I don’t know if anyone has ever asked this question before, so I will ask. And if someone did and there is an answer, could you direct me to it. And if there isn’t, maybe someone from one of the modern Amateur Radio manufactures can answer it. Why isn’t there USB on modern rigs? What’s the catch to getting it added?

A standard USB port on a computer

I mean, with USB, you could make it much easier to setup the frequencies in the memory or the radio. It’s faster through put then serial, so you could get a lot more data from the rig. It would be a simpler setup for interfacing it by just plugging it in and making APIs available for software developers to write code that will talk to it. Apple revolutionized the MP3 and smart phone markets by making it easier to interface your devices with your computer. They’ve moved on from USB to WiFi and cloud based service now. While a modern rig is still using serial ports.

When I talked about a “Smart Rig” back when Google bought Motorola, I was hoping someone may seize in that and go to the next step. But I also understand, many companies don’t share plans for upcoming products with the public. But could you give us a hint? A small clue that something, anything is going to be available at some point? I love my FT-847, but it if used a USB interface that I could hook up to my Mac, I would be in heaven. And a USB accessible rig, makes for much less clutter. Radios are getting smaller and smaller, and adding a USB based interface or even a soundcard capable to allowing you to do APRS, PSK31, etc… is that too much to ask for?

I know there will be folks that say, “West Mountain Radio” makes interfaces, why do you need USB? Simple, I like clutter to be kept a minimum myself, and the ease of one connection to troubleshoot is also nicer. Not to say West Mountain doesn’t make great products, because they do, sans the Mac support. But think of how easy you could explain how to do a digital mode if all you said was, “Yep! I just plug it in the USB port and put in all my favorite frequencies in the radio. Then I start up the software for the mode I want to run and I’m off!” compared to, “Well, you’ll need a serial to USB interface, and drivers have to be installed, then a serial cable and make sure it’s a null modem cable too…” Have I lost anyone yet? Because I need a compass right now.

Hopefully you see where I am going with this. I would have thought after the 15+ years that USB has been around, someone would have came up with a rig with USB to interface it to your computer, giving you the tools to write your own code for your computer. Windows, Linux and Mac, not to maybe mention, Amiga or MorphOS or AROS. So I ask, why don’t modern rigs have USB ports? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

73.

Rich also writes a Tech blog and posts stories every Tuesday and Thursday on Q103, Albany’s #1 Rock Station website, as well as Amateur Radio stories every Monday thru Friday on AmiZed Studios and hosts a podcast called The Kim & Rich Show with his fiance’ Kim Dunne.

Another Summer Comes
So here we are. June of 2011. Summer’s not quite here but we’re so close we can see it from where we’re standing (for northern hemisphere folk). 26 summers ago Commodore released the Amiga 1000 upon the world, and if you agree with my previous post, upon our hearts. And with a clear voice told the world; other personal computers are tools, this one is a friend.

A-Eon’s aim to release the X1000 in the summer of 2010 would have been terrific for several reasons; First, and most obvious, those who looked forward to buying one would’ve had one for an entire year by now. Second, it would have been a nice touch to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the Amiga. Third, and for a start-up probably most important, they would have done good on their word. Not that any promises where made, but it pays to achieve goals in accordance with a written or verbal schedule. Consumer confidence and all that stuff.

At the end of the day 25 is just another number, and apart from the reasons listed above, and their respective flow-on effects, 26 is just as good a number. Many X1000 hold-outs are genuinely optimistic when they proclaim “It’s not too late for A-Eon to release the X1000”. But I’m here to offer another, also optimistic view; It’s not too late for A-Eon to pull out.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower

Change Tack

On the eve of what was one of the greatest war offensives in recorded human history, General Dwight D. Eisenhower has been quoted as saying “Plans are nothing, Planning is everything”. It is a philosophy rooted in the knowledge that circumstances are constantly changing and demand our vigilance and adaptivity. Plans represent a point-in-time view; what might have been true then is not necessarily true today. Planning represents adaptation to a new set of circumstances.

To use the sub-heading’s nautical theme, when the prevailing winds are favourable, we can stay on our original tack with a bit of trim (sail adjustment) here and there. But when the winds change, and we want to continue sailing, we need to change tack. This means changing the direction of motion by up to 90 degrees. You’re still heading in the same general direction, but you’re approaching it from a different angle.

