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

[persia]

Android is now the most common operating system.

[Duce]

The Ouya stinks.  It's god awful, and I regret ever backing it.  While some forgiveness can be given for a rev 1 product, it's beyond rough around the edges, bordering on unusable.

2-3 more generations and it might actually do something, but IMHO it's about as useful as a Nexus Q right now.

[agami]

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...

Every PC user in the world? No one was even suggesting that.
The only thing anyone can ever do is aim for a segment of the overall market.

What royalcrown is talking about is establishing a 'known quantity' platform. Apple has done it for decades and especially recently with iOS, Commodore used to do it, and at the big end of town Cisco and Oracle are doing it.

The concept is often referred to as "the liberating freedom of constraint". It's about freeing up the developer to think only about the things that matter.

I am a big fan if this approach. Yes, there will always be a market for DIY computing, but most people will favour things that just work and don't require all this messing around.

[royalcrown]

@commodorejohn

Are you saying that such a thing would not raise the QUALITY of software in general ? While fixed hardware may be bad, the payoff would be better apps I think.

AFAIK people buy a comp to run apps, so this good would outweigh the "forced" evil of standardization.

I think the price would drop enough to take away much of the sting of overspending.

It's not like were eating little kittens or anything

It might happen anyway as speed increases are starting to really hit a cost wall, and soon physics.

[spirantho]

I think the point is that the PC isn't a platform like a C64, Amiga etc. A PC is a bunch of cards stuffed together which may or may not run Windows. You can't standardise the platform because there's no platform to standardise!
If you wanted to make everything use the same standard and the same hardware then you'd need one company to take over what it means to be a PC, and as the PC succeeded because of its open nature, that's just not going to happen.

Not only that but it would be a terrible thing. I know what you mean about how much more we could do with an i7 but if we didn't have an open platform, there would have been no competition. With no competition, progress would be far far slower... we'd probably be using Pentium 2s or something still!

Look at the speed of evolution of the Amiga from the 1000 to the 4000 and apply that to the IBM PC/XT.

Fierce competition in the open PC market is what defines the PC and the technology behind it. Take that away and watch it stagnate.

Just my 2p.

[Linde]

One fixed platform implies one use case -- which implies that this idea is stupid. Users aren't interested, not to mention hardware manufacturers and software developers (but hey, it will be fun rewriting every software package every five years).

[Lurch]

Here you go, fixed hardware, open source development friendly and cheap too.

A very 'Amiga like' business model in fact.

Ouya

Bought one of these in Jan. When will it turn up was promised April. Still nothing, there is a huge amount of lies coming from the Ouya team.

Would I recommend buying it, no.

Just check out the reviews, controller lag, buttons sticking. Incomplete store/OS/games, onboard NIC not working, weak wireless. The lying and hiding of shipping details and other things.

Maybe one day I'll receive it, I'll be rooting it and using it as an Amiga emulator.

http://www.reddit.com/r/ouya/

[royalcrown]

I think the point is that the PC isn't a platform like a C64, Amiga etc. A PC is a bunch of cards stuffed together which may or may not run Windows. You can't standardise the platform because there's no platform to standardise!
If you wanted to make everything use the same standard and the same hardware then you'd need one company to take over what it means to be a PC, and as the PC succeeded because of its open nature, that's just not going to happen.

Not only that but it would be a terrible thing. I know what you mean about how much more we could do with an i7 but if we didn't have an open platform, there would have been no competition. With no competition, progress would be far far slower... we'd probably be using Pentium 2s or something still!

Look at the speed of evolution of the Amiga from the 1000 to the 4000 and apply that to the IBM PC/XT.

Fierce competition in the open PC market is what defines the PC and the technology behind it. Take that away and watch it stagnate.

Just my 2p.

I guess it boils down to this for me personally:

I'd rather be using a P2 being pushed to the limit and good software vs a monster system and a ton of so-so software.

Right now I have an I7 with a GTX 680, dual SSD and 32 gigs. Never has a PC been so boring for lack of anything compelling or fun to run on it. Nothing fun  really needs this much computer. At least older platforms were enjoyable (to me) to use.

[spirantho]

I think you'd actually find a P2 with a Riva TNT set-up would be rather less fun than you think, no matter how far it was pushed.
Remember that although a lot of code is lazily written for the big games, the hardware has a very efficient design. That's why games still look so good.

I think you're absolutely bang on about modern games being boring - the only PC games I buy are ones with "Civilization" and "Red Alert" in the titles, these days - but I think you're misplacing the blame.

It's kind of like saying that modern chart music is rubbish because we have CDs now. It's not, it's because chart music (and PC games) have become commodity items rushed out by large corporations for as little time and money and as large a return as they can garner. The fact that PCs are very powerful is nothing to do with the quality of the game - there's nothing to stop a coder writing really efficient, powerful code on an i7 - but even if he did that he might get a few frames per second more.... and a few fps more does not a good game make. In other words, instead of rubbish running at 60fps, he'd have rubbish running at 63fps.

