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Nokia Set-top Boxes to Ship with AmigaDE
AtlasT writes: "Amiga Inc. announced today that Nokia will be shipping their Linux-powered "Mediaterminal" STBs with AmigaDE pre-installed. These news along with the previously announced cooperation with Sharp for their Zaurus PDA make the future of Amiga Inc. look a bit brighter indeed. What we who use computers more often than PDAs and STBs wonder is when we'll see the release of AmigaOS 4 and new machines. If you'd like to have a pre-view of AmigaDE and some applications you can buy the AmigaDE Player for Linux or Windows. I wouldn't mind running games like Payback, a GTA2 clone, on a PDA!" The Nokia Media Terminal was supposed to be launched in the second quarter of 2001, then by the end of 2001, now... who knows. Update: 02/23 21:24 GMT by M : It seems the Mediaterminal is already available but expensive.
BLAZEMONGER?
I'm too lazy to surf around and find out on my own, but is the current "Amiga" in anyway related to the Amiga computer that I think Commodore (of 64 fame) produced at the end of their lifespan?
With a 566MHz Celeron and that amount of RAM (64Mb), they won't reach the price point which would lead to mass-market uptake. There's also way too many connectors, etc., etc.
Having worked on a set-top box project, the prime goal seems to be cost-reduction on a per-unit basis. Various developments are in the pipeline which will enable PVR/MPEG/DVD/DVB boxes to be made at a cost point where cable and sat providers can afford to subsidise them to a zero cost. This is where the market lies for these things, and the first company to succesfully bring such a box to market will be the one who wins the big share of that market.
We've been hearing about STBs for a long time. Projects like these, with or without Amiga software, are the reason we hear a lot and see nothing.
Amiga have been claiming to have deals with STB manufacturers for a long time now. Aside from press releases and cryptic mails from Fleecy Moss, I've never seen anything solid come from any of these.
PenguiNet: the (shareware) Windows SSH client
How much does this thing cost?
Wow... I want one of these!
I'm not sure exactly where its supposed to fit into the market though... it seems to be a jazzed up WebTV, RePlay and Cable TV box, all in one. But if people already own one or two of those allready why would they buy this?
Although saying that I do like the fact that its Linux Based and it does look nicer than your average Set-Top Box (but the fact that you can't put the TV *on* the box may be a minus) I would almost buy one, but I don't want internet on my TV and I've got a Cable box already with Interactive TV.
Very nice... but I don't think its going to sell that well
I believe in the second coming of Amiga! Death to the nonbelievers!
While the Zaurus was originally announced to use AmigaDE, the developer version is using QT/Embedded + the Jeode VM
What do you know I wrote a novel
According to the TechSpecs, the Mediaterminal runs Linux.
A quite correct, however redundant observation since it was pointed out in the story.
AmigaDE runs on Linux.
Help savingAmigaOS and a free PowerPC market
Looks like they're running Amiga servers too...
sounds cool ... I used to love my commodore 64 and the tapes to load games .. it seems so long ago .. LOL
Anyone found a price ?
The Nokia Media Terminal was supposed to be launched in the second quarter of 2001, then by the end of 2001, now... who knows.
According to Amiga Inc's CEO Bill McEwen, "before summer this year".
Help savingAmigaOS and a free PowerPC market
Simple answer, no. This DEad is more of a .com business trying to sucker developers in so they can sucker OEMs into contract$.
If your more into the Amiga OS, I suggest you take a look at Amithlon, AROS, AmigaXL or MorphOS.
Now if your really into a OS developed by a game porting company (that as the official Amiga badge), your in luck. HyperOS4 should be out this year.
Dammy, awaiting the Faithful Follower's of The Name Cult to come out flaming me. Who needs Scientologist, we have Amiga Inc!
I certainly hope that Amiga can make a comeback in this area. I don't really see them displacing any PC's to be honest. Its been too long, they're way out of the game, and any massive steps forward they have made with the Amiga OS have been dwarfed by the accomplishments of Linux and Mac OS X.
... Amiga really had their sh*t together. I think that a STB from Amiga would be an awesome product if they ever actually produce it, and put in the time/effort to make it as good as the A2000 and A4000 were.
