Bill McEwen of Amiga, Inc. writes in a public letter: “Over the last several months and in fact couple of years, Amiga has continued our software and business development and generally kept quiet. This path of quietness was chosen so that we communicated only when there was a development that culminated in a product that could be purchased. In recent weeks, our being quiet has been interpreted as weakness or an open invitation to attempt harming our business relationships and opportunities with partners and customers.”
#define AMIGA_INC_STATUS_QUO 1
int main(void)
{
bool Action = 0;
char OpenLetter[16384] = “empty promises”;
if(!Action) printf(“%s”, OpenLetter);
else doSomething(“substantive”);
return 0;
}
Bill McEwen
(slashies don’t survive posting?)
Edited 2007-10-03 07:18 UTC
Oh god, why do you allocate a whopping 16k on the stack for such a short string? Furthermore half of this code is unecessary.
Plus you don’t even use that define.
Also, didn’t include stdio.h, so the compiler won’t do much with printf. doSomething hasn’t been defined either…
Not sure about bool sorry, maybe use int?
Maybe the string could have been defined in a const, something like
char OpenLetter[] = “empty promises”;
There are a few other problems with the code as well, but lets not get into casting (void) for printf’s etc…
so we now have…
#include <stdio.h>
void doSomething(void) {
/*…*/
}
int main(void) {
int action = 0;
char openLetter[] = “empty promises”;
if (!action)
(void)printf(“%s”, openLetter);
else
doSomething(“substantive”);
return 0;
}
I’m sure there are a lot of other things we can do here too, like use fprintf, include <stdlib.h> perhaps, umm, return SUCCESS instead of 0, maybe (void)main(void) instead? There is also the problem of hardcoding values so code never gets reached – lol…
Seriously, I hope Amiga does go somewhere and they do find a market for it. I’m not sure why so many people here don’t like it. I’ll stick with OS X personally, and I’m sure most people will stick with their OS of choice, but if Amiga can find a market for DE, then more power to them…
Gee, you think 16k is too much? Really? He had room to say something useful, but didn’t. I reduced his letter to two words. Thanks for pointing out that I left him a few thousand extra bytes to say something, I sure didn’t notice it … pure genius.
Missing the humor again you pedantic twat. I used it to make a reference to STATUS QUO. Get a sense of humor, Captain Oblivious.
Edited 2007-10-03 18:16 UTC
Am I missing the humor in your post or are you missing it in mine?
If he just communicated when they finished a product, he would have been declared dead by now. It seems more like he communicates whenever he has collected enough hot air.
I am not trying to troll or anything, I just want to know why/who would use Amiga OS now?
Considering there are more powerful which support more hardware and have more software support?
I would say the same for Risc OS. I am not arguing that they were ahead of there time blah blah blah, but are they still now ahead of there time? is there hardware cheap? worth buying?
People do still use these OSes out of pure stubbornness and there’s no reason to at all. They are the ones that fuel this ‘new Amiga’ crap that is still going on.
Edited 2007-10-03 10:13
Yeah right.. try run linux/bsd/winblows/osx on a 14mhz 68020 and tell me how many hours you have to wait before you can even start a file manager….
not to mention that some of us do have some code for the amiga which have no x86 equivelants..
not to mention that some of us do have some code for the amiga which have no x86 equivelants..
Well either start recoding or use winuae or cloanto’s stuff. If amiga doesn’t come out with something cheap and cool enough to buy then it’s not going to happen again.
Accept it, Amiga is dead a thing of the past. It hasn’t moved since last century. If you keep hoping you’ll get dissappointed again and again. Get over it.
where does one even get a 68020 anymore? Esp when I can get a 2Ghz x86 cpu for like $50.
yet the 68020 still boots faster into a usable user interface than what you have on your 140 times higher clocked x86…..
“yet the 68020 still boots faster into a usable user interface than what you have on your 140 times higher clocked x86…..”
*sigh* So it boots faster, now what?
Your 020 box will take hours to perform some tasks than the Ghz machine can do in minutes/seconds. Under that scheme of things, a few seconds saved in the booting process seem fairly irrelevant really.
But if that floats your boot, by all means enjoy.
And my phone boots in ~1 second, point? It’s easy to boot quickly when you actually _do_ nothing.
Though i have to admit a lot of modern OS’s have been pretty fail on even attempting to bring boot times into a more reasonable time frame. Some have made an effort; Upstart for Ubuntu is getting there and XP boots very quickly.
Other linux distros, Vista and Mac OS X are often quite a lot slower though. Arch linux is incredibly fast but then again that’s not down to better technology, it just does less on boot and is more optimized for the architecture than most.
Its silly to compare boot times like that. DOS booted quickly on my 286 too but I’m not going to use that am I?
Edited 2007-10-03 16:36
ooohhhh, so I’ll be able to enjoy all those modern apps and hardware. What, no PCI-E bus? No AGP? No built in Ethernet? No USB? Perhaps the more modern system takes longer to boot because it has to power up and configure so many different interfaces and buses. Also, it may take longer to do a quick check of 1G of ram compared to say…16M.
