That's not an explanation, that's an observation. BB has had years to fine tune its phones, to make them fit into the newer market. The fact that many of its phones are clunky shows they haven't done this, or haven't done it enough.
I believe they're sitting on a large body of cash and in no danger of going under any time soon.
What I want to know is how they've fallen so quickly? Yes, Apple and Android have taken up the marketshare RIM once enjoyed, but of a much larger market than was around when they ruled the roost.
Why is RIM completely unable to use the larger market that exists to sell more smartphones (yes, I know this story is about tablets but...)?
OK, but what if I made a note of someone's VIN code and then used it to clone their car? Would that be stealing?
Wait, can you clone a car from a VIN code? Does that even make sense to begin with? DAMN THESE CAR ANALOGIES!
Let's try again - OK, suppose you have a series of cars, like, red, green, brown, etc, and then you make a note of the ones that pass you, and... no, this isn't working either.
So you're following a car, and you happen to crash into the back, launching yourself through your windshield and through the back window of the car you were following, landing on the backseat. There, you notice someone's handbag, and you quickly pull out your Android phone and scan the card. Would that be stealing? Hmmm? Hmmmmmmm?
That's a great argument in 1990. In 2012, where every computer is connected to every other computer in this great big network we call "The Internet", and people often need to download software from the Internet... not so much.
This, incidentally, is what Java and other managed code environments, are/were trying to solve, and would probably work great if it wasn't for inevitable unpredictable stutters caused by garbage collection.
No, the GP is right and you're wrong. Far more people buy iPads than use them. And as Android tablets are inherently more powerful (bigger range, better OS, open and programmable), yet come at a lower cost, the GP's comments stand up.
All capitalists fear change. You become a successful capitalist by producing something that the market wants, at a profitable cost and price.
Change means the success is going to stop. You may be able to change what you're doing, and remain successful, but there are no guarantees that's the case.
Worse still, if significant change occurs during a project that will take many years to complete, to make its money back, well, you may well be fucked anyway.
Capitalists crave stability. They want to be able to predict the likely success of a venture. Change is incompatible with planning, and prediction.
The people directly owning the means of production might have been tried in the Paris Commune before they were defeated by the Nazis
FWIW, that's... quite a mix of periods. As in dinosaurs walking with cavemen. The Paris Commune rose up, and fell apart, in a period of months during 1871. It never really established itself for any period of time that would allow historians to judge its effectiveness and ability to implement, let alone stick to, any underlying ideology.
That's, obviously, got little to do with the point you were making, it's just "Paris Commune defeated by Nazis" was just so out of whack I had to comment!
Each byte of each plane apparently represents four pixels, with two bits of each byte going into each pixel. So four planes gives you 256 colours (8 bits per pixel.)
Which is kinda ugly, but no more, I guess, than a lot of 1980s computer graphics technologies.
Unfortunately it also adds to the reasons why just because Carmack worked on a planar version of Doom for the PC doesn't mean his decision to ignore the Amiga was entirely inexplicable. Leaving aside the market share, and the fact I assume to get this to run at any speed, it would have to have been done in assembler (which would be different for the PC and Amiga), code that manipulates double-bit planes is going to be slightly different to that that manipulates single bit planes, and will probably be around twice as fast.
If the Amiga had a chunky mode, I suspect it would have been a no-brainer to port Doom. It would have worked on more models, and only the interactions with the API would have had to be recoded. Oh well.
Very surprised by it actually, pretty much everyone insisted at the time it was the lack of chunky graphics! I'm guessing that it probably was, but Carmack saw it was worthwhile to do the work for the PC given the PC's marketshare.
Actually, don't bother responding to my previous response to you. After the modbombing and the idiots saying that sample sizes are measured in "Number of times I took a bunch of samples" rather than "Number of samples actually taken", I'm done with this.
I posted some figures for a group of websites that I know aren't likely to be skewed towards any particular browser. Those figures have been modded down to oblivion, for no apparent reason.
And you can't even be civil.
