go into all the crazy awesome hardware you can get on a PC.


There are something that Windows hasn't caught up to though. (feel free to compare these to Mac/Linux on the same hardware)

-Single directory App installations.  i.e. no Registry.  Windows needs to find a better way to do things.  Windows is a pain the ass to deal with a lot of times when an 'app goes bad' and needs to be repaired.    Now, you can lay some blame on the app developers, but Windows default model is messy.

-OS Windows/System32 file structure is a mess.  Most all virus/spyware you find out there just puts files in /Windows/ or Windows/System32.  You'd think viruses would be easy to remove, but there is so much crap everywhere that literally people make a living just by telling what is suppose to be in System32 and what isn't.

-There still some Amiga GUI type things Windows lacks.  Such as window focus.  In Windows as soon as you click a Window it is forced to the front.  Would like to at least have more control or things like that, ala double 'click to front'.

-Boot times.  Yeah, sore subject these days I guess.  But seriously it a sad joke.  I leave my computer on 24/7 because it's a SO slow to startup.  Sometimes if the OS becomes a little flaky I just leave until a point I am doing something else so I can restart it as shut down & boot up is even more of a joke.  

SATA2 is rated a 6gb/sec- computers have tons ram - multi cores and multi GHZ, there is no excuse for it.  The "well" Windows has your ethernet are ready to go by the time the Start button appears at least, that argument just doesn't cut it anymore.

My computer is an appliance to me.  I don't leave my TV on 24/7 because it's a pain in the ass to wait for it to turn on.  If my light bulbs took so long to turn on I'd leave my lights on all the time too.  


Anyway, it's hard to just say, blanket statement, that todays OSes are flawed, but there is room today for a "fast" single user OS, where I can copy a program by moving a folder, or delete a program for that matter by dragging the folder to the trash.


Anyway....

Well said. Especially the boot times: it IS a joke on the PC, any PC.

[stefcep2]

Oh, really? That's exactly what I do to turn off my Icaros Destkop machine: i press the button and the PC is off. Immediately.

Ok i stand corrected.  Approximately 1 in 1 billion PC's in operation can do this...

But don't think it's the safest feature on earth: if you turn off your computer while it's writing to disk, it doesn't matter if you're using AmigaOS, Windows, AROS or MacOS X, you'll kill the accessed file and you can also ruin the whole filesystem, with a random degree of pain. A shutdown procedure is not simply a bloated pointless loose of time, but a safer way to close operations and leave everything in a good shape.

I know why PC's shutdown, but thats why on Amiga I said you SHOULD wait that second or so for the hard drive light to go off after you have saved. But with Windows and Linux PC's are very frequently reading and writing to the hard drive eg swap file-even with 4 gig ram, so you can't really wait for the hard drive light to go off, well because its going on and off all the time, whether you're saving or not.

BTW does anyone know WHY Windows and linux need a swapfile even if they use so little available RAM?  I know you can force the swap file size to zero in Windows, but I suspect it still uses a swap file.  And AFAIK Linux won't install without a swap file partition.

[stefcep2]

*FYI an accelerator card and graphics card as the sole internal expansion cards in a system do not make it a Frankenstein machine.

Duly noted.  Even though you have transplanted an additional foreign brain from a totally different species and likewise a foreign display system, all communicating with the original carcass over transplanted foreign busses.

Having both a PPC and 68k, would describing at as having a multiple-personality disorder be more appropriate? That might explain why it slows down every now and then: the two CPU's are fighting over who will be the dominant personality.

[stefcep2]

t?

Boot times are not a metric for computer performance. Boot times are dominated by waiting, be it waiting for initialisation of hardware, software, synchronisation between processes or a myriad of other things. The more processes that are started, the more conflated this becomes.

All computers wait at exactly the same speed. Even a factor of a million CPU clockspeed difference cannot make a half second device initialisation go any faster. a 4GHz CPU cannot negotiate an IP address with your router any quicker than the router wants to talk to it.

Lets ignore my A1200 that you label a "toy". And ignore yours that I label a "frankenstein".
A big box Amiga with third party hardware in its standardised Zorro slots is a good comparison machine as PC's often have lots of third party hardware in their slots.  My A4000 has an 68060 CPU card that needs to be initialised, with RAM on it that needs to be initialised, a scsi adaptor, a CV64, an elbox fast serial/fast parallel port card, and a Tocatta, CDRW, and Octagon SCSI, plus keyboard, mouse.  It boots OS 3.1 in under 10 seconds, and that includes several OS software enhancements, CGX, sound drivers, fast port drivers, and whatever is in the ROMS of the cards.  (OS 3.9 is slower because of the reset, but to be fair if Escom didn't go broke i think we would have had 1 meg ROMS that would've avoided the reset.  Anyway OS 3.1 is functionally equivalent to OS 3.9 on *this* system).  The PC also has to initialise its CPU, RAM, Video card, DVD, Sound system, USB ports, keyboard, mouse, hard drive. All of these components have functional equivalents on the A4000.

