I have been thinking about this myself, there is a solution for this problem for small innovative games developers. It lays with the console makers. If Nintendo, or Microsoft want to beat out Sony, they could provide a full suite of engines for little or no money. Any game producer could use it and build on the engines over time. We can only hope the console makers wake up to the hurdles to small companies innovating on their platforms. I for one have been sitting on two games ideas that have nothing to do with any current genres... not even close. But with my current life situation I can never see them to reallisation.
In case you missed it, RE4 on the Gamecube uses the game engine and modles for the cut scenes. It is wonderful to play as yoou never know when the cut scene is no longer the cus scene and you are in the thick of it (some of the button combos during these parts are a little annoying).
I have a couple of requests, if you would be so kind to consider them and then pass them on.
The first is a splinter argument of the "genre" point. I want to see less jingoism in games. I understand the need to add American heroes into every game for the American market, but I stopped buying games a few years ago that had anything close to rabid American jingoism. I do like the occasional game based on war, but I want to play that WWII game as a Kiwi, Australian, Brit, Gurkha, and even an arian SS soldier. I also want to play that shoot the terrorist game in reverse. If you have all the models, all the levels, all the sound and the game engine, can't someone be hired to write a story for the terrorist to sneak in and shoot up the American troops? It could be sold as a different title if you are worried about a backlash. Alternatively it could sell as an add-on to a game. This argument crosses over to the immersion part of the problem. American troops did not fight every battle (in fact WWII went on happily, with Allied troops winning the African front for years before USA got involved. WWI also had USA coming in toward the end) so it ruins the believability when you only have American troops to capture the Enigma machine when USA was not even in the war at that point.
My second point is the lack of anything naughty. The "Nipple" point. Again you have most of what you need to start this already. You have the levels, you have most of the models, you have the story... why cant two versions be marketed at the same time to two different age groups? With the option of buying and downloading games for the next generation of consoles this may be a very easy option for games developers. If a console can be registered to one adult with no child lock asked for by the owner, then the "adult" game can be purchased and downloaded for that machine. Many people do get annoyed that most game development has moved from Europe to Japan and USA as most of the world (mostly) views nudity as part of life and not a perversion worse than portraying a gruesome death by blowing a persons head off so the heart can be pulled out of the gaping hole in the top of the neck.
Give us some options PLEASE! You may even find that teens in USA may want to play the anti hero terrorists after completing the game as the all conquering American troops.
I put it to you that you lied in your original post. You claimed to run a network of more than a thousand machines with not one of many things, including BSOD. It is interesting to note that in your second post while explaining how you did it you mention having to reinstall the OS and software from an image. If there were no crashes etc. then you had no reason whatsoever to re image any machine.
It would be so nice if the Windows kiddies stopped lying.
Are you missing the other flame wars in Slashdot, or are you just ignoring them?
Try the XBox vs Playstation vs Gamecube war. How about the PSP vs Nintendo DS war. The obvious Linux vs Windows war. Even *BSD vs Solaris vs Linux war.
Every time you have one person making an absolute statement and your audience is big enough you will have someone who takes the completely opposite stance. I would put it to you that if someone posted a link suggesting a real life link to the theory of relativity then you would have others disagree and point out how it can be disproved by quantum physics. In fact I personally think relativity is a bunch of rubbish, I doubt if the quantum theory is correct either.
So please stop complaining. This Mac vs Wintel argument has actually changed over the past 20 years. Once apon a time Mac OS wasn't that great, wasn't on Unix, diddn't have great security, had forked files, used incompatible connections for everything. Once apon a time Windows sucked more than any other software (times when the public dreamed of Bonzi Buddy quality software). Now the windows situation may not have moved very much (ducks) but it has improved a little. This to me is a more interesting evolving argument than physics theories that do not change significantly more than twice a century.
a lot of people get help with PC's from friends and family. It's this network of enablers that really keeps the Windows dominance alive.
My wife and I were two of these enablers. We quit. It was part of the bonus list for switching to Macs. We had a credible excuse to never repair another machine that was only 3 months old after we told the friend NOT to buy a specific brand because it had known problems. Now Dell, Compaq, Asus, and a bunch of other locally made name brands can service their own problem machines.
We have known that we were enablers of bad hardware suppliers and bad hardware purchasers for a couple of years before picking up the courage to switch to OSX and to say "No More!".
You have made an error in your assumption. The budget no brand DVD players in the budget store. You know, the players that give out six months after purchase. They are made in the same factories as the Panasonic/Phillips/Samsung/LG units. I knnow some of the units I have quoted may not be, but the idea is the same. One company pays the factory in China/Phillipines etc $10 to produce one unit, while the other company pays the same factory $30 per unit. The two units do not use the same parts sourced from the same parts companies. These two units are also not built to the same standard in the factory.
This practice of building spec to the limit of the budget has been going on since the eighties, probably earlier.
Im sorry to have to say this, but it is obvious that you had to sneak into ROTS because you weren't old enough to go without your parents there.
Anyone who makes it past the age of seventeen with a fully fintioning brain can explain to you that you listed "features". "Features" are not now nor have they ever been "Quality".
Yes you may want to go buy a "Quality" Ford because it has alloy wheels. I however would prefer to purchase a BMW even if it had no alloy wheels.
Wrong. In fact it is obvious from your post that you have never owned anything other than wintel.
I have already gone through the list in another post, but 9 years on three Amigas... none stoped working, all retired because of age of hardware.
Wintel experience. Over six or seven years, I have basicly lost count of the machines and the new motherboards, cpus and cards that went belly up. My rough guess that for combinations of parts close to twenty seperate configurations broke at the hardware level. Not to mention the problems with other businesses machines and peoples machines I was maintaining.
I have been on a Mac now for nearly a year. Not a problem. My wife has been on a Mac for six months. Not a problem.
Final result. Broken Wintel machines ~20/20. Broken non Wintel machines 5/5. Cost of owning Wintel machines per unit, per year $8000 NZ Dollars (Excluding cost of OS and software). Cost of owning Non Wintel machines per unit, per year $1350 NZ Dollars (Excluding cost of OS and software). I have not taken into account that the Amigas sold for more than the average cost of the Wintel machines as all computers were three times the cost back in the late eighties and early nineties.
You may not have had to put up with as many parts and machines blowing, but my experience shows that the hardware for Wintel machines is so much more expensive to own day to day that I would be an idiot to ever buy another Wintel machine.
Here are mine. My wife and I have been through seven Wintel machines personally in the past five years. Our machines were new. All burned out. We have also gone through another seperate five motherboards, two CPUs, two CRT monitors, and a few addon cards like modems, soundcards i/o cards etc. These extra parts also burned out. We fitted some ourselves as we are experienced and far more careful than the average technician, and we let a repair company handle some of the repairs in house (just in case we were idiots). The final result of all of this. I have been through three Amigas in nine years, all Amigas were retired and did not blow. I have been through too many PCs and parts in a matter of six or seven years. Now I am on a reliable Mac, and so is my wife. The only surviving Wintel machine I have left is an IBM Netfinity 3000. I assume that IBM have a reputation for reliability and need to protect that reputation. The machine is a rock. No other manufacturer of any Wintel part that I have experienced has been reliable.
I will not go into the Wintel machines that we have had to maintian and service amid dozens of hardware failures, half of these filures happen within three weeks of a new machine landing on a desk. The manufactureres refuse to fix the problems as they are within their tollerance levels (a 2.4 Ghz machine that permanantly slows down to half the speed of the 1.2 Ghz machine sitting next to it within three weeks... no no spyware etc... no access to the net at all).
Yes there are thousands of happy Windows users who were lucky enough to get shipped a machine that was more compatible than most that had every part run reliably from day one. But I have found that in my comunity that for every happy person there are ten wanting to rip Bill Gates a new one.
