Elbox Dragon "news"

[Ral-Clan]

Errr....can someone fill in us Amiga users who are not fully acquanted with the whole Dragon project?

The web page I found says it is only for the A1200, but a poster here talks about being disappointed it will not work with his A1200 clock port....and another is talking about how he'd like to get it for his A4000....

What kind of Amiga is it going to be for?

Can anyone provide an overview in a few sentences?

[Piru]

@stopthegop

If this "trashing" routine were triggered would it physically ruin the drive such that it could never be used again?

That's not possible.

It's irrelevant anyway. What is important is the user data that is seemingly lost. For user it appears as the disk was totally wiped clean (no partitions at all). The disk would appear as uninitialized and HDToolBox would suggest initializing it when selected. Unless if you're an expert there's little you could do. Even if you're an expert, restoring the RDB without existing backup is very tricky.

Or does it trash the file structure (thus data) on the drive, but where I could still partition and reformat the drive?

You could still partition and reformat. But data is much more valuable than the actual drive.

[stopthegop]

Thats what I thought.  About a month ago I had a disk fail rather dramatically.  I just wanted to make sure it died of natural causes.  Or to make sure software, as you said, is "irrelevant" in this case.  As it apparently is..

[Bennymee]

@Piru

>>>Also, problem described can be avoided by using SFS or >>>PFS instead of standard FFS.

>Eh how? The type of the filesystem has nothing to do with >it.

Nothing, doesn't SFS and PFS has better performance then FFS ? Specially on reading small files, like .info, and caching ?

[Piru]

@Bennymee

Ah, problems referred to the performance problems. Anyway, is there reason to believe they used FFS? If they did, is there any particular reason to use it (it does have worse performance indeed)?

It'd be rather silly to slow down the demo machine with slow filesystem.

[humppa]

@thread

It seems that Darek responded to Chris Hodges piracy claims on  PPA.PL.

Can somebody translate?

edit: For what it's worth (automatic translation, don't draw too many conclusions from it) ;-)

"Certainly it walks about no 38 here EUR. It walks about it, that when somebody makes something on market more Amigi than foreshadows only, immediately it becomes public enemy for some number 1. It was satisfied from agreement about cooperation with very Chris Hodges Elboksem, but only till the moment, when as it happens, that it will not process lat (summer; year) for his pile by several Elbox sterowników, it has been made in only weeks few couple. Probably, it counted on it Hodges, that agreement will boost interest of his with pile Elboksem - as for standard USB Amigi - but it will not be for its (his) producing friend of card kart for simultaneously long competition USB Zorro. When we have received developer documentation, we were returned for about sale of license for key Hodgesa Elboksu. Then it has suggested us for our firm free keys Hodges. After several months, when it irritated in mediator too very 2.0 already USB Hodgesa, aggression has achieved him respect of our firm such level, that in one of next update it key zdezaktywował. It IS INCORPORATED on computer presented on on surname of permanent employee installed Posejdon Amizaduszkach Elboksu. This registration has been carried through FIXIT POINT PPA. This person is not amigowcem, does not have ( and never had in house ) Amigi and this registration is taken advantage only and for brand application exclusively. I salute, cream Darek ELBOX COMPUTER"

[stopthegop]

Man, software translators have a long way to go...  That almost hurt reading, it was so disjointed.  My guess is they're saying Poseidan was registered privately by an employee but there is a dispute over the amount paid?  Dunno,  thats only a guess.

[humppa]

That almost hurt reading, it was so disjointed.

I agree... :lol:
Just in case somebody here speaks German, there is a German translation (non-machine) on Amiga-news.de by Valwit:

"Es geht hier nicht um 38 EUR (anspielung auf erstes posting - anm. V.) es geht darum dass wenn man auf dem amigamarkt etwas mehr macht als nur ankündigungen man sofort zum staatsfeind nummer 1 wird. chris hodges war sehr zufrieden mit dem abkommen mit elbox, aber nur bis zu dem moment als sich herausstellte dass elbox die nötigen treiber nicht jahrelang entwickeln wird, sondern es innerhalb weniger wochen machte, hodges zählte wohl darauf, dass das abkommen mit elbox das interesse an seinem usb-stack erhöht - als usb standard für den amiga - und gleichzeitig es lange zeit keine konkurenz geben wird für seinen freund der usb-karten für die zorro slots baut.

als wir die developer dokumentation erhielten, wandten wir uns an hodges wegen der verkaufes von lizenzen (keys) für elbox. daraufhin bot uns hodges kostenlose keys für unsere firma an. nach ein paar monaten als usb 2.0 in mediator hodges zu sehr störte, erreichte seine agression gegenüber unserer firma einen derartigen stand, dass er in einem der updates die keys deaktivierte.

poseidon, der auf dem rechner instaliert ist, der auf amizaduszki vorgeführt wurde IST REGISTRIERT auf den namen eines festangestellten mitarbeiters von elbox. die registrierung wurde durch den registrationspunkt von ppa durchgeführt. der mitarbeiter ist kein amiga-user, hat (und hatte nie) keinen amiga zu hause und die regiestrierung wird ausschliesslich in der firma verwendet.

grüsse

Darek Smietana
ELBOX COMPUTER"

[Argus]

The German translation indicates that one of Elbox's employees or contractor's owns the licensed version of Poseidon that was shown at the Amizadzuki show.  It also references the problem between Elbox and Poseidon's author; that originally the developer information and free keys were given to Elbox, but later updates received from Posideon's author deactivated the keys (presumably to market protect the USB Amiga market for E3B because Elbox was making USB 2.0 compliant cards).  So sounds like some kind of misunderstanding between developers.  Just great.

btw, I thought it funny that the polish translation ended with by translating Darek Smietana's last name as 'cream', which is what it means in Polish.

