In an effort to enhance the communication between the Amiga community and Amiga companies Amiga’s Chief Technology Officer, Fleecy Moss, has agreed on offering weekly Questions and Answers sessions at the AmigaWorld.net community portal.
In an effort to enhance the communication between the Amiga community and Amiga companies Amiga’s Chief Technology Officer, Fleecy Moss, has agreed on offering weekly Questions and Answers sessions at the AmigaWorld.net community portal.
There still is an Amiga community? Don’t get me wrong, I loved the Amiga, but are there still people that don’t have at least one IBM compatible in their house?
Bob
Finally there are some initial but interesting AmigaOne comparisons available. The hardware is progressing very well, but currently only various Linux distribution have been ported to these AmigaOne motherboards. AmigaOS4 makes solid steps as well, regardless of further delays. The version for classic PPC powered Amigas is already booting into a full Workbench.
http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?storyid=267
When are they ever going to finally release something. (And don’t tell me “…real soon now…”) Nobody who has owned Amiga technology since Commodore has done anything but talk and make empty promises.
Sorry, Mike, but I *do* care about the Amiga (or at least did), which is why I can’t pull any punches.
> There still is an Amiga community?
Yes, there still is. There are dozens of mini-Amiga shows every year, which even dwarf those of most alternative platforms. Even last year’s main German Amiga mini-“fair” still enjoyed more visitors than Linux’ main event, the First Desktop Linux Summit. This despite for the fact that the visitor count for the Amiga event was merely a third or maybe a half, compared to the previous year. Most Amigans are simply waiting for the consumer version of the AmigaOne/AmigaOS4 combo to get finished.
> Don’t get me wrong, I loved the Amiga, but are there
> still people that don’t have at least one IBM compatible
> in their house?
Most people actually do own PCs next to their Amigas. Not because we really want to, but because that’s where most of the new software gets released.
Yes there is, but it is very small and filled with jerks/trolls and fanatics (well and many nice intelligent people too but those you notice as easily). I can not see why one must be Amiga ‘exclusive’ to be counted as a member of the community thought?
> Yes there is, but it is very small and filled with
> jerks/trolls and fanatics (well and many nice
> intelligent people too but those you notice as easily).
I believe and hope this will only be temporary. There’s currently someone with quite a bit of cash actively recruiting trolls and this is also part of the problem.
However when AmigaOS4 is finally available to the public, I believe things will sort themselves out, eventually. Always note that there is a quiet majority. (especially when trolls step in)
> I can not see why one must be Amiga ‘exclusive’ to be
> counted as a member of the community thought?
I don’t understand what you mean by this?
of this whole amiga os shindig.
Is that amiga inc. hasn’t delivered a single thing accept some hw combo and pegasus has, pegasus are being pursued like the polish under ww2 because of it.
I think it’s rather petty.
And I don’t think it’s that easy mike, I perused the ann.lu forums and some other amiga only forums and there is quite a bit of … dissapointment.
amiga inc has not managed to deliver t-shirts that was ordered and had some sort of coupun thing going (im not entrenched in that issue though)
From my pov I wouldn’t buy anything that comes from amiga inc mostly due to the failed delivery of -any- t-shirts to its customers.
I will most definetly purchase pegasos hw as soon as it’s availible again.
and btw mike who are “bb” that i see people referring to here and there?
oh and for the record, i’d love to see the amiga os in action again but it will need some serious rebranding.
Hello Robert, most of the people you hear complaining aren’t actually the people who wanted this t-shirt as a bonus anyway. The issues surrounding those t-shirts will soon be solved however. I also believe many people will be happy with the end result of the way this issue will be dealt with.
The BB guy I prefer not to name by name, but most people familiar with the Amiga community will know who I mean.
Mike, I think that the way you use your comments is sometimes inappropriate and should be modded down.
Robert – bbvr – bill buck & raquel velasco – Genesi …
Mike – Amiga Inc. failed upon delivery of any single promise they did, so – let’s wait and let released products speak for themselves … Don’t get me wrong – I would like to see e.g. AmigaDE becoming success, but I will not simply accept any excuses, unfair behavior and lack of communication …
-pekr-
Petr, you are likely referring to the trolling recruitment. Please note that BB has made no secret of this fact, he has openly asked on one of the main Amiga forums that he was seeking competent trolls for marketing purposes.
Also it wouldn’t be the first time that I hear that he activily asks such people to back him up on forums.