So I'll stick you on ignore for a while, and I'll leave this thread. Shame, it would have been interesting to see what other webmasters experience vs this survey is. That's not terribly likely to happen in an environment where publishing GA figures gets you modbombed.
I can't find anything on Wordpress's site that reports browser usage. Or are you just saying it's a "big site"?
What makes you think our sites skew towards IE users? I'm curious to know what non-StatCounter figures you're looking at that also suggest IE's usage is low?
1. They're not stats from just one website. They're stats from all the websites run by my employer
2. There are over half a million visitors being counted here.
3. The question at issue here is not "What are the exact market shares of each browser" but "Is it remotely plausable that Chrome has surpassed IE in market share?"
4. You've asked me for the figures after I've said this doesn't match my experience. You're now moving the bar.
Seriously, if you're not interested in what figures I'm seeing that make me think the original survey is ludicrously out of whack with reality, don't fucking ask for them!. I'm not trying to convince you, I'm telling you why I think this survey is improbable.
I'm looking at the figures for a set of general interest financial advice websites. These sites do not attract a demographic likely to be skewed towards any particular browser. So I'm basically getting half a million samples to look at that are more or less random. Most of these people are using IE.
This figure tells me that it's highly improbable that Chrome is doing better than IE. You can disbelieve that if you wish, but I will remain skeptical until I either see something more solid from StatCounter, start seeing my figures change, or start seeing other web surveys actually back StatCounter up.
That's a sample size of a little over half a million, not one.
My employer, FWIW, is a publisher of financial advice. We're not targeting geeks (specifically) or any other group. While I'd expect the figures to be slightly skewed, I'd say they're likely to be closer to normal than, say, some Slashdotter's blog.
GA reports, that of the 506,682 people who visited the sites run by my employer in the last month:
28.29% used IE 9
25.70% used IE 8
14.61% used Firefox 12.0
5.39% used Chrome 19.0.1084.52
4.33% used IE 7 (thank God.)
3.07% used Safari 534.57.2
2.56% used Android Browser 533.1
2.45% used Firefox 13.0
1.27% used Chrome 19.0.1084.46, and 1.25% used Chrome 19.0.1084.56
The fact that our site of HALF A MILLION USERS is getting almost three times as many Firefox users as Chrome users is why I think the idea Chrome is #1, even considering my employer's demographic, highly improbable.
I've tried to find some evidence for this on the net and I can't find a damned thing. It contradicts pretty much everything that was said at the time, said since, and, for that matter, makes any sense. If Doom used a planar mode, then frankly, the question arises why even use the algorithm they did?
You see, SC comes up with a moderately intelligent article that does seem, in the face of it, to address the points Microsoft addresses.
And yet, virtually anyone who administers a public website can tell you that SC's original figures are complete crap. IE most certainly is the most popular browser right now. And Chome is third place. Not second. Definitely not first.
SC can continue to push this ludicrous crap if they want. But their figures are laughable, and they'd be better off figuring why than writing snippy retorts to anyone who points it out.
I'm curious if they were bad at estimating fabrication and support chip costs or if they were bad at coming up with a target price and sticking with it. I mean, near the end you had AAA then AA/AGA then AA+ and lastly Hombre. Sounds very chaotic.
Neither. From the Interview with Dave Haynie I linked to earlier, this gives some insight into the day to day problems the Amiga team had to deal with.
How to you feel about the A4000 in relation to the A3000? It's allways felt like a rushed system to me, which is the reason I never got one. AGA didn't do much for me wich was another reason not to get that A3000+
AA was a good solution for what it did, it just wasn't enough to satisfy most people by that time. But hey, it did get finished, and that's an achievement in itself.
There's an A4000 story, which I'll relate. The story begins in 1991, when Sydnes took over as VP of Engineering. I was working on the _real_ A3000+, the first prototype of which was the first AA machine ever, back when we called it "Pandora". This machine was using mainly A3000 parts (I planned to revise it to the '040 bus once the AA stuff had been proven - custom chip lead times are many times that of gate arrays; we had the in-house gate arrays at the time that be turned over in about a month), though it had the AGA, and an AT&T DSP3210 subsystem. This would have delivered 16-bit audio I/O, software modem, number crunching 5x-10x faster than a 68040, etc. Not too shabby.
