Who mentioned screwing over QSSL? Or that Tao was a bad product? And I have the SDK, it's quite nice. I just stated how I saw it, mr afraid to give their name. And yes I will be at St Louis, because I want to see something good come out of this, because I really don't want to see Amiga fail again.
He also designed the Commodore 128, Amiga 3000 and 3000+, and the new Met@box series of computers. (which run OS/2 or his newly availible CAOS) Check out his current company.
No AmigaOS for x86. (It couldn't be done anyways, not and retain that performance edge that made AmigaOS so good)
You will, however, get AmigeDE, a rebirth of the old JavaOS concept, done yet again! It's going head-to-head with AT&T's Open-Sourced OS's like Plan9 and Inferno for the platform-independent software arena. And with Sun Microsystems' Java and Microsoft's.NET platform to boot.
As for new hardware, don't expect anything but a crappy x86 box, maybe a PPC system provided IBM finally begins releasing that northbridge for POP, running a Matrox video card and SB Live! while charging twice as much for the right to have a Boing Ball logo on it.
I didn't used to be so critical of the new Amiga, but what they've done, shown, and stolen over the past year from good-natured Amiga support groups is really criminal. Ask them about KOSH, AROS, OpenAmiga, all groups that either were squashed, threatened with lawsuits, or had their ideas stolen by Amiga, Inc. Amiga has shown a need to be the "Big Dog" in the arena, marking it's territory by pissing on the smaller dogs. They then wonder why they have a VERY vocal anti-Amiga group formed within their own "loyal" Amigans.
I'm not dissing binary compatability across platforms. That is a good thing, but not necessary a critical thing. Good API's, detailed documentation and solid support go a lot further than any cross-platform binary ever could.
And it's not like they even own the Amiga in the first place. (courts could not proove ownership of the Amiga by Escom back in '95 during a suit they filed. There is a LOT of legal mess with the Amiga) Gateway sold the trademarks, yes. But the ownership of a platform is not in the trademarks, nor in the patents (which, also, are under legal issues, with no less than 4 groups having equal claim on them) nor in the OS... it is when a computer balances everything, provides the user with a consistantly high-level of responsiveness when under the harshest of workloads, and when that computer does what you want it to HOW you want it to. That is what an Amiga is.
Luck is the term used by those without providence and foresight. Luck rarely has anything to do with economics, schrewdness, integrety, and cunning do. But a little luck can't hurt.
Did we say we're doing a PC? No. We said home computer, which is far different from a personal computer. Home computer ranges from that STB your children play video games or play DVD's with to the handheld computer you bring with you to check up on your 401k to the webpad that the hubby claims he's doing his taxes on when he's really playing a game of solitare.
Did I say anything about dumbing down computers? No. You can improve a computers usability without dumbing it down, ya know. Look at UNIX (pre-X). It was an improvement for usability over the other systems in that era, a dramatic improvement. Would you say that it dumbed down computers? I wouldn't, I run several UNIX-based OS's. It's very smart, very concise, so long as you don't fill it with half-baked libraries and unfinished and unstable API's.
As for big-boxes, I never said we wouldn't make big boxes, only that they're not our primary concern. You want big box computers, go to best buy, there's a ton of them. Try and find a slimline system that's easy enough for my grandmother to use yet powerful enough to appease my need for raw number crunshing without giving me a brain-dead OS.... doesn't happen.
This is probably one of the biggest cases of being caught with your zipper down I've ever been a part of. We're *just* getting our act together, with several projects under the umbrella, and now this occurs. We don't even have our webpage up yet. But cest'la vive.
For some more information about Phoenix, allow me:
We're a new group, no we did not make replacement boards for this or that. We're only a year and a half old, and only with a few products in-works or near-release. The NDA is not to steal ideas, it is to protect those who are not yet ready to have their ideas posted to the public. A premature slip can cause entire projects to fail. We're not big corporate america, out to take ideas and claim them as our own. We're joe-blows with ideas and dreams of our own. We've got game developers, hardware designers, OS companies, all with the goal of getting us PAST the Wintel box. Of getting PAST this concept that computers are a big dumb box that you have to sacrifice your firstborn to in order to get work done on them. That is what Phoenix is all about, and why I'm proud to be a member of her.
