OPINION PIECES------------------------------------------------------------ This document was written on 8/8/06, and last updated on 13/2/23, by James Jacobs of Amigan Software (amigansoftware@gmail.com). Mostly consisting of criticisms of annoying or reprehensible things. You should probably not read these if you are easily offended as there is a lot of swearing. :-) Additions and corrections are welcomed. Linux Windows AROS MorphOS iPhone Android Android Studio Amiga Forever Presentation Crap NES Conversions Crap SMS Conversions Visual C Codecs Wikipedia Cloud Storage Streaming Flawed Games Nero Browsers Freedoms Vampire Accelerators Amiga Community LINUX ----- The version tested was Red Hat 4.1, as found on the InfoMagic Linux Developer's Resource CDs. So things are somewhat different now but it's still pretty bad. Why is several screens of what is effectively logfile output generated and shown whenever booting the system, scrolling past too fast to be useful in any event? Why not just output information about problems encountered (which is supposed to be the UNIX philosophy anyway)? ./ to indicate the current directory? Why should this be necessary? This seems to defeat the purpose of a current directory, if you still need to prepend characters to it! Why is almost a full line worth of arguments needed to make commands such as ls give informative readable output? Why do Linux commands not display their templates? Why are they named so cryptically? grep, what the hell is that supposed to mean, why not just find? Why is / used both as a directory separator and to mean the root directory? What is wrong with : for this? Why should I have to access a CD-ROM as /mnt/cdrom? ie. why are devices represented as directories!? Why does Linux force a cryptic and archaic directory structure? Why should I have to log in to a single-user machine? Why is the GUI subsystem kludged on rather than being properly integrated? Why are many error messages not only obscure but simply wrong? Eg. if it doesn't want to run a command because it is too old, it says "command not found". Whereas it is of course found (the relevant file exists in the current directory), so clearly that is not the problem. So why not say what the real problem is, instead of lying about it? Why does software need to be compiled on the user's machine? Why is software not distributed in executable format as is the norm on every other platform? Source code should be made available in addition to, not instead of, executables. Compilation of software is the responsibility of the developer, not of each user. Why should the job not be done once on one machine, rather than requiring it to be done potentially millions of times on millions of machines? The scripts supplied to build the exectuables fail to work correctly on most machines more times than not. This also requires users to have extra software (compilers, etc.) installed on their machines. Why does changing the configuration of the OS require recompiling the OS!? Why is every error message completely cryptic and unhelpful? Why are there literally dozens of different forks of UNIX, which are all mutually incompatible, and most of which are virtually unusable? How could this ever be regarded as a good thing? Why does the GPL allow for the selling of freeware for profit by leeches? And why is it considered acceptable to distribute software without source code? It is not in the interests of the entrenched Linux industry to make the OS more usable or friendly, as this would deprive them of their support revenue stream. This, and the selling of free software, are the only two significant ways in which these parasitic companies make profits. Windoze clearly sux, but compared with Linux it comes out miles ahead. At least Windoze installation and configuration is friendly and straightforward. With Linux, even once you it is supposedly installed it is still missing a GUI, compiler, etc.; it doesn't even mount the CD-ROM! It is like trying to install Windoze and getting MS-DOS instead. It seems to be stuck in some kind of time warp. The Linux CLI is so unfriendly and powerless that is it just about useless. Eg. what would you expect Shift- Left to do? On most sensibly designed OSes, this would move the cursor left, generally to the start of the line. Not on Linux: instead it dumps a raw ANSI sequence into your command line. What fucking use is that to anyone? Oh, and it beeps at you as well, as though some kind of error has occured. Why are Linux text editors, eg. vi, so universally lame and unusable? It doesn't even support the backspace key for fuck's sake! If you are going to make your OS rely so heavily on ASCII configuration files, at least provide a decent editor for them. Even a straight port of MS-DOS EDIT would have been superior to this crap. And despite this, Linux is not even backwards-compatible, even with 100% system-legal software! I would rather use even GEOS or MS-DOS than this crap. It goes without saying that AmigaOS wipes the floor with it. Eg. echo `which metacity` > ~/.xinitrc && startx -- :1 Really user-friendly! There are dozens of issues that must be resolved in such ways. How is someone who has not previously used Linux expected to know this? How is anyone supposed to become knowledgable enough in Linux to resolve these issues if they can't install it!? And of course, why the fuck would anyone bother? WINDOWS ------- Every successive version of Windows tends to become slower, more bloated, less compatible and more restrictive. Support of parallel and serial ports is being removed. These are straightforward ports; the amount of code required to support them is negligible. Are they trying to save a few bytes out of 15Gb? An outrage for users with hardware which is rendered useless by this pointless removal of basic functionality. Similarly, you can no longer use the internal IBM-PC speaker, you can no longer format 720K disks, you can no longer run in a 640x480 screenmode, you can no longer run in 256 colours, etc. Why, when such code has been present for years and is stable and functional? If you have a double density drive it is now effectively useless. Have their customers really asked them to degrade their OS and effectively render their hardware investments useless for no perceptible benefit? I doubt it. Product Activation: a waste of bandwidth, a punishment for buyers, an invasion of privacy, a security issue, an extra problem for standalone machines. Digital Restrictions Management: yet another reason why you would want to stay away from this. This is a deliberate policy of introducing arbitrary incompatibilities and bottlenecks for absolutely no benefit, denying users the ability to utilize and safeguard data freely. Why would anyone want this crap on their system? 15Gb for an OS!? 1Gb RAM for an OS!? How large does an OS kernal, drivers for connected hardware, GUI layer, TCP/IP stack, etc. need to be? What other crap do they need to be loading? Can't they check eg. how much memory is available before trying to load extraneous crap? Instead of just refusing to work at all if insufficient resources are available for everything? Microfilth seem bent on destroying the one reason anyone would have to want to use their crap OS; namely, the ability to natively run the vast existing library of IBM-PC software. Windows XP can't properly run most MS-DOS software. Supporting such software could not be difficult, as evidenced by the fact that eg. Windows 9x can run the vast majority of these without issues. The compatibility wizard doesn't work for most programs and shouldn't be necessary anyway. OS/2 support has also been removed. Compare against eg. AmigaOS 3.9; a full OS with full compatibility with all standards-compliant Amiga software and hardware going back to 1985. At a size measured in the tens of megabytes at most. That is in reference to hard disk usage, but likewise, RAM usage is also less for AmigaOS 3.9 (6Mb RAM is the official minimum, but in practice it uses only about 2Mb). MS-DOS has been criticized in the past; Microfilth have decided to replace it with something that is just as ugly but lacks most of the functionality. Eg. the following commands have disappeared without explanation: DELTREE, CD..., DIR.EXE, etc. So now the CLI of Windows XP is less powerful than MS-DOS. Not only have Microfilth refused to release eg. security patches for known vulnerabilities in older versions of Windows, they have also refused to release information on these vulnerabilities to enable these vulnerabilities to be fixed by others. And, Microfilth have deliberately removed the ability of their development tools to generate standard Win32 binaries. Eg. recent versions of Visual C cannot and will not generate code that will run on Win9x. Contrast with the Amiga situation, where just about every development tool is able to create binaries which will work on the full range of Amiga hardware and software. Microsoft has also deliberately removed applications, drivers etc. for older versions of Windows from their site, deliberately punishing users of these versions, for no apparent reason. There is a difference between something being unsupported, and existing correctly functioning applications, drivers and patches being taken down from a website as a vindictive and greedy act. (I should mention here also that Microfilth have an annoying habit of changing all the links on their site and not even bothering to redirect to the new link (maybe the articles have even been completely removed?), so any link to something on the Microsoft site from older material is unlikely to work.) It has also deliberately forbidden third parties, via threats of litigation, from distributing well-tested and useful support files, previously freeware, for versions of Windows considered to be "obsolete", by callously withdrawing their licence to redistribute such software. Even if eg. Vista were actually good, it will nevertheless be quickly deemed obsolete by Microfilth and users will find that the new Windows will not support their current hardware, even less of their existing investment in Windows software will run on the new Windows, and woe betide them if they ever need to access Vista drivers, patches, API information, etc. And of course, any increase in the speed, RAM/mass storage capacity, etc. of the new computer that would likely be required to run their latest abomination would be swallowed up by the increased sluggishness and bloat of the new Windows. What else would you expect from a corporation which regards malware as desirable, eg. according to them, "Bonzi Buddy is an interactive character that helps you search the Web." whereas according to just about everyone else it is just malware. All this and I have not even really addressed missing features, bugs, programming annoyances, business practices, faults in other Microfilth software... The above was written at the time of Windows Vista. Since then... Windows 7 is their best OS in many ways; however system requirements are still excessive, DRM crap from Vista is still present, and problems first introduced in WinXP (eg. no access to built-in "PC" speaker, awful CLI) still remain. Windows 8/8.1 are really awful. The first thing you have to do is install Classic Shell but it is still annoying with these fucking charms; it interprets normal trackpad or touchscreen movements as gestures and pops up these fucked-up charms that have no useful functionality. I don't want any Metro shit. This is the case despite having a touchscreen. Touch support is perfectly feasible to do on the "classic desktop" and doesn't require any Metro shit. It uses a "crap(p) store" approach, therefore if you are a Metro developer you have to bend over for Microsoft; eg. you can't publish any program they don't like, can't upload your own program to your own site, you have to do/ pay whatever they want or they will yank your program at any time. You basically have to eat the same kind of shit as an iOS developer :-( . That includes adhering to their shitlicking rules. Eg. blind anti-emulator hatred: "Products that emulate a game system are not allowed on any device family" which they don't even bother to try to justify even though of course emulators are perfectly legal; I'd feel like Microsoft had fucked me in the arse if I had gone to all the hassle of porting WinArcadia to that platform while there was no rule against emulators and then they suddenly sprang that fascist shit on everyone. Another reason to be glad that I never did so. Also foisting their twisted amorality on everyone with various other stupid anti-freedom rules about glamourizing legal substances, sexually explicit content (of course not defining any specifics that would help someone determine exactly what they mean by this), violence (thus banning 90%+ of games), anything that might upset the fucking Chinese communist dictatorship (!), etc. And of course they can and do change the rules at any time with no warning or justification. It's also a completely different API from Win32, requiring much relearning, and since it's less powerful and more restrictive than the desktop, at the end the programs produced aren't as good. App stores don't protect anyone as there have been countless instances of malware on them, the app store people don't bother to evaluate them properly for malware but are swift to reject anything that doesn't meet their prudish and ambiguous content standards. Metro has to be just about the ugliest GUI in existence. It's flat so you don't get important 3D depth cues; in fact many buttons don't have a border at all so you can't even tell they are buttons without having to click them first. Most GUI elements (eg. tiles) are just white and one other colour. It is constantly bitching to activate it with these shithouse nag screens. This is despite buying it new in box, isn't the OEM (in this case Hewlett- Packard) supposed to preactivate it? Why force this on the customer? I should have pirated the damn thing, at least it would be cracked then...as usual the pirated version is superior to the legal version. So one day Media Player just randomly decides that from now on it won't show any videos, just a black screen with sound. The same videos that have been working for years in Media Player, and continue to work in MPC-HC. Nothing has meanwhile changed on my system, so no reason for it to suddenly stop