You point is moot
Edited 2007-10-03 18:42
My AmigaOneXE takes quite a long time to boot up. Part of that is scanning for a bootable CD disk, but I’m not going to change that, since I am likely to need to reboot and restore due to driver development test/debugging. This is a fair comparison IMHO as my PCs are set to boot from CD as well if anything is found there. I would not bet on my AmigaOne with OS4 winning the race with my AMD64 and WinXP. It’s been ages since I booted my A4000T with 68060 CPU, I don’t recall how long that took.
The only thing legendary about the Amiga nowadays is the length to which Amiga users will go to try to win an argument about technical merits.
o_0
“yet the 68020 still boots faster into a usable user interface than what you have on your 140 times higher clocked x86…..”
Correction: it will boot faster into an interface that was usable in 1991. You would probably have a hell of a time launching, oh, say BioShock for example.
Here is how I roll nowadays: S3 resume – 10 seconds, launch WinUAE – 2 seconds, boot AmigaOS 3.5 10 seconds. And yes, UAE on a modern x86 is faster than any real 680×0 processor. It’s also more backwards and forwards compatible than any real Amiga ever was (no using degraders to get program x to run)
But if you really want to talk boot times, a Vic20 boots to a “usable interface” in about 1 second with just 5k of RAM! WOOT! I win!
>>Here is how I roll nowadays: S3 resume – 10 seconds
It took ages to boot my vista-book (C2D + 2GB) to the point until it becomes responsible.
And de-hibernation isn’t much faster.
On the other hand, my OS3.1 setup can boot in 2 secs under UAE
I can move icons, launch programms in both cases.
What is so special in 2007 vs 1991 desktop?
> What is so special in 2007 vs 1991 desktop?
I was wondering the same thing. The Amiga’s “engine” seems just as modern, infact more modern in some ways than Vista and Linux. But the hardware is too slow, and no, you can’t just port it to x86 and expect it to work. There are workarounds, hell Amithlon did it, what, 5 years ago?
“It took ages to boot my vista-book (C2D + 2GB) to the point until it becomes responsible.
And de-hibernation isn’t much faster.
On the other hand, my OS3.1 setup can boot in 2 secs under UAE
I can move icons, launch programms in both cases.
What is so special in 2007 vs 1991 desktop?”
1. I didn’t say hibernate resume (S4) I said S3, aka sleep resume.
2. Did you REALLY fail to get my point or are you just trolling? If the latter, lurk moar…
Everyone stop this nonsense.
You like Windows ? fine.
You like Gnu/Linux xyz distrib ? fine.
You like MacOSX ? fine.
You like BeOS ? fine.
You like AmigaOS (or MorphOS) ? fine.
etc…
that’s simple, go on with the system you like. And stop complaining about this site reporting news about Amiga.
I’m a computer professional and an Amiga/MorphOS user as a hobbyist and that’s fine. I have pleasure to use this system and that’s all that matter.
Can you say that too ?
> What is so special in 2007 vs 1991 desktop?
This little thing called the internet happened…
also people are used to true preemtive and protected multitasking, 4-channel stereo is not really that impressive anymore, neither is 640xwhatever @ 16 colour, people are used to have full motion video, etc, etc, etc, etc….
I loved my Amiga in the context of its hey day: the late 80s. Honestly there has been a lot of water under the bridge ever since.
>This little thing called the internet happened…
>also people are used to true preemtive and protected multitasking, 4-channel stereo is not really that impressive anymore, neither is 640xwhatever @ 16 colour, people are used to have full motion video, etc, etc, etc, etc….
>I loved my Amiga in the context of its hey day: the late 80s. Honestly there has been a lot of water under the bridge ever since.
Um… it seems someone does not know what the Amiga can do. In 1985, it came with full preemtive multitasking. I run my Amiga at 1024×768. I listen with a 5.1 audio system. The Amiga in 1985 had full motion video. I was rocking out to online mp3 streams on the Amiga earlier today.
Again, what do you need that the Amiga OS itself does not offer?
Edited 2007-10-04 23:47
“Um… it seems someone does not know what the Amiga can do. In 1985, it came with full preemtive multitasking. I run my Amiga at 1024×768. I listen with a 5.1 audio system. The Amiga in 1985 had full motion video. I was rocking out to online mp3 streams on the Amiga earlier today.”
A 1985, 7.16Mhz 68000 based, 512K (or even 1MB) OCS Amiga 1000 was not capable of FMV (e.g. 480 lines, 50 or 60 fields interlaced, 24bit color) playback. It didn’t have the bus bandwidth, the video hardware fill rate, the color pallet or even the storage subsystem to support FMV playback (not even close).
What it was capable of doing was genlocking since Denise allowed control over video signal generation. This combined with the fact that Agnus and its subcomponents (including copper and blitter operations) were strictly synchronized to the timing of the video signal generated by Denise, allowed the Amiga to generate some pretty impressive graphics that were easily usable for video effects.
