Gentu writes "Genesi released today an extensive feature list of MorphOS, the pre-emptively multi-tasking operating system for PPC. MorphOS/Pegasos is a brand new platform (the last full OS+HW platform released was 7 years ago with Be's BeBox) so it is very modern and it has support for 3D cards, USB, SMP while it also features partial Amiga application binary compatibility! Additionally, OSNews today features an interview with the Eclipsis Project Manager, Nicholas Blachford, about MorphOS, and they include three exclusive screenshots of the OS."

nastyphil writes "After a wait of almost 10 years and passing through a series of owners' hands, new Amiga hardware is on sale. G4 processors at up to 800 Mhz. Development of AmigaOS 4.0 has been continuing at a steady pace by Hyperion and will be ready for release early 2003."

An anonymous reader writes "Individual computers have announced a new version of they're multi-format floppy controller the Cat Weasel. This new version (Catweasel MK3 PCI/Flipper) has a few surprises such as 3 different interfaces to connect it to the host computer and a socket for an original C64 SID chip :). 'The main purpose of the Catweasel has always been to allow access to non-standard disks using normal PC-disk drives, even if you usually need a completely different computer for that. The capacity of the drive does not matter in this case: A 5.25 inch drive with 1.2MByte capacity will read and write a C-64 disk with 170KByte as well as a 3.5 inch drive with 1.44MByte can access a 1,76MByte Amiga disk. Together with a company that has specialized in data recovery, we're working on the implementation of more than 1100 different disk formats, and it does not matter that this has been classified impossible by others before. Even the 800KByte disks from older Macintosh computers can be used in standard 1.44MB drives, although the original drives have rotated their disks at variable speeds.' Find out more at the Catweasel MK3 PCI/Flipper page."

wiredog writes "Slate has an article about why TiVo (the company, not the idea) is destined to fail. It suffers from the same first mover disadvantage that did in the Newton and the Amiga."

kyala asks: "I am finishing up a seven-year BS in a degree program that I designed but can't come up with a name for. Going through my school's interdisciplinary studies department, I designed a degree that combines physics, botany, and computer programming. The degree is great and I love what I study. The only problem is that I need to come up with a title for it and am stumped. So, of course, I'm turning to slashdot for suggestions. Not only will you be repaid in karma, but I'll give royalties on any spontaneous donations made at commencement out of sheer delight at the name of my degree. Some details: I pretty much have carte blanche, so, besides unimaginative profanities, don't inhibit yourself. Of course, ideally, I'm going for accuracy. Barring that, obscurity will do. Some of the candidates so far: 'Techno-Botanical Inevitabilities', 'Quantum Astrobiology', 'Heuristic Ontologies', 'The Degree Formerly Known as Everything', 'Inevitable Prolificity'. One guy even suggested I forego words and try an interpretive dance."

Hot Trout writes "24/7 Streaming Retro Radio bringing to you all those classic game and demo tunes from the 80's and 90's. Mainly C64 and Amiga but also games. This allows DSL users to enjoy their old school fav's in 128 kbps, 44Khz, STEREO. Very very cool ... Check it out at The old Computer @ Retro Radio." I've been reading High Score lately, so retro gaming is great to run through again.

Mike Bouma writes "AnandTech has reviewed ATI's latest mobile graphics solution. According to the reviewer this small and energy efficient chip is the new king when it comes to mobile graphic chips for Notebooks. Also John Carmack is apparently very positive about the chip and also stated that Doom 3 will be able to run smoothly with this new Radeon chip."

joshua42 asks: "Although having used Linux and FreeBSD for many years, I have yet to come across anyone seriously questioning the traditional UNIX style file system name paradigm. With an Amiga background (It should be the same for people growing up with Windows, or those growing up with no computer at all (God forbid!).) it took me quite a while to get used to 'A' and 'a' being treated as different characters. This is of course fairly easy to accept and to understand if you have a technical background. I do however have a hard time to see how aunt Ginny will ever be able to distinguish between her 'Letter.txt', 'LETTER.TXT' and 'letter.txt' files. In real life, upper and lower case letters represents almost identical information to most people. Has any thoughts been spent on this issue, now that our favorite OS is becoming increasingly mainstream? Does it need to be addressed? Have any attempts been done? What are the implications to parts outside the file systems?" This is an interesting point. As Unix grows more and more popular, the simple things we've taken for granted about the filesystem may stand in the way of general users adopting it. What ways can you think of that will mitigate this problem for new Linux users without actually affecting too much? Special shells for novice users, that can simplify much of the complexity may be the way to go, here.

Sebby writes "This is pretty neat - the folks over at retrosystem rebuild old computers/consoles with new guts inside. They have Amiga 1000, Atari 2600, and also NES systems, with lots of options for configuration. If they only made a Sinclair ZX81 with the same specs, I'd be sold!" I mean, who wouldn't want a PC in an NES box ;)

Ethan writes: "A developer on the Yahoo Amiga One mailing list has successfully installed MacOS 9.2 using Mac On Linux. And it seems that adding OS X support is on the to-do horizon for the MOL developers. I think that it will be interesting to see the people at Apple lose some sleep now that a low cost, fast, off the shelf solution exists to run Mac OS, without any Apple hardware. If it doesn't do anything else, at least it will give the people buying the new Amiga One G3 PPC board an existing software base." Mind you, I've never even seen an Amiga One, but it would be a pretty silly thing to make up ;) Update: 07/05 07:03 GMT by T : Mike Bouma piped up with a link to a page featuring the same hardware, in this case running Debian, OpenOffice.org and Mozilla.

