There is noplace to hide

April 8, 1997

Looks like April Fools went without a hitch - I certainly survived intact. Unfortunately, our primary Web server here wasn't so lucky. www.compassworks.com suffered some damage during a storm a couple weekends ago - we were dumb enough to run it without a UPS, and got what we deserved - and thus spent much of last week disassembled on someone's desk. It didn't help much that the server was built from a Compaq Deskpro - word to the wise, even if it's the only machine available, do NOT run UNIX on a Compaq. They're just too damn nonstandard. In this case, the "energy saver" circuitry was damaged by the power fluctuations, and thus the monitor and hard drive would power down at random times - which isn't good. But the BIOS on a Compaq isn't normal - you need to run disk-based software to access it - and it insists on putting a "diagnostics partition" on your hard drive which contains the BIOS software. This partition goes right where /root lives on a UNIX drive - which is also not good. (before you ask, yes, I really WAS that dumb.)

At any rate, users.compassworks.com went from a Compaq Pentium/133 to a "nameless" 486DX2/50 - but in many ways it's a step up, because the 486 has more RAM and is a "true clone" and therefore lacks all the Compaq "customizations." (More importantly, it doesn't have "power saver" features - and sits behind a UPS and surge suppressor.) In a week we'll be swapping that for a Pentium 200 - again, to host BSD/OS, and again, no Compaq crap. I have no doubt that a Compaq would make a great home computer - they certainly play Command & Conquer nicely - but if you're hosting any UNIX variant, get the most generic PC clone you can find. Proprietary hardware and UNIX don't mix - unless you wrote the UNIX specifically for the proprietary hardware.

While idly browsing the BSD 3.0 manual, waiting for the system to reboot I think, I did notice a couple of familiar names under the "contributed" section: the BSD virtual memory mechanism came from Carnegie-Mellon, contributed by a certain microkernal development team led by some guy named Avadis Tevanian, Jr. I also spotted another name in the lists: the Quiz game included with BSD was authored and contributed by a certain Keith Gabryelski, one of the people behind a little package called Commodore UNIX. There are other names I _think_ I recognize - but then, there's nothing to say there's only one Rick Adams in the world. (Just ask the Mehdi Ali who works at the World Bank and can't figure out where all the hate mail keeps coming from.)

Anyway.

Almathera, makers of the unorthodox paint program Photogenics, are going bye-bye. Not because Photogenics wasn't selling well. Not because of the Amiga market dwindling. Far from either of those - Photogenics was selling great - they closed their doors because VIScorp forgot to pay them for some work they did. Something to do with software for the ED, a critical software library that Almathera invested considerable time and effort in making - and lack of payment is bringing them down. I'm now hoping and praying for VIScorp to go out of business. They've fucked too many people over for too long. Between Carl Sassenrath (110 weeks without a paycheck? Excuuuuse me?) and Jason Compton (why hire a PR person if you're never gonna tell him anything?) and RJ Mical (all Carl did to bring him on board was just blown off by management) and now Almathera (what, you expected us to write this set-top library for free? shoulda told us sooner so we could have told you to fuck off while we still had money in the bank!) I think it's time VIScorp fucked themselves over for once. April 1997 is just getting started. VIScorp may go out of business yet - and if they do collapse, this is the perfect month to do it.

So what of the Amiga, the Great Silicon Fruitcake that changes hands every 350 days? Well, Petro Tyschtshenko (did I get it right?) for one is bouncing with joy - and two months ago he was in tears over the ESCOM/VIScorp situation. Rick Snyder, chief operating officer of Gateway 2000, is quoted as saying "We could not let a technology like that die." No word yet on what they plan to DO with the technology - but so far I don't have the Bad Vibe the way I did with ESCOM and VIScorp. My Muad'Dib-like computer industry prescience just reads a blank wall with Gateway - neither good nor bad - but at least it could have been MUCH worse, it could have been Compaq or Packard Bell.

I DO know this: out here among the user base, we're real fond of the PowerPC as a potential next-generation Amiga CPU. It makes sense from a consumer standpoint - it's cheap, low heat, low power consumption (in the 603E incarnation), and already has an installed base of emulatable software (the Power Mac). A 200Mhz 603e will beat a Pentium 200 in benchmarks; a 200MHz 604e will beat a Pentium Pro 200 in benchmarks; Apple has just announced a 300MHz 603e-based Power Mac for May -the 6500. Intel has only recently broken the 200MHz barrier with the Pentium Pro.