Look at this. Fare' posted a fearful possibility to all of us/.'ers, and all we'd managed to do is go and makr Roblimo afraid to post any more such possibilities. This was made to cause an ethnical worry amongst us/.'ers, especially those of us that use the GPL. Any possibility of a loophole has to be addressed. All we need is M$ to get wind of one and make VisualLinux (the horror). I say shame on all of you/.'ers that flamed Roblimo and Fare'. You should appologize for such rude behavior, especially against those who mean so well.
I am also a member of #tunes on openprojects.net, so if anyone has a problem with my postings, come talk to me directly.
No canidate I have seen directly addresses the real issues. I see half-addressed issues, like the internet tax issue. If they did the tax thing, all I'd have to do is move my sales office to Bermuda, and then I fall into a loophole in the tax laws. I say stop any thought of having an Internet Sales Tax. You know why? Because it'll end up like long distance phone, a hopeless mess. The McCain tax is just as bad, move itonto ISP's and the like. The Internet should remain a seperate entity from the US govt'. Make itgovernable by the UN. (Hell, they can'tdecide anything anyways, we'd remain tax free for centuries) What they should be dealing with isn't money, it's FREEDOM! The net has given an overwhelming array of freedom to people. Freedom to read. Freedom to discuss. I've learned more about the world on the internet than I ever did on the nightly news. We should be encouraging new ideas, new philosophies arising on here. Sure, you'll get jerks spreading naked pics of Pam and Tommy (who here has NOT seen these pics/videos yet?) but we have the freedom to delete message. It is OUR responsibility, not the government, to regulate our internet viewing. This issue about kids and porn is another non-issue IMHO. If the parents were there with the children, exploring the net with them, answering their numerous questions as they arose, there would be no problem. My uncle lived with my family when I was a kid, and always took time out to do his homework from HS while I was watching TV, and he'd always take time out totalk to me about it. When we got out Commodore 64 w/ modem and got into BBS's, he'd surf with me there too. My Uncle showed me what was right and wrong, by explaining and letting me decide. Sure, one time I sat up watching an R-rated movie, but he sat there and explained it to me, and I went "Oh, ok" and eventually grew bored and changed the channel. If parents were like my uncle, open to questions and listening to their children, there would be a lot less problems and minimal need for these kind of legislations.
I read about a group of borderline nutsos, guys who thought they could do the impossible. Get out there and take on the mightiest computer company out there, Apple. Especially their newest product, Macintosh. Their company name was Hi-Torro, their product, Lorraine. Then, to fund their increasingly expensive product, (making hardware is not for cheapskates, TRUST me) they decided on IPO'ing. Then they got an offer from Atari, it was not much, but enough to complete the project. They were going to take it, after all Atari was owned by Jack Tramiel, the father of the Commodore 64. Then Commodore stepped in, outbidding Atari 3 to 1. The Hi-Torro team went with Commodore and thus began the Commodore Amiga effort. That, as we all know, turned into a disaster. If Commodore had not been a billion-dollar firm by that point, the Amiga could not have made it into the 90's. It was only due to the massive back-history and huge credit file that Commodore continued, mis-managed and under-marketed. We know the history of the Amiga after that. From one owner to another, and so on. Neverr in control of it's own destiny since Hi-Torro. Always at the mercy of older, larger companies. But now, for the first time since the Hi-Torro sale, Amiga controls it's own destiny. It is the master of it's own fate. No longer trapped by the rules of corporate law, the Amiga has always made for a new way of doing things. So now under the new, unified Amiga Corporation banner, we may be finally able to complete the original Lorraine project, to produce a system that is revolutionary in every aspect, from the OS to the hardware, capable of delivering more performance per dollar than the best macintosh, than the biggest PC.
For the first time, Amiga is in control of it's own destiny.
People seem to have forgotten the point of RISC'ing in the first place. RISC's main point was to give the final control of the system's pipeline speed from the hardware to the compiler.
