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Amiga's New SDK: A First Glance
Mike Bouma writes: "Recently it began raining news coverages about Amiga`s new OS in the mainstream press like CNN`s Digital Jam, The New York Times and Gamersdepot. The first impressions of the new SDK have been very positive. Lars Thomas Denstad has written a small article about his experiences with the new SDK so far."
That's what I find so disturbing...
Watch out if you use DC, it splits off the hydrogen and oxygen
That's kinda what I'm *trying* to do...
why the hell am I replying to this bullshit post anyhow?
If you're like me, it's because you've been up for about 30 hours without sleep...
Amiga Inc really should get their developers' site up (www.amigadev.net) if they hope to attract any developers. There's virtually no technical information up on amiga.com, nothing for developers. They've generated quite a bit of publicity, but I wonder, who is this publicity targeted to? Surely they should be courting developers at this stage.
The issue I was addressing wasn't so much hardware support as mindshare. Firstly, I agree that this is a Good Thing. Secondly, I am a fan of diversity... one person's "chaos" is usually everybody else's "choice". My lament, was that a certain operating system which shall remain nameless (oh hell, windows) managed to gain a massive mindshare in the mid-90's because the alternatives were underdeveloped. I recall with great clarity hearing over and over again in the mid-90's that Amiga was working on Wonderful Things in some secret European laboratory and that one day they would ride over the hill to save us from the... uh, evil wizard. Anyway, poor analogies aside, I must admit I feel a little disappointed. In '96 the options were: Mac (my choice... but near-bankrupt), BeOS (with two device drivers... and run by Gasse! ack!), NeXT (for less money than a BMW... and less software than Be), Linux (I admit I thought it was a science fair project... or a repackaged Xenix... how was I supposed to know?) or Winders. Really, I was waiting for Moses Amiga...
Now that it's here; the "Mac is Back" (nice hardware, my choice of colour), BeOS can be hooked up to a printer finally (and do all sorts of other fine things), NeXT is OS X (and if DP4 is in indicator, it is going to be, at the very least, a lot of fun) and Linux is, uh, well you know Linux.
Anyway, the white knight showed up only to find three other tin guys fighting the dragon... and the princess is already dead. That's all I had to say....
2 1337 4 u!
AMI, WAKE UP!
WAKE UP!
Hmm...it certainly looks dead to me. :)
BTW: I love my Amigas (500 & 2000)!!!
Later...
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
I'ts not dead. It's pining for the fijords!
- Spryguy
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
The Tao strategy seems to be a good one, and it seems to me the only road to take when their (Amiga's) hardware innovations have eight years of catching up to do. That way, if this does take off, we won't be tied to legacy hardware (or any hardware, come to think of it ;-), which is a Good Thing.
Although some dissenters won't be happy until computing is 100% true to Jay, Dave, RJ and the others' vision, it can be said that big business and monopoly practice has put paid to that for the forseeable future. If we can make the new Amiga palatable enough that most of the philosophy is intact, then maybe we can finally call it a victory of sorts.
Personally, I'll be glad to finally be able to say I code on Amigas without getting funny looks ;-)
- "How do we do it? Volume!" - The Bursar of Unseen University.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Hmmm. That's strange. I could have sworn that this 13G hard drive in my Amiga is, well, a hard drive. Guess I must be wrong.
"pathetic keyboard"
It's got all the keys, they work, what more do you need?
"No decent applications"
Depends what you mean. Other than word processors, spreadsheets, databases, games, networking software, newsreaders, mail readers, web browsers, music sequencers, gfx software...
"No multi-user"
Nope, you are wrong again. Mine has it right here. Next?
"No networking"
Interesting. So how do you explain, "Karma collector", the fact that this Amiga upon which I am typing this, is not only connected to the Internet, but, via EtherNet, is connected to 1 PC, 2 Suns and an RS6000 and acts as the gateway.router to enable them all to access the internet?
No no networking indeed! Pillock.
"I could go on"
Yes, I expect you could. And if you went on long enough, you MIGHT actually stumble over a fact, although I doubt you'd recognise one if you did.
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
--
Yes, and the source is fully available from Amiga Inc themselves, on their website.
But then, I suppose it is too much to expect people to actually CHECK before they post.
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
And how, exactly, Mr Anon, are Amiga Inc violating the GPL, hmm>
Don't be shy. Please do tell us.
