July 1997
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"Nothing is happening" (31-Jul-97 )

    Alexander Dorn posts a 6k article speaking about software development not being dead, but merely waiting; VRML not being useful on Amigas; NewTek just waiting for memory management, weird rumours of AI hiring Irving Gould and Medhi Ali for OS developments; Gateway 2000 barely knowing the word Amiga at its purchase; the need for hope; a future for the Amiga as a fact; about licensing of low-end machines; a new OS in November... [I really can't go into details, check out the original posting.]

Aminet (31-Jul-97 )

    Aminet's hard drives are full, they're going down for a few days to upgrade their storage.

Amiga patents (31-Jul-97 )

    In reply to the recent disclosure of a "standardized" cover plate and serial number on AmigaOS 3.1, Olaf Barthel says there are only a natty hologram and a seal proclaiming "Guaranteed to be at least four years old" missing. He adds that probably the hologram would then be worth more than the disks and the suggests that perhaps nobody at AI has yet noticed that their products are old and badly need to see updating, rather than licensing. He also remarks that AI seem to have resurrected the Boing! ball.

Rightiming/China/Escom info (31-Jul-97 )

    According to Mick Tinker of Index Information Ltd, Rightiming paid USD $2.4m for China, Escom used this as part of the purchase price for C=.

UAE speeds (30-Jul-97 )

    On a P200 [..], UAE feels like a slow A3000. To calculate the speed of an UAE-emulated Amiga, you can use this calculation:
    a = average number of x86 instructions per 68K instruction: 40
    b = average number of x86 instructions per clock cycle: 1.2
    c = average clock cycles per 68000 instruction: 3
    Assuming a 100 MHz host CPU, the virtual 68000 runs at a speed of
    100 MHz/a*b*c = 9 MHz
    Apparently, a PPro-200 is exactly the type of CPU UAE starts making sense on

Kludges (30-Jul-97 )

    The Amiga has become a bit of a kludge, with patch over patch. These are potential problems when running Amiga software, but brought to life as third-party add-ons while the Amiga was trapped in Bankruptcy Purgatory. However, "kludges" are a means of taking a machine that was not being advanced [..] farther than most probably would have imagined, capability wise. Related to the article subject ("To PPC or not PPC?") Alexander Dorn then adds a Shakespeare Rant:
    To PPC, or not to PPC, that was the question (was it not?)
    Weather 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer the slow processing speeds
    of a 68k Processor;
    or to Take On the task of switching to another platform;
    and in so doing, abandon Amiga...
    To Switch, to Switch per chance for speed!
    Eye, there's the rub, for in that speed of PPC, what programs may
    come, when we have shuffled off this AmigaOS.
    For what OS should we bear?
    To that Undiscoverd Country from whose borders the Amiga
    may not return.

New IBrowse 2.0 features (30-Jul-97 )

    Stephen Marriot of HiSoft Systems replies to an older post and confirms that all possible IBrowse 2.0 featues mentioned there will be implemented. This includes inline MPEG/QT/AVI support, inline VRML support, Extensive plugin api for all types of plugins, internal support for JavaScript, as well as clipboard copying from the HTML display and improved printing.

New newsgroups (30-Jul-97 )

    Nicholas Stallard suggests that, besides a comp.sys.amiga.misc.tim newsgroup for Timothy Rue, we also need comp.sys.amiga.offtopic, comp.sys.amiga.flame, comp.sys.amiga.personal.bashing, (de.)comp.sys.amiga.ortmann.

Reasons why there won't be a PPC AmigaOS (29-Jul-97 )

    According to Michael Thaler, there will probably be no new AmigaOS for the PPC, since the current OS was written with different compilers, by different people (who have left C=/AT/AI); and probably nobody will want to rewrite it either. He asserts that the only real AmigaOS successor is a thing called HURD, very innovative and ahead of its time (but not compatible).

Against Timothy Rue, again (27-Jul-97 )

    Bill Hogget answers to yet another huge Timothy Rue posting and asks if there is no end to this man's inane rambling. He says he's never seen anyone write so much and say so little and suggest that Timothy should considered a career in politics.

