Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!att!dptg!ulysses!andante!mit-eddie!snorkelwacker!ai-lab!wookumz.ai.mit.edu!rjc
From: rjc@wookumz.ai.mit.edu (Ray Cromwell)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Some MAC and Amiga Comparisons.
Message-ID: <11435@life.ai.mit.edu>
Date: 18 Oct 90 19:16:38 GMT
References: <84888@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> <11419@life.ai.mit.edu> <16885@thorin.cs.unc.edu>
Sender: news@ai.mit.edu
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|
| I've never seen MacDraw, but I wonder how it compares to stuff like
   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
|Deluxe Paint. I also wonder if Mac has software that is comparable to
|the Amiga's turbosilver,Disney Animator, JourneyMan,LightWave 3d,
|Scult, The Art Department.  
|
|AAAAAACKK!!  That's not what MacDraw does!  Please don't advertise
|your ignorance to the whole net!  (pause while I regain control)
|Sorry, I didn't mean to have my flame-throw on high like that!

  I have no problem admitting ignorance,  since thats the only way it can
be cured, but since I don't own a Mac, or Mac software, how am I supposed
to know what it is.

|MacDraw is an object oriented drawing program.  You draw using primitives
|such as lines, boxes, circles, arcs, smoothed polygons, etc.  Not PIXELS!
|When you print a MacDraw document, it prints the primitives in the highest
|resolution the printer can handle.  So even though the circle appears in
|72 dpi on the screen, it prints at 300 dpi on the printer, and looks
|perfectly round.

  Big deal. GEOS on my C64 used to do this. I do beleive AmigaVision
has an object oriented editor in it.
|It's basically a CAD program, though most of the users aren't engineers.
|They're people who want to put nice figures into reports and presentations.
|You see, one of the Mac's prime advantages over Amiga and PCs is that
|I can take these object-oriented figures and paste them directly into my
|word-processor document.  I don't think Amiga IFF includes this format
|(I don't know, does it?).

 Well, on the Amiga you can solid-model render an object, and save it
as IFF ILBM then include it into word processors that support brushes.
In fact, I remember a local guy who took 24bit pictures, processed them
throught the art Department and used them in Professional Page.
And there is an IFF vector/object format,althought I don't know if
its official, there was a file describing its format on Bix.

|As the original poster stated, the Mac's primary advantage over the
|Amiga is software.  Not just applications, but its operating system
|as well.  They put in a lot of effort to achieve the goal of user
|friendliness, and did pretty well.  The Amiga's operating system is
|a very good technical achievement (whereas the Macs is nothing
|special - no multitasking, etc.), but as far as "Joe User" is concerned,
|he could really care less HOW it works.
|
|Gee, I could start making a list of things where the Mac has advantages
|over the Amiga (standard file requestors; icons that don't take forever
|to appear and stay where they're put without specifically being told;
|oops!  I'm starting!), but that would make me just like Marc Barrett!

  Have you seen 2.0? There is a standard file requester. And on 1.3,
a large majority of people used the Arp requester. And by your
experience, I can tell you don't own a harddrive. On an A3000/2000
with a harddrive icons pop up rather quickly. I still am waiting for
you to point out something the MacOS has better than the Amiga besides
cosmetics! (by the way, The Mac doesn't have pull down screens, or
virtual sprites, or dual playfields, or page-flipping, or a shell(builtin)
or Arexx(heh), or copper lists! :-))

| For Word processing I use DME (yep) If I want to do fancy formatting
|I'll use TeX. Sadly enough, I don't use a Word Processor everyday,
|and I don't think many people do unless they are Journalists,etc.
|I use Emacs(Unix) everyday, and DME(Amiga). And if they are WYSIWYG,
|I don't know what is.
|
|Did you mean "if they aren't WYSIWIG"?  They certainly aren't.  And
|if you think the average user would prefer using TeX over something
|like MacWrite I'd have to laugh my head off!  TeX certainly offers
|a lot of power, but you have to learn a whole new language before you
|can begin to use it!  Indeed one needs to learn to use MacWrite as
|well, but the difference in learning curves is like day and night.
|
|As for Emacs, I use it everday also.  In fact, I'm using it right
|now.  I like Emacs, but it's NOT a word processor.  It's a text
|editor.  There IS a difference.  Will Emacs do subscripts, different
|point type size, variable line spacing, etc. and show you interactively
|on screen what the printed page will look like?  Can you paste figures
|into Emacs?  (all this applies to DME as well.)

Emacs and DME are WYSIWYG. I wasn't talking about TeX. (TeX is
what you think you'll get will be nicely formatted) And pasting
graphics is not what defines a wordprocessor. a Text editor is
a subgroup in the family of word processors. (It processes words)
and primitive word processors years ago like on CPM etc looked like the
Text editors of today. All those features that you listed for
word processors are definitions of what todays advanced WYSIWIG 
WP's have in them. Are you trying to tell me that a WOrd Processor
that is not WYSIWYG is not a Word Processor?

||	When you compare power you need to look at software.  The
||fastest machine in the world is useless without the right software for
||the job.  My Amiga is excellent for TeX, games, and animation.  My Mac
||is good at doing the things that I need to do almost every day.  Sure,
||the Mac is terrible at multi-tasking, and the hardware is boring, but
||it does the jobs that I need to do.  That's the bottom line.