In true RISC processors (MIPS and SPARC as good examples) the compiler can and does produce an efficient pipeline w/o stalls of any sort. Which means that OOO is wasted on such a chip. The problem comes in with inefficient compilers and poor resource management. To solve this, hardware dvelopers introduced things like OOO and thread forecasting to allow bad compiling alg's to retain their top speed. But this leads to a bad trend which is quite apparent in the x86 compiling community, allowing the hardware to schedule processes in the end does not encourage compiler developers to make better and better compilers, instead allowing them to "scoot by" without ever learning the art of mastering the pipeline.
There is a new architecture arriving shortly, called VLIW, which is at it's heart nothing but taking the RISC concept one step furthur, forcing the compiler to take it's motley crew of commands and set them up to pipeline efficiently. There are more differences than this, I know, but at it's heart this is pretty much what it is. A good compiler will produce better code than any OOO engine out there can ever manage. Why? Because the programmer knows what he wants, the processor does not. No matter how smart, how many transistors you throw at a problem, a smart programmer with a smart compiler will always turn it on it's head.
In fact the world did end, this is just a reasonable duplicate created by the producers at hollywood. Unfortunately they forgot the plotline, concentrating solely on the special effects, so this gets a big two thumbs down by me.
I don't say that we never will see a machine as good if not better than the Amiga in these areas. Just noone has ever really tried to. The technology nowadays would make an Amiga-esque machine could make it even better. Not to toot my own horn, but the company I work for is trying something similar, using many of the same tricks and techniques to perfect a much more, interesting system than has been tried before. Whoever says that Amiga is the only machine ever capable of being like the Amiga is deluding themselves. It was smart engineering that made the Amiga, and smarter engineering can replace it.
Gateway still holds the patents, the licences and all of the cards. It did not originally buy Amiga in order to resurrect it, only to gain that technology. But holding those trademarks ment that a gigantic community was built around it, and Gateway had to deal with them. By selling the trademarks and not the patents to Mr McEwan's Amino, they solve that problem. They keep the technology, and loose the community. Amino gains the community and not the technology (except maybe the OS, which is copyrighted not patented) This could be good yet.
This was a perfect tactic for eToys, using a suit to guarantee customers. By eliminating a potential mis-understanding by eToy through this suit, they managed to keep customers focused on it's own website, thereby eliminating a possible "confusion" which could send their customers to their competition. Now that the key season, the "make it or break it" season for eToys I'd note, is over with, they are happy to drop the suit and no damage is done, completely innocent. No damage done, except to eToy. eToys has managed to make the VC's happy, and will likely shortly begin another round of financing. With the influx of cash, they won't care if they are sued. It's a win-win situation for them.
Such a sad commentary when a lawsuit is a marketing tactic
Well, before DVD was even realeased, I'd decided not to buy into it. My thought process was simple, "it's the purest example of trying to force closed standards down peoples throats." VHS profited by being open, any company could make VHS w/o paying this hefty fee, and the standard was open to all. Not so with DVD, this time the big boys want the pie all to themselves. After seeing this, I, as well as my entire company, has decided on boycotting DVD entirely. We were planning on using DVD for our products, but with these events, the fact that DVD was not an "open-standard" as originally promiced, and now them attempting legal trickery to gain whatever they want, we are now seeking an alternative to DVD. Someone else on this list mentioned making an open-standard to compete with DVD, yet brought up the high cost in hardware development. My company (a start-up, but we're willing) would be happy to put our money where it's mouth is, and I'd challenge any other corporate/entrepeneurial/.'ers to help form such a standard, open and honest. Let us become the VHS to DVD's Betamax.
My browser sees JPG, GIF, and PNG equally well. It is fast, smooth, has no problems with compression algs, interlacing, or anything of that nature. My browser is LYNX!
if IDG can do this, then they're going to do that to the/. article here as well, aren't they? They say that someone's free use of speech is illegal, doesn't that go against a small piece of paper written in the late 18th century or something? Help me out here.
Slashdot Mirror
Who mentioned screwing over QSSL? Or that Tao was a bad product? And I have the SDK, it's quite nice. I just stated how I saw it, mr afraid to give their name. And yes I will be at St Louis, because I want to see something good come out of this, because I really don't want to see Amiga fail again.
He also designed the Commodore 128, Amiga 3000 and 3000+, and the new Met@box series of computers. (which run OS/2 or his newly availible CAOS) Check out his current company.
