Fair enough, I guess there are probably a few people still using classic MacOS who would bitch about OS X not being a Mac, it's just a shame the Amiga stories always get a lot more of the "it's only using the trademark" comments.
It's not even over now. It was over many long years ago.
Play with the legacy hardware if you like (Hell, I was drooling over a Cray X-MP at the National Cryptologic Museum not too long ago), but mentally - guys, MENTALLY - join us here in the current century, OK?
But who are you referring to when you say "join us here in the current century, OK?"
You see, every Amiga story on Slashdot gets flooded with "It's dead" comments, but I find it hard to see comments from anyone advocating the Amiga has the best machine ever. In fact, I've found it hard to see those comments in about the last 10 years. Even on Amiga forums, about 5-10 years ago, most Amiga users still seemed to also have other platforms, and the extremely rare "The Amiga is better than PC" post got shot down even by Amiga users themselves.
If you mean the fact that people are still developing in it, well there are plenty of niche platforms, both old and new, being worked on, which occasionally get mentioned on Slashdot. No one trolls on those threads though.
So I think the only ones who need to mentally join us in this century are the ones who seem to be stuck in the 1990s PC vs Amiga flamewar mode...
Re:That's not our Amiga; It's Amiga-branded
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AmigaOS 4
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· Score: 1
I don't entirely disagree with the spirit of your post, but it's false to say it's just a trademark. This OS is an updated AmigaOS, at least as much as modern versions of other OSs are updated versions of their predecessors. In fact, it's "Macintosh" which is just a trademark, as the original MacOS was ditched, and the hardware platform is different now too.
not the underwhelming output of some company whose only real purpose is to figure out how to extract revenue from the copyrights and trademarks for a 20-year-old technology.
I dare you to post that in an Apple thread, and see how fast you get modded down...
Extracting copyright and trademark would apply to enforcing copyrights on the old software. Writing new versions and using the trademarks they have a right to use doesn't seem comparable, and is what all companies do.
Obviously a disk booted when you first switched on the machine, this is how all platforms work. It's just that back then it was common to have machines without hard disks, and games booted direct from disk, which became a virus target. If I booted a PC with my own boot disk, I could get it to do whatever I liked too - this isn't really comparable to the situation on a platform today, and yes, the Amiga has happily worked as a platform with a hard disk for ooh, about a couple of decades now.
When the OS is running, floppies do not "autoboot" (unlike CDs on Windows...)
But yes, in general it was the "worst" because it was the most popular home machine for a time.
Seriously - all the Mac articles focus on pointing out flaws in Windows, rather than telling us the killer unique app for Macs, yet everytime an Amiga article comes along, there's a load of comments asking for unique wonderful features that don't exist on any other platform.
I'm not disagreeing with your point by the way, but I can't help noticing that people always seem to hold the Amiga to a higher standard (you see this with other things on Slashdot too - e.g., Firefox gets "IE is crap", Opera gets "Why should I use Opera?").
What is it about space stories (whether it's the US, or elsewhere) that always brings out the "Won't somebody think of the poor?" comments?
I knew I'd see something like this as soon as I saw this article - and indeed, two comments in the top ten posts.
Why do people not make the same charitable "Think of the poor" suggestions for other things? Most notably military spending, but Governments spend all sorts of money on things other than helping poor people. No one complains then. Indeed, usually you get the opposite response - "Why should I have to pay for poor people?"
Are you shitting me? I have NEVER YET seen a Kernel Panic in Mac OS X. Yet I have seen Windows 2000 "STOP Error" once or twice, and even more times with Windows XP. And of course, WinDOwS 3.11/95/98/ME would bluescreen at the drop of a hat.
Anecdotes don't make evidence. And what on earth does 3.11/95/98/ME have to do with anything? These are not the same operating system, and at their time OS X didn't even exist, because Apple were still faffing around trying to work out how to get a half-decent OS for the Macintosh computer. If you do want to compare previous OSs from Apple vs Microsoft, then we're comparing to the joke that was the "classic" MacOS...