BTW, before you answer, you might like to know (as you could have EASILY found out) that AInc have already released the sources to their modifications, as required by teh GPL.
So, what violations are you talking about again?
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
--
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Amiga's OS was a very nice Cambridge Computer Lab creation called tripos - programmed in BCPL if I remember rightly, ran on lotsa machines on the original Cambridge Ring, ignored the rest of the world and was ignored back by the rest of the world, including Acorn who were into reinventing the Apple II at the time.
This is not a signature.
--
Go buy a bridge rectifier (aka full wave rectifier) from Rat Shack... you can also build one out of 4 diodes. I think they've got one rated up to 250V.. not sure about amperage. Also, make sure gap between electrodes isn't too wide.
Better yet, go find an old heathkit power supply!
I remember seeing Taos in a magazine from years back, June 1994 to be exact. This whole text, is some mine, some quoted from Chris and mainly excerpts from the magazine. The magazine is called Edge, a UK videogaming magazine. I noticed the same raytraced picture was done using Taos, and there are numerous mentions of Taos systems.
..
.. they were always a favourite.
"This month Edge got a glimpse of the future, thanks to a demonstration of the Taos OS. In a nutshell, Taos enables programs coded on any machine to run on any other machine - in parallel, across any available processors in the system."
"Taos ie even more amazing when you realise that it is the product of one man's efforts, coding for his own benefit, rather than cumulative efforts of some corporate programming team"
The men denoted as the "Three Wise Men" were Chris Hinsley (inventor of Taos), Tim Moore and Francis Charig - directors of Taos Systems.
This operating system was targeted at the console industry, where Chris had the idea of producing an operating system that would manage games and aid code portability. The first step was a macro set which Chris constructed for the assemblers of all the platformers he was writing on. Rather than write in the native assembler language, he wrote in the macro language he defined; he then devised a translator which would take the binary equivalent of that macro set and translate it, on the fly, into the instructions of a particular machine.
The Taos kernel which is typically around 16K, is loaded into the processor at boot time. That kernel is specific to that particular processor. If the kernel finds it needs a translator tool, it brings in the translator as well. The application then gradually builds itself in memory: as a processor in the network needs to call functions it brings them in and binds the application.
All programs are compiled or assembled into VP code and are kept in this form on disk. The VP code is translated into the native code of the processor on which it is run only when it is needed. The translation occurs as the VP code is loaded from the disk, across the network, and into the memory of the target processor. (Note this implies distribued computing.)
However, this doesnt slow the system down: most processors can actually translate VP code into native code faster than VP code can be loaded from disk and sent across the network. And VP code is often more compact than native code; it takes up less disk space and is loaded faster.
For instance, if you had a console that booted from CDROM, a CD would be pressed so that the first thing it did would be to load up the appropriate version of Taos, place it in memory and set it running. Then it would load the game code, which would run the operating system. The operating system would then load the specific tools required for that game and execution of the game would begin.
Access to custom chips is taken care of automatically by Taos using a method called dynamic binding: individual chips are supported by VP libraries, which allow for a tool for that particular processor to be accessed by the system; the tools are bound in during runtime as they are needed. Dynamic binding also enables several processes to share tools, which is very memory efficient.
"This 'virtual processor' works like a 16-bit register RISC microprocessor, explains Chris" "But it isnt an emulated technology; it actually translates into native code and it's the native code which runs and al the translations take place during the load time of the
It is quite an effort to think of their feature list so many year ago
Hardware Independance / Load balancing / Heterogenous processing / Dynamic Binding / Multi-threading / Parallelism as well as support for MPEG / Postscript and real time polygon rendering.
In my opinion this guy is a genius, that relegates Linus to quite a mediocre status. I mean this OS is good by todays standard. I mean Linux is even now not brilliant at parallel processing and this OS can not only parallel process tasks but delegate them to entirely different chips.
To put it into perspective, at the start of 1994 only 7 million people in US had computers with CDROM drives.
I think he deserves a universal sympathy award for not patenting some of these concepts. Had these been patented you wonder whether technologies like Java and companies like Transmeta would still exist.
I hope Amiga does well
Naden
(member of www.it-guys.com)
Funtage Factor: Purple
Norway is nice country and Finland is a nice country also(And Linus comes from that country). And so is Denmark and Sweden (Lars Wirzenius) also.