No AmigaOS for x86. (It couldn't be done anyways, not and retain that performance edge that made AmigaOS so good)
.NET platform to boot.
You will, however, get AmigeDE, a rebirth of the old JavaOS concept, done yet again! It's going head-to-head with AT&T's Open-Sourced OS's like Plan9 and Inferno for the platform-independent software arena. And with Sun Microsystems' Java and Microsoft's
As for new hardware, don't expect anything but a crappy x86 box, maybe a PPC system provided IBM finally begins releasing that northbridge for POP, running a Matrox video card and SB Live! while charging twice as much for the right to have a Boing Ball logo on it.
I didn't used to be so critical of the new Amiga, but what they've done, shown, and stolen over the past year from good-natured Amiga support groups is really criminal. Ask them about KOSH, AROS, OpenAmiga, all groups that either were squashed, threatened with lawsuits, or had their ideas stolen by Amiga, Inc. Amiga has shown a need to be the "Big Dog" in the arena, marking it's territory by pissing on the smaller dogs. They then wonder why they have a VERY vocal anti-Amiga group formed within their own "loyal" Amigans.
I'm not dissing binary compatability across platforms. That is a good thing, but not necessary a critical thing. Good API's, detailed documentation and solid support go a lot further than any cross-platform binary ever could.
And it's not like they even own the Amiga in the first place. (courts could not proove ownership of the Amiga by Escom back in '95 during a suit they filed. There is a LOT of legal mess with the Amiga) Gateway sold the trademarks, yes. But the ownership of a platform is not in the trademarks, nor in the patents (which, also, are under legal issues, with no less than 4 groups having equal claim on them) nor in the OS... it is when a computer balances everything, provides the user with a consistantly high-level of responsiveness when under the harshest of workloads, and when that computer does what you want it to HOW you want it to. That is what an Amiga is.
Luck is the term used by those without providence and foresight. Luck rarely has anything to do with economics, schrewdness, integrety, and cunning do. But a little luck can't hurt.
Indeed we do.
Did we say we're doing a PC? No. We said home computer, which is far different from a personal computer. Home computer ranges from that STB your children play video games or play DVD's with to the handheld computer you bring with you to check up on your 401k to the webpad that the hubby claims he's doing his taxes on when he's really playing a game of solitare.
So in a way, we all agree.
If that is a challenge, we're already up to it.
It all comes down to being able to place the product in front of people, correct?
I'd note Commodore did this by by-passing traditional computer vendors and selling C64's off the shelf at Toys R Us.
I'd also note Sinclair with his own unique brand of getting things in front of people.
Or of Apple, who sold people with solid commercial after commercial, even when the rest of the market was against them.
You can sell anything if you know how to get it to where the customer can see it.
if it were me, I would have wasted for the last week till the website was finished.
Oh? Which mystical ball are ye looking into for this insight? What tarot card layout do you use to gain your mystical fortune telling capability?
The PS2 is not made for this market, while it might gain a share, it will not dominate, not by a long shot.
And BTW, I'd love to play with your design work. I'll keep an eye on that site, thank you.
Did I say anything about dumbing down computers? No. You can improve a computers usability without dumbing it down, ya know. Look at UNIX (pre-X). It was an improvement for usability over the other systems in that era, a dramatic improvement. Would you say that it dumbed down computers? I wouldn't, I run several UNIX-based OS's. It's very smart, very concise, so long as you don't fill it with half-baked libraries and unfinished and unstable API's.
As for big-boxes, I never said we wouldn't make big boxes, only that they're not our primary concern. You want big box computers, go to best buy, there's a ton of them. Try and find a slimline system that's easy enough for my grandmother to use yet powerful enough to appease my need for raw number crunshing without giving me a brain-dead OS.... doesn't happen.
This is probably one of the biggest cases of being caught with your zipper down I've ever been a part of. We're *just* getting our act together, with several projects under the umbrella, and now this occurs. We don't even have our webpage up yet. But cest'la vive.