working. The damn program doesn't have a proper menu bar, so I have to right click to get a context menu. I click "Help with playback..." and it comes up with an error message basically telling me Microfilth have fucked up their website again by moving everything and thus breaking links. At the new address it complains that it needs Javashit, not sure what the hell for just to display some text about working around their bug. Anyway, so I reluctantly enable Javashit, and five minutes later I'm still waiting for the text to appear. So fuck this, I'll try another way: I bring up the context menu again, click "More options...", then "Help". A "Windows Help and Support" window comes up saying: "We can't find the topic you are looking for." (So what was the point of adding a Help button and then not actually bothering to write any help?) It suggests "Click the Back button to return to the previous page." There is no previous page so the back button does nothing, why not ghost it then? Fucking lamers. By the way, even if you have turned off "store and display a list of recent/frequently played music/pictures/video/playlists" in the privacy settings, it is still obviously tracking you because it still builds a list of everything you have ever played, it's necessary to regularly click the "Clear History" and "Clear Caches" buttons to empty out this crap which I specifically told it not to track in the first place! If you have updates turned on for Windows 7/8/8.1, you will be automatically "upgraded" to Win10. Of course this is many gigabytes, which over a metered connection is ridiculously expensive, and at the end of it you have Win10 which is terrible (see below). It is now completely impossible to trust Microsoft and therefore the only sane course of action is to disable updates completely. Windows 10 has now been inflicted on the world. I don't even know where to begin. If you had told me even five years ago that this would happen I would not have believed you. Everything you type is sent to Microsoft. The machine is in a state of semi-constant communication with their machines. You get forcibly "upgraded" at the whim of Microsoft. They have utter control over the machine because they can run whatever arbitrary code is desired, and of course they can access all your files whether they are stored locally or in the cloud. Not only is it an infringement of users' privacy, but also I don't see how any company could use Win10; the vulnerability to industrial espionage is enormous. In terms of technical or usability improvements, there seem to be bugger-all of those. Basically you can't go online at all on Win10 on any kind of metered connection because all the gigabytes of updates will chew up your allowance. Even if you use a USB modem to access a mobile network, at premium prices, Win10 considers this an "unmetered connection" unless you hack the registry. In any sane society there would be laws against this kind of shit. Those responsible should be rotting in jail. Why the fuck does Microfilth charge money for security patches and other bug fixes!? They deliberately sell a bug-ridden product, full of defects, then charge extra if you want those defects fixed! Eg. for WinXP, they are still fixing various bugs (the fact that they are still fixing bugs 17 years after its release indicates how utterly bug-ridden the original product was), but refuse to provide such fixes unless you pay exorbitant charges. ("The service will issue patches for critical vulnerabilities and some rated as important, but not for vulnerabilities rated moderate or low, Computerworld reported. It will cost about $200 per device per year, plus extra charges for some of the important patches.") If they cared at all about users' security and goodwill or even their own reputation they would release these for free to all users; this would not cost them anything as the fixes have already been developed. AROS ---- Note that this hasn't been updated to reflect the leak of the OS3.1 source. I will just say: that leak basically removes AROS's only reason for existence. AROS isn't ready for any serious use and is missing core functionality. If all you want to do is run CLI programs or obsolete/hacky GadTools/MUI stuff you could get by with AROS. And therefore as a consequence, for example, it is completely impossible to produce any ports of any ReAction- based software to AROS without completely rewriting the GUI, which is just not feasible in most cases. There are many other enhancements from OS3.5/ 3.9 that are missing from AROS (and MOS and OS4 too for that matter); I can't believe this is the case but it is. OS3.9 is now over a decade old so I'm not quite sure why the delay. I understand that the sources are not available but neither are OS3.1 sources (nor Windows sources and WINE manages to emulate Windows). It's somewhat analogous to if WINE only supported up to Win95. There are hundreds of ReAction-based programs available. I should also make the point that coders who want their code to be easily portable to AROS and MOS are forced to use MUI (or GadTools); they would not necessarily make such a decision if all the GUIs were available on all platforms. Therefore, this means more MUI programs than would otherwise be the case. But even if, for the sake of argument, it was 75% MUI and 25% ReAction, it shouldn't really matter; it's like saying "Only 25% of programs access the joystick, therefore there is no point supporting joysticks". OS3.5/3.9 have had functionality for over a decade which AROS lacks, so it's not a viable option to have an Amiga compatible OS that actually isn't very compatible at all and still lacks entire subsystems, forcing anyone wanting their programs to be portable to it to avoid using any features newer than about twenty years ago. There's lots of improvements in OS3.5/3.9 compared to 3.1 and AFAICT AROS doesn't implement *any* of them. I could write a reimplementation of OS1.0 and I could truthfully call it an "Amiga compatible OS" but it wouldn't be very useful for much. The same applies (to a lesser extent) to a reimplementation of OS3.1. I'm not sure why they stopped at 3.1, do they have something against H&P? Plus of course it's ugly as all hell. There are various "initiatives" undertaken from time to time by certain people to establish "standard" methodologies for "portable" Amiga programming. They are just basically MUI-foisting attempts. The latest one is called "OpenAmiga". Basically this "standard" bans the use of any technology that AROS can't handle. Eg. ReAction is banned, OS3.5/3.9/4.x functions are banned, MOS functions are banned, basically every advance since the mid-1990s is banned. Not only is use of MUI is mandated, but also the use of SDL (the infamous rudimentary low-performance low-feature common-denominator function library)! Since when has fucking *SDL* been an Amiga standard!? If I wanted to be running programs with crap interfaces I would be using Linux (or AROS). What is the point of AmigaOS, MorphOS, AROS, or indeed any other OS, if none of the features provided by the operating system are actually used? How does SDL provide an "Amiga-like" experience? Even mandating the use of GadTools would provide more flexibility and more Amigaishness than that. Basically the philosophy here seems to be that if there is any Amiga- like OS in existence that is only half-arsed, buggy as hell and missing important features, that instead of the developers of that OS actually improving it, all Amiga application developers should start crippling their programs so that said OS can run them. I hope that there does not appear in the near future a new Amiga-like OS that is just based on OS1.0, because apparently we would all suddenly have to drop back to using only OS1.0 features. Rather than this common-denominator approach, whereby developers are forced to avoid using anything that is missing from AROS, surely it would be better to fix the incomplete OSes so they offer the complete API and can thus run the full range of Amiga software? I don't intend to write OS3.9/4.x/MOS applications that ignore half the functionality available, just because of AROS. AROS seems to be hindering the development of further quality Amiga software. AROS developers are supposedly trying to extend the functionality into other areas, ie. forking. Any AROS-specific extensions won't be used anyway under the OpenAmiga philosophy (since they wouldn't work on OS3/ OS4/MOS) so it seems a waste of time for them to be developed. No applications are written especially for AROS; they are all ports from other systems (most often AmigaOS 3.1 or Linux). So AROS-only features are pointless. Better to implement functionality from OS3.9/4.1/MOS; at least that way there are already many applications making use of those functions which can then be very easily recompiled for AROS. AROS should decide whether it wants to be Amiga-compatible or not. If so, it should fully implement the AmigaOS 3.9 (at least) API (this is not a very fast moving target, eg. they have had over a decade to implement OS3.5/3.9 functionality). If not, they should stop trying to pretend that they are. At the moment, it is really just a subset of AmigaOS at best. I used to think that eventually all functionality would be incorporated, or at least this would be attempted; however it is clear that AROS developers have very strange priorities and would rather support eg. exotic multiprocessor hardware for which there is not much software, before the basic task of being able to run the existing library of system- friendly Amiga software is achieved. Development of AROS seems to have stagnated and it does not seem likely that any of the gaping holes will be addressed. It seems likely to be limited to running mostly SDL ports and has nothing to recommend it other the fact that it will run on IBM-PC hardware. Also the AROS source code is an inferior but still arguably useful replacement for the still-unreleased OS3.1 source code. Addendum: The entire AROS community, and much of the Amiga community in general, seems to have this blind worship of OS3.1. I still don't fucking understand it. When I upgraded to OS3.5 and later OS3.9 I was so glad that I had something much better than OS3.1. I did not think that anyone would resolutely refuse to acknowledge the existence of OS3.5/3.9 because for whatever reason they don't like H&P (a company that did more to keep the Amiga alive in the late 1990s than any other). It should be evaluated on its technical merits, not this political crap. It is the best and most modern AmigaOS version available for Classic Amigas; any kind of replacement AmigaOS should therefore obviously use OS3.9 as a starting point. In the early 1990s, there was much "upgrade or die" talk in Amiga magazines in regards to users persisting with OS1.2/ 1.3. Back then there were valid reasons for some users to stick with OS1.x, such as compatibility issues. But there are no such reasons to stay with OS3.1 instead of OS3.5/3.9. Users of very weak Amigas, eg. those with 68000/68010 CPUs, won't be able to run it, admittedly. But even those users could at least use a cheap Wintel box to run OS3.9 via WinUAE. Just because there are still a few low-spec Amigas in existence is no reason to cripple OS development. Eg. there are still IBM PC ATs equipped with EGA, and floppy-only Classic Macs with 128K RAM, but development of Windows and MacOS is not hampered by considerations of this. There's just no reason for an Amiga application developer to hold back from using OS3.5+ functionality these days. (Except that AROS won't run it, but that is just a reason not to bother about AROS rather than a reason to write crippled applications.) And no reason at all for any Amiga-like OS to support only the OS3.1 API instead of the far richer OS3.9 API. Last time I tried installing it, it was hundreds of megabytes to download, but it's not actually preinstalled for some reason; you have to download a separate VM to run it in, and then install the OS according to the provided instructions, which are incorrect and don't actually result in a working AROS installation, in fact it won't even boot. Probably could get it working if I buggered around with it enough but fuck that, not wasting any more of my time on a shit OS with incorrect documentation. When confronted with the fact that OS3.5+ support is lacking, and thus some applications will not run, instead of addressing the lack of support, they instead attack all such applications. If the software is so bad, why are they bothering with AmigaOS or AROS? Why would they expect that the situation will improve in the future? How would further development of AROS help? Is the entire goal of AROS nothing more than running old OS3.1 applications from the early 1990s? If so, why all the fuss about it? That has been possible for decades. The AmigaOS 3.1 source code has also been available for many years now. Even if the contention is accepted that all modern AmigaOS software is awful, what if one far-off day some killer app is written for a modern AmigaOS? Are the AROS developers finally going to suddenly code up all the necessary intervening 25+ years of AmigaOS development? In how long a time? Or, alternatively, have they instead decided that OS3.1 is the only possible good edition, and regardless of advances in the platform they are staying firmly in 1994? Or the third option is that they take their inferior OS3.1 clone as a base and then fork it in an incompatible direction with new features no-one is likely to ever use and having nothing really to with AmigaOS. ReactOS developers didn't say "We'll just stick to Window 95 compatibility only" and didn't say "We'll fork Windows with incompatible extensions no-one will ever use", instead they at least tried to chase the official version of Windows as closely as possible regarding compatibility, performance, etc. Whereas AROS, which has the same goal, is slower, less compatible, more bloated, and has less features, than AmigaOS. That's unfortunate but those are the objectively verifable facts. This is unlikely to change as there is no interest in even acknowledging problems, let alone fixing them. If anyone points out the reason(s) why AROS is not useful for them, and/or makes a suggestion to improve it, they are attacked by the AROS zealots. Whereas you would think with a normal software project that such