From: jtv@xs4all.nl (Jeroen T. Vermeulen) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.misc Subject: Re: Cologne Fair Briefs Date: Tue, 18 Nov 97 20:09:19 Organization: XS4ALL, networking for the masses Message-ID: <19971118.8B1BCE8.11F3D@asd17-22.xs4all.nl> References: <1828.258T2751T13234674@netcologne.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: asd17-22.dial.xs4all.nl Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-XS4ALL-Date: Tue, 18 Nov 1997 20:10:50 CET X-NewsSoftware: GRn 2.1 Feb 19, 1994 Lines: 70 Path: 195.95.96.10!news.unisource.be!News.Amsterdam.UnisourceCS!cosy.sbg.ac.at!newsfeed.Austria.EU.net!newscore.univie.ac.at!europa.clark.net!207.172.3.52!feed1.news.erols.com!dispose.news.demon.net!demon!bullseye.news.demon.net!demon!newsfeed.xs4all.nl!xs4all!nestorix2.xs4all.nl!not-for-mail In article <1828.258T2751T13234674@netcologne.de> "Joachim Sondermann-Bieker" writes: > > - new Amigas shall be developed by Amica Inc., USA, but not necessarily > manufactured by Amiga itself. Instead, Amiga International is supposed to > licence new developed items to whoever. Under a "powered by Amiga" label there > shall be a variety of manufacturers that actually build Amigas. Amiga Intl. > will see that certain standards and compatibility is maintained. The quote from AInc at the devcon went something like "we're not in the products business, we're in the technology business". I thought that compared well to the Commodore situation were the engineers and their professional enthusiasm pushed the core technical development ahead, the difference being that management's ability to stall or cancel technical development is greatly reduced. And there certainly was a lot of professional enthusiasm, plus ample opportunity for productive informal contact with the AInc/AInt people. Did you know for instance that the real Boing Ball has 8 by 8 facets and is tilted right by 18 degrees, that it is a polygon rather than being perfectly round, and that the facet directly above and to the right of the central point should be red and perfectly square? There was heated debate over this, as well as over whether Jeff Schindler pronounced Boing correctly. I gave him the third-degree about this, but he denied ever having said "Boeing Ball". I have witnesses to the contrary, but they will remain anonymous. Back to the new Amiga business model, my recollection of what was said is that there will be three main entities: - Amiga International, Incorporated ("Amiga Inc.", I think :) drives development for a broad range of markets, possibly with a more diversified palette of OS configurations. - Amiga International licenses the use of this technology. I don't remember whether they were supposed to produce and sell individual products as well. Petro seemed to have a lot of strategic tete-a-tetes with various Amiga developers. This and other things left me with the impression that AInc and AInt cooperated to get and maintain a good overview of what's happening both inside and outside of the Amiga world. - The ICOA will be in charge of customer/public relations. Whereas AInc would support major developers directly, ICOA would take care of the little fish (no pun intended Fred, honest!). An advantage of this separation as I see it could be that major developers may have more requirement for individual support, eg. where possible new application areas of the Amiga platform would require modifications to the OS. Personally I believe that high-requirement uses can help drive technical development in meaningful directions. The way I understood it, this model has not been set in stone yet but has been thought out into a fair amount of detail and is actively being implemented. The AI people struck me as open-minded, but also very practical people. > Maybe OS 3.5 will be out in the middle of the year. They were very careful not to promise a date, so what we have is basically "as soon as we can, obviously within a year, but obviously not within a month". That makes it somewhere in 1998. Judging by the version number it will be a minor upgrade, but the idea is to also bundle software for functions that weren't previously part of the Amiga OS (eg. networking or web browsing, in part using existing products). There seems to be an intention to have frequent OS releases after that, something like once a year. -- ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ; Jeroen T. Vermeulen \\"How are we doing?"// Yes, we use Amigas ; ;--- jtv@xs4all.nl ---\\"Same as always."//-- ... --; ;jvermeul@wi.leidenuniv.nl \\"That bad huh?"// Got a problem with that? ; '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' I have nothing against fags and niggers, honest!