For some more information about Phoenix, allow me:
We're a new group, no we did not make replacement boards for this or that. We're only a year and a half old, and only with a few products in-works or near-release. The NDA is not to steal ideas, it is to protect those who are not yet ready to have their ideas posted to the public. A premature slip can cause entire projects to fail. We're not big corporate america, out to take ideas and claim them as our own. We're joe-blows with ideas and dreams of our own. We've got game developers, hardware designers, OS companies, all with the goal of getting us PAST the Wintel box. Of getting PAST this concept that computers are a big dumb box that you have to sacrifice your firstborn to in order to get work done on them. That is what Phoenix is all about, and why I'm proud to be a member of her.
Look at this. Fare' posted a fearful possibility to all of us /.'ers, and all we'd managed to do is go and makr Roblimo afraid to post any more such possibilities. This was made to cause an ethnical worry amongst us /.'ers, especially those of us that use the GPL. Any possibility of a loophole has to be addressed. All we need is M$ to get wind of one and make VisualLinux (the horror). /.'ers that flamed Roblimo and Fare'. You should appologize for such rude behavior, especially against those who mean so well.
I say shame on all of you
I am also a member of #tunes on openprojects.net, so if anyone has a problem with my postings, come talk to me directly.
No canidate I have seen directly addresses the real issues. I see half-addressed issues, like the internet tax issue. If they did the tax thing, all I'd have to do is move my sales office to Bermuda, and then I fall into a loophole in the tax laws. I say stop any thought of having an Internet Sales Tax. You know why? Because it'll end up like long distance phone, a hopeless mess. The McCain tax is just as bad, move itonto ISP's and the like.
The Internet should remain a seperate entity from the US govt'. Make itgovernable by the UN. (Hell, they can'tdecide anything anyways, we'd remain tax free for centuries)
What they should be dealing with isn't money, it's FREEDOM!
The net has given an overwhelming array of freedom to people. Freedom to read. Freedom to discuss. I've learned more about the world on the internet than I ever did on the nightly news. We should be encouraging new ideas, new philosophies arising on here. Sure, you'll get jerks spreading naked pics of Pam and Tommy (who here has NOT seen these pics/videos yet?) but we have the freedom to delete message. It is OUR responsibility, not the government, to regulate our internet viewing. This issue about kids and porn is another non-issue IMHO. If the parents were there with the children, exploring the net with them, answering their numerous questions as they arose, there would be no problem. My uncle lived with my family when I was a kid, and always took time out to do his homework from HS while I was watching TV, and he'd always take time out totalk to me about it. When we got out Commodore 64 w/ modem and got into BBS's, he'd surf with me there too. My Uncle showed me what was right and wrong, by explaining and letting me decide. Sure, one time I sat up watching an R-rated movie, but he sat there and explained it to me, and I went "Oh, ok" and eventually grew bored and changed the channel.
If parents were like my uncle, open to questions and listening to their children, there would be a lot less problems and minimal need for these kind of legislations.
I read about a group of borderline nutsos, guys who thought they could do the impossible. Get out there and take on the mightiest computer company out there, Apple. Especially their newest product, Macintosh. Their company name was Hi-Torro, their product, Lorraine.
Then, to fund their increasingly expensive product, (making hardware is not for cheapskates, TRUST me) they decided on IPO'ing. Then they got an offer from Atari, it was not much, but enough to complete the project. They were going to take it, after all Atari was owned by Jack Tramiel, the father of the Commodore 64. Then Commodore stepped in, outbidding Atari 3 to 1. The Hi-Torro team went with Commodore and thus began the Commodore Amiga effort. That, as we all know, turned into a disaster. If Commodore had not been a billion-dollar firm by that point, the Amiga could not have made it into the 90's. It was only due to the massive back-history and huge credit file that Commodore continued, mis-managed and under-marketed.
We know the history of the Amiga after that. From one owner to another, and so on. Neverr in control of it's own destiny since Hi-Torro. Always at the mercy of older, larger companies.
But now, for the first time since the Hi-Torro sale, Amiga controls it's own destiny. It is the master of it's own fate. No longer trapped by the rules of corporate law, the Amiga has always made for a new way of doing things. So now under the new, unified Amiga Corporation banner, we may be finally able to complete the original Lorraine project, to produce a system that is revolutionary in every aspect, from the OS to the hardware, capable of delivering more performance per dollar than the best macintosh, than the biggest PC.
