Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: ami_junki on October 08, 2008, 02:00:54 AM
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I was thinking recently, what would I do if I won say 100 million pounds, crazy amount I know ... but just if, what would I would do and I the first thing that came to mind was buy out Amiga and try to turn it around. But how would I do that, for me I would love to hire what`s left of the original team and get them to work with the new hardware developers, get them to work on a new machine and in the meantime release a new version of the A1200 with onboard PPC and graphics card called the A1400, sell this for around 99 pounds, then get the Mini Mig and brand them officially and sell them for around 40 quid as small devices like portable gaming or joysticks. Probably not the best option I guess but I really do wish there was something that I could do ... what would you guys do if you were in charge of Amiga?
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If I had the money to burn, I'd just open source what I could (not GPL, probably something less restrictive) and set it free. But it's really not about buying "Amiga"--most of the core IP is worthless, and what isn't worthless has been replicated fairly well by others.
It's really about taking the Amiga trademark and turning it into something users can be proud of. When you look at Amiga OS, MorphOS, AROS, and AmigaAnywhere, what you see is a standard API, implemented in the same way UNIX vendors implement POSIX standards or the Single UNIX Specification. Whether or not that API is really the best way to do things isn't what's important. What's important is allowing it to grow and prosper. It really can't do that in a small, disparate community relying on mostly closed standards.
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Unfortunately I doubt very many people would buy them .. amiga is hobbiest level remember .. you;d have to get as much hype as the iPod inspires to really re-launch it.
Mark
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Why not ? Hobbies inspire people.... People that build DeLoreans for example.
But Anyway, if I get that amount of money I would buy a huge house on the beach and retire... :-D
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I was thinking recently, what would I do if I won say 100 million pounds, crazy amount I know ... but just if, what would I would do and I the first thing that came to mind was buy out Amiga and try to turn it around.
That would imply a great reward for Amiga Inc that has badly managed Amiga IP all these years. Instead I would use that money to fund AROS, MOS, DiscreetFX, hardware developers like Acube and CloneA, and some how support Hyperion and it's developers. I would wait for Amiga Inc to come to me for a amicable deal or else leave them wither to dust.
Plaz
(not feeling charitable today)
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Interesting take; support those that are actually doing something. I like that!
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Hehe suffice to say, if I did buy out Amiga Inc I would fire all the people, for me I would want to re-create that community feeling again that the original Amiga developers had, so by creating a new powerful Amiga company which would be open and try to actually create new Amiga hardware and market. I was thinking of what made the Amiga so great other than the hardware and it was the passion that the designers had to make something wonderful, if we could kick out McBill and his cronies and build a new Amiga company with the original name, bring in the original designers as consultants and have all the Amiga hardware designers work together ... unity and a level of conformity to an Amiga standard. I think that if this would happen the Amiga computer could really kick off, people now are switching more over to Apple than before but what if there was a real alternative, a fully functioning Amiga computer that was on the same level at "least" as the PC and Mac ...
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reality check. Most original amiga developers are at their late careers now, if still working in the industry at all. besides, you can never fight off competition from x86 & apple whatever you do. it would be a dead investment.
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I think with proper management and advertising and a good product the Amiga could come back, you only limit yourself by setting limits. I am not saying that Amiga could be number one, or number two but there is a market place still - but to be honest people are too jaded and there is no proper marketing. Let me put it to you this way, if Amiga was back, say properly back with money, new hardware that was better than the PC or Mac, there was enough production, it was competitively priced, and there was proper advertising, there was new management no more of the McBill crew - would you buy a new Amiga? The thing is that if there was an Amiga that ran the latest Amiga OS, had hardware that was powerful, could run original Amiga apps, was MS Office compatible and was cheap, put them next to a PC and people would start buying them. Not quickly at first of course. Thing is it is become to easy to say, oh this won`t work because we can`t compete with this and that, well to be honest I think that is bollocks - things are tough yes, but so what. If the original Amiga engineers had the same attitudes as people today there would have been no Amiga and to be honest they faced the same problems that people would face today. There were only PC and Mac, they had to create a new market, same as today, but people are lazy and it is the great social condition of being negative and stalling true development. I think the people out there doing the Mini Mig and Natami are brilliant, they not doing it because it will sell well or not but because they have a passion for doing something they think is right, same with all the software developers out there too.