Some of you may say that the amount of change in the wind requires only a bit of sail adjustment, I say the winds weren’t that good for this tack to start with, and a year later there’s been enough change to justify a change of tack. Forget the plans from 2009/2010, and start planning.

Planning
Please feel free to put your thoughts forward on why A-Eon should continue with their original plans, in the meantime I’ll explain why it’s not too late for them to bail on those plans. (The following is a hypothetical planning session).

Lets take stock. What have we (A-Eon) got thus far:

1. An OS that is commercially bound to the PowerPC microprocessor architecture.
2. Decent investment of funds into Nemo development boards.
3. Decent investment (or deposit) for the manufacture of a set number (hundreds) of X1000 boards and other non-commodity paraphernalia (case, keyboard, etc).
4. Verbal, architectural, and in some ways a philosophical commitment to use the Xena (XMOS) programmable co-processor.
5. Fragmentation of the core target demographic over multiple Amiga-like offerings.
6. High price tag (if we want to break even on the short-run PC manufacturing).
7. Key open source applications being ported to the platform (Firefox, OpenOffice).

What does our core demographic want:

1. An OS that is free and open.
2. Developers developing for the platform.
3. Powerful hardware. The kind that isn’t too far behind the x86 counterparts.
4. Something to set us apart from the rest of the Windows and Apple crowd.
5. Unified user-base supporting the true Amiga NG platform.
6. Reasonable price tag. The kind that’s not too far above the x86 counterparts.
7. Choice of freeware, shareware, and big-name commercial applications that shine on the platform.

What do ‘we’ want:

1. An OS that allows us to do things rather than prohibit us from doing things. An OS that developers want to develop for.
2. Developers developing for the platform.
3. Second, and third generation hardware. We want this thing to keep growing because we have a vision.
4. Something to set our products apart from the Windows and Apple products. We’re not playing catch-up, we’re not even looking at leap-frog. Like the Wii in the world of Xbox 360 and PS3, we want to define a unique experience.
5. A user-base that may use other platforms, but is using our product for 90% of their computing needs. Like with the original Amiga, a user-base that has a sense of endearment and loyalty to the brand.
6. A price tag that our customers consider reasonable, but also makes us a decent profit. That way we can invest in new products and extend the platform.
7. An ecosystem that will encourage freeware, shareware, and big-name commercial applications to be developed specifically for the platform. Ports are nice, but native apps rock.

Now lets look at the themes and patterns. We want a lot of the same things our core demographic wants, and our second and third demographics would surely appreciate (rich ecosystem with a respectable number of developers creating freeware, shareware, and big-name commercial applications, and something to set us apart from our contemporaries), other mutually inclusive themes are things like the reasonable price tag. It covers what our core demographic wants, but it also feeds the proliferation of the platform and gets it into more hands. More users equals more developers interested in developing for the platform.

The one caveat, the thing we can’t do, if Hyperion is going to make money from their OS investment, is port AmigaOS to another microprocessor architecture. Yes, Arm is nice, x86 is cheap as chips (see what I did there?), but we are wedded to the PowerPC. For better or for worse.

For Better
So here’s what we can do and still cover the things that both ‘we’ and our user-base want.

We pull the plug on the current plan. Any boards currently developed or already in the pipeline will be considered development boards. The thing isn’t reducing in price at the rate we expected.

Now if all those boards are going to be development boards, what will be the user board?

The users want a good price/performance ratio. They want board prices similar to those of the intel/AMD motherboards. They’re not unreasonable in expecting this. Whilst these boards are manufactured in the thousands, the components on these are mostly the same as those found on the Nemo; PCIe, PCI, SATA, PATA, USB2.0, GbE, AC97, DDR2 RAM, BIOS, etc. So the real differences are a different socket, different controller chipset, and lets not forget the Xena. So why are we building a board that has 80% of the components found on $100.00 board? So I say, lets do that, lets give the users a commodity PC motherboard.

What? I thought you said we can’t port AmigaOS to x86.

