Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!unmvax!ncar!asuvax!mcdphx!mcdchg!ddsw1!corpane!sparks
From: sparks@corpane.UUCP (John Sparks)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: "But Can It Sing and Dance?"
Message-ID: <896@corpane.UUCP>
Date: 17 Jul 89 13:00:10 GMT
References: <19638@louie.udel.EDU>
Reply-To: sparks@corpane.UUCP (John Sparks)
Organization: Corpane Industries, Inc.
Lines: 67

In article <19638@louie.udel.EDU> mjsagar@sandia.gov (9123 SAGARTZ, MATHIAS J.)
writes:
>Computer Graphic World has decided to acknowlege the existence of the
>amiga.  Rick Cook has an excellent article in the July issue, well
>worth a look.  Random quotes:

Personally, I got the impression that Rick knows squat about the Amiga and that
he relied on third party information for his article. It started out saying
that Amiga is a great video machine and then went on to prove that it wasn't
worth sh*t. What kind of article is that? Here are some more quotes:

"..At 320 by 240 resolution the amiga can display 32 colors out of a pallete of
4096, and at 640 x 480 resolution, it can display 16 colors (although that can
be stretched with overscan)"

?! What about ham mode? or even half-brite? and what is 320 x 240 and 640 x
480? It's 320x200 and 640x400, or with overscan it's around 720x480. No where
in the article does he mention that the Amiga can use 4096 colors. He goes on
to say that the color range is met or exceeded by VGA. VGA only allows 256
colors at 320 x 200, and 16 at 640x480.

"The workbench is incomplete, and such basic jobs as formatting a floppy disk
must be done from the CLI"

This is plain wrong!

Then he goes on to say that the Amiga has problems with crashes, and in
practice, isn't as reliable as MSDOS, because it doesn't have hardware
protection for memory. 

Now what does parity checking do for the PC? If you get a parity error, does it
fix it? No. It just crashes. And the PC I have here at work crashes more than
my Amiga does.

And he says:

     "When an Amiga crashes, it usually flashes a message saying 'Guru
Meditation' followed by a 16 digit number. The Joke is that a guru chants 'OM'
and OM is shorthand for Out of Memory - A common cause of Amiga crashes. This
is funny the first time you hear it."

     Hear it? Anyone out there hear their Amiga chant "OM"? And of course if
you only have 1/2 meg of memory and you are trying to multi-task too many
things, then yes you will run out of memory. I have had my PC at work crash if
it runs out of memory too.

Then he tells about all the woes of hooking up different third party hardware
on the Amiga, that much of it don't work with each other because Commodore
hasn't been effective at working with third party manufacturers. 

Now I know that the Amiga 100 had some major problems with this, but the 2000
ad 500 aren't any worse in getting hardware to work with each other than is any
other PC.

-
If I were a new computer user, who knew nothing about the Amiga, After reading
this article, I would run screaming to my nearest IBM salesrep yelling "Save
me! Save me!"


 


-- 
John Sparks   |  {rutgers|uunet}!ukma!corpane!sparks | D.I.S.K. 24hrs 1200bps
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Don't worry if you're a kleptomaniac, you can always take something for it.