Last time I looked, the booth number quoted by Bill McEwen will in fact be occupied by Microsoft, at least according to the official show website.
This was first discovered in the comments section of ANN (where this news item is also extensively discussed), after a news item was posted this morning.
Exactly same news item was posted on ANN several hours ago. In the comments section, Bernie Meyer, the main programmer behind Amithlon, responds in several posts (1, 2, 3)
Over a year ago, the author, Kurt Skauen, wrote this on ANN:
Yes indead, the window borders looks alot like Amiga. If memory serves, I had something called "sysihack" installed on my Amiga when I used it (a looong time ago) that made the window borders look more "3D". The AtheOS (default) windows have almost identical borders. I don't think the rest of the GUI have the same style as the Amiga though. Then again, I have not run AmigaOS for loong time now.
I have to agree, this news item belongs on Amiga news sites, but not on Slashdot (IMHO). Amiga coverage on Slashdot would be fine if there was a finished product, or at least a bullet-proof plan of what to do to make it succeed, but things like these will just spawn yet another "we don't want Amiga coverage" / "Amiga is dead" / "Amiga computers used to be fine ten years ago" discussion, I fear.
But then again, I'm biased, I've been running an Amiga news site for almost four and a half years.
People seem to think that (a) this interview is pretty old, (b) development has not yet started, or (c) that there are NDA's preventing clearer answers.
I meant to say, "make fun", of course. I feel stupid now.:) Flaming for not getting facts right gets less effective if you're overlooking your own (grammatical) mistakes caused by last-minute structural changes....
"Your a USian arn't you? A Mars Bar to the first person who can tell the Yank who failed Geography which language the speak in Luxemburg."
I'm not "USian". I'm from Luxembourg. I speak Luxembourgish. The only language in which they drop the "o" from the name is German, as far as I know, but certainly not English. Therefore your attempt to correct, flame and/or make funny failed.
To get this on topic again, though, anti-flame technology might prevent the usage of strong language. But I am more offended by childish remarks, irrelevant ramblings and careless (full of errors) usage of a language. And I doubt the Eudora team, or anybody else for that matter, could come up with a "stupidity filter" that just delays messages until they reach a given thresold of meaning and intelligence.:)
I'm using Eudora 5 now. Until last year, I used Marcel Beck's YAM on the Amiga (both real hardware and emulated on the PC via WinUAE). When I fully moved over to the PC, I was thinking that, surely, mail programs must offer better features, more control and better useability, seeing how they are not written by hobby programmers in their spare time. I guess I was wrong.
Even though Eudora 5 offers some new features and bugfixes, I'm disappointed that the major headlight in this version is a "mood watch", which seems to me like nothing more than a filter that displays an small image whenever it stumbles across a potentially offensive word.
I don't know how large the Eudora team is, but I'm sure there would be better things to implement or reconsider than a basic algorithm that controls the user's language. I am rarely in the mood to use any words Eudora might consider as offensive, but if I am, I still feel that I would be a better judge of what can be said and what can't than any mail program could possibly be.
Besides, what about multi-language users? I typically write emails in four different languages. While I'm sure French and German will get implemented, I somehow doubt that the team would know enough Luxembourgish to build up a suitable database.
One thing it does though, I have to admit, is that it offers a pretty reliable filter for any "free xxx" spam mails I receive.:)
I covered AtheOS on ANN two and a half weeks ago. Here is a direct link to the original article, 37 comments were added to it. The author, Kurt Skauen, actively participated in the discussion. It was predictable that Slashdot would bring his server and/or network connection down, since my site with about 2500 daily visitors already made him rip the network-cable off the server before it run out of memory.
I can't comment on the Usenet as a whole, but I can give one specific example of how the traffic and quality of one newsgroups went down over the years.
When I started with Amiga Network News, in November 1996, I was providing a quite unique service of summarising all the important discussions and postings that could be found on the comp.sys.amiga.misc newsgroup on an easy-to-access web page for people with little time or no access to Usenet.
Back in 1996, 1997 and 1998, the Amiga newsgroups were frequented by a number of very knowledgeable persons. Many people were directly involved in Amiga companies, or had access insight news via other sources. This meant I was able to present a lot of exclusive news to my visitors, which other web-based news sites simply did not have.
But gradually, most of the interesting people just disappeared or stopped posting for various reasons. After I found less and less news on Usenet, I was forced to also focus on websites as source of information. I think this transition happened sometime in 1999, after I had been trying (in vain) to get more people to post to comp.sys.amiga.misc, and had even begun reposting news items to be able to cover them on my pages.
Meanwhile, I think I succeeded in filling the gap that the slowdown of Usenet brought. I've been busy working on my site, adding my own comments system and adding other features that wouldn't have been possible if I had just kept on focusing on Usenet.
What I feel is missing though, is the informal atmosphere of Usenet. While the web is a fine place to find official announcements, or other mainstream news items, none of the sites I visit now ever managed to build such a "community", where end users, programmers, hardware gurus and company owners posted so much quality, and revealed so many interesting things.