This scenario makes a lot of sense, however. Back in the day when video hobbyists and professionals stood by their Amigas like tenacious terriers, Amigas really WERE on the forefront of things. Massive port expansion, insane A/V capabilities, fully protected memeory
Of course a lot of you will say "where does it fit, why would I want this" well the fact is it's not a majority of people that owns a PVR or a media station box (new buzzword?) should ring a bell.
:) ) that it offered (and we can also add the price/meg of the HDDs that are getting very interresting the more the time go), and HDTV support, I could go on for days. OF COURSE the positive aspect of being an early adopter is that you already have the technology and can actually do something while the others wish.. but if I would have bought it right off I wouldn't have wanted to spend again on another box. The dream machine of course is some kind of tivo, with ethernet access, dual IDE brackets, divx codec in firmware, transcoder from grabbed->divx realtime, DVD+RW, and for most of you "not running windows" :).
I wanted one of these since I saw the replay/tivo hardware, but 2 things stopped me, first generation so probably there would be firmware issues, better revisions not too far ahead, etc.. and the other was the price for the non-upgradability (well without hacking it
This machine is a step in the right direction, and yes I am an avid amiga fan, if you think all the amiga people are lame zealots, you probably never owned or programmed or enjoyed that piece of advanced technology way ahead of it's time. That being said, I don't beleive it would do a comeback on the desktop unless it doesn't repeat all of linux's errors or arguable moves, even then, there would be a great need of marketting power and it doesn't mean it would still take off...(just look at where BE is today...) Nevertheless, amiga was famous for video, for one thing, whether it was for video processing, all it's gazillion video output possibilities, colors or advanced features, when you heard amiga you were thinking "multimedia" before that term became a buzzword on a 486PC that had a cdrom.
I think it's very nice to see amiga striking tangible deals like this and finally see a product, it's not what everybody wanted (i.e. a computer that rights off the bat kills windows mac and linux and is so revolutionnary that it will be the second video toaster), this will probably never happen because of the current infrastructure in companies, and besides, a lot of projects have tried before, and there are already 1000s of people paid just to think of the future and desings, and they aren't all FOC people. The time when one person could really change things in the computer realm is probably over (of course there's always exeptions so I keep an open mind) what you need to target now is "what is going to be the next electronic revolution and how can I bypass all my competitors" Cellular technology is gaining a lot since a few years, so is HDTV or any new video technology... I just hope they do the right moves and not to many errors, I wish them the best.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
I'd like to get my hands on the magnificent ass of either Jennifer Lopez or Shakira.
The owls are not what they seem
http://www.hansa-electronic.com/receiver-ci.htm is selling the Mediterminal 510S for 8295 SEK, this is about 907 EUR, according to oanda.com.
Take a look at the shipping announcement from November 21st last year.
- Paul
What malaka modded this down!
I am into the copy and paste.
...this thing is totally Linux/Mozilla based. And the best part -- check out the "developers" pdf, the want people to hack it! I think someone finally figured out what the hacking community is all about :) With a slough of A/V hardware and simple x86 arch this could be fun. A sleek little set-top box that I can hack from the couch :)
Cheers,
Mike
Intel transfer the difficult from Hadware to software, for get more power, programmer need more technology. -- chinaitn
They're trying to market these like cell phones: sign up for a year, get a free computer.
... that would be the average wholesale cost of a regular cell phone. It's close, but I don't think it'll ever happen. By the time the prices on older hardware come down enough to make this feasable, they stop manufacturing the stuff, and the price shoots up like a rocket. Remember EDO memory?
Been there, done that, never bothered getting the T shirt. What happened to that ISP that was doing this? It was a regular ISP, not that "sign up for AOHell, get $400 off" bullshit. Anyone?
For this to work, I believe they have to target the $50 - $100 mark
Poor bastards victims of an obvious saturday morning slashdotting... classic weilding of the turd sabre?
