steve30: I think a new Amiga should have a nice fast PPC processor (NOT intel)
Keep in mind that computers are not all about CPUs. A CPU isn't that useful without a good chipset to go with it. Where do you get those components affordably? Insistance on PPC is what gave us the AmigaOne, a buggy, expensive board that is now defunct.
Think function, not form.
skurk: "In what way is UNIX rusty and in need of a major overhaul?"
Well, I already gave two examples. Traditional UNIX doesn't support international text encoding (or anything other than ASCII, really), and the "everything is a file" paradigm is false, because when it comes to networks, you still have to use clients with proprietary command sets (like FTP) to transfer files, instead of just using a shell prompt. These two things alone are really huge disadvantages that have been fixed in "new" (but unpopular) UNIX implemenations, like Plan9 and Inferno. The "old" UNIX community prefers compatibility and consistency over real improvement.
What about filetypes? UNIX filesystems are pretty much braindead in this regard, and require higher-level layers, such as the desktop environment, to do all the dirty stuff.
Delete a file, and it's gone for good, at least at the low-level. Higer-level interfaces are expected to manage journaling. Much more sophisticated history management would be better.
Security is unimpressive, too. Oh yeah, UN*X geeks laugh at Windows, but in reality, UNIX has many of the same security failings as Microsoft's OS. The applications handle security, not the OS. The system will cover its own butt with group accounts, but your files are still fully exposed to any program that runs on your account. Who cares if the OS is safe? It can be re-installed. What about your files? UNIX was designed for mainframes and multiuser groups where the whole is more important than the individual. For single-user systems, UNIX (and Macs) get by on obscurity alone.
Bash is OK for simple stuff, but there's a reason why people write Perl scripts to do anything useful. Simple concepts like arrays are difficult to perform directly through a shell.
There's no way to get the status of a shell command in progress, regardless of how parallel it is. You just have to wait for it to finish. You could use a complex, bloated, high-level framework to monitor that stuff, or you could just build a simple, standard batch monitor into the terminal.
UNIX has no concept of packages, either. I have to say that ".app" archives on the Mac are a major improvement from the rather primitive way UNIX handles application files.
Why can't applications have their own scratch folders -- a "safe" place to put their configuration files and whatnot? It would certainly make backing-up the system a heck of a lot easier, and still allow each user account to have its own configuration settings. It would greatly improve security, too. This is what the Windows System Registry tried to do, but failed miserably. Dammit, I don't WANT my web browser cookies or cache to be accessible to any program running on my account! Keep everything seperate, and don't use some bloated desktop manager API to manage it all!
Lots of things to improve. Instead, some people still want an ancient AmigaOS running on PPC, because Intel is bad. No wonder Microsoft still controls everything. Almost every alternative platform isn't focused on fixing problems. What exactly did BeOS fix? Nothing, really, and that's why it failed.