The difference is that 12 years ago x86 chips were still gaining regular speed increases. If you think all is well in the x86 world when cpu speeds have increased less than one Gb in the ast two or three years. I know Moores Law talks about transisters, but speed has increased regularly.
The power chips from IBM have not had stellar improvements in speed over the same time, but this does launch the basic design in a new, faster direction. Yet you think this is a repeat of the past? I would put to you that its similar to the end of the life of the "Zilog Z80A" while motorola was readying the new "supercomputer" 68000.
Excuse me swillden, I strongly suggest you do a trial run on a Mac.
I used to think just like you. I converted to PC from the Amiga about 7 years ago. I switched to the wrong platform. I do a lot of high end graphics stuff, animation, video, A0 posters, truck skirting etc.
The last PC I purchased was the bleeding edge at the time. This was now 2.5 years ago. Dual 2 Ghz CPUs, 3 Gb Ram (I was going to add another gig to max it out until I gave up), Exagy, 3D imput devices etc... It was rubbish. I couldnt paint up an A3 sized picture in Photoshop on this machine.
I switched almost a year ago to a powerbook. I never in my wildest dreams actually thoughyt thaat a laptop could outperform a PC that had massivly higher specs. I thankfully found I was totaly wrong. I am now doing everything I wanted to do on the PC in realtime, in realtime on this Mac. The mac is a 1.33 Ghz CPU, 1.5 Gb Ram, Bluetooth input devices, usb2 input devices, Firewire 400 and firewire 800, gigabit networking... I had been puting up with the standard artists wait on computers until switching to Macs. The Amiga I am sure would have been here eight or nine years ago if it haddn't come to an untimely end, but I am very happy now. My wife is too now she has her own Mac laptop, and she had to suffer almost two decades of PC use for gfx.
Yes, this would be nice, but when the Amiga came out, Commodore added this exact feature. Some people used the feature, but the vast majority did not. It added extra cost to the machines for a feature that many did not use. In fact the Amiga system added a whole 286 on a card, then later 386 and finally a 486, so there was no emulation of any part of the system. You could run both "computers" simultaniously.
I have a severe disability. Its a breathing condition that i have been told only 11 people have worldwide. It does not affect me normaly, as I have clean dehumidified air in my hous and I seldom leave my house.
Yesterday My wife and I got tickets to ROTS early in the day. We called the management of the cinema a few hours before the movie started. They arranged for us to be seated in the positive air of the cinema when we arrived while the cinema was still being cleaned. The popcorn smell, and the smokers outside makes it impossible to be in the area for more than 5 minutes before getting into the cinema. I was forced to wait, and wait. After 20 minutes I was in so much trouble that my wife got a refund of the tickets and we left before we had to call for an ambulance.
Today I learned how to use Bit Torrent for the very first time. Yes i would prefer not to "break the rules", but when my life was close to threatened for the sake of bad staff at theatres (I have never met staff at theatres who take dissabilities seriously) then it is time to (sorry for the following pun) go over to the dark side.
I wouldnt trust Australia with USAs power. They have proven that they are scaresly better than USA.
New Zealand may not be perfect, but one thing is for certain, if NZ had the power of USA the world would be Nuke free (including Israel) within a decade. New Zealand is still the only Nuclear free country (been so for more than a decade and a half)... the funny thing is that the leadersw in the field of Nuclear science all came from New Zealand... Including Sir Ruderford (New Zealanders were knighted back in those days).
There are many other interesting facts that surround this issue and New Zealand, but the point is that New Zealand is fanatical about its anti Nuke (even power generation) stance.
New Zealand is one of the lowest piracy countries? Here's BSA's dirty little secret. BSA has no office in New Zealand, and don't monitor New Zealand, and don't take reports about cases in New Zealand from its closest office in Australia.
