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Quadruple Interview With Amiga 4.0 Developers
Mike Bouma writes: "diff.org has done an interview with some important developers involved in the development of AmigaOS 4.0 PPC. These developers also helped to realize AmigaOS 3.9 which was released at the World of Amiga show last december. AmigaOS 4.0 will be available later this summer together with the release of new PPC based AmigaOne mainboards." I'd like to see a robust OS marketplace -- the more the merrier -- but I wonder if Amiga can ever really succeed, what with the continued promises, delays, rearrangements, direction changes ...
alright it's one thing to kick the Amiga when its getting back up.. its another to say it was replaced by Apple. COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PHILOSOPHIES. Apple targets a higher-priced, lower-intelligence consumer market. Amiga targets lower-priced, more intellectually curious market.. the kind that appreciates detailed schematics in the manuals, highly documented operating system, and welcomes 3rd party software and hardware..
Besides, Amiga still has much better paint (DPAINT IV, Brilliance), 3D (lightwave, caligari), music (Octamed) etc.. its been copied by the headless subsequent ones, but all lack class and usability.
With so many people now abandoning BeOS, they will need a home. And the Amiga looks to be a home for all the orphaned Be users.
bPlan has a MicroATX MoBo in the works, that is dual G3/G4, has all important IO onboard (like Ethernet,PS/2,USB,ser/par,Firewire (!!)) and is at the moment the only other product that was designed with the AmigaONE specs in mind and already does boot Linux.
Hardly. DE is meant to primarily be RAN, not "hosted" under Windows and Mac. Changing the verb one uses to denote that a USERSPACE program is being executed does not make it anything more than a userspace program. And an emulator at that. As far as super fast java, I kinda have the impression that is what DE itself is meant to be. STB's? And if they are planning on catering to the WebTV crowd, well then, I think that says it all. Oh, no it doesn't actually. The game console market is being targeted by M$. Is't it a rule that going after markets that have the borg's attention a surefire way to fail?
Well its a hell of alot real than the PPC board you should of sent Baggy 6 or so months ago, tell me are you really that forgetfull? Or did you steal his money?
Downix recieved money for an Amiga PPC card, then never sent the card
Sure, Grandma isn't senile anymore, ever since the brain transplant. And so what if 98% of her body has been replaced with prosthetics at one point or another? Why, she now has a IQ of 200 and is an Olympic contender, and lord knows thats all that really matters. ;P
McEwen, you do us all a disservice in presuming to call your company Amiga. You look down at us as if we were just another fringe market to milk for all the cash we're worth, and if you don't even have to go to the trouble to throw us a few bones along the way, why should you care? After all, if we wanted a modern computer, a real computer, we would have switched to the Windows PC long ago. The Amiga is truely dead now, with no hope of yet another buyer who might do that name any honor. And it shouldn't be that way. Is that all you see, a trademark with brand name recognition, an opportunity to foist ill-concieved and irrelevant technologies on us? No Amiga fan that I know has ever said "Hey, if only my toaster ran Workbench 5, I could play Populous and have breakfast at the same time!". AmigaDE is a copout, some sort of lame-brained notion that since most people's exposure to the Amiga is UAE, then it's only fitting to release the entire system as some trumped up emulator. Macintosh owners have Macs, because for some reason they want them. Ditto for PC/windows owners. As a matter of fact, they are probably happy with the variety of games available to them. So what, you're marketing to developers, some sort of crossplatform development tools? Only not calling it such?
Drop AmigaDE. Drop it now. Apologize for it. Quit saying how software is all that matters, you sound like a bum making excuses about why he doesn't work. Give us first-gen neo-amiga hardware with legacy zorro3 slots AND PCI. Kill Zorro after you've had at least a bit of token continuity. Show us a computer that will never, NEVER EVER have only one CPU again. Entry level dual G3/4's, with quad cpu on the high end. Market it to power users, to computer nerds, and those who have to have the most powerful of everything. But make it the first multi-CPU computer marketed to users ever. If there was one thing Be did right, it was the Bebox. But almost as soon as they did, they changed their minds, and decided "software is the only important thing". Look where that got them. License the OS, the hardware specs, but make some yourself. Send a couple hundred freebie systems to Adobe, to Macromedia, to all the hotshot graphics companies. Offer free hawaii vacations to their programmers, if they spend those extra 15 minutes they linger at the donut table actually porting code to AmigaPPC. If it's already written, there is no reason not to sell it. You can make money off licensing development tools after you've got some apps to show for it. Give free "I resurrected Amiga!" T-shirts to shareware developers who can prove they wrote something for it. Bribe Tucows to put up an amiga section. Do whatever it takes, but concentrate on making it the system to envy. Carve out a niche in the graphics and video market, and go from there.
