The Lair! has joined forces with AmigaWorld in a bid
to offer even more to you - its readers!In a move which "establishes" The Lair! as a recognised force within Amiga cyberspace, I have accepted an invitation to relocate the e-zine onto the AmigaWorld server.
Fear not, this move will not change the character of The Lair! which has been welcomed enthusiastically by the Amiga on-line community, but it does open up new doors for inside-information, items for review, news, commercial relations and a whole host of other advantages which would otherwise have been unavailable to me.
For example, in the next issue I hope to bring you an exclusive preview of the long-awaited news/mail suite "MicroDot II"! I would not have been able to get hold of this program without the help and backing of AmigaWorld.
Other benefits will include valuable competition prizes, The Lair!'s own mailing list, established links with the Vaporware team, and a link to the incredible software resources of the AmigaWorld site.
AmigaWorld have placed a massive chunk of World-wide Web space at my disposal, so the limits which previously kept the size of the site down have now been removed and I can expand the content (with the help of your contributions) exponentially!
Both sites are still very much in the embryonic stage, so you can expect much in the coming months. By visiting both sites regularly, you'll be able to watch them develop until they became invaluable to you - that's my vision, and I will strive to make it a reality.
I retain complete freedom as to style and content so, as I said earlier, the only changes you'll notice will be good ones. :-)
So what happened? Did I just spout off for the sake of it in the last issue? Did I just say to myself "To hell with it!"? Was I visited by the the great God of Web-page Design who urged me to "Spice it up a bit!"?
No, none of the above. So what happened? Well I'll tell you... Voyager-NG happened! I suddenly adopted a new browser, one which supports tables, frames and animated GIF's, among other things.
Of course, the result of this was that I "just had to" experiment a little and try to improve the presentation of The Lair! in the process!
The site is now riddled with tables, animated GIF's and varying font styles. I have optimised the code as much as possible though, so those of you who congratulated me for the simplicity of the previous issue should not be too disappointed. I have also improved some of the pages, correcting errors along the way. For example, the images on my "Media Link" page have now been coded to actually log-on to the site they promote! This is how I should have done it first time round! Better late than never though! :-)
I have also introduced a facility to down-load the entire issue. I have done this to ensure that those of you who worry about on-line time (as I do with British Telecom's insane charging structure) can retrieve the issue from an FTP-server and read it off your own hard disks. An added advantage of this is that the pages will of course load quicker too!
Other changes include renaming the "Opinion" page to the new "Forum" and the removal of the decidely un-cool "What's Cool?" page (that one came in for a lot of criticism, but I only put it there originally to fill out space!.)
New to The Lair! is the "Hot Hardware" page (currently under construction, but should hopefully be present with Issue III), this page will contain a regularly updated list of the finest Amiga peripherals currently available.
Finally, for those of you who missed the launch issue (shame on you), you can now down-load that too (and all future issues) from my new "Back Issues" page.
Have fun my friends!
Please visit it and submit your views!
The IARS has received an official recognition by phase 5 Digital Products (Cybervision, A\Box etc,). I quote:
"phase 5 Digital Products appreciates very much the independent efforts of engaged Amiga
community members to support the planning of the future of the Amiga. The IARS project
seems to be an excellent means to collect and analyse the views and opinions of Amiga users
all over the world. We are looking forward to see the results which shall be compiled in "The
Independent Amiga Rejuvenation White Book", and expect this to be a source of additional
information and inputs that can support our goal of designing the dream machine that the
users want. We hope that the IARS project is successful and gets the response from users
worldwide that it deserves.
Wolf Dietrich, General Manager Phase 5 Digital Products"
Others who have shown their interest for IARS include ProDAD and Carl Sassenrath, who said "It will be very insightful to see the results."
The survey will be running until the 30th of March, 1997.
I visited the Amiga Web Directory that's what!
