AmigaOS 4 415
Second five-eighth writes "The Amiga is alive and sort of well (you can get the OS, but not the hardware), and Ars Technica has a review of the final version of AmigaOS 4. New features include limited memory protection, 3D display drivers, an improved suite of applications (the bounty for porting Mozilla to AmigaOS has yet to be claimed), and much better 680x0 emulation. Perhaps most telling, the reviewer was able to move his daily writing workflow from Windows XP to AmigaOS 4.0: 'Not only was it possible to do this, but having done so I feel no urge to switch back. It is nice to not have any distractions when working — there is no waiting for the system to swap out when switching between major applications, no constant reminders for updates or to download new virus definitions and even if the worst happens and the system locks up, it takes only seven seconds to reboot and get back to a functional desktop.'"
Switching XP - Amiga (Score:1, Insightful)
Short memory (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Short memory (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:please.. (Score:5, Insightful)
What is your problem?
I don't get all upset when somebody drives by in a 1950's Studebaker all tricked out. Yeah, it has some limitations, such as: a single-speaker AM radio, no air conditioning, cruise control, electric windows, it requires fuel additives to not die on unleaded gas, and it's hard to find parts for. Oh, and it's a death trap in an accident.
And despite all that, it's still mighty cool. I honk when I see somebody driving one.
Can you imagine what a dorkass you'd look like if you stuck your head out the window and screamed: "Dude, die already! The Studebaker's time has come and gone already!".
Oh, wait. Nevermind. You're posting O/S elitism on Slashdot. My guess is that you probably already know all about what a dorkass you look like. Never mind.
What's wrong with this summary? (Score:5, Insightful)
Something not up to Slashdot standards...
Ah... there's no "dept." caption/commentary!
Re:please.. (Score:2, Insightful)
If it takes pretty much a decade of dicking around to get an OS release out the door, and you STILL have to guess what it'd be like to run this OS on hardware that's not emulating a 680x0, it's gonna take a WHOLE lot of time-saving computer use to get your decade of invested time back by switching instantly between major applications.
I say this as a former Amiga owner and lover. It's not even over now. It was over many long years ago.
Play with the legacy hardware if you like (Hell, I was drooling over a Cray X-MP at the National Cryptologic Museum not too long ago), but mentally - guys, MENTALLY - join us here in the current century, OK?
We like you Amigans, your hearts are in the right place....
Re:please.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Just because it is old doesn't make it a classic.
Perhaps in 2057 people will see my junker as a piece of history, but until then...
Let it rest in peace! (Score:2, Insightful)
I think old cars are cool. I think old computers are cool. I think old computer games are cool even. But it is time to stop molesting the poor Amiga's cold dead corpse like this. It's dead people, remember it for what it was but leave it in peace. It belongs to a different time, a difference philosophy.
The Amiga died for one reason. Closed Source on a Closed Platform. No amount of cool could save it when Amiga Inc went kaput. Let it be a lesson unto you, invest not thy emotions, neither thy creative output in platforms which can vanish in the twinkling of an eye. The future belongs to Open Standards, Open Platforms and Open Source. Apple is coming around, albeit kicking and screaming most of the time, even Microsoft will eventually be forced to adapt or die.
Amiga Inc died and the bloody bits have passed from charnel house to charnel house, each run by a rabid fanboi who believed with all his heart that HE could save the Amiga platform, but none of their plans could be realized because no sane person will invest the needed funds to bring a product to market because there isn't a market for it waiting to buy it. Just read the article to see why. How many times do you read phrases like "used to", "was", "once", etc. Most of the software still in use is old 68000 stuff from companies which themseleves are so long in the grave that nobody would even knows where to look for the sourcecode anymore, assuming it exists. Orphaned closed source software. So even if interest could be revived it would be for naught because a new Amiga owner can't (legally) obtain much of the software anymore.
Combine with the tangled ownership history for the IP and you get stuff like the line in the article where the current developers find they don't have the right to port to x86. PPC is pretty much dead these days, no future development is likely that would be useful to a desktop OS so the current roadmap is a deadend. The only PPC platform in production these days is the PS3 but it doesn't allow "other OS" to access the 3D hardware which would be a bummer since Amaga OS 4 just gained 3D support.
Re:Switching XP - Amiga (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because a resource is abundant and cheap isn't a reason to abuse it. You don't waste water, do you?
Schwab
no, you'll have bigger problems (Score:2, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem [wikipedia.org]
Re:Let it rest in peace! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, just like Macintosh. And we all know that IBM machines survived because of Microsoft's open operating systems.
The reason Amiga died was because Commodore was completely inept on just about everything non-technical in nature - advertising, business decisions, corporate alliances, you name it.
Dan East
Re:Switching XP - Amiga (Score:2, Insightful)
After reading TFA (Score:2, Insightful)
I am a fan of old hardware and my old macintosh 512 lives on in a basilisk II emulator which I will occasionally use to play some of those old mac games. (galax ftw!)
