This board is also being sold by Eyetech (www.eyetech.co.uk) as the AmigaOne SE, which has already been shown running Mac On Linux via SUSE I believe. Also keep an eye out for the Teron PX board, which will have a socket to swap CPU modules, which I believe can use Mac CPU modules.
OK, so you want to use live, but have a modded xbox? If you've got a mod with a disable switch, no problem. Turn it off. Live should work fine...
I got my mod chip to allow me the possibility of running alternative software, such as media player stuff, and to copy the games I own to the hard drive for faster load times, and also to play my region2 DVD and hopefully turn on progressive output for DVD playback. But I haven't bothered to get any mod chip software installed yet, I'm busy renting games to find out which ones I'd like to buy.
Re:Seriously, who is going to use this?
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PPC Amigas Go On Sale
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· Score: 2, Informative
I will.
Why?
Games, apps, internet, email, word processor, software development, etc. Much the same stuff you probably use Linux instead of Windows for.
Why would I do this with AmigaOS? Why not? I happen to like it. Why would you guys use Linux instead of Windows? It's such a small group of users compared to the world of Windows folks out there... You happen to like Linux more than you like Windows, and that's good enough reason for you. Why not for us Amiga fans?
Some would think you slashdot guys insane to use Linux for games, apps, internet, etc. "Everyone else uses Windows, why don't you?" Sound familiar?
I'm putting together a Linux box to use as a firewall. A friend of mine couldn't fathom why in the world I'd even consider using Linux. He stumbled upon a retail boxed Linux port of Heretic 2 a while back, and got it for me because he thought I should have something to actually use on Linux, as if this box was the one and only piece of software to ever be made for Linux. Now, you and I know better, there's a bunch of stuff to use Linux for. My friend is wrong about that.
Now, having said that, you are wrong about how useful an Amiga is. It's the only platform I use at home for email, period. Nice and immune to all them email viruses going around. Also nice and immune to web browser viruses. Linux is also immune to a lot of this, sure. But I like my email client, so that is what I use. My CD burner is on my Amiga. I have scanner and image editing software. I have games, which believe it or not include a native AmigaOS PPC port of that same Heretic 2 game. Quake 2 was just released. I have native AmigaOS port of Myst. I have a word processor I'm happy with, and they're working on porting OpenOffice, which you Linux guys are so fond of. I like my web browser, and who in the world has bothered to make hacks into Amiga computers via holes in an Amiga browser? It's also faster than Moz is. No, it isn't as up to date as I'd like, and does fail on a number of web sites, and when it does I do fire up Moz on my x86 box.
Point is, Amiga is not completely useless as you believe, just like Linux is not completely useless as my friend thinks. If there wasn't a use for it, there wouldn't be any market at all. They wouldn't be doing this if they didn't feel there was a market... Sure, it's a small market, but it most certainly is there, like it or not.
I always hate to see Amiga related stories on slashdot, because people like you just don't get it, for much the same reason that Windows sheep don't get Linux. Though, oddly enough, the recent thread about building PPC motherboards from scratch had some rather nice things to say about the AmigaOne hardware. Nice to see you're back to bashing anything with the "A" word involved.
>why buy a $550 CPU and motherboard for the PPC architecture, a $50 case, a hard drive, a >keyboard, a mouse, and a CD-ROM drive instead of an x86 based total package for $200
Well, the original poster expressed interest in the PowerPC. He probably already has a number of x86 machines, and was curious to try something PowerPC flavored. What other reason is needed??
I myself have 3 PCs at home, with an extra motherboard laying around wishing it had a CPU to match. Plus a couple Amigas still currently in use. And I'll still buy one of these >$200 PowerPC rigs. Do absolutely need it? Of course not. I'm interested in it, and that's the only reason I require to spend my money on it. If you're not interested, then don't. Quite simple, really.
Well, look at his web site, he has mostly Amiga hardware products listed there. So he's used to low-volume sales. Adn this thing is PCI on eone side, not ISA, with aparently the Amiga Zorro connection on the "other side". I'd love to see a picture of how this works out.
Other than the data recovery folks, he'll probably sell mostly to Amiga fans. People using Amiga emulators on PCs like UAE or Amithlon can now use their Amiga floppies directly instead of ripping them to.ASF of.AFS or whatever the popular image format is called via a real Amiga/Amiga drive.
It'll also likely be popular with AmigaOne and Pegasos computer users, the new and "real soon now" to be released powerPC based motherboards for Amiga users, as they use more standard chipsets that cannot natively use Amiga format disks, so this will be useful to those of us left that will upgrade to these PowerPC machines rather than emulate on X86 boxen. (These PowerPC machines will run the newer PPC native Amiga software and PPC native operating systems soon to be released, with won't work on either the older 680x0 hardware or the X86 emulations right now, as those only emulate 68K's.) It would also allow people to use their current Amiga keyboards with their new PPC Amiga hardware, and save them the US$5 or so of buying a USB keyboard. Whoopty crap, yea, but $5 is $5 you could be buying beer or pizza with. And give you use of old Amiga joysticks that you might like to keep around, while we wait for USB controller driver support.
I'm actually suprosed to see this appear on slashdot, considering the company and it's products mostly being related to the Amiga community, and slashdot's strong disinterest in such a "dead" platform, as most comments allude to when an Amiga-related post shows up here. No, the guy won't get rich with this thing. Most of you guys probably won't have much use for it. I'll probably end up getting one, so I can use Amiga disks with my future PPC Amiga hardware. And I probably won't use it very often, but it would be nice to pop in an older floppy game now and then, or have easier access to Mac floppies as you can get certain older versions of MacOS free from Apple's ftp sites as floppy images, for use with Mac emulators. (I played the Mac versions of 7th Guest, Doom2 and Duke Nukem on my Amiga, great games that just weren't available on Amiga natively, and they ran great. X86 emulation would surely give me more choices, but I have a PC and having to translate between instruction sets would be a lot slower)
It's not going to change the world, but he'll surely sell in the numbers he's used to from his other Amiga products and be happy with it. You don't need to sell in the zillions to be successful...
I agree about the shuttles. I'm hoping they have an Athlon/AGP version by the time I've saved up for one though, as I prefer the Athlons over P4's. They're small enough to fit comfortably in a home-theater environment, and the standard parts capability will let me use really big hard drives and make a decent Tivo-alike/DVD/DiVX/mp3/etc. device, without having seperate DVD/Tivo/etc. units piled up. It's a great combination of small and standard drive support for this kind of use. Something using laptop style drives isn't going to have enough storage space...