   The above inclusion is not mine. It was from someone else who I included.

|It does what the 'average user' expects, and does it pretty well.
|Remember, it's the computer made for idiots.  And there are hordes
|of idiots, uhh, I mean 'average people' out there buying computers.
|(I guess I sound a bit elitist here.  Sorry about that!)

  Good. Don't turn my amiga into no damn idiot computer! The Amiga
always has been 'the computer for the creative mind.' 5 years ago
when the A1000 was lightyears above any other computer. (4096 colors
vs 16 colors, Multitasking,etc) none of the idiots wanted it. Only
the power users knew where the real power was and they bought A1000s.
Now after 5 years the market is FINALLY catching up and in some aspects passing us (color).

||	Finally, the Mac is easier to use.  For non-techie students,
||this is a big plus.
|
|  Yep. But a $500 PC system is also easy to use for Word processing,
|and its much cheaper.  I don't think C= needs to worry about Apple.
|I think Apple needs to worry about the NeXT. We have our niche
|(multimedia), whereas the NeXT is a direct attack on DeskTop Publish
|ing(Mac). What happens is remain to be seen.
|
|Who Commodore needs to worry about depends upon whom they're trying to
|sell computer to.  Commodore's market overlaps with the PC's, Mac's,
|and Next's.  I get really quite ill whenever I see people who state
|that better than NTSC video is unnecessary for the Amiga since the
|video people don't need it.  Fact is, not only video people use the
|Amiga.  Programmers do to, and we who are used to workstation displays
|with megapixels and 8 bits/pixel feel really cramped when working with
|a 80x24 display.  Do you have any idea how small a 320x200 image looks
|when viewed on a display that's 1024x800 or larger?

 And with those mega-pixel workstation displays comes incredibly slow
interface updating time. Intuition is much faster than most workstation
displays i've seen. Unless a huge portion of the workstation CPU time is
devoted to the interface (e.g. NeXT)

|Gad!  I seem to have 'gone off the handle' again.  Let me come back down
|to earth and make a few things clear so I won't get flamed too badly.
|
|First of all, I like the Amiga very much.  I have an A500 and I plan
|to get a 3000 when I can afford it.  I like the principles embodied
|in the computer and I generally like Commodore and its pricing policies.
|On the other hand, I despise Apple for gouging its buyers ever since
|they came out with the Apple II back in 1978(?).  I want Commodore to
|do really well, so that a lot of us can afford well-thought-out
|computers.  I want Apple to do okay so that there is competition in
|the market, especially against IBM and the clone horde.
|
|What _I_ feel is Commodores most pressing need is some operating
|system standards for 1) add-on hardware such as video boards 2) object
|oriented data formats (like PICT for the Mac) (if this doesn't exist
|already) 3) hmmm... let's see, printers and I/O devices are already
|handled fairly well; I can't really think of anything else right now.

PLEADING REQUEST: Could people PLEASE stop saying 'I want some add on video
boards.' If you haven't heard the rumors or seen the products of all
the video boards being developed then I suggest you do. (e.g.HAM-E, DCTV,
Ulowell, G300, M.A.S.T.'s, Toaster, Firecracker,etc)

|Heck, I just remembered another peeve.  Why oh WHY? on the 3000 was
|there not enough memory put into the deinterlacer to support the
|Super-Hires mode?  It's SO BOGUS!  You have all these video modes
|which you can display on a 30 khz monitor EXCEPT for Super-Hires!
|You need a multi-sync just for this one mode.  What's so bad about
|that, you may ask, given that multisyncs don't cost so much now?
|What's so bad is that when future video modes appear that require
|a 60 khz monitor (the ULowell board?) you won't be able to find
|a monitor that can sync from 15-60 khz to display every mode!
|There might be some monitors like that, but I've not seen any.
|Most multisyncs go from 15-35 khz _OR_ 30-60 khz.  Could somebody
|prove me wrong and point out an affordable monitor that is an
|exception to this rule?

  Its because Super-Hires is a part of the ECS Denise which outputs
pixels twice as fast. To make the deinterlacer work with the Productivety
modes the deinterlacer would have to oversample (2x) and use faster
ram. The end affect is the deinterlacer sees every other pixel.
I think Commodore decided on a cheaper A3000 so they didn't make
the Display Enhancer oversample. (I could be wrong about all this)

|Wow, I didn't expect to write so much!  But I guess I just had to
|let the steam off sometime....


-- 
"NeXTs are useless... Mac's are irrelevent.. IBM's are futile. Amiga's,however,
are quite nice!" -Capt Jeal-Luc Amiga      |     Flames to /dev/null
Ray Cromwell   rjc@wookumz.ai.mit.edu      |   //     AMIGA!     \\
"Your software will adapt to service ours!"| \X/      AMIGA!      \X/