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The things that made the original Amiga innovative are now ubiquitous. To move forward, the "Amiga" would have to make strides in parallelization and related areas. A complete paradigm shift is unlikely as users and the industry are too invested in the computing memes of our time--windowed GUIs, the mouse, peer-to-peer networking (not file sharing--peer-to-peer protocols like TCP/IP), etc. Much of what is innovative today revolves around new uses for existing technology, not innovations in the technology itself.
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Unfortunately I think that Trev and the other "realists" are correct.
The Amiga at its time was a true quantum leap of sorts, both technologically and affordability wise. You could NOT get a computer that was as advanced as the Amiga and for that price back then. In other for the Amiga (or "another Amiga") to succeed or be reborn again, today, you'd need the same ingredients:
* Truly trend-breaking hardware advances (extreme parallelization with hardware enforced problem decomposition? thread-level speculative execution in hardware? self-modifying hardware? who knows?).
* Truly trend-breaking software advances (something beyond the GUI paradigm? is multi-touch it? not sure! or perhaps a fundamental difference in OS architecture and programming language paradigms - forget Object Oriented Programming, what's better or NeXT?).
* Truly competitive price model (when you can get $500 PCs in the 3Ghz range, your "new Amiga" better be at that range or near that - and don't forget the broken world economies due to all the greedy, corrupt, cheating bankers and financial institutions).
* Some good style and design. Computers are so ubiquitous today that almost all can surf on the internets and all are 3Ghz or something like that. People are thus now choosing what is also cool looking, or that feels good or that pampers them with backlit keyboards, lighter weight, longer battery life, built-in cameras, etc. (Perhaps that's why you're seeing Macs appearing everywhere lately. Apple gets it.)
As to the original question:
I'd probably invest in space travel. I'd love to walk on another planet before I perish from this one! (of course I'd be carrying an Amiga with me so I can send messages back to you guys via IRC or something :-D)
OK, OK, the original question was rephared, more specifically what one would do if one would be running the show with a new Amiga company. Basically I'd hire the most passionate, obsessive, creative engineers and have the whole show run by a super-passionate tight-handed French business guy (to make sure spending doesn't get out of hand as in the original Commodore, and to make sure there's some culture in the product and the company) who would have to be, without a doubt, a true visionary and a true leader, else it'd all be pointless. OK, I don't know what I would really do :-)
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yup, i hear what you're saying, and 100 million would by a house for me, my parents, my girlfriends parents, and my good friends.
then i'd have enough left over to maybe play about with investments and stuff. i don't think 100mil would get you anywhere near a new machine to market,so i'd look at other ventures. however, if i did have the capital behind me...
not sure how far it would go with development of a new machine. but i'd buy out A.inc or whoever they are these days, sack the crap out of the management, cancel their pension funds/401ks or whatever and have them investigated for fraud, buy out hyperion and give those guys a massive "thank you" bonus and "stay pay" to stay on and dev some more. merging both companies should iron out any legal disputes, or have hyperion in a offical consultancy capacity to Amiga. help out red/vesalia/softwarehut/amigakit to become regional distributers if they want,
hire the talent we have on the amiga forums
if you were really flush with cash, buyout Nvidia - put it under some decent management, buyout AMD/ATI, ie, so you have a controlling share of GPU development as ATI did the xbox360, Wii, Gamecube, Nvidia did the Xbox, and PS3. maybe munch into Motorola as i don't think they're doing to complain much these days.
then you'll have a fairly solid foundation to generate funky hardware. but obviously keep churning out some parts that fit the current market in order to fund your R&D.
the sooner the world ditches x86 and moves on, the better. its about time for a revolution rather than an evolution. and when you bring something to market, it has to be a top to bottom range.
PDA/(i)Phone alike mobile device so you can get your contacts/emails, run some basic apps, stream IPTV/music from your media centre machine, maybe even RDP into your home/office machine.