But when you talk to the video people, and to the high-end "professional Amiga users", you find they are looking toward a different chip: the Digital Equipment Alpha processor. A 466MHz Exponential PowerPC-compatible lags somewhat behind a 466MHz DEC Alpha 21164A. And the Alpha has already reached 533MHz. (Due to technical foibles, the 500MHz Exponentials won't appear until later this year.) The downside to the Alpha, aside from high heat output, is that the aforementioned 466MHz 21164A will cost you about a thousand dollars for the chip alone, not counting the rest of the motherboard to support it, plus the 128MB of RAM (or more) most Alpha systems seem to ship with, plus the superfast hard drive interfaces needed to keep up with the chip, not to mention several megs of static RAM for the level 3 cache to keep that chip constantly fed with data. But I daresay you mention the idea of an Amiga 6000 or 7000, integrated 24-bit chipset, NTSC-compatible video circuitry, the Amiga OS, and a 500MHz Alpha processor, to any Toaster pro, and you'll find yourself standing in a puddle of drool.

Well, a visit to one of my local information sources provided some fascinating clues about an Alpha-based Amiga on the horizon. First of all, keep in mind the older Alphas - the 21064 series, for instance, in the 150-to-190-MHz range, aren't quite THAT expensive, only a couple hundred bucks per chip, maybe less if you shop. You could slap together an Amiga 3000-like system - small case, three or four PCI slots, advanced AGA or SVGA chipset, and 150MHz 21064 - for about $1600. There'd be a bottleneck for the 64-to-32-bit bus conversions coming out of the Alpha - but that's when you put all the CPU architecture and memory on a daughtercard, the Dave Haynie way. Higher-end systems could be full 64-bit, run on the Big Bad-Ass chips at 500MHz and up, and ship for 10 grand and make all the Lightwave people salivate themselves dry. But the OS is the big question...

Right?

When Digital first got the 21064 taped out and in silicon samples, back in '91 or so, I think, they wanted an OS to run on it. (This according to my rumor network.) They looked at existing OSes - Windows NT didn't exist then - and found the only 32-bit preemptive OS that suited their needs, running happily on 68000-based hardware, namely the Amiga. They did some testing in the labs at Digital, and apparently actually got small pieces of the OS "ported the hard way" - a reverse-engineered Exec, possibly - running on the Alpha, just enough to prove the concept. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, Commodore's management nixed the licensing deal - and Digital went ahead and came up with their own OS for it, specifically porting VMS, the old VAX mainframe OS, to the Alpha. NT and Digital UNIX came later.

But the story didn't end there, according to what I heard. In 1993 or so, Commodore's engineering people began thinking about architectures beyond the 68000 series. They shot down the PPC in a hurry - for reasons both political and technical - and were looking at such chips as the PA-RISC and DEC Alpha. Before deciding on PA-RISC, the software team at Commodore apparently were partway through porting a "testbed" version of the OS to Alpha. Somewhere on this planet, if you believe the rumor, exists a stack of source code and some tapes containing an Alpha version of exec.library, graphics.library, and a few others.

Think about this for a moment. Had Commodore followed through on either of their Alpha encounters, they would now be the #2 vendor of RISC desktop computers in the world - right behind Apple. Collectively Apple and Commodore would own 15 or 20 percent of the computer industry - and April 29, 1994 would have gone very, very differently.

Just a thought.

In any case, some of this development is apparently DONE, sitting in a can somewhere, in a vault alongside the AAA tapes, the A3000+ DSP code, and the 1985 Commodore Portable prototypes. This is the legendary Unfinished Systems Vault - other things which may lurk inside that vault include the memory-protected 1983 versions of the Amiga OS, the chip masks and motherboard designs for various Plus/4-like 8-bits that never shipped, the 1984 1024x768 monochrome UNIX box that never shipped (they had to sell off several divisions to pay for the Amiga!), Kickstart 1.4, the 1989 8-bit 3.5-inch-floppy machine that we, the loyal Commodore user base, finally convinced them not to waste their money on, various Sydnes-era projects (the 1000+, 3000+, 1000jr, and various wacky CDTV variations), the tapes and masks for the AAA chips, some PA-RISC stuff, primitive 3D chipset work (that would have put a Playstation-like Commodore console on the market in early 1995 had they continued), and various other oddball dead Commodore projects over the years. I don't know that such a vault even exists - but you and I would both love to peek inside it if one did exist. At any rate, the Alpha port of the OS is, according to the rumor mill, well under development, and could be restarted and finished faster than writing a completely new OS for the PowerPC.

Whether Gateway takes this route remains to be seen - although VIScorp, for one, seemed to take some interest in an Alpha-based Amiga, so the seeds are certainly planted.

