Slashdot Mirror
Amiga 510 & 1010 released?
bbrindle writes " An unknown German company called IWin just recently announced the release of the Amiga 510 and Amiga 1010. The company just came about at the beginning of this month and is offering Classic Amiga compatibles at decent prices. It seems though they are slow to respond to the media and have not contacted Amiga Inc. in any way. Check out the story in Wired. " It doesn't look good though-if they've built them without contacting Amiga Inc., then they have violated the copyright-and they don't ship with Amiga installed apparently. You have to get it from a local dealer-wherever you might find one, that is.
Some more information about this "300 person" company...
:):
:)
The domain name is, of course, registered to the mysterious Martin Steinbach. His phone number and assorted info can be found by doing a whois lookup.
transcript of an nslookup session (minus all the stuff where I could remember syntax of course
> server ns1.germany.worldcix.net
Default Server: ns1.germany.worldcix.net
Address: 195.206.86.101
> ls -d iwin-corp.com
[ns1.germany.worldcix.net]
iwin-corp.com. SOA ns1.germany.worldcix.net dns.ibg.net. (929948882 10800 3600 604810 41000)
iwin-corp.com. NS ns1.germany.worldcix.net
iwin-corp.com. NS ns2.germany.worldcix.net
iwin-corp.com. MX 10 mail.iwin-corp.com
iwin-corp.com. A 151.196.202.71
mail A 151.196.202.71
www A 151.196.202.71
iwin-corp.com. SOA ns1.germany.worldcix.net dns.ibg.net. (929948882 10800 3600 604810 41000)
pretty amazing that this big company thats made all these wonderful products only has ONE server...
And about that server. telnet shows it to be Sunos 5.6. FTP is more interesting. It prints out the message:
Connected to iwin-corp.com.
220 usahost.net FTP server (SunOS 5.6) ready.
Name (iwin-corp.com:rawlins):
usahost.net? first time I've seen that in my little investigation. Well, upon looking at usahost.net, that seems to be a virtual hosting website! This guy's server count has shrunk from 1 to 0.
The pictures of the amiga boxes (to my untrained eye of course) look like they were done in gimp (or photoshop etc). The different color pics are EXACTLY the same with only color different...same shading, highlights, etc. Not only that, but the computer is advertised as having all these dvd, zip, etc drives, but the pictures show only what appears to be a 3.5 floppy!
well enough of my picking that apart...back to work
We've been following this story all week, and it is absolutely definitely indisputably positively a HOAX.
No one has ever HEARD of the spectacular PowerSE product they claim is their flagship software - even though they claim its first release was in 1993.
They have surprisingly few screenshots of their software - and what they do have are suspiciously boring and devoid of actually displaying FEATURES. This makes perfect sense if screenshots are not merely a keyclick away, but actually require doctoring in paint programs (the few meaningless PowerSE screenshots on their site are obviously NeXTstep screenshots heavily doctored).
All their pages used to have meta tags listing the author as Martin Steinbach, the guy claiming to be their CEO (of what they say is a 300-person company, mind you). When people noticed this and began mentioning it publicly, suddenly the meta tags all change and now the company has an "internet division".
Their software downloads section is perpetually broken.
Most of what is described for the A510 and A1010 feature list is either unachievable or impractical at the listed price points. Some of what's listed would seem to require Herculean engineering efforts, yet iWin seems to have pulled it out of their hats.
Read the specs on their site for what PowerSE is capable of doing. Why aren't we all using this instead of VMware or WINE?
The tech specs are all suspiciously vague and misleading-sounding, but not in a way that can be blamed on poor translations.
It's not yet clear what purpose is to be served by perpetrating such an elaborate (and expensive!) hoax, but especially in light of the Godlike specs of PowerSE, it is the only reasonable conclusion.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard