The Os 3.1.4 Thread

[kolla]

So then OS 3.1.4 is not an update of OS 3.1, but a new OS developed by Hyperion.

[kolla]

I am not negative against everything and everyone, the list is extremely short - I am mostly positive with all that goes on in the Amiga community, I have supported bounties, kickstarters, software development, patreons for developers, podcasts... I have done testing, reported bugs and helped with debugging (and you know this, but where Olsen always is the kindest and easy to communicate with, you tend to be arrogant and patronising). I was not negative against you, nor OS 3.1.4, before it became clear how this "product" is distributed and what the implications are (btw - "distribution" is on-topic, according to post #1 in this very thread) . I don't know exactly what triggered you to start this "slanderous campaign" against me - I do not have any problems, neither in job nor private, and if I had, it would be none of your business. What I am negative against is bullshit, and lately you have been climbing up the "bullshit ladder" quite rapidly. Why are you resorting to "scientology" tactics btw, are you a scientologist perhaps? Or perhaps you just enjoy the status of "alpha-nerd" among a handful of faithful sycophants, like some certain other Germans I know of...  It's not like I am the only one who find it troubling to see where things are heading with the way the OS is now developed, but I am perhaps more vocal about it... there are others who just roll their eyes and leave.

[kolla]

So will Hyperion have their website fixed in the remaining days? It is still broken in all kinds of ways, despite _requiring_ registration for updates, https is largely unsupported on the site, and the certificate ran out almost two months ago.

Why is this so damn hard to fix? Is one supposed to just use fake credentials to protect oneself?

This (among a handful of other things) is what I mean with "distribution problems"... a class action style GDPR based lawsuit would fit them well, huh?

And while I am posting - someone tell Damien over at EAB that it is the only site I am banned, unlike what he likes to believe.

[kolla]

You somehow seem to consider Hyperion as a small or medium sized enterprise

Nonsense, stop putting words in my mouth - I consider them a one-man show, a lawyer, with a plumber and an sql-jockey as sidekicks.

But... it's not like https is magic and maintaining a certificate is wizardry, this is really simple to fix issues, but yet they are incapable. It seems they are only interested to offer support if your problem is related to registering and paying, otherwise it is utter silence.

[kolla]

Then again, what help is this forum? ... this is certainly the wrong place.

This is related to "distribution of OS 3.1.4", which was one of the "right things" to discuss here.

I understand that you are not the right person to answer, but if your "countdown" has any credibility, it shows that you clearly have _some_ communication with Hyperion and whoever is running the website, so you could certainly mention for that person, whoever it is, that these issues should not be ignored. They are after all, a registered commercial company, with products and customers - would be a shame if they were slammed with a GDPR fine on top of everything else going on with them.

[kolla]

If Hyperion would fix their distribution issues, that is, fix their website to follow at least work properly with https, and fix the software license for OS 3.1.4 so that it doesn't consist of nonsensical conditions, and make it absolutely clear what hardware they consider permittable for OS 3.1.4, I would buy 9 copies of OS 3.1.4 instead of just the one I have. I am also happy to buy them the certificate, install it on their server and make sure https works properly. For free. Or just set up Let's Encrypt, which is for free. Because these are realy trivial issues to fix for anyone with slightest clue.

It's not about helping me, it's about helping themselves, about having at least *some* credibility as a *computer software* company that knows what it's doing. This low resource, undermanned and "possibly low revenue" (are you kidding? It's a "negative revenue" company), is still capable of writing a software license that is long, full of quasi-legalese nonsense, still capable of buying Reaction, still capable of fighting legal battles east and west, still capable of threatening people east and west, still capable of stepping all the toes they can and burning all bridges they have had with other Amiga entities, still capable of updating content and do announcements, still capable of pissing people off by attempting to register trademarks which they don't own and tons more. But no resources to take necessary measures to secure the privacy of their own customers, who are the only source of income they have, and for whom they have legal responsibilities.

[kolla]

There is no contradiction and you have not demonstrated anything, so a "QED" here is out of place.

[kolla]

0.09998788... (as calculated on AC68080)

[kolla]

It's not a loss for me, and Damien seems super proud about his accomplishment.

I was given no other reason than "trolling", nothing specifics, I guess it is reason enough that a certain "high profile" (read "alpha nerd") character keeps going ballistic over questions that he finds "impossible to answer". Well, this is Amiga, what goes around comes around, I'm sure that in hindsight some years from now, things will appear clearer for everyone.

(What's more concerning is that the EAB site prevents banned users from accessing their accounts, like... at all, and hence prevents them from seeing what info that is stored, and prevents banned users from closing their accounts, and prevents anonymizing personal information. I asked the site admins for what info they have stored on me, but have not heard anything. Now what does GDPR say about these things?)

What was the point of this count down anyways?

[kolla]

Costel could just put it on Aminet and call it the day

[kolla]

Github would be even better, you can have releases there too. 

Of course

However, since Costel is one of the guys currently maintaining Aminet (the database, I presume), it seems like the natural choice.
http://wiki.aminet.net/Team_Members

But why not both - Aminet could have its own installation of gitlab, with a CI/CD (continuous integration & delivery - exactly what Hyperion are notoriously bad at) prepped and aimed for Amiga developers.

[kolla]

(double-post)

[kolla]

Well, Aminet could need some love too, its "software architecture" (*snigger*) is ancient by today's standards - both the web front-end and the database backend should be distributed around on multiple instances from different hosting sites.

[kolla]

What I was mentioning, has nothing to do with browser support 😛

What I am talking about, is to make the service more robust, getting rid of downtime on the web frontend and avoid "single points of failures". You may have noticed that every now and then the web frontend is unreachable, or is answering "can not connect to database" - that's what should be fixed, using a more "modern" approach.

The service could also be made more amiga friendly with better native tools - UHCTools is great, and I have myself made an Amiga guide frontend to Aminet. This type of frontends could be helped with better APIs to the official database, for example, instead of implementing database and search engines over again, or go nuts parsing HTML output from a service that cannot be relied upon. My favorite interface used to be ADT, the official Aminet Download Tool (which I also somewhat maintained an Amiga version of), but it should be fully re-implemented, as it fails in all kinds of ways today.

[kolla]

Under what conditions does the new SetPatch replace shell with L:Shell-Seg and under what conditions does it not replace shell with L:Shell-Seg? Does it care about what version of shell that is already resident?

[kolla]

I found $? so unreliable that I simply dropped using it, and instead use the old 'if "$var" eq "${var}"'-trick, really wishing that non-existing variables could just expand to an empty string.

A shame that all these new features cannot really be used in distributed scripts anyways, since only a fraction of the systems out there may have the shell required.