You're correct, this did delve venture into the realm of Commodore. I do have quite a history and thus a not-so-objective point of view on the subject, but What about Amiga?
The Amiga 500 was made by Commodore, but was really quite revolutionary at the time. I would find a comparison of the Apple II (gs) and the Amiga as a gaming platform very interesting, because in many ways the Amiga was pigeonholed by gaming, when in fact it was a platform with extreme promise in a fuller spectrum of applications.
I miss the days when truly proprietary chip sets were available for personal and business computing. The computer industry as a whole suffered from the loss of the ability to really comparison shop between computer hardware. I think people have the illusion of options with the presence of Linux, Apple, and the various Windows OEM machines (like HP, Dell, Sony). In truth, the hardware comparisons are subtleties compared to walking into a computer shop and being able to look at an Atari [ST], an Apple, a Commodore 64 & 128, a Commodore Amiga (500 -- marketed as a gaming machine and the 1000/2000 -- a real full sized desktop), and an Apple Macintosh. There was a day when these were all on the shelves simultaneously.
Hey, that's completely plausible. The ship explanation that's been offered is probably true. When you're in the middle of the ocean, generally there's a ship involved (or a movie starring Tom Hanks). I hope for the sake of irony it was a cargo ship full of OEM Vista upgrades headed for their customer service centers in India. On that subject, isn't the writing on the wall a bit here? I'm a US based programmer, I happen to be a citizen, but regardless I'm authorized to work here and I live here. Thus, anything that demonstrates that off-shoring anything is scary, especially technology, is a fan of mine. The cable will falter again. Whether it's perceived as a conspiracy to invade privacy, a true accident, or corporate espionage, it will chip away at the confidence of those who believe one can rely on other nations to deliver one's technology solutions, from blogs to finance to the business of war. Having said that, my heard does bleed; I hope the citizens of all affected countries get the bandwidth they deserve, albeit, I hope it's overwhelmingly downstream bandwidth they're using when routing through the network to the US.
I mean, if the photo enforcement equipment in Los Angeles intercepts someone being too aggressive going into a yellow light, shouldn't the good people of Sumatra be privy to this information so that they can protect their streets from this reckless individual?
You know, though, on the topic of your comment, it really is high time we leveled the playing field between the fry guy and the warlord weapons dealer in sub-saharan Africa.
If you sell software that self-destructs, or by some inherent defect, destroys data without external intervention, I can deal with your product being considered negligent.
All products have exploits. As mentioned in the subject, there are a million ways to "crack" a car that can result in damages. We hardly require auto manufacturers to protect vehicles from exploits used externally with malintent.
Without self inflicted damage, I don't see any reason to assume liability.
You can sue anyone you'd like to in civil court, so long as you can demonstrate damages.
You are correct that there are some professions with prominent and/or government sponsored board certifications as well as regulations, but this deals more with a person's ability to practice and be insured within a profession.
A lawyer may be disbarred but not sued. He/she may also be sued but not disbarred. In fact, he/she can even be sued if he/she was never a member of the bar (perhaps even for that reason).
The reason why there have been few lawsuits with programmer/software company defendants is that most software comes complete with legal disclaimers for damages done or data lost. As of now, very little software comes with any kind of operational guarantee or implied liability, especially when it comes to potential security exploits.
On a side note, however, perhaps we should stop this thread, for fear that you've planted the idea of programmer certification in the minds of legislators.... before you know it, we programmers might not be able to "practice" until we're well into our thirties.
Yeah, it's just great for innovation when we raise the point of entry to an industry such that we exclude all but those with an in-house legal department.
I see a lot of parallels to the patent process in this topic. Why is it that intellectuals, of all people, think that passing legislation that would lead to grossly subjective enforcement is good for an industry?
