Amiga Acknowledges T-shirts Shipping

[KennyR]

And another thing. A hypothetical situation: supposing Genesi, bPlan and MorphOS never existed, and Eyetech and Hyperion didn't have any serious PPC competition from 2001 to present day.

Would that have prevented XE and SE users having to keep their boards in a cupboard years after purchase? Would it have prevented thousands of people holding back on buying them waiting for the price to drop a bit, or because OS4 was not ready? Would it have meant news of pretty serious bugs in A1 hardware wouldn't put anyone off? Would it have prevented there being a large number of people so distrustful of Amiga Inc after Bill McEwens blatant "mistruths" so they weren't interested in *anything* they ever did again? Would it have produced Eyetech's production capacity?

The answer to all these is no. It wouldn't have changed a damn thing.

If MorphOS had never existed, personally, like thousands of others, I'd either have prolonged buying an AmigaONE indefinitely after not getting my voucher (and watching the original Escena A1 plan quietly "disappear"), or got it and be sitting starkly disillusioned right now close on a grand out of pocket with a machine that did not work as I was told it would, with only a beta of OS4 for comfort. Probably the former.

Seriously, the blame for condition the community was in since Amiga Inc. took over cannot be placed on competition. Amiga Inc. dropped the ball, it's as simple as that. Eyetech and Hyperion both massively underestimated the scale of the task they picked up, and perhaps they'd never had to if Amiga Inc. hadn't abandoned the "classic" Amiga OS and left them with zero support.

Now its 2005, we're back where we were when Amino bought the Amiga IP: Genesi are not here (they're practically out of the picture), MorphOS is being developed in part time by unpaid coders, new A1 models are coming out. It's amazing, it's like 2001 again.

But KMOS/AInc haven't quite made up that trust deficit with the T-shirts, however much I appreciate them. It's much too easy to repeat the mistakes of the past. What I want to see now is the vouchers and Party Pack obligations being met. Once that's done, maybe we can look up to them as a real company again and start healing the rifts in the community. Until that, I can't trust them and I doubt many others will either.

[Dandy]

KennyR wrote:
...
But KMOS/AInc haven't quite made up that trust deficit with the T-shirts, however much I appreciate them. It's much too easy to repeat the mistakes of the past. What I want to see now is the vouchers and Party Pack obligations being met. Once that's done, maybe we can look up to them as a real company again and start healing the rifts in the community. Until that, I can't trust them and I doubt many others will either.

Well roared, lion!
I agree entirely!

Seriously, the blame for condition the community was in since Amiga Inc. took over cannot be placed on competition. Amiga Inc. dropped the ball, it's as simple as that.

I'm not suggesting otherwise.  Though BBRV did intentionally help Amiga Inc dig their deep hole, the hole that Amiga Inc is in belongs solely to them.

However....  When Bill and Raquel are sitting across from both me and Melissa at the dinner table and emphatically state that they're actively trying to "run McEwen out of town", the causes for the current state of Amiga Inc are not as crystal clear as you would like to suggest.

In regards to Amiga Inc, whether or not they survive is almost irrelevant to me any more.  Especially since the "cheap PPC alternative market" just got cornered by Apple.  For the reasons I've already speculated above, I honestly fear that it's simply too late now for either to make a dent in the world.

That being said, I sincerely hope every member of their staff (both past and present) is doing well, just as I hope almost every current, and every former member of the Genesi team is doing well.  

Regardless of how things turned out, each person involved with both Amiga Inc and Genesi *has* honestly tried to make a difference for the better, which is more than can be said for some trolls (or cheerleaders) in this community.  Personally speaking, I'm critically tired of watching this necrophilic soap opera and seeing the lives of good people being ruined along the way.

[restore2003]

The major question now is:

Will Eyetech sell enough Micro a1-c boards(i would guess around 4/5000) to continue with the a1-XC board(A board that WILL catch up with the rest of the world hardware wise, and to a much more logical pricetag)

So we have to buy some now, and gain some later.
It`s not easy building up momentum in such a small market,
but where can you start?

And if some other companies brought along other boards with a license, nothing would be better.

[miksuh]

cecilia wrote:
I know exactly how he feels. I've only discovered moo bunny about a year ago myself.
there are some of us with a life. strange as that may sound.

