Amiga vs. PC - Stop whining!

[CMM]

>>On Tue, 25 Feb 1997, Keith Blakemore-Noble wrote:
>>Better 160k of MUI libs than 70M of Win95 OS!!!

>Get real! They're not even comparable!

>To be frank, I don't know why you guys even bother with this thread.
>The PC people will never convince the Amiga people that PC is a cool
>computer and vice versa. The fight will go on and on until Amiga dies
>and PC lives on.

>Yes, I believe that Amiga will disappear within a few years. It is not
>a matter of IF, but WHEN. The support right now might be better than
>in years, but the fact that the computer is no longer manufactured and
>the fact that the world standard _is_ PC, Amiga _will_ die...

>I am not saying that this is good, because we certainly need
>competitors to Windows and NT. The sad thing is that Amiga is not
>considered to be a competitor to the PC.

>I had an Amiga 3000 for 5 years and I released several freeware
>programs, one shareware program and several source codes. I was an
>Amiga fanatic. I even refused to buy a PC because I hated Win3.11 so
>much. I tried to convince my friends to buy Amiga's instead of PC's. I
>showed them how cool my Amiga looked; dragging the screens up and
>down, switching between applications at the speed of light, playing
>MOD files while formatting a disk, etc. But my friends just replied:
>"Cool, but what can I use it for?".

>I had to agree with them later... when I bought a PC. People don't
>want what the Amiga can offer. They want software, and they want tons
>of it, they want browsers that handle the latest (non-standard) HTML
>codes, they want "WYSMBWYG" (What You See May Be What You Get)
>HTML editors, they want Word, they want Excel, they want to be able to
>drag objects into a document and the document will automatically
>display it in its right format, they want the latest in games, they
>want integrated programming environments (if you have ever tried
>Visual C++ you know what I mean, SAS/C C++ for Amiga is nothing
>compared to VC++), they want to be able to share documents and data
>with their co-workers, they want to be able to bring work home from
>their office, they want to be able to display on-line help for the OS,
>they want cheap system with lots of features and they want a cheese
>helmet...

>And PC simply offers this at a lower price than what an Amiga would
>cost. PC is easier to use for the novice and it is more powerful for
>the professionals.

>But the Amiga people are too narrow-minded to see this... Stop
>whining! If your Amiga does what you want, then keep it. If it
>doesn't, then buy another computer. Don't flame other people who
>abandon the Amiga - they do it for a reason. Amiga is not a religion
>(it seems to be for some...unfortunately) and you don't have to hate
>everybody that does not follow the same "religion" as you do...

>All that "my calculator is smaller than your calculator"-stuff will
>not do you any good...

>Get it?
>____________________________________________________________________
> Ketil Hunn MSIS student at the
> 6629 Wilkins Ave University of Pittsburgh.
> Pittsburgh, PA 15217
> U.S.A. mailto: ke...@sis.pitt.edu
> Phone: 412 421 5735 http://www.lis.pitt.edu/~ketil/

[Chris Handley]

In article <3250.699...@gulftel.com>, tu...@gulftel.com says...

>>To be frank, I don't know why you guys even bother with this thread.
>>The PC people will never convince the Amiga people that PC is a cool
>>computer and vice versa. The fight will go on and on until Amiga dies
>>and PC lives on.

I'm sorry that you believe that. I also believe that the CURRENT Amiga's will
died eventually, but I also believe that some of these new RISC machines/OSs
(BeOS,p-OS, PIOS-One, A\Box, etc) have a BIG change to oust the PC..

The wind of change has finally come again. We are again at a cross roads
where EVERYTHING will change. You may not see it yet, but most people don't
until it has already happened. I'm sure you don't believe me - I don't ask
you to - but that is what I believe, and I see enough evidence of it.

All other computers that became big market leads eventually died. So will the
PC, because it is still held-back by backward compatibility, fragmented
architecture, a memory/speed hungry OS/GUI, and no guiding owner company to
get rid of these problems. The lots-of-companies-selling-PCs made the PC the
success it is; it is also it's biggest problem.

I do not believe it will happen overnight - but it will happen. It MUST
happen. If it does not, the computer industry will have been put back 5-15
years. The PC is hard to use (even with Win95 - look at all those
books/videos on the subject), has a fragmented architecture which causes
problems with much new software/hardware installations, and wastes so much CPU
power it nees 100+MIPs (approx) and 32Mb to be properly useable with Win95.

I use PCs *alot* (inc.Pentiums with 16/32Mb ram), and I do not find that they
are easy to use DESPITE much experience with them. I know how to get around
SOME of their problems & idosyncracies - but they are there, and slow me down.

You think PCs are modern? Every time you boot-up you are presented with a 70s
black&white DOS screen with crap that the User doesn't need to know (unless
something goes wrong - he he).

On the other hand, I generally find the Amiga quite stable, very configurable
(and an easy learning curve), and most importantly:

My Amiga does what I want, without getting in my way (usually).

Go and read Carl Sassenrath's web page about "Personal Computing" (etc) if you
want a better explanation than I can (www.sassenrath.com).

You should also go and look at one of Squid's best pages
"http://users.compassworks.com/~squid/amiga/articles961214.html", where he
does a very good job of explaining his point of view (which I share alot
with).

>>Yes, I believe that Amiga will disappear within a few years. It is not
>>a matter of IF, but WHEN. The support right now might be better than
>>in years, but the fact that the computer is no longer manufactured and
>>the fact that the world standard _is_ PC, Amiga _will_ die...

The PC is & has been the standard. That does NOT mean it will always be the
standard. Just because it has achieved more unit sales than previous
'standards', that does not invalidate my argument. It just means that it's
death will be a slower, more protracted, and painful one.

>>I am not saying that this is good, because we certainly need
>>competitors to Windows and NT. The sad thing is that Amiga is not
>>considered to be a competitor to the PC.

Only because the Amiga ran into trouble about the time that PCs were
really taking off. It hasn't yet recovered, maybe it won't. Other BETTER
computers, that are at least the spiritual descendants of the Amiga, will
take-off where it left. I don't know which one will, but there are enough
people who believe it can be done that it will happen.

>>I had an Amiga 3000 for 5 years and I released several freeware
>>programs, one shareware program and several source codes. I was an
>>Amiga fanatic. I even refused to buy a PC because I hated Win3.11 so
>>much. I tried to convince my friends to buy Amiga's instead of PC's. I
>>showed them how cool my Amiga looked; dragging the screens up and
>>down, switching between applications at the speed of light, playing
>>MOD files while formatting a disk, etc. But my friends just replied:
>>"Cool, but what can I use it for?".

Well, they are stupid, or your arguments/knowledge weren't up to it. There
are good applications enough, there's not that much that MOST
(`average`) people can do on PCs that they can't on the Amiga.

If you could come-up with a list of non-esoteric applications, I would be
interested. And 2-3 isn't much, if thats all you can manage.

>>I had to agree with them later... when I bought a PC. People don't

That's your problem, not the Amigas.

>>want what the Amiga can offer. They want software, and they want tons
>>of it, they want browsers that handle the latest (non-standard) HTML
>>codes, they want "WYSMBWYG" (What You See May Be What You Get)
>>HTML editors, they want Word, they want Excel, they want to be able to

A HTML *editor* is used by may PC owners? You jest!

There's not much that Word can do that Wordworth 6 (or FinalWriter..) can't
do. Most people don't even use most of the features of Word (because they add
complex features that people don't use!).

Yes, the Amiga doesn't have an Excel - but it's not that far behind.

>>drag objects into a document and the document will automatically
>>display it in its right format, they want the latest in games, they

I'm not sure quite what you mean by "object" - but the Amiga has dragndrop,
and uses it most of the time. Which program were you referring to?

Ok, so it doesn't have the latest wizz bang 3D game. Except for Quake of
course ;^) . Buy a PlayStation/Nintendo64. It will cost you less that a PC
with the necessary specs (and will cause you 1/100th of the trouble that a PC
game installation will give you). PC games are STILL generally MS-DOS, and
alot seem to have naff installers. Win95 doesn't help much (& can even
hinder).

>>want integrated programming environments (if you have ever tried
>>Visual C++ you know what I mean, SAS/C C++ for Amiga is nothing

What about StormC????? I'm not a C programmer myself, but I it's supposed to
be pretty damn good (and getting better quite quickly).

>>compared to VC++), they want to be able to share documents and data
>>with their co-workers, they want to be able to bring work home from
>>their office, they want to be able to display on-line help for the OS,

You can display on-line help from the Amiga's OS. Ever heard of AmigaGuide
documents? Any big Amiga application that requires it, usually has it (see
Wordworth, DOpus5.5, most MUI apps, etc). And of course MUI has help bubbles,
but not much software (except internet software) uses that.

>>they want cheap system with lots of features and they want a cheese
>>helmet...

I wouldn't call the Amiga expensive. Not as cheap as a PC sure, but not THAT
much more expensive. [The Amiga can uses the same harddrives, CD-drives,
monitors, mice/joysticks (with adapter), printers, etc that PCs use, and they
account for a large percentage of PC price. Amiga accelerators have also
dropped in price.]

Back when the Amiga was still being sold, most of your arguments would not
have hold - it's mainly the last year or two where PCs have started being
brought home where you might want to share data or use the same s/w.

Of course your arguments are a lot more convincing now, and if that is what
you NEED - fine. I have no problems with that. Just don't say the PC is
better at EVERYTHING, ALL THE TIME.

>>And PC simply offers this at a lower price than what an Amiga would
>>cost. PC is easier to use for the novice and it is more powerful for
>>the professionals.

A PC is easier to use???? Don't make me laugh :-D . Get them to install a
piece of software/hardware by themselves, and watch them weep from conflicts,
Plug`N`Play Problems, and wrong answers to questions by the installer
(even despite reading the manual).

I've seen other people spend ages peering through manauls, trying to get rid
of that printer problem, find out how to get Win95 to do something, stop Win95
doing something, crash Win95, etc.

Maybe Amiga's aren't much easier in that you still need to read the manual,
but that's not my point. PCs have become TOO complicated, and they drop all
that at the users feet. At least Macs almost never have that problem.

I would say that the Amiga doesn't have such a problem - many things are
'hidden' until you become more experienced (which is the best way). And you
are virtually never asked to fiddle with batch-files/scripts by/for commercial
software.

Trying to explain why the PC is worse that the Amiga is difficult because
there are so many points, often minor ones. All those minor ones add up
though.

>>But the Amiga people are too narrow-minded to see this... Stop

I would hold that it is more likely that you are the one with a narrow mind -
although I can't blame you for buying a PC. Some people have to have what the
majority has (even if it's "a bit" worse). Occasionally there's a real, good
reason.

>>whining! If your Amiga does what you want, then keep it. If it
>>doesn't, then buy another computer. Don't flame other people who
>>abandon the Amiga - they do it for a reason. Amiga is not a religion
>>(it seems to be for some...unfortunately) and you don't have to hate
>>everybody that does not follow the same "religion" as you do...

There are certainly a few Amiga people with the wrong attitude, but you
shouldn't stick that on the majority. I don't know any Amiga owners
personally who have that attitude (they are usually far more knowledgable
about computers, which is why they didn't switch to a PC)

I haven't heard any "whining" lately - although if you visit csa.advocacy you
might expect that ;-)

>>All that "my calculator is smaller than your calculator"-stuff will
>>not do you any good...
>>Get it?

Ho. Ho. What an amazing wit you posses.

With the Amiga situation as it is now, I wouldn't advise anyone to buy an
Amiga (a difficult prospect in itself), but when it gets a new owner for more
than 5 seconds things could change. If they don't, I'll just buy an A\Box (or
whatever succeeds) instead.

Perhaps it's lucky you can't see my normal Email sig =:)

--
From Christopher Handley; Email: ela9...@sheffield.ac.uk
------------------------------------------------------sig v2.71 A---------
A1200/Blizzard 040/40MHz/16Mb + PowerStation (SCSI: 540Mb Hd, 2.4 speed CD
drive, SyQuest EZ Flyer 230). Plus DOpus5.5, MUI, MWb2, MCP, XFH, TKG,...
AmigaQuake - the biggest thing since the death of C=.
Be prepared for a *MAJOR* shake-up of the Amiga games scene...
Predictions:- 040 accelerator sales double in the next 1.5-3 months;
Quake on cover of ALL Amiga mags; iD make an official response; (a bit) of
Amiga coverage in PC mags; 1000s of Amiga owners buy the commercial Quake!;
The Amiga games scene sees a (at least minor) revival; I will look very
stupid if none of this actually happens ;-)

[Ketil Hunn]

On 28 Feb 1997 14:46:53 GMT ELA9...@shef.ac.uk (Chris Handley) wrote:
>You think PCs are modern? Every time you boot-up you are presented with a 70s
>black&white DOS screen with crap that the User doesn't need to know (unless
>something goes wrong - he he).

Not all games run from Windows, so if you like games you still need
DOS. And yes, the PC is _based_ on old technology, but so is the Amiga
(slightly more recent, but still old) so what? I still have 64-bits
graphicscard, 16-bits soundcard etc. and this equipment is not older
than a year. Would you call a '98 model of Ford non-modern just
because it is based on the technology from last years cars?

> My Amiga does what I want, without getting in my way (usually).

Good for you! Nothing is better than that! I never told anybody to
sell their Amiga and buy a PC. Just wanted to pick a fight with those
Amiga fanatics who say everything about the PC is crap and Amiga
rules... :))))

>Well, they are stupid

Not at all! They were able to see through my Amiga-crap and they
bought the computer that best suited their needs, a PC.

>If you could come-up with a list of non-esoteric applications, I would be
>interested. And 2-3 isn't much, if thats all you can manage.

OK, say you want to bring a Word-document home from your office to
work on it during the weekend. There's no wordprocessor that imports
the Word format on the Amiga. You could of course convert it to ASCII,
but then you would lose all the other data that the document contains.
And how easy is it to include a small spreadsheet into your Amiga
wordprocessor? And how about a program like Frontpage 97 on the Amiga?
How about Visio? How about Schedule+. How about SystemAgent? How about
Access? How about Visual C++? I believe that was more than 3... :)
Those are all programs that I use frequently. Now YOU tell me what you
can do with your Amiga that I cannot do with my PC!

>There's not much that Word can do that Wordworth 6 (or FinalWriter..) can't
>do. Most people don't even use most of the features of Word (because they add
>complex features that people don't use!).

ha ha ha - you're just jealous! ;-)

>Ok, so it doesn't have the latest wizz bang 3D game. Except for Quake of
>course ;^)

Which Amiga people stole from the id server... but that is of course
not as bad as Win95 stealing some nice features from the AmigaOS...
(which of course Amiga stole from the Mac... ;-)

>What about StormC????? I'm not a C programmer myself, but I it's supposed to
>be pretty damn good (and getting better quite quickly).

The last review I read about StormC++ was not very uplifting... There
are still a lot of important things missing, they said...

>You can display on-line help from the Amiga's OS. Ever heard of AmigaGuide
>documents?

Not from the desktop, with on-line help about the OS. I guess that if
C= was afraid that it would be pirated like everything else on the
Amiga...
And of course I've heard of AmigaGuide. I made my own GUI library with
objects that automatically had asynchronous on-line help!

> DOpus5.5

Yes, THAT one I still miss...

>Back when the Amiga was still being sold, most of your arguments would not
>have hold

According to others Amiga is still being sold... so your point is?

>Just don't say the PC is better at EVERYTHING, ALL THE TIME.

I never said that and I never will... I see good and bad things with
both systems... Unfortunately, some Amiga fans only see good things
about the Amiga and bad things about the PC...

>A PC is easier to use???? Don't make me laugh :-D

To late now, isn't it? ;-)

>I've seen other people spend ages peering through manauls, trying to get rid
>of that printer problem, find out how to get Win95 to do something, stop Win95
>doing something, crash Win95, etc.

Hmmm, it really _is_ strange that the most of the computers in the
world are PC's if they are that crappy. Never had any problems with my
PC, but maybe I'm the only one then...

>PCs have become TOO complicated, and they drop all
>that at the users feet

Too complicated for Amiga users maybe... ;) But of course there are
more people having problems with th PC. There are simply MORE people
using it.

>Trying to explain why the PC is worse that the Amiga is difficult because
>there are so many points, often minor ones. All those minor ones add up
>though.

That was not the point in my initial posting either. It was to say
that there are good things about the PC too and that some Amiga
fanatics should open their eyes. And the first couple of replies I got
was something like "BULLSHIT! PC is crap!!!!" and so on, which
actually proves my point about the Amiga fanatics... ;-)

[GROUT LEN EDWARD]

Ketil Hunn (ke...@sis.pitt.edu) wrote:

: Good for you! Nothing is better than that! I never told anybody to

: sell their Amiga and buy a PC. Just wanted to pick a fight with those
: Amiga fanatics who say everything about the PC is crap and Amiga
: rules... :))))

What do you care anyway? If the PC has the majority buying them and
supporting them then why the hell are you posting here? It's almost like
you are trying to convert us to the Pentup machines. It may not be your
intention, but it comes out that way. The loyal users of the Amiga
stay with it despite all the so called glorious things the Pentup users
boast about.
I find it ironic that my friends with their Pentup machines
think I'm making up the Voodoo graphics card, that I'm making up
the newest game that requires an MMX called Gnome. And I don't even have the
blasted machine.
I think you want a fight from any Amiga user whether or not they
are fanatics. Saying we are ignorant of what the Pentup machines can
do, Is pretty much like boasting about Fascism. So it has the power, but
it is very inefficient with that power, it's in your face without too
much freedom. And it only makes sense since it is brought to you by fascist
companies like Intel and Microsoft. Have you ever wondered why the new
Pentup machines have GPS. Have you noticed?
: Those are all programs that I use frequently. Now YOU tell me what you

: can do with your Amiga that I cannot do with my PC!

Oh I don't know play Capital Punishment? Use Dopus?

: >Ok, so it doesn't have the latest wizz bang 3D game. Except for Quake of
: >course ;^)

: Which Amiga people stole from the id server... but that is of course

: not as bad as Win95 stealing some nice features from the AmigaOS...
: (which of course Amiga stole from the Mac... ;-)

It's not like we are making a profit off the game, and it was just sitting
and still is on ID's website. And to make a good point, AmigaOs is still
better than Windbowze95 and it doesn't take up over 75megs on our HDs.
: >You can display on-line help from the Amiga's OS. Ever heard of AmigaGuide
: >documents?

: Not from the desktop, with on-line help about the OS. I guess that if

: C= was afraid that it would be pirated like everything else on the
: Amiga...

You mean like games and programs being pirated as we speak for Pentup users?

: > DOpus5.5

: Yes, THAT one I still miss...

: >Back when the Amiga was still being sold, most of your arguments would not
: >have hold

: According to others Amiga is still being sold... so your point is?
Precisely, the Amiga is still being sold and Quikpak is still making em
(4000T)
: >Just don't say the PC is better at EVERYTHING, ALL THE TIME.
: I never said that and I never will... I see good and bad things with

: both systems... Unfortunately, some Amiga fans only see good things
: about the Amiga and bad things about the PC...

We have to hang on somehow, and we do know that the PC does have its good
points, but I would much rather hope for the Amigas future than give in
to Tyranny.

: Hmmm, it really _is_ strange that the most of the computers in the

: world are PC's if they are that crappy. Never had any problems with my
: PC, but maybe I'm the only one then...

It's not so strange, they were marketed better than Amigas and especially
for business. And I know alot of Pentup users who have problems with their
machines. I pride myself on having a machine that hasn't broken down in
the 5 years I've owned it. I have a friend who is every month it seems
taking in his machine to get worked on.

: That was not the point in my initial posting either. It was to say

: that there are good things about the PC too and that some Amiga
: fanatics should open their eyes. And the first couple of replies I got
: was something like "BULLSHIT! PC is crap!!!!" and so on, which
: actually proves my point about the Amiga fanatics... ;-)

Which brings us back to the original point, why are you here? If the
PC is your own little heaven then why bother us Amiga users who are talking
about the latest games and illegal Ports?
The Amiga isn't dead yet, and has alot of kick left in her.
PHere's to peace PC user, no matte what the machine we are still human after
all.
Len
--
\ /
\ ~ ~ /
\ * * /
\ /
\ <> /
\ /
\ [] /
Len \ / Jerri
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^\/^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

[Ruud van de Kruisweg]

On 28 Feb 1997 14:46:53 GMT, ELA9...@shef.ac.uk (Chris Handley) wrote:

>I also believe that the CURRENT Amiga's will
>died eventually, but I also believe that some of these new RISC machines/OSs
>(BeOS,p-OS, PIOS-One, A\Box, etc) have a BIG change to oust the PC..
>
>The wind of change has finally come again. We are again at a cross roads
>where EVERYTHING will change. You may not see it yet, but most people don't
>until it has already happened. I'm sure you don't believe me - I don't ask
>you to - but that is what I believe, and I see enough evidence of it.

The Power PC has been around for how long? Three, four years? When it was
announced the general opinion in the computer trades was that it was going to
be a PC killer, since it was both faster and cheaper than an Intel processor.
Even better were the ambitious plans launched by biggies like IBM, Motorola
and Apple who were working together on various projects to bring the Wintel
steamroller to a grinding halt.

A couple of years down the road nothing much has changed. Apple has become
even more a niche platform with decreasing sales and diminishing returns for
numerous financial quarters; IBM has botched up their OS/2 Power PC port and
put a stop to Talingent. Intel on the other hand sells more chips than ever
before and Windows has become even bigger than it already was.

There's not a chance in hell that Be, Pios or Phase 5 are going to change the
current situation. They'll never be more than interesting niche OS-es for a
small bunch of computer fanatics. BeOS is likely to be the most succesful of
these, but it won't be any more succesful than NextStep. Pios-One and A\Box
should be lucky if they get sales somewhere near those of the Atari Falcon or
maybe even the Acorn Archimedes series. Don't expect these machines to become
hot sellers like the A500 ten years ago, those days are long gone.

Ruud
==
Holland SF - SF in the low countries: http://www.bwot.tmf.hva.nl/~ncsf/
Ruud van de Kruisweg - The Flat Earth Company - krui...@flatearth.xs4all.nl

[Marc Forrester]

Ketil Hunn wrote:
>> You think PCs are modern? Every time you boot-up you are presented
>> with a 70s black&white DOS screen with crap that the User doesn't
>> need to know (unless something goes wrong - he he).
>

> Not all games run from Windows,
> so if you like games you still need DOS.

A Windows 95 Dos 6.22 emulation program would have been preferable.

> And yes, the PC is _based_ on old technology, but so is the Amiga
> (slightly more recent, but still old) so what? I still have 64-bits
> graphicscard, 16-bits soundcard etc. and this equipment is not older
> than a year. Would you call a '98 model of Ford non-modern just
> because it is based on the technology from last years cars?

The difference as I see it is that the Amiga system,
for the most part, is less heavily based on its old
technology than is Dos in its many forms, it just
uses it, but could and is being moved up to a more
modern hardware base fairly easily. Not as easily
as UNIX, true, but then, UNIX has hardly any games
to speak of. Certainly I'd rather be trying to
port AmigaOS across to a StrongARM multiprocessor
system than MS-DOS 7.0..

> Good for you! Nothing is better than that! I never told anybody to
> sell their Amiga and buy a PC. Just wanted to pick a fight with those
> Amiga fanatics who say everything about the PC is crap and Amiga
> rules... :))))

Instantly making you look like a PC fanatic who say everything
about the Amiga is crap and the PC rules. :] What fun.

> OK, say you want to bring a Word-document home from your office to
> work on it during the weekend. There's no wordprocessor that imports
> the Word format on the Amiga. You could of course convert it to ASCII,
> but then you would lose all the other data that the document contains.

It's a bugger, that, isn't it? I'm surprised
no-one's sneaked a convertor onto Aminet anywhere.

> How about Visual C++?

I can't list any top of the range Amiga business software,
because as you say, if you want to do that sort of thing
it makes sense to turn on an IBM. The Amiga is for
computer hobbyists more than users.

However. Visual C++ ? Forgive me, but isn't that a
system for developing Windows programs? Why would you
want to do that on anything other than a Windows box?
Amiga C++ packages are more suited to converting UNIX C
programs. Oh, and devloping Amiga software, of course.

> Now YOU tell me what you can do with
> your Amiga that I cannot do with my PC!

Play Nethack in Tiles mode with a random selection of
intermixed Midi files, Mods, and full sampled tracks
ripped from favourite CD's playing in the background?
:) Yes, I know, but I'm a computer hobbyist, like I
said. If it's not the ultimate Nethack platform,
I'm not interested.

>> Ok, so it doesn't have the latest wizz bang 3D game.
>> Except for Quake of course ;^)
>

> Which Amiga people stole from the id server...

They left us no choice. :]

> but that is of course not as bad as Win95 stealing some nice
> features from the AmigaOS...
> (which of course Amiga stole from the Mac... ;-)

Nonono.. Microsoft stole them from the Mac ages back,
but decided not to use them until they had huge amounts
of money in reserve and could clobber Apple in a court
action. Thus Windows 3.1 as a stopgap to Windows 95.

AmigaOS is a simple case of parallel evolution. Honest, guv. :)

>> I've seen other people spend ages peering through manauls,
>> trying to get rid of that printer problem, find out how to
>> get Win95 to do something, stop Win95 doing something,
>> crash Win95, etc.
>

> Hmmm, it really _is_ strange that the most of the
> computers in the world are PC's if they are that crappy.

Where have you been? People will buy anything if you advertise it
expensively. And the adoption of the MS-DOS format by the business
world certainly helped. (This being largely as a result of the
world's first spreadsheets being written for it)

Then, once you have a reasonable majority, well,
with computers it tends to be self-reinforcing,
until you get to the point where today, most
people don't know there -are- any other sorts
of computer.

> Never had any problems with my PC, but maybe I'm the only one then...

You've never tried to do anything, then.
Speak to a systems admin some time for horror stories.

--
Marc Forrester, via his mum's ISP.

[Ketil Hunn]

On 28 Feb 1997 23:22:00 GMT gr...@ucsu.Colorado.EDU (GROUT LEN

EDWARD) wrote:
>If the PC has the majority buying them and
>supporting them then why the hell are you posting here?

This sounds more like: "Get the hell out of our playground" :-)
A friend of mine and I are having a blast writing the replies to this
thread...8-) We were once dedicated Amiga fans ourself but for some
reason we made a switch to PC, and we find it strange that most Amiga
owners really HATE everything about the PC... etc. etc.

>It may not be your intention, but it comes out that way.

Only because you don't read what I've posted so far then. Or maybe
because Amiga owners become very defensive when PC owners even try to
say a few good things about the PC...

>and we do know that the PC does have its good
>points, but I would much rather hope for the Amigas future than give in
>to Tyranny.

The sentence started out good, but it _had_ to end in some flaming
towards the PC... ;-)

[Ketil Hunn]

On Sat, 01 Mar 1997 13:18:13 +0000 Marc Forrester
<s...@mail.zynet.co.uk> wrote:
>A Windows 95 Dos 6.22 emulation program would have been preferable.

Actually DirectX in all games would be more preferable... I don't know
how the situation on the Amiga is now, but when I had my Amiga most
games wouldn't even run from HD's and only one or two from the
Workbench itself...

>> Good for you! Nothing is better than that! I never told anybody to
>> sell their Amiga and buy a PC. Just wanted to pick a fight with those
>> Amiga fanatics who say everything about the PC is crap and Amiga
>> rules... :))))
>
>Instantly making you look like a PC fanatic who say everything
>about the Amiga is crap and the PC rules. :] What fun.

How you can extract that information from my paragraph above is beyond
me...

>However. Visual C++ ? Forgive me, but isn't that a
>system for developing Windows programs? Why would you
>want to do that on anything other than a Windows box?
>Amiga C++ packages are more suited to converting UNIX C
>programs. Oh, and devloping Amiga software, of course.

What I meant was a tool on the Amiga for developing Amiga programs,
but similar and as good as Visual C++ for Win95.

>AmigaOS is a simple case of parallel evolution. Honest, guv. :)

Yes, Amiga can do some pretty amazing things, and easily too. I'm
surprised no one even mentioned Scala when asked about things you
could do with an Amiga that you can't with a PC (the MM packages for
Win95 are just not good enough, yet. And the MMDOS port of Scala is
nothing compared to the original).

>You've never tried to do anything, then.

Believe me, I use my computer A LOT. I've even released programs on
it, just as I did on the Amiga. I program a lot and it is really
valuable tor me since I'm a student...

I can't say that my Amiga was as valuable for me when I was at
college. My papers always had to be converted into ASCII and I had to
do all the layout on the PC. There were no good flowchart programs, no
good vector drawing programs, no usable spreadsheet programs, no good
wordprocessors where I could combine ALL these things into one
document. But when it came to programming, I enjoyed Amiga more than
3.11. But when Win95 and Visual C++ came along I preferred the PC even
when programming...

[Chris Handley]

Well, you've snipped 90% of what I said so that you can answer out of context
& make me look worse off :-)

In article <3317178f...@usenet.pitt.edu>, ke...@sis.pitt.edu says...

>On 28 Feb 1997 14:46:53 GMT ELA9...@shef.ac.uk (Chris Handley) wrote:

>>You think PCs are modern? Every time you boot-up you are presented with a
70s
>>black&white DOS screen with crap that the User doesn't need to know (unless
>>something goes wrong - he he).
>

>Not all games run from Windows, so if you like games you still need

>DOS. And yes, the PC is _based_ on old technology, but so is the Amiga

>(slightly more recent, but still old) so what? I still have 64-bits
>graphicscard, 16-bits soundcard etc. and this equipment is not older
>than a year. Would you call a '98 model of Ford non-modern just
>because it is based on the technology from last years cars?

The PC is still at heart out of date. As I said, it STILL boots using a
black&white DOS - they haven't lost that 'feature', and they probably never
will.

These are the things that cause problems on the PC - why do you think Windows
is so slow? It's not just M*cr*s*ft's fault...

Of course a 64-bit gfx card, etc is modern - the heart of the PC doesn't
exactly help these high-spec add-ons go well. Nowadays people have finally
managed to kuldge the PC into working suprisingly well, but
kludge-on-kludge-on-kludge does not make a simple, stable & easy computer.

>> My Amiga does what I want, without getting in my way (usually).
>

>Good for you! Nothing is better than that! I never told anybody to
>sell their Amiga and buy a PC. Just wanted to pick a fight with those
>Amiga fanatics who say everything about the PC is crap and Amiga
>rules... :))))

Couldn't you leave this in csa.advocacy? I would have removed irrelevant
groups, but my news browswer (a PC one - ugh) seems unable to handle large
newsgroup lists well.

>>Well, they are stupid
>
>Not at all! They were able to see through my Amiga-crap and they
>bought the computer that best suited their needs, a PC.

Not from what you said which was they effectively said "but what can it do?".

*I* can easily switch between many programs easily, working on several
different things at a time (very useful sometimes) - this is easier on the PC
than it was, but it still doesn't do it as good.

>>If you could come-up with a list of non-esoteric applications, I would be
>>interested. And 2-3 isn't much, if thats all you can manage.
>

>OK, say you want to bring a Word-document home from your office to

OH GOD - not this again! I have said - if you need a PC at home (for work
compatibility) then FINE! This is obviously the case if you really must live
& sleep with Word.

<snip>

>wordprocessor? And how about a program like Frontpage 97 on the Amiga?
>How about Visio? How about Schedule+. How about SystemAgent? How about
>Access? How about Visual C++? I believe that was more than 3... :)

As I don't have access to some of the less common PC programs I'm not sure
precisely what most of them actually do! I don't think they count if they are
programming tools....

>Those are all programs that I use frequently. Now YOU tell me what you

>can do with your Amiga that I cannot do with my PC!

That wasn't the point of your previous arguments specifically! I never said
that the Amiga could do things the PC can't (indeed the PC has a much larger
software base). My point was that PCs aren't always as GOOD at doing
something as an Amiga is - problem is, that can be a very subjective point :)

Off the top of my head, it has ARexx which I can make alot of utilities &
applications interact automatically (great sometimes). It is FAR more
configurable than any Win95 PC. On a more "averge user" level it's mainly
ease of use - applications often seem more elegant. Word vs Wordworth 6 is an
obvious example - and you will probably disagree! If thats the case can we
stop this particular point?

>>There's not much that Word can do that Wordworth 6 (or FinalWriter..) can't
>>do. Most people don't even use most of the features of Word (because they
add
>>complex features that people don't use!).
>

>ha ha ha - you're just jealous! ;-)

Apart from wishing WordWorth 5 had better tables - no! I'll take ease of use
anyday.

>>Ok, so it doesn't have the latest wizz bang 3D game. Except for Quake of
>>course ;^)
>

>Which Amiga people stole from the id server... but that is of course

>not as bad as Win95 stealing some nice features from the AmigaOS...
>(which of course Amiga stole from the Mac... ;-)

Then again Win95 blatently stole huge amounts from the Mac itself - far more
than from the Amiga (strangely). For instance: Where do you think the much
publicised "Start button" came from? Turn it upside-down, and it begins to
look strangely like the "Apple" menu.... Bill Gates must secretly like
Macintoshes!

