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Former Netscape Executive gives $4000 to AmiZilla

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the 'tis-the-season dept.

POds writes "Recently a Former Netscape Executive made a 2000 dollar donation to the Amizilla project, but for one reason or another, decided 2000 wasn't good enough and donated, yet another 2000 dollars. His only request is that he wants to see the amount get over $10,000 so is requesting others donate what they can. The Booty is now over $8400 and goes to the first developer(s) to port Mozilla to the Amiga platform."

7 of 360 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Please give us Firebird first by NoMoreNicksLeft · · Score: 3, Informative

    I think you have it all backwards. The people doing the coding, they get to deicide what is more or less worthwhile.

    Ijits on slashdot, who likely have never seen an Amiga (and despite the contest rules, UAE doesn't count), shouldn't go dissing what was once an awesome computer.

    I have 5 or so Amigas, and the only thing that makes my interest so slight is lack of an ethernet card for them. $100+ for 10baseT on ebay is absurd, even by my standards.

  2. Re:always leaving out Atari... by The+Lynxpro · · Score: 4, Informative

    "Correct me if I'm wrong (I probably am), but wouldn't a port from Amiga to ST be relatively easy? I know that for a while there they had a fair bit of software in common, but I confess that I don't know if it was due to similarities in architecture or similarities in capability."

    The two platforms didn't have much in common other than the fact that they both shared Motorola 680x0 microprocessors and the optional Motorola math co-processors (rare in both platforms standard). Both platforms tended to have more custom chipsets and co-processors than say the Mac or x86 platforms of their era. Graphics, sound, MMU, Blitters, (the Ataris even had their own keyboard processor) etc. If you move up to the Atari Falcon, you had the Motorola 68030 and the Motorla DSP processor, but the Falcon is a rare bird of the ST platform, probably rarer than the Amiga 3000.

    Then there's the fact that Atari's TOS operating system was essentially CP/M68K (GEMDOS) with a customized Digital Research GEM GUI sitting on top. Granted, early Linux was ported over to the ST/TT/Falcon platform so I guess there's that route...

    --
    "Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
  3. Re:Please give us Firebird first by Tassach · · Score: 3, Informative
    Have you tried a parallel port Ethernet adapter? You should be able to find an old one (Xircom) on Ebay that will work with the Amiga.

    Another cheap and easy way to get IP connectivity to your Amiga is PLIP: run the plip daemon on a linux box, then run a null-modem parallel cable from the Linux box to your Amiga's parallel port.

    --
    Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
  4. Re:Different Idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative
    Recursive: adj. see Recursive

    That's not recursion, that's an infinite loop. You need a stopping condition, like "See Recursive until you get it."

  5. Re:Amiga zealots. by downix · · Score: 2, Informative

    Correct, to his A500 it would be.

    But check the specs again, it's not planned nor even attempted for the A500. It's for the latest models, the most expandible, and even non-Amiga hardware that can run Amiga API's. We're talking it is for Athlons, PowerPC, even 68040/060 machines. A1200's alongside Dells and Pegasos.

    AROS runs on PC's, and MorphOS runs on the PowerPC based Pegasos.

    --
    Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
  6. Re:Amiga zealots. by frankbro · · Score: 2, Informative
    Bribing people to port new, resource hungry software to a decade-old platform is an exercise in frustration. Now, someone else in this thread said that the AmiZilla port is more aimed at the "new and exciting" AmigaOS that everyone's been promising for the last five years. Hey, that would be great. My impression was that some poor bastard was taking on the task of porting Moz to his A500, and that just struck me as futile and impractical.

    The port of Mozilla to AmigaOS is not for people with a stock A500 and AmigaOS 1.3. It is for those with much more powerful Amigas and at least AmigaOS 3.x. The preferred OS will be AmigaOS 4.0 at it is soon to be released, running on new PowerPC hardware. It will also work with MorphOS, which is in its 1.4 release, and runs on the Pegasos PowerPC platform. MorphOS shares the same API's as AmigaOS 3.1.

  7. Re:I am truly impressed by vidarh · · Score: 2, Informative
    The shortlist of what I still miss from my Amiga using days:

    • Datatypes - Amiga had a generalized system for basic handling of file types that allowed you to drop in a library to handle a data type (an image format for instance) and all programs that used datatypes and could handle the particular type of data (image, sound etc.) would instantly be able to load and save and manipulate the new format in various ways.
    • Assigns. Almost like symlinks, but volatile and not visible in the filesystem. Almost like shell aliases, but visible in file selectors
    • A usable file selector... I to this day have not seen any other one that I've been as satisfied with as the file selectors used on the Amiga (plural, because most people would use slightly enhanced onces, from the asl or arq libraries)
    • Workbench... There was much discussion about spatial finders here earlier. Amiga's Workbench had the basics, and was lightweight enough to be usable even on very slow machines. Back then I did manage my files graphically - I've not seen a graphical file manager that's been good enough since, though Nautilus is slowly approaching a usable state at least on CPU's a few hundred times faster than the Amigas
    • AREXX, or at least the automation it gave. I hate the language, but love the level of automation offered and having a standard API for doing it. DCOP, DBUS etc. seem to be slowly getting there, but it's still nowwhere near what the Amiga had 15 years ago. The beauty of it was simplicity - Arexx only passed arrays of strings around and got arrays of strings back, and how apps dealt with what they got was up to the apps. For most automation tasks that's all that's needed... Most newer attempts are severely over-engineered.
    • Some of the apps, that I've not yet found replacements for that I'm happy with: Diskmaster II (I've seen a few DOpus clones, and they might do the trick, haven't tried them though), Cygnus ED (combined with Arexx it was a great development environment), Deluxe Paint IV and Digipaint (Gimp may have more features, but Deluxe Paint and Digipaint are still miles ahead in terms of usability for basic freehand or pixel work)
    • Screens, and having app menus on top of the screen... MDI was a kludge. Menu bars in each app window each screen realestate. Screens were a nice clean solution, and I DID regularly use the ability to drag them. Enlightenment have or had support for draggable screens, but without app support for it you're only halfway there.
    • A standard way of handling command line options that also provided option overviews in a standard format that could easily be parsed by a program