No, please keep on track. "Mac-like" is a perfect fit for the "Daddy, what's (a) computer/programming?" vibe crowd.
Even The Company itself thinks so, as evidenced by relevant advertisements of the not too distant past. :)
890 karma · joined May 24, 2025
Even The Company itself thinks so, as evidenced by relevant advertisements of the not too distant past. :)
Yeah, I got that. I just don't think the fact that a to me detestable individual can have, or work for, an outfit that produces (some) good, interesting, or even highly impactful merchandise is at all remarkable. History is littered with such people, especially in the tech sector (e. g. Ford, von Braun, etc.).
Certainly one of the most devisive controller designs, but the lack of two thumbsticks is precisely what I like about it. The pad centers one thumbstick and the trigger on opposite sides of the "main hull", with the rest of the inputs divided along two (remappable) zones, i. e. the outriggers. I have never held a controller in my hand with better ergonomics and holding adaptability. Even the size is just right for my hands.
It's the only pad that ever made FPS games on a console a joy to play for me; put in two analog sticks and you fuck with that formula. Its only serious weaknesses are the cheap plastic, especially for the thumbstick, and the weight (too light). Make a full metal version out of it, with some thumbstick material mods known from the PvP fighting game community, and it's the best. Well, at least for me.
ModRetro produces one thing I do have an interest in. A partly aluminium-cast version of the, to me, most ergonomic gamepad made so far: the classic trimaran-style N64 controller. But that marriage ain't gonna happen. And that goes for every other (future) product of theirs as well.
Careful. You're one step away from playing out the "Yet you participate in society. Curious!" meme. Besides, many people who are not in the Anduril fan club already boycott Microsoft for their ethical transgressions.
Lot's of HN (and "social" media) commenters in this world evidently are; nothing ironic about it.
It's just many people have a radically different set of ethics which, once they become principles, can't be easily, or at all, compromised on. And just to be fair, it's not just the what, but the how (which extends not just to Luckey & Friends, but to Anduril & Friends).
Minimum was a 386 (12 MB RAM, 16 MB RAM for the ASE); seems the recommended minimum for NT 3.5 (Workstation/Server) according to German trade press of the time (c't, 1994) was a 486. If that made sense given NT's widely reported sluggish performance is another story.
You've got to be kidding me, lol. Anyway, voice (character) mismatch is the first thing I often notice. How often have I heard a commanding adult in English dubbed into what sounds like a tortured, overemoting teen/twen in the German version (I feel it's especially pronounced in women's characters but that might be just sample bias). Even deadpan delivery sounds tryhard. And it's not just for English, either.
Modern German dubs, to me anyway, are their own comedic genre. And make no mistake: I'm fuckin' serious about it. Just study some classics. You'll see.
Dubbing for foreign movies is an art long lost in Germany; the East Germans (DEFA) were especially good at it, my favorite being Karel Steklý's eternal Dobrý voják Švejk (The Good Soldier Schweik), for which DEFA tapped the Austro Rudolf Wessely.
And today? Whenever I get exposed to a German dub I get reaquainted why I call that stuff the Fremdschämspur (the cringe track).
True as well; the race towards photorealism and natural immersion (mostly first-person 3D across various genres) had an almost suffocative, and sometimes obliterative, quality.
That's a name I haven't heard in a long while. And the "Cat Stache Puzzle", once an infamous case-study of virtual insanity in game design, now nearly forgotten...
That's good.
> We need models to be better trained on digital fine art (digital graffiti).
Only lamers need something like that. And lamers and artists (sceners) don't go together.
The 86ers got one, on the other hand. It's from Sweden. :)
Bit harsh, lol. And you invited agriculture poetry! Albeit I've heard that many an old school Amiga lifer rejects those "Neomigas" (e. g. the Apollos) for one reason or another. Me, I liken these classics to music instruments, with their own specific capabilities and mythos, etc.
I often pondered about getting one of them, but I've just too much x86 poison in my veins. And putting a Vortex86 board or somesuch into an A600 case is just sacrilege. What would I give for a classy 32- bit x86 keyboard case computer...
All things considered, no. It didn't. It had, for quite a while, a better bang-for-the-buck appeal, hardware- and software-wise, especially in the market niches it was designed to appeal to. But that headstart was over technically in late 1987 (386, VGA, AdLib, MT-32), and economically from ca. 1990/91 onwards, strongly dependent on market, of course, and not including the lowest margins, e. g. the home computers (based on their use cases, for a lot of people, used or new A500s, A600s or A1200s were still excellent deals even in 1993).
And philosophically? I say that was over before the first Amiga was even born. The adaptability speed and sheer potential of an open platform built around the relative stability/predictability of ever-evolving standards, as well as vendor diversity, ate you raw. It was just a matter of time.