feedback would be welcomed. But they would rather shoot the messenger than deal with the real issues. If anyone mentions it is slow they are expected to join the dev team to fix the problem. Yet they still expect users to install and use that slow crap in the meantime. It's not even proper open source: the licence only requires source code for changes be made available upstream, not to the general public. Rather than being honest about the situation, it seems that the AROS zealots feel their time is best spent deriding all versions of AmigaOS since 3.1 (a quarter-century ago!), and all applications designed for those versions of AmigaOS. Yet they have the hypocrisy to claim that they are helping the Amiga in some way when they denigrate its official OS it has had from the very start and the few developers who still bother to produce software for it. They apparently like the Amiga or they presumably wouldn't be bothering with AROS in the first place, but they spend their time attacking users and developers of the real AmigaOS and defending flaws in their inferior clone of it. It is in their interest, or at least they seem to think it is, to denigrate AmigaOS and to spread FUD about its legality. Even though I have gone to considerable effort to facilitate ports of my software to AROS, where at all feasible, I still am treated as some kind of enemy by these AROS zealots. If the goal was to be AmigaOS and they were just limited in manpower, skill, funds, etc. and admitted this, like ReactOS, that would be fine. But they do not even have 3.9 or any other modern AmigaOS version as a goal; they seem to revel in their idolization of OS3.1. And if you like OS3.1 that much...well, we have it have had it for 25 years of course. Development of AmigaOS and its applications does not need to be limited by AROS's imperfections. The AROS zealots, who presumably should care about the Amiga, should not be trying to hold back its operating system and applications. In fact they have already caused tremendous damage with eg. their insistence on use of MUI etc. which has basically helped ensure the demise of the Amiga. And when AmigaOS gets open sourced, presumably all developers and users will shift to the official AmigaOS, and presumably AROS will be abandoned, having zero reason to exist any longer, and all the decades of work put into AROS will have been wasted. MORPHOS ------- It has no documentation because the developers couldn't be bothered. They charge serious amounts of money for the OS (over $AUD100!) but then claim they "don't get paid", it is only a "hobby", etc. as an excuse for every shortcoming. Apparently they run at a loss, but surely this is their own problem (the prices the users pay are certainly high enough, maybe that is part of the problem). I'm sure even if, for example, Hyperion were losing money on AmigaOS, Microsoft losing money on Windows, or whatever, they wouldn't claim that it was just a "hobby" and they were "not being paid". If you are running at a loss because you can't attract enough users, which is the situation with MorphOS, then refusing to improve the OS by eg. documenting it is hardly going to improve the situation. It is presumably more fun for them to add new features, even if such features will never be used because they are undocumented, which seems a total waste of time. Their coding efforts seem to be mostly about adding undocumented MOS-only features which will likely never be used, rather than something useful like eg. providing a native MOS port of ReAction, or fixing some of the many bugs in the OS, or even just providing proper support for the hardware it runs on. For example, there is still no way in MOS to disable or reenable the annoying startup chime; doing this requires a different OS. Something of apparently vital importance that they seem to spend a shitload of time and effort on is pointless Easter eggs. Eg. http://morphos.lukysoft.cz/easter/ has 26 separate known Easter eggs as of 2011 (none of which are particularly amusing); there are probably dozens more by now. For some reason they have an anti-emulation bigotry. Eg. they have added code specifically to make emulation more difficult, and refused to answer technical questions from Zoltan Balaton, just saying that running MOS on QEMU is "something we did 7 years ago already". So they are losing money hand over fist and yet hate the idea of being able to run MOS on a widely available system like Wintel. They are not only annoying the community by infringing on their right to emulate but also missing out on a potential bonzanza. If just 1000 Windows users (which is less than one millionth of all Windows users) users registered MorphOS, it would mean over $AUD100,000 for the MorphOS team. Maybe then they could afford to write documentation ;-) Also, currently you have to buy a second-hand Crapintosh *plus* pay the MOS registration fee, whereas if people could use their existing Wintel machines, the registration fee therefore would be more affordable. Plus of course the advantage of not needing a separate machine, monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc. When emulation of OS4 via WinUAE became feasible there was a spike in sales of OS4. Hyperion even added features to OS4 to make it better for emulator users (eg. support for large amounts of Z3 RAM). Their cooperation with the community is a far cry from the arrogant attitude of the MorphOS team. I don't know why the MOS team would only support hardware that was already obsolete and no longer manufactured a decade ago, and then wonder why they weren't getting lots of registrations. Registration keys are locked to a specific machine, depriving users of their rights and causing deliberate and unnecessary hassle. Every MOS user has to have installed on their machine an ever-growing list of the MAC address of every revoked MOS licence ever, taking up space on the user's hard disk purely for DRM enforcement. They refuse even to provide .cd nor .ct files, which defeats the purpose of the locale system and prevents anyone from being able to translate things to another language. IPHONE ------ These relate particularly to the iPhone 3G and 4S; however, they generally apply across all iOS devices. Hardware: The keyboard is missing, and so are any kind of gaming controls, such as a D-pad. So the system is useless for most purposes. All input is apparently expected to be done via the touchscreen. However, the on-screen buttons are too small to be accurately selected with a finger, and yet no stylus is provided. Gestures are often misinterpreted as button presses, and vice versa. When playing music, the slightest shock or vibration will cause the device to change songs; this makes it impossible to eg. walk around while listening to music. Similarly, while reading PDFs, viewing web pages, etc. the device often changes the orientation of its screen; there appears no way to disable this "feature". Also not included in the package is any kind of cover or case for the device; since it lacks a clamshell such a cover or case is quite necessary to prevent scratches as it is not in any way scratch-resistant. A drop of less than one foot is sufficient to crack the screen. The phone as shipped is set to silent mode. There is an unlabelled jumper-style switch which enables the phone to actually emit ringtones. There is nothing mentioned in the settings as to what mode the phone is in; it will allow you to adjust eg. ring volume and ringtone without ever mentioning that this functionality is completely disabled by default and that you are wasting your time changing it. Why such a switch even exists is unknown, as its effects can be achieved by changing the ring volume settings. The least they could do would be to label the switch (and, of course, provide a manual with the device). When you receive an SMS, it will generally make two sounds for some bizarre reason, so the second time you check, there is no new message. It doesn't seem possible to customize most of the sounds, nor the colour scheme, which are things that can be easily done on a $20 bottom-of-the- range phone. There is no torch/light function, unlike most cheaper phones. The camera lacks a flash. The device only has one speaker. The backlight is too dim in a dark environment. The connector on the device is non-standard; what would have been wrong with a standard USB connection at both ends? Speaking of USB, where is the fucking USB port? How are you supposed to add any storage? and also it makes getting content on or off the device a hassle. Also, often the phone doesn't detect the SIM card. In such cases it's necessary to remove the SIM card and reinsert it. Apparently the newer models have no way to plug in a standard pair of headphones either, you have to buy one of their hugely overpriced adapters. What a scam! Fuck that shit. iTunes: iTunes is a huge download, in excess of 70Mb, yet completely lacks any kind of help system when operating standalone. It apparently needs to go online and download yet more crap just to give basic help. The installer asks the same stupid questions multiple times (eg. regarding Autoplay) and also gives misleading warnings that the computer is incapable of playing animations unless you download and use their equally crap QuickTime program. Then it ignores the answers to your questions; eg. even if you tell it during installation never to check for updates, this option is still ticked in the application itself, and the Crapple Software Update crapplet is still installed. It also installed a crap unwanted Firefox spyware plugin ("iTunes Application Detector") without asking. iTunes also assumes you want to waste your bandwidth in other ways too, eg. by downloading unnecessary crap such as album covers, and will not even ask before doing so, so using the program while online is inadvisable. Also, the interface is the worst I have ever seen in any program. After you "quit" iTunes, it actually persists in memory as spyware and must be killed off via eg. Task Manager. Even after you uninstall it, it still leaves parts of itself behind. It seems it is keeping a backup of the contents of every iDevice that has been used on that computer. Additionally, the program is unreliable and on half the machines tested it simply would not recognize that there was a device attached to the machine, and therefore would not do anything useful. Judging from forum posts, this is a common issue. The messages are also contradictory; eg. you can get "Sync is complete. OK to disconnect" on the computer while you are getting "Sync in progress" on device. Also, apps are not always installed correctly. Eg. the "TXT Reader" app, which has presumably been vetted for quality by Crapple, since it came from their store, doesn't add itself correctly to the list of installed apps and therefore you can't add any ASCII files and so the program is utterly useless. When you do a sync, it deletes files from your device, seemingly at random. If I wanted to delete files I would have fucking said so. Battery: On the iPhone 4S in particular, battery life is very poor, approximately twelve hours; during most of this time the phone was in standby mode. Actually using the functions of the phone causes it to become quite hot. The batteries are deliberately non-replaceable; once the batteries stop charging/discharging properly the only remedy is to buy a new device. (Or to send the old device back to Crapple for battery replacement at exorbitant expense.) Additionally, the battery meter is often incorrect, even on a new device. Eg. after charging the device overnight, the battery meter was still on empty, even though the battery was in fact fully charged. Additionally, when the phone has gone flat and you plug it in to recharge it, you still can't actually use it in any way until it has charged for about half an hour, even though it is plugged into the wall. Even a $20 piece of shit Motorola phone is able to run from AC power while charging. Software: Most of the time, when receiving a call, the phone will not ring nor vibrate, regardless of settings. Apparently, the suggested fix for this is to reset the phone to factory settings each time it happens. Why not fix the fucking bug? It's rather a major issue when you are missing calls from clients, I suppose Crapple don't care though. The device as shipped cannot even view PDFs nor plain ASCII files! You are expected to go download crapplets even for such basic functions, such as ASCII text viewing, that could be easily done with built-in software 30 years ago or more. And the iBooks crapplet doesn't support ASCII, only PDF; you have to use a third-party solution for ASCII viewing. iBooks takes about 20 seconds to initialize each time it is used; this is the case even when only a couple of PDFs are on the device. While this is happening, you are shown an ugly brown bookcase which is empty. For some PDFs, each page is displayed blurred, and you have to wait several minutes (per page!) while the device unblurs it. So, you spend longer waiting for it to unblur pages than actually reading the pages. Every time you turn the page, it forgets your current zoom setting and you have to laboriously re-zoom. For some bizarre reason, probably a bug, the screen always scrolls in the opposite direction from what one would expect. Eg. if you try to scroll left, it will actually scroll right. There is no option to change this stupid behaviour. Also, on any decent OS you can click/tab a slider to change its value. However in iOS you have to put your finger exactly on the current value, then slide to the desired value, then release. The built-in "Notes" crapplet seems to use a built-in dictionary containing very few words, and any word it doesn't know is changed arbitrarily to one it does know, without even asking. So you spend more time fighting with it than actually using it. Each key on the on-screen keyboard is much smaller than a fingertip and therefore it is impossible to accurately enter text. Also, the lack of any tactile feedback means that repeated presses eventually will cause pain for ergonomic reasons. Backspacing seems to turn on the Shift key sometimes for no apparent reason. Most of the built-in crapplets don't seem to work properly. Eg. Maps doesn't have any maps, just a blank grid. Really useful, not. Weather always reports the temperature as zero degrees. It was also completely