>What really needs to be done is to penalize >companies that use the services of spammers.
Exactly. I couldn't understand why the antispam laws haven't done this. Sure, we can try to shut down the guys actually pressing the "send" button, but the company payng him to do so will only find another guy to press the send button. I've been boycotting Circuit City for 5 years now because they kept spamming me, even after writing to Circuit City customer support asking them to stop. They of course claimed no knowledge or responsibility for emails advertizing Circuit City sales appering in my email. Yea, right. Why can't we send the CANSPAM guys after the company being advertized? Obviously the spammers would not be doing so if the companies being advertized weren't paying for it to be done.
Without any motivation to stop, Circuit City, the guys selling all those "herbal supplements" and junk will continue to do so, jumping from one bulk emailer to the next. These antispam laws dropped the ball in neglecting to demotivate those being advertized.
>Now they want more money from those people while giving them less than they would by buying the CD in the store.
And this is a suprise how? They want to keep their existing business model the primary one. That's selling media at music stores, not legal internet downloads. By pricing legal internet downloads higher than prices of media at a music store, they believe it encourages customers to do what the record companies wish, and buy CD media rather than legal internet downloads.
That, and they're too greedy for their own good.
Until the record companies begin to realize that fair prices for legal internet downloads can be good for them, they'll try to limit this activity. Hopefully someday they'll realize that the world is moving on, technology is surpassing the CD era just like CDs surpassed cassettes, which overtook vinyl, which overthrew wax cylenders, etc. and relax their grip on CDs. It's curious that they don't embrace a distribution method that does not require manufacturing jewel cases, CD discs, printing covers, wrapping them in plastic wrap and then paying a trucker to drive it all to the store... With legal downloads they just have themselves, the store (iTunes for example in place of Best Buy), and the credit card companies, who all already have their places in the current media-based model. With the executive's share, the artist's sliver, and whatever the store and credit card companies get from the final sale price, should "retail" prices not go down with the lack of manufacturing and shipping? Should lower prices not encourage more purchases, and thus ultimately raise the RIAA's income simply by increasing the number of purchases made? I just don't understand why they conciously want to decrease sales via a model that has no materials/shipping costs compared to their current way, and think this will result in better overall profits for them... But that appears to be what they want, to do things in such a way that can actually reduce their overall profit.:/...and which also frustrates their consumers, who decide pricing is unfair, and that they may be more willing to rip off the RIAA via p2p rather than let the RIAA rip them off. Ironic isn't it?:)
>What exactly turns you people on about watching TV in higher resolution?
With my current TV it's really nt omuch of a problem really. Kindof dumb wasting the side edges of a film on my square-ish TV screen though. And I'd like something bigger than my 19". Big-screen would be cool. But I've seen NTSC rez bigscreens and they look like crap with their 1'4" pixels and such. Higher resolution at big-screen sizes will vastly improve picture quality compared to NTSC at the same big size... Widescreen will be bonus for movies too, I'll get those side endes back without having the boring black bars on the top and bottom. I suppose I'll have similar black bars on the side instead when watching a square TV show or movie format, but at least I won't be forced to throw data away. I kindof like the Samsung DLP sets but they only have 720 native display and down-convert 1080 streams.:/ Until I find something I like that can go the whole way to 1080 format on screen that I can possibly afford, I'll sit and quietly save my money... Pity I don't have a good room for a front projector. Puny townhouse with windows and glass doors everywhere I wouldn't be able to see the image real great on a sunny day.:(
>TFA mentioned something about distribution problems.
That could explain things. I only saw two yellow cap bottles around here the whole time the promotion was on, and those were both Sierra Mist. I never saw one single Pepsi with a yellow cap. And that wasn't because of other promotions getting in the mix, all I ever saw was plain ordinary Pepsi bottles. How was I supposed to even try to participate or use winning codes when I couldn't find any freakin yellow caps??
> I don't believe that. Companies that make hardware > shouldn't be so dogged about protecting their software.
They're not necessarily overly paranoid about protecting their software. Part of what some hardware companies are afraid of is letting everyone know the software will give them "too much" insight into the design of the hardware. How it works. What spiffy tricks they've come up with to increase performance or quality or whatever as part of the chip architecture.
They don't want their hardware competitor to get anything out of such possible insights via driver code. This is why certain companies don't want to open-source their drivers, not because they want to keep it secret how good or bad their coders are or whatever conspiracy you have up your sleeve.
Uhm... There is compatibility built in. I don't see this part mentioned on Hyperion's press release, but that's what has been happening. There's a 68K CPU interpreter there already, and they're workign on building in a JIT 68K CPU emulator. "System friendly" applications/games/etc. will work via this CPU emulator via an API bridge. Things that weren't system friendly and banged on hardware directly? The UAE classic Amiga emulator that emulates the complete chipset has a version ported to OS4, so there's really not that much support missing for old games or apps that can't/won't be ported to OS4 API/PPC native. Will this API thing be perfect? Probably not, but you Linux guys seem relatively happy with the percentage of Windows apps are supported by Wine, so you better not complain.;) I haven't seen any specifics on emulation/wrapper success or failure, and I don't have the hardware to try it myself yet, but I will soon as I'm going to order a machine for it this next week. Fortunately for me, most of the stuff I still use on my "classic" Amiga has already planned OS4 native porting.
>Help me understand why anyone cares about this, let >alone why it qualifies as/. worthy?