>>What about StormC????? I'm not a C programmer myself, but I it's supposed
to
>>be pretty damn good (and getting better quite quickly).
>

>The last review I read about StormC++ was not very uplifting... There
>are still a lot of important things missing, they said...

I read two reviews - one thought it was great with a few minor problems, the
other seemed to set out to criticise it for things which didn't quite work
right in the current version, and minor missing things - if it had been a
game, I would have thought it was AmigaPower reviewing TKG :-)

>>You can display on-line help from the Amiga's OS. Ever heard of AmigaGuide
>>documents?
>

>Not from the desktop, with on-line help about the OS. I guess that if

Of course, Windoze NEEDS online help about itself....

I won't mention that I think most of the on-line help on PCs is crap, with no
thought given to what the user might actually want, or given to organisation
either. :)

>C= was afraid that it would be pirated like everything else on the
>Amiga...

THAT I seriously doubt =:)

>And of course I've heard of AmigaGuide. I made my own GUI library with
>objects that automatically had asynchronous on-line help!
>

>> DOpus5.5
>
>Yes, THAT one I still miss...

Windows95 in disguise? Except that it does things far better than Win95 :-)

>>Back when the Amiga was still being sold, most of your arguments would not
>>have hold
>

>According to others Amiga is still being sold... so your point is?

I ment when Commodore sold Amigas! Yes they are still being sold, by Eagle &
QuickPak mainly.

PCs had not become so 'popular' (except people dislike computers because they
always go wrong....) in the past, so that having one at home to work on a Word
document that you had at work would not have been such an issue. Basically.

Except of course, you have snipped everything that you said, so that no-one
else can follow this trivial argument ;^)

>>Just don't say the PC is better at EVERYTHING, ALL THE TIME.
>

>I never said that and I never will... I see good and bad things with
>both systems... Unfortunately, some Amiga fans only see good things
>about the Amiga and bad things about the PC...

That sort of Amiga person I wish didn't exist - we need realistic opinions to
convince people, not maniacs who haven't even used a PC for 5 minutes.

>>A PC is easier to use???? Don't make me laugh :-D
>

>To late now, isn't it? ;-)

Darn! A flaw in something I said! (I thought I was doing so well till then:)

>>I've seen other people spend ages peering through manauls, trying to get rid
>>of that printer problem, find out how to get Win95 to do something, stop
Win95
>>doing something, crash Win95, etc.
>

>Hmmm, it really _is_ strange that the most of the computers in the

>world are PC's if they are that crappy. Never had any problems with my

>PC, but maybe I'm the only one then...

You have NEVER had problems installing games?
You have NEVER had Win95's printer driver crash, stopping any more print-outs?
You have NEVER had to edit any batch files to stop your PC doing something
because some dumb installer didn't ask you?

Problems with Win95 are generally down to experience - I'm glad I know
computers so well, or I would have big problems too. Of the top of my head:

Editing the Start menu isn't obvious.

What the Documents thing in the Start menu do isn't obvious - maybe they are
copies which are wasting space?

Altering the printer settings is as bad as on the Amiga, almost! Win95's
attempt to make things easier sometimes makes it more complex...

Try deleting an application which you just installed. Without CleanSweep it
would be virtually impossible; with CleanSweep it still doesn't do it
properly.

Accessing drives (floppy, cd-rom, etc) is very un-obvious. "My Computer"???
That could mean ANYTHING!

Copying/Moving files is overly complicated (Select, go to mop-up menu, Drag -
if I remember correctly).

Explorer is appalling compared to almost any Amiga directory util.

The equivalent of filetype recognition in Win95 compared to DOpus5.5 (maybe
not fair - who cares!) is pathetic. Only by filename ending, and the
application used with that filetype is specified in the middle of a batch
file!

I don't want to have to think of any more problems or annoyances - they exist,
and I would rather do something more constructive (use an Amiga ;-)

>>PCs have become TOO complicated, and they drop all

>>that at the users feet
>
>Too complicated for Amiga users maybe... ;) But of course there are
>more people having problems with th PC. There are simply MORE people
>using it.

My point wasn't (directly) to do with number of people having problems!

The Amiga Workbench may not be quite a functional as Win95 with some
functions, but it's a hell of a lot easier to use. Unlike Win95, everything
is represented in a very physical way. Drop an icon out of the window onto
the desktop, and it doesn't leave a 'copy'. Want Win95 to run something on
start-up - the drawer responsible for that is in the first level of the
Workbench partition. Also, PCs generally don't have partitions - this is a
major problem when you get more than a few big applications & games.

The AmigaDos is easily 20 times more functional, and certainly several times
easier to use.

The Amiga's elegant OS makes certain things far easier on the user. Eg.If an
application which requires a CD-ROM is run (say from Start menu), the
"requester" isn't exactly helpful is it? If I remember rightly (PCs at uni.
still use Win3.11 - completely horrid), you even often get a DOS screen thingy
pop-up!! Similarly for floppy disks. New hardware requires far less
configuration &/or problems (bets on you ignoring this point again?)

>>Trying to explain why the PC is worse that the Amiga is difficult because
>>there are so many points, often minor ones. All those minor ones add up
>>though.
>

>That was not the point in my initial posting either. It was to say
>that there are good things about the PC too and that some Amiga
>fanatics should open their eyes. And the first couple of replies I got
>was something like "BULLSHIT! PC is crap!!!!" and so on, which
>actually proves my point about the Amiga fanatics... ;-)

You were actually being a bit more general than "some" - how convenient that
you removed that bit ;^)

>____________________________________________________________________
> Ketil Hunn MSIS student at the
> 6629 Wilkins Ave University of Pittsburgh.
> Pittsburgh, PA 15217
> U.S.A. mailto: ke...@sis.pitt.edu
> Phone: 412 421 5735 http://www.lis.pitt.edu/~ketil/

You living in PC land doesn't help! Although some people say the Amiga's
doing better in the USA than most - I'm not sure of that (but I haven't been
there....)

[Chris Handley]

In article <33184c28...@news.xs4all.nl>, krui...@flatearth.xs4all.nl
says...

>>I also believe that the CURRENT Amiga's will
>>died eventually, but I also believe that some of these new RISC machines/OSs
>>(BeOS,p-OS, PIOS-One, A\Box, etc) have a BIG change to oust the PC..
>>
>>The wind of change has finally come again. We are again at a cross roads
>>where EVERYTHING will change. You may not see it yet, but most people don't
>>until it has already happened. I'm sure you don't believe me - I don't ask
>>you to - but that is what I believe, and I see enough evidence of it.

>The Power PC has been around for how long? Three, four years? When it was

That is NOT the point! The PowerPC was a new, super cool chip back then - it
was also expensive, and it takes time for a chip to gain acceptance, and more
a computer to be designed around an entirely new processor.

The *latest* PowerPC chips which compete with the Pentium & above are quite
NEW - how long has the Intel 80x86 been around hmmmm?? Your argument there is
plain silly.

>announced the general opinion in the computer trades was that it was going to
>be a PC killer, since it was both faster and cheaper than an Intel processor.
>Even better were the ambitious plans launched by biggies like IBM, Motorola
>and Apple who were working together on various projects to bring the Wintel
>steamroller to a grinding halt.

The opinions of the industry are generally know for being wrong until it is
something is obviously right! Hype does not equate success, unless you have a
medium-sized market (too small you get no sales, too few people listen). Even
then it's not a sure.

The fact that big companies can make mistakes is nothing to do with it.

>A couple of years down the road nothing much has changed. Apple has become

Yep - unrealistic dream of big companies that they spoken about too much, only
for things to turn out differently.

>even more a niche platform with decreasing sales and diminishing returns for

Certainly Apple's market is shrinking (although slower than before), but it
has a fair chance (no means certain) of making a come-back...

>numerous financial quarters; IBM has botched up their OS/2 Power PC port and
>put a stop to Talingent. Intel on the other hand sells more chips than ever
>before and Windows has become even bigger than it already was.

Stating that Intel is selling more chips than before is hardly supprising -
the momentum of the PC market is large, and takes time to change. Expect it
to change to quickly, and you will fall flat on your face.

On the other hand, the personal-computing CPU market is VERY small compared to
chips used for other things (TVs, VCRs, washing machines, the PC keyboard
controller, cars, etc) - in this stake Motorola sells at least ten times what
Intel does, and makes more sales than anyone else by far. Infact, Intel isn't
even third!

This fact means that Motorola has the cash to pump it's PowerPC project while
many companies (more than I listed by far) start using it's PowerPC chips.
The PowerPC chips is quite new in computing terms, and it takes time for
people to see it as good.

IBM don't rely on the home-computer market anymore! Infact, I believe they
are become MORE successful - just not with PCs :-)

>There's not a chance in hell that Be, Pios or Phase 5 are going to change the
>current situation. They'll never be more than interesting niche OS-es for a

I said that most people wouldn't see that Change is coming. Spouting facts
that are only relevant half the time (maybe you didn't realise that?) doesn't
change things.

>small bunch of computer fanatics. BeOS is likely to be the most succesful of
>these, but it won't be any more succesful than NextStep. Pios-One and A\Box

BeOS is looking a little shaky just recently, but seems to be taking things in
it's stride. I would certainly think Be is faily likely to quite well -
although I am not so sure ATM.

>should be lucky if they get sales somewhere near those of the Atari Falcon or
>maybe even the Acorn Archimedes series. Don't expect these machines to become
>hot sellers like the A500 ten years ago, those days are long gone.

What the f*ck has the Falcon or Archimedies to do with things??? Or even the
A500 for that matter? You completely mis-understand me.

You are also trying to undermine my argument (belief? the facts won't be so
clear until it is *obvious* what will happen) by comparing A\Box/Pios-One/etc
to out-of-date wedge-shape computers aimed at kids & schools.

The Acorn Arc was far too late for it's market (during the last days of the
Amiga's success). The Atari Falcon was far too little, too late, with crap
hardware due to over-run deadlines. The A500 was for a completely different
market to what exists now.

If it wasn't so clear: I expect one or several of the PowerPC based machines,
that will be coming out soon, to gain a foot hold in niche markets, the few
'early takers', and of course what ever Amiga owners who are left. It is the
correct niche markets that will allow these machines to make some money to
fund the SLOW expansion into other markets which the PC currently dominates.

It is also possible that the uptake of one of these machines may be a lot
faster than I generally expect, because they are just so good! Maybe that
sound naive the way I have put it, but that's the best way I can explain it
(I'm not always good at explaining things.....).

I'm 100% sure you will disagree with me on most of my points (except a few to
make it look like you have a realistic view point:-). No need to give huge
lists of facts if you reply - it's not as if they will change my point of view
!

If nothing else, trying to predict what will happen to (personal) computing
makes for a very tricky and interesting spectator sport :)

[Chris Handley]

In article <33186564...@usenet.pitt.edu>, ke...@sis.pitt.edu says...

>
>On Sat, 01 Mar 1997 13:18:13 +0000 Marc Forrester
><s...@mail.zynet.co.uk> wrote:
>>A Windows 95 Dos 6.22 emulation program would have been preferable.
>
>Actually DirectX in all games would be more preferable... I don't know
>how the situation on the Amiga is now, but when I had my Amiga most
>games wouldn't even run from HD's and only one or two from the
>Workbench itself...

That intolerable situation has at least changed! You might of course
point-out that not many new games are actually released now, but....

>>> Good for you! Nothing is better than that! I never told anybody to
>>> sell their Amiga and buy a PC. Just wanted to pick a fight with those
>>> Amiga fanatics who say everything about the PC is crap and Amiga
>>> rules... :))))
>>

>>Instantly making you look like a PC fanatic who say everything
>>about the Amiga is crap and the PC rules. :] What fun.
>
>How you can extract that information from my paragraph above is beyond
>me...

As are many other things it appears :-)

>>However. Visual C++ ? Forgive me, but isn't that a
>>system for developing Windows programs? Why would you
>>want to do that on anything other than a Windows box?
>>Amiga C++ packages are more suited to converting UNIX C
>>programs. Oh, and devloping Amiga software, of course.
>
>What I meant was a tool on the Amiga for developing Amiga programs,
>but similar and as good as Visual C++ for Win95.

Wow, what Big sentence! Sorry :), I couldn't resist :)

I still think StormC is making big strides towards being like VisualXXX...

>>AmigaOS is a simple case of parallel evolution. Honest, guv. :)
>
>Yes, Amiga can do some pretty amazing things, and easily too. I'm
>surprised no one even mentioned Scala when asked about things you
>could do with an Amiga that you can't with a PC (the MM packages for
>Win95 are just not good enough, yet. And the MMDOS port of Scala is
>nothing compared to the original).

The first Amiga-pro statment you've actually made!

I guess MultiMedia was far too obvious!?

You heard of course that IBM once used Amiga's (Scala?) with some stand it
did? Not exactly conclusive, but damn funny!

>>You've never tried to do anything, then.
>
>Believe me, I use my computer A LOT. I've even released programs on
>it, just as I did on the Amiga. I program a lot and it is really
>valuable tor me since I'm a student...
>
>I can't say that my Amiga was as valuable for me when I was at
>college. My papers always had to be converted into ASCII and I had to
>do all the layout on the PC. There were no good flowchart programs, no

Why would you EVER convert them to ASCII?????? Surely you could print-out
your stuff using the college printers without resorting to that? I do it all
the time for my write-ups at uni - even colour sometimes!

All the penance of (re)structuring ASCII is almost enigh for your sin of
buying a PC!

>good vector drawing programs, no usable spreadsheet programs, no good
>wordprocessors where I could combine ALL these things into one

Possibly there weren't, but that isn't the case anymore :-)

>document. But when it came to programming, I enjoyed Amiga more than
>3.11. But when Win95 and Visual C++ came along I preferred the PC even
>when programming...

I assume you haven't written any gfx intensive stuff (eg.games) then? Utils
are hardly a measure of a computer.

You are prolific aren't you?

[Shawn K. Carman]

Ketil Hunn wrote:
>
> On Sat, 01 Mar 1997 13:18:13 +0000 Marc Forrester
> <s...@mail.zynet.co.uk> wrote:

> Actually DirectX in all games would be more preferable... I don't know
> how the situation on the Amiga is now, but when I had my Amiga most
> games wouldn't even run from HD's and only one or two from the
> Workbench itself...

Sad fact. Helped to kill the Amiga market, some users refused to buy a
game that wasn't HD installable, worked with an accerlator etc.

>
> >> Good for you! Nothing is better than that! I never told anybody to
> >> sell their Amiga and buy a PC. Just wanted to pick a fight with those
> >> Amiga fanatics who say everything about the PC is crap and Amiga
> >> rules... :))))
> >
> >Instantly making you look like a PC fanatic who say everything
> >about the Amiga is crap and the PC rules. :] What fun.
>
> How you can extract that information from my paragraph above is beyond
> me...

How do you pick a fight with someone? Take the extreme opposite of
their view, hmmmn.

>
> >However. Visual C++ ? Forgive me, but isn't that a
> >system for developing Windows programs? Why would you
> >want to do that on anything other than a Windows box?
> >Amiga C++ packages are more suited to converting UNIX C
> >programs. Oh, and devloping Amiga software, of course.
>
> What I meant was a tool on the Amiga for developing Amiga programs,
> but similar and as good as Visual C++ for Win95.

Storm Wizard and the Amiga Developer CD combined can provide quite a bit
of useful utils, code or whatever to help in development of your own
software.

> Yes, Amiga can do some pretty amazing things, and easily too. I'm
> surprised no one even mentioned Scala when asked about things you
> could do with an Amiga that you can't with a PC (the MM packages for
> Win95 are just not good enough, yet. And the MMDOS port of Scala is
> nothing compared to the original).

SCALA no longer supports the Amiga, and it was some pretty good
software.

>
> >You've never tried to do anything, then.
>
> Believe me, I use my computer A LOT. I've even released programs on
> it, just as I did on the Amiga. I program a lot and it is really
> valuable tor me since I'm a student...
>
> I can't say that my Amiga was as valuable for me when I was at
> college. My papers always had to be converted into ASCII and I had to
> do all the layout on the PC. There were no good flowchart programs, no

> good vector drawing programs, no usable spreadsheet programs, no good
> wordprocessors where I could combine ALL these things into one

> document. But when it came to programming, I enjoyed Amiga more than
> 3.11. But when Win95 and Visual C++ came along I preferred the PC even
> when programming...

Hmmn, I'm a college student and I can use my Amiga for everything I
need. If I write a document in Word it can be saved in RTF format, and
imported into FinalWriter. I actually prefer to write the entire
document in FinalWriter though. There are several Vector drawing
programs now for the Amiga, DrawStudio for one. FinalCalce is a decent
spreadsheet, and it can be used with FinalWriter. Very easy to import
them all into one document. I cuurently work doing programming in Java,
C++, Perl on the PC at work and if you didn't have Visual C++ then it
would be extremely difficult to perform some of the simplist tasks. On
the Amiga its as simple as accessing the library and executing the right
machine function.

I hate PCs. I use them because I have to, not because I want to. I do
tech support and it is the most unreliable peice of equipment. Why is
it acceptable for a program to crash on a regular basis? Why do you get
GPFs or Protection Faults when the temp dir gets somewhat filled. Why
do you need 16 megs or 32 megs to do any decent work? How many times do
people have to unistall and reinstall?

I am in a position where I see the worst of PCs. That are truly just
large fast calculators. It amazes me that a $200 game system
outperforms a decent pentium that costs 10 times as much. Truly the PCs
are a result of Mass Marketing. How in this day and age can anyone
believe in the MMX as the way of the future? I remember the modems that
used the Pentium to do the DSP. They never worked with online services.
The MMX is the result of marketing and brainwashing people into
believing that an integrated chip to do everything is better that
seperate chips to perform specific task and free up the CPU. I
guarantee a Pentium MMX cannot outperform a similarly equipped PC that
has a dedicated MPEG decoder or someother hardware device like a DSP.

I am the only Amiga user where I work. I find the Mac people have the
same opinions as Amiga users do. Oh wow you have long file names, hmmn,
we had that for how long? Oooh, you can put shortcuts on the
desktop?!?!? Hey with Windows95 you can even Format a floppy and
continue working on something, thats impressive. Hey you have to pay
for BETA version with no upgrade discount, wow. Anyway, most people at
my work have started using Windows NT, Linux, or they reluctantly stay
with Windows95 while they dream about owning an Alpha or some other
system. Take a look at the System requirements for SoftImage. Might as
well buy a SGI and run Alias.

The only thing I like about PCs is you can get anything you want
basically for free, except hardware. Maybe thats why they require so
many upgrades to just play games. A conspiracy?

Ignore my ranting as I had a headache and just wanted to rant.
Although, I feel they are some valid points. I can also make many pros
for the PC if I wanted to. What would I compare it to? Well the
debated wouldn't be to buy an Amiga over a PC whihc is the converse of
the implied topic here of Buy a PC over your Amiga; it would be whether
to buy a games system over a PC. Scary huh? If you need it for
wordprocessing or whatever, then you ususally have access to them at
school or work and there is truly no requirement for getting them at
home. Oh BTW, where does WEBTV fit into all of this?

Shawn

[Ketil Hunn]

On 1 Mar 1997 21:00:10 GMT ELA9...@shef.ac.uk (Chris Handley) wrote:
>Why would you EVER convert them to ASCII?????? Surely you could print-out
>your stuff using the college printers without resorting to that? I do it all
>the time for my write-ups at uni - even colour sometimes!

If you had read my post before you replied you would know that I
needed to include spreadsheet tables, flowcharts, vector graphics etc.
in my document-. All those things that the Amiga software is not very
good at... at least not when it comes to combining them into one
document.

>I assume you haven't written any gfx intensive stuff (eg.games) then? Utils
>are hardly a measure of a computer.

So what? I hardly ever play games and I am not much interested in
graphic programming. That's why I spend my time programming useful
utilties instead. But I guess you just wanted to point out that the
Amiga is only about games anyway, so...

>You are prolific aren't you?

How would you know? I knew it wouldn't take you long before you went
for the person instead of his meanings.If your Amiga has a decent
browser, do a search on Alta-Vista on my name... then do a search on
yours...

[tim]

>On 28 Feb 1997 23:22:00 GMT gr...@ucsu.Colorado.EDU (GROUT LEN
>EDWARD) wrote:

>>If the PC has the majority buying them and
>>supporting them then why the hell are you posting here?

>This sounds more like: "Get the hell out of our playground" :-)

>A friend of mine and I are having a blast writing the replies to this
>thread...8-) We were once dedicated Amiga fans ourself but for some
>reason we made a switch to PC, and we find it strange that most Amiga
>owners really HATE everything about the PC... etc. etc.

Er.. why? I think thats reasonable considering they decide to have an Amiga and
not a PC. Seems pretty ok to me. Why hassle them ?

>>It may not be your intention, but it comes out that way.

>Only because you don't read what I've posted so far then. Or maybe

>because Amiga owners become very defensive when PC owners even try to
>say a few good things about the PC...

Nope, but it's a little pointless having Amiga newsgroups to dicuss the merits
of other platforms.

>>and we do know that the PC does have its good
>>points, but I would much rather hope for the Amigas future than give in
>>to Tyranny.

>The sentence started out good, but it _had_ to end in some flaming
>towards the PC... ;-)

Aw c'mon! Thats just provacation! Thats no flame - any reasonably minded human
being can call 'Microsoft' tyranny ;)

Tim

[sno...@thenet.co.uk]

>On 28 Feb 1997 14:46:53 GMT ELA9...@shef.ac.uk (Chris Handley)
>wrote:

>OK, say you want to bring a Word-document home from your office to

>work on it during the weekend. There's no wordprocessor that imports
>the Word format on the Amiga.

well then lets run shapeshifter and run a copy of word5.1
that imports and exports word for windows 2 files perfectly
as does works and word on the Pc (ami-pro can import ok but
doesn't make much of a job off exporting).

If you really can't find an amiga spreadsheet then there is
Excell 4 for the mac as well.

system requirements for this is a A1200 with 4 meg fast and
a harddrive off course I find my amiga mac is very useable
with a 60 meg partition even run ircle and go on the internet
with it thou with mac software the more ram the better.

>You could of course convert it to
>ASCII, but then you would lose all the other data that the document

>contains. And how easy is it to include a small spreadsheet into your
>Amiga wordprocessor? And how about a program like Frontpage 97 on the

>Amiga? How about Visio? How about Schedule+. How about SystemAgent?
>How about Access? How about Visual C++? I believe that was more than

>3... :) Those are all programs that I use frequently. Now YOU tell me

>what you can do with your Amiga that I cannot do with my PC!

Hmm run mac software maybe ;-)

If theres mac versions of these programs then the amiga can run them
Yes not native programs I admit but with shapeshifter you see that

If microsoft had chosen to write for the amiga then the amiga
could have applications as good as any on the Pc

>>There's not much that Word can do that Wordworth 6 (or
>>FinalWriter..) can't do. Most people don't even use most of the
>>features of Word (because they add complex features that people
>>don't use!).

>ha ha ha - you're just jealous! ;-)
Not for a word processor :o)

>>Ok, so it doesn't have the latest wizz bang 3D game. Except for
>>Quake of course ;^)

>Which Amiga people stole from the id server... but that is of course

>not as bad as Win95 stealing some nice features from the AmigaOS...
>(which of course Amiga stole from the Mac... ;-)

Or MsDos stealing from Cpm ... ;-)

>>You can display on-line help from the Amiga's OS. Ever heard of
>>AmigaGuide documents?

>Not from the desktop, with on-line help about the OS. I guess that if

>C= was afraid that it would be pirated like everything else on the

>Amiga... And of course I've heard of AmigaGuide. I made my own GUI

>library with objects that automatically had asynchronous on-line
>help!

you can include amiga guide documents in your programs using
the amigaguide.library (its not just there for multiview and
amigaguide)

and on line help for the amiga os isn't such a difficult
thing to add really you basically want a commodity that pops up off
the help key or simpler use a function key or a menu to launch a guide
file for the os. several guides have been written for the amiga os
from the users point of view.

I don't want to waste my hd space on them thou. what is so hard
to understand about workbench any way.

As for the piracy jibe how many pirate copys are there of Word
or Excell or Office or Win95.

Do you really think the Pc would be so popular in the home without
the wide spread availability of pirate software.

Theres a massive industry of third party books for using assorted
Popular Pc programs.
Would people be buying these with legal copies of the software
complete with manuals.

>> DOpus5.5

>Yes, THAT one I still miss...

Prefer opus 4.12 but i'm strange that way ;-)

>>Back when the Amiga was still being sold, most of your arguments
>>would not have hold

>According to others Amiga is still being sold... so your point is?

Perhaps he mean't being developed and unfortunatly with the main
owner of the amiga being a liquidator over the past few years
and an over extended Pc company in between then there hasn't been
much done in the way of development.

Perhaps the worst developments have been Commodores and Amiga
Technologies attempts at a Cdrom drive For the A1200.

Commodore never found a way of getting money from me once i
bought my A1200 plenty of other companys did but not commodore
If they had then perhaps things would be different now.

>>Just don't say the PC is better at EVERYTHING, ALL THE TIME.

>I never said that and I never will... I see good and bad things with

>both systems... Unfortunately, some Amiga fans only see good things
>about the Amiga and bad things about the PC...

Yes some do but then again there are extremes in all groups in society

I love the speed of the Pc but i don't need it. On the net my Amiga
is barely ticking over Its getting about 8% Cpu use.

I love the flexability of my amiga and the freely available software.
and I love the sense of community you get with the Amiga.

Would you be suprised to find at my Isp there are a minority of Amiga
users but its the Amiga users that have a mailing List to help each
other out. Its the amiga users at my isp that run an ftp site holding
freely distributable software for the amiga.

would you be suprised to find that there is nothing similar happening
for the Pc user's at My Isp Dispite there vast numbers this is a big
difference in attitudes of the two different camps.

There is a relatively large percentage of amiga owners that put
something back Into the Amiga Community. It may be a mod a picture
a text guide icons even or helping out a fellow amiga user install
some hardware /software or perhaps its a program or beta testing.
you see that everyone that wants too can put something back. The
People with experience help those with less and as they get better
then they help out the other less experienced people.

sure some don't but then these tend to be the people who move away
to the Pc.

>>A PC is easier to use???? Don't make me laugh :-D

>To late now, isn't it? ;-)

To late for what exactly world domination a world of clones.
a world where if it isn't microsoft it isn't any good.
How many people have made a name for them selfs on the Pc.

now as an ex Amiga owner you have heard of people like jim drew dave
haynie jonathon potter stephen boburg oliver wagner jon hare to name a
few can you really say its the same for the Pc.

>>I've seen other people spend ages peering through manauls, trying to
>>get rid of that printer problem, find out how to get Win95 to do
>>something, stop Win95 doing something, crash Win95, etc.

>Hmmm, it really _is_ strange that the most of the computers in the
>world are PC's if they are that crappy. Never had any problems with
>my PC, but maybe I'm the only one then...

It's the software base thats available to Pc users that makes it
So attractive. Lets face it the average Pc home user will get the
cash together to buy the hardware but take away there pirate software
and you would find a different situation.

Ok to an extent this applys to the amiga as well but on the whole
you don't need to pay a vast deal for amiga software look at what
has been put on cover disk's Dopus4.12 Pagestream2.2 Imagine2,3,4?
Octamed sound studio Various spread sheet programs. Ppaint 4
(Ppaint 6.4 is on formats rom next month).
Wordworth3Se. Ced3.5 there are loads of good applications which
have been released very cheaply and widely.

look at whats free several programing languages gadtools box
Yam Voyager MCP ...

>>PCs have become TOO complicated, and they drop all
>>that at the users feet

This is true how many time's have you seen things like not enough
conventional memory available or the sound card getting lost it
works in win95 but then you run a Dos Game and it can't find your
sound card probably doesn't happen to you or does it..

>Too complicated for Amiga users maybe... ;) But of course there are
>more people having problems with th PC. There are simply MORE people
>using it.

There is a difference between you somebody who Programs the Pc and
the Average home user or Office user for that matter who uses a Pc

Why are there so many Pc support people about If the user's could
handle the problems Pc's throw at them then there would be a large
number of redundancys.

>>Trying to explain why the PC is worse that the Amiga is difficult
>>because there are so many points, often minor ones. All those
>>minor ones add up though.

>That was not the point in my initial posting either. It was to say

>that there are good things about the PC too and that some Amiga
>fanatics should open their eyes. And the first couple of replies I
>got was something like "BULLSHIT! PC is crap!!!!" and so on, which
>actually proves my point about the Amiga fanatics... ;-)

Yes there are fanatics in all camps and perhaps i've painted a rosey
picture for the amiga well i'm bound to do that perhaps I should add
some things i don't like about the Amiga at least with the A1200, No1
has to be the slow inbuilt serial and parallel ports however hypercom
and surf squirel provide solutions to that little problem.

The lack of a sensible graphic card solution for the A1200.
and possibly 16 bit sound. I say possibly becouse i have very few
problems with 8 bit sound lets be honest here with 256 levels
available you get an accuracy of 0.4 % or less you put a filter on
that and you have even better apparent quality than that.
can you hear the difference between 16 bit and 8 bit.

And how much is it used any way seems to me i'm exchanging wav files
on irc which are 8 bit Mono at 11khz.

there is one product which is missing for the Amiga A1200 and in
a big way. Its a Way of adding either a Zorro slot cheaply or possibly
a PCI slot. This would mean a Graphics card could be either a standard
Pc One If we had Pci or a Zorro Graphics card for big box amiga's
the Zorro slot is most appealing but for A1200 users It has to be the
Pci Slot.

As for the future for me I think i'll probably end up buying a scsi
controller and siamese my A1200 with a 486 system running windows95
fraid for me i can't see the Abox or Pios1 coming within my budget.
there are things i want that only the Pc can provide at a reasonable
Price and this way i get the best of both worlds.

catch ya

john

sno...@thenet.co.uk

[Hans Guijt]

Ketil Hunn (ke...@sis.pitt.edu) wrote:
>Good for you! Nothing is better than that! I never told anybody to
>sell their Amiga and buy a PC. Just wanted to pick a fight with those

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

What for? Don't you think we have enough assholes here as it is?

>Amiga fanatics who say everything about the PC is crap and Amiga
>rules... :))))

Hans

[Marc Forrester]

Ketil Hunn wrote:
> >A Windows 95 Dos 6.22 emulation program would have been preferable.
>

> Actually DirectX in all games would be more preferable... I don't know
> how the situation on the Amiga is now, but when I had my Amiga most
> games wouldn't even run from HD's and only one or two from the
> Workbench itself...

I mean preferable to Raw Dos 7.0 for playing old IBM games.
The Amiga has improved somewhat, but yes, still lots of
faffing about if you want to combine games and hard drive
in any useful manner. Older games, that is.

> >Instantly making you look like a PC fanatic who say everything
> >about the Amiga is crap and the PC rules. :] What fun.
>
> How you can extract that information from
> my paragraph above is beyond me...

I extracted that information from the
responses you engendered to your posting. :7

[Marc Forrester]

Shawn K. Carman wrote:
> > Actually DirectX in all games would be more preferable...
> > I don't know how the situation on the Amiga is now, but when
> > I had my Amiga most games wouldn't even run from HD's and only
> > one or two from the Workbench itself...
>
> Sad fact. Helped to kill the Amiga market, some users refused to
> buy a game that wasn't HD installable, worked with an accerlator etc.

More fatally, to my mind, no-one bought a HD because
hardly any of their games would make any use of it.

[Stephan Schaem]

In article <5fa1gd$9...@bignews.shef.ac.uk>, ELA9...@shef.ac.uk (Chris Handley) wrote:
>Well, you've snipped 90% of what I said so that you can answer out of context
>& make me look worse off :-)
>
>
>In article <3317178f...@usenet.pitt.edu>, ke...@sis.pitt.edu says...
>
>>On 28 Feb 1997 14:46:53 GMT ELA9...@shef.ac.uk (Chris Handley) wrote:
>>>You think PCs are modern? Every time you boot-up you are presented with a
>70s
>>>black&white DOS screen with crap that the User doesn't need to know (unless
>>>something goes wrong - he he).
>>
>>Not all games run from Windows, so if you like games you still need
>>DOS. And yes, the PC is _based_ on old technology, but so is the Amiga
>>(slightly more recent, but still old) so what? I still have 64-bits
>>graphicscard, 16-bits soundcard etc. and this equipment is not older
>>than a year. Would you call a '98 model of Ford non-modern just
>>because it is based on the technology from last years cars?
>
>The PC is still at heart out of date. As I said, it STILL boots using a
>black&white DOS - they haven't lost that 'feature', and they probably never
>will.
>
>These are the things that cause problems on the PC - why do you think Windows
>is so slow? It's not just M*cr*s*ft's fault...
>

I wonder why Byte benchmark show a 133mhz pentium beying faster then
a 167mhz ultra sparc...
The bus/cpu/memory/blitter/co processor are a few time faster then anything
available for the amiga.

>Of course a 64-bit gfx card, etc is modern - the heart of the PC doesn't
>exactly help these high-spec add-ons go well. Nowadays people have finally
>managed to kuldge the PC into working suprisingly well, but
>kludge-on-kludge-on-kludge does not make a simple, stable & easy computer.
>

PCI a kludge? risc based controler a kludge? interleaved sdram a kludge?