unable to play any of the various video files in sundry formats which I tried with it. Crapplets such as "Stocks", which are completely useless without an Internet connection, are still shown even when such a connection is not present; there doesn't seem to be any way to hide or delete these even if you have no intention of ever using them. The device is advertised as 32Gb; however the OS requires a mind- boggling 3.9Gb, so you actually only get 28.1Gb. There's no way to delete unnecessary or unwanted parts of the OS to reclaim any of this storage, like you can do with any normal OS. The organization of the menus leaves much to be desired. Eg. to get the About information (ie. the version number of iOS), you have to go into Settings (the equivalent of Preferences)! What sane program would put its version number only on the Settings menu, rather than on eg. a Help menu? No user manual is included in the package. There is not even a user manual preloaded onto the device. If you do go to the trouble of getting the manual from the Internet, you will find that it is deficient in providing basic technical information about the device. However, they have seen fit to preload several hundred pages worth of useless legal crap onto the device instead. Aforesaid useless legal crap can't be deleted to reclaim the space, either. Deleting a photo doesn't really delete it, as it is still there on my lock screen, it has just been removed from the "Camera Roll". If I tell it to delete it, then delete the fucking thing already! Also, arbitrary restrictions are imposed on the amount of zooming permitted when viewing photos; as soon as you release your fingers, the photo snaps back to a less-zoomed state. Many phones allow animated wallpaper; this is impossible on this device. The built-in calculator is imprecise, ie. it suffers from rounding errors. Whenever you send an email, Crapple appends spammy advertisements for its products to the end of the email; these are even phrased to misleadingly give the impression that they have been deliberately added by the original sender. Digital Restrictions Management: You can't upload and download files to and from the device like you would expect. Instead, you need to download and install the bloated bug- ridden piece of shit called iTunes. This is not available for eg. AmigaOS nor Win9x, forcing the users into vendor lockin. There is no reason why the device should not be mountable as simply another drive, like any sane hardware (USB drive, MP3 player, digital camera, etc.) allows. There doesn't appear to be any kind of user-accessible filesystem either. You can't even delete music on the device, this has to be done via iTunes and takes over a minute even to delete a single file. Surely if Crapple aren't going to allow editing or even viewing of the contents of the device by normal OS mechanisms, for whatever reason, they should provide a replacement file manager. The phone as shipped is entirely useless. Unlike other phones, it requires product activation first over the Internet. For this, a normal wired connection via your computer can't be used; you must either put money into the SIM card so that the phone can go online itself, or hijack an existing Wi-Fi connection. Until this is done, the phone is inoperable. Similarly, without a SIM card, the phone is inoperable. This is despite there being no technical reason to block access to the contents of the phone, as they are not stored on the SIM. To download anything via iTunes, you need a Crapple ID. This is the case even for free downloads. And even such free downloads are encumbered with DRM crap which limits you to installing them on five "authorized" computers. Why this would be the case for free software is unknown and it makes no sense. Running a basic search on iTunes is always extremely slow, taking over 30 seconds to return a search result. Also, you can't do anything useful from a standalone computer hooked up to an iPhone because said computer must be "authorized" online by Crapple, which is obviously not possible for a standalone machine. Also, after you have paid for your own device, and gone to the hassle of writing a program to run on it, they have the gall to charge you a hundred bucks to run your own code on your own device! Additionally, the range of available apps is small due to the odious restrictions placed by Crapple on Crapp Store submissions. Eg. no emulators. There are very few decent games available, eg. the only port of Hack seems to be one that costs money and uses a text-based display. We had better-looking displays for Hack 25 years ago. It's also not even possible to go to another site for your apps, like you could do on any non-shit platform, unless you jailbreak your phone. Why the fuck is it locked down in the first place, does the damn thing belong to me, or to Crapple? Needless to say, there is no programming language of any kind included on the device, and AFAICT none available for download either. (Of course, typing on the damn thing is hell anyway :-( .) Speaking of jailbreaks, there are none available at present for current phones and iOS versions (eg. iPhone 4S running iOS 6.0), meaning the phone is effectively just a toy until such a jailbreak is released (if ever). You aren't allowed to develop for the platform using eg. Windows, AmigaOS, etc., only a Crapintosh. You aren't allowed to write apps in C nor in assembly language, what the fuck!? Emulators and other programs which perform interpretation of code are banned from the Crapp Store. Additionally, the device comes preinstalled with spyware which logs all activity and secretly sends information back to Crapple. They even have the ability to alter or remove any and all data on "your" device for any reason, or indeed for no reason at all. They even dictate what languages you are and aren't allowed to use to develop applications in! They can remotely delete any application on "your" device, even those you have paid for. They forbid development of any application that might compete with or replace their own bug-infested shit. They also force you to develop using a Crapintosh. Talk about vendor lock-in. In the past few days it has sent 56.4Mb of data to Crapple and received 26.1Mb from them. This is without installing or running any third-party apps, and without even having any credit on the account. What this data is, why it needs to be sent/received, and why permission wasn't asked is not explained anywhere. While it is possible to link two iDevices via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, there is no point in doing so as it even doesn't seem to allow the most basic functionality; eg. copying of files from one device to another. So what the fuck is the point? The Crapp Stores use some insane region locking bullshit. Wasn't the point of it to be a single site with all apps hosted there? Not dozens of different sites each with only a few apps each, and with users locked to one of those sites. If I want to download eg. a game, why should it matter what country I am in? If I wanted to release eg. a game (this won't be happening, for obvious reasons, by the way), I would presumably have to upload it to every different Crapp Store and then provide all the different links to the different Crapp Stores. Multiple DRM schemes are employed to prevent downgrading of iOS. If you ever need to downgrade the OS, because a new version is even worse in terms of restrictions, spyware, bugs, performance, compatibility, or any other reason, you're basically fucked. Music: The music player seems to be lacking even the most basic features, such as tempo (playback speed) changing, which have been in cheap MP3 players for a decade or more. There is no radio functionality either, unlike most cheap MP3 players. Let alone TV functionality. There appears to be no way to adjust the balance, no vumeter or other visuals, no graphic equalizer, and no playback speed or pitch controls. There is no way to view songs by their filename. So, if you have gone to the trouble of naming all your MP3s consistently, the device ignores this and instead uses the embedded tags, which are generally incomplete or inconsistent. Needless to say, no way of editing such tags is provided. If there are no tags, it will sort by filename: according to Crapple this is equivalent to sorting by song title, but that is bullshit as standard practice is generally to name MP3 files as "Artist - Song.mp3". If you tilt the device while playing a song, the "back" button disappears for some reason. That is, of course, only when it actually notices that you have tilted the device; most of the time it doesn't notice this action when it has been done deliberately, only when done accidentally. Safari: The browser seems not to cache any pages; therefore it is impossible to view a webpage when offline, even if you have viewed it in the past. Also, it doesn't seem to be possible to actually download anything from (or upload to) the Internet, which makes all the Internet functionality completely pointless. Not even FTP or Telnet functionality. There also appears to be no firewall of any kind. Nor any user-accessible log of Internet activity. (Of course, there is such a log kept secretly on the device, but only for Crapple's benefit.) Downloading apps larger than 50Mb on the device isn't allowed; instead you are expected to leech a connection from another computer, even if said connection is 3G and has less allocation than the one on the device. Whenever you enable or disable the net connection you have to power cycle the device for it to notice. There is no option to not load images, resulting in wasted megabytes. Scrolling is very laborious, especially scrolling from the bottom of a long webpage to the top, which is necessary after reading it if you want to use the address or search gadgets. There is a very thin scrollbar on the right side of the screen but it seems to be read-only. There don't seem to be any drop-down menus nor pop-up menus. ANDROID ------- This is based on the Alcatel Pixi3. I was very hopeful about Android; however basically it is just a weak clone of iOS, which is itself a shit OS. It has the advantage of a real filesystem and easier sideloading, however it is even more unintuitive. You buy a device new in 2016 and it is running the obsolete Android V4.4 (October 2013). Sideloading is disabled by default, what the fuck? Thanks for adding another fucking hassle before it will work properly. The screen turns off after fuck all, another setting to fuck with. The OS is the most mystifying ever. Gestures have poor discoverability, There is never any hint of what swipes are available or what they would do. An over-reliance on vague icons without any text captions let alone tooltips for them. Trying to do one thing just causes some other undesirable thing to happen instead; you spend most of your time just trying to undo whatever the device has arbitrarily decided to do. Almost nothing is labelled, you have to guess what glyphs represent, and what pressing the buttons and glyphs do, and what gestures might be possible and what they would accomplish. Swiping doesn't work most of the time; the screen will move somewhat and then immediately return to where it had been as soon as you finish swiping. Why the fuck does it sometimes randomly decide to turn off the ringer and go into airplane mode? There are too many different screens, it isn't clear which screen is for what purpose and how they relate to one another, and no way of depth- arranging them. It has 1Gb of crapware; dozens of crap apps preinstalled on a 2Gb device, yet it is missing basic apps, eg. a PDF reader, ASCII reader, etc. 2Gb is fuck all too, why be a fucking jew if there's not even any way to expand the storage? Because there seems to be no external storage support. It also doesn't even get assigned a drive letter. Deleting crapware just hides it, doesn't actually free the space. For fuck's sake. Most of the crapware can't even be hidden. And most of the crapware is not useful without internet connection. Once it began bitching about low battery when there was still 83% remaining. Why is no gamepad built in? That would make it much more useful at a marginal cost. It is very non-obvious how to answer a call (the main function of a phone); you have to drag a pointer from one specific coordinate to another, a mechanism not generally used in other programs even on the same platform. Fumbling to get it out of your pocket will often result in it deciding to just hang up on them. During a call, you must hold the phone away from your head and yell, because ear/cheek presses are interpreted as taps, which might hang up, turn on the torch, or similar unwanted actions. Why must I grant apps all permissions they want or they can't be installed? Why does a typical APK not contain the program concerned? Ie. most programs seem to be just a downloader for the actual content. Therefore they can't be installed when offline, and there is no way to tell the total bandwidth needed. There are many of the same issues as with iPhones (see above). Eg. no stylus (despite average finger/thumb size being much larger than icons), no gamepad, etc. Why do I have to log into Google Play if I only want free apps? Why doesn't Google Play provide actual APK downloads? The end result is that you have to go to other sites for your software, adding unnecessary risk. Even just taking a call or similar, it still takes 40 seconds to get back into the PDF reader. Not that one is provided, you have to go find one yourself, with 2Gb to play with the OS is still missing basic functionality. The PDF reader takes up to 40 seconds of completely black screen each time you unsuspend it, just to show one page of text. If a page is printed sideways and you rotate the phone to more ergonomically easily read it, the fucking display rotates so that it still looks sideways. Apps seem to hang around in memory after you've quit, especially the fucking camera. Other ones you didn't want to quit just do so anyay. Speaking of the camera, it is entirely useless for taking photos at night; you will end up with a black photo, with a couple of white dots in the brightest part of the scene if you are lucky. There is no manual provided. If you go to the hassle of hunting it down online, it is too brief and doesn't cover most of the functionality. Wi-fi handling is annoying, too