Ok, so Sydnes some in, and his first mission is to destroy the appearance that the former administration (Henri Ruben and Jeff Porter) were as organized and far along as they were. So he cancels all products, and turns the A3000+ into just a development system for programmers (Jeff Porter is able to keep the DSP development alive, I'm able to kludge two working DSP systems even with the DSP control logic, in one of the new custom chips, flawed).
Somewhere down the road, Sydnes and Ali, or perhaps their pet chimpanzee for all I know, decide they need a new computer, something more mid-level. Rather than revive the "A1000+", which was Joe Augenbraun's project to build an $800 AA-based, 25MHz entry-level machine for April 2002 release, he gets Greg Berlin to build a scaled-down A3000. This is dubbed the A1000jr (Sydnes claim to fame at IBM was that he was the manager in charge of the PCjr, the greatest failure in IBM PC history), and is basically an A3000 with 68EC020, two Zorro II slots, and ECS.
Now, this is ready to go in April. You have to understand Commodore's working to know what happened here, but basically, C= was run like a cellular company. Each cell did it's thing, and ran fairly independently of the parent (CIL, Commodore International Limited). This is why every company did marketing differently; different independent marketing companies. So now, to get their product, each marketing company places orders, and C= fills them as best as they can. But guess what absolutely no one ordered. If you said the "A1000jr" (real name as Amiga 2400 or something like that), you win the LBM Effigy, to be burned later. Nope, no one wanted a stripped down A3000 without AA graphics (or SCSI, or flickerfixer, or Zorro III, etc).
So now Sydnes is in a panic. So he calls on Greg again (Greg's a good guy, one my oldest friends, just not in the best situation then) to start up the next thing, the A4000. Fast. This command came in May, they wanted to ship in September. So Greg takes the A2400 design, drops in the AA stuff from my A3000+ design, gets me in to fix it to run Zorro III, etc. Sydnes mandates IDE (ATA-1, I think is all you get), so that's done, poorly, with a PAL (you couldn't do good ATA in a cheap programmable part back then; you can today), so goodbye SCSI. Anyway, no joy, but there's an A4000.
The '040 board, too, was a left over. Scott Schaeffer was our '040 expert (I had been the CPU guy, but had too mu
There's a hell of a lot of Amiga stuff that relies upon tasks all seeing a single, unified, memory image. IPC for example. And even stuff like drawing graphics is done in an environment in which processes assume they'll be able to address the screen directly.
Now, before you go "But that's OK, because you can just..." and then explain the obvious solutions, yeah, I know. The problem here is that I've yet to hear solutions that do not fundamentally result in an OS that has no resemblance to the original, an OS that loses just about everything that made it interesting to begin with.
Which is what sucks about the situation. Pretty much the only way I can think of to implement security in a unified memory model OS, short of having the world's most complex MMU, would be to use managed code. Yeah. I don't like that idea either. And that wouldn't add security to older apps.
Well, there's your problem -- you listened to the marketers and journalists. The fact is, a tablet is not a general purpose computer. It's a glorified book reader/movie watcher/web surfer/picture displayer.
That's very true... of the Kindle Fire. And I've praised the KF for that very reason, it's exactly what it sets out to be, and isn't intended to be a general purpose device.
The problem here is that the iPad and the 10" Android tablets is supposed to be a general purpose device, and it sucks at it. It's too big to be the "glorified book reader/movie watcher/web surfer/picture displayer" (and has totally the wrong screen for the glorified book reader...), it has a lot of unnecessary functionality for a device that's supposed to be that too.
If I need to type, I just use the notebook. I'll take the notebook to the bar to surf the web while I'm there, but a tablet would be handier.
Yep.
Still, if the intention, espoused by the iPad evangelists and Microsoft, is to get us to use tablets everywhere and for everything, then Microsoft is definitely heading in the right direction with the Surface and the functions it has.