I really wish the amiga add all the kludges at the same price.

BTW, what do you call AGA?

>>>If you could come-up with a list of non-esoteric applications, I would be
>>>interested. And 2-3 isn't much, if thats all you can manage.
>>
>>OK, say you want to bring a Word-document home from your office to
>
>OH GOD - not this again! I have said - if you need a PC at home (for work
>compatibility) then FINE! This is obviously the case if you really must live
>& sleep with Word.
>

Also if you do programming, multimedia, etc... I never had the intention
to run word and I still got a PC at home.(And amigas) The amiga market
give people reason to upgrade to PC's or else.

>Off the top of my head, it has ARexx which I can make alot of utilities &
>applications interact automatically (great sometimes). It is FAR more
>configurable than any Win95 PC. On a more "averge user" level it's mainly
>ease of use - applications often seem more elegant. Word vs Wordworth 6 is an
>obvious example - and you will probably disagree! If thats the case can we
>stop this particular point?
>

The aplication that do have an arex port... I do beleive tho that each app
should have a comunication port for automation.
But who stop an amiga programmer to create wordworth6 on the PC?
The development tools are better and after a little time he can create
an amiga like layer to program with.

>>>Ok, so it doesn't have the latest wizz bang 3D game. Except for Quake of
>>>course ;^)
>>
>>Which Amiga people stole from the id server... but that is of course
>>not as bad as Win95 stealing some nice features from the AmigaOS...
>>(which of course Amiga stole from the Mac... ;-)
>
>Then again Win95 blatently stole huge amounts from the Mac itself - far more
>than from the Amiga (strangely). For instance: Where do you think the much
>publicised "Start button" came from? Turn it upside-down, and it begins to
>look strangely like the "Apple" menu.... Bill Gates must secretly like
>Macintoshes!

It look like a menu bar... big deal. BTW, I dont beleive anyone like macs,
the only mac user out there are forced to use them one way or another :)

>>>You can display on-line help from the Amiga's OS. Ever heard of AmigaGuide
>>>documents?
>>
>>Not from the desktop, with on-line help about the OS. I guess that if
>
>Of course, Windoze NEEDS online help about itself....
>

Dont you think hdtollbox need some reading before using?
Also dont forget there are people out there that are utterly confused
when they see a phrase like "Hit any key to continue"...

>I won't mention that I think most of the on-line help on PCs is crap, with no
>thought given to what the user might actually want, or given to organisation
>either. :)
>

Its hard to please all there 100,000,000 users or so :) (But they do try
and thats why windows is the way it is)

>
>>And of course I've heard of AmigaGuide. I made my own GUI library with
>>objects that automatically had asynchronous on-line help!
>>
>>> DOpus5.5
>>
>>Yes, THAT one I still miss...
>
>Windows95 in disguise? Except that it does things far better than Win95 :-)

win95 a file manager? look again...

>You have NEVER had problems installing games?
>You have NEVER had Win95's printer driver crash, stopping any more print-outs?
>You have NEVER had to edit any batch files to stop your PC doing something
>because some dumb installer didn't ask you?
>

Defenetly not worse then the amiga.

>Problems with Win95 are generally down to experience - I'm glad I know
>computers so well, or I would have big problems too. Of the top of my head:
>
>Editing the Start menu isn't obvious.
>

Click on it... to open the start menu folder to drag&drop.
or open the startmenu directory in windows.

I know this is above 80% of the windows user out there, but you dont need to
know computer to well to figure out how how to use the right mouse button.
Or know that the sratup menu old the startmenu items.

>What the Documents thing in the Start menu do isn't obvious - maybe they are
>copies which are wasting space?
>

Do you also think all the item under programs are copies that are waisting
space?

>Altering the printer settings is as bad as on the Amiga, almost! Win95's
>attempt to make things easier sometimes makes it more complex...
>

I think it depand on the manufacturer... HP drivers offer a clear interface.

>Try deleting an application which you just installed. Without CleanSweep it
>would be virtually impossible; with CleanSweep it still doesn't do it
>properly.
>

Thats an aplication problem... go shoot the programmer.
Its the same as amiga aplication copying file to libs: or elsewhere.

>Accessing drives (floppy, cd-rom, etc) is very un-obvious. "My Computer"???
>That could mean ANYTHING!
>

Its 100% logical... you are the one to choose what go onto the desktop.
At least you have a choice to too clutter your desktop with all the
partition/drive on the desktop.
I personaly have my partition in the startup menu.

>Copying/Moving files is overly complicated (Select, go to mop-up menu, Drag -
>if I remember correctly).
>

Click on file, move, release file, click option from popup that apear on
release.

The last click can be removed if you know you are moving the file
on the device, or copying it to another device.

>Explorer is appalling compared to almost any Amiga directory util.
>

I deleted explorer...

>The equivalent of filetype recognition in Win95 compared to DOpus5.5 (maybe
>not fair - who cares!) is pathetic. Only by filename ending, and the
>application used with that filetype is specified in the middle of a batch
>file!

I agree that windows should try to idendify the file when no extension is
present. otherwise the methode it uses is ok for the benefit.

>I don't want to have to think of any more problems or annoyances - they exist,
>and I would rather do something more constructive (use an Amiga ;-)
>

I was anyoned as much on the amiga... ok I deleted explorer from windows,
but I also deleted loadwb on the amiga.

>The Amiga Workbench may not be quite a functional as Win95 with some
>functions, but it's a hell of a lot easier to use. Unlike Win95, everything
>is represented in a very physical way. Drop an icon out of the window onto
>the desktop, and it doesn't leave a 'copy'. Want Win95 to run something on
>start-up - the drawer responsible for that is in the first level of the
>Workbench partition. Also, PCs generally don't have partitions - this is a
>major problem when you get more than a few big applications & games.
>

I dont beleive loadwb is easyer... not a chance. And its so simple that its
near useless for file managment.

Once you understand the win95 desktop is a drawer, like the startup menu
you might see how logical it is VS the amiga desktop.

I can resize my partition dinamicly on my PC... Ok, if I realize that I want
a 680meg partition VS 500meg, I just resize it (taking 180 meg free from
another).

>The AmigaDos is easily 20 times more functional, and certainly several times
>easier to use.
>

Agree 100% :) the dos command are a total joke, the dos shelll itself is
a crime.

But that can be fixed... I do beleive in MS to slowly go ahead.. the amiga
since the A3000 as been pretty much stagnant.

If MS dont, I switch too unix and hope the rest of the world will too :)

Stephan

[Marc Forrester]

Chris Handley wrote:
> I won't mention that I think most of the on-line help on PCs is crap,
> with no thought given to what the user might actually want, or given
> to organisation either. :)

Why not? It's a good point. Every time I want to look for something
in a Windows help book, my immediate choice is for a full search for
text, since you'll never find anything much past what 'Save as' means
through the Contents list. Admittedly I do generally find the
function I need, or whatever, but I'm not sure most people would.
I certainly never know wether I'm on the right track.

OTOH, are Amigaguides any better? Well, most of the ones I've
had recourse to use were, but then, they are generally for
shareware programs, so there's a lot of 'written by end-users
for end-users' about that..

[Jorn Hansson]

Ketil Hunn wrote:
> =

> On 28 Feb 1997 23:22:00 GMT gr...@ucsu.Colorado.EDU (GROUT LEN
> EDWARD) wrote:

> >If the PC has the majority buying them and
> >supporting them then why the hell are you posting here?

> =

> This sounds more like: "Get the hell out of our playground" :-)
> A friend of mine and I are having a blast writing the replies to this
> thread...8-) We were once dedicated Amiga fans ourself but for some
> reason we made a switch to PC, and we find it strange that most Amiga
> owners really HATE everything about the PC... etc. etc.

It's really hard not to, when we are being harassed by dickheads
"having a blast" harrassing us. You're discussing something we've
heard 1000s and 1000s times over. It's unevitable to become anti-PC
in the end! Maybe PC is right for you. Great. Write to Bill Gate$
then and tell him aaall about how you love his OS and your nice nice
Pentium.

> >It may not be your intention, but it comes out that way.

> =

> Only because you don't read what I've posted so far then. Or maybe
> because Amiga owners become very defensive when PC owners even try to

> say a few good things about the PC...

We KNOW what PC's are good for. Everyone I know have bought them
because of one thing: Games. And I admit: Quake rocks in a PC network.
There's really nothing like it.

> >and we do know that the PC does have its good

> >points, but I would much rather hope for the Amigas future than give i=
n
> >to Tyranny.
> =

> The sentence started out good, but it _had_ to end in some flaming
> towards the PC... ;-)

Facing a PC-only future sounds like tyrrany to me.

/J=F6rn Hansson

[Bernd Meyer]

ELA9...@shef.ac.uk (Chris Handley) writes:

>The PC is still at heart out of date. As I said, it STILL boots using a
>black&white DOS - they haven't lost that 'feature', and they probably never
>will.

Showing a bit of ignorance here? The PC boots through its BIOS routines
(which, these days, more often than not put an annoying colourful "energy
star" logo on the screen), and then boots straight into whatever OS you
have installed. No "DOS" in sight.

BTW, what would you use colours for during the boot process?

>These are the things that cause problems on the PC - why do you think Windows
>is so slow? It's not just M*cr*s*ft's fault...

Why do you think Linux is so fast?

>Couldn't you leave this in csa.advocacy? I would have removed irrelevant
>groups, but my news browswer (a PC one - ugh) seems unable to handle large
>newsgroup lists well.

Then you "browser" sucks. It doesn't have anything to do with the PC.

>The AmigaDos is easily 20 times more functional [than Win95], and certainly

>several times easier to use.

Hmm --- I bet you want to share with us your method of quantifying
"functionality" and "ease of use", right?

Bernie

--
============================================================================
"It's a magical world, Hobbes ol' buddy...
...let's go exploring"
Calvin's final words, on December 31st, 1995

[Kalico]

...so much for a "marketplace" newsgroup.

[Ketil Hunn]

On 1 Mar 1997 19:53:49 GMT ELA9...@shef.ac.uk (Chris Handley) wrote:
>I have said - if you need a PC at home (for work
>compatibility) then FINE!

So we agree then? ;-)

>Off the top of my head, it has ARexx which I can make alot of utilities &
>applications interact automatically (great sometimes).

Unfortunately not many programs make use of AREXX, and there is no
reason why they should not. Using my EasyRexx AREXX interface designer
you can create an AREXX interface in less than 5 minutes! (that was
today's commercial... ;-))

>For instance: Where do you think the much
>publicised "Start button" came from? Turn it upside-down, and it begins to
>look strangely like the "Apple" menu.... Bill Gates must secretly like
>Macintoshes!

And sure enough, isn't there an utility available for the Amiga that
implements a taskbar - just like in win95? I have at least seen some
postings about it.

>Of course, Windoze NEEDS online help about itself....

All features in an OS should always be well documented, even the most
obvious features. That is the most common flaw among computer
designers today: what is obvious to the designer might not be obvious
to the user

>You have NEVER had to edit any batch files to stop your PC doing something
>because some dumb installer didn't ask you?

That is the programmer's fault, not the OS... You cannot prevent
lamers of releasing programs on the Amiga either...

>What the Documents thing in the Start menu do isn't obvious - maybe they are
>copies which are wasting space?

They are shortcuts to your documents... When selecting one of the
items in the Documents menu, Win95 will open the
document/picture/whatever with your preferred program... That wasn't
difficult to understand, was it?

>Try deleting an application which you just installed.

ha ha ha. You say that unistalling is easier on the Amiga? It doesn't
even have a standard unistaller! Win95 has! Sure, you can make a LISP
script, just as you did with your installer-script, but the program
sure says INSTALL everywhere in the program (it is hardcoded into the
installer executable). I guess THAT is very obvious to the novice!?!?

>Accessing drives (floppy, cd-rom, etc) is very un-obvious. "My Computer"???
>That could mean ANYTHING!

No, it simply means YOUR computer. Boy, you really think Win95 is
horribly difficult to use, don't you?

>Copying/Moving files is overly complicated (Select, go to mop-up menu, Drag -
>if I remember correctly).

Never used drag 'n' drop, have we? ;-)

>Drop an icon out of the window onto
>the desktop, and it doesn't leave a 'copy'.

In Win95 it leaves a SHORTCUT to that program. Fast and effective!

>Editing the Start menu isn't obvious.

>Want Win95 to run something on
>start-up - the drawer responsible for that is in the first level of the
>Workbench partition

And your point is that it is easier to add programs in the StartUp
folder, right? I guess right-clicking the Start menu is to abstract
for you then?

>Also, PCs generally don't have partitions - this is a
>major problem when you get more than a few big applications & games.

What? That's entirely up to the user! You can partition your HD in
anyway you want...

>The Amiga's elegant OS makes certain things far easier on the user. Eg.If an
>application which requires a CD-ROM is run (say from Start menu), the
>"requester" isn't exactly helpful is it?

Oh? A requester that inform you to insert the CD-ROM... I guess that
isn't obvious to somebody... ;-)

>New hardware requires far less
>configuration &/or problems (bets on you ignoring this point again?)

Yeah, sure. Insert the new hardware and Win95 ask you want to use the
drivers when you restart Windows the next time... How hard can that
be?

>The AmigaDos is easily 20 times more functional, and certainly several times
>easier to use.

ha ha ha Obviously. Having problems with adding programs to the
StartUp menu, copying files, don't understand the My Computer icon and
you even get confused when the OS asks for a particular CD-ROM...
;-)))

[John Christian Lonningdal]

t...@ix.netcom.com (Stephan Schaem) wrote:

>>What the Documents thing in the Start menu do isn't obvious - maybe they are
>>copies which are wasting space?
>>
> Do you also think all the item under programs are copies that are waisting
> space?
>

As for the document thing, I really find it extremely valuable. Mostly
I can use that directly to access the last documents that I have been
working on. Works just great!

> Thats an aplication problem... go shoot the programmer.
> Its the same as amiga aplication copying file to libs: or elsewhere.
>

As for some people's mentioning problems about installation I think
a little experience with the PC will teach you that DLL files that
can be shared usually go in the Windows/System directory, OCX controls
in another, INI files in the Windows directory (although most have
started moving these to the app's directory). The installation
programs always ask where you want to install the program, which
defaults C:\Program Files.... I don't understand what people talk
about when they say Win95 is copying files all over the place. Again
this is an application thing, has nothing to do with the OS.

> I deleted explorer...
>
I don't like exporer either, and there are other alternatives, some
obviously based on some well known Amiga filemanagers. Just as you
use AMINET for your stuff, we can get better software out there
as well.

> I agree that windows should try to idendify the file when no extension is
> present. otherwise the methode it uses is ok for the benefit.
>

I actually find extensions to be a big benefit, because the name
itself gives an immediate indication to what file this is. No
long text is needed to explain it... just a small extension. Also
these extensions are used pretty consistently...

> Agree 100% :) the dos command are a total joke, the dos shelll itself is
> a crime.
>

Get 4DOS... got "intelligent" filename completion. A much better and
faster batch language. Context sensitive help (just hit F1). Color
coding... "intelligent" history. Alias'es ... etc etc etc... Always
look for something better if you hate some software... the selection
of software for the PC is huge!

John

-----------------------------------------------------------------
John Christian Lonningdal - http://www.lis.pitt.edu/~john
jo...@lis.pitt.edu - Ph: (412) 521-9386 - MSIS at Univ. of Pitt.

[CMM]

>t...@ix.netcom.com (Stephan Schaem) wrote:

Yeah...it is so huge that most of it is crap! According to an article I read not
too long ago....that out of the 100's and 100's and 100' of software titles
available for the PC about 93% of them sold less than 100 copies.
Besides..everyone I know that owns PC's uses the same 6 or 7 programs, so it
appears that the PC floats on about 7 programs and the rest or most of the
rest it is not worth having.

[Marc Forrester]

sno...@thenet.co.uk wrote:
> Yes there are fanatics in all camps and perhaps i've painted a rosey
> picture for the amiga well i'm bound to do that perhaps I should add
> some things i don't like about the Amiga at least with the A1200, No1
> has to be the slow inbuilt serial and parallel ports however hypercom
> and surf squirel provide solutions to that little problem.
>
> The lack of a sensible graphic card solution for the A1200.

There is the Eagle Tower for Ł340, which is perhaps a -lot-
of money just for a port that you can plug a graphics card
into, but it is almost an upgrade from A1200 to A4000.

> and possibly 16 bit sound. I say possibly becouse i have very few
> problems with 8 bit sound lets be honest here with 256 levels
> available you get an accuracy of 0.4 % or less you put a filter on
> that and you have even better apparent quality than that.
> can you hear the difference between 16 bit and 8 bit.

Well, you can if you concentrate, although I believe there are
a couple of Zorro cards kicking about which offer 16 bit sound.
In the interim, try getting a couple of guitar amps and
connecting them. 10% volume, and just a touch of reverb..
Perfect. And they go 'THUMP' when you power up the system. :)

> And how much is it used any way seems to me i'm exchanging
> wav files on irc which are 8 bit Mono at 11khz.

You get 16 bit sound out of your CD-Rom drive, in any case.

> there is one product which is missing for the Amiga A1200 and in
> a big way. Its a Way of adding either a Zorro slot cheaply or possibly
> a PCI slot. This would mean a Graphics card could be either a standard
> Pc One If we had Pci or a Zorro Graphics card for big box amiga's
> the Zorro slot is most appealing but for A1200 users It has to be
> the Pci Slot.

To be honest, I wouldn't be very interested in a cheap hack to
add a single Zorro and/or Pci slot to my 1200. If I'm at the
point where I want that much hardware attached, I'm really going
to need a tower in any case, for the power supply, general
tidyness, 68040 expansion possibility, and decent keyboard.
My setup won't be resaleable until I get a tower case for it,
also. It's trailing all over the desk at the moment.

> As for the future for me I think i'll probably end up buying a scsi
> controller and siamese my A1200 with a 486 system running windows95
> fraid for me i can't see the Abox or Pios1 coming within my budget.

If the A\Box appears and is everything we're hoping for,
I'll damn well find a way to fit it into my budget,
if it means selling half the contents of my room,
and getting to work on a bike. :) No, really.

[b...@spots.ab.ca]

On 28 Feb 1997 14:46:53 GMT, ELA9...@shef.ac.uk (Chris Handley)
wrote:

>In article <3250.699...@gulftel.com>, tu...@gulftel.com says...
>
>>>To be frank, I don't know why you guys even bother with this thread.
>>>The PC people will never convince the Amiga people that PC is a cool
>>>computer and vice versa. The fight will go on and on until Amiga dies
>>>and PC lives on.
>
>I'm sorry that you believe that. I also believe that the CURRENT Amiga's will

>died eventually, but I also believe that some of these new RISC machines/OSs
>(BeOS,p-OS, PIOS-One, A\Box, etc) have a BIG change to oust the PC..

I think you are right about the Amiga, but people will try
(including me) to keep it alive and make it a computer that is an
'alternative' to main stream personal computers. As for Be, A/Box
having a BIG chance to oust the PC you are CRAZY. How much does Mr.
Billy make in a MONTH? More than these companies can make in 2 years!
They don't REALLY have a chance.

>The wind of change has finally come again. We are again at a cross roads
>where EVERYTHING will change. You may not see it yet, but most people don't
>until it has already happened. I'm sure you don't believe me - I don't ask
>you to - but that is what I believe, and I see enough evidence of it.

No. Gates has a foundation that will be VERY hard to crack.
Take for instance this new software he has (something '97) that will
not allow you to install it when you have NETSCAPE on your machine!
Geez! Also, MS is creating every type of software FOR Win '95 and
beacuse it is MS, PEOPLE are buying it. Plain and simple.

>I do not believe it will happen overnight - but it will happen. It MUST
>happen. If it does not, the computer industry will have been put back 5-15
>years. The PC is hard to use (even with Win95 - look at all those
>books/videos on the subject), has a fragmented architecture which causes
>problems with much new software/hardware installations, and wastes so much CPU
>power it nees 100+MIPs (approx) and 32Mb to be properly useable with Win95.

I do agree with you in that if some other computer does not
come along and show MS that '95 really sucks and when an OS needs MORE
than 8 megs to multitask PROPERLY this is a BAD thing. Ohh, you GOTTA
love the text that states when Win 95 is looking for NEW hardware and
your machine locks, hay, that's NORMAL and just turn your machine off
for 3 seconds and try it again. Duh, if this is a new user, how the
HELL are they going to figure out that they need to edit their
config.sys and take out some autoloading program that loads when
windows does.

>Go and read Carl Sassenrath's web page about "Personal Computing" (etc) if you
>want a better explanation than I can (www.sassenrath.com).

I will.

>You should also go and look at one of Squid's best pages
>"http://users.compassworks.com/~squid/amiga/articles961214.html", where he
>does a very good job of explaining his point of view (which I share alot
>with).

Ok

>>>Yes, I believe that Amiga will disappear within a few years. It is not
>>>a matter of IF, but WHEN. The support right now might be better than
>>>in years, but the fact that the computer is no longer manufactured and
>>>the fact that the world standard _is_ PC, Amiga _will_ die...

PLEASE! When was the C64 released? PEOPLE ARE STILL WRITING
DEMOS FOR THE DAMN THING! How about the COCO? I KNOW there has to be
a least ONE person using that Colecovision Adam.

>The PC is & has been the standard. That does NOT mean it will always be the
>standard. Just because it has achieved more unit sales than previous
>'standards', that does not invalidate my argument. It just means that it's
>death will be a slower, more protracted, and painful one.

I hope so.

>>>I had an Amiga 3000 for 5 years and I released several freeware
>>>programs, one shareware program and several source codes. I was an
>>>Amiga fanatic. I even refused to buy a PC because I hated Win3.11 so
>>>much. I tried to convince my friends to buy Amiga's instead of PC's. I
>>>showed them how cool my Amiga looked; dragging the screens up and
>>>down, switching between applications at the speed of light, playing
>>>MOD files while formatting a disk, etc. But my friends just replied:
>>>"Cool, but what can I use it for?".

>Well, they are stupid, or your arguments/knowledge weren't up to it. There
>are good applications enough, there's not that much that MOST
>(`average`) people can do on PCs that they can't on the Amiga.

What can they use an Amiga for - when the PC has the software,
HAS the support and HAS the hundreds of THOUSANDS behind it. The
Amiga is a great machine, but lets be realistic. It is NOT going to
replace the PC nor would I want it to. The Amiga is OLD and it would
need 2 to 3 years of HARD work to bring the OS up to what Win 95 CAN
do. At that point you have to bring the hardware up. Lots of work to
be done. So, where are the PC manufactures going to do? Sit idle?
Don't think so. It's allways a catch up game that CBM never wanted to
play, or we would not be having this conversation.

This is getting a bit point less. These are the same things
that have been said for the last 5 years on the Amiga and other
computers that have a chance to 'take over the pc' market.

[Chris Handley]

I really can't be bother with this any more (not that I'm "losing"
particularly, just would rather do other things!), so I've been a little short
with my answers :-)

In article <5fcuju$j...@sjx-ixn8.ix.netcom.com>, t...@ix.netcom.com says...

>>Of course a 64-bit gfx card, etc is modern - the heart of the PC doesn't
>>exactly help these high-spec add-ons go well. Nowadays people have finally
>>managed to kuldge the PC into working suprisingly well, but
>>kludge-on-kludge-on-kludge does not make a simple, stable & easy computer.
>>
>
> PCI a kludge? risc based controler a kludge? interleaved sdram a kludge?

You misunderstand! The actual PARTS of the PC thermselves are good (or indeed
lovely) - but how they were 'added' to the PC is the kludge, as well as
getting them to interact. Ever heard of "fragmented architecture"? I think
that sums up the PC quite well...

Most of the PC h/w works most of the time, but these kludges DO cause
problems. Put a PC together without knowing exactly what will dislike other
bits, and you will probably find it doesn't work terribly well :-)

> I really wish the amiga add all the kludges at the same price.
>
> BTW, what do you call AGA?

Pretty Damn Good for the time? It ISN'T a "kludge" (I wonder if that has a
dictionary definition?), just rushed. You could get picky with the meaning of
"kludge" <zzzzz>

>>>>If you could come-up with a list of non-esoteric applications, I would be
>>>>interested. And 2-3 isn't much, if thats all you can manage.
>>>
>>>OK, say you want to bring a Word-document home from your office to
>>
>>OH GOD - not this again! I have said - if you need a PC at home (for work
>>compatibility) then FINE! This is obviously the case if you really must
live
>>& sleep with Word.

> Also if you do programming, multimedia, etc... I never had the intention
> to run word and I still got a PC at home.(And amigas) The amiga market
> give people reason to upgrade to PC's or else.

Word was an example (jeez!). Much of the software in the Amiga market
compares just fine - some obviously not. I might buy a PC if there was any
s/w that I thought was much better & that I needed (& I don't think I'm
particurly special).

>>Off the top of my head, it has ARexx which I can make alot of utilities &
>>applications interact automatically (great sometimes). It is FAR more
>>configurable than any Win95 PC. On a more "averge user" level it's mainly
>>ease of use - applications often seem more elegant. Word vs Wordworth 6 is
an
>>obvious example - and you will probably disagree! If thats the case can we
>>stop this particular point?

> The aplication that do have an arex port... I do beleive tho that each app
> should have a comunication port for automation.

If only ARexx ports were slightly more standardized - eg. the same quit&save
command for all apps, then the Amiga could easily do what Windoze does (one
minor bonus for having a PC).

>>Then again Win95 blatently stole huge amounts from the Mac itself - far more
>>than from the Amiga (strangely). For instance: Where do you think the much
>>publicised "Start button" came from? Turn it upside-down, and it begins to
>>look strangely like the "Apple" menu.... Bill Gates must secretly like
>>Macintoshes!
>
> It look like a menu bar... big deal. BTW, I dont beleive anyone like macs,

It was an example (probably a poor one now I think of it:), but it's still
pretty obvious that Microsoft nicked that (& many other) ideas; changing them
very little in some cases.

> the only mac user out there are forced to use them one way or another :)

>>>>You can display on-line help from the Amiga's OS. Ever heard of
AmigaGuide
>>>>documents?
>>>
>>>Not from the desktop, with on-line help about the OS. I guess that if

I still don't quite follow - you mean Workbench having help? Since I probably
won't answer this again, you needen't reply :-D

>>Of course, Windoze NEEDS online help about itself....
>>
>
> Dont you think hdtollbox need some reading before using?

It does have some SMALL help - but the missing on-line help is mainly due to
C= not doing their job :-(

> Also dont forget there are people out there that are utterly confused
> when they see a phrase like "Hit any key to continue"...

How could ANYONE not understand that? I thought that quote of Homer's (the
Simpsons) saying "Press any key. Where's the any key?" was playing on a very
small minority.

>>>> DOpus5.5
>>>
>>>Yes, THAT one I still miss...
>>
>>Windows95 in disguise? Except that it does things far better than Win95 :-)
>
> win95 a file manager? look again...

DOpus5.5 (only) a filemanager? look again...

Things like having a Start menu (if you want), filetype recognition &
execution using specified standard program, listers with sorting using 'title
buttons' (Name, Date, Size, etc), left-out icons with a little 'arrow' in the
corner, copy/etc progress window, renaming 'on' the filename alreasy there, a
diskinfo replacement that has a pie chart like win95, icon/file traversing
using the keyboard, saves window positions when quits, blah blah - all the
GOOD ideas (not necessarily the ones that Win95 implement well)

Anyway, you seem determined to misinterpret me! I was refering to all that
DOpus did often looked similar to Win95 in some ways.

>>You have NEVER had problems installing games?
>>You have NEVER had Win95's printer driver crash, stopping any more
print-outs?
>>You have NEVER had to edit any batch files to stop your PC doing something
>>because some dumb installer didn't ask you?

> Defenetly not worse then the amiga.

Yeah right. Basically installing any new program/game use the great C=
Installer - the percentage of well written installers is MUCH higher, and
problems much much less.

Never had my Amiga crash because it was printing!

The Installer always asks before adding an Assign to you User-Startup, or
replacing libraries, which is basically the extent of altering the Amiga
system partition. Obviously prefs stored in EnvArc: don't count as that is a
standard place for putting prefs (which NEVER causes problems with other
applications).

I am sorry, but PC installers stick files EVERYWHERE, and often alter batch
files used by the system with less by your leave :-) . The main problem is
the way a standard PC is organised - "C:\" & "C:\Windows" being the main
places to bung a file with some purpose (doesn't seem to matter too much!).

I assume we are talking commercial s/w btw

You can't have not used an Amiga very recently! Before 3.x? Certainly not
with much modern s/w.

>>Problems with Win95 are generally down to experience - I'm glad I know
>>computers so well, or I would have big problems too. Of the top of my head:
>>
>>Editing the Start menu isn't obvious.

> Click on it... to open the start menu folder to drag&drop.
> or open the startmenu directory in windows.

> I know this is above 80% of the windows user out there, but you dont need to

Well there you go then! Trying to find the startmenu folder in the C: drive
is not exactly easy (not that beginners should!).

> know computer to well to figure out how how to use the right mouse button.

> Or know that the startup menu old the startmenu items.

>>What the Documents thing in the Start menu do isn't obvious - maybe they are
>>copies which are wasting space?
>>
>
> Do you also think all the item under programs are copies that are waisting
> space?

It's not ME - this was an example of what someone asked me! They had used
Windows95 before as well!!

>>Altering the printer settings is as bad as on the Amiga, almost! Win95's
>>attempt to make things easier sometimes makes it more complex...
>
> I think it depand on the manufacturer... HP drivers offer a clear interface.

I forgot that each printer has it's own non standard interface ;^)

>>Try deleting an application which you just installed. Without CleanSweep it
>>would be virtually impossible; with CleanSweep it still doesn't do it
>>properly.

> Thats an aplication problem... go shoot the programmer.

No it's NOT. Windows gives basically NO structure as to where to store prefs,
batch files, and anything else the program needs.

The Amiga isn't perfect in this respect, but it's bloody damn near it.

> Its the same as amiga aplication copying file to libs: or elsewhere.

Not! Is there a specific directory to store, say, DLLs? Prefs? ALMOST
ANYTHING? No :D

Libs: stores specific files, and the standard Installer checks if the version
to install when overwriting (or not) most system files.

>>Accessing drives (floppy, cd-rom, etc) is very un-obvious. "My Computer"???

>>That could mean ANYTHING!

> Its 100% logical... you are the one to choose what go onto the desktop.
> At least you have a choice to too clutter your desktop with all the
> partition/drive on the desktop.

I didn't realise you could do that - I've never read the manuals that came
with Win95 (too much hassle:-)))

> I personaly have my partition in the startup menu.

I still think it's a bit confusing - although once you realised this I suppose
it's reasonably logical...

>>Copying/Moving files is overly complicated (Select, go to mop-up menu, Drag
-
>>if I remember correctly).

> Click on file, move, release file, click option from popup that apear on
> release.

I don't remember the popup-menu that appears automatically - but I haven't
used Win95 for a while (until I go home again for holiday). Hmmmm...

> The last click can be removed if you know you are moving the file
> on the device, or copying it to another device.

>>Explorer is appalling compared to almost any Amiga directory util.
>>
>
> I deleted explorer...

At least you have SOME sense ;)

>>The equivalent of filetype recognition in Win95 compared to DOpus5.5 (maybe
>>not fair - who cares!) is pathetic. Only by filename ending, and the
>>application used with that filetype is specified in the middle of a batch
>>file!
>
> I agree that windows should try to idendify the file when no extension is
> present. otherwise the methode it uses is ok for the benefit.

>>I don't want to have to think of any more problems or annoyances - they
exist,
>>and I would rather do something more constructive (use an Amiga ;-)

> I was anyoned as much on the amiga... ok I deleted explorer from windows,
> but I also deleted loadwb on the amiga.

You deleted LoadWB???????????????????????? You are CRAZY! Thats like
deleting the file that starts Win95. Workbench is really quite nice after
customising it a little (Win95 is better here as they already have lots of
stuff for you to use).

>>The Amiga Workbench may not be quite a functional as Win95 with some
>>functions, but it's a hell of a lot easier to use. Unlike Win95, everything
>>is represented in a very physical way. Drop an icon out of the window onto
>>the desktop, and it doesn't leave a 'copy'. Want Win95 to run something on
>>start-up - the drawer responsible for that is in the first level of the
>>Workbench partition. Also, PCs generally don't have partitions - this is a
>>major problem when you get more than a few big applications & games.
>>
>
> I dont beleive loadwb is easyer... not a chance. And its so simple that its
> near useless for file managment.

It isn't intended for serious filemanagement - you can of course buy DOpus4/5.
C='s decision, wrong in my opinion.

Workbench isn't just a filemanager ;-)

> Once you understand the win95 desktop is a drawer, like the startup menu
> you might see how logical it is VS the amiga desktop.

I disagree that that is logical, or at least easy, unless the drawers
responsible are very obvious & easily accesible.

You expect someone to easily accept/understand that a 'copy' (alias/etc) can
appear with still only one file?

