The Amiga community is far from dead!

Wow. Still getting emails now following the Amiga piece, several days on. The majority are positive and supporting, in some cases expressing thanks for giving the Amiga some coverage...

Great Amiga Article... It's really nice to see the Amiga still gets press. I have fond memories of it.
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Keep up the good work!
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Nice post :-)
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Thanks for a very good article on the Amiga.
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I want to translate you article called "The Amiga is dead. Long live the Amiga!" and put translation on polish amiga site - http://www.ppa.pl/. Do you agree?
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Holy Shit Liam! Nice article.
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Awesome Article !!! [...] Well done! I've just found out that there is activity in Amiga-land a few months ago & your article REALLY summed up quite a bit of the past action!

However I've also had a few abusive ones, telling me that I'm a know-nothing fool who can't write, clearly did no research, don't know what I'm talking about and should not waste my time:

When was Pegasos AmigaOS compatible? This story seems to be an odd an inaccurate attempt to associate Genesi and their boards with AmigaOS4. [...] I don't get this at all... And the second paragraph of your article is not accurate.
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The Pegasos is *not* AmigaOS compatible. The Pegasos has nothing to do, in any way, shape, or form, with AmigaOS. This entire article is in error, and anyone with even a passing interest in AmigaOS (eg: anyone who sees the word "Amiga" and reads this article) knows this.

Fun fun fun!

I don't think I've ever seen this much response from a single article that I've written anywhere. It stayed as the #2 top story on the Inq most of the day, as far as I could see, dropping down to #2 for a while then recovering.

It's being discussed/castigated/heckled in various places, too:

Amigaworld
Moobunny
Pegasos.org

I stand sit amazed. (In a good way! At least, mostly...) There is still considerable interest in this particular bit of of the geek world, at any rate!

Sartorial elegance

Wore my Commodore chicken-head logo shirt to the Ton last night in celebration. Or something. Or perhaps it was just the 1st one out of the wardrobe, who can say?

But I think I gotta get me an Amiga logo T now. Just the big tick and the AMIGA logo. Maybe a boing ball on the back. Anyone know of anywhere? Seems to me to be the perfect answer to all those ATARI "Mount Fuji" logo ones worn by nongeeks who wouldn't know an ST if you hit them round the back of the head with it...

Although of course the Amiga was always the superior hardware platform, what with Agnus and Copper and so on, I mean, the ST didn't even have a blitter as standard... I ask you! And GEM? No multitasking, no decent hires screen modes without a mono monitor... I mean, who'd want one?
[cough]
Not that I have 2 in the attic, oh no, not me guv. I think they're next to the Amiga 1200 and my first ever machine to give me a taste of Raw Computer Power (®™hunkymouse 1984), my old Archimedes A310, and my A5000 and my new RISC PC and my QL with the 640K expansion and floppy interface...

I want a bigger house.

Still looking for a lodger

Oh, yes, while I remember, as per flickgc's suggestion:

---

Here we go again...

Last time I advertised my room on Gumtree, I got a crack addict who stole about £2000's worth of stuff and legged it, so I am a little reluctant to go down that route again.

So out here in sunny Surrey, I am looking for an occupant for my spare room once again. As soon as possible, in fact.

I'm looking for about £80/wk plus a share of the bills. It's a spacious, sunny furnished room (about 3m x 2.5m) with quite a bit of shelf space, a single bed (but that might be changeable) & built-in wardrobes, in a 3-bed house otherwise occupied by just me.

I'm at CR4 3SB: south London, a fairly pleasant 15min walk from Colliers Wood Tube, which is in Zone 3 on the Northern Line. I'm also 15min from the Croydon Tramlink (Phipps Bridge) & a mainline station at Tooting (on 1st Capital Connect, i.e., Thameslink). It's about 20min on a #264 bus to Croydon or 10min on various routes to Wimbledon & thus the District Line for West London, Clapham Junction and so on. (If a 15min walk from the Tube is too much, you can hop on a 152 bus for about 5min, from outside the Tube to a couple of minutes' walk away.)

It's well-served by nightbuses - both the N155 & N44 run from Trafalgar Square to near here all night.

8Mb broadband (and even a free PC, if you need it) is included in the deal, too.

I don't smoke or drink and am a vegetarian, but I don't object to these things. Antisocial hours& loud music not a problem, so long as it's decent music. ;¬) There is a cat but she's an exceptionally sweet little thing.

If you know anyone that's looking, please spread the word around... Loads of contact details in my userinfo.

More Vista nastiness

Interesting comparison from Information Week. This time, it's a reasonably deep comparison of Vista and OS X, rather than the usual "oh, look, the icons are quite similar" or "both do 3D flippy stuff!" which is what most articles have come up with. Instead, this article focuses on the consistency and feel and design of the UI, of window frames and controls, of authentication mechanisms, of the layout of the admin tools, comparing them both to previous versions of the same platform as well as to the competition.

Review: Mac OS X Shines In Comparison With Windows Vista

A mildly interesting aside, which only ocurred to me last night. In the last couple of days, I've spent some time chatting about my (OK, really dougs's) new Windows-based smartphone with both daveon and if42. (Who I don't think know one another, but ought to.) Both Dave and Ian have considerably more experience with prior iterations of Windows CE and Windows Mobile than me, and thus tend to assume that I know nothing at all about them and so lecture me. :-)

(By the way, Ian: mine really is - amongst other things - a Qtek 9000 and yours a 9100. Look.)

This is fine and entirely understandable. However, I have been watching the field really quite closely from the outside in, as it were, while for a long time remaining a happy and contented Psion user, and later a rather less happy and less contented Symbian user.

As I have mentioned previously, although I am delighted with the functionality of the Universal, the software horrifies me with its extreme lashed-together unstable kludginess and the actual implementation of the Universal's design is terrible, as opposed to the overall concept, which is really very clever.

(After using WinMob 5 for a while, honestly, Symbian feels really very "together" by comparison. I ought to be less critical of them.)

Both Dave & Ian, almost needless to say, use newer, smaller but slightly lower-spec WM5 devices. Smaller matters a lot: zenmeisterin's comment when she first saw the Universal was "My God, it's a brick!"

What only struck me later was certain similarities in what Dave, in particular, said, not so much with Ian's comments but with the overall outlook (haha) of 'Softies in general. Which is, broadly, "if you think WinMob 5 is bad, you should've seen 2003 or even v3 before that! Actually, no, you shouldn't - it was awful. Really terrible. V5 is so much better by comparison! To be honest, the next version isn't much different - it's just a facelift. But the version after that - version 7 - that's going to be something else. That's when they really get it to work. It's going to be lovely and Symbian and so on won't know what's hit them."

It didn't strike me at the time, but this is a version of the eternal Microsoft apology, isn't it? It's better than before, but just you wait for next year...

Whereas the difference is that the Linux mob just get on with releasing new and improved versions as fast as they can. It might be version 0.3 and still buggier than an anthill, but it's here now and you can use it if you want or need it. No big-bang, "wait 'til the next release", annual marketing driven programme.

And Apple, which for 7 years or so now has been releasing a new wave of products every year to 18 months, attracting complaint and condemnation for charging full-whack no-special-upgrade-price each time, but every time, delivering real measurable improvements. Some incremental, some big-bang, but every time, a bit better than before: a bit faster, a bit stabler, a bit more polish, a few more features. No backward steps. Continuous improvement. Kaizen.

It really is a difference of philosophy so very deep that it is hard to explain.

Dave finds it hard to believe that Apple can do anything genuinely new and interesting in the world of mobile phones. I think it can. It will be interesting to see.