BTW, quote from Dave Haynie (who posts here occasionally. Originally a C64 engineer but moved on to the Amiga group and later chipset design work):
And while ads might have helped, additional interfacing with Marketing might not have done much in those days. Amiga engineers were better in touch with the buyers than Marketing. Because most of us WERE the target market - we were making our own new toy, within the financial limits accorded.
That's what's missing from modern computing.
Ubuntu is about cornering the desktop and tablet market.
Mac OS X / iOS is about "user experience" and purity.
Windows is about controlling the market and adding the features users are demanding.
Android is about keeping mobile devices open.
Who's sitting down any more and saying "The computer we're going to build is the one I want to use"?
Because back in the early nineties, we were obnoxious.
I'm not kidding. We'd bring in the Amiga into every discussion. How it was the best computer in the world. How you suck for having a PC or Mac. How Bill Gates sucks because he won't support our wonderful computer system.
We were basically the early nineties equivalent of Apple fanbois. Except worse, if you can imagine such a thing.
And I suspect there are a few Team Amigans out there who are still like that. The rest of us are old farts who post to threads like this and reminise, which makes us easy pickings both for trolls, and people who just didn't like us back in 1992.
That's not all of it of course. There's also always the MBA-who-thinks-he's-a-geek type who, on hearing someone has created a 6502 entirely out of discrete soldered together transistors, or out of Lego, posts here demanding to know WHY ANYONE WOULD MAKE A 6502 in 2012?!! And they're posting here thinking "Amiga?! But why would we want anything other than {"Linux"/Windows 8/Mac OS X}"
That's why. My advice. Ignore it. Enjoy the fact geeks are doing geeky things. And try the OS if you have a chance, you might find a use for it, and you'll certainly learn something from it.
Over time, there probably isn't a lot that's better than what we have today, beyond efficiency and a look and feel that I just felt comfortable with - which itself is somewhat subjective... hey, take a look here: http://home.datacomm.ch/mrupp/TAWS/WB.html
At the time however, these were considered radical:
- Pre-emptive multitasking
- A shell that was half way between Command.com and Bourne. Had some very nice user friendly aspects, such as named parameters and a shared command line parsing system.
- The file system supported mixed case, long, filenames.
- An automatically-managed multiple desktop system. Larger apps would have their own desktops. Each could be a different screen mode if necessary (important in the days when there was a resolution/colour tradeoff)
Everything was patchable and extendable. Utilities were encouraged to intercept standard library calls for all kinda of stuff. The file system had some extremely nice features such as an assignments system that allowed you to assign symbolic names to directories - you didn't have drive letters or a single file system, but something more partitionable. From Workbench 2.0 onwards it had an extremely pleasant look and feel (older versions, not so much.)
It's hard really to describe how radical and better it was at the time to anything else mainstream. Unfortunately, it became obsolete the moment MMU support (and other security features) became important, which is to say, as soon as the Internet proper came on the scene.
Well, kinda. The Amiga 500 was 6 years old, but the 500 and 600 were the most popular brands of Amiga ever made and there were tens of millions of them. The 1200 was sold towards the end of Commodore's life and didn't sell at anything like the same rate.
Could the 1200 run Doom? Well, yeah, just about, but that wasn't what Carmack was getting at. He was looking forward, saying "Look, mainstream Amigas have this bitplane architecture. It's nice, and flexible, but when it comes to 3D games, it's just never going to pan out. Sorry." Unbelievable levels of assembly-level optimization would be needed to get Doom to work at an acceptable framerate on a 1200, and as for a popular model of Amiga, forget it. What would that say about Carmack's next big project?
Commodore knew it was a problem at the time too, and the CD32 actually had a bizarre hardware hack thing in it that would copy data in a chunky forward optimally to a planer format so the CPU didn't have to do that work, but...
The point I'm making is that the Amiga, in the early nineties, just wasn't something you bought for the hardware. It was nice hardware, but you could get better, and what's more, if you knew where the industry was heading (in terms of hardware requirements to support the software that was coming), the Amiga architecture was on its last legs.