This is probably one that has more to do with preferance than most Win95
problems though.

> I can resize my partition dinamicly on my PC... Ok, if I realize that I want
> a 680meg partition VS 500meg, I just resize it (taking 180 meg free from
> another).

Very nice feature too - nothing to do with what I said of course :-)

Which was that the PC doesn't have partitions normally (just one huuuuge C:
drive).

>>The AmigaDos is easily 20 times more functional, and certainly several times
>>easier to use.

> Agree 100% :) the dos command are a total joke, the dos shelll itself is
> a crime.

Hurrah! 100% agreement on something!

> But that can be fixed... I do beleive in MS to slowly go ahead.. the amiga
> since the A3000 as been pretty much stagnant.

Pretty stangnant since the A3000? I actually think Workbench/Kickstart 3.x
was a pretty big leap (unlike some Amiga bods) - it certainly added, rather
than changed, quite a bit.

> If MS dont, I switch too unix and hope the rest of the world will too :)

I'm not so sure that Unix may not in fact be disappearing slowly - but don't
quote me on that!

Have fun with your PC!

[Marc Forrester]

Stephan Schaem wrote:
> Also if you do programming, multimedia, etc... I never had the

> intention to run word and I still got a PC at home. (And amigas)

> The amiga market give people reason to upgrade to PC's or else.

Can't quite accept that. The PC market is certainly a big
attraction to programmers, but it's not actually impossible
to make any profit from Amiga programming. Not just yet.

>> Of course, Windoze NEEDS online help about itself....
> Dont you think hdtollbox need some reading before using?

Not as much as the IBM BIOS setup menu does..

> Also dont forget there are people out there that are utterly
> confused when they see a phrase like "Hit any key to continue"...

Doh.. Where's the anykey? :)

> Its hard to please all there 100,000,000 users or so :)
> (But they do try and thats why windows is the way it is)

Nng. You tell us that Windows achieved marketplace domination
by trying to be what the users wanted? You don't think it was
maybe slightly to do with advertising and luck?

Remember how long Windows was Windows 3.. How many Windows
3 users did you know who thought it was a wonderful, er,
well, a wonderful whatever it was supposed to be?

> >>> DOpus5.5
> >>Yes, THAT one I still miss...
> >Windows95 in disguise?
> >Except that it does things far better than Win95 :-)
> win95 a file manager? look again...

DOpus is a little more than a file manager itself, these days..
Still, yes, Win95 is mostly a file manager, and most of its
other abilities are provided by the AmigaOS under DOpus.

[Chris Handley]

In article <5fbvf7$9...@wombat.cs.monash.edu.au>, bme...@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au
says...

>>The PC is still at heart out of date. As I said, it STILL boots using a
>>black&white DOS - they haven't lost that 'feature', and they probably never
>>will.
>

>Showing a bit of ignorance here? The PC boots through its BIOS routines

No! Of course the PC uses it's BIOS (who do you think I am? Don't answer
that;-) .

>(which, these days, more often than not put an annoying colourful "energy
>star" logo on the screen), and then boots straight into whatever OS you
>have installed. No "DOS" in sight.

As for energy saving logo - yes, I ignored that for sake of simplicity. If
you are going to be pendantic I would be sitting at this PC all day :-(

And MS-DOS is used by over 99% (99.9%?) of PC owners - which basically makes
the PC MS-DOS in my opinion as far as my/your arguments are concerned.

>BTW, what would you use colours for during the boot process?

How about it opening a system window and displaying the text in a proporional
font of your choice? With a nice grey main background & black text if you
must. Of course DOS can't do that - shame huh? And no it wouldn't slow it
down it it did it properly!

Strangly the Amiga500 used a Window all those years back. The A1200 and above
don't display ANYTHING (except perhaps a boot pic) while booting - far more
modern in my books.

>>These are the things that cause problems on the PC - why do you think
Windows
>>is so slow? It's not just M*cr*s*ft's fault...
>

>Why do you think Linux is so fast?

I haven't used Linux so I can't comment on how smooth window moving, screen
updates, button response (v.important), text display, displaying animations,
etc.. I think you will still need a VERY fast PC (high end of a Pentium) to
achieve (near) glitch free animation (especially with other programs running).

>>Couldn't you leave this in csa.advocacy? I would have removed irrelevant
>>groups, but my news browswer (a PC one - ugh) seems unable to handle large
>>newsgroup lists well.
>

>Then you "browser" sucks. It doesn't have anything to do with the PC.

It runs on the PC, and is rather similar to most PC s/w I have used.

Then the PC sucks.

>>The AmigaDos is easily 20 times more functional [than Win95], and certainly

>>several times easier to use.
>

>Hmm --- I bet you want to share with us your method of quantifying
>"functionality" and "ease of use", right?

I sure could but I'm already falling asleep with this thread as it is...

Lets just say that MS DOS's commands have less funcionality that equivalent
AmigaDOS commands, better options (not /letter), and allow more complex stuff
in some cases (like pattern patching if we take the obvious example).

[Chris Handley]

In article <331a2b81...@usenet.pitt.edu>, ke...@sis.pitt.edu says...

>>I have said - if you need a PC at home (for work
>>compatibility) then FINE!
>

>So we agree then? ;-)

It appears so!

>>Off the top of my head, it has ARexx which I can make alot of utilities &
>>applications interact automatically (great sometimes).
>

>Unfortunately not many programs make use of AREXX, and there is no

Most major applications do, as do many big (PD) utilities - although certianly
not every one does (it would be a bit pointless for some though).

>reason why they should not. Using my EasyRexx AREXX interface designer
>you can create an AREXX interface in less than 5 minutes! (that was
>today's commercial... ;-))
>

>>For instance: Where do you think the much
>>publicised "Start button" came from? Turn it upside-down, and it begins to
>>look strangely like the "Apple" menu.... Bill Gates must secretly like
>>Macintoshes!
>

>And sure enough, isn't there an utility available for the Amiga that
>implements a taskbar - just like in win95? I have at least seen some
>postings about it.

There are probably over a dozen start-bar/menu utilities - however, seeing as
they eat some screen space, do the same job as a Tools menu, and don't make
switching screens (or tasks on occasions) any easier that before - I don't use
any. I don't even use Win95's task bar much....

>>Of course, Windoze NEEDS online help about itself....
>

>All features in an OS should always be well documented, even the most
>obvious features. That is the most common flaw among computer
>designers today: what is obvious to the designer might not be obvious
>to the user

Or even better - perhaps after learning the basics, the interface should be
SELF-explanatory without needing a manual, etc

>>You have NEVER had to edit any batch files to stop your PC doing something
>>because some dumb installer didn't ask you?
>

>That is the programmer's fault, not the OS... You cannot prevent
>lamers of releasing programs on the Amiga either...

Even small-medium commercial programs, and games?

>>What the Documents thing in the Start menu do isn't obvious - maybe they are
>>copies which are wasting space?
>

>They are shortcuts to your documents... When selecting one of the
>items in the Documents menu, Win95 will open the
>document/picture/whatever with your preferred program... That wasn't
>difficult to understand, was it?

Yes for people without lots of computing experience! Why should there be TWO
(or more) places to get at the same thing? Win95 is a sever culprit of this
in much of it's design. Giving someone several ways to get at something gives
them more to learn, and complicates things unnecessarily.

Workbench was great for this, DOpus5.5's standard config unfortunatenly
isn't... (probably because it was copying Win95 too much)

>>Try deleting an application which you just installed.
>

>ha ha ha. You say that unistalling is easier on the Amiga? It doesn't
>even have a standard unistaller! Win95 has! Sure, you can make a LISP
>script, just as you did with your installer-script, but the program
>sure says INSTALL everywhere in the program (it is hardcoded into the
>installer executable). I guess THAT is very obvious to the novice!?!?

Except that uninstalling DOESN'T do it for all files or changes to batch
files.

The Amiga doesn't generally NEED an uninstall as deleting the place it was
uninstalled gets rid of most of it. Any prefs files are small & won't cause a
problem. Any libraries can be used by other programs (& are a good idea to
keep).

The Amiga doesn't spread files EVERYWHERE unlike Win95 programs do. The
places for finding Amiga system files are specific (eg.libs, devs, l,
dos-drivers/printers, etc), while the PC basically sticks everything in C: &
C:Windows - thus tracking down a specific file difficult at best. Maybe
saying "everywhere" is misleading, but it sure seems like that when a program
installs half a dozen files of unspecifed names, and possibly alters
unspecified system batch files (of which there are more than the 2 that the
Amiga uses).

>>Accessing drives (floppy, cd-rom, etc) is very un-obvious. "My Computer"???

>>That could mean ANYTHING!
>

>No, it simply means YOUR computer. Boy, you really think Win95 is
>horribly difficult to use, don't you?
>

>>Copying/Moving files is overly complicated (Select, go to mop-up menu, Drag
-
>>if I remember correctly).
>

>Never used drag 'n' drop, have we? ;-)

Do ALL PC users try to misunderstand me ALL the time for god sake?

Trying to tell it to specifically Copy/Move correctly when drag'n'drop IS
difficult, and completely stupid.

Won't go home until the hols where I have lots of "fun" with Win95 - which is
why I said "if I rememeber correctly"...

>>Drop an icon out of the window onto
>>the desktop, and it doesn't leave a 'copy'.
>

>In Win95 it leaves a SHORTCUT to that program. Fast and effective!

Confusing to the beginner!

>>Editing the Start menu isn't obvious.

>>Want Win95 to run something on
>>start-up - the drawer responsible for that is in the first level of the

>>Workbench partition
>
>And your point is that it is easier to add programs in the StartUp
>folder, right? I guess right-clicking the Start menu is to abstract
>for you then?

I don't think I ever tried that!!!! Right-clicking on a PC is a novel
experience ;^)

>>Also, PCs generally don't have partitions - this is a
>>major problem when you get more than a few big applications & games.
>

>What? That's entirely up to the user! You can partition your HD in
>anyway you want...

How many users DO it then? Why don't any PCs I've seen come with the
equivalent of a "Work:" partition straight out of the box? Pretty standard on
the Amiga.

>>The Amiga's elegant OS makes certain things far easier on the user. Eg.If
an
>>application which requires a CD-ROM is run (say from Start menu), the
>>"requester" isn't exactly helpful is it?
>

>Oh? A requester that inform you to insert the CD-ROM... I guess that
>isn't obvious to somebody... ;-)

Which CD Rom? It's probably the application you just started, but....

>>New hardware requires far less
>>configuration &/or problems (bets on you ignoring this point again?)
>

>Yeah, sure. Insert the new hardware and Win95 ask you want to use the
>drivers when you restart Windows the next time... How hard can that
>be?

When it doesn't work? PlugNPlay isn't anywhere NEAR perfect - some PC users
wish they could do it the old way after giving up with a particular piece of
h/w Win95 won't recognise.

As an example I know of personally:
I have a friend who's really into the PC now (eg.he uses NT & Linux), and he's
got problems with a CD-drive/Zip-drive causing one of them not to appear to
the system (can't remember which).

>>The AmigaDos is easily 20 times more functional, and certainly several times
>>easier to use.
>

>ha ha ha Obviously. Having problems with adding programs to the
>StartUp menu, copying files, don't understand the My Computer icon and
>you even get confused when the OS asks for a particular CD-ROM...
>;-)))

Which were a compilation of my experience of OTHER users problems!

So you don't admit MS-DOS is crap then?

[Darwin Ouyang]

In article <5ffc65$i...@bignews.shef.ac.uk>,
Chris Handley <ELA9...@shef.ac.uk> wrote:

>>BTW, what would you use colours for during the boot process?

>How about it opening a system window and displaying the text in a proporional
>font of your choice? With a nice grey main background & black text if you
>must. Of course DOS can't do that - shame huh? And no it wouldn't slow it
>down it it did it properly!

The ATI 3D Expression+ PC2TV puts up this stupid spinning 3D logo when the
system boots up.

Can't think of a worse waste of 3 seconds. :)

>Lets just say that MS DOS's commands have less funcionality that equivalent
>AmigaDOS commands, better options (not /letter), and allow more complex stuff
>in some cases (like pattern patching if we take the obvious example).

Get a real command shell for the PC, like 4NT (4DOS) or even a unix shell
like csh or ksh or whatever you like. :)

Darwin Ouyang

[Matthew Schinckel]

On 1 Mar 1997, Chris Handley wrote:
[ snip]

> You heard of course that IBM once used Amiga's (Scala?) with some stand it
> did? Not exactly conclusive, but damn funny!

I remember this. It was for the big launch of OS/2 (Half an operating
System? - okay, old joke :-)

I saw OS/2 v3 for sale in a shop the other day - reduced from AU$160 to
AU$50. Almost bought it, even though I don't have a PC :-)

---
Matthew Schinckel - ma...@null.net Shapeshifter Registered
TopFerm...@beer.com (Yay Coopers Ale!)

[Bernd Meyer]

ELA9...@shef.ac.uk (Chris Handley) writes:

>I didn't realise you could do that - I've never read the manuals that came
>with Win95 (too much hassle:-)))

I just hate it when people don't read the manuals _and_ then start heaping shit
on the product. Either one is OK, but the combination is absolutely deadly.

>Which was that the PC doesn't have partitions normally (just one huuuuge C:
>drive).

Huh? Now what do you blame _that_ on? Hardware? Windows95? Or maybe, just
maybe, the idiot who installed the software?
Although, of course, there isn't much of an argument against having one large
partition. Windows95 now comes with FAT32, which at least doesn't waste
hundreds of megabytes anymore due to incredible cluster sizes; Everything
else comes with reasonable filesystems, anyway.
But just to add one more observation to the sample:

[bmeyer@wombat tmp]$ df
Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on
* /dev/sda1 1932894 1789126 43866 98% /
* /dev/hda3 792800 518225 233600 69% /oldroot
* /dev/hda4 61967 1 58766 0% /oldroot/music2
* /dev/hda2 67526 1922 62001 3% /oldroot/var/spool/boot
* /dev/sdb2 1979094 370171 1506631 20% /newdisk
* /dev/hdb3 1400582 1182513 218069 84% /newdisk/music
ossi:/cool 862939 205290 613069 25% /cool
ossi:/newdisk2 2043371 118935 1818811 6% /newdisk2
/dev/hdc 659610 659610 0 100% /mnt/cdrom_really
/dev/fd0 1423 836 587 59% /mnt/fd0
[bmeyer@wombat tmp]$

The ones with the asterisk in front are harddisk partitions.

>I'm not so sure that Unix may not in fact be disappearing slowly - but don't
>quote me on that!

>Have fun with your PC!

And as long as I have my PC, UNIX won't be disappearing ;-)

[Ari Ukkonen]

Ketil Hunn <ke...@sis.pitt.edu> wrote in article
<3317178f...@usenet.pitt.edu>...
[...]

> OK, say you want to bring a Word-document home from your office to

> work on it during the weekend. There's no wordprocessor that imports

> the Word format on the Amiga. You could of course convert it to ASCII,

> but then you would lose all the other data that the document contains.

Save the document as a RTF (Rich Text Format) and load it up in
FinalWriter on an Amiga. This will retain most formatting information
including fonts and sizes.

> And how easy is it to include a small spreadsheet into your Amiga

> wordprocessor? ....................................
Not a problem with FW and Final Calc.
[...]

>____________________________________________________________________
> Ketil Hunn MSIS student at the
> 6629 Wilkins Ave University of Pittsburgh.
> Pittsburgh, PA 15217
> U.S.A. mailto: ke...@sis.pitt.edu
> Phone: 412 421 5735 http://www.lis.pitt.edu/~ketil/

--
Ari Ukkonen, Consultant, CEO - ThunderSoft Consulting Services.
Reachable at: (250) 385-3994, Cellular (250) 812-3515
Reply-To: ariuk...@tnet.net
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Amiga CD32+SX1 6 MB '020, Amiga 2000HD 1 MB CHIP KS2.0 49 MB HD
NEC Ready 9522 P100 Mhz, 16 MB, 1.6 gig HD, 4X CD, MPEG 1 MB 64bit PCI

Visit my homepages at:http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Park/7481/
and http://members.tripod.com/~Ukkonen/

[Marc Forrester]

Ketil Hunn wrote:
> >New hardware requires far less
> >configuration &/or problems
>

> Insert the new hardware and Win95 ask you want to use the drivers
> when you restart Windows the next time... How hard can that be?

I've seen it not quite work as smoothly as all that, actually. :)

[Marc Forrester]

Chris Handley wrote:
> There are probably over a dozen start-bar/menu utilities - however,
> seeing as they eat some screen space, do the same job as a Tools menu,
> and don't make switching screens (or tasks on occasions) any easier
> that before - I don't use any. I don't even use Win95's task bar
> much....

Well, each to their own, but I think heirarchial application menus
are a great idea whatever form they take. Much nicer than opening a
huge list of file folder windows on a well organised filesystem.
(Which IBM's tend not to have, everything just gets installed to
C:\APPNAME, but anyway..) Try StartMenu 2 with a list of
Preferences programs and a New CLI, and whatever else you use a
fair amount. (Although actually, that's not direct enough for me.
I prefer LAmiga & Space for calling up a new CLI)

> Yes for people without lots of computing experience!
> Why should there be TWO (or more) places to get at the same thing?

Don't be daft.. I bet you have half a dozen ways of getting
at some of the more central programs and files on your Amiga.
Okay, so you defined most of them yourself, but still.

> Trying to tell it to specifically Copy/Move correctly
> when drag'n'drop IS difficult, and completely stupid.

What, Windows 95? Can't agree. You do use the RMB, yes?

> How many users DO it then? Why don't any PCs I've seen come with
> the equivalent of a "Work:" partition straight out of the box?
> Pretty standard on the Amiga.

Not that I ever quite figured out what 'Work:' meant,
and I certainly don't call any partitions that nowadays.
Still, IBM drives are still called nice, meaningful
things like 'G', which doesn't exactly encourage
the use or understanding of partitions.

[Bernd Meyer]

ELA9...@shef.ac.uk (Chris Handley) writes:
[About Win95]

>Except that uninstalling DOESN'T do it for all files or changes to batch
>files.

>The Amiga doesn't generally NEED an uninstall as deleting the place
>it was uninstalled gets rid of most of it. Any prefs files are small
>& won't cause a problem. Any libraries can be used by other programs
>(& are a good idea to keep).

That must have been the most blinded-by-loyalty excuse I have seen in a
long time --- first he goes on ranting how under Windows95 the uninstaller
isn't perfect, and then THAT!

>The Amiga doesn't spread files EVERYWHERE unlike Win95 programs do. The
>places for finding Amiga system files are specific (eg.libs, devs, l,
>dos-drivers/printers, etc), while the PC basically sticks everything in C: &
>C:Windows - thus tracking down a specific file difficult at best.

So far, I have seen _two_ directories for Windows95 (not "the PC"), and at
4 plus "etc" for the Amiga. Never mind that the directories for Windows95
were incorrect....

>Maybe saying "everywhere" is misleading, but it sure seems like that
>when a program installs half a dozen files of unspecifed names, and
>possibly alters unspecified system batch files (of which there are
>more than the 2 that the Amiga uses).

In fact, there is only one batch file (under 3.1, I don't know whether 95
got rid of it). The other one is the config.sys file, which has some sort
of commands in it.

What you might be thinking about are .ini files --- and the tendency of
Windows apps to store their configuration in them. But what were your very
words...: "Any prefs files are small". Sections in .ini files are even smaller.

Then of course there is the matter of shared libraries. Now, once again
Windows might be pretty crappy, but you said yourself "Any libraries can
be used by other programs (& are a good idea to keep).". If this is good
enough reason for the Amiga, the same should go for the Windows PC.

Of course, if you run a _real_ OS on that PC, you can either use rpm
to install, uninstall and update your software, or simply every now and
again delete everything that hasn't been accessed in the last 6 months
(well, maybe not delete, but offline it).

>How many users DO it then? Why don't any PCs I've seen come with the
>equivalent of a "Work:" partition straight out of the box? Pretty
>standard on the Amiga.

Is that really a _partition_, or an alias?
I would be pretty unhappy if some dork at the vendor thought he had a better
idea than me how much "work" I do, how much "system" space I will need,
how many "libaries" I will install and how much space to leave for the
"games" partition.

>So you don't admit MS-DOS is crap then?

This is the first time you mention MS-DOS....

[Bernd Meyer]

ELA9...@shef.ac.uk (Chris Handley) writes:
>In article <5fbvf7$9...@wombat.cs.monash.edu.au>, bme...@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au

>>>The PC is still at heart out of date. As I said, it STILL boots using a
>>>black&white DOS

>>Showing a bit of ignorance here? The PC boots through its BIOS routines

>>(which, these days, more often than not put an annoying colourful "energy
>>star" logo on the screen), and then boots straight into whatever OS you
>>have installed. No "DOS" in sight.

>As for energy saving logo - yes, I ignored that for sake of simplicity.

Granted. Just thought I would point out that the one bit of colour is
actually pretty annoying.

>And MS-DOS is used by over 99% (99.9%?) of PC owners - which basically makes
>the PC MS-DOS in my opinion as far as my/your arguments are concerned.

Wow. Now you really got me.
MS claims 40 million Windows95 "delivered", so probably at least 20 million
are still running. Now unless "Loading Windows95" is called "booting using
a black and white DOS", all those don't. Which means that even your lower
estimate would put the number of PCs in the world at a minimum of
2 billion, 1.98 billion of which run DOS.

Current estimates are that around 85% of all PCs run some sort of MS OS
as their main OS. And 15% of 100 million (the more realistic estimate for
the total number of active PCs) is 15 million --- which, unless I am wrong,
is more than the number of Amigas ever sold, let alone still in use.

So, if those 15 million don't count (not to mention the 20 or so million
running Win95, and the 4 or 5 million running NT), then the Amiga doesn't
count at all....

>>BTW, what would you use colours for during the boot process?

>How about it opening a system window and displaying the text in a proporional
>font of your choice?

Huh? One word: Why?
Booting is the process of initializing the hardware, finding out what
software to start, and do it. If it goes wrong, you are screwed, and better
be able to see why. Which means outputting it in a standard font in a standard
screen mode is a very good idea. If all goes well, it's over within seconds,
anyway.

>With a nice grey main background & black text if you must.

Why not white text on white background?

>Of course DOS can't do that - shame huh?

Well, once we are through to DOS, you can do whatever you want --- if you
want to play mods in the background while starting up things like
smartdrive or your mouse driver, you can do it. Seems nobody wants to.
As long as we are still in the BIOS boot up phase, there is nowhere where
a font could be loaded from, or even preferences for which font to use.

BTW, the PC at least prints some information during the BIOS phase. The
Amiga just cycles screen colours....

>Strangly the Amiga500 used a Window all those years back. The A1200
>and above don't display ANYTHING (except perhaps a boot pic) while
>booting - far more modern in my books.

Gosh. Once it doesn't boot, you will wish it did display something... Is
that new SIMM faulty, or has Agnus just died? Did it find the keyboard,
or is the processor dead? So many possibilities, so few clues...

>>Why do you think Linux is so fast?

>I haven't used Linux so I can't comment on how smooth window moving, screen
>updates, button response (v.important), text display, displaying animations,
>etc.. I think you will still need a VERY fast PC (high end of a Pentium) to
>achieve (near) glitch free animation (especially with other programs running).

First you say you can't comment, and the you _do_ make a comment. How
unnecessary.

>>>Couldn't you leave this in csa.advocacy? I would have removed irrelevant
>>>groups, but my news browswer (a PC one - ugh) seems unable to handle large
>>>newsgroup lists well.
>>
>>Then you "browser" sucks. It doesn't have anything to do with the PC.

>It runs on the PC, and is rather similar to most PC s/w I have used.
>Then the PC sucks.

So? I saw a total idiot, you know, a total shithead, in a Mercedes Benz
recently. The Mercedes really sucks, obviously.

>>Hmm --- I bet you want to share with us your method of quantifying
>>"functionality" and "ease of use", right?

>I sure could but I'm already falling asleep with this thread as it is...

Oh, you don't have to write it in this thread --- just write it all down,
send it to any GUI oriented computer science journal, and immediate fame
and riches will be yours.

However, just saying "I have found a wonderful proof, which unfortunately
doesn't fit on the margin of this book" does not a proof make --- and saying
"I can quantify it, but I won't tell you how" in csaa usually means "I made
a statement I cannot back up, and am too chicken to admit it".

[Marc Forrester]

Bernd Meyer wrote:
>> Which was that the PC doesn't have partitions normally
>> (just one huuuuge C: drive).
>

> Huh? Now what do you blame _that_ on? Hardware? Windows95?
> Or maybe, just maybe, the idiot who installed the software?

That's a symptomn of mainstream home and business computer use
by people who really don't want to understand their computers,
just turn them on and run a couple of programs with the default
options. And Microsoft cater for these people, which is fair
enough, but still, I think they do encourage their customers
to stay this way. I can't point to any specific examples,
but I always find that when trying to customise any Wintel
setup, most of the options seem to hide from you, and others
just plain don't work. Hell, some of them, like the swap file
settings, have big red warning signs on them absolving the
manufacturers of any resposibility should you touch them.

[Matthias Bethke]

In article <3317178f...@usenet.pitt.edu> ke...@sis.pitt.edu (Ketil Hunn) writes:
> than a year. Would you call a '98 model of Ford non-modern just
> because it is based on the technology from last years cars?

Very good example here: yes, very much so. Automotive technology is
basically rusting with age, despite all the bells and whistles that today's
cars have. In fact it's just technology from the 19th century, extended,
refined and polished a lot, but never revolutionized like one could expect
in a century of technical advance. Very much like PCs.

> OK, say you want to bring a Word-document home from your office to
> work on it during the weekend. There's no wordprocessor that imports
> the Word format on the Amiga. You could of course convert it to ASCII,
> but then you would lose all the other data that the document contains.

Use RTF then. RTF is crappy, but so is Word's native format...

> And how easy is it to include a small spreadsheet into your Amiga

> wordprocessor? And how about a program like Frontpage 97 on the Amiga?

Not so easy at all, you're right here. Not that I'd ever have needed it,
but it's definitely a point for business stuff.

> >do. Most people don't even use most of the features of Word (because they add
> >complex features that people don't use!).
>
> ha ha ha - you're just jealous! ;-)

He's right. I know quite a couple of Word users, very few of which really
exploit everything the programs can do. And these just use it because
they've used it ever since, they'd be better off using PageMaker.

> Hmmm, it really _is_ strange that the most of the computers in the
> world are PC's if they are that crappy. Never had any problems with my
> PC, but maybe I'm the only one then...

Most people accept calls to the service technician as part of normal work,
stuff you inevitably have to do when you use a computer.

bye!
Matthias
--
GMC/O d-- s+: a-- C+++>$ BU+ P+ L+ E- W+@ N++ o+ K? w--- !O M V- PS+++
PE-- Y+ PGP>+ t 5 X- R tv- b++ DI D--- G e+ h r- y+

[Matthias Bethke]

In article <5fa3pj$9...@bignews.shef.ac.uk> ELA9...@shef.ac.uk (Chris Handley) writes:
> You are also trying to undermine my argument (belief? the facts won't be so
> clear until it is *obvious* what will happen) by comparing A\Box/Pios-One/etc
> to out-of-date wedge-shape computers aimed at kids & schools.

As the Archimedes was only the ancestor of the Acorn RISC series I wouldn't
say Acorn targets "kids & schools" with their current RiscPCs. It's even
more a niche market than AmigaOS but with professional ambitions.

> The Acorn Arc was far too late for it's market (during the last days of the
> Amiga's success).

IIRC this A500-like Archimedes (A3000?) came out around '89, and it was
pretty damn fast for its time, good graphics and sound for a resonable
price. IMHO it's just the mediocre OS (apart from their
Wintel-incompatibility...) that prevents Acorn's success.

> The Atari Falcon was far too little, too late, with crap
> hardware due to over-run deadlines. The A500 was for a completely different

:-) Even more, it was crap hardware as designed. They bought licences from
Motorola to make their own EC030-CPUs with 16bit data bus like the 386SX!
If that ain't crap I dunno what is!

[tim]

>>And MS-DOS is used by over 99% (99.9%?) of PC owners - which basically makes
>> the PC MS-DOS in my opinion as far as my/your arguments are concerned.

>Wow. Now you really got me.
>MS claims 40 million Windows95 "delivered", so probably at least 20 million
>are still running. Now unless "Loading Windows95" is called "booting using
>a black and white DOS", all those don't. Which means that even your lower
>estimate would put the number of PCs in the world at a minimum of
>2 billion, 1.98 billion of which run DOS.

>Current estimates are that around 85% of all PCs run some sort of MS OS
>as their main OS. And 15% of 100 million (the more realistic estimate for
>the total number of active PCs) is 15 million --- which, unless I am wrong,
>is more than the number of Amigas ever sold, let alone still in use.

>So, if those 15 million don't count (not to mention the 20 or so million
>running Win95, and the 4 or 5 million running NT), then the Amiga doesn't
>count at all....

This is pretty silly. Win 95 doesn't replace MSDOS (yet) so MSDOS does still
load windows and the bios loads MSDOS. Ho hum. If the Amiga doesn't count
(BTW) then why do you waste your time here?

>>How about it opening a system window and displaying the text in a
>>proporional font of your choice?

>Huh? One word: Why?
>Booting is the process of initializing the hardware, finding out what
>software to start, and do it. If it goes wrong, you are screwed, and better
>be able to see why. Which means outputting it in a standard font in a
>standard screen mode is a very good idea. If all goes well, it's over within
>seconds, anyway.

One Phrase: why not? We are after all human and like 'pretty' looking things.

>>With a nice grey main background & black text if you must.

>Why not white text on white background?

Doh! You really have to grin and bare bernie..

>>Of course DOS can't do that - shame huh?

>Well, once we are through to DOS, you can do whatever you want --- if you
>want to play mods in the background while starting up things like
>smartdrive or your mouse driver, you can do it. Seems nobody wants to.
>As long as we are still in the BIOS boot up phase, there is nowhere where
>a font could be loaded from, or even preferences for which font to use.

Nobody wants to? Why do MS provide a pretty boot-up picture for W95 with a
colour cycling bar at the bottom? Because people like things too look pretty
:*) Whats wrong with that? Aren't you human?

>BTW, the PC at least prints some information during the BIOS phase. The
>Amiga just cycles screen colours....

At least it doesn't take as long :) And the colours all mean something anyway
:)

>>Strangly the Amiga500 used a Window all those years back. The A1200
>>and above don't display ANYTHING (except perhaps a boot pic) while
>>booting - far more modern in my books.

>Gosh. Once it doesn't boot, you will wish it did display something... Is
>that new SIMM faulty, or has Agnus just died? Did it find the keyboard,
>or is the processor dead? So many possibilities, so few clues...

You don't need a keyboard plugged in to boot my A4000.. The last PC that died
in the office gave me the following information - a black screen. So few
clues.. Processor dead on the Amiga is black, red means bad rom and so forth..

>>>Why do you think Linux is so fast?

>>I haven't used Linux so I can't comment on how smooth window moving, screen
>>updates, button response (v.important), text display, displaying animations,
>> etc.. I think you will still need a VERY fast PC (high end of a Pentium)
>>to achieve (near) glitch free animation (especially with other programs
>>running).

>First you say you can't comment, and the you _do_ make a comment. How
>unnecessary.

You talk utter crap, which is also _unecessary_ :)

>>It runs on the PC, and is rather similar to most PC s/w I have used.
>>Then the PC sucks.

>So? I saw a total idiot, you know, a total shithead, in a Mercedes Benz
>recently. The Mercedes really sucks, obviously.

Stay away from mirrored buildings ;)

>>I sure could but I'm already falling asleep with this thread as it is...

>Oh, you don't have to write it in this thread --- just write it all down,
>send it to any GUI oriented computer science journal, and immediate fame
>and riches will be yours.

Alternatively, some of us have other things to do :) You obviously do not.
Shame.

>However, just saying "I have found a wonderful proof, which unfortunately
>doesn't fit on the margin of this book" does not a proof make --- and saying
>"I can quantify it, but I won't tell you how" in csaa usually means "I made
>a statement I cannot back up, and am too chicken to admit it".

How you can draw all that from what he said is beyond me. I'd agree with his
point of view - "Bernie is a lost case" :)
We each live our lives, make our choices - why does this bother you so ?

Tim

[Patrick William Mackin]

ke...@sis.pitt.edu writes:
>
> Hmmm, it really _is_ strange that the most of the computers in the
> world are PC's if they are that crappy. Never had any problems with my
> PC, but maybe I'm the only one then...

I don't think it's that strange at all. Usually a company
faces a choice between marketing and development and it has to
heavily weight in one or the other.
What is the average car on the road in America today?? I'd say
probably some crappy 1982 NOVA or something.. Quality and
popularity rarely go hand in hand, in my experience.
What are the most popular television programmes?
The nasty, obnoxious, boring "sit-coms" like Home Improvement,
which is truly utterly devoid of humor.
What happens to quality programmes including dramas like Hill
Street Blues, Andy Griffith, heck even the original Star Trek??
All cancelled!