Very nice that sort of virualistaion is made for amiga SDK allready before they have it running native, sort of like vmware before they got the system of operation running in the natives.
But given this is mostly a software solution, those little hardware hacks won't work. So how is this relevant?
That could be said of the whole PC world? Does 640k ring a bell anywhere? MS-DOS (dead in Windows Millenium?... could be)? Layers and layers of stuff to cover and aging (and awful) base?
I still have my Amiga, and with a 68060, at 50mhz, it sure feels faster than my 500Mhz Athlon, by the way. And it has a decent OS (much more efficient than Windoze and more ellegant and simple than UN*X)... it just doesn't play Quake (oops, I forgot. It does).
Which is plenty of reason to criticise it. Stealth marketing an OS under the Amiga name has obvious attractions from a getting sheep to buy it perspective, but it's more than a trifle misleading to people who might want something with an API and suchlike that bears a vague resemblence to the classic AmigaOS.
Will the thing have Amiga style screens?
Am I the only person to see the important issues in life?
Having looked at the article, I must say that I'm not terribly impressed with it. There are dozens of OSs (QNX, BeOS, RiscOS, etc.) that have anti-aliased text. Most OSs can do the alpha blending tricks without a hiccup. (Look at the BeOS samples for a really cool alpha blending demo) amd tje widget sets look exactly like they came out of Windows 98 (except the - + buttons which actually make sense! If this is going to be the nifty stuff in the "new" OS, then I'm not too impressed. However, what impresses me is the code/object stuff. I'm thinking, instead of a full blown OS, this would make a great addition as a Linux development environment a la GTK+.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
So basically, it's Java without Sun's APIs and without the support of any other large partner. Not quite. Just similar. This is designed to be just in time compiled, and also optimised for compact code, and a compact interpreter.
This should have considerable speed benefits.
You're just complaining because Linux doesn't have it. (Just kidding!) Seriously though, I get fed up with nay-sayers who think that a new introduction is useless. There are new opportunities in technology. There are new things to be done. For example, library calls in this OS are implemented with objects. This is very cool, because it allows the extension of functions without inturrupting other library-level stuff, and also allows object to be swapped out with different functionality. As for a VM-type environment, I think this is done pretty well. It is a lower-level (thus easier to interpret quickly) language, yet it offers a lot of functionality (via the objects) to applications. As for the alpha blending, it is quite possible that they are simply using X for a shared memory direct access to the window type of thing, and that the alpha blending they are doing (where the views in different windows were blended together) really wouldn't be possible with regular X windows. When you can add all this functionality to Linux, then you can say, "okay, this is useless." As it stands, it is quite innovative, and I hope at least some of this technology makes it into the mainstream.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I don't feel remotely threatened, I'm sick of hearing about a system that so obviously failed decades ago being resurrected (yet again).
Oh, and BTW, God is nothing more than a fairy tale told to children to keep them in line.
Gimme Gimme Gimme - Karma!
Always will be too.
The Amiga died decades ago. Get over it.
Gimme Gimme Gimme - Karma!
That's the Amiga for you.
Dead & gone.
It sure isn't going to be changing the face of computing any time in the next CENTURY!.
Get over it losers.
Gimme Gimme Gimme - Karma!
A REAL geek is on parties where there are girls present. A REAL geek tries to convert the girls over to geekhood. And of course getting laid. I know I do get laid and try to teach the girls the basics of computers.
The last thing poor ol' Amiga needs is poor reviews. At least there is some hope!
Just got a copy of the SDK, and I'm looking over the license agreement. One thing of interest: if you write and distribute a "Value Added Solution" (would that be an application?), then you agree to pay Amiga max($3 * # copies sold, 10% of gross revenue) each quarter, and also send them a report each quarter on what you've distributed, and keep records that they can audit at will. You can ask for permission to distribute a "Value Added Solution" as freeware.
It does have some interesting pictures. :) And this is NO review! It`s a first glance by a developer! Although he stated he couldn`t get it to work on Mandrake he states at devicetop.com that with the help of Amiga.Inc he solved the problem! And that the softwarte appears to fly(speed)!
Big trouble, considering that I merely qualify as a nerd.
--
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The geeks shall inherit the earth.
If all Amiga was offering was an OS, then the Amiga would be dead. However, if what they have works as they've described, then it's one more example of what the future holds.
