@T_Bone

Tell me can you guarantee any generic X86 MOBO is bug free and in supplies that can be had for at least a years time.

Untill you can anything you say is just pure noise annoying, grating ,repeating noise

You make assertions that I keep changing the goal post. The real problem is you are not even on the same field. You are at the ICE skating rink trying to figure out how a zamboni works.

X86 is only a workable idea if you have a custom board. But that wipes out the advantage of porting to X86 and brings even more disadvantages.

Look your idea no matter how much YOU like it is never gonna happen, Why becuase it is a proven loser of an idea.

HOW is that a proven loser because BE tried to do exactly that and that was thier downfall as EXPLAINED BY BE!!!!!!!!!

The rest of the computer industry also agreed the problem with BE was it was too busy writing drivers to improve and support the OS.

If your idea was so hot why didn't Apple do it when they switched to Intel.
Would of saved Apple a bundle in development costs!
Becuase they are smart enough to realize that is a bad idea.

kgrach

Last edited by kgrach on 04-Feb-2006 at 04:05 AM.
Last edited by kgrach on 04-Feb-2006 at 04:03 AM.

@kgrach

Quote:

Tell me can you guarantee any generic X86 MOBO is bug free and in supplies that can be had for at least a years time.

Quote:

X86 is only a workable idea if you have a custom board. But that wipes out the advantage of porting to X86 and brings even more disadvantages.

Yeah, I guess we have seen how having a custom board guarantees availability, and lack of bugs. Which is why the A1 was such a resounding success, right?

Quote:

HOW is that a proven loser because BE tried to do exactly that and that was thier downfall as EXPLAINED BY BE!!!!!!!!!

Yes, you are right, Be tried to sell custom PPC hardware, and were going nowhere.

Then they tried selling an OS for common PPC hardware, and that went a bit better. Then they tried selling an OS for x86 machines, and that went a bit better yet. Then they thought they had seen the holy grail, and decided to go for the internet appliance market --- the embedded market of the late 90s. They promptly tanked.

Interestingly, with *NO* well-established, million-seller name, with no legacy of millions of adoring users, and at the point where they were complere "LOSERS" (your term), BeOS was then
bought by Palm for $11m. Which is probably several times the combined turnover of all companies even remotely Amiga-related in the last half decade.

But wait, it didn't end there. Be later made another cool $23.25m which they could never have made if they hadn't been on x86.

So, total value of the LOSERS: $34.25m. Total value of all AmigaOS/PPC related companies, combined.... probably considerably less than a million. But I guess clinging to the custom PPC hardware (and going down clinging to it) will show those LOSERS just how much of a LOSING idea it was to give up on the BeBox....

@umisef

nice bit of spin
Quote:

$23.25m which they could never have made if they hadn't been on x86.

so your idea is to get a PC manufacturer to dualboot AmigaOS and windows XP and have microsoft block it so Amiga inc can sue them. hmm

according to Jean-Louis Gassée the downfall of his company was X86.
according to the pundits the downfall was X86
so were did you get the idea he made money

yea 34.25 sounds great except before he went X86 his company was worth over $300 million.

So a net loss of over 265 million sounds good to you.

The Amigaone was available for over three years.
give me a PC mobo for half the time and as much as you like to bash the XE and the micro has less problems then some current Mobo's made by DFI and MSI.

I have gone throught three different PC MOBO's in the last six month's
.

you want to argue intelligently about X86 here is a smart post.

X86 offers a larger array of options in chipsets and CPU's
including some very nice laptop chips.
Nice thing about X86 is Chipmakers will offer reference designs so making a X86 MOBO
will be easier to design.
But you will still need a custom board with Uboot because a BIOS would require paying licensing fees to MS for every Amiga sold and/or deep pockets to insure availability over long term. otherwise the boards will no longer be available by the time the code is written to support them. Give up on the idea of generic MOBOs

As for Amiga companies combined worth less than a million.

Again not true because my company is valued at more than a million.
check the D&B.

Kgrach

@T_Bone

Yes ..Strange how it turns around over time.


MicroStar used to be the crap MoBo manufacturer (Maybe thats why they now refer to themselves as MSI ?)

And Asus was the benchmark for quality.

It's MSI in my household now as well although My daughter "Kelly" Does have the "K7" iirc its the nforce 3 chipset on it and its been rock stable appart from the sh itty FX5200 graphics card in it.

My eldest daughter, Melissa (CC-Rider) was about to buy the Asus A8N32-SLi Deluxe nForce4 SLi X16 (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard (MB-118-AS)

from here

She's now unsure whether to go for that Mobo after reading Dr BombCrators post.








