OS4 on the pegasos

[Waccoon]

What about Future games releases and compatibility with a PC? You see by nature I'm a Pc user but like a lot of other people I'm getting fed up with the sluggishness of the os even with a high power machine...

If you want compatibility, you definately don't want either OS4 or MorphOS.  You'll basicly have to start from scratch and search high and low for software.  The money you'll eventually pump into it won't be worth it, either.  Just about anything works with Windows2000 these days, and it's smaller than XP.  I won't give up my Win2K system for anything, though I like to experiment with other OSes like Linux and BeOS using an older PC.

I think it's a myth that an efficient OS can run better on lower spec hardware.  Even BeOS runs like a slug on my Celeron 400 with the nVidia TNT2 Ultra card.  The OS really matters for memory management.  The development libraries for Windows aren't too bad for efficiency -- it's the junk running in the background that sucks, and Win2K lacks much of the trash that comes with XP.  Besides, memory is more expensive for the PPC.  It matters little to me that Windows idles on 100+MB or memory, when 512MB is easy to afford, depending on what speed you want.

My Win2K system boots in 20 seconds flat with $400 worth of motherboard, CPU, and memory, plus a good ATA100 hard drive which will run you about $80-$100.  Prebuilt PCs are a different issue entirely, but then, you'll have to build an AmigaOne or Pegasos machine yourself, or ask a dealer to make one for you.

I'm no fan of nVidia - they make overhyped, hot, noisy cards that are strictly only for heavy gamers. I wouldn't get one.

Boy, did they go downhill after the GeForce4.  My dad can't get a stable system with his unless he uses drivers a year old, and his 4200 is still too damn hot.  My brother-in-law (and programming guru) got the "budget" FX without the fan, and he eventually had to mount an oscillating office fan blowing into his open case to keep the machine stable.  I think he put his old S3 Virge card back in, and you have to be pretty desperate to do that.  ;-)

That's the trouble with PeeCee's these days. They got great softwares but you need to compensate your hardware to meet its max specs... And on(x10)...

Yeah, right.  As if you're lacking in choices!  If one product has specs too high for you, there are about a million others.

Market demand determines specs, so quit blaming the hardware companies and Microsoft.

(I'm aware that OS4 claims to have some memory protection but I doubt very, very much if this is worth the overhead it will cause. AmigaOS just wasn't designed for memory protection, period. )

Refresh my memory.  I thought Hyperion is going with a sandbox approach to memory protection in OS4.  Considering how old most apps are, and new apps will be natively compiled, won't the overhead be a non-issue?

[Waccoon]

Cymric:  I've read on various sites that one of the reasons a machine might be sluggish is a sh*tload of spyware and other nasty things infecting your computer

What bugs me is that people seriously think this is a Windows-only problem.  Even Linux distroes come loaded with bloat these days if you don't look around.

What matters to me is how easy it is to get rid of the junk, and how many places spamware can hide.  Windows is infamous for this, but many other OSes aren't much better.  Download AppPaths and you can snuff out 95% of spamware from the registry.  It's not as bad as people think.

I used to be a sysadmin for a Mac network, and believe me, there's nothing like staring down 250+ system extentions -- most with cryptic names -- and having to eliminate the one that's causing the machine to crash every 10 minutes (and it'll likely be a system extention you can't remove, anyway).

Oh yeah, THAT was a BLAST -- especially when the Mac people could only sit around and tease Wintel people all day.

Personally I think they sell snake oil (who on Earth needs a 64-bit CPU in a system, and why would you need personalised benchmarking specs for your machine...?)

Never trust anything in the ultra-performance market.  64-bit is meaningless at the moment, but so long as it's faster than 32-bit and price competitive, I don't care.

Game companies have been touting bits for years.  It's all bunk.

Given the facts that very few people run these special applications at their own home, that everyday games are not amongst those, and that said systems are offered to game fanatics, I can only conclude one thing: you're being ripped off. It is just show.

Athlon64 is a good performer and cost comparible to the 32-bit P4.  Where's the ripoff?

Go to nVidia and ask for hardware documentation and you'll be politely told to f*ck off.

Well, not unless you have money.  Apple got the Geforce3 pretty quick with their own drivers, until ATI started stepping on nVidia's toes, again.

Welcome to the world of open x86 hardware.

Right.  We all know Macs use all their own proprietary standards these days.  Nobody ever heard of PCI, USB, and Ethernet on a Mac!  ;-)

Really, a Mac is just a PC with a different CPU... that costs more.

I don't believe that for a second. A1 was designed (and later replaced by TeronCX) for one purpose, and one purpose only - to run OS4. No real effort has been made to get it to run anything else, except by Mai.

I thought the Teron was made to be a dev board for the PPC, so people could more easily make embedded software for other boards build on the Artica chipset.  It's not really designed to compete in any traditional market.

