Re:They might have a point, you know.
on
Quack!
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· Score: 1
So take it up with Hasbro. And come to think of it, I grew up with Hasbro and so far I'm not in jail or the rubber room, even despite my Transformers collection. Then again I grew up with Big Bird before Hasbro, so maybe that makes a difference.
Oh, whoops. I guess if it weren't for the fact that the United States government of late DOES NOT have an excellent track record of protecting individual rights and freedoms, maybe we'd all be a little less triggerhappy about this sort of thing.
Regardless of whether this means they're TAKING action, the point is they're LOOKING for actions to take - and given the conclusions they've drawn so far, and the actions they've taken so far (regardless of party, btw), I think we're all justified in being maybe a little worried that this will not turn out for the best.
Besides. Is anyone on that panel a USENET regular, or a Slashdot regular, or in any other capacity one who is on the Net as often as any of us? They are almost certainly going to base LAW on what they find on the Net between now and December. Want to lay odds on what they'll find - and what they'll be looking for?
C'mon, guys. "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." This thing is not yet news, and is not real enough to be "stuff" at all, much less "stuff that matters".
That's exactly what the Amiga community has been asking Amiga Inc. ever since the Linux kernel announcement.
It seems little more than some cool gadgetry without a point. Now, granted, the original Amiga was cool gadgetry, but it was an enabling technology - you had a list in your head of groovy things you'd do with it if you ever owned one. This new Amiga, despite its cool technology and AmigaObject buzzword, seems more like a solution waiting for a problem.
While I was once a big Amiga fan (like in 87 or so), I'm turned right off by overly curvacious plastic. Give me one of those new, 18" flatscreens and a box hidden somewhere under the desk, and cool software.
Amen. What good is a computer you can't stack stuff on?
Linux, yes, Transmeta no. And ignore the rumors of the word Transmeta flashing on a screen during the show - it's a red herring.
But then, Amiga Inc. lack the professionalism and drive that will be necessary to make a product like this succeed. It will be neither first nor fastest when it ships. Compound this with Amiga Inc's habit of blowing off developers, and their inability to do public relations worth a damn, and you're looking at a genuine successor to the original Amiga. Force to be reckoned with? Not until Amiga Inc. learn to play hardball.
Tandy Color Computer. Color BASIC is one of the very few Microsoft programs I've ever actually LIKED.
OK, nostalgia time: Putting tape over the leads on ROM cartridges to defeat the autoboot, so you can save the contents to tape. Speech/Sound Cartridge ("this is the compyooter speekeying") and having to type in its little 15-line loader so many times I memorized it. Connectix SpeedDoubler in one line: POKE 65495,0 (absolutely the coolest hack on ANY computer ever - doubles your clock speed!)
Recovering disks by tweaking the GAT directly with a disk zapper (back when file systems were simple enough you had a reasonable chance of success with this). Doing POKEs to change the drive step rate, change the number of tracks, etc. Attaching cast-off TRS-80 Model III floppy drives to the system simply because I could.
RAINBOW Magazine and open source the way it SHOULD be done - program listings you type in! That really puts the peer into peer review, you don't send your code in to the magazine until you're absolutely, positively, 100% convinced people won't laugh at it or come to your house and kill you for making them type in something stupid!
Then there was The Upgrade: going to a CoCo 3, finding out 1/3rd of your old games don't work, another 1/3rd are in black and white now, but the rest look FABULOUS on that new RGB monitor. 80 column screens for editing BASIC lines. The disappointingly s.l.o.w Microware BASIC extensions for the new hi-res modes (boxfilling a hi-res screen took 2.5 seconds!).
OS/9: I've heard it said OS/9 advocates are even worse than Amiga advocates, and rightly so: OS/9 does things the Amiga can't do, Linux can't do, Windows NT can't do, maybe QNX comes close. OS/9 on the CoCo 3 was bragging rights: full preemptive memory-managed multitasking on a 2MHz processor in 512K on floppies. Multiple screen support. Open about 150 shells and hold down "clear" to cycle between them at high speed. Of course, no one mentions you couldn't DO a whole hell of a lot with OS/9, but who cares.
