@CodeSmith

Well, I was editing the post you're quoting here while you wrote this post so the quote is unfortunately obselete but I did write it and I'll still answer, of course.

Quote:

CodeSmith wrote: @samface Quote: As a personal side note, I'm getting the impression that alot of people are disregarding the fact that Hyperion, just like Amiga Inc., hasn't added much code to the AmigaOS either. I think the vast majority of us here is aware that Hyperion has consisted of only one or two people for quite a few years now. I personally, when talking about OS4, use the term "Hyperion" as shorthand for "the group of programmers and testers hired by Hyperion".

I read you loud and clear here. However, then you say...

Quote:

Quote: Most, if not all, seems to be done by third party contractors that are also suing Hyperion, for not paying them. If this is true, it would mean that even if the outome of the Amiga Inc. vs Hyperion court case goes in Hyperion's favor, AmigaOS4 would still not be Hyperion's. True, but it would belong to the people who wrote OS4, as opposed to a set of people who have been either ignoring it or actively sabotaging its future by refusing to sell licenses to prospective hardware manufacturers.

...where you clearly differentiate Hyperion from their hired programmers and testers. Perhaps it would be less confusing if you were a little bit more consistent?

What I'm trying to say is that the same arguments used against Amiga Inc., eg that they would be "people who have been either ignoring it or actively sabotaging its future", can also be applied to Hyperion, the company.

Besides, I fail to see how granting Hyperion this exclusive license agreement to develop AmigaOS4 and sell it royalty free would be to actively sabotaging it's future nor igoring it. On the contrary, I would agree to that sentiment if they hadn't.

And please stop blaming Amiga Inc. for Hyperion's doings. Things would probably have been very different if Hyperion had delivered on time as they were bound to by the contract and all rights handed back to Amiga Inc. when they payed. Now that Hyperion have delayed completion by several years, violated the agreement and refused to deliver AmigaOS4 to Amiga Inc., why in god's name would Amiga Inc. grant them any license to develop for more hardware? In fact, it wasn't until recently that they finally fulfilled their obligations to release AmigaOS4 for the hardware devices mentioned in the original license agreement, eg the AmigaOne AND PPC equipped Amiga1200/4000's. It wouldn't be very appropriate to demand a license for more hardware to develop for while they still haven't completed their current undertakings, wouldn't you agree?

Quote:

It doesn't matter anyway, technology is not standing still and by the time the lawsuit gets resolved, OS4 won't have anything left to offer. Portables like cell phones and PDAs already have CPUs that run at hundreds of MHz and have several MB of memory, so very soon running "heavyweight" OSs like Windows XP on your handheld won't be a problem (heck, iPhones run MacOSX already). OS4's major advantage, its low resource requirements, won't be important any more and the only thing left will be the lack of modern features like full OpenGL or a JVM.

Well, I agree and I disagree. The thing is, people have been saying that bloatware or not is becoming less of an issue as we get better hardware ever since the first operating systems with graphical interfaces came to be. This is because our software is getting more and more bloated at about the same speed as we get faster hardware. That's why Windows feels just as slow today as it did 10 years ago, despite the humongous improvements in performance on today's hardware.

But agreed, AmigaOS is simply far too behind anything else in the market for the lightweight argument to be able to compensate. However, an interesting trend in the market not completely Amiga unrelated is the increased use of application virtualization, aka "hypervisors", provided by tools such as Softgrid (Microsoft) and Thinstall (VMWare). It's applications with "built-in" hardware virtualization technologies that enables the application to be run on virtually any computer, completly independant of the OS. Yeah, we've heard this before, right? We already got Java, right? Wrong, this is different.

A JavaVM or the .NET environment are operating system hosted virtual machines and are therefore highly OS dependant solutions. A hypervisor runs directly on the hardware and is therefore not dependant of the OS in the same manner as Java or .NET. The difference is where it runs.

There are also different kinds of hypervisors, some that is launched as an application within a host OS but still runs directly on the hardware in an exokernel like mode in it's seperate adress space outside the kernel of the OS, like VirtualPC on Windows. And of course there are the ones that boots on the hardware directly on it's own.

Anyhow, it's a quite clear trend now that even Microsoft is going for a hardware virtualisation solution and market analysts are estimating hardware virtualisation as the greatest threat to Windows today. I'm not sure how AA2 is going to do up against Microsoft and VMWare, but I must say that they really got the right idea, long before many others even understood what it was all about and simply dismissed it as just another VMM. I simply cannot stop hoping, wishing that their ideas will actually materialize in one form or another.

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Sammy Nordström, A.K.A. "Samface"

MINDRELEASE.net - The Non-Commercial Network of Digital Arts.

Samworks D & C - Professional Web Development (in Swedish)

Moving to a separate thread... This post was off topic here as per Seer's warning.

Last edited by ShadesOfGrey on 30-Jan-2008 at 07:27 AM.
Last edited by ShadesOfGrey on 30-Jan-2008 at 07:27 AM.
Last edited by ShadesOfGrey on 30-Jan-2008 at 07:20 AM.

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Unless otherwise explicitly stated, this message is not meant to affirm nor deny, defend nor offend any faction within the 'Amiga' Community.

@CodeSmith

Quote:

... or actively sabotaging its future by refusing to sell licenses to prospective hardware manufacturers.

Tsk, tsk, tsk. They "partnered" with Ack to have him produce PPC-hardware. Last thing I heard about Ack's efforts in this respect was that he was polishing up the documentation. (Adam's probably using Vista + the latest Office2008 on a 486@50MHz, but as always; good things come slowly.)

OldFart

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More then three levels of indigestion and you're scroomed!