http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/26/1854229
Yes, I've got 2 A2000 3 or 4 A500 and an A1000 in my basement. The Amiga taught me the true meaning of Vaporware. Now that we _finally_ get a new OS for them, it turns out it only runs on certain discontinued hardware, and maybe on hardware that _might_ get released by somebody else at some point in the future. I'm glad OS 4 is out. I'm sad that Amiga Inc. skipped a dedicated user base when releasing it.
It's difficult to know where to even get started commenting on this. Talk about too little, too late. The fact it only runs on a discontinued PowerPC evaluation board (Which has several documented chipset hardware bugs.) is the least of its problems.
The massive mismanagement of the Amiga OS intellectual property since the collapse of Commodore is particularly amusing when one considers how schizophrenic Commodore was in managing their own projects. How you could do worse then a company that saw nothing wrong with at one point selling at least five mutually semi-incompatible lines of 8 bit microcomputers at once is difficult to fathom, but I think the Amiga caretakers just about pulled it off. At various points Amiga OS was going to power game consoles, set-top boxes, be morphed into a Java-esque virtual machine, be ported to X86 (obviously doomed to failure from the start, since the primary factor motivating a lot of Amiga loyalists is a deep-seated religious hatred of PC hardware), run on custom chipset "super-Amigas"... all fine ideas, but all highly dependent on having a *sellable product*. AmigaOS was a technically brilliant product in 1985 (just like the original Macintosh was in 1983), but time has moved on, and the AmigaOS really didn't. Most of the genius of the Amiga was in the custom hardware anyway, which ironically the AmigaOne totally lacks. Instead of just being able to twiddle a few bits here and there to make the computer perform some mind-numbing screen effect AmigaOS on the AmigaOne has to execute a software routine just like any other OS. Why bother with some ancient ill-handled proprietary pile of software code when any number of more modern kernels, both commercial and open source. can do that just as well?
Sad, really.
--Peace