Sneaky hardware hacks (some of which I have not done): piggybacking RAM chips for the 32K upgrade, swapping the old CoCo 1 keyboard with a REAL keyboard, putting a PC keyboard on a CoCo 3, upgrading to 1MB or 2MB, shaving out the plastic over the power supply for ventilation, installing a SmartWatch RTC onto the floppy controller ROM, replacing that crap floppy controller with a Disto no-halt so you can use HD floppies, adding a RASCAN framegrabber, etc. Replacing the 68B09E processor with a Hitachi 6309 to get about a 5% speedup (the difference between a Pentium 200 and a Pentium 233, I guess).
Today some sick puppy has written a MOD player and a Wolfenstein-like 3D demo for the CoCo. I hear talk of IDE controllers, Ethernet cards, IP stacks for OS/9, and other such sick hacks. I'd settle for CoCo 3 emulation on my Amiga.:-)
I think I finally figured it out: The ENTIRE reason Amiga Inc. chose Linux for the kernel was so they could get free publicity from being on Slashdot twice a week.
The Amiga was born in a time when the OS didn't matter as much - and indeed most game programmers found it an unnecessary slowdown and just bypassed it.:-) But it's got an essence most of today's OSes lack in some measure or another - consistent user interface, speed, responsiveness, shell and GUI living side by side in harmony, etc. I mean, many of the problems KDE and Gnome are trying to solve in X, the Amiga solved a decade ago.
That said, everyone defines Amiga-like differently - and I don't define Amigalike the same way as some of the obnoxious "amiga r00lz d00d" purists who think UAE is blasphemous. I think the Amiga - or whatever it ends up reborn as - can exist independent of its hardware (so long as it doesn't end life on the shelf as "yet another failed x86 OS" alongside OS/2 and NeXTSTEP/x86).
But I have also been hearing some sweet things about the new hardware we're getting next year...:-)
Zealotry didn't kill the Amiga, Commodore refusing to market the Amiga killed the Amiga. Yes, it put a lot more of the focus on the users, such that THEIR zealotry - since they were the only ones actively trying to promote the platform (while Commodore execs were ignoring and someties actually BADMOUTHING the platform!) - took home a lot more of the spotlight. But the real problem was that Commodore couldn't have marketed a cure for death, and nothing the users did differently would have changed that.
That said, I'm sickened by the nasty reputation the Amiga user base has gained over the years (which continues in some circles to this day), and am disturbed to see the Linux base repeating the Amiga community's mistakes. Most bothersome is seeing Linux users shoot down Amiga users in exactly the way Amiga users used to shoot down other platforms - as though there were no parallel.
However you'll notice, although there ARE a lot of Windows bigots out there, it hasn't hurt that platform - mostly because it has enough "real" marketing to cover for it.
You don't remember an entire picture - you remember things about the picture, this object was over here, that thing was blue, etc. It's lossy compression with the quality cranked way down. Our memory is more about concept mapping (assembling a 'picture' of a party by remembering who was there and what they wore and what was talked about) than about digitizing every detail. 2.5GB? I believe it.
I've heard that people who take "memory booster" courses eventually have to learn how to intentionally forget things, or else they have difficulty remembering new things.
(I'm trying to keep it spoilerless, but no guarantees.)
Even in my younger days I knew the Trilogy had flaws. I mean, the Death Star gets taken out, along with what must easily be a few hundred million occupants ("heading for that small moon"), after rescuing exactly ONE falsely imprisoned civilian from cell block 2187 (meaning cell blocks 1 - 2186 were full). Nobody bats an eye. Everyone CHEERS. It's never explained how many planets had to be mined dry to come up with enough metal to build that thing.
Luke Skywalker drives us NUTS with his whining, all through SW and Empire. C3PO takes the whining and doubles it through SW and Empire and even Jedi for good measure.
We have to sit and WAIT through most of Star Wars for the action to get underway - watching those two hunks of junk wandering around the desert, listening to Luke whine, watching Luke eat dinner, watching Luke stare at the sunset, etc.
Do we now complain about the lack of character development? Obi-Wan was underdeveloped well up until Jedi where he finally explains his motivations to Luke (until then he's just the generic old guy). Chewbacca was NEVER really developed. Leia's 'princessness' is never explained. Boba Fett has six lines. And there's a million generic characters. Didn't stop me from watching ANH about 70 times. Didn't stop some of you from watching it several HUNDRED times.