What will inevitably happen is that those who can demonstrate that they have procedures in place to remedy security holes (through patches, alerts, etc.) will be immune to enforcement efforts. The actual quality or security of the software itself will become irrelevant because no government funded operation will be able to measure quality appropriately. In other words, the evaluation process turns into the question: "How much are you spending in relation to your sales to ensure security of your products?", not "How secure are your products, and how important is security within your application?"
This terrorism argument is getting stale. How long will we let our government act as if intellectual property, private data, etc., are all our nation's collective interests. If the government wants to establish standards for software they purchase internally, fine. IMHO, that's a procurement issue, not one of industry regulation.
Let's let capitalism handle the rest naturally. Bottom Line:
if a company promises that certain actions are secure, they're subject to civil suit if they fail
if a company demonstrates a good track record for security and reliability and gives the greatest piece of mind, they will be the choice of enterprise business (i.e. Oracle, Sun, etc.)
I'm getting sick of the sentiment that government involvement in technology will improve the industry. The only industry this type of legislation helps is the legal industry, and having a massive legal industry for internal matters certainly does not promote economic growth.
Wow, maybe that means somebody received a version in which VP Brian realized that "serious" doesn't function as an adverb without the "ly".
testing the mod / meta-mod ?
on
Why ADCo?
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, that user has a few nice ones on this topic...
Check out this one (heh).
Testing the mod systems? A bot? Slashdot civil disobedience? Flippant? Karma Suicidal?
Why the Phoenix Center's timing is flawed
on
Why ADCo?
·
· Score: 1
After reading through some comments here and battling my own bias, a desire for a better telecom infrastructure, I'm reluctantly compelled to resort to boring realism.
As much as I'd like to believe that there IS a solution right now to the telecoms' monopolistic business model, I remain unconvinced that new networks in even the majority of urban areas are financially viable. Why?
The only problem associated with the "Last Mile Problem" would be created in trying to solve it too quickly.
We, especially those of us who are Americans, believe that we're entitled to a choice every time we spend money. We are, however the choice may not be between a variety of suppliers, it may be a choice between yes and no. A few examples... Cable TV is finally available to most of us from two different carriers (Echostar/DirecTV and the local fiber/cable company). When cable was first introduced, however, you could either buy cable or not buy cable. You may have been consistently pissed off at your cable company, but you either dealt with it or went back to your antenna. The first settlers in any rural area in America probably only had one store in which to buy their household goods (I'll cite Little House on the Prairie as evidence). Now they have two choices, Walmart and KMart (a little joke). The point is, the heart of capitalism is based on YES or NO, not WHERE, although when markets reach a point of saturation, that's a nice side effect. With most new goods or services, the first decision customers make is either YES or NO. When the demand is great enough to motivate another supplier to snatch a piece of the profits in a given market, the effect is usually a subtle, yet beneficial drop in price and elevation in service to the consumer. Right now, broadband internet and other relatively new telecom-based services are still in the YES or NO phase, and may be for some time. Individuals and businesses won't switch other telecommunications services (like telephone and FAX) to a startup for a few dollars savings.
Having said that, Cable internet is expanding, is affordable, is not run by the local telco in most cases, and is a suitable introductory broadband product for the average home customer. It can also be argued that in most places cable is not available, either demand is not substantial, or the cost to run the line is too high. Believe me, the timing of the release of this report also has a lot to do with the chaos surrounding Excite@Home, which, I might add, is only temporary (cable offerings will shift management, not disappear). See #3, below.
In other words, I don't view the "Last Mile Problem" as one that can be solved any time soon, and we can't blame the problem on the telcos, even if they have made DSL installation less than ideal.
The climate for alternative networks hasn't gotten any better since 1996.