As for the Amiga’s multitasking, AmigaOS used a simple priority driven, round-robin scheduler that was reasonably effective in its day. However it didn’t perform priority deprecation or boosting for assisting CPU starved threads and could be monopolized. What most people saw as great multitasking was really a combination of the preemptive scheduler, async IO and, most importantly, separate coprocessing hardware. Regardless, modern systems have much more advanced preemptive scheduling solutions.
That you’re using your Amiga to listen to MP3’s while running your desktop at 1024×768 means you have the equivalent of a decade old PC. This also means you likely have a powerup board (or an 060), some form of RTG graphics card in the box and a sound card. If it works for you, well that’s great. Regardless, it’s a far cry from a modern system.
However it didn’t perform priority deprecation or boosting for assisting CPU starved threads and could be monopolized.
How this words can help to make Windows/Linux more responsive?
Even simple infinite loop with normal priority will almost completely block the NT/W2k. Even mouse cursor will move jerkily. Actually RESET button saved a lot of my nerves.
Fedora 4-5-6-7 was always very unresponsive on my old A64@3000+1GB. Probably because their sheduler favours background processes more than UI.
“Even simple infinite loop with normal priority will almost completely block the NT/W2k. Even mouse cursor will move jerkily. Actually RESET button saved a lot of my nerves”
Okay, let’s examine why your statement is incorrect. First we will define the two common scenarios were the AmigaOS Exec’s scheduler can get in trouble:
1. Large number of concurrent tasks (units of execution or threads in NT) consuming large amounts of CPU time
2. One or more tasks consuming large amounts of CPU time at a higher priority
Now, let’s examine number one and take a look at a screenshot ( http://i20.tinypic.com/303bczs.jpg ) of two extremely CPU intensive processes on NT (in this case Vista RTM running on a 3 ½ year old socket 478 uniprocessor Pentium 4 Prescott 3.2Ghz). In this screenshot you can see one has launched a 256 worker threads while the other has just two. In all cases these are basically just loops performing basic integer math. This screenshot illustrates that even with a very large number of CPU intensive threads, the scheduler is distributing CPU time and that even the sidebar, for example, is getting CPU cycles. Clearly, your statement that a simple loop at normal priority can bring the system to its knees is patently false.
Now, as to WHY dynamic priorities are important; in the second screenshot ( http://i22.tinypic.com/2vvw02e.jpg ) I have actually displayed the individual threads in the heavily threaded process to illustrate that in order to make sure that the threads are not starved, the scheduler dynamically boosts their priority. In screenshot 3 (http://i22.tinypic.com/vfbk45.jpg ), you can see that even if the process is set to run at lowest base priority class (4) while the second CPU intensive process is running full tilt two classes above it (8) to make sure that threads still making some forward progress, the scheduler boosted the priority of the circled thread all the way to the high priority class at level 15. Additional scenarios also apply for interactive threads (threads waiting on input events like mouse and keyboard events are given significant boosts of up to 6 levels in priority upon that event occurring and waking up the thread). As the thread executes, for each full quantum, its priority will decay by 1 level so eventually it will return to its base priority. Furthermore, in NT 6, the actual process quantum accounting is now cycle exact, not clock based (and ISR/DPC time is not counted against a threads quantum).
Now, in the case of the AmigaOS Exec, because it is a simple round-robin scheduler, it is possible to bring the system to its knees by simply spawning a large number of CPU intensive tasks thus flooding the scheduler. Since no mechanism exists to boost priority for either interactive threads waking on an important event or those that are starved, getting to the point of unrecoverable responsiveness while everything is at the same default priority is fully possible (not the case as demonstrated here). Furthermore, even more effective is to launch a task with a priority of over say +64 and you will effectively gain the same effect. In fairness, there was an add on extension to AmigaOS called Executive that provided a policy based feedback loop to dynamically mange scheduling and the NT scheduler has a “realtime” priority class that can be used to monopolize the system since priority boosting never crosses the threshold into realtime priorities (24-32) (standard linux scheduler also had similar functionality, though this may have changed with CFS).
Regardless, scheduling in NT is much more advanced that the default AmigaOS Exec scheduler and no, not even 258 instances of a “simple loop” cpu intensive threads running at normal priority will bring the machine to its knees, as demonstrated in the provided screenshots (you might notice that even my dynamic wallpaper continued to update while I documented my assertions). By the way, the most common cause of a jumpy mouse cursor and poor responsiveness is the result of the cpu spending lots of time in a driver ISR at an IRQL higher than the mouse thus masking out the servicing of the lower priority interrupts, and subsequent ISR’s/DPC’s, as well as normal thread scheduling. This is usually due to either an incredibly bad bit of driver coding or failing hardware.
————————————————-
“Even simple infinite loop with normal priority will almost completely block the NT/W2k. Even mouse cursor will move jerkily. Actually RESET button saved a lot of my nerves”
Okay, let’s examine why your statement is incorrect. First we will define the two common scenarios were the AmigaOS Exec’s scheduler can get in trouble:
————————————————-
This arguement is off-topic and pointless in this case, as the Amiga’s mouse system and NT’s are two different beasties. The Amiga’s will continue to run when the rest of the OS is locked up not due to some miraculous scheduler, but becaue of the custom hardware, which is what actually drives the mouse pointer. The chipset gave the Amiga this ability, not the OS.