Why are we so busy coding a clone of .NET's IL when we could be cloning Intent? Intent truly is language neutral, because its assembler is extremely low-level, and yet nicer than most ASM; indeed, it's almost a mid-level language, if there is such a thing. You have registers, but you have an infinite number of them, and you can give them names instead of referring to r823 and so on. You have looping constructs, but you also can jump around. As on .NET, you can include fully native methods in your code if you wish (and even have the VM automatically pick between a bytecode version and a native version of a function if both exist). Because of the lower-level nature than that of .NET, functional languages can be fully implemented, including tail-calls. Further, while the VM is object-oriented, objects and methods are really little more than mini-programs that run in the current stack space. (It's really tough to explain this; the best I example I can think of is shell scripts, where tasks are done by calling other programs and then parsing their output--only imagine then that this were done lower-level and was the way all programs were built, such that a program's functions were even little programs like this.) And, simlar yet better than .NET, as you run a program, the VM begins writing out a native version for the next run, but continues optomizing it. Think about all of the problems about getting a decent compiler for something like Itanium: now we'd have a VM that could continue to analyze program flow so that a program really could take advantange of an VLIW chip. The compiler doesn't need to do profiling; the JIT does, the upshot being that older programs will run faster and faster as the JIT improves, without a recompile.
.NET->Intent bytecode converter, and you've got yourself a winner, I'd think. However, I vaguely recall that there are patent problems here. Still, at least we could reimplement some of the concepts...
What I'd kind of like to see, to be honest, is for the community to make an Intent VM and then make the C# compiler compile to that instead of IL. Throw in a
Actually, I think this is possible running Linux and an emulator.
I always wondered why the other machines of the Amiga's heyday don't have the same bull-terrier style fan base.
Why am I not hearing rumor after rumor, year after year, about the return of the Atari ST, for example?
I seem to remember some vicious flame wars between these two camps back in the eighties, when Commodore and Atari were not only still in existence but actually relevant to the computer industry. Why are the Amiga folks the only ones still carrying the torch for their long deceased platform?
--saint
And the point is? AmigaDE runs on virtually any OS and prosessor out there. If they prefer Linux to provide drivers and other stuff to AmigaDE we don't care.
You can learn all about the latest Amiga stuff if you're going to be in the Baltimore, MD area at the end of March. On March 29th-31st at the Marriott Hunt Valley Inn there will be the first east coast Amiga show in at least eight years! Go to www.amigaexpo.com and find out about it.
Hear, hear!
Please mod parent up.
Best wishes,
James
Yeah thats right i still believe , Go Amiga INC , Go Hyperion and Go eyetech :)
:)
Frankly 68k emu isn`t the future , X86 sux , and the amiga darkside we`ll call um seem to have links to every dodgy amiga company in history including the one involved in stealing PPC cards.
BTW . Buy payback it rocks
Figures that the x86 wasn't really useable until the 4th revision. I'd say the 3rd revision, but that whole deal with the mathco and what-not, the bugs weren't worked out until 486. Amiga was always before its time. And a little out of my price range, besides who used a computer for video and sound editing? That's what complex dubbing and recording tools were for, not computers. Sheesh, if I only I knew where dreamworks would be 12 years ago, if only ..
It still amazes me that these machines are selling for hundreds of dollars on ebay now, along with the apple II's, and commodores ... but 286's are a dime a dozen. What's this tell me? Absolutely nothing :-) ... just information.
Personally I think the day of MS is over, the day of apple is nearing, and the day of the underdogs is going to rise upon us once again. There will be hundreds on non-standards, software will be written for multiple platforms and operating systems, only to have one more victory to which we will be locked into another companies ideals and software. It's a vicious trend that does not have a foreseeable end to it ... maybe one day ... maybe.
But right now, Go Amiga! :)
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Uh, that's my point. The AC I replied to said that AmigaDE on the Nokia Mediaterminal is "bollocks" because it already runs Linux. I said that AmigaDE runs on Linux. Why are you repeating what I said?
And who are "we"?
Help savingAmigaOS and a free PowerPC market
So I can understand the enthusiasm but let's face it, the Nokia 21xx series phone is dead and we need to get over it. They're not going to make any more, and putting the Nokia logo on every phone out there isn't going to bring back the 21xx series phone we knew and loved. Doubtless assocating with Amiga will bring more brand recognition and let people know that the name of Nokia is still alive, but it just will never be the same phone as we knew and loved. And furthermore... [...continued on page 94]
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
This was first discovered in the comments section of ANN (where this news item is also extensively discussed), after a news item was posted this morning.
