That's a remarkable piece of illogic. If I'm reading you correctly, you are saying that because the _content_ of games is often fanciful, the medium itself can't be taken seriously. You could say the same thing about literature or film.
BTW I once got a copy of Microsoft Works (a cut down office suite) bundled with a computer. It wasn't very good, but it did _work_, so it's not really an oxymoron;)
Point and click is very nice if you're a casual user of some piece of software. You don't want to have to read a massive manual just to do some small task.
Though it's nice to have power user interfaces as well, such as scripting interfaces. I agree with you here. Traditional Unix programs, being command line tools, are inherently scriptable. Very few Windows programs are (one notable exception is MS Office).
But Point and Click doesn't preclude the use of other interfaces in the same peice of software of course.
It is possible to create more efficient technology with lower environmental impact.
Certainly it is possible, but whether or not it produces something which is cheaper to whomever is buying, is a different matter. Sometimes using more efficient technology procuces a cheaper product, like in the case of the energy companies, sometimes it doesn't. If it's cheaper, then obviously people will be more likely to buy it. That seems fundamental. I really don't understand what the reviewer meant by "Radical Resource Productivity".
Think about it. Corporations strive to make money. Their resources are natural and finite. Money is created by government agencies and is of unlimited supply. As long as the objective is to make money and the potential supply of money is infinite, there can be no equilibrium with the environment.
Money, rather than being created by governments, is created by banks in most captialist contries. Banks create money by making loans; that is, if a bank makes a loan for some amount of money, then that amount is new money that enters the economy.
The original Amiga was innovative. Hopefully this one will be too. At one time, the original Amiga was new and alien itself. The technological landscape today is vastly different to then; obviously any sort of innovation today must be different too.
It's not a shell. It can run hosted by another OS or, at some time in the future it is planned, natively.
C is sometimes refered to as portable assembly, because it is at a (sort of) similar level of abstraction as assembly and is (sort of) portable. There are some compilers out there, for various languages, that target C rather than a particular assembly language.
But getting back on topic: Elate has its own Virtual Machine, with its own assembly language and machine code. This machine code is automatically translated to native machine code on the user's machine. This means of course that binaries can be distributed and work automatically on any supported architecture.
I'm quite let down on Slashdot posting this -- it's obvious that there is more than a single truth on the matter and Slashdot is just adding ammunition to an internal id battle on the issue.
Uh, Slashdot is just reporting the news. JC's plan is on the public record. It's newsworthy. You are free to make of it what you will.
Nah, people learn fastest by doing stuff hands on. Kids dig being able to make the computer do fun stuff like animation and games. You can learn logic along with the programming.
IMHO you should avoid C and C++ as languages to learn on. Both are excellent languages, but require a lot of attention to low-level details, which could easily obscure the more important programming lessons to be learned.
Yes, I had a quick look at alice a few years ago. It's a lot of fun; and because it's graphical, it should appeal to kids.
Forget Basic, kids should be learning OOP. Alice is good because it has a very approachable use of objects. Basically the idea is, you have graphical objects in a 3D world, and you can do things to the objects.
Apart from that, Python is a very nice, low cruft language.
The prevoius post was marked redundant because the moderator, with great prescience, could tell that some wit would feel compelled to make this joke again;) and they were right. I wouldn't be surprised to see the joke made again below.
Another reason that it was marked redundant, as another poster pointed out, was that the article preempted the joke. In fact, the article was called ``Amiga Are No April Fools''.
A third reason it was marked redundant was that Amiga (the company) made the joke first by choosing to make their announcement on April Fools day.
The current track record of companies attempting to resurrect the Amiga name.
The failure for the current Amiga-name owner to announce anything earth shattering technically speaking.
The fact that the company is relying on the Amiga name to sell something that, in all likelyhood, will NOT be backwards-compatible. And if this is the case, and you DO have something technically earth-shattering, then why not give it its own name and let it stand on its own merits?
Yours points are addressed correspondingly below.
Completely bogus! The track record of one group of people has no bearing on the success of an essentially unrelated, other group of people.
They haven't really announced any technical details yet. Really, we can't make any definitive judgements yet, we'll have to wait and see. I found Elate to be earth shattering (well at least it might cause a few minor tsunamis). That is if it is as good as the marketing blurb ( www.tao-group.com ) makes it out to be. Also, some of the ideas for the Operating Environment that were being kicked around were very inovative. But again, we'll have to wait and see.
