mac and pc sucks!!!!

[stefcep2]

As the_leander says, I mostly use linux day to day. And it runs very nicely indeed. I recently tried haiku and even with VESA driver support only, flew like the proverbial muck off a shovel.

In the end, who said anything about Windows? In any event, bloated as it is, the proof is in the usage. Last time I booted into Windows, it ran all my games at their highest detail settings, full antialiasing and with all sorts of 3rd party "HD" mods for even larger, more detailed textures etc. at decent frame rates. Since the install isn't full of miscellaneous of crap that so many windows users feel the need to pollute their systems with, even windows itself runs fine.

Considering that's all I ask of windows on that machine, I can't really complain.

Thats all simply a function of the lightning fast hardware that even a low end x86 machine has these days.

A simple thing like pulling down a menu in my multi-core, multi Ghz, mult Gb ram Ubuntu system, and the menu contents are drawn more slowly than a 14 mhz 2 meg A1200.  Its "sticks" as i go across the menu bar and the next men u is drawn and populated and the old one erased Move your pointer down the menu bar a little faster, and the selection jumps over the menu items as the OS can't keep up with the pointer.  FFS it just FEELS shit.

[stefcep2]

Something wrong with your install then mate.

Ha.  Yeah.  That hoary old chestnut. NOTHING wrong with the install.  Its just Linux, a CLI OS with a GUI sitting on top to make it LOOK like i have a mouse and GUI system, but not FEEL like it.

[stefcep2]

@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.  

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.

[stefcep2]

Another TL;DR from Amiga_Nut

I know you're anti M$ing it up if you have things like Winblows in there plain as day, and complaining about problems with an OS that are petty and whiney.

We should be beyond that now.  We have 1000z CPU power, x1000 RAM, etc, etc.  Usability, responsiveness ie putting the user in charge in real time is not petty.  Simple things that by now we shouldn't even be talking about.

Welcome to 2010.  A place where alot of computing/OS stuff requires a powerful machine for maximum performance.  All that eye candy, and behind the scenes multitasking stuff requires power!  You keep dogging on the "experts", which implies you are an expert, so you should understand this, right?

Amikit's eye candy looks as good as anything out there, and runs on 50 mhz cpu with an ancient 24 bit display board. Sure its not Aero, but then there isn't a blinding fast 3d video card with 1 gig of video RAM running the display either.  With that grunt power behind it, I shouldn't even know that I'm running any eye candy by seeing my performance suffer.  And yet I do.

Also, you dont *need* a omgexpensive computer.

two of my Windows 7 machines are like, 6 years old and they run perfectly fine.


maybe the problem isn't the OS.  PEBKAC.

yep thats MS double speak: Blame the user.

[stefcep2]

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.

BUT THIS IS THE POINT.  F'en 8 CORES!!!!!!!! RUNNING AT 3,200 MHZ. 16,000 MB OF RAM!!!! AN i5 IS NOW "BASIC".  TO DO WHAT? RUN A FRICKEN GUI?  Play a movie. That plays better on a $149 Bluray player from China.  Play some same old same old FPS.  That works better on a $199 XBOX?

Sorry when I read post like yours, and I've read many over the years, and each year the specs get higher and higher, I am convinced that people have lost perspective and have no idea what those specs actually mean.  Here's a little help: you can get the entire text plus pictures of the 32 volume Encyclopedia on ONE  0.6 GB ie 650 MB CD.

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.  

And you are OK with this?  Its just an OS, FFS.

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?

The PC platform was always about:  "If it ain't running fast enough, buy something faster."  Here's a novel idea:  "Write decent code"

[stefcep2]

And you could probably get just the text on a single 64Mb flash stick, what's your point?

What? Its not obvious to you?

Have you actually looked at the content in the 32 volume encyclopedia?  Its A LOT.  You think its OK that some POS OS requires more than double that memory space-more likely at least 4 times- just let you make the computer do something?

You suggest others need to get perspective, perhaps you aught to look in a mirror.

Right back at ya

You really don't see why its Not A Good Thing that you have 10x hardware resources to do things 3 or 4 x as well, if you are lucky.  Actually  don't feel so bad,  find coders to be the worst offenders.  They have an intimate knowledge of what is going under the hood.  Which blinkers from seeing what's happening with the driver.  They'll tell the driver, but it does this and that to make this and that work.  And the driver nods and believes, "I'm sure you are right, but why does it feel like i'm driving a corolla when I was promised a Ferrari"

Right, because there is absolutely no possibility that these large apps contain decent code.

There might be, somewhere.  But I doubt it.  Windows is programmed by large committees.  Big apps are probably the same.  Anything done by committee processes is guaranteed to be inefficient.