Come on, Archie, you're better than this. I'm very disappointed.
Interesting side note: the term "multi-media" is in fact a trade mark, much like "Ping-Pong". It was first used as the name of the presentation program Scala MultiMedia, for the Amiga of course. One of the slickest presentation programs ever designed, in fact it still slaughters Powerpoint even on a 7.14 MHz A500...
They've since migrated to PC, check it out a www.scala.com. Try doing a site search for "Amiga"... They still write about it and somewhat support it (kudos to them!)
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
Hi
;) )</rant>
;) </troll>, ah, and one last thing, the person ;)
;)
michael: FYI the media terminal *was launched by the end of 2001*, I live in Sweden, and they
have been selling for quite a while now.
We also had a demo of the new version, that will be launched in 2 weeks or so, in the FOSDEM, at
the Mozilla developers room, it was really great, it runs Linux(2.4.10+ I think), uses an embedded
version of mozilla as browser(0.9.5+, and will be upgraded automatically to 1.0 when it's released),
have 2 USB, 2 FireWire, 1 PCMCIA, Ethernet, and I don't remember what else, but it was really cool...
(full specs here: http://www.nokia.com/multimedia/tech_specs.html)
I don't have a TV, so I doubt I'll buy one, but you can be sure that it will take very short
time to be hacked, also almost all(if not all) the software it runs it's opensource, and you
can find it at: https://www.ostdev.net/(I think they are
going to release even more software there in the very near future)
A really cool project, that uses opensource software... <rant>ah, sorry, I forgot that this
days slashdot is full of M$ zealots that run WinXP/IE and think that in linux you have to do
"./configure; make; make install" to install anything(have you heard of RedCarpet? that makes
me think.... RedCarpet/Ximian desktop for the MediaTerminal? that could be cool...(not for me,
of course
[End rambling, back on topic ]
I think it's great that somebody is doing something like this, have in mind that this
will compete directly with the next version of the X-Box(HomeStation or whatever it's
going to be called), and I really prefer to see people using a product based on opensource
(so I can hack it if I want) than having to run windows on their TV(<troll>anyone wants to get
a BSOD in the middle of his favorite movie
from nokia(hi Magnus!) that made the presentation, said that they are going to release xDSL modems
for it, that means that this modems will have drivers for Linux, something that in the past was a really
big problem... in resume(I have to go back to work!) this is a "Very good thing(tm)" and
anybody that cares about open source should be happy that it exists..(even if like me, many
of us aren't probably going to ever use it, after all, we don't have a life, right?
\\Uriel
P.S.: I use FreeBSD with Ion instead of any desktop, but it's really funny
to see people complaining that linux is hard to use when even a 3 years
old could install RedHat(in my experience much easier than installing any
WinXX)
P.P.S.: Hmmm. I think in the end it could be useful for me: a Plan9 CPU or file server...
and I could mount the TV screen(if I had one) from my Plan9 termianl
"When in doubt, use brute force." Ken Thompson
The Nokia Media Terminal was supposed to be launched in the second quarter of 2001, then by the end of 2001, now... who knows.
Actually, it's already available in Sweden, and I guess the rest of Europe, though at a price of 8.495 SEK (~ $1000), I can't imagine they sold many of them...
I've seen playback on a full-sized Amiga, this looks like its really going to rock on a PDA- now I just have to decide what one to get :)
And please guys- stop living in the '80s- its 2002, its a new Amiga, yes, its not the original Amiga crew (Jay and his dog, RJ and the rest), but they're guys who have been with the Amiga for years all the same.
If I understand it right, AmigaDE is just a VM together with programming tools. .NET framework, except that people are claiming it is very fast? Portability is also not an issue with tha Java VM and others. Maybe I just don't get it ...
How is it different then from other VMs like the
I too used, and loved, a system now passed away. Zealots still continue to say that it will rise again, but I saw long ago that - "It's dead, Jim."
None of your pathetic hopes are going to bring Windows back, it's dead, dead, do you hear me?
