Cymric: I've read on various sites that one of the reasons a machine might be sluggish is a sh*tload of spyware and other nasty things infecting your computer
What bugs me is that people seriously think this is a Windows-only problem. Even Linux distroes come loaded with bloat these days if you don't look around.
What matters to me is how easy it is to get rid of the junk, and how many places spamware can hide. Windows is infamous for this, but many other OSes aren't much better. Download AppPaths and you can snuff out 95% of spamware from the registry. It's not as bad as people think.
I used to be a sysadmin for a Mac network, and believe me, there's nothing like staring down 250+ system extentions -- most with cryptic names -- and having to eliminate the one that's causing the machine to crash every 10 minutes (and it'll likely be a system extention you can't remove, anyway).
Oh yeah, THAT was a BLAST -- especially when the Mac people could only sit around and tease Wintel people all day.
Personally I think they sell snake oil (who on Earth needs a 64-bit CPU in a system, and why would you need personalised benchmarking specs for your machine...?)
Never trust anything in the ultra-performance market. 64-bit is meaningless at the moment, but so long as it's faster than 32-bit and price competitive, I don't care.
Game companies have been touting bits for years. It's all bunk.
Given the facts that very few people run these special applications at their own home, that everyday games are not amongst those, and that said systems are offered to game fanatics, I can only conclude one thing: you're being ripped off. It is just show.
Athlon64 is a good performer and cost comparible to the 32-bit P4. Where's the ripoff?
Go to nVidia and ask for hardware documentation and you'll be politely told to f*ck off.
Well, not unless you have money. Apple got the Geforce3 pretty quick with their own drivers, until ATI started stepping on nVidia's toes, again.
Welcome to the world of open x86 hardware.
Right. We all know Macs use all their own proprietary standards these days. Nobody ever heard of PCI, USB, and Ethernet on a Mac! ;-)
Really, a Mac is just a PC with a different CPU... that costs more.
I don't believe that for a second. A1 was designed (and later replaced by TeronCX) for one purpose, and one purpose only - to run OS4. No real effort has been made to get it to run anything else, except by Mai.
I thought the Teron was made to be a dev board for the PPC, so people could more easily make embedded software for other boards build on the Artica chipset. It's not really designed to compete in any traditional market.
Most hardware is overhyped and/or bad. I'm fed up off all these sh1tty PC motherboard with huge design flaws being sold off as packaged PCs, for instance.
Serious question: what's the worst thing about PC quality? Stability, heat, reliabilty, technical documents... ?
The two different Operating systems are, for all intents and purposes, identical -- being that they both emulate the old real classic Amiga OS. Neither OS is "Amiga", so why get hung up on a name brand?
Nice. :-)
So? You said there was no decent support for nVidia cards, and no 3D drivers. Nothing about them having to be open source.
Seriously, how many drivers are open source that aren't hacked up for 10-year-old cards nobody uses anymore? Everyone I know with a Linux box runs the OS on some tinny computer with a Celeron and a PCI card with no 3D support -- cause all they do is use it as an Apache/scripting server.
The gfx card race is really cut-throat and neither ATI or nVidia are willing to spill the beans.
Do S3 and Matrox throw around their documentation?
The suggestion that one company is evil and closed while the other is open and helpful is laughable.
I'm always suspicious of open source. I've had more than a handful of these applications that are just as buggy and crash prone as the rest (FireFox and PHP BBSes come to mind), and unlike commercial apps, their interfaces suck to boot. No matter how many people "contribute" to a project, the maintainers pull all the strings.
Quality depends more on commitment than coding style.
A "tweak" to one person is a "workaround" to another one. As long as special mofications are needed, of any sort, that's a workaround to me. Scale is irrelevant.
For anything to be portable, all hardware has to have a reference of commonality (is that a real word?)
Sure, but they're being sold at a fifth of the price of a Pegasos board, or even less, and you don't have to buy them. You can choose another model, and yet get exactly the same compatibility with the rest of your system. Conversely, the alternative to a Pegasos board is...
...another Pegasos board. Not exactly a breadth of choice, then.
So much for licensing. I have no trouble being required to buy a specific x86 board with a ROM modification, so long as I can be assured the likeliness of a decent replacement in the future. There's a LOT more x86 chipset choices than PowerPC choices. Hell, what's to say they can't supply two motherboards built by two manufacturers with completely different specs, but based on the same chipset?
