Amiga Growing Silent Again?

Dr. Mabusa writes "Seems like Amiga is starting a new period of silence. The executive update section of their site, where Amiga president Jim Collas used to pledge "openness to the community" until recently, has been shut down "for the next several months". " The rumor is pretty impressive: A Transmeta CPU, a Linux Kernel, released by Amiga within the next 2 months.

Amiga can *never* die

I've read many people asking why isn't Amiga dead, isn't it a toy, etc., on many previous articles linked up in Slashdot.

My answer is: if a machine and it's users can continue a market for Amiga, without a functional parent company (the fastest Amiga is as fast as whatever PowerPC chip you care to mention), and people like the doubters still have to ask that question 5 years after Commodore fell, you know that there is something about Amiga that will never let it die.

It had *principle*. Jay Miner did it right first time around - the linux kernel this time will make Amiga no longer conceivbale as a toy by the uninitiated (it is far beyond toy OSs like Windows and Macs, but lags behind the *nix's). CPU is irrelevant - as are the latest fastest graphics cards with xxxmillion polys/sec.

It will undoubedly have impressive hardware - be it the MIPS+ATI graphics core, the Transmeta or PPC CPU. All these things are readily available. What makes Amiga live on is not the original hardware or software, but the vision of design.

WIndows and Macs are dying for the underlying power of linux. But they lack robust design. Linux has the power, but as Torvalds has indirectly said on many occations, due to it's development implementation, it never *had* a design.

Amiga combines it all - and adds the special sauce that makes it Amiga. :)