much fucking around; it's necessary to go into Settings just to connect, then you have to click through bullshit TOS screens in the browser before it will actually work. It is always detecting Wi-fi networks that are private and making a loud annoying noise, what the fuck good is that? There is no way to limit it to public networks. The sound it makes when a network is detected is the same one it makes when an SMS is received, so you have to check the screen each time in case someone has messaged you. Or fuck around in the settings again to fix the brain-dead default of using one ringtone for two completely unrelated events. If you happen to bump or turn over the device while playing a song, it stops the song. It can't multitask for shit, eg. you can't even begin choosing the next song to listen to until the old one has finished playing. This shit was figured out in 1985... Text input gets everything wrong because the keys are much smaller than anyone's fingers/thumbs. It changes what you are typing without even warning you, then to change it you have to erase it each time. There are three buttons at the bottom of the device with no indication of what they do. The square button often just brings up ads. Speaking of which, the "Apps" app just brings up ads, no apps. Why are there two different browsers preinstalled? They are both shithouse and you can't delete either of them! If you save a HTML page, it doesn't actually put it anywhere logical (eg. Downloads), in fact such pages are invisible and inaccessible via File Manager, and thus there is no way to copy such pages to another device, what the fuck! It fills up your storage with crap without warning you. It tells you to delete emails and applications to free up space, when no emails have ever been sent or received on the device. And as previously mentioned, the vast majority of the crapplets on the device can't be deleted, ie. the crap ones taking up all the space. If you put in an SD card, none of the apps actually bother to use it; the internal storage will continue to fill up and programs will then stop working, even if there are gigabytes of free storage on the SD card. Programming it is apparently crap; everything has to be written in Java. No wonder that even if your device is running at gigahertz frequencies you still spend most of your time waiting around. Even though it is just a layer on top of Linux, you can't actually run any Linux applications. There is no way to block calls from a particular number; every other mobile phone even decades ago was capable of this basic function. So you are at the mercy of any dickhead who wants to call you hourly to sell you the same shit you told them you didn't want an hour ago. Lots of pointless options to stop *yourself* calling certain numbers, if I don't want to call a number I just won't fucking call it, obviously. Likewise, no way to block SMSes from a prticular number so you are at the complete mercy of any spammer; of course every time you get a message you need to check it even if it spam so it is a massive waste of time, and then you miss important messages because 9 out of 10 messages are just spam and you have given up checking them in a timely manner. Google puts anti-competitive, user-hostile and developer-hostile restrictions on what apps can go in the Play Store. And this multi-billion dollar company seems to think it is ethical for them to steal 30% of donations made for support of eg. freeware open source code, or any other purpose. Additionally: FUD warnings about play protect before you can install a program. And then it interrupts in the middle of using the program to demand you send them a copy of it. USB file transfer connection randomly loses sync, requiring physical disconnection and reconnection whenever it happens. They charge a $25 fee to offer freeware in their crapp store, as blackmail if you don't want your app marked as malware. Why do i have to sign a bundle just to run it on my own device? You need to use C to have reasonable performance, and such APKs have to be bloated (to support all 4 CPUs), and yet only those 4 CPUs are supported. ANDROID STUDIO -------------- >2gb & slow as buggery, esp. eg. text editing uses weird unintuitive non-standard gui slow indexing of project whenever starting pain in the arse to generate a signed apk, have to go through a fucking wizard every time. emulator doesn't work java sux compiling can be slow ndk package should be part of it over half an hour just to load a sample project fucking ide error all the time gradle fucking sux downloads shitloads of files all the time, usually without asking cleaning doesn't actually get rid of .o nor .o.d files just creating a new empty project takes over 15 minutes and download of hundreds of megabytes it is always either loading, indexing, syncing/updating/downloading, building, initializing, etc. it's so slow that it doesn't even keep up with your typing takes several minutes to show you the visual gui layout. & it doesn't even show a cool phone around it anymore then 7 minutes to build signed bundle of hello world, no shit! and then the fuckning thing won't build anyway without warnings downloads all sorts of crap that you aren't even using seems it's fucking building every file from scratch every time, even unchanged ones, what's the fucking point of a makefile then no offline installer lots of versions of components, none are properly forward- or backward- ocmpatible. any example program ya try to compile that's more than a few mmonths old won't build. android studio is over 5gb install even for old version. no x86 version only x64. hello world is over 3mb and takes yonks to compile. STUPIDLY deep directory structures for yer projects. keeps fucking with your edits when trying to add/remove spaces etc. gets errors when building and then you build again with no changes and this time it worx. AMIGA FOREVER ------------- This is based on Amiga Forever 2006 (Pro Edition), running under Windows 98SE. But to my knowledge none of these issues mentioned have been addressed yet (as of 2018), so it's a safe bet they never will be. Before anyone wastes their money on this crap, note the following points: 1. I tried playing one of their "preconfigured" games, picked one at random (Zoom), and it crashes the whole machine (not just UAE but Windows itself too) before you even get to start playing. 2. The version of UAE they supply is obsolete and unsupported. 3. The Deathbed Vigil DVD supplied is not the official, extended, digitally-remastered one made by Dave Haynie for DVD release, it is instead one that was digitized from an old VHS tape: image/sound quality is very poor and all the extras are missing. 4. There is nothing anywhere to suggest that the commercial games included have been included legally. They are pirate versions, complete with cracktros. Yet if anyone distributes Kickstart or AmigaOS, even obsolete versions, Cloanto come down on them like a ton of bricks. Hypocrites. (Plus of course they scammed Ralph Schmidt in 2015.) 5. Most of the software supplied is just demo versions, eg. ClassAct. 6. The ROMs supplied are worse than those that are freely available: they don't work without stuffing around with keyfiles etc. 7. They haven't bothered making and including a 3.9 ROM, instead they force the warm rebooting of the emulator to apply the patches in RAM every time, making bootup times considerably longer than they need to be. (These days they have a "Kickstart 3.X" ROM, but that is unusably buggy incompatible crap, not at all like a proper 3.9 ROM.) 8. The HDF files that were apparently supposed to be included are missing. 9. The only Workbench which is there in full is 3.1 (6 disks), all the rest are just the first disk only. 10. No support for actually using the thing on anything other than Windows. Eg. like an Amiga. Obviously they don't give a fuck about the Amiga community. 11. The OS they supply is not the proper OS3.9, the world's best OS; it is instead "OS3.X", basically a crippled version of OS3.5 with many components removed or downgraded to obsolete versions. This problem still exists as of 2015. Plus, it's illegal anyway; see http://www.amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2015-12-00046-EN.html Which is ironic after all the libel and generalized FUD they have spread about H&P, their actions in shutting down community sites, etc. And of course now they are suing Hyperion, the developers of AmigaOS itself; it would be hard to imagine a move which is more of a direct blow against the Amiga community. The Settlement Agreement clearly grants Hyperion "an exclusive, perpetual, worldwide and royalty-free, transferable right and Object Code and Source Code licence to the Software in order to use, develop, modify, commercialize, distribute and market the Software in any form, on any medium, through any means and for any current or future hardware platform." and in the Definitions section: "Software means OS3.1." But Cloanto are making the spurious claim that since they had a (non- exclusive) Kickstart licence in the 1990s for the purpose of bundling a crippled version of Kickstart with Amiga Forever (similar licences were also issued to many others including eg. CU Amiga magazine), and then later were scammed by Bill McEwen into buying rights from Amino aka Amiga Inc. which they didn't possess and thus couldn't sell (as those rights had already been assigned exclusively to Hyperion in the Settlement Agreement), that this somehow makes them the sole owner of the Amiga and AmigaOS and makes the Settlement Agreement somehow magically null and void. The end result will very likely be that Hyperion is vindicated but it is wasting time and money which could be used to further develop the OS. Hyperion have shown themselves committed to furthering AmigaOS by their development of OS4 and OS3.1.4. Whereas Cloanto have done absolutely fuck- all: deleted much of OS3.9, replaced most of what was left with obsolete versions, and proudly announced "their" OS3.X. That must have taken at least 15 minutes ;-) Hacked the copyright string in their illegal Kickstart 3.1 clone and broke some functionality, must have been half an hour's work there. Anyone who seriously expects any significant upgrade of AmigaOS to come from Cloanto is a fool. The rights they are fighting about in court, they claim to have had for years. So if they had any confidence that they actually had the rights they claim, there has been nothing stopping them from enhancing AmigaOS all these years. Also they make vague promises from time to time about open sourcing AmigaOS, but that's bullshit for the same reason; nothing has been stopping them all these years, if they really have the rights they claim. (In any event it doesn't matter because the OS3.1 sources are already leaked, and Cloanto don't have the sources for OS3.5/3.9/4.) And yet they go on and on about how fucking great they are, how much they support the community, etc. when they do fuck all, just sell a free emulator with bonus crap that you could likewise get for free, milking the platform and its users dry to scam money out of suckers to fund their efforts to destroy Hyperion and thus prevent any further development of the platform. Anyone buying Amiga Forever or supporting Cloanto in any way is directly contributing to the demise of the Amiga. PRESENTATION ANNOYANCES ----------------------- One wonders why most developers find it desirable to repeatedly annoy users by inserting forced delays into games. Almost every game, from the mid-late 1980s onwards (and some older games), across virtually every platform, is guilty of this to an extent, and it is completely unnecessary. Aren't loading times a necessary annoyance? So why have these additional delays, as a further (unnecessary) annoyance? Some developers seem under the impression that they are making movies rather than games. Whilst annoying enough in movies, at least such "credit sequences" can be fast forwarded, and movies are generally watched only a few times. You are forced to watch these annoying sequences every time you load the game. The only reason I can find for these sequences is the inflated ego of the developer and complete lack of playtesting. It is not as though such screens are worthwhile to watch even once let alone at every loading of the game. The ideal design for most games would seem to be a single combined title/ options screen. If the player wants to see the introduction, they should be able to do so from this title/options screen. Similar annoyances can also be manifested by delays when losing men (eg. Penetrator for TRS-80) or at game over (eg. Shadow of the Beast for Amiga). Here are some examples of Gameboy Advance games exhibiting these faults: "Konami Collector's Series: Arcade Advance" has three loading screens, all unskippable, all of which have fade-ins and fade-outs (approx. 11 seconds total), then a fade-in, then an intro which must be clicked past, then a fade-out, then a fade-in, then a title screen which must be clicked past, then a fade-out, then a fade-in, then the game selection screen, then a fade-out, then a title screen for the game which must be clicked past, then a "game mode" selector, then a fade-out, then a fade-in to the actual start of the game. The quickest that it is possible to start a game is approx. 15 seconds. For a single game of a coin-op conversion with a 3-minute average game length, this is 1/13th of the total time. "Crazy Taxi: Catch a Ride" has four loading screens, all unskippable (approx. 27 seconds total), then a title screen, then an options screen, then the "game rules" screen, then a city selection screen, then a driver selection screen, then a forced delay while a sample is played, then a loading screen, then another forced delay while a sample is played, then you can actually play. All screens have fade-ins and fade-outs. The quickest that it is possible to start a game is approx. 