Linux Format forums

Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: nigel

evilnick — Wed Jun 08, 2005 1:14 pm

Author: evilnick

Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 1:14 pm

Hudzilla wrote:

Please take your flame wars elsewhere.

Paul

spoilsport

Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: nigel

Nigel — Wed Jun 08, 2005 11:22 am

Author: Nigel

Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 11:22 am

Hudzilla wrote:

Please take your flame wars elsewhere. This is not a thread about Amiga Format, Mac Format, or Flame Format, and by posting here you're just muddying the water in what are serious questions about the magazine.

Sorry

I did try to answer your questions seriously - see my first post in this thread.

RE: Re: RE: Re: nigel

Hudzilla — Wed Jun 08, 2005 10:40 am

Author: Hudzilla

Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 10:40 am

'lo,

Please take your flame wars elsewhere. This is not a thread about Amiga Format, Mac Format, or Flame Format, and by posting here you're just muddying the water in what are serious questions about the magazine.

Paul

RE: Re: RE: Re: nigel

guy — Tue Jun 07, 2005 8:37 pm

Author: guy

Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2005 8:37 pm

optimaloptimussupreme what are you on?
Can I have some?

btw, didn't Linus start out with an Amiga? He was only goaded into writing Linux when he moved on to a "Grown-up" x386 box that only ran broken OS like MS-DOS and Minix.

RE: Re: RE: Re: nigel

Flea — Tue Jun 07, 2005 2:07 am

Author: Flea

Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2005 2:07 am

nelz wrote:

I'll take you on with that. how about something like the GNOME vs. KDE piece, we could call it "Fact vs. Fantasy"

ROFLMAO

RE: Re: RE: Re: nigel

jer1ch0 — Mon Jun 06, 2005 11:25 pm

Author: jer1ch0

Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2005 11:25 pm

Love the mag and it's getting and looking better all the time. Please give Jono, Hoyt and David a bigger column.Love the Mailserver and Answers section and they should be bigger. The artwork in the "What on Earth" section is terrible - always - as is the old black and white stock photography (recently used in the php tutorial)
However I have gone from buying four pc mags a month to just one - Linux Format. No contest. Keep up the good work.

RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: nigel

Nigel — Mon Jun 06, 2005 3:25 pm

Author: Nigel

Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2005 3:25 pm

Nelz, you beat me to it...

I was surprised at just how similar the layout of the AF I dug out last night was to LXF... far more so than I remembered. Which is no bad thing, because I think the layout is pretty good.

Quote:

motorola invetd the x86 archtiecture in 1947 and it hasnt changed since

Now come on... the transistor wasn't invented until December 1947 (and no, I'm not old enough to remember it ), and it was at Bell Labs, not Motorola.

You got me interested in this Hombre chip - all the Amigas I used were 680x0 based. So I looked it up. Hombre is/was a chipset based around an HP PA-Risc processor. It's not a forerunner of it. It sounds interesting, though.

Quote:

x86 single task -which also antoher bad point are 8bit layerd becuase its cheaper then the 16bit layered as they started off with on the 286.
ask your self this how does a anything multitask not unlike a care factory many people -robot arms do differnt things at the same time in real-time
no ibc(ibm compatible) waite states - which you loose real-time then and there. Truthfully on the human does true maultitasking and real-time.
The Amiga-Hombre is always compared to the human cell no other paltform is. Why the archteicture is the same - asymetric - this enables multitasking.
Of course the os helps. one bad doesnt make it good . Great os and great hardware make it period. Well micksoft redifiens things to make it look like
its doing it as you well know - or it tries to by out he other company so it cant say anything about it.

Besides if you dont know this...humm, you can go to any site worth anythign and they will say the same thing.

Thing is, realtime and multitasking are two completely different things. The Amiga was multitasking. So are Linux, UNIX, HP-UX, AIX, SunOS, Solaris, MacOS, OS-X, VMS, MVS, Windows NT and George3 (now that really does date me !). I don't think any of them can be classed as realtime systems, though. From what I've read, Hombre was designed to act as a realtime graphics accelerator, which ain't quite the same thing.

Quote:

If this doesn't help, I don't care - yeah thats your humor %)

Glad you realised that... it was meant that way

Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: nigel

nelz — Mon Jun 06, 2005 2:43 pm

Author: nelz

Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2005 2:43 pm

I love this post, it has really made my day. The statements are even less accurate than the punctuation

optimaloptimussupreme wrote:

linux is true unix
due to it beign based on the best os amiga os3.92.