I used their "Suggest a Link" form to submit the details of The Lair!. They added a link to their site, announced the magazine in their "News" pages and my Web-counter suddenly went ballistic!
So I'd like to take this opportunity to publicly thank the AWD for their support and for their courtesy in featuring my humble site. Further, I'd like to suggest to you all, that if you have a good site which you'd like to share with the Amiga community, you should drop in to the AWD and follow suit. Announce your site to the world and watch those visitors swarm in.
Be warned though, you should expect a deluge of mail and Guestbook entries!
On the first day of its being featured there, I was absolutely stunned when I tried to collect my mail. There were thousands of letters and Guestbook responses for me. You can check these out on the relevant pages in this issue. From that day hence they have continued to pour in, messages of thanks and congratulations, 99% of which were very positive towards The Lair!
I wasn't sure at first if the Amiga community would welcome yet another e-zine, I was wrong - and I thank you all for the warmth of your reception.
Consequently though, I have now a pile of mail and Guestbook entries which demand a response and I'll probably never get round to replying to them all. :-(
I would ask you all to appreciate that as a family-man, trying to hold down two jobs and produce The Lair!, I am finding it very difficult to find the time to answer all this incoming mail.
So please be patient. If your letter posed some questions which you would have expected me to reply to, please bare with me. I'm not being ignorant and I'll try to answer some of the more pertinant mails just as soon as I have learned to survive without sleep! :-)
Thanks again, for welcoming The Lair! so readily. I'll do my part, and the magazine will continue to improve now that I know that it's appreciated.
This seems like a good option to offer as it appears that the largest block of Amiga users are German (not that I generalise or anything), and so I was delighted when Thomas volunteered to write these translations for me.
However, I don't think Thomas fully appreciated just how much text there is in The Lair! as I haven't heard from him since I sent the copy!
If there is anyone else out there who can translate English to German and who would be prepared to help out, can you please write to me so that I can ease the strain on poor Thomas.
Any help would be appreciated and gratefully received. In the meantime, I apologise for the delay with the promised German version and will have these on-line just as soon as is humanly possible!
The PD/shareware distributer, 17 Bit Software, long time allies of the Amiga and producers of acclaimed CD compilations, are to cease trading due to the "Amiga situation"!
For those of you to whom the name is unfamiliar, 17 Bit have been with the Amiga from the start. They got their name when the Atari ST and Commodore machines popularised the move in home-computing from 8 to 16-bit processing. They called themselves 17 Bit and used the slogan, "That bit better than the rest", which became familiar to very many here in the UK and abroad.
I, for one, am saddened by this news and will be sorry to see them go.
No longer did I have to wait ages for World-Wide Wait (as one of my readers, tongue in cheek, calls it) pages to down-load. I was able to surf in comfort and style, slipping easily from one site to the next with virtually no delay whatsoever. It is fantastic.
So why am I telling you this when the most the majority of us can aspire to is a 33.6K modem connection? Because I think I have seen the future, and the future of Internet activity is looking good.
Allow me to elaborate: In the not too distant past modem speeds were considered high at around 9,600 baud, then we moved to 14K and up again to 28K. US Robotics has now announced its "X2" protocol which permits a speed of around 56K/second. This is about as fast as we can go with current telephonic communications systems (unless anyone wants to tell me differently?)
All around the country at the moment (UK), you'll find workmen digging up roads and driving trenches through fields, as they hurry to lay fibre-optic cable in what has suddenly become a very competitive venture in telecommunications.
Their aim is simple, to establish an infrastructure of these cables with which to tempt you, the consumer, into purchasing Cable-TV systems! Usually, when you have such a system installed, you are able to take advantage of the advanced telephone system which accompanies it.
There are many engineers and scientists at work behind the scenes, developing a new generation of modems which are to be used with this system.
These modems, taking advantage of the massive bandwidth of fibre-optic technology, will offer previously unheard of speeds (and I'm talking of baud rates in the Mb range!), with which you'll be able to connect to the Internet.