Go figure!
I'll stick with my Amiga any day, regardless of what everyone
else owns. As long as the hardware and software there is, in
my opinion, superior, I'll stick with it!

Patrick Mackin

[Billy Gates]

>
> Is that really a _partition_, or an alias?
> I would be pretty unhappy if some dork at the vendor thought he had a better
> idea than me how much "work" I do, how much "system" space I will need,
> how many "libaries" I will install and how much space to leave for the
> "games" partition.
>
> >So you don't admit MS-DOS is crap then?

MS\DOS crap you say? MS-DOS is far, far superior to Windows95! Errr...well at
least it will run most of the time!

>
> This is the first time you mention MS-DOS....

No, acutally this is the 1,786,143 times I've mentioned MS-DOS

>
> Bernie
>
> --
> ============================================================================
> "It's a magical world, Hobbes ol' buddy...
> ...let's go exploring"
> Calvin's final words, on December 31st, 1995

> .

[sno...@thenet.co.uk]

>ELA9...@shef.ac.uk (Chris Handley) writes:
>Gosh. Once it doesn't boot, you will wish it did display something...
>Is that new SIMM faulty, or has Agnus just died? Did it find the
>keyboard, or is the processor dead? So many possibilities, so few
>clues...

More Clues than you might think There are a series of colored screens
on the amiga which come up when there is a hardware fault.
Plus the keyboard Caps lock led i think that also flashes at you
the number of flashes gives you the fault.
Ok not error 301 as on the Pc but just as informative.

There is also romwack which lets you debug a crashed amiga with
another amiga plus a pretty well defined set of symptoms when you
do get hardware faults anyway.

it's all relatively painless and theres the early startup screen
as well which details all your expansion boards and thier status.
Amiga boards have got a thing called autoconfig which identifys
boards to the system. This comes in very early on an amiga
before booting actually.

but you don't want to know how to fix Amiga's do you bernie ;-)

Then again does the average amiga owner want to fix Amiga's
either.

What is the average home users response when there computer
fails, Panic ? isn't it easy to just say what color screen did
you see and then say this is the problem or do you prefer to
frighten your users with some Cryptic piece of jargon that they
don't understand. Users understand red blue green grey.

See even failure is friendly on the amiga you've heard of guru
alerts haven't you or the surfboard or any of the other near
mythology which the Amiga is steeped in.

Show me a pc with the names of its designers in or songs by the
B52's You have with the Pc an anonymous piece of equipment which
will last you a year or two then you will buy another one and you
will not miss your old one will you.

Sure your Pc goes faster than my Amiga will ever do but I don't
care I like my Amiga i like the people that run amiga's. Haven't
you noticed yet we help each other always have done and always
will. When I was new to the Amiga Other amiga users taught me things
and now I do the same for other people including some that taught me
Originally.

I'm still relatively inexperienced on the amiga I'm trying to follow
in the foot steps of great people. Thing is everybody on the Amiga can
put something back into this Amiga Community of ours.

Why do you think aminet is so big its because it's full of stuff put
there by its users. I don't know if you used to run an Amiga bernie
but I know I won't find the same kind of feeling If I move on to the
Pc sure I know i'll have to work with Pc's I can't see the Amiga
giving me a living but I enjoy what I do with my Amiga and with other
Amiga users. Maybe it's this which makes the Amiga different. Perhaps
its the lack of soul thats inbuilt into every anonymous Pc Clone
That makes a Pc user seek out an Amiga News group and try and attack
What we have and what we may have The Amiga is a computer thats been
made by great people not anonymous Companys and some of them even got
paid for what they did.
See It's not like the Pc and it never will be.

>Bernie

catch ya
john

sno...@thenet.co.uk

[Bernd Meyer]

tim <dan...@angeldos.demon.co.uk> writes:
[I just live Thor 2.4; It's always such a pleasure to lose attributions...]

>>>And MS-DOS is used by over 99% (99.9%?) of PC owners - which basically makes
>>> the PC MS-DOS in my opinion as far as my/your arguments are concerned.

>>Wow. Now you really got me.
>>MS claims 40 million Windows95 "delivered", so probably at least 20 million
>>are still running. Now unless "Loading Windows95" is called "booting using
>>a black and white DOS", all those don't.

Remember we were talking about "booting using black and white DOS" here.

>This is pretty silly. Win 95 doesn't replace MSDOS (yet) so MSDOS does still
>load windows and the bios loads MSDOS. Ho hum.

Ho-hum. And all MSDOS ever does is print "Loading Windows95". Wow! "Booting
using black and white DOS" for sure....

>>Current estimates are that around 85% of all PCs run some sort of MS OS
>>as their main OS. And 15% of 100 million (the more realistic estimate for
>>the total number of active PCs) is 15 million --- which, unless I am wrong,
>>is more than the number of Amigas ever sold, let alone still in use.

>>So, if those 15 million don't count (not to mention the 20 or so million
>>running Win95, and the 4 or 5 million running NT), then the Amiga doesn't
>>count at all....

>If the Amiga doesn't count (BTW) then why do you waste your time here?

Oh, I am not the one claiming that all PCs run DOS. You are.
I am not the one saying the Amiga is nonexistant. By your logic, you do.

>>>How about it opening a system window and displaying the text in a
>>>proporional font of your choice?

>>Huh? One word: Why?
>>Booting is the process of initializing the hardware, finding out what
>>software to start, and do it. If it goes wrong, you are screwed, and better
>>be able to see why. Which means outputting it in a standard font in a
>>standard screen mode is a very good idea. If all goes well, it's over within
>>seconds, anyway.

>One Phrase: why not? We are after all human and like 'pretty' looking things.

Read the above paragraph again, and you get a number of good reasons why
not.

>>>Of course DOS can't do that - shame huh?

>>Well, once we are through to DOS, you can do whatever you want --- if you
>>want to play mods in the background while starting up things like
>>smartdrive or your mouse driver, you can do it. Seems nobody wants to.
>>As long as we are still in the BIOS boot up phase, there is nowhere where
>>a font could be loaded from, or even preferences for which font to use.

>Nobody wants to? Why do MS provide a pretty boot-up picture for W95 with a
>colour cycling bar at the bottom? Because people like things too look pretty
>:*) Whats wrong with that? Aren't you human?

I am. However, I am a human who sometimes has to fix these things, for whatever
reason. When the circling colour bar suddenly stops circling, what has
happened?

And I was referring to non-Windows95 machines (because obviously Windows95
doesn't "boot using black and white DOS"). And for some strange reason
(according to your view of the world), noone has ever bothered to beautify
the DOS bootup.

>>BTW, the PC at least prints some information during the BIOS phase. The
>>Amiga just cycles screen colours....

>At least it doesn't take as long :) And the colours all mean something anyway
>:)

Yes, all 6 of them (or how many is it? 8? 10?).

>>>It runs on the PC, and is rather similar to most PC s/w I have used.
>>>Then the PC sucks.

>>So? I saw a total idiot, you know, a total shithead, in a Mercedes Benz
>>recently. The Mercedes really sucks, obviously.

>Stay away from mirrored buildings ;)

Give me 5 more years, then I will be able to afford the Merc.

I have to notice you failed to get the point of the analogy....

>>>I sure could but I'm already falling asleep with this thread as it is...

>>Oh, you don't have to write it in this thread --- just write it all down,
>>send it to any GUI oriented computer science journal, and immediate fame
>>and riches will be yours.

>Alternatively, some of us have other things to do :) You obviously do not.
>Shame.

If I could come up with a way of quantifying ease of use and feature richness,
I would drop whatever else I was doing at the time, write it up, probably
apply for a patent, and be an instant millionaire.
If you have better things to do than to become a millionaire, it must be
posting in csaa, right?

>>However, just saying "I have found a wonderful proof, which unfortunately
>>doesn't fit on the margin of this book" does not a proof make --- and saying
>>"I can quantify it, but I won't tell you how" in csaa usually means "I made
>>a statement I cannot back up, and am too chicken to admit it".

>How you can draw all that from what he said is beyond me. I'd agree with his
>point of view - "Bernie is a lost case" :)

Well, you say "AmigaOS is 20 times more user friendly than Windows95", implying
that you _can_ quantify that quality. When asked to explain _how_, you
say "I could tell you, but I won't, as I am bored". Call me a sceptic,
but considering the fact that such a method would be worth millions of
dollars and would instantly put dozens of highly qualified computer
scientists out of work, I take that as "OK, I went out too far, now I
am backpedaling".

BTW, if you had understood the reference to Fermat's last theorem, you'd
know that I don't say such a method is impossible. Just that I highly
doubt that you have it.

[Marc Forrester]

Bernd Meyer wrote:
> >The Amiga doesn't generally NEED an uninstall as deleting the place
> >it was uninstalled gets rid of most of it. Any prefs files are small
> >& won't cause a problem. Any libraries can be used by other programs
> >(& are a good idea to keep).
>

> That must have been the most blinded-by-loyalty excuse I have seen
> in a long time --- first he goes on ranting how under Windows95 the
> uninstaller isn't perfect, and then THAT!

It does sound like an excuse, I'll grant you, but it's mostly true.
Amiga porgrams install by putting the vast majority of their support
files into their own directory, since this can always be accessed
through Progdir: or failing that, assigns, and put a couple of
libraries in Libs: and maybe some fonts in Fonts:. Whilst there
is no standard for Uninstallers, (Although an uninstall option
can be added to an installer script if it is deemed necessary)
There is little purpose for one. Libraries are small, very
rarely unique to a single program, and generally only two or
three are installed per program, compared to the multitude of
new, meaninglessly named, program specific DLL's that turn up
with each new Windows program as standard. Fonts must be
looked after manually if the drawer is not to get flooded,
but I wouldn't personally want fonts automatically removed
during uninstallation in any case. More often than not,
I keep the font(s) even if I throw the program away.
It helps to have a comfortable amount of HD space,
and a font cache OS-patch in place, 'tis true.

>> The Amiga doesn't spread files EVERYWHERE unlike Win95 programs do.
>> The places for finding Amiga system files are specific (eg.libs,
>> devs, l, dos-drivers/printers, etc), while the PC basically sticks
>> everything in C: & C:Windows - thus tracking down a specific file
>> difficult at best.
>

> So far, I have seen _two_ directories for Windows95 (not "the PC"),

If you're not running Windows and MS-DOS, we have no quarrel
with you. UNIX derivatives are, for the most part, our allies.

It's not true to say that Windows programs install files 'everywhere',
but you miss the second point. Everything (And it's a lot of files,
typically, with pretty meaningless names) is installed to a couple of
places. This results in a huge mass of white noise of a directory
listing, impossible or at least highly impractical to clean up
manually. And then there's the registry and Ini files..
Basically, you -need- a good uninstaller on a Wintel setup.
It would be useful for AmigaOS, but it's not really necessary.

> and a least 4 plus "etc" for the Amiga.

Yes, but it's only Libs: and Fonts: additions that you would
conceivably want removed. Things in L: and the Devs: heirarchy
are so small, useful, infrequently added, and clear about what
they're doing during installation, that you wouldn't -want- any
automatic removal from those areas, assuming you had the
slightest idea what you were doing.

[Markus Castren]

CMM said about Re: Amiga vs. PC - Stop whining!:
^^^

Well, not really..

>>>On Tue, 25 Feb 1997, Keith Blakemore-Noble wrote:
>>>Better 160k of MUI libs than 70M of Win95 OS!!!
>>Get real! They're not even comparable!

Yep, MUI kicks the hell out of Win95

--
.---------------------------------+-----------------------------------.
| MARKUS CASTREN a.k.a. | EMail: sl...@xgw.fi |
| GANJA / NERVE AXiS | WWW: www.xgw.fi/~slice/ |
| | |
| A12oo/o3o/4o/1oMB/85oMB/2xCDROM | The Official Gloom Pages: |
| 14"MULTiSYNC/AURA | www.xgw.fi/~slice/gloom/gloom.html|
| | |
| AMiGA:MUSiC^GAMES^NET^SCENE^ETC | Musician for the game PHOENiX! |
|_________________________________|___________________________________|

[Billy Gates]

>
>
> CMM said about Re: Amiga vs. PC - Stop whining!:
> ^^^
>
> Well, not really..
>
> >>>On Tue, 25 Feb 1997, Keith Blakemore-Noble wrote:
> >>>Better 160k of MUI libs than 70M of Win95 OS!!!
> >>Get real! They're not even comparable!
>
> Yep, MUI kicks the hell out of Win95

Yes, it certainly does!!!
>
> --
> ..---------------------------------+-----------------------------------.

> | MARKUS CASTREN a.k.a. | EMail: sl...@xgw.fi |
> | GANJA / NERVE AXiS | WWW: www.xgw.fi/~slice/ |
> | | |
> | A12oo/o3o/4o/1oMB/85oMB/2xCDROM | The Official Gloom Pages: |
> | 14"MULTiSYNC/AURA | www.xgw.fi/~slice/gloom/gloom.html|
> | | |
> | AMiGA:MUSiC^GAMES^NET^SCENE^ETC | Musician for the game PHOENiX! |
> |_________________________________|___________________________________|
>

> .

[tim]

>tim <dan...@angeldos.demon.co.uk> writes:
>[I just live Thor 2.4; It's always such a pleasure to lose attributions...]

>>>>And MS-DOS is used by over 99% (99.9%?) of PC owners - which basically
>>>>makes
>>>> the PC MS-DOS in my opinion as far as my/your arguments are concerned.

>>>Wow. Now you really got me.
>>>MS claims 40 million Windows95 "delivered", so probably at least 20 million
>>>are still running. Now unless "Loading Windows95" is called "booting using
>>>a black and white DOS", all those don't.

>Remember we were talking about "booting using black and white DOS" here.

>>This is pretty silly. Win 95 doesn't replace MSDOS (yet) so MSDOS does still
>>load windows and the bios loads MSDOS. Ho hum.

>Ho-hum. And all MSDOS ever does is print "Loading Windows95". Wow! "Booting
>using black and white DOS" for sure....

Yes, but why bother with that? I mean, isn't it better to keep the screen blank
unless something goes awry (like my Amiga does) and then put up your pretty
windows pic etc.. I freely admit to having a nice little boot program that runs
whilst i'm initialising my WB. I like it - and these programs are INCREDIBLY
popular. People come round, they see it and say - "I wanna copy of that". And
theres *nothing* wrong with that. Personalisation is a great thing - and one of
the major pluses of the Amiga over say a MS PC.

>>>Current estimates are that around 85% of all PCs run some sort of MS OS
>>>as their main OS. And 15% of 100 million (the more realistic estimate for
>>>the total number of active PCs) is 15 million --- which, unless I am wrong,
>>>is more than the number of Amigas ever sold, let alone still in use.

>>>So, if those 15 million don't count (not to mention the 20 or so million
>>>running Win95, and the 4 or 5 million running NT), then the Amiga doesn't
>>>count at all....

>>If the Amiga doesn't count (BTW) then why do you waste your time here?

>Oh, I am not the one claiming that all PCs run DOS. You are.

<GRIN> can we agree on a majority then? Or would you put linux at the top of
the list of OS' on the PC ?

>I am not the one saying the Amiga is nonexistant. By your logic, you do.

Heheh.. nice try - but you can't get away with that! The original point (which
you made, not I) is that that Amiga doesn't count. It obviously does for those
that use it. All i'm asking is why you spend so much time here telling us how
incredibly naive we are, when the truth is that (the majority) of us aren't. We
just make a choice :) I drive a VW golf - I like it - you might hate it. So
what?

>>>>How about it opening a system window and displaying the text in a
>>>>proporional font of your choice?

>>>Huh? One word: Why?
>>>Booting is the process of initializing the hardware, finding out what
>>>software to start, and do it. If it goes wrong, you are screwed, and better
>>>be able to see why. Which means outputting it in a standard font in a
>>>standard screen mode is a very good idea. If all goes well, it's over
>>>within seconds, anyway.

>>One Phrase: why not? We are after all human and like 'pretty' looking
>>things.

>Read the above paragraph again, and you get a number of good reasons why
>not.

Oh I agree - but why not give people the choice of how it looks? :) The font,
screenmode and colours are all definable for the Amiga. I think the problem
here is in trying to compare the Amiga and PC - the Amiga is somewhat different
in the way it acts on bootup - for one thing you have a ROM full of OS (not just
a bootstrap that loads the OS [PC]). The Amiga is more integral in it's boot -
I have never EVER been lost on a failing Amiga due to lack of messaging.
Honest!
Anyway, you do see the problem in comparison - don't you?

>>>>Of course DOS can't do that - shame huh?

>>>Well, once we are through to DOS, you can do whatever you want --- if you
>>>want to play mods in the background while starting up things like
>>>smartdrive or your mouse driver, you can do it. Seems nobody wants to.
>>>As long as we are still in the BIOS boot up phase, there is nowhere where
>>>a font could be loaded from, or even preferences for which font to use.

>>Nobody wants to? Why do MS provide a pretty boot-up picture for W95 with a
>>colour cycling bar at the bottom? Because people like things too look
>>pretty
>>:*) Whats wrong with that? Aren't you human?

>I am. However, I am a human who sometimes has to fix these things, for
>whatever reason. When the circling colour bar suddenly stops circling, what
>has happened?

It's broke :) If you Amiga pops up a message instead of that black screen it's
also broken down during startup ;)

>And I was referring to non-Windows95 machines (because obviously Windows95
>doesn't "boot using black and white DOS"). And for some strange reason
>(according to your view of the world), noone has ever bothered to beautify
>the DOS bootup.

I think if you want to talk PC you have to acknowledge Windows not Linux is in
the majority. People run NetBSD on the Amiga but you're not using that as a
comparison for the same reasons. My PC happily loads drivers etc in MSDOS
before it boots to Windows95 (in black and white if you must know!). See
previous point re: beautification.

>>>BTW, the PC at least prints some information during the BIOS phase. The
>>>Amiga just cycles screen colours....

>>At least it doesn't take as long :) And the colours all mean something
>>anyway
>>:)

>Yes, all 6 of them (or how many is it? 8? 10?).

GASP! you don't know ;) Offhand I don't know either - I've only ever been faced
with RED for bad ROM (crashed the image out doing something really nasty ;) and
black for processor fault (I hadn't plugged in the processor board correctly).

>>>>It runs on the PC, and is rather similar to most PC s/w I have used.
>>>>Then the PC sucks.

>>>So? I saw a total idiot, you know, a total shithead, in a Mercedes Benz
>>>recently. The Mercedes really sucks, obviously.

>>Stay away from mirrored buildings ;)

>Give me 5 more years, then I will be able to afford the Merc.

5? Hell.. S'only gonna take me 2..

>I have to notice you failed to get the point of the analogy....

I didn't - and you *should* know I didn't miss it too ;) Sorry, it was a one
liner I couldn't pass up :)

>>>>I sure could but I'm already falling asleep with this thread as it is...

>>>Oh, you don't have to write it in this thread --- just write it all down,
>>>send it to any GUI oriented computer science journal, and immediate fame
>>>and riches will be yours.

>>Alternatively, some of us have other things to do :) You obviously do not.
>>Shame.

>If I could come up with a way of quantifying ease of use and feature
>richness, I would drop whatever else I was doing at the time, write it up,
>probably apply for a patent, and be an instant millionaire. If you have
>better things to do than to become a millionaire, it must be posting in csaa,
>right?

Funnily enough I spend a lot of time doing just this - for my University course.
The latter is also the reason why I post here - I'm using it for research.
BTW sure - money is great! But my priorities lie elsewhere - like in the woman
that I love and the pursuit of happyness. Am I getting too philosophical for
you? I'm serious too, if i'm on 30,000UKP a year then I'll be more than happy.

>>>However, just saying "I have found a wonderful proof, which unfortunately
>>>doesn't fit on the margin of this book" does not a proof make --- and
>>>saying "I can quantify it, but I won't tell you how" in csaa usually means
>>>"I made a statement I cannot back up, and am too chicken to admit it".

>>How you can draw all that from what he said is beyond me. I'd agree with
>>his point of view - "Bernie is a lost case" :)

>Well, you say "AmigaOS is 20 times more user friendly than Windows95",

Actually, I didn't. The original post wasn't mine. Notice the cunning use of
"what he said" :)

>implying that you _can_ quantify that quality. When asked to explain _how_,
>you say "I could tell you, but I won't, as I am bored". Call me a sceptic,
>but considering the fact that such a method would be worth millions of
>dollars and would instantly put dozens of highly qualified computer
>scientists out of work, I take that as "OK, I went out too far, now I am
>backpedaling".

But would you seriously expect someone to explain it all, in detail, to you
here? I mean, thats a whole thesis in University terms - and probably a masters
at that!

>BTW, if you had understood the reference to Fermat's last theorem, you'd
>know that I don't say such a method is impossible. Just that I highly
>doubt that you have it.

Look, if he's happy with the Amiga and so am I - how does that affect you?
Perhaps you find the PC to be more user friendly but thats hardly a basis for
troucing anyone else's opinion. As i've got to teach my folks how to use a PC I
guess i'll find out how "easy" it really is - these are people that need help
setting up the VCR :)
My *own* *personal* view is that i've yet to see a PC running anything that
would make me abandon my Amiga. Many others feel this way but it's never going
to be enough to make any impact on you and the majority in the PC market.
You're not under threat - so why do you feel the need to tell us what to buy and
use ? :) It's interesting to note that (on the whole) pro-Amiga folk don't
spend their lives in YOUR newgroups doing this sort of thing. It should really
be the other way around, but we're all pretty happy and thats enough for us.
Does the fact that the Amiga user base has such a sense of community and (dare I
say) friendship really dig at you that much? Be happy - what on Earth do you
have to fear from any of us?

Tim

[Patrick William Mackin]

ke...@sis.pitt.edu writes:
>
> Believe me, I use my computer A LOT. I've even released programs on
> it, just as I did on the Amiga. I program a lot and it is really
> valuable tor me since I'm a student...
>
> I can't say that my Amiga was as valuable for me when I was at
> college. My papers always had to be converted into ASCII and I had to
> do all the layout on the PC. There were no good flowchart programs, no
> good vector drawing programs, no usable spreadsheet programs, no good
> wordprocessors where I could combine ALL these things into one
> document. But when it came to programming, I enjoyed Amiga more than
> 3.11. But when Win95 and Visual C++ came along I preferred the PC even
> when programming...

That's strange.. I have NEVER had a need for ANY of those
strange things above (Flowchart programs??!#@). But perhaps
that's just me. Of course, OUR PCs and Macs in the labs don't
do any of the above except screadsheets and word processors,but
in case you haven't noticed, the Amiga DOES have these. I
can't use Micro$hit ACCESS for the life of me.. I am forced to
use Final Data, which is MUCH nicer and simpler and doesn't do
a lot of the stupid things that Access does (like haveing rows
A through Z appear on the screen even though you only want
THREE categories! and a bunch of other stuff I didn't have the
patience to figure out) Basically for me the Amiga does many
cool things the PC doesn't, and for the crossovers, in almost
every instance, I PREFER the Amiga (Wordperfect vs. FinalWriter
or Wordsworth MIGHT win out here.. just for compatibility)
But I can not see myself EVER buying a PC or a Mac.
Ever.

Patrick Mackin
University of Virginia
College of Arts and Sciences

[Gareth Young]

On Wed, 05 Mar 97, Bernd Meyer wrote:
«MEGA MASSIVE GIGANTIC HUMUNGOUS ENOURMOUS SNIP SIMILAR IN SIZE TO THE
AMOUNT OF RAM REQUIRED TO RUN WIN85»

> >At least it doesn't take as long :) And the colours all mean something anyway
> >:)

> Yes, all 6 of them (or how many is it? 8? 10?).

We Amiga owners, we like, you know, don't memorise every single colour, like
PVC owners wouldn't remember every single BIOS error. However, for your
satisfaction, here are the colours for my A1200 and their associated
meaings, showing that it doesn't really matter how the bloody computer tells
you something is wrong, unless it contradicts itself... keyboard not
connected, press any key to continue, for example. HA HA HA. :
Red: ROM error
Green: Chip RAM error
Blue: Custom chips error.
Yellow: 680x0 detected error before software trapped it (GURU)

dunno what the hell that yellow code is supposed to mean. That's what it
says in the manual though.

> >>>It runs on the PC, and is rather similar to most PC s/w I have used.
> >>>Then the PC sucks.
>
> >>So? I saw a total idiot, you know, a total shithead, in a Mercedes Benz
> >>recently. The Mercedes really sucks, obviously.

In this case, no. However, if 99% (Or it least a massive majority) of the
merc owning people were shitheads (win'85) then most people would probably
say that the merc sucks.

> Well, you say "AmigaOS is 20 times more user friendly than Windows95", implying
> that you _can_ quantify that quality. When asked to explain _how_, you
> say "I could tell you, but I won't, as I am bored". Call me a sceptic,
> but considering the fact that such a method would be worth millions of
> dollars and would instantly put dozens of highly qualified computer
> scientists out of work, I take that as "OK, I went out too far, now I
> am backpedaling".

*ONE* particularly annoying aspect with win'85 is the way it assumes the
user is a complete cretin. And there is (to my knowledge) no way of
changing this. One example taken from this newsgroup would be using
drag'n'drop and having win'85 say "Are you sure you want to do this?".
That sucks. Could you imagine trying to copy over 150 files esp. when you
KNOW you REALLY want to do it. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes...... etc.
To the experianced user (And experiance is something that we all gain
through using a computer (Albeit slowly with win'85) and cannot lose unless
you get involved in some kind of accident) this is most definately
UNFRIENDLY. And I can guarantee that some user out there is willing to post
every last thing they hate about win'85 (well experianced users anyway).
--
_ _
|_|_ |_| Connecting via NETCOM Internet Ltd
_ |_|_ IRC:Niles or Nile5. After the neurotic on the sitcom Fraisure.
|_| _|_|
|_| Gareth Young - gar...@netcomuk.co.uk (See me on DALNet #amigabar after 6PM GMT on Weekends)

[Skipper Smith]

Matthias Bethke wrote:
[...]

> :-) Even more, it was crap hardware as designed. They bought licences from
> Motorola to make their own EC030-CPUs with 16bit data bus like the 386SX!
> If that ain't crap I dunno what is!

Until very recently, Motorola has not licensed anyone to make any variant of the 68000
architecture beyond the original MC68000. Atari did not hold a license. All they did was have
their memory respond with DSACK1_ and never both DSACK0_ + DSACK1_. This achieves the affect you
are referring to without the expense of having to license a processor.

--
Skipper Smith Somerset Design Center
6300 Bridgepoint Pkwy Bldg 3 Austin, TX, 78730 USA
Better data paths for better living Grackle Design Team
All opinions are my own and not necessarily those of my employer

[Marc Forrester]

Bernd Meyer wrote:
> Ho-hum. And all MSDOS ever does is print "Loading Windows95". Wow!
> "Booting using black and white DOS" for sure....

That's not actually a good thing. It's much nicer to have windowing
protocols, device drivers, and suchlike as part of the underlying
operating system, rather than loading them up as part of one huge
executable. It means you don't actually have to load that huge
executable unless you need to use it for something, for a start.

> Oh, I am not the one claiming that all PCs run DOS. You are.

That's not really what anyone's trying to say. What we're trying
to say is that when we refer to 'PCs' and 'IBMs', we mean by
implication Wintel setups. If you were running Linux, we'd
count you as neutral if not an ally, and if you were just
running MS-DOS, well, you've already lost. :]

[tim]

I'm surprised noone has mentioned you can print to a postscript file with final
writer, take it to uni and run it off through the laser printer. I do it all
the time - it's great!

Yours,

Tim

[tim]

>tim <dan...@angeldos.demon.co.uk> writes:
>[Tim, please fix up that Thor monster to create attributions! ]

>>>tim <dan...@angeldos.demon.co.uk> writes:
>>>[I just live Thor 2.4; It's always such a pleasure to lose attributions...]

>>>>This is pretty silly. Win 95 doesn't replace MSDOS (yet) so MSDOS does

>>>>still load windows and the bios loads MSDOS. Ho hum.

>>>Ho-hum. And all MSDOS ever does is print "Loading Windows95". Wow! "Booting
>>>using black and white DOS" for sure....

>>Yes, but why bother with that?

>Because at that point there is a number of different possibilities, and
>it's nice to inform the user about what is happening. You can boot Win95
>in safe mode, you can boot Win95 in DOS mode, or you could even boot the
>previous OS.

Same on my Amiga - except it doesn't actually print up anything till i *do
something* to alter the normal boot procedure - e.g. LMB halts to ADos, turn
caps lock on and early boot menu comes up, i've reset using 'resrun' so it
outputs a message telling me this. CLever really.

>>>>>So, if those 15 million don't count (not to mention the 20 or so million
>>>>>running Win95, and the 4 or 5 million running NT), then the Amiga doesn't
>>>>>count at all....

>>>>If the Amiga doesn't count (BTW) then why do you waste your time here?

>>>Oh, I am not the one claiming that all PCs run DOS. You are.

>><GRIN> can we agree on a majority then? Or would you put linux at the top
>>of the list of OS' on the PC ?

>Oh, majority for sure. I don't think the majority of PCs is running any
>particular MS OS at the moment, but sure, the majority is running _some_
>MS OS,

Really? I'd say without doubt that most PC's in the UK run Win95 as it's both
sold with machines and pirated like hell too.. I can't think of any PC i've
seen in the last year or so that's running 3.1. NT is pretty rare too.

>>>I am not the one saying the Amiga is nonexistant. By your logic, you do.

>>Heheh.. nice try - but you can't get away with that! The original
>>point (which you made, not I) is that that Amiga doesn't count.

>Nope. The original point I made was that, considering you think that 15
>million non-MS PCs don't count, you will obviously also think the Amiga
>doesn't count. I say both do count.

Great, so we agree - aside from the fact you still (for some odd reason) believe
I said the Amiga doesn't count. hmm.

>>It obviously does for those that use it.

>As do millions of linux PCs for those that use them....

You'd be hard pressed to find that many linux machines here - thats for certain.

>>All i'm asking is why you spend so much time here telling us how
>>incredibly naive we are, when the truth is that (the majority) of us
>>aren't. We just make a choice :) I drive a VW golf - I like it - you
>>might hate it. So what?

>Oh, nothing wrong with that. It's only when you go and claim that your
>GOLF is so much better than my beetle, because all beetles come in an
>ugly colour, have AM only radios and leak oil, that I have to take exception.

...and vice versa.

>>>Read the above paragraph again, and you get a number of good reasons why
>>>not.

>>Oh I agree - but why not give people the choice of how it looks? :)
>>The font, screenmode and colours are all definable for the Amiga.

>Yes, and they are _only_ available when AmigaOS is already far enough
>booted to access the harddisk. It would be trivial to do the same in DOS,
>once you are up to executing the commands in config.sys. Nobody seems to
>want to do it.
>However, changing the _BIOS_ font would require the fonts to be stored in
>ROM, as at that time harddisks are not yet available.

I think it's the inherent difference in the boot procedures of the two machines
that makes it impossible for the PC more than anything else. I mean, when you
reset an Amiga it takes what - a couple of seconds - to reach hardrive stage.
You don't actually load AmigaDos off the drive (a heck of a lot of it's on the
KS ROM).

>>>And I was referring to non-Windows95 machines (because obviously Windows95
>>>doesn't "boot using black and white DOS"). And for some strange reason
>>>(according to your view of the world), noone has ever bothered to beautify
>>>the DOS bootup.

>>I think if you want to talk PC you have to acknowledge Windows not Linux is
>>in the majority.

>But when you want to talk about an OS that "boots using black and white DOS",
>I will not acknowledge Windows95. Nope, sorry.

Er... why? It does it on my PC, on my friends PC, on the x hundred PC's in the
university's labs.. It's what happens.

>>>>>So? I saw a total idiot, you know, a total shithead, in a Mercedes Benz
>>>>>recently. The Mercedes really sucks, obviously.

>>>>Stay away from mirrored buildings ;)

>>>Give me 5 more years, then I will be able to afford the Merc.

>>5? Hell.. S'only gonna take me 2..

>In two, I will just have finished my PhD. The big bucks come after that ;-)

Good luck to you :) I can't wait to get out of University right now.. Too many
loans and too little fun :(

>>>If I could come up with a way of quantifying ease of use and feature
>>>richness, I would drop whatever else I was doing at the time, write it up,
>>>probably apply for a patent, and be an instant millionaire. If you have
>>>better things to do than to become a millionaire, it must be posting in
>>>csaa, right?

>>Funnily enough I spend a lot of time doing just this - for my
>>University course. The latter is also the reason why I post here -
>>I'm using it for research. BTW sure - money is great! But my
>>priorities lie elsewhere - like in the woman that I love and the
>>pursuit of happyness. Am I getting too philosophical for you? I'm
>>serious too, if i'm on 30,000UKP a year then I'll be more than happy.

>Hey, no problem with that --- money sure is nice, but a nice life is even
>nicer (why do you think I am still at university, rather than making money
>in industry). However, I don't think you would pass up a chance of making
>millions for two weeks of work ;-)

Noone would :) I'm still at university for the same reason. In fact i've spent
six years of my life getting to the point where I can get a decent job. The
main reason (over money even!) is to do something interesting and at least
taxing so that i don't get bored right outta my skull :)

>>>>>However, just saying "I have found a wonderful proof, which unfortunately
>>>>>doesn't fit on the margin of this book" does not a proof make --- and
>>>>>saying "I can quantify it, but I won't tell you how" in csaa usually
>>>>>means "I made a statement I cannot back up, and am too chicken to admit
>>>>>it".