And while I'm thinking about that, any recommendations for a somewhat quiet DVD drive? The one I have now sounds like a jet engine when it spins up, a bit too noisy for an enjoyable DVD experience, and I'd love to find a slower/quieter drive...
>>"However, no manufacturer has presently made this aspect of driver performance a priority." > >Why should they, was anybody complaining till now.
There's at least one rendering/video software company working with one of the GPU vendors to get drivers that do this. Just think of the benefits fo Hollywood, being able to render scenes via the GPU's 3d pipeline rather than software on the CPU, and be able to save the output of the GPU. There is certainly potential to decrease rendering time, as the GPU could do a good bit of work, and the CPU could software-render in the background while it's also preparing data for the GPU and copying finished frames back from the GPU card. I had wondered why this wasn't done for quite a while, and was happy to finally hear it was being worked on.
There's also an issue of TV capture. I have an ATI AIW 8500DV card in my Athlon XP 1700+, but no matter what codec option/resolution I choose, the audio and video get out of synch. The capture says 0 frames dropped... (My other AIW 7500 in a K6-2+/550 has about 18% frame loss) As the TV tuner/capture device is inthe AGP slot, perhaps better readback bandwidth would help? I've very recently learned of the Linux GATOS project, and hope to try and get that working, if I find some free time. Win2000 might be hogging some resources it doesn't need, as the thing is intended to be a Tivo-like unit. (but with DVD, DiVX, Mp3, etc. playback capability as well as TV capture)
Now that I think of it, readback from a Gfx card could also be useful for DVD/Divx edits. The Radeon 9700 claims to be able to process video in its pipeling, and smooth out some of the mpeg artifacting squares, if you have an over-compressed divx perhaps you could use this feature to make a clearer copy direct back to disk... I have a couple early DVDs that have weird looking gradients in clouds and such, that could use some smoothing as well, the opening cloud fly-though in Mystery Men is one example of over-compressed DVD content that could use some attention like this.
>Just how "imperfect" does something have to be before I'm allowed to watch it?
Like you said, they Pan-and-Scan it, then they edit it for content and/or time constraints and/or other reasons, turning swear words into blatantly obvious edits to less colorful words using a completely diffrent voice actor's voice most of the time. Or in Army of Darkness when evil Ash first appears, USA mutes out part of evil Ash's line "You're good Ash, I'm bad Ash", as the censors apparently thought he said "bad ass".
There ain't going to be no perfect copies of movies for the majority of people that don't pay for the premium channels that don't edit things like that...
And this same majority of the people ain't going to be looking on the internet to pirate the show they missed the day before, 'cause they ain't going to be paying for broadband either.
>How is making copies of copyrighted videos fair use?
Well, here's a good one... DVDs area bit fragile, easy to scratch and make unplayable. If I spend $30 on a freakin Disney film for the kids, I don't want it unplayable the first time they get their hands on it, drop it, step on it, or do other things that kids do to the poor thing. I should be able to make a copy of this nice, new, shiny DVD and make some form of cheap copy of it for the kids to do their thing to, and then make a new copy when the first copy inevitably dies. Why should I be forced to go out and buy new $30 copies of a DVD that won't last two viewings every time??? Especially with their evil practice of sellinga film for a couple days and then taking it off the market for 10 years, to screw with demand? Give me one good reason I don't have a right to protect the investment I've made in that damn DVD...
Well, if it's going to be standardized as the lower-quarter of my TV, I'll go out and buy a piece of poster-board or something and hang over top of it. Something easy to move out of the way to see all my PSX2 screen or whatever. Or if I get a fancy enough big-screen TV next year, use the resize features that let you stretch the TV picture to fit a widescreen, also stretch it vertically to push that lower quarter below the visible portion on screen. And that'd also help put the sideways stretch back into proper proportions so people don't look really fat.
I've already been sick of some channels advertizing their other shows, or even the one they're already playing in the lower-right corner. Because you know the annoying semi-transparent network logo just wasn't enough. How I long for the days before they started abusing those poor genlocks 24/7...
How long before we have the Futurama style advertizing where they intrude into our dreams at night? And when will they realize that I don't buy somethnig just because I saw it on TV?? Maybe someday our economy will change to the point that they automatically deduct money from our accounts without our knowledge or permission and ship stuff to us? The way things are going, I think it's only a matter of time before something that rediculous is legalized...
So, is RIAA going to sue the magic marker and post-it industries out of existence, or at least get the distribution/sale of such DMCA protection circumvention tools banned?
Man, I'm going to have to find something else to scribble notes on and with, or find a way to recycle the pile of post-its on my desk. Perhaps pencils won't be banned, which will make reusing the paper easier anyway.
Well, I've been stealing TV shows for the vast majority of my lifetime then, taking bathroom breaks, refilling my drink, grabbing a snack, taking dirty dishes to the kitchen, cheking my email, or whatever else I feel during breaks in the show. I suppose I'm also stealing when I fast-forward through commercials if I've taped a show I wasn't home for.
Besides, a lot of commercials are really annoying, and sometimes outright insulting to me. And these commercials only end up making me boycott the product/service/company involved, so not seeing commercials in my case should usually be good for the marketing guys, and hte networks should be happy that I am not boycotting advertizers' stuff due to watching my favorite TV show on that channel.
But the car itself IS sold to you with all the bits. It comes with engine, tires, radio, A/C, transmission, seats, gauges, and so on. You're welcome to strip them out yourself, but the car company certainly won't support that, unless you decide to upgrade with other company parts.
But most cars also have various options to choose from a the dealership. You can get a cassette deck or a CD player. You can get a single CD player in the dash, possibly a milti-CD changer in the dash, or a CD changer in the trunk. You can get it with or without a sunroof. You can get black, green, blue, erd, or some other color paint. You can get an automatic or manual transmission. You can get electric power locks or windows, or not. My Honda Civic is a DX model that came with a CD player, but did not have the supposedly fancier V-tech engine, the EX model also can have a CD player but does have the V-tech engine. Or you can get the EX model with V-tech with a cassette player instead of CD. You can get a coupe/2-door or a 4-door sedan version, with some years also offering a hatchback version. While Honda may call it a Civic model, there's a large number of things that can be different from someone else's Honda Civic. Some have spoilers, mine does not... Comparing the possibility/impossibility of modularizing Windows to a car and saying all Honda Civics (or whatever your brand/model is) isn't a good comparison. As while my car came with a CD player, I've seriusly thought of changing it to a cassette deck, as my revious car had that and now all my driving music is on tape, not CD. Don't know about you, but my car is modular enough to allow me to remove the CD player and put a tape deck in its place.