Talk about going off topic ?

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I dont suffer from Insanity - I enjoy it

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I wish just once that the PC wouldn't be mentioned as a hardware replacement for OS4. Why, because its not going to happen. A waste of typing space.

But, if it did, it would have to be custom hardware design and not generic to run on any PC, so you PC owners would still have to buy new hardware. BeOS took a nose dive when it went x86. Too many drivers and other crap to write the OS for. Apple is going x86, but with specific hardware design.

Right now, the Pegasos hardware is the path to go. Its available ! ! ! It's PPC ! ! ! ! and its open source so anyone can put out an OS for it. Getting the Amiga OS4 running on it should be lot easier than rewriting it for every PC on the planet. That is of course if they can get AInc. to go along with it.



Why is it everytime I mention AInc. I get shivers of Dooooom ! ! ! ?

_________________
Avatar babe - Monica Bellucci.

@kgrach

Quote:

X86 is only a workable idea if you have a custom board. But that wipes out the advantage of porting to X86 and brings even more disadvantages.

Of course there's no chance at all that some already made Motherboards can be chosen to be the AmigaX86, you know just as Teron<->Amiga ONE.. You could go to the market, see what the model it would be best suited for the purpose, reliability, performance wise and voila, one Hardware that wouldn't cost you the earth...

So you can have a custom board in the sense no other is supported, just like PPC, you have AmigaOS4 on it because no other is supported, yet the user could eventually be 'a bit' more productive if he finds that AmigaOS doesn't fit all that he needs.

What most are defending here on AmigaONE being exclusively PPC seems like an hostage situation, where after paying the earth for AmigaONE the user is forced to use it namely for all the money spent... and that for me isn't saying anything good about AmigaOS 4.

Last edited by pixie on 04-Feb-2006 at 01:45 PM.

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Indigo 3D Lounge, my second home.
The Illusion of Choice | Am*ga

@kgrach

Quote:

kgrach wrote: @T_Bone Tell me can you guarantee any generic X86 MOBO is bug free and in supplies that can be had for at least a years time.

This question has been answered almost every time the subject comes up. So far, nobody has been able to find one single instance of a mainstream non-proprietary, non-custom board with *no* direct drop-in replacement available for a year. That's not even considering the fact that in the case it ever did happen (which it hasn't yet), switching to a *similar* board would be less than trivial, if not a complete equivalent to a drop-in replacement in the first place.

If the world ended tomorrow and for some reason you had to make a custom board because a meteor struck ASUS, Gigabit, etc, then even the highly improbable and never yet occuring situation we would hypothetically be in is the exact situation we are already in right now anyways, full time.

Quote:

Untill you can anything you say is just pure noise annoying, grating ,repeating noise

Quote:

You make assertions that I keep changing the goal post. The real problem is you are not even on the same field. You are at the ICE skating rink trying to figure out how a zamboni works.

You are moving the goalposts. There's no way to argue that commodity hardware solutions are less viable with respect to replacement than proprietary ones without doing so...

Every option available, to the problem you suggested above, in a proprietary hardware scenario, is also available in the set of options you'd have to solve the exact same problem in the commodity hardware scenario, without exception. The one mathematical set is completely contained within the other as far as options go, however you're present the above problem as if the solutions available in the interior set arn't also available in it's containing set.

In fact, the resolution to the containing set's worst-case scenario *IS* the contained set. e.g.: If we can't get replacement hardware, we'll have to make our own. So, making our own hardware to prevent a situation where we might have to make our own hardware, doesn't make much sense.

Quote:

X86 is only a workable idea if you have a custom board.

Why?

Quote:

But that wipes out the advantage of porting to X86 and brings even more disadvantages.

That's why I'm against proprietary hardware, although the problems you refer to as "more disadvantages" WRT x86 proprietary boards, arn't "more", they are the "same" disadvantages inherent with ALL proprietary hardware, x86 or PPC.

Quote:

If your idea was so hot why didn't Apple do it when they switched to Intel.

They did. Their x86 MacOSX desktop developer platform was x86 commodity hardware. They couldn't have switched without it.

The AmigaOS desktop developer platform is proprietary, and isn't available.

Last edited by T_Bone on 04-Feb-2006 at 02:13 PM.

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"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you." - Oscar Wilde

@wolfe

Quote:

BeOS took a nose dive when it went x86.

Can anyone please provide any evidence for this oft-repeated-never-substantiated claim?