FWIW Karlos I AGREE that  much of the delay in booting on the PC is due to the hardware initialiasation that occurs when the PC is booted. And yes no number of CPU, ghz, RAM, hard drive speed will change that part of the boot-up process, because it happens before software processes begin.  Integral to the PC architecture is waiting for hardware to initialise. Its part and parcel of the PC hardware design.  It seems that the *way* the Amiga  initialises and then configures its hardware during the boot process is more efficient.  That would seem to be an architectural issue.

[stefcep2]

They share the same bus into memory. Logic on the board handles any differences between m68K and PPC's local buses.



.

I thought the ppc has no cache?

[stefcep2]

Let's, just for arguments sake, accept that there are some unique features left in the architecture that have not yet been surpassed it still does not mean that the PC is still playing catchup.

surely thats a contradiction isn't it? If the PC can't yet do it then it still hasn't caught up to the Amiga?

 Some peple arguing on this thread do seem to think the modern day PC is inferior to a retro computer and that the Amiga is perfect beyond criticism and has no catching up to do with the PC at all. Try telling them that.

Actually from another POV its been the reverse: my impression is that some pro-PC people believe the *PC* is perfect and any flaws regarding its hardware eg joystick polling, hardware initialisation and boot times and shut downs, user-interface slow downs, propensity for malware, registry clogging, hard drive fragmentation, hardware incompatibility (Linux), etc have not been accepted as the flaws that they are but rather have been excused for various reasons (the PC does more, it can crunch number faster, the PC has industry standard software compatibility, more people use a PC), despite the Amiga being superior at many of these things.

[stefcep2]

This is what caches are for.

I thought the PPC has no caches.

[stefcep2]

So you are now calling all Amiga users cardigan-wearing gronks? That wasn't nice of you at all. :rolleyes:

No. ONLY YOU.  And an anal one at that.

ONLY an anal cardigan wearing gronk would:

1.  Embark on a grammatical argument about whether the original post is a question or a statement, as if THAT would make one iota of a difference to what replies are posted.

2. Be incapable of understanding that a statement such as "PC=x86 running on 90-95% of the worlds computers run Windows", would also mean most of the world doesn't use an Amiga computer.

3. Want limit the meaning of "PC" to a discussion about x86 hardware, without admitting that without software, hardware is useless.

4. Want to ignore that 95% of PC hardware runs Windows, and ignore the user-experience of THOSE machines but instead focus his argument solely on the few per cent that don't run Windows.

Only a deluded, anal cardigan-wearing gronk would:

5.  Even contemplate the notion that a PC could run AmigaOS natively because not only is there no PC that can run AmigaOS natively, it has virtually zero probability of eventuating in this universe, or at any time in this universe's existence.

Only a stupid, deluded, anal, cardigan wearing gronk would:

6.  Ask the reasons as to why it is believed that "PC is still playing Amiga catch-up", and then dismiss those reasons because they don't matter to HIM and HIS computer needs, no matter that, for many people, its because of the unique qualities of the Amiga over a PC that they still use Amiga.

7.  Ask the reasons as to why it is believed that "PC is still playing Amiga catch-up". and then re-state the reply into a statement of belief that not only will Amiga be popular again, that it will be more popular than the PC and even put a dollar value on how much that would cost.

8.  Ask the reasons as to why it is believed that "PC is still playing Amiga catch-up" and then re-state the reply into a statement that, not only can Amiga do EVERYTHING that a modern PC can currently do, but that the Amiga can do it ALL better than the PC.

9. Use emerging technologies (CLOUD COMPUTING FFS), which may or may not gain wider acceptance , as an argument against the capabilities of Amiga compared to PC.

[stefcep2]

I don't really think that has anything to do with initalisation though.  With drivers your really are getting back to HD speed and CPU speed. Besides even it took a full second to initalize the card, with the Quad core beast, blazing fast bus speeds, and HD speeds you should be able to initialize just about everything at the same time.

So why might that not happen?  karlos?

[stefcep2]

@GadgetMaster
You really live in alternate reality don't you?  Ignorance is bliss, so they say, and your life must be perfectly blissful.  You make such lengthy posts, and yet have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO SAY. However there is no point having a discussion with retarded clam, so I'll spare you the intellectual challenge of stringing two coherent words together and leave you blissfully ignorant.

[stefcep2]

and that day you'll buy a cheap USB joystick and enjoy nice games of today... wondering... "how did I miss these jewels ?"

why do you think he hasn't played any games of today?

Actually more generally why is it assumed he only uses an Amiga?

[stefcep2]

To answer the question.
 
NO.  The PC is terms of hardware alone passde the Amiga well over ten years ago.   Probably more like 15.   Lets get real.

And the user-experience?

[stefcep2]

(Disclaimer: this does not mean I don't feel PC's have long since surpassed the old Amiga, it merely means I feel most people on these boards overstate the capabilities of the average PC)

Or they say: "fast booting doesn't matter to me" , or "fast shut down doesn't matter to me" or "jerky menus don't happen""-knowing full well they do or "malwares only a consequence of how popular the PC is, so that makes it ok", or "the registry isn't so bad", knowing full well that the registry is an abomination, or a Linux PC 'just works' because they know a Linux PC can easily send you into command line hell just to get the hardware working at all, or to get the GUI up.  You see if it doesn't matter to them, these things can be ignored and therefore the argument is WON.