Do we now complain about the pace? We watch people wander the desert in ANH, wander the tundra and wander the worm stomach in Empire, and wander the woods in Jedi. Didn't stop us from watching these movies enough times over to put them all in the top 10 grossing films of all time.
Do we complain about Jar Jar? Only if we also complained when Luke Skywalker did the same sorts of things. And Jar Jar actually has some character development - so if you complained about the lack of character development, stop complaining about Jar Jar. He has a REASON to be there - he provides a conversation piece for some of the characters (getting Anakin and Amidala talking), he provides the link to the Gungans, and he provides us with a focus inside the battle later on (nowhere else in the saga do we have a battle shown "third person" without one of the heroes actually in it). And those who say "Jar Jar should die" - yes, it would be nice if we could kill everyone in the world who annoys us.
Do we complain about Darth Maul's lack of screen time? Of course - we complained about Boba Fett's lack of screen time, so George gave us 30 seconds more in the remastered ANH, waving to the audience and saying "HI, I'm Boba Fett". Be careful what you wish for.
Do we complain about a certain, shall we say, "microscopic detail" regarding the Force? Sure, I guess we're entitled to complain about anything that makes the Force, or the Saga itself, anything other than what we've convinced ourselves over two decades that it should be. Timothy Zahn gave us something similar (the ysalamiri, animals that can block the Force) and instead of raising a stink, it raised lively debate about what the Force really is and how it works. I think this new revelation makes a GREAT explanation for why strong sensitivity to a ubiquitous energy field is a rather exclusive inherited trait. And it raises more questions than it answers.
Do we complain about Yoda? Yes, and we have every reason to: he looks like they cast another "actor" for the part, he acts like he stuck his lips into the podracer power beam like Jar Jar did, and he sounds like Frank Oz needs to actually WATCH Empire and remember how to do the voice. And his dialogue is some of George's finest - "more have you to say?" This complaint I grant you - but for all we know, he might "change" in the next two films to become older, his eyes might bug out more, his voice could deepen, and he might get off the painkillers, leaving him more like the Yoda we remember. Conversely, if TPM is the first movie you ever see of the saga, later Yodas won't seem quite right either.
Do we complain about the Nimoudians and how easily they were defeated? Remember what the film is REALLY about - and who was calling the shots in the blockade - they were never SUPPOSED to win. Watch the movie. Think about who stood to gain the most from the arrangement.
Do we complain about the kick-ass Jedi action, the adrenalizing 300mph pod race through the canyons, R2D2 cavorting outside the ship, the exquisite Naboo city, the sea monsters, the jawdropping Coruscant cityscape (I think ILM just took back the award for most ships onscreen), the Senate, the seamless droids-walking-among-the-prisoners effects, or the "red shield" thing in the end battle? No, of course not.
Do we complain about the director and how he composed certain shots? Fault his screenwriting and his ability to coax perfect performances out of actors, if you must - but his skill in actually putting pictures on film has NOT been diluted by the passage of time. It is still very much a George Lucas movie; he uses every square inch of the 2.1:1, he has a sense of motion that few directors have, and he approaches the visual effects as "this is the world, I'm showing you how cool it looks" instead of "these are our cool effects".
Complain about the merchandising, if you must - but if Taco Bell ever offers you a few hundred million for the right to advertise your work on a taco wrapper, you'll have to say no.
I admit: I'm an artist, which makes me a primarily visual creature - which means I can be suckered by a visually entertaining movie that lacks a few points in the plot department. But then, Independence Day didn't impress me, so clearly this film has SOMETHING more to offer.
So just shut up, stop looking for things to hate, and go WATCH THE MOVIE A COUPLE TIMES. You learned to tolerate the flaws in the other three, you'll learn to tolerate most of the flaws in this one, and with any luck, eventually you'll learn to appreciate what this film DOES have. Of course, it'll help when the marketing frenzy dies down, and Jar Jar is no longer smiling at you from every product in Wal-Mart.
Besides, if you don't like how George makes movies, make your own.
