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The "New" Amiga Finally Releases Something
It appears that the new Amiga has actually released something - yes, in a
press release put out on the 3rd, they announced the Developers' Kit has been put out for Linux, Amiga and Java Developers. Yes, at only $99, you too can be a new Amiga Developer.
I can't believe many people are getting caught up in this total marketing scam. The only thing they are taking from the old Amiga is the name. I mean, it's great that they are trying to build a new platform and all, but why call it the Amiga? What does the old Amiga of 1984 have to do with this thing at all?
I don't know; maybe they'll come out with something and it'll be cool. But why do I have the feeling it's going to be a Caddyshack II? (or name your own bad sequel where some genius producer decides to make a movie whose only purpose is tack onto the success of the first movie)
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
But the PC has 1.44Mb disks, and the Amiga had 880Kb disks and a 512K ROM. Together, that is 1.4Mb for the Amiga, uncompressed. Many of the single disk Linux distros are compressed to fit everything on.
Of course, the Linux kernel has more features, but you would hope so considering how much more recent it is and the amount of work that hos gone into it. But being able to boot up into a full GUI, filemanager (Workbench), CLI available, many programs available on the first disk was amazing. A full preemptive multitasking OS, with autoconfig that is better than plug and play, and everything else that you all know, in only 1.4Mb. Nothing has come close since.
The Amiga was great in its day. Strict control of the hardware helped though, there was no having to support 100 different sound and graphics cards, the computer already came with the best you could get! A computer with real charisma, great games, but no killer applications, despite the superiority of the OS. WIthout the backing of business it didn't get brilliant sales except to designers and gamers.
Commodore were to blame. The managers there had no vision or foresight.
Hopefully the new Amiga will combine the best of the old Amiga with the best of other operating systems. Tao's VP technology is very good and doesn't take much of a hit on the system. The best way I could describe it is a very rich object code, and the OS loader incorporates the last stage of a compiler (very optimised) to get the best performance possible. I would bet that it would bo better on PPC, Alpha, MIPs, ARM etc than on x86 because of the limited instructions though. Also, the VP can include instructions like malloc, qsort, etc, so processor intensive applications will not be slowed down overly but core functions, as they will already exist in optimised formats.
The GUI is interesting as well. It isn't X, but it does allow anti-aliasing of text, transparency etc like Mac OS X. I don't know much else though, but it is a lot better than X, more like Berlin in a way.
A portable assembler? Isn't that another name for a C compiler?
They want developers? Then why charge for the dev kit? I would think _they_ need developers, rather than the the other way round. Feeling a bit pissed about how costs of (some) dev lits.
However, one of the parties behind this movement, the Tao group I find very interesting indeed.
Platform-independent, binary-portable high performance Java implementation? I'd sign up today.
Jouni
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Jouni Mannonen : 3D Evangelist @ SurRender3D.com
Jouni Mannonen | Game Designer, Consultant
"I for one am quite sick of having a bloated OS like linux on my HD. It's getting to the stage with GNU/linux/X that I am reminded how bloated windows was when I used to use it. Full Mandrake 7 install - 1.5Gb. Minimal - 250Mb. That story of putting linux on a floppy is bull**it."
Then don't be such a dumbass and get yourself a distro that *discourages* bloat:<http://www.slackware.com>. A reasonable non-X install with no kernel sources can be done in less then 50megs. Mandrake is installing not just the kitchen sink, but most of the plumbing in the bathroom and down to the sewer main. You don't -need- all that.
And a decent Linux install can be done to disk, it's been done, many times.
-> I hate sigs...