But the whole notion of an Alpha-based Amiga is still rumor and little else. My source for the Alpha rumors claims it's authentic - and they've done some investigating to confirm it - but I'm not quite so sure.

But that source is pretty good at being on the mark. In 1994, they told me Amiga OS 3.1 was never supposed to ship in the US - except as an upgrade for Picasso owners. It was licensed to Village Tronic for a specific kind of package - and those 3.1 kits you saw on store shelves from 1994 on were not supposed to be there. I kinda doubted it at the time - this same source later bought 3.1 - but the fact remained that, in the early days of 3.1, Consultron and others refused to support it because it "isn't official," preferring to wait until CEI or Commo UK shipped the oft-rumored but never-shipped OS 3.2. Apparently now the circle has closed on itself, though - 3.1 kits are out of distribution for the time being, for "legal" reasons. The exact details I don't know yet - but it kinda looks like my source was on the mark.

A few people have mentioned they think Gateway is going to be a horrible thing for the Amiga. Well, as one who's normally the most skeptical of such things, all I can say is, can it really be worse than Commodore? If Gateway was going to kill the Amiga, they'd already have done so - liquidating the remaining hardware, and using the intellectual property rights to start suing people who're using Amiga technology without a license. (For what it's worth, Microsoft apparently DOES have a license - somewhere in Win95, there's a copyright screen, with Commodore-Amiga as one of the names listed.) Amiga Technologies - which they're renaming Amiga International - would have been disbanded, Petro Tee laid off, and they'd have announced all this the same day they announced their bid had been accepted. Hembach doesn't care what Gateway does with the Amiga once they have it - all he wants is his money, and if Gateway wants to scrap the Amiga and put the leftover inventory on the store shelves at Big Lots, it's no skin off Hembach's back - so if Gateway was gonna do it, they'd lose nothing by saying so. Instead, the existence of something called Amiga International hints that they DO want the Amiga to succeed in some capacity or other - and will probably fund some development. Rehiring much of the development team would be difficult - most of them already work for PIOS - but not impossible. Hell, I'm not that experienced with C/C++, but I have some cool ideas - and will gladly learn if they provide me the RKMs and a decent compiler - and since I'm a loner and never talk to humans anyway, moving to Germany where no one speaks my language wouldn't be that bad. :-)

But anyway. Photogenics is apparently going to find a new home with another company soon - the way ImageFX survived the collapse of GVP. I've got a "free demo" of Photogenics 1.2 from awhile back - and it is, to say the least, different; I'm still learning its nuances, it's certainly not DPaint, but it's got some useful and cool things in it - I wouldn't use it to draw Workbench icons, but for image processing and "abstract" stuff it's already proving its value to me, and once I get used to its decidedly unorthodox interface, I may start doing some artwork with it.

Imagine, meanwhile, continues to piss me off. It uses memory exponentially - twice as many polygons seems to eat up ten times as much RAM to render. It's not hard for me to fill up all 18MB - and when you do so, Imagine doesn't last long, and neither does the rest of the system. Of course, by the time you reach that stage, it can take entire minutes on a 50MHz 030/882 to move objects around - and it does little good anyway, because objects that big will be unrenderable. VMM could get me around the RAM usage issue, but would do mean things to the rendering time - and Imagine already hits the disk really heavy when it renders. (Didn't they think of buffering it instead of writing every line? Even POV does better!) Brush textures sit one way for altitude mapping and other effects, but another way (90 degrees off all three axes) for color! And it's very, very crashprone. I'm told Lightwave is better at some things and worse at some things - its Bones interface, for example, is easier to set up but FAR less capable than Imagine's. Cinema 4D is a joke - its render quality is lousy, its textures are computery-looking, its interface doesn't really work that well, it's useful for staging and little else - it's Caligari except slower. I'd much, much rather still be using POV-Ray - except the objects I mess with are far too complex to code by hand, I NEED a modeler, and no good POV modeler/animator for Amiga exists - and I'm not smart enough (yet) to write one.

My "big cool project" therefore will not be a movie after all - coaxing Imagine into doing even remotely believable humans, even Anime-style, is going to be a near-impossible task from my end, and a task I'll have to surmount every time a human appears in the frame, which would be quite often. Which got me thinking on a different tangent: the N64 and Playstation do 3D humans rather nicely, and in real time. Games like Tekken and Shadows of the Empire look like what my Imagine movie would have looked like after months of rendering - and they do it on the fly in hardware. So think about this killer app for the Playstation or N64: a movie package. Prebuilt human objects, possibly an external storage device that hooks to the controller port (a Zip drive, possibly?), a controller-driven modeler and staging program... the young George Lucases of the world sit down at the Playstation, pop in the movie maker disc, plug in the ZIP drive, build nifty-looking characters, set up the stage, record the dialogue (which the software could actually convert to mouth movements! - it can be done), stage the movements with prebuilt "human movements" like "walk" or "sit down" or "drop kick", save it all to cartridge, pop a tape in the VCR, hit "show movie" - and wait while it plays your movie to videotape in real time.