Anywho, I am all for an OS and hardware being limited to the hobbiest domain, sort of like using ham radio instead of IRC, but I shudder to think what would happen if an OS that lacked rudimentary memory security until recently was unleashed upon the harsh interweb en mass. I'm certain amiga OS would have even less security than OS/X and a lonely hacker could ruin a lot of people's fun.
Re:Switching XP - Amiga (Score:3, Insightful)
The point is that you really shouldn't be swapping to/from disk just to switch between applications. There is being efficient with memory... and then there is being a total cheapass who refuses to upgrade beyond 64MB of RAM.
-matthew
Re:Switching XP - Amiga (Score:1, Insightful)
Uhh... since fall 1999, when $150 wouldn't even get you 128MB of any RAM?
Seriously, you need to remember where we've been before you bitch about RAM prices.
That's not our Amiga; It's Amiga-branded (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember when "Amiga" meant innovation and usability at an affordable price. One of the amazing things about the Amiga was that most of the cheesy slogans that were used to sell it (e.g. "Only Amiga makes it possible" and "The computer for the creative mind") were true. It felt good to own an Amiga, because it was orders of magnitude better than anything else out there.
Today, "Amiga" is just a trademark. Will this new Amiga-branded system compete with Mac OS X? With GNU/Linux? With Windows? If not, why should I, as an nostalgic Amiga zealot, care?
I have no need for yet more proprietary hardware running yet another proprietary OS in a time when commodity hardware and free software are where most of the interesting things are happening.
The new Amiga we dream of won't be called "Amiga". It will be something completely different---built by a small group of brilliant people that nobody has ever heard of---not the underwhelming output of some company whose only real purpose is to figure out how to extract revenue from the copyrights and trademarks for a 20-year-old technology.
Re:Let it rest in peace! (Score:5, Insightful)
The proprietary nature of the platform had little if anything to do with the Amiga's death
Re:Switching XP - Amiga (Score:4, Insightful)
At the early 90's Amiga was an amazing platform, with even more amazing software. A desktop publishing software was crammed into 1.4MB, two 720KB floppies! And you had an almost perfect alternative to Word 6.0 on less than 720KB, and spell checking was only another floppy away from you.
I had an Amiga 600, with 4MB RAM and 40MB HD, and I never managed to use half of the space. Why software is so bloated nowdays? I understand that now we have multi GHz cpus, with loads of RAM... but yet, we waste too much resources using poorly optimized software. For an example: OpenOffice.
I understand that now software do a lot more, we have higher resolutions and color depths... But does it justifies the lack of performance, the bloat? I mean, OpenOffice will crawl on a machine with less than 256MB, and a average Amiga had no more than 4MB of RAM!
The Amiga was a quantum leap for computers (Score:5, Insightful)
1) preemptive multitasking.
2) special hardware for graphics.
3) a unified memory architecture.
4) stereo sound with hardware-assisted mixer
5) a UNIX-like O/S with many goodies, including
6) a nice GUI that looked good on low resolutions with datatype aware drag-n-drop for every app.
7) a good DMA architecture that allowed for easy parallelization of many tasks (for example graphics not blocked by I/O)
What would it take for the Amiga to be a quantum leap today, given that the average 500$ Intel PC has much better capabilities than the Amiga of yesteryear? there are certain possibilities:
1) provide sound and graphics of 5000$ worth at the price of 500$. This is highly unlikely, because all the billion dollar pioneering research in graphics takes place in the labs of NVidia and ATI, two companies that will not be willing to sell their top technology for a mere 500$. The Amiga was the result of hardware gurus like RJ Mical that worked on their own designs...so unless a similar group of talented individuals gather up and make something unique, this possibility is less likely to happen.
2) provide a computer with a fixed hardware, like a console, but with an O/S that the users can write applications and games that hit the hardware directly. It might sell but for small numbers...back bedroom programming will certainly thrive on such a machine,
but I do not think the numbers it sells will be sufficient to sustain it.
3) do something really wild like a computer with 3d stereoscopic graphics projected either in mid air or in a special display. Now that would be a quantum leap, but only if the price is right, and it would certainly be hard to make and sell.
Overall, I do not think Amiga has a place in today's computing environment...especially when the O/S works on special hardware platforms.
Re:The Amiga was a quantum leap for computers (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Switching XP - Amiga (Score:5, Insightful)
I write this on a laptop with 2GB of memory - sum total of applications running:
Outlook (yes I'm at work, we do what we have to)
Several gVim sessions
Firefox with 6 Slashdot tabs and 1 gmail tab
Acrobat Reader
VNC session
Winamp
as I alt tab to winamp, watch the hdd light flash and the delay in re-draw.
I kid you not, that with the exception of tabbed browsing, I used to do all of this on my Amiga 4000 with 16MB of ram without swapping. my old A1200 only had 4M of ram and i used that as a desktop for a couple of years and that didn't even have the concept of virtual ram!
Now maybe this is the price of progress, but seriously, how much ram do you suggest I need to buy in order to stop this swapping?