There was no AmigaOS 3.92, and 3.9 came out in 2000, so Linus would have needed a time machine to use it as a base for Linux.

optimaloptimussupreme wrote:

Oh and alot of amiga
users, till the hombre came out are in the linux communtiy -why not it was invented on an amiga

This just gets better Linux was originally written for i386 only, with no intention of cross-platform compatibility. It was only later that it was ported to other architectures, like m68k.

optimaloptimussupreme wrote:

Pci express is the zorro 4 slot zorro 7 slot what every you want to call it.

Dave Haynie, designer of the Zorro system, has stated that he wouldn't have bothered with working on it if PCI had come out sooner, due to PCI being better.

optimaloptimussupreme wrote:

Oh by the way did you know whay no body could make new amiga hardware.

The Amiga IP is owned by Gateway.

optimaloptimussupreme wrote:

Just split the maginzs into sections - not unliek the latest amiga format

What, like News, Reviews, tutorials, Cover discs etc? That's a good idea, I wonder how LXF would look if paid out like that. Let's open any issue just to see.

optimaloptimussupreme wrote:

heck if you want an interview by me email me back

I'll take you on with that. how about something like the GNOME vs. KDE piece, we could call it "Fact vs. Fantasy"

optimaloptimussupreme wrote:

you think wrong that pc cant do half the stuff the amiga can. try putting a amd64 in an old amd motherboard or putting a new intel chip you cant-
simply put x86 archtiecture sucks even intel admits to it .Hum I can put a powerpc G4 on an Amiga 1000- hum it was done it was recorded in amazing amiga
and yours amiga format.

So I can just rip the CPU out of this iBook and shove it in my A2000 or A4000? Cool! Where's my screwdriver? Why did I spend all that money on PPC accelerator cards for my Amigas when I could just force a G4 in the the 68040 processor socket?

optimaloptimussupreme wrote:

If I get time later in the week I'll pull out a few more at random and see if the programming content was any higher.

Well, there was a series on programming ARexx, by Nick, which I didn't take too much notice of because I'm a far better ARexx hacker than he could ever be , and I wrote a six part JavaScript tutorial. So yes, there were quite a few tutorials. AF used a good template for these, where they grouped them all together towards the back of the magazine.

RE: Re: RE: Re: nigel

optimaloptimussupreme — Mon Jun 06, 2005 1:56 pm

Author: optimaloptimussupreme

Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2005 1:56 pm

Linux is not AmigaOS, and LXF is also trying to reach a more professional audience

THanks god, Amiga os is better-well till the amigaos was used as a base for the new linux for the Itanium=Hombre clone so now that linux is true unix
due to it beign based on the best os amiga os3.92. 4.0 is just windos - so dont go there.%) There is true profesionlism . Oh and alot of amiga
users, till the hombre came out are in the linux communtiy -why not it was invented on an amiga and that version is still on the best version
well until now as described above. Pci express is the zorro 4 slot zorro 7 slot what every you want to call it. Oh by the way did you know whay no body
could make new amiga hardware.Intel owns the chipsets. Which is how the ITanum came about which at his point is 4 parisc chips in one -realt-time.

You wouldn't want LXF to use MacFormat or PC Format as a template, would you ?
But they are both very successful magazines in their own environment.

Template means as you should know various sections used -like programing as been asked bring that out and use it more often.
among other things.

Please explain how the Motorola 68000 series chips, on which the Amiga was based (IIRC), were multitasking in a way that x86 chips aren't ?
Surely with a single processor machine, it's the operating system that determines whether you get multitasking or not ? I thought that Linux
was conceived from the very beginning to be multitasking, like UNIX is. Hell, even Windoze claims to have (not very good) multitasking these days.

Man nigel , first linux ISNT Unix its linux well until now. ITs the whole setup motorola invetd the x86 archtiecture in 1947 and it hasnt changed since
True,smaller resitors. YOur competion Pcresource says in a prime example.
x86 single task -which also antoher bad point are 8bit layerd becuase its cheaper then the 16bit layered as they started off with on the 286.
ask your self this how does a anything multitask not unlike a care factory many people -robot arms do differnt things at the same time in real-time
no ibc(ibm compatible) waite states - which you loose real-time then and there. Truthfully on the human does true maultitasking and real-time.
The Amiga-Hombre is always compared to the human cell no other paltform is. Why the archteicture is the same - asymetric - this enables multitasking.
Of course the os helps. one bad doesnt make it good . Great os and great hardware make it period. Well micksoft redifiens things to make it look like
its doing it as you well know - or it tries to by out he other company so it cant say anything about it.

Besides if you dont know this...humm, you can go to any site worth anythign and they will say the same thing.

I'm sure Fedora Core 4 will turn up on the coverdisks soon - the other Fedora releases have. I don't understand what you are saying with regard to
SuSE Pro 3 (do you mean SuSE 9.3 Pro ?) and royalties. Please explain...