According to my sources, Amiga Inc. thought so too. But they had a terrible time getting Be to cooperate - they wanted too much for licensing, taking too long to sign paperwork, etc. Finally they mutually said "f*** you" this time last year (a week before the Amiga convention where the partnership was supposed to be announced!) - and Amiga Inc. started talking to QNX after that.
(I've heard that Sun was also on the list of "potential partners".)
A couple things the Amiga has always offered and will probably continue to offer:
- Nowhere is it written that every OS wants to be UNIX when it grows up - the Amiga is not UNIX and thus brings a fresh perspective to OS design, while remaining robust enough that UNIX apps can be ported to it. - The GUI is integrated the way a GUI should be - preferences are basically systemwide, not merely toolkit-wide or API-wide. GUI and Shell are given equal billing and don't operate in separate universes. ARexx provides a platform-wide scripting mechanism that lets applications talk to each other. And on and on. - The Amiga speaks NTSC and PAL, and the proposed next-generation Amigas will speak HDTV. There is a real need in the home computer AND the video pro market for machines that consider television as a native language - allowing software to manipulate video whether the software was designed to or not (like using Workbench to genlock!).
The Amiga has less than 0.1% market share right now, and I don't really see the classic Amiga line making a noticeable comeback - nor do I have convincing reason to believe the current batch of promises any more than the last 173 we've been given - but there really is a place for the Amiga, or some descendant of its spirit (and I don't mean Be, which seems to become more like a closed-source UNIX with each successive release).
The day before Commodore went out of business, you could get an A1200 for $349 and an A4000 for $1899.
The day after they went out of business, those prices (I witnessed this personally) went up to $549 and $2499 respectively.
Wasn't Elvis worth more dead than alive?
Wasn't Be part of the equation?
on
PPC SMP Boxes
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· Score: 1
A month ago they weren't going to build the box unless Be allowed them to port the OS. Supposedly it was going to take "an afternoon" (according to Haynie and associates) to port BeOS to this thing - and Be was stalling (probably because of their relationship with Intel). I guess they didn't get enough feedback on THAT front, so they're going through the list of OSes.
Kinda depressing, really - Dave builds good boxes.
The real problem isn't that OSS will never be easy to use - the problem is that it tends to be radically inconsistent. Knock the Mac or Windows, but at least the software is pretty much all built with the same building blocks and thus looks and works mostly the same. Linux today has what, ten? fifteen? different GUI toolkits - not counting the programs that address X directly or otherwise implement their own look and feel (Ghostview, XV) and not counting window managers that add their own look and feel to the system. When it was announced that KDE and Gnome would use the same drag-and-drop protocol, it was a watershed - making Linux the last OS on the planet to get a DND standard.
Part of what makes an OS easy to use is consistency - if it worked this way in the other program, it should work this way here. Radically jumping between interface styles and widget appearances between applications jars even the experienced user - and annoys those anal people like myself who want all the programs running under a given OS to look like they belong together. (When one program won't respect the color scheme you've chosen, it's annoying and it looks unprofessional. X Window is the king of this - a typical screenshot looks like a mockup, with four or five GUI styles mixed and matched like the Screamshot. A NeXT-style window manager with Motif widgetry in one window and Win95-style widgetry in the next... a confused observer might think you've gone emulator crazy.)
The solution to that kind of scrambled interface would be to have a style guide - but that requires making all the toolkits conform to it, and the toolkits usually have their own style guides. In OSS there seems to be little incentive to make things interoperable - and far less incentive to obsess over the UI style. This wouldn't be a problem with the application coders - they should have a reasonable expectation that the toolkit provides such consistency. Just having the major toolkits look in the same place for appearance and configuration info would be a big step up - if I want an aqua-green OS, I don't want half my apps to ignore my request!
That the GNU tools on the command line are completely style-guide compliant and are fully interoperable makes this situation in X that much less acceptable. It CAN be done. Why isn't it being done?
Slashdot Mirror
So take it up with Hasbro. And come to think of it, I grew up with Hasbro and so far I'm not in jail or the rubber room, even despite my Transformers collection. Then again I grew up with Big Bird before Hasbro, so maybe that makes a difference.