For the first time, Amiga is in control of it's own destiny.
People seem to have forgotten the point of RISC'ing in the first place. RISC's main point was to give the final control of the system's pipeline speed from the hardware to the compiler.
In true RISC processors (MIPS and SPARC as good examples) the compiler can and does produce an efficient pipeline w/o stalls of any sort. Which means that OOO is wasted on such a chip.
The problem comes in with inefficient compilers and poor resource management. To solve this, hardware dvelopers introduced things like OOO and thread forecasting to allow bad compiling alg's to retain their top speed. But this leads to a bad trend which is quite apparent in the x86 compiling community, allowing the hardware to schedule processes in the end does not encourage compiler developers to make better and better compilers, instead allowing them to "scoot by" without ever learning the art of mastering the pipeline.
There is a new architecture arriving shortly, called VLIW, which is at it's heart nothing but taking the RISC concept one step furthur, forcing the compiler to take it's motley crew of commands and set them up to pipeline efficiently. There are more differences than this, I know, but at it's heart this is pretty much what it is. A good compiler will produce better code than any OOO engine out there can ever manage. Why? Because the programmer knows what he wants, the processor does not. No matter how smart, how many transistors you throw at a problem, a smart programmer with a smart compiler will always turn it on it's head.
In fact the world did end, this is just a reasonable duplicate created by the producers at hollywood. Unfortunately they forgot the plotline, concentrating solely on the special effects, so this gets a big two thumbs down by me.
I don't say that we never will see a machine as good if not better than the Amiga in these areas. Just noone has ever really tried to. The technology nowadays would make an Amiga-esque machine could make it even better.
Not to toot my own horn, but the company I work for is trying something similar, using many of the same tricks and techniques to perfect a much more, interesting system than has been tried before.
Whoever says that Amiga is the only machine ever capable of being like the Amiga is deluding themselves. It was smart engineering that made the Amiga, and smarter engineering can replace it.
Gateway still holds the patents, the licences and all of the cards. It did not originally buy Amiga in order to resurrect it, only to gain that technology. But holding those trademarks ment that a gigantic community was built around it, and Gateway had to deal with them. By selling the trademarks and not the patents to Mr McEwan's Amino, they solve that problem. They keep the technology, and loose the community. Amino gains the community and not the technology (except maybe the OS, which is copyrighted not patented)
This could be good yet.
This was a perfect tactic for eToys, using a suit to guarantee customers. By eliminating a potential mis-understanding by eToy through this suit, they managed to keep customers focused on it's own website, thereby eliminating a possible "confusion" which could send their customers to their competition. Now that the key season, the "make it or break it" season for eToys I'd note, is over with, they are happy to drop the suit and no damage is done, completely innocent. No damage done, except to eToy. eToys has managed to make the VC's happy, and will likely shortly begin another round of financing. With the influx of cash, they won't care if they are sued. It's a win-win situation for them.
Such a sad commentary when a lawsuit is a marketing tactic
those kids got coal that christmas.
Well, before DVD was even realeased, I'd decided not to buy into it. My thought process was simple, "it's the purest example of trying to force closed standards down peoples throats." VHS profited by being open, any company could make VHS w/o paying this hefty fee, and the standard was open to all. Not so with DVD, this time the big boys want the pie all to themselves. /.'ers to help form such a standard, open and honest.
After seeing this, I, as well as my entire company, has decided on boycotting DVD entirely. We were planning on using DVD for our products, but with these events, the fact that DVD was not an "open-standard" as originally promiced, and now them attempting legal trickery to gain whatever they want, we are now seeking an alternative to DVD. Someone else on this list mentioned making an open-standard to compete with DVD, yet brought up the high cost in hardware development. My company (a start-up, but we're willing) would be happy to put our money where it's mouth is, and I'd challenge any other corporate/entrepeneurial
Let us become the VHS to DVD's Betamax.
My browser sees JPG, GIF, and PNG equally well. It is fast, smooth, has no problems with compression algs, interlacing, or anything of that nature.
My browser is LYNX!
if IDG can do this, then they're going to do that to the /. article here as well, aren't they? They say that someone's free use of speech is illegal, doesn't that go against a small piece of paper written in the late 18th century or something? Help me out here.