Saturday, October 22, 2011

AmigaOS refuses to die

I was an avid AmigaOS user in the early 90s, but my Amiga has been collecting dust in the attic for the last 15 years or so. But its fun to see that AmigaOS is not quite dead yet. AmigaOS 4.1 is available from http://www.amigaos.net/, and Hyperion seems to be putting out updates on a fairly regular basis.


But it is sad to see that Hyperion doesn't realize that for desktop computing, x86 is the only relevant hardware platform today. As long as they limit themselves to PowerPC, they will never reach other users than the old hardcore Amiga fans from the 90s -- I will simply not purchase a separate piece of pretty expensive hardware from some obscure online store in Germany for my already crowded desk just to be able to run an OS which was cool 20 years ago.

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Eclipse sucks. Or does it?

I stumbled across this long-running blog-post about people complaining about Eclipse. Pretty fun to read actually: http://techdetails.agwego.com/2007/02/23/121/. Lots of the comments are your regular aggressive internet trolls and other people venting their frustration, but there are some gold comments in there:

  • "It is like a sweet cherub that lures you in with kind smiles and a gentle touch, AND THEN, when you want to do something out of its little box of gay baby tricks, it turns into devil spawn, with the wrath of all injustice ever served, it sucks your soul dry, and makes everything black and death and hate and pain. DO NOT USE THIS SOFTWARE. You have been warned."
  • "I look back on the time I used eclipse and a dark shadow falls upon my whole being. I can see now that it was some twisted mind f*ck that I will never understand the extent of the evil behind. It is a darker, more spirited and intent evil than any else i know of on Earth. At the time of using Eclipse, its power blocked all light and i could see only darkness, a deep desperate hole that the Eclipse designers and engineers had constructed so perfectly there seemed to be no seam; no way out. I can now see past it. To all other developers that find themselves in the depths of despair that Eclipse will bring you, I offer you only solace: if you have any human soul you will defeat the dark, dark evil that lies in the lines of code of this devil-sent tool. Find the strength to defeat this great evil. Developers everywhere require it of you."

I think Bjarne Stoustrop said (about C++) that There are two kinds of programming languages: The kind everyone complains about, and the kind no one uses. This is true for Eclipse as well. For any piece of software in widespread use, you can find a number of people who think that it is a piece of shit.