CDTV/CD32 alike set-top box home theater / media centre machine with multiple cable/sat/digital terrestrial tuners, and IPTV streaming to other "media extenders".
A500/A1200 alike for gamers and learner coders.
A3000 alike funky serious machine that doesn't look out of place in the home / homeoffice
A2000/A4000 alike heavey weight machines for businesses and enthusiasts. not being funny, but spreadsheets sell machines. we've just put in an order for another floor of machines. probably about 300, with minimum 4 screens each. on an average joe level, people want the same as they have at work, at home.
my idea would be to ween the world off backwards x86. but i heard somewhere intel puts in something like $2billion a year on development. so $100million may just about cover your marketing budget... :roll:
so we need a few of us to win the euro millions, the UK lottery after a few roll overs, and there has to be a lottery in the US?
then we all join up as a business entity and do this thing! :lol:
--edit--
i was thinking about this... in the grand scheme of things, $100mil isn't that much these days.
house for me, my parents, my girlfriends parents, holiday home for the same three, say a million$ a time. thats 6mil.
flat/town house in the city for somewhere to crash after a heavy night out, another mil - or 2 for river front property. nice cars, holiday... thats $10mil gone in the first week.
then i'd buy houses for my close friends so they never have to have the milstone of a mortgage around their necks. at current prices, that'll prolly be another 10mil$.
then i have to maintain the lifestyle to which i am to become accustomed for the rest of my life. god knows how much that'll cost. start my own business, do things i really enjoy, be a "silent investor" in hyperion :-D and that's before i've even thought about buying up all the scraps of amiga and putting it all together...
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lol come to think of it, yeah it is not that much money nowadays really, sounds like a nice plan though. I wish I had been old enough to have worked in the old Commodore days, I used to live quite close to the West Chester headquarters, I remember going past there and thinking ... whoo my new A500 will be coming out there soon! It`s funny though that even after all this time, coming back to Workbench and doing work is still so much more rewarding experience, to tell the truth I still write all my documents in Final Writer, still find it the best and doing graphics in Brilliance still has that special quality. But I digress ... sounds like a top plan, everyone win the lottery and get the Amiga going again :-) :idea:
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^5 :-)
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If I had the money, like for example Richard Branson, I would buy all companies, assets and rights related to the Amiga. I would kick out everyone and start all over with innovative people like Haynie. I would make Haynie CEO by the way.
Next Amiga on the market: The A5000.
PPC powered @3GHz
4Gb RAM
onboard 2.5" HDD 500Gb
AAA-like chipset featuring Dale(video),Glenn(audio),Dave(DMA chip).
VideoMem would be 1Gb
PCMCIA-port
SDRAM/MMC/CF ports
Need more? The A5000T.
Extra:
5x PCI-bus for more hardware
3x ZORRO IV, backward compatible with all others ZORRO ports.
Oh well, one can have dreams...
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mate that is exactly what I was thinking, what a beautiful dream ... if only ... :-(
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darule wrote:
...Dale(video),Glenn(audio),Dave(DMA chip).
Can't we keep using ladies names ??? :-P
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@da9000
Decomposition. Yes. Although I'd move that into software, probably the compiler. Now it's separate from the hardware, and the compiled code can scale appropriately depending on the target.
Everyone take note: without a major engineering breakthrough, processors are not going to get faster than they are today. It's all about rethinking how we solve problems.
@darule
That sounds like a great machine for continuing the classic legacy (although I'd ditch PCI and use PCIe and probably drop Zorro altogether); however, it's not going to move things forward.
Here's an excellent example of innovation using existing technology:
1. Ageia releases the PhysX SDK and companion hardware for accelerating physics calculations in games and other software.
2. nVidia buys Ageia, ports the PhysX middleware to its existing GPUs, and ends up with a solution that runs PhysX software an order of magnitude faster than the original companion hardware.
Here's my point: you don't need special purpose hardware. You just need a configuration flexible enough to allow your developers to make the best use of existing hardware. (Yes, "GPUs" are now general purpose processors.) That's what makes Cell, Tesla, and other low-cost, high-performance processor subsystems so attractive.