Internet explorer in consumer-choice-friendly theory should allow me to remove it and put something else in its place if I like (just like my car allows me to change out the CD player for a tape deck), but MS says that's "impossible".
If it's impossible for them to make an OS without a browser that cannot be removed, how did Windows 3.x/95 exist before MSIE was bundled into them??
> A method of swing on a swing is disclosed, in which a user positioned on a standard swing
> suspended by two chains from a substantially horizontal tree branch induces side to side motion
> by pulling alternately on one chain and then the other.
Whew... All my childhood swinging activities, which included side to side, diagonal, elliptical, etc. motions was done with a swing suspended by two chains from a man-made metal framework, so I guess I'm safe. If/when I have kids someday, they're going to be using similar metal-framework swingsets so that I won't get sued then either.
Hmmm, if he can do this, perhaps I should get some patents, like arranging grains of sand using plastic containters as molds to form a castle shape, arranging small pieces of plastic using some form of adhesive to generate the shapes of cars, airplanes, etc. and then patent the act of standing underneath something which is impervious to water (perhaps someone will name this device a "roof"), as a method of staying dry during a period of time when small droplets of water are falling from the sky.
OK, so hundreds of thousands of people were laid off work, some others had their paychecks trimmed a bit (like me), and the economy in general went to crap. And the recording industry says the only possible explanation for a freakin' 10% drop in sales is internet file swapping? Maybe people just had less money to spend in 2001, anyone ever think of that?? (Oh yea, the RIAA doesn't want a believable alternative to piracy to be known...) Sorry, but considering the recession, the RIAA should be damn happy their sales only sunk by 10%, and that those of us finding less money available to spend still managed to buy some CDs at all.
OK, so per-unit bandwidth charges are coming back. The amount of spam email, pop-up/under ads are getting more popular and larger in size. Some ads are using audio/video instead of just a banner. I don't remember what site it was, but someplace I clicked ona link to another page of theirs and it went to an audio/video ad page before moving on to the real thing I actually linked to.
So effectively we're all going to end up paying more money for less interesting content, with more and more of our money going to all the spam we don't read and ads we don't look at. Great.
I'll have to look into replacing my Linksys gateway/router with a Linux box to filter out the known big-time ad sources andlearn how to filter emails by header before downloading the messages. I have an old 486 I'm trying to get Linux running on as a CVS server, might as well make it a router as well... Only problem is the old machine doesn't seem happy with a 40gig drive, even with a BIOS update ISA card meant for this purpose, and worked great with a 5gig drive previously. RH 7.2 appeared to install fine, but neither LILO nor GRUB seem happy with botting this way. Any ideas??
A guy I work with is in a small musical ensemble, and recently expressed his concern that the SSSCA/CBDTPA would effectively prevent them from making, copying and distributing their own music, which is written and played by themselves. How does such a law do what the RIAA/MPAA want without preventing such small ensembles or people making home movies/videoing their kid's graduation/etc. from making legitimate copies of their own content? Certainly such laws would make it a pain to share home videos taken with a digital camcorder and give home-brew DVD copies to grandparents or fans of independent music artists? Or home-video kids making cheesy movies like Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell started out doing with Super-8 film? If this kind of law is passed, it must take into consideration that legitimate copying/distribution of one's own content should not be made a pain in the ass to do for families, independent artists, and future movie stars.
What OS versions are supported by this thing? I recently ordered the 8500 AIW, and only when I opened the box found out it won't work with Windows earlier than ME, so my 98 box is not suitable. (stupid web store leaving that detail out of their description) Eh, I don't want ME or XP... I know, you guys here advocate Linux, and I'm trying to get RH 7.2 running, but Windows runs my games, CAD/EDA software, and some things that I really can't do with Linux yet. Any chance Lindows would handle the included PVR software with these ATI cards??
What happens if you just delete it but don't open and read it?
What if it gets eaten by a spam filter?
Are you then still legally obligated to appear in a courtroom on some date that you honestly are completely unaware of? And can you be fined for having never seen such an email?
>You see the pattern? What's an ID card going to do? All your purchasing data and aggregate >information already belong to some shady corporation.
Yea, but currently not any one credit card company knows all of my "trends". I have multiple cards and do different things with different cards. While different banks know different things, not one bank knows all of those things. With a single all-purpose national ID card, one entity (be it corporate or governmental) can then track ALL of my spending and travel habits. I'd much prefer to have this distributed so it's not so easy to abuse the complete collection of data collected about me - if someone steals one credit card, that would be easier to cope with than losing my complete identity at once.
>>Memory speed concerns The AmigaOneG3-SE supports 133MHz FSB SDRAM. >>(According to our engineers DDR memory doesn't gain anything in help PPC board design).
>Anyone care to explain the technicalities?
The G3/G4 would still be bottlenecked by their frontside bus speed. On G3/G4 PowerPCs, this tops out at 133MHz, according to specs on both motorola's and IBM's web sites.
IBM page describing their 750 G3's (pdf): http://www-3.ibm.com/chips/techlib/techlib .nsf/tec hdocs/852569B20050FF7785256993005870F7
With SDR available at 133MHz and 150MHz to some extent, there's not much point in attaching DDR that goes beyond 133MHz effective speeds, as the frontside bus speed will bottleneck it down to 133 anyway. Plus, Eyetech has been smart in using a standard PPC northbrodge chipset instead of rolling their own in an FPGA like they originally planned to. Their original specs were 100MHz SDRAM, AGP1X, and would have taken some time to debug the FPGA logic. With the ArticaS chipset, the debug is done for them by the chip vendor, and they also get the added 133MHz SDRAM, and AGP2x support as a bonus.