I’m sick of all of these projects/companies saying that they are going to have the greatest thing since sliced bread in the next couple of weeks. Amiga was great and what they’ve been planning looks good too, but I haven’t really seen anything either. There is a reason that Linux is the alternative OS: there is easily installable proff that it exists. Sure, there are BSD distros, Cosmoe, Syllable, AtheOS OpenBeOS, etc. that have files that people can look at, but there is nothing that allows a dolt to use them even as a half hour play OS. With Linux, one can easily download a binary, burn it to CD and install it using an easy graphical interface. It doean’t matter who is more advanced. There are hundreds of projects more advanced than Linux. What has made Linux what it is today on the desktop (ie. the most common alternative desktop OS) is the fact that people can install it with minimal hassle. I would love to try out Syllable and other options, but they are much more difficult (Syllable’s problem is that rawwrite isn’t included in Windows).
If you want people to think that your OS is better than another, you first have to have them use it. And that means that it has to be easy enough for regular people to install/obtain a copy of. It is time for Amiga and other closed projects to release something and it is time for open projects to make their systems accessable.
I have left the Mac out of this because it is more of a platform than an OS. The Mac obviously has greater desktop use than Linux, but unless you own Apple hardware it isn’t something that you can install and the point of this post was making it easier for people to be able to get access to alternative OSs. I don’t want to get into the Apple situation because it has been throughly explored thousands of times before. Incidentally, I am typing this post on a PowerMac G3/300 running Jaguar.
If by troll you mean someone who dared to offend your personal feelings by speaking the truth based on personal experience… well thats just sad. A true religious mentality.
The fact is I have an Amiga 500, 1200, and 3000, and still use the 3000. I just don’t light candles and worship the thing, much less whoever happens to own the name.
Another fact is that Commodore wouldn’t do anything until it was almost too little too late. Escom did nothing at all. Gateway would do good and then trash everything and start over (QnX). And this current group hasn’t done much more than drop crumbs and dangle carrots.
Sure my post was sarcastic. I’ve waited and waited, and spent money on hardware, software, and magazine subscriptions, only to be ripped-off and screwed time after time. Maybe that reflects on me. Maybe I should stop waiting and caring.
Hey, maybe they’ve really got OS4 as far along as they claim. I hope they release it this spring and prove me wrong. But I’m at the point now where I won’t believe anything thats said anymore until there’s something shipping to back it up.
The Amiga community does need hope in order to survive, but that shouldn’t mean lapsing into denialism or attacking anyone with a valid complaint.
>I have left the Mac out of this because it is more of a platform than an OS.
I prefer to have a platform, than to have an OS that runs on every hardware, which is synonymous to more bugs, more hardware incompatibility, scattered app ports etc. Having a fully controlled platform, means that there are easier ways to control your OS to run better on THAT platform, you control the hardware and their bug fixes, and all in all, having a SOLUTION rather than an OS port, is just better if you want to do your job well and with no many headaches. If OSX was in the x86 world, it would have huge trouble with hardware compatibility for example, even WinXP has.
Old Rasta, the reasoning you stated are exactly some of the main reasons why there has been such a lack of PR and communication with the Amiga community lately. Often it is better to be able to quietly concentrate on development of a product without having to worry about satisfying the community with information all the time. AmigaOS4 is afterall the biggest AmigaOS update ever.
Now when the products are finally getting close, it starts to make sense to concentrate alot more on PR issues.
There’re still diehards using their Amiga 1000s and 1200s after all these years, and have never owned another computer. These systems typically have upgrade boards spewing out of the computer’s case with all the hardware hacks they’ve done to them. They’ll have PowerPC cpus, big hard drives, 3rd party this and that, latest versions of AmigaOS and Linux, and an archive on their hard drives of almost every Amiga game ever made. You could say they’re dedicated.
@ Kw:
You *are* aware that the A1000 was the first Amiga model to be released, 1985, and doesn’t allow for stuff like PowerPC expansions, while the A1200 was the very last model released, over seven years later?
Simplified heritage graph of Amiga generations (oversimplified):
First (1985): A1000
Second (1987): A500, A2000
Third (…not sure myself): A600, A3000
Fourth (1992): A4000, A1200
Solar, the full ECS machines (A500+, A600, A3000, B2000 6.x) were released around 1991.
The A3000 (ECS) was released in 1990 and the A600 (ECS) was released in 1992, just like the A1200 (AGA) which appeared later that year.
Mike Bouma wrote (with Megol’s words in brackets):
“I believe and hope this [Amiga platform being very small and filled with jerks/trolls and fanatics] will only be temporary.”
Anyone who’s been even slightly aware of the Amiga computing community knows that it has always been a magnet for jerks/trolls and fanatics, in addition to people who are creative in positive ways. As you said, once Hyperion and Eyetech release AmigaOS4 on AmigaOne computers, and Genesi’s MorphOS/Pegasos become more widely available, at least then people will have products in their hands to talk about, and hopefully there’ll be less motivation for such yellow journalism as this:
“There’s currently someone with quite a bit of cash actively recruiting trolls and this is also part of the problem.”