I worked at a company that was the last major consumer of Amigas in the United States. Remember the Prevue Channel, now the TV Guide Channel. It use to be the blue scrolly thing and now it's the gold scrolly thing. Well, the blue scrolly thing displayed half or quarter screen video in the top half and the bottom half had the listings for your local cable channels. The satellite video feed was passed through but the listings were displayed locally from the Amiga.
They had over 2,000 Amiga 2000's in the field at cable head ends across the country. Two years ago they finally replaced them with NT boxes that had a special video card in it. They kept the Amigas going by remanufacturing them and buying up old Amigas and parts wherever they could scrounge them. Forgotten warehouses, flea markets, Amiga bounty hunters, etc.
The reason they got stuck with having to keep reusing the Amiga 2000's was because the custom demod card used to receive the listings data would only fit in the 2000's and wouldn't fit properly in the 3000's or 4000's.
So rather than getting stuck with a dying computer they switched to a platform that they felt wasn't going to go away ten years after they adopted it. They chose Microsoft and Intel. I doubt Linux or Mac was seriously considered when the R&D boys were architecting the new system.
I enjoyed working for them when I did, though they thought Microsoft was the answer to all their problems.
All your problems begin to look like nails when all you have is a hammer.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
i was doing a lot of work on my Amiga (with the attendant Guru Meditation errors) and freaked one sunday morning when i woke up at my girlfriend's house, turned on the tube and found the Preview Channel's Guru Meditation screen! for a second i thought my programming errors were chasing me across town. :-)
.NET?
wonder if that'll happen with
strangely enuf, i consulted for a (would-be) competitor of Prevue called StarNet, we delivered mpegs via satellite instead of sending laserdiscs around, and played them on NT boxes with the local cable schedule.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Personally, I enjoyed ColorIt! on the Mac for some time in the early-mid 90's. But my needs outgrew it -- when I got to use layers in Photoshop I didn't look back.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
True, all those BeOS users may wind up looking for a home, but if they didn't amount to enough users to sustain Be, how will they sustain Amiga?
I think the Mac (of which I am a user) has about as small a market presence as you can get and still be viable (as a hardware-oriented company) - Apple will always have a built-in market just by defining themselves as "the alternative" to Windows hegemony. Linux is an operating system, and development costs are minimal if you want to have your own distro. This gives the companies that do nothing but press CD's a chance to make money (with no costs), but the bigger companies like RedHat and Caldera need to make money in services and integration (as the FSF intended), rather than on code alone. Because Linux has a use in the server space, this is feasible - Amiga isn't looking like a server OS to me, it's looking like a "power user" OS. And they plan to make hardware as well, tuned to their OS and using PowerPC processors.
Be tried that, too - and if you look up, you can see Be's flame trails heading for the ocean as we speak. Other than the more well-known name, I don't see anything different for Amiga, either. I do wonder, though - will this coming Amiga death finally be the last one? Their corporate logo should be a cat, since they've gone through so many lives.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
With no circle tool? As just one example :-)
Paint Shop Pro is nowhere near as powerful as DPaint, PPaint or Brilliance. And our previous contributor isn't the only one who misses them.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Any circle tool in v5 is _very_ well hidden ;-) so I think I'm safe in the assumption that 3 doesn't have one.
I jsut find that interface horribly clunky though. Brilliance is just stunning - PSP sometimes makes me think POS.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
I type this from my PPC604e/233-based A4000(Elbox Tower w/7 Z3 slots). It's my primary machine and is also the fastest machine in my house. I don't have a single Wintel box here. The 604e also happily runs Linux at a decent clip so I don't see the need to grab any Wintel hardware thankyouverymuch.