The latest hope (and there's always a new one) is that Microsoft seems to be making a appearance at Amiga's booth at the Embedded Systems Show in San Francisco, CA, March 12 (booth #1602)...
Seriously, the above is true (except in reverse). Amiga will be displaying DE (+ more announcements?) at Microsoft's booth at the above fair, check out Amiga Network News, comment 7 (and horrified replies). MS buying AI? MS embracing (and extending...) Intent/DE? MS actually supporting Amiga? Find out in the next episode of Soap!I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
Hehehehehehe... did anyone read the technical specifications? I wonder how they accomplished to implement IP over MPEG? (heheh) Is this similar to DWDM, but rather splitting a wave length, they use the already split framerate? LOL...just thought i'd toss this out to the void...
Or are they just itching to get their hands on the AutoConfig(tm) patents that prevented P&P from being efficient? Seems a little late for that, but...
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Remember when Sony released a Internet terminal that used BeOS? It certainly cemented BeOS' future.
Jason.
yup the exist !! :) suck that bplan check :/ 116 04
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/amigaone/message
Theres more on the miggy.com site , but seems slashdoters have given it a hard time hehe
Loki's gone. I wonder where they get games for it now....
Why would Microsoft buy Amiga though, if it's really true (it kind of seems unlikely, given .NET presumably is a head-to-head rival to AmigaDE, they're not going to throw out the CLI now and replace it with DE surely?)
That bit about AutoConfig is interesting too... For those that have never experienced it, Amiga AutoConfig allowed all expansion (Zorro) cards to have drivers in ROMS on the cards. You would just plug in the card, reboot, and the driver would be uploaded and run.
This is all very tied to a single platform (Amiga in this case), but Sun has made a lot of progress in this field with JINI, where the drivers are made in Java, and there's also actual interface programs built in.
The coolest demonstration I ever saw was when some Sun guys hooked up a FireWire HD and a digital camera to the same box. Two little icons appeared in windows (Camera, HD). By double clicking on the Camera icon, a (Java, stored in the camera) interface appears, displaying the pictures in the camera in an explorer like way. Clicking the HD made the contents of it (from the Java program stored in the HD) also appear in a explorer like window.
Then, they just drag a picture from the camera to the HD...
True Plug-and-Play (on any system!) requires an architecture agnostic solution of this kind!
You will need a virtual language, and I guess Tao's version is as good as (or better than!) any...
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
I don't know if it's even still an issue in the way it was. Autoconfig was wonderful, but as you say, the solution was tied to a particular architecture. Worse in my mind, it was tied to a particular platform - you couldn't use it for MINIX or AmigaUnix. To be honest, a Java solution or something similar only hides the fact that the solution is platform specific - a PC could theoretically be designed to work with Amiga autoconfig by, amongst other things, incorporating UAE into whatever OS you want to run, but you wouldn't want to.
In practice, I wonder how possible it is to create a framework for platform independent device drivers? And if the only way is to produce an intermediate platform, as in the Java solution, would it be best to optimise that platform given its role as a go-between rather than an OS in its own right?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Do you think these capitalistic prousti's will make this go? or are they just flogging a dead corpse? [like taco's right hand?]
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
I'm programming an operating system that does allow you to use your computer as a PVR / media hub.
Kaos has a media design that uses DeCSS to play DVDs, and can play DivX. CD/DVD burning is supported in the OS, not a purchase.
Kaos is going to be very fast compared to Linux, Windows or Mac OS. I think it would be better to go with a fresh start than a fresh corpse.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
What they mean with "Ip over MPEG" is nothing else than IP over DVB - Digital Video Broadcast. DVB is the digital television standard in Europe, and NOKIA is a major player in it, as is Fujitsu-Siemens and others. There exist three DVB transmission styles:
and a similare audio-standard, named DAB - Digital Audio Boradcasting. DAB will replace the FM tuners over the years, and DVB will replace the conventional TV broadcastings.