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the sooner the world ditches x86 and moves on, the better. its about time for a revolution rather than an evolution. and when you bring something to market, it has to be a top to bottom range.
Oh my god! This foolish argument another time! You're late, my friend: the world has already ditched x86 and is moving to x64 and, anyway, the x86 has progressively improved over the years adding instructions, multiple cores, 64 bit computation and now it's the most powerful and costless architecture. No need to use something else for our everyday computing.
I'd like PPC advocates to bring to this discussion any REAL argument, because goin' on hating x86 just for the spirit of hating it is really really stupid.
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paolone wrote:
I'd like PPC advocates to bring to this discussion any REAL argument, because goin' on hating x86 just for the spirit of hating it is really really stupid.
I don't like CISC because I think it is an inefficient CPU. More instructions equals more transistors equals more heat etc. The RISC always used to be faster, at the same frequency, and still is to my knowledge.
I like to think that the CISC processor is where it today because Microsoft is using that architecture.
Which brings me to hell called Windows. An operating system which requires insane amounts of RAM, CPU and clock speeds just to be....slow.
I work with Windows every day, because I have to, not because I really really like it. This is not meant as a rant against Microsoft, I just don't find the operating system efficient at all.
Hm, I got carried away....
Anyway, I don't believe adding more computing power is the way to get a fast operating system. I still firmly believe in a ROM-based operating system. But hey, perhaps I should be beamed back to the 90s. :-D
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darule wrote:
I don't like CISC because I think it is an inefficient CPU. More instructions equals more transistors equals more heat etc. The RISC always used to be faster, at the same frequency, and still is to my knowledge.
I like to think that the CISC processor is where it today because Microsoft is using that architecture.
Which brings me to hell called Windows. An operating system which requires insane amounts of RAM, CPU and clock speeds just to be....slow.
I work with Windows every day, because I have to, not because I really really like it. This is not meant as a rant against Microsoft, I just don't find the operating system efficient at all.
Hm, I got carried away....
Anyway, I don't believe adding more computing power is the way to get a fast operating system. I still firmly believe in a ROM-based operating system. But hey, perhaps I should be beamed back to the 90s. :-D
Wow .. I'm amazed that in this day and age of Wikipedia and Google people still don't know very much about computer architecture.
Though I will agree with your statement about adding more cpu power is not the way to go ... elegant code is the way to performance, rather than the just compile it approach people have these days :-)
regards
Mark
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Well, I wasn't talking all bull poopoo:
:-D
RISC Vs. CISC
The argument over which concept is better has been repeated over the past few years. Macintosh owners have elevated the argument to a pseudo religious level in support of their RISC-based God (the PowerPC sits next to the Steve Jobs statue on every Mac altar). Both positions have been blurred by the argument that we have entered a Post-RISC stage.
RISC: For and Against
RISC supporters argue that it the way of the future, producing faster and cheaper processors - an Apple Mac G3 offers a significant performance advantage over its Intel equivalent. Instructions are executed over 4x faster providing a significant performance boost! However, RISC chips require more lines of code to produce the same results and are increasingly complex. This will increase the size of the application and the amount of overhead required. RISC developers have also failed to remain in competition with CISC alternatives. The Macintosh market has been damaged by several problems that have affected the availability of 500MHz+ PowerPC chips. In contrast, the PC compatible market has stormed ahead and has broken the 1GHz barrier. Despite the speed advantages of the RISC processor, it cannot compete with a CISC CPU that boasts twice the number of clock cycles.
CISC: For and Against
As discussed above, CISC microprocessors are more expensive to make than their RISC cousins. However, the average Macintosh is more expensive than the WIntel PC. This is caused by one factor that the RISC manufacturers have no influence over - market factors. In particular, the WIntel market has become the definition of personal computing, creating a demand from people who have not used a computer previous. The x86 market has been opened by the development of several competing processors, from the likes of AMD, Cyrix, and Intel. This has continually reduced the price of a CPU of many months. In contrast, the PowerPC Macintosh market is dictated by Apple. This reduces the cost of x86 - based microprocessors, while the PowerPC market remains stagnant.
