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QNX give update of new Amiga OS and GUI
g.macdonald wrote in to
send us news of the new Amiga GUI based on QNX. It
looks very perty. How long before we have a GNOME and Enlightenment
theme that mimics it.
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It's the "Boing" ball. One of the first ever Amiga demos had a 3D "Boing" ball bouncing around the screen, making a "boing" noise whenever it hit the border. In the post-Commodore era, the "Boing" ball got adopted as an unofficial Amiga logo. Somewhere along the line it became the official logo. Just as well; I think it's way cooler than the old rainbow tickmark logo that Commodore used.
http://www.amiga.com/diary/1999/990799-e.html
Read the Executive Update article as well. Interesting dynamics between this announcement and the QNX announcement of only a few hours earlier.
-DrPsycho - Coping with reality since 1975
Ah. So you didn't read the press release.
:-)
The key to any OS is long-term credibility.
QNX has been around since 1980. 19 years ago, I figure Linus Torvalds was hacking helloworld in AppleSoft BASIC, maybe. Plenty of long-term credibility, I'd think.
Other than that they seem to be offering features that are already done better by other OSs.
Real-time. QNX owns real-time UNIX, and always has. SGI and Sun didn't weren't building real-time systems worthy of the name until '95-ish. If you're building a system that lowers the control rods into a nuclear reactor in response to temperature, and a 1ms delay will cause a meltdown, would you turn to Linux? Oops! I'm sorry, you just irradiated a large chunk of North America. Perhaps you'll consider QNX next time 'round
Notice that all the engineering that goes into making a real-time system can help out with other stuff too. E.g., those low low dispatch times presumably help multimedia apps.
They are the leading realtime OS for the x86 platform.
:-)
The Amiga project is based on their new Neutrino kernel which runs on x86, PPC, MIPS(and whatever the Amiga is going to run on
From their corporate backgrounder at: http://www.qnx.com/company/compover.html
"We lead the realtime industry not only in innovation but in experience as well. No other realtime OS vendor has over 18 years on the x86 platform. As a result, no other realtime OS offers more options for this environment. (We are now porting our advanced OS technology to several other platforms.)
QNX also leads the industry in marketshare. According to a recent Emerging Technologies report, "QNX Software Systems has the largest realtime OS market share in the Intel x86 marketplace". IDC Consulting and First Technology discovered similar findings. According to their recent Industry Report, QSSL has almost 22% of the marketshare for self-hosted development environments while the next largest share held by a realtime OS competitor is just over 11%."
So what exactly are we getting?
/is/ different, and /is/ built on top of the QNX OS, what the heck are they going to rip out to justify charging consumer OS prices for Amiga and industry OS prices for their existing clients?
That whole thing sounded like a sales pitch for QNX and their windowing stitch-on, Photon.
Gods, I have such a love-hate relationship with QNX. I think it'll make an amazing foundation to a new OS, but on the other hand I've developed under QNX for the last year and I hate it - it's a RTOS and gods help you if you aren't writing a specialised realtime app for thousands of installations. And I don't see much in that press release telling you what you get that you can't already have:
- QNX OS foundation - The QNX OS is already available for the x86. (A license'll cost you, at last check, $1K+ cdn unless you can get major volume discounts. A new pricing structure, actually, and the straw that broke our little software house's back and is pushing us to a free, full-featured OS that starts with an 'L')
- Photon Micro-GUI - I've never used their Photon. We have no licenses for it. QNX likes licenses. (Did you know that QNX requires a separate license for their TCP/IP package?) Oh, but Photon does already exist anyway.
- x86 architecture. So we're using the same machine guts too.
What Amiga? where? Is this going to be QNX on x86 with a slightly enhanced GUI with its own look-and-feel - and the Amiga label.
Another thought. QNX charges big bucks for their OS. More big bucks for development licenses. A new Amiga is going to be a consumer machine, right? So if this wonderful new OS
Of course, I may just be ranting, after spending another month working on a minor release number on QNX rather than the next major release on Linux. So take what I say with a grain of salt.
--Tiger