Come on now - if I decided to compare Vista/XP to classic MacOS, I'd obviously be modded down, but this gets Insightful?
Sweet Jesus no. Windows UI, XP and later, is ugly and sucky and makes me want to replace it with KDE. Yes, you can turn off the "Themes" service and get something that is somewhat like the "Classic" Windows 2000 interface. But it's only SOMEWHAT like it. It's just different enough to make me want to punch someone at times.
Well, the look sucks and I much prefer the classic Windows interface too, but I prefer it over the OS X look too; both OS X and Vista/XP are bad in the same way. Furthermore, the irony is that it seems that Microsoft only went this direction in response to OS X, with everyone saying how cool it looked, so it's Apple to blame for that one.
I have to respectfully disagree. I also work on OS X every day. Reliability-wise, my OS X machine has crashed one time in 2 years. That cannot be said for ANY of the Windows machines I have used (they seem to do well if they crash 1 time in 1 week).
And I work with Windows everyday, and it's never crashed, in several years. I guess anecdotes don't make evidence.
Sane UI choices - OS X does not ignore the last two decades worth of human/computer interaction research.
Examples?
OpenStep application bundles - drag and drop installation and uninstallation of most applications, e-mail or IM working programs without having to save installers, run software off an ipod or thumb drive without having to install (including remembering per-machine preferences), easy binaries for multiple platforms, finding resources in packages is much easier and requires no tools.
Drag and drop works fine on Windows, it's just that most applications choose to give you a wizard to force-feed you the EULA, or offer you to set some preferences. Running software off an external drive works fine too, it depends on the software.
Security - for a variety of reasons that don't matter to most end users, OS X users have never had to worry about malware or worms and probably will not have to in the foreseeable future.
Nor do Commodore 64 users.
Upgrading hardware - upgrading a mac to a mac is as easy as plugging in a firewire cable clicking a button. This saves a lot of time and effort, amazingly better
Ubiquitous zeroconf - automatically and instantly finds printers, local chat, streaming music, file shares, and collaborative documents
All works fine for me on Windows.
Emulation/ports/virtualization/compatability - it is easier to run Linux and Windows software on OS X and there are more options to do so on OS X, than there are to run Linux and OS X apps on Windows (yeah I know about cygwin and Apple's licensing and the relative number of apps)
This assumes I want to run OS X in the first place. Yes, emulation may be an important issue, but there's all sorts of different platforms (especially older platforms where there's more of a need to emulate due to lack of modern hardware for them), and some are better at others at emulating various ones.
Easier support of third party devices, plug them in and they just work much more often.
Again, no problem these days on Windows.
Don't get me wrong, Windows sucks in lots of ways. But that doesn't automatically make OS X great, it's necessary to show why OS X in particular is the best.
Windows might have died years ago if Apple had made an operating system for the PC.
I agree with the rest of your post, but not here - OS X would have been too late to move the Windows monopoly (and would have suffered the same problems as BeOS). Before then, you just had (the original) MacOS which might have attracted a small number of users, but had its own flaws and wasn't anything special, and probably would have done a lot worse than it did as a separate platform.
I, too, became a first-time Mac user this week (well, with one exception; 9 years ago I briefly used a Mac with OS 7.6.1 at a job, and it sucked horribly. Crashed numerous times every day and was just a general PITA. Windows 95 *was* better than that thing)
Well it's not like they have anything in common except the brandname. I agree, it did suck, all the better that MacOS (i.e., classic, not the new "OS X" one) is long dead.
But surely it's even worse than that? Can you point to a single thing that Vista lets you do - as an average Joe six-pack - that even Windows 98 does not let you do? Indeed going further, is there anything you can do with Vista that would even be easier to do than with Windows 98?
Run without crashing or needing reboots all the time? Not having to reinstall every six months...?
