What still makes Amiga superior today?

[persia]

Yeah, I can drag an app out of the Applications Folder on a Mac and put it in say iTunes music folder and it will work, but why in the name of the bugbladder beast of trall would I?

My Mac happily users all eight of it's processors (2 quadcore xeons)  and will happily use my wife and son's processors as well.

The Amiga takes me back to my youth, that's all it does that my Mac doesn't.  Really unless you've taken up residence in 1989 that's about the only thing that you can say.

[Matt_H]

@ persia

Yeah, I can drag an app out of the Applications Folder on a Mac and put it in say iTunes music folder and it will work, but why in the name of the bugbladder beast of trall would I?

If the applications folder gets too cluttered, conceivably someone might want to branch things off into video, image, office, or scientific subdirectories (or drives). Easy to do with the Mac or Amiga, a complete nightmare under Windows or Linux.

Remember, we're talking about nifty design features in the Amiga's hard/software that (still) aren't available elsewhere. Any modern machine runs rings around the Amiga in terms of performance and application capability, but there are concepts in which the Amiga still has an edge.

[Sig999]

Actually thats one of the things I didn't have problems with under Linux.

[Varthall]

A6000 wrote:
If the Amiga had a fast CPU, a graphics card and a (slightly) updated operating sytem with a browser, we would all be prepared to ignore any additional speed a multicore PC may have.
In practice the PC user will still have to wait longer to start using his PC than the Amiga user would, and if the Amiga feels faster, then for all intents and purposes, it is faster.

You're talking about the AmigaOne!

Varthall

[Hammer]

Matt_H wrote:

I'd think a better example would be a SCSI controller, like the A4091. Full SCSI access with no drivers. Haven't tried SCSI on a PC yet, but the IDE cards I've connected require some form of driver to be installed. Sometimes Windows could find the drivers on its own, sometimes it needed a little help. But it did need them before the cards would function.

Exactly. Good ol' Amiga ROM tags. A hypothetical graphics card could store an RTG system in Flash and be ready for use at power-on (you'd just need something in Devs:Monitors, same as you do for the full NTSC or PAL screenmode database). If I'm not mistaken, P96 and CGX in their current forms aren't ROMable because they rely on some functions only available from disk, but OS4 is moving in the direction of making it possible by converting P96 components into Kickstart modules.

Well, my laptop is fitted with 1GB of Intel's Turbo Memory (Flash Memory).

[Hammer]

I would agree with that. Amiga is a different species. It was targetted for games, real-time audio/video effects (which arcade-type games require), fast game port interface, etc. PCs gaming is like a delayed (after-thought) superficial imposition on the computer-- slower game port, effects have to be done through slower APIs rather than hardware standard (and not all hardware supports all API calls),

PC GPUs changes its micro-architecture nearly every generation. It’s like changing from PPC-to-X86-to-ARM-to-(yet another processing core) nearly every year.

For example
NV Geforce FX 5x00 VILW based architecture.
NV Geforce 6x00/7x00 SIMD/MIMD based architecture.
NV Geforce 8x00 (CUDA) Scalar based architecture.
AMD Radeon X1xxx SIMD/MIMD based architecture.
AMD Radeon HD 3xx0(CTM/CAL) VILW based architecture.

If the game was designed to “hit-the-metal” the hardware would become a “boat anchor” for any architecture changes.

I can’t run Fold@Home GPU2 (written on AMD's CAL) on NV CUDA hardware.

Note why you don’t see any commercial PC games being designed directly on NV's CUDA or AMD's CTM(aka "Close-To-Metal")/CAL. The abstraction layer enables rapid hardware architecture changes without completely killing software compatibility.

 

[stefcep2]

Hammer wrote:

Have a look at Vista: what does it need to install (recommend) 12G of hard drive space. I have most of the text and pictures of the Encylclopeadia Brittanica and it fits on one 650 Mb CD. How can it take possibly take more information than whats in an encyclopedia to make a hard drive arrange its data in order, suck information of it or a DVD, put the info into memory so that the CPU can do something to it, show some windows and move a mouse pointer and display the result on a screen or print it out?

Windows provides more than just showing some windows and move a mouse pointer and display the result on a screen.