It will be backwards compatible. Linux and Windows are backwards compatible with the classic Amiga. Emulators run the old software faster than any classic Amiga can (and if it doesn't, it will only take an iteration or two of Moore's law). I'm not sure if the new Amiga (the company) has the rights to the (classic) AmigaOS or not; if they do then they can distribute it with the new platform of course. Why use the name "Amiga"? Well no doubt for the brand recognition. Anyway, according to the article, the new OS called Amie; the company is called Amiga.
Then it's not an Amiga. Ever since Jay Miner passed away, I've had no hope. And now that Carl Sassenrath is busy with Rebol, how can you assume that this new Amiga will be *anything* like the old ones that we all know and love?
According to the article, the new OS is called Amie. The company is called Amiga, but I think the platform isn't. I seem to rembember reading Fleecy Moss (head guy at Amiga) saying they didn't want to call the platform "Amiga" precisely because of concerns such as yours.
It should be noted though that this new Amiga has grown out of the Amiga community, and seems to have the support of at least a large proportion of it (not that I'm an active member of the Amiga community). Hopefully the new Amiga will be as inovative as the original, and thus be worthy of the name.
Then how is it the Amiga? Oh wait, I get it - it'll have the same cheap 1980s "design" and look like it was designed by someone on drugs. Which it probably was, what with all the "Guru meditation" rubbish that it produced. And as for more functionality, well, I'll believe it when (and if) I see it.
The classic AmigaOS had cheap 1980s "design"? Funny, it always seemed like a pretty elegant piece software to me. Surely you can't be thinking about the case design...
I'm not sure what issue you have with the Guru Meditation. Seems like a pretty standard thing to have the OS alert the user when it has an unrecoverable error.
Why is there any reason to believe that they will succeed when so many others have failed? The Amiga seems to be very dead indeed, and the many half-arsed attempts to bring it back always end in failure. I don't see anything different about this one. If anything, the previous failures should have convinced them not to bother.
You didn't seem to understand the point I was trying to make, that this new Amiga is being produced by a different set of people to the previous attempts. Because they are different group, the antics of previous groups has no particular influence on this group. Surely these new people have to be judged on there own merits. My opinion, FWIW as a casual observer, is that they are a clever and dedicated.
No need to speculate, it won't be based on the Linux kernel, it will be based on the Elate kernal.
One thing that may be confusing people is that Gateway, the previous owners of Amiga, had announced an OS that would be based on the Linux kernel (which came to nothing).
Whenever there is a post on Slashdot about the Amiga, someone always makes a comment like the above (almost word for word).
Some facts that you don't seem to see:
1. This will be a new OS, not the old floppy disk based one. Hopefully with functionality that is more advanced than ``modern'' OSes like Linux or W2k.
2. This is a different group of people doing this new Amiga; which implies that the previous attempts have little bearing on this one. If anything, the previous failures will make this team more resolute.
Slashdot Mirror
What exactly does ``stretching its content past the breaking point'' mean. I tried, but couldn't make any sense of it.
BTW I once got a copy of Microsoft Works (a cut down office suite) bundled with a computer. It wasn't very good, but it did _work_, so it's not really an oxymoron ;)
I get that too, with IE but not with Netscape.
Though it's nice to have power user interfaces as well, such as scripting interfaces. I agree with you here. Traditional Unix programs, being command line tools, are inherently scriptable. Very few Windows programs are (one notable exception is MS Office).
But Point and Click doesn't preclude the use of other interfaces in the same peice of software of course.
Why bother using it when there alternatives? Simply because many people like it. Why else?
It sounds bogus to me though. MS announced Windows in 1983 (didn't ship until 1985).
That Bill Gates quote appears to be an urban legend.
It is possible to create more efficient technology with lower environmental impact.
Certainly it is possible, but whether or not it produces something which is cheaper to whomever is buying, is a different matter. Sometimes using more efficient technology procuces a cheaper product, like in the case of the energy companies, sometimes it doesn't. If it's cheaper, then obviously people will be more likely to buy it. That seems fundamental. I really don't understand what the reviewer meant by "Radical Resource Productivity".
Think about it. Corporations strive to make money. Their resources are natural and finite. Money is created by government agencies and is of unlimited supply. As long as the objective is to make money and the potential supply of money is infinite, there can be no equilibrium with the environment.
Money, rather than being created by governments, is created by banks in most captialist contries. Banks create money by making loans; that is, if a bank makes a loan for some amount of money, then that amount is new money that enters the economy.
I remember Pike
He had a light bulb only
To flash yes or no
It's not a shell. It can run hosted by another OS or, at some time in the future it is planned, natively.
But getting back on topic: Elate has its own Virtual Machine, with its own assembly language and machine code. This machine code is automatically translated to native machine code on the user's machine. This means of course that binaries can be distributed and work automatically on any supported architecture.