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well i think if just if we had a version of Amiga os for the ps3 then that would be a pretty sweet amiga :)
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@darule
Microsoft wouldn't be the only developer that preferred CISC to RISC. Regardless, today's RISC processors are more like CISC processors than they are like the first generation RISC processors--lots of high level instructions that could have been implemented by the software developer as a series of low-level instructions. But really, that sums up any modern processor, doesn't it? Instructions are microcode that translate into primitives implemented in hardware. It keeps the hardware smaller, regardless of the core architecture.
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NVidia has a market cap of 4.1 billion US Dollars, it spends hundreds of millions of US Dollars in research, what's a paltry 100 million quid gonna do? Best to built a house on the beach in tropical north queensland, actually the Sunshine Coast would be ok. Buy the Amiga name and start a Portuguese/Spanish dating service, no I mean give it to the community, give out the OS source and leave it to the community to develop, the Amiga is a hobby computer, let it's future be in the hands of the hobbyists.
(http://i106.photobucket.com/albums/m252/RiverIsMyGoddess/icons/smiley_poledancer.gif)
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persia wrote: Buy the Amiga name and start a Portuguese/Spanish dating service, no I mean give it to the community, give out the OS source and leave it to the community to develop, the Amiga is a hobby computer, let it's future be in the hands of the hobbyists.
(http://i106.photobucket.com/albums/m252/RiverIsMyGoddess/icons/smiley_poledancer.gif)
Hehe "Hablamos Español", but making it open source would be a great idea.
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Oh my god! This foolish argument another time! You're late, my friend: the world has already ditched x86 and is moving to x64 and, anyway, the x86 has progressively improved over the years adding instructions, multiple cores, 64 bit computation and now it's the most powerful and costless architecture. No need to use something else for our everyday computing.
no, look, you've missed my point. my point is to start from fresh. "given the money to do what ever you liked, what would you do?"
this isn't an argument about risc vs cisc, or x86 vs ppc vs mips vs sparc. this is about having the money and giving Amiga a fresh start. which i think i covered in my last post.
i am not impressed however, by persons who tell me i am stupid and use that as the founding basis for their ideas as to why i am stupid, and in doing so display a total lack of understanding of either the intention of my post, or the topic thread.
to quote the famous philosipher 'Cartmanious',:-
"jesus f*cking christ dude."
:lol:
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I don't like CISC because I think it is an inefficient CPU. More instructions equals more transistors equals more heat etc. The RISC always used to be faster, at the same frequency, and still is to my knowledge.
Darule, you statements about RISC and CISC are incredibly outdated. Even the words you later reported are painflully old (the Mac "ruling the RISC market"? this used to happen many years ago). Modern x86 processors are mixed CISC/RISC architectures, and they are frankly more powerful and efficient than PowerPC processors still alive are.
Anyway, Motorola 68K were CISC microprocessors and this helped a lot in developing a tiny operating system and simple applications. RISC is the absolute negation of all this, and the necessity to write longer routines to get the same results obviosuly doesn't help so much: it's better having less transistors continuously working and consuming power, or more transtistors which can be but down to a consume-less Cn state when they aren't needed?
I think all this love for RISC architectures is the natural son of the hate for Microsoft and Intel.
Anyway, if I had so much money to spend (but there would need more to accomplish the mission) I would buy all Amiga IPs, open source anything related to AmigaOS 3.1 and move to a new platform and operating system, trying to keep all the look'n'feel of AmigaOS, but focusing on stream multiprocessing and use of GPUs general purpose features. My favourite platform for now would be a X64 mainboard coupled with a RV770 GPU from AMD. With a total cost of no more than € 249, we would get a powerful and energy-saving computer with cpu, GPU, northbridge, southbridge, audio and ethernet link.
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paolone wrote:
Darule, you statements about RISC and CISC are incredibly outdated.
I feel outdated myself after that statement. :lol:
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:lol: :headwall: :lol:
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