A small, efficient means for a single binary to run on a multitude of hardware may only be a laudable goal at present, but with the predicted increases in information-appliances it could become a necessity. Especially since what Amiga (and of course, Tao) seem to be building will run any any hardware and any operating system.
The only question that remains is How Well Does It Work?
=)
Yeah, but so does BeOS.
When is the last time you went to egghead Keanue? As far as I know, they closed all their stores and went 100% virtual (ecommerce) about 3 years ago.
The real question is why they're using the name "Amiga" at all. There really isn't any similarity between the two products, except a general feeling of "coolness". It's almost as if they went out of their way to confuse people.
The first one of you to post "the Amiga was good for its day but it should die in peace" - thus demonstrating that you haven't read the article and don't know we aren't talking about the "classic" Amiga anyway - will be beaned with an A500 power supply brick.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
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Ya know, the minute I hit submit I realized I'd forgotten the ol' S/2.... oops. Personally, I chose to avoid it because it was a Big Blue project. The late 70' - early 80's (when my somewhat prejudicial views on operating systems were formed) was a time when BB was regarded by anyone who didn't wear sta-prest as being Evil Incarnate.... of course now I'm a slobbering fan of the ppc chips. My how times have changed :)
2 1337 4 u!
They would forget about their software strategy, build a KILLER transmeta based native system with a Y2K video toaster, one of the "user friendly" linux distros (Mandrake, Corel) and lots of open source video editing software and some games. Then put the whole shebang in a chassis that looked like it fell out of a time warp from 2050 and market it to the mainstream. It would fill a great niche. Oh it would have to have support for clustering of course...
I'm sorry, but it doesn't speak too well for the SDK if it not only requires Red Hat, but a specific release of Red Hat--OK, I could understand requiring version x.y or later, but this... I can't say I feel inclined to drop back a release, bringing back a list of known bugs and security holes, to accomodate the SDK. I guess we'll see whether Amiga/Tao can get rid of whatever it is that's tied to a specific version of a specific distribution of Linux.
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
-- http://thegirlorthecar.com funny dating game for guys
Then again, it could be like:
ps -elf | grep -v grep | my_backend
meaning that you can go build
whatever backends you like that works on the
.o outputs from gcc and does the final parts
itself without altering gcc.
As someone said, they do provide the source, so
this is a non-issue, but since gcc is just a
launcher for cpp,cc1 and so on, you could easily
exchange one part with your own prop. SW without
breaking the GPL.
-- I'm as unique as everyone else.
That article better not be as long and incoherent as that /. interview -- oh wait, wrong Lars.
Hmmm...evidently it's Red Hat that has the problem, so it's time to go pester Red Hat. I apologize to Amiga and Tao.
Its nice to see someone catering to the 2D crown instead of 3D gfx accelerators and software.
Troll. Anyone who has ever known an Ami user knows that the Amiga design needs only a 40Mhz processor to kill an Athlon 500 (the video doesn't waste time calculating pixel locations to memory addresses, it just sets a delay on the video gun.) It does in 2 passes what takes an Athlon 38 passes. Amiga CDTV predated WebTV. Came out same year as HTML, had IR ports + modem.
I like my Athlon and I bought an Athlon because I've never used an Amiga but I'll be running an Amiga for my web browsing and other things. Amiga's not yet much of a compiling machine.
And I like the fact you didn't read the article. True troll style.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
For all this "surprisingly fast" alpha blending, I fail to see how a VM running on top of Linux can provide faster alpha blending than an app built directly on top of Linux (implementing the same algorithms) could.
Besides, what with the entire Java mess, do we really need yet another virtual environment?
a) There were girls present.
b) People took their shirts off and danced about.
I'll be damned if I'm going to consider this guy's opinion in technical matters!
--Joakim Ziegler
there is a CNNfn transc ript available from the CNN interview. I wasn't able to hear the original so I'm not certain of its accuracy.
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--
Wouldn't worry too much about the minerals and stuff. Mostly gonna be things like Calcium carbonate, which has always been present in hard water.
Anyway, my suggestion would be add salt (And keep ventolated. Chlorine gas will come off the other electrode. Nasty stuff)
A model railway or a scalextric controller is pretty good for getting a decent whack of fairly safe DC power. Worked for me anyway. As long as you only want small quantities. This will fill a test tube quite quickly.