While it may not matter to you, it is somewhat nerdy type news, and isn't that what Slashdot is all about? Personally I wish people would stop posting Amiga news items to Slashdot, as it's obviusly not welcome here, and we're obviously an outcast group of nerds looking for news if we are interested in it. The comments in response to any Amiga post make that abundantly clear.
Some people care or it wouldn't have been developed at all. The guys spending the development money would have chosen not to, if there were zero people interested. If you and other Slashdot/Linux users do not count yourselves as part of that group, well, apparently the developers don't seem to consider that to be a serious problem.
I don't like Linux because it's harder to get running than I'd like. I don't go around wondering why Linus and friends bother to continue wasting their time developing such a thing. It's what they want, it's what you want, and that's cool. Why are people that are interested in something different than you are scorned so?
>In all honesty they should just open up the source >instead of flogging a dead horse.
You slashdot guys are always saying this, it's dead, jsut open source it. Why open source it? What are you open source guys actually going to do with it? Would you ever actually look at it or use it for anything? If not, then why go around with your record skipping on this phrase?? Open source it, open source it, open source it.... But there' s never a reason why or description of how this would be useful or a good thing to do or would be worth doing to the current owners...
Please, an honest question... WHY, do you or anyone else here want it open sourced?? What would you use the source for? Do you plan to add any parts to Linux or BSD or any other OS project? Which ones? Why use pieces of what Slashdotters consider to be a dead OS in whatever project you're thinking about? Really, how does open sourcing it do any good to the people that have paid money to own it? Or to you, or to me, or to anyone?
I do. I use it for all my email. It's something to tinker with and create things for and do some programming. I do image editing with it. I haven't fired up a game on it for quite a long time now. What does your Linux box do that makes it so special compared to Windows, and why don't you just use Windows instead because more people do that than use Linux?? You may think Linux is so cool and stuff, but why bother?? It's basically the same question as you and other Slashdot people always ask from Amiga users.
Modern hardware? I'm involved with the company writing drivers for Radeon cards... It is a PowerPC OS so won't run on the latest Athlon or P4 machines though.
What is the compelling reason for Linux to exist? With 90-some% of computer users running Windows, why should they care about anything not Windows?
Comparable answers exist to your same question regarding AmigaOS, MorphOS, QNX, BSD, MacOS, etc. Not everyone likes vanilla (Windows). Not everyone that doesn't like vanilla likes chocolate (Linux) either. Some prefer eggnog flavor, butter pecan, or whatever.
Myself, I simply do not like Windows, so I'm looking for a different flavor that suits me. I've tried Linux, but I've found it unsuitable to me as it's currently still a bit too much of a hacker thing, and I'm looking for something easier to install and use, but I do intend to eventually get a Linux/MythTV PVR box running, but I've fought with that for over a year now, and Linux isntall/config has ben by far the largest obstacle dur to driver issues, cryptic configuration methods, and lack of "for dummies" style documentation, and I'm just not interested in fihgting with stuff just to get it to run. If it suits you, that's great, but I'm on to a different flavor. MacOS didn't suit me in the past, though I haven't seen OS X which I hear is a large improvement. *BSD I basically put in a similar category as Linux, though my NetBSD exoerience (on Amiga hardware no less!) a number of years ago, though that may be better too now. MorphOS may be similar to Amiga in some ways, and it may be very good, I don't know, but I don't like certain individuals involved with producing it. Kindof like boycotting Velveeta because I'm mad at the president of Kraft foods as a comparison example, but (disclaimer) I don't actually have any problems with Kraft or their execs, I don't know anything about them (/disclaimer).
AmigaOS years ago I found quite to my liking. It's been sortof a specialty flavor that's been hard but no timpossible to find, long forgotten by many but found in certain specialist shops for those who know where to look.
Basically the compelling reason for it to exist is that some people want it to, just like some people want Linux to exist. And just like the masses not understanding why you bother with Linux when Windows is so popular, most of the slashdot/Linux crowd doesn't understand why someone would use something different yet again. If the fact that neither Windows NOR Linux is suitable for me in particular,just like Windows may not be suitable for you in particular, then there is no explaining anything about this.
Some people want it, and some people think it's worth doing. What other reason is there for anything to exist?
Well, what about just adding some variety to life? I've got an mp3 CD filled with most of my regular CD collection. If I begin playing it at work at the beginning, I hear the same thing first every time, and the stuff at the end of the disk I would miss every day when I leave before the player gets to them. Same old same old same old day in and day out. No fun... Random play feature allows me to hear different songs, rather than reach the point of dreading the first number of songs on the CD as I've heard them and got sick of them in the morning. Much like I get sick of songs that are played very often on the radio, lack of variety makes me really annoyed with that one song that never goes away for more than 20 minutes.
I might ask the guy talking about people liking it because they're brain damaged, do DJ's onthe radio now, or have they ever, played a particular album stright through from start to finish? Or do they mix it up with different bands and different songs, in a somewhat random arrangement? (When they aren't really showing preference to some new song the Clearchannel folks have told everyone to play every 3rd song for a couple months...) Since the RIAA via Clearchannel now owns almost all radio stations, you'd think they could enforce the requirement to play albums from start to finish for the remaining people ut there that don't yet have brain damage, surely there is some reason this hasn't been done for the last 50 years??
I think this also depends on who's installing the stuff. I'm not a linux nut. Perhaps a hobbyist wannabe, but a lot of things are still beyond my motivation to deal with. I've got a project going to build a MythTV box.