I mean, come on. There are several phases to Be Inc's existence:

(a) BeOS on proprietary hardware. Total sales: 1800
(b) BeOS on PowerMacs and compatibles. Total sales unknown
(c) BeOS preinstalled on Power Computing's PowerMac clones. Sales an estimated 2000-3000 per week(!)
(d) BeOS as a candidate for the foundation of the new MacOS
(e) BeOS lost in space after the MacOS thing didn't happen, and the Power Computing deal vanished
(f) BeOS on x86
(g) BeOS neglected in favour of BeIA
(h) BeOS sold to Palm.

At point (d), the value of the company apparently was "well south of $100m" (no, the value of a company is not what one asks for it, but what someone else is willing to pay. So, no, Be wasn't worth $300m).

Point (e) is interesting. The only potential buyer for a PPC-based BeOS had just decided to buy someone else's OS. The only OEM distributor Be had ever had had just been bought out by those very same guys --- who, incidentally, also had the power to remove any incentive for any other third party development Be could piggyback on. I cannot help but feel that any "nosediving" would have happened between (d) and (e). So I believe it is safe to say that at point (e), Be was worth less than $100m.

While at point (f), on the other hand, Be was a publicly traded company. At the end of period (f), On Jan 17, 2000, just prior to announcing that BeOS would be free for the download (and, as we now know, Be would concentrate on BeIA), Be's share price was more than $19.50. Be's annual filing report 35 million shares for Q1, but who knows what kind of shares they are... But we *know* there were 6 million common shares offered and subscribed in the IPO (at $6 per share), and 22 million further (preference) shares automatically converted to common shares at that point. So at that point, Be was valued at more than $550m, and possibly up to $700m.

A year later, Be's share price was down to $2 on the same number of shares, quarterly revenue was down to $68k for Q3/2000 and $16k for Q4/2000 (as opposed to $775k in Q3/1999).

In 1999, when Be was selling BeOS/x86, they had $2.7m in revenue. In 2001, when Be was meaning to sell BeIA, they sold --- nothing. And more nothing. They turned themselves into a consulting and service house. And eventually, they sold everything, for $11m.

So if you want to argue that Be "nosedived when they went x86", you have to explain why (a) the value of the company rose from under $100m to over $550m during their x86 activities, and then fell to $11m when the x86 activities were abandoned in favour of BeIA.

BTW, most of that info is linked straight from Be's own website (yes, Be Inc still exists :)

Quote:

kgrach wrote: X86 is only a workable idea if you have a custom board.

Quote:

wolfe wrote: But, if it did, it would have to be custom hardware design and not generic to run on any PC, so you PC owners would still have to buy new hardware.

Why, for God's sake?
Are you guys some sort of masochists? AOS4 got fscked on PPC by "special" hardware, so if it were ported to x86 it should get fscked by "special" hardware there as well?

Yes, if you don't already own the hardware that's supported initially, you'd obviously have to buy it if you want to run AOS. But a new (or used) "PC" motherboard would be good, modern and not cost anywhere near fscking 800 bucks, in contrast to what we (don't) have now.

Quote:

wolfe wrote: Right now, the Pegasos hardware is the path to go.

Yeah, considering that AOS will stay PPC only for a foreseeable future, I agree.
But first we'd need someone to make it "special" and only available to AOS customers on a "special" "Amiga" market, wouldn't we? :P

(BTW, the silly "Be failed because of x86" and "we'd need to support a bazillion mobos with one CPU architecture but not with another" myths are not even fashionable any more. Could we drop them now?)

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Oh, bother.

@umisef

Quote:

umisef wrote: @wolfe Quote: BeOS took a nose dive when it went x86. Can anyone please provide any evidence for this oft-repeated-never-substantiated claim?

Folklore doesn't need evidence. :)

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Oh, bother.

@kgrach

Quote:

HOW is that a proven loser because BE tried to do exactly that and that was thier downfall as EXPLAINED BY BE!!!!!!!!!

yea they would say anything to not admit they screwed up when the left BeOS.

one other think irks me i tried BeOS once many years ago when it was distributed on a magazine cd as a demo. but lack of compelling software made me lose interest. aos will be in the same boat without the software to back up the os. the processor it runs on is irrelevant (though i do believe that x86 would be cheaper.)

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@T_Bone

Quote:

This question has been answered almost every time the subject comes up. So far, nobody has been able to find one single instance of a mainstream non-proprietary, non-custom board with *no* direct drop-in replacement available for a year. That's not even considering the fact that in the case it ever did happen (which it hasn't yet), switching to a *similar* board would be less than trivial, if not a complete equivalent to a drop-in replacement in the first place.