Oh, whoops. I guess if it weren't for the fact that the United States government of late DOES NOT have an excellent track record of protecting individual rights and freedoms, maybe we'd all be a little less triggerhappy about this sort of thing.
Regardless of whether this means they're TAKING action, the point is they're LOOKING for actions to take - and given the conclusions they've drawn so far, and the actions they've taken so far (regardless of party, btw), I think we're all justified in being maybe a little worried that this will not turn out for the best.
Besides. Is anyone on that panel a USENET regular, or a Slashdot regular, or in any other capacity one who is on the Net as often as any of us? They are almost certainly going to base LAW on what they find on the Net between now and December. Want to lay odds on what they'll find - and what they'll be looking for?
C'mon, guys. "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." This thing is not yet news, and is not real enough to be "stuff" at all, much less "stuff that matters".
That's exactly what the Amiga community has been asking Amiga Inc. ever since the Linux kernel announcement.
It seems little more than some cool gadgetry without a point. Now, granted, the original Amiga was cool gadgetry, but it was an enabling technology - you had a list in your head of groovy things you'd do with it if you ever owned one. This new Amiga, despite its cool technology and AmigaObject buzzword, seems more like a solution waiting for a problem.
Amen. What good is a computer you can't stack stuff on?
No, the photos arent faked - that's genuine styrofoam.
Linux, yes, Transmeta no. And ignore the rumors of the word Transmeta flashing on a screen during the show - it's a red herring.
But then, Amiga Inc. lack the professionalism and drive that will be necessary to make a product like this succeed. It will be neither first nor fastest when it ships. Compound this with Amiga Inc's habit of blowing off developers, and their inability to do public relations worth a damn, and you're looking at a genuine successor to the original Amiga. Force to be reckoned with? Not until Amiga Inc. learn to play hardball.
The fact that its parent company doesn't quite take the market seriously?
"It's only a model..."
Amazing how nice styrofoam looks when you paint it, isn't it?
Tandy Color Computer. Color BASIC is one of the very few Microsoft programs I've ever actually LIKED.
:-)
OK, nostalgia time: Putting tape over the leads on ROM cartridges to defeat the autoboot, so you can save the contents to tape. Speech/Sound Cartridge ("this is the compyooter speekeying") and having to type in its little 15-line loader so many times I memorized it. Connectix SpeedDoubler in one line: POKE 65495,0 (absolutely the coolest hack on ANY computer ever - doubles your clock speed!)
Recovering disks by tweaking the GAT directly with a disk zapper (back when file systems were simple enough you had a reasonable chance of success with this). Doing POKEs to change the drive step rate, change the number of tracks, etc. Attaching cast-off TRS-80 Model III floppy drives to the system simply because I could.
RAINBOW Magazine and open source the way it SHOULD be done - program listings you type in! That really puts the peer into peer review, you don't send your code in to the magazine until you're absolutely, positively, 100% convinced people won't laugh at it or come to your house and kill you for making them type in something stupid!
Then there was The Upgrade: going to a CoCo 3, finding out 1/3rd of your old games don't work, another 1/3rd are in black and white now, but the rest look FABULOUS on that new RGB monitor. 80 column screens for editing BASIC lines. The disappointingly s.l.o.w Microware BASIC extensions for the new hi-res modes (boxfilling a hi-res screen took 2.5 seconds!).
OS/9: I've heard it said OS/9 advocates are even worse than Amiga advocates, and rightly so: OS/9 does things the Amiga can't do, Linux can't do, Windows NT can't do, maybe QNX comes close. OS/9 on the CoCo 3 was bragging rights: full preemptive memory-managed multitasking on a 2MHz processor in 512K on floppies. Multiple screen support. Open about 150 shells and hold down "clear" to cycle between them at high speed. Of course, no one mentions you couldn't DO a whole hell of a lot with OS/9, but who cares.
Sneaky hardware hacks (some of which I have not done): piggybacking RAM chips for the 32K upgrade, swapping the old CoCo 1 keyboard with a REAL keyboard, putting a PC keyboard on a CoCo 3, upgrading to 1MB or 2MB, shaving out the plastic over the power supply for ventilation, installing a SmartWatch RTC onto the floppy controller ROM, replacing that crap floppy controller with a Disto no-halt so you can use HD floppies, adding a RASCAN framegrabber, etc. Replacing the 68B09E processor with a Hitachi 6309 to get about a 5% speedup (the difference between a Pentium 200 and a Pentium 233, I guess).
