Interview with Trevor Dickinson

[koaftder]

It would be interesting to know how much of that 200k euro went directly to Hyperion and if any of that money was from business development grants from the government.

[koaftder]

Excellent point!

That works out to like 3 guys @ 80k USD for 1 year. Could three guys port AOS 4 over to x86 in one year?

[koaftder]

community who believe it is sensible including A-EON/Hyperion themselves. Why would a company pursue a "crap business model"?

Incompetence.

[koaftder]

@AJCopland
You're assuming that the 200k investment so far includes the actual production costs. They're still working the kinks out, they may not have even done a run yet.

[koaftder]

Do you really even see a market for 500 machines though?  Personally I think that is a stretch.

I'm guessing they'll sell 100 tops, probably half that. I've heard a lot of dyed in the wool AOS4 users balking about the price. That's a bad sign.

[koaftder]

Its a bad sign for Trevor sure. If that happens he won't break even, which is his hope. Does it mean he was foolish to even try? I guess that depends on how much 200,000 EUR is to him and how important a dream this was for him to see this machine even made.

Seems pretty foolish to me. Most folks I've known who had money like that to toss around didn't get there by making stupid investments. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that a computer costing over 2000 dollars running AOS 4 on yesterdays tech with an out of production processor isn't going to be profitable nor is it something that's going to "carry the platform forward".
 
The whole idea of "trying" doesn't impress me, all kinds of idiots try all kinds of ridiculous things and loose their shirts in the process. They're fools. The folks at A-Eon are a little bit more than fools though, -MODERATED- Their bizarre marketing scheme was designed to appeal to suckers in the community who don't know jack about hardware or software design and development. The whole thing stinks to high heaven and I can't wait to see it wrapped in a plastic bag and tossed in a compactor.

[koaftder]

They way you write about this guy, you'd think you were closer to him than his own wife. *barf* C'mon, you don't know what's going on Trevor's head.

[koaftder]

And Hyperion has said they believe in PPC, its not just that they think x86 conversion is "too much work" as it were.  For those reasons I suspect Hyperion was thrilled that Trevor came along.

Where do you get this crap from? Rouge quite frankly said, on AWN, that he thought AOS 4 on IA32 was a good idea and the only reason it's not under consideration is because they simply don't have the resources to do it. They don't "believe" in PPC, they tied to like a ball and chain.

[koaftder]

The user "HyperionMP" at AW.net.

Just a 2 sec search and there was this one (from one year ago):

"we have taken a look at the PowerPC roadmap and there is plenty of life in it including 8 core designs under 30 W.

One of the main benefits of Amiga OS 4.1 is the fact that the geared entirely towards the PowerPC architecture as one of the very few operating systems around. Linux runs fine on PPC but it certainly is not optimised for this architecture in any way."

I'm not saying they hate x86.  I am saying its not just that they are considering the effort to go x86 when sticking with PPC but also that they clearly still believe in PPC.

That's some selective quoting there.

What the post said was that they a) don't have the resources b) they've spent too much money on ppc c) they're afraid that if they ported to x86 folks would just steal it.

In addition to that, and the issue has been discussed to death already, a move to x86 would be prohibitively costly. So far OS 4.x has cost well over 2 M euro to develop. That's 2.75 million USD. A move to x86 would halt all existing OS 4 development (i.e. complete feature freeze) and subsequently nearly all development time would be spent on dealing with the wide variety of x86 based hardware. In essence, Amiga OS 4.x development would grind to a complete halt and all this on the fairly far-fetched notion that tens of thousands of existing x86 owners would be willing to pay for a copy of OS 4.1 rather than just downloading a copy somewhere. No thank you, we have taken a look at the PowerPC roadmap and there is plenty of life in it including 8 core designs under 30 W. One of the main benefits of Amiga OS 4.1 is the fact that the geared entirely towards the PowerPC architecture as one of the very few operating systems around. Linux runs fine on PPC but it certainly is not optimised for this architecture in any way.

The later parts are just excuses to make it look like there's a future in PPC for the platform because obviously they're not going to flat out admit they're  running up against a wall. If they actually had the resources to port to IA32/AMD 64 and continue supporting the existing users, they'd do it in a heart beat.

[koaftder]

Thats a perception issue.  You perceive they are lying at the end with "just excuses".  You said that I was talking crap as if they never uttered such talk, but I was right, they did.  So on that you are not really making any kind of point.

Personally I don't see them lying per-se at the end of that post with "just excuses".  I tend to believe more that they have somehow convinced themselves that what they are saying makes sense, even though it does not in real world terms and even though they should know better.

Again, they state it as a reason they want to stay PPC and all I said was that according to Hyperion the reason is not just because it will "take too much work" to go x86.  Whether someone choose to believe them on that or not is an entirely different issue.  

As a for instance I personally find the claim of the money spent so far (as of June 2009) more likely to be BS if anything on the "HyperionMP list of reasons not to go x86"

You have HyperionMP saying one thing, and Rouge saying another. I'll take what Rouge has to say as being more important than who ever the hell HyperionMP is considering Rouge is actually involved in the development. It's a shame that on more than one occasion moderators at AWN have moderated his posts covering up for Hyperion. When Rouge posts drunk on the site and roasts a user over the coals, y'all should just let to post stand.

The main point HyperionMP made was that they don't have the resources. The justified sticking to PPC by making up weak sauce. In reality, they're sticking to PPC because that's their ball and chain.

Also, I never said you were "talking crap", go back an reread the post I wrote. I asked, "where do you get this crap from", in other words, what on earth leads you to these conclusions.

[koaftder]

Considering they probably hardly make any money I find it hard to believe they don't believe in at least some of what they say.  Is that delusional?  Sure.  But after all whats the difference between porting to x86 for almost no money vs. to just another PPC board for almost no money?

Dude, if AOS 4 was ported to IA32/AMD64 and they offered three models: a) budget b) midrange c) fancy, every AOS 4 fan boy would buy one the next day. And they wouldn't have to support every thing under the sun, just the crap they stuff in their boxes and they could solve the security problem with a cheap ass usb dongle. There would be plenty of profit and they'd suck in users from the other camps not to mention old timers and folks into esoteric stuff. The problem is, they're incompetent and running on fumes.

They've run into some money and they're blowing it on a last hurrah to net perhaps 100 users for a new platform that uses a chip that's obsolete and out of production. I look forward to seeing that ship burn and sink to the bottom of the ocean.

[koaftder]

A few months ago Rogue said something nasty to someone and somebody moderated it, and that's not the first time it's happened. And by moderated I mean the whole text was just modified to just *moderated*, you're a mod over there, go dig through rogue's posting history, you'll see it. As a user, I have no good way to dig through posts other than going to google and typing in "site:amigaworld.net 'some string to search for'", hell, you've admitted on the forum that you look at people's IP addresses and look for matches on the moo, so you've got the capability to poke around. No point in denying things here.