Opinions on AmigaOS4 from OSNews

[Waccoon]

nadoom:  as it stands the amiga OS market is shrinking, there is no way im going to by a different platform eg ppc i just dont have the space or money, amiga could really have gone some where without people trying to extract as much capital out of it as they can, e.g. custom motherboards.

Custom and low-volume hardware is usually expensive and prone to design flaws.  People don't notice the flaws as much just because there's fewer people looking for problems.  Trying to extract as much cash from this kind of hardware is a popular idea (like, Kodak charging $5,000 for a "workstation" with dual 800Mhz CPUS, while single-CPU 2Ghz machines sell for $1,000), but it rarely works well.

uncharted:  Where's your orthogonal persistance when I need it?

The current buzzphrase is "transparrent persistence."  Funny how the software that does its job properly is always supposed to be invisible.  Doesn't make it easy to market, does it?  Well, unless you hype something that doesn't really do anything.  :-)

I can't imagine anyone getting upset over this review.  It doesn't say that much, even from a newbie's perspective.

From the article:  Another problem is that going the x86 route means you suddenly have a lot more competition: Linux, BSD, Zeta/Haiku, and maybe even SkyOS and Syllable. And last but not least, it would introduce the concept of piracy to Amiga OS4, depriving Hyperion of possible sales.

I find both points rediculous.  First, OS4 is going to compete against these OSes no matter what.  It's about the features of the OS, not the hardware on which it runs.  Apple is x86, now.  Oh noes!  Teh Mac is squashed by eevil M$?!

As for piracy, I think people should try using some of the software I used to use at work.  Most of the software required some low-level drivers that would only work with one specific kind of machine.  Getting that software to run on generic hardware was a real challenge.  Besides, there are plenty of Macs out there.  Why isn't a bootleg copy of OS4 already available for Macintosh?  Piracy isn't just an x86 problem, and EFI has all sorts of new DRM options.  Hell, how many generic PC motherboards out there use EFI?  That alone would be an effective lockout mechanism, at least for the time being.

[Waccoon]

itix:  True and false. Selling an OS product in x86 world is extremely difficult when it is saturated by good, efficient and free OS choices. You get compared to OS'es with better driver and hardware support.

Linux is free.  I don't use it.  Why?  Because I hate how it works.  Again, the OS is judged by its features.  The hardware only matters if it has special features, and AmigaOne doesn't have anything on even a budget x86 board.  Neither does PowerVixxen or whatevertheotherboardiscalled.

Bloodline:  Something I rather like is that Piracy is cited as a method that will "kill" AOS4... I really fail to understand how people using an OS kills it... since the sucess of an OS is defined by the number of users!!!!

I seem to recall a lot of people blame piracy for killing the original Amiga, as if Commodore's inability to properly update the chipset had nothing to do with it.

Fun fact:  I have originals for all my favorite Amiga games, but I have the cracked versions, anyway.  Why?  Copy protection on the Amiga has to be the most aggressive I've ever seen on any platform, to the point where A500 games didn't always run on an A500 (not to mention the fact that floppies sucked, so making copies was pretty much mandatory).  The horrible copy protection is what made the Amiga piracy scene so popular to begin with, in my opinion.  Copy protection shouldn't really be that aggressive, because these days it's only effective on people that are too lazy to do a few google searches.  :roll:

Look up "Starforce".  *shudder*  Oh yeah, let's all have low-level drivers installed as background services on our computers, and have a different one for each game.  Blue Screens of Death waiting to happen, and they'll run even when the game isn't!  Will that thwart piracy?  It'll probably just make both legal and illegal users mad, but take a guess as to which of those two groups will be hurt more.

wonea:  Port to a pc architecture, support ONLY mainstream quality components say Intel boards only, Radeon graphic cards, soundblaster, etc. I'd be very very happy with this.

I'd have no problem buying one of, say, three or four boards (rather than one chipset spanning several dozen boards).  I just won't pay $800 for it if it can't beat my current P4 setup, which is worth about $180.

Value is important to the whole world.  Why Amiga companies think this rule doesn't apply to them is beyond me, especially if they really want to go beyond the hobby market.  Even Apple could not sell computers this way, and you know how extrememly loyal Mac users are.  Hell, look how much Mac people complained after the x86 announcement.  There were hardly people setting fires to cars and throwing bottles on the streets.

Floid:   As much as x86 makes all sorts of sense financially (and perhaps even thermally, these days), I don't see it making a lot of sense technically, especially after the horrendous investment made to actually Do Neat Things on PowerPC.

What neat things?

Porting to different CPUs requires developers to look for a baseline of commonality, and develop abstraction layers as appropriate.  There's no need to hard-code for VMX (IBM's version of Altivenc).  I think Hyperion is being stubborn about this either to save themselves some work (ie, from actually doing it properly), or they just don't have enough experience outside the 68K and PPC communities to really know what they have to do.  This kind of development would be unacceptable in the "real" OS market, and will probably give Hyperions some major problems down the road.  I see this all the time when tryint to get UNIX Perl scripts to work on Windows.  Most of the time, the UNIX-specific features are completely unnecessary, but people use them anyway because they don't know better, and that makes it tough to get them working on Windows servers.  When I write scripts, they work perfectly on IIS or Apache, on either Windows or Linux, because I'm familiar with both types of servers.  In the long run, that makes things much, much easier for everyone, and reduces a lot of unexpected behavior.

Always keep your options open.  Hardware is a very unpredictable market.

JoannaK:  Opensourcing is out, cause Hyperion don't *own* rights to old 3.X code and they have publicly admitted using it while making 4.0 ... So they are forever stuck to whoever happens to own 3.X rights ..

That's the other major problem with AmigaOS.  Too many different companies claim ownership over certain parts.  If everything were to go bust tomorrow, it's hard to say how long it would take to unify all the properties, legally.

I do a lot of refactoring, and no matter what, there comes a time when you really need to start over from scratch.  If Hyperion has something in mind for OS5, let's hope they survive long enough to actually work on it.

[Waccoon]

maybe they current Amiga owners have it right with the Amiga Anywhere virtual machine philosophy!

The virtual machine philosophy is flawed.  It's more like having an OS on an OS, and as Java has shown, version control is a huge problem.  Virtual processing is a better way of thinking, but there's less opportunity to "lock in" the end-user.

Also, there's too much emphasis on making VP code work everywhere.  Some people just want to use special features of hardware.  Whether a program is universal, it isn't at all, or simply uses optimizations for a specific platform, should be entirely up to the programmer.  Forcing universal compatibility doesn't really work, especially on proprietary embedded devices where features differ considerably.  No wonder there's so many cheezy puzzle games for AA.

I was very interested in DE when it was announced, and bought the SDK, but it's obviously going nowhere at this point.  That's a real shame.