Today some sick puppy has written a MOD player and a Wolfenstein-like 3D demo for the CoCo. I hear talk of IDE controllers, Ethernet cards, IP stacks for OS/9, and other such sick hacks. I'd settle for CoCo 3 emulation on my Amiga.
Phase 5: Fighting Vaporware with Vaporware since 1995!
Phase 5: If we don't ship it, you didn't want it.
Phase 5: One of three promises actually ships, it's six months late and 150% it's original budget, but when you finally get it, it's GOOOOOD...
Phase 5: If this don't work out, you can always try out Mac accelerators instead!
Phase 5: Cooperation, shmooperation - just don't piss us off, okay?
My take: http://flyingmice.com/squid/ amiga/amiga_articles.shtml
That press release is here. :-)
The Amiga was born in a time when the OS didn't matter as much - and indeed most game programmers found it an unnecessary slowdown and just bypassed it. :-) But it's got an essence most of today's OSes lack in some measure or another - consistent user interface, speed, responsiveness, shell and GUI living side by side in harmony, etc. I mean, many of the problems KDE and Gnome are trying to solve in X, the Amiga solved a decade ago.
:-)
That said, everyone defines Amiga-like differently - and I don't define Amigalike the same way as some of the obnoxious "amiga r00lz d00d" purists who think UAE is blasphemous. I think the Amiga - or whatever it ends up reborn as - can exist independent of its hardware (so long as it doesn't end life on the shelf as "yet another failed x86 OS" alongside OS/2 and NeXTSTEP/x86).
But I have also been hearing some sweet things about the new hardware we're getting next year...
Zealotry didn't kill the Amiga, Commodore refusing to market the Amiga killed the Amiga. Yes, it put a lot more of the focus on the users, such that THEIR zealotry - since they were the only ones actively trying to promote the platform (while Commodore execs were ignoring and someties actually BADMOUTHING the platform!) - took home a lot more of the spotlight. But the real problem was that Commodore couldn't have marketed a cure for death, and nothing the users did differently would have changed that.
That said, I'm sickened by the nasty reputation the Amiga user base has gained over the years (which continues in some circles to this day), and am disturbed to see the Linux base repeating the Amiga community's mistakes. Most bothersome is seeing Linux users shoot down Amiga users in exactly the way Amiga users used to shoot down other platforms - as though there were no parallel.
However you'll notice, although there ARE a lot of Windows bigots out there, it hasn't hurt that platform - mostly because it has enough "real" marketing to cover for it.
You don't remember an entire picture - you remember things about the picture, this object was over here, that thing was blue, etc. It's lossy compression with the quality cranked way down. Our memory is more about concept mapping (assembling a 'picture' of a party by remembering who was there and what they wore and what was talked about) than about digitizing every detail. 2.5GB? I believe it.
I've heard that people who take "memory booster" courses eventually have to learn how to intentionally forget things, or else they have difficulty remembering new things.
looks kinda... TALL. Or that an optical illusion?
> They thought he was trying to devleop a new religion based on the force.
'They' had never noticed that the concept of Chi has been around for a long, long time, apparently...
> Lucas is just like Gates, surrounded by idiotic Yes-Men who only care about their cool technology,
Hey, how dare you insinuate that Steve Howe has anything to do with Microsoft!
:-)
(I'm trying to keep it spoilerless, but no guarantees.)
Even in my younger days I knew the Trilogy had flaws. I mean, the Death Star gets taken out, along with what must easily be a few hundred million occupants ("heading for that small moon"), after rescuing exactly ONE falsely imprisoned civilian from cell block 2187 (meaning cell blocks 1 - 2186 were full). Nobody bats an eye. Everyone CHEERS. It's never explained how many planets had to be mined dry to come up with enough metal to build that thing.
Luke Skywalker drives us NUTS with his whining, all through SW and Empire. C3PO takes the whining and doubles it through SW and Empire and even Jedi for good measure.
