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More On Phoenix Developer Consortium
Mike Bouma writes: "The Phoenix Developer Consortium is an developer organisation which is unhappy
with the currently available computing solutions.
John Chandler has written an article about a
small start-up company
which has been one of many developers to tap into the organisation for resource contacts and advice.
"It allowed them to extend their resources and survive the perils of being a
small company in a large world."
If you are a similar minded developer and want to join and help others or
yourself to take your Ideas2Reality contact Greenboy and include the following
information (signing
a NDA will be required). Among the members are important figures involved in the
development of OSes like the Amiga DE, MorphOS and QNX
RtP."
I see, if there already isn't one, an open version of this.
This sig intentionally left blank.
- If it gets funded
- If it gets built and
- If it's affordable and
- If it's implemented well and
- If developers rally around it and
- If consumers buy it and
- If it gets a strong application base and
- If it doesn't get bought out and quashed by current heavyweight, then
It could be the platform for you!Read the rest of this comment...
As an real, usable alternative to the currently available OSs, QNX RtP is most of the way there. It has a nice, fast, slim core architecture, fast response times, a well-developed package management system, it has a fast GUI, a complete API, and some great networking (GUI transparency, distributed processing, the works). Still, some areas need work. The filesystem needs to be totally replaced, and the VM/swap system needs a good bit of work. Also, the desktop environment, while certainly pretty, needs a lot of work from the usability standpoint, and its configuration services need to be more complete.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
It was a sad day when the Amiga ceased production.
All you Linux sheep should try checking out other operating systems from time to time, lest you become blinkered in your outlook.
you could start with BeOS.
Is is a coincidence, or do these guys have any connection to the company who made replacement MoBos for the A1000?
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Now maybe I am wrong, but it looks like these guys might be trying to troll us. Or worse yet, trick us into breaking the GPL.
Don't be fooled. Your ass could be on the line if this goes to litigation.
More information about the GPL can be found HERE
This is probably one of the biggest cases of being caught with your zipper down I've ever been a part of. We're *just* getting our act together, with several projects under the umbrella, and now this occurs. We don't even have our webpage up yet. But cest'la vive.
For some more information about Phoenix, allow me:
We're a new group, no we did not make replacement boards for this or that. We're only a year and a half old, and only with a few products in-works or near-release. The NDA is not to steal ideas, it is to protect those who are not yet ready to have their ideas posted to the public. A premature slip can cause entire projects to fail. We're not big corporate america, out to take ideas and claim them as our own. We're joe-blows with ideas and dreams of our own. We've got game developers, hardware designers, OS companies, all with the goal of getting us PAST the Wintel box. Of getting PAST this concept that computers are a big dumb box that you have to sacrifice your firstborn to in order to get work done on them. That is what Phoenix is all about, and why I'm proud to be a member of her.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Computing is going mobile - you probably want to look at some cool things you can do with Palm devices or WAP phones instead of rehashing the PC. The PC has really reached its dead end and its unlikely that you have much to offer that isn't just an incremental tweak on a dead paradigm.
One word my friend: Linux
Now if he was just on-topic it would be real good :}
hint: Find anyone who talk about gpl.
This is funny. QNX has this built-in (transparent no less!) See the article on QNet.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I see all of these posts going "NDA and GPL don't mix" and "No way to NDA" and I'm going "What are you people thinking?" I see people waving the GPL around like it's some kind of mantra, a god sent from heaven for you to rally around. For Christs sakes, it's JUST A SOFTWARE LICENSE. And NDA doesn't mean you can't talk, it's there to protect people. this is a gentleman's NDA, not that you guys have any clue what being a gentleman is about. That means "we won't reveal your plans until YOU tell us to." That's it, it's common respect defined in writing due to people like Mike bauma here that keep breaking it. That keep posting idiotic articles on Slashdot before groups are ready for it. Yes, Phoenix wants you to know about them, but not like this. not like a pack of rapid wolves who'll nit pick the use of an NDA during conceptualization and development level work. They need criticism, of course, but all good projects do. I really feel that, with the poor responsiveness and lack of foresight from many people on this board and elsewhere that a very good idea will be overlooked by people that do want to get ahead in life, that do want to make a difference, that don't want their future to be an Intel Inside and Start-buttoned nightmare.
