Philosophical question related to AROS vs OS4

[unusedunused]

More philosophically speaking, the Amiga community has become so fragmented because the Amiga brand has been floundering for over 15 years.  But *if* Hyperion and partners can bring back respectability and reliability, should we all stand behind a sanctioned Amiga once again or continue in a fragmented manner?

>But *if* Hyperion and partners can bring back respectability and reliability, should we all >stand behind a sanctioned Amiga once again or continue in a fragmented manner?

when the product is not good enough and the price is not ok, the support is slow or bad, wy should we stay behind it ?

thats always the trick of bad constructors to sell some crap under a good brand.See for example some fake rolex or something else.

it doesnt help the amiga when user accept anything.OS4 is the offical AOS, but its really a shame for that much money Preorder money, Marketing and support by devs and community flow in it since 2001 what is here.

OS4 is the only AOS System that support no USB2.

but whats here with OS4 are the great future announces.

Look at IBM/PS2 what happen with that.SO you can see if the price/quality is too bad, then there help also no nice brand.

""""
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_System/2

The PS/2's controversial hardware design was tied to a marketing strategy that was similarly unsuccessful. During the 1980s, IBM's advertising of the original PC and its other product lines had frequently used the likeness of Charlie Chaplin. For the PS/2, however, IBM augmented this character with a notorious jingle that seemed more suitable for a low-end consumer product than a business-class computing platform:

“How ya' gonna' do it?
PS/2 It!
It's as easy as I.B.M.”
“How ya' gonna' do it?
PS/2 It!
The solution is I.B.M.”
Another campaign featured the actors from the television show M*A*S*H playing updated versions of their characters from the series.[1][2]

The profound lack of success of these advertising campaigns led, in part, to IBM's termination of its relationships with its global advertising agencies; these accounts were reported by Wired Magazine (Issue 3.08, August 1995) to have been worth over $500 million a year, and the largest such account review in the history of business.

Overall, the PS/2 line was largely unsuccessful with the consumer market, even though the PC based Models 30 and 25 were an attempt to address it. With what was widely seen as a technically competent but cynical attempt to gain undisputed control of the market, IBM unleashed an industry and consumer backlash. The firm suffered massive financial losses for the remainder of the decade, forfeited its previously unquestioned position as the industry leader, and eventually lost its status as the largest single manufacturer of personal computers (ironically, only after it decided to deemphasize Microchannel), first to Compaq and then to Dell. Still, the platform experienced success in the business sector where the reliability, ease of maintenance and strong support from IBM offset the rather daunting cost of the machines. Also many people still lived with the motto "Nobody ever got fired for buying an IBM." The model 55SX and later 56SX were the leading sellers for almost their entire lifetimes. Many models of PS/2 systems saw a production life span that took them well into the late 1990s.
""""

[cv643d]

Really fantastic news that AROS is getting good UAE integration. I think I mentioned here two/three (or was it four) years ago, integrated 68k emu will be the killer application for AROS. Once I get some free time again I am going to participate actively in the AROS community.

OS4.1 is nice but expensive. I had a hard time motivating a 600 euro system when I did not use that as my primary workstation. I think what nailed the coffin for me was when I tried out AROS live installation on virtual system and ran AROS with the OS4 skin.

Could I tell the difference between OS4 and AROS? Yes, off course. The difference is huge, AROS is not finished yet. Did it bother me? No, not at all, because a next-gen Amiga will not become a workstation for me. Maybe with x86 AROS can have something such as WINE implemented and we can finally run Photoshop and x86 apps in Workbench environment?

Time for a new bounty?

[hbarcellos]

That was the turning point for me.
That + good coding tools = Good Hobbyist machine.
That + Wine + Modern Browser with Flash support = Good Mainstream machine.

[runequester]

Well, if I want to run such HW hitting apps or games I do it with WinUAE. WinUAE is superior to any other UAE, including AROS one.

winUAE does get a lot more love, but performance wise, e-uae runs even alien breed 3D 2 nice and smooth, on my machine, which isn't a monster by any stretch.
 
The main benefit of the windows version is that it has more options to customize the setup.