Now, by modern standards my 604e isn't exactly fast, but it's certainly liveable. At Hyperion (Yes I work there) we've benchmarked an identical system to mine as being approx equivalent in speed to an AMD K6-2/450. This is not fast but it's not dirt slow either (unless you're running Losedoze 2000).
There are things I do want, however. I want a fully PPC OS (parts are still running on an onboard 68060/60). I want a newer motherboard with a nice PPC7450 on it that will put me up in the performance range of the latest Athlons. I want these things so I can keep moving forward. Why is it that certain assholes want to stop me? What is so wrong with wanting this? Who the hell are *THEY* do decide that my computer should go "quietly into the night".
*FUCK YOU*. We will *NOT* go "quietly into the night". This is my system, my lifestyle, and my home. I'm willing to fight for it. So a pox on all those who tell us that "You're dead, get a Windoze box."
I want a machine that does what I want it to do, and my Amy does this. Damn you all who think that her future should be destroyed.
Jim
P.S. For those who don't know, AmigaOS 4.0 is not some "other OS". It is a direct evolution from the current AmigaOS. Yes it will have elements of Tao running hosted on it, and the basic kernel will of course be rewritten (it's running on a different CPU after all, even the Linux kernel has low-level stuff that has to be rewritten for different CPUs) , but all the things that make the Amiga nice to use (Tightly coupled CLI/GUI, Intuition, ARexx, Datatypes, BOOPSI, etc.) will still be there. It won't be an Amiga "in name only".
This guy has it cold. The amiga was about the hardware - the people that dared to laugh when they saw what current state of the art was. I've been waiting for someone to do this for a long time, be it under the guise of Linux, of AmigaOS. The trick is getting someone who's willing to put out specs, drivers, and all the required hardware until the market catches up (As amiga did).
..don't panic
Since when are you the authority on what everybody thinks?
------
The Amiga is a computer that's not a PITA to use. One of the rare Amiga commercials said, "What does it do? Well, what you want it to do," and this is so blatently true it's hard for an outsider to imagine. No other mainstream computer has ever had this property, so people will continue to admire the Amiga until this happens.
The Amiga is not dead because there are too many Amiga users who are too dumb to know that their computer is dead. ;-P
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I'm getting tired of these "Amiga is Dead" posts. A product dies when it has no support from both users and manufacturers. Since neither of those is the case, Amiga is not dead.
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You've pretty much answered your own question. BBEdit is the #1 stand-alone text editor on the Mac, for HTML and for programming in just about any language. I personally use the built-in editor in Codewarrior which is not quite as feature-complete as BBEdit as a text editor, but has source-browser integration.
Try the Video Toaster NT in your PC, then say the same thing. Its not particularly fair comparing dedicated video hardware with a general purpose CPU. If youre going to compare old hardware to new hardware, at least compare old apples with new apples. That being said, the original Video Toaster is certainly a useful piece of equipment, which changed the world of broadcast video. Newtek we salute you.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Dude! You gotta stop hitting that crack man.
That means (in my mind) : 1) fixed hardware; a GForce 2MX or Kyro II board, 300 MHz PPC or ARM CPU, soundblaster live, I/O for television/video, embedded joypad ports, embedded DVD ROM, 10 GB hard disk, 56K modem etc
>>>>>>>>>
What? The Amiga was one of the most powerful machines of its day. That shit (comparitively) hardware you have listed could never be called an Amiga.
2) fixed software; EEPROM with the basic O/S which is transferred to Ram at boot time; after that, rest of the O/S is loaded from hard disk; the included hard disk will contain a pre-configured O/S that is ready to go
>>>>>>>>>
Umm, that describes every computer on sale now. The BIOS image is loaded into RAM (shadowing, remember?) which loads the OS from the harddisk, which (unless you build it) comes preconfigured. Or do you mean they should never release updates?
web-browser price around $300-$400;
>>>>>>>>>
What? Cheap is nice, but an Amiga at $300? Methinks you have Amiga's mixed up with the game machines. The Amiga's were quite expensive machines for their time.
you buy it, you hook it to the telly and voila...cheap web-surfing, cheap DVD player, cheap multimedia, and above all that a computer to do the calculations and write those CVs and letters. And a damn good game machine, too.
>>>>>>>>
Its called an playstation2. At Toys R Us for $300.