Anyone who uses the board lifespan argument as a way of dissing x86 either knows nothing about hardware or is simply dissembling to further their agenda. As you say, almost every board has a direct drop-in replacement available, and in the rare times when that's not the case fixing the OS to run on a new board is probably the work of a day or two, tops.

To borrow a line from a politician who's name I forget - it's the chipset, stupid!. Code the OS for one particular chipset and it'll happily work on dozens of boards. You just have to pick boards that use the chipset's integrated functionality for things like sound, LAN and SATA, to ensure no driver issues with on-board hardware. And even if that chipset goes out of production, the successor will almost certainly be highly compatible at driver level.

One way to minimise problems with unavailable boards is to pick a design that the manufacturer will guarantee to be available for x years. The bigger manufacturers offer such guarantees on some products because large corporations like to run identical hardware to ease support problems, so of one of the 10,000 machines they just bought breaks down in 3 years time they want to know replacement parts will be available.

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Who do you serve, and who do you trust? - Galen

@Jorge

Quote:

I still don't understand why all x86 or mainstream believers don't simply switch to what ever is available there - instead of whinig here. What makes you think that an AmigaOS on that platform will make such a difference. Actually I don't. Go with Zeta. Fast, modern, nice programming environment. Or I guess even MacOS X. Nice system (might give it a go), some others (Sky OS), even QNX Momentics is free. Don't want mention Linux. I for myself want to have a geek machine, not just a PC running AmigaOS.While I agree the A1 (or even the peg) is still a PC (with a big endian CPU), I hope sometimes there will be something more...

I'm sorry, this seems silly. 'Amiga' as it stands today is NOT about hardware, or shouldn't be. What remains of our once amazing Amigas from the 80s/early 90s is simply the OS. Most people don't buy current systems 'because they like the hardware' without considering what they are going to run on it. They choose their OS, and apps, and THEN buy hardware. 'Unique' hardware, outside of consoles, I'm sorry to say (really, I am ), simply can not compete on even footing, and is not a way for a small enterprise (like AOS/'Amiga') to ever hope for price or performance parity, even in a market much bigger than ours.

Even Sun Microsystems is learning- they _think_ they are a hardware company, but had better change, fast, as their low and even mid-range systems were being taken out from under them. I believe Fujitsu actually makes all SPARC chips nowadays even..their 'turnaround'? Low cost Opteron servers, using AMDs chips over their own, but at much lower prices than Sun has ever sold hardware for. (And they ARE nice systems!)

Apple is the sole standing 'hardware company' selling 'custom' hardware for their OS. They also have much more going for them than we do currently. Even with that, without the iPod momentum, I wonder just how well their mac sales would be going now.

PPC is the road we're on right now, for better or worse, and there's nothing to be done about it right now. I have confidence Hyperion will complete OS4, and if they are able to, would expect them to consider additional platform ports once that albatross (OS4 final release) is off their backs and allowing them all to get some sleep at night again.

Once/if that happens, I can't believe some are still expecting 'custom hardware.' Short of a billionairre investor, that's only a sue way into bankruptcy or seriously limiting of sales. Choosing to try to build a 'custom x86 board' is even more insane, IMO. Commodity hardware or something so inexpensive people won't mind the cost (more like Efika, Amy/maybe, ACK, say < $300, ideally less), or you're going to limit both sales and growth potential for no real reason. I do believe it's possible A1 sales helped in OS4 development money-wise, so perhaps that 'lockin' was in fact nescessary to come as far as things have, but once final is available and a port or two done, you're out of full-time long term development mode, and money can be made off the OS sales itself.

Trying to build a 'special' x86 board...is simply insane IMO. I have no problems with a USB key dongle or other piracy prevention means (personally, I'd do something like RHN or Steam, and use a unique ID per customer, but _force_ them to download signficant bits from online servers, better yet, with each download keyed to their systemid so it can't simply be handed off to a friend, etc. - nothing is foolproof, but it's all about best effort). Then hurry up and go for the Zeta sales numbers, something which will never be attained by the use of 'speical' hardware...

Quote:

And to be on topic again, I hope that any of the promised products will see the light of day anytime soon. Well, and who knows, maybe we'll get AGP4 and a fast G4, too (at least for now).

Yes, I do too!

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Are we not done with the same silly arguments and flames yet??!

@umisef

Quote:

At point (d), the value of the company apparently was "well south of $100m" (no, the value of a company is not what one asks for it, but what someone else is willing to pay. So, no, Be wasn't worth $300m).

okay Apple was willing to pay $200 million at point D
so according to you the company was worth 200 million.

the argument is old and I am tired of getting my blood pressure up.

