No, I don't. I find the question of actual substance to be vastly more important than whether a particular system's creator has shelled out to Bill McEwen for the rights to put a particular sticker on the case - and even a thing like the PPC boards that's really only Amiga-like in software is still infinitely closer to being "Amiga" than a bog-standard PC board running Linux.
I never said it can't. I just said that unrelated hardware + unrelated software does not equal "Amiga." Unrelated hardware + Amiga-related software has a lot stronger case to be made for it.
==Well you 'can' run AROS (albeit unofficially) on a CUSA Vic Slim or C64x. That certainly gets us closer to an 'Amiga' than ever before. Then again the same can be said when you plug a Soundblaster Live card into a SAM460EX - totally unrelated to Amiga initially, but brings you all the features we wanted in our dreams. Yes, that I agree...
Apple's re-emergence has a lot less to do with switching its computers to Intel (Macs are still at about the same general portion of the market they've always been) and a lot more to do with its shift in focus towards consumer electronics. And frankly, I have even less interest in Amiga-like OSes on a phone than I do in Amiga-like OSes on PCs.
==Well, Apple's been clever with their management and marketing (and moving away from computers to actual electronic software/music delivery), and so far been lucky with how they went about with the development of OSX. I still consider it 'very sly' the way Steve handled the transition from PowerPC to x86, but I guess it was their luck how it turned out.
Funnily enough I learnt this week from a friend that most of the world's oldest PowerPC Macs have all mostly ended up in South Korea. Apparently it's to do with how their font systems work. In the Korean publishing industries their fonts are controlled by a few tiny companies who had their since the System OS days. And what happened was they refused to open them up/port them to OSX so the printing and publishing companies have no choice but to use older OS9 setups, Postscript and closed systems like Quark and Pagemaker. Because these machines are well over 10 years old (and still running, even today) sales of new Apple machines are flat and there's a huge secondhand market there for older spare Mac parts.
So the irony is, some people still needs a PowerPC machine in some places in our world..... But yes I agree with you too on the Ami-phone thing. Amiga OSes DO NOT work well on things...
And? Any definitive categorization is restrictive by nature. If we know what "Amiga" as a concept is, then we also know everything that it isn't. A Linux PC has nothing, in terms of hardware, software, or even more than basic superficial similarity of user interface, in common with any flavor of Amiga/Amiga-like. Saying that we should agree to call it "Amiga" means that "Amiga" is essentially a meaningless term; since it has no real definition, it can therefore be affixed to anything. Why not take that all the way? Have Amiga kitchen appliances, Amiga hardwood flooring, Amiga tampons! Does it mean anything, or doesn't it?
==I've seen the term been misused before on other things, but at least with a Linux-based PC it is still relevant (as its computing). But God forbid the day we get Amiga tampons! That'll really be the end of the world....
I never said anything of the kind. I'm all for advancement, just not at the cost of sacrificing every single thing at all unique about a system.
==Well if you're talking about sacrifice, the ultimate sacrifice had already been made when Commodore International had gone bankrupt. Most of the loyal fanbase had lost everything when the parent company went under - we lost everything then. Talent, money, knowledge - everything that was C=. What we're trying to do now (in CUSA's case) is not 'resurrect' the old 16-bit platform per se, but to start off with a completely new sheet. Since everything's been so convuluted anyways, we might as well start off with a clean-sheet right (as Wolf To The Moon says)?
In this sense (in CUSA's case - I'm not talking about anyone else) it is 'doing things in the spirit of Commodore and Amiga' which was doing it creatively, imaginatively and powerfully. Doing things in 'the spirit of Amiga' is more important (and relevant) I feel to the markets today than ever before. Because as Leo, Barry, Terminills and the many Ami folks that I've talked to discussing this at length, as former Amiga users we are tired of Windows and tired of OSX/Macs/Apple revisionism. We just want something else 'different' on the market, something that will still give us that nostalgic feeling but still allow us to run the latest and greatest stuff, primarily games and creative stuff. Classic Amiga is certainly established now, but the idea of a new machine is to move 'beyond' that. It's still performance driven and modern, but with a unique character that is 'Amiga'.
No. It's shown me that being cheap, open, freely manufacturable, and backed by industry titans is what sells systems.
==EXACTLY....backed by industry titans. And you can't do with without a powerful, affordable and adaptable architecture. At the moment it seems, nothing can touch x86 right now in terms of bang for buck or platform support. Just look at how many copies of Battlefield 3 got shifted recently.....8 million copies!
Excellent question. Myself, I favor what I see happening with the NatAmi project, and I'd love for it to be inexpensively available to a large audience. If I had any means to help that happen, I would do so. But I don't, so it's going to depend on what the existing NatAmi team can manage.
==I've looked at NatAmi too and it looks interesting. There's a lot going for it, but sadly it's still based on the older architecture. Unless they can create a PPC/Cell board which can connect to say, a PCI Express slot on a PC like Yellow Dog Linux did (which can then allow AmigaOS to run natively within Linux) I think we're a little far off...
And I hate it less, but I still don't much care for it, for a host of different reasons. And in any case, I'm not aware of a Linux distro that uses OSX-like underpinnings - FreeBSD, maybe, but even that's stuck with the clusterfun that is X11 and eight quadzillion interface toolkits with their own different UI guidelines that developers ignore or heed utterly at random.
==Perhaps then FreeBSD should re-evaluate their position? But I certainly know NetBSD could be a contender because it can read AmigaOS files natively. POSIX support is important for a better OS for Amiga I agree...
...? OSX's market share is somewhere in the 6-10% range.
==Yes, but not when you include iOS as part of the make-up. The potential for Apple to utilise this as an underpinning is huge...just look at how the new iOS5 update has 'freed' people from their computers when updating their phones/iPads.
I don't care. Good is good, bad is bad, and I've had well and truly enough of pretending otherwise.
==I think there's a lot more potential for Amiga to develop even further now as a new system than ever before. Just look at Aros' latest posting. They are now supporting Nvidia's Fermi cards right out of the box! Now that's what we need to revitalise the brand and userbase....
*raises hand*
==That's a tough wish....but would be interesting if it did happen!