Your comparison might be better with Vista vs 2000 - but what new things do you think should be possible in Vista, that aren't? Are there any other OSs offering wonderful new features?
does anyone else here think it seems a bit odd to print a number with 16 decimal places then stick an E+08 at the end, why not just an 8 digit number with 8 decimal places?
It means you can see at a glance how big it is, without having to count the digits.
I'm more curious that they think they can measure Jupiter's position to a fraction of a millimetre, or the velocities to a fraction of a nanometre per second...
The debate about a war comes before the war starts, once it's on, it's on, and all the whining and bitching in the world won't change that.... [snip long rant]
So why don't you accept what's happened, and quit whining?
That was only 12 years ago.. I doubt the situations have changed much where suddenly all the kids have a cell phone now. Cell phones are for super-elite rich kids.
Things haven't changed much? Mobile phones are probably one of the technologies that have changed the most in the last 12 years, going from something which only a few people had back in 1995, to something which virtually everyone has!
I didn't get one until I was 21 - but my decision wasn't based on age ("Well I'm 21, time to get a phone"), it was based on the fact that they were cheap, and enough of my friends had one to make it worthwhile.
Most physics so far has been based on real things: mass, electrons,... Strings are just a modelling tool.
Science has been modelling with "non-real" things at least as far back as Newton, when the concept of a "force" was invented, even though no one had any idea what a force really was. Can you tell me what the reality of mass and energy is? What about particles and waves?
No longer are we improving our observations.
I'm not sure what you mean by "improving observations", but there are certainly attempts to observe more (e.g., particle accelerators). The purpose is then to improve models to match these observations better.
The US have some weird attitudes to tits and nudity (playboy ain't really porn).
Agreed, though it isn't just the US. The UK still has outdated obscenity laws, and you can be charged for showing non-approved material to someone (even if they are an adult who wants to see it), or for importing a video from abroad that wasn't approved by the censors. (Admittedly, this doesn't include playboy as it's legal to publish, but then again I wouldn't be surprised if there were laws about showing it to minors.)
The Government, unable to cope with the fact that they aren't able to censor the Internet, are now planning to criminalise possession (they're using words like "extreme porn", but it's about criminalising possession because some people think the images are too naughty - see http://www.backlash-uk.org.uk/ for more info). Mediawatch are currently petitioning the Government to also criminalise possession of a wider range of (currently legal to publish) porn. (A counter petition is here, or see the one in my.sig.)
Also note that the Government defines porn to be anything which was intended to arouse, so could be broad enough to cover anything erotic (i.e., it doesn't have to be sexually explicit).
Tell them about Firefox, suggest that they get a Mac next time.
Well I'm no great fan of Windows, but I don't think not getting a Mac is a reason to lay blame...
All good points - at the end of the day, it's just trademarks. There may be some parts in common, there may not, but the choice of name is decided by what brand name a company thinks is best, not what the technology is (it's not like there's going to be much if anything left over from "classic" Mac OS, as opposed to Mac OS X).
I remember when various new versions of AmigaOS were being proposed over the last decade - strangely in those situations, everyone on Slashdot was screaming about how "It's not an Amiga" - even in the cases where it certainly was a next version of the same OS, just because it had dropped some older things or wouldn't run on an Amiga 500. Yet on the Apple articles, it's accepted that all sorts of different systems are all "Macs" (and anyone even suggesting otherwise gets modded down, as you did...)
If Apple bought the trademark, they could just as easily say the iPhone ran BeOS - indeed, if history had gone different, BeOS would have been called "Mac OS X"...
Slashdot Mirror
And you can't apply the mathematical definition of "proof" to non-mathematics.
Fair enough, I guess there are probably a few people still using classic MacOS who would bitch about OS X not being a Mac, it's just a shame the Amiga stories always get a lot more of the "it's only using the trademark" comments.
But it's commonplace for car manufacturers to reuse brandnames for newer models of cars, there's nothing misleadning about that.
