State of the Amiga, 2007

[stopthegop]

what you are doing is no different from what medium and large format photographers do in their darkrooms, difference is you're dealing with a negative thats made up of 1's and 0's.

Thats true.  But there's a major skill differential between the dark room editor and his photoshop counterpart. Making a convincing edit in a darkroom is like a Black Art.  IMO, Photographs done this way have intrinsic value because they are "handmade" by someone who is tremendously skilled and  has clearly mastered his craft. Being a skilled darkroom tech was once a fairly exclusive club. Photoshop has bestowed this power to any 3 year old.  Whether thats a good or bad thing is polymical because its not going away.  Don't get me wrong.. I love my digital camera and have lots of fun with editing apps (ImageFX, Photoshop, whatever..). I agree these are very powerful tools.  Still, there's something very alluring about traditional photography that is simply absent with digital media.   I just can't bring myself to call a digital photograph (even a very good one) "Art".      

[adz]

@stopthegop

Don't get me wrong, I love to see the creations of an old school darkroom worker, but at the same time, I think it's fair to say that being as proficient in software manipulation can be just as difficult.

[Mallette]

mrescher wrote:

Mallette wrote:
I don't mean what is now understood as "VM," which is neither virtual nor memory.  I mean VM, as in not distinguishable from RAM.  

GigaMem was totally transparent to the OS.  

Virtual Memory is memory that's any combination of memory physical, stored on disk etc. that's addressed as though it is all one piece of memory. Programs that run on the OS are not aware if they're being run in physical RAM or off disk.  

Correct me if I'm wrong, but GigaMem was transparent to the OS as it was a method for implementing virtual memory in an operating system (AmigaOS) that didn't already support it.  What I'm saying is that I think existing virtual memory schemes will work better than GigaMem ever could because they do work at the OS level and because the OS is better at slicing up the memory pie than you or I will ever be.

The one thing that I don't think I've seen done as well as on the amiga is the Datatypes.  This was an excellent idea - wherein everything that used datatypes could suddenly load a JPEG by dropping in the JPEG datatype.
I want to know why haven't we seen this type of advance outside the Amiga?  I think a lot of the issues are caused by vendor lock in.

Imagine if Microsoft released the Word datatype, then you could use OpenOffice or whatever you like and it would automatically understand Microsoft's Word format.  You could then choose the application you want on its features, performance or interface instead of having to buy the only one that supports the format your document is in.

The datatypes really were a brilliant invention.  I bought an A4000 on ebay and, as a result of datatypes, it understands PNG - a format that wasn't standardised until after Commodore sold their last Amiga.  That's pretty cool.

Fully agree about datatypes.  File compatibility in an OS is FAR more important to me than a uniform GUI as imposed by Windows.  What a spreadsheet has to do with photo retouching eludes me...

Anyway, I can follow what you are saying about VM just fine, but can't tell if you ever used it.  Windows implementation of "VM" is, from what I can tell, in no way comparable.  When I say "transparent," I mean the only difference was speed.  I've had Windows run out of memory when there was gigabytes of HD space left untouched.  There was no limit on GigaMem except available drive space and the OS limitations, which I think were 1gb.  I suspect you could have run every program available to the Amiga simultaneously in a gig.  I certainly don't understand what you mean by Windows handling it better.  As I said, GigaMem worked PERFECTLY.  I do not ever recall being able to notice it at work except the drive starting to run flat out when it came into play.  The memory optimizers for Windows and such are poor comparisons, IMOH.  

Dave

[mrescher]

Mallette wrote:
I've had Windows run out of memory when there was gigabytes of HD space left untouched.  There was no limit on GigaMem except available drive space and the OS limitations, which I think were 1gb.  I suspect you could have run every program available to the Amiga simultaneously in a gig.  I certainly don't understand what you mean by Windows handling it better.

I guess all I'm saying is that I believe you perceive Windows to be that much worse because it's trying to do a whole lot more. I don't meant to sound argumentative - Windows, MacOS and Linux are all heavier on the system than AmigaOS ever was but I'm just trying to be fair, they also do a lot more too - have a built in TCP stack, 3d acceleration, address more memory and hard disk space, drive higher screen resolutions, recover when applications leak memory - even under emulation they can run several instances of AmigaOS in isolation.  Most of the issues I see day-to-day are caused by bloated software, not the OS itself - it's miraculous that some of that stuff runs at all.  The main thing that kills performance for me on a modern Windows system is the virus/email-scanner-with-firewall-thingum but that's an ENTIRELY different story.

That's not to detract from how great the AmigaOS was.  I'm sure there are lessons that the modern OSes could still learn from it today.

[Mallette]

Well, I'd be the first to admit I am no expert on such things.  I know when they work and when they don't, why is a question for true High Nerds.  I am just a wannabe...

I am messing around with Ubuntu right to see if it is ready for prime time.  I was surprised to see it required a swap file.  I still do not understand why when RAM is dirt cheap.  You'd think they'd at least allow an option to use physical memory.  

I still say any OS that cannot be shut down with the power switch is an accident that WILL happen.

Dave

[Starrfoxx]

Mallette wrote:
I still say any OS that cannot be shut down with the power switch is an accident that WILL happen.