Windows Print Spooler supports multi-user objects and network printing.

Ok, so we need 20 times the data thats in the Encyclopedia Brittanica (with maps and pictures) so that we can run a multi-user print spooler.  Great.  If I were a hardware vendor I'd be having a stroke at how the OS is crippling my hardware.

Its a croc.  Todays programmers are the laziest ever.  I am not a programmer but I did it for 1 semester at university years ago.  Just by writing better code we more than doubled the search speed and halved the file size of a little database proggie we had to write.  Today its: "who cares: we'll have double the processor speeds in 18 month time, lets write for that.."  An this extends to the OS programming as well.

yes Windows does more things than AmigaOS, but not by a factor of 1000 or 10000.  If I had a modern web browser, PDF reader/writer DVD player and burner I would not need to suffer through it (or Linux for that matter).

stefcep2 wrote:
Its a croc.  Todays programmers are the laziest ever.  I am not a programmer but I did it for 1 semester at university years ago.  Just by writing better code we more than doubled the search speed and halved the file size of a little database proggie we had to write.  Today its: "who cares: we'll have double the processor speeds in 18 month time, lets write for that.."  An this extends to the OS programming as well.

If the software didn't cripple the hardware, people would simply not buy hardware often enough to make manufacturing PC hardware profitable! A PC used to be considered to have a lifespan (free from hardware failure) of about 3 years. These days, you can expect a brand-new PC that never sees smoke or other environmental factors that cause damage to last you twice as long.

If Dell had to wait 6-7 years for repeat customers, they'd be screwed. They rely on Microsoft (and other software vendors) to up the ante with bloated crap software that needs ever increasing amounts of CPU time, disk and RAM. The average user is not a gamer who 'needs' to have the latest system; he is not even the owner of the computer - because he uses it at work, to do computationally trivial work that could have been accomplished on a 486 DOS box.

Granted, there is a (more) diverse set of applications now that do need some level of performance to run at all (digital video comes to mind and I'm sure there are others but it's too early for me to think of them), but the vast majority of users get by with just ie or firefox, word and excel.

The reason for this, of course, is that there are any number of tasks that computers can do now that they simply couldn't a few years ago, which are not prevalent enough to make the economies of scale sufficient to support manufacturing high-end systems for them. So we all have to suffer with crap software in order to get the average user to keep buying new computers, just to keep costs down for commercial applications! These rarely run on the desktop operating systems, instead you see them on linux or windoze's server variants (which are much more efficient, imho, than XP or Vista).

I am a programmer by trade, and I will tell you that is a sad fact that most programmers are _very lazy_ in their code. They will happily type garbage for an hour to avoid thinking for half of that time; their ideas are all similar to each others (they call this 'improving readability') and they are well and truly attached to their von Neumann programming languages and methodologies. This is an antiquated system which needs to be destroyed through education.

Sadly, most universities (and university professors) have given up on teaching alternate methods of programming that could have a great impact on software performance. They still offer their courses on programming languages, but they end up being weak surveys of scheme or lisp and prolog, which never delve deep enough into the material to empower the students to use these languages in the real world. The students also just do not care about this material (which is why people are understandably disinterested in teaching it) because they do not see ads on dice.com for prolog or lisp programmers - they see C# and Java and .Net.

Those programming languages are crap, because they force programmers to use libraries that are ever increasing in size and complexity without providing more functionality than one could produce in a few prolog statements. The only area in which I consider so-called modern programming languages at all efficient is in the changes they cause in the learning curve for database- and network-oriented programming. (When you write code that has to be viable in the real world, it still takes just as long, but you can get basic models that promote understanding running with much less effort than using the POSIX system libraries from C/C++ or Pascal.)

Sorry if I ranted a bit - I'm facing major feature creep this morning.

[EDanaII]

@ persia:

Yeah, I can drag an app out of the Applications Folder on a Mac and put it in say iTunes music folder and it will work, but why in the name of the bugbladder beast of trall would I?

