"Last month, I thought I left RISC OS. After 19 years of using Acorn or Acorn-derived computers, my love affair is no longer. I sit here writing this on my Mac Mini, and very happy I am with it too. My Iyonix lies abandoned - still sitting under the desk here, but not connected. And not actually used for some time. And it's weird - because, in some strange way, I thought I would be using RISC OS forever. In January 2005, I said: 'There's people who annoy me on the RISC OS scene, and I still wouldn't think of leaving. The nice people more than cancel it out, and besides - I just couldn't really do without using RISC OS.' So what changed?"
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Member since:2005-11-15
In many ways the Amiga situtation is worse, two systems running on obscure PPC platforms, Amiga OS4 and MorphOS, neither of which will run on each others hardware, and I don't know much about Morphos, but there are serious issues with the makers of Amiga OS4 and hardware producers and the holders of the Amiga copyright holders, making the whole thing a bit of a joke, shame as OS4 is really good, but these stupid divisions and politics are just killing the system, even the i386 open source AROS dosn't seem to be going as well as it should due to a spliting of the groups.
Sigh... Its a sad thing to see, but I've had to do some work from home recently and have had to turn on my Windows 2000 based PC just so I can use upto date Word processors, and web browsers that'll let me into all site, including 'orrible flash ones.
And you know, Windows, although a bit horrible, if you throw enough hardware at it, does "work"..
Member since:2005-07-06
And this is something I never understood about the open source Amiga.
I have all the reference manuals that were released for the Amiga and there is a wealth of information on the internals - infact far more information than the BeBook releases about BeOS.
The x86 CPUs were starting to top 100MHz when the Amiga went out of production (and the fastest production CPU was only about 50 MHz from Commodore), there should have been no problem duplicating the Amiga OS to run on an x86 machine. Of course one would lose many of the unique features of Amiga's hardware, but it really is the software features I miss even in BeOS/Haiku. And the software could have been done. The AROS did alot of it themselves. Instead we see the Amiga community breaking up into competing groups.
I guess this is why the Haiku project has such fixed goals, every other BeOS replacement project tried to improve BeOS during the rewrite and all of them have fallen by the way-side.
Both RISC OS and the Amiga groups should have concentrated on just getting the basic code working on basic hardware. If extra hardware is wanted it should be a plug in card rather than a custom motherboard that run little else.
Official Apple statement on PRISM and privacy: "Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it." This is basically Apple re-publishing their earlier statement in a more official manner. You either believe it, or you don't.
The open source Contiki operating system and its commercial Thingsquare distribution are making strides towards the connected home. According to a Computerworld article, a new LED light bulb manufacturer is putting small computers into their light bulbs. Each computer runs the Contiki OS, which gives each bulb an IP address and allows them to be controlled with a smartphone application. To connect the bulbs to the application, the bulbs use both Wi-Fi and the much lower power IEEE 802.15.4 mesh technology.
"Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it's forced to give the government. The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic." Draining the ditch after the cow has drowned in it."I can't find one person who has been using the Nexus 7 for an extended period of time, and hasn't seen a massive downgrade in performance. Just what kind of downgrade are we talking here? I cannot pick up my Nexus 7 without experiencing problems like a lag of ten seconds, or more, just to rotate the display; touches refusing to acknowledged; stuttering notification panel actions; and unresponsive apps." Fully and utterly agreed. My Nexus 7 was blazing-fast and awesome for a few months, and at some point, it just started sucking. Just like that. I've tried loads of ROMs, and nothing helps.A new release of the hobby operating system MenuetOS! The release notes are a bit non-descript, but you'll have to take what you can get: "updates and improvements (picview, httpc, ehci, ...)"."The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem. There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity - jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month's income. Solving these problems isn't simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we're unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access." Insane.
"MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a 'Hello World' bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time. Note that the goal of this project was not to write highly efficient hand-optimized assembly code, but rather to have fun and write code that balances readability and speed. This is primarily accomplished by proper commenting and consistent code structuring." Just cool.
Jon Rubinstein, former CEO of Palm: "Well, I'm not sure I would have sold the company to HP. That's for sure. Talk about a waste. Not that I had any choice because when you sell a company you don't get to decide that. Obviously, the board and shareholders decide that. If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company? I think the deal we had with Verizon really hurt us, but who knew that at the time? These things are all hindsight.""And so it is with Dell's Alienware X51 R2, a small form factor gaming PC in console digs. It's shaped similar to Microsoft's Xbox 360 Slim, and though it's slightly larger than either a 360 or PlayStation 3, the X51 R2 would be right at home in a living room setting nestled next to a large screen TV. Indeed, it's adept at running Steam's Big Picture mode, and if your primary objective is to play games in the living room, go ahead and consider the X51 R2 a hybrid game console." This is obviously not the only machine like this - still, these are very valid console alternatives even for those that don't like being hunched over with a cramped WASD-claw. Also, PC gamers among us: could you get away with the $699 model for gaming?
From Bloomberg: "Microsoft, the world's largest software company, provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix, according to two people familiar with the process. That information can be used to protect government computers and to access the computers of terrorists or military foes." The lid has officially been blown off.
Member since:
2005-07-06
I basically went thru the same things as he did when I gave up my Amiga for BeOS.
The Amiga community was and still seems to be running around in circles as far as shipping the open-source version of AmigaDos they are always talking about - worse for a long time they wanted you to buy expensive custom hardware to do it.
When I moved to the Intel based BeOS it was with the knowledge that if it did not work out that I would still have a choice of a number of diffirent OSes out there that would run on my PC hardware.
Another marker that has matched my Amiga experience but not my BeOS one is the lack of exchange of info between the diffirent developers.
With BeOS/Haiku/Zeta there has been a movement of code between the diffirent OS versions.
RISC OS like the Amiga developers seems to have two camps who refuse to share common code back and fore resulting in a lot of wasted effort. Right now I am using dual monitors on BeOS using a driver that also works in Haiku and Zeta after a recompile on each, the same for my USB. I know my future use of this hardware is supportted.
RISC OS sounds like one camp may have working video drivers and the other working USB drivers - but neither will exchange code and get on with development. Instead each camp re-invents the other's work.
Edited 2006-12-01 08:00