Well sell it, they dont want to give it away so when you put fedora core 4 and suse pro 3 or any newer version - sell it for -ie liek the
annual amiga special version -25 us dollars and suse gets wantever agreed % for allowing the full pro version on there.
- and spliting up the mag to 2 communitys would be a death trap. ie one games mag another profssional.
Just split the maginzs into sections - not unliek the latest amiga format heck if you want an interview by me email me back so you could put out a
special mag for 25 us dollars onthe new amiga and put old stuff and new stuff on 2 dvds. I could help .Its not retro as it has new amiga..Hombre stuff.
also.

If this doesn't help, I don't care - yeah thats your humor %)

as I think my better half got a shiny new PC around that time.
you think wrong that pc cant do half the stuff the amiga can. try putting a amd64 in an old amd motherboard or putting a new intel chip you cant-
simply put x86 archtiecture sucks even intel admits to it .Hum I can put a powerpc G4 on an Amiga 1000- hum it was done it was recorded in amazing amiga
and yours amiga format - i think.

There's 4 tutorials in the "AF Creative" section - one on getting onto the Internet, one on OctaMed (music software), one on Real3D (3D modelling) and finally one on Blitz, covering writing an HTML display program (aka web browser). 2 pages of programming in total.

There is an interesting 3 page article on getting NetBSD running on an Amiga... and 12 pages of games reviews !

If I get time later in the week I'll pull out a few more at random and see if the programming content was any higher.

See and yes there where many programming content ie the guy that won a contest from making photogentics off of the Amiga e contest. Oh yeah Paul.

HOMBRE IS HERE

Re: RE: Re: nigel

towy71 — Mon Jun 06, 2005 11:06 am

Author: towy71

Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2005 11:06 am

evilnick wrote:

AAArgh! Don't do that! Everyone will find out I've only ever had one good idea for how a magazine should work...

and you're still milking it??

Re: RE: Re: nigel

evilnick — Mon Jun 06, 2005 10:36 am

Author: evilnick

Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2005 10:36 am

Nigel wrote:

OK, optimaloptimussupreme, you got me curious, so I dug out an old Amiga Format... the first one to come to hand was issue 88, dated September 1996.

The layout is actually very similar to LXF, with news at the front, coverdisk stuff at the back, and sections in between for reviews, articles and tutorials.

AAArgh! Don't do that! Everyone will find out I've only ever had one good idea for how a magazine should work...

RE: Re: nigel

andychannelle — Mon Jun 06, 2005 9:21 am

Author: andychannelle

Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2005 9:21 am

Guy. As the writer of the Beginners/First Steps pages for the past couple of years, I should probably answer your question. I try to approach these tutorials from the perspective of a beginner who has maybe used Windows but is new to Linux, and this means avoiding the command line wherever possible. In terms of specifics, I covered Firefox extensions quite recently and have just completed a tutorial on using the RSS features in KDE 3.4 (as well as looking at some of the new features on that desktop). This will be in issue 69, and I'm doing a runthrough of GNOME 2.10 for issue 70.

Please let me know if there are any specific areas you think I should cover in the future. Fonts is a good idea that I've not done yet, so maybe I'll plan that in...

Andy

RE: Re: nigel

Nigel — Mon Jun 06, 2005 1:20 am

Author: Nigel

Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2005 1:20 am

OK, optimaloptimussupreme, you got me curious, so I dug out an old Amiga Format... the first one to come to hand was issue 88, dated September 1996. Probably one of the last ones we bought, as I think my better half got a shiny new PC around that time.

The layout is actually very similar to LXF, with news at the front, coverdisk stuff at the back, and sections in between for reviews, articles and tutorials. One of the major differences is the number of advertisers - there were loads of companies advertising software & add-ons for the Amiga.
A total of 41 pages of ads, including those for AF subscriptions, in a 114 page mag (bet Nick would give his eye teeth for that volume of advertising now )

There's 4 tutorials in the "AF Creative" section - one on getting onto the Internet, one on OctaMed (music software), one on Real3D (3D modelling) and finally one on Blitz, covering writing an HTML display program (aka web browser). 2 pages of programming in total.

There is an interesting 3 page article on getting NetBSD running on an Amiga... and 12 pages of games reviews !

If I get time later in the week I'll pull out a few more at random and see if the programming content was any higher.

Re: nigel

Nigel — Mon Jun 06, 2005 12:45 am

Author: Nigel

Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2005 12:45 am

optimaloptimussupreme wrote:

no it doesnt help nigel -you avoided some of my ? . Nick and you can do better I know.

OK, so maybe it's time to update/vary my sig

Actually, I was answering Hudzilla's questions rather than yours, and the only connection I have to LXF is as a subscriber, but as you insist...

