Which way do you prefer or "Have it your way."

[commodorejohn]

I think we should go to one standard PC config is my point, not low end either, high end and squeeze the most out of it we can.

Why? The present system allows everybody to buy as much or as little in the way of hardware horsepower as they need, instead of forcing low-end users to overspend and constraining high-end users to less than they could otherwise make use of. And who would set such a standard, and why should anybody listen to them? It's just idiotic.

What we could really use is for software developers to start coding efficiently again, so that low-end systems are more usable and high-end systems get the full benefit of their hardware might instead of wasting it on bloat.

[commodorejohn]

IMO commodorejohn...and only my opinion here, if we standardized and dumped the lowest of the low, for instance, it would raise the minimum standards for software quality. Kinda like android when you buy the super cheap phone, it doesn't run the "good apps".

And, let's see, how has that worked out for the aforementioned Android devices? Oh, right, everybody who buys the cheap phones gets shafted, everybody who knows about this ahead of time winds up paying more than they otherwise would purely so they won't get shafted, and it doesn't make a damn bit of difference to the actual quality of software. Yeah, that sounds like an arrangement we need more of.

Yes, picking the standard would be difficult, and we should leave it to the engineers and not marketing...hehe.

Yeah, that's totally going to happen.

[commodorejohn]

Who am I to nail down fixed specs for every PC user in the world? Who are you?

And anyway the wait time to get into the Duluth Grill is long enough that anything we settled on would be obsolete by the time we got out...

[commodorejohn]

I am routinely using a Macintosh SE/30 with 16Mb of RAM and a 250Mb hard disk; I write documents with Microsoft Word 5.1a (which can even be read by Office up to the 2000 version) or spreadsheets with Excel 4. I can even play a few decent games, and connect to the internet to check email or transfer files from my PC. I have A/UX installed on the same machine, with a full complement of development tools, and it also runs native Macintosh applications. This machine can boot its OS FROM A FLOPPY! The whole System 6.0.8 lives on a floppy disk! THAT was a feat.

Right on I need to get my SE/30 recapped...

The mac is much less efficient than the Amiga.  If you're impressed by that, remember that an A1200 can usefully write  letters and stuff using Final Writer using just a couple of MB of RAM.

If you like fast, efficient OSes, then you should love AmigaOS!

I've of course got no bad words for the Amiga OS, and classic Mac OS has its own issues, but I'll just note that 68k Mac software is perfectly capable of doing plenty in a couple MB as well. It didn't really start suffering from bloat until the later PowerPC years...

Just because a 20 year old Mac suits your needs doesn't make everyone on the bleeding edge "wrong"    Those old machines boot the OS off a floppy - the OS from those days is far, far different than a modern OS.

Use what you enjoy, I say.  There's always going to be the types  that scream from the rooftops "WELL IF I CAN'T DO IT ON MY PDP-8 IT  ISN'T WORTH DOING AND IT IS NOT REAL COMPUTING!11!!1!1!1"

Simple fact is, when most of us got into computers, you had to be a  computer enthusiast.  You *had* to have technical skills.  These days,  modern machines are just an appliance to most people.

You know what, I'm going to go ahead and be "that guy" here, and say that there really is nothing that can't be done in some form on a reasonably powerful 68k Mac or Amiga that is really vitally worth doing on a computer at all. Movies, sure, or playback of recorded music (as opposed to synthesized music,) but those can be done perfectly satisfactorily on dedicated devices (VCRs, CD players) anyway.

And the "appliance" view of computing, blindly treating the computer as a magic black-box that makes stuff happen when you press buttons but that can never be understood by mere mortals, is half the reason modern computing is in such a mess to begin with.

One thing to consider is that as you go from 16  bit to 32 bit to 64 bit software, the smallest that any information can  be is 16 bit, 32 bit and 64 bit respectively.  Even if you optimized it  100% the same software will always end up needing more ram and the  executable will always be larger as you up the bits.

That's not true at all. Modern processors are perfectly capable of handling things at the byte level, and some architectures even support bit-field instructions. Some architectures do have a fixed instruction size, so code size can't always be reduced by much, but bloating of RAM usage for data is purely down to programmer laziness.

But I agree there is a lot of bloat, but no all is due to inefficient  code  Some of it is due to feature creep: adding more and more features  which are less and less useful.

Its interesting that this also extends to even things like icons: do we  really need 32 bit photo-realistic icons that take up more ram, more cpu  cycles?  I actually enjoy using Macos 7 for its simplicity.   I also  now have a 8 color Workbench with the stock Commodore  icons.

And do we need animations of a page curling and turning when reading a  document?  Well actually Apple seems to now think the answer is "no",  with Jon Ives heavily involved in the new Mac interface design, and he  is dead against "photo-realism".