I stared trying to install Debian, as I understand MythTV's core developers use Debian. The OS installed OK, but I couldn't get X to run with my Radeon card well, only being able to get the generic VESA drivers to work with it. Not very good, and I eventually gave up.
My next try was Redhat. Probably in the 8.something time. The OS installed pretty good, and easily set up Radeon drivers for me. But I couldn't get Myth installed. And I gave up.
Now I'm trying Gentoo. Fought with it for some time, gave up on Radeon and gor an Nvidia based card. The OS installs OK, but I again had problems with graphics drivers, but a couple weeks ago somehow finally got things working with X nicely. I don't know what I did different, or what I did that I didn't do before, as I was going downthe install checklist printed from Gentoo's website. Seemed to be OK, so I went to ebuild mysql which MythTV requires. I can't figure this thing out, the ebuild "completes" with one error, which I can't find a reference to exactly what happened. I've started the mysql interface which appears to work, but some of the setup instructions fail on sql server not found problems, even though something from mysql is running a new command line interface. I have no clue what's up, or how to fix the ebuild error. So as I've done a couple other times with Gentoo, I'm now waiting for someone else to fix whatever is wrong. I'm not motivated to do it myself, I'm annoyed that some ebuild that should work doesn't.
I may try Redhat/Fedora again, or perhaps Mandrake as I haven't had a go with that one yet.
For you, always going from source might be OK. For certain things, always going from source is probably OK. For me, I'd probably have a working MythTV box if it wasn't such a mess. In my case, for me, precompiled stuff would probably be easier to install, as I wouldn't have to worry about compiler versions, compile times, etc. Might not be "optimized" for my exact hardware set, but should be usable.
If the ebuild stuff in Gentoo gets working more reliably I'll be happy to do that, but for now I'm about to give up on this Gentoo distro as well. I may give it one more go withthe newer 2004 CDs, as my current install used the 1.4 CDs and ebuild updated to 2004. Maybe something got left out of that update, I have no idea how to know. Don't much care, if a fresh 2004 install doesn't go then I'm done with Gentoo.:/
And I would never ask my mom to use Linux and install everything from source. If things reach the point where she could handle that, maybe source-only distribution of stuff would be great. For now, all it's done for me is give me headaches and pull my hair out.:)
Hey, the producers and networks are really at fault here. I don't care for reality shows, and what's the current big fad? It doesn't interest me, so I'll find something better to do with my time. If Final Fantasy XI is more fun than keeping up with Idol and the other sludge on my TV screen then so be it. TV might get more of my time if it wasn't so boring or just outright stupid as heck these days.
For now, Stargate, reruns of Family Guy and Futurama on Cartoon Network, Simpsons, and the occasional episode I get to see of Smallville is about all I care to spend time with my TV anymore. Other than that it's just background noise or torturing the channel up button for a couple hours.
>Bottom line, we can do it because we have the power >and the might. We don't need to play well with >others, others need to play well with us.
He who has the might is always right? Imagine a world where Mr. Bin Laden had all the nukes, and USA was a middle-class country rather than on top. Would you be happy in a world with him in charge, and his beliefs were the only right ones, solely because he had the might and power? Come on...
I do see the USA as somewhat hippocritish. We say other countries must allow US access to foreign markets, yet for some products/services at the same time try to forbit those same countries access to USA markets.
Being an 800 pound gorilla doesn't give you the right to do whatever you want. We should all still play fair, regardless of how much power or might or cash each country has. Each country should hold itself to the same standards that it expects other countries to abide by. If we don't, then there is no good reason to expect another country to abide by some rule that we declare ourselves exempt from.
If it's a bad rule, no one should be held accountable to it, not just certain countries but not the rest. If the US thinks it's a bad rule for the US, then the US thinks it's a bad rule for everyone. If the US thinks it's a good rule for foreign countries, then the US should also consider it a good rule for the US to follow as well. Golden rule and all that...
>They assert that states have the right to prohibit >cities from engaging in a particular activity, not >that states are required to prohibit such activity
So what exactly does this say, does it allow states to prohibit ANYONE from starting a new small telco, if that state so chooses to do? Or does it only allow states to choose to prevent a city-run or country-run telco starting up, but does NTO allow states to choose to prevent a new small PRIVATELY owned telco from starting up??
If they can say no to ANYONE, that's bad. But if private telcos can still have a chance, that's still good.
Sounds cool and cheaper than iTunes. But Walmart retail stores have taken to not accepting Mastercard Debit card (takes money from my checking account, is not a credit card) as payment, which happened early February sometime. I'm not going to call it a debit card to them, as that means I pay service fees to someone, while if I tell a store it's a Mastercard "Credit card" I myself do not pay an extra fee. I was told that Visa debit cards are still accepted (but my bank/credit union only has the Mastercard one available for me to get) and they stopped accepting Mastercard debit cards because the fee to Walmart was higher than the Visa debit card fee.
Apparently Walmart still was going to accept true Mastercard credit cards when I talked to them about it last month.:/
So, am I even able to participate in this, considering the only payment opeion I'd have is my Mastercard debit card? I closed all my true credit cards and don't want new ones, as Walmart is the only place I have a problem with it (well, Sam's club too but they are part of Walmart, and I sure as heck don't want another Discover card to be able to shop at Sam's... I don't carry checkbooks or cash around.)