I don't mean you But... I think that many of the people in Moo Bunny do have as much life as zombies Moo bunny must be one of the worlds most annoying web sites.

[amigamad]

How long before the rarest amiga item ever the t shirt ends up on ebay.

if only amiga os was written for x86 the market for it would have been much larger almost everyone has a pc.For me ppc is now to far behind for me to invest any more money into .I want a new 64 bit athlon pc more than anything now.

[restore2003]

@amigamad:

Remember AmigaOSXL/Amithlon? It was quickly pirated, do u want the same thing to happen to OS4?

Atleast with PPC the chance of pirating the OS is smaller.

[dammy]

Remember AmigaOSXL/Amithlon? It was quickly pirated, do u want the same thing to happen to OS4?

Amount of piracy means nothing, it's the amount of paying customers that means a successful business.  M$ used piracy to gain world domination of the computer market and now they are trying to collect as much $ as they can before the next big change (which will be Linux) ends thier dominance.  Umilator did not die becaue of threats of piracy, it was someone's brain dead threats against it.

Dammy

M$ used piracy to gain world domination of the computer market and now they are trying to collect as much $ as they can before the next big change

I actually agree with what you've said.  Even counting piracy, Hyperion would have sold 10x more copies to legitimate customers under x86 than the 1500 or so AmigaOne boards.  Then they would have been able to sell updates and versionary increments.  Doesn't matter.  They didn't listen when I screamed this four years ago.  They aren't going to listen now.

I also agree that Microsoft USED piracy to get in place everywhere, which is why they're pushing so hard to clamp down on it now.  Now that they "have you where they want you", they want the money you "owe them".

Wayne

[Waccoon]

Atleast with PPC the chance of pirating the OS is smaller.

Shame on you.  Amigans, of all people, should understand how harmful hardware locking and copy protection is to any platform.  I know you're talking specifically about the CPU, here, but the neverending quest to crack down on piracy has usually just screwed over paying customers.  Choosing a CPU based on piracy concerns is stupid, compared to performance, value, and flexibility.

The Amiga has always had the worst copy protection of any computer I've ever used, to the point where the software wouldn't even work -- and it only got worse and worse as people figured out new, clever ways to hack the hardware.

Even after buying originals, I got cracked versions of all my games because half the time the originals went bad and / or made me type in stupid codes from blood-red manuals.

Do you know how many A500 games don't work on the 1200 *just* because of the stupid things done with the disk code?

How do you feel when you buy a new PC game on a CD, put it in the drive, and the game refuses to boot?  How do you feel when the publishers blame your hardware and say there's nothing they can do, while getting a NoCD crack instantly fixes the problem?  It's the dependency on the copy protection built into your CD-ROM that causes the problems, and the developers don't want you to know WHY the game refuses to boot, so you get no error messages.

Macs have this problem, too.  I had several issues where Macintoshes with Sony CD-ROMs used software just fine, but Macs with Toshiba drives croaked.  Even though all the Macs were officially built by Apple, there were still branding complications.  Updates to MacOS (such as the 8.1 patch) sometimes solved the problem, but there were many issues I couldn't resolve short of replacing the CD-ROMs or downloading a new patch for an application, hoping the developers would "silently" fix a copy protection compatibility issue.

Like it or not, turning hardware into software is the future of computing.  Ten years from now, the idea of running software on only one CPU will be insane.  Are people learning anything from Linux and Java?

I also agree that Microsoft USED piracy to get in place everywhere, which is why they're pushing so hard to clamp down on it now. Now that they "have you where they want you", they want the money you "owe them".

I don't quite see why as 95% of computers are pre-built machines with Windows pre-installed, and therefore Microsoft gets their money even if the computers sit on shelves collecting dust.

Note that Windows has HUGE restrictions on what you can do to a system that has nothing to do with piracy, such as being unable to access files on an NTFS hard drive partition from the Windows boot CD without owning an enterprise WinPE license.  You can access all the OS files, but not your PERSONAL files.  If anyone knows how to read files from the recovery console, please let me know.  And, no, turning on "access to all drives and folders" in your Local Security Policy does not do it.

Personally, I just think Microsoft marketeers are full of you-know-what because they just have so much power.  Everyone knows that bosses don't make decisions based on logic.