Internal notice (27-Jul-97 )

    New feature! I have now finally updated my ParseArticles program, so that it will now also include Dates in the Originally posted by... field. Starting today, locally stored articles will also be in the correct Usenet format and not in the old Thor "Forwarded Message" format. This also means that you can now easily guess the time it takes between the posting and the summary by comparing the summary date below the title and the posting date below the article.
    Delays: During the next two weeks, updates will not be as frequent as I want, since André Hoffmann is on vacation until 5th August and I need to browse the Usenet myself (with a pretty unreliable Usenet host)...
     · 

MUI not the cause of buggy programs? (26-Jul-97 )

    Alan Buxey replies to Colin Ward's recent post [see "MUI and buggy programs below] and says that there is nothing wrong with MUI and that we should embrace the system. What's wrong is some of the people using it, there needs to be tighter control on MUI programs. Programs should be beta-tested, utils are no longer thoroughly tested before release. Perhaps there should be some kind of MUI examiners to check/optimise/bug report and possibly say "hey, you cant release this yet"

Timothy Rue (22-Jul-97 )

    Jason Compton says he is sick and tired of hearing Tim make his indirect attacks on [his] and Carl Sassenrath's character while at the same time implying that he has something worthwhile to say. He adds that he received many letters by Tim while working at VIScorp, he hardly gave his writings a second thought, people at execute lebel never saw this stuff since Tim's letters where not quite "professional" (fanfold print paper still in one big long strip out of a dot-matrix printer). Jason thinks Tim has gotten worse over the past 12 months and points out that his lack of response (to Tim's postings) is not some sort of admission of guilt.

QuikPak homepage gone (22-Jul-97 )

    Darren Eveland says the QuikPak homepage is gone, along with the whole www.amigasupport.com site going down (for unknown reasons). He adds that support for QuikPak's 060 is available on his site at http://tdg.res.uoguelph.ca/~darren/68060.html.

MUI and buggy programs (22-Jul-97 )

    Colin Ward is posting a rather long article where he says that Amiga programming has become worse since MUI. Can anyone bother to write bug free software any more? Does anyone bother to use Mungwall and Enforcer? He explains that he can't connect to the net for ten minutes without multiple program failures. Colin thinks MUI is killing the Amiga, because it enforces bad programming. He recalls the old days where everything needed to be programmed without any flaw or the program would crash and that nowadays programming MUI is so easy that people don't even think about testing their programs before releasing them. We either have to get rid of MUI or develop some tools that will allow us, as users and programmers, to detect incorrect usage of it, in a global attempt to raise the standard of software reliability.

The Amiga sold again... in China (22-Jul-97 )

    Eric Giguere is forwarding a message from biz.yahoo.com that says that Lotus Pacific Inc. announced on July 18, 1997 it entered into a Purchase Agreement with Righttiming Electronics Corp [aka. NewStar] to acquire all Commodore-Amiga's patents, trademarks, licenses and copyrights to be registered and used in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao and the bordering countries between China and the former Soviet Union.

Amiga Survey (21-Jul-97 )

Dr. Peter K.'s computer (20-Jul-97 )

    Dr. Peters's amazing little A1200 uptime monster is an AT A1200 with AmigaOS 3.1, 4 MB PCMCIA RAM card, Dillon AmigaUUCP 1.16, AmigaBasic 2.0 Alpha (!), occasionally PPaint 6.4, CrossDos heavily, Voodoo sometimes, and the ancient NComm. There are sometimes three copies of AmigaBasic running (it can't multithread several Basic sources from one interpreter, forgive it, it's from MS)...

Index information, part 2 (17-Jul-97 )

    Once again, Mick Tinker clears up what the Access is: a machine for corporate applications. Prices at the moment are $633 for a 1 off cased unit and $412 for a motherboard unit. The motherboard includes a '020, 2 Mb CHIP, 2 Mb FAST, 256kb FLASH ROM, 1kb EEPROM, Real-Time Clock, Sound sampler, IDE, RGB & Composite outputs on rear, Mouse, keyboard & printer ports on rear, Headphone, volume, microphone and reset on font, Floppy drive, Mounting brackets, front & rear cover, Most of the usual A1200 stuff. 8 Mb of FAST RAM wouldn't be a major problem, besides that they are working on (optional) MPEG1 and Ethernet support. Their target for the next twelve months is 10,000 units.
    The Connect is in design and the final ship date is not [yet] certain. It is for retail sale and basically is a low cost A4000. The idea is to start a PC style OEM computer assembly market.
    There are not much informations about the InsideOut, as they don't want to hold people back from spending money and killing the market, they want people to buy what is available otherwise there will be no Amiga market left to sell to. Additionally, they don't want to influence other companies' behaviour (and don't want that they 'borrow' ideas). You'll have to wait and see!

Details about ICOA (17-Jul-97 )

    Fleecy posts an 8k article with precisions about the ICOA initiative. He explains why ICOA is an Industry Council, what this means, why it is also an Open Amiga initiative and what that means. He then proceeds to explain the relation between JMS (the Jay Miner Society) and the ICOA, and says he's a member of the JMS steering committee, but is not the JMS representative at the ICOA.

UAE with retargable graphics (17-Jul-97 )

    A person from Canada, who currently lives in Italy will add the necessary code for retargable graphics to UAE. Hopefully, the Windows-port will feature this in about three months, later all versions will offer it.

About Index (14-Jul-97 )

    Michael Schulz forwards informations about Index. Apparently they have been working on the Access since 1995. They are developing (or planning to develop) three machines:
    • the Access, an A1200 based mini tower with newly-designed motherboard, 8Bit ISA Slot, Soundsampler, microphone and battery-backed clock, built-in Fast-RAM slots (up to 8 MB). The Access is said to be 2.3 times faster than a normal A1200, using the same 68020/14MHz.
    • the Connect, compatible to the A4000, with 68040 or 68060, ZorroIII, ISA, AGA, a maximum of 128 MB RAM on-board, IDE slot for up to 4 devices, connector for PC keyboard
    • The InsideOut, a computer with RISC processor performance, with 64/128 bit graphics card and 3D accelerator, PCI, network support through TCP/IP.

Third AI license (14-Jul-97 )

    Zippy forwards a copy of the latest Amiga International License press release, that says AI licensed Intrinsic Computer Systems to manufacture A1200 based computers. ICS are not allowed to use the Amiga name for their computers, the license only lasts one year. They will be selling A1200-based tower systems, called Amigo PC, some fitted with accelerators, hard drives and CD-ROM drives, and bundled with either three new professional software packages or three new games never seen before on the Amiga.

More crackers (14-Jul-97 )

    Thorsten Stocksmeier is once again the victim of a pirate. He received feedback from an English guy who sent a keymaker for Thorsten's Shareware program FFNews. He also included a cracked version of the program that neither shows its registration state nor a key number. Piracy where I look in the Amiga "community". Thorsten's original subject was Anyone who buys shareware key files is a dumb idiot... [Is that ironical or do people really think that way?]

NASA using Amigas (14-Jul-97 )

    Hal Greenle, former NASA employee posts details about the Amiga system used at NASA's Hangar AE in Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. These systems process launch vehicle and spacecraft data from the Centaur and Delta launch vehicles, and sometimes assist with Shuttle data. Currently, they are using A4000 motherboards in MicroniK towers kits with Warp engines, but they also used A2000's and A1000's before. Hal says more information is available in an article he did for Amiga Computing issue August 96.

Changing CygnusED... (14-Jul-97 )

    Olaf Barthel says enhancing CygnusED is pretty hard, because it was built upon hard design principles that are nearly impossible to change. Basically, CygnusED is just one blazingly fast text display engine with editing features glued to it. It will probably never offer features like syntax colouring or plug-in API, as that would be too hard to implement into the existing code. Apparently, most of the 50k of suggestions he received already circle around turning CygnusEd into GoldEd, which is obviously not possible.

Apple CEO resigns, Quarterly loss (14-Jul-97 )

    For those who don't know it yet, Harv Laser posts a message with details on Apple Computer's CEO, Gil Amelio, resigning, and adds that Apple's about to announce yet another quarterly loss as well.

VIScorp and SkySite (14-Jul-97 )

    According to Jason Compton, VIScorp's overall picture now IS Skysite, and companies like it. The STB idea is internally pretty dead.

CygnusED (12-Jul-97 )

    According to an official press release, Schatztruhe will republish CygnusED. There will be updated and bugfixed versions; right now Bruce Dawson and Olaf Barthel are working on it. You are invited to submit suggestions to schatztruhe@cww.de, 10 copies of the new CygnusEd will be given away. Estimated time of arrival is later this year; CygnusED will be on CD-ROM and there will be update and cross-update offers.

AmigaBasic on modern Amigas (12-Jul-97 )

    Denis Zwornaz repeats what should be done to run AmigaBasic on modern Amigas. Turn FastMem off, turn DisplayBeep in the Sound prefs off, turn the CPU data-cache off, start AmigaBasic, enter clear 50000 (or a higher value), reactivate fast memory and run your programs. Of course it is more comfortable to use a modern program that is compatible to Amiga-Basic, like ACE or MaxonBASIC (aka. HiSoft BASIC).

VIScorp news (09-Jul-97 )

    Jason Compton reports that VIScorp just completed an acquisition of a company called Skysite. This may be the reason why their stock went up over $1.25, hovering around thirty cents for a month or two.

Amiga sighting at Burger King (09-Jul-97 )

    Jeroen T. Vermeulen reports that at Burger King he definately saw an Amiga pointer in the big video screens that constantly showed promotional videos, movie shots, and Burger King logos. Perhaps franchises all over Europe are showing that Amiga mouse pointer right now. ;-)

"Proper priority" (09-Jul-97 )

    In a rather lenghty post and in his usual style, Timothy Rue writes that AI should have a priority list with hardware development on the top (as foundation for software or anything beyond this), software development at second place (better software development tools too, as the Amiga community is a creative community) and, at third place, a surprise [whatever that means]. In his own words, Timothy summarises this as follows:
    The first of the priorities is already showing productive results in new hardware product value for the consumer. The second will address software development needs, bringing new software value to and by the users. The third, well it's a supprise. One which will be keep quite until the second priority is well under way. Maybe the second won't happen? Then the third can't.

Amiga being enhanced (09-Jul-97 )

    Joern Plewka says that, according to CU-Amiga's web pages, the new Amigas are being enhanced. [The Index Amiga motherboard will be smaller and Chip RAM access will be faster, amongst others]

ESC codes (09-Jul-97 )

    Nicholas Stallard posts a (German) list with all the ESC codes that can, amongst others, be used to format CLI output (ie. bold, italic, inverse...)

Amiga usage at AI (05-Jul-97 )

    In reply to discussions whether Amiga companies should use Amiga computers for all their work, Mick Tinker of Index Information Ltd. confirms that AI have a demo room in their offices, with quite a lot of Amiga kit in it. He adds that he is not so blind to think the Amiga is the best product for everything, for example office work is a weak point [and it can be understood that the Amiga is not used for that].

mmu.library? (05-Jul-97 )

    "LA GUEST" says that he saw a reference to an mmu.library that a new version of the AmigaOS will include [..] the other day, but adds that he cannot remember where he saw it.

DEC suing Intel (05-Jul-97 )

    Jeroen T. Vermeulen posts precisions on DEC suing Intel for wilful infringement in the designs of all Pentium, Pentium Pro, and Pentium II processors of 10 of DEC's microprocessor patents that have been instrumental in boosting the Alpha and VAX processor families' performance over the past decade or so.

Getting rid of A1200s (05-Jul-97 )

    The new AI licenses are debatable, but at least AI gets rid of their huge stock of A1200s. On their own, they couldn't have been sold, so working together with MicroniK was a nice solution. Olaf Barthel says he wouldn't be surprised if it took AI a long time to persuade MicroniK to jump into cold water.

Against WYSIWYG HTML editors (05-Jul-97 )

    Dr. Peter Kittel says there are many reasons why shiny WYSIWYG HTML editors may not be very useful. It is similar to computer languages, where everybody should have used Assembler sometime. Every HTML author should have tried to write pages with an ASCII editor, chances are high that he will ignore pseudo-WYSIWYG editors afterwards.

No Amiga trade-in programs? (02-Jul-97 )

    Jason Compton says he doesn't think Gateway will do have any sort of trade-in policy. Initial Amiga sales in the consumer market are [..]going to be to existing Amiga users, so a trade-in almost amounts to an outright price reduction for everyone. Besides that, there's also the question of what they would do with old Amigas, as the outlets for used Amigas are not very lucrative.

www.amiga.de Frontpage discussions (01-Jul-97 )

    "Arctangent" says that the reason the Amiga webmaster is using Frontpage may be that tools on the PC and Mac offer far more in the line of options, ease of use than authoring tools on the Amiga. He says that webmasters should use the BEST tool for the job, regardless of its manufacturer. What matters most, above all else, is that the web page is attractive.
 
Last updated 26-Dec-1997, 15:14 by Christian Kemp, ckemp@vo.lu. All HTML files on this site are copyrighted, usage on other sites requires a written permission.