“This arguement is off-topic and pointless in this case, as the Amiga’s mouse system and NT’s are two different beasties. The Amiga’s will continue to run when the rest of the OS is locked up not due to some miraculous scheduler, but becaue of the custom hardware, which is what actually drives the mouse pointer. The chipset gave the Amiga this ability, not the OS.”
My point was about the effectiveness of the NT and Amiga schedulers and a direct reply to blatant unsubstantiated FUD regarding responsiveness. That I addressed why the cursor on an NT box (same is true for other OS’s on conventional PC hardware) can become “jumpy” was an addendum at the end of the post. The post was not about device interrupt handling or how the mouse cursor gets drawn to the screen.
Clearly, your statement that a simple loop at normal priority can bring the system to its knees is patently false.
I have experienced it several times in W2k in MY programs (1 thread, windowed directx).
Edited 2007-10-07 23:55
“I have experienced it several times in W2k in MY programs (1 thread, windowed directx).”
Anecdotes don’t cut it; I want you to prove it. I want the binary for this single threaded, windowed directx app that, when running at normal priority, will elicit the behavior you are describing.
Anecdotes don’t cut it; I want you to prove it.
Sorry makfu, but i’m too lazy to do it
You’re free to believe me or not.
I agree, i was too agressive with “will block”,
and i should say “can block … under rare circumstances”
But i did it solely because of my trolly nature =)
> Um… it seems someone does not know what the Amiga
> can do. In 1985, it came with full preemtive
> multitasking. I run my Amiga at 1024×768. I listen
> with a 5.1 audio
> system. The Amiga in 1985 had full motion video. I
> was rocking out to online mp3 streams on the Amiga
> earlier today.
*sigh * I had an original Amiga 1000, so I am very aware of what the original amiga could and couldn’t do. It could definitively not do “full motion video.”
And yes it did multitask, however that has not been a feat for what, over 15 years? What the Amiga still does not do to this day is having a decent memory protection mechanism. And the scheduler had some serious flaws (I guess I am not the only one who was using executive on their Amigas).
What you described as using is an updated machine, the Amiga of ’91 did not even had a decent IP stack… so it would be fairly hard to stream all those MP3s on 5.1 (neither of which were really around in ’91 BTW).
It was a cool system for the day, however the tall tales about the Amiga are starting to get ridiculous…
> It was a cool system for the day, however the tall tales about the Amiga are starting to get ridiculous…
This was about what PC OS’s could do that Amiga’s couldn’t. Not what a 1985 Amiga had vs a modern PC. It is what a modern Amiga has in comparison. Frankly, the only thing I witness is memory protection, and in Vista’s case here, I don’t happen to see much different as I get memory segfaults several times a week.
Incidentally, my “Amiga” is a Sempron 2800 on an nForce mobo, running Amithlon. Runs the OS faster than my Vista install, and as I’m emulating a good portion of the Amiga’s OS, that’s saying something.
> This was about what PC OS’s could do that Amiga’s
> couldn’t. Not what a 1985 Amiga had vs a modern PC.
No, it was about what was the difference in requirements between the desktop of ’91 and the desktop of 2007. So let’s stop moving the goalposts OK?
My point being that a heck of a lot has happened/changed in 15+ years. AmigaOS runs at acceptable speed when emulated because this OS really does not do much. The sad part is that it is taking Amiga Inc. almost a decade to add functionality that has been standard on a lot of OSs for quite some time. That is almost in the realm of pathetic, and a clear disservice to the memory of Amiga. Which was in its day a remarkable platform. Dear to some of our hearts because we cut our teeth in it.
Times move, and so does technology. And honestly a decade in technology is a might long time. In any case, most developers left the Amiga platform eons ago. It is a stagnated system, both OS and application-wise — let alone the hardware side of things — The denial of Amiga fans is just mesmerizing sometimes.
However if it floats your boat, by all means use whatever it is that you want to use. Computers are just tools, for some of us the Amiga right now is of fairly limited use if any at all. I am however excited to see where AROS may be going though.
Edited 2007-10-06 01:53
>No, it was about what was the difference in requirements between the desktop of ’91 and the desktop of 2007. So let’s stop moving the goalposts OK?
Pardon? What does AmigaOS 3.0 have to do with today’s Amiga OS 4.0, AROS or MorphOS? You continue to insist that we compare todays OS’s against a version of Amiga’s OS that is now a decade and a half old. Such an insistance sounds like you assume that was the last release, and it wasn’t.
*sigh* For the nth time, my comments where about what was different between the desktop of ’91 and ’07. And why Amiga is woefully underpowered, under featured, and just plain stagnated to be of use for some of us today.
I’d appreciate it if you were to stop making straw men and tangential arguments, OK?