Look, nobody's saying that anyone's suing anyone. I'm giving osm a bit of help on this matter, and I really think it would be most constructive if we didn't use this sort of hysterical language.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
But please people, lighten up and let us have our fun. If I want to spend ~$100 on an SDK for a dead platform It's my money. I don't need/want people to tell me that the platform is dead.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Amazing. Got the SDK today. I have Red Hat 6.2. Installation went without a hitch, but intent_shell and intent_media both hang. This is not an impressive beginning.
The one thing to kill linux will be fragmentation. I agree with your point of a 'standard' set by some Linux Hacker Org and Distro's running compliance against those watermarks. This will also enable to set a clear path to adding features. When will Linux stop emulating UNIX and develop what is best for Linux as an independent OS. Linux is ready to lead, it is necessary to define a modern OS and build Linux to that to maintain its momentum. =BeOS is showing what advantages exist to writing an OS without over concern for legacy code.
>didn't Amiga have 8-bit sound? I think you had
>to buy an additional soundcard to get 16 bit...
That may be so, but I can`t tell any difference between the Amiga sound and my SB16 - and maybe it`s just me, but the Amiga often sounds better (maybe it`s just all the superb musicians we had / have ?)
People are once again realizing that there is more than one OS option. Linux and Mac dented the Win32 armor and now others like BeOS and Amiga can take advantage.
It's also apparent that specialized OS's are better than General Purpose OS's on some things. Linux is better as a server than Win32, BeOS is better at multimedia than BSD, etc etc. The time is finally right for the Amiga to be able to ge noticed and taken seriously.
D
The first, last, and only tech news site on the net
No hard drive was hardly a problem when they first came out, and helped reduce the cost. In fact, the A500/A500+ was probably the only Amiga _without_ an easy interface for a hard drive (although I wasn't around for the A1000).
The keyboard again depended on which model you bought.
I would personally disagree with the applications; it never had many Microsoft applications, but that was more down to the fact that the two that did turn up on the Amiga (Amiga Basic and Word 1) were slow and buggy. I'll also admit that the applications aren't up to scratch with current ones, but they weren't bad at the time!
Multi-user, I'll admit, the Amiga doesn't really support. It can be added, but it isn't easy to. On the other hand, it was never designed to, and how many people really use multi-user on their home systems?
Networking was always an option, in the same way you can add a networking card to a PC.
What exactly do you mean no security? Are you just repeating the complaint about multi-user? Because you just complained it had no networking, so it can't be security against remote access...
Basically, you're doing the equivalent of buying a cheap 286/386/whatever, then complaining it doesn't match a server class system costing several times as much. It was never designed to, it was meant to be cheap! What it was meant to do, it did very well!
A couple things. What's the story here? Maybe I'm oblivious, but I failed to understand what was going on from the two links you posted.
Secondly, "Mr. Malda" does not equal "Andover.net," so be careful to whom you're addressing your questions.
"The Amiga SDK implements a new GCC backend, that is; instead of having GCC output Intel- or Alpha-binaries, it outputs VP code. "
Since the GCC compiler is GPL'ed, doesn't that mean that the whole modified compiler is GPL'ed and consequencly open source?
Sadly, I think this is destined to be an "also ran" in the race sheet of history.
2 1337 4 u!
That page doesn't say anything new about the SDK besides that it uses GCC and it has some demos. What features does it have? What are the APIs like?
This SDK is release 1.0. Its made for people who want to get coding right away, and for those who want to learn VP (aka Virtual Processor Assembler) as soon as possible. The SDK contains the basics for developing including the Kernel, a modified GCC (Source is available) and a few other goodies. The more advanced dev stuff such as OpenGL and the new Sound system will be added soon. I have yet to see a single person who understands what this all means to say anything negative about it. You can expect to see more and more coverage, and company after company moving to it. You just have to look at Devicetop.com to see that.
Although nobody here seems aware of it, Amiga and Tao made a deal with each other earlier this year. Get the details here
why the hell am I replying to this bullshit post anyhow?
Probably because you see inherent benefit to others in helping with experiments that result purely in a greater understanding of the physical sciences, thus encouraging people to study these phenonema full time, and help develop a greater understanding of the universe.