It's great that the BSA stays out of this backwater, it's not as if we have all run out to pirate software because they have not been looking over our shoulder. The point is that they have to be making something up if they put New Zealand at the top of the "Good" list if they don't gather any data from the country.
There has been a loose agreement over arms in space for decades. Everyone agrees not to go there.
The simple reality is this. USA puts arms in space and has a vast superiority over other contries. France, Russia, China, India, and half a dozen other capable countries send rockets straight up into orbit to explode. Hundreds of rockets creating millions of super speed projectiles.
End result. USA has no superiority, as does anyone else. No one could send ICBMs into space, no one could send shuttles, or space stations up. Space close to earth would be scorched earth (figuratively).
For a gamer I would advise them to dump the PC altogether and get a gamecube and RE4 to tide him over until the next gen consoles come out... Alternativly I hear scrabble is a game played by millions.
I did not see any mention of QNX.
Being the first realtime OS, its GUI had one interesting feature. It was the first OS that allowed the extention of the desktop accross two monitors. Windows could be dragged to be displayed in part on both monitors, even while playing a first person shooter in the window.
I thought about adding the facts about the icons, but I figured that I had confused the Mac and Windows users enough.
The reality is that of all the systems that were listed the Amiga had the leas space in the article, but had more innovations than any OS in the article. None were mentioned tough, and only the first gen of the OS was covered, when there were some serious improvements over WB 1.3, WB 2.04, WB 3... and no mantion that the users (read fanatics) have improved it further still and there is even a new OS waiting in the wings that is loosly based on WorkBench.
We are getting a Tiger Family pack tomorrow (when you live in the sticks in New Zealand you dont get things on the release date) so I have yet to use it personaally.
There is one use for Quartz Extreme. It offloads more gruntwork from the CPU to the GPU. This frees up the CPU for more useful tasks. This is very Amiga like in basic theory... yes the AMiga used different hardware and GPU's were nothing like todays. But the Amiga stored all files to be displayed like text in the graphics memory (VRAM) so the Graphics processor could work with them directly before sending them to the display chips.
The Amiga had perfectly smooth scrolling text documents. Tiger features perfectly scrolling text documents. Both systems hold the text document in VRAM so the GPU can do its work directly while not stressing the CPU at all.
So as far as I am concerned Tiger may not look different, but the addition of Quartz Extreme will help in many small ways that will improve the overall quality of the user experience.
I agree. The Amiga may have been only the first consumer level machine to offer true multitasking, but its bus design with its multiple coprocessors meant it pioneered the multithreading game... only because any program had to send seperate threads to operate.
In Eurpope, Australia, Hong Kong and New Zealand, that company was Commodore with the Amiga.
The Amiga outsold all other machines in most of these countries especially in the home and Graphics markets.
Here is what I had to say at Ars Technica...
I stopped reading after I ran accross too many accuracy problems.
The "proportionally-sized scroll bars" that were accredited to Acorns Risc OS in 1987 is incorrect as the patent was awarded years earlier to Commodore for the Amigas Workbench, which had this feature.
The Task Bar which is accrdited to Windows 95 was actually in use a decade earlier by Acorns Risc OS.
No mention as to the Amigas other OS inventions. Like multiple screens. Each screen held as many programs and windows as you wished, each screen could be dragged down with its contents, or pushed back in the stack of screens by clicking on the depth gadget. Each screen could have an independant resolution, and the OS would display both resolutions at the same time if two screens with different resolutions were made visible by dragging.
Also since therfe was mention of single tasking and task switching, why the the Amigas OS miss out on the mention of the first consumer OS that had multitasking? Amiga users were harrassed for a decade by Mac and Windows users that "mutlitasking is useless, you can't use more than one program at a time".
This is a badly researched article by someone who obviously was not there, or only ever used one OS family while ignoring the rest of the computing world.
Slashdot Mirror
About this licencing of game engines.