And someone better complain about Apple for slapping the "Mac" label on something which today is completely different...
They have a legal right to the trademark, so it's not like you describe.
You missed the chance to sell him it for "a few hundred bucks"! ;)
It's not even over now. It was over many long years ago.
Play with the legacy hardware if you like (Hell, I was drooling over a Cray X-MP at the National Cryptologic Museum not too long ago), but mentally - guys, MENTALLY - join us here in the current century, OK?
But who are you referring to when you say "join us here in the current century, OK?"
You see, every Amiga story on Slashdot gets flooded with "It's dead" comments, but I find it hard to see comments from anyone advocating the Amiga has the best machine ever. In fact, I've found it hard to see those comments in about the last 10 years. Even on Amiga forums, about 5-10 years ago, most Amiga users still seemed to also have other platforms, and the extremely rare "The Amiga is better than PC" post got shot down even by Amiga users themselves.
If you mean the fact that people are still developing in it, well there are plenty of niche platforms, both old and new, being worked on, which occasionally get mentioned on Slashdot. No one trolls on those threads though.
So I think the only ones who need to mentally join us in this century are the ones who seem to be stuck in the 1990s PC vs Amiga flamewar mode...
I don't entirely disagree with the spirit of your post, but it's false to say it's just a trademark. This OS is an updated AmigaOS, at least as much as modern versions of other OSs are updated versions of their predecessors. In fact, it's "Macintosh" which is just a trademark, as the original MacOS was ditched, and the hardware platform is different now too.
not the underwhelming output of some company whose only real purpose is to figure out how to extract revenue from the copyrights and trademarks for a 20-year-old technology.
I dare you to post that in an Apple thread, and see how fast you get modded down...
Extracting copyright and trademark would apply to enforcing copyrights on the old software. Writing new versions and using the trademarks they have a right to use doesn't seem comparable, and is what all companies do.
Although note that's not really a browser problem, but that the OS didn't properly support 8 bit graphics until 1992.
What sort of autobooting are you talking about?
Obviously a disk booted when you first switched on the machine, this is how all platforms work. It's just that back then it was common to have machines without hard disks, and games booted direct from disk, which became a virus target. If I booted a PC with my own boot disk, I could get it to do whatever I liked too - this isn't really comparable to the situation on a platform today, and yes, the Amiga has happily worked as a platform with a hard disk for ooh, about a couple of decades now.
When the OS is running, floppies do not "autoboot" (unlike CDs on Windows...)
But yes, in general it was the "worst" because it was the most popular home machine for a time.
What's the killer app for Macs?
Seriously - all the Mac articles focus on pointing out flaws in Windows, rather than telling us the killer unique app for Macs, yet everytime an Amiga article comes along, there's a load of comments asking for unique wonderful features that don't exist on any other platform.
I'm not disagreeing with your point by the way, but I can't help noticing that people always seem to hold the Amiga to a higher standard (you see this with other things on Slashdot too - e.g., Firefox gets "IE is crap", Opera gets "Why should I use Opera?").
Yes, clearly, the only possible two choices are "Spend money on space" and "Spend money on food for the poor".
What is it about space stories (whether it's the US, or elsewhere) that always brings out the "Won't somebody think of the poor?" comments?
I knew I'd see something like this as soon as I saw this article - and indeed, two comments in the top ten posts.
Why do people not make the same charitable "Think of the poor" suggestions for other things? Most notably military spending, but Governments spend all sorts of money on things other than helping poor people. No one complains then. Indeed, usually you get the opposite response - "Why should I have to pay for poor people?"
Are you shitting me? I have NEVER YET seen a Kernel Panic in Mac OS X. Yet I have seen Windows 2000 "STOP Error" once or twice, and even more times with Windows XP. And of course, WinDOwS 3.11/95/98/ME would bluescreen at the drop of a hat.