Cable-TV is currently very much a luxury, but as time passes these systems will be installed in more and more homes until, in all likelihood, they eventually become standard and replace the current copper-wire system we employ.
When this comes to pass, we will all be able to use the Internet with the kind of comfort and ease I described above! So rest easy my friends, it will not always be as bad as it is now. The Internet, despite its age, is still developing and we have much to look forward to. Our children will use it and look at us with disbelief when we describe to them how slow it was in our day!
Reading through these, I have noticed a startling, yet very pleasing trend. It seems that the majority of you (by a massive margin) are using equipment with which I could only categorise you as "Power Users"!
I have been totally stunned (and made green with envy) at the machines you are employing. You are running A1200's, A3000's & A4000's almost to a man, with '030 or better processors, an average of 16Mb's of RAM, massive hard-disks and countless luxuries such as CD-ROM's (one or two recordables out there too!), flatbed scanners, multi-scanning monitors and other devices like Zip and SyQuest drives.
Between you, you have made a mockery of the software companies who refuse to produce new programs for the Amiga due to a "poor specification"!
You have helped keep the Amiga alive with your willingness to expand your beloved hardware. You have kept the market of a twelve year-old machine bouyant against the massive power of the current range of PC and Macintosh machines. You epitomise the spirit of Jay Miner & Co., with your constant drive for ever-more powerful computers.
I discussed this phenomenon with an associate recently and we came to the same conclusion: That, at last, the game-playing crowd who destroyed the Amiga's credibility as a "serious" computer, have moved to other platforms - PC's and PlayStations in all probabilty. They have left us behind them - the "Hard Core", the reluctant few who simply refuse to move from a hardware/OS configuration which is still today superior in many ways to the others on offer. We'll stay until the end, whatever the outcome of the Amiga's destiny, we'll be there to witness it...
It seems that this article was the source of much confusion and I'd like to resolve some of your misconceptions here:
I am not running any kind of a campaign for Kevin Mitnick's release - Others have taken up this role, I was merely reporting on the current situation. So I will have to reject the pledges of monies offered towards Kevin's defence fund! Check out the links in the previous issue for more information on this. However, I will accept any donations to The Lair! :-)
I was not advocating the illegal activities I described - Again, I was only reporting facts about Kevin's plight. I do not condone his treatment or the persecution of him by the authorities in the United(!) States and my article was written more in Kevin's defence and as an objection to the way he has been handled by his captors rather than as an encouragement that you should also follow similar paths.
I do not maintain any communication with Kevin Mitnick - So I am unable to pass on your kind and encouraging words of support and condolence. However, I would like to say "Thank You", on Kevin's behalf. I am sure that his heart would be warmed by the deep feelings you have expressed.
Finally... I am not Kevin Mitnick! Kevin is currently languishing in a jail in L.A. - I, on the other hand, am producing my magazine from the depths of The Lair!, which is located in a quiet suburb of that once green and pleasant land which is England!
It is apparent that some of you thought otherwise! Again, I thank you for your kind words and the other support you have offered, but I am not Kevin!
The Amiga Web Directory, for featuring The Lair! in its extensive index of all things Amiga on the Internet.
Gerry Menzies, for his tireless work in producing articles for inclusion in this issue.
Vulcan Software and HiQ Ltd., for allowing themselves to be subjected to the frenzied interviewers of The Lair!
AmigaWorld, for adopting The Lair! and offering so much potential for its future.
Thomas Petersohn, for offering to undertake the mammoth task of translating the entire contents of The Lair! into his native German tongue. Thomas, please get in touch - if only so I can be sure that you are still alive! :-)
And last but not least, I'd like to offer a big "Thank You" to Paul and Chris Midgely of Active Multimedia. They offered me a large chunk of web-space for The Lair! I won't be needing this, thanks to my relocation to the AmigaWorld server, but thank you any way guys, for your generous offer and your willingness to help me out of a tight spot!