POLL: Which word, in your opinion, best describes AMIGA today?

[bloodline]

amigadave wrote:
bloodline wrote:

OS4, MOS and even my beloved AROS are nothing more than trying to give us what we already had 15 years ago... but on more modern hardware, so we can keep it with us.

So you think there are no new features, functions, or capabilities in AmigaOS4.x, or MorphOS, beyond what was available in AmigaOS3.1?  I think the developers of those two OSes would disagree, as well as the 800 to 1,200 users (guesstimate).  Do you own and use an AmigaOS4.x, or MorphOS computer?

Do these features take those systems even close to a £199 PC from curries? No. This is not progress... It is life-support... progress would be taking the Amiga platform beyond what is standard in the rest of the market, that would be a compelling reason to develop for the platform and the platform would be alive.

This is not progress, this is life-support at best... nostalgia at worst.

The Amiga is a dead computing platform... if we want our community to survive then we need to focus on what is really important... without the delusion of grandeur that plagues the ranks.

The delusions of grandeur for the Amiga are limited to a few dozen at most, and not the majority of the remaining Amiga owners that still enjoy using their old or new Amiga computers and I don't even want to get into a discussion about "what is really important....." on a computer forum, but since you put it out there, why don't you try to explain (in your opinion) "what is really important........" to help our Amiga community survive?

Our community only has one generation left now, so lets just enjoy it :-) in 10 years the Amiga will be a footnote in history books.

For me, the prefect system would be a 68k AROS based AGA clone in an FPGA (Like a minimig but with AGA...)... that would be a nice system to have... Thus I await whatever Jens has planned with the CloneA project.

To each, their own.  I am a bit more interested in seeing what can be accomplished by the NatAmi team than I am in a 68k AROS AGA clone.  I think the NatAmi team has its sights set at a much higher goal as their target, and even if they do not reach all the way to their objectives, I think they will produce something better than a 68060 based Amiga with just the standard AGA capabilities.

Even the most whizz-bang Natami vaporware (i.e. the most amazing system they can dream up) will not be as good as that £199 PC I mentioned earlier...

[Gibbersan]

Even though I rarely make any posts, I consider the Amiga to be ALIVE because of the community.

[Hessu]

It's ALIVE. Since i use it daily, and i think i'm not the only one. I do have 2 PC's, laptop and desktop, but it doesn't mean that i have abandoned AMIGA.

[guru-666]

The DEAD....
  Crazy parallels between music and computers.. if that's possible.

[frl9lk]

Alive.

I've never been on this site without plenty of company. And it's obviously evolving: the OSs, the hardware... new things on AmiNet all the time. I'd call that alive. An "investor" might not agree.

(By comparison, and using the same standards, the ST does seem moribund. Even the TI-99 has more of a heartbeat.)

[persia]

Yep, the Aspire runs leopard like a champ and Final Cut Express runs fine on it.  Can you do HD Video on an Amiga?  Get the video from my industry standard AVCHD-format video recorder?  Use a Firewire video source?  import still images  in PSD, BMP, JPEG, PICT, PNG, SGI, TARGA, and TIFF formats?  Mix DV (NTSC and PAL) and HD formats in the same Timeline?

The Amiga Video Toaster is ancient technology with no relevance to the 21st century.  Shoot some video on a video recorder, mix in text, still and DVD source, preview it real time and upload it to youtube, and do it without a Mac or PC....

[nikodr]

Dead

but it is an interesting retro project to add things to the amiga such as usb etc.

Would love to see os ported to other platforms.

[Karlos]

Really, it all depends on the context.

The Amiga, as a hardware platform is dead insofar as there is no progression. True there are interesting expansions being made but as has been mentioned by others they serve only to expand the capability of existing systems. I concede that machines like Sam440 are "new" hardware, but is a long way behind commodity PC hardware and the gap is widening every day.

However, as an enthusiasts platform I'd say it enjoys quite a following. JIT emulation on current PC hardware, for example, has opened new doors for the classic OS. It brings with it a performance level that was totally unimaginable in the days when I got my first 040 board. I wouldn't be surprised if 68K apps on my Q9450 run faster than the equivalent PPC ones on any existing G3/G4 class machine.