To add to what Matt_H has already pointed out. Many times in the past (and present) I've run out of space on my Windows system and, rather than adding a new drive and tossing the old, I would add that drive and keep the old. But then I'd need to transfer data over to the new drive and, naturally, those apps would break. I still have this problem today. Fortunately, many software designers design their software to be independent of this problem or to reinstall themselves one started again, but not all do and reinstalling those can be a pain in the S.

Presently, I have 4 OSes installed on my main machine. Maintaining these can sometimes cause my partition information to break. Suddenly, what was identified as drive P: is now drive E: and, once again, everything breaks.

Assign and the RDB, for my examples, make these issues easier to deal with.

Ed.

[sdyates]

Other than boot-time, I can't see how it is better than other OSes. The lack of new hardware is a big issue.

I still enjoy running my Amigas, but I'd say the baton has been passed on some years ago.

[Matt_H]

@ Hammer

Well, my laptop is fitted with 1GB of Intel's Turbo Memory (Flash Memory).

I hadn't heard of this before, but based on a quick look at Wikipedia it does look pretty cool and useful. But it seems to me like its raison d'etre is a workaround for the bloat and inefficiency of Windows. It seems like it would make "disk" loading unnoticeable, whereas the point of the ROM tag is to make disk loading unnecessary.

Similar ends, different means.

[stefcep2]

sdyates wrote:
Other than boot-time, I can't see how it is better than other OSes. The lack of new hardware is a big issue.

I still enjoy running my Amigas, but I'd say the baton has been passed on some years ago.

Not meaning to offend, but there are over 80 posts here highlighting the benefits of the Amiga operating environment over other systems.  We are not talking about the lack of new hardware or software, but the concepts.  If you want to see what AmigaOS might be like on new hardware, try Winuae.  See how quickly it boots, how quickly it lists window contents, how quickly applications start, how smooth the multitasking is, all the while its actually emulating a foreign instruction set.  Why does outlook take longer to fetch my email than YAM under Winuae and under my A4000? Imagine if it were running native code: your PC would fly.  Here are some of the advantages:

1. 5 sec boot.
2. Amiga RDB/Assign command
3. Wonderfully smooth preemptive mutitasking
4. Highly configurable GUI
5. Datatypes
6. Arexx
7. Shell
8. Multiple screens, each with their own color depth and resolution.
9. Highly efficient RAM and hard drive usage.
10. Graphics and sound co-processors with their own DMA, leaving the CPU to act independently on house keeping tasks, ensuring that you always have a responsive GUI.
11. Autoconfig
12. RAM: disk

[stefcep2]

pkillo wrote:


If the software didn't cripple the hardware, people would simply not buy hardware often enough to make manufacturing PC hardware profitable! A PC used to be considered to have a lifespan (free from hardware failure) of about 3 years. These days, you can expect a brand-new PC that never sees smoke or other environmental factors that cause damage to last you twice as long.

I could do everything on my circa 1994 PIII 650 256 meg Win98SE machine that I do on my Athlon 4800 with 2 gig ram XPPro machine .  In fact i can't think of a single thing that I do now on the XPPro machine that i didn't do before on the Win98 machine.  Yes USB support wasn't as good but how hard could it have been to add a service pack-hell Amiga does it on a 1993 or earlier OS.  For me i upgraded only because XPPro is more stable, and to run XPpro on that hardware would have cost 50% of the cost of a new PC, about $200 more.

stefcep2 wrote:

I could do everything on my circa 1994 PIII 650 256 meg Win98SE machine that I do on my Athlon 4800 with 2 gig ram

I completely agree with your opinion here, but I think you haven't had enough coffee today - win98 in 1994?

[stefcep2]

Yes I inherited it from my brother, I was mainly using my A1200 then.

Sorry, but you must have the dates mixed up. In 1994 Intel was still trying to get the original Pentium to do better than 90MHz and Microsoft was desperately attempting to get Windows 95 to be Windows 94... I actually wish I had a quality-built PC from back then, because as you know if you've ever tried to write an OS for a modern PC, that was just about the end of being able to use old-school assembler tactics on an IBM-compatible. (I wrote a boot-loader/screen pager a few years ago for the early AMD 64-bit systems and was aghast at how many instructions it took just to read a text file off disk and write it to the screen with line wrapping and scrolling...my AT hardware reference manual became a relic around the time we are speaking of..)