[hbarcellos]

BTW, talking about monster machines, Piru and fishy_fiz competing just to see who has the fastest Core 2 (Duo or Quad) was really immature, but funny! Reminded me my teenage days...
...and I don't respect anyone with something slower than an i7.
...and I stoped overclocking machines when I got myself tweaking car radiators to adapt them into my home-made watercooling solution....
hehee...

[runequester]

BTW, talking about monster machines, Piru and fishy_fiz competing just to see who has the fastest Core 2 (Duo or Quad) was really immature, but funny! Reminded me my teenage days...
...and I don't respect anyone with something slower than an i7.
...and I stoped overclocking machines when I got myself tweaking car radiators to adapt them into my home-made watercooling solution....
hehee...

I always got more interest in what you can do with limited resources. Anyone can toss more hardware at a problem. Good programming is achieving the goal with less.
Part of what fascinates me about the amiga, to this day. The stuff that was capable with 1024 kb of RAM and a 7 mhz processor

[Piru]

BTW, talking about monster machines, Piru and fishy_fiz competing just to see who has the fastest Core 2 (Duo or Quad)

The speed wasn't mentioned in any competitive sense.

PS. The CPU is passively cooled.

[fishy_fiz]

Huh ? Who was competeing ? I was simply saying that after a while raw speed becomes redundant for custom chipset stuff, citing my personal use of winuae vs. aros+uae and the systems I run them on. There were absolutely no, "my computer is faster than your computer" comments at all. If anything you're the one who's closest to doing such nonesense with your "I dont respect anyone who uses less than an i7" rubbish. By the way, a highly clocked core2 is faster than a standard i7, which must be confusing for you if youre going to make such claims ?

[kolla]

Aros is way better than OS3.9 on native Amiga, I have dropped back to OS3.1

AROS shell needs lots of work though, sadly - OS3.9 has IMO the best shell implementation, easily beating OS3.1.

Things lacking in AROS Shell:
* The concept of local variables - there is set and get, but the shell has no way of printing those variables, there is only global, filebased, variables.
* No backticking, only method to catch output from a program is to dump output to a file, also no piping as far I can tell - it's like being back in ancient MSDOS.
* Asterisk is neither wildcard nor "this console" as in amiga shell (compare "copy s:user-startup *" on amiga shell and AROS shell)
* There's a pure flag in the filesystem, but it seems to work opposite of intended; if you set pure flag and try to make a program resident, the shell will protest. I discovered this by accident the other day, thought for a long time that the pure concept didnt work at all.
* No hold flag in the filesystem at all for some weird rason (?!), just sparwed, not hsparwed - weird, considering that pure actually is there
* The con-handler of AROS leaves much to be desired for anyone used to KingCON or whatever

Other things...
In general, drag and drop is lously implemented in AROS, one cannot drop icons into filerequesters for example.

I also am one of those weirdos who easily prefer OS3.9 Workbench and ASL over these so called modern incarnations, and I have yet to grasp what the "Close" entry in the "Icon" menu of Wanderer is supposed to do - how do one close an icon? And is there no "Copy"? Makes much more sense to make a copy of an icon than to close it, if you ask me

Another simple issue - versions strings, man, do AROS coders have no idea how amiga os version strings work at all? :hammer:

I have lots of other issues as well, but why not leave at this for now :laughing:

[hbarcellos]

Huh ? Who was competeing ? I was simply saying that after a while raw speed becomes redundant for custom chipset stuff, citing my personal use of winuae vs. aros+uae and the systems I run them on. There were absolutely no, "my computer is faster than your computer" comments at all. If anything you're the one who's closest to doing such nonesense with your "I dont respect anyone who uses less than an i7" rubbish. By the way, a highly clocked core2 is faster than a standard i7, which must be confusing for you if youre going to make such claims ?

Calm down Hobbyist fishy_fiz. It's probably be confusing to you, but do you know something called Irony?

Totally irrelevant, but: http://techgage.com/article/intel_core_i7_performance_preview/11

[ChaosLord]

@kolla
Thank you for the honest and informative assessment of AROS.
We need more reporters like you.

[kolla]

Well, if I want to run such HW hitting apps or games I do it with WinUAE. WinUAE is superior to any other UAE, including AROS one.