Still we do not know what "IP over MPEG" is, right ? Well, DVB transmissions consist of a subset of MPEG2. I think this is what they meant with this. I have such a DVB-Card in one of my PCI slots. Together with my USB Host-To-Host bridge, my D-Link NIC this is the third (never asked for, since I use DVB for Television only) network card I have in my system. The DVB standard not only transmits audio/video but also (since we are talking digital, you guessed it...;-)) generic information, as in this case, TCP/IP packets. With this it is possible to use a sattelite (with the SAT version) as network-downstream. This still would require the upstream to go through a conventional method, however. I guess this will change in the next ten years, and DVB will become a standard way to access the Internet...
What is especially interesting are the things going on "behind the scenes", especially from an Open Source point of view:
MHP is a standard, that will incooperate DVB but make it a real standard. At the moment each broadcaster tries to enforce its own modifications and incompatibilities on the users (Germanies largest broadcaster did so, some French pay-channel did, etc.), just as we know similare practices from M$.
LinuxTV.Org also wrote and/or hosts the important (GPL'ed) software for the DVB cards on Linux, both the v4l compatible TV drivers as well as the IP over MPEG ;-) driver. In addition they host a very cool Linux project, named VDR, which makes a harddisk-video recorder out of any linux compatible PC with one ore more DVB card(s).
BTW: see also DirectFB stuff on Freshmeat and for Gods sake, have a look at this amazing GTK+ desktop with full aplpha blending or the "rootless X Server"(1) (2) or "ten MPEG Videos playing at once, blended, without framedrops". You will find their GTK+ patches here and the DVB stuff here
All in all this is perfect for embedded systems and desktop boxes as well as it will be for full blown deksktops. (Linux desktop without X, digital video and audio broadcast based on free and open standards etc.)
Hello?? Fred?! Is this you?
This article is beginning to look like something I'd see on memepool.
are you racist?
Microsoft doesn't make computers.
Amiga's strategy ain't half bad- what flaws it is McEwen's enthusiasm to make the DE nothing more than a Flash plugin- but with a revenue stream from that, the vision can return.
It's 2002. We've been doing desktop systems for more than 22 years. Everything on an x86 desktop can now be crammed into a Metapad. Everything the 'average user' does on a daily basis- and I count myself in this category- can be done on a device with much less horsepower. The only exception is compiling Mozilla sources (something you really *don't* want to be doing daily, if you can help it?), and even that ain't bad on a Transmeta or PPC laptop.
What does the whole DE vision mean? It means that, in 20 years, you'll be able to get the hell away from your desk, because your software will run equally well on your low power, SuperH wearable. It means you can pick up a Palm-type device for $40, and slap it up wherever, *without having to think about it.* No scavenging for a port for a particular architecture, no dealing with crossplatform issues, it'll work, it'll run, and it'll hopefully use open standards. Your grandmother can buy software at the store without worrying about compatibility. You can actually buy that game you wanted, because your investment is protected when your OS or hardware is changed.
There's a whole world beyond both x86 and PowerPC (look at NetBSD's platforms for a sampling), and the VP concept opens up that world. Sure, there are a lot of bugs to work out- VP doesn't support memory protection, which is pretty limiting, but not wholly crippling (slide OS-9 or QNX underneath it, and run multiple instances)- but even if Tao and Amiga don't get there, I'm hoping someone else will. I don't want to be chained to the desktop simply because x86 is the only commoditized processor and it can only be had cheap in that form factor; I don't want to wait for another Loki to emerge to give me some entertainment software. I don't want to have to spend *months* of my life configuring things for my relatives, or be stuck as an unpaid sysadmin if I move them to a *NIX. Amiga promises to let me have my cake and eat it, too- a unified experience for the people who can't deal with more, and just another process on my *NIX box when I want to play around.
If they can pull it off, this *is* the next Macintosh, and a hell of a lot more elegant, to boot.
The original Amiga designers (founders of Hi-Toro, in Los Gatos, CA, which was later renamed Amiga and bought out by Commodore) had some real vision. Jay Miner (RIP) had the sense to realize that the *real* killer app for home computing was entertainment, and had the brains to put it in silicon. Multimedia was a research project before, left to the likes of PARC, and realized in sterile, monochrome form in the Mac. The Amiga designers knew that games technology would also enable new 'serious' applications. These guys were fleeing Atari, who were only concerned with the bottom line.