Now, for those concerned about the pricetag, which is of course high compared to PC stuff. Compare the number of sales for a PC motherboard, to the number of sales you might expect to get out of the Amiga market, which this product is targeted at. That PC board sells a hell of a lot more units, no? They have to pay for production, set up, components, and design with far fewer sales than a popular PC board does, which means higher price per board to cover their expenses. They aren't marketing this thing to PC users or Slashdot folks or Linux users. They're marketing it to Amiga users. And considering that my only other PowerPC option is an obsolete 233MHz 604e card designed by a defunct company, and these boards are nigh-impossible to find and start around US$900, I'll happily shell out $400 or so for this thing that is truckloads better.
And yes, I do also have a PC. Windows 98SE and Red Hat 7.2 on it, though my new Radeon 8500 All In Wonder doesn't do 98/98SE. >:( Stupid internet store didn't tell me that, so I'm pondering my options, but the card really wasn't meant for the PC anyway, I just wanted to test it there to get support if it didn't work. (Just returned a flaky 8500 AGP no AIW card) I just don't like Windows at all, and Linux is too cumbersome to get working reliably the first time, it's still weird. And I like to tinker with Amigas as an alternative that I do actually like and get along with well.
Echoing words often used by Microsoft during the Department of Justice's antitrust trial, Webb called the litigating
states' proposals "truly Draconian," "extraordinarily harsh" and "unfair."
Aw, gee. How many people in jail think their punishment is "unfair" as well? I thought punishments for commiting a crime was supposed to be unpleasant, in order to persuade the criminal from repeating his mistakes. MS seems to already have been proven to have continued it's wrongful doings even after it was convicted, so it would seem that more unpleasantness is required in order to get MS to change its ways. Surely MS is capable of understanding the concept of what a punishment is and why it's that way...
> The way I see it, shareware authors shouldn't expect to turn a profit.
Why not? Shareware users expect support and bugfixes. perhaps the shareware author had some expenses involved, and would like to at least get those expenses paid for. And something in return for helping users with installation issues, compatibility issues, fixing bugs, adding new features, etc.
I realize that many in the Slashdot community are hard-core "software should be free and open source with zero exceptions", but some people have bills to pay related wo their works. For example, I am working with a friend to write drivers for modern graphics cards for the Amiga platform. Sure, a lot of you will think such a thing is laughable and rediculous. But there is interest for such a thing, at least from users wishing they could plug a new graphics card into their machine (via one of the many currently available PCI bridges or the upcoming new motherboard with an AGP slot) and have it actually do something. To properly support and debug these drivers, I have to buy PCI bridges beyond what I really need myself, and various cards in the product line I'm working with. This costs me money. I didn't already have all this stuff, and I wouldn't have bought all of it independent of this driver project, so there is true expense involved, which I'm happy do to so long as I can expect at least that expense to be reimbursed by users of these drivers. I of course do not expect to get rich in the current Amiga market, but I would appreciate some help in paying for the hardware involved.
And yet there were Amiga users responding to this announcement with anything but appreciation. One guy even said and I quote: "I don't care if developers have bills to pay." OK, then please tell me what my motivation for this project is.
I've already spent US$800 on hardware, the PCI bridge and three graphics cards, and have the new Amiga PCI/AGP/PowerPC motherboard on preorder. Why do the users out there demand that developers spend money to make something possible, but then refuse to spend any money to have a legit license to use the resulting software? These people sound very interested in having something better than a Voodoo3 card, but at the same time the vocal among them have zero interest in helping make that possible by collectively reimbursing the hardware and my own licensing expenses by paying registration fees. Sorry, but not everyone is willing to go very deeply into personal debt to satisfy selfish users that want everything for free (as in beer). If a driver for a modern graphics card isn't worth US$5 or so to these people, they probably won't be getting many new features or a wide variety of models from the product line supported well.
And they don't seem to realize that user disinterest in paying for someone else's work and investments in development is exactly why the Amiga market has got to where it is today, with very very few active developers doing commercial quality work. Why the office apps don't seem to be in development at all anymore, games are few and far between, and web browsers have been stagnant for years, etc.
This problem goes beyond shareware. I would sell my drivers via a web page credit card registration for only a few US$, not as shareware but as internet commercial purchase for cheap. The public discussion shows that I shouldn't have any right at all to ask for anything whatsoever in return for my work and expense. So when "finished", I'm going to be finding other ways to occupy my spare time, such as working on my house or developing for a more viable computer market when I'm not at my "day job" as a chip guy. I'm stil obsessed with Amigas and will continue using it as my main system at home, but it's just not possible to please these users and still have even remotely realistic expectations in return. I simply can't afford to give every Amiga user in the world a "free beer".
> By time you add up your phone, long distance, cable, and AOL you get around $230!
My TOTAL monthly phone bill is around $35, which INCLUDES long distance. Comcast cablemodem/basic/extended TV service is about $85. My combined bill is closer to $120 than $230. That leftover $110 is way beyond the number of movies I rent a month. I'm not willing to pay the extra $30 or so a month to get digital cable TV with Comcast, why would I pay $110 a month more for it at TW? I'm not willing to pay extra for HBO or any other premium channel, why would I want to pay TW $110 for that? The extra featuers I see compared to my current combined services simply are not worth anywhere near $110/month to me, and I'm quite happy I don't have TW. I just hope Comcast doesn't try to force such a price tag on me. I've considered tossing out my cable TV service, as there really isn't that much on that's worth the current $45-ish/month. If my bill jumped by $110/month I'd simply have no choice but to unsubscribe from CableTV service. The vast majority of shows I care to waste my time on I can get via antenna, and I could live without the very few shows I occasionally eatch on the extended channels.
There's good reasons for this. Say my family gets a video camera compatible with computers & burning DVDs of home-movies. If family goes on vacation down my way, they can burn a DVD for me before leaving. If I go to them, I can burn a DVD to bring home with me, and not have to tote my entire system around, just the drive. And make a few copies at once to save mailing disks around, just hand them out when everyone is in the same place...
Or I could lend it to a friend who can't afford the drive but does have a suitable camera. Or to use it to make hard drive backups of various machines around the house (currently 3 systems of my own and 3 systems belonging to roommates) Lend it to friends for backups, etc. Not to mention the potential backup use for computer repairs places to restore data in case "something bad/worse" happens, backup usage for bigger companies that only want to buy one drive, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
This board is also being sold by Eyetech (www.eyetech.co.uk) as the AmigaOne SE, which has already been shown running Mac On Linux via SUSE I believe. Also keep an eye out for the Teron PX board, which will have a socket to swap CPU modules, which I believe can use Mac CPU modules.