Since 1995, the only thing I heard about new amiga stuff was "in project" "in work" "soon to be released" "this" "that". 99% of the stuff never got out, (and I am not only talking about Jim Drew's SNES/GENESIS/etc emulator on the emplant board, hehe, I am talking about viscorp, gateway, escom, side projects...
:)
The only thing that came out since 6 years that is tangible is the SDK. And I might be a moron, but I hate it.
God Gimme a an accelerator with a 68100-600mhz with 680x0 emulation, with a GeForce2GTS as graphic chip, DDR266 ram expantion, with cybergraphics support, Ethernet... all this in my A1200, and NOW you'll have your killer machine!
actually the 68100 doesn't exist but you could do the same with a G4.
The more I think of it the more I like it, imagine with all the ports behind a 1200, add firewire, video capture, scsi, yikes, I am drooling. I should stop
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Even he is mad at MS.
It sees that there is a large collection of users that are unhappy with MS and their fools-gold-plated tin handcuffs. They would be so much happier if they didn't have to use it because of work, or whatever. And they would do so if they could.
Unfortunately they are enslaved to the MS apps. But they would revolt if they could.
So there is a market if someone could pull it together, somehow. I can only applaud and encourage guys like these to keep on trucking. If no one tries, then it certainly will not happen.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
It just creates and employs features no longer necessary on the platform since the Amiga doesn't pretend to be a computer, it actually does half the work most software has to do on the PC.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
If these guys want to have a serious impact on the platforms in use, they will either have to surf the existing platforms with something like TIBET(tm) or they will have to create a radically new platform that is so much better than anything else that it will seed a new regime of technology. For that, IMNSHO they should team up with the optical associative processing guys at Colorado State, the Mozart guys in Europe and the Postgresql guys before taking off to do yet another BeOS.
Seastead this.
let me know.
Otherwise don't give me this trend crap. I need a workshop, not a conversation piece.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Why would I need a big box if the system itself is much more efficient at completing tasks?
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
"A few atoms won't even light a match" - Dr Jones, 1933
"A few atoms won't even light a match" - Dr Jones, 1933
Did I say anything about dumbing down computers? No. You can improve a computers usability without dumbing it down, ya know. Look at UNIX (pre-X). It was an improvement for usability over the other systems in that era, a dramatic improvement. Would you say that it dumbed down computers? I wouldn't, I run several UNIX-based OS's. It's very smart, very concise, so long as you don't fill it with half-baked libraries and unfinished and unstable API's.
As for big-boxes, I never said we wouldn't make big boxes, only that they're not our primary concern. You want big box computers, go to best buy, there's a ton of them. Try and find a slimline system that's easy enough for my grandmother to use yet powerful enough to appease my need for raw number crunshing without giving me a brain-dead OS.... doesn't happen.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
And BTW, I'd love to play with your design work. I'll keep an eye on that site, thank you.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Interview with Dave Haynie
...but you are interested also in operating systems, drive many computer languages (40?), have a clear vision how to do the computing right and in general it makes you fun to learn and design new things.
...and WHEN written well also more secure.
...and what has been adopted (what could prove AmigaOS did it right) by other operating systems like Linux (or other UNIX clone), BeOS, or even Windows.
A system architect's view
Amiga to me is basically the set of design philosophies embodied in the Amiga computers. This is both HW and SW, you can't (and shouldn't) really try to separate the two, they're part of the same thing to any good system designer.
Everyone knows you are one of the best HW guys Amiga platform ever had what means you have to understand also low-level SW issues like firmware, device drivers, HAL...
Of course. Pretty early on, I learned that the HW and SW pieces were really two sides of the same coin. I learned about them both by reading the old hobbiest magazines of the 70's: BYTE, Kilobaud Microcomputing, Creative Computing, etc. Back when making your own computer was something akin to building your own HAM radio rig, you didn't specialize in HW or SW, you had to know and use both.