That's why I have a PS3 for the occasional bash of Warhawk or Skyrim, and I have Amigas, C64s, Sinclairs, the rest... for when I actually want to play something new (to me).

Luckily I have a really interesting PC. It's my bridgeboard in my Amiga. It plays UFO: Enemy Unknown and Ultima VII, and that's all that matters.

[rabindranath72]

As always, it's the software which makes the difference; and today's software is mostly CRAP, light years behind the hardware. Starting from operating systems (Windows 8 anyone?) to applications (Microsoft Office.) I REFUSE to believe that I need 2Gb of RAM to run an operating system. I REFUSE to believe that to write a letter I need a program which requires 1Gb of RAM and takes 1Gb hard disk space. That's just sloppy, godawful programming.

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.

I have never owned an Amiga, but soon (thanks to Petro Tymschenko!) I will get an Amiga 1200 so I will see what it can do.

[spirantho]

@rabindranath72

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!

[royalcrown]

I think you'd actually find a P2 with a Riva TNT set-up would be rather less fun than you think, no matter how far it was pushed.
Remember that although a lot of code is lazily written for the big games, the hardware has a very efficient design. That's why games still look so good.

I think you're absolutely bang on about modern games being boring - the only PC games I buy are ones with "Civilization" and "Red Alert" in the titles, these days - but I think you're misplacing the blame.

It's kind of like saying that modern chart music is rubbish because we have CDs now. It's not, it's because chart music (and PC games) have become commodity items rushed out by large corporations for as little time and money and as large a return as they can garner. The fact that PCs are very powerful is nothing to do with the quality of the game - there's nothing to stop a coder writing really efficient, powerful code on an i7 - but even if he did that he might get a few frames per second more.... and a few fps more does not a good game make. In other words, instead of rubbish running at 60fps, he'd have rubbish running at 63fps.

That's why I have a PS3 for the occasional bash of Warhawk or Skyrim, and I have Amigas, C64s, Sinclairs, the rest... for when I actually want to play something new (to me).

Luckily I have a really interesting PC. It's my bridgeboard in my Amiga. It plays UFO: Enemy Unknown and Ultima VII, and that's all that matters.

That's my point. Software is being turned out as fast as possible instead of turned out as fast as possible while doing it well, or making any old crap to sell vs something interesting. That is what is making pc's boring as well. I think that if we froze the platform, devs could better learn to "use what we got, and instead of learning new api's and tools, use that time to make better programs.

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.

[spirantho]

Yeah, I think we're both thinking the same thing here, about modern games (and music ).

But honestly, if you were to freeze the platform all that would happen is the games would just get worse (because most of the really big games are supported by people like nvidia and AMD to show off their hardware - take the hardware away and take away the support) and also the PC platform would die completely as a gaming platform because the consoles would continue to evolve.

[Tripitaka]

To the original question I have to say that I am very much undecided. One of the things I liked about my first Amiga was that everything worked. I'de buy a game, put in the floppy and voila. Awesome. However, as time moved on some stuff required, or at least would benefit from extra hardware. But still, it was a small enough amount of upgrades to understand all of the options in depth. I liked how all of that worked and continues to work.

I used to like my PC having loads of options too. My 486 had so many bays and slots it was silly. As times gone on I find I use less bays and slots, I simply don't need them. The average pc mobo these days has built in everything with the exception of graphics (sometimes). Add a graphics card if you need one and what else do you need? An SSD and an optical drive maybe? I hardly use my optical drive these days, just an SSD and a card reader would do. As for upgrading the CPU and RAM, how often does that end up with a mobo replacement? It's often cheaper to get a newer mobo and CPU than finding a faster CPU for an older socket.

Even that once huge hard disk, or even RAID that a true power might use is probably better inserted into a NAS enclosure for convenient network access.

I guess what I'm saying is that even though the pc platform is very open, market forces for the typical user make a lot of our choices for us. Often to the point that it might as well been a closed platform in the first place.

A extra smothering of irony can be found in the jailbreaking of consoles of course. Closed platform it may be but someone will always find a way of opening up a console.

As to whatever is the best or worse approach, I just don't know. I just look forward to whatever it is memristor will do to the market, that will be fun.

[Duce]

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.

Your usage case is simply different.  That same machine wouldn't do a single task I require out of a daily driver machine, but as above - my needs are much different than yours.  To each his own, with due respect - and all that jazz.

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.

I've got a SAM 440 I just love.  I know I overpaid for it by about 3x.  I know it can't do half what my year old cell phone can do.  I love it for what it is.

[rabindranath72]

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.

Your usage case is simply different.  That same machine wouldn't do a single task I require out of a daily driver machine, but as above - my needs are much different than yours.  To each his own, with due respect - and all that jazz.

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.

I've got a SAM 440 I just love.  I know I overpaid for it by about 3x.  I know it can't do half what my year old cell phone can do.  I love it for what it is.

My point was that software has not evolved as fast (and well) as hardware. If I have to write a letter or document, I don't need a word processor which occupies 300Mb ram.