A reader writes " NTK Magazine and Mute Magazine are holding a Festival of Inappropriate Technology in London city centre on the 9th of June. Featuring the Commodore 64 underground, The Classic Amiga Preservation Society, DNSCon, the EFF plus many more talks and stalls. There will also be wired and wireless network access available. The Register will also be there. Should make for a great day, all are welcome!"

Michael Jennings writes: "Here is a review of the Game On exhibition that is on at the Barbican centre in London, and which will tour Japan and the US in 2003." Here are two previous mentions of the exhibit. Below are Michael's detailed impressions of the exhibit.

In celebration of the release of AotC, here are a bunch of random SW stories that have fluttered through our bin: Tim Drage has made a Lego Star Wars movie, POds sent us a fan film Fan Film (quicktime. Bah). Here is a comic to share and enjoy. iamchaos noted that the next Matrix Trailer will be showing with Clones. nellardo sent in a fine tribute to darth maul. Anyone want a Star Wars Axe? Zack sent us a great collection of SW Characters you won't see as much as you might want to. wiredog sent us some spoilers, the Skywalker family tree and how Anakin becomes Vader. peter_gzowski sent in an essay by Ebert where he gives it 2 of 4 stars, and discusses the digital filming. Finally ant sent us a bizarre tale of some guys who got the brilliant idea to build a life-size Millenium Falcon. So there it is folks. I have tickets for a 12:01 showing in Ann Arbor and I'll be getting in line in just a few short hours.

YttriumOx writes: "Eyetech Ltd, a UK based company now has the AmigaOneG3SE for prerelease to developers. Anyone who's been craving a PPC motherboard for either Linux or the New AmigaOS can put their orders in now. The developers prerelease board comes with a TurboLinux PPC CD. While this system is targetted at Amiga owners wanting new hardware, there's no reason for anyone needing a good PPC solution for Linux can't get their hands on one. You've got until the 24th of March if you want a prerelease board (note that the only difference between it and the final board is that the ROM chip in the final board will be an AmigaOS4 ROM where as it's an OpenPPC BIOS in the developers board. Exact specifications of the board can be found here." This is also a good solution for people who want to use Linux on a PowerPC but do not want to buy an Apple machine. Price for the "beta" board is $450 and final will be $500.

Mike Bouma writes: "A special release of the intent Application Development Kit for Windows and Linux is included on the cover CD of the current issue of digital magazine. Intent is the core technology used in the AmigaDE and is also the standard programming and the platform independent content environment chosen by the Open Contents Platform Association (OCPA) for digital consumer devices. Consumer Electronic Giants including Hitachi, Sony, Kyocera, PSION, Nokia, NEC, Motorola, Grundig, JVC, Fujitsu, Sharp, Epson, Intel, Pioneer, Metrowerks, Sega, Bandai and Capcom are supporting the platform. A full new release of the AmigaDE Software Development Kit will become available for general developers later this year. Software developed for intent works with the AmigaDE platform as well. Recently a partnership between Amiga and Nokia was revealed and finally here are some links to recent interviews with AmigaDE software developers."

AtlasT writes: "Amiga Inc. announced today that Nokia will be shipping their Linux-powered "Mediaterminal" STBs with AmigaDE pre-installed. These news along with the previously announced cooperation with Sharp for their Zaurus PDA make the future of Amiga Inc. look a bit brighter indeed. What we who use computers more often than PDAs and STBs wonder is when we'll see the release of AmigaOS 4 and new machines. If you'd like to have a pre-view of AmigaDE and some applications you can buy the AmigaDE Player for Linux or Windows. I wouldn't mind running games like Payback, a GTA2 clone, on a PDA!" The Nokia Media Terminal was supposed to be launched in the second quarter of 2001, then by the end of 2001, now... who knows. Update: 02/23 21:24 GMT by M : It seems the Mediaterminal is already available but expensive.

AmiLover writes: "OSNews is running a review of AmigaXL, a system that allows you to boot AmigaOS on your PC in a way that resembles a regular-booting x86 operating system. Screenshots accompany the article show the latest version of AmigaOS 3.9 running on a Compaq laptop. With AmigaOS 4.0 coming out in March with lots of new features (antialias fonts, better memory protection etc) is AmigaXL the one true future of Amiga, a future that AmigaDE, QNX and Gateway failed to materialize through their involvement with AmigaOS?"

Jeremy writes: "KernelTrap has interviewed Matthew Dillon, a well-known FreeBSD kernel hacker. He has recently been in the spotlight due to many impressive NFS related bug fixes, as well as fixes to the TCP stack. In this interview he talks about these bug fixes as well as his history with computers, programming and FreeBSD. He also discusses Linux, open source, embedded systems, the Amiga (and his DICE C compiler), and much more."

apanishev asks: "Hi to all /.'ters! I'm a beginner computer journalist in a Russian on- and offline magazine "PL-komp'yutery". One of the recent topics of my interest is: whether the computer journalism itself has a history? Sure it does, but my first investigations revealed nothing. I know there were some Amiga paper magazines and some BBS electronic bulletines before the Internet age, but what was the very first paper (and/or online) magazine about personal computers? About web design and professional computing? About PC games? I would be very grateful for any thoughts about the subject."

kilaasi writes "Some hard-core game-developers from Finland is making super-optimized games for the iPaq and similar devices, tweaking and tuning every bit of piece there is. These are old Commodore and Amiga-programmers that know the virtues of small-is-beautifull."