I fileld out a thing on friendster once, but none of my friends were interested. You can't just meet people not in your existing network there, so to this day my friend network there ends with myself. You need to have friends that will sign up for these things, and they have to have other friends that will sign up, and so forth for this idea to work as it's implemented where I've seen it. Otherwise it's a total waste of time, as it was in my case. Were my buds a bunch of party poopers by not wanting to get into that thing, or were they smarter than I? Hmmm...
Uh, there have already been two releases since the demise of Commodore. 3.5 and 3.9 were both made after Commodore, a company called Haage & Partner in Germany were contracted to do the work on those. 3.9 I think was inthe Gateway (aka "Gatemiga") days, I think 3.5 was done inthe Escom days but may have been Gateway time period as well, I don't remember for sure. These are done, as in past tense. OS4 will be the third after Commodore release.
Re:Most sold technology EVAR
on
Amiga Sells AmigaOS
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· Score: 2, Informative
The timeline goes something like this, though I don't remember dates anymore:
1. Amiga - made the Lorraine prototypes and developed the custom chipset
2. Commodore - added an OS based on TripOS after screwing up CHAOS (Commodore Amiga OS)
3. Escom - German company that did more buyouts than they could handle, but did produce my own Amiga A4000T that I still use today.
4. Gateway 2000, now just Gateway. Nothing really happened here though there were lots of unfulfilled ideas.
5. Today's Amiga Inc. previously called Amino or something like that until they purchased the Amiga name from Gateway. These are the guys that just sold AmigaOS.
6. KMOS Inc. I know pretty much nothing at all about these guys. Hopefully they will do better with everything.
There had also been an attempted buyout by VisCorp, who not long after that went bust, I don't remember if they were competing with Escom for Commodore's remains or if they were competing with Gateway for Escom's remains. The guys running this now run a company called Genesi and are developing the Pegasos, another PowerPC motherbard and an Amiga-alike OS called MorphOS.
Also, Dell had submitted a bid to buy out the remains of Commodore, and supposedly made a higher bid than Escom did, but some political shennanigans left it in Escom's hands. Dell even made a small number of floppy drives for Amigas, high density things even (a rarity on Amigas), from some spare external laptop drives they had laying around. I have one such drive connected to my A3000 at home right now, and it's pretty cool. Don't really know what they had in mind for buying Amiga, but rumors were they wanted the Zorro expansion bus patents that they might have leveraged to own PCI.
This might have also been why Gateway wanted it, I believe they still own all the Commodore/Amiga patents and just licensed whatever patents to Amiga Inc.for the AmigaOS to be kosher.
> And they wouldn't have had to fight a (STILL!) crowded OS market.
While I don't see why open-source has to be the answer to everything, it's an interesting position. There's AROS which is an open-source reimplementation of AmigaOS 3.1, a project started from scratch and from which some pieces had been licensed and used in the commercial AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9 versions.
But at this point it is mostly what you said, a hobby OS you have to pay for. Much like the remaining Commodore64 hobbyists. If some company would want to make an order I'm sure these guys wouldn't say no, but I don't think anyone expects a lot fo that to happen.
But if the current developers weren't going to get any payment at all, AmigaOS would truely be dead by now, no development at all would be going on anymore, and I cannot believe that opensourcing it would save it from that kind of death. Why? The opensource community is obsessed with Linux and to a lesser degree *BSD. Who among you guys would want to play with an open-sourced AmigaOS? If you did, you'd already know about AROS, and the fact that there's really not a whole lot to do with it, not even compared to the real AmigaOS. So why say it "should be open sourced" when none of you open source zealots would ever have anything to do with it again??
This is why I don't like seeing Amiga related stuff on Slashdot...
But there probably won't be huge sales, certainly nothing to compare to the scale of Windows or Linux customers out there. The remaining Amiga community will have a use for it, however small it is.
Also, Eyetech are making PowerPC based motherboards, some for Amiga users but they seem to be planning mostly for industrial and embedded uses, and have said they would like AmigaOS to be part of some of that industrial/embedded stuff too. Which would most likely be a larger market than the remaining Amiga community.
Don't worry, they aren't targetnig their marketing at Slashdot people, as it's well known you guys aren't interested in anything but Linux or perhaps some *BSD variant. But there are some people interested, just as there are still people using Commodore=64 stuff and other classic platforms. Just let us continue livng happily in our own little worlds, thanks!
(BTW, I think I just got Gentoo running on one of my PCs, I've been fighting with Linux for a couple years now and already gave up on getting Debian or Redhat doing what I wanted. Now if only the mysql ebuild didn't give me an error at some point I might be close to a MythTV box... Not everyone who hates Windows is up to outsmarting Linux you know. And I can't afford a Mac, though I am interested in OSX for it.)
The announcement as I read it said that KMOS Inc. has outright purchased AmigaOS, including "classic" versions as well as the upcoming 4.0 and its successors. They haven't bought the Amiga NAME, but have licensed the name to go with AmigaOS but not for anything else.
Just another step in the ongoing Jerry Springer episode...
Heck, they could even make the computer interface reachable. But if you have to drop the engine out the bottom to do even the most minor work, not many home-fixit guys will be able to do anything at all as they don't have a lift. Let alone an under-the-car engine removal system. I think that welding the hood shut will only serve to increase the dealers' stranglehold on car servicing. A guy I work with has a Boxter, and you really can't do much of anything at home, yuo really have to get it to a dealer so they can put it ona lift and look up in there, and perhaps drop the engine to tinker with anything at all.
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>What really needs to be done is to penalize
>companies that use the services of spammers.