And we won’t. Let me finish. We go with an AMD chipset board, something that is used by all the main motherboard producers; ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI. The other reason we go with AMD is because the socket doesn’t change as often as it does with intel, and the AMD CPU’s cost less. So our dual PCIe 16x non-custom board + AMD CPU is about $300.00 to the consumer. We give ourselves a ceiling of $1000.00 for the consumer price for the board solution, which leaves us $500.00 – $600.00 (per unit) to source, design, and produce a PCIe PPC board, there are some Freescale QoreIQ parts that would fit nicely. We can try and have the Xena on the same PCIe board or we can just use another of the slots on the motherboard, whichever costs less. After all, the XMOS parts are not PPC specific.

So AmigaOS runs on the PPC board!

To help you visualise the solution

Correct. We use Linux, BSD, or COUGH(aros)! to create a mini-OS that boots off the x86 AMD and loads only the bare necessities to provide a soft UBoot environment for AmigaOS to see the PPC CPU, the PCIe bridge, and all the other devices presented through the soft UBoot (the other PCIe/PCI slots, SATA, PATA, USB2.0, GbE, AC97, DDR2 RAM. It won’t be as fast as a native motherboard, but for AmigaOS 4 it will still be very fast. It’ll be much faster than the SAM460 and for not much more in terms of price. Architecturally it’d be not too dissimilar to a Classic Amiga with a PPC board, consider it as replacing the 68k sub-platform with a x86 sub-platform.

The key is, we get to provide a multi-core AmigaOS 4 computer with modern hardware, and we get to shave a good $1000,00 off the original price tag. It’s a bit Frankensteinien to start with, but the end result is the important thing. Not only are we still in the game, but we are better positioned to satisfy the things we and our users want. And I’m sure there’s a few other things clever developers would do with a box like this.

So what’s stopping someone to buy any x86 board they want, buy the A-Eon PCIe PPC and Xena board or boards, compiling their own kernel, purchasing Amiga OS, and building their own AmigaOne computer?

Nothing. Why would we want to stop a thing like that.

Conclusion
It’s not too late for A-Eon to pull out of it’s original plan and come up with a new one. The one I’ve presented up here is just one of a few possible alternatives. Most of their efforts to date would not be wasted. They can still end up at their destination.

They would no doubt be concerned about user backlash if they told everyone that they are changing their plans. To this I say “We’re Amigans. Plan changes are nothing new to us. Just don’t tell us you’re getting out of the Amiga business.”

What do you guys say? Would you mind a change of plans if they were for the better?

Eddie Cejvan

Hosts: Rich Lawrence, Sean Fitzgerald, Mike Blackburn, Bill P., Jerry Withers.

Check out our new Facebook page. Plus follow us on Twitter.

• Talked about a bunch of Amiga Events that were happening that weekend.
• OWB 1.11 for Morphos Released.
• Jerry tells us a little about his experience with Timberwolf.
• CUBE 1 – 3d FPS for Amiga OS4 port released.
• New Native IRC-client in the works for Morphos.
• KickROM Bounty Phase I & II for AROS 68K.
• Segue into screen dragging?
• Rich calls out trolls.
• We made it on Moobunny!?

Drama, laughs and more!

About a week ago in one of the frequented Amiga online forums I was engaged in a back-and-forth conversation to do with Amiga’s chances in the hands of A-Eon, where upon in order to defend my position and answer to some scathing accusations, I did what I generally don’t like to do, I flashed my credentials. My business credentials that is. Anyway, the other party, DAX, proceeded to make amends and continue the conversation with a new found zeal given my background. “Well at least shed some free advice, don’t just bash them ” DAX proclaimed, after which I pointed him to the many Op-Eds I’ve posted here which I consider ‘free advice’. After some time had past DAX asked in all sincerity “given that money restrains are REAL (this must be taken into account), what could Aeon/Hyperion improve in your opinion?”

A Bit of History
I have been researching the viability of a completely new computing platform since May 2001. I could say that it is Amiga inspired but that would be misleading, for it would bring up ideas of a platform resurrection. It would be more accurate to think of it as an Amiga reincarnation. It’s a large scale project that requires $1M+ to start-off and has nothing to do with AmigaOS 4, Morphos (MOS), or AROS. If you’ve read some of my other Op-Eds you’ll know what I think of all of these.

