Re: the mind boggles
That's no moon...
200 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Dec 2012
"This far, no further...". Hmmm that sounds familiar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tleSnj4OD0g
There is no evidence of any legal wrangling between Cloanto and Hyperion. I expect none in future. In fact it makes no sense.
Cloanto's business appears to be selling and supporting Amiga Forever and its components/ROMs. I don't believe they have any intention of actually doing software development. They do a great job with Amiga Forever as many can attest.
Now Hyperion appears to be testing the waters on updating OS 3.1. Awesome. What I would expect is Cloanto to somehow sub-license some future worthy version of 3.1 to distribute with updated Amiga Forever packages.
So what's the big deal? Win-win as far as I'm concerned.
Regards,
Greg
Hi Terry -
The Vampire compatibility is very good. FYI the pre-order queue for the Vampire 600 has now exceeded 1000 units! Look here: http://www.apollo-accelerators.com/orders/index.php. For their next model (the Vampire 500) they are planning to ship 200+ units per month. The demand is there.
For some programs there is a compatibility issue. This will happen when the CPU is literally hundreds of times faster than the original. ;) The next release (Gold 2) will introduce a new "turtle mode" to work with this badly written software. In addition some other software didn't wait for the blitter correctly. This issue is being solved in hardware. Any properly written software works fine.
I definitely understand your position but this new Apollo core is something special. The team building this product also works inside IBM on their Power systems so they know what they are doing.
Be patient, sit back and watch this project mature. It's a definite step in the right direction for classic Amiga fans.
Cheers!
There is a bit of a revival in progress on the "Classic" (680x0-based) Amiga scene. One of the reasons for the Amiga's demise was Motorola's end-of-the-line and quite expensive 68060. It was reasonably competitive with Intel chips at the time but was soon eclipsed. Amiga had lost the performance edge.
To me the most exciting part of this revival is the emerging development of a new "Apollo" next-generation 680x0 core currently in FPGA. This is being developed by a brilliant (yes brilliant!) team of designers who have spent years quietly working on a true successor to the 68K lineage. They have chosen the "68080" name and it does make sense.
There is another project in the works (Amiga Reloaded) that is another FPGA-based attempt at updating the Amiga hardware platform. Unfortunately I know less about that one but it also looks promising.
The Apollo 68080 core is being provided on a series of "Vampire" accelerator cards for classic Amiga models. The first version out is the for the Amiga 600. Upcoming versions will cover more of the classic Amiga models. Also coming in the near future is a stand-alone model. These are also ongoing discussions with the Atari community.
With all this new 68K-based hardware coming out Hyperion has appeared to realize there is a potential market for an updated "Classic" Amiga OS 3 distribution. They have taken their first baby-steps with this first update to the 3.1 system.
Some may criticize Hyperion for some historic odd behaviour but I believe we are seeing a more humble and open Hyperion. These have been some recent management changes and hopefully they result in a more logical organization.
Here are some links for more information on the Apollo core and Vampire accelerators:
"IBM and the ABS managed to put in place another howler of a misconfiguration: “Island Australia” (which only partially worked) was designed to block traffic from outside Australia, but IBM was hosting the Census password reset facility offshore."
OMG - I laughed so hard my wife was like "WTF?".
When Zen does finally ship Intel will re-price their equivalent processors. Their tactic in the past appeared to be charging about a 5 to 10% premium for equivalent performance.
Part of the premium has been accounted for by the fact that Intel chips have generally been more power-efficient than AMD for the same performance. That 5 or 10% premium is more than offset by long term power savings. Enough to make an AMD or Intel decision difficult because the large price savings for AMD won't be there especially in the data centre market.
So AMD better be deliver something that Intel doesn't, or be prepared for ongoing squeezed margins.
Will be interesting to watch the market.
They are working with Citrix right now - did you miss the announcement? Or else I missed your sarcastic tone?
A while back Microsoft laid off a large number of experienced testing/QA staff in USA. I believe a lot of that was 'outsourced' to overseas locations (if at all).
This is the obvious result. Save a few pennies, pay out another penny in dividends, but in the long term you fu@!#! the product.
I think my dad got burned by this one. Panicked phone call a few weeks ago because his computer was upgraded - swears he didn't consent.
This upgrade process is overly aggressive. MS should be taken to task for this one so they don't try anything as stupid as this again. Unleash the Kraken!
I understand that there exist some previously standardized file formats that, after sufficient evaluation, testing and pilot studies may provide a suitable cross-platform industry-standard solution.
These are lean formats that require no plug-ins, Flash, HTML5, JavaScript, JAVA, or any other technologies.
GIF and JPG files you bloody wankers!!