It will sell like hot cakes, for two reasons : 1) people are tired of the problems having with the PC and MS Windows/Linux 2) a typical good PC (that is able to run all of todays bloatware) costs around $700
>>>>>>>>>
Really. This explains why all these set top machines and $300 machines are selling like hotcakes.
when DirectX is established,
>>>>>>>>>>
Huh? You mean back in 1997?
we all should cash out for a GForce3 anyway(which costs around the money mentioned above for the home computer)
>>>>>>>>>>
Except it doesn't, it costs $350. Subtraction harder than C++? Maybe...
, because the older cards will not run anything in respectable frame rates
>>>>>>>>>
Explains why my old RivaTNT is running UT just fine? Most games run fine on lower end harware, and only serious gamers need absolutely smooth fps at high res. Still, what serious gamer buys a $300 machine? Seriously, though, a GeForce2 GTS is plenty fast for the next year or so, and is only $127 on Pricewatch. Pair that with a nice 1GHz Athlon ($208 on pricewatch w/ mobo) and some RAM ($170 per gig!) and you have a nice gaming machine that won't cost more than $1200 or so.
4) it would be almost portable (one unit, like the old Amigas 1200-600) but without the propriatery hardware used by todays portable PCs, because it would use standard hardware; I remember a friend who stuffed his A1200 in his suitcase and travelled with it!
>>>>>>>>>>>
Great. It'll be an unpropriatary iMac!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
s/opacity/transparency/g
Sheesh.
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
I come to bury the Amiga, not praise it.
In 1994, I leveraged the knowledge I'd gained using an Amiga and Impulse 2.0 to get a job creating 3D models using 3DS for DOS (R2), running on '486. I was lucky. The Amiga was a toy, Impulse was a toy, and I considered myself lucky to have a $3K program running on a $3K computer (at my client's expense) for a change.
Using DOS and WfW 3.11 for the first time, I missed the close coupling between GUI and CLI that the Amiga OS had, and the opacity of the startup scripts (compared to autoexec.bat, config.sys, win.ini, and system.ini).
All the while I'd been using Macs to do digital audio and MIDI sequencing, along with DTP and video editing and Director scripting (since version 1.0). But I missed the control that the AmigaOS command line afforded. Eventually, I discovered MacShell, a CLI for MacOS 7.x, but as a userland app it lacked the speed I craved and the power I needed. The power of "/".
Fast-forward to the year 2001, Dave.
I have a fricken' fast machine with a closely coupled GUI/CLI system...Mac OS X on a G4/466.
It's like an Amiga on steroids, and it runs Photoshop, Quark, and Illustrator, along with Apache, ftpd, gcc, and ssh.
"Nostalgia is a disease of dogs." -- Lenin
Woof.
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Repeat after me
Linux is not the solution to everyone's problems.
Linux is not the solution to everyone's problems.
Linux is not the solution to everyone's problems.
Ye gods, the view Linux users have about their OS in relation to everyone else's OS reminds me immensely of the way some Java programmers feel about Java. "Sure, it does xxx shittily because it was never meant to do that and should never be used to do that, but hey, I'm going to use it to do that anyway because it's Linux and Linux is Perfect."
I for one agree with almost everything you are saying...
But they have to actually SHIP it first.
And we've been hearing promises FOREVER.
I reserve the right to say I was wrong later if they actually DO ship something.
Until then... The Amiga is Dead. Long live the Amiga.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
They didn't actually say very much in that article... seemed to be full of "N/A" and "I don't know" answers... The interesting bit I thought was the 'running in a sandbox' bit... So Amiga, Inc are dumping the old OS in favour of an emulation mode similar to OS X/Classic....
i don't read slashdot anymore.
At this point it is official:
The Amiga we all knew and loved is dead.
There is no working on combining hardware and software for a symbiosys with the user.
There is no attempt to make the system beyond what is popular or expected.
There isn't even the neat-o checkmark logo.
Deal with it guys, the AmigaONE is a POP board. AmigaOS 4.x is a cheap knock-off. They didn't even ship AmigaOS 3.9 with real apps, it was 70% shareware. And 30% bloatware. Amiga was about being able to run the entire system off of a floppy disk and ROM. No more, you need a CD-ROM and a 2 gig HD to even think about installing the system
What did you do, license Windows NT?