45 seconds. There is a disturbing trend towards distributing effectively crippled games, requiring the player to spend dozens of hours or more of play to "unlock" the content for which they have already paid. What is the point of including content which most users will never experience? Having a choice of characters, levels, etc. is an important factor which is unreasonably limited in these games. By the time you have unlocked everything, or even most things, you will most likely be sick of the game anyway. So why do this? Prominent examples include most recent games, even otherwise good games such as Out Run 2. Would you want a word processor that restricted you to one font size until you had typed in a hundred pages? Of course not. CRAP CONVERSIONS ---------------- The reference systems used to compare these games against are generally the coin-op original, Commodore 64 and Commodore Amiga versions. In most cases the hardware of the NES/SMS is capable of supporting a decent conversion (particularly for the SMS); most of what follows is simply bad programming, bad design, censorship, etc. Note that these were tested mostly on a Game Boy Advance with the PocketNES and PocketSMS emulators; some issues may be emulator bugs. CRAP NES CONVERSIONS -------------------- 1942: The sound effects are awful and consist largely of beeps. 720 Degrees: What was wrong with the original title screen? Whenever a car drives "behind" the status panel it flickers. You can be knocked over by frisbees which are not even close to your character. The downhill is extremely short, it seems like the bottom three quarters of it was removed. The jump and slalom are even shorter. The graphics and music are awful. Archon: What happened to the selectable difficulty levels and the cyborg option? All the pieces are monochrome: light brown and dark brown. Even pieces from opposing sides use the same "light brown and dark brown" colour scheme! Not only are they despicably ugly, but it makes it more difficult to tell the two sides apart. In combat mode, the brightly-hued background makes it more difficult to tell where the combatants are, especially on a handheld. An annoying tune drones on throughout; there doesn't seem to be a way of turning this off. Arkanoid 1: The playing area is only eleven bricks wide. But, even worse, you have unlimited lives. Yes, that is correct. Another glorious triumph of the Nintendo quality assurance department. I know that most NES gamers are not very skilled but even so...! Arkanoid 2: You start at the end of the game, ie. fighting Doh. What the fuck!? Bard's Tale 1: Cut down beyond belief. Every other version, even the Spectrum version, of this game had the full city to explore. The interface is awful. Plus, the bars have only faggot drinks. What the fuck!? Bionic Commando: What the fuck!? What is all this "PLEASE INSTRUCT US" crap? It was never in the coin-op or any other version. Why do these NES developers always think they can "improve" a game by fucking it up? Also, the rope controls are pathetic; it appears, for example, that it is no longer possible to lengthen and shorten the rope as desired whilst swinging on it. Where is the first level, looks like it has been omitted? Cabal: This would probably be alright if not for the controls. The game only seems to let you throw a grenade when it feels like doing so. Seems to be some esoteric combination. Why the other button was used for rolling instead of grenade throwing is very questionable. Commando: Enemies disappear at random for no apparent reason. Defender of the Crown: The title music has been butchered; the timing and notes have been changed, it sounds terrible. Why was this done? To buy soldiers, you cannot just move the cursor to the appropriate row and move left or right, you must first press the button to select it. Then after the left/right moving, you must again press the button to deselect it before you can do anything else. Why!? Then, when you do press the button to deselect, the cursor jumps to catapults. (!) The cursor also moves at an excessively fast speed. Unlike every other version, the lands are not coloured to represent their ruler; instead, small shield glyphs are used which clutter the screen and do not such an instant appraisal of the state of play. The graphics are laughable, much worse than on the Commodore 64 version, for example. The animation on the horses is terrible, and the dismounted knights look like stick figures. Donkey Kong: Why are there only three levels? Even TRS-80 clones of this game have all four levels. Ripped off. People are expected to pay $30 for this exact same crap game on the GBA? Still with only three levels? Double Dragon: What happened to the famous title music? You do hear a mangled version of it throughout playing the game though. The sprites rather short and fat and don't look convincingly like those from the Amiga version, for example. The players are orange-pink. The game can decide to suddenly speed up to many times normal speed, where enemies will strike you several times per second; this was never in the coin-op or any other conversions. Sometimes your weapon will just disappear for no apparent reason, even if you were holding it. The whip looks like a cane when it is used. The elbow attack, throws, etc. seem to have disappeared. Controls are reversed (left to kick, right to punch). Double Dragon 2: This has most of the problems of Double Dragon 1. Also, you can only kick backwards (!). Dragon Ninja: The player has only two frames of animation for moving. The introductory text has been changed needlessly. Gauntlet 1: The characters move faster than their thrown weapons do! That is, you can actually move through your own weapon without taking damage or stopping the weapon. The speed of character movement is much too fast. The exits are coloured blue instead of black for no good reason. The treasure chests are rendered using just three different shades of brown and no other colours. Ghosts are the wrong colour (blue). Monster generators can be destroyed just by touching them. The level number is not displayed in the corner with the other status information but rather is lower on the screen and horizontally centred. The levels are not the same as those from the coin-op. There are strange but pointless information screens between each level. All the speech from the coin-op is missing. Heroes of the Lance: "Raise the Perished"? What the fuck is this? There is no such spell in any version of D&D/AD&D. Joust: The NES port of this game has fully gay sound effects. Last Ninja 2: You can see that this is crap immediately. Even the title screen is wrong; it proclaims "The Last Ninja" but the game is in fact Last Ninja 2. The graphics are very ugly, much plainer than the detailed graphics of the C64 version. As usual, the music has been stripped out and replaced with awful crap. The controls have also been changed for the worse for no apparent reason. Censorship has been applied; eg. the juggler's knives are now bowling pins. Lode Runner: The graphics have been ruined. Also, you can no longer see the entire level at a glance; instead, the level scrolls about horizontally. Despite this, the levels are still cut-down smaller versions of the proper equivalents. Maniac Mansion: The music has been stripped out and replaced with something bloody awful. The Nintendo censorship department has also been hard at work stripping out half the game and replacing it with crap. See, for example, http://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/maniac.html MULE: The graphics are horrible. The town, which used to be a single screen, has now been changed to a needlessly scrolling affair which slows down and annoys the player for no benefit. Pac-Land: The controls are completely fucked up. It doesn't seem to be possible to walk instead of running. Cherries are the same colour as the dirt making them hard to distinguish. Warps are missing, other powerups are in the wrong places and also don't work correctly. Pirates!: All the coastlines are square. The graphics are the worst of any version. The swordfighting has been ruined. Sometimes you lose gold and/or men for no apparent reason. Spy Hunter: The game runs at an unplayably fast speed, easily triple that of any other version; there is no reaction time to deal with oncoming troubles. Ultima 3-5: What the fuck? I really don't know what the programmers were on when they decided to inflict these. Rather than doing straight ports, they have opted to royally fuck these games up, stripping the atmospheric graphics and music and replacing them with crap. The interfaces are annoying in the extreme. Untouchables, The: The entire first level, at least, seems to have disappeared. So apparently they have cut out the good parts and left in only the bad parts. Winter Games: Where is Biathlon (which was the best event)? Where is Ski Jump? There is a poorly animated introductory sequence whenever the game is booted, the first half of which is unskippable. Commendations for New Zealand Story and Skate or Die. CRAP SMS CONVERSIONS -------------------- Alien Syndrome: Missing levels, no 2-player mode, changed level layouts, flickering sprites, no robots, no maps, no indicator of victims remaining to be rescued, missing weapons, crippled bosses, crap graphics (in many cases changed from the original for no apparent reason), crap sound. Even the Spectrum version pisses all over this one. Bomb Jack: Hm, square bombs, what the fuck? The graphics on this are truly awful. Flapping your arms hardly slows you down at all. There is no slowdown as you reach the top of your leap. Hang On 2: There is absolutely no sense of speed, even at 295kph. To change up a gear, you have to push down, and vice versa. HERO: They have decided to redraw all the graphics, with disastrous results. Marble Madness: You can choose from two rather lame controller orientations. The "diagonal" one has its top axis pointing up-left rather than up-right, for some absolutely insane reason. The wave on level 3 does not move (presumably because the coder was too lame to implement this). Montezuma's Revenge: Before you can start playing, you have to watch some gay intro sequence. The graphics have been redrawn, losing all the charm of the original. The levels have been altered for no good reason. Speedball 1: The game is now far too slow. The league option has been removed. Some graphics have been redrawn, badly. Wonderboy: It's now impossible to jump high enough to collect most of the objects. This fact seems to have completely escaped the playtesters. World Games: Where is Cliff Diving? If you must cut events, surely the crap ones are what should be cut, not the best one. Commendations for R-Type. VISUAL C -------- Visual C 6.0 Standard Edition lacks an optimizer. Even many PD C compilers from the 1980s included optimizers. This is supposed to be the standard C compiler for Windoze and it lacks basic functionality. In effect, the compiler is crippleware. Microfilth are deliberately bringing about the situation whereby most Windows software is slower and more bloated than it should be. This is self-evidently unwise, especially on an OS which is itself slower and more bloated than it should be. Surely a simple optimizer, if not a profiler, has been considered basic functionality for a commercial C compiler for the last 20 years or more. Microsoft has deliberately sabotaged recent releases of Visual C so that it is impossible to create Windows 9x programs with them. Even if they don't access any APIs at all! To contrast, all 680x0 Amiga compilers can compile programs which will run on OS1.0. It should be dependent only on the code being compiled as to what minimum OS is required. So these recent releases of Visual C are actually inferior to the releases they are intended to replace. There is no valid reason for it. CODECS ------ Why the fuck are there so many codecs? Each one is in effect a separate file format. It results in the situation where every video and/or music player has to support effectively hundreds if not thousands of different file formats, otherwise the user has to have many different video/music players, none of which are entirely useful. You can never be sure when downloading files whether it will actually be accessible on your machine without having to download another fucking codec (which half the time is buggy or malware) to clog up your hard disk. It also helps increase the problem of malware due to the need for even the lamest users to download and install so much crap. WIKIPEDIA --------- This site seems to be run by a bunch of total fuckwits. In the past I have spent considerable time correcting misinformation and adding new information; however you come back a few days later and your changes have been thrown away by some dickhead who has no expertise in the subject in question. When you question why this has happened, you just get some stupid rude answer; you have to justify the most minor corrections with hundreds if not thousands of words. After this the corrections might be safe for a week or two, but as soon as you stop watching it some wanker comes along and fucks it up. I've learnt my lesson: I just won't bother correcting or adding any information there in future. It seems many others have had similar experiences, which means the only people now making edits are vandals and "Wikipedians" (ie. people who spend most of their online lives resisting and reverting any attempts by experts to correct misinformation). Look up any subject in which you have a reasonable level of knowledge; you will notice many errors. Thus, it's useless for researching a subject which you don't have knowledge of, as whatever information is presented is likely to be wrong. Also the notability criteria makes no sense and is poorly applied; there are pages about the most inane trivia crap from certain games, but no entry at all about various significant hardware, software, companies, technologies and people (eg. US Gold!). Where there is information, it is generally so brief and inaccurate as to be useless. Pages which were useful and high-quality are deleted entirely without notice. Are they running out of disk space or something!? Yet they waste disk space by keeping every version ever of non-deleted articles. I reached the above conclusions many years ago, but thought perhaps the mindset there may have since improved. So, when I noticed a word ("fortunately") that clearly should not have been in an encyclopaedia, I decided to "be bold" and removed the problematic word, giving an appropriate explanation ("Removed non-NPOV wording"). At the time I was considering the possibility of becoming a more regular improver of the wiki, all being well. However, as will be seen, things have actually gotten even worse there in the past few years. But subsequently some fuckwit