Bill buys World

Billy boy has given those nice peeps down at Apple $150 mil, but it goes deeper than that.

Microsoft and in particular Bill Gates knows that if he bought out Apple (Which he definitely could), the Anti Trust people would be on to him in a flash shouting monopoly. In making , in my opinion, one of the shrewdest business deals this century, Bill has placified what threat there was left in Apple.

The terms of the agreement:

Microsoft will develop more for Apple machines

MS gets a 7% non voting share of Apple

MS and Apple will share development stuff

Apple will drop all lawsuits against Microsoft (the "look-and-feel" one of Win95 being the most obvious

Apple will ship Internet Explorer v4 and later versions as the default browser on all its machines

Oh, and Apple gets $150m, but I`ve already said that

Microsoft has seriously wounded, if not decapitated two birds with one stone. With Apple shipping IE as de facto browser (meaning IE is pre loaded on 97% of all new computers), Netscape will only appeal to "Conspiracy theorists, Unix users and Win3.11 people" as John Shephard put it. And let`s face it, we (the Amiga community) don`t feature that big in the statistics. I dread to think what market share IBrowse or Voyager have of the total browser market :-(

Also, Microsoft removes the last big computer manufacturer not shipping with MS products, and moves closer to its dream od a MS product on every computer. Unix users? Be? Amiga? Sorry, no.

Anyway, I ticked the Amiga heckbox and the General News checkbox, thinking that the general one would only be for major events, like Gateway being sold or other nasty things. How wrong can you BE!

Testament to Gateway`s strength, in the last past while I have been inundated with countless articles about Gateway`s new server products, the new baby called Dimension, new telephone call centers in the United States, for heaven`s sake. I live in the UK, people!!!!

So, Gateway has been doing a lot of stuff, and the score is

So, at the moment the EFF/FreeSpeech blue ribbon campaign has officially stopped, but some of these crazy right wing senators (I didn`t say that, ok?) are planning to try again. Good ol` American democracy. The courts say it`s illegal by their own Constitution, which ironically these right wingers believe in so adamantly, but still they go ahead.

Hill Binton said that

"We must find a way of..." filtering/censoring "... the internet in the same way the V-chip does for television"

Doncha just love America? (apologies to all American viewers, I`m just criticising your government, not you :)

Now, the only two service providers in the world are AOL and *snort*, the Microsoft Network. For the moment though, AOL had said the status quo will continue, except the profits go to a different office. Isn`t that always the way?

I`m talking about Flying High here, and perhaps some others. Flying High has been panned by just about everyone, who lament that if there had just been a little more playtesting, if you didn`t do this when you did that, and so on.

New games development is to be commended, as is releasing them on time. How ever, I would be more than happy if Flying High, which I was planning to buy, had been released a bit later, but a bit better. The message is this, go for the graphics, but yeah, they need that gameplay thing, yes?

Magic Workbench, Newicons, MUI, not MUI, DEC Alpha, PPC, Wordworth, Final Writer, Imagine freaks, everyone else :-)

For instance, there is the particularly vicious MUI/ antiMui debate. I had hoped to get Stefan Stuntz and Yvon Rozijnj (author of Aweb and not renowned for liking MUI) to debate it openly, but they both thought it had gone too far already

And the Newicons/MWB one. This has gotten really nasty between Martin Huttenloher and Roger McVey after some comments made by Mr McVey were taken badly.

And the one about the 2 chips who both had MIPs pouring out them, and we`re still in indecision.

Can we please no-one?

Amongst others, one reason being cited back then was that the Amiga had been marketed as a games computer, that it had been pushed into where it didn't belong. As a result of this, the Amiga was at that point best known for its games, which held their own against the then current generation of consoles.

With the decline of Commodore, games companies quickly started leaving as soon as sales figures dropped, and the Amiga games market went into a state of decline to say the least, with only one or two big-name games being released that were worth buying.

But, as games sales dropped, it was the serious side of the Amiga that flourished, with software like Lightwave and Imagine untouched by anything on the PC, Wordworth an Final Writer maturing into word processors to be proud of, plus new software like Photogenics, and not even mentioning TurboCalc, FinalCalc, things like PPaint, XI-Paint, ImageFX - the list goes on forever. In that new era, it was the exceptionally high standard of applications like the ones mentioned here that kept the Amiga going, not forgetting the PD scene of course.

Now, another few years on, still the serious side goes from strength to strength, with new versions of established favourites like PPaint 7, Final Writer 97, and completely new packages, like Art Effect, Image Studio etc., consider also the definite move to CD-ROM and CD-R with packages like Burn-It, MakeCD and MasterISO. And that, funnily enough, together with the mass upgrading users have been undertaking, and the Gateway buy-out, has sparked a whole new range of games, with Genetic Species, Wendetta, Trapped 2 and of course Myst (which will also be the first PowerAmiga game released), all of which demand a CD drive and are aimed solely at '030+ Amigas with 6-8Mb RAM or better, so they can be expected to be of a very good standard indeed. With this pick-up in the Amiga games market, will the Amiga finally present itself to the outside world not as a games machine, not as a machine for serious users, but as the strong all-rounder we know it is? Let's hope so.