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
People seem to think that (a) this interview is pretty old, (b) development has not yet started, or (c) that there are NDA's preventing clearer answers.
I suggest you look at Ardour .
Rich...
Ignore Alien Orders
Please, the Amiga wants to die. Let it.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
http://www.qsl.net/ke5fx/misc/GPAINT.JPG
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
... I have been interested in a PPC platform for a long time, but dislike the implication of buying Apple products (great-looking, sure, so far the most comfortable computing experience I've ever had was using a PowerMac G4, and the new iBooks certainly smoke the new Celery Sony (built-in CD-ROM with no options? whatt...).
And with the OpenPPC motherboard from IBM soon becoming the leading VapourWare of the late '90s, to be able finally to use a 3rd party PPC board without paying royalty to Apple (and being stuck with low-frequency G3s just because Apple won't have G3s running faster than G4s) would be really neat. Plus they seem to be doing on the software side what Transmeta is doing on the hardware side, so even if it is not Open Source they deserve a break. Hope it's not another Be in the making though.
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
What I'd really like to get is BeOS R6 running on a dual G4 motherboard, which would be a perfect development platform for Amiga (Tao) Intent. Dual boot with LinuxPPC or MacOSX. Get Sony (who'll probably buy out BeInc) to sponsor Connetix to port Virtual PC (and Virtual Playstation) to this platform, and we've got a box which can utilise one G4 for emulation and the other for running native apps. Drooooooooool.
Revolution = Evolution
What is 'success' for Amiga? Some people seem to think it's a return to being the little box that outpaced all the competitors in graphics and sound performance. Others think it's the ability to write really cool software that will enable any box to be the little box that outpaces all the competitors, etc...
The one point here is that Amiga isn't defining success as being Open Source, or making really cool graphics and sound hardware. They're defining success as finding a way to stay in business, whether or not that matches with the expectations of the old Amiga user base or with the expectations of the current Mac users who say that the Mac is really the best Amiga ever made.
If you think this is easy, try creating and supporting a hardware/software platform sometime, not just a piece of somebody else's project, and see how far you get. Amiga deserves respect for surviving in its various forms this long, not derision for not being exactly what you want it to be.
That's AmigaDE... not AmigaOS, which is going to be PPC-only.
Bjarne
It will make you feel at home again?
Bjarne
Why would it need to be revolutionay? Does every OS need to aim for worldomination?
;)
I'm not looking for a revolutionary OS. Just a modern OS run on modern HW with modern Apps. I've been on this quest the last 5+ years and I'm still searching. I've tried Mac, various Linux' (Slackware was neat, the rest sucked), QNX RtP, BeOS. FreeBSD is the one the comes the closest to what I'm looking for, but it's not quite right.
If Amiga succeed in bringing the OS to inexpensive PPC-MoBo's, implement modern features (like MP) and cater for the community so it once again will have modern Apps and games, that's not 3+ years old, well, then I'll return home and leaving gigabytes of man-pages behind me!
No, it need not be revolutionary... it just needs to be home!
Bjarne
The reason for Amiga Inc. to build OS5 is because Tao's Elate isn't really suited as a stand alone desktop OS. That's where OS5 comes in, it will include stuff like MP, SMP etc..
AmigaDE will be hosted on OS4.x and integrated into OS5, but it will not *be* OS5.
Yes, AmigaDE is platform independant, but OS5 is not. And I seriously doubt Amiga Inc. have the resources to support more than one platform for OS5.
Bjarne
How log has the Amiga really been dead anyways (and this is NOT a flame) ? At least 15 years ago, for all intents and purposes.
15 years ago it was just about been released, so I'd think that your estimate is a bit over the top. ;) About 7 or 10 years would be closer to the mark.
There's actually a bit of new commercial software still released for it btw, although in amounts that are rather far less than for the current platforms.
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
I wonder why they are developing 3D support for Voodoo3 and G450; the former is rather old, and though still reasonably OK performance-wise, it's disappearing. G450 is more recent, has good image quality and dualhead capability, but it's exactly the performance leader either. Wouldn't Nvidia products and Radeon products make more sense?
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
Why my video toaster/flyer is still BAD ASS? And edits video like a no limit soldier? No, it doesn't. The amiga is STILL ahead of its time as far as that is concerned. My PC with a SHITLOAD more megahertz STILL can't do real time crossfades and what not. The flyer can.