Commodore knew that. Actually, they knew that in the late eighties, but various projects to fix it were either cancelled (AAA) or came too late (Hombre - which arguably was an attempt to create a post Amiga system, rather than a next generation Amiga.)
Slashdot Mirror
That's not an explanation, that's an observation. BB has had years to fine tune its phones, to make them fit into the newer market. The fact that many of its phones are clunky shows they haven't done this, or haven't done it enough.
Why?
I believe they're sitting on a large body of cash and in no danger of going under any time soon.
What I want to know is how they've fallen so quickly? Yes, Apple and Android have taken up the marketshare RIM once enjoyed, but of a much larger market than was around when they ruled the roost.
Why is RIM completely unable to use the larger market that exists to sell more smartphones (yes, I know this story is about tablets but...)?
OK, but what if I made a note of someone's VIN code and then used it to clone their car? Would that be stealing?
Wait, can you clone a car from a VIN code? Does that even make sense to begin with? DAMN THESE CAR ANALOGIES!
Let's try again - OK, suppose you have a series of cars, like, red, green, brown, etc, and then you make a note of the ones that pass you, and... no, this isn't working either.
So you're following a car, and you happen to crash into the back, launching yourself through your windshield and through the back window of the car you were following, landing on the backseat. There, you notice someone's handbag, and you quickly pull out your Android phone and scan the card. Would that be stealing? Hmmm? Hmmmmmmm?
That's a great argument in 1990. In 2012, where every computer is connected to every other computer in this great big network we call "The Internet", and people often need to download software from the Internet... not so much.
This, incidentally, is what Java and other managed code environments, are/were trying to solve, and would probably work great if it wasn't for inevitable unpredictable stutters caused by garbage collection.
No, the GP is right and you're wrong. Far more people buy iPads than use them. And as Android tablets are inherently more powerful (bigger range, better OS, open and programmable), yet come at a lower cost, the GP's comments stand up.
All capitalists fear change. You become a successful capitalist by producing something that the market wants, at a profitable cost and price.
Change means the success is going to stop. You may be able to change what you're doing, and remain successful, but there are no guarantees that's the case.
Worse still, if significant change occurs during a project that will take many years to complete, to make its money back, well, you may well be fucked anyway.
Capitalists crave stability. They want to be able to predict the likely success of a venture. Change is incompatible with planning, and prediction.
FWIW, that's... quite a mix of periods. As in dinosaurs walking with cavemen. The Paris Commune rose up, and fell apart, in a period of months during 1871. It never really established itself for any period of time that would allow historians to judge its effectiveness and ability to implement, let alone stick to, any underlying ideology.
That's, obviously, got little to do with the point you were making, it's just "Paris Commune defeated by Nazis" was just so out of whack I had to comment!
If I'm reading http://fly.srk.fer.hr/GDM/articles/vgamodex/vgamx1.html correctly, then this isn't quite true.
Each byte of each plane apparently represents four pixels, with two bits of each byte going into each pixel. So four planes gives you 256 colours (8 bits per pixel.)
Which is kinda ugly, but no more, I guess, than a lot of 1980s computer graphics technologies.
Unfortunately it also adds to the reasons why just because Carmack worked on a planar version of Doom for the PC doesn't mean his decision to ignore the Amiga was entirely inexplicable. Leaving aside the market share, and the fact I assume to get this to run at any speed, it would have to have been done in assembler (which would be different for the PC and Amiga), code that manipulates double-bit planes is going to be slightly different to that that manipulates single bit planes, and will probably be around twice as fast.
If the Amiga had a chunky mode, I suspect it would have been a no-brainer to port Doom. It would have worked on more models, and only the interactions with the API would have had to be recoded. Oh well.
Thank you, that's interesting.
Very surprised by it actually, pretty much everyone insisted at the time it was the lack of chunky graphics! I'm guessing that it probably was, but Carmack saw it was worthwhile to do the work for the PC given the PC's marketshare.
Actually, don't bother responding to my previous response to you. After the modbombing and the idiots saying that sample sizes are measured in "Number of times I took a bunch of samples" rather than "Number of samples actually taken", I'm done with this.