Exactly. I couldn't understand why the antispam laws haven't done this. Sure, we can try to shut down the guys actually pressing the "send" button, but the company payng him to do so will only find another guy to press the send button. I've been boycotting Circuit City for 5 years now because they kept spamming me, even after writing to Circuit City customer support asking them to stop. They of course claimed no knowledge or responsibility for emails advertizing Circuit City sales appering in my email. Yea, right. Why can't we send the CANSPAM guys after the company being advertized? Obviously the spammers would not be doing so if the companies being advertized weren't paying for it to be done.
Without any motivation to stop, Circuit City, the guys selling all those "herbal supplements" and junk will continue to do so, jumping from one bulk emailer to the next. These antispam laws dropped the ball in neglecting to demotivate those being advertized.
> I believe the record labels are responsible for giving the artist their royalties.
Didn't the record companies just get sued for failing to do just that?? To the amount of some $50 million??
>Now they want more money from those people while giving them less than they would by buying the CD in the store.
:/ ...and which also frustrates their consumers, who decide pricing is unfair, and that they may be more willing to rip off the RIAA via p2p rather than let the RIAA rip them off. Ironic isn't it? :)
And this is a suprise how? They want to keep their existing business model the primary one. That's selling media at music stores, not legal internet downloads. By pricing legal internet downloads higher than prices of media at a music store, they believe it encourages customers to do what the record companies wish, and buy CD media rather than legal internet downloads.
That, and they're too greedy for their own good.
Until the record companies begin to realize that fair prices for legal internet downloads can be good for them, they'll try to limit this activity. Hopefully someday they'll realize that the world is moving on, technology is surpassing the CD era just like CDs surpassed cassettes, which overtook vinyl, which overthrew wax cylenders, etc. and relax their grip on CDs. It's curious that they don't embrace a distribution method that does not require manufacturing jewel cases, CD discs, printing covers, wrapping them in plastic wrap and then paying a trucker to drive it all to the store... With legal downloads they just have themselves, the store (iTunes for example in place of Best Buy), and the credit card companies, who all already have their places in the current media-based model. With the executive's share, the artist's sliver, and whatever the store and credit card companies get from the final sale price, should "retail" prices not go down with the lack of manufacturing and shipping? Should lower prices not encourage more purchases, and thus ultimately raise the RIAA's income simply by increasing the number of purchases made? I just don't understand why they conciously want to decrease sales via a model that has no materials/shipping costs compared to their current way, and think this will result in better overall profits for them... But that appears to be what they want, to do things in such a way that can actually reduce their overall profit.
>What exactly turns you people on about watching TV in higher resolution?
:/ Until I find something I like that can go the whole way to 1080 format on screen that I can possibly afford, I'll sit and quietly save my money... Pity I don't have a good room for a front projector. Puny townhouse with windows and glass doors everywhere I wouldn't be able to see the image real great on a sunny day. :(
With my current TV it's really nt omuch of a problem really. Kindof dumb wasting the side edges of a film on my square-ish TV screen though. And I'd like something bigger than my 19". Big-screen would be cool. But I've seen NTSC rez bigscreens and they look like crap with their 1'4" pixels and such. Higher resolution at big-screen sizes will vastly improve picture quality compared to NTSC at the same big size... Widescreen will be bonus for movies too, I'll get those side endes back without having the boring black bars on the top and bottom. I suppose I'll have similar black bars on the side instead when watching a square TV show or movie format, but at least I won't be forced to throw data away. I kindof like the Samsung DLP sets but they only have 720 native display and down-convert 1080 streams.
>TFA mentioned something about distribution problems.
That could explain things. I only saw two yellow cap bottles around here the whole time the promotion was on, and those were both Sierra Mist. I never saw one single Pepsi with a yellow cap. And that wasn't because of other promotions getting in the mix, all I ever saw was plain ordinary Pepsi bottles. How was I supposed to even try to participate or use winning codes when I couldn't find any freakin yellow caps??
> I don't believe that. Companies that make hardware
> shouldn't be so dogged about protecting their software.
They're not necessarily overly paranoid about protecting their software. Part of what some hardware companies are afraid of is letting everyone know the software will give them "too much" insight into the design of the hardware. How it works. What spiffy tricks they've come up with to increase performance or quality or whatever as part of the chip architecture.
They don't want their hardware competitor to get anything out of such possible insights via driver code. This is why certain companies don't want to open-source their drivers, not because they want to keep it secret how good or bad their coders are or whatever conspiracy you have up your sleeve.
Uhm... There is compatibility built in. I don't see this part mentioned on Hyperion's press release, but that's what has been happening. There's a 68K CPU interpreter there already, and they're workign on building in a JIT 68K CPU emulator. "System friendly" applications/games/etc. will work via this CPU emulator via an API bridge. Things that weren't system friendly and banged on hardware directly? The UAE classic Amiga emulator that emulates the complete chipset has a version ported to OS4, so there's really not that much support missing for old games or apps that can't/won't be ported to OS4 API/PPC native. Will this API thing be perfect? Probably not, but you Linux guys seem relatively happy with the percentage of Windows apps are supported by Wine, so you better not complain. ;) I haven't seen any specifics on emulation/wrapper success or failure, and I don't have the hardware to try it myself yet, but I will soon as I'm going to order a machine for it this next week. Fortunately for me, most of the stuff I still use on my "classic" Amiga has already planned OS4 native porting.
>Help me understand why anyone cares about this, let /. worthy?