What, me worry?
What do you want for it? Email me if you like. -b
I don't really agree that anything not free/open is
evil and must absolutely fail. I believe there is a place
for both free/open software and proprietary stuff.
Besides, there's always AROS which is what this guy
asks for, an open AmigaOS clone that even runs on
x86 hardware.
I've used Linux. I've tried QNX. I use Solaris at work.
I can't stand Windows. Guess what I use at home? My old
Amiga A4000T, which was manufactured over two years AFTER
Commodore went bankrupt. It's simply the most pleasant platform
I've ever used, and regardless of what people consider dead
or not, I'll use it until it won't turn on anymore. After that
happens, I'll be using the new motherboard due for release
soon. (Using the standard Mac ZIF modules to have a speedy CPU,
pretty darn spiffy idea there... And I don't care if it costs
more than an x86 PC hardware - I already have one of those
and rarely use it.)
Amigas rocked. My A500 with a 512MB upgrade chip used to whip the butts of the 286s & 386s of the time. So many colours. Such vibrant sound. And ... just smooth.
... I'd be set.
I can see a nice little niche market here. Linux's real-time processing isn't up to scratch yet for stuff like hard disk recording, and I wouldn't mind pissing off my Windows partition if I could find a Cakewalk lookalike for the Amiga. Oh yeah, I'd have to wait for Wine to install Office into a non-windows setup. And then
My only fear is that there isn't a large enough market to support another OS with Linux and OS-X talking up the Windows-haters. But I would LOVE for it to happen. Where are the apps? (that hurt)
Cryptnotic
My other first post is car post.
Hmmm... Where's the reasoning for the death of the Amiga OS? All I see here is some heavy praise for a completely seperate OS. For all the claims that we should be supporting as many alternative development efforts as possible, it strikes me as odd that this post, which knocks down a possibly promising effort without much in the way of support, would get so highly modded up?
Perhaps those whom are moderating should really take a look at exactly what they are supporting.
-Medgur
I wish the guys the best of luck. But, this sounds like a tale of the underside of the programmers' life:
Olaf Barthel: Probably the same as with 3.5, which is complaining about the things that don't work and then surprisingly ending up doing all the work to resolve the issues I don't see anybody else finding the time to tackle. That's how I ended up rewriting workbench.library and reimplementing icon.library from scratch, plus taking to fixing a gazillion of other bits and pieces. Believe me, I'd rather have spent my time more productively.
Amen, but as they say, the devil is in the details
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
If you had a scale with Bill Gate mindset on one side and Richard Stallman's
on the other, Where would Amiga fall?
That's the real question!
Going to extreams:
Who cares if you have the best product, if you are going to use it as bait to
trap and abuse the consumer?
Who'll pitch in to help improve something that is GPL, in order to excape
the trap and even avoid such a trap all together?
Where does Steve job fall on this scale (Why has he moved towards the GPL side?)
And the Amiga Trio (three owners) who most don't know enough about their mindsets
to have a better idea of where they fall on that scale.
Those who do, might very well tell you they are much closer to the Bill Gates
mindset then the Richard Stallamn mindset.
IN FACT Amiga has said that they intend on following the Bill Gates mindset but
that they are not going to make the same mistakes. They have even hired a former
MS employee, I believe for the marketing division.
IS this flame bait?
NO IT'S FACT! And Some Amiga followers like this direction. Not Me!
What people need to pay attention to is the mindset of those in control, or they
may set themselves up for a big dissapointment.
3 S.E.A.S - Virtual Interaction Configuration (VIC) - VISION OF VISIONS!
I absolutely agree Richard. I'm using an Amiga right now, but my concious tells me I should be using a free OS (which I do also incidentally). I use to pride myself on my Amiga usage, not because of the OSs technical prowess, but because I was exercising my right to choose - I felt free from the shackles of corporate OSs. However, it has become apparent that the AmigaOS is now no different in this regard considering the recent developments. Bizarrely, I preferred it when the Amiga had no future. However, as another poster has said, there is an effort to reimplement the AmigaOS in order to achieve this freedom. It is called AROS, and it looks very promising indeed.
AmigaDE is a platform independant system which can run hosted on a bunch of OS' (Linux, PalmOS, WinCE, Win32) and uses Tao Groups VP technology for fast binary compatibility.
