Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 26th Mar 2009 23:34 UTC
Despite the recent emergence of several new ways to actually run AmigaOS 4.0, the supply of machines is still extremely small, and not very future proof. As such, one of the most recurring questions within the Amiga community is why don't they port the darn thing to x86?
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Member since:2006-03-01
There's not a single useful concept left in that technology that hasn't been superseded by something equivalent or better in modern OSes.
concept: "settling for a unified versatile container file format"
implementation: the IFF chunk based format that could be used for graphics, audio, document, or iirc executable files
superseded by: the current plethora of completely independent formats each with their own (and sometimes not efficient) parsing formats
concept: "allow applications open or read files types (be they audio, image, document, or other files) they may not natively know, granted application can query the system to do it"
implementation: the centralized DataType filters, available to all applications once installed
currently replaced by: on BeOS / HaikuOS, Translators; on Windows, codecs (that in turn only cover the needs for multimedia files and streams) and, to a certain extents, browser plugins; on *nix, nothing
concept: "when changing some settings (Preferences) let the user try alternate values without altering the saved one"
implementation: "Use" option to use apply the new value only for the current session (iirc saving the setting to the RamDisk instead of permanent storage) and be reassured that even if things got messed up, they'd be back to normal on restart - and "Revert" companion option that restored the last saved value in case of necessity
superseded by: the current ubiquitous, less useful and flexible "Apply" paradigm
but i'm sure there's much more...
Member since:2006-01-10
In defense of the *nix platforms, they also use codecs, and through gstreamer it's very pluggable, not to mention Nautilus does use mime-types for identifying what files actually are.
Granted the DataTypes that AmigaOS has is one of the coolest things I've seen in an OS, but they're really only a 'driver' file for different formats. Though it definitely makes applications slimmer, because you don't need to have every program have it's own libraries for displaying jpegs (for example). But in that respect again, they are like shared libraries that Unix systems have. It was Commodore's answer to DLL hell, before it really became an issue.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
The amiga and amiga-related platforms stopped making any sense a long time ago.
The only people left in that community are only people who don't make sense either since they can't realize that amiga is an obsolete technology that don't have anything interesting to offer anymore. There's not a single useful concept left in that technology that hasn't been superseded by something equivalent or better in modern OSes.
Edited 2009-03-27 10:22 UTC