As an collery, my desktop at home at 4GB runs Ubuntu and that swaps in similar situations too. Maybe this is the price of progress, but if this article only reminds us that there is another way then I'm all for it.
Re:Nice Nostalgia (Score:3, Insightful)
I have an A3000 out in my garage, amongst other bits and pieces of history. It was pretty trick for it's time, a full complement of memory, soft-kicked running the last official Kickstart of the time, a Picasso card with Pablo expansion (never worked out how to use that), a couple of large IDE hard drives (running on a PC card adapter thing I'm trying to remember the name of) and a couple on the SCSI too (I ran a BBS on it, and purchased it from a guy who closed down his BBS), a "fast" serial port card, few others bits and bobs. It's slightly broken, it needs a new PSU mostly, certainly fixable.
Anyway, every now and then I think for a few seconds, "hey, I should really get that working again, yea, that'd be cool", but quickly afterwards, I realise that when I did get it working I don't actually have any use for it. Sure I could make it a "file server", or even a web server, but that is just, I don't know, beneath it somehow, like a once great scientist reduced to clearing paper jams from a printer.
Somehow, I think it's better for it to just rest in piece in a box in my garage. Death with dignity so to speak.
Re:The Amiga was a quantum leap for computers (Score:4, Insightful)
2) special hardware for graphics.
3) a unified memory architecture.
4) stereo sound with hardware-assisted mixer
5) a UNIX-like O/S with many goodies, including
6) a nice GUI that looked good on low resolutions with datatype aware drag-n-drop for every app.
7) a good DMA architecture that allowed for easy parallelization of many tasks (for example graphics not blocked by I/O)
There were other machines around at the same time with many of these features, at the same price
provide sound and graphics of 5000$ worth at the price of 500$. This is highly unlikely, because all the billion dollar pioneering research in graphics takes place in the labs of NVidia and ATI, two companies that will not be willing to sell their top technology for a mere 500$.
Don't they already sell their top designs for $500? Isn't that what a top-end video card costs these days? You just don't get the rest of the computer with it
Overall, I do not think Amiga has a place in today's computing environment...especially when the O/S works on special hardware platforms.
Agreed, and even more so given that, as far as I can tell, this new AmigaOS has very little to do with the original other than name. It's just another niche OS which is platform specific, non-free (in any sense) and very, very limited in functionality. Pointless.
Re:Switching XP - Amiga (Score:3, Insightful)
Article explains why it won't take off (Score:3, Insightful)
The article's 3rd and 4th paragraphs explain why it has taken so long to be developed, and why nobody knows how much long-term maintenance there will be. The software was held hostage by dying companies. And it still is.
Fool me twice, shame on me. Open it up, if you want it to live. Until then, it's going to have the same kind of maintenance problems it has had for the last 15 years, and the next major update will be in 2022, if ever.
And as usual, freeness has technical consequences and isn't just a damn fool idealistic crusade:
In earlier versions of AmigaOS, when you asked exec for memory, you passed some attributes to AllocMem(), one of them being MEMF_PUBLIC, which if set, meant "this indicates that the memory should be accessible to other tasks." The catch is, with AmigaOS up through 3.x, this attribute didn't actually do anything. But theoretically, it could have been fairly easily used to add memory protection to an Amiga with an MMU. Just give each task its own address space, except for its public blocks which could all share memory. This would have given the Amiga most of the stability of modern systems, while also retaining its blazingly fast IPC. But, as the article says, adding this feature would break many old apps, because those apps were written either before the MEMF_PUBLIC was added to the spec, or the programmers just didn't do it right, or whatever. If AmigaOS had implemented memory protection, those unmaintained apps would allocate their IPC buffers privately, and fail when they tried to pass a message.
Now, imagine if this situation happened with Free Software, such as GNU/Linux. What would people do? They would fix the broken software, duh! It doesn't really take a lot of effort to grep through source looking for AllocMem()s and adding an attribute if it's being used to allocate a message buffer.
But on AmigaOS, you didn't have the damn source to most of your apps. A lot of really popular programs were no longer maintained by developers that had left the platform, and some source had even been completely lost. D'oh!
Being unmaintainable retards technological advance. It's that simple.
I don't know what how the AmigaOS 4 guys finally decided to implement memory protection, but from the article's description, it looks like they had to make serious compromises. Then they admit that maybe with AmigaOS 5 (due out in 2022 by my above predictions) they'll finally get to Do It Right (probably by throwing away the legacy apps, or running all the legacy stuff in a single virtual machine which just can't talk to the rest of the system). Heh, reminds me of how OS/2 or Windows deals with MSDOS apps. In my Amiga days, a comparison of AmigaOS to MSDOS was fightin' words. ;-) This just ain't pretty, and yet, being pretty is what the Amiga excelled at.
Re:Switching XP - Amiga (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean, should we give up array bounds checking because it sucks up CPU cycles?
Computers are meant to be used. Part of the reason why programs have proliferated so rapidly in recent years is precisely BECAUSE it has been less necessary to take care of these mundane details and to experiment.