Indeed. Modern software is increasingly buried under a mountain of glitz...Windows 7 won't even let you roll back to the simple 95 look anymore.

Music is crap now because kids think video game noises from a sega are  music nowadays and strippers = talent. Kids don't have a frame of  reference to know talent vs crap.

Right on. As we all know, men in flower costumes, furry drag, and spangly vest/pants combos = talent.

[commodorejohn]

Non solid state hard drives in a laptop?  Why would you do that?

Oh, gee, I dunno, maybe low-cost high-capacity storage?

Oh, right, I forgot, everything is The Cloud now and local storage is (*haughty sniff!*) obsolete.

[commodorejohn]

Have you tried live video streaming on such hardware?   Have your tried to do live streaming while playing a game without it dropping a single frame?

Actually? Yes. Take the Sega CD - FMV on a 12MHz 68000, even while playing a game! And that's got nothing on a mid-range 68k Mac or a moderately upgraded Amiga. Even a stock 1200 needs only a PCMCIA CD-ROM to whoop its ass.

Sure older hardware can still be used to do real work yet modern hardware is beyond what even super computers of the 1990's were capable of.

Never claimed otherwise.

There still is tons of text based software for Linux and BSD.

And if either of those were good desktop OSes, I might care.

[commodorejohn]

I could just use an Amiga with a Genlock and a VCR. Imagine that.

Or a Laserdisc. Golly, it's like we've had dedicated hardware for video playback since decades ago or something!

[commodorejohn]

I meant streaming video onto the Internet, and by also playing games I mean that the computer can stream the output of the graphics of the game to the Internet while you are playing it (thus also sending it to your monitor).

Oh. Frankly that's actually pretty stupid.

[commodorejohn]

It allows people to broadcast video from the PC over the Internet. There more practical applications i.e developers can stream video of builds of their program to other people in their team over the Internet or to people interested in the project.

No, that's still stupid, sorry. The only practical purpose for live-streaming of video over the Internet is for remote-desktop access, and framerate requirements are much lower on that.

[commodorejohn]

Yeah, that's dumb too.

[commodorejohn]

If you have a girlfriend/wife and you're not getting to appreciate said hottie in person, you need to reassess your priorities

[commodorejohn]

Steaming of desktop works fine for broadcasting TV through a capture card over the Internet.  It it clear even the most modern television one could buy today is obsolete for anything other then a display for a PC as it is only a matter of time before streaming video replaces TV.

That's as may be; I still don't consider TV-watching to be an essential part of the computing experience when there's perfectly adequate dedicated hardware available.

And I have absolutely no idea what you propose to accomplish by broadcasting TV over the Internet through a capture card...?

(And anyway there hasn't been anything that worth watching on TV since The Red Green Show finale.)

"Obsolete" is a silly word. It's just another  way of saying something stopped being popular, but with a delusion of  objectivity.

Quoted for truth. But if there weren't a pretense of objectivity, how could self-described "futurists" imply that they were objectively better than the rest of us for fetishizing new technology?

[commodorejohn]

The downside to television is that its quantity of programming pales in comparison to the Internet, even if you have 1,000 channels that a drop in the buck compared to video programming on the Internet.  It also makes it easier for people to provide video content.

Quantity, sure - but good luck finding any broadcast-quality content outside subscription services.

Except this guy. I would watch this guy on TV religiously.

[commodorejohn]

The absolute worst thing about TV in my opinion is the advertisements. This is really putting me off YouTube lately as well.

No kidding. The more ads show up on YouTube, the less I bother even going there.

You know what I don't actually care how  popular My Little Pony is, but if it's only popular because of hives of  self-reference and in-jokes such as 4Chan and Reddit it would be no loss  to humanity if no-one had heard of it.

Heh By many accounts it actually is pretty good for a kids' show, but there's no denying that the Internet hype machine has far overblown its actual merits...

I'd rather only pay for the content I actually wanted to watch. The  problem with a subscription is you'd be tempted to try to "get your  money's worth" and spend hours every day glued to the box, or have the  TV on the whole time even when you're not watching it like some people  do and you get so used to it that you can't do without. Which is also a  disadvantage of streaming media. You can get addicted to it. I don't see  the appeal of "more, more, more entertainment!" I treat myself to a  2nd-hand DVD once a week and I watch that and that's it. Even the  inconvenience of having to go to a shop and pay for it with money makes  life a fuller, more satisfying experience.

Right on. I've found it pretty liberating to not think that I have to be watching something in my free time.

(And huzzah for second-hand buys! I've got a stack of great stuff from different thrift stores that cost me a fraction of what I would've paid to get them new...)