I posted some figures for a group of websites that I know aren't likely to be skewed towards any particular browser. Those figures have been modded down to oblivion, for no apparent reason.
And you can't even be civil.
So I'll stick you on ignore for a while, and I'll leave this thread. Shame, it would have been interesting to see what other webmasters experience vs this survey is. That's not terribly likely to happen in an environment where publishing GA figures gets you modbombed.
This is why periodically I just hate Slashdot.
Mod-bombed because my own experience doesn't match SC? Really? Seriously?
I can't find anything on Wordpress's site that reports browser usage. Or are you just saying it's a "big site"?
What makes you think our sites skew towards IE users? I'm curious to know what non-StatCounter figures you're looking at that also suggest IE's usage is low?
1. They're not stats from just one website. They're stats from all the websites run by my employer
2. There are over half a million visitors being counted here.
3. The question at issue here is not "What are the exact market shares of each browser" but "Is it remotely plausable that Chrome has surpassed IE in market share?"
4. You've asked me for the figures after I've said this doesn't match my experience. You're now moving the bar.
Seriously, if you're not interested in what figures I'm seeing that make me think the original survey is ludicrously out of whack with reality, don't fucking ask for them !. I'm not trying to convince you, I'm telling you why I think this survey is improbable.
I'm looking at the figures for a set of general interest financial advice websites. These sites do not attract a demographic likely to be skewed towards any particular browser. So I'm basically getting half a million samples to look at that are more or less random. Most of these people are using IE.
This figure tells me that it's highly improbable that Chrome is doing better than IE. You can disbelieve that if you wish, but I will remain skeptical until I either see something more solid from StatCounter, start seeing my figures change, or start seeing other web surveys actually back StatCounter up.
That's a sample size of a little over half a million, not one.
My employer, FWIW, is a publisher of financial advice. We're not targeting geeks (specifically) or any other group. While I'd expect the figures to be slightly skewed, I'd say they're likely to be closer to normal than, say, some Slashdotter's blog.
GA reports, that of the 506,682 people who visited the sites run by my employer in the last month:
28.29% used IE 9
25.70% used IE 8
14.61% used Firefox 12.0
5.39% used Chrome 19.0.1084.52
4.33% used IE 7 (thank God.)
3.07% used Safari 534.57.2
2.56% used Android Browser 533.1
2.45% used Firefox 13.0
1.27% used Chrome 19.0.1084.46, and 1.25% used Chrome 19.0.1084.56
Removing version numbers:
IE: 58.63$
Firefox: 21.38%
Chrome: 8.88%
Safari: 7.52%
The fact that our site of HALF A MILLION USERS is getting almost three times as many Firefox users as Chrome users is why I think the idea Chrome is #1, even considering my employer's demographic, highly improbable.
I've tried to find some evidence for this on the net and I can't find a damned thing. It contradicts pretty much everything that was said at the time, said since, and, for that matter, makes any sense. If Doom used a planar mode, then frankly, the question arises why even use the algorithm they did?
Do you have a citation?
What's the actual truth?
You see, SC comes up with a moderately intelligent article that does seem, in the face of it, to address the points Microsoft addresses.
And yet, virtually anyone who administers a public website can tell you that SC's original figures are complete crap. IE most certainly is the most popular browser right now. And Chome is third place. Not second. Definitely not first.
SC can continue to push this ludicrous crap if they want. But their figures are laughable, and they'd be better off figuring why than writing snippy retorts to anyone who points it out.
Neither. From the Interview with Dave Haynie I linked to earlier, this gives some insight into the day to day problems the Amiga team had to deal with.
How to you feel about the A4000 in relation to the A3000? It's allways felt like a rushed system to me, which is the reason I never got one. AGA didn't do much for me wich was another reason not to get that A3000+
AA was a good solution for what it did, it just wasn't enough to satisfy most people by that time. But hey, it did get finished, and that's an achievement in itself.