For someone with journalistic pretentions you rather casually toss ideas together. Yes, the Genesi people have quite a bit of cash, at least relative to what we’re used to seeing in this market, but it’s silly to think that anyone is paying trolls to cause trouble. As we know, there are plenty of people, on boths sides of any of these issues, who willingly cause plenty of trouble for free. 🙂
“I don’t understand what you mean by this [why one must be Amiga ‘exclusive’ to be counted as a member of the community thought].”
Clearly, he’s asking why some people who’ve rallied behind the licensed Amiga-brand products fail to acknowledge that the ‘Amiga community’ is broader than the market of these products alone. People can enjoy both AmigaOS and MorphOS, and (if they have the money) can have and appreciate both an AmigaOne and a Pegasos. In both cases they will be participating in the the “Amiga community” in the sense that all of these products have the lineage, and in fact if you think about such things, the Pegasos was created by people with deep roots in Amiga computing, whereas the AmigaOne is essentially an off-the-shelf MAI Teron motherboard, albeit with some modifications (firmware and a dongle, as I understand it). But the point isn’t to debate the fine points endlessly, but to think inclusively. It’s silly to be parochial in an already-tiny market; it makes the situation seem like the Lilliputian war over which end of the egg to open.
— gary_c
> Anyone who’s been even slightly aware of the Amiga
> computing community knows that it has always been a
> magnet for jerks/trolls and fanatics
There was a time when the Amiga community was known for its helpful and friendly nature. Personally I hope those times will return. Currently there are forces within the Amiga community who make no secret of the fact that they think being controversial and to introduce conflicts is good for PR. For the Amiga community as a whole I greatly disagree.
> Clearly
Nobody was talking about anything Amiga ‘exclusive’.
Im getting an amigaone and yes i do have pc,s
Mike Bouma wrote:
> There was a time when the Amiga community was known for its helpful and friendly nature. Personally I hope those times will return.
In my experience there have always been both helpful, friendly people and irritating obsessives among Amiga users, typical of most groups of people. Of course the frustration due to the platform’s corporate problems brought out the worst in a lot of enthusiasts.
> Currently there are forces within the Amiga community who make no secret of the fact that they think being controversial and to introduce conflicts is good for PR.
This description is unnecessarily melodramatic, based on, as far as I know, one person’s tongue-in-cheek statement. It’s best not to let our imaginations carry us away.
>> Clearly
> Nobody was talking about anything Amiga ‘exclusive’.
There are people who feel this way, and make no secret of it, which was what the other poster was asking about. I wasn’t implying that you feel this way, necessarily.
I’ll stop here, not wanting to completely bore anyone who’s bothered to read this far.
— gary_c
Mike Bouma wrote:
> There was a time when the Amiga community was known for its helpful and friendly nature. Personally I hope those times will return.
I don’t think that the Amiga community is not helpful nor friendly.
A minority of people are fanatics and get into the OS wars but most of the people are nice.
For example Amiga.org is getting better and better. Since some of the fanatics went on other sites the discussion between the different Amiga applications users such as Amithlon, WINUAE, MorphOS, and the classic Amiga have been going on with less flames than before.
It is a nice progress that make a real community federing all Amiga applications users.
It is unfortunate that Fleecy does not answer to such questions on Amiga.org which is the most crowded Amiga site and getting together all branches of the community.
> In my experience there have always been both helpful,
> friendly people
I know, but most of them will keep quiet when the more vocal people resort to name calling and insults on Amiga forums. This gives a bad impression to newcomers.
> one person’s tongue-in-cheek statement.
Believe me, I don’t take this person too seriously, however others do.
@ Christophe
LOL (@ Gary, perfect example..)
I have no IBM compatible in my house, unless you count the IBM 486 I use to test NetBSD’s PS/2 support on.
People still buy IBM compatibles these days?
I remember being given a 386@25Mhz. But I only ever used it to keep the door open in my basement. (its a heavy bloody thing).
So far my A4000 has yet to dissapoint me. And whats all the buzz with this Pent-ho-hum. Does it really do anything or is it a glorified whirring air conditioner. sheesh.
W-e-e-l-l ….. there is an IBM compatable under one of my desks. A K6 AMD with a Linux install, but I didn’t perservere when I couldn’t get my modem to connect with my ISP.
Still using my A2000HD with 68060, 32Mb, and PicassoII.
Have an A1XE on order.
Which term did I not comply with?