OK, so you want to use live, but have a modded xbox? If you've got a mod with a disable switch, no problem. Turn it off. Live should work fine...
I got my mod chip to allow me the possibility of running alternative software, such as media player stuff, and to copy the games I own to the hard drive for faster load times, and also to play my region2 DVD and hopefully turn on progressive output for DVD playback. But I haven't bothered to get any mod chip software installed yet, I'm busy renting games to find out which ones I'd like to buy.
I will.
Why?
Games, apps, internet, email, word processor, software development, etc. Much the same stuff you probably use Linux instead of Windows for.
Why would I do this with AmigaOS? Why not? I happen to like it. Why would you guys use Linux instead of Windows? It's such a small group of users compared to the world of Windows folks out there... You happen to like Linux more than you like Windows, and that's good enough reason for you. Why not for us Amiga fans?
Some would think you slashdot guys insane to use Linux for games, apps, internet, etc. "Everyone else uses Windows, why don't you?" Sound familiar?
I'm putting together a Linux box to use as a firewall. A friend of mine couldn't fathom why in the world I'd even consider using Linux. He stumbled upon a retail boxed Linux port of Heretic 2 a while back, and got it for me because he thought I should have something to actually use on Linux, as if this box was the one and only piece of software to ever be made for Linux. Now, you and I know better, there's a bunch of stuff to use Linux for. My friend is wrong about that.
Now, having said that, you are wrong about how useful an Amiga is. It's the only platform I use at home for email, period. Nice and immune to all them email viruses going around. Also nice and immune to web browser viruses. Linux is also immune to a lot of this, sure. But I like my email client, so that is what I use. My CD burner is on my Amiga. I have scanner and image editing software. I have games, which believe it or not include a native AmigaOS PPC port of that same Heretic 2 game. Quake 2 was just released. I have native AmigaOS port of Myst. I have a word processor I'm happy with, and they're working on porting OpenOffice, which you Linux guys are so fond of. I like my web browser, and who in the world has bothered to make hacks into Amiga computers via holes in an Amiga browser? It's also faster than Moz is. No, it isn't as up to date as I'd like, and does fail on a number of web sites, and when it does I do fire up Moz on my x86 box.
Point is, Amiga is not completely useless as you believe, just like Linux is not completely useless as my friend thinks. If there wasn't a use for it, there wouldn't be any market at all. They wouldn't be doing this if they didn't feel there was a market... Sure, it's a small market, but it most certainly is there, like it or not.
I always hate to see Amiga related stories on slashdot, because people like you just don't get it, for much the same reason that Windows sheep don't get Linux. Though, oddly enough, the recent thread about building PPC motherboards from scratch had some rather nice things to say about the AmigaOne hardware. Nice to see you're back to bashing anything with the "A" word involved.
>why buy a $550 CPU and motherboard for the PPC architecture, a $50 case, a hard drive, a
>keyboard, a mouse, and a CD-ROM drive instead of an x86 based total package for $200
Well, the original poster expressed interest in the PowerPC. He probably already has a number of x86 machines, and was curious to try something PowerPC flavored. What other reason is needed??
I myself have 3 PCs at home, with an extra motherboard laying around wishing it had a CPU to match. Plus a couple Amigas still currently in use. And I'll still buy one of these >$200 PowerPC rigs. Do absolutely need it? Of course not. I'm interested in it, and that's the only reason I require to spend my money on it. If you're not interested, then don't. Quite simple, really.
Well, look at his web site, he has mostly Amiga hardware products listed there. So he's used to low-volume sales. Adn this thing is PCI on eone side, not ISA, with aparently the Amiga Zorro connection on the "other side". I'd love to see a picture of how this works out.
.ASF of .AFS or whatever the popular image format is called via a real Amiga/Amiga drive.
Other than the data recovery folks, he'll probably sell mostly to Amiga fans. People using Amiga emulators on PCs like UAE or Amithlon can now use their Amiga floppies directly instead of ripping them to
It'll also likely be popular with AmigaOne and Pegasos computer users, the new and "real soon now" to be released powerPC based motherboards for Amiga users, as they use more standard chipsets that cannot natively use Amiga format disks, so this will be useful to those of us left that will upgrade to these PowerPC machines rather than emulate on X86 boxen. (These PowerPC machines will run the newer PPC native Amiga software and PPC native operating systems soon to be released, with won't work on either the older 680x0 hardware or the X86 emulations right now, as those only emulate 68K's.) It would also allow people to use their current Amiga keyboards with their new PPC Amiga hardware, and save them the US$5 or so of buying a USB keyboard. Whoopty crap, yea, but $5 is $5 you could be buying beer or pizza with. And give you use of old Amiga joysticks that you might like to keep around, while we wait for USB controller driver support.
I'm actually suprosed to see this appear on slashdot, considering the company and it's products mostly being related to the Amiga community, and slashdot's strong disinterest in such a "dead" platform, as most comments allude to when an Amiga-related post shows up here. No, the guy won't get rich with this thing. Most of you guys probably won't have much use for it. I'll probably end up getting one, so I can use Amiga disks with my future PPC Amiga hardware. And I probably won't use it very often, but it would be nice to pop in an older floppy game now and then, or have easier access to Mac floppies as you can get certain older versions of MacOS free from Apple's ftp sites as floppy images, for use with Mac emulators. (I played the Mac versions of 7th Guest, Doom2 and Duke Nukem on my Amiga, great games that just weren't available on Amiga natively, and they ran great. X86 emulation would surely give me more choices, but I have a PC and having to translate between instruction sets would be a lot slower)
It's not going to change the world, but he'll surely sell in the numbers he's used to from his other Amiga products and be happy with it. You don't need to sell in the zillions to be successful...
I agree about the shuttles. I'm hoping they have an Athlon/AGP version by the time I've saved up for one though, as I prefer the Athlons over P4's. They're small enough to fit comfortably in a home-theater environment, and the standard parts capability will let me use really big hard drives and make a decent Tivo-alike/DVD/DiVX/mp3/etc. device, without having seperate DVD/Tivo/etc. units piled up. It's a great combination of small and standard drive support for this kind of use. Something using laptop style drives isn't going to have enough storage space...
And while I'm thinking about that, any recommendations for a somewhat quiet DVD drive? The one I have now sounds like a jet engine when it spins up, a bit too noisy for an enjoyable DVD experience, and I'd love to find a slower/quieter drive...
>>"However, no manufacturer has presently made this aspect of driver performance a priority."
>
>Why should they, was anybody complaining till now.
There's at least one rendering/video software company working with one of the GPU vendors to get drivers that do this. Just think of the benefits fo Hollywood, being able to render scenes via the GPU's 3d pipeline rather than software on the CPU, and be able to save the output of the GPU. There is certainly potential to decrease rendering time, as the GPU could do a good bit of work, and the CPU could software-render in the background while it's also preparing data for the GPU and copying finished frames back from the GPU card. I had wondered why this wasn't done for quite a while, and was happy to finally hear it was being worked on.
There's also an issue of TV capture. I have an ATI AIW 8500DV card in my Athlon XP 1700+, but no matter what codec option/resolution I choose, the audio and video get out of synch. The capture says 0 frames dropped... (My other AIW 7500 in a K6-2+/550 has about 18% frame loss) As the TV tuner/capture device is inthe AGP slot, perhaps better readback bandwidth would help? I've very recently learned of the Linux GATOS project, and hope to try and get that working, if I find some free time. Win2000 might be hogging some resources it doesn't need, as the thing is intended to be a Tivo-like unit. (but with DVD, DiVX, Mp3, etc. playback capability as well as TV capture)
Now that I think of it, readback from a Gfx card could also be useful for DVD/Divx edits. The Radeon 9700 claims to be able to process video in its pipeling, and smooth out some of the mpeg artifacting squares, if you have an over-compressed divx perhaps you could use this feature to make a clearer copy direct back to disk... I have a couple early DVDs that have weird looking gradients in clouds and such, that could use some smoothing as well, the opening cloud fly-though in Mystery Men is one example of over-compressed DVD content that could use some attention like this.
>Just how "imperfect" does something have to be before I'm allowed to watch it?
Like you said, they Pan-and-Scan it, then they edit it for content and/or time constraints and/or other reasons, turning swear words into blatantly obvious edits to less colorful words using a completely diffrent voice actor's voice most of the time. Or in Army of Darkness when evil Ash first appears, USA mutes out part of evil Ash's line "You're good Ash, I'm bad Ash", as the censors apparently thought he said "bad ass".
There ain't going to be no perfect copies of movies for the majority of people that don't pay for the premium channels that don't edit things like that...
And this same majority of the people ain't going to be looking on the internet to pirate the show they missed the day before, 'cause they ain't going to be paying for broadband either.
>How is making copies of copyrighted videos fair use?
Well, here's a good one... DVDs area bit fragile, easy to scratch and make unplayable. If I spend $30 on a freakin Disney film for the kids, I don't want it unplayable the first time they get their hands on it, drop it, step on it, or do other things that kids do to the poor thing. I should be able to make a copy of this nice, new, shiny DVD and make some form of cheap copy of it for the kids to do their thing to, and then make a new copy when the first copy inevitably dies. Why should I be forced to go out and buy new $30 copies of a DVD that won't last two viewings every time??? Especially with their evil practice of sellinga film for a couple days and then taking it off the market for 10 years, to screw with demand? Give me one good reason I don't have a right to protect the investment I've made in that damn DVD...
Well, if it's going to be standardized as the lower-quarter of my TV, I'll go out and buy a piece of poster-board or something and hang over top of it. Something easy to move out of the way to see all my PSX2 screen or whatever. Or if I get a fancy enough big-screen TV next year, use the resize features that let you stretch the TV picture to fit a widescreen, also stretch it vertically to push that lower quarter below the visible portion on screen. And that'd also help put the sideways stretch back into proper proportions so people don't look really fat.
I've already been sick of some channels advertizing their other shows, or even the one they're already playing in the lower-right corner. Because you know the annoying semi-transparent network logo just wasn't enough. How I long for the days before they started abusing those poor genlocks 24/7...
How long before we have the Futurama style advertizing where they intrude into our dreams at night? And when will they realize that I don't buy somethnig just because I saw it on TV?? Maybe someday our economy will change to the point that they automatically deduct money from our accounts without our knowledge or permission and ship stuff to us? The way things are going, I think it's only a matter of time before something that rediculous is legalized...
So, is RIAA going to sue the magic marker and post-it industries out of existence, or at least get the distribution/sale of such DMCA protection circumvention tools banned?
Man, I'm going to have to find something else to scribble notes on and with, or find a way to recycle the pile of post-its on my desk. Perhaps pencils won't be banned, which will make reusing the paper easier anyway.
Well, I've been stealing TV shows for the vast majority of my lifetime then, taking bathroom breaks, refilling my drink, grabbing a snack, taking dirty dishes to the kitchen, cheking my email, or whatever else I feel during breaks in the show. I suppose I'm also stealing when I fast-forward through commercials if I've taped a show I wasn't home for.
Besides, a lot of commercials are really annoying, and sometimes outright insulting to me. And these commercials only end up making me boycott the product/service/company involved, so not seeing commercials in my case should usually be good for the marketing guys, and hte networks should be happy that I am not boycotting advertizers' stuff due to watching my favorite TV show on that channel.
But the car itself IS sold to you with all the bits. It comes with engine, tires, radio, A/C, transmission, seats, gauges, and so on. You're welcome to strip them out yourself, but the car company certainly won't support that, unless you decide to upgrade with other company parts.
But most cars also have various options to choose from a the dealership. You can get a cassette deck or a CD player. You can get a single CD player in the dash, possibly a milti-CD changer in the dash, or a CD changer in the trunk. You can get it with or without a sunroof. You can get black, green, blue, erd, or some other color paint. You can get an automatic or manual transmission. You can get electric power locks or windows, or not. My Honda Civic is a DX model that came with a CD player, but did not have the supposedly fancier V-tech engine, the EX model also can have a CD player but does have the V-tech engine. Or you can get the EX model with V-tech with a cassette player instead of CD. You can get a coupe/2-door or a 4-door sedan version, with some years also offering a hatchback version. While Honda may call it a Civic model, there's a large number of things that can be different from someone else's Honda Civic. Some have spoilers, mine does not... Comparing the possibility/impossibility of modularizing Windows to a car and saying all Honda Civics (or whatever your brand/model is) isn't a good comparison. As while my car came with a CD player, I've seriusly thought of changing it to a cassette deck, as my revious car had that and now all my driving music is on tape, not CD. Don't know about you, but my car is modular enough to allow me to remove the CD player and put a tape deck in its place.