In any case I’ll bite:
1. AmigaOS 4.0 is not existent. And if it is, it doesn’t have any HW to run on. It is always “just 2 more weeks away.” Anyone taking Amiga Inc seriously now, it is either delusional or a complete moron.
2. AROS albeit interesting, it is not useful for most people. It biggest feature this week was that they finally got a semi-working partitioner. Whoohooo! Most people tend to use their OS to do work, not work on their OS.
3. MorphOS for all intents and purposes is dead. Thanks to the great ability shared by Amiga Inc and Genesi to show themselves in the foot and look more and more like weird embezzlements.
So, unless you consider having a vapour OS that doesn’t have a platform to run on, or a hobby OS which right now is far from being near prime time, or an OS sued out of existence as the qualities for your OS of choice then I assume Amiga right now may fit the bill. However, it is safe to assume that Amiga is for most intents and purposes death and stagnated out of the interests of most people.
In any case, an OS sans applications is of no use for most people. And for the most part Amiga lacks support for some of the applications and features most people may be expecting in 2007. Which was my original point.
As I said, if it floats your boat use it. But the denial is just getting beyond ridiculous.
Edited 2007-10-07 04:51
“try run linux/bsd/winblows/osx on a 14mhz 68020”
Well, it’s not 1985 anymore and hardware has actually moved forward since then.
Yeah right.. try run linux/bsd/winblows/osx on a 14mhz 68020 and tell me how many hours you have to wait before you can even start a file manager….
Once upon a time, Windows, MacOS, and several Unix flavours did run on 14 MHz processors.
Who wants a 14 MHz personal computer today? I don’t.
Edited 2007-10-03 13:46
are you serious? 14mhz chip? LOLOL even my nintendo DS has a 67 MHz ARM9 chip. what i don’t understand is WHY amiga doesn’t try to get their os working on common hardware. they always try to get some wierd outdated hardware monstrocity for their os. by the time they get their os working on the ancient wierd hardware, it wont be on the market anymore. They need to just use common x86 hardware just like apple did. i mean, if apple had problems using their own hardware, it must be a nightmare for amiga.
Apple didn’t have any issue with the hardware but more with IBM , which wasn’t producing chips as fast as Apple wanted them to. If there is one thing you can say about Intel is that they have the ability to manufacture at a fair cllp.
Apple didn’t have problems using their own hardware. They had problems getting IBM to build a G5 that could do what the Celeron did — selectively power circuits so that it didn’t run so hot as to make laptops impossible.
Intel had been wooing Apple for years, Apple had been developing a parallel version of MacOS for Intel since before Jobs was fired, and when IBM decided that Cell processors were more important than serving Apple, Apple made a switch they were already prepared to do.
This isn’t trivial. NT was platform independent (Xbox games were developed on G5 Macs running a PPC build of NT). BeOS was simultaneously written for two platforms with opposing endianness, at the same time Linux was being developed to do the same. Finally, OS X chose the Mach fat binary kernel because NeXT had to run on both 68K Motorolas and Intel CPUs.
Unless Amiga invested the same platform neutrality into their OS design, they’re as tied to it as any 1980s chip-burned OS.
Well, there’s also Lunix, which runs on the Commodore 64 which runs a mighty 6510 @ 1.02 Mhz. Something even Amiga OS cannot do
Really? I’ve to try it myself 🙂
My C64 is in a carton box in the basement, I keep it in working order (well, I chek it when I manage to get it out of there).
Here you go, the LNG homepage;
http://lng.sourceforge.net/
And this is helpful for transfering files to and from c64 disks:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencbm
Unfortunately, it isn’t strictly linux, but Lunix, next generation, a Little Unix designed to run on C64 and C128 architectures.
(Is it even possible to put the Linux kernal in 64k?)
(Is it even possible to put the Linux kernal in 64k?)
I doubt it. You would have to strip away so many things, it wouldn’t be Linux anymore. And if you manage to do it, you will be left without enough memory to run anything, making the whole operation useless.
Don’t forget Symbos (http://www.symbos.de/), which provides a full Windows-style GUI on top of a pre-emptive (with priorities) multitasking microkernel GUI on a 3.5 MHz Z80. It ven play video!
Yeah, and I still have floppies with Mac software written in Pascal from 1986.
But no one’s getting necrophiliac on 512k Macs just because they boot faster than OS X on a Mac Pro.
No way any reasonable person is going to give up everything a modern OS gives you just to boot in 10 seconds, especially when you can run a Linux box for 6 months without rebooting.
Amiga maybe could have place in ultraportable laptops or PDA’s where that kind of thing is actually important, and where you can give up some of the power a modern desktop OS gives you, but you would need serious companies with serious developers working on it. Not the circus freak show you have now.
Amiga is long dead. Let it go. I let go my beloved Mac OS 7.5 10 years ago. It’s going to be OK, I promise.
>No way any reasonable person is going to give up everything a modern OS gives you just to boot in 10 seconds, especially when you can run a Linux box for 6 months without rebooting.