Nevertheless, I felt that it would be a nice exercise to put down how I would have approached the situation were I asked for a plan or strategy, or if I were the primary angel investor in this chapter of the Amiga story. The year is 2009 and the mediation process has just been finalised with a somewhat favourable outcome for Hyperion, and in this version, Trevor Dickinson has not yet had any discussions with Ben Hermans.

What Have We Got
Since the parties involved are not all that forthcoming with the details I have made some educated guesses based on uncomfortable silences, question evasion, reading between the lines, slipped comments, and thanks to video, body language. Plus there are some hard facts that don’t need to be spelled out.

We have an operating system largely based on the source code of the classic AmigaOS that has been, for lack of a better term, uplifted to the PowerPC architecture. Currently usable at 4.1 and there’s a lot of work still to be done. We have a software company with the worldwide rights to distribute AmigaOS 4 and the rights to the AmigaOne brand. There are no full time coders and everything is done via contracts. We have a community of several thousand Amiga stalwarts spread all over the world. We have some competition in the form of Morphos and AROS. There’s a good chance that the settlement awards conditional rights to the AmigaOS 4 (OS 4) to do with processor architecture so porting to another architecture is out, even if it were economically viable to move to ARM or MIPS. We have AMCC SoC based PowerPC boards from ACube Systems; 440ep and 440ep-flex. There is free and shareware applications for OS 4 but not a lot of commercial software, which makes sense given the small size of the install base; If I had to guess, around 50 running on classic w/ PPC, around 70 on the Eyetech AmigaOne boards, around 30 on Pegasos boards, and around 150 running on the Sam 440 boards. There are many quick and beta-like ports from the open sourced Linux world and the OS 4 install base can’t grow much as a lot of applications get ported to MOS and even AROS. We can’t blame the developers, they’re just trying to reach as many customers as possible.

Hypothetically Hyperion
So as an angel investor and a long time Amigan I decide to do something about it and start having conversations with Ben Hermans about my plan to grow the OS 4 install base. Ben likes the idea and wants me to put together a pack. I put together a business plan based around small amounts of investment from some other angel investors I have worked with before. I meet with Ben and present the plan for starting small and growing slowly but steadily.

I ask him “what’s the number one road block for you to selling more OS 4?” He answers “software”. “Exactamundo”. Ben knows as well as I do that that the Sam440 boards are fine for most purposes. What’s stopping people from buying more of them to run OS 4 is a lack of software. I’m not talking about the high end professional niche kind of software, I’m talking the kind that my friend’s grandma is taking for granted, the kind that every kid at school is using, is available for free at very high quality and user satisfaction, the software without which the masses would be wondering how they lived before it.

I ask him “Out of the 300-500 OS 4 users out there, what do you think is their number one item on their wish list?” Ben shrugs. “That’s OK Ben, I’ve done the research; up-to-date web browser with flash support.” Whilst there have been some commendable efforts in this area in terms of WebKit and Firefox ports, this needs to be taken in-house. We’ll get some of the more popular plug-ins ported as well. We can follow-up with Thunderbird and Sunbird ports as well at a later date.

Even though the users will be able to access online office apps, the second thing needed is offline office apps. OpenOffice is nice but what we need is something more lightweight, we’ll port KOffice, start with KWord and KSpread, and then slowly do the others later. It’ll be a nice ongoing thing.

“For my next wish I want unlimited wishes.” Ben chuckles. What I mean Ben, is we port over a platform with existing software. I’ve talked to Adobe, and with the right level of sponsorship we can have the PowerPC version of Adobe Air ported to OS 4.

You know Ben, I’d like to make this an ongoing partnership and I’d like to be able to talk to you over the net, so I spoke to Skype and negotiated the porting of the PowerPC version to OS 4.

I’m proposing we form a new company under partnership that will produce and own these software assets, and license them exclusively to AmigaOS 4. As you can see in the business plan, we expect to double the user base in the first year. To incentivise the rapid bump up in install base, you’ll need to offer OS 4 for free with the next 500 Sam boards. From our investment fund we’ve allocated $50,000 to subsidise the next 500 Sam440 boards to make them even more appealing; $50 off of the 440ep or $100 off the 440ep-flex. With the four software projects costing $150,000 that brings it to a $200,000 investment. All the software except the office suite will be given away for free. The office suite will have a very reasonable price.