>alone why it qualifies as
While it may not matter to you, it is somewhat nerdy type news, and isn't that what Slashdot is all about? Personally I wish people would stop posting Amiga news items to Slashdot, as it's obviusly not welcome here, and we're obviously an outcast group of nerds looking for news if we are interested in it. The comments in response to any Amiga post make that abundantly clear.
Some people care or it wouldn't have been developed at all. The guys spending the development money would have chosen not to, if there were zero people interested. If you and other Slashdot/Linux users do not count yourselves as part of that group, well, apparently the developers don't seem to consider that to be a serious problem.
I don't like Linux because it's harder to get running than I'd like. I don't go around wondering why Linus and friends bother to continue wasting their time developing such a thing. It's what they want, it's what you want, and that's cool. Why are people that are interested in something different than you are scorned so?
>In all honesty they should just open up the source
>instead of flogging a dead horse.
You slashdot guys are always saying this, it's dead, jsut open source it. Why open source it? What are you open source guys actually going to do with it? Would you ever actually look at it or use it for anything? If not, then why go around with your record skipping on this phrase?? Open source it, open source it, open source it.... But there'
s never a reason why or description of how this would be useful or a good thing to do or would be worth doing to the current owners...
Please, an honest question... WHY, do you or anyone else here want it open sourced?? What would you use the source for? Do you plan to add any parts to Linux or BSD or any other OS project? Which ones? Why use pieces of what Slashdotters consider to be a dead OS in whatever project you're thinking about? Really, how does open sourcing it do any good to the people that have paid money to own it? Or to you, or to me, or to anyone?
I do. I use it for all my email. It's something to tinker with and create things for and do some programming. I do image editing with it. I haven't fired up a game on it for quite a long time now. What does your Linux box do that makes it so special compared to Windows, and why don't you just use Windows instead because more people do that than use Linux?? You may think Linux is so cool and stuff, but why bother?? It's basically the same question as you and other Slashdot people always ask from Amiga users.
Modern hardware? I'm involved with the company writing drivers for Radeon cards... It is a PowerPC OS so won't run on the latest Athlon or P4 machines though.
>What is the compelling reason for this to exist?
What is the compelling reason for Linux to exist? With 90-some% of computer users running Windows, why should they care about anything not Windows?
Comparable answers exist to your same question regarding AmigaOS, MorphOS, QNX, BSD, MacOS, etc. Not everyone likes vanilla (Windows). Not everyone that doesn't like vanilla likes chocolate (Linux) either. Some prefer eggnog flavor, butter pecan, or whatever.
Myself, I simply do not like Windows, so I'm looking for a different flavor that suits me. I've tried Linux, but I've found it unsuitable to me as it's currently still a bit too much of a hacker thing, and I'm looking for something easier to install and use, but I do intend to eventually get a Linux/MythTV PVR box running, but I've fought with that for over a year now, and Linux isntall/config has ben by far the largest obstacle dur to driver issues, cryptic configuration methods, and lack of "for dummies" style documentation, and I'm just not interested in fihgting with stuff just to get it to run. If it suits you, that's great, but I'm on to a different flavor. MacOS didn't suit me in the past, though I haven't seen OS X which I hear is a large improvement. *BSD I basically put in a similar category as Linux, though my NetBSD exoerience (on Amiga hardware no less!) a number of years ago, though that may be better too now. MorphOS may be similar to Amiga in some ways, and it may be very good, I don't know, but I don't like certain individuals involved with producing it. Kindof like boycotting Velveeta because I'm mad at the president of Kraft foods as a comparison example, but (disclaimer) I don't actually have any problems with Kraft or their execs, I don't know anything about them (/disclaimer).
AmigaOS years ago I found quite to my liking. It's been sortof a specialty flavor that's been hard but no timpossible to find, long forgotten by many but found in certain specialist shops for those who know where to look.
Basically the compelling reason for it to exist is that some people want it to, just like some people want Linux to exist. And just like the masses not understanding why you bother with Linux when Windows is so popular, most of the slashdot/Linux crowd doesn't understand why someone would use something different yet again. If the fact that neither Windows NOR Linux is suitable for me in particular,just like Windows may not be suitable for you in particular, then there is no explaining anything about this.
Some people want it, and some people think it's worth doing. What other reason is there for anything to exist?
Well, what about just adding some variety to life? I've got an mp3 CD filled with most of my regular CD collection. If I begin playing it at work at the beginning, I hear the same thing first every time, and the stuff at the end of the disk I would miss every day when I leave before the player gets to them. Same old same old same old day in and day out. No fun... Random play feature allows me to hear different songs, rather than reach the point of dreading the first number of songs on the CD as I've heard them and got sick of them in the morning. Much like I get sick of songs that are played very often on the radio, lack of variety makes me really annoyed with that one song that never goes away for more than 20 minutes.
I might ask the guy talking about people liking it because they're brain damaged, do DJ's onthe radio now, or have they ever, played a particular album stright through from start to finish? Or do they mix it up with different bands and different songs, in a somewhat random arrangement? (When they aren't really showing preference to some new song the Clearchannel folks have told everyone to play every 3rd song for a couple months...) Since the RIAA via Clearchannel now owns almost all radio stations, you'd think they could enforce the requirement to play albums from start to finish for the remaining people ut there that don't yet have brain damage, surely there is some reason this hasn't been done for the last 50 years??
>90% of the people who participate in a TV Turnoff
>Week successfully reduce the amount of television
>they watch permanently.
The stuff currently available to see on my TV viewing device made me permanently reduce the amount of TV I watch...