Just curious, what features would you be giving up that is integral to the OS? What core feature, not talking apps or the like, the actual OS features themselves.
I’m still an Amiga fan. I hope someone finds a way to bring it back to some useful state, even if only as a hobby item. I have Amiga computers, have OS4, but have not used them for nearly 2 years now. I mostly use my iBook with OSX these days at home, but also have 2 WindowsXP boxes and a Linux box. At work I use Solaris and Linux.
I tried to sort out a way to bring OS4 to Apple’s PPC hardware, particularly the iBook as I’d love an “Amiga laptop”, but Amiga Inc. ignored those license inquiries as well as license inquiries to make a new hardware design, all contacts sent to Amiga’s own defined technology licensing email address set up for exactly that purpose. But since getting some laptops at home I found I did not like to be tethered to my office where the Amigas are, and they fell into disuse in favor of computers that could go where I pleased.
PPC hw is practically dead. It’d be a waste of time and money to port an OS to old Apple G3/G4 hw which isn’t supported by anyone any longer.
x86 based hw can be cheap enough to revive AmigaOS and it would be made to fly by inexpensive Semprons and Celerons. MicroITX (VIA and Intel) and miniATX solutions would be great.
PPC hw is practically dead. It’d be a waste of time and money to port an OS to old Apple G3/G4 hw which isn’t supported by anyone any longer.
I’ll take that over zero hardware of any kind. I don’t disagree with porting to x86, but if that’s not on the table, porting to obsolete PPC Mac hardware only found on Ebay is still better then a total void.
I agree with you that a port too old/unsupported PPC hw is better than nothing. At least that would show AmigaOS isn’t defunct and a relic of a glorious past. But would you risk buying an expensive 2ndhand Mac without guarantee? I wouldn’t. I don’t think it’s enough to rely on Mac owners, because most of them have never been interested in Amiga. So x86 is the way to go.
Besides nostalgia? People are always on the lookout for a good Windows alternative.
But with most other OSs (Mac included!) tying themselves to the open-source philosophy (“Don’t worry about breaking things, it’s the user’s responsibility to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it, and lecture them about how they are obligated to support ‘the community’ by giving us all they create while we’re pushing this on to them”), there are very few alternatives left; mostly, AmigaOS and SkyOS (plus a dozen or so meant for very niche markets and which aren’t quite the same thing as an alternative general OS).
And between AmigaOS and SkyOS, at least pre-ordering SkyOS gives you access to functional, downloadable images of the same system the developers are working on, plus a private forum where you can file bug reports and talk with the developers…
Same shit different day. Always trying to lock it in, never thinking that if they freaking opened up the OS, they could actually make money.
>Same shit different day. Always trying to lock it in, never thinking that if they freaking opened up the OS, they could actually make money.
Agreed 100%. They do not have the time, nor developer resources, to dedicate to anything at this point. If you want your community to do your work for you, as they have shown a desire for in the past, then you have to trust that same community with your very lives, the source code itself.
If AOS did go OSS, I’d imagine that AROS would get a huge boost in development, giving them an actual, sellable product.
Repeat after me: Open source is not a magic cure-all handed down from the gods.
We might also add this axiom: The people who will only use my program if I give it away are not my user base.
Atleast it’s not a threat for what is dead unusable software and ip anyway.
Open Source is not a magic cure-all, but it would have been in this case.
You forget, in ’00, they announced that AmigaOS was dead, discontinued, never to be developed again. The future was AmigaDE, a new OS built on top of Tao.
i say it is for a small niche market,where mostly hobbiest are involved and are the userbase. it can cure most anything in those cases. Keeping the platform closed means that essentially NOTHING gets released while in an opensource environment at least something gets released even if its not great in the beginning, but the users have the chance to add, tweak, change the source so that scratching their own itch might actually become and scratching those users backs as well. The power of opensource is in the contribution that developers bring to the table. Keeping Amiga closed means nobody contributes and no one benefits at all. I’ve used AROS and eventhough its a bit rough it looks to have potential and it really only needs a larger community of developers.
“Open source is not a magic cure-all handed down from the gods.”
No one is arguing that, but still, look at the success of Ubuntu, Red Hat, and other linux distros. The money is in services, not so much in the actual OS these days.
“The people who will only use my program if I give it away are not my user base.”
You say that as though there is a userbase for 4.0 to have. Haiku and Syllable are making more progress than that one.
Open source is not a magic wand, but it would prevent exactly what is happening to Amiga: having an entire community at the mercy of incompetent companies and greedy lawyers.
Same shit different day. Always trying to lock it in, never thinking that if they freaking opened up the OS, they could actually make money.
Please describe how they make money by giving away their one and only product to open source…
I do believe that Amiga Inc. should allow the OS4 developers to bring this software to more hardware, any PPC platform, to x86, etc. to unleash the shackles it has to no longer existent hardware (I have that hardware and it works, but no one can buy them anymore). But I don’t see any need for it to be open-source. If you want open-source, then use AROS and be happy. But what we really need is license to bring this OS4, proprietary or not, to hardware people can buy and use.
