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First, the old Pegasos 1 (which that usenet post mentioned) is long discontinued. The parent post to yours was talking about the successor, Peg2.

Second, you might wanna let people see that post in context, including the responses to the post. Perhaps a separate link to the following retraction and apology for some of the false accusations against Genesi would be in order as well.

And do we slashdotters really need to be reminded of that Theo "The rat" De Raadt is an absofuckinglutely raving lunatic?

The old pegasos computer isn't produced longer and probably out of stock everythere. But the pegasos2 is supposed to get released during september and will future a much better price/performance ratio since it will be sold for the same price ($499) but are very likely to have three gigabit ethernet ports, PCI-X, 1-1.4GHz G4 and so on. G4 card for the old pegasos costs $200, aswell as to replace your pegasos with a pegasos2, which is a very nice price since you can/could get the pegasos for 299, pay 200 later and then have a pegasos 2.

There are other PowerPC motherboard suppliers our there still, notably Genesi Sarl which ships a Micro-ATX board of its own design, as opposed to the OEMed Mai Teron board that both TerraSoft and Eyetech have been licensing. There are a limited number of Pegasos 1 motherboards available from Genesi and a Pegasos 2 motherboard is in development for release later this year. Additionally Eyetech has been pre-selling their "AmigaONE" boards, which as I mentioned are based on the old Mai Teron design.

Please note that the current Peagsos 1 boards use the same chipset as the Teron boards, except for the addition of a chip dubbed the April which fixes some bugs in the chipset. The new Pegasos 2 boards will use a completely different chipset from Marvell.

I just thought a view people might want to read a review from a *gasp* non-linux point of view

You raise valid points that I'd like to respond to. This issue is important to me, as it will be for everyone who's been through the BeOS experience and now finds QNX offering what looks like the same situation all over again.

I think QNX RTP differs in some fundamental ways. First of all, QSSL *is* involved in a desktop effort for RTP, though indirectly. (The Phoenix Developer Consortium -- only a splash page so far) was set up to organize people who want to get involved with RTP as a desktop OS. QSSL staff are active in this organization and have been very responsive through the beta period. I can't speak with authority about the absence of desktop references on the QNX website. What I've been told is that QSSL is taking care of the underpinnings and working with the Phoenix Consortium to help extend RTP to the desktop. How this will pan out remains to be seen, of course, but the mechanism is there.

Secondly, QSSL has the advantage of being well-established in its market and can leverage this for the desktop implementation. Things like Real Player, Flash, and so on that Be has struggled to add to BeOS and are appearing only now are already part of RTP's feature set because of the OS's background in IAs, etc. This is the same arrangement Be had in mind, of course, but QSSL is just farther along.

Then there's the question of direction. Be moved away from BeOS to focus on information appliances. QSSL is already well-established in information appliances and embedded systems and is expanding to the desktop. At least superficially, it seems the vectors here look better for RTP, as far as the desktop is concerned. Admittedly, the prime reason for a desktop implementation for both companies is to have a development platform for their embedded systems, but, ever since QSSL was approached by Gateway to provide the kernel, etc. for a new Amiga OS, QSSL has been actively involved with developers, through Phoenix, to go beyond that.

Actually, then, there's more to the story of what QNX RtP is "intended for" than might first be apparent.