Fleecy Moss on AmigaOS 4 Release Date and More

[Floid]

Just to clarify...

*IA64 (Itanium) has been the special case out of the current crop of 64-bit chips, in terms of "instant OS support."  But that's because it's been practically incompatible with IA32 (something they're *now* planning to address in hardware, I gather; it's been what, six, eight years?) ... and despite all the effort 'poor' Microsoft and friends put in, Intel's only been selling like 3,000 units a year.  ... Because, guess what?  Few third-parties have recompiled *their* applications to the platform.

*From there, practically every other 64-bit platform to date has been UNIX of one flavor or another (VMS being the exception).  Like it or not, that supports a slightly different development model... and certain *other* aspects of UNIX have long kept third-parties targeting it ready to recompile or port at the drop of a hat.  As it turns out, this enforces some professionalism in that market (software vendors have to know enough to 'stay on the treadmill,' or they'd have long since fallen off), but given some of the moans targeted at Linux on the AmigaOne, I doubt many of us would really be happy with 'UNIX' (as stood ~1990-2000) on the desktop.  No matter how cool SGIs seemed at the time.

OS X is addressing some of the issues; from my perspective, DragonFly BSD is set to give them all a knockout punch; desktop Linux has gotten around many of them by promoting vendor-maintained package repositories.  So I do encourage the haters to try things again in two years, while at the same time saying "Yeah, on 'the desktop,' you want software you bought six years back to 'just run.'"

*64-bitness offers big fat wads of memory addressing.  That's basically it.  (Some registers get wider, but in tradeoff, all your addresses and pointers or whatnot tend to get wider too.  It does help out with a few specific calculations, but yes, 32-bit chips are basically "just as fast," and could remain so as long as we can keep scaling them by the GHz.)  Big fat wads of memory addressing do let you do some cool things, though... like storing entire CDs in RAM.  Or decent chunks of video.  Or artwork for a building-covering banner at 300DPI.  Or game data that includes an entire topographic map of New York state with one-inch resolution or something.

Like I said, it'll be a while until we can afford this much RAM, so as users, we don't need to fret much right now.  But when 64GB is as cheap as 64MB is now, you'll hope we got around to having the option open, right? ;-)

[Rogue]

wahhhh! More waiting

It says "We intend to show at a major mainstream show early in the new year". It doesn't say anything about release dates, or showings on Amiga shows (which hardly quality as 'mainstream').

I guess to show something at a mainstream computer show nowadays you got to have more than "just" an operating system.

[Dietmar]

>Why not? Infact while we're at it let's use a really good and polished 16 bit OS?!

You have to understand the concept of bits. 16 bit allow values from 0 to 65535 (64 KB). That's obviously not ideal for a polished OS. Fortunately, each bit that is added doubles the range. With 32 bit, values from 0 to 4 GB can be expressed. That means that such a cpu can directly work with numbers of such magnitude, including address pointers: A 32 bit computer is ideally suited for RAM up to 4 GB. That's enough for a polished OS, so people above pointing out to you that 64 bit might be nonsense for an Amiga-style "home computer" OS have a point.

64 bit will make more sense if you have more than 4 GB memory and start using content/files sized several GB, for example if you have a web server running a 8 GB database or a mathematical simulation with 16 GB data.

[Floid]

Dietmar wrote:
>Why not? Infact while we're at it let's use a really good and polished 16 bit OS?!

You have to understand the concept of bits. 16 bit allow values from 0 to 65535 (64 KB). That's obviously not ideal for a polished OS.

Exactly.  Just remember that we have to question what what 'polished' is from one year to the next.  There was a time when window gradients seemed ridiculously 'expensive' - especially before and during the period when it still took $500 of add-ons to get the average machine running a browser stably.  

Now the machine itself costs $500, and we want a bit of eye-candy to satisfy our sense of aesthetics and act as a natural 'demo' of our hardware's capability.  (I used to pick on my Mac-using friends about this... "Sure, you've got shading on the window borders, but how long does it take to boot?")

Who's to say we won't finally see basic voice controls, or as we're already seeing (finally!), scalable graphics become part of the 'necessary' user experience?

For the business end of things, the trick is to introduce these features *when* there's a hope they'll integrate quickly and unintrusively on hardware your users can afford.  MS learned how to play this game by the time they introduced XP - it's huge, it's bloated, yet the features (and misfeatures, like MSN Messenger integration) -- and the extra 256MB of RAM to run them -- are far, far more "affordable" to the average user than the $300/16MB it cost  to get OS/2 running suitably in '94.

In retrospect, I'm still happy I spent those $300, but I did have to turn voice navigation (let alone dictation) off to get some reasonable speed from the system.

So let's agree to hang back at 32 bits for now -- and kick some ass despite our 'limitations,' since our 64-bit brethren won't be able to afford much better outside the server farms -- but agree to revisit the idea in a year or two, lest we become a bunch of bus arch trolls convinced the status quo can never be improved upon.   :quickdraw:

[cope]

Can't that be read as After the community has had 4.0 for Christmas.
This not a large chunk of the pie. If they really want a stable product
they would want more than just a few Beta testers.
John Paul

[CodeSmith]

@Rogue:

We intend to show at a major mainstream show early in the new year

Umm, E3 is a major mainstream show in the first half of the year...



:-P

(NOTE for those who don't get it: E3 is one of the worst shows as far as vaporware is concerned...)

[Warface]

What about CEBIT launching OS4? *coughs*

[JoannaK]

Nah even they would not dare to do *that* twice in a row...

[mikeymike]

@ Elektro

Do you know the advantages of a fully 32-bit system?

[Elektro]

its 32 bit ?

i mean wtf... if you have a 64 bit cpu the best thing is to have a 64 bit OS.

and no i dont understand stuff like 2^x=... thats too much math for me...

[dammy]

by mikeymike on 2003/9/5 5:59:54

Do you know the advantages of a fully 32-bit system?

For which CPU family?

Dammy

[mikeymike]

@ Elektro

Horses for courses.  You need to know why you're asking for something like that.  And we don't have a 64-bit CPU, so to want one there should be some sound technical reasons.  And no, speed is not necessarily one of them.

@ Dammy

I was talking "in theory".

@ general murmourings of 64-bit AmigaOS

If OS4 is released in early 2004, I'd guess another 3 years after that before we see 64-bit AmigaOS.  And then you guys will be complaining that it only runs on the old and crappy PPC 970.

[blubbe]

Edited by Argo:Off Topic

[Argo]

Ah, at last "A Voice in the Wilderness"...