Bill buys World
Bill Gates has taken one step closer to world domination buy (sic)
by giving Apple money. Yes, I know it sounds daft, but hear me out.
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.
If you are not privy to the GW/Amiga mailing list, I`ll give you a quick
insight. I signed up, the URLs somewhere, find it on the Gateway site.
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
Misc. News | Amiga News |
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The Communications Decency Act (America) has been repealed by the highest
court in the land, but some senators are planning on a second CDA, net-news cries
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 :)
If you have been living in an Amiga free zone for the psat 6 months,
you`ll have noticed that a lot of these "new breed" of Amiga game have been coming out.
I`m not talking about the really awful 6.99 poorer than PD games that we have been getting in
the UK, but the ones that look good, jaw droppingly good.
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?
This Amiga lot, we get awfully hot under the collar about somethings.
Especially when it gets to opposing viewpoints.
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?
When Commodore went into liquidation, everyone started looking for possible explanations,
reasons for the demise of a company that, despite being past its heyday, still appeared capable of having the
future of computing on the drawing boards.
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.
The new up and coming PowerPC machines, the A/Box from phase5, and the TransAM
from Pios have raised a lot of hopes. Hopes for next-generation Amigas, for the Amiga
platform flourishing finally on hardware that can compete with and easily better anything
PC machines can offer. Hopes for the Amiga ideals and characteristics to finally show the
world what computing should be like. Phase5 and Pios are convincing many that their
particular machine will realise those hopes and dreams of many a disenchanted, disillusioned
and disgusted user, unhappy with what has become of his beloved machine. But should we
be so convinced?
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.
This is not exactly an announcement, but rather a reminder :-).
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:
Windows 95
is the best, you can install it three times, taking 20 minutes a shot, and still have a
totally unbootable machine, much better than the crappy old Workbench which works every time and is
infinitely faster.
- Ross Wood, PC User/ex Amiga user (after trying to get a CD-ROM to work,
re-installing windows and finally formatting drive C:)
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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