Dave

I've worried about that too, but I've had times where my desktop HAD to be turned off because it froze.  Boot it back up and it was fine.  There were times when the battery on my laptop ran out of power.  Most of the time I can switch the battery and keep going, but other times it actually turns it off and I have to boot back up.  So far, everything is okay.

[mrescher]

@Mallette
Hey that's cool. Completely agree with the sentiment, just not necessarily on the technicalities.

Good call on Ubuntu. Most of my work (like this lively post, for example!) is done on Ubuntu or Debian (on which Ubuntu is based). This laptop runs Ubuntu anyway and I do like it;

This is where Linux comes into it's own, since you can change what you don't like... you CAN stop it swapping if you really want to.
If you type

Code: [Select]

sudo swapoff -a

it will disable all swap until you reboot.

Code: [Select]

sudo swapon -a

to turn it back on again.  If you have tonnes of RAM and really want to make it permanent I can tell you how. (This doesn't make it any 'safer' to just turn the computer off at the power though).

I still say any OS that cannot be shut down with the power switch is an accident that WILL happen.

Yes. It does. Lots.  :-)

[deBrun]

@Persia
"I can't take a camera, download the photos and edit them on an Amiga, pretty standard stuff. I can't develop website images etc."

I can't, I can't, I can't realize Amiga's have been doing just THAT FOR YEARS!!!  Do you or have you ever even owned one?

@Thread
I've GOT Photoshop!!!  It's very handy but if I want something simple like an animation... pah!  Its simpler on DPaint.

@Amiga Enemies
When did Amiga go down? 1994?  And NOW you want to compare EXPENSIVE software running on the LATEST hardware to Amiga stuff and slam it to boot?  
WTF?  YOU SHOULD HAVE YOUR MEMBERSHIP REVOKED IMMEDIATELY BECAUSE YOU DON'T BELONG HERE.  
Go polish someone elses apples and the jump out the windows!!!!

[Mallette]

mresher:
Ubuntu appears cool.  I installed it on a laptop that has a hardware bug that causes it to shut down when there is a lot of HD activity.  It took several tries where sometimes I'd get all the way to 97% and it would shut down.  Ubuntu doesn't seem to have a way to complete a failed installation, so every time it started back at partition and format.  No complaints...it still went better for free than most Windows installs I ever did.  

Wired net came up perfectly, but not wireless, and sound did not install...though I can't see anything wrong with it and the "Test" function doesn't indicate anything.  OTOH, all it does is show a 25% bar and say "Press OK to Finish" so I can't be sure.

Oh well, it's new to me and I suppose I've new tricks to learn...

Once I am familiar I'll install it on the kids computers instead of you-know-what.  Most of what they do is browse, anyway and perhaps they'll learn to be non-conformists like the rest of us.

Once my Amiga skills are back from the upcoming A4000 resurrection project, maybe I'll hunt down some 1200's for them.  Yeah, that'll do it.  They'll go to school, get sat down in front of Windows, look at the teacher and say "WTF is this POS?  :pissed:

[stopthegop]

@Mallete:

lol.  Too funny.  I have my little nephew doing the same.  A whiz on the A1200 I bought him, he's totally fascinated by it. Will be funny to see his reaction when he starts kindergarden and they plop him down in front of a Windoze box.. Like you said, "WTF is this piece of sh1t??!"      haha  

[Mallette]

stopthegop wrote:
@Mallete:

lol.  Too funny.  I have my little nephew doing the same.  A whiz on the A1200 I bought him, he's totally fascinated by it. Will be funny to see his reaction when he starts kindergarden and they plop him down in front of a Windoze box.. Like you said, "WTF is this piece of sh1t??!"      haha  

Actually, in the context of Windows, "POS" stands for "Pitiful Operating System."  :-D

[stopthegop]

Pitiful, yep..  No doubt about that.  Many of our bloat-denying brethren would argue the "p" stands for Parsimonious.    

[mrescher]

Hey thought I'd bump this conversation up - this was an interesting comparison of a Mac Plus (not an Amiga) vs. a dual core AMD from this year comparing productivity on the two systems:

Mac Plus Comparison

Could be a good candidate for an Amiga comparison in future?

[Pyromania]

For my view on the current Amiga market please read my interview here.

http://arosshow.blogspot.com/2007/05/bill-panagouleas-interview-what-is.html

[guru-666]

wow I think I will do all my work and a mac plus... NOT... LOL
what kind of work do these people do?  
If all you do is type you can use a type writer, NO boot time.   You can also draw things out by hand, better and faster than you can on the computer...

so for people who think these comparison are useful, I recomend getting rid of the computer all together becasue you don't need one. The rest of us can feel the difference between a mac pro and modern PC.

[uncharted]

guru-666 wrote:

so for people who think these comparison are useful, I recomend getting rid of the computer all together becasue you don't need one.

Indeed.  I've recently replaced my internet connection with a carrier pigeon.  Works well enough, but the lag is a bit of a bugger.  

The rest of us can feel the difference between a mac pro and modern PC.

With the Mac Pro being a high-end 8 core computer I imagine you would ;-)