amiga-news.de - Fortnightly Q&A's with Fleecy Moss

09.Jun.2003
AmigaWorld (Website) Fortnightly Q&A's with Fleecy Moss - episode 12
The English online magazine AmigaWorld has published episode 12 of the regular questions and answers session with Fleecy Moss, CTO at AMIGA, Inc. (Update 2012-03-17, cg: as the original document is no longer available, the following content was moved into our database):

1) Bodie: Considering that OS4 has yet to be released, have sales of the AmigaOne thus far largely fallen in line with expectations?

Fleecy: Since an AmigaOne is a combination of the certified Eyetech hardware solution and AmigaOS4, it is hard to make any comments about the sales of the hardware alone. People want to buy an AmigaOne so that they can experience the latest version of their favourite operating system running on new and powerful hardware. Eyetech has sold quite a few units of the hardware but as we have not yet completed the full product and pre launch promotion has only just started, with the AmigaOS4 on Tour events, we don't really have any sales expectations for this stage. From our standpoint, this final stage is all about raising the levels of excitement and exposure, building towards the launch stage.

2) Pods: Have you considered Envoy over SMB for network support? What were the pros and cons? What other tools have you considered.

Fleecy: SMB is technically quite a let-down in terms of robustness, reliability, performance and general architecture. But it's the only game in town when you want to do printer and file sharing across a heterogeneous network (that is, while it works; printer sharing is at best a black art of sorts). If you don't mind that it can take anything between 5 minutes and three days for changes in the network topology propagate through the SMB server/client chain, that it occasionally refuses to work without any apparent reason and that the Amiga SMB support is nowhere near as polished as it ought to be. Envoy is the best integrated peer to peer file, printer and resource sharing system for the Amiga. However, it is being owned by a third party and would need further polishing to integrate it into the operating system (the user interface needs a brush-up). The downside to Envoy is that it's Amiga-only.

3) alx: Is there any more news on the BlizzardPPC version of OS4?

Fleecy: Our partner, Hyperion Entertainment has asked for feedback numbers in order to judge the demand for a BlizzardPPC version. The issue is that we have to move the the platform forwards and so we do not want people to think that a BlizzardPPC is a viable long term solution for the AmigaOS platform. In the short term we will support the CSPPC (even though its hardware implementation leaves a lot to be desired) and most likely the BlizzardPPC (even though it is a few orders of magnitude harder to support than the CSPPC) but this will only be in order to allow owners of these products to test out the new OS and see where we are going with it.
In addition, performance on these accelerator driven products will be a far cry for what can be experienced on the new Amiga certified hardware.

4) MetalJoe: What are the requirements/costs for Amiga certification of hardware i.e. to run AmigaOS 4 on a new PowerPC motherboard developed by a start-up?

Fleecy: The requirements are simple. Provide a piece of hardware on which AmigaOS4 can potentially run, arrange for it to run on the hardware so that it can pass our certification test suite and convince us that there is a viable commercial market for AmigaOS4 on that piece of hardware. We have been approached in the past by people requesting this information but they have only been interested in small numbers of boards, which makes no commercial sense (unless those third parties want to pay huge premiums per individual board).

5) ssolie: There are some rather vocal members of the Amiga online community who do not trust anything you say and consider you to be a liar. How do you feel about this kind of public criticism and how it may reflect on Amiga Inc. as a whole?

Fleecy: I have four kids, one of whom will be a proper teenager soon so I am used to being detested, insulted and called a liar by those with their own agendas, those who lack all the facts and those who just enjoy the pseudo celebrity status that goes with making lots of noise.

Public criticism comes with the role of having a public presence. Commercial activity is for adults and in the adult world, things don't always go according to plan, nor in the way that you want or even expect. We have had a very rough last three years and I certainly wouldn't say that we haven't made any mistakes. What is important is that we have held firm, worked with our partners and have kept going. AmigaOnes are now shipping, the AmigaOS4.0 is getting closer and closer to production release, with the AmigaOS4 on Tour programme now under way. That is the only way you can answer criticism, by delivering.

6) DaveP: I have been reading a lot of speculative and unsubstantive articles on Moobunny and ANN about the precense of the Articia S bug - or rather the one that the April 1 chip tried to fix. People posting checksums as evidence that it is the Articia S at fault. Can you give us a definitive, in depth explanation as of the situation right now with A1, Articia S and the relevance of these articles if any?

Fleecy: We have spent a lot of time looking at these claims, along with Eyetech, Hyperion, Mai and now Via as well. We have no evidence of the Articia S being responsible for any of the issues claimed. There are well known and documented issues with the Southbridge chip and where it has been used in other systems, those integrators have addressed those using hardware and/or software solutions. Indeed some of the reported issues seem to be because of incomplete implementations or failure to understand the capabilities of the hardware within the specific operating systems on which the problems have been reported.

The 200 MB chunk IDE DMA capability is well known and has not yet been addressed within the Linux PPC driver.
For AmigaOS, which is of course our chief concern, this is not a problem at all. When looking for a future hardware model, we were concerned about the coarse granularity of the PCI model and in particular the way a single process could take control of the bus. For a platform such as the Amiga, which prides itself on total system responsiveness, this is unacceptable and we had intended to implement these services in a chunk based solution anyway, in preparation for the consideration of other packet based bus architectures that would allow us to deliver our quality based solution for the future.

7) GregS: I had read that OS4 will have filesystem room for User and Group IDs, besides the filename is there another space that could be used for a Universal Unique File ID?

Fleecy: The user and group IDs have been in there for quite a while (1992?), it's just that besides Envoy hardly any software package would use them. As for universal unique file identifiers, there isn't an API to create or manage these with, and file system implementations, such as FFS, may not even have room for these in the first place. The 32 bit 'key' numbers associated with each directory entry are a poor substitute.

8) donV: Do you know of any plans for adding complete Java J2SE support for AmigaOS? What about complete Java J2ME support for AmigaDE?

Fleecy: Once the AmigaDE is added to the AmigaOS then J2ME functionality will be available. Further Java capabilities are on our 'to do' list but this is a large list and a lot of those items are likely to take precedence over Java.

9) defrisselle: Since you are located in the UK, will you be organizing a stop on the OS4 tour or have to talked to UK resellers/retailers about setting up a stop on the tour?

Fleecy: The 'AmigaOS4 on Tour' programme is not an Amiga Inc event, although it has our support. It has been organised by Jurgen Schober of Point Design and other dealers as a taster and promotional event for those dealers, using a demonstration of the new AmigaOS4.0 as a draw. Jurgen is the point man for this and will be driving to each dealership each weekend to demonstrate AmigaOS4.0 on a set of machines. I don't believe he was contacted by a UK dealer.

My time is taken up with finalising the pre launch, launch and post launch global marketing campaign for AmigaOS4.0.

10) ikir: OS4 contributions drawer will it contain an office suite (like Star Office, Open Office...)?

Fleecy: The AmigaOS4.0 contributions drawer is for third parties, both commercial and free/shareware who want to distribute versions of their applications to AmigaOS4.0 purchasers. Anyone wishing to take advantage of this can contact me directly. I am not aware of an currently being developed office suite existing for the Amiga, even in a 68K version so I don't believe there will be one.

(Copyright © 2003 Amigaworld.net. All rights reserved.
Originally available at http://amigaworld.net/modules/fleecymoss/index.php?cat_id=13
You may freely redistribute this article, providing that a URL is provided to the original source,
and the copyright notices remain intact) (nba) (Translation: sk)

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