There's an A4000 story, which I'll relate. The story begins in 1991, when Sydnes took over as VP of Engineering. I was working on the _real_ A3000+, the first prototype of which was the first AA machine ever, back when we called it "Pandora". This machine was using mainly A3000 parts (I planned to revise it to the '040 bus once the AA stuff had been proven - custom chip lead times are many times that of gate arrays; we had the in-house gate arrays at the time that be turned over in about a month), though it had the AGA, and an AT&T DSP3210 subsystem. This would have delivered 16-bit audio I/O, software modem, number crunching 5x-10x faster than a 68040, etc. Not too shabby.
Ok, so Sydnes some in, and his first mission is to destroy the appearance that the former administration (Henri Ruben and Jeff Porter) were as organized and far along as they were. So he cancels all products, and turns the A3000+ into just a development system for programmers (Jeff Porter is able to keep the DSP development alive, I'm able to kludge two working DSP systems even with the DSP control logic, in one of the new custom chips, flawed).
Somewhere down the road, Sydnes and Ali, or perhaps their pet chimpanzee for all I know, decide they need a new computer, something more mid-level. Rather than revive the "A1000+", which was Joe Augenbraun's project to build an $800 AA-based, 25MHz entry-level machine for April 2002 release, he gets Greg Berlin to build a scaled-down A3000. This is dubbed the A1000jr (Sydnes claim to fame at IBM was that he was the manager in charge of the PCjr, the greatest failure in IBM PC history), and is basically an A3000 with 68EC020, two Zorro II slots, and ECS.
Now, this is ready to go in April. You have to understand Commodore's working to know what happened here, but basically, C= was run like a cellular company. Each cell did it's thing, and ran fairly independently of the parent (CIL, Commodore International Limited). This is why every company did marketing differently; different independent marketing companies. So now, to get their product, each marketing company places orders, and C= fills them as best as they can. But guess what absolutely no one ordered. If you said the "A1000jr" (real name as Amiga 2400 or something like that), you win the LBM Effigy, to be burned later. Nope, no one wanted a stripped down A3000 without AA graphics (or SCSI, or flickerfixer, or Zorro III, etc).
So now Sydnes is in a panic. So he calls on Greg again (Greg's a good guy, one my oldest friends, just not in the best situation then) to start up the next thing, the A4000. Fast. This command came in May, they wanted to ship in September. So Greg takes the A2400 design, drops in the AA stuff from my A3000+ design, gets me in to fix it to run Zorro III, etc. Sydnes mandates IDE (ATA-1, I think is all you get), so that's done, poorly, with a PAL (you couldn't do good ATA in a cheap programmable part back then; you can today), so goodbye SCSI. Anyway, no joy, but there's an A4000.
The '040 board, too, was a left over. Scott Schaeffer was our '040 expert (I had been the CPU guy, but had too mu
There's a hell of a lot of Amiga stuff that relies upon tasks all seeing a single, unified, memory image. IPC for example. And even stuff like drawing graphics is done in an environment in which processes assume they'll be able to address the screen directly.
Now, before you go "But that's OK, because you can just..." and then explain the obvious solutions, yeah, I know. The problem here is that I've yet to hear solutions that do not fundamentally result in an OS that has no resemblance to the original, an OS that loses just about everything that made it interesting to begin with.
Which is what sucks about the situation. Pretty much the only way I can think of to implement security in a unified memory model OS, short of having the world's most complex MMU, would be to use managed code. Yeah. I don't like that idea either. And that wouldn't add security to older apps.
That's very true... of the Kindle Fire. And I've praised the KF for that very reason, it's exactly what it sets out to be, and isn't intended to be a general purpose device.
The problem here is that the iPad and the 10" Android tablets is supposed to be a general purpose device, and it sucks at it. It's too big to be the "glorified book reader/movie watcher/web surfer/picture displayer" (and has totally the wrong screen for the glorified book reader...), it has a lot of unnecessary functionality for a device that's supposed to be that too.
Yep.
Still, if the intention, espoused by the iPad evangelists and Microsoft, is to get us to use tablets everywhere and for everything, then Microsoft is definitely heading in the right direction with the Surface and the functions it has.
BTW, quote from Dave Haynie (who posts here occasionally. Originally a C64 engineer but moved on to the Amiga group and later chipset design work):
That's what's missing from modern computing.