>>>>How you can draw all that from what he said is beyond me. I'd agree with
>>>>his point of view - "Bernie is a lost case" :)

>>>Well, you say "AmigaOS is 20 times more user friendly than Windows95",

>>Actually, I didn't. The original post wasn't mine. Notice the cunning use
>>of "what he said" :)

>OK, then "he said" that, implying the same ;-)

:*P

>>>implying that you _can_ quantify that quality. When asked to explain _how_,
>>>you say "I could tell you, but I won't, as I am bored". Call me a sceptic,
>>>but considering the fact that such a method would be worth millions of
>>>dollars and would instantly put dozens of highly qualified computer
>>>scientists out of work, I take that as "OK, I went out too far, now I am
>>>backpedaling".

>>But would you seriously expect someone to explain it all, in detail,
>>to you here? I mean, thats a whole thesis in University terms - and
>>probably a masters at that!

>Then just give me the reference to the masters thesis. No problem. But
>the very fact that all those highly trained people are still trying to come
>up with a way seems to indicated that no such thesis has been published.

Come on - don't be so unreasonable ;) You're not stupid!

>>It's interesting to note that (on the whole) pro-Amiga folk don't
>>spend their lives in YOUR newgroups doing this sort of thing.

>As a percentage of user base --- oh yes, they do ;-)

Really? Personally I wouldn't ever bother...

>>Be happy - what on Earth do you have to fear from any of us?

>Uhm, I know that this is a low blow --- but how about ruthless stealing
>of copyrighted source code and subsequent release of a binary compiled
>from said code? And guess who's web page that binary is available from?

Hehehe I have to admire your ability to turn things on an individual :)
Actually, *I* didn't steal anything and can you proove the code wasn't written
from scratch? :) Exactly. I'm simply acting as a PR for the AQuake team which
leaves me free of responsibility. How you percieve this a threat to the PC
empire i don't know :)
..and don't think I didn't notice you used this to evade the question ;)

Tim

[ttammi]

Marc Forrester <s...@mail.zynet.co.uk> wrote:

>It does sound like an excuse, I'll grant you, but it's mostly true.
>Amiga porgrams install by putting the vast majority of their support
>files into their own directory, since this can always be accessed
>through Progdir: or failing that, assigns, and put a couple of
>libraries in Libs: and maybe some fonts in Fonts:. Whilst there

Funny, that sounds just like Win95 application installers. Couple of
DLLs in the Windows/System directory (usually they keep them in their
own directory), shortcut on the desktop to launch the application, and
a registery entry for the unistaller. Many Win95 games don't do even
that, they don't add anything outside their home directory.

Yes, there are _some_ Win95 applications that can do lots of
modifications to your setup (for instance MS Office and certain ftp
client). Especially for those, I recommend using InCtrl3, which is
freeware by the way.

It could be Win95's own built in uninstaller works fine for those two
applications I mentioned, but I always rather use InCtrl3 to be sure I
get any redundant files and registery entries out of my system, when I
want to get rid of a certain application.

>There is little purpose for one. Libraries are small, very
>rarely unique to a single program, and generally only two or
>three are installed per program, compared to the multitude of
>new, meaninglessly named, program specific DLL's that turn up
>with each new Windows program as standard.

Quite wrong. How do you know that? I have inspected the behaviour of
lots of Win95 applications and games (with InCtrl3, of course), and
they add extra "unique" DLLs hardly ever. And if they do, they usually
keep them in their own home directory.

>places. This results in a huge mass of white noise of a directory
>listing, impossible or at least highly impractical to clean up
>manually.

Not, if you use e.g. InCtrl3.

>Basically, you -need- a good uninstaller on a Wintel setup.
>It would be useful for AmigaOS, but it's not really necessary.

So far it seems Amiga needs it just as badly as Win95.

[Bernd Meyer]

tim <dan...@angeldos.demon.co.uk> writes:
[Tim, please fix up that Thor monster to create attributions! ]

>>tim <dan...@angeldos.demon.co.uk> writes:
>>[I just live Thor 2.4; It's always such a pleasure to lose attributions...]

>>>This is pretty silly. Win 95 doesn't replace MSDOS (yet) so MSDOS does still

>>>load windows and the bios loads MSDOS. Ho hum.

>>Ho-hum. And all MSDOS ever does is print "Loading Windows95". Wow! "Booting
>>using black and white DOS" for sure....

>Yes, but why bother with that?

Because at that point there is a number of different possibilities, and

it's nice to inform the user about what is happening. You can boot Win95
in safe mode, you can boot Win95 in DOS mode, or you could even boot the
previous OS.

>>>>So, if those 15 million don't count (not to mention the 20 or so million

>>>>running Win95, and the 4 or 5 million running NT), then the Amiga doesn't
>>>>count at all....

>>>If the Amiga doesn't count (BTW) then why do you waste your time here?

>>Oh, I am not the one claiming that all PCs run DOS. You are.

><GRIN> can we agree on a majority then? Or would you put linux at the top of
>the list of OS' on the PC ?

Oh, majority for sure. I don't think the majority of PCs is running any

particular MS OS at the moment, but sure, the majority is running _some_
MS OS,

>>I am not the one saying the Amiga is nonexistant. By your logic, you do.

>Heheh.. nice try - but you can't get away with that! The original
>point (which you made, not I) is that that Amiga doesn't count.

Nope. The original point I made was that, considering you think that 15

million non-MS PCs don't count, you will obviously also think the Amiga

doesn't count. I say both do count.

>It obviously does for those that use it.

As do millions of linux PCs for those that use them....

>All i'm asking is why you spend so much time here telling us how

>incredibly naive we are, when the truth is that (the majority) of us
>aren't. We just make a choice :) I drive a VW golf - I like it - you
>might hate it. So what?

Oh, nothing wrong with that. It's only when you go and claim that your

GOLF is so much better than my beetle, because all beetles come in an
ugly colour, have AM only radios and leak oil, that I have to take exception.

>>Read the above paragraph again, and you get a number of good reasons why
>>not.

>Oh I agree - but why not give people the choice of how it looks? :)
>The font, screenmode and colours are all definable for the Amiga.

Yes, and they are _only_ available when AmigaOS is already far enough

booted to access the harddisk. It would be trivial to do the same in DOS,
once you are up to executing the commands in config.sys. Nobody seems to
want to do it.
However, changing the _BIOS_ font would require the fonts to be stored in
ROM, as at that time harddisks are not yet available.

>>And I was referring to non-Windows95 machines (because obviously Windows95

>>doesn't "boot using black and white DOS"). And for some strange reason
>>(according to your view of the world), noone has ever bothered to beautify
>>the DOS bootup.

>I think if you want to talk PC you have to acknowledge Windows not Linux is in
>the majority.

But when you want to talk about an OS that "boots using black and white DOS",

I will not acknowledge Windows95. Nope, sorry.

>>>>So? I saw a total idiot, you know, a total shithead, in a Mercedes Benz

>>>>recently. The Mercedes really sucks, obviously.

>>>Stay away from mirrored buildings ;)

>>Give me 5 more years, then I will be able to afford the Merc.

>5? Hell.. S'only gonna take me 2..

In two, I will just have finished my PhD. The big bucks come after that ;-)

>>If I could come up with a way of quantifying ease of use and feature

>>richness, I would drop whatever else I was doing at the time, write it up,
>>probably apply for a patent, and be an instant millionaire. If you have
>>better things to do than to become a millionaire, it must be posting in csaa,
>>right?

>Funnily enough I spend a lot of time doing just this - for my
>University course. The latter is also the reason why I post here -
>I'm using it for research. BTW sure - money is great! But my
>priorities lie elsewhere - like in the woman that I love and the
>pursuit of happyness. Am I getting too philosophical for you? I'm
>serious too, if i'm on 30,000UKP a year then I'll be more than happy.

Hey, no problem with that --- money sure is nice, but a nice life is even

nicer (why do you think I am still at university, rather than making money
in industry). However, I don't think you would pass up a chance of making
millions for two weeks of work ;-)

>>>>However, just saying "I have found a wonderful proof, which unfortunately

>>>>doesn't fit on the margin of this book" does not a proof make --- and
>>>>saying "I can quantify it, but I won't tell you how" in csaa usually means
>>>>"I made a statement I cannot back up, and am too chicken to admit it".

>>>How you can draw all that from what he said is beyond me. I'd agree with
>>>his point of view - "Bernie is a lost case" :)

>>Well, you say "AmigaOS is 20 times more user friendly than Windows95",

>Actually, I didn't. The original post wasn't mine. Notice the cunning use of
>"what he said" :)

OK, then "he said" that, implying the same ;-)

>>implying that you _can_ quantify that quality. When asked to explain _how_,

>>you say "I could tell you, but I won't, as I am bored". Call me a sceptic,
>>but considering the fact that such a method would be worth millions of
>>dollars and would instantly put dozens of highly qualified computer
>>scientists out of work, I take that as "OK, I went out too far, now I am
>>backpedaling".

>But would you seriously expect someone to explain it all, in detail,
>to you here? I mean, thats a whole thesis in University terms - and
>probably a masters at that!

Then just give me the reference to the masters thesis. No problem. But

the very fact that all those highly trained people are still trying to come
up with a way seems to indicated that no such thesis has been published.

>It's interesting to note that (on the whole) pro-Amiga folk don't

>spend their lives in YOUR newgroups doing this sort of thing.

As a percentage of user base --- oh yes, they do ;-)

>Be happy - what on Earth do you have to fear from any of us?

Uhm, I know that this is a low blow --- but how about ruthless stealing

of copyrighted source code and subsequent release of a binary compiled
from said code? And guess who's web page that binary is available from?

Bernie

[Bernd Meyer]

tim <dan...@angeldos.demon.co.uk> writes:
[And once more there are no attributions....]

[The majority of PCs running an MS OS]

>>Oh, majority for sure. I don't think the majority of PCs is running any
>>particular MS OS at the moment, but sure, the majority is running _some_
>>MS OS,

>Really? I'd say without doubt that most PC's in the UK run Win95 as it's both
>sold with machines and pirated like hell too.. I can't think of any PC i've
>seen in the last year or so that's running 3.1. NT is pretty rare too.

Don't look for machines in private homes --- look for machines in the
workplace and in university labs. A lot of them still run Windows 3.1

MS claims 40 million Windows95 shipped, last I checked. Compared to 100 million
PCs, that's less than half (and MS's "shipped" figures have always been
pretty dodgy, anyway; I think I saw a breakdown of 38 milliopn preinstalls
and 2 million retail sales).

>>>Heheh.. nice try - but you can't get away with that! The original
>>>point (which you made, not I) is that that Amiga doesn't count.

>>Nope. The original point I made was that, considering you think that 15
>>million non-MS PCs don't count, you will obviously also think the Amiga
>>doesn't count. I say both do count.

>Great, so we agree - aside from the fact you still (for some odd
>reason) believe I said the Amiga doesn't count. hmm.

I don't think you said that. I just pointed out that, applying the logic
that says "all PCs are running an MS OS", you _would_ also have to say
"all desktop computers are PCs".

Now, the first was a statement you (I think) made in this thread; You seem
to have retracted it above --- did I get that right?

>>>It obviously does for those that use it.

>>As do millions of linux PCs for those that use them....

>You'd be hard pressed to find that many linux machines here - thats
>for certain.

Huh? All over the world, there are most certainly millions of linux machines.
And it's a pretty safe bet that in most countries right now there are more
linux machines actively used than Amigas.

>>>Oh I agree - but why not give people the choice of how it looks? :)
>>>The font, screenmode and colours are all definable for the Amiga.

>>Yes, and they are _only_ available when AmigaOS is already far enough
>>booted to access the harddisk. It would be trivial to do the same in DOS

>I think it's the inherent difference in the boot procedures of the

>two machines that makes it impossible for the PC more than anything
>else. I mean, when you reset an Amiga it takes what - a couple of
>seconds - to reach hardrive stage. You don't actually load AmigaDos
>off the drive (a heck of a lot of it's on the KS ROM).

True. But that proportional font you want to display messages in is _not_
in ROM. Which means that all the interesting stuff (_getting_ the machine
booted far enough so it can talk to the harddrive, display something on
a bitmapped screen and store things in memory) happens _before_ you can
get to (or at least use) that font.

>>>It's interesting to note that (on the whole) pro-Amiga folk don't
>>>spend their lives in YOUR newgroups doing this sort of thing.

>>As a percentage of user base --- oh yes, they do ;-)

>Really? Personally I wouldn't ever bother...

Personally, 99% of the PC crowd wouldn't either (and if they would, I sure
as hell would take a quick hike out of here).

>>>Be happy - what on Earth do you have to fear from any of us?

>>Uhm, I know that this is a low blow --- but how about ruthless stealing
>>of copyrighted source code and subsequent release of a binary compiled
>>from said code? And guess who's web page that binary is available from?

>Hehehe I have to admire your ability to turn things on an individual :)

Just tell me where "internal" can be downloaded from, and I'll shut up ;-)

>Actually, *I* didn't steal anything

I know. I tried to make that clear in my post.
You might still be on very shaky ground, though, from a legal point of view.

>and can you proove the code wasn't written from scratch? :) Exactly.

That should be pretty trivial. Just compare the instructions in some
part of the code for the Amiga and for linux, and see whether they came
from the same C source.

>I'm simply acting as a PR for the AQuake team which leaves me free of
>responsibility.

I wish you best of luck, but you really shouldn't count on that. At least
having the binary on your web page is probably illegal in the UK.

If I take Stephen King's latest novel and produce 100,000 copies, and then
sell them to the book shops of London through a third party, with all
involved parties knowing damn well that these copies are illegitimate,
then all involved parties can be prosecuted....

>How you percieve this a threat to the PC empire i don't know :)

Not to "the PC empire". But to the livelyhood of honest programmers.
I really don't like the idea of people hacking Websites, stealing source
code and doing unauthorised "ports".

But I guess you have to have been on the producing side of the software
industry for a while to get that point of view....

[Bernd Meyer]

gar...@netcomuk.co.uk (Gareth Young) writes:
>On Wed, 05 Mar 97, Bernd Meyer wrote:

[Amiga bootup colours]

>> Yes, all 6 of them (or how many is it? 8? 10?).

>We Amiga owners, we like, you know, don't memorise every single colour, like

>PVC owners wouldn't remember every single BIOS error.

The nice thing about BIOS errors is that most of them are written on the
screen in clear English. Well, in English. Well, in whatever the BIOS
programmer thought was English. But at least in some sort of text....

>However, for your
>satisfaction, here are the colours for my A1200 and their associated
>meaings, showing that it doesn't really matter how the bloody computer tells
>you something is wrong, unless it contradicts itself... keyboard not
>connected, press any key to continue, for example. HA HA HA. :

And once again I challenge you to come up with a single machine that would
give that exact BIOS error. I bet you can't.

>Red: ROM error
>Green: Chip RAM error
>Blue: Custom chips error.
>Yellow: 680x0 detected error before software trapped it (GURU)

>dunno what the hell that yellow code is supposed to mean. That's what it
>says in the manual though.

Wow. 4 possible errors. The information, the detail, I am so impressed....

>> >>>It runs on the PC, and is rather similar to most PC s/w I have used.
>> >>>Then the PC sucks.
>>
>> >>So? I saw a total idiot, you know, a total shithead, in a Mercedes Benz
>> >>recently. The Mercedes really sucks, obviously.

>In this case, no. However, if 99% (Or it least a massive majority) of the

>merc owning people were shitheads (win'85) then most people would probably
>say that the merc sucks.

Huh? First of all, this was about the software, not the users. Also, not
all Windows95 users are shitheads, and a lot less than 99% of PCs run any
MS OS, anyways.

And to get back to the point --- you can assume that there is a number of
newsreaders for the PC which have absolutely no problems with long newsgroups
lines, or with editing them. Now if the above poster uses one that _does_
have problems, it says something about

a) The newsreader, and
b) the poster.

It doesn't say anything about the PC, though.

[Quantifying feature-richness and user friendliness]

>*ONE* particularly annoying aspect with win'85 is the way it assumes the
>user is a complete cretin. And there is (to my knowledge) no way of
>changing this.

Yeah, sure, I agree wholeheartedly. But can you _quantify_ those properties?

>One example taken from this newsgroup would be using
>drag'n'drop and having win'85 say "Are you sure you want to do this?".
>That sucks. Could you imagine trying to copy over 150 files esp. when you
>KNOW you REALLY want to do it. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes...... etc.

Uhm, I am pretty sure that it usually comes with a button "yes to all".
It's still mighty annoying, but not _quite_ that bad.

>To the experianced user (And experiance is something that we all gain
>through using a computer (Albeit slowly with win'85) and cannot lose unless
>you get involved in some kind of accident) this is most definately
>UNFRIENDLY. And I can guarantee that some user out there is willing to post
>every last thing they hate about win'85 (well experianced users anyway).

No doubt about it. Hey, I could make a start, and I have hardly ever
touched it.
I do not doubt that in the views of a great many people (including myself),
Windows95 sucks, lacks features, is poorly implemented and confuses the
hell out of the user. But I doubt anyone can _quantify_ those things, and
unless you can do so, statements like "AmigaOS is 20 times more feature rich"
are about as sensible as "Sandra Bullock is 5 times as cute as Claudia
Schiffer"....

[Dennis Lee Bieber]

On 7 Mar 1997 02:23:37 +1100 in comp.sys.amiga.applications,
Bernd Meyer (bme...@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au) declaimed:

>
> Wow. 4 possible errors. The information, the detail, I am so impressed....
>

Considering that those are, for the most part, HARDWARE ERRORS
rather than something in a "BIOS" (what a misnomer "Basic Input/Output
System" -- Remember, the Amiga does NOT HAVE a TEXT MODE DISPLAY; by the
time it could display a text error message it has booted the equivalent
of WINDOWS) the colors are useful -- I believe there are also two grey
levels in the sequence too.

Heh... And the keyboard LED is /also/ a diagnostic -- if the
keyboard fails the LED flashes at a certain rate... (This is needed as
the keyboard is responsible for sending the RESET signal to the main CPU
to start the boot cycle).

> Uhm, I am pretty sure that it usually comes with a button "yes to all".
> It's still mighty annoying, but not _quite_ that bad.
>

It's bad enough... at least it is in WfW3.11... Select files and
drag... Get a popup with all source files in a string requester...
confirm... Get a popup for first file (then confirm "ALL")...

WHY the intermediate requester?

--
> ============================================================ <
> wulf...@netcom.com | Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber KD6MOG <
> Finger for PGP key | Bestiaria Support Staff <
> ============================================================ <
> Bestiaria Home Page: http://beastie.dm.net/ <
> Home Page: http://www.dm.net/~wulfraed/ <

-=-=-=-=-=-
Usenet KILL-FILED for excessive off-topic SPAM:
worldnet.att.net cyberway.com.sg hotmail.com

Is your site going to be next?

[Bernd Meyer]

Marc Forrester <s...@mail.zynet.co.uk> writes:

>Bernd Meyer wrote:
>> Ho-hum. And all MSDOS ever does is print "Loading Windows95". Wow!
>> "Booting using black and white DOS" for sure....

>That's not actually a good thing. It's much nicer to have windowing

>protocols, device drivers, and suchlike as part of the underlying
>operating system, rather than loading them up as part of one huge
>executable. It means you don't actually have to load that huge
>executable unless you need to use it for something, for a start.

And which OS would that be, with the one huge executable that gets
loaded completely? Certainly not Windows95.....

>> Oh, I am not the one claiming that all PCs run DOS. You are.

>That's not really what anyone's trying to say. What we're trying

>to say is that when we refer to 'PCs' and 'IBMs', we mean by
>implication Wintel setups. If you were running Linux, we'd
>count you as neutral if not an ally,

Sure, but I'd still run it on a PC (which in fact I do).

And linux itself has the windowing protocol and such like in one
huge executable (or, well, one executable with a number of shared
libraries). Of course, only the needed parts of that executable are
loaeded....

[sno...@thenet.co.uk]

>>ke...@sis.pitt.edu writes:
>>>
>>> Believe me, I use my computer A LOT. I've even released programs
>>> on it, just as I did on the Amiga. I program a lot and it is
>>> really valuable tor me since I'm a student...
>>>
>>> I can't say that my Amiga was as valuable for me when I was at
>>> college. My papers always had to be converted into ASCII and I had
>>> to do all the layout on the PC. There were no good flowchart
>>> programs, no good vector drawing programs, no usable spreadsheet
>>> programs, no good wordprocessors where I could combine ALL these
>>> things into one document. But when it came to programming, I
>>> enjoyed Amiga more than
>>> 3.11. But when Win95 and Visual C++ came along I preferred the PC
>>> even when programming...

Schucks I thought I had it bad Saving my spreadsheets in lotus123
format from a coverdisk program called advantage
I had a nice little graph program which made me some nice plots
of experimental data Darn was that Pd as well

>>That's strange.. I have NEVER had a need for ANY of those
>>strange things above (Flowchart programs??!#@). But perhaps
>>that's just me. Of course, OUR PCs and Macs in the labs don't
>>do any of the above except screadsheets and word processors,but
>>in case you haven't noticed, the Amiga DOES have these. I
>>can't use Micro$hit ACCESS for the life of me.. I am forced to
>>use Final Data, which is MUCH nicer and simpler and doesn't do
>>a lot of the stupid things that Access does (like haveing rows
>>A through Z appear on the screen even though you only want
>>THREE categories! and a bunch of other stuff I didn't have the
>>patience to figure out) Basically for me the Amiga does many
>>cool things the PC doesn't, and for the crossovers, in almost
>>every instance, I PREFER the Amiga (Wordperfect vs. FinalWriter
>>or Wordsworth MIGHT win out here.. just for compatibility)
>>But I can not see myself EVER buying a PC or a Mac.
>>Ever.

>I'm surprised noone has mentioned you can print to a postscript file
>with final writer, take it to uni and run it off through the laser
>printer. I do it all the time - it's great!

For me I use a HplaserjetII printer driver

Best tell em how to do it eh tim ;-)

look in your commoditys for a program called cmd and all printer
output goes to file.
don't think you will find many programs that can't print to file
if they use there own printer drivers.

Capture your desired laser printer windows is good for this
And then go into a dos shell and
type copy filename.txt lpt1: /b

Print files can be pretty big thou so use lha on the amiga
and then unpack it with lha.exe on the pc.

Alternatively shapeshifter will let you run Word5.1 and this
Will save in word2 for windows format (use word or works on the Pc)
and it'll port perfectly

I think you will find a 6 meg A1200 can handle this fine.
Erm Excell is quite good as a spreadsheet ;-)

>Yours,

>Tim

catch ya

john

sno...@thenet.co.uk

[Marc Forrester]

Patrick William Mackin wrote:
> I can't use Micro$hit ACCESS for the life of me..

No, sorry, Access is a pretty good database. It has a few
hiccups here and there like the 256 character limit in expressions,
and version one, well, it doesn't work, to be blunt,
but I've done a fair bit of development in Access 2,
and on the whole it's very powerful and quick to use.

Just don't use the inbuilt security system. :)

[Marc Forrester]

Gareth Young wrote:
> *ONE* particularly annoying aspect with win'85 is the way it assumes
> the user is a complete cretin. And there is (to my knowledge) no way

> of changing this. One example taken from this newsgroup would be

> using drag'n'drop and having win'85 say "Are you sure you want to
> do this?". That sucks. Could you imagine trying to copy over 150

> files esp. when you KNOW you REALLY want to do it. Yes. Yes. Yes..

Well, you can drag them all as one block of selected files,
assuming they're all in the same folder. But yes, it does
tend to treat you like you're four years of age.

> And I can guarantee that some user out there is willing to post
> every last thing they hate about win'85 (well experianced users
> anyway).

The definitive list is under construction and review,
even as we speak.

[Marc Forrester]

Bernd Meyer wrote:
> Nope. The original point I made was that, considering you think that
> 15 million non-MS PCs don't count, you will obviously also think the
> Amiga doesn't count. I say both do count.

It's not a matter of not counting, it's a matter of not being
relevant to the discussion. An IBM running Linux is a UNIX box.
Very few of us have anything bad to say about UNIX boxes.

> Uhm, I know that this is a low blow --- but how about ruthless
> stealing of copyrighted source code and subsequent release of a
> binary compiled from said code?

A binary which in its IBM form is authorised, nay,
encouraged for free distribution by its authors? :)

> And guess who's web page that binary is available from?

Methinks it would be a tad foolish to suggest
ethical problems with this distribution.

[Alan L.M. Buxey]

On Fri, 07 Mar 1997 11:16:31 +0000 ,Marc Forrester posted the following:

: Very few of us have anything bad to say about UNIX boxes.

..and would usually be stupid to do so ;-)

: A binary which in its IBM form is authorised, nay,

: encouraged for free distribution by its authors? :)

:-)

alan

[Chris Handley]

GOD. I was going to leave this thread alone, but I can't help myself correct
your misinterpretations.... Hopefully for the last time huh?

In article <5fgr67$g...@wombat.cs.monash.edu.au>, bme...@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au
says...

>>And MS-DOS is used by over 99% (99.9%?) of PC owners - which basically makes
>>the PC MS-DOS in my opinion as far as my/your arguments are concerned.
>
>Wow. Now you really got me.
>MS claims 40 million Windows95 "delivered", so probably at least 20 million
>are still running. Now unless "Loading Windows95" is called "booting using

>a black and white DOS", all those don't. Which means that even your lower
>estimate would put the number of PCs in the world at a minimum of
>2 billion, 1.98 billion of which run DOS.

Very strange indeed... Windows95 does use MS-DOS u know. And the machine I
have used alot always has tons of shit being displayed on a black&white
screen - are you saying most PCs don't do this?!?

>Current estimates are that around 85% of all PCs run some sort of MS OS

<snip>

>running Win95, and the 4 or 5 million running NT), then the Amiga doesn't
>count at all....

Ah, a reasoned argument. Not.

>>>BTW, what would you use colours for during the boot process?

>
>>How about it opening a system window and displaying the text in a
proporional
>>font of your choice?
>
>Huh? One word: Why?

You can fit more text on the display? Stops it scrolling so much + looks
good! If you're going to spend time booting, might as well make it look NICE?

What do you think a boot screen is for? Any pratical value? Non really,
unless you are so stupid as to not be able to see a flashing HD light & wonder
if the computer is doing anything....

>>With a nice grey main background & black text if you must.

Ooops, I meant white text. Still, black looks nice (it's what I'm typing in
now!)

>Why not white text on white background?

IDEA! If you COULD change MS-DOS colours, you could actually make it look
nice by having black text on a black background :-)))))))

>>Of course DOS can't do that - shame huh?
>
>Well, once we are through to DOS, you can do whatever you want --- if you
>want to play mods in the background while starting up things like
>smartdrive or your mouse driver, you can do it. Seems nobody wants to.

I have a big IFF sound playing while I boot-up the 1st time each day....

>As long as we are still in the BIOS boot up phase, there is nowhere where
>a font could be loaded from, or even preferences for which font to use.

Bummer huh?

>BTW, the PC at least prints some information during the BIOS phase. The
>Amiga just cycles screen colours....

More user friendly, and just as helpful. Someone answered this in more detil
:)

>>Strangly the Amiga500 used a Window all those years back. The A1200
>>and above don't display ANYTHING (except perhaps a boot pic) while
>>booting - far more modern in my books.

>
>Gosh. Once it doesn't boot, you will wish it did display something... Is
>that new SIMM faulty, or has Agnus just died? Did it find the keyboard,
>or is the processor dead? So many possibilities, so few clues...

Colour screen to show a fault anyone? Boot menu? The Amiga does it better,
so ;-P . Again, someone was kind enough to answer this in more detail.

>>>>Couldn't you leave this in csa.advocacy? I would have removed irrelevant
>>>>groups, but my news browswer (a PC one - ugh) seems unable to handle large
>>>>newsgroup lists well.
>>>
>>>Then you "browser" sucks. It doesn't have anything to do with the PC.

>
>>It runs on the PC, and is rather similar to most PC s/w I have used.
>>Then the PC sucks.
>
>So? I saw a total idiot, you know, a total shithead, in a Mercedes Benz
>recently. The Mercedes really sucks, obviously.

If 90% of PC software behaves like that then....

>>>Hmm --- I bet you want to share with us your method of quantifying
>>>"functionality" and "ease of use", right?

Idiot! If I said "alot" then it wouldn't mean much would it? So I said "at
least 20 times" because AmigaDOS is quite probably 20-ish or more times more
complex (& certainly more than "a bit" easy to use).

>>I sure could but I'm already falling asleep with this thread as it is...
>
>Oh, you don't have to write it in this thread --- just write it all down,
>send it to any GUI oriented computer science journal, and immediate fame
>and riches will be yours.
>

>However, just saying "I have found a wonderful proof, which unfortunately
>doesn't fit on the margin of this book" does not a proof make --- and saying
>"I can quantify it, but I won't tell you how" in csaa usually means "I made
>a statement I cannot back up, and am too chicken to admit it".

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
B*ll*cks. I *was* getting tired of this (and am beginning to think all PC
users have a mental deficiency for mis-understanding sentences).

Since I was referring to MS-DOS & AmigaDOS (check the original post before you
say I didn't), it is VERY VERY VERY easy.

Look at all MS-DOS command templates. Generally MS-DOS will have a few "-a -x
-w" or something while an Amiga has "File/A/K, All/S, Dirs/S, Pattern...".
Which is easier to understand? Also, MS-DOS commands generally have a lot
less options - eg. the Dir command.

Try complex pattern matching. MS-DOS can just about manage *.*, while the
Amiga can match virtually ANYTHING you want (you can specify a list of items,
wildcard, unlimited string (or none) of some characters, you can specify files
that DON'T match something, you can stick all these together using logical
ANDs & ORs if you wish, etc).

What happens if the command fails? Most MS-DOS commands will give you a list
of several things which might have caused the error - not very helpful huh?
Most AmigaDOS commands are give you at least some specifc reason like "File
was in use" or "File does not exist" or "File protected against deletion"
or "Incorrect prefs file" or "Sound channels already allocated" etc etc...

AmigaDOS has Global (SetEnv,"Env:",etc) & Local (Set,etc) enviromental
variables, with easy support to have them available next time you boot-up
("EnvArc:"). MS-DOS's enviromental variables are rather crude by comparison
(only just doing their job).

AmigaDOS commands can often be made memory resident (if they are "Pure").
AmigaDOS commands co-exist peacefully in a multitasking enviroment (file
locking & so on works very well - I heard a good story about some poor PC guy
who could have used this when installing Win95 automatically :-) .

Scripts (batch files) can be made to act EXACTLY like exectuables, even
displaying a template like normal commands automatically.

There's more, but as I said I am getting BORED of this thread and all the sad
PC users who only exist to misunderstand.

--
From Christopher Handley; Email: ela9...@sheffield.ac.uk
------------------------------------------------------sig v2.71 A---------
A1200/Blizzard 040/40MHz/16Mb + PowerStation (SCSI: 540Mb Hd, 2.4 speed CD
drive, SyQuest EZ Flyer 230). Plus DOpus5.5, MUI, MWb2, MCP, XFH, TKG,...
AmigaQuake - the biggest thing since the death of C=.
Be prepared for a *MAJOR* shake-up of the Amiga games scene...
Predictions:- 040 accelerator sales double in the next 1.5-3 months;
Quake on cover of ALL Amiga mags; iD make an official response; (a bit) of
Amiga coverage in PC mags; 1000s of Amiga owners buy the commercial Quake!;
The Amiga games scene sees a (at least minor) revival; I will look very
stupid if none of this actually happens ;-)

[John Sheehy]

Marc Forrester <s...@mail.zynet.co.uk> writes:

>Well, you can drag them all as one block of selected files,
>assuming they're all in the same folder. But yes, it does
>tend to treat you like you're four years of age.

Of course, no one is stopping you from using the command line, with
switches that turn off verification.

<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>>< ><<>
John P Sheehy <jsh...@ix.netcom.com>
><<> <>>< <>>< ><<> <>>< ><<> ><<> <>><

[ttammi]

Marc Forrester <s...@mail.zynet.co.uk> wrote:

>It's not a matter of not counting, it's a matter of not being
>relevant to the discussion. An IBM running Linux is a UNIX box.

>Very few of us have anything bad to say about UNIX boxes.

Wrong. Linux is not UNIX.

Furthermore, Amiga advocates have always said that the PC hardware is
faulty. Funny you would suddenly decide that you don't have anything
bad to say about it.

[Robert Masters]

>>I'm sorry that you believe that. I also believe that the CURRENT Amiga's
>>will died eventually, but I also believe that some of these new RISC
>>machines/OSs
>>(BeOS,p-OS, PIOS-One, A\Box, etc) have a BIG change to oust the PC..

