Layers.library V45 on the aminet

[psxphill]

What is this?

TomasRitcher= good (have the aeon ok), cosmos (or others)= bad (they are crackers using illegal hackery)?

cosmos went from not reporting bugs and instead releasing hacks for software that Thomas is maintaining, to hacking software that has already been fixed.
 
 It's obvious what is going on and the motives behind it.

[psxphill]

Luckily there is Cosmos

At one time I would have agreed, recently he's trashed his own reputation in a dick waving contest.

[psxphill]

+1 We may have had a chance, with things like Amithlon, when they first came out, but now none of the camps have what is needed for any of them to become commercially viable, beyond a hobbyist machine.

Commercial viability disappeared in the early 90's.
 AOS4 and MorphOS will never be more than a crowd funded hobby.

[psxphill]

Predictable ? Well some did not agree with this predictions.

PowerPC back in 1998 was doing about the same in the benchmarks as the Intel chips.

It was predictable because PowerPC was mostly able to compete with x86.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/1998/10/01/microsoft_killed_the_powerpc/

Things have changed now and Microsoft and Intel aren't so close these days. A dual Arm/X86 chip would be more likely to get support.

[psxphill]

I can host the file, but you can forget any contract, because it would be invalid to indemnify you in this case.

Why would it be invalid? He purely asked you to provide indemnity insurance, which is "a thing".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indemnity

If it was possible to indemnify against a lawsuit every corporation out there would hire some poor drug addict to take the legal responsibility for their actions, it doesn't work this way, fortunately.

You can indemnify against anything, if someone is willing to take the risk on you. But the insurance is only worth something if they would pay out.
 
 Why would you rely on a poor drug addict to indemnify you knowing they couldn't? He wouldn't be able to pay up and you would still owe the money. It's much better to get insurance from a company that would pay out, usually they will check to make sure you're not doing anything stupidly illegal up front though.

You appear to not understand what you are talking about.

[psxphill]

So, Thomas Richter just have to trust that I'm good for the money then, hehe.

He could sue you for breach of contract if you didn't pay out. If you own nothing and have no income then being sued is not a major problem.

Any kind of crime...really? No wonder the white collar criminals rarely get caught.

You still misunderstand, it wouldn't stop you getting caught. It only covers your expenses if you were caught. Generally it's only going to cover civil law rather than criminal law (where you end up in prison).

[psxphill]

I also do not really see the problem, people are not forced to use them.

That is the problem, you're fracturing the user base.
 cosmos isn't just fixing bugs, he's changing fundamental behaviour as he sees fit. This will make software work differently. If someone does come along and starts writing applications for the amiga then it's going to be a nightmare to make sure it's compatible with all the different hacks.
 
 Getting people on the same page was one of the reasons for OS3.5 & 3.9 in the first place.

[psxphill]

quite contrary it seems, if aros devs prefer zune you are still free to introduce reaction yourself, if os4 devs do not want zune then thats it, the user has to live with it.

You're still missing his point, but I'm now more interested in how os4 devs could stop you running zune?
 
 

I fail to see why some guys need to be so negative about updates, if you don't like updates, don't install them.

If someone graffiti's your house and you don't like it, then you don't have to look at it.

[psxphill]

They don´t graffiti your house, they just offer the service, it is upto you to decide if you want to. The service is still there, but it is optional

No, you agreed to it without realising what it was you were signing up for.

[psxphill]

You "could" modernize AmigaOS (or any other related OS) but then you risk that no software runs on it anymore. Then you have a kind of BeOS with zero software, what sense would it make? A "proof of concept"?

If I were doing it I'd redesign exec with full memory protection and then applications that had problems with it would require compatibility modes. You could start out allocating ram privately and then when it was passed to another component and causes an access violation it would make the memory accessible and mark the original allocation as requiring extra privileges. Kind of like how firewalls on the PC ask you if it's ok to access certain sites.

The work would only need to be done once and files distributed for each application. They could be distributed by a central AmigaOS Update site.
 
 If the application needs access to everything then most applications could also be run inside a virtual machine sandbox.

[psxphill]

so way don't you install Linux 68k, or NetBSD 68K, or are this also bad or are this also not great?

In any case what ever you do your going to have to deal with limited hardware specifications, so there is trade off between having some thing that can do every thing and some thing that has to be light weight.

It's possible to do something light weight that can do everything, you just have to design it properly to start with.
 
 AmigaOS and Linux/NetBSD sit at opposite ends of the table, there is middle ground.

[psxphill]

In software, the more stuff you add the more the CPU has to do, there is limit what it can do. Well yes a good program will take less CPU cycles bedouse it do the lest amount of work to active its goals, but still has to do the work.

The trick is to do more with less. It's definitely possible to do better in comparison to Linux and NetBSD.
 
 With layers.library and the recent AllocMem patches it's shown it's possible to do better than 90's AmigaOS.

[psxphill]

These should have gone into a library on top of the blitter.resource, with a clear abstraction layer between them such that the blitter could be exchanged with something else for rtg.

Abstraction layers slow every thing down and they only had one piece of hardware, so it made sense.
 
 I still wouldn't abstract it straight from graphics.library to blitter.resource (or blitter.device), there should be a device that is in control of allocating a screen, displaying it and drawing into it. graphics.library should just deal with managing those devices.

[psxphill]

Such NDAs are quite common, and of course, the they forbid you to take the developed software and re-sell that to a competitor.

That isn't legal even if you didn't sign an NDA. As long as you don't disclose anything that could only be learnt during your contract then you can contribute to AROS just fine.
 
 What you are describing sounds more like a non-compete clause, which isn't going to be in force by now (if they try to say it is then the court would rule that it was an unfair clause).

[psxphill]

Back in 1989/1990 Michael Sinz at Commodore modified the timer.device not to use two different time sources any more (UNIT_VBLANK and UNIT_MICROHZ used different CIA A and CIA B timers, which had different granularities), but to use single CIA timer instead. That timer had much higher resolution and precision, which was a great improvement.

It turned out that when the 'C' port of timer.device was reviewed, all the old obsolete CIA A and CIA B timer code was still in there, and a good part of the 'C' port was effectively useless. Again, observations such as these, which lead to irrelevant code being discovered and removed, require a high level view of the code, which for assembly language (by its very nature) is difficult to find.

Sounds like "Jumpy the Magic Timer Device", are you sure the code was all unused?
 
 
 

but code brings me (and AROS) into a situation which is quite delicate.

You can't contribute any of the code you received or were paid to write (and that doesn't matter whether you signed an NDA or not), but you were implying that under no circumstances could you contribute anything to AROS ever.
 
It would be pretty easy to prove in court where your contributions came from though, so as long as you are honest then you're fine.
 
 I'm pretty sure that quite a bit of AROS was written by people who had disassembled commodore's code & it already isn't a clean room implementation.