You do realise that with the example of Photoshop as was given, using layers on massive images will quite quickly run into Gbs of memory in use, right? :rolleyes:

No becacuse you're the only person thats ever opened more than on layer in photoshop. Layers, are one of the least efficeint ways to image process, but its The Industry Standard, so it must be good, right?

Professional magazine photographers have been opening up images in photoshop for more than 10 years with a fraction of the RAM.  I'm convinced that most shots are taken at higher resolutions than needed, just beascsue they can.  I have a digital publishing and design graphics magazine from 2000.  3 Megapixels cameras were the next big thing.  Now they'll shoot the same photo at 12 megapixels, and complain they don't have enough ram in Photoshop to open it .

Every time computers get to the stage where they can do just about everything reasonably quickly, someone will come along and add a new piece of software that does something that needs more, take digital video editing as a good recent example. 5 years ago only pros and geeks were editing much video on the PC, now everyone who uploads to youtube will likely chop and paste things together.

In 1998, my school was using G3 imac with firewire to do all that shit-with about a tenth of the hardware specs.  You only think we've come a long way..

[stefcep2]

@stefcep2

I think you are making some huge assuptions in most of your points, for example:

"There might be, somewhere. But I doubt it. Windows is programmed by large committees. Big apps are probably the same. Anything done by committee processes is guaranteed to be inefficient."



You apparently have no idea how large apps are written, or what efficient code is. Do you have any examples of this supposed ineffieciency? Or any proof of it.

With MS there are different and numerous departments that deal each deal with sections of the OS.  That inevitably leads to inefficiencies.

Proof?  No I don't have the source code for Windows.  Do you have it and have you checked how tight it is?  I'd say no.  So how do you know one way or the other?  So lets judge it on the end user experience. Here's a few examples.

Click on a close gadget, delay before it its re-drawn to give you feedback that you have clicked it, delay and a feel of "stickyness" before the window closes.  

Every now and then the window closes half corrupted as if there aren't enough resources, but there are.

Does this always happen?  No.  Does it happen predictably, as when under high CPU load?  No.  So whats going on?  

Other annoyances do happen all the fricken' time.

Click on start->All programs, delay before the menu is populated, delay as each program icon is redrawn,  run your pointer up or down and the menu can't keep up to redraw.  Everytime after a cold boot.  (BTW i know WHAT is happening, but how hard its is to write a bit of code that keeps an index of installed programs and corresponding icons that takes a microsecond to load at boot times  A shitty menu added with tools prefs on a crappy 4 meg 14 mhz machine does it faster.)

Why does Win 7 reload the drivers EVERY TIME I plug my mobile modem in?  Why doe sit make me wait 2 minutes later before it recognises the modem, an exceedingly common one that has the latest firmware?  It does the same thing on 5 PC's all less than 2 years old, all updated, some running XP Pro, some Vista Business, some Win 7.  But why never in Ubuntu? (which has its own different issues).

Or what about all the PC's that won't shut down because they wait for some program to exit, but it never does until you end it.  The user has said "SHUT DOWN", why is the OS ignoring that command.

This is all in the realm of the OS, software related ie coding.  Why after all these years with all the resources do lags like this happen?

You might not care, more power to you.  But operating system designers should care.  And if they don't then that doesn't negate the argument.  It just proves another well worn one:  "if it aint fast enough buy faster hardware"

Should we all ignore new cpu's and ram just because you say so? and what level should we be at? should we all be running g3's or g4's? If so why not 603e's? Is ddr ram ok or should we be using sdram? and how much? we all have different needs but it 64megs ok? or should I only have 2megs?

What I am asking is this: what are you saying here? what hardware do you think is sufficient you everyone, and what os? And why?

Like a few others here, you have totally missed the point: THE OVERALL PERFORMANCE LAGS SIGNIFICANTLY BEHIND THE HARDWARE ADVANCEMENTS THAT HAVE HAPPENED.   Read the hardware spec sheets.  Absurdly quick and massive numbers.  And remember, this "hobbling" of the hardware is cumulative over generations. If getting the FULL POTENTIAL out of your hardware doesn't matter to you and you are happy with that, then good for you.

Amiga was always about efficiency, simplicity, elegance and pushing the hardware to its limits with tight, often ingenius code.  The closest I've experienced on a PC was with BeOS.   IMO it was AmigaOS for x86.  On the same PC hardware, it made your Windows and MacOS look pedestrian.  Proof positive that PC hardware could do more than Windows would have you believe.

[stefcep2]

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.