reverted my edit with the dismissive comment "ridiculous". So I reapplied my fix and explained in more detail on the fuckwit's talk page. The relevant policy clearly states "Wikipedia should not take a view as to whether an event was fortunate or not" and also "This policy is non-negotiable, and the principles upon which it is based cannot be superseded by other policies or guidelines, nor by editor consensus." Well, he had no answer for that one of course, so he starts with the personal attacks, just because I didn't log in first: "Why don't you have an account, or are you blocked? It does matter if your address changes with every edit. Now go away." This is in clear contravention of more of Wikipedia's own policies: "IPs are human too" states "It doesn't matter whether you are dealing with an unregistered user or not. It is you that needs to follow policy." and "Common misconceptions: They should register for an account (eg. if they want to participate): No. You need to accept their contributions, heed their suggestions and participate in consensus building with them. There is no requirement for anyone to register for an account before they can participate in the building of this encyclopedia. There is, however, a requirement on you that you behave." Also he breached the "Assume good faith" policy and "No personal attacks". So, I mentioned what was going on on the administrator's noticeboard, hoping that someone would be able to help enforce Wikipedia's own policies. But they decided to hassle me about the fact that my ISP uses dynamic IP allocation. (This is something I don't have direct control over. But those cunts at Wikipedia sure as fuck do their best to make you feel like a second class citizen regardless.) Despite their own policy being "Do not assume all IP-editors are sock puppets." At no time did anyone do anything about fixing the article, nor admonish the fuckwit for not following policy. Not following policy out of ignorance might be excusable but this prick knew the policy, as I had already pointed it out to him; he was just doing it to be a dickhead. He roped in some other cocksuckers to call me a "petulant child", "half-wit" etc. Even people who do blatant vandalism to articles often don't get treated this shabbily. He edited out my responses but left in the name calling done by his and his clique. Anyway, as I said, the admins refused to do anything. Then they said "The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion" without actually doing anything about the problematic article, nor the problematic user. "Administrator intervention against vandalism" yielded no action either. Now the page has been locked so no one can make any improvements to it. Oh well, at least he is prevented from adding his bullshit opinions to it or whatever other vandalism he had in mind. But really, the user should be punished rather than the page. Maybe the edit will stand, maybe not. Regardless, the amount of flaming and other bullshit that has occurred in relation to it has convinced me of the total worthlessness of attempting any further improvements to anything on that site. Finally, even if your edit goes ahead, you basically have to keep a watch over the page for the rest of your life in case the dickhead, or any other dickhead, reverts the change. If and when that occurs, you are right back where you started, and will likely need to produce another thousand words of justification and be engaged in another edit war. Now, if such a straightforward and plainly correct edit, consisting of the removal of one word, entirely in accordance with core Wikipedia policies, leads to the saga of bullshit hassle and personal attacks described above, why the fuck would anyone make an improvement? I shouldn't have to repeatedly quote their own policies to them and put up with all this crap, in order to do them a favour by improving their site. If I have to write a thousand words of justification for a one-word edit like this, what's the fucking point? It is just a waste of my time and the time of anyone else who wants to improve the site. And I don't need the stress. At least on my own site I have control over the content and would not spend hours working just to have all my work thrown away by some faggot lamer. There are really only three kinds of people who will do any editing of the wiki under these circumstances: (a) those who have a vested interest in shilling for some company/government/lobbyists; (b) those who obsessively bully and war with other editors as some kind of power play, enjoying the power they can wield over them and the distress they can cause; and (c) casual vandals. So of course editing it is a waste of time, and the logical conclusion is that reading it is largely a waste of time too. The reason is that mistakes, bias and misinformation are not likely to be corrected on the editing side of things, for the reasons given in the previous paragraphs, and therefore you can't trust any of the information there. If you already have knowledge of the subject matter of the article, you will notice many blatant mistakes, but you can't correct them because some dickhead will just revert it back to the mistaken version. If, on the other hand, you don't already have knowledge about it, it is even worse as you, and many others, will be learning incorrect facts. Take the Arcadia 2001 article as an example. Their references include Dark Wanker's page, which I already know to have erroneous information. Nonexistent games are listed, eg. Home Squadron. There is no link to the world's largest site for these machines, and the page linked to at the MESS wiki doesn't exist. The article makes unfounded assertions about the licensing arrangements for the system. It is stated that the system has 1K RAM, but the History_of_video_game_consoles_(second_generation) page says 512 bytes. The encyclopaedia cannot even agree with itself. The 1292 Advanced Programmable Video System article is even worse. "On many other processors an opcode 0 indicates "no operation" whereas on the 2650 it instructs the processor to Branch To Address In Immediate Register B." What the fuck!? It's actually LODZ,r0, nothing to do with branching anywhere, and there is no such thing as "Immediate Register B" (or A, for that matter)! And apparently "This was a source of many software debugging hassles for budding home programmers." Another completely unverified and subjective statement. A problem only for anyone who reads that wiki page, believes any of that false shit, and then attempts to code. Presumably written by the same lamer who wrote that crap about "Immediate Register B", no wonder he had problems if he had absolutely no understanding of 2650 programming and apparently thought he was programming for some other CPU ;-) (By the way the 2650 is generally considered as one of the more orthagonal CPUs.) Regarding cartridges, it says "later ones, such as Activision branded ones, up to 8 KBytes". Activision never released any carts, and no manufacturer ever released any 8K carts, for the system, nor for any of the other Interton-like systems. I have pointed out some of the errors here by way of example (there are several more), but don't intend to correct them there (on their site) because I'm not a fucking masochist. They have enough money to run the site for hundreds of years yet continue to persistently put up large, obtrusive, annoying demands for money where the article text is supposed to begin. These cocksuckers have pages and pages of rules about procedures that are supposed to be followed, yet they don't actually follow them. Eg. you are supposedly allowed to clean up your own talk page ("Users may freely remove comments from their own talk pages. Users may also remove some content in archiving. The removal of a warning is taken as evidence that the warning has been read by the user. This specifically includes both registered and unregistered users.") yet if you actually do so some utter fuckknuckle administrator comes along and vandalizes it by reverting the edit without cause nor explanation. Hypocrites. Then if you redo the edit you find yourself blocked from editing your own talk page (and every other page), and not only is there no way to get action taken against the vandal but there is also no way to appeal the wrongfully applied block! Why have these policies if they aren't even followed by the administrators? Who the fuck appoints these people? I guess the answer is that they are a bunch of cunts so they only appoint other cunts; it would take the mindset of a cunt to want to join a community that is nothing but bullying cunts. CLOUD STORAGE ------------- Why would I pay $10,000 to upload 1Tb (at 1c/Mb) to someone else's server, when I could have local storage at 10c/Gb? Then every time I want to access the data it must be slowly downloaded at similar exorbitant rates. Plus paying a monthly fee to the cloud storage provider for the privilege of doing so. Plus having all my data at the mercy of the provider and who knows who else, for it to be datamined, etc.? And if the provider goes out of business or has a hardware failure or I forget to/can't afford to pay the monthly fee, all the data is lost. And if I don't have Internet access for whatever reason, the data is inaccessible. That doesn't seem affordable nor secure. STREAMING --------- Why the fuck should I have to redownload something again and again, every time I want to access it? What if the site goes down or the content is removed? What if I want to access it offline? What is the point of downloading content just to immediately throw it away? If it was so crap that it wasn't worth keeping then why would you want to access it in the first place? Surely I can decide for myself whether to delete something or not. Crap sites that only support streaming (eg. YouTube) are not helping the user, it is just a way for them to inflict more ads on them. Admittedly it's possible to use third-party tools/sites such as KeepVid to save content in most situations, however why should this be necessary in the first place? And just visiting a page can start a streaming movie playing, without even hitting the play button, at massive wastage of bandwidth for both the site and the user. What is wrong with just making the AVI/MPEG/etc. files available for download? The ebook lending system operated by OpenLibrary and the Internet Archive is just silly. They have millions of books scanned, but no one is ever allowed to download these books, but one person in the whole world (yes, really!) at a time can "borrow" a book for up to a fortnight, which means that you can read it in a browser while online using some Javascript or similar crap. So what you have to do is screenshot the pages, one spread at a time. So it isn't actually preventing piracy at all, yet it is still inconveniencing the borrower and all the other users in the world. The system cannot scale because they only ever have one "copy" of a book and only one person on the planet can borrow it. The legal and financial arrangements surrounding this system, nor the reasoning behind it, do not appear to be disclosed anywhere. There are also millions of other books which seem to have a similar arrangement, except that with those ones you have to be a blind American, thus excluding over 99% of the possible audience that could benefit from the material and blatantly discriminating against almost the entire population. FLAWED GAMES ------------ These games are mostly, on the whole, really quite good; however they have just one or more really annoying flaws which almost spoil them. TRS-80: Penetrator: crap controls; annoying wait after losing each man. (A patched version from us which fixes these is available from this site.) Emerson Arcadia 2001: Grand Slam Tennis: turning is slow, imprecise and asymmetrical. MS-DOS: Pango: crap keyboard controls (eg. key repeat is not suppressed). Amiga: Barbarian (Psygnosis): not enough animation frames; jerky scrolling; slow; confusing/unergonomic icons. Black Lamp: too many enemies. Grand Monster Slam: crap bonus level ("Revenge of the Beloms"). LED Storm: look-ahead distance is too short; poor horizontal scrolling. Rolling Thunder: poor frame rate; all enemies look the same, small playfield size. Shadow of the Beast 1: maddening game over wait. Street Sports Basketball: not enough animation frames; jerky movement; incorrect frames being shown at some point(s) in the animation. Winter Olympiad '88: in downhill skiing, wrong camera angle/opaque player. Turbo: look-ahead distance is too short; poor horizontal scrolling; car is too hard to control. Uridium 2: crap bonus level. Vectorball: controls change to an unintuitive scheme while you have the ball; field takes too long to generate; not enough friction. Commodore 64: Black Lamp: too many enemies. Denaris: player sprite is too big. Target Renegade: headlock is too painful; time limit on level 4 is too tight; no variety of enemies at any given time. NERO ---- Winblows Media Player on Win8.1 doesn't even fucking work properly; it can't even burn a simple audio CD because it hangs every time in the "Processing..." stage. So I load up Nero Express to burn a CD. It says it needs some fucking "Nero BurnRights" crap to be installed before it will actually perform its main function of burning shit. I go to the link suggested, it won't work without fucking Javascript so I have to turn that on just to be able to download a fucking file from a site. First thing I get is a big fucking popup, great, how fucking professional. Also it tries to autoplay some fucking video. So anyway, there is not only nothing on that page about BurnRights but nothing else anywhere about it on the whole shitty site. So while looking for it I notice that there a 15-day trial version of Nero Burning ROM 2018 available. Why the fuck do they misleadingly call it the 2018 version when the year is 2017!? Anyway I (foolishly, in hindsight) decide to install and evaluate it, hell maybe it will actually work and I can burn a fucking CD. I click the button to get details, it claims to be only 3Mb, turns out that was a fucking bullshit lie because that's only to download a program to download the fucking program you actually want. So anyway I click the "Download" button, you would think that would commence the download but no, now it wants my fucking email address and tries to convince me