Check Amiga Inc. for a press-release type announcement, but the tech update is quite well done (enough info without too much development tech -that stuff can go in the developers section of the site)
----
"God hates me."
----
"God hates me."
"Hate Him back - works for me"
Wow, the last person in the interview wasn't too knowlegable. Or were the questions tailered to the other respondents?
How log has the Amiga really been dead anyways (and this is NOT a flame) ? At least 15 years ago, for all intents and purposes. The fact that it has eked out an existence for this long in its little niche seems to be to make the best case for long term survival. Heck, I've been predicting the demise for Apple in the next year, for 15 years now, and finally have to concede it will survive.
It would be nice to see exactly the same post with 'amiga' swapped with 'windows'... well maybe in another decade or so...
...they come up with a truly revolutionary OS. We already have a glut of OSes out there, what with MacOS, BeOS, Windows, UNIX, Linux and a bunch of other free and proprietary OSes. The world does not give a rat's ass about another me-too operating system. Unless a new OS is several orders of magnitude better than what's already out there, it's doomed.
The only way a new OS can be orders of magnitude better than the others is for it to solve long standing problems with software systems. What are the biggest problems in the software industry right now? We all know that software sucks. It sucks because it breaks down all the time and takes too damn long to develop. Does AmigaOS offer a solution to either of these problems? Answer: no.
The Amiga OS development team has only one consolation. All the other OSes suck just as much as theirs. The other OSes have an enormous advantage though. They are already accepted by a sizable fraction of the OS market. Can anyone tell me how many people around the world are thinking of buying an Amiga?
You got to hand it to the Amiga team though. They are true believers.
No, wait, I saw the insides of one once sitting on a shelf at one of my old jobs... complete with 486 add-on board...
"I'm not dead yet! I don't want to go in the cart! I feel happy!"
From what has been said of it, the amigaone board is basically a relatively pc-like board with pci slots, usb, etc., except that it uses a PPC. It seems like this is exactly what is needed as a linux platform, that is, a standards-based, non-apple, ppc motherboard. If its anything like they say, this thing might very well be my next linux box.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
The only way to save it now is to release it under a GNU license to permit it to be moved to more modern machines. If this had been done originally, the loyal user base would have moved it to more modern systems and it would be thriving today. But by locking themselves into a proprietary system, they ensured their own downfall.
The best thing that amiga fans can hope for now is to fall in love with a truly free system like GNU/Linux or GNU/Hurd which they can become involved with. With a free system, they can take the future in their own hands and make sure that this does not happen to them again.
Open Source is not Free!
OK, I'm not trying to flamebait here. This is a serious question, and I'd like a well-thought & reasoned answer: Why??? Who cares??? What will Amiga 4 do that no other existing OS can do? How can it do it better? What, besides nostalgia, is the fucking point?
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
If you consider the big picture of the current OS environment, you see that microsoft is succeeding in getting the normal people of the world to buy their stuff. I'm not talking servers here, I'm talking desktops. Linux can fend for itself on the server, but ask pretty much any smoe who uses windows for general purposes to switch to Linux and remain at the same productivity level and you might have an issue. MacOS is good but it's tied to the hardware so I can't use it, can you? BeOS has abandoned ship. Atheos will work but needs alot of things to succeed. In general, to succeed in the desktop OS marketplace, you need a combination reliable office software + hardware support + usability + easy to use multimedia software + somewhat brainless operation + games. Microsoft has all of these, Linux, MacOS, Beos, etc. doesn't. AmigaOS, although slightly dated, has a viable degree of all of those. Frankly, as a normal person, you can get work done easily on Windows. AmigaOS you can't now with speed, but you will. I don't own an Amiga, but I will purchase an AmigaOne. I am a programmer as well, and I will probably program for it as well. Look at the big picture of where various OSs are going and you will see that AmigaOS has one of the most innovative plans to get into the desktop arena. Better that any company I've seen other than MS. I believe they can do it. None of us can say they won't because (1) there's a hint of bias in everyone and (2) no one whose posted here (including myself) has seen all the NDA'd plans and betas that Amiga is preparing. Recommendation: be skeptical that's fine, but if it shows up, embrace it as one of the few viable MS alternatives.