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Interesting to hear about the BSD/Solaris commanalities. I've got to confess that my experience of most of the OS's I use don't stretch much further than the command-line tools - not much experience under the hood so to speak. It might be more interesting to some of the guys I work with who reckon that (for some of the apps we run) the sparc + Solaris is poor value for money. They'd love to switch to, well, anything if it can run on fast commodity hardware without them having to rip the guts of the app out.

BTW, you have nothing to apologise for. You're the kind of reasonable, level-headed downright pleasant guy/gal who I should have in my friends list.

The VMS thing? It's at least 6 months since I touched it. OpenVMS on a creaky old alpha box - so old that it's intel replacement runs rings around it - kept on mainly for a few internal legacy tools. Pretty soon, none of the users will use it, while none of the IT guys dare unplug it. A bit like that lost NetWare server.

Best,

T&K.

Why does Slashdot insist on posting anything "PPC" under the Apple category?

One of the interesting points with the Pegasos is that it's a PPC based consumer-oriented (as in non-workstation/server á la IBM) system that's NOT from Apple, it comes on a nice micro-ATX mobo, and it comes with a rather new non-Apple OS! The POP concept has come to fruition, and hopefully the Teron PX (a.k.a. "AmigaOne XE" when marketed to AmigaOS users) will also do well.

That running Mac-On-Linux on Linux on a PPC system let's you run MacOS isn't all that sensational IMO...

People might be interested in hearing a new Pegasos system has been announced for this autumn(?), which won't be hampered by the currently buggy Articia S northbridge. This will have a Marvell Discovery II northbridge (366(?) MHz DDR, gigabit ethernet...).

Shock Level 4

Considering the article and IBMs processing power goal - Question: how much processing power will it take to figure out? --- Military Budgets vs. Solving World Problems productively

"ASCI Purple, which will be built first and used to simulate nuclear tests, will be able to complete 100 thousand billion calculations per second -- a speed known as 100 teraflops that some scientists say is comparable to the human brain."

"Blue Gene/L will be able to map stars in three dimensions, analyse earthquakes, and help in oil exploration."

And considering IBM Autonomic Computing effort:

Anyone notice the flaw in Autonomic Levels?

One example of the flaw - "Level 3: Predictive
The system monitors and correlates data to recognize patterns and recommends actions that are approved and initiated by the IT staff. This reduces the dependency on deep skills and enables faster and better decision-making."

Now how is the IT staff to really understand the solution direction given by the system, unless they have a deep understanding of the problems and solution direction?

If they do not have such an understanding then how are they to approve and initiate such a solution direction?

If it is the human desire to build a machine that needs humans less and less the machine will figure out a way to help that process.

IS the computer industry that short sighted, to not see that? YES! Y2K!

Of course what IBM is really doing is playing with theory and trying to make that theory work. It doesn't mean they will be successful, even with the open invitation for all to help (OSS and GPL).

It just means they are trying. It should also be noted that IBM is the top new Patent holder, year after year. Help them solve a problem and they will patent it for their control.

Today, anyone with enough money can build the biggest and fastest, etc.. computer system........ But what it really comes down to is "Why?" what is it's intended use?

Well, for one thing, I'm an artist and lossless high-DPI scan files take up a LOT of room...

</shameless_plug>...

and yet another friend got tackled to the ground by campus security for looking like he was "on-drugs".

I'd be fucked at that school. I look like I'm on drugs most of the time. Especially if i haven't slept well (dark bags under my eyes), my allergies are acting up (red bloodshot eyes, runny red nose), or have gone too long without food and my blood sugar level has crashed (incoherent, occasionally tripping over stuff). Then they'd look at my art (shameless plug) and realize I MUST be on drugs.

But I'll bet that school turns a blind eye to teachers who come in smelling like Budweiser.

"It needs to happen." Does anyone know the details for why the POP boards never materialized? What ever happened to Silicon Fruit, Eternal Computing, Total Impact, etc? Is the lack of production a result of perceived lack of market, or a missing part from Motorola, or what?

FWIW, some of the ex Phase 5 (a former Amiga addon manufacturer) guys, in the hope of having a good platform to run their MorphOS Amiga-like OS on, have started a company to produce some PPC motherboards. Ralph Schmidt has stated that the hardware will be "mostly generic" and running LinuxPPC on it should be possible. Whether that means it will be compliant with the PREP/CHRP/POP/whatever standards is still not clear to me. And of course any time products even tangentially related to the Amiga are mentioned, peoples' Vapor Warning lights go off. Nevertheless, it's at least a ray of hope for people who are interested in such things, so I thought I would mention it here.

AS SET FORTH IN SECTION 3 OF YOUR LICENSE AGREEMENT, IF YOU DISTRIBUTE ANY SOFTWARE CREATED USING THE AMIGA SOFTWARE, YOU MUST PAY AMIGA A QUARTERLY ROYALTY. YOU ARE ALSO REQUIRED TO PROVIDE AMIGA A REPORT OF YOUR DISTRIBUTION AND THE RIGHT TO AUDIT YOUR RECORDS. To review details relating to these obligations, including the royalty rate you are obligated to pay, you may click the "Previous" button below to review the License Agreement again.

I'm sorry, but such an stupid license prevents any useful development on the platform. If you are serious about creating a new platform and gaining some market share, make the development as open as possible, and open-source it if possible in order to gain developer mind share. Are you aware of any succesful development system that is not royalty-free?

Don't get me wrong, some of the ideas are somewhat cool (a portable assembler looks neat for a VM). I would like to see an open source assembler-like VM project and/or a minimalist windowing system with alpha blending and usable font support.