I think this also depends on who's installing the stuff. I'm not a linux nut. Perhaps a hobbyist wannabe, but a lot of things are still beyond my motivation to deal with. I've got a project going to build a MythTV box.
:/
:)
I stared trying to install Debian, as I understand MythTV's core developers use Debian. The OS installed OK, but I couldn't get X to run with my Radeon card well, only being able to get the generic VESA drivers to work with it. Not very good, and I eventually gave up.
My next try was Redhat. Probably in the 8.something time. The OS installed pretty good, and easily set up Radeon drivers for me. But I couldn't get Myth installed. And I gave up.
Now I'm trying Gentoo. Fought with it for some time, gave up on Radeon and gor an Nvidia based card. The OS installs OK, but I again had problems with graphics drivers, but a couple weeks ago somehow finally got things working with X nicely. I don't know what I did different, or what I did that I didn't do before, as I was going downthe install checklist printed from Gentoo's website. Seemed to be OK, so I went to ebuild mysql which MythTV requires. I can't figure this thing out, the ebuild "completes" with one error, which I can't find a reference to exactly what happened. I've started the mysql interface which appears to work, but some of the setup instructions fail on sql server not found problems, even though something from mysql is running a new command line interface. I have no clue what's up, or how to fix the ebuild error. So as I've done a couple other times with Gentoo, I'm now waiting for someone else to fix whatever is wrong. I'm not motivated to do it myself, I'm annoyed that some ebuild that should work doesn't.
I may try Redhat/Fedora again, or perhaps Mandrake as I haven't had a go with that one yet.
For you, always going from source might be OK. For certain things, always going from source is probably OK. For me, I'd probably have a working MythTV box if it wasn't such a mess. In my case, for me, precompiled stuff would probably be easier to install, as I wouldn't have to worry about compiler versions, compile times, etc. Might not be "optimized" for my exact hardware set, but should be usable.
If the ebuild stuff in Gentoo gets working more reliably I'll be happy to do that, but for now I'm about to give up on this Gentoo distro as well. I may give it one more go withthe newer 2004 CDs, as my current install used the 1.4 CDs and ebuild updated to 2004. Maybe something got left out of that update, I have no idea how to know. Don't much care, if a fresh 2004 install doesn't go then I'm done with Gentoo.
And I would never ask my mom to use Linux and install everything from source. If things reach the point where she could handle that, maybe source-only distribution of stuff would be great. For now, all it's done for me is give me headaches and pull my hair out.
Hey, the producers and networks are really at fault here. I don't care for reality shows, and what's the current big fad? It doesn't interest me, so I'll find something better to do with my time. If Final Fantasy XI is more fun than keeping up with Idol and the other sludge on my TV screen then so be it. TV might get more of my time if it wasn't so boring or just outright stupid as heck these days.
For now, Stargate, reruns of Family Guy and Futurama on Cartoon Network, Simpsons, and the occasional episode I get to see of Smallville is about all I care to spend time with my TV anymore. Other than that it's just background noise or torturing the channel up button for a couple hours.
>Bottom line, we can do it because we have the power
>and the might. We don't need to play well with
>others, others need to play well with us.
He who has the might is always right? Imagine a world where Mr. Bin Laden had all the nukes, and USA was a middle-class country rather than on top. Would you be happy in a world with him in charge, and his beliefs were the only right ones, solely because he had the might and power? Come on...
I do see the USA as somewhat hippocritish. We say other countries must allow US access to foreign markets, yet for some products/services at the same time try to forbit those same countries access to USA markets.
Being an 800 pound gorilla doesn't give you the right to do whatever you want. We should all still play fair, regardless of how much power or might or cash each country has. Each country should hold itself to the same standards that it expects other countries to abide by. If we don't, then there is no good reason to expect another country to abide by some rule that we declare ourselves exempt from.
If it's a bad rule, no one should be held accountable to it, not just certain countries but not the rest. If the US thinks it's a bad rule for the US, then the US thinks it's a bad rule for everyone. If the US thinks it's a good rule for foreign countries, then the US should also consider it a good rule for the US to follow as well. Golden rule and all that...
>They assert that states have the right to prohibit
>cities from engaging in a particular activity, not
>that states are required to prohibit such activity
So what exactly does this say, does it allow states to prohibit ANYONE from starting a new small telco, if that state so chooses to do? Or does it only allow states to choose to prevent a city-run or country-run telco starting up, but does NTO allow states to choose to prevent a new small PRIVATELY owned telco from starting up??
If they can say no to ANYONE, that's bad. But if private telcos can still have a chance, that's still good.
Sounds cool and cheaper than iTunes. But Walmart retail stores have taken to not accepting Mastercard Debit card (takes money from my checking account, is not a credit card) as payment, which happened early February sometime. I'm not going to call it a debit card to them, as that means I pay service fees to someone, while if I tell a store it's a Mastercard "Credit card" I myself do not pay an extra fee. I was told that Visa debit cards are still accepted (but my bank/credit union only has the Mastercard one available for me to get) and they stopped accepting Mastercard debit cards because the fee to Walmart was higher than the Visa debit card fee.
:/
Apparently Walmart still was going to accept true Mastercard credit cards when I talked to them about it last month.
So, am I even able to participate in this, considering the only payment opeion I'd have is my Mastercard debit card? I closed all my true credit cards and don't want new ones, as Walmart is the only place I have a problem with it (well, Sam's club too but they are part of Walmart, and I sure as heck don't want another Discover card to be able to shop at Sam's... I don't carry checkbooks or cash around.)