We have to sit and WAIT through most of Star Wars for the action to get underway - watching those two hunks of junk wandering around the desert, listening to Luke whine, watching Luke eat dinner, watching Luke stare at the sunset, etc.
Do we now complain about the lack of character development? Obi-Wan was underdeveloped well up until Jedi where he finally explains his motivations to Luke (until then he's just the generic old guy). Chewbacca was NEVER really developed. Leia's 'princessness' is never explained. Boba Fett has six lines. And there's a million generic characters. Didn't stop me from watching ANH about 70 times. Didn't stop some of you from watching it several HUNDRED times.
Do we now complain about the pace? We watch people wander the desert in ANH, wander the tundra and wander the worm stomach in Empire, and wander the woods in Jedi. Didn't stop us from watching these movies enough times over to put them all in the top 10 grossing films of all time.
Do we complain about Jar Jar? Only if we also complained when Luke Skywalker did the same sorts of things. And Jar Jar actually has some character development - so if you complained about the lack of character development, stop complaining about Jar Jar. He has a REASON to be there - he provides a conversation piece for some of the characters (getting Anakin and Amidala talking), he provides the link to the Gungans, and he provides us with a focus inside the battle later on (nowhere else in the saga do we have a battle shown "third person" without one of the heroes actually in it). And those who say "Jar Jar should die" - yes, it would be nice if we could kill everyone in the world who annoys us.
Do we complain about Darth Maul's lack of screen time? Of course - we complained about Boba Fett's lack of screen time, so George gave us 30 seconds more in the remastered ANH, waving to the audience and saying "HI, I'm Boba Fett". Be careful what you wish for.
Do we complain about a certain, shall we say, "microscopic detail" regarding the Force? Sure, I guess we're entitled to complain about anything that makes the Force, or the Saga itself, anything other than what we've convinced ourselves over two decades that it should be. Timothy Zahn gave us something similar (the ysalamiri, animals that can block the Force) and instead of raising a stink, it raised lively debate about what the Force really is and how it works. I think this new revelation makes a GREAT explanation for why strong sensitivity to a ubiquitous energy field is a rather exclusive inherited trait. And it raises more questions than it answers.
Do we complain about Yoda? Yes, and we have every reason to: he looks like they cast another "actor" for the part, he acts like he stuck his lips into the podracer power beam like Jar Jar did, and he sounds like Frank Oz needs to actually WATCH Empire and remember how to do the voice. And his dialogue is some of George's finest - "more have you to say?" This complaint I grant you - but for all we know, he might "change" in the next two films to become older, his eyes might bug out more, his voice could deepen, and he might get off the painkillers, leaving him more like the Yoda we remember. Conversely, if TPM is the first movie you ever see of the saga, later Yodas won't seem quite right either.
Do we complain about the Nimoudians and how easily they were defeated? Remember what the film is REALLY about - and who was calling the shots in the blockade - they were never SUPPOSED to win. Watch the movie. Think about who stood to gain the most from the arrangement.
Do we complain about the kick-ass Jedi action, the adrenalizing 300mph pod race through the canyons, R2D2 cavorting outside the ship, the exquisite Naboo city, the sea monsters, the jawdropping Coruscant cityscape (I think ILM just took back the award for most ships onscreen), the Senate, the seamless droids-walking-among-the-prisoners effects, or the "red shield" thing in the end battle? No, of course not.
Do we complain about the director and how he composed certain shots? Fault his screenwriting and his ability to coax perfect performances out of actors, if you must - but his skill in actually putting pictures on film has NOT been diluted by the passage of time. It is still very much a George Lucas movie; he uses every square inch of the 2.1:1, he has a sense of motion that few directors have, and he approaches the visual effects as "this is the world, I'm showing you how cool it looks" instead of "these are our cool effects".
Complain about the merchandising, if you must - but if Taco Bell ever offers you a few hundred million for the right to advertise your work on a taco wrapper, you'll have to say no.
I admit: I'm an artist, which makes me a primarily visual creature - which means I can be suckered by a visually entertaining movie that lacks a few points in the plot department. But then, Independence Day didn't impress me, so clearly this film has SOMETHING more to offer.