I would buy such a product - and gladly retire Imagine to the box alongside Sonix and Fantavision and Thexder and the Walker Demo II ("coming in March 1989!"). Till then, though, Imagine is what I have - and I will make as much use of it as humanly possible. When I have some prototypes of "Hideaway Dark" in something close to the form the final project will take, they'll probably appear here.

(Did anyone else wax nostalgic when I mentioned Walker Demo II?)

Ah, yes - next topic, Larry "Looney" Ellison. What can you say about this man? He's got all the Wall Street people so jumpy it's comical. Even his friend Steve Jobs is scared of what he might do next. Larry is, to put it succintly, weird. He candidly discusses his sex life on national TV like some Silicon Valley Ashley MacIsaac ("hey everyone check out my nads!") - has Japanese statues guarding his house "in case any Microsoft employees try to come through the door" - and is friends with that Saudi prince who's buying Apple stock the same way I buy Pepsi 2-liters. I think it's great to have people like Larry in the computer industry - but not running companies. He's far too dangerous - rather like letting David Letterman drive a school bus. Better to keep him in the engineering division of a company - the George Robbins Effect, that says weirdos design the best computers. (George, of course, being the man who designed the Amiga 1200 between sleeping in his office and showering in the men's room at Commodore West Chester.) If Larry wants to buy Apple, fire Markkula and Amelio and Hancock, and put Steve Jobs on the board - it might not be so bad. But if it means having Larry's finger on the button, I'd have to flinch.

In any case, Apple still has some serious hurdles to surmount technologically before they can truly stay on their feet. I'm still convinced the recent layoffs and cutbacks weren't the best thing - cutting overbudget projects isn't such a bad thing, but that almost ALL the advanced projects on the board were overbudget and overdue, says something much deeper is wrong - something that didn't get fixed and will rear its ugly head again later. Still, keep your eyes peeled for "Mac OS 8" due this July - it will contain some surviving pieces of Copland, including the multithreaded Finder and the Apple Grayscale Appearance ("AGA"? of all the acronyms...) - y'know, the Copland Look? Apparently the Appearance Manager will also appear in this release - so if you don't like the Copland look, you can swap it for the High-Tech look or anything else Apple chooses to include. Expect people like me - once the appearance plug-in format gets documented - to make nifty-looking appearance schemes for it. Kaleidescope junkies will love it.

But Rhapsody is still a weird picture. Think about this: Mach, by its nature, will slow things down - it didn't help Power Mac Linux any at all. Trying to emulate the Mac OS under UNIX - which is what Rhapsody will end up doing - will slow things down. UNIX is inherently bigger than the Mac OS anyway - and thus will require a LOT more memory, and we already know how much virtual memory slows a system down. Add to that the remaining 68000 legacy code - and Rhapsody starts to look like a four hundred million dollar slug. Native Rhapsody code will probably run real nifty - but for the first year of Rhapsody's existence, such native Rhapsody apps will be few and far between. Look how long it's taken for some PC companies to port their apps to Win95.

Anyway. NeXT's big deal wasn't its underpinnings, it was the user interface. Underneath the pretty face it's BSD/OS on a Mach kernal - and not particularly the best for things like multimedia. (UNIX was never designed as a single-user graphical OS - NeXT came closest but still missed the mark somewhat.) Those of us rooting for NeXT did so because the user interface just did so many things right that the Mac sorta missed the mark with - proportional scrollbars, the simplified dock, object orientation, pull-off menus, better color handling, the Browser, minimization, solid window movement, application-as-folder, on and on and on. NeXT users won't want to switch to a Mac-like UI. Mac people won't want to switch to a NeXT-like UI - especially knowing how much it resembles Windows 95 (or how much Win95 resembles it). Hopefully, Apple sees fit to incorporate a NeXT appearance scheme as an option in Appearance Manager for Rhapsody - and include the dock and various other NeXT features as options for those who want them. Mac apps running with a Next interface are eminently possible. NeXT-compatible apps with a Mac interface should be possible as well. The whole point of Apple surviving is the notion of choice anyway - it should be up to the user, not Ellen Hancock, what a future Mac OS looks like.