Ubuntu is about cornering the desktop and tablet market.
Mac OS X / iOS is about "user experience" and purity.
Windows is about controlling the market and adding the features users are demanding.
Android is about keeping mobile devices open.
Who's sitting down any more and saying "The computer we're going to build is the one I want to use"?
Because back in the early nineties, we were obnoxious.
I'm not kidding. We'd bring in the Amiga into every discussion. How it was the best computer in the world. How you suck for having a PC or Mac. How Bill Gates sucks because he won't support our wonderful computer system.
We were basically the early nineties equivalent of Apple fanbois. Except worse, if you can imagine such a thing.
And I suspect there are a few Team Amigans out there who are still like that. The rest of us are old farts who post to threads like this and reminise, which makes us easy pickings both for trolls, and people who just didn't like us back in 1992.
That's not all of it of course. There's also always the MBA-who-thinks-he's-a-geek type who, on hearing someone has created a 6502 entirely out of discrete soldered together transistors, or out of Lego, posts here demanding to know WHY ANYONE WOULD MAKE A 6502 in 2012?!! And they're posting here thinking "Amiga?! But why would we want anything other than {"Linux"/Windows 8/Mac OS X}"
That's why. My advice. Ignore it. Enjoy the fact geeks are doing geeky things. And try the OS if you have a chance, you might find a use for it, and you'll certainly learn something from it.
I completely agree with you. I was just saying that "custom hardware" is what the posters quoted were advocating, not "I HATE IX86!!?!"
Over time, there probably isn't a lot that's better than what we have today, beyond efficiency and a look and feel that I just felt comfortable with - which itself is somewhat subjective... hey, take a look here: http://home.datacomm.ch/mrupp/TAWS/WB.html
At the time however, these were considered radical:
- Pre-emptive multitasking
- A shell that was half way between Command.com and Bourne. Had some very nice user friendly aspects, such as named parameters and a shared command line parsing system.
- The file system supported mixed case, long, filenames.
- An automatically-managed multiple desktop system. Larger apps would have their own desktops. Each could be a different screen mode if necessary (important in the days when there was a resolution/colour tradeoff)
Everything was patchable and extendable. Utilities were encouraged to intercept standard library calls for all kinda of stuff. The file system had some extremely nice features such as an assignments system that allowed you to assign symbolic names to directories - you didn't have drive letters or a single file system, but something more partitionable. From Workbench 2.0 onwards it had an extremely pleasant look and feel (older versions, not so much.)
It's hard really to describe how radical and better it was at the time to anything else mainstream. Unfortunately, it became obsolete the moment MMU support (and other security features) became important, which is to say, as soon as the Internet proper came on the scene.
Well, kinda. The Amiga 500 was 6 years old, but the 500 and 600 were the most popular brands of Amiga ever made and there were tens of millions of them. The 1200 was sold towards the end of Commodore's life and didn't sell at anything like the same rate.
Could the 1200 run Doom? Well, yeah, just about, but that wasn't what Carmack was getting at. He was looking forward, saying "Look, mainstream Amigas have this bitplane architecture. It's nice, and flexible, but when it comes to 3D games, it's just never going to pan out. Sorry." Unbelievable levels of assembly-level optimization would be needed to get Doom to work at an acceptable framerate on a 1200, and as for a popular model of Amiga, forget it. What would that say about Carmack's next big project?
Commodore knew it was a problem at the time too, and the CD32 actually had a bizarre hardware hack thing in it that would copy data in a chunky forward optimally to a planer format so the CPU didn't have to do that work, but...
The point I'm making is that the Amiga, in the early nineties, just wasn't something you bought for the hardware. It was nice hardware, but you could get better, and what's more, if you knew where the industry was heading (in terms of hardware requirements to support the software that was coming), the Amiga architecture was on its last legs.
Commodore knew that. Actually, they knew that in the late eighties, but various projects to fix it were either cancelled (AAA) or came too late (Hombre - which arguably was an attempt to create a post Amiga system, rather than a next generation Amiga.)