You can read a very cool article on the subject here.

"Ignore them and they'll go away" - oh yes, I do remember that one. If I wasn't so weak and the vice principal wasn't so fat, I'd have been tempted to throw him in a trash can, as the locker room fuckwits often did to me, and said "can you ignore this?"

So ignoring them doesn't work, and they don't go away - or else they specialize in activities that are harder to ignore, like vandalizing my property or bodily throwing me around. Unable to get help from the school, I ended up getting in fights trying to defend myself (and losing badly) - and once in the office, they'd ask "why didn't you come to us when this was going on?"

Here and here is what I did to stay sane. (shameless plug for my site...)

As to the girl getting suspended for "casting a spell" - what does it say about the teacher that they're superstitious enough to think a flu bug must have been caused by someone practicing witchcraft? Does he think this way about other things in life too, like if there's dog poo on his porch and he's the only one in the neighborhood with a dog, does he think his neighbor psychically commanded the dog to do it?

"Ignore them and they'll go away" - oh yes, I do remember that one. If I wasn't so weak and the vice principal wasn't so fat, I'd have been tempted to throw him in a trash can, as the locker room fuckwits often did to me, and said "can you ignore this?"

So ignoring them doesn't work, and they don't go away - or else they specialize in activities that are harder to ignore, like vandalizing my property or bodily throwing me around. Unable to get help from the school, I ended up getting in fights trying to defend myself (and losing badly) - and once in the office, they'd ask "why didn't you come to us when this was going on?"

Here and here is what I did to stay sane. (shameless plug for my site...)

As to the girl getting suspended for "casting a spell" - what does it say about the teacher that they're superstitious enough to think a flu bug must have been caused by someone practicing witchcraft? Does he think this way about other things in life too, like if there's dog poo on his porch and he's the only one in the neighborhood with a dog, does he think his neighbor psychically commanded the dog to do it?

In an nutshell, the new Amiga OS based on the Taos java vm does work, but Amiga could care less about its users and their target is embedded devices and set-top boxes, not desktop apps and games that might run on a home computer. As most of you know, the initial SDK selling for $100 runs on top of RedHat linux, and you can develop many types of apps with it, but, the licensing for such applications includes this:

AS SET FORTH IN SECTION 3 OF YOUR LICENSE AGREEMENT, IF YOU DISTRIBUTE ANY SOFTWARE CREATED USING THE AMIGA SOFTWARE, YOU MUST PAY AMIGA A QUARTERLY ROYALTY. YOU ARE ALSO REQUIRED TO PROVIDE AMIGA A REPORT OF YOUR DISTRIBUTION AND THE RIGHT TO AUDIT YOUR RECORDS. To review details relating to these obligations, including the royalty rate you are obligated to pay, you may click the "Previous" button below to review the License Agreement again.

No point in reading much further into the license or taking the time to try out the SDK. If you ordered one, ask for your money back. It is a complete waste of your time.

Further, the Taos vm does not include memory protection, which makes it no better than the old Amiga for desktop apps but might be acceptable for appliances which consist of an os and just one app where if the app crashes the system is unusable anyway.

Squid is quite pessimistic though he has posted here tonight in to put a more positive spin on things.

I say fuck 'em. If you are an old Amigoid as I am then transfer those creative energies to Linux. There are plenty of good, free SDK's for developing games and more are in the works. Of course Amiga is allying with RedHat because RedHat is very interested in the internet appliance market. But this does not mean that RedHat has any plans whatsoever to incude an Amiga OS or addon with its Linux disto. Redhat has no sch plans.

The spirit of the old Amiga lives on in Linux even though the name is not the same. You might also be interested to know that Amiga Inc. is vigorously prosecuting anyone who uses the Amiga logo (in its various forms) on a website but I feel they have no right to the trademark. A trademark is more than a name, and they cannot claim to own what a user community has a much more valid claim to by imparting value to the mark. Amiga Inc. has done nothing to honor and respect their trademark, but has instead insisted on once again screwing the community with hype, false promises and licensing that makes development of software by small operators and enthusiasts next to impossible.

The terminology doesn't match up with real technology. If this thing really existed, it would be very popular. Oh yeah, and the HTML was done by the "CEO" of the company. What it seems to me they're doing is taking the rumours flying around (Linux Kernels, New Boxes) and creating a hoax. Turning it into the iMac of Amigas. And if you send money? theyWin.

And then, of course, you have to wonder about the "new" distro they're creating. What would the point be? RedHat's Rough Cuts CD has had a fully fuctional Amiga distro for quite a while. It would be stupid to create another distro to do the exact same job of another one already much more accepted.

Don't tell me someone is taking this seriously.

I've never seen Slashdot as a community. It's a news source with a built-in newsgroup.

Conversations here last as long as the story that spawned them remains on the Front Page. Form friendships? I do good if I can remember people here by their signatures. Certainly the discussions don't last long enough for people to get to KNOW each other.

There are sites that get it right - but Slashdot's focus is on the stories and the conversation, not on the community. It shows.

He was probably referring to this mail by Holger Kruse, author of the Miami TCP/IP stack and GUI for Amiga.
I don't know if his opinion concerning Linux problems with newer Internet features is right, but it sounds relatively credible (at least it did to LeFaivre).

My take: http://flyingmice.com/squid/ amiga/amiga_articles.shtml

Once you've read the page linked above you need to read this as well.

Holger Kruse on Linux TCP/IP Holger Kruse seems to know what he is talking about. I've seen several posts from him on comp.sys.amiga.sys backing up his statements, with few people arguing with him.

That press release is here. :-)