> No hard drive,
My A500 had a hard drive. In fact I had a SCSI hard drive first (a huge 52Mb!) before most of my PC owning friends had heard of SCSI.
> no networking
The had TCP/IP stacks. Not included as standard though. AmiTCP was a popular one which was based on the BSD stack and was stable and fast. These days, most people using Amigas use Miami. It's a modern TCP/IP stack most features anyone would want such as IP-NAT, automatic SOCKS (a la tsocks)
> , no security
Okay, you got me!
> no decent applications
I think some of the apps were/are good. The only remaining use I have for my amiga (my A4000) is on my LAN as a web client, using my Linux box as a proxy. I would say that no single browser available for the Amiga beats netscape on linux, but the variety available (three fairly good browsers: Voyager, IBrowse and AWeb) are pretty good, fast (thats not the browsers though - thats the Amiga's snappy GUI) and usually more stable than netscape so I often find myself using my amiga for a fair amount of web access.
I find it unfortunate that I find myself feeling like I have to make an excuse for still using my Amiga occasionally. It's a sorry state of affairs when others resort to spreading mis-information about things they don't understand or don't appreciate. Why can't we stick to up-to-date facts and let people make up their own minds instead?
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
osm - Open Source Man
Trollus Opensourcus
Habitat - Slashdot
Very rare. poss. extinct.
The osm was until recently a common Troll on Slashdot. It had a distinctive Trolling call sounding like long science fiction parody stories about Natalie portman and open source man. Since osm is only capable of considering breeding with hot young actresses, a new generation of these formidable creatures seems quite unlikely.
The Amiga Foundation Layer
1994 Byte intro to Taos
Basically, it's a means of distributing closed-source software. But your one build runs on any platform to which the Amiga layer has been ported, now and in the future, and it still gets decent performance.
Hmmm... Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Amiga have 8-bit sound? I think you had to buy an additional soundcard to get 16 bit...
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
The Amiverse looks very exciting, I also found some interesting articles at devicetop.com relating to Tao/Amiga`s new OS:
Motorola`s first mobile phone based on Tao technology,
Review
Tao becomes Sun authorised JVM,
Elate first Heterogenous Multiprocessor OS,
ARM even states: "Because of the patented techniques, the intent JTE runs Java applications extremely quickly, more than 30 times faster than competitor's products."
Classic/NG Amiga article
In fact, the A500/A500+ was probably the only Amiga _without_ an easy interface for a hard drive (although I wasn't around for the A1000).
Same Zorro I connector but upside down and on the other side apparently. And its not really a bad hard disk interface, its just that you need a SCSI or IDE controller, which pushes up the cost of the disk drives.
They're Americans (and possibly Norwegian). Says it all really.
...Student, Artist, Techie - Geek *
Mong.
*
*...Slacker, Artist, Techie - Geek *
Remember: Nothing is Cool.
Apart from the fact that they hired an Amigan to design DirectX.
I take it this was the Amiga community's revenge for Amiga Basic.
What was the point?
-=-=-=-=-
-=-=-=-=-
My mom's going to kick you in the face!
No more, defunct, passed over, kicked the bucket, devoid of life, dead as a doornail, pushing up daisies, deceased, departed, exanimate
Understand now?
Gimme Gimme Gimme - Karma!
Quick question - is this something to be proud of? Scary memories of a soot-stained DVD (is that where they got the name from?) in Mary Poppins...
----
"God hates me."
----
"God hates me."
"Hate Him back - works for me"
After reading over the article, I found that I'm a bit disappointed. First thing you might want to know is that the demos with alpha blending and font rendering are actually tao's elate demos. You can find more about the tao group at:
http://www.tao-group.com/2/tao/index.html
I've seen their environment running on top of QNX, last year. The alpha blending demos were impressive but it was *entirely* at the cost of memory usage. Basically, if you looked at the memory usage, you could compute the amount of double buffering they were using to achieve the effect. (Bear in mind that this is at the cost of hardware acceleration...from what I remember, Tao's Elate is sitting on top of a JavaVM called "intent".)
So basically, it's Java without Sun's APIs and without the support of any other large partner.
BUT they are looking at HAVi ('Home Audio Video Interoperability') and other emerging standards for what IBM and QNX call "Pervasive Devices".
So what I'd like to know is - What's the value-add from Amiga? The name? A higher level API...couldn't just the tao-group do that?