> I think you are right about the Amiga, but people will try
>(including me) to keep it alive and make it a computer that is an
>'alternative' to main stream personal computers. As for Be, A/Box
>having a BIG chance to oust the PC you are CRAZY. How much does Mr.
>Billy make in a MONTH? More than these companies can make in 2 years!
>They don't REALLY have a chance.

Well, here's my 2 cents worth...

The Pentium technology is at it's limit, MMX is an ad-hoc update, they can't get
the chip much past 200Mhz without storing it in freon (ala Cray)..

With the base standard for PC's changing every 6 months, by the end of the
year, the clone is at the end of it's evolution.

With the development of various multi-proccessor risc machines in progress, and
most ready for release this year, perhaps next year we will see power boxs
becomming the new standard.

If Gates wants to maintain his financial/market position, it's only logical to
port Windoze to risc based machines.

The fact is the Amiga is dead on the hardware side, the OS still kicks serious
arse, and it's future must be on a risc machine. I for one would love to have
something like a Pios, and have the choice of running BeBox, AmigaOS, or
Windows and the same machine.

Amiga was revolutionary, Windows merely evolutionary, the next revolution will
be the power machine with a os choice, no more dependence on any one software
company, and hopefully not on any one hardware company.

Clones nowdays have little choice but to run Windows, and to update it all the
time. An os choice will make MS work to create a better os. Imagine, competition
in the computer market place once again, just like the 80's before pc
dominance.

And (dare I say), I think that windows is a GOOD os, considering the hardware
it has to run on.. And with the huge support of MS, would make a good os on a
risc machine.

Any comments ?

[John Bittner]

In article <2128.7006...@acay.com.au>, Robert Masters <rmas...@acay.com.au> wrote:
>The Pentium technology is at it's limit, MMX is an ad-hoc update, they can't
> get
>the chip much past 200Mhz without storing it in freon (ala Cray)..
>

Intel plans on releasing a 300MHz Pentium II code named Deschutes early next
year. According to Computer Reseller News, a confidential Intel Memo states
that by the first quarter of next year a 200MHz Pentium with MMX will be
considered low-end technology and will be available in machines priced
as low as $1200.

John Bittner
http://www.zumagroup.com

[Marc Forrester]

Bernd Meyer wrote:
> The nice thing about BIOS errors is that most of them are written on
> the screen in clear English. Well, in English. Well, in whatever the
> BIOS programmer thought was English. But at least in some sort of
> text....

The Amiga colour errors deal with things which go wrong before
such niceties as how to write text on the screen have been loaded.

[Dr. Peter Kittel]

In article <5fmnhp$9...@wombat.cs.monash.edu.au> bme...@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au (Bernd Meyer) writes:
>
>The nice thing about BIOS errors is that most of them are written on the
>screen in clear English. Well, in English.

Hmm, a *very* foreign language for many, if not *most* of the users
of such computers! So understandability is not assured.

--
Best Regards, Dr. Peter Kittel // http://www.pios.de
Private Site in Frankfurt, Germany \X/ office: pet...@pios.de

[Jorn Hansson]

This will be my one and only post in this thread. Like someone wrote
before me (I think it was Mr. Forrester? -correct me if I'm wrong),
I don't see why you even care to go on babbling on this pointless
subject. Having used both systems, I will add my own
comments this once though:

[heavily snipped]

> It could be Win95's own built in uninstaller works fine for those two
> applications I mentioned, but I always rather use InCtrl3 to be sure I
> get any redundant files and registery entries out of my system, when I
> want to get rid of a certain application.

> >There is little purpose for one. Libraries are small, very
> >rarely unique to a single program, and generally only two or
> >three are installed per program, compared to the multitude of
> >new, meaninglessly named, program specific DLL's that turn up
> >with each new Windows program as standard.

> =

> Quite wrong. How do you know that? I have inspected the behaviour of
> lots of Win95 applications and games (with InCtrl3, of course), and
> they add extra "unique" DLLs hardly ever. And if they do, they usually
> keep them in their own home directory.

He's actually quite *right*. I've been using Win95 (and NT4 for that
matter) long enough to see that what you write is just plain
*bullshit*! Most programs *do* spread DLL's all over. They have the
ability to show up in the most peculiar of places, and on other
occasions they just magically disappear from the face of the hard-
drive! As far as uninstallers go, I haven't used the miracle
uninstaller "InCtrl3", but loads of others who would only do half
a job.

> >places. This results in a huge mass of white noise of a directory
> >listing, impossible or at least highly impractical to clean up
> >manually.

> =

> Not, if you use e.g. InCtrl3.

> =

> >Basically, you -need- a good uninstaller on a Wintel setup.
> >It would be useful for AmigaOS, but it's not really necessary.

> =

> So far it seems Amiga needs it just as badly as Win95.

It really does sound like you've never used an Amiga at all. =

I have been using PC's for three years - I switched to PC from
Amiga because I thought that Windows was the future of
professional computing. Duh! What a joke! If this is the future,
I'd be just as happy to stay in the past!
Also, being a gaming freak, another big reason for getting a
PC was that I could have lots of cool games as well as (presumably)
useful applications. What a disappointment to find out that the
games were the only programs that would work as advertised.
(Yes, have you ever noticed that M$ do all their advertising in
hardly justifiable superlatives? "blablabla...unleashes your
creativity...blabla" - right! It should read "...releases your
annoyment, wrath and gives you stroke within five weeks of use"!)

I do not own a PC any longer. I sold the damn thing when I
came across a second hand A4000 - THE best purchase I've done in
a long time. The only thing I will miss is Quake (but now I have it
again - on the Amiga, thanks to MAX! :-D ).
I am not against PCs in general - they have many advantages
over the Macs and the Amigas, but I'm definately "anti-M$"! The more
I got into Windows, the more I hated it. Win95, for example, is
supposed to make hardware installations easier, but all it really
does is to complicate things to ridiculous extents. To be honest,
I'd rather be fiddling with jumpers and manual configuring than
letting Windows try it - it just messes up the system with malfunctions
and/or crashes as a result.

I think it's a sure bet that Hell has PCs only, running Windows
(where Satan is the network administrator)...and no games, just
M$ Office!

The Amiga is far from perfect. I don't think that we'll ever see a
perfect computer platform, neither a perfect OS. I just happen to
like Amiga/AmigaOS best when facing the options I have.
This summer I will upgrade it to PowerPC 604e, and I will no longer
lack processing horsepower (which is the main point with having a PC
nowadays).

I do not complain to PC-users that they "have the wrong computer"
or that "PC sucks". The case is a little more complicated than that.
They have chosen to use PCs and they are in
their fullest right to do so, whether I like it or not. It's also
a fact that some PC-users cannot be reasoned with (as this
thread obviously has proven already).

To end this rant, let me recite words written by the Amiga
equivalent of Nostradamus: John "Squid" Shepard:
"...I'm still amazed at how the faster computers get, the longer
they take to boot. It's counterintuitive but it's true."

I couldn't agree more.

Sincerely,
/J=F6rn Hansson

[Marc Forrester]

ttammi wrote:
> >There is little purpose for one. Libraries are small, very
> >rarely unique to a single program, and generally only two or
> >three are installed per program, compared to the multitude of
> >new, meaninglessly named, program specific DLL's that turn up
> >with each new Windows program as standard.
>

> Quite wrong. How do you know that? I have inspected the behaviour of
> lots of Win95 applications and games (with InCtrl3, of course), and
> they add extra "unique" DLLs hardly ever. And if they do, they
> usually keep them in their own home directory.

Dir C:\Windows\System\*.dll reports 439 files,
all with old eight character MS-DOS filenames.
So that's little more than the Windows 95 base
installation, then?

> So far it seems Amiga needs it just as badly as Win95.

C:\Windows\System\*.dll on this machine wouldn't
fit on my Amiga's Operating System partition,
let alone the Libs: drawer. I don't need an
uninstaller, honestly.

[Marc Forrester]

Bernd Meyer wrote:
> >That's not actually a good thing. It's much nicer to have windowing
> >protocols, device drivers, and suchlike as part of the underlying
> >operating system, rather than loading them up as part of one huge
> >executable. It means you don't actually have to load that huge
> >executable unless you need to use it for something, for a start.
>
> And which OS would that be, with the one huge executable
> that gets loaded completely? Certainly not Windows95.....

Okay, perhaps Windows 95 isn't all in one indivisible lump.
You still have to load it in order to do some very basic things,
and it doesn't exactly load instantaneously. I reckon it might
even use virtual memory while it loads itself.

> >That's not really what anyone's trying to say. What we're trying
> >to say is that when we refer to 'PCs' and 'IBMs', we mean by
> >implication Wintel setups. If you were running Linux, we'd
> >count you as neutral if not an ally,
>
> Sure, but I'd still run it on a PC (which in fact I do).

Fine. So would I. The hardware is only relevant in a
comparison of computer systems in as much as it affects
what the operating system can and cannot do.
No-one cares what alloys your system bus is made of,
to take an extreme(ly silly) example.

Amiga users saying 'X, Y, and Z are crap on PC's' will
almost certainly mean Wintel IBM's. If you, as a Linux
user, defend your system from these slurs, I think you're
being a bit daft. Throwing yourself into their fists,
as it were, and considering yourself under attack.

> And linux itself has the windowing protocol and such like in one
> huge executable (or, well, one executable with a number of shared
> libraries). Of course, only the needed parts of that executable
> are loaeded....

And it might be nice to have some dedicated Linux hardware,
which loaded that sort of thing straight into memory from a
ROM chip, n'est ce pas? But you do the best you can to
support your OS of choice with what's available.
Think we'd be draining ourselves to buy A4060T
systems if AmigaOS were available for IBM hardware?
Unlikely, all other things being equal.

[CMM]

>John Bittner
>http://www.zumagroup.com

It will probably sell for much less than that, judging from previous PC price
decreases....and ummmm about being low end technology at that time, I thought it
was all low end technology now, just having a lot of raw cpu power??? huh

[Bernd Meyer]

ELA9...@shef.ac.uk (Chris Handley) writes:
>GOD. I was going to leave this thread alone, but I can't help myself correct
>your misinterpretations.... Hopefully for the last time huh?

That depends on whether you get it _this_ time.
>In article <5fgr67$g...@wombat.cs.monash.edu.au>, bme...@bruce.cs.monash.edu.ausays...

>>>And MS-DOS is used by over 99% (99.9%?) of PC owners - which basically makes
>>>the PC MS-DOS in my opinion as far as my/your arguments are concerned.
>>
>>Wow. Now you really got me.
>>MS claims 40 million Windows95 "delivered", so probably at least 20 million
>>are still running. Now unless "Loading Windows95" is called "booting using
>>a black and white DOS", all those don't. Which means that even your lower
>>estimate would put the number of PCs in the world at a minimum of
>>2 billion, 1.98 billion of which run DOS.

>Very strange indeed... Windows95 does use MS-DOS u know.

We could have holy wars over whether Win95 uses MSDOS, or provides an MSDOS
subsystem, but I don't care. The question at hand was "booting using black
and white MSDOS". And all Win95 uses "black and white MSDOS" for is to
display "booting Windows95"

>And the machine I have used alot always has tons of shit being
>displayed on a black&white screen - are you saying most PCs don't do
>this?!?

I am saying that most Windows95 PCs do not display anything more than
"Booting Windows95" (or some such) from DOS.
Yes, you do get heaps of stuff beforehand from the BIOS. The BIOS isn't
DOS, and it doesn't matter what OS you use, you will always get that
stuff. It is similar to the Amiga cycling screen colours, only with a lot
more detailed information available. Also:
Yes, _your_ PC might load some drivers in whatever config.sys is now called
in Windows95. It shouldn't, and it basically would mean that you have a poorly
configured system.

>>Current estimates are that around 85% of all PCs run some sort of MS OS
><snip>
>>running Win95, and the 4 or 5 million running NT), then the Amiga doesn't
>>count at all....

>Ah, a reasoned argument. Not.

Not anymore, after your "snip".
Let's see this again:

>>>And MS-DOS is used by over 99% (99.9%?) of PC owners - which basically makes
>>>the PC MS-DOS in my opinion as far as my/your arguments are concerned.

to which I answered:

>>Current estimates are that around 85% of all PCs run some sort of MS OS

(This figure is pretty widely accepted.)

Now, the remaining 15% of 100 million PCs currently in use (that number is
probably a bit low by now, actually) would be 15 million PCs running a
non-MS OS.
Now if, by your argument, "The PC" is "MS-DOS", then obviously the few million
Amigas out there are not enough to make "a computer" anything other than
"a PC".

If, on the other hand, you insist that the few million Amigas _are_ a large
enough group to not be treated as a negligible deviation from the norm,
_then_ you must also accept that the 15% of PCs not running MS OSs are
significant.

[Colours and proportional fonts during bootup]
>>Huh? One word: Why?

>You can fit more text on the display? Stops it scrolling so much + looks
>good! If you're going to spend time booting, might as well make it look NICE?

And you are saying that, using a machine that just flashes different colours?
Ouch!

>What do you think a boot screen is for? Any pratical value? Non really,
>unless you are so stupid as to not be able to see a flashing HD light & wonde

>if the computer is doing anything....

Oh, I find a boot screen of tremendous value. It actually tells you what is
in the machine, whether things work the way they should and so on.
Sure, if all you ever have to work with is your one computer, which has been
unchanged for half a dozen of years, you have no problem. Now, go support
machines you have never seen before, and all people tell you is "it doesn't
boot anymore". You will wish for detailed boot information!

>>Why not white text on white background?

>IDEA! If you COULD change MS-DOS colours, you could actually make it look
>nice by having black text on a black background :-)))))))

GREAT! Now, you _do_ know that you _can_ change the colours, right?
It's a simple "echo" command....

>>As long as we are still in the BIOS boot up phase, there is nowhere where
>>a font could be loaded from, or even preferences for which font to use.

>Bummer huh?

It's the same on the Amiga. Which is why it doesn't even try to use text.

>>>>>groups, but my news browswer (a PC one - ugh) seems unable to handle larg

>>>>>newsgroup lists well.
>>>>
>>>>Then you "browser" sucks. It doesn't have anything to do with the PC.
>>
>>>It runs on the PC, and is rather similar to most PC s/w I have used.
>>>Then the PC sucks.
>>
>>So? I saw a total idiot, you know, a total shithead, in a Mercedes Benz
>>recently. The Mercedes really sucks, obviously.

>If 90% of PC software behaves like that then....

If 90% of all Merc drivers are arrogant shitheads, that still doesn't
mean the Merc is a bad car.

>>>>Hmm --- I bet you want to share with us your method of quantifying
>>>>"functionality" and "ease of use", right?

>Idiot! If I said "alot" then it wouldn't mean much would it?

It would be a lot more honest, though. About 5 times, I would say; Of course,
I will never tell you why 5 times, and not 6 or 4!

>So I said "at least 20 times" because AmigaDOS is quite probably
>20-ish or more times more complex (& certainly more than "a bit" easy
>to use).

Oh, now you can quantify complexity as well. Hey, mate, you missed a big
carreer in CS!
Anyone for Kolmogorov Complexity? Anyone remember why the KC is a purely
theoretical beast?

>>Oh, you don't have to write it in this thread --- just write it all down,
>>send it to any GUI oriented computer science journal, and immediate fame
>>and riches will be yours.

>B*ll*cks. I *was* getting tired of this (and am beginning to think all PC

>users have a mental deficiency for mis-understanding sentences).

Nope. Remember that this started out with a one line comment about you
sharing your method for _quantifying_ these things? You still haven't done
so, so I still assume you don't _have_ one....

>Since I was referring to MS-DOS & AmigaDOS (check the original post
>before you say I didn't), it is VERY VERY VERY easy.

Actually, you were referring to Windows95 and AmigaDOS. May I quote from
your article (Message-ID: <5fa1gd$9...@bignews.shef.ac.uk>):
=======================
The Amiga Workbench may not be quite a functional as Win95 with some
functions, but it's a hell of a lot easier to use. [....]

The AmigaDos is easily 20 times more functional, and certainly several times
easier to use.
=======================
And if you want to cry "foul quoting, the [...] stuff was talking about
MSDOS", then go and look it up; It wasn't.

God, don't you hate people who keep their newsspool ;-)

[A rather longish list of perceived advantages of AmigaOS over MS-DOS
deleted]

>There's more, but as I said I am getting BORED of this thread and all the sad
>PC users who only exist to misunderstand.

But you failed to say the one important thing --- how do you translate all
this into a _number_ which measures feature-richness or user-friendliness.

If I say that Sandra Bullok is 5 times as cute as Claudia Schiffer, what
does that tell you? If I said she was 20 times as cute rather than 5 times,
what would _that_ tell you?

You don't have a method of taking an OS and objectively coming up with a
measure for its user-friendliness or its feature-richness. That's no problem,
because nobody else does, and large corporations have invested a lot of money
looking for it.
However, making statements implying that you _do_ have such a method, and
when exposed not admitting that in fact you don't, _that's_ a problem.

[John Sheehy]

Jorn Hansson <t96j...@und.ida.liu.se> writes:

>To end this rant, let me recite words written by the Amiga
>equivalent of Nostradamus: John "Squid" Shepard:
>"...I'm still amazed at how the faster computers get, the longer
>they take to boot. It's counterintuitive but it's true."
>
>I couldn't agree more.

What is counter-intuitive about it? Booting depends heavily on HD
throughput and seek times, so faster CPUs do not benefit booting as much
as they do numbercrunching, etc. As time goes on, CPUs get faster and
OSes get bigger, hence more HD accesses.

<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>>< ><<>
John P Sheehy <jsh...@ix.netcom.com>
><<> <>>< <>>< ><<> <>>< ><<> ><<> <>><

[Stephan Schaem]

In article <331B2D...@mail.zynet.co.uk>, Marc <s...@mail.zynet.co.uk> wrote:
>Stephan Schaem wrote:
>> Also if you do programming, multimedia, etc... I never had the
>> intention to run word and I still got a PC at home. (And amigas)
>> The amiga market give people reason to upgrade to PC's or else.
>
>Can't quite accept that. The PC market is certainly a big
>attraction to programmers, but it's not actually impossible
>to make any profit from Amiga programming. Not just yet.
>

Its just very rare, hard & risky... not too appealing.
Also if you are not doing work on your own, who want amiga
people nowdays (To do amiga work, on amiga...).

>> Also dont forget there are people out there that are utterly
>> confused when they see a phrase like "Hit any key to continue"...
>
>Doh.. Where's the anykey? :)
>

Now, I wonder how many people actually look for that key ;)

>> Its hard to please all there 100,000,000 users or so :)
>> (But they do try and thats why windows is the way it is)
>
>Nng. You tell us that Windows achieved marketplace domination
>by trying to be what the users wanted? You don't think it was
>maybe slightly to do with advertising and luck?
>

I'm not saying they got where they are because they please... Just that
they are under preasure to please many diferent type of users.
Windows look the way it is mostly because of this, I beleive
programers at MS could do much better if they had a chance of
a fresh start.

>Remember how long Windows was Windows 3.. How many Windows
>3 users did you know who thought it was a wonderful, er,
>well, a wonderful whatever it was supposed to be?
>

I dont know... but for people use too dos, windows3 must be something :)

Stephan

[ttammi]

Marc Forrester <s...@mail.zynet.co.uk> wrote:

>>I have inspected the behaviour of lots of Win95 applications and
>>games (with InCtrl3, of course), and they add extra "unique" DLLs
>>hardly ever. And if they do, they usually keep them in their own home
>>directory.

>Dir C:\Windows\System\*.dll reports 439 files,
>all with old eight character MS-DOS filenames.
>So that's little more than the Windows 95 base
>installation, then?

Yes, but most (or all) of them are used by _several_ applications, not
just one.

Don't forget that the Win95 base installation lacks lots of dll's that
are considered vital nowadays (for instance, the whole DirectX set).

I have inspected the behaviour of lots of Win95 applications and games,
and they add new dll's to the system directory very rarely.

>>So far it seems Amiga needs it just as badly as Win95.

>C:\Windows\System\*.dll on this machine wouldn't
>fit on my Amiga's Operating System partition,
>let alone the Libs: drawer. I don't need an
>uninstaller, honestly.

Of course not, because you are not continuously installing new and
uninstalling old software and hardware to/from your Amiga. Less
software/hardware = less library files changes.

[ttammi]

pet...@combo.ganesha.com (Dr. Peter Kittel) wrote:

>>The nice thing about BIOS errors is that most of them are written on
>>the screen in clear English. Well, in English.

>Hmm, a *very* foreign language for many, if not *most* of the users
>of such computers! So understandability is not assured.

Quite wrong. I'm quite sure most (almost all) PC users know English
pretty well, at least good enough to translate the error messages.

It amazes me how you think "color coded error messages" would be any
easier to understand than English error messages. I'm quite sure more
people have to refer to the manual to understand the color coded
messages than those in plain English.

[Bill Near]

On Sun, 09 Mar 1997 19:35:43 +0200, ttammi articulated this in comp.sys.amiga.advocacy:

<>It amazes me how you think "color coded error messages" would be any
<>easier to understand than English error messages. I'm quite sure more
<>people have to refer to the manual to understand the color coded
<>messages than those in plain English.