I have more productive things to do.

I guess I will give up reading AW for now because every thread degenerates to X86 or morph madness.

Listen if you like X86 and think it will work PUT THE MONEY WERE YOUR MOUTH IS AND pay for AOS4 to get ported to a board you like.
And you could sell the X86 version to your hearts content.
prove us all wrong.

Kgrach

@wegster

My main concern is not "Amiga is Hardware" but AmigaOS gives you the flexibilty to design what ever HW you want. And I simply think, that going x86 mainstream (or whatever mainstream) just destroys this flexibilty.

I think, if AmigaOS is available as a customizeable OS for a HW vendor, you would simply build HW for you sepecific needs, and the next step is you are looking for an OS which could drive the HW.

Currently you have a bunch of embedded systems out there, two main stream OSs (XP and Linux) amd some server oss. The embedded systems are simply not targeted to anything else than mobile devices (cell phones, or PDAs) or any other industrial solution.
Well, there is XP (embedded) and even the latest CE isn't that bad. But then, you'll end up beeing a MS slave. OK, QNX could do this too. But it's expensive and still, QNXs main domain is the industrial market.
Allright, lets take Linux. Sure, you can do all this with Linux - figure out how to customize you kernel, try to get a proper graphics driver working and what the h..l is X ? But I just wanted to play some movies.

I think the AmigaOS can fill that gap perfectly. A small, efficient OS with its domain in graphical content. It always was. It will need some brush ups, but it is still way more flexible than anything out there. Currently the risk is too high, but once available, I would really like to see AmigaOS based "appliances". And, a scaled architecture can simply find it's way into the living rooms. I do not think it does not make sence to write another desktop operating system (solely). And about the Zeta/BeOS sales. Does anybody know, how much Gobe Productive sold ? (If you don't know what it is...that would answer the question). It's not just about the OS, it's also about the apps.

(Note: I didn't add MacOS X to the list above, because this is not available for anything/anybody else than Apple).

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XE/G4 (broken 7450/800)

@The_Editor

Quote:

My eldest daughter, Melissa (CC-Rider) was about to buy the Asus A8N32-SLi Deluxe nForce4 SLi X16 (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard (MB-118-AS)

Get her a Shuttle Barebone
(There is both AMD and Intel mobos.)


I've got a clone of this, the best x86 I've ever had

(Mine is a Creative Slix barebone, a Shuttle cloned by license)

Last edited by tomazkid on 04-Feb-2006 at 07:36 PM.

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@pixie

Quote:

A PC... there's lots of dealers and they seem to be pretty well indeed. Most of the time, even on todays Amiga dealers they are forced to also sell PC hardware, so what's the fuss?

Well, ever asked what margin they have ? How many survive 5 years ? You have some big ones and some small ones popping up every year - and shutting down again after some time. The price pressure simply kills most of them. You have to compete against the big vendors.

And what do you think, how many support an Amiga platform will get if the dealer sells 99% PC stuff ?

Guess, that's the reason why the sell 100% windows stuff (not even linux or what ever) and why Apple has it's own stores...

_________________
AmigaOne XE G3/933/VIA/FM801/R200 (fixed),
G3SE/600/Voodoo3/Sil680/RTL8139/SBLive! (noiseless!)
µA1-MK2/G3/933/R200/CMI8738
XE/G4 (broken 7450/800)

I think bringing Amiga to mainstream x86 is the only way Amiga OS can
be "sort of" common again. With special hardware it's for geeks only.

Amiga to me was the OS, Personal Computing and the games back then.
Only focusing on PPC to get to embedded devices markets means to me that Amiga
as "an OS on a desktop" is more of a bi-product, the main goal is to get into the embedded markets but if it scores some goals as a desktop PC then fine, that
future is not compelling to me.

_________________
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hardware-intensive solutions. And they'd go faster.-- D.Haynie

@tomazkid

i really dont think



That will fit in a pissant case like that

its a ATI 1900 XTX card. Which is what she's installing in ti.

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I dont suffer from Insanity - I enjoy it

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@The_Editor

Got an Asus A8N-E, nForce 4. no SLI tho.. No need for it. Great board, no probs hardware wise. (Don't have the firewall running but that's because if I install the software for it (nVidia) either BSODs the system after a hour and/or it corrupts network traffic.. More people with nForce 4 boards have this).

Not saying Dr BombCrators is wrong, at work several Asus mobo's died within a year. But at home I have 3 Asus mobo's lying around all still work.

Last edited by Seer on 04-Feb-2006 at 08:12 PM.

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Everything you say will be misquoted and used against you..
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