“That all looks pretty good Eddie, are you sure the Sam440’s are up to the task?”
“No they’re not Ben, but that’s OK”. In the research conducted we discovered that the majority of users will trade speed for functionality. Does it really matter that OWB runs really really fast? Plus, it’s a business approach that has been proven several times in the past, 12 months from now there’ll be faster hardware and it will cost less. I bet with twice the install base ACube will move quicker to make a faster board. And if they’re not interested, we’ll find someone in China who is. I know you’re a fan of complete systems, but initially we start with the board, no need to make the higher shipping costs a deterrent, the users we’re targeting in the first year are capable of putting together their own system, they actually kind of prefer it. We’ll include a nice sticker.

The key is to get people to use these things on a regular basis. It’s been shown that when users are vested in a platform, they’d rather upgrade than move to another platform. In the first year we’re targeting the wider everyday usage scenarios. The second year we’ll start working on software that is more targeted to a specific use and will make OS 4 appealing to users outside the Amiga community. And as you can see in the Year 2 financials of the business plan, the foundation we laid down in Year 1 will help us go to market much faster to fill specific niches.

Meanwhile, Back on Planet Earth
The above scenario is not as fantastical as you might think. I have actually done market research, and since Apple’s announcement that Mac OS X 10.6 will be intel only I have spoken to Skype, and Adobe about the PowerPC versions of their clients and what it would take to continue working on them.

I know DAX was referring to the contemporary A-Eon/Hyperion and what they could improve on. Unfortunately A-Eon have asserted on several occasions that they are a hardware company, and they’ve kind of promised to release the X1000. They’re a good way down the track and it would be silly to pull the plug now. But there’s really nothing stopping them from executing, for the most part, what I’ve outlined above after they release the X1000.

Eddie Cejvan

I will from time to time, as I’m sure many of you do, get into a conversation to do with the yesteryear of computing. Sentences like “I remember paying $500.00 for my first 20MB HD” and “Remember how slow a 1200 baud modem was?” would fill the room as heads would shake, eyes would role, and smiles exchanged over how much things have changed over the years.

Or Have They?
As I read the various posts, in the handful of active Amiga forums, relating to the various operating systems (OS) available to the Amiga community today I find that very little has changed over the past 25 years. Granted, the Amiga faithful have at their disposal more in terms of choice but the behaviour of the OS proponents hasn’t changed. Where it used to be Windows 3.1 vs. Mac System 7 vs. Amiga (DOS) Workbench 3.0, it is now AROS vs. MorphOS vs. AmigaOS 4.

From a multitude of causes, two stick out as the main culprits; One, all three of our current “choices” have more in common with their progeny from 1992 than they do with the present day versions of their former competitors. The Amiga may have been years ahead of its time, but not that many years. And Two,

Users still confuse OS with UI
This particular behaviour may also be in part due to the attachment of the current operating systems to the one from 1992, as I recall I was saying it even way back then: Windows, Workbench, and Finder are not the OS, they are User Interfaces (UI). Yes, each OS comes with its own UI, but user interfaces actually have more in common with other applications running on the respective OS than with the OS itself.

It’s understandable that an attachment to a UI would develop; it is after all the visualisation a user is presented with upon every computer use. Combined with the perception of the UI as the OS, and the attachment to the UI, users have actually developed an attachement to the OS. Something a user should never develop.

Who should care about the OS?
The OS is only ever relevant to an application developer. They are the ones that will be utilising OS resources to have their application execute and deliver the experience they’re aiming for. But even that is a somewhat outdated view. With a structured and rich SDK and IDE, there could be enough abstraction that the majority of developers would be able to produce applications without needing to gleen much of the OS it will be running on. In essence, as an application delivery platform, the simpler it is for a developer to build, deploy, and target an audience, the more apealing that OS is.

In terms of affectional attachment to a specific OS by users, it doesn’t help that OS producers bundle in a suite of applications to make the OS useful right out of the box, i.e. Web broswer, notepad, calculator, email client, calendar, instant messaging, simple games, etc.