I think you've missed the entire point. The Amiga can tell you that something
has gone wrong BEFORE it can even put text to a screen.

~~~~~~~ //// ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
//// Bill Near ~ wn...@epix.net ~ Team AMIGA
////
\\\\ //// A2000/030@50/Picasso IV/CGX/Workbench 3.1
\\\\/// Supra 33.6k/ViewSonic 17GS/EZ135/ScanJet 5p
\\\\/
Contributing Editor @ Amiga Report Magazine
I wasn't born with enough middle fingers - Marilyn Manson
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[tim]

>ELA9...@shef.ac.uk (Chris Handley) writes:
>>GOD. I was going to leave this thread alone, but I can't help myself
>>correct your misinterpretations.... Hopefully for the last time huh?

>That depends on whether you get it _this_ time.
>>In article <5fgr67$g...@wombat.cs.monash.edu.au>,
>>bme...@bruce.cs.monash.edu.ausays...

>>>>And MS-DOS is used by over 99% (99.9%?) of PC owners - which basically
>>>>makes the PC MS-DOS in my opinion as far as my/your arguments are
>>>>concerned.
>>>
>>>Wow. Now you really got me.
>>>MS claims 40 million Windows95 "delivered", so probably at least 20 million
>>>are still running. Now unless "Loading Windows95" is called "booting using
>>>a black and white DOS", all those don't. Which means that even your lower
>>>estimate would put the number of PCs in the world at a minimum of
>>>2 billion, 1.98 billion of which run DOS.

>>Very strange indeed... Windows95 does use MS-DOS u know.

>We could have holy wars over whether Win95 uses MSDOS, or provides an MSDOS
>subsystem, but I don't care. The question at hand was "booting using black
>and white MSDOS". And all Win95 uses "black and white MSDOS" for is to
>display "booting Windows95"

No Bernie, Win95 runs "on top of" MSDOS it does not *yet* replace it entirely.

>>And the machine I have used alot always has tons of shit being
>>displayed on a black&white screen - are you saying most PCs don't do
>>this?!?

>I am saying that most Windows95 PCs do not display anything more than
>"Booting Windows95" (or some such) from DOS.

Plus all your drivers etc..

>Yes, you do get heaps of stuff beforehand from the BIOS. The BIOS isn't
>DOS, and it doesn't matter what OS you use, you will always get that
>stuff. It is similar to the Amiga cycling screen colours, only with a lot
>more detailed information available. Also:

How you can strike a comparison is beyond me. The two systems are so massively
different in start up as to make this kind ^ of comment ridiculous.

>Yes, _your_ PC might load some drivers in whatever config.sys is now called
>in Windows95. It shouldn't, and it basically would mean that you have a
>poorly configured system.

Ho hum.. Blame the user... Not the OS for that is infallible of course.

>>>Current estimates are that around 85% of all PCs run some sort of MS OS
>><snip>
>>>running Win95, and the 4 or 5 million running NT), then the Amiga doesn't
>>>count at all....

>>Ah, a reasoned argument. Not.

>Not anymore, after your "snip".

Hehehehe being the king of that yourself that's a bit rich :)

>Let's see this again:
>>>>And MS-DOS is used by over 99% (99.9%?) of PC owners - which basically
>>>>makes the PC MS-DOS in my opinion as far as my/your arguments are
>>>>concerned.

>to which I answered:

>>>Current estimates are that around 85% of all PCs run some sort of MS OS

>(This figure is pretty widely accepted.)

By who? 15% of all PC's run linux then ?

>Now, the remaining 15% of 100 million PCs currently in use (that number is
>probably a bit low by now, actually) would be 15 million PCs running a
>non-MS OS.
>Now if, by your argument, "The PC" is "MS-DOS", then obviously the few
>million Amigas out there are not enough to make "a computer" anything other
>than "a PC".

I think it's fair to say that the "PC" is "MSDOS" as for the very large whole it
is. Much as it's fair to say the "Amiga" is "AmigaDos" too. Stop being so damn
provocative for the hell of it - you're saying nothing in the above paragraph.

>If, on the other hand, you insist that the few million Amigas _are_ a large
>enough group to not be treated as a negligible deviation from the norm,
>_then_ you must also accept that the 15% of PCs not running MS OSs are
>significant.

Ohhh now this is a REALLY bad analysis. Think about the numbers involved here
and then resubmit the statement. The PC market is so large as to make your 15%
unimportant (at least in terms of the market) and unsupportive of that group.
Comparison of this to the Amiga market is pretty hard to do, especially as 99%
of all Amiga machines are running one OS right now. If MS has it's way then
that 15% won't even exist eventually - sad but true.

>[Colours and proportional fonts during bootup]
>>>Huh? One word: Why?

>>You can fit more text on the display? Stops it scrolling so much + looks
>>good! If you're going to spend time booting, might as well make it look
>>NICE?

>And you are saying that, using a machine that just flashes different colours?
>Ouch!

Early startup menu, guru messages, error codes, the time it takes to get to a
text screen, the OS is mostly on ROM anyway not on your HD a la MSDOS.. Once
again you don't really consider the practicalities of the situation or the
difference in the hardware/firmware/software here. On my Amiga I don't even SEE
those flashes - it's THAT fast. If something fails at the "flashing" stage
there really isn't all that much that can be wrong! You don't need the machine
to test Zorro cards for instance - they aren't necessary to start the machine
and are cover in early startup (a GUI with a mouse pointer, buttons and text!)
before the HD even boots.

>>What do you think a boot screen is for? Any pratical value? Non really,
>>unless you are so stupid as to not be able to see a flashing HD light &
>>wonde if the computer is doing anything....

>Oh, I find a boot screen of tremendous value. It actually tells you what is
>in the machine, whether things work the way they should and so on.
>Sure, if all you ever have to work with is your one computer, which has been
>unchanged for half a dozen of years, you have no problem. Now, go support
>machines you have never seen before, and all people tell you is "it doesn't
>boot anymore". You will wish for detailed boot information!

Doh! There are so many ways you can check hardware and software on an Amiga as
to make the above ridiculous. As for your "detailed" boot screen - i have one
:) It's also very pretty, user definable etc.. Having worked with both the PC
and the Amiga I can tell you that when my Amiga has "gone wrong" at hardware
level i can find out all i need to fix it. If this weren't the case then you'd
have a valid point, sadly it isn't - you don't. Do try to stay away from the
workplace analogy too, since the Amiga generally is a home computer.

>>>Why not white text on white background?

>>IDEA! If you COULD change MS-DOS colours, you could actually make it look
>>nice by having black text on a black background :-)))))))

>GREAT! Now, you _do_ know that you _can_ change the colours, right?
>It's a simple "echo" command....

Hehehe.. thats MSDOS and thats ANSI colours... pretty groovy? Nope..

>>>As long as we are still in the BIOS boot up phase, there is nowhere where
>>>a font could be loaded from, or even preferences for which font to use.

>>Bummer huh?

>It's the same on the Amiga. Which is why it doesn't even try to use text.

It's not, and you don't seem to realise this.

>>>>>>groups, but my news browswer (a PC one - ugh) seems unable to handle
>>>>>>larg newsgroup lists well.
>>>>>
>>>>>Then you "browser" sucks. It doesn't have anything to do with the PC.
>>>
>>>>It runs on the PC, and is rather similar to most PC s/w I have used.
>>>>Then the PC sucks.
>>>
>>>So? I saw a total idiot, you know, a total shithead, in a Mercedes Benz
>>>recently. The Mercedes really sucks, obviously.

>>If 90% of PC software behaves like that then....

>If 90% of all Merc drivers are arrogant shitheads, that still doesn't
>mean the Merc is a bad car.

>>>>>Hmm --- I bet you want to share with us your method of quantifying
>>>>>"functionality" and "ease of use", right?

>>Idiot! If I said "alot" then it wouldn't mean much would it?

>It would be a lot more honest, though. About 5 times, I would say; Of course,
>I will never tell you why 5 times, and not 6 or 4!

>>So I said "at least 20 times" because AmigaDOS is quite probably
>>20-ish or more times more complex (& certainly more than "a bit" easy
>>to use).

>Oh, now you can quantify complexity as well. Hey, mate, you missed a big
>carreer in CS!
>Anyone for Kolmogorov Complexity? Anyone remember why the KC is a purely
>theoretical beast?

Anyone remember why computers got interesting when the Amiga came along in the
first place? Something to do with "fun" I think as compared to the PC
counterpart? Slate the Amiga all you like, but the computing world in the 80's
didn't sit around and ask "why is there no BIOS detailed information screen"
because it didn't need it. It still doesn't. The machines do things
differently - great isn't it? :*)

>>>Oh, you don't have to write it in this thread --- just write it all down,
>>>send it to any GUI oriented computer science journal, and immediate fame
>>>and riches will be yours.

>>B*ll*cks. I *was* getting tired of this (and am beginning to think all PC
>>users have a mental deficiency for mis-understanding sentences).

>Nope. Remember that this started out with a one line comment about you
>sharing your method for _quantifying_ these things? You still haven't done
>so, so I still assume you don't _have_ one....

OH stick to the point - he's entitled to his opinion without having to
_quantify_ anything. Use an Amiga and you KNOW why (or should do!). This
works, since I've got to demo an Amiga in 2 months in a university lab right
next door to a P166 (high spec with 17" samsung etc..). Now, either i'm a fool
(in which case what am I doing at university?) or i'm happy that i can
illustrate this practically for 25% of my overall degree. I'm not in the habit
of throwing my career away :)

>>Since I was referring to MS-DOS & AmigaDOS (check the original post
>>before you say I didn't), it is VERY VERY VERY easy.

>Actually, you were referring to Windows95 and AmigaDOS. May I quote from
>your article (Message-ID: <5fa1gd$9...@bignews.shef.ac.uk>):
>=======================
>The Amiga Workbench may not be quite a functional as Win95 with some
>functions, but it's a hell of a lot easier to use. [....]

>The AmigaDos is easily 20 times more functional, and certainly several times
>easier to use.
>=======================
>And if you want to cry "foul quoting, the [...] stuff was talking about
>MSDOS", then go and look it up; It wasn't.

Right, so you summarised he was talking about AmigaDos vs. a GUI window based
machine in this last statement? I'm not Einstein but even I can equate this to
AmigaDos vs. MSDOS :)

>God, don't you hate people who keep their newsspool ;-)

Why waste your hate? :)

>[A rather longish list of perceived advantages of AmigaOS over MS-DOS
> deleted]

Refer back to your point about editing replies to posts... ;)

>>There's more, but as I said I am getting BORED of this thread and all the
>>sad PC users who only exist to misunderstand.

>But you failed to say the one important thing --- how do you translate all
>this into a _number_ which measures feature-richness or user-friendliness.

You fail to say ANYTHING of interest here. You method of 'discussion' seems to
be to draw people into mindless arguements about a subtopic not particularly to
do with the original post. At least if you were constructive we'd actually all
learn something instead of listening to you whine on about academics.

>If I say that Sandra Bullok is 5 times as cute as Claudia Schiffer, what
>does that tell you? If I said she was 20 times as cute rather than 5 times,
>what would _that_ tell you?

That you prefer women with smaller breasts ? :)

>You don't have a method of taking an OS and objectively coming up with a
>measure for its user-friendliness or its feature-richness. That's no problem,
>because nobody else does, and large corporations have invested a lot of money
>looking for it. However, making statements implying that you _do_ have such a
>method, and when exposed not admitting that in fact you don't, _that's_ a
>problem.

Use it. Live the reality. Amiga :)
Everyone can make such statements when it comes down to esoteric issues -
quantify art for me Bernie? :) What makes a masterpiece? Yeah - you're aware
of the real point here, you just choose to blanket it (quite well I might add)
with endless referals to quite pedantic issues. Most of the Amiga fraternity
use Win95 and can quite qualify to saying they like one over the other. Perhaps
you should study communication rather than computing since you don't seem to
realise that words and speech can only portray so much about real life. *This*
is why people can't quantify everything as you so desire - and thats probably a
very good thing too!

Tim

[tim]

>Jorn Hansson <t96j...@und.ida.liu.se> writes:

<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>>< ><<>
> John P Sheehy <jsh...@ix.netcom.com>
> ><<> <>>< <>>< ><<> <>>< ><<> ><<> <>><

At least your in touch with reality John.. Doh! You just *didn't get it*

Tim

[John Sheehy]

Bill Near <wn...@epix.net> writes:

>On Sun, 09 Mar 1997 19:35:43 +0200, ttammi articulated this in comp.sys.amiga.advocacy:
><>It amazes me how you think "color coded error messages" would be any
><>easier to understand than English error messages. I'm quite sure more
><>people have to refer to the manual to understand the color coded
><>messages than those in plain English.
>
>I think you've missed the entire point. The Amiga can tell you that something
>has gone wrong BEFORE it can even put text to a screen.

Sort of like the PC BIOS "beep" messages?

<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>>< ><<>
John P Sheehy <jsh...@ix.netcom.com>
><<> <>>< <>>< ><<> <>>< ><<> ><<> <>><

[John Sheehy]

tim <dan...@angeldos.demon.co.uk> writes:

>>What is counter-intuitive about it? Booting depends heavily on HD
>>throughput and seek times, so faster CPUs do not benefit booting as much
>>as they do numbercrunching, etc. As time goes on, CPUs get faster and
>>OSes get bigger, hence more HD accesses.

>At least your in touch with reality John.. Doh! You just *didn't get it*

You're 100% correct; I don't get your microcosmic viewport, and judging
from how silly you look from out here, I certainly wouldn't want to.

<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>>< ><<>
John P Sheehy <jsh...@ix.netcom.com>
><<> <>>< <>>< ><<> <>>< ><<> ><<> <>><

[Erik Lundevall]

Marc Forrester (s...@mail.zynet.co.uk) wrote:
> Okay, perhaps Windows 95 isn't all in one indivisible lump.
> You still have to load it in order to do some very basic things,
> and it doesn't exactly load instantaneously. I reckon it might
> even use virtual memory while it loads itself.

The point being? If it is stored on disk instead of in ROM, it must
be loaded. That is valid for both AmigaOS, Windows95 and any other
OS. If you load the Kickstart from disk, you are loading one
indivisible lump ;-)

> Fine. So would I. The hardware is only relevant in a
> comparison of computer systems in as much as it affects
> what the operating system can and cannot do.
> No-one cares what alloys your system bus is made of,
> to take an extreme(ly silly) example.

Some people care about the hardware, as can be seen in a number of the
discussions that has taken place in this forum. This includes the
hardware used in PC clones.

> Amiga users saying 'X, Y, and Z are crap on PC's' will
> almost certainly mean Wintel IBM's. If you, as a Linux
> user, defend your system from these slurs, I think you're
> being a bit daft. Throwing yourself into their fists,
> as it were, and considering yourself under attack.

If people mean Windows, then they should say Windows. It is only five more
letters than PC, it should not be too difficult.

Compare it to if someone wrote a message here complaining about Amigas
having a stupid design by putting the keyboard in the computer itself.
Most certainly a number of people would point out that some Amiga models
have separate keyboards, even though they are not the most common models.

The complainer would have been better off in the discussion and would not
have seemed ignorant if he had talked about specific Amiga models instead.

> > And linux itself has the windowing protocol and such like in one
> > huge executable (or, well, one executable with a number of shared
> > libraries). Of course, only the needed parts of that executable
> > are loaeded....

> And it might be nice to have some dedicated Linux hardware,
> which loaded that sort of thing straight into memory from a
> ROM chip, n'est ce pas?

Definitely not! Having it on disk makes it quite easy and simple to upgrade
to new versions or if I change the hardware. I would not be worth the hassle
to have it in a ROM, which probably would cost me a bit as well to have it
changed. Much better to just download it.

> But you do the best you can to
> support your OS of choice with what's available.
> Think we'd be draining ourselves to buy A4060T
> systems if AmigaOS were available for IBM hardware?
> Unlikely, all other things being equal.

Some people would, others wouldn't.

--
-Erik Lundevall http://www.algonet.se/~erikl/
Your fault. Core dumped.

[Adam Hough]

On 8 Mar 97 19:04:23 MEZ Dr. Peter Kittel wrote about "Re: Amiga vs. PC - Stop whining!" in comp.sys.amiga.applications:

> Hmm, a *very* foreign language for many, if not *most* of the users
> of such computers! So understandability is not assured.

As aptly demonstrated by your reply, Peter :)

[Fx: sound of a person ducking and running for cover from an annoyed
German!]

--
Regards

Adam Hough (ad...@spots.ab.ca) | Still using an Amiga after all this time
http://www.spots.ab.ca/~adamh | Happily multitasking at home since 1985

[Bernd Meyer]

pet...@combo.ganesha.com (Dr. Peter Kittel) writes:

>In article <5fmnhp$9...@wombat.cs.monash.edu.au> bme...@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au (Bernd Meyer) writes:
>>

>>The nice thing about BIOS errors is that most of them are written on the
>>screen in clear English. Well, in English.

>Hmm, a *very* foreign language for many, if not *most* of the users

>of such computers! So understandability is not assured.

You are getting desperate, are you? I mean, how many PCs with English BIOS
are used in countries where English is not taught at school?

You seem to forget that I have been building PCs in good ole Germany for
a while --- and while I met a large number of people who wouldn't know
a harddisk when it hit them, I never had anyone complain about not being
able to understand the language at bootup.

Of course, you can always buy the right c't, where most error messages
are not only translated, but a lot of stuff is also explained....

[Bernd Meyer]

Bill Near <wn...@epix.net> writes:

>On Sun, 09 Mar 1997 19:35:43 +0200, ttammi articulated this in comp.sys.amiga.advocacy:
><>It amazes me how you think "color coded error messages" would be any
><>easier to understand than English error messages. I'm quite sure more
><>people have to refer to the manual to understand the color coded
><>messages than those in plain English.

>I think you've missed the entire point. The Amiga can tell you that something
>has gone wrong BEFORE it can even put text to a screen.

Great. 4 different things.

Have you ever looked at the long list of things the PC can tell you with
its beeper? "Two short, three long, one short" --- ahhh, a memory problem
in the first 64k of memory (this one completely made up --- I know where to
find the lists, but I don't have them memorized ;-).

[Bernd Meyer]

tim <dan...@angeldos.demon.co.uk> writes:
[Still trying to configure Thor, right?]

>>ELA9...@shef.ac.uk (Chris Handley) writes:
>>>In article <5fgr67$g...@wombat.cs.monash.edu.au>,
>>>bme...@bruce.cs.monash.edu.ausays...

>>>Very strange indeed... Windows95 does use MS-DOS u know.

>>We could have holy wars over whether Win95 uses MSDOS, or provides an MSDOS
>>subsystem, but I don't care. The question at hand was "booting using black
>>and white MSDOS". And all Win95 uses "black and white MSDOS" for is to
>>display "booting Windows95"

>No Bernie, Win95 runs "on top of" MSDOS it does not *yet* replace it entirely.

Read again... "We could have holy wars" over that. I am not interested in
holy wars. And, more importantly, the holy war would be completely irrelevant
to the thread at hand, which is "PCs booting using black and white DOS".

Now, no matter what else you want to say about Windows95, the fact that all
it displays in black and white text on the typical machine is "Loading
Windows95" is undebatable. Yes, it might do all sorts of nasty things using
DOS later on, but
a) That's not booting, and
b) There is no trace of black and white in whatever services it requests
from MSDOS.

If you want to argue that Windows95 is a crap OS, I won't say it isn't.
However, if you want to argue that Windows95 boots using "black and white
DOS" (as you seem to do), I will qualify that statement, giving the full
extent of "black and white DOS" usage....

>>>And the machine I have used alot always has tons of shit being
>>>displayed on a black&white screen - are you saying most PCs don't do
>>>this?!?

>>I am saying that most Windows95 PCs do not display anything more than
>>"Booting Windows95" (or some such) from DOS.

>Plus all your drivers etc..

Which drivers? You load drivers from black and white DOS?

Just remind me about that the next time you whinge about your PC
not performing well, because it makes it so much easier to point out
in which way it is misconfigured....

>>>Ah, a reasoned argument. Not.

>>Not anymore, after your "snip".

>Hehehehe being the king of that yourself that's a bit rich :)

I resent that remark, and would like to challenge you where I <snip>ped
in a way which changed or totally crippled and argument...

>>Let's see this again:
>>>>>And MS-DOS is used by over 99% (99.9%?) of PC owners - which basically
>>>>>makes the PC MS-DOS in my opinion as far as my/your arguments are
>>>>>concerned.

>>to which I answered:

>>>>Current estimates are that around 85% of all PCs run some sort of MS OS

>>(This figure is pretty widely accepted.)

>By who? 15% of all PC's run linux then ?

No, 15% of all PCs run a non-MS OS. Such as OS/2, Linux, NeXTStep, QNX,
FreeBSD, CP/M 86, Concurrent DOS, Novell DOS, FreeDos, NetBSD, Minix,
The Hurd, MkLinux or whatever else.

>>Now, the remaining 15% of 100 million PCs currently in use (that number is
>>probably a bit low by now, actually) would be 15 million PCs running a
>>non-MS OS.
>>Now if, by your argument, "The PC" is "MS-DOS", then obviously the few
>>million Amigas out there are not enough to make "a computer" anything other
>>than "a PC".

>I think it's fair to say that the "PC" is "MSDOS" as for the very
>large whole it is.

85 percent of all PCs run _any_ MS OS. If that is a large enough
"whole" to make it an "is", then "A computer" (or maybe "A computer in
the home") "is" a PC, because more than 85% of all computers (or
computers in the home) currently in use _are_ PCs. I.e. the Amiga
would be a simply an exception from the rule, which is, to use your
very words, "unimportant (at least in terms of the market) and
unsupportive" (whatever "unsupportive" means).

>Ohhh now this is a REALLY bad analysis. Think about the numbers
>involved here and then resubmit the statement. The PC market is so
>large as to make your 15% unimportant (at least in terms of the
>market) and unsupportive of that group.

Actually, because the PC market is so large, that's _exactly_ why 15%
of it are still very important.
Why do you think companies like Caldera, RedHat and Yggdrasil(sp?) are
catering for the linux market? Why is WordPerfect, StarOffice and
Applixware available for linux, commercially? Why is there Matlab
and Mathematica for linux? Quake, Doom and Abuse?

What about the Lotus suite for OS/2? NeXTStep itself?

>Comparison of this to the Amiga market is pretty hard to do,
>especially as 99% of all Amiga machines are running one OS right now.

You still don't get it, do you?
I don't compare the PC market to the Amiga market. I compare the
"MS domination" of the PC market to the "PC domination" of the computer
market. What OSs Amigas run is totally irrelevant, because if 15% isn't
enough of a market to be significant, then Amigas are not significant.

Mind you, I am not saying that --- I would say both Amigas and non-MS OSs
are significant. However, in this group the first is always assumed,
while the second is denied whenever convenient.

>>>IDEA! If you COULD change MS-DOS colours, you could actually make it look
>>>nice by having black text on a black background :-)))))))

>>GREAT! Now, you _do_ know that you _can_ change the colours, right?
>>It's a simple "echo" command....

>Hehehe.. thats MSDOS and thats ANSI colours... pretty groovy? Nope..

Hmmm --- "If you could change MS-DOS colours, [...] having black text on
blakc background".
So, MSDOS was the thing in question, and "black" certainly is an ANSI
colour. So doing what he asked is perfectly possible, making the implied
inability nonexistant.

>>>>>>Hmm --- I bet you want to share with us your method of quantifying
>>>>>>"functionality" and "ease of use", right?

>>>Idiot! If I said "alot" then it wouldn't mean much would it?

>>It would be a lot more honest, though. About 5 times, I would say; Of course,
>>I will never tell you why 5 times, and not 6 or 4!

[...]

>Anyone remember why computers got interesting when the Amiga came along in the
>first place?

Well, they didn't "get" interesting, they were bloody interesting before
that, too.

>Slate the Amiga all you like, but the computing world in the 80's
>didn't sit around and ask "why is there no BIOS detailed information screen"
>because it didn't need it. It still doesn't. The machines do things
>differently - great isn't it? :*)

Yep, that's great. Maybe you should preach that to people who try to
slam the PC for being different from the Amiga?

>>Nope. Remember that this started out with a one line comment about you
>>sharing your method for _quantifying_ these things? You still haven't done
>>so, so I still assume you don't _have_ one....

>OH stick to the point - he's entitled to his opinion without having to
>_quantify_ anything.

Excuse me, that is exactly _my_ point! Saying "the Amiga is more user
friendly than Windows95" is perfectly all right. However, writing "The

AmigaDos is easily 20 times more functional, and certainly several

times easier to use" implies that the author _does_ indeed quantify this
stuff. If one thing is 20 times as something as another thing, then there
must be a number of the somethingness of both things....

>>>Since I was referring to MS-DOS & AmigaDOS (check the original post
>>>before you say I didn't), it is VERY VERY VERY easy.

>>Actually, you were referring to Windows95 and AmigaDOS. May I quote from
>>your article (Message-ID: <5fa1gd$9...@bignews.shef.ac.uk>):
>>=======================
>>The Amiga Workbench may not be quite a functional as Win95 with some
>>functions, but it's a hell of a lot easier to use. [....]

>>The AmigaDos is easily 20 times more functional, and certainly several times
>>easier to use.
>>=======================
>>And if you want to cry "foul quoting, the [...] stuff was talking about
>>MSDOS", then go and look it up; It wasn't.

>Right, so you summarised he was talking about AmigaDos vs. a GUI
>window based machine in this last statement? I'm not Einstein but
>even I can equate this to AmigaDos vs. MSDOS :)

You are _really_ not Einstein... Even my first years could figure out that
this is about "AmigaDOS" and "Win95". BTW, where did I "summarise"?

>>[A rather longish list of perceived advantages of AmigaOS over MS-DOS
>> deleted]

>Refer back to your point about editing replies to posts... ;)

Was that an accurate description of what was deleted or not? Did it change
the argument in any significant way?

>>If I say that Sandra Bullok is 5 times as cute as Claudia Schiffer, what
>>does that tell you? If I said she was 20 times as cute rather than 5 times,
>>what would _that_ tell you?

>That you prefer women with smaller breasts ? :)

Uhm --- I have to damit that I have no idea of the breast size of either.
But hell, Sandra _has_ a cute little smile, whereas Claudia is highly
intelligent....

But you missed the point --- there is absolutely no difference between
saying 5 or twenty times. Think about why.

>Everyone can make such statements when it comes down to esoteric issues -
>quantify art for me Bernie? :) What makes a masterpiece?

I don't know. A recent Australian arts "scandal" indicates that it
not only depends on the piece itself.

However, I am not saying that the Mona Lisa is at least 15 times as good
as the giant painting on one of Hamburg's docks.....

>*This* is why people can't quantify everything as you so desire - and
>thats probably a very good thing too!

Oh, I don't "desire" people to quantify stuff. I just pointed out that in
order to say one thing is 20 times as user friendly as another, you _have_
to quantify, and as you can't, you should not make such statements.

Bernie "Argh, why is that numeric integration taking so long" Meyer

[tim]

>tim <dan...@angeldos.demon.co.uk> writes:

>>>What is counter-intuitive about it? Booting depends heavily on HD
>>>throughput and seek times, so faster CPUs do not benefit booting as much
>>>as they do numbercrunching, etc. As time goes on, CPUs get faster and
>>>OSes get bigger, hence more HD accesses.

>>At least your in touch with reality John.. Doh! You just *didn't get it*

>You're 100% correct; I don't get your microcosmic viewport, and judging
>from how silly you look from out here, I certainly wouldn't want to.

Ah, silly eh? Interesting, I always thought those who judge others so willingly
are the 'silly' ones. Guess you proove the point, once again. Well done.
You still, very sadly, don't *get it*.

Still, have a nice day...

:)

Tim

[Johan Rönnblom]

ttammi wrote:
> Marc Forrester <s...@mail.zynet.co.uk> wrote:

> >It does sound like an excuse, I'll grant you, but it's mostly true.
> >Amiga porgrams install by putting the vast majority of their support
> >files into their own directory, since this can always be accessed
> >through Progdir: or failing that, assigns, and put a couple of
> >libraries in Libs: and maybe some fonts in Fonts:. Whilst there
>
> Funny, that sounds just like Win95 application installers. Couple of
> DLLs in the Windows/System directory

I know exactly what I'd do with a program that put lots of files named
32kcme0.dll or btrv110.dll or p1284mlc.dll *anywhere* on my harddrive!

/Johan Rönnblom, Team Amiga

[tim]

>>>We could have holy wars over whether Win95 uses MSDOS, or provides an MSDOS
>>>subsystem, but I don't care. The question at hand was "booting using black
>>>and white MSDOS". And all Win95 uses "black and white MSDOS" for is to
>>>display "booting Windows95"

>>No Bernie, Win95 runs "on top of" MSDOS it does not *yet* replace it
>>entirely.

>Read again... "We could have holy wars" over that. I am not interested in
>holy wars. And, more importantly, the holy war would be completely irrelevant
>to the thread at hand, which is "PCs booting using black and white DOS".

Some would say the plot was lost a very long time ago. Sadly.

>Now, no matter what else you want to say about Windows95, the fact that all
>it displays in black and white text on the typical machine is "Loading
>Windows95" is undebatable. Yes, it might do all sorts of nasty things using
>DOS later on, but
>a) That's not booting, and
>b) There is no trace of black and white in whatever services it requests
> from MSDOS.

>If you want to argue that Windows95 is a crap OS, I won't say it isn't.
>However, if you want to argue that Windows95 boots using "black and white
>DOS" (as you seem to do), I will qualify that statement, giving the full
>extent of "black and white DOS" usage....

>>>>And the machine I have used alot always has tons of shit being
>>>>displayed on a black&white screen - are you saying most PCs don't do
>>>>this?!?

>>>I am saying that most Windows95 PCs do not display anything more than
>>>"Booting Windows95" (or some such) from DOS.

>>Plus all your drivers etc..

>Which drivers? You load drivers from black and white DOS?

>Just remind me about that the next time you whinge about your PC
>not performing well, because it makes it so much easier to point out
>in which way it is misconfigured....

Ah... "misconfigured" refering to running an MS OS ;0)

>>>>Ah, a reasoned argument. Not.

>>>Not anymore, after your "snip".

>>Hehehehe being the king of that yourself that's a bit rich :)

>I resent that remark, and would like to challenge you where I <snip>ped
>in a way which changed or totally crippled and argument...

I'm sure you would, but unlike you I don't keep reams of newsgroups on local
storage. You're quite keen on editing previous posts and answering only the
points you dain to in your replies. I'm not saying that's a bad thing (nor is
this a personal attack) but I am saying it happens.

>>>Let's see this again:
>>>>>>And MS-DOS is used by over 99% (99.9%?) of PC owners - which basically
>>>>>>makes the PC MS-DOS in my opinion as far as my/your arguments are
>>>>>>concerned.

>>>to which I answered:

>>>>>Current estimates are that around 85% of all PCs run some sort of MS OS

>>>(This figure is pretty widely accepted.)

>>By who? 15% of all PC's run linux then ?

>No, 15% of all PCs run a non-MS OS. Such as OS/2, Linux, NeXTStep, QNX,
>FreeBSD, CP/M 86, Concurrent DOS, Novell DOS, FreeDos, NetBSD, Minix,
>The Hurd, MkLinux or whatever else.

Fair enough..

>>>Now, the remaining 15% of 100 million PCs currently in use (that number is
>>>probably a bit low by now, actually) would be 15 million PCs running a
>>>non-MS OS.
>>>Now if, by your argument, "The PC" is "MS-DOS", then obviously the few
>>>million Amigas out there are not enough to make "a computer" anything other
>>>than "a PC".

>>I think it's fair to say that the "PC" is "MSDOS" as for the very
>>large whole it is.

>85 percent of all PCs run _any_ MS OS. If that is a large enough
>"whole" to make it an "is", then "A computer" (or maybe "A computer in
>the home") "is" a PC, because more than 85% of all computers (or
>computers in the home) currently in use _are_ PCs. I.e. the Amiga
>would be a simply an exception from the rule, which is, to use your
>very words, "unimportant (at least in terms of the market) and
>unsupportive" (whatever "unsupportive" means).

If the market continues the way it has been doing for the past x years do you
honestly believe that the 15% group will increase in size? Just a thought.
It's commonplace to refer to the PC in terms of Windows and MSDOS simply because
thats all some of us (most of us) ever see it running! Tell me which high
street store I can walk into and see linux being run on a on-sale PC ?
Sad fact, that better techology isn't always a best seller.
The Amiga is completely unimportant to the market as a whole, but singularly
very important to the small group of fans that use and buy them.

>>Ohhh now this is a REALLY bad analysis. Think about the numbers
>>involved here and then resubmit the statement. The PC market is so
>>large as to make your 15% unimportant (at least in terms of the
>>market) and unsupportive of that group.

>Actually, because the PC market is so large, that's _exactly_ why 15%
>of it are still very important.

They aren't important to the PC market though are they? If that 15% died
overnight noone would actually care and nothing would change for the PC as a
platform. To put it another way, that 15% of the market will never affect
someone like me either in my career or in my home. I'm not advocating this BTW.

>Why do you think companies like Caldera, RedHat and Yggdrasil(sp?) are
>catering for the linux market? Why is WordPerfect, StarOffice and
>Applixware available for linux, commercially? Why is there Matlab
>and Mathematica for linux? Quake, Doom and Abuse?

A very impressive list - care to list what supports Win95 and NT ?

>What about the Lotus suite for OS/2? NeXTStep itself?

OS/2 is dying - even IBM have woken up to that and started to sell MS products.
Well, this is at least what IBM told me when I last spoke to their rep. Shame
really as I quite liked the look of OS/2 but it's simply a case of MS owning the
market now.

>>Comparison of this to the Amiga market is pretty hard to do,
>>especially as 99% of all Amiga machines are running one OS right now.

>You still don't get it, do you?
>I don't compare the PC market to the Amiga market. I compare the
>"MS domination" of the PC market to the "PC domination" of the computer
>market. What OSs Amigas run is totally irrelevant, because if 15% isn't
>enough of a market to be significant, then Amigas are not significant.

Ho hum.

>Mind you, I am not saying that --- I would say both Amigas and non-MS OSs
>are significant. However, in this group the first is always assumed,
>while the second is denied whenever convenient.

Fine, but I would point out it's more a case of relevance within your own
'pond'. PC market - big pond - 15% small fish, 85% big fish. Big fish very
likely to eat little fish. Amiga market - small pond - 99% big fish. Okay,
i'm having a little to much fun with this (!) but you get the point. What MS do
in their pond will have little or no effect on the Amiga, whereas it will have a
a large effect on those living in the same pond with MS. If you want to talk
markets for platforms as a whole, then this is a different matter, of course.

>>>>IDEA! If you COULD change MS-DOS colours, you could actually make it look
>>>>nice by having black text on a black background :-)))))))

>>>GREAT! Now, you _do_ know that you _can_ change the colours, right?
>>>It's a simple "echo" command....

>>Hehehe.. thats MSDOS and thats ANSI colours... pretty groovy? Nope..

>Hmmm --- "If you could change MS-DOS colours, [...] having black text on
>blakc background".
>So, MSDOS was the thing in question, and "black" certainly is an ANSI
>colour. So doing what he asked is perfectly possible, making the implied
>inability nonexistant.

<Groan> Yes, and i'm very impressed with ANSI.

>>>>>>>Hmm --- I bet you want to share with us your method of quantifying
>>>>>>>"functionality" and "ease of use", right?

>>>>Idiot! If I said "alot" then it wouldn't mean much would it?

>>>It would be a lot more honest, though. About 5 times, I would say; Of
>>>course, I will never tell you why 5 times, and not 6 or 4!
>[...]
>>Anyone remember why computers got interesting when the Amiga came along in
>>the first place?

>Well, they didn't "get" interesting, they were bloody interesting before
>that, too.

Bullshit. DO pray tell how interesting the PC was at that time? The Amiga
rocked the computing world by offering unheard of features at an amazing price.

>>Slate the Amiga all you like, but the computing world in the 80's
>>didn't sit around and ask "why is there no BIOS detailed information screen"
>>because it didn't need it. It still doesn't. The machines do things
>>differently - great isn't it? :*)

>Yep, that's great. Maybe you should preach that to people who try to
>slam the PC for being different from the Amiga?

Ah. So you agree? Great.

>>>Nope. Remember that this started out with a one line comment about you
>>>sharing your method for _quantifying_ these things? You still haven't done
>>>so, so I still assume you don't _have_ one....

>>OH stick to the point - he's entitled to his opinion without having to
>>_quantify_ anything.

>Excuse me, that is exactly _my_ point! Saying "the Amiga is more user
>friendly than Windows95" is perfectly all right. However, writing "The
>AmigaDos is easily 20 times more functional, and certainly several
>times easier to use" implies that the author _does_ indeed quantify this
>stuff. If one thing is 20 times as something as another thing, then there
>must be a number of the somethingness of both things....

The numbers are arbitary and there just to illustrate his opinions! For God's
sake stop being so bloody pendantic about this. How would you quantify
"several" ? :) Is it an absolute? No? Oh dear.

>>>>Since I was referring to MS-DOS & AmigaDOS (check the original post
>>>>before you say I didn't), it is VERY VERY VERY easy.

>>>Actually, you were referring to Windows95 and AmigaDOS. May I quote from
>>>your article (Message-ID: <5fa1gd$9...@bignews.shef.ac.uk>):
>>>=======================
>>>The Amiga Workbench may not be quite a functional as Win95 with some
>>>functions, but it's a hell of a lot easier to use. [....]

>>>The AmigaDos is easily 20 times more functional, and certainly several
>>>times easier to use.
>>>=======================
>>>And if you want to cry "foul quoting, the [...] stuff was talking about
>>>MSDOS", then go and look it up; It wasn't.

>>Right, so you summarised he was talking about AmigaDos vs. a GUI
>>window based machine in this last statement? I'm not Einstein but
>>even I can equate this to AmigaDos vs. MSDOS :)

>You are _really_ not Einstein... Even my first years could figure out that
>this is about "AmigaDOS" and "Win95". BTW, where did I "summarise"?

I'm always so impressed when you lower yourself to personal insult. Very
clever. Doubtless you impress thousands with your intellect.
He talks about Workbench vs. Win95. Having done this he's then talking about
AmigaDos - different from Workbench. Would you expect this to be a comparison
between Win95 - a GUI interface - and AmigaDos - a CLI?
It's because you argue these points to their death that you never actually give
us anything meaningful to dwell on.

>>>[A rather longish list of perceived advantages of AmigaOS over MS-DOS
>>> deleted]

>>Refer back to your point about editing replies to posts... ;)

>Was that an accurate description of what was deleted or not? Did it change
>the argument in any significant way?

How about "A list of perceived advantages of AmigaOS..." rather than attatching
your opinion to the edit statement with "rather longish". :)
Who knows if it changed the arguement, it's gone now.

>>>If I say that Sandra Bullok is 5 times as cute as Claudia Schiffer, what
>>>does that tell you? If I said she was 20 times as cute rather than 5 times,
>>>what would _that_ tell you?

>>That you prefer women with smaller breasts ? :)

>Uhm --- I have to damit that I have no idea of the breast size of either.
>But hell, Sandra _has_ a cute little smile, whereas Claudia is highly
>intelligent....

I really didn't actually expect an answer :)

>But you missed the point --- there is absolutely no difference between
>saying 5 or twenty times. Think about why.

Sorry - I don't share your view. If a man walks up to me in the street and
says his machine is five times as fast as a P200 i'm impressed. If he says it's
20 times as fast then I'm very impressed (and probably a little disbelieving!).
The numbers, as stated, are arbitary - but they do illustrate how much one
person holds a view as compared to another. Numerics aren't the issue, it's
just a RL comparison. Think about why.

>>Everyone can make such statements when it comes down to esoteric issues -
>>quantify art for me Bernie? :) What makes a masterpiece?

>I don't know. A recent Australian arts "scandal" indicates that it
>not only depends on the piece itself.

>However, I am not saying that the Mona Lisa is at least 15 times as good
>as the giant painting on one of Hamburg's docks.....

...but you could quite rightly do so. As long as you're pulling figures out of
a hat it doesn't actually matter. It's only when people get the wrong end of
the stick and decied it's all about numbers that things go awry.

>>*This* is why people can't quantify everything as you so desire - and
>>thats probably a very good thing too!

>Oh, I don't "desire" people to quantify stuff. I just pointed out that in
>order to say one thing is 20 times as user friendly as another, you _have_
>to quantify, and as you can't, you should not make such statements.

Says who? You? You're the only one saying this - most of us can apply a little
real world intelligence to such statements and take them in the correct manner.

Tim

"WHY GOD??? WHY!?!?!?"

[J.SADOTTI]

> What is counter-intuitive about it? Booting depends heavily on HD
> throughput and seek times, so faster CPUs do not benefit booting as much

Getting my 030 for my A1200 has itself reduced the bootup time of my
machine from cold from 22 seconds to 14 seconds. The HD access in that
time has increased due to a bootup picture I have added and a series of
boot commodities. I think it's a safe bet to say that on an Amiga, the
speed of the cpu can have a significant effect on startup times.

Jules

[Gareth Young]

On Fri, 07 Mar 97, Bernd Meyer wrote:

> gar...@netcomuk.co.uk (Gareth Young) writes:
> >On Wed, 05 Mar 97, Bernd Meyer wrote:
>
> [Amiga bootup colours]
> >> Yes, all 6 of them (or how many is it? 8? 10?).
>
> >We Amiga owners, we like, you know, don't memorise every single colour, like
> >PVC owners wouldn't remember every single BIOS error.

>
> The nice thing about BIOS errors is that most of them are written on the

> screen in clear English. Well, in English. Well, in whatever the BIOS

> programmer thought was English. But at least in some sort of text....
>
> >However, for your
> >satisfaction, here are the colours for my A1200 and their associated
> >meaings, showing that it doesn't really matter how the bloody computer tells
> >you something is wrong, unless it contradicts itself... keyboard not
> >connected, press any key to continue, for example. HA HA HA. :
>
> And once again I challenge you to come up with a single machine that would
> give that exact BIOS error. I bet you can't.
>
> >Red: ROM error
> >Green: Chip RAM error
> >Blue: Custom chips error.
> >Yellow: 680x0 detected error before software trapped it (GURU)
>
> >dunno what the hell that yellow code is supposed to mean. That's what it
> >says in the manual though.
>
> Wow. 4 possible errors. The information, the detail, I am so impressed....

Well, er, what else could go wrong on an Amiga? Everything does anything
automatically, with out stupid jumpers for IRQ and crap like that.

>
> >merc owning people were shitheads (win'85) then most people would probably
> >say that the merc sucks.
>
> Huh? First of all, this was about the software, not the users. Also, not
> all Windows95 users are shitheads, and a lot less than 99% of PCs run any
> MS OS, anyways.

I was talking hypothetically. merc translates into PC and shitheads
translates to using an MS os.

>
> And to get back to the point --- you can assume that there is a number of
> newsreaders for the PC which have absolutely no problems with long newsgroups
> lines, or with editing them. Now if the above poster uses one that _does_
> have problems, it says something about
>
> a) The newsreader, and
> b) the poster.
>
> It doesn't say anything about the PC, though.
>
> [Quantifying feature-richness and user friendliness]
> >*ONE* particularly annoying aspect with win'85 is the way it assumes the
> >user is a complete cretin. And there is (to my knowledge) no way of
> >changing this.
>
> Yeah, sure, I agree wholeheartedly. But can you _quantify_ those properties?

Cracked monitors, high absence due to stress rates, dents in the wall caused
by things being thrown etc. are all more common in the enviroment of a PC
user, hence one way of quantifying the issue.

>
> >One example taken from this newsgroup would be using
> >drag'n'drop and having win'85 say "Are you sure you want to do this?".
> >That sucks. Could you imagine trying to copy over 150 files esp. when you
> >KNOW you REALLY want to do it. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes...... etc.
>
> Uhm, I am pretty sure that it usually comes with a button "yes to all".
> It's still mighty annoying, but not _quite_ that bad.
>
> >To the experianced user (And experiance is something that we all gain
> >through using a computer (Albeit slowly with win'85) and cannot lose unless
> >you get involved in some kind of accident) this is most definately
> >UNFRIENDLY. And I can guarantee that some user out there is willing to post
> >every last thing they hate about win'85 (well experianced users anyway).
>
> No doubt about it. Hey, I could make a start, and I have hardly ever
> touched it.
> I do not doubt that in the views of a great many people (including myself),
> Windows95 sucks, lacks features, is poorly implemented and confuses the
> hell out of the user. But I doubt anyone can _quantify_ those things, and
> unless you can do so, statements like "AmigaOS is 20 times more feature rich"
> are about as sensible as "Sandra Bullock is 5 times as cute as Claudia
> Schiffer"....

System comparisons and efficiancy could be one way. And as I said above,
stress levels when using a PC could be compared to stress levels when using
an Amiga.

>
> Bernie

>
> --
> ============================================================================
> "It's a magical world, Hobbes ol' buddy...
> ...let's go exploring"
> Calvin's final words, on December 31st, 1995

--
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