This path of quietness was chosen so that we communicated only when there was a development that culminated in a product that could be purchased.
Where is the product that can be purchased…?
Well, you can always buy some:
Egg and bacon
Egg, sausage and bacon
Egg and fud
Egg, bacon and fud
Egg, bacon, sausage and fud
fud, bacon, sausage and fud
fud, egg, fud, fud, bacon and fud
fud, fud, fud, egg, and fud
fud, fud, fud, fud, fud, fud, baked beans, fud, fud, fud and fud
Lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce garnished with truffle paté, brandy and with a fried egg on top and fud
fud, sausage, fud, fud, fud, bacon, fud, tomato and fud
spam,spam,spam,spam….
you so got a +1 for that one
“Amiga has nothing to release. Amiga is not under offer. Nothing has changed. We’re still idiots with no product.”
Gee, thanks for the open letter!
Edited 2007-10-03 10:12
Amiga has never wavered from the path that was laid out and will deliver on that promise.
We just need 2 more weeks
I would seriously mod you up a billion points if I could.
This has sadly been the state of Amiga for years. Just two more weeks, two more months. Oh we’re almost there. It’s like waiting for a Debian release to become stable, except that Debian eventually does release something.
I recall finally being excited that Amiga OS 4 was finished. But then there was no actual hardware to put it on.
I think even GEM and TOS are more or less open source now. At least EmuTOS is around for the latter part, and I think Digital opened up GEM a long time ago, though it wasn’t necessarily the Atari GEM.
Amiga Inc. could make a lot of money opening up Amiga OS. Ah, how we all miss the Workbench.
No one believes you anymore. Oh, and:
“our being quiet has been interpreted as weakness or an open invitation to attempt harming our business relationships and opportunities with partners and customers”
Don’t you dare try and blame this mess on anyone other than yourselves.
Quoted text:
“our being quiet has been interpreted as weakness or an open invitation to attempt harming our business relationships and opportunities with partners and customers”
Don’t you dare try and blame this mess on anyone other than yourselves.
End of quoted text.
Yeah, because no progress isn’t a weakness!
And oh how bad to tell others nothing is happening over at amiga inc at all and everything is a failure to their potential partners and customers.
The truth hurts!
To bad that Ubuntuguy didn’t bought it instead ;D
To be fair to Bill McEwen, I really do blame Amiga Inc’s problems on incompetence rather than malice.
Things have just been too f–ked up for far too long. I can’t see any possible way out of this mess that’s going to happen within this decade.
“This path of quietness was chosen so that we communicated only when there was a development that culminated in a product that could be purchased.”
Ah, that explains it, it only means nothing happens at all..
Where is the news? OSfacts?
Yea, the path of quietness. Ironic then that this very same Bill McEwen offered to answer “questions fromt eh audience” a few months ago but never followed up on them…
http://www.amigaweb.net/index.php?function=view_news&id=612
I’m curious as to the reason for their quietness since then.
As an Amiga fan since beginning and having had “commercial developper” status, I would just want to LOOOOOOOOL, but I feel very sorry about all this…
I love the fact that I can get the source to Atari TOS… but nothing form commodore assets.
Heck even their SYSV Unix on the 3000 would have been of minior intreset, they could have been something in the unix space, but instead the owners of the Amiga IP have instead chosen to do *nothing*.
How big is their fan base? 17 people?
AROS almost looks interesting but their HDDtoolbox can’t even partition a disk without crashing.
Sorry, it seems that if I ever want to play Captain Blood, or SpeedBall2, I’ll use UAE of Vista.
I do have to admit, this is like a bad horror movie in it’s 20th version.
Anyone want to save Amiga? Bueller? Anyone?
“…so we just wanted ot break the sielence and let you all know….we got nothing. but dont worry, THIS is teh decade of the AMiga come back, and if not this decate then surely next decade. That is all”
Amiga is the Duke Nukem Forever of hardware?
(Of course, I just got rid of my Atari ST about a year ago… *sigh*)
– chrish
Their time is running out and they fail to act. I wonder what happens after the generation of people who still have nostalgic memories of amiaga finds something more exiting. How do they plan to make money then? Even sky os has protected memory and its i one of the least known commercial os-es, and if they dont have that in amiga os 4 i wonder how do the plan to survive.
What does any of this have to do with AmigaOS? He’s coming out with hype for Amiga Anywhere, which is based on Tao’s OS, which is out of business, so in short, he’s selling a product that is not only vaporware, it cannot exist legally at this point.
If they have paid for the rights to use it why can’t it exist longer?
IMHO the status quo is on the consumer market itself as a whole:
– We’ve had only three competing major players in the OS arena at least for the last five years, all with comparable strengths
– Apple’s rise in popularity and haul to x86, Intel’s Centrino and AMD64/EM64T furthered that ISA’s stranglehold on the market
So things really aren’t very interesting because platforms are stagnated, and I think we’re far from a saturated market.
It’s a shame companies like Amiga don’t move and provide alternative platforms that are interesting, viable, to spice this thing up.