Hal Plotkin, author of the SF Gate story, does a fine job of summarizing the report's economic determination of why deregulation in 1996 hasn't worked in creating competition. The reasons, he summarizes are that 1) inital costs are so high that large market shares in a given area must be achieved, and 2) the variety of services, and the burden of marketing and providing all of them, place an unsurpassable strain on any competitor. The Phoenix Center is essentially arguing that by skipping #2 as a wholesaler, they can achieve #1. The problem is that *someone* has to market the various services in order to sell enough bandwidth, perhaps the so-called CLECs. Obviously the wholesaler relies on the success of its customers to succeed, and I'm not sure any CLECs will succeed in carrying out #2 now or soon, even without worrying about laying down the cable. The incumbent LECs have been around forever, and it won't be easy to encourage the majority of people to switch (we all need to remember that when it comes to this topic, we're definitely not part of the majority).
We've seen a lot of good ideas fail in the past five years. In fact, a lot of them have been based on broadband bandwidth. A lot of these ideas could work, but were attempted ahead of their time. It's normal for us (especially those of us interested in technology) to be anxious and impatient when it comes to growth. There were a lot of people who had to wait a decade for cable TV, and another decade for a competitor. The problem is that our economy is complex, labor is expensive, and as long as the availability of capital is finite, growth in high tech areas will have to be deliberate and slow.
The Phoenix Center, no doubt, endeavored to find "the best way to compete" with telcos, not to find out "whether to compete" with telcos. I'm sure a lot of time, effort, and mathematics went into this report. The problem is that, as Mr. Plotkin notes, the CEO of the most notable potential ADCO is on the board at the Phoenix Center. We're obviously reading a key piece of research that was spawned to help companies like CityNet find the substantial financing required to start grabbing small pieces of the telecommunications market. Perhaps they were also hoping the high profile collapse of Excite@Home would help corroborate the myth that there are easily serviceable groups of people out there who are ready to pay for broadband, but can't get it. Unfortunately, I doubt any VC firm will be writing a check after reading this report, unless of course the year is 2011 instead of 2001. On that note, however, this report is probably an accurate prediction of a more distant future
I actually think the report will turn out to be accurate in how the telecommunications market is gradually opened. Perhaps in the near future we'll see some alternative sources of bandwidth in highly concentrated regions, but I think it will be a very long time until most of us will be able to choose where we buy our bandwidth. One of the side effects of the telecommunications monopoly is that because we've never seen any real competition, we don't know what advantages (or lack thereof) a competitor might offer. I think we might find any premature offerings to be either disappointing or doomed for failure.
The problem with corporate mafias like the RIAA is their incredible leverage.
I think you hinted at this, but the overhead you speak of will never reach the record companies. The duplication cost of a CD is next to nothing. Even if the megastores return the CDs they receive back, they're still paying the shipping charges in both directions. Sure, maybe Circuit City will refuse to sell the soundtrack to The Fast and the Furious, but they're not going to refuse NSYNC's next release, even if there's a "Please shoot the salesperson" sticker on the cover. Once the protection (along with associated stickers) is pervasive this overhead simply gets passed on to the consumer by the retailers.
The result:
they've got the added laugh of provoking all of the dissenters to spend their time and gas returning the CDs
the record stores are funding their own demise, while the record companies shift sales to a direct, online (more profitable) business model
The only way to really hurt them is to stop buying music. Sure, it's possible, but in the end you still suffer (quality, time, or even lack of desirable entertainment, etc.).
Hey RIAA: Here's a tip.. Commission Microsoft to create a database in which listeners must register their serial number to their passport. As an added bonus, they could make CDDB proprietary. Wow, what a great complement to.NET!
I share your belief that Amiga's committment to the majority consumer hardware platform constrains their ability to excel or innovate, but as a business strategy I think it may be the only way to (re)capture some of the consumer market. There is a small group of faithful amigans who will buy anything at any price, simply because it is associated with the Amiga name. However, for the majority of potential users, the cost of a software license is probably the most they are willing to invest in a pipe dream.