So, even if no new amiga hardware of any description was developed from this day forth, it would still live on through UAE and even AROS.

[wawrzon]

amiga? its neither dead nor alive. its a zombie!

[smerf]

@the_leander

Hi,

I still use Pen Pal almost every day to add to my video data bases, my disk data bases, my household inventory data base and my cd/dvd game collection data base. I use the gvp iv24 to edit my tapes that I make with my movie camera (JVC mini) and I also use various Amiga graphics effects in my recording. I then transfer them to my PC where I can tune them up and record them to dvd or hard drive.

I never keep anything of value on my PC using Windows Vista or Windows, I have learned through time that the PC is not a very stable machine since its breaking out in 1981 where I set up 92 IBM machines for the Navy, they were junk then and have not improved since. So you can say what you want, PC's are crap and this comes from a person who has a quad 6600 with 4 gig of memory, 3 hard drives, using both Ubuntu (great system so far) and Microsoft windows XP, Vista (32), Vista (64) and the new Windows 7, which is probably the best of the Windows series. Now you can take your new Acer Aspire and Windows and see if you can match my Amiga for stability, as a matter of fact all you PC heads out there match this, since 1993 my Amiga has only had one crash which I induced myself in 1993, it was easily called back due to Diskmaster and LHARC where I had all my data saved on a backup zip drive. Restore time about 20 minutes. Since then the Amiga has had no failures with data, this year I installed a 2.2 gig hard drive which replaced my 1.2 gig hard drive, no the 1.2 gig hard drive was nowhere near filled, I just done it to use an old 2.2 gig hd that I had sitting on the shelf. Once again restore time on new hd was 20 minutes. Now for all you PC users out there with bragging rights, has your computer been going since 1993 without a crash, or without losing data. Rememeber on most computers the first thing they teach you is that the most important thing on your computer is not HARDWARE but your DATA, and I have lost none since 1993 on my Amiga. THANK YOU, How about your ACER ASPIRE?

smerf

[the_leander]

smerf wrote:
@the_leander

Hi,

I still use Pen Pal almost every day to add to my video data bases, my disk data bases, my household inventory data base and my cd/dvd game collection data base. I use the gvp iv24 to edit my tapes that I make with my movie camera (JVC mini) and I also use various Amiga graphics effects in my recording. I then transfer them to my PC where I can tune them up and record them to dvd or hard drive.

Fantastic, I'm glad you still use your system for this. But your personal use is hardly the same as industry now, is it?

smerf wrote:
I never keep anything of value on my PC using Windows Vista or Windows, I have learned through time that the PC is not a very stable machine since its breaking out in 1981 where I set up 92 IBM machines for the Navy, they were junk then and have not improved since.

:lol:

smerf wrote:
Now you can take your new Acer Aspire and Windows

No, I really can't - I own an EeePC 701 running Elive and Xandros. I pointed to the AA1 because it was cheep and available now.

smerf wrote:
and see if you can match my Amiga for stability, as a matter of fact all you PC heads out there match this, since 1993 my Amiga has only had one crash which I induced myself in 1993, it was easily called back due to Diskmaster and LHARC where I had all my data saved on a backup zip drive. Restore time about 20 minutes. Since then the Amiga has had no failures with data, this year I installed a 2.2 gig hard drive which replaced my 1.2 gig hard drive, no the 1.2 gig hard drive was nowhere near filled, I just done it to use an old 2.2 gig hd that I had sitting on the shelf. Once again restore time on new hd was 20 minutes.

I use multiple backup types, both local and offsite. Relying on a single source for backing up important data is retarded.

Also I want to know what definition of "crash" you are using. I take it to mean the system having to be rebooted due to non response to user command, or in the event of a catastrophe, the Guru/BSOD/coredump output.

smerf wrote:
Now for all you PC users out there with bragging rights, has your computer been going since 1993 without a crash, or without losing data.

Even on the Amiga crashes happened. I've lost data on both the amiga and on PC over the years, difference is, with a PC I can effect quick replacement of defective parts.

smerf wrote:
Rememeber on most computers the first thing they teach you is that the most important thing on your computer is not HARDWARE but your DATA, and I have lost none since 1993 on my Amiga. THANK YOU, How about your ACER ASPIRE?

smerf

I backup everything. AA1 only came out a year ago, also, as I stated I personally own an EeePC 701 and as yet, have not lost any data at all.  