Phase two was college. I wasn't really sure if I wanted to major in Electrical Engineering (HW) or Computer Science (SW). So I wound up doing both. I set out to find work that involved both. Which was harder than I thought, since in many places in the world, hardware and software lived on alternate sides of some odd, artificial wall. In fact, my first job out of school was at General Electric, in a department called "Computational Design". We were the only folks in the whole freekin' company allowed to touch both HW and SW. Ok, GE was a miserable place to work, I lasted four months. From there to Commodore.
Then Commodore. On projects like the C128, it became clear to me that, even when I was doing just HW, that the two were so interrelated you'd do a horrible job if you didn't consider both pieces as one. If I design a chip without considering how it's to be programmed, it'll invariably be crappy to program.
Sure....
There are some people in these latitudes (mostly those who switched from AmigaOS to Linux earlier or later) who say there's nothing so special about AmigaOS, that it's just a middle 80's mutant of UNIX, but a badly implemented one - the argumentation is no memory protection, IPC done through pointer exchange is utterly a bad idea, device drivers as independent tasks may look nice but it's not such an advantage.
People can say what they like, but it won't make them right. AmigaOS has absolutely nothing to do with UNIX - not even a tiny bit of resembalance. No one holding the above view has the first clue about AmigaOS and/or UNIX.
And do realize that we are in the age of the user. Just because a person used AmigaOS for a few years and now runs Linux is no indication they have Clue #1 how either OS actually works.
They argue Linux kernel space model for drivers is faster, more efficient...
No. Actually, it's much, much slower. See, here's one example of ignorance on their part. In a UNIX-like system, you lose all kinds of performance in context switching. So a microkernel OS like Mach, in which most of the OS runs user-mode programs to do OS things, is inherently slower, all else being equal. That's because of the context switches: your I/O call switches to kernel space, then to user, then back to kernel, then back to user.
In the AmigaOS, none of that happens. There is no big context switch, simply because you're not carrying around that big protection context. OS calls in UNIX (and its clones) are always expensive, they always call up the kernel. On AmigaOS, many Exec calls run on the user's own context, and even if there is a switch to supervisor mode, it's still very light weight. This is why you can get 25,000 messages per second sent on slow Amigas (or thereabouts), whereas under Linux it's more like a few thousand, even on hardware that's many, many times faster. Everything on the Amiga is messages, not kernel calls. No one who isn't speaking to this point has a clue about how AmigaOS works.
That is also very ignorant. When drivers are well written, they're equally safe under Linux and AmigaOS. They're less safe than under Mach or something similar, for exactly the reasons stated above: Mach drivers usually run (or at least mainly run) in user mode, so if they crash, they don't bother anyone.
So, what do you think about these issues - actually, would you defend AmigaOS?
Of course I defend AmigaOS, but I have no mission to convert those of another religion. And believe me, people do take on their attachements to an OS (or even a text editor, sometimes), with the worst of man's ability toward zealousness. No single fact I bring up is going to change a person's opinion of AmigaOS if they are not listening and understanding the facts.
Could you please summarize where AmigaOS showed the way how to do things right?
Threads and Messages! When you have very efficient messanging and low cost threads, these become the fundamental building blocks of a good OS. Linux is so steeped in the UNIX traditions going back 30 years, it has yet to embrace much of what has been learned since the days at Bell Labs when "what do we do now that Multics is over" was the operative question.
BeOS is a good example of a modern OS that's learned from the AmigaOS. Sure, it has a POSIX interface to let it easily run UNIX code, but underneath, it's much more like a protected-mode AmigaOS - everything's done in threads and messages.
Linux now has real threads, though user-mode only (BeOS allows kernel mode threads, pretty necessary if, as in either OS, you have lost of stuff running in kernel mode). But since the Linux kernel isn't reentrant, threads in the kernel block other threads, similar to the way tasks in 16-bit Windows block other tasks. I have read comments like "no serious Linux program uses threads", which seems to be true, at least today.
AmigaOS also taught the world about dynamic design. UNIX/Linux, Windows, and most primitive OSs are static. They precompile in everything they're going to need: drivers, number-of-tasks, etc. This may be fine for the OS that's going into a toaster oven, and it was fine in the days of yore when 64K was tons of memory on your old PDP-8. But this isn't the dark ages, and there's no reason to do things the UNIX way when there are better ways, already well proven (eg, you don't have to jump into something weird like KOSH or The Hurd or Plan 9 to be able to move beyond UNIX - while, of course, keeping what you learned from it).