Meanwhile, Java programmers are laughing their butts off over all this hardware debate.
Amiga OS4 is based on Amiga OS source code, it is the natural evolution of AmigaOS on the PPC. Why it shouldn't be Amiga?
My Oekaki BBS is based on cleaned-up OekakiPoteto source code, but I've changed it so much you'd never recognize it. Design is more important than raw code, and in that respect, AmigaOS4 and MorphOS seem close enough to me.
Either machine may sell well to the Linux community, and that is the niche they need to be marketing to. The remaining Amiga market however will never put food on the table for anything but a few dedicated hobby developers.
Funny how people who hate Windows the most always end up killing themselves. Even BeOS wasn't terribly revolutionary once you clip through the hype. I'm surprised they even lasted for 10 years at all.
Good if you define "good" as being "incompatible and buggy as hell", that is. The complaints of Linux users about these drivers are constant. Change kernel, you have to wait for update. Choose any CPU but x86, too bad. This goes totally against the Linux mindset.
User-mode recompiling is easy enough, but things get really ugly in kernel mode. I don't like microkernels that much, but Linux has really overgrown itself and could use a really good driver framework. But, you know how UNIX people feel about low-level interfaces...
And your implying that if one doesn't use these big companies for a computing solution then the result must be crap by default is equally laughable. You are trapped in this world where only the cutting edge is any good, which is really not better than some who believe anything x86 is inherently evil just by existing
Everything in the computer industry is like that. I was trying to fix the transmission of data from a Java applet to a BBS programmed in PHP, and was horrified to see that the BBS has to import the data with $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA and do lots of handiwork with hex matches! I thought HTTP headers were supposed to format all the POST data! Well, it *IS*, but the applet programmers were too damn lazy to do it right. So, any change to the applet, and all the BBSes that use that applet will have to be completely reprogrammed or else they stop working.
When will people wise up?!
YES! It was! Hardware designs for the A1 were being processed years before a single line of code were being written for OS4. How have you missed that?
Well, they were all canceled, and then they went with an off-the-shelf mobo by Mia Logic. Expensive, but infinately better and cheaper than the original AmigaOne would've been... if they had even gotten it to work.
"tweak" to one person is a "workaround" to another one.
Actually, I don't see the difference between those two, either.
...this is beginning to sound like the infamous KDE/Gnome flame war. Gnome is a huge waste of time, manpower, programming effort and disk space, just to avoid one slightly restrictive (read: non-GPL) license. And in the end the problem ceased to exist thanks to Trolltech's change of mind.
Tried both. *I* think they both suck. I don't know why anyone wants to use the same "pick-n-place" GUI tools when we could be using markup, instead.
"incompatible and buggy as hell" is sheer FUD in my experience. I haven't found anything it caused crashes with, and I've always been able to install the drivers on my system.
Well, I never was able to get my GeForce3 to work on Linux using any driver made for the GeForce3. It kept dumping me to a desktop with white lines going across the screen and an invisible mouse cursor. That's when I went to the TNT2.
Anyway, anything to do with open source is totally against the Amiga mindset, so what's your point?
God, I miss the Public Domain scene. Forget games and mutimedia... PD was *THE* thing that seperated Amiga from the stuffy, self-congratulatory PCs and Macs.
"Almost obsolete" may still have plenty of merit, but I wouldn't advise anyone to pay more for it than they would have to for "cutting edge". Get it?
It's all about value. I don't mind proprietary hardware, but I don't want to pay $800 for a machine that performs like a PC I can build for $150 today.
...making an emulator so the old apps work
Good point. Any app worth its salt is going to be recompiled natively to the new hardware, and it it can't be, it's because the company is out of business and nobody cares enough to make a BETTER app. So, what's so bad about emulation? You wouldn't buy a new PC to run Windows3.1, would you? I have fond memories of my old DOS games, but I didn't buy a P4 to run Red Baron and Whiplash.
Some people argued that backwards compatibility in the PlayStation2 would hurt new game sales, because people could play their old PlayStation games all day. Yeah, right. I'm sure anyone would pay $300 for a machine to play old games. PSOne compatibility was one of the few things about the PS2 I really, really liked both from a marketing standpoint, as well as practical. People only buy new games, but the psychological impact of being able to run old software is still a selling point. Now, it looks like backwards compatibility will be a normal expectation for any game console, and rightfully so.