Looks like they'll become just another game corp. It's time for someone elseto do the innovations now.
You forget that John Carmack is a technological god. He defines the bleeding edge.
I'm quite let down on Slashdot posting this -- it's obvious that there is more than a single truth on the matter and Slashdot is just adding ammunition to an internal id battle on the issue.
Uh, Slashdot is just reporting the news. JC's plan is on the public record. It's newsworthy. You are free to make of it what you will.
The Director of Strategic Business Development's was quite appropriate, if you consider that he may not have known osm is a self confessed Troll.
Nah, people learn fastest by doing stuff hands on. Kids dig being able to make the computer do fun stuff like animation and games. You can learn logic along with the programming.
IMHO you should avoid C and C++ as languages to learn on. Both are excellent languages, but require a lot of attention to low-level details, which could easily obscure the more important programming lessons to be learned.
Yes, I had a quick look at alice a few years ago. It's a lot of fun; and because it's graphical, it should appeal to kids.
Forget Basic, kids should be learning OOP. Alice is good because it has a very approachable use of objects. Basically the idea is, you have graphical objects in a 3D world, and you can do things to the objects.
Apart from that, Python is a very nice, low cruft language.
The prevoius post was marked redundant because the moderator, with great prescience, could tell that some wit would feel compelled to make this joke again ;) and they were right. I wouldn't be surprised to see the joke made again below.
Another reason that it was marked redundant, as another poster pointed out, was that the article preempted the joke. In fact, the article was called ``Amiga Are No April Fools''.
A third reason it was marked redundant was that Amiga (the company) made the joke first by choosing to make their announcement on April Fools day.
A number of reasons:
Yours points are addressed correspondingly below.
Why use the name "Amiga"? Well no doubt for the brand recognition. Anyway, according to the article, the new OS called Amie; the company is called Amiga.
Then it's not an Amiga. Ever since Jay Miner passed away, I've had no hope. And now that Carl Sassenrath is busy with Rebol, how can you assume that this new Amiga will be *anything* like the old ones that we all know and love?
According to the article, the new OS is called Amie. The company is called Amiga, but I think the platform isn't. I seem to rembember reading Fleecy Moss (head guy at Amiga) saying they didn't want to call the platform "Amiga" precisely because of concerns such as yours.
It should be noted though that this new Amiga has grown out of the Amiga community, and seems to have the support of at least a large proportion of it (not that I'm an active member of the Amiga community). Hopefully the new Amiga will be as inovative as the original, and thus be worthy of the name.
Then how is it the Amiga? Oh wait, I get it - it'll have the same cheap 1980s "design" and look like it was designed by someone on drugs. Which it probably was, what with all the "Guru meditation" rubbish that it produced. And as for more functionality, well, I'll believe it when (and if) I see it.
The classic AmigaOS had cheap 1980s "design"? Funny, it always seemed like a pretty elegant piece software to me. Surely you can't be thinking about the case design ...
I'm not sure what issue you have with the Guru Meditation. Seems like a pretty standard thing to have the OS alert the user when it has an unrecoverable error.
Why is there any reason to believe that they will succeed when so many others have failed? The Amiga seems to be very dead indeed, and the many half-arsed attempts to bring it back always end in failure. I don't see anything different about this one. If anything, the previous failures should have convinced them not to bother.
You didn't seem to understand the point I was trying to make, that this new Amiga is being produced by a different set of people to the previous attempts. Because they are different group, the antics of previous groups has no particular influence on this group. Surely these new people have to be judged on there own merits. My opinion, FWIW as a casual observer, is that they are a clever and dedicated.
No need to speculate, it won't be based on the Linux kernel, it will be based on the Elate kernal.
One thing that may be confusing people is that Gateway, the previous owners of Amiga, had announced an OS that would be based on the Linux kernel (which came to nothing).
[...] And although it had some great cutting-edge software, it was mostly about the hardware.
And the OS had nothing to do with it?
[...] I can't imagine that any new platform could actually regain the glory that the original had
You're not really trying. I'm sure you could imagine it if you tried.
Let the Amiga die with some dignity!
You are presupposing that they will fail. Why?
Whenever there is a post on Slashdot about the Amiga, someone always makes a comment like the above (almost word for word).
Some facts that you don't seem to see:
1. This will be a new OS, not the old floppy disk based one. Hopefully with functionality that is more advanced than ``modern'' OSes like Linux or W2k.
2. This is a different group of people doing this new Amiga; which implies that the previous attempts have little bearing on this one. If anything, the previous failures will make this team more resolute.