Internet explorer in consumer-choice-friendly theory should allow me to remove it and put something else in its place if I like (just like my car allows me to change out the CD player for a tape deck), but MS says that's "impossible".
If it's impossible for them to make an OS without a browser that cannot be removed, how did Windows 3.x/95 exist before MSIE was bundled into them??
> A method of swing on a swing is disclosed, in which a user positioned on a standard swing > suspended by two chains from a substantially horizontal tree branch induces side to side motion > by pulling alternately on one chain and then the other. Whew... All my childhood swinging activities, which included side to side, diagonal, elliptical, etc. motions was done with a swing suspended by two chains from a man-made metal framework, so I guess I'm safe. If/when I have kids someday, they're going to be using similar metal-framework swingsets so that I won't get sued then either. Hmmm, if he can do this, perhaps I should get some patents, like arranging grains of sand using plastic containters as molds to form a castle shape, arranging small pieces of plastic using some form of adhesive to generate the shapes of cars, airplanes, etc. and then patent the act of standing underneath something which is impervious to water (perhaps someone will name this device a "roof"), as a method of staying dry during a period of time when small droplets of water are falling from the sky.
OK, so hundreds of thousands of people were laid off work,
some others had their paychecks trimmed a bit (like me), and the
economy in general went to crap. And the recording industry
says the only possible explanation for a freakin' 10% drop in
sales is internet file swapping? Maybe people just had less money
to spend in 2001, anyone ever think of that?? (Oh yea, the RIAA
doesn't want a believable alternative to piracy to be known...)
Sorry, but considering the recession, the RIAA should be damn
happy their sales only sunk by 10%, and that those of us finding
less money available to spend still managed to buy some CDs at all.
OK, so per-unit bandwidth charges are coming back. The amount of spam email, pop-up/under ads are getting more popular and larger in size. Some ads are using audio/video instead of just a banner. I don't remember what site it was, but someplace I clicked ona link to another page of theirs and it went to an audio/video ad page before moving on to the real thing I actually linked to.
So effectively we're all going to end up paying more money for less interesting content, with more and more of our money going to all the spam we don't read and ads we don't look at. Great.
I'll have to look into replacing my Linksys gateway/router with a Linux box to filter out the known big-time ad sources andlearn how to filter emails by header before downloading the messages. I have an old 486 I'm trying to get Linux running on as a CVS server, might as well make it a router as well... Only problem is the old machine doesn't seem happy with a 40gig drive, even with a BIOS update ISA card meant for this purpose, and worked great with a 5gig drive previously. RH 7.2 appeared to install fine, but neither LILO nor GRUB seem happy with botting this way. Any ideas??
A guy I work with is in a small musical ensemble, and recently expressed his concern that the SSSCA/CBDTPA would effectively prevent them from making, copying and distributing their own music, which is written and played by themselves. How does such a law do what the RIAA/MPAA want without preventing such small ensembles or people making home movies/videoing their kid's graduation/etc. from making legitimate copies of their own content? Certainly such laws would make it a pain to share home videos taken with a digital camcorder and give home-brew DVD copies to grandparents or fans of independent music artists? Or home-video kids making cheesy movies like Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell started out doing with Super-8 film? If this kind of law is passed, it must take into consideration that legitimate copying/distribution of one's own content should not be made a pain in the ass to do for families, independent artists, and future movie stars.
What OS versions are supported by this thing? I recently ordered the 8500 AIW, and only when I opened the box found out it won't work with Windows earlier than ME, so my 98 box is not suitable. (stupid web store leaving that detail out of their description) Eh, I don't want ME or XP... I know, you guys here advocate Linux, and I'm trying to get RH 7.2 running, but Windows runs my games, CAD/EDA software, and some things that I really can't do with Linux yet. Any chance Lindows would handle the included PVR software with these ATI cards??
What happens if you just delete it but don't open and read it?
What if it gets eaten by a spam filter?
Are you then still legally obligated to appear in a courtroom on some date that you honestly are completely unaware of? And can you be fined for having never seen such an email?
>You see the pattern? What's an ID card going to do? All your purchasing data and aggregate
>information already belong to some shady corporation.
Yea, but currently not any one credit card company knows all of my "trends". I have multiple cards and do different things with different cards. While different banks know different things, not one bank knows all of those things. With a single all-purpose national ID card, one entity (be it corporate or governmental) can then track ALL of my spending and travel habits. I'd much prefer to have this distributed so it's not so easy to abuse the complete collection of data collected about me - if someone steals one credit card, that would be easier to cope with than losing my complete identity at once.
>>Memory speed concerns The AmigaOneG3-SE supports 133MHz FSB SDRAM.
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b .nsf/tec hdocs/852569B20050FF7785256993005870F7
>>(According to our engineers DDR memory doesn't gain anything in help PPC board design).
>Anyone care to explain the technicalities?
The G3/G4 would still be bottlenecked by their frontside bus speed.
On G3/G4 PowerPCs, this tops out at 133MHz, according to specs on both motorola's
and IBM's web sites.
Motorola PPC compariston chart:
http://e-www.motorola.com/webapp/sps/site
IBM page describing their 750 G3's (pdf):
http://www-3.ibm.com/chips/techlib/techli
With SDR available at 133MHz and 150MHz to some extent, there's not
much point in attaching DDR that goes beyond 133MHz effective speeds,
as the frontside bus speed will bottleneck it down to 133 anyway. Plus,
Eyetech has been smart in using a standard PPC northbrodge chipset instead of
rolling their own in an FPGA like they originally planned to. Their original
specs were 100MHz SDRAM, AGP1X, and would have taken some time
to debug the FPGA logic. With the ArticaS chipset, the debug is done for them
by the chip vendor, and they also get the added 133MHz SDRAM, and AGP2x support
as a bonus.
Now, for those concerned about the pricetag, which is of course high
compared to PC stuff. Compare the number of sales for a PC
motherboard, to the number of sales you might expect to get out of
the Amiga market, which this product is targeted at. That PC
board sells a hell of a lot more units, no? They have to pay for
production, set up, components, and design with far fewer sales
than a popular PC board does, which means higher price per board to
cover their expenses. They aren't marketing this thing to PC users or
Slashdot folks or Linux users. They're marketing it to Amiga users.
And considering that my only other PowerPC option is an obsolete
233MHz 604e card designed by a defunct company, and these boards are
nigh-impossible to find and start around US$900, I'll happily shell out
$400 or so for this thing that is truckloads better.
And yes, I do also have a PC. Windows 98SE and Red Hat 7.2 on it, though
my new Radeon 8500 All In Wonder doesn't do 98/98SE. >:( Stupid internet
store didn't tell me that, so I'm pondering my options, but the card
really wasn't meant for the PC anyway, I just wanted to test it there to get
support if it didn't work. (Just returned a flaky 8500 AGP no AIW card)
I just don't like Windows at all, and Linux is too cumbersome to get working
reliably the first time, it's still weird. And I like to tinker with Amigas
as an alternative that I do actually like and get along with well.
From the eWeek article:
Echoing words often used by Microsoft during the Department of Justice's antitrust trial, Webb called the litigating
states' proposals "truly Draconian," "extraordinarily harsh" and "unfair."
Aw, gee. How many people in jail think their punishment is "unfair" as well? I thought punishments for commiting a crime was supposed to be unpleasant, in order to persuade the criminal from repeating his mistakes. MS seems to already have been proven to have continued it's wrongful doings even after it was convicted, so it would seem that more unpleasantness is required in order to get MS to change its ways. Surely MS is capable of understanding the concept of what a punishment is and why it's that way...
> The way I see it, shareware authors shouldn't expect to turn a profit.
Why not? Shareware users expect support and bugfixes. perhaps the shareware author had some expenses involved, and would like to at least get those expenses paid for. And something in return for helping users with installation issues, compatibility issues, fixing bugs, adding new features, etc.
I realize that many in the Slashdot community are hard-core "software should be free and open source with zero exceptions", but some people have bills to pay related wo their works. For example, I am working with a friend to write drivers for modern graphics cards for the Amiga platform. Sure, a lot of you will think such a thing is laughable and rediculous. But there is interest for such a thing, at least from users wishing they could plug a new graphics card into their machine (via one of the many currently available PCI bridges or the upcoming new motherboard with an AGP slot) and have it actually do something. To properly support and debug these drivers, I have to buy PCI bridges beyond what I really need myself, and various cards in the product line I'm working with. This costs me money. I didn't already have all this stuff, and I wouldn't have bought all of it independent of this driver project, so there is true expense involved, which I'm happy do to so long as I can expect at least that expense to be reimbursed by users of these drivers. I of course do not expect to get rich in the current Amiga market, but I would appreciate some help in paying for the hardware involved.
And yet there were Amiga users responding to this announcement with anything but appreciation. One guy even said and I quote: "I don't care if developers have bills to pay." OK, then please tell me what my motivation for this project is.
I've already spent US$800 on hardware, the PCI bridge and three graphics cards, and have the new Amiga PCI/AGP/PowerPC motherboard on preorder. Why do the users out there demand that developers spend money to make something possible, but then refuse to spend any money to have a legit license to use the resulting software? These people sound very interested in having something better than a Voodoo3 card, but at the same time the vocal among them have zero interest in helping make that possible by collectively reimbursing the hardware and my own licensing expenses by paying registration fees. Sorry, but not everyone is willing to go very deeply into personal debt to satisfy selfish users that want everything for free (as in beer). If a driver for a modern graphics card isn't worth US$5 or so to these people, they probably won't be getting many new features or a wide variety of models from the product line supported well.
And they don't seem to realize that user disinterest in paying for someone else's work and investments in development is exactly why the Amiga market has got to where it is today, with very very few active developers doing commercial quality work. Why the office apps don't seem to be in development at all anymore, games are few and far between, and web browsers have been stagnant for years, etc.
This problem goes beyond shareware. I would sell my drivers via a web page credit card registration for only a few US$, not as shareware but as internet commercial purchase for cheap. The public discussion shows that I shouldn't have any right at all to ask for anything whatsoever in return for my work and expense. So when "finished", I'm going to be finding other ways to occupy my spare time, such as working on my house or developing for a more viable computer market when I'm not at my "day job" as a chip guy. I'm stil obsessed with Amigas and will continue using it as my main system at home, but it's just not possible to please these users and still have even remotely realistic expectations in return. I simply can't afford to give every Amiga user in the world a "free beer".
> By time you add up your phone, long distance, cable, and AOL you get around $230!
My TOTAL monthly phone bill is around $35, which INCLUDES long distance.
Comcast cablemodem/basic/extended TV service is about $85. My combined
bill is closer to $120 than $230. That leftover $110 is way beyond
the number of movies I rent a month. I'm not willing to pay the extra
$30 or so a month to get digital cable TV with Comcast, why would I
pay $110 a month more for it at TW? I'm not willing to pay extra for
HBO or any other premium channel, why would I want to pay TW
$110 for that? The extra featuers I see compared to my current
combined services simply are not worth anywhere near $110/month to
me, and I'm quite happy I don't have TW. I just hope Comcast doesn't
try to force such a price tag on me. I've considered tossing
out my cable TV service, as there really isn't that much on that's
worth the current $45-ish/month. If my bill jumped by $110/month
I'd simply have no choice but to unsubscribe from CableTV service.
The vast majority of shows I care to waste my time on I can get
via antenna, and I could live without the very few shows I occasionally
eatch on the extended channels.
There's good reasons for this. Say my family gets a video camera compatible with computers & burning DVDs of home-movies. If family goes on vacation down my way, they can burn a DVD for me before leaving. If I go to them, I can burn a DVD to bring home with me, and not have to tote my entire system around, just the drive. And make a few copies at once to save mailing disks around, just hand them out when everyone is in the same place...
Or I could lend it to a friend who can't afford the drive but does have a suitable camera. Or to use it to make hard drive backups of various machines around the house (currently 3 systems of my own and 3 systems belonging to roommates) Lend it to friends for backups, etc. Not to mention the potential backup use for computer repairs places to restore data in case "something bad/worse" happens, backup usage for bigger companies that only want to buy one drive, etc.