Would it really hurt Amiga Inc. to profit later? Aren't they already profiting later? And isn't an additional profit sucking company that doesn't actually produce anything more likely to ensure that the Amiga stays dead?
AInc's only interest in hardware is that it's tied to a purchase of OS4. That's the same kind of interest the RIAA and MPAA have in cd and dvd players.
I would like to own and use a computer that runs OS4 and I know, for now, that means a PPC motherboard that carries the blessing and cost overhead of AInc. Even if I could give a crap about vapourware, the proposed OS4 motherboards are not interesting in and of themselves. OS4 and software is the big deal not the hardware.
Meanwhile, any day of the week, I can go out and buy a multigigahurtz multicpu/multicore, multimonitor pc that can run multiple instances of WinUAE each going faster than any 'real' Amiga ever did.
Does anyone else think G3 and G4 cpus will be discontinued before any company is in a position to produce a sufficient number of OS4 motherboards? Perhaps the jump to PPC9x0 or Cell is the best short term solution but it's been a chain of short term solutions that has driven our little market segment to the point of extinction. If our operating system has to suffer another change of cpu, let it be to x86-64 and don't let anyone interfere with our choice of motherboard.
BTW... The only people who have any right in criticizing x86 are assembly programmers and their toughest arguments don't hold to the extent they once did. x86-64 is still stuck with little endian byte ordering but it has improved it's range of internal registers and, if the 1970's era opcodes and syntax are too offensive, there are compilers that allow you to rename them as you please. PPC still beats x86-64 for internal registers but whoever named the PPC opcodes is also guilty of never considering that a programmer might actually want to use them.
We all had it so good in the day of 680x0 and Commodore...