I, too, remember Amiga Format. My wife was a subscriber for a few years - we still have the mags somewhere, probably in the loft with the A500+ which was her first serious computer. At the time I was heavily into VAX/VMS, with DOS/Win3.1 running at home because I had to - my company's software ran on DOS, VMS and SunOS at the time. The A500+ was used for games (of which there were plenty on the Amiga Format coverdisks), a bit of word processing (remember Scribble ?) and some computer art stuff. But mostly games.
We liked Amiga Format because of the games reviews, the hardware reviews and the Workbench tutorials. I don't recall a great deal of programming stuff - that would have put my better half off as she's very much a user (player) and not a programmer.
Actually, I think a lot of the spirit of Amiga Format has carried through to LXF. But to use Amiga Format as the basis for LXF is, IMHO, a mistake. Linux is not AmigaOS, and LXF is also trying to reach a more professional audience. You wouldn't want LXF to use MacFormat or PC Format as a template, would you ? But they are both very successful magazines in their own environment.

I DO think a few more programming tutorials would be nice. But until the Linux world expands sufficiently to enable LXF to fork into two magazines ("Linux Newbie Format" &" Linux Expert Format"), the magazine has to appeal to allcomers so there has to be a mix of stuff in there. Whilst I could probably find fault with the mix in any particular edition, overall I think they've got it about right.

Please explain how the Motorola 68000 series chips, on which the Amiga was based (IIRC), were multitasking in a way that x86 chips aren't ? Surely with a single processor machine, it's the operating system that determines whether you get multitasking or not ? I thought that Linux was conceived from the very beginning to be multitasking, like UNIX is. Hell, even Windoze claims to have (not very good) multitasking these days.

I'm sure Fedora Core 4 will turn up on the coverdisks soon - the other Fedora releases have. I don't understand what you are saying with regard to SuSE Pro 3 (do you mean SuSE 9.3 Pro ?) and royalties. Please explain...

---------------------------

If this doesn't help, I don't care

Nigel.

RE: nigel

guy — Sun Jun 05, 2005 8:20 pm

Author: guy

Posted: Sun Jun 05, 2005 8:20 pm

The thing I wonder about most is how LXF should treat the Windows runaways who are frightened off by all that geeky stuff.

Where a Windows HowTo tends to be "click this wizard, drag that icon...", Linux HowTos tend to be "SU to root, in wibblecgf set the blarglinit to your oggbog value..."

While the existing Linux enthusiast must be the bread-and-butter of LXF, how can it also attract newcomers to the scene?

Too often in Linux magazines I have seen "Beginners start here" sections with articels like,
"Oggbog Made Easy.
Oggbog is one of the powerful things that all newbs need to know about." (implying that without a working knowledge of it you are stuffed).
"The great thing about oggbog is that all you need to do is set the blarglinit to your oggbog value (we'll be looking at wibblecfg and blargleinit in a future article)..."

What I'm saying is that newbs need a whole different mindest behind the author's fingers. I don't often see that mindest in LXF. Is that deliberate, to make more room for the enthusiast's toys, or is it something you could look at?

Would it be a good idea to have a Beginners Corner with topics like:
Firefox Extensions.
Finding your way on the desktop, Part 4 - Fedora (and next month, Part 5 will look at Ubuntu).
Getting the best from your printer.
Working with OpenOffice Part 2 - Fonts on Windows and Linux.

These are not the sort of things that one would need to keep for reference, but I think they would reassure people that even they could use Linux for familiar, everyday stuff.
It's not about dumbing down so much as respect for the other guy's ignorance and fear.

Oh, yeah, and those questions you asked...

To answer them all at once, IMHO the quality has shot up recently. Love the way it's gone. Just one minor quibble:
The Q-and-A style can get a bit heavy after a while. I'd like to see it kept for the interviews and just the occasional "different" article. Maybe the "vs." articles could vary the format - sometimes conversational, sometimes technical blow-by-blow, maybe a picture-mag style once in a blue moon - how long could you go without repeating a format?
Coverdiscs - please keep both aspects rolling. A new distro plus some generally nice stuff is a great formula. BTW, I notice that the CD and DVD editions are now the same price. Cool.
Reader involvement. Great. Just remember it won't tell you what the people who put it back on the shelf were looking for.

One final suggestion (think I've mentioned this before). Geeks buy gadgets. Some supplier tie-ins with review/HowTo, competition, advertisements, discounts if we mention LXF, etc. etc. on favourite toys would be great. Graphics cards, webcams, VoIP phones, whatever. More of that, "Hey, I've tinkered with this long enough, let's take it for a riiiiide!"