:)
As Hi-Toro/Amiga burned through their VC, they were almost acquired by Atari- headed by the Tramiel family at that time, who had just left Commodore. The Tramiels had a reputation for sucking the technical superiority out of products- Jack Tramiel had just left Commodore, and had given the go-ahead to ship the C64 with its broken UART (not the engineers' faults; it was a 3rd party vendor's failure). Remember the slow load times off a 1541? That was Jack Tramiel's fault- it was designed to be 8x faster.
Commodore swooped in and picked up the ailing Amiga, nurturing it back to health (though screwing it up from the start, by limiting the resolution to ~640x240). Atari, grumbling, called the proverbial board meeting, and assembled the ST as competition- it bore vague similarities, but couldn't multitask, lacked the coprocessors of the Amiga, and was as proprietized as Atari could make it. It was, in all respects, an attempt to undercut the Mac.
By endgame (1994), the two platforms were nearly caught up, but by then, Atari users had fled to the Mac- which they'd wished they could've afforded in 1985- or to Wintel. Amigans, on the other hand, never wanted anything but an Amiga- or if they did want something else, it was an SGI machine and a yet-uninvented Dreamcast.
I've snuck a bit of opinion in, I'm sure, but that was the base difference. The Amiga designers' feud with Atari was public knowledge from the start (see old issues of INFO-64), and a lot of users sympathized. A lot of Amiga users came from the Commodore 64 scene, and had been following the news. ST users came from a different camp- they were just trying to save a buck versus a Mac, or were musicians who saw the built-on MIDI interface (no MPU-401 emulation in those days; it was just a serial port) and assumed the ST was their only option.
There *was* no real competition for an Amiga back then, unless you had a 5-digit graphics workstation- and most of those machines squandered precious cycles and memory on oversized OSes.
A chance to get something i said linked to from the slashdot front page!
Frigidaire doesn't make computers either. That's hardly a flaw in my argument. Besides, if M$ is the role model for Amiga Inc., that's hardly very encouraging. Computer companies that don't make their own computers are vulnerable to all sorts of things, like having M$ keep them off systems, manufacturers making substandard consumer junk, inability to fix critical hardware flaws... etc. Do you really think that if they have a shot, M$ won't actively squash them? Chances are good Be would still be here, but for that. Be had as many as 5 deals going, to be dual loaded on big name systems. If just 1 of those had panned out...
Maybe for you, this vision will be good enough, but for me it's hardly adequate even today. I like to do things that most people would never do, unless it could be bought on a shelf at Walmart, and was promised to configure itself. If it goes your way, I won't be able to have 4 nics in my box, like I do now, there will be no slots at all. No building my own. And with no building my own, there will also be no learning how it all works, short of a masters degree in computer engineering. There are so many good reasons for there to be one more kind of computer, several kinds, and so few reasons to let the industry just explore one approach. Anti-trust issues, lack of creativity, lack of consumer choice, tech security problems on a global scale. Any idea how your general run of the mill script kiddy virus will fare in a world where all systems can run the same code? Now, what if it isn't a script kiddy, but someone with talent? A biosphere where all organisms are genetically identical is a disaster waiting for the right pathogen. Your vision puts us on track for the first part, all we have to do is wait.
This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future. - Adolph Hitler 1935
This quotation, often seen without any date or citation at all, suffers from several credibility problems, the most significant of which is that the date given (*in alternate versions, the words "This year..." are replaced by "1935...") has no correlation with any legislative effort by the Nazis for gun registration, nor would there have been a need for the Nazis to pass such a law, since gun registration laws passed by the Weimar government (in part to address street violence between Nazis and Communists!) were already in effect.
More: hitler gun control
I wonder if a reactionary right-wing puke like yourself will allow the truth to get in the way of your use of this bogus pro-gun quote. I doubt it. With your type, the ends always justify the means.
Sig goes here
It's an open platform, and you can develop for it. You should read more of the content before you make this sort of assertion. The "applications" that are available are applications to develop for the platform, and the platform itself, not the actual applications (TV Guide, recorder, etc).
OS X is based on BSD, OS X has at least 3.5 million paid users. Probably 7 million total uers.
Linux would be lucky to have 70 thousand users, if that. Linux is Dying. And nobody buys transmet chips.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer