The vehemence of the community whenever an Amiga post (or any other alternate OS post) comes up pisses me off. The posts that are so politically guaranteed of instant karma: "What's the point?" or "How can the Amiga possibly survive?": you've all completely missed the point. It has nothing whatsoever to do with why most individuals and companies spend time, effort, and money on the Amiga.
We hack Amigas for the same reason audiophiles spill their salaries on tubes, or on mint vinyl pressings. There's a vibrant aftermarket for new Amiga processors, graphics cards, and bus expansion cards for the same reason that vacuum tubes still roll off the assembly line. There's nothing about the platform that's about dominance, or resurrection; it's an ENTHUSIAST MARKET! Get over it!
Computers are such a dominant part of life anymore, why do people assume that an enthusiast market for computers COULDN'T survive? It's just the opposite: the Amiga thrives exactly because the OS market has percolated to two, maybe three dominant OSes. We can make our money on Windows, and spend it our Amigas.
I don't believe there is a phoenix complex any more, not with those of us who simply enjoy spending money on our favorite platform.
There's precious little left on the web about this, but NeXTSTEP had distributed computing installed, by default, on every box all the way back to the '030 cube in 1988. Anyone remember Zilla?
I'd be curious to know whether Pooch is an evolution of the Zilla codebase/protocol, and whether Zilla was used for any specific projects within large NeXT customers like the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center or Morrison-Knudsen.
Back when I marketed NeXT boxes, it was little more than a scientific curiosity, with few if any case studies to go by.
...it equals 25 million customers around the world using Macs.
Let's put that in perspective: based on recent press releases, Sony has 23 million PS2's out in the world right now. AOL has 33 million worldwide customers.
I would say that 25 million Mac users is an enormous share.
Every alternate OS post results in a whiny rant about the necessity of abundance. So, please, allow me to preempt all these time-wasters with the new and improved Slashdot(R) TrollTemplate(TM). Just cut-'n-paste into your favorite Linux-based text editor, and save for all those annoying alternate-OS postings that foul up your favorite website:
begin included text
I don't mean to start a flamewar, but why is [Amiga | OS/2 | NetBSD | OpenBSD | FreeBSD | DeadBSD | AtheOS | Atari TOS | BeOS | HURD | GeoWorks | Darwin | xemacs | CPM | DNA computers | the human soul | ant colonies ] better than Linux? Really, seriously, why? I have everything I need with Linux (doesn't everyone?), and I don't recognize the need for any other [Open Source | GPL | BSD-licensed | commercial | forced labor-licensed | mandatory genital-mutilation-licensed] operating systems. Ever.
Is it just me, [and | or] am I [a complete moron | a lifeless cretin | a useless troll | completely intolerant of the sun and everything it represents]?
end included text
Repeal the Sodomy laws! Get the Man off our backs!
NEXTSTEP was Unix for the 'common person' twelve years ago. If you were never there on the front lines, using the NeXT environment for day-to-day tasks, you can't understand how transparent the entire experience was. Every app was a registered service to every other app (no matter where you were-- file manager, a paint program, WordPerfect-- Command + '=' brought up an illustrated Webster definition; another hotkey could import arbitrary data to the Paint program, etc.). Display Postscript was awesome, and obviated print preview in any arbitrary application. Everything was nice and there were happy flying puppies.
There was no need for a command line; but NeXT's mistake was in letting us old Unix farts and punks try to market the system. Ultimately, the system became schizophrenic, and never found a target audience.
Apple has gone the other way; taken a platform known for its user-friendliness and insinuated NEXTSTEP onto it. That schizophrenia is still there, but it will be embraced by the Mac platform audience, and then find its Unix power niche, in an inversion from NeXT's 1980's tactics.
Disclaimer: I was a NeXT marketer in '89. Pity me.
SLI = Scan Line Interleave, a process that has nothing to do with multiple PCI boards. A Voodoo 5 5500 does two-chip SLI in a single AGP board. The now-cancelled V5-6000 (which I have fondled and demoed myself at WinHEC some 8 months ago) did four-chip SLI on one monster AGP board.
The aforementioned Quantum3D card was a single board with two V2 framebuffers and four V2 texture units.
The second point by ewhac is a misreading of the AVault blurb on the cancellation of the V5-6000. Quantum 3D is a long-standing partner of 3dfx who has for years used their existing chips in visual simulation and training systems. That's what's so cool about scaleable hardware for the consumer.
3dfx has never suggested in any forum that they will leave the PC market. Why would they? At worst what we're seeing is a return to the Voodoo 2 strategy: a successful one, before they took too much upon themselves. And by the way, Quantum 3D had a kick-ass SLI product on store shelves then, too.
In recent news, director Steven Spielberg has agreed to direct a film that Stanley Kubrick was working on when he died, a film called A.I. that Kubrick had been developing for 18 years. "I'm excited and pleased to be working on this project," Spielberg was quoted as saying, "really, I am excited. His dying words to me were 'Steven, you're the best; you're the ONLY director who could possibly to do justice to my vision,' before he slumped back in his pillow dead. I really feel quite satisfied that Kubrick wasn't the moron I had believed him to be, and that in the end he knew I was the best of them all, with the possible exception of George Lucas, who is a close personal friend of mine."
Spielberg then sighed and looked out the window. "You know, I'm just glad to be alive. I hope some day I can piss out Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, then maybe do Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. All those people in the world who don't read would really love those films, as long as I directed them. I think that would get me even more babies named after me."
Spielberg then ended the interview by rocking back and forth in his stool and singing softly to himself.
Most geniuses and iconoclasts are. Very nice article, it warmed my heart to see my favorite Hermetic Magician in a Slashdot headline.
It's worth noting that to many of his contemporaries, Bruno was seen as a chief proponent of the hermetic tradition (alchemical natural magic philosophy), not necessarily of Copernican scientific truth. Perhaps this was to his chagrin, but he played the part. While Bruno did indeed believe that Copernicus stumbled upon the truth, he also firmly held that it was his duty, as an Hermetic Messiah, to popularize and recontextualize the discoveries into hermetic symbolism. Unfortunately for Bruno, in his lectures he would do this in the precise words of one Marsilio Ficino, a contemporary natural philosopher, and his unacknowledged alchemical theories and terms were laughed at by the "grammatical pedants" at Oxford.
Bruno, who frequently referred to himself in the third-person as "The Nolan", took Copernican science and dragged it back into the murky prescientific, hermetic paradigm. A quote from Bruno's Cena de la ceneri:
"being more a student of mathematics than of nature [Copernicus] was not able to penetrate deeply enough to remove the roots of false and misleading principles."
Perhaps he did this to enlighten the masses, but his reward for this was obscurity and a nice statue.
It is, perhaps, by happy accident that these notions were driven almost entirely by Bruno's Hermetic thought, and not by his acceptance of either the empirical or the mathematical veracity of the Copernican system.
Nonetheless, the man was a stud: regardless of his intentions, the result was laudable.
For further information, I would say the definitive work on Bruno is Francis A. Yates' Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964).
I still use my 8K pet for some of those old classic BASIC games. Remember Dungeon? One of my fondest memories is my uncle rewriting it to say 'twat' and 'angry pimp' instead of 'grue' and 'fire newt';^). I fire it up about once a week to make sure everything grooves. I was seven years old when my uncle purchased the machine for $1100 (a ransom in '77!)
I still have the dot-matrix printer that came with, a weird electrostatic thing: when you turn off the lights, you can see the sparks fly as the imager fries the special silver-gray wax-paper. We even did the funky parallel-port modification that adds an RCA plug.
Like my Amigas, it's nothing but preventative maintenance, now. I use a pencil eraser and isopropyl alcohol to keep the chiclet keyboard contacts fresh. I've still only been through a fraction of the hundreds of programs my uncle handed over to me a year ago.
These guys need an acid bath. Bottom of the page: "Linux is a registered trademark of Linux Torvalds." I almost wet my pants. These guys are about as vapour as it gets. Let's not encourage their behaviour by noticing they exist.
It's not easy to predict vaporware these days, but it sounds like the film will closely correspond with the release of Neverwinter Nights, a massive online game by Bioware (the guys who did Baldur's Gate...). The game is supposed to be 100% true to the AD&D ruleset, fully 3D enhanced, and allow for separate Dungeon Master and client machines, all networked together. We'll see, but the end of 2000 might mark a nice resurgence in AD&D stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
We hack Amigas for the same reason audiophiles spill their salaries on tubes, or on mint vinyl pressings. There's a vibrant aftermarket for new Amiga processors, graphics cards, and bus expansion cards for the same reason that vacuum tubes still roll off the assembly line. There's nothing about the platform that's about dominance, or resurrection; it's an ENTHUSIAST MARKET! Get over it!
Computers are such a dominant part of life anymore, why do people assume that an enthusiast market for computers COULDN'T survive? It's just the opposite: the Amiga thrives exactly because the OS market has percolated to two, maybe three dominant OSes. We can make our money on Windows, and spend it our Amigas.
I don't believe there is a phoenix complex any more, not with those of us who simply enjoy spending money on our favorite platform.
There's precious little left on the web about this, but NeXTSTEP had distributed computing installed, by default, on every box all the way back to the '030 cube in 1988. Anyone remember Zilla?
I'd be curious to know whether Pooch is an evolution of the Zilla codebase/protocol, and whether Zilla was used for any specific projects within large NeXT customers like the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center or Morrison-Knudsen.
Back when I marketed NeXT boxes, it was little more than a scientific curiosity, with few if any case studies to go by.
Let's put that in perspective: based on recent press releases, Sony has 23 million PS2's out in the world right now. AOL has 33 million worldwide customers.
I would say that 25 million Mac users is an enormous share.
begin included text
I don't mean to start a flamewar, but why is [Amiga | OS/2 | NetBSD | OpenBSD | FreeBSD | DeadBSD | AtheOS | Atari TOS | BeOS | HURD | GeoWorks | Darwin | xemacs | CPM | DNA computers | the human soul | ant colonies ] better than Linux? Really, seriously, why? I have everything I need with Linux (doesn't everyone?), and I don't recognize the need for any other [Open Source | GPL | BSD-licensed | commercial | forced labor-licensed | mandatory genital-mutilation-licensed] operating systems. Ever.
Is it just me, [and | or] am I [a complete moron | a lifeless cretin | a useless troll | completely intolerant of the sun and everything it represents]?
end included text
Repeal the Sodomy laws! Get the Man off our backs!
There was no need for a command line; but NeXT's mistake was in letting us old Unix farts and punks try to market the system. Ultimately, the system became schizophrenic, and never found a target audience.
Apple has gone the other way; taken a platform known for its user-friendliness and insinuated NEXTSTEP onto it. That schizophrenia is still there, but it will be embraced by the Mac platform audience, and then find its Unix power niche, in an inversion from NeXT's 1980's tactics.
Disclaimer: I was a NeXT marketer in '89. Pity me.
The aforementioned Quantum3D card was a single board with two V2 framebuffers and four V2 texture units.
Just to clarify.
Derina X. Pinchfish
3dfx has never suggested in any forum that they will leave the PC market. Why would they? At worst what we're seeing is a return to the Voodoo 2 strategy: a successful one, before they took too much upon themselves. And by the way, Quantum 3D had a kick-ass SLI product on store shelves then, too.
Derina X. Pinchfish
Spielberg then sighed and looked out the window. "You know, I'm just glad to be alive. I hope some day I can piss out Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, then maybe do Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. All those people in the world who don't read would really love those films, as long as I directed them. I think that would get me even more babies named after me."
Spielberg then ended the interview by rocking back and forth in his stool and singing softly to himself.
It's worth noting that to many of his contemporaries, Bruno was seen as a chief proponent of the hermetic tradition (alchemical natural magic philosophy), not necessarily of Copernican scientific truth. Perhaps this was to his chagrin, but he played the part. While Bruno did indeed believe that Copernicus stumbled upon the truth, he also firmly held that it was his duty, as an Hermetic Messiah, to popularize and recontextualize the discoveries into hermetic symbolism. Unfortunately for Bruno, in his lectures he would do this in the precise words of one Marsilio Ficino, a contemporary natural philosopher, and his unacknowledged alchemical theories and terms were laughed at by the "grammatical pedants" at Oxford.
Bruno, who frequently referred to himself in the third-person as "The Nolan", took Copernican science and dragged it back into the murky prescientific, hermetic paradigm. A quote from Bruno's Cena de la ceneri:
Perhaps he did this to enlighten the masses, but his reward for this was obscurity and a nice statue.It is, perhaps, by happy accident that these notions were driven almost entirely by Bruno's Hermetic thought, and not by his acceptance of either the empirical or the mathematical veracity of the Copernican system.
Nonetheless, the man was a stud: regardless of his intentions, the result was laudable.
For further information, I would say the definitive work on Bruno is Francis A. Yates' Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964).
I still have the dot-matrix printer that came with, a weird electrostatic thing: when you turn off the lights, you can see the sparks fly as the imager fries the special silver-gray wax-paper. We even did the funky parallel-port modification that adds an RCA plug.
Like my Amigas, it's nothing but preventative maintenance, now. I use a pencil eraser and isopropyl alcohol to keep the chiclet keyboard contacts fresh. I've still only been through a fraction of the hundreds of programs my uncle handed over to me a year ago.
Man, I'd love to get NetBSD on this thing...
These guys need an acid bath. Bottom of the page: "Linux is a registered trademark of Linux Torvalds." I almost wet my pants. These guys are about as vapour as it gets. Let's not encourage their behaviour by noticing they exist.
Now where'd I put that 11th level thief...