[Donar]

User Valwit in german forums translated the post from polish? (i mean the language spoken in poland) to german. I won't bother translating all, because then i had to also post the other point of view too... never ending story...

First Darek Smietana  says that it is not about 38€ but about some diffrences between Chris Hodges+E3B with Elbox (Note: Thats Elbox point of view). bla bla -  Thats the part with the 38€.

He also states that Poseidon is registered to an employee of elbox, who (bought/got) it through ppa.pl. The employee is no Amiga user, and never had one. He only bought it  for Elbox the company. Thats the licence they used at the demonstration.

So that's the short form of it. I tried to get this posted "neutral" so that Chris Hodges does not have to reply to the insults from Darek Smietana here.

Bye

Edit:
Seems that other people can type faster than i.
Edit 2:
As the german text is here and others have translated this for themselves... and got the meaning out of the german text as intended by Elbox: There is a reaction from E3B on german forums, and they have a slightly other point of view. The main (one of the main) problem(s) seems to be Elbox selling a 10€ NEC USB Card for 50 € saying it works (ships) with Poseidon, but not mentioning that Poseidon is not  part of the package -> And then People complainig to Chris Hodges because they have to pay for Poseidon.

So you see why i originally wanted to leave this out.... i think we should leave the rest to E-Mails between Elbox, E3B and Chris Hodges.

Bye

[lorddef]

It's always nice to see some new hardware so I welcome the Dragon, however as a Mediator owner I too am weary of Elbox.

With regards to the whole Poseidon adventure, if you read Planton42s page of email correspondence you'll see it's quite clear Elbox intended to rear-end him from the start. I gather it was something similar with the whole P96 thing?

[HopperJF]

Doobrey wrote:

keropi wrote:
with the 2nd coming of Jesus ofcourse. He will have OS6 with him.

 A lentil eating,long haired, sandal wearing do-gooder not using a Mac?  :-o

MacOS 6  ;-)

[_ThEcRoW]

Elbox are just a bunch of *************. Plainly. Their drivers are {bleep} and steal the user's freedom. If you bought a hardware second hand, and uses a driver form a mate, it will screw your disk. Why? Hasn't having the hardware legitimates you to use the driver?.
Hope my english is understandable.
From my own experience, i use openpci drivers instead of the crappy mediator ones.

[humppa]

From my own experience, i use openpci drivers instead of the crappy mediator ones.

For Mediator? I thought that one was "canceled"?

[r-tea]

@ Donar
First Darek Smietana says that it is not about 38¤ but about some diffrences between Chris Hodges+E3B with Elbox (Note: Thats Elbox point of view). bla bla - Thats the part with the 38¤.

I'll try to translate the remaining part of that one with 38EUR which Donar have left untranslated.
Cite: "Chris Hodges was satisfied with the contract with Elbox, but only till the time when it turned out that Elbox developed their drivers for Poseidon much faster than he expected. It tooks a few weeks, not years.
Probably Hodges counted on growing up of the interest of Poseidon as the standard for Amiga and in the mean time to have no competitor for E3B products for a long time."
This is instead of Donar's "bla bla"
I did my best trying to translate strictly as it is, as far as my lame english lets me do.

[platon42]

"Chris Hodges was satisfied with the contract with Elbox, but only till the time when it turned out that Elbox developed their drivers for Poseidon much faster than he expected. It tooks a few weeks, not years.
Probably Hodges counted on growing up of the interest of Poseidon as the standard for Amiga and in the mean time to have no competitor for E3B products for a long time."

Never heard so much bullsh1t before. As you can read on http://www.platon42.de/soapopera.html yourself, I did not try to fool those people, but rather be as helpful as possible -- before Elbox started going to slag E3B for no reason and started doing there unfair competition (by refusing to mention that Poseidon was NOT included in "their" product).

As for the key thing: Even /if/ somebody working for Elbox registered Poseidon, Elbox clearly states that this person does not even *own* an Amiga. But as the Poseidon licence is personally bound to the machines somebody owns (and here in this case, the licensee does not own one, especially not the Elbox one), installing and using it on a foreign machine is a breach of licence conditions and renderes the licence invalid. If the user registered it in the name of Elbox, he didn't specify this information in the reg form. Anyway, only one PPA registered user ever upgraded their key to Poseidon V3.x, and it was Poseidon V3.x that had been shown by Elbox. And this user /does/ have an Amiga.

But whatever, all this arguing is not going to change the situation a bit. Maybe it's really time to move on.