Probably what your typical average Joe Amiga would want from these new machines, is a new almost-Amiga, what I mean by that is a computer, with next-generation spec's, running a new version of AmigaOS, much like the one Amiga International are now concentrating on producing, together with new, souped-up PowerPC versions of all his favourite Amiga programs, like DOpus, PPaint or Wordworth, plus of course new PowerPC games like Myst from ClickBOOM.

Will phase5 deliver this? Well, their A/Box has of course got the spec's, phase5's agreement with ClickBOOm for PowerPC games will make sure there's no shortage of those, but what about the important bit, the AmigaOS? Nope - phase5 are developing their own OS, which, according to them, will incorporate many of the features of AmigaOS. However, it won't be the same, and in the end I get a feeling that an A/Box user will be using a machine that may be a bit like the Amiga, that might even be compatible in some form, but essentially different.

Will Pios deliver? Pios are hoping to convert the Amiga faithful and aren't hiding that fact, strategically calling their machine the TransAM. It too has the specs, although it maybe isn't as revolutionary as the A/Box, but it at the moment only runs BeOS, which, while impressive, isn't Amiga compatible and as such is not what Joe Amiga would want. It will however run AmigaOS in the future, but via a Siamese RTG system. It's designed to be a multi-OS system, and so it will also run pOS from ProDad, but how great that is remains to be seen, and the fact that it runs multiple OS's is likely to simply confuse a lot of people, plus it would be of more use if it also ran MacOS and/or maybe even (spit) a version of Windows, 95 or NT.

Why all this messing around with OS's, when Amiga International are working on the next, PowerPC based version of AmigaOS, which is surely what the vast majority of users want! Plus AmigaOS, as a standard, sorts out the compatibility problem I talked about last month.

Amiga International were talking to all the parties at WOA, and their intentions seem to be to have AmigaOS standard on all new PowerPC "Amigas", so I wish them luck and all the best, keeping my fingers crossed though.

Miami supports full IP multicasting since version 2.1, in a way that is source-level compatible to Unix, allowing relatively easy ports of Unix multicasting software to AmigaOS/Miami.

Multicasting is the transport mechanism used by real-time applications (audio/video conferencing etc.) on the Internet, and by the "MBone" multicasting backbone embedded into the Internet.

With an MBone tunnel connection at your provider, a multicasting- capable protocol stack like Miami and some conferencing software based on multicasting, you can participate in the MBone, e.g. watch Space Shuttle launches live, watch conference meetings, run your only live audio/video conferences etc.

Up until earlier this year the MBone has been "experimental" and was not considered a real Internet service. This has changed recently though. There is a very strong movement on the Internet towards delivering MBone to end users right now, and several Internet providers (most of them small regional providers) have officially added "MBone access" to their list of services recently. The MBone is gradually becoming an "official Internet service", just like W3 and e-mail. Ask your provider for more information on this.

What the Amiga needs at this point are good, clean ports of the available multicasting application software, and maybe a few Amiga-native multicasting applications. I don't have the time to do this myself, but there are probably many programmers reading, and some of them might be looking for an interesting project. The MBone is likely to become the next "hot issue" after email and www, so we should try to get a quick start on this, and all the Amiga needs is application software.

If you are looking for a way to generate some income from your Amiga: Good video/audio conferencing tools could become real money makers - probably more interesting than yet another e-mail/news program or web browser, where you first have to invest many months of work to just get to the point that the competition has already reached. Besides you can implement straight from the specs and from Unix examples - no need to add workarounds for broken M*cr*s*ft implementations for a change...

If you are interested in porting or writing multicasting applications please check the following links for more information on the MBone:

The currently available operating systems for the Amiga are increadibly powerful; more so than most people imagine - after using my Amiga for several years I'm still finding features that I've never used; the "Alias" command was, until recently an alien concept to me, now I find no end of uses for it. I have added a progress bar to the shell copy command for example by just making an "alias" to the "SCopy" command ("alias copy scopy window" in my "s:user-startup"); although not the most exciting thing a computer can do, it's little touches like that which makes a system more enjoyable to use (depending on what you're touching of course :-) ). If the Amiga's characteristic easy-to-use-but- powerful design is to be carried into the next millenium then it needs carefully updating; maintaining compatibility but giving a slightly slicker appearance - most people's perception of the Amiga is still the yellow text and windows on a blue background that the A500 so horrifically burnt onto our brains; carefull advertising and restructuring is required by who ever now owns Amiga, (slow readers may find it has changed ownership again before reaching the end of this paragraph) if support for the Amiga is to continue, so someone needs to get their act together pretty sharpish, personally I'd give better odds of finding intelligent life behind the keyboard of an Apple Mac than that happening within the next 2 years - A new Power Amiga may prove me wrong, lets hope so.

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