I think it's safe to assume that any amiga advocate, past or present, probably uses an operating system for day to day tasks with which they are extremely dissatisfied. For them, the ability to play with the Amiga software while maintaining the ability to perform these day to day tasks is crucial. Amiga/TAO's intel-compatible software will also likely gain exposure to the growing amount of consumers who are toying with Redhat or Corel's linux distribution. I think this first step has to cater to the majority. As we all well know, especially in the software industry, quality does not equal sales, let alone does it create a market.
Although Amiga has clearly focused on Intel hardware as a development platform, their business model is also explicitly tied to various proprietary hardware architectures (appliances, devices, and possibly "computers"). I don't think anyone assumes that this first effort will actually replace our current OS and set of applications.
I'm trying to view Amiga's initial direction as a necessary step to regain trust, name recognition, and momentum in a market which fell victim to a very painful "soap opera", as Slashdot calls it. In fact, I'm sure this step pained Bill, Fleecy, and the others greatly.
I maintain, in classic Amigan fashion, a foolish hope that one of the "devices" we see in the future is a "home computer" comprised of great hardware and a hardware-dependent version of Amiga's OS/OE/whatever. Of course this goes against every word uttered by any vocal proponent of the so-called "convergence" market, but I still think the home computer is perhaps the most useful kind of internet appliance.
In the meantime, I'm just happy to have something interesting to play with on a computer -- it's been a while since I viewed it as anything more than a browser, compiler, and word processor.
I'm thoroughly impressed with Napster's programming staff (Shawn Fanning and any others). They have actually written a lean, efficient windows app. As of now, the thing plays mp3 audio, provides a chat room, and facilitates both efficient client/server communication (search & library functions) as well as the "peer to peer" transfers between users. If I recall, it's about a 500K download; what's winamp alone, about 2MB?
Of course, it's still in beta, so I hope they stay away from some 32-bit rendered UI for their full release. The minimalist approach is both refreshing and superbly usable. Sometimes when I leave its window, I'm surprised to see the start button and not the gnome paw.
It's still a shame that it takes a bunch of AOLers downloading on 28.8's to spawn such an approach.
Slashdot Mirror
You're correct, this did delve venture into the realm of Commodore. I do have quite a history and thus a not-so-objective point of view on the subject, but What about Amiga?
The Amiga 500 was made by Commodore, but was really quite revolutionary at the time. I would find a comparison of the Apple II (gs) and the Amiga as a gaming platform very interesting, because in many ways the Amiga was pigeonholed by gaming, when in fact it was a platform with extreme promise in a fuller spectrum of applications.
I miss the days when truly proprietary chip sets were available for personal and business computing. The computer industry as a whole suffered from the loss of the ability to really comparison shop between computer hardware. I think people have the illusion of options with the presence of Linux, Apple, and the various Windows OEM machines (like HP, Dell, Sony). In truth, the hardware comparisons are subtleties compared to walking into a computer shop and being able to look at an Atari [ST], an Apple, a Commodore 64 & 128, a Commodore Amiga (500 -- marketed as a gaming machine and the 1000/2000 -- a real full sized desktop), and an Apple Macintosh. There was a day when these were all on the shelves simultaneously.
Hey, that's completely plausible. The ship explanation that's been offered is probably true. When you're in the middle of the ocean, generally there's a ship involved (or a movie starring Tom Hanks). I hope for the sake of irony it was a cargo ship full of OEM Vista upgrades headed for their customer service centers in India. On that subject, isn't the writing on the wall a bit here? I'm a US based programmer, I happen to be a citizen, but regardless I'm authorized to work here and I live here. Thus, anything that demonstrates that off-shoring anything is scary, especially technology, is a fan of mine. The cable will falter again. Whether it's perceived as a conspiracy to invade privacy, a true accident, or corporate espionage, it will chip away at the confidence of those who believe one can rely on other nations to deliver one's technology solutions, from blogs to finance to the business of war. Having said that, my heard does bleed; I hope the citizens of all affected countries get the bandwidth they deserve, albeit, I hope it's overwhelmingly downstream bandwidth they're using when routing through the network to the US.