[amigadave]

@bloodline,

Nothing personal, but your responses are getting so predictable.  If you don't have a good retort, you just try to deflect the question with a completely unrelated answer.

What does a crappy £199 PC from curries have to do with the questions I asked you?  Nothing!  You stated that "OS4, MOS and even my beloved AROS are nothing more than trying to give us what we already had 15 years ago...", which is not true.  The developers have advanced beyond what was available on an Amiga 15 years ago and continue to add more modern features with each release, just like any other OS, but obviously at a slower pace due to resources.  Just because those systems are not competing directly with Windows PCs, does not negate the progress that has been made, however slow or small.  The progress is useful for those of us who do use AmigaOS4.1 and MorphOS2.2 systems, so again I will ask, do you own and use any of these NEW systems that you are so quick to criticize, or call DEAD.

In response to my assertion that only a small group of the Amiga community has delusions of grandeur and my request that you explain what you meant about what is "really important to our community", you wrote: "Our community only has one generation left now, so lets just enjoy it  in 10 years the Amiga will be a footnote in history books".

I think people that make predictions like they know what will happen to the Amiga community (or anything else) in the future are having the delusions of grandeur, but I will do as you suggested and enjoy our community for the next ten years and as many more as I choose to participate in with this crazy group.

Then the funniest comment of all, in response to my preference of NatAmi over your less than vaporware 68k AROS AGA project that I have never heard anyone even mention before this, but is supposed to be somehow related to Jens' CloneA project, you again try to deflect the validity of my opinion and compare the NatAmi to your much loved £199 PC.

Just because you are caught up in the whizz-bang world of PCs that think they must have the shear number crunching CPU power to complete a zillion computations per second and to keep up with the competition the latest hardware must be used, because everything that came before it is now crap and therefore useless, does not mean that everyone would be better off following the rest of the lemmings off the cliff with their money every couple of years.

If there is some new application that I just have to buy because it is going to make my life so much better and it will only run on that £199 PC you are so hung up on, then maybe I will take a look at it, but I haven't seen or heard of it yet, and since it will probably only be written to run on Windows, as that is the dominant OS for your £199 PC, it will really have to be an application that I can't live without to get me to buy another PC of any kind, because I can not tolerate Windows problems any more and will not be spending any more money on any MS operating system or software.  What I can't find for MorphOS, I will find for MacOSX, or Linux.

Again, nothing personal about this message, I just don't believe your previous arguments had any meaning to them.

[orb85750]

persia wrote:
Yep, the Aspire runs leopard like a champ and Final Cut Express runs fine on it.  

You're running Final Cut on an Aspire *ONE*? (re: original question)  What type of pro hacking was required to get Leopard up and running on it?  Easy enough?  Total cost of system with above software and any required hardware upgrades?

[the_leander]

orb85750 wrote:

persia wrote:
Yep, the Aspire runs leopard like a champ and Final Cut Express runs fine on it.  

You're running Final Cut on an Aspire *ONE*? (re: original question)  What type of pro hacking was required to get Leopard up and running on it?  Easy enough?  Total cost of system with above software and any required hardware upgrades?

Hardly pro hacking... Here's a guide to do so on a Dell Mini 9. Getting OSX for standard X86 PCs working is fairly well established now, with its own "hackintosh" community no less.

If you're genuinely interested with regard the AA1, note that I saw Tescos selling them on their website for around £130. So far as I know though you do need to replace the wireless on the AA1 for that to work under OSX, so the Mini 9 might be an easier option.

[the_leander]

amigadave wrote:
@bloodline,

Nothing personal,

You know, whenever I read this in a forum post, I can almost always expect for the rest of the post to be a snipe-fest...

I wasn't disapointed.

[HenryCase]

the_leander wrote:

amigadave wrote:
@bloodline,

Nothing personal,

You know, whenever I read this in a forum post, I can almost always expect for the rest of the post to be a snipe-fest...

I wasn't disapointed.

It is possible to have a go at what someone says without being overly aggressive towards them. You have to ask yourself whether you would really be that offended if amigadave's comments were directed at you.