I have been thinking about this myself, there is a solution for this problem for small innovative games developers. It lays with the console makers. If Nintendo, or Microsoft want to beat out Sony, they could provide a full suite of engines for little or no money. Any game producer could use it and build on the engines over time. We can only hope the console makers wake up to the hurdles to small companies innovating on their platforms. I for one have been sitting on two games ideas that have nothing to do with any current genres... not even close. But with my current life situation I can never see them to reallisation.
In case you missed it, RE4 on the Gamecube uses the game engine and modles for the cut scenes. It is wonderful to play as yoou never know when the cut scene is no longer the cus scene and you are in the thick of it (some of the button combos during these parts are a little annoying).
I have a couple of requests, if you would be so kind to consider them and then pass them on.
The first is a splinter argument of the "genre" point. I want to see less jingoism in games. I understand the need to add American heroes into every game for the American market, but I stopped buying games a few years ago that had anything close to rabid American jingoism. I do like the occasional game based on war, but I want to play that WWII game as a Kiwi, Australian, Brit, Gurkha, and even an arian SS soldier. I also want to play that shoot the terrorist game in reverse. If you have all the models, all the levels, all the sound and the game engine, can't someone be hired to write a story for the terrorist to sneak in and shoot up the American troops? It could be sold as a different title if you are worried about a backlash. Alternatively it could sell as an add-on to a game. This argument crosses over to the immersion part of the problem. American troops did not fight every battle (in fact WWII went on happily, with Allied troops winning the African front for years before USA got involved. WWI also had USA coming in toward the end) so it ruins the believability when you only have American troops to capture the Enigma machine when USA was not even in the war at that point.
My second point is the lack of anything naughty. The "Nipple" point. Again you have most of what you need to start this already. You have the levels, you have most of the models, you have the story... why cant two versions be marketed at the same time to two different age groups? With the option of buying and downloading games for the next generation of consoles this may be a very easy option for games developers. If a console can be registered to one adult with no child lock asked for by the owner, then the "adult" game can be purchased and downloaded for that machine. Many people do get annoyed that most game development has moved from Europe to Japan and USA as most of the world (mostly) views nudity as part of life and not a perversion worse than portraying a gruesome death by blowing a persons head off so the heart can be pulled out of the gaping hole in the top of the neck. Give us some options PLEASE! You may even find that teens in USA may want to play the anti hero terrorists after completing the game as the all conquering American troops.
I put it to you that you lied in your original post. You claimed to run a network of more than a thousand machines with not one of many things, including BSOD.
It is interesting to note that in your second post while explaining how you did it you mention having to reinstall the OS and software from an image. If there were no crashes etc. then you had no reason whatsoever to re image any machine.
It would be so nice if the Windows kiddies stopped lying.
I seem to totaly dissagree with you.
Are you missing the other flame wars in Slashdot, or are you just ignoring them?
Try the XBox vs Playstation vs Gamecube war. How about the PSP vs Nintendo DS war. The obvious Linux vs Windows war. Even *BSD vs Solaris vs Linux war.
Every time you have one person making an absolute statement and your audience is big enough you will have someone who takes the completely opposite stance. I would put it to you that if someone posted a link suggesting a real life link to the theory of relativity then you would have others disagree and point out how it can be disproved by quantum physics. In fact I personally think relativity is a bunch of rubbish, I doubt if the quantum theory is correct either.
So please stop complaining. This Mac vs Wintel argument has actually changed over the past 20 years. Once apon a time Mac OS wasn't that great, wasn't on Unix, diddn't have great security, had forked files, used incompatible connections for everything. Once apon a time Windows sucked more than any other software (times when the public dreamed of Bonzi Buddy quality software). Now the windows situation may not have moved very much (ducks) but it has improved a little. This to me is a more interesting evolving argument than physics theories that do not change significantly more than twice a century.
a lot of people get help with PC's from friends and family. It's this network of enablers that really keeps the Windows dominance alive.