to sign up for their fucking spamming list. Anyway finally it sent the file. The installer now proceeds to download over 500Mb (!) of crap over my (metered) Internet connection without once warning me or giving me any options about what (not) to install. It's fucking spyware too; lucky I noticed there was an option buried away to turn that off but with a company so lacking in any kind of ethics I have my doubts that it is honoured. I put it in the background after a while because it is so fucking slow, then a few minutes later I hear what sounds like some loud fucking advertisement, I flick back in anger and see that it has indeed decided to download and autoplay some fucking ad from YouTube, like I wasn't already exposed to enough ads on the damn site and like I hadn't already wasted half a fucking gig on this shit. (And no, I didn't get it from some dodgy download site, the domain was definitely http://www.nero.com, the same as Nero Express suggested going to. Go there yourself if you don't believe it.) OK, twenty minutes or so later it has finally downloaded/installed all the crap and I can finally start the fucking program. Well, guess what, the first fucking window that pops up is yet another fucking "Buy me" nagware kind of window, these also pop up seemingly at random while using the program when you actually try to do anything with it. I haven't even evaluated the piece of shit once yet; if I had wanted to buy it without evaluating it why would I have wasted half a gig downloading the fucking evaluation version first? So I drag over the songs I want to burn, and hit "Burn"... Oh sorry, you can only burn 100Mb onto to a CD, you have to waste about 85% of the fucking disc. So you can have about two songs on a CD. Actually there was not even any "sorry" about it when it finally deigned to tell me about this crucial crippling. It was never mentioned on the site, or by the installer, or anywhere else. So here we have a CD burner that can't actually burn a CD properly, for fuck's sake. What a fucking waste of time and bandwidth, theirs and especially mine. This is really going to endear them to potential customers!? Not only does it not work beyond 15 days but it doesn't even work properly *during* the 15 days, deliberately. And you didn't even have the basic courtesy to mention that vital fact. The vast majority of the time that I, or (I suspect) most people, burn an audio CD, they are going to want to fill it more than 15%. Even a CD single is typically considerably over 100Mb. It's like downloading a demo of a word processor where you can only type one page, real fucking useful for evaluating it in any real-world situation eh!? Except here it is worse because you are actually expected to waste real money on CDs evaluating this crap. So OF FUCKING COURSE I am going to immediately uninstall it and never use anything by that bunch of filthy cocksuckers again. But there's no uninstaller among the reams of useless crap it has added to my Start menu. I go into Control Panel to uninstall it that way. I find there that not only is the 500Mb Nero Burning ROM 2018 there but also several other pieces of even more useless Nero shit that it decided to install at the same time, much of which is completely unrelated to burning CDs, without asking. Uninstalling it all takes administrator mode and about ten minutes or more. During the process it several times forcibly opens up pages on my browser and tries to convince me I'm making the wrong decision. Why the fuck would I want to leave that crap on my system, I wanted to burn a fucking CD not a seventh of one you filthy fucking dog cunts. The uninstaller doesn't even remove everything, it leaves behind some "NeroCheck" spyware/malware crap that starts automatically when Windows does. Back in the day Nero was a reasonably well respected and trusted product and company. They have flushed all this down the crapper by these actions. The product is now nothing more than malware, specifically: crippleware, bloatware, nagware, spamware and spyware. I strongly suggest avoiding anything by this vile company, now or in the future. BROWSERS------------------------------------------------------------------ What the fuck is the matter with browsers and most web sites these days!? Whenever you update your browser, generally you end up with something worse than you started with. Not just the usual increase in size and decrease in speed that occurs, but a real decrease in functionality and user control. Eg. they remove or hide common and important used options like toggling images and/or Javascript on/off. Now supposedly you have to get some plugin that will restore the missing functionality. But then when you download the plugin, it refuses to install saying you need an even newer (and presumably even worse) version of the browser to use it! So they obviously keep changing the plugin API with every version, without any attempt at mainting compatibility, meaning plugins are well-nigh useless: plugin coders have to keep adapting their plugins for every new release of the browser, and plugin users have to redownload and reinstall all of their plugins each time too. None of these fucking plugins would be needed anyway if the browsers weren't missing basic functionality we already had over 20 years ago; missing features should be integrated properly into the program, not some kludged-together plugin afterthought crap. Browser developers just remove feature after feature. But not only does this mean important features are now missing, but the browsers don't even get any smaller or faster or more usable, because at the same time the browser developers are adding all sorts of crap to support all kinds of unnecessary and useless HTML5, Digital Restrictions Management, etc. A browser is supposed to be for rendering HTML documents and transferring files. Not for playing games, watching movies, listening to music, etc. There are specific applications for those tasks that do the job much better than any browser, rather than just bloating the browser with all manner of extraneous crap. Most of the recent browsers are even missing essential standard GUI elements such as a menu bar. How are users supposed to navigate around the functionality of the program? They brag about how secure their browsers are, yet many of the most commonly used browsers (eg. Chrome) are nothing more than spyware, sending every keystroke to corporate headquarters, which of course completely obviates your privacy, security, etc. A system running a keylogger such as Chrome is insecure by design. Recent browsers will autoplay every animation. So in the case of ads, you are forced to waste your data cap downloading crap and then annoyed further by having to watch and listen to annoying ads. In the case of an animation you actually did want, it will just stream it there and then without providing any method of actually saving the file. With an older browser, conversely, the file will be presented as a link you can right-click on and "save video as...", none of this fucking streaming shit. Also newer browsers preload all kinds of shit and do fuck-all in the way of caching previously loaded content, they don't care if your data cap is blown. After all this time they are still missing basic functionality that even ancient browsers such as AWeb have, such as telling you how many bytes a web page is transferring. Most "modern" webpages will actually cause the browser to stop responding, and eventually come up with an error message about the Javascript taking too long, and you have to stop the script, and only then can you actually interact in a normal manner with the browser or site. If a site only needs normal HTTP, newer browsers will warn the user that it is a "security risk", which is entirely false, and discourage the user from visiting. (And search engines will downgrade it in their rankings, what the fuck is the good of that I don't know. You would think they would rank sites based on their content, not irrelevant shit like this.) And if a site that does use HTTPS lets their certificate expire even momentarily, the browser will totally refuse to let the user access that site, with no user override possible. What an arrogant bunch of cunts. Not only do a lot of sites now use HTTPS unnecessarily, but they are missing support for SSL, meaning the site can't be accessed by older browsers. Of course the newer browsers are all shit though for the reasons previously mentioned :-( . Turning off images on a newer browser doesn't work properly; many images are still loaded, especially ads, defeating the whole point of it. LOSS OF DIGITAL FREEDOMS ------------------------ Many recent operating systems and applications have no respect for freedoms that used to be ubiquitously respected, eg.: the right to: be able to freely modify/delete files from your own system be able to freely modify hardware configuration without it needing "re-activation" be able to download and run programs from anywhere be able to freely choose what OS to install and the right not to: have everything you do monitored, logged and uploaded have installed programs forcibly updated/deleted/etc. have to "activate" or otherwise register your software for it to work have to keep paying rent for software or it stops working VAMPIRE ACCELERATORS -------------------- What is the point of a 68000 accelerator in 2019? The 68020 was released in 1984, 35 years ago. The Amiga base hardware configuration moved to 68020 in 1993 with the discontinuation of the Amiga 600. The Amiga operating system moved to 68020 in 1999. Most Amiga applications, at least performant modern ones, are coded to use the 68020 instruction set. Why does this accelerator not support 68020 instructions? If it can't run the majority of Amiga software, what is the point of it? Who cares how fast it is if the programs won't run? It also lacks support for an FPU, MMU, etc., further reducing the amount of software that will run. Instead of supporting the 68020, they have called their CPU a "68080" even though it can't even do things that a 68010 can do, and have added extra useless instructions it that no Amiga software has ever used, and that no Amiga compiler will generate. And of course, if these extra instructions do get used, the resulting software will be incompatible with any real (or emulated) Amiga. In terms of speed it lags far behind WinUAE running on any machine from the last decade or two. Apparently they had to hack the OS to get it to work with their non-standard incompatible hardware. Because of this they seem to hate Hyperion and instead illegally "licence" the Kickstart from Cloanto, who don't have any rights to sublicence it, and pirate the OS, while spraying unwarranted anti-Hyperion nonsense everywhere. And now they do virtue signalling by a giving token amount of money to AROS 68K instead, which as mentioned elsewhere in this document that whole project is a colossal waste of effort. Also it is massively overpriced; there are many other solutions for running Amiga software at a better price-performance ratio. AMIGA COMMUNITY --------------- The Amiga community nowadays is mostly made of trolls, taking any opportunity to launch personal attacks against developers. There have always been a few like that in the community, but in the Amiga's glory days they were outnumbered by friendly sane people. Now the friendly people have gone and only the unfriendly ones remain, it seems. If the Amiga community was small but made of friendly people then maybe the platform would be worth bothering with. But it is not only small, but the majority of the users, at least the ones who post in Amiga forums, are completely obnoxious and just drain any possible enjoyment from developing for, using or discussing Amigas. Most of the forums are very poorly moderated, users can and do hurl all kinds of abuse for no apparent reason without any consequences, with the self-selecting effect that reasonable users will flee the forums, and often the platform. I don't claim to be a particularly important developer and don't expect massive gratitude, just ordinary decency and civility. I don't mind users criticizing my software, in fact I appreciate it as it helps focus my efforts on what needs to be improved in the future. What I don't like is the personal attacks, the apparent ongoing vendettas against me from people that I didn't even have any problem with, who seem to want to make personal attacks against developers and then complain about the lack of developers and software! There are dozens of users who have posted flames, and less than a dozen who have been really friendly and helpful. Even though I have spent a lot of time developing free software for the Amiga and helping users on the forums. And of course no user has ever made any donation to encourage continued development. And software like MCE is not reviewed in Amiga Future, yet they will review just about any crap Backbone game. So the easiest thing to do is just to stop bothering. Why would I want to spend all my time working for free for this community? The handful of good users don't deserve to be blamed for the actions of the trolls but I can't justify spending time developing for just a handful of good users. A shame because the OS is good and of course there are a lot of good Amiga games. Oh well, I can keep playing them, I will even have more time to do so. In fact, I made this decision five years ago and have gradually been decreasing my involvement in the platform. There has been a polishing of the existing software. Now it has reached a level where there will be very little Amiga development henceforth. I feel more sure of that decision now than ever. Frankly the Amiga comeback has failed and it will henceforth be just a retro platform with an ever-dwindling base of increasingly rude and obnoxious users. The Amiga community will get what it deserves, which is basically nothing. There may be some further updates to AmiArcadia, Worm Wars and/or T&T as the Windows versions are updated, but any future projects will certainly be Windows-only, and development of Amiga-only programs such as MCE, Report+, etc. is unlikely to happen. The Windows community seems to have much friendlier and more reasonable, on average, and the size of the user base means I am not wasting my time. END OF DOCUMENT-----------------------------------------------------------