Thats a shame, now Genesi won't get AmigaDE on the Thendic SmartBoy.

Obvious now why AmigaOS4 is desperately needed by Amiga Inc!

Definitely puts a new spin on BBRV's claims as well, don't you think?

Anybody know much about the investment group Cross Atlantic Capital Partners, they claim $600 million in capital.

Tao is good technology, comparisons with JAVA are misplaced. Who are the new owners, will they bury it? Or do they have the capital to get things rolling?

When Bill said things would not be based on Intent, it could now mean two things, either some other approach, or rebadged technology.

In any case Tao's technology works best on a hosted environment and that seems to be a cutdown OS4, designed for porting.

On the other hand the whole thing might just be turning into merde.

These are turbulent times for technology, a sign of basic instability that grips the industry.

I wonder what caused Tao to fail in the end?

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That's what it looks like and I am not surprised.

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I don't understand why these should be turbulent times for technology only because a company with obsolete technology finally goes belly up. We could see this coming, they didn't make any great deals during the last years and their technology didn't have any competitive advantage. Nobody needed it anymore. While Tao technology was neat in 2002, how did they use their advantage? They quickly fell behind, didn't make the right deals and what we can see today is the result of it.

I won't miss them.

Helge, I was thinking of the many problems of VISTA when the leading OS becomes so demanding that it can only virtually run on new machines, is a cow to run any "old" applications etc.,.

I also believe LINUX while growing in popularity is also nudging a brick wall, in that despite its power it is a hell of an OS to deal with - Amiga's X11 server in some ways tames LINUX, but LINUX remains what it has always been.

MacOS, perhaps the most modern of the OSes also seems a stuck behind expensive HW and in some ways a sealed off OS designed for off-the-shelf programs but harder than the other two to customise.

Meanwhile the power and spread of digital HW is seeping into nearly everywhere. None of the major OSes seem the least capable of harnessing the existing power, or coordinating in any meaningful way what is already in place - from phones and Mp3 players, to optioned up Desktop systems.

The need for domestic servers, seems to me obvious, looking at a foxtel box, video recorders, digital sound, digital tuners, game consoles, internet, email etc, etc, etc., But for that to work there needs to be a common small undemanding OS, shared applications etc,.,. that cannot be done with existing mainstream OSes which instead are looking towards protocols as a way to allow basic comminications.

On top of this, is something that is so common it goes below the radar. The over-abundance of data that leads to needless duplication and the loss of data within the machines.

Effectively HW has outstripped software solutions, more specifically traditional mainline OSes have over extended themselves.

Tao's technology is nowhere obsolete, unless someone is doing the same thing elsewhere better. Compiling to a Virtual Processor is a lean means to create portability and software permanency, something JAVA cannot do.

REBOL supplies some glue that is much needed, and it has an overlooked strength that should be making it far more successful - that is having no reserved words and capable of easily producing "dialects" sidestepping implementing symbolic interpreters within an interpreted language.

The most obvious point, is that the need to have a stripped down and tamed OS is that runs directly counter to the nature of mainstream OSes which have become enormously bloated.

Turbulence is a time when all the solutions are available but the direction of the past development acts as a dead hand, unable to pose the right questions and therefore caught with embracing the wrong solutions.

Companies like Tao, become victims. Hyperion and Amiga Inc seem incapable of seeing what they have and lock horns over small change issues. The PS3 stands there begging for a OS and the only thing that walks through the door on time is the worst OS possible for a games box - Linux.

SAM sits on the sideline, an almost perfect domestic server.

Turbulence.

Edit: Source removed so I removed this too.

without any real facts to back that up it just shows you as being someone with an axe to grind with amiga.inc.

derfs

Back what up? You might find it very comforting to say stuff like this as someone who seems to have the opposite of an axe to grind with Amiga Inc but it doesn't make your comment correct.

There are two things I draw your attention to. One is that it is a quote of a TAO Group Employee who posted on The Register and is NOT my words.

Second is where I say "If". I even put it in bold for you. My personal opinion is couched in a conditional, congratulations on skipping it.

@derfs

Huh? What does Amiga Inc have to do with all this? Chris Rimmer never mentioned Amiga Inc in his comment. Are you seeing things?

Edited: Confrontational.

@Gregs

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Funny how you twist the fact that noone was interested anymore in Tao's products because they were obsolete into something that makes them appear as a victim of turbulences and peoples not seeing the light.

Face it, IF Tao had a competitive product, a larger company would have already bought them out.
That's what companies like Microsoft do. They buy in technology that they see as groundbreaking. Two examples are Photosynth and LocalLive. Both are great technologies that they bought in through the acquisition of small companies.
Strangely nobody is interested in TAO. And according to you the reason for this is that nobody has seen the light yet? It's time to face reality.

Helge, compiling to a virtual processor and translating on-the-fly to real CPUs, is practically the only way to create software permanency.

If you know another way I would be interested.

As far as I know Tao is the only company that followed this path. What they did wrong in terms of marketing and positioning I do not know, but the technology worked well.

On top of the problems of being under capitalised and the mistakes that can stem from this, there is the fact that the computer market is far from a free market, it is a tangle of invested interests.

The difference between the Tao VP approach and some mere applications, is that its portability threatens MS quasi monopoly, it threatens Mac, it runs against the grain of Linux ports, of course none of these interests would be interested.

As for the punter, they need products they can buy, and that requires packaging the technology in a way that is useful to them.

Software permanency is an abstract, and so is infinite portability.

Yet if you think about it, surely the idea in the long term we will be bogged down with CPU tied software does not make sense.