My wife and I were two of these enablers. We quit. It was part of the bonus list for switching to Macs. We had a credible excuse to never repair another machine that was only 3 months old after we told the friend NOT to buy a specific brand because it had known problems. Now Dell, Compaq, Asus, and a bunch of other locally made name brands can service their own problem machines.
We have known that we were enablers of bad hardware suppliers and bad hardware purchasers for a couple of years before picking up the courage to switch to OSX and to say "No More!".
You have made an error in your assumption. The budget no brand DVD players in the budget store. You know, the players that give out six months after purchase. They are made in the same factories as the Panasonic/Phillips/Samsung/LG units. I knnow some of the units I have quoted may not be, but the idea is the same. One company pays the factory in China/Phillipines etc $10 to produce one unit, while the other company pays the same factory $30 per unit. The two units do not use the same parts sourced from the same parts companies. These two units are also not built to the same standard in the factory.
This practice of building spec to the limit of the budget has been going on since the eighties, probably earlier.
Im sorry to have to say this, but it is obvious that you had to sneak into ROTS because you weren't old enough to go without your parents there. Anyone who makes it past the age of seventeen with a fully fintioning brain can explain to you that you listed "features". "Features" are not now nor have they ever been "Quality". Yes you may want to go buy a "Quality" Ford because it has alloy wheels. I however would prefer to purchase a BMW even if it had no alloy wheels.
Correction...
Final result. Broken Wintel machines ~20/20. Broken non Wintel machines 0/5.
Wrong. In fact it is obvious from your post that you have never owned anything other than wintel.
I have already gone through the list in another post, but 9 years on three Amigas... none stoped working, all retired because of age of hardware.
Wintel experience. Over six or seven years, I have basicly lost count of the machines and the new motherboards, cpus and cards that went belly up. My rough guess that for combinations of parts close to twenty seperate configurations broke at the hardware level. Not to mention the problems with other businesses machines and peoples machines I was maintaining.
I have been on a Mac now for nearly a year. Not a problem. My wife has been on a Mac for six months. Not a problem.
Final result. Broken Wintel machines ~20/20. Broken non Wintel machines 5/5. Cost of owning Wintel machines per unit, per year $8000 NZ Dollars (Excluding cost of OS and software). Cost of owning Non Wintel machines per unit, per year $1350 NZ Dollars (Excluding cost of OS and software). I have not taken into account that the Amigas sold for more than the average cost of the Wintel machines as all computers were three times the cost back in the late eighties and early nineties.
You may not have had to put up with as many parts and machines blowing, but my experience shows that the hardware for Wintel machines is so much more expensive to own day to day that I would be an idiot to ever buy another Wintel machine.
So you have one anecdotal story.
Here are mine. My wife and I have been through seven Wintel machines personally in the past five years. Our machines were new. All burned out. We have also gone through another seperate five motherboards, two CPUs, two CRT monitors, and a few addon cards like modems, soundcards i/o cards etc. These extra parts also burned out. We fitted some ourselves as we are experienced and far more careful than the average technician, and we let a repair company handle some of the repairs in house (just in case we were idiots). The final result of all of this. I have been through three Amigas in nine years, all Amigas were retired and did not blow. I have been through too many PCs and parts in a matter of six or seven years. Now I am on a reliable Mac, and so is my wife. The only surviving Wintel machine I have left is an IBM Netfinity 3000. I assume that IBM have a reputation for reliability and need to protect that reputation. The machine is a rock. No other manufacturer of any Wintel part that I have experienced has been reliable.
I will not go into the Wintel machines that we have had to maintian and service amid dozens of hardware failures, half of these filures happen within three weeks of a new machine landing on a desk. The manufactureres refuse to fix the problems as they are within their tollerance levels (a 2.4 Ghz machine that permanantly slows down to half the speed of the 1.2 Ghz machine sitting next to it within three weeks... no no spyware etc... no access to the net at all).