It depends on what is "efficiently enough" and what is a "satisfactory experience".  Your example about number of icons fitting on screen is plain wrong.  It matters from a user's point of view in a couple of ways:  Firstly more icons on screen can mean faster access to being able to launch programs, as you don't have to look under layers of folders.  In terms of a programs GUI, more icons means more functions of a program can be accessed faster. This all has an impact on the efficiency with which a user can communicate with the computer to what they need to do

If PCs were so bad and Amigas so good why are there a billion or more PC users and a few hundred Amiga users?  

Lots and lots of reasons, we know them all here, and none of which take away from what Amiga was great at.  Put AmigOS aside, and if you can, try seeing BeOS running on comparable hardware.  It really shows you how much of a boat anchor an OS like Windows can be to the hardware.  Or what might have been..

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 .....

So what you are saying is that a computer built in 1992, can't run MS Office 2010 and Photoshop CSS?  Radical concept, man.

[stefcep2]

I think (hope) we scared him off

Nah , went to sleep, like you are now differnt time zones.
 

No not really, I'd like to let him play a modern game on one of my pcs. Maybe something like Bioshock or Bioshock 2 on my current rig, then setup one of my P4's and run the same game.

Nah, I'll be up and playing it faster than you on my $199 XBOX on a 50 inch 1920x1080 plasma.

But if someone offered you say a 20% speed improvment without hardware change, would you take it?



S

[stefcep2]

Stefcep, Nah , went to sleep, like you are now differnt time zones..  It is also in the minority.

The lags are there, minority or not.  Less than than Vista, but still there.

I run win7 on a single core 2GB machine and do not experience the lag you are whining about.  That is like the ass minimum to get the thing running...

There's a message in the second sentence ..

Theres like 25 icons on the desktop and a buncha quick launch stuff pinned to the start menu.

So what?  Evry now and then the icons need to be re-read in and re-drawn on the desktop, and the start menu always needs to be populated when you boot up.  No BIG deal, but why should it happen AT ALL?

It runs WoW full blown, all of my music and programming apps run snappy as balls, and it hasnt been rebooted since the power went out 3 weeks ago.

What's your point?  That a 1992 14 mhz machine can't?

Also, I have experienced some lag/herpderping on Amiga computers, so it isnt like they are without fault, so you can stop waiving around the "AMIGA DID IT BACK IN THE DAY" flag.

Should it still be happening today?

Also, until you have worked for M$, don't comment on how they code.  You don't have any idea, so making claims about it makes you look dense.

I don't need to work for MS to know that they use committee coding.

[stefcep2]

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?

What you say is correct.  Windows is now entrenched as the most popular platform and has the most support from third party hardware and software developers.  And clearly an Amiga doesn't have the hardware or software to compete.  Thats not what interests me.

What interests me is the fact that the software platforms do not do the current hardware justice.  When I took a semester in programming, my first program was to write a simple database.  A major task was to see how fast we could complete a search for a file. Over 2 weeks, just by re-writing our code we got it down better than half the time.  

Now in the modern world, if it doesn't run fast enough, you get faster/bigger capacity/extra CPU/GPU cores.  And this works, and as its so cheap, who cares.  But it also means your hardware isn't being used to its full potential.  And then your once-new hardware will soon enough feel slower, so its replaced.  And this second lot is also not being used to its full potential  After several generations of this cycle, how much has the software hobbled the hardware?  What more *could* your hardware be doing?  

After seeing BeOS run on a p2 350 mhz with a 8 Mb MAtrox TV-Tuner VGA card, multitasking several work spaces in different resolutions without any hint of slow down I was convinced that the hardware could do so much more than Windows was allowing it too.  Its successor Haiku, by all accounts continues that tradition.  Ofcourse it will never be popular enough to compete with Windows, but it shows just how good the hardware is and how Windows isn't.

[stefcep2]

Have you tried watching a youtube video on a G3 Mac recently?

No, but I remember editing raw full screen PAL overscan video, which has 4 times the amount of pixels per frame than your average 320x200 youtube rubbish.  If I can't watch a youtube video with that same G3 then that just proves the point about how aerated the youtube/flash code is, not how incapable the hardware is.

Yes, I'm not defending the programmers of these things who are producing massively inefficient code, but some things in the modern world do actually need more CPU power and memory, like it or not.

For a minute there i thought you "just didn't get it", but seems thats only partially true.

[stefcep2]

Redrawing is normal.  If it didn't happen then GUIs would be worthless.  It would draw once and you'd never see movement again.

WTF?  This is the desktop we are talking about here. How about just drawing an icon when the program is added and deleting it when the program is removed?  Other OS's seem to do fine without re-drawing the whole fricken thing even when nothing is added or removed.  In XP, the World's most used OS this can even results in generic icons replacing the originals

Your start menu needs to be populated because.... the computer has to know what is there?  It doesnt automagically just know stuff upon booting.  It has to process these things.  with the processor.  mainly the central unit like one known as the CPU.