Who should care about the UI?
Counter-intuitively enough, not the user. The user should only ever care about the application. That’s what makes a personal computer such a ubiquitous tool; the ability to run different applications and in one aspect be a content creation device, whilst in another aspect be a content consumption device.

The UI is a way for an application developer to engage, enable, and in the well executed forms, empower users. Sure, the application developer can take the quick/lazy way out and just construct a UI using standard platform UI artifacts, but when an application developer spends the time to understand the user and how they accomplish tasks and shape an application UI to truley interface with the user, then that application is seperated from the merely good enough and becomes one of the very good.

To a user the entire experience is what matters, which is why over the better part of the past decade the focus on User Expereince (UX) has emerged. UX goes beyond the interface and looks at the equation of work put in vs. value drawn out. A particular application’s UX could sit atop a stack of components that includes the OS and its UI, whilst in well executed cross-platform applications the UX is maintained independantly of the OS and its UI.

Conclusion
Platform producers should be in the business of attracting developers. Intuitive, logical, and modern OS design coupled with powerful tools is the way to empower them. A clearly defined revenue model doesn’t hurt either. The better the tools and platfrom, the better the applications and the user experience, and the more users that will be interested in the platform.

So unless you’re an application developer, please don’t expend so much energy in devotion to an OS. I know all of us are trying to project a certain public persona and our ids are on the line, but in the privacy of your own mind ask yourself this question:

In a world with AROS, MorphOS, and AmigaOS 4, where you favour one over the others, if there were a sudden emergence of well developed applications for web browsing with HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, and Flash, an ooxml compatible office suite, video capture and editing, music creation and editing, 3D modeling and animation with render farm support, integrated messaging and calendar application with CalDAV support, and Skype client with video support, all of that on one of the less favoured systems, would you move to that system?

My advice, care more about the applications and the user experience, especially in terms of quality and not just quantity.

Eddie Cejvan

Hosts: Rich Lawrence, Sean Fitzgerald, Mike Blackburn, Bill P.

• AROS WiFi Bounty.
• Audio Evolution for MorphOS and AROS.
• ARESOne & DFX Partnership.
• OWB 1.9 for MorphOS released.
• X-bench Project.
• Magic Ink for MorphOS.
• Commodore USA – Yeah, not gonna touch that.
• Assorted tangents.

Sean did the show notes if you couldn’t tell. LOL

Hosts: Rich Lawrence, Sean Fitzgerald. Guest Host: Jerry Withers, our host from ART Episode 1.

• Fortis v1.1 for Morphos out :encore-games.com.
  
• Cheap chineese Boing Ball keyboards and mice for fun and profits!
• 25 Years – Amiga – rather broad topic.
• 10 Years Morphos.
• Audio Evolution for Aros released..Morphos is just a powermac g4 away.
• Fairly recent flurry of game ports: Ginana Returns, Sqrxz, Gish – all quality!
• Open Office lite/Kids Edition in development for OS4 via a private developer.
• amiwest plug – around the corner. Rich going?

Corrected the Open Office Item. Originally said in development by Hyperion.

Hosts: Rich Lawrence, Bill P. Guest: StrayFarce.

• Project Timberwolf progressing nicely. New screen shots and bounty now over $6000.
• OWB 3.19 now available.
• PowerBook G4 MorphOS sneak preview.
• Upgrade offer for those that have been abandoned by their 3D animation software vendor.
• November should be the month that the mystery buyer of Amiga.org reveals themselves.
• Tricks & Treats from DiscreetFX.
• More information on Hyperion Entertainments most ambitious project.
• New videos from HKvalhe and he is launching his own magazine. Does he have ART in his sights next?

Hosts: Rich Lawrence, Sean Fitzgerald, Bill Panagouleas. Guest: Bill Buck

My apologies for this LATE episode. Late is a mild term to say the least. Between working a 16 day stretch and the passing of my father, I really didn’t have much time or ambition to get this one out. I apologize. But, for what it’s worth, we’re back next week. Thanks for sticking with us.

• OWB Updates
• New AROS SDK for AmiDevCpp
• 10 Years Amiga Future: New downloads and special offers
• NatAmiga Shown At MeKa 2008
• BBRV talks about LimePC and other happenings.