Yes there are thousands of happy Windows users who were lucky enough to get shipped a machine that was more compatible than most that had every part run reliably from day one. But I have found that in my comunity that for every happy person there are ten wanting to rip Bill Gates a new one.
The difference is that 12 years ago x86 chips were still gaining regular speed increases. If you think all is well in the x86 world when cpu speeds have increased less than one Gb in the ast two or three years. I know Moores Law talks about transisters, but speed has increased regularly.
The power chips from IBM have not had stellar improvements in speed over the same time, but this does launch the basic design in a new, faster direction. Yet you think this is a repeat of the past? I would put to you that its similar to the end of the life of the "Zilog Z80A" while motorola was readying the new "supercomputer" 68000.
Excuse me swillden, I strongly suggest you do a trial run on a Mac.
I used to think just like you. I converted to PC from the Amiga about 7 years ago. I switched to the wrong platform. I do a lot of high end graphics stuff, animation, video, A0 posters, truck skirting etc.
The last PC I purchased was the bleeding edge at the time. This was now 2.5 years ago. Dual 2 Ghz CPUs, 3 Gb Ram (I was going to add another gig to max it out until I gave up), Exagy, 3D imput devices etc... It was rubbish. I couldnt paint up an A3 sized picture in Photoshop on this machine.
I switched almost a year ago to a powerbook. I never in my wildest dreams actually thoughyt thaat a laptop could outperform a PC that had massivly higher specs. I thankfully found I was totaly wrong. I am now doing everything I wanted to do on the PC in realtime, in realtime on this Mac. The mac is a 1.33 Ghz CPU, 1.5 Gb Ram, Bluetooth input devices, usb2 input devices, Firewire 400 and firewire 800, gigabit networking... I had been puting up with the standard artists wait on computers until switching to Macs. The Amiga I am sure would have been here eight or nine years ago if it haddn't come to an untimely end, but I am very happy now. My wife is too now she has her own Mac laptop, and she had to suffer almost two decades of PC use for gfx.
Yes, this would be nice, but when the Amiga came out, Commodore added this exact feature. Some people used the feature, but the vast majority did not. It added extra cost to the machines for a feature that many did not use. In fact the Amiga system added a whole 286 on a card, then later 386 and finally a 486, so there was no emulation of any part of the system. You could run both "computers" simultaniously.
I have a severe disability. Its a breathing condition that i have been told only 11 people have worldwide. It does not affect me normaly, as I have clean dehumidified air in my hous and I seldom leave my house. Yesterday My wife and I got tickets to ROTS early in the day. We called the management of the cinema a few hours before the movie started. They arranged for us to be seated in the positive air of the cinema when we arrived while the cinema was still being cleaned. The popcorn smell, and the smokers outside makes it impossible to be in the area for more than 5 minutes before getting into the cinema. I was forced to wait, and wait. After 20 minutes I was in so much trouble that my wife got a refund of the tickets and we left before we had to call for an ambulance. Today I learned how to use Bit Torrent for the very first time. Yes i would prefer not to "break the rules", but when my life was close to threatened for the sake of bad staff at theatres (I have never met staff at theatres who take dissabilities seriously) then it is time to (sorry for the following pun) go over to the dark side.
I wouldnt trust Australia with USAs power. They have proven that they are scaresly better than USA. New Zealand may not be perfect, but one thing is for certain, if NZ had the power of USA the world would be Nuke free (including Israel) within a decade. New Zealand is still the only Nuclear free country (been so for more than a decade and a half)... the funny thing is that the leadersw in the field of Nuclear science all came from New Zealand... Including Sir Ruderford (New Zealanders were knighted back in those days). There are many other interesting facts that surround this issue and New Zealand, but the point is that New Zealand is fanatical about its anti Nuke (even power generation) stance.