How much of a genius could Bach really have been?
Didn't he realize that musicians don't need to get married to get laid?
You need mod_perlbox.
3 21&ycord=567
That way you can access your desktop through lynx at a speed increase of 800%. Just format your urls like this:
http://localhost/desktop/?action=leftclick&xcord=
I mean, if the photo enforcement equipment in Los Angeles intercepts someone being too aggressive going into a yellow light, shouldn't the good people of Sumatra be privy to this information so that they can protect their streets from this reckless individual?
You know, though, on the topic of your comment, it really is high time we leveled the playing field between the fry guy and the warlord weapons dealer in sub-saharan Africa.
Safety and Security are different ideas.
If you sell software that self-destructs, or by some inherent defect, destroys data without external intervention, I can deal with your product being considered negligent.
All products have exploits. As mentioned in the subject, there are a million ways to "crack" a car that can result in damages. We hardly require auto manufacturers to protect vehicles from exploits used externally with malintent.
Without self inflicted damage, I don't see any reason to assume liability.
You can sue anyone you'd like to in civil court, so long as you can demonstrate damages.
You are correct that there are some professions with prominent and/or government sponsored board certifications as well as regulations, but this deals more with a person's ability to practice and be insured within a profession.
A lawyer may be disbarred but not sued. He/she may also be sued but not disbarred. In fact, he/she can even be sued if he/she was never a member of the bar (perhaps even for that reason).
The reason why there have been few lawsuits with programmer/software company defendants is that most software comes complete with legal disclaimers for damages done or data lost. As of now, very little software comes with any kind of operational guarantee or implied liability, especially when it comes to potential security exploits.
On a side note, however, perhaps we should stop this thread, for fear that you've planted the idea of programmer certification in the minds of legislators.... before you know it, we programmers might not be able to "practice" until we're well into our thirties.
I see a lot of parallels to the patent process in this topic. Why is it that intellectuals, of all people, think that passing legislation that would lead to grossly subjective enforcement is good for an industry?
What will inevitably happen is that those who can demonstrate that they have procedures in place to remedy security holes (through patches, alerts, etc.) will be immune to enforcement efforts. The actual quality or security of the software itself will become irrelevant because no government funded operation will be able to measure quality appropriately. In other words, the evaluation process turns into the question: "How much are you spending in relation to your sales to ensure security of your products?", not "How secure are your products, and how important is security within your application?"
This terrorism argument is getting stale. How long will we let our government act as if intellectual property, private data, etc., are all our nation's collective interests. If the government wants to establish standards for software they purchase internally, fine. IMHO, that's a procurement issue, not one of industry regulation.
Let's let capitalism handle the rest naturally. Bottom Line:
- if a company promises that certain actions are secure, they're subject to civil suit if they fail
- if a company demonstrates a good track record for security and reliability and gives the greatest piece of mind, they will be the choice of enterprise business (i.e. Oracle, Sun, etc.)
I'm getting sick of the sentiment that government involvement in technology will improve the industry. The only industry this type of legislation helps is the legal industry, and having a massive legal industry for internal matters certainly does not promote economic growth.Wow, maybe that means somebody received a version in which VP Brian realized that "serious" doesn't function as an adverb without the "ly".
Yeah, that user has a few nice ones on this topic... Check out this one (heh). Testing the mod systems? A bot? Slashdot civil disobedience? Flippant? Karma Suicidal?
As much as I'd like to believe that there IS a solution right now to the telecoms' monopolistic business model, I remain unconvinced that new networks in even the majority of urban areas are financially viable. Why?
- The only problem associated with the "Last Mile Problem" would be created in trying to solve it too quickly.
- The climate for alternative networks hasn't gotten any better since 1996.