Anecdotes don't make evidence. And what on earth does 3.11/95/98/ME have to do with anything? These are not the same operating system, and at their time OS X didn't even exist, because Apple were still faffing around trying to work out how to get a half-decent OS for the Macintosh computer. If you do want to compare previous OSs from Apple vs Microsoft, then we're comparing to the joke that was the "classic" MacOS...
Come on now - if I decided to compare Vista/XP to classic MacOS, I'd obviously be modded down, but this gets Insightful?
Sweet Jesus no. Windows UI, XP and later, is ugly and sucky and makes me want to replace it with KDE. Yes, you can turn off the "Themes" service and get something that is somewhat like the "Classic" Windows 2000 interface. But it's only SOMEWHAT like it. It's just different enough to make me want to punch someone at times.
Well, the look sucks and I much prefer the classic Windows interface too, but I prefer it over the OS X look too; both OS X and Vista/XP are bad in the same way. Furthermore, the irony is that it seems that Microsoft only went this direction in response to OS X, with everyone saying how cool it looked, so it's Apple to blame for that one.
and certainly not so big as in the days of Windows 3.1/MacOS 7.
;) Well, I guess it's like comparing shit with slightly-less-shit; at least we had more alternatives back then.
MacOS 7 was superior?
I have to respectfully disagree. I also work on OS X every day. Reliability-wise, my OS X machine has crashed one time in 2 years. That cannot be said for ANY of the Windows machines I have used (they seem to do well if they crash 1 time in 1 week).
And I work with Windows everyday, and it's never crashed, in several years. I guess anecdotes don't make evidence.
Sane UI choices - OS X does not ignore the last two decades worth of human/computer interaction research.
Examples?
OpenStep application bundles - drag and drop installation and uninstallation of most applications, e-mail or IM working programs without having to save installers, run software off an ipod or thumb drive without having to install (including remembering per-machine preferences), easy binaries for multiple platforms, finding resources in packages is much easier and requires no tools.
Drag and drop works fine on Windows, it's just that most applications choose to give you a wizard to force-feed you the EULA, or offer you to set some preferences. Running software off an external drive works fine too, it depends on the software.
Security - for a variety of reasons that don't matter to most end users, OS X users have never had to worry about malware or worms and probably will not have to in the foreseeable future.
Nor do Commodore 64 users.
Upgrading hardware - upgrading a mac to a mac is as easy as plugging in a firewire cable clicking a button. This saves a lot of time and effort, amazingly better
Ubiquitous zeroconf - automatically and instantly finds printers, local chat, streaming music, file shares, and collaborative documents
All works fine for me on Windows.
Emulation/ports/virtualization/compatability - it is easier to run Linux and Windows software on OS X and there are more options to do so on OS X, than there are to run Linux and OS X apps on Windows (yeah I know about cygwin and Apple's licensing and the relative number of apps)
This assumes I want to run OS X in the first place. Yes, emulation may be an important issue, but there's all sorts of different platforms (especially older platforms where there's more of a need to emulate due to lack of modern hardware for them), and some are better at others at emulating various ones.
Easier support of third party devices, plug them in and they just work much more often.
Again, no problem these days on Windows.
Don't get me wrong, Windows sucks in lots of ways. But that doesn't automatically make OS X great, it's necessary to show why OS X in particular is the best.
Windows might have died years ago if Apple had made an operating system for the PC.
I agree with the rest of your post, but not here - OS X would have been too late to move the Windows monopoly (and would have suffered the same problems as BeOS). Before then, you just had (the original) MacOS which might have attracted a small number of users, but had its own flaws and wasn't anything special, and probably would have done a lot worse than it did as a separate platform.
I, too, became a first-time Mac user this week (well, with one exception; 9 years ago I briefly used a Mac with OS 7.6.1 at a job, and it sucked horribly. Crashed numerous times every day and was just a general PITA. Windows 95 *was* better than that thing)
Well it's not like they have anything in common except the brandname. I agree, it did suck, all the better that MacOS (i.e., classic, not the new "OS X" one) is long dead.
But surely it's even worse than that? Can you point to a single thing that Vista lets you do - as an average Joe six-pack - that even Windows 98 does not let you do? Indeed going further, is there anything you can do with Vista that would even be easier to do than with Windows 98?
Run without crashing or needing reboots all the time? Not having to reinstall every six months...?
Your comparison might be better with Vista vs 2000 - but what new things do you think should be possible in Vista, that aren't? Are there any other OSs offering wonderful new features?
does anyone else here think it seems a bit odd to print a number with 16 decimal places then stick an E+08 at the end, why not just an 8 digit number with 8 decimal places?
It means you can see at a glance how big it is, without having to count the digits.
I'm more curious that they think they can measure Jupiter's position to a fraction of a millimetre, or the velocities to a fraction of a nanometre per second...
The debate about a war comes before the war starts, once it's on, it's on, and all the whining and bitching in the world won't change that. ... [snip long rant]
So why don't you accept what's happened, and quit whining?
That was only 12 years ago.. I doubt the situations have changed much where suddenly all the kids have a cell phone now. Cell phones are for super-elite rich kids.
Things haven't changed much? Mobile phones are probably one of the technologies that have changed the most in the last 12 years, going from something which only a few people had back in 1995, to something which virtually everyone has!
I didn't get one until I was 21 - but my decision wasn't based on age ("Well I'm 21, time to get a phone"), it was based on the fact that they were cheap, and enough of my friends had one to make it worthwhile.
Most physics so far has been based on real things: mass, electrons,... Strings are just a modelling tool.
Science has been modelling with "non-real" things at least as far back as Newton, when the concept of a "force" was invented, even though no one had any idea what a force really was. Can you tell me what the reality of mass and energy is? What about particles and waves?
No longer are we improving our observations.
I'm not sure what you mean by "improving observations", but there are certainly attempts to observe more (e.g., particle accelerators). The purpose is then to improve models to match these observations better.
But then Macs will become mainstream!
I keep my porn on Amiga formatted floppy disks.
The US have some weird attitudes to tits and nudity (playboy ain't really porn).
.sig.)
Agreed, though it isn't just the US. The UK still has outdated obscenity laws, and you can be charged for showing non-approved material to someone (even if they are an adult who wants to see it), or for importing a video from abroad that wasn't approved by the censors. (Admittedly, this doesn't include playboy as it's legal to publish, but then again I wouldn't be surprised if there were laws about showing it to minors.)
The Government, unable to cope with the fact that they aren't able to censor the Internet, are now planning to criminalise possession (they're using words like "extreme porn", but it's about criminalising possession because some people think the images are too naughty - see http://www.backlash-uk.org.uk/ for more info). Mediawatch are currently petitioning the Government to also criminalise possession of a wider range of (currently legal to publish) porn. (A counter petition is here, or see the one in my
Also note that the Government defines porn to be anything which was intended to arouse, so could be broad enough to cover anything erotic (i.e., it doesn't have to be sexually explicit).
Tell them about Firefox, suggest that they get a Mac next time.
Well I'm no great fan of Windows, but I don't think not getting a Mac is a reason to lay blame...
All good points - at the end of the day, it's just trademarks. There may be some parts in common, there may not, but the choice of name is decided by what brand name a company thinks is best, not what the technology is (it's not like there's going to be much if anything left over from "classic" Mac OS, as opposed to Mac OS X).
I remember when various new versions of AmigaOS were being proposed over the last decade - strangely in those situations, everyone on Slashdot was screaming about how "It's not an Amiga" - even in the cases where it certainly was a next version of the same OS, just because it had dropped some older things or wouldn't run on an Amiga 500. Yet on the Apple articles, it's accepted that all sorts of different systems are all "Macs" (and anyone even suggesting otherwise gets modded down, as you did...)
If Apple bought the trademark, they could just as easily say the iPhone ran BeOS - indeed, if history had gone different, BeOS would have been called "Mac OS X"...