So just shut up, stop looking for things to hate, and go WATCH THE MOVIE A COUPLE TIMES. You learned to tolerate the flaws in the other three, you'll learn to tolerate most of the flaws in this one, and with any luck, eventually you'll learn to appreciate what this film DOES have. Of course, it'll help when the marketing frenzy dies down, and Jar Jar is no longer smiling at you from every product in Wal-Mart.
Besides, if you don't like how George makes movies, make your own.
According to my sources, Amiga Inc. thought so too. But they had a terrible time getting Be to cooperate - they wanted too much for licensing, taking too long to sign paperwork, etc. Finally they mutually said "f*** you" this time last year (a week before the Amiga convention where the partnership was supposed to be announced!) - and Amiga Inc. started talking to QNX after that.
(I've heard that Sun was also on the list of "potential partners".)
A couple things the Amiga has always offered and will probably continue to offer:
- Nowhere is it written that every OS wants to be UNIX when it grows up - the Amiga is not UNIX and thus brings a fresh perspective to OS design, while remaining robust enough that UNIX apps can be ported to it.
- The GUI is integrated the way a GUI should be - preferences are basically systemwide, not merely toolkit-wide or API-wide. GUI and Shell are given equal billing and don't operate in separate universes. ARexx provides a platform-wide scripting mechanism that lets applications talk to each other. And on and on.
- The Amiga speaks NTSC and PAL, and the proposed next-generation Amigas will speak HDTV. There is a real need in the home computer AND the video pro market for machines that consider television as a native language - allowing software to manipulate video whether the software was designed to or not (like using Workbench to genlock!).
The Amiga has less than 0.1% market share right now, and I don't really see the classic Amiga line making a noticeable comeback - nor do I have convincing reason to believe the current batch of promises any more than the last 173 we've been given - but there really is a place for the Amiga, or some descendant of its spirit (and I don't mean Be, which seems to become more like a closed-source UNIX with each successive release).
The day before Commodore went out of business, you could get an A1200 for $349 and an A4000 for $1899.
The day after they went out of business, those prices (I witnessed this personally) went up to $549 and $2499 respectively.
Wasn't Elvis worth more dead than alive?
A month ago they weren't going to build the box unless Be allowed them to port the OS. Supposedly it was going to take "an afternoon" (according to Haynie and associates) to port BeOS to this thing - and Be was stalling (probably because of their relationship with Intel). I guess they didn't get enough feedback on THAT front, so they're going through the list of OSes.
Kinda depressing, really - Dave builds good boxes.
The real problem isn't that OSS will never be easy to use - the problem is that it tends to be radically inconsistent. Knock the Mac or Windows, but at least the software is pretty much all built with the same building blocks and thus looks and works mostly the same. Linux today has what, ten? fifteen? different GUI toolkits - not counting the programs that address X directly or otherwise implement their own look and feel (Ghostview, XV) and not counting window managers that add their own look and feel to the system. When it was announced that KDE and Gnome would use the same drag-and-drop protocol, it was a watershed - making Linux the last OS on the planet to get a DND standard.
Part of what makes an OS easy to use is consistency - if it worked this way in the other program, it should work this way here. Radically jumping between interface styles and widget appearances between applications jars even the experienced user - and annoys those anal people like myself who want all the programs running under a given OS to look like they belong together. (When one program won't respect the color scheme you've chosen, it's annoying and it looks unprofessional. X Window is the king of this - a typical screenshot looks like a mockup, with four or five GUI styles mixed and matched like the Screamshot. A NeXT-style window manager with Motif widgetry in one window and Win95-style widgetry in the next... a confused observer might think you've gone emulator crazy.)
The solution to that kind of scrambled interface would be to have a style guide - but that requires making all the toolkits conform to it, and the toolkits usually have their own style guides. In OSS there seems to be little incentive to make things interoperable - and far less incentive to obsess over the UI style. This wouldn't be a problem with the application coders - they should have a reasonable expectation that the toolkit provides such consistency. Just having the major toolkits look in the same place for appearance and configuration info would be a big step up - if I want an aqua-green OS, I don't want half my apps to ignore my request!
That the GNU tools on the command line are completely style-guide compliant and are fully interoperable makes this situation in X that much less acceptable. It CAN be done. Why isn't it being done?