Meanwhile, the classic Usenet has to a certain extent be replaced by web-based services such as Remarq and Deja, to an extent where some posters on the above sites don't even realise that they are not using a messageboard but a graphic frontend for one of the many newsgroups.
So to answer the question of this article ("Is Usenet dying?"), I don't think it is dying. I just think it is changing. But whether that change is for the better, or for the worse, is up for you to judge.
Slashdot Mirror
This was first discovered in the comments section of ANN (where this news item is also extensively discussed), after a news item was posted this morning.
Exactly same news item was posted on ANN several hours ago. In the comments section, Bernie Meyer, the main programmer behind Amithlon, responds in several posts (1, 2, 3)
Yes indead, the window borders looks alot like Amiga. If memory serves, I had something called "sysihack" installed on my Amiga when I used it (a looong time ago) that made the window borders look more "3D". The AtheOS (default) windows have almost identical borders. I don't think the rest of the GUI have the same style as the Amiga though. Then again, I have not run AmigaOS for loong time now.
I have to agree, this news item belongs on Amiga news sites, but not on Slashdot (IMHO). Amiga coverage on Slashdot would be fine if there was a finished product, or at least a bullet-proof plan of what to do to make it succeed, but things like these will just spawn yet another "we don't want Amiga coverage" / "Amiga is dead" / "Amiga computers used to be fine ten years ago" discussion, I fear.
But then again, I'm biased, I've been running an Amiga news site for almost four and a half years.
People seem to think that (a) this interview is pretty old, (b) development has not yet started, or (c) that there are NDA's preventing clearer answers.
I meant to say, "make fun", of course. I feel stupid now. :) Flaming for not getting facts right gets less effective if you're overlooking your own (grammatical) mistakes caused by last-minute structural changes....
I'm not "USian". I'm from Luxembourg. I speak Luxembourgish. The only language in which they drop the "o" from the name is German, as far as I know, but certainly not English. Therefore your attempt to correct, flame and/or make funny failed.
To get this on topic again, though, anti-flame technology might prevent the usage of strong language. But I am more offended by childish remarks, irrelevant ramblings and careless (full of errors) usage of a language. And I doubt the Eudora team, or anybody else for that matter, could come up with a "stupidity filter" that just delays messages until they reach a given thresold of meaning and intelligence. :)
Even though Eudora 5 offers some new features and bugfixes, I'm disappointed that the major headlight in this version is a "mood watch", which seems to me like nothing more than a filter that displays an small image whenever it stumbles across a potentially offensive word.
I don't know how large the Eudora team is, but I'm sure there would be better things to implement or reconsider than a basic algorithm that controls the user's language. I am rarely in the mood to use any words Eudora might consider as offensive, but if I am, I still feel that I would be a better judge of what can be said and what can't than any mail program could possibly be.
Besides, what about multi-language users? I typically write emails in four different languages. While I'm sure French and German will get implemented, I somehow doubt that the team would know enough Luxembourgish to build up a suitable database.
One thing it does though, I have to admit, is that it offers a pretty reliable filter for any "free xxx" spam mails I receive. :)
I covered AtheOS on ANN two and a half weeks ago. Here is a direct link to the original article, 37 comments were added to it. The author, Kurt Skauen, actively participated in the discussion. It was predictable that Slashdot would bring his server and/or network connection down, since my site with about 2500 daily visitors already made him rip the network-cable off the server before it run out of memory.
When I started with Amiga Network News, in November 1996, I was providing a quite unique service of summarising all the important discussions and postings that could be found on the comp.sys.amiga.misc newsgroup on an easy-to-access web page for people with little time or no access to Usenet.
Back in 1996, 1997 and 1998, the Amiga newsgroups were frequented by a number of very knowledgeable persons. Many people were directly involved in Amiga companies, or had access insight news via other sources. This meant I was able to present a lot of exclusive news to my visitors, which other web-based news sites simply did not have.
But gradually, most of the interesting people just disappeared or stopped posting for various reasons. After I found less and less news on Usenet, I was forced to also focus on websites as source of information. I think this transition happened sometime in 1999, after I had been trying (in vain) to get more people to post to comp.sys.amiga.misc, and had even begun reposting news items to be able to cover them on my pages.
Meanwhile, I think I succeeded in filling the gap that the slowdown of Usenet brought. I've been busy working on my site, adding my own comments system and adding other features that wouldn't have been possible if I had just kept on focusing on Usenet.
What I feel is missing though, is the informal atmosphere of Usenet. While the web is a fine place to find official announcements, or other mainstream news items, none of the sites I visit now ever managed to build such a "community", where end users, programmers, hardware gurus and company owners posted so much quality, and revealed so many interesting things.
Meanwhile, the classic Usenet has to a certain extent be replaced by web-based services such as Remarq and Deja, to an extent where some posters on the above sites don't even realise that they are not using a messageboard but a graphic frontend for one of the many newsgroups.
So to answer the question of this article ("Is Usenet dying?"), I don't think it is dying. I just think it is changing. But whether that change is for the better, or for the worse, is up for you to judge.