I fileld out a thing on friendster once, but none of my friends were interested. You can't just meet people not in your existing network there, so to this day my friend network there ends with myself. You need to have friends that will sign up for these things, and they have to have other friends that will sign up, and so forth for this idea to work as it's implemented where I've seen it. Otherwise it's a total waste of time, as it was in my case. Were my buds a bunch of party poopers by not wanting to get into that thing, or were they smarter than I? Hmmm...
Uh, there have already been two releases since the demise of Commodore. 3.5 and 3.9 were both made after Commodore, a company called Haage & Partner in Germany were contracted to do the work on those. 3.9 I think was inthe Gateway (aka "Gatemiga") days, I think 3.5 was done inthe Escom days but may have been Gateway time period as well, I don't remember for sure. These are done, as in past tense. OS4 will be the third after Commodore release.
The timeline goes something like this, though I don't remember dates anymore:
1. Amiga - made the Lorraine prototypes and developed the custom chipset
2. Commodore - added an OS based on TripOS after screwing up CHAOS (Commodore Amiga OS)
3. Escom - German company that did more buyouts than they could handle, but did produce my own Amiga A4000T that I still use today.
4. Gateway 2000, now just Gateway. Nothing really happened here though there were lots of unfulfilled ideas.
5. Today's Amiga Inc. previously called Amino or something like that until they purchased the Amiga name from Gateway. These are the guys that just sold AmigaOS.
6. KMOS Inc. I know pretty much nothing at all about these guys. Hopefully they will do better with everything.
There had also been an attempted buyout by VisCorp, who not long after that went bust, I don't remember if they were competing with Escom for Commodore's remains or if they were competing with Gateway for Escom's remains. The guys running this now run a company called Genesi and are developing the Pegasos, another PowerPC motherbard and an Amiga-alike OS called MorphOS.
Also, Dell had submitted a bid to buy out the remains of Commodore, and supposedly made a higher bid than Escom did, but some political shennanigans left it in Escom's hands. Dell even made a small number of floppy drives for Amigas, high density things even (a rarity on Amigas), from some spare external laptop drives they had laying around. I have one such drive connected to my A3000 at home right now, and it's pretty cool. Don't really know what they had in mind for buying Amiga, but rumors were they wanted the Zorro expansion bus patents that they might have leveraged to own PCI.
This might have also been why Gateway wanted it, I believe they still own all the Commodore/Amiga patents and just licensed whatever patents to Amiga Inc.for the AmigaOS to be kosher.
> And they wouldn't have had to fight a (STILL!) crowded OS market.
While I don't see why open-source has to be the answer to everything, it's an interesting position. There's AROS which is an open-source reimplementation of AmigaOS 3.1, a project started from scratch and from which some pieces had been licensed and used in the commercial AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9 versions.
But at this point it is mostly what you said, a hobby OS you have to pay for. Much like the remaining Commodore64 hobbyists. If some company would want to make an order I'm sure these guys wouldn't say no, but I don't think anyone expects a lot fo that to happen.
But if the current developers weren't going to get any payment at all, AmigaOS would truely be dead by now, no development at all would be going on anymore, and I cannot believe that opensourcing it would save it from that kind of death. Why? The opensource community is obsessed with Linux and to a lesser degree *BSD. Who among you guys would want to play with an open-sourced AmigaOS? If you did, you'd already know about AROS, and the fact that there's really not a whole lot to do with it, not even compared to the real AmigaOS. So why say it "should be open sourced" when none of you open source zealots would ever have anything to do with it again??
This is why I don't like seeing Amiga related stuff on Slashdot...
But there probably won't be huge sales, certainly nothing to compare to the scale of Windows or Linux customers out there. The remaining Amiga community will have a use for it, however small it is.
Also, Eyetech are making PowerPC based motherboards, some for Amiga users but they seem to be planning mostly for industrial and embedded uses, and have said they would like AmigaOS to be part of some of that industrial/embedded stuff too. Which would most likely be a larger market than the remaining Amiga community.
Don't worry, they aren't targetnig their marketing at Slashdot people, as it's well known you guys aren't interested in anything but Linux or perhaps some *BSD variant. But there are some people interested, just as there are still people using Commodore=64 stuff and other classic platforms. Just let us continue livng happily in our own little worlds, thanks!
(BTW, I think I just got Gentoo running on one of my PCs, I've been fighting with Linux for a couple years now and already gave up on getting Debian or Redhat doing what I wanted. Now if only the mysql ebuild didn't give me an error at some point I might be close to a MythTV box... Not everyone who hates Windows is up to outsmarting Linux you know. And I can't afford a Mac, though I am interested in OSX for it.)
The announcement as I read it said that KMOS Inc. has outright purchased AmigaOS, including "classic" versions as well as the upcoming 4.0 and its successors. They haven't bought the Amiga NAME, but have licensed the name to go with AmigaOS but not for anything else.
Just another step in the ongoing Jerry Springer episode...
Heck, they could even make the computer interface reachable. But if you have to drop the engine out the bottom to do even the most minor work, not many home-fixit guys will be able to do anything at all as they don't have a lift. Let alone an under-the-car engine removal system. I think that welding the hood shut will only serve to increase the dealers' stranglehold on car servicing. A guy I work with has a Boxter, and you really can't do much of anything at home, yuo really have to get it to a dealer so they can put it ona lift and look up in there, and perhaps drop the engine to tinker with anything at all.