In the early 80s we had dozens of consumer-grade platforms with little to no interoperability or compatibility, but that’s no longer a concern nowadays; we really could use more choices.
I think you’re crazy to say that the x86/x86_64 platform is stagnant. PCI express, SATA, Core2 and other high performance per watt CPUs? Multi-core systems for grandma? Heck we even have physics processing units these days (we have yet to see if they’ll ever become successful). Media center PCs, servers in the home… the only stagnant thing I see in this article is Amiga Inc.
stevieu83 (Me) – Ya know. This video is haunting…(Deathbed Vigil trailer on YouTube)
*shudders*
Well, I shall continue to go through life moaning. The ‘failure’ of the Amiga is another thing to moan about, along with the crap that goes on in this world.
The whole computer market/it industry is another situation that sums our race up. Blind and devoid! (well, I won’t mention names)
Darn.
hazydave (Dave Haynie – Commodore, Chief Engineer) – I read an interview with Bob Dylan; he had an observation.. was a time when you could travel in the USA, and it was like changing countries in Europe. Today the culture is the same.
That’s reflected in computing,.. we have PCs, Windows, all the same. Weirdness is tragically ust at the fringe. You can travel to Key West or New Orleans or Austin and get a slice of “something better” today. There are few using something else… but the differences are dramatically less than back in the 80s.
Oh I’m sorry. I wasn’t paying attention. I was too busy trying to keep from yawning.
It’s usually not a good idea to submit an open letter to your users/developers/possible customers and blame any subset of them for your issues. Doesn’t matter whether or not its true, you just don’t do it.
Die, die Amiga Inc, please!!!
Before that, release AOS 4 to us!
Maybe someday we will have Intuition running on our x64 systems…
For those of you wanting to point fingers and blame Amiga for the fact that OS 4.0 is not shipping, you are pointing your fingers at the wrong people
It wasn’t ME! It was the one armed man!
we explained to the contact at the other company our current valuation based on the last round of funding we had completed, and then gave them the current valuation on the round that is in the process of closing,
Sorry Bill but the *valuation* of a company is not based solely on what cash you have at hand.
You can have 2 billion dollars in hand but without real products generating the revenue to sustain it you haven’t got much value and the money ain’t going to last long!
As the CEO of Amiga I do hold old Bill responsible. Thats the way it works at every other company I’ve ever seen that is a *success*.
To me this thing reads like a big ole’ pity party and drawn out blame game.
Amiga is finished. I’m convinced now more than ever.
>> Sorry Bill but the *valuation* of a company is not
>> based solely on what cash you have at hand.
It doesn’t matter because DiscreetFX CAN’T buy Amiga anyway.
Amiga Tech(acquired by Commodore) /B/
Commodore(bankrupt) /D/
Escom(bankrupt) /F/
Gateway(acquired by Acer) /H/
Itec LLC(acquired by KMOS) /J/
KMOS(still alive?) /L/
M-?
The next Amiga owner is mystical “M” company.
Edited 2007-10-03 23:09
If we apply “perverse mirror” technique we’ll know
the future of KMOS:
acquired
bankrupt
bankrupt
acquired
———-
acquired
bankrupt -> KMOS
Please let the Amiga die with grace.
Let AROS take over the kingdom!
Is a product I can buy.
I would *LOVE* a complete MiniMig with OS 3.9 as a stopgap while new hardware is made.
Or, port OS 4.0 to a MacMini.
Or, buy the PPC Co-Processor Card from Micro-Code Solutions and let me run it on my PC.
But, MAKE A PRODUCT I CAN BUY!!!
I bought the $50.00 coupon to support Amiga, and all I got was a $5.00 t-shirt.
I never got the new computer or OS as promised.
I would buy a decent computer with the name Amiga on it. Just stop all the legal nonsense, and the infighting and the vaporware and get something out there…
Please?
The thing is, if Amiga Inc. was serious about staying in business, there would be a product out now — there are PLENTY of affordable, available, already existing solutions, even for PPC hardware. Small form-factor PCs are flooding the market, and there are many below $500 (heck, several are breaking below the $100 barrier).
The amount of work that does not need to be done by Amiga cannot be overstated. Heck, with the money and the rights, I could have these things out by Christmas…
Has anyone else noticed that Amiga Inc.’s official site now has a ‘donation meter’ to keep the site running from month to month?
That’s about how seriously we can take this letter, I fear…
> Has anyone else noticed that Amiga Inc.’s official site
> now has a ‘donation meter’ to keep the site running
> from month to month?
It ain’t an official site, it’s a community site. http://amiga.com is the official site. You might also check .com and .org definitions, it might help you in the future on not being so clueless…
or software anyone hardly uses? No? Well, let’s start another REXX thread then!
<satire>Bill McEwen announces that he has taken on a new role as spokesman for the Duke Nukem Forever software project. He says that substantial progress has been made, including an internal beta test program, and that it is due for imminent release.</satire>
http://youtube.com/watch?v=V_CDJfXRMtY