Subj : Re: what are you dialing in with? To : Bob Worm From : AKAcastor Date : Tue Jun 11 2024 10:53:56 > Ni> compatibles), I wonder what a modern Amiga would be like.. > > Like a modern PC? In essence all roads lead to Rome as they say. BW> Yup, that was going to be my suggestion. We currently BW> have x86, ARM and a bunch of other options for BW> hardware, running Windows, Linux, MacOS, iOS, BW> Android... controversially I'm going to say the user BW> experience isn't hugely different across the board, for BW> casual users at least. Very controversial statement there, Bob, I'm not sure whether to agree with you or meet you in the parking lot for a fist fight. ;) BW> I think the things that made the Amiga so incredible at BW> its time were the special purpose chips for sound, BW> blitting, graphics, etc - they really enabled new and BW> wonderful things. Nowadays we almost have too much BW> grunt to know what to do with it, everything runs in BW> "true colour" modes, high quality sound is standard... BW> I'm not sure where you could differentiate for BW> capabilities. I wonder about an alternate universe where computers were made BETTER instead of just FASTER and with more data capacity. What do I mean by 'making computers better'? Well, do we have fewer computer issues today than in the 1980s, or more? When I was growing up, computers were "the next big thing" and everyone accepted that of course some kinks have to be worked out along the way, as we become computerised. But I think that instead of the kinks being worked out, we just decided that computers not really working that well is a normal and satisfactory baseline. We live in a world of compromise, and the result isn't always ideal. Instead of stacks of books documenting computer hardware/software, things are made so intuitive that documentation "isn't needed". Now we're relying on posts online from unknown sources to educate us in how to use our new devices. I didn't know how to move the cursor for text entry on my iPhone for a really long time, until I happened to see a friend do it - I still run into people who have no idea you can move the cursor and don't have to backspace everything to fix a typo in the middle. How the hell are we supposed to know how to use things when there's no documentation? Why is it so hard to get ECC memory in consumer devices? The technology has been around for decades and provides a significant reliability increase for a small price increase. It solves a known problem - bits get flipped, and this breaks computers - ECC memory can fix many of those bitflips and notify an error has occured in cases where there are too many bits flipped. But on new devices, we get the ability to superimpose funny mustaches on our pets faces in realtime video instead of hardware that works more reliabily. DRAM memory is so unstable these days it's a miracle it works at all. "Rowhammer" is a security exploit that has affected DRAM memory for the past decade (or more) - the tiny capacitors that hold each bit of information can sometimes have their value changed by READING other nearby bits. An attacker can read from a memory location repeatedly and the effect is that bits in other locations are flipped - this includes being able to flip bits in the kernel, ring 0, escaping browser sandboxes, etc. There are multiple layers of mitigations that run on modern computers just so that the rowhammer effect doesn't happen accidentally - and as chip sizes shrink, the rowhammer effect continues to get worse and worse. The DRAM chips have mitigations, the memory controller has mitigations, the operating system has mitigations, the problem still isn't solved (and I think physics suggests it'll only get worse). Don't even get me started on software development practices... They make modern hardware look absolutely brilliant. So I do really wonder "what could be" if the focus was on making computers work better, instead of the focus always being on "what can the sales department sell today". All this money and time and effort put into AI, yet I have to get off the couch and power cycle my Android TV box because it crashed again. Using anything with a computer in it is death by a thousand cuts, as we encounter all the corners cut by rich tech companies. (I may have been feeling a bit rant-y...) :) Chris/akacastor --- Maximus 3.01 * Origin: Another Millennium - Canada - another.tel (21:1/162) .