New Zealand is one of the lowest piracy countries? Here's BSA's dirty little secret. BSA has no office in New Zealand, and don't monitor New Zealand, and don't take reports about cases in New Zealand from its closest office in Australia. It's great that the BSA stays out of this backwater, it's not as if we have all run out to pirate software because they have not been looking over our shoulder. The point is that they have to be making something up if they put New Zealand at the top of the "Good" list if they don't gather any data from the country.
There has been a loose agreement over arms in space for decades. Everyone agrees not to go there. The simple reality is this. USA puts arms in space and has a vast superiority over other contries. France, Russia, China, India, and half a dozen other capable countries send rockets straight up into orbit to explode. Hundreds of rockets creating millions of super speed projectiles. End result. USA has no superiority, as does anyone else. No one could send ICBMs into space, no one could send shuttles, or space stations up. Space close to earth would be scorched earth (figuratively).
For a gamer I would advise them to dump the PC altogether and get a gamecube and RE4 to tide him over until the next gen consoles come out... Alternativly I hear scrabble is a game played by millions.
I did not see any mention of QNX. Being the first realtime OS, its GUI had one interesting feature. It was the first OS that allowed the extention of the desktop accross two monitors. Windows could be dragged to be displayed in part on both monitors, even while playing a first person shooter in the window.
I thought about adding the facts about the icons, but I figured that I had confused the Mac and Windows users enough.
The reality is that of all the systems that were listed the Amiga had the leas space in the article, but had more innovations than any OS in the article. None were mentioned tough, and only the first gen of the OS was covered, when there were some serious improvements over WB 1.3, WB 2.04, WB 3... and no mantion that the users (read fanatics) have improved it further still and there is even a new OS waiting in the wings that is loosly based on WorkBench.
We are getting a Tiger Family pack tomorrow (when you live in the sticks in New Zealand you dont get things on the release date) so I have yet to use it personaally.
There is one use for Quartz Extreme. It offloads more gruntwork from the CPU to the GPU. This frees up the CPU for more useful tasks. This is very Amiga like in basic theory... yes the AMiga used different hardware and GPU's were nothing like todays. But the Amiga stored all files to be displayed like text in the graphics memory (VRAM) so the Graphics processor could work with them directly before sending them to the display chips.
The Amiga had perfectly smooth scrolling text documents. Tiger features perfectly scrolling text documents. Both systems hold the text document in VRAM so the GPU can do its work directly while not stressing the CPU at all.
So as far as I am concerned Tiger may not look different, but the addition of Quartz Extreme will help in many small ways that will improve the overall quality of the user experience.
I agree. The Amiga may have been only the first consumer level machine to offer true multitasking, but its bus design with its multiple coprocessors meant it pioneered the multithreading game... only because any program had to send seperate threads to operate.
In Eurpope, Australia, Hong Kong and New Zealand, that company was Commodore with the Amiga. The Amiga outsold all other machines in most of these countries especially in the home and Graphics markets.
Here is what I had to say at Ars Technica... I stopped reading after I ran accross too many accuracy problems. The "proportionally-sized scroll bars" that were accredited to Acorns Risc OS in 1987 is incorrect as the patent was awarded years earlier to Commodore for the Amigas Workbench, which had this feature. The Task Bar which is accrdited to Windows 95 was actually in use a decade earlier by Acorns Risc OS. No mention as to the Amigas other OS inventions. Like multiple screens. Each screen held as many programs and windows as you wished, each screen could be dragged down with its contents, or pushed back in the stack of screens by clicking on the depth gadget. Each screen could have an independant resolution, and the OS would display both resolutions at the same time if two screens with different resolutions were made visible by dragging. Also since therfe was mention of single tasking and task switching, why the the Amigas OS miss out on the mention of the first consumer OS that had multitasking? Amiga users were harrassed for a decade by Mac and Windows users that "mutlitasking is useless, you can't use more than one program at a time". This is a badly researched article by someone who obviously was not there, or only ever used one OS family while ignoring the rest of the computing world.