Where AmigaOS fails...
The two major failing of AmigaOS's design are lack of protection and (only in a few places) lack of abstraction. The protection issue is a tricky one, since while everyone wants protection, you don't want to implement it such a way that it does, in fact, drag down performance in the way your Linux people (seeing things only through Linux-colored glasses, apparently) seem to assume the AmigaOS works. There are ways this could have been done within Exec - the folks from Amiga who worked on the 3DO OS did this - but it's unlikely to be an issue, with the new OS being based on QNX (which is also a modern OS with some UNIX-friendly facade, but very much not UNIX).
Well, I'm still waiting for someone to do autoconfig right. Maybe BeOS is doing this, not sure. But the others, forget about it. Windows is a half-step ahead of Linux in this, but only a half step. Users THINK that Windows is doing real autoconfig, but it is not. What happens is just smoke and mirrors. On reset, Windows starts up and reads its driver setup from The Registry (that giant file Windows puts everything into), builds a single image containing all drivers, and goes forward. Thus, much like UNIX, all drivers are statically bound, it's just that they get to do this binding without building a whole new OS image. Linux will probably get this at some point (yes, I'm familiar with the Red Hat dynamic driver loading hack; that's not it, you're just compiling driver-specific stubs into the kernel rather than the whole driver, it changes nothing).
I have read that under Linux 2.2, there's a better "module loader" facility that perhaps can load, if not unload, drivers on demand by name. I have not looked into this, and while that alone doesn't deliver autoconfig, it's certainly a necessary component of an all-over autoconfig system, and maybe even a stage beyond where Windows is today.
Why Windows seems to do autoconfig (and this would be a simple model for the Linux folks to use) is that, sometime early in the boot process, they launch a special device snooper. This is the guy that actually finds new hardware for you, assigns IRQ and DMA slots, etc. All this puppy actually does it put drivers in the right place and add their names to the registry. This is of course why you have to reboot to use them (they have to get rolled up in that gigantic driver file). This is also why a Windows system goes insane if you do something as simple as swap two PCI cards.
The AmigaOS does fully dynamic device binding. This is simple when drivers are separate modules that can be loaded at runtime. The BeOS does this too - drivers are always implemented as plug-ins (using their generic plug-in system) which can be loaded or unloaded at any time. Low-level drivers are plug-ins to the kernel (for that UNIX-like efficiency, when it matters). Some high-level stuff, as in AmigaOS, is implemented as client/server, such as graphics, but that's also true under UNIX if you're running X, and generally considered a good thing.
Where should the AmigaOS move in thell ever be for novices depends on the will of the Linux developers to depart UNIX for parts, to them, unknown.
As for Amiga and Linux, this is a middle ground. The Linux kernel needs to be fixed, certainly. But their stated intention is that all user-level stuff in "AmigaNG" programs is written to their object API, not to the Linux kernel. So if you stick to AmigaNG programs, many of the Linux problems, at user-level, should not exist. Without the kernel changes, though, you won't have real autoconfig or real multimedia. Jim Collas says kernel work will be done, and they know what should change. So it's a matter of seeing how they deliver on this, to judge the AmigaNG's use of Linux.
Conclusion
I think they have a rocky road, doing this. On the other hand, the Amigaification of Linux, especially if it spread through the Linux market, should have a certain degree of satisfaction to the Amiga community. And finally give Linux the abilility to compete against Windows on the desktop, simply by doing things better - which ultimately is a necessary precondition to a well waged war against Microsoft.
Oh? Which mystical ball are ye looking into for this insight? What tarot card layout do you use to gain your mystical fortune telling capability?
The PS2 is not made for this market, while it might gain a share, it will not dominate, not by a long shot.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
My girlfriend and I were discussing old 80s computing while trying to get her Atari working (we did actually! Its amazing how much its like MacOS today, or windows, and it was from 1986). She mentioned that Amiga was trying to start up again ... I agreed that I had heard the same thing, but not much had come from it. Are they going to have a release of Amiga OS for x86 peecees? Will they, or someone, be selling hardware any time soon?