- Hal Plotkin, author of the SF Gate story, does a fine job of summarizing the report's economic determination of why deregulation in 1996 hasn't worked in creating competition. The reasons, he summarizes are that 1) inital costs are so high that large market shares in a given area must be achieved, and 2) the variety of services, and the burden of marketing and providing all of them, place an unsurpassable strain on any competitor. The Phoenix Center is essentially arguing that by skipping #2 as a wholesaler, they can achieve #1. The problem is that *someone* has to market the various services in order to sell enough bandwidth, perhaps the so-called CLECs. Obviously the wholesaler relies on the success of its customers to succeed, and I'm not sure any CLECs will succeed in carrying out #2 now or soon, even without worrying about laying down the cable. The incumbent LECs have been around forever, and it won't be easy to encourage the majority of people to switch (we all need to remember that when it comes to this topic, we're definitely not part of the majority).
- We've seen a lot of good ideas fail in the past five years. In fact, a lot of them have been based on broadband bandwidth. A lot of these ideas could work, but were attempted ahead of their time. It's normal for us (especially those of us interested in technology) to be anxious and impatient when it comes to growth. There were a lot of people who had to wait a decade for cable TV, and another decade for a competitor. The problem is that our economy is complex, labor is expensive, and as long as the availability of capital is finite, growth in high tech areas will have to be deliberate and slow.
- The Phoenix Center, no doubt, endeavored to find "the best way to compete" with telcos, not to find out "whether to compete" with telcos. I'm sure a lot of time, effort, and mathematics went into this report. The problem is that, as Mr. Plotkin notes, the CEO of the most notable potential ADCO is on the board at the Phoenix Center. We're obviously reading a key piece of research that was spawned to help companies like CityNet find the substantial financing required to start grabbing small pieces of the telecommunications market. Perhaps they were also hoping the high profile collapse of Excite@Home would help corroborate the myth that there are easily serviceable groups of people out there who are ready to pay for broadband, but can't get it. Unfortunately, I doubt any VC firm will be writing a check after reading this report, unless of course the year is 2011 instead of 2001. On that note, however, this report is probably an accurate prediction of a more distant future
I actually think the report will turn out to be accurate in how the telecommunications market is gradually opened. Perhaps in the near future we'll see some alternative sources of bandwidth in highly concentrated regions, but I think it will be a very long time until most of us will be able to choose where we buy our bandwidth. One of the side effects of the telecommunications monopoly is that because we've never seen any real competition, we don't know what advantages (or lack thereof) a competitor might offer. I think we might find any premature offerings to be either disappointing or doomed for failure.- We, especially those of us who are Americans, believe that we're entitled to a choice every time we spend money. We are, however the choice may not be between a variety of suppliers, it may be a choice between yes and no. A few examples... Cable TV is finally available to most of us from two different carriers (Echostar/DirecTV and the local fiber/cable company). When cable was first introduced, however, you could either buy cable or not buy cable. You may have been consistently pissed off at your cable company, but you either dealt with it or went back to your antenna. The first settlers in any rural area in America probably only had one store in which to buy their household goods (I'll cite Little House on the Prairie as evidence). Now they have two choices, Walmart and KMart (a little joke). The point is, the heart of capitalism is based on YES or NO, not WHERE, although when markets reach a point of saturation, that's a nice side effect. With most new goods or services, the first decision customers make is either YES or NO. When the demand is great enough to motivate another supplier to snatch a piece of the profits in a given market, the effect is usually a subtle, yet beneficial drop in price and elevation in service to the consumer. Right now, broadband internet and other relatively new telecom-based services are still in the YES or NO phase, and may be for some time. Individuals and businesses won't switch other telecommunications services (like telephone and FAX) to a startup for a few dollars savings.
- Having said that, Cable internet is expanding, is affordable, is not run by the local telco in most cases, and is a suitable introductory broadband product for the average home customer. It can also be argued that in most places cable is not available, either demand is not substantial, or the cost to run the line is too high. Believe me, the timing of the release of this report also has a lot to do with the chaos surrounding Excite@Home, which, I might add, is only temporary (cable offerings will shift management, not disappear). See #3, below.
