... over zealous dependancy requirements? I get sick of downloading RPMs which refuse to install unless I have this morning's build of QT only to find they run fine when installed with --nodeps.
Haha! I just grabbed the Red Carpet sources because of lack of native RPMS for my system, for now and I thought I'd better go 100% native with this kind of software. Now I've had a few RPM updates and source RPMS built to satisfy dependencies and I still haven't got this miraculous tool compiled yet! I certainly hope this is my last lib.so hell. Expectations UP, reality DOWN!:)
I'd say we could cover most of our needs on an A4000 - definitely one like mine with basically a ported SVGA card, an 060 processor, big drives and a load of RAM. But the 1200 isn't up to that sort of thing, speaking as someone who held out on one until '98.
Now should I be wondering how on Earth did we cover most of our needs in the '85? Or especially in the early '90? Before the time of 060? Or the time of AMD Athlon? Or how can we cover those needs now, prior to those 10 GHz CPU's coming in a few years?
My A3000, currently equipped with lots of neat hardware isn't significantly faster in simple tasks than a plain A1200. That counts using Workbench or shell, running your favorite paint program, text editor or a word processor, creating music etc. Creating a 20-meg truecolor animation, using background pictures of megs in size or decoding cd-quality music is another thing but most people don't need those to be happy using their computer. Waiting a few more seconds to decode a JPEG is more sensible than buying new hardware just to notice the new box can't play mp3's, then buying even newer hardware to notice it can't play mpg4 DivX videos and then buy even more... Uh. Not everyone considers those being really essential tasks. So why would a secretary or the famous Joe User need a high-end machine to roll a document or manage spreadsheets?
The question is that where's the line where developing more revolutionary software and data formats (and due to those, more revolutionary processors) becomes an overkill in comparison to the the level of advance needed for doing all the basic work conveniently and not much more? We probably don't like monochrome screens no more but do we need a 1600x1200x32 at 100Hz to write a document either? I think we've crossed the line many years ago when it comes to basic, daily tasks done with a computer.
I'll probably never use Amiga, but it's still good to see competition in the market.
I think that still using an Amiga is as crazy as using just any other computer system. Or should I say no more crazy than that. Competition doesn't guarantee the victory for the best and the most elegant. Still, things would probably be even worse with no competition at all. Markets ain't fair.
From the ordinary user's point of view things haven't actually evolved much. You want ease of use, fast response time and an intuitive interface to the system having only a bit more features that you'll ever need. No more than that. Except for today's gamers most of us could very well do our daily things with the CPU and hardware power of an A1200. (Some of us did those things even before the whole Amiga era so what's the fuzz?)
It's just that the system environments have blown up. Sure you can't properly view that five-meg MS Word document with an Amiga 1200 but the problem is the five-meg document instead of the computing power and available resources. Writing a few dozen pages of nicely structured and layouted text into a document file wouldn't need to take a Pentium or better only if the applications and the operating system had to be one percent in size of those we use today. And that problem exists not only in the Microsoft realm. The newest Mozilla 0.6 on my computer is still slower than IBrowse on an 68030 equipped Amiga. Why do I find that it's most efficient to write my documents in XEmacs (which I actually loathed few years ago for being such a bloated piece of sticky Lisp) and then layout the plaintext just before printing? Why starting name-your-favorite-office-suite takes an eternity to load up and keeps crashing too? Have I gained anything in comparison to mid 90's when I wrote my documents in WYSIWYG with FinalWriter, browsed the web and even practiced serious programming on my Amiga. (I still have her working all right but using two computers conveniently together is a pain in the ass and PC feeds my family.)
The growth (in size and the needed cpu cycles) of user and programming environments is understandable, of course. However, most of the reasons are silly. Using the horsepower just because it exists makes not much sense. Increasing the available horsepower because of badly written applications choke makes no more sense.
It's nerdish to do thing because you can, without thinking how they should be done. Technocrats seem to think that everything can only be either bloated or cryptic. You don't need all the hundreds of megabytes to build a high-level application development environment where the programmer works more with abstract modules and objects instead of writing raw code, as we once used to say. Even efficient networking doesn't take that much power and resources. And finally, Joe the User wouldn't need most of the things he has today if he hadn't been told to need them.
Then who needs to have a lot of resources and CPU power to consume for nothing? Probably the salesmen. Even hackers are happy with a minimal system that has left something out to hack on. Joe the Users can cope with such, too. I don't think multiplying the megahertzes or gigahertzes by some numbers each year has brought us anything remarkably good, uniquely useful and meaningful. Technology and the markets just have to stabilize their growth, it seems.
Amiga had most of the nice things we have today about ten years ago. I hope the Amiga Inc. or whatever company it is today will survive for another ten years. It's somehow comforting to have it there, somewhere.
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Haha! I just grabbed the Red Carpet sources because of lack of native RPMS for my system, for now and I thought I'd better go 100% native with this kind of software. Now I've had a few RPM updates and source RPMS built to satisfy dependencies and I still haven't got this miraculous tool compiled yet! I certainly hope this is my last lib.so hell. Expectations UP, reality DOWN! :)
Now should I be wondering how on Earth did we cover most of our needs in the '85? Or especially in the early '90? Before the time of 060? Or the time of AMD Athlon? Or how can we cover those needs now, prior to those 10 GHz CPU's coming in a few years?
My A3000, currently equipped with lots of neat hardware isn't significantly faster in simple tasks than a plain A1200. That counts using Workbench or shell, running your favorite paint program, text editor or a word processor, creating music etc. Creating a 20-meg truecolor animation, using background pictures of megs in size or decoding cd-quality music is another thing but most people don't need those to be happy using their computer. Waiting a few more seconds to decode a JPEG is more sensible than buying new hardware just to notice the new box can't play mp3's, then buying even newer hardware to notice it can't play mpg4 DivX videos and then buy even more... Uh. Not everyone considers those being really essential tasks. So why would a secretary or the famous Joe User need a high-end machine to roll a document or manage spreadsheets?
The question is that where's the line where developing more revolutionary software and data formats (and due to those, more revolutionary processors) becomes an overkill in comparison to the the level of advance needed for doing all the basic work conveniently and not much more? We probably don't like monochrome screens no more but do we need a 1600x1200x32 at 100Hz to write a document either? I think we've crossed the line many years ago when it comes to basic, daily tasks done with a computer.
I think that still using an Amiga is as crazy as using just any other computer system. Or should I say no more crazy than that. Competition doesn't guarantee the victory for the best and the most elegant. Still, things would probably be even worse with no competition at all. Markets ain't fair.
From the ordinary user's point of view things haven't actually evolved much. You want ease of use, fast response time and an intuitive interface to the system having only a bit more features that you'll ever need. No more than that. Except for today's gamers most of us could very well do our daily things with the CPU and hardware power of an A1200. (Some of us did those things even before the whole Amiga era so what's the fuzz?)
It's just that the system environments have blown up. Sure you can't properly view that five-meg MS Word document with an Amiga 1200 but the problem is the five-meg document instead of the computing power and available resources. Writing a few dozen pages of nicely structured and layouted text into a document file wouldn't need to take a Pentium or better only if the applications and the operating system had to be one percent in size of those we use today. And that problem exists not only in the Microsoft realm. The newest Mozilla 0.6 on my computer is still slower than IBrowse on an 68030 equipped Amiga. Why do I find that it's most efficient to write my documents in XEmacs (which I actually loathed few years ago for being such a bloated piece of sticky Lisp) and then layout the plaintext just before printing? Why starting name-your-favorite-office-suite takes an eternity to load up and keeps crashing too? Have I gained anything in comparison to mid 90's when I wrote my documents in WYSIWYG with FinalWriter, browsed the web and even practiced serious programming on my Amiga. (I still have her working all right but using two computers conveniently together is a pain in the ass and PC feeds my family.)
The growth (in size and the needed cpu cycles) of user and programming environments is understandable, of course. However, most of the reasons are silly. Using the horsepower just because it exists makes not much sense. Increasing the available horsepower because of badly written applications choke makes no more sense. It's nerdish to do thing because you can, without thinking how they should be done. Technocrats seem to think that everything can only be either bloated or cryptic. You don't need all the hundreds of megabytes to build a high-level application development environment where the programmer works more with abstract modules and objects instead of writing raw code, as we once used to say. Even efficient networking doesn't take that much power and resources. And finally, Joe the User wouldn't need most of the things he has today if he hadn't been told to need them.
Then who needs to have a lot of resources and CPU power to consume for nothing? Probably the salesmen. Even hackers are happy with a minimal system that has left something out to hack on. Joe the Users can cope with such, too. I don't think multiplying the megahertzes or gigahertzes by some numbers each year has brought us anything remarkably good, uniquely useful and meaningful. Technology and the markets just have to stabilize their growth, it seems.
Amiga had most of the nice things we have today about ten years ago. I hope the Amiga Inc. or whatever company it is today will survive for another ten years. It's somehow comforting to have it there, somewhere.