Right.  How about indexing that as you go along, storing that in 500 byte file at the last shutdown, and all being ready to go when you next boot up,taking a microsecond to load at the next boot?  And for all the Win 7 talk, XP is still by far the most used OS on the planet.  Try launching from the start menu in a fully populated PC and see how long XP takes to draw its menus and icons

So you took a semester in programming and are suddenly the expert on how OS's should function and what goes on with them?

No, the point thats eluded you is I only NEEDED ONE SEMESTER to know that your computer could be made to do things twice as fast if you did your job as a programmer right.  There is a discrepancy between the hardware capability and the end product.

Pushing the technology to the limit is what brings about the need and desire for new technology.

Yep, your modern day OS is pushing your hardware to the limit, but too much of that is not doing anything useful.

[stefcep2]

I really hate these "trash windows" fests...  XP draws the desktop completely differently than Windows Vista and Windows 7. There is a new compositing engine that XP and before doesn't have. That's why Windows XP desktop refreshes are so badly done.. AERO is a completely different animal.

 Love the pace of progress: 20 years later and they got the desktop to refresh decently.  Mind you they needed multiple CPU's, GPU's and several gigabytes of ram to do it.  Great, Pat On The Back MS.

As far as the 100 byte or so file that you are talking about how about fetch and superfetch which caches up files..

And yet it still has to visibly populate its start menu one program at a time.

 

I swear if you guys really knew more about Windows internals this topic could at least be a fair comparison. Windows actually builds on many of the things that made the Amiga so popular initially.

The last time I used XP it was 2006.. . Do you realize how ridiculous it is to compare something like Windows 7 to the Amiga and believe me folks I know the classic AmigaOS and Workbench and Intuition backwards and forwards and learned it back in 1985-86. It hasn't changed ALL that MUCH..

Windows is a very different beast in many ways and is doing so much stuff behind the scenes that if the AmigaOS did all that it's doing, it would probably be performing similarly as well..

XP is dead and has been dead for two revs of Windows already.. get over it..

Umm XP is what most of the world uses.

I love the Amiga, I own Macs and Windows boxes love them too.. I don't have performance issues with Windows or Mac anymore it really just doesn't exist if you have a relatively new machine and you are up-to-date with your OS..

I can do UI development, animation, etc. anything I want really twice as fast as i could with the Amiga because of all of the tools today like Expression Blend..

Hmmmm, TWICE is fast.  With um, what factor increase in CPU power, RAM, etc, etc?

Is the penny dropping?

Y'all need to get CURRENT if you want this to be a more interesting argument..

Oh and as for the G3 G4 Mac and intel Mac Video editing comments.. None of the Mac's video is hardware accelerated by the GPU. Apple just finally released an SDK to support GPU accelerated video on macs (the CPU did it all up until now and Apple finally admits this) this came in the update for OS X 10.6.3 and isn't even support all video cards yet on apple products. It also only works on the intel ONLY snow leopard release..

So when you go to talk about how slow and bloated Flash is on the Mac, remember Apple uses your CPU for all it's worth to display video. That's why it's slow it's not that Flash is badly programmed. All other platforms that flash has access to are fully GPU accelerated. The mac version up until now has been doing something people refer to as GPUCPU acceleration (not using the NVIDIA or ATI processors)..

So the comments you guys are talking about really don't hold water..

Umm the G3 video argument was begun by me when someone said that video editing was something that became mainstream for the past 5 years.  Well, we were editing digital video in 1998 with G3 over firwire, playing back full screen PAL overscan.  So if the G3 can do that why can't it play youtube's shitty 320x200 flash video?  Beacsue flash is a bloated POS, so bloated as you said, it needs GPU accleration to run.  Hell multicore multighz, multigig ram aint enough to stream a 320x200 video without maxing the CPU out.  And you folks are OK with that?  Unbelievable.  But thats where we've ended up now, keep re-inventing the wheel, and marvel at what you can do with it

[stefcep2]

This redraw argument is total b*llocks.

I have 2 RTG equipped 68040 amigas. Both machines have a visible redraw of the background whenever a layer is closed. Whilst it is true that only the area that was obscured is redrawn, the fact is that it is highly conspicuous. The only time you don't notice it is if you have the default "colour index zero" as your background.

i don't have my CV64 68060 A4000 to check it up and running, but I don't remember any re-draw delays.  At least AmigaOS doesn't feel the need to re-draw every icon on the desktop just for the hell of it.