The multitasking OS part is, I think, a quite overrated as well as romanticized retelling of history, written mostly by younger retro nerdlingers with roided-out (largely anachronistic) machines, on top of members of the Old Breed that sometimes still fight the Platform War. I can understand that. If Apple and Google won the hardware race by way of elimination with their to me rather miserable offerings, I'd most likely not be in the best of moods either, lol.
> Nothing beats a vertical computer company who has control of the operating system and the hardware that is the edge that Apple has over its competition [...]
Speed and overspecialization/overintegration are not everything. Especially old Amiganers should have learned that lesson by now...
Oddly enough, Apple made exactly one machine I really liked to use: the Newton MessagePad. The rest of their merchandise has been, through the bank, inferior given my specific preferences and use cases. The same goes for all iterations of their mainline operating systems. What remains is a bit of a soft spot for the Apple IIc. Just on account of its really lovely looks.
I got the same impression from the German trade press in 1991, which emphasized the openness, adaptability and standardization of the whole PC platform. I've learned a long time ago that the way to the truth is the way "through the archives"... anecdotes only go so far, and many markets differed wildly, even locally. In my personal circle in big city East Germany, the PC reigned supreme; Amigas were virtually nonexistant, albeit the machines being a huge hit in Germany, especially in the West. For us Easterners most of that can be traced back to accumulated pre-Wende experience with two main general-purpose computing platforms: Z80- as well as x86-machines (clones).
And I've yet to read a thorough, balanced, and clear-eyed comparative analysis of the Amiga and PC (as well as other) platforms, i. e. one that includes some serious market analysis.
Flat, or quasi-flat (minimalistic/brutalist), design is fantastic if one makes use of appropriate visual discriminators, e. g. shadows, outlines, contrasts etc. Less is more here. Which makes this design philosophy clash with Apple's, Google's, or their imitators, oversaturated Fisher-Price playdough-UIs.
Or 6K (1.5K used in 92/93) for a well-specced 386 that can actually run UNIX, multiple DOS versions (including preemptive multitaskers), OS/2, Windows (3.x/NT). And that's just the surface of the mainstream.
> But where the Amiga really was ahead was in software, [...].
You confuse "software" for your specific preferences in GUIs. And software? The PC software catalog in DOS alone towers over Amigas, with a couple of notable outliers (the odd exclusive here and there, especially in cost-effective video production).
> The 256 color mode only really made sense when coupled with a powerful enough CPU which had enough oompfh to update each pixel each frame (for instance Doom's recommended spec was a 486).
Yeah, like 2D platformer Stormlord (VGA version released in 1989) or Red Baron (1990). Played the latter first in VGA on a 286. Ran smooth. Amiga 500? Stutterfest. The game that allegedly sold more 386 machines than any other? Wing Commander. 1990. The late OCS port was technically inferior. Yeah, yeah, I know. 2.5D only counts when one invokes Doom.
AFAIK the highest high a (vintage) PC reaches here is the Japanese Epson PC-286C with a 486SLC CPU and the matching FasMath FPU upgrade. Time to change that. :)
That's demonstratably false. But the A3000 was a ficker fixer.
It certainly doesn't. Not that it matters to people who love reading books, for they know judging a whole book by its first page(s), or based on some formula extracted from one of those silly self-improvement tomes, is just ridiculous (especially the latter reminiscent of "Pritchard's graph" from Dead Poets Society).
IRQ settings? Pffft. Cards came factory-configured to a default that was then detected by the setup routine of any game coded in a merely competent enough fashion. And you were free to change the jumper config on the card... which obviously meant you had to change it accordingly in a game's (or application's) setup config. It's all in the manual. Et cetera.
That indeed teached you at least a modicum of working basic literacy of how some of the systems in your computer worked. Back then, I never heard PC people bitching about these trivialities. That came much later, often in form of lamentations of still bitter Amiga nerdlingers, confused "retro" gamers, or (other) computer illiterates.
Which can be blended and remixed successfully. The follow-up, Prophecy, is a clear testament to that (while another family member, The Darkening, was a total disaster). The only reason Wing Commander IV feels rough around the edges is because of the still immature emergent multimedia technology, some problematic game mechanics, and related design as well as narrative choices.
> When I posted a notice of his death on Bluesky, Shane McKee, a consultant in genetic medicine in Northern Ireland, responded: “I'm still using my Psion Series 5mx daily.”
Psion's little marvels were (and in some instances still are) the backbone of many outfits in my industry, especially smaller ones.
And not just that: Street's full of smombies, already keeping in mind that the situation awareness of the average pedestrian is a joke to begin with.
Also... mopeds and scooters are not a problem here in big-city Europe, they blend virtually completely into the vehicle hum, with two notable outliers: a) asshole mods, and b) the odd classic, two-stroke sewing machine. But even then, there's many other vehicles much louder than scooters. In the countryside they might be more of burden, for obvious reasons.