Not to mention that you wont have to run wannabe OSes like for example MorphOS.

[cicero790]

@Kolla
You obviously have a deep understanding of these things. Can't you get involved and put you skills to good use? If you like the 3.9 that influence would be ideal for linking back to the heritage.

[kolla]

I dont share the idea that I have deep understanding of these things (and most devevlopers I know would agree), to me those are just observations from a user's point of view. Yes, I should get more involved, at least fixing version strings should be trivial task

[unusedunused]

>By the way, a highly clocked core2 is faster than a standard i7, which must be confusing >for you if youre going to make such claims ?

http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=29964&forum=25&19

The I7 is lots faster at same clockrate.its more than 60% this mean a 2 GHZ I7 is faster as a 3.2 GHZ Core2 or Athlon CPU.

because the bench use for all CPU exact the same simple RISC instructions, you can see what CPU have the best intern out of Order performance optimazing and register renaming features and can execute the given code at best speed.

Sure a not so good CPU design can perform maybe better with a better optimized code for the CPU, but in reality Compilers only produce best code when they can optimize well known code, the peephole optimizer are special trim for it.

So this common specint specfp say in my eyes nothing about the best CPU design, because the compiler developers know this code and can tweak the compiler for it, the CPU developers can choose a compiler that perform best.In real world programs the compilers produce not so good optimize code, and a better out of order execution give then more better performance /MHZ

Also when in I7 run only 1-2 core it can overclock.

winuae Core Duo 1,8 GHZ Notebook

Speed test for FFT + iFFT: (float)
time needed 1149ms for 413696 samples, => 4.0821852684021x speed
@44100Hz/stereo
------------ (4136 ms at 500 MHZ)

-----------------------------

winuae 3.9GHz Core i7 920.


3.harddrive0:d> fftdemo
Speed test for FFT + iFFT: (float)
time needed 312ms for 413696 samples, => 15.0334320068359x speed
@44100Hz/stereo
------------ (2433 ms at 500 MHZ)

[warpdesign]

As I see it...

1. Emulated applications

- AmigaOS4/MorphOS emulate 68k applications by calling native PowerPC libraries. As there's no integrated emulation for custome chips (except some basic stuff), most hardware-banging software won't run (and may easily bring the OS down).
68k applications that will work this way will be real fast (a lot faster than when run through UAE).

- AROS will call UAE when encountering 68k applications. The first thing it implies is that UAE requires a full AmigaOS 68k install or at least a compatible kickstart for simple games/demos while AmigaOS4/MorphOS don't have such requirement. So today, (freely) distributing AROS with the option to run Amiga68k applications through the UAE integration isn't possible. A kickstart replacement has been announced, but it's been 10 years at least since it's been announced, so I wouldn't hold my breath. So this is an obstacle for me.

The second difference is that UAE will run 100% of the 68k applications, not only "OS-friendly" ones, since it will emulate every custom chips. And a crash of a 68k application will only crash UAE, since the emulated application doesn't have full access to the OS'resources, unlike AmigaOS4/MorphOS'transparent emulation.

That's the big differences I can see.


2. Native applications VS emulated ones

Speedwise, some emulated applications may run slower on AROS since the emulation is a lot heavier. But native applications will run a lot faster because the x86 will be a lot faster than PPC (at least today's x86 are faster than the fastest PPC OS4/MorphOS run on: who knows ? This may change in the future ).


3. Compatibility

The 3 OS are binary incompatible: an AmigaOS4 executable won't run on AROS, nor MorphOS (well, could be run through OS4Emu but the author decided to stop its development, so let's forget about this option), and an AROS executable won't run on MorphOS nor AmigaOS4.

All 3 OS are source-compatible, if you don't use any of the OS'specific functions/libs and of course don't use inline ASM stuff (like Altivec code or SSE code).

Last but not least, the 3 OS lack modern features such as Memory Protection, Resource Tracking, etc... And these features can't be added without losing not only 68k compatibilty, but also today's native applications.

Oh, and btw MorphOS and AROS aren't based on AmigaOS sources. They are reimplementation of the Amiga's libraries, much like Linux is a reimplementation of original Unix, but isn't based on Unix sources.