The problem with JAVA is that it is VM solution, the difference between this and a VP one is big.

The VP approach sits upon a point, not a complete machine, just a processing unit. The rest is borrowed through drivers from a purpose built OS (a host).

Unless someone can come up with a better long term solution (and I mean decades and more) to creating software that can persist through time and HW developments - I would again very much like to hear.

In the history of technology, it is not unusual for solutions to be pushed aside, only to be picked up years latter, once the shit has hit the wall.

For almost 20 years the need for a VP solution has been on the boards, Tao itself has been around for a far shorter period, and half-arsed solutions like JAVA have displaced it, but only temporarily, as JAVA is a bulky and fragile approach.

If Tao's technology slips away, all it does is delay the inevitable. Perhaps other approaches will spring up (REBOL has an interesting approach REBOL + Tao + a cut down ported OS4 would nicely fit the bill).

The reality is that reality changes. The logic of reality remains, in this case a whole industry which is in a dead end.

Facts don't exist independently, what is or is not a fact depends on the question being posed.

I respect your thoughts, but I don't think they have much to do with reality or how the future might look like.

Helge, perhaps I complicate matters, because I do love OS4 as the most workable OS I have ever used and the only one I know I can make work the way I would like.

In this sense I like what Hyperion's developers have done.

I also much prefer the SAM board combined with a PS3 port of OS4 (the SAM would be an excellent server and the PS3 a great little box for everyday processing.

I have nothing against ACK, but I do strongly believe the desktop computer is largely a dead end (not that it won't be around for a good long while).

The X11 server gives OS4 a lot of breathing room in porting LINUX apps, it also makes a much better users "LINUX" than Linux itself (if this make sense).

However, there is also the future, the long term future which I believe has a number of features partially in OS4, but also in advanced scripting, generalised compiled code and something like VP.

If that future could be ported first to OS4 then that would strengthen OS4, but that requires the core of OS4 to be available as source code, and at the moment the only company that has been at least saying the right things in general, whatever else people think about it, is AI.

I don't have a good guy bad guy outlook on either Hyperion or AI, or Tao for that matter. Companies are made up of people however they are not people but legal fictions that act sociopathicly.

I want arbitration, not a legal court case. For I think arbitration can only resolve the thing one way, that is AI gets the source code and Hyperion goes on developing OS4 and selling it.

Tao's technology is, I hope, still in the mix.

The other thing to take account of is the BB effect.

In an effort to muscle in this faction has destroyed a perfectly good project MorphOS, and carried on setting AI against OS4, disparaging Tao's technology (without good reason), and generally ridiculing everything and anything said by AI.

Black propaganda, continuous, malicious and with one aim has fed the normal frictions, greed etc between AI and Hyperion, continues to feed it with constant slander and rumouring and I believe has had no small effect in poisoning relations and contributing to the current mess.

Delay, delay and more damn delay. Tao itself is a victim of it. We should literally have been several years ahead of where we are now.

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Binary portability is, IMO, overrated. In a framework like Java, this is useful, especially in the context of a heterogeneous web environment, although with a project like Eclipse I doubt that it profits from the binary portability of Java.

I think, however, that it is absolutely no problem to write portable applications. Mozilla, OpenOffice.org and other such project clearly demonstrate that this is possible. Most of all it eliminates the requirement for a proprietary platform.

Why is this a "lean means" to create portability? Applications don't get smaller because of a virtual assembler code.

I am not saying that TAO's technology is obsolete, however, the question is in what context you want to apply it. Desktop environments are certainly not the target of Intent, because as we all know, the diversity of CPU's on the desktop market is everything but diverse.

Rogue

Why is this a "lean means" to create portability? Applications don't get smaller because of a virtual assembler code.

I was being unclear. VP code is no smaller. I meant it in terms of processing for different CPUs, that is that it is the CPU instructions being translated, and not an entire OOPs VM environment.

Binary portability is, IMO, overrated.

In the context of desktops HW, I would agree. Further the choice of CPUs, as you say is restricted and probably will remain so for a good long time.

However, small devices, which as time goes on will only become more processor powerful, changes things to a large degree. Finding compatible programs (and I am speaking of small ones) that work across PDAs and Desktops is a nightmare.

As phones and PDAs seem to be converging, the idea of having a handy small device that seamlessly integrates with bigger environments elsewhere, is just the tip of the future iceberg.

Other things ride on this, scripting, generalisied compiled code, fragmentation of application parts. Having the ability to simple transfer compiled code onto different devices is a major asset, especially if the same code is being used in the same way on bigger devices.

I am not saying that the OS itself should or could be effectively done in VP. Rather the reverse, specific porting to the resident CPU and HW configuration would seem both efficient and effective.

But the application base, is another question. Here I see a major long term benefit to Tao-type VP. However Tao may be out of the picture.

Where Mozilla etc shows the best in traditional porting, at least in terms of Open Office this comes with a huge amount of dependences and general bulk. I don't think this is were we should be heading in the long term.

I also know that this sounds very much like AIs line, but in this case at least, my attraction to AIs "plans" was that this was a direction I was interested before I had even heard of them.

VP, compiled code fragmented into generalised modules, scripting acting as glue between modules (Very much like REBOL seems to shaping into), is what I have been interested in since the late 1980's.

I am at the moment resting my last hope on fair arbitration, and hoping against hope that we may still end up with a strong AOS4 (especially on the PS3 especially now we have an X11 option for need app fillers), and a small device method of integrating many things together in a user useful way.