Most hardware is overhyped and/or bad. I'm fed up off all these sh1tty PC motherboard with huge design flaws being sold off as packaged PCs, for instance.

Serious question: what's the worst thing about PC quality?  Stability, heat, reliabilty, technical documents...  ?

The two different Operating systems are, for all intents and purposes, identical -- being that they both emulate the old real classic Amiga OS. Neither OS is "Amiga", so why get hung up on a name brand?

Nice.  :-)

So? You said there was no decent support for nVidia cards, and no 3D drivers. Nothing about them having to be open source.

Seriously, how many drivers are open source that aren't hacked up for 10-year-old cards nobody uses anymore?  Everyone I know with a Linux box runs the OS on some tinny computer with a Celeron and a PCI card with no 3D support -- cause all they do is use it as an Apache/scripting server.

The gfx card race is really cut-throat and neither ATI or nVidia are willing to spill the beans.

Do S3 and Matrox throw around their documentation?

The suggestion that one company is evil and closed while the other is open and helpful is laughable.

I'm always suspicious of open source.  I've had more than a handful of these applications that are just as buggy and crash prone as the rest (FireFox and PHP BBSes come to mind), and unlike commercial apps, their interfaces suck to boot.  No matter how many people "contribute" to a project, the maintainers pull all the strings.

Quality depends more on commitment than coding style.

A "tweak" to one person is a "workaround" to another one. As long as special mofications are needed, of any sort, that's a workaround to me. Scale is irrelevant.

For anything to be portable, all hardware has to have a reference of commonality (is that a real word?)

Sure, but they're being sold at a fifth of the price of a Pegasos board, or even less, and you don't have to buy them. You can choose another model, and yet get exactly the same compatibility with the rest of your system. Conversely, the alternative to a Pegasos board is...
...another Pegasos board. Not exactly a breadth of choice, then.

So much for licensing.  I have no trouble being required to buy a specific x86 board with a ROM modification, so long as I can be assured the likeliness of a decent replacement in the future.  There's a LOT more x86 chipset choices than PowerPC choices.  Hell, what's to say they can't supply two motherboards built by two manufacturers with completely different specs, but based on the same chipset?

Meanwhile, Java programmers are laughing their butts off over all this hardware debate.

Amiga OS4 is based on Amiga OS source code, it is the natural evolution of AmigaOS on the PPC. Why it shouldn't be Amiga?

My Oekaki BBS is based on cleaned-up OekakiPoteto source code, but I've changed it so much you'd never recognize it.  Design is more important than raw code, and in that respect, AmigaOS4 and MorphOS seem close enough to me.

Either machine may sell well to the Linux community, and that is the niche they need to be marketing to. The remaining Amiga market however will never put food on the table for anything but a few dedicated hobby developers.

Funny how people who hate Windows the most always end up killing themselves.  Even BeOS wasn't terribly revolutionary once you clip through the hype.  I'm surprised they even lasted for 10 years at all.

Good if you define "good" as being "incompatible and buggy as hell", that is. The complaints of Linux users about these drivers are constant. Change kernel, you have to wait for update. Choose any CPU but x86, too bad. This goes totally against the Linux mindset.

User-mode recompiling is easy enough, but things get really ugly in kernel mode.  I don't like microkernels that much, but Linux has really overgrown itself and could use a really good driver framework.  But, you know how UNIX people feel about low-level interfaces...

And your implying that if one doesn't use these big companies for a computing solution then the result must be crap by default is equally laughable. You are trapped in this world where only the cutting edge is any good, which is really not better than some who believe anything x86 is inherently evil just by existing

Everything in the computer industry is like that.  I was trying to fix the transmission of data from a Java applet to a BBS programmed in PHP, and was horrified to see that the BBS has to import the data with $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA and do lots of handiwork with hex matches!  I thought HTTP headers were supposed to format all the POST data!  Well, it *IS*, but the applet programmers were too damn lazy to do it right.  So, any change to the applet, and all the BBSes that use that applet will have to be completely reprogrammed or else they stop working.

When will people wise up?!

YES! It was! Hardware designs for the A1 were being processed years before a single line of code were being written for OS4. How have you missed that?

Well, they were all canceled, and then they went with an off-the-shelf mobo by Mia Logic.  Expensive, but infinately better and cheaper than the original AmigaOne would've been... if they had even gotten it to work.

"tweak" to one person is a "workaround" to another one.

Actually, I don't see the difference between those two, either.

...this is beginning to sound like the infamous KDE/Gnome flame war. Gnome is a huge waste of time, manpower, programming effort and disk space, just to avoid one slightly restrictive (read: non-GPL) license. And in the end the problem ceased to exist thanks to Trolltech's change of mind.