In other words, I don't view the "Last Mile Problem" as one that can be solved any time soon, and we can't blame the problem on the telcos, even if they have made DSL installation less than ideal.The problem with corporate mafias like the RIAA is their incredible leverage.
I think you hinted at this, but the overhead you speak of will never reach the record companies. The duplication cost of a CD is next to nothing. Even if the megastores return the CDs they receive back, they're still paying the shipping charges in both directions. Sure, maybe Circuit City will refuse to sell the soundtrack to The Fast and the Furious, but they're not going to refuse NSYNC's next release, even if there's a "Please shoot the salesperson" sticker on the cover. Once the protection (along with associated stickers) is pervasive this overhead simply gets passed on to the consumer by the retailers.
The result:
- they've got the added laugh of provoking all of the dissenters to spend their time and gas returning the CDs
- the record stores are funding their own demise, while the record companies shift sales to a direct, online (more profitable) business model
The only way to really hurt them is to stop buying music. Sure, it's possible, but in the end you still suffer (quality, time, or even lack of desirable entertainment, etc.).Hey RIAA: Here's a tip.. Commission Microsoft to create a database in which listeners must register their serial number to their passport. As an added bonus, they could make CDDB proprietary. Wow, what a great complement to
I share your belief that Amiga's committment to the majority consumer hardware platform constrains their ability to excel or innovate, but as a business strategy I think it may be the only way to (re)capture some of the consumer market. There is a small group of faithful amigans who will buy anything at any price, simply because it is associated with the Amiga name. However, for the majority of potential users, the cost of a software license is probably the most they are willing to invest in a pipe dream.
I think it's safe to assume that any amiga advocate, past or present, probably uses an operating system for day to day tasks with which they are extremely dissatisfied. For them, the ability to play with the Amiga software while maintaining the ability to perform these day to day tasks is crucial. Amiga/TAO's intel-compatible software will also likely gain exposure to the growing amount of consumers who are toying with Redhat or Corel's linux distribution. I think this first step has to cater to the majority. As we all well know, especially in the software industry, quality does not equal sales, let alone does it create a market.
Although Amiga has clearly focused on Intel hardware as a development platform, their business model is also explicitly tied to various proprietary hardware architectures (appliances, devices, and possibly "computers"). I don't think anyone assumes that this first effort will actually replace our current OS and set of applications.
I'm trying to view Amiga's initial direction as a necessary step to regain trust, name recognition, and momentum in a market which fell victim to a very painful "soap opera", as Slashdot calls it. In fact, I'm sure this step pained Bill, Fleecy, and the others greatly.
I maintain, in classic Amigan fashion, a foolish hope that one of the "devices" we see in the future is a "home computer" comprised of great hardware and a hardware-dependent version of Amiga's OS/OE/whatever. Of course this goes against every word uttered by any vocal proponent of the so-called "convergence" market, but I still think the home computer is perhaps the most useful kind of internet appliance.
In the meantime, I'm just happy to have something interesting to play with on a computer -- it's been a while since I viewed it as anything more than a browser, compiler, and word processor.
I'm thoroughly impressed with Napster's programming staff (Shawn Fanning and any others). They have actually written a lean, efficient windows app. As of now, the thing plays mp3 audio, provides a chat room, and facilitates both efficient client/server communication (search & library functions) as well as the "peer to peer" transfers between users. If I recall, it's about a 500K download; what's winamp alone, about 2MB?
Of course, it's still in beta, so I hope they stay away from some 32-bit rendered UI for their full release. The minimalist approach is both refreshing and superbly usable. Sometimes when I leave its window, I'm surprised to see the start button and not the gnome paw.
It's still a shame that it takes a bunch of AOLers downloading on 28.8's to spawn such an approach.