C=usa. A peaceful solution?

[commodorejohn]

I pretty much said my piece in the other thread, but just to reiterate:

C-USA, thus far, has billed their products as somehow being a successor to the C64 and Amiga. And no, despite BigBenAussie's protestations to the contrary, it's not just "modern tech in retro cases" - the whole of their website is designed around reminding people how cool the C64 and Amiga were and suggesting that this is somehow related.

Yet not only have they not even begun to approach that level of innovation and quality engineering, they're not even trying. The full extent of their creative efforts has been to create a reproduction C64 case for one particular model of generic x86 PC, and pick some stock cases that look sort of like the desktop Amigas for some others. It is plainly obvious that the only thing they're interested in is flogging the brand they scavenged for some extra money.

Shipping with AROS would be an interesting event, but it wouldn't change the fact that they're sticking generic x86 PCs (are they even manufacturing the innards?) in slightly custom cases and then trying to pass it off as the legitimate heir to the crown.

Back in the day Commodore brought an unprecedented combination of computing power, multimedia capabilities, and low prices into the home-computer market with the C64, then did it again with the Amiga and added a solidly-engineered OS into the bargain. C-USA has innovated nothing, and while its systems, going by the listed specs, are reasonably powerful, I sincerely doubt they'll be more powerful than the competition for less money, as both the C64 (against the Apple IIe) and the Amiga (against the Macintosh) were.

But that is, admittedly, a difficult trick to pull off these days. I wouldn't be so bothered by it if they were either A. trying at all to create something new, or B. not dressing up the status quo in Commodore drag.

[commodorejohn]

Honestly, you folks who think powerpc's are the way to go, or any one processor including PowerPC and Intel aren't reading the right tea leaves.. When I think of an OS now I thinki of virtualization, I think of the computing cloud etc..

*snip*

Time to be supportive of whoever is left (including Hyperion and Commodore USA). I am guessing it wont impact on any sales one bit, because many people here in the USA don't really want anything with a powerPC chip in it one bit, unless it does ARM and is mobile they don't care.. I have said this once and i'll say it again, the world is now processor agnostic as long as it's fast enough for what they want and many now want to run this on a 6-8 hour battery if not better..

Only if you think the Amiga has to be a Serious Market Competitor, as rather too many people in the community do. I don't see why the bar for new-Amiga success has to be set at "as powerful as modern commodity hardware with at least as much market share as the Mac." Why couldn't we be happy with a new Amiga system that's simply more advanced than the old hardware we've been maintaining and upgrading but preserves all the neat aspects of the system, and dispense with the inter-platform dick-waving contest? Let the people who are happy with x86 commodity hardware do their thing, and drop the inferiority complex.

Does it really matter what the company known as Commodore USA does ? You  guys are fighting over OSes and hardware long since surpassed (even  with the latest offerings)..

C-USA's behavior bothers me because they're acting like "we're now the official arbiters of what constitutes the Amiga," which is annoying enough when individual zealots do it, and they're also expecting to make money from it, which is arrogance squared.

[commodorejohn]

Come on guys, how can you be so hard on a company that includes a postion of employment with every computer it sells?  In this economy, that's really something that can set a company apart from its competitors.  That's real value added right there.

I don't really need another x86 box, but I am looking for a job.
If anyone from CUSA is reading this, I'd just like you to know that I'm fully versed in not only copying, but also pasting, and I have Paint.net installed on my PC and I'm pretty good at removing watermarks and other pesky bits from images.  I have some real Amiga hardware that I can look at and compare to present off-the-shelf cases, and I totally know what Workbench is.

You, sir, win. Please find enclosed one (1) complementary Internets.

[commodorejohn]

When I think of an OS now I thinki of virtualization, I think of the computing cloud etc..

Fashion victim. ;-)

Man, I didn't want to say it, but yeah. I understand that distributed computing has its applications, like providing reliable large-scale computing power for organizations like Google and such. But so very many people talk about it like some kind of magical computer genie that's going to provide limitless power to everyone in the immediate future, where every computer is just a screen with an Ethernet connector that jacks into The Cloud (the capital letters mean it's Important.)

Even if that were likely to happen, it would still require a reliable high-speed Internet connection. That's the problem with any dumb terminal/server setup - the minute the connection goes down, it's completely useless. We spent all of modern computing history moving away from that model, and now people rhapsodize about it like it's the best idea ever. This? This is what reading Wired does to people.