Tried both.  *I* think they both suck.  I don't know why anyone wants to use the same "pick-n-place" GUI tools when we could be using markup, instead.

"incompatible and buggy as hell" is sheer FUD in my experience. I haven't found anything it caused crashes with, and I've always been able to install the drivers on my system.

Well, I never was able to get my GeForce3 to work on Linux using any driver made for the GeForce3.  It kept dumping me to a desktop with white lines going across the screen and an invisible mouse cursor.  That's when I went to the TNT2.

Anyway, anything to do with open source is totally against the Amiga mindset, so what's your point?

God, I miss the Public Domain scene.  Forget games and mutimedia... PD was *THE* thing that seperated Amiga from the stuffy, self-congratulatory PCs and Macs.

"Almost obsolete" may still have plenty of merit, but I wouldn't advise anyone to pay more for it than they would have to for "cutting edge". Get it?

It's all about value.  I don't mind proprietary hardware, but I don't want to pay $800 for a machine that performs like a PC I can build for $150 today.

...making an emulator so the old apps work

Good point.  Any app worth its salt is going to be recompiled natively to the new hardware, and it it can't be, it's because the company is out of business and nobody cares enough to make a BETTER app.  So, what's so bad about emulation?  You wouldn't buy a new PC to run Windows3.1, would you?  I have fond memories of my old DOS games, but I didn't buy a P4 to run Red Baron and Whiplash.

Some people argued that backwards compatibility in the PlayStation2 would hurt new game sales, because people could play their old PlayStation games all day.  Yeah, right.  I'm sure anyone would pay $300 for a machine to play old games.  PSOne compatibility was one of the few things about the PS2 I really, really liked both from a marketing standpoint, as well as practical.  People only buy new games, but the psychological impact of being able to run old software is still a selling point.  Now, it looks like backwards compatibility will be a normal expectation for any game console, and rightfully so.

[Waccoon]

It is a Windows-only problem, as spyware is specifically designed to be obnoxious, insidious, hard to remove, and to not do anything useful except pointing your browser at vague sites and displaying advertisements you don't care one iota about. Or worse.

Uh, so just HOW does all that prove it's a Windows-only problem?

And believe me, there have been examples of malicious code which are exceedingly clever at hiding themselves, going as far as removing themselves off of the main task lists, so the process doesn't show up anywhere but still runs in the background

If so, I've never seen such stuff.  I know you can hide stuff from the Task Manager, but you can't hide from the Process List.  Tasks are not the same as Processes, which is a very common misconception about the Windows process model.  If Ctrl-Alt-Del is your way of looking for spyware, no wonder you can't find anything.

I want everything removed.

Then don't install anything.  If someone really wants to take over your computer, and you let their software run on your computer, they can.

The only solution is a total quarantine security system, but no OS offers that, as far as I know.  Java comes pretty close, but it has had many famous bugs that allow apps to read the hard drive, and Java is an application, not an OS process.

Or, even better, not have to go through the trouble of running these programs twice a week to see what got in this time

In my experience, nothing gets on the computer uless you let it on.  Spyware killers only identify software on your computer, they don't prevent it from getting installed.  I don't understand where the Internet Explorer paranoia comes from, because I've never had a virus get on my machine via Explorer.

The only time I had a problem with software I didn't want was years ago with IE 5.0, when Comet Cursor installed on my system without me knowing.  Seeing how that was the only app ever to do that since I got online in '96, I consider that to be a security compromize rather than a regular, valid programming construct permitted by the OS.

And don't start complaining about security holes.  All computers have them.  I found out a way to get pop-ups to work in FireFox, and there's ways to get around Opera's pop-up blocker, so a site can be given permission to use pop-ups without you approving them.  There's probably a way to read the HD in the Linux version of FireFox, given how damn buggy that browser is.

I come from the camp that believe all computers suck.  Yes, Windows sucks, but I don't really think other "real" OSes are any better.

Check out this link for some hairy stories

Either my Apache server prevents me from viewing that site, or the site is dead.  But, I've heard plenty of horror stories, and as someone who regularly fixes other peoples' computers, I've come to the conclusion that people are morons and allow melicious software on their machines willingly.  I've heard similar stories from people using other OSes, including Amigas.

You are confusing easy-to-remove, not-designed-to-hide bloat of applications with truly sneaky spyware

If spyware gets on a Linux system, how many files do you have to check to trace all executables that run when the system is started?  How do you tell if a process "CCStart" is malicious or not?  What if the app hides itself by patching another executable?  Do you think any "real" OS is immune to stuff like this?  What about the fact that you have to log into root to install some kinds of software?  Spyware can't patch system files, then?

UNIX is famous for lousy security.  If you don't believe that, read some decent books on UN*X architecture.  This is most definately not a Windows-only problem.

[Waccoon]

I've read through your reply, and I think that you are still not clear on what exactly I mean with spyware. Spyware to me are malignant browser extensions which take advantage of bugs in the browser to make sure you visit sites or see advertisements you normally would avoid. In addition, some spyware might track what you are doing in order to establish a user profile.

I'm quite familiar with what you mean.  My point is that if the browser is to blame, don't rap on the OS.  Use another browser and you'll be better off.  If Linux were to run IE, you'd have the same problems.  Also, UNIX security stops at the user-level, so if something gets into your browser (through a plugin, or an e-mail script), it may not be able to touch the system, but it has full authority to wipe out your whole user account.  In my opintion, that's not better security than Windows, because an OS can always be re-installed.  Your only hope to restore user files is to make a backup (how many Linux people actually make backups, BTW, or do they feel invincible behind the UNIX wall?)

The point I'm really trying to make here is that all operating systems I know of rely on applications to handle security on their own.  The OS really doesn't do anything but cover its OWN behind.  Rather than hailing UNIX and slamming Windows, it may be more procuctive to fix the real problem: applications shouldn't be able to modify any file in your account at will.  I'd really like to attach my download manager to a particular download folder, and tell the browser to stay within its containing folder.  Of course, current OS and browser architecture doesn't allow that.  Applications have their files sprawled out all over the place.  I still see windows applications that write their config files directly into "C:/", and tons of INI files into the System folder.  When will they ever learn?  What if Microsoft cracked down on this behavior and locked out the System folder to ANY write requests?  Do you know exactly how many apps would die overnight?  Linux doesn't allow you to write to the system folder, but it has plenty of its own problems, such as, any app can read the config file of any other app.  How will that prevent a spyware app from reading sensitive information and broadcasting it to a collection server?  What if the app is smart enough to keep quiet if you have a firewall, and attack the next time you log in as root?

Over and over again, I see people praise an OS because it's better than Windows.  If you're better than the worst, that's hardly a valid acclaim.  Linux and UNIX have *LOTS* of security problems, and the only reason why things don't go wrong more often is because those people tend to be more tech savvy.  Put an ordinary person behind the wheel, and see how easy it is to reduce it to rubble.  Seeing how a majority of people are not computer experts, this should be a very big concern if people want to bring Linux to the desktop market.  Personally, I don't think Linux will ever be a desktop OS unless someone builds a whole new desktop running on a modified Linux kernel.

That's what I was really hoping OS4 would be:  a Linux system with a brand new Workbench, not this proprietary, native PPC, bare-platform crap.

Tightening security and improving compatibility doesn't start with the applications or the kernel.  It's the desktop.  At the OS level, Windows and UNIX/Linux really don't look all that different to hackers and spyware.  You have to do a lot to harden a raw UN*X machine.

Spybot Search and Destroy + CWShredder + AdAware6 = no more hijacking.

Funny, I don't use those and I still have no problems.  I think all this spyware crap is due to ActiveX, which I have disabled on my machine (it's only good for Flash, anyway).

ActiveX is basicly an IE plug-in handler that runs code right off the Internet, and was used extensively before Java and .NET became more commonplace.  ActiveX is probably the worst idea ever -- worse than the system registry.

Either disable it right away, or use a non-MS browser.  With ActiveX disabled, I've never seen a system get infected with trash when just using IE and Outlook.

Slapping two words together and feeding them to Google's search engine does not mean that the pages turned up have relevant information on them.

No problem, here!  Move along citizens!

Sure, we can't guarentee accurate information in the midst of the information age, but vulnerability denial is a serious issue.  Sorry, there is *NO* such thing as a fully secured computer.  I'm quite familiar with PHP and Perl right now, and it absolutely shocks me how easy it is to exploit security holes in any kind of script.  No wonder so many ISPs don't like it when you add scripting to your websites.

Some people are stupid, and/or don't realise the danger that the web browser is to system security.

More naiive than stupid.  People come to me all the time with broken computers, and when I point out security holes to them, the are very surprised any software developer would be so stupid as to offer feature X, option Y, etc.

Stop blaming users.  Hell, today's computers have enough storage space to hold millions of pages of documentation, but many developers can't even be bothered to spell-check their own instructions!  I can't tell you how many times I've lost data due to a gramatical error.  "Far Cry", for example, has a button that says "Load Save Game" (note capitalization.)  I thought it was a unified button that would take me to an interface that would let me load OR save the game.  I found out later that Far Cry doesn't let you save games at all.  What it should have said was, "Load saved game".

My dad rolled his eyes and told me I was thinking too deep about a stupid button.  The problem is, this time it resulted in me loading a game I didn't want to load.  Next time, it may trash my documents folder.