The question then becomes how much NeXT will survive into Rhapsody. For NeXTSTEP to die and become an organ donor seems a waste of a perfectly good OS - as well as a waste of $400 million, when Apple could have put the Mac on a BSD foundation for much cheaper. The burden is on Apple to prove to us there's going to be more to Rhapsody than a Mach kernal, Display Postscript, and Shapeshifter sandwiched in between.

Apple, meanwhile, is still slipping. They're shipping cool hardware - the 160-Mhz Newton ships this month, and next month come the 300MHz Power Macs and 240MHz Powerbooks. But software-wise... I dunno, something just strikes me as odd about Ellen Hancock mentioning that Apple considered writing their OS in Java. That's not something you mention casually - a Java OS is a doable thing, Sun's doing it, but it's for a specific purpose - and to consider writing the entire Macintosh OS in Java implies you don't have that great an understanding of the Mac OS, or Java, or both. I have no doubt that Ellen Hancock is an intelligent person and would make a great executive - just not at Apple. Corporate stiffnecks don't belong at Apple. Amelio isn't really that great a match for the company himself - yes, he put National Semiconductor back on the map, but National Semiconductor doesn't invent nifty things for a living. Apple does - and MUST, if it's to survive. Apple long ago missed its chance to become a simple PC clone vendor - they either make cutting-edge stuff or they die, it's that simple. Amelio doesn't grasp that. Ellen Hancock doesn't either. Steve and Avie grasp it, but aren't setting corporate direction. Markkula - I don't know what he grasps besides the lever that controls the trapdoor in front of his desk. (It's said if you look closely you can still see John Sculley's fingernail marks in the carpet in front of Markkula's desk...) All of Apple's best programmers are being handpicked by Microsoft and others. Apple's critical problems remain unfixed - and it's a sad statement that it may take someone like Larry Ellison to bring it to light.

We cannot afford to lose Apple. If Apple goes, we'll all HAVE to use Windows. Do you want to volunteer for the job of going around telling people like Sarah McLachlan and Trent Reznor they've got to toss their Macintoshes and learn Windows instead? Do you know how many months the magazines you all read will look ugly all of a sudden while the graphics art departments at every publisher on the planet learn Windows? The Mac may not have "creativity" built into its code - but it doesn't stifle it the way Windows does. You've noticed by now how Web pages made by PC people tend to look like word processor documents, while pages made by Mac people tend to look like they were made in Photoshop?

Microsoft this weekend bought a company called WebTV - and all that says to me is, this is what they'll say they were going to do with those communications satellites. I get a stomach ache every time Microsoft gets expansionist. And I have to work with a guy who's a big Microsoft nut - and there are plenty more where he came from. Individually nothing Microsoft does is particularly out of line - buying a company here, releasing a proprietary standard there - but the sum total of it all is a company who wants to be THE ONLY software company on the planet. And it's frustrating to have to deal with people who don't see that. Yes, Sun is arrogant with their Java licensing. Yes, Netscape is arrogant and likes doing "market research" using the occasional "innocent packet" Navigator transmits back to them. Yes, Apple likes using undocumented Mac OS features to make their products run better. What the Microsoft advocates don't notice is that for every one thing a company like Netscape does that's arrogant, Microsoft has done three or four similar things - but not to Netscape, and can therefore use that as PR leverage. Gates is not smart technically - far from it, the programmers at Microsoft don't tell him what they're doing until they're far enough along that they can show him it works better than what he suggested they do. But he's smart as dictators go. He knows the first secret to brainwashing is to make people think they're not being brainwashed. He knows how to get you just far enough into the door that by the time you realize you aren't "where you want to go today" it's too much of a hassle to leave. He knows how to maintain critical mass - he knows what to buy, who to buy, and when to buy. He knows how to nip competition in the bud - or let it fail on its own so he can either "do it right" or claim the concept was inherently flawed in the first place and doomed to failure. He knows how to sacrifice lambs - OS/2, for instance - thus discarding Microsoft projects in favor of other Microsoft projects, while making it look intentional.

Of Mafia boss John Gotti, it is an oft-quoted anecdote that he used to hold a big Fourth of July barbecue for the neighborhood. People who KNEW he was an organized crime boss would overlook it because he _seemed_ like a nice guy - and hey, he throws a damn good barbecue. One observer said, "Bill Gates throws an awesome barbecue." Gates hangs around trade shows and shakes people's hands - so they can go home and say "I shook hands with Bill Gates!" - and he can have the satisfaction of knowing he's a good king, who goes among his peasants and is nice to them. He's good to the customer - or makes them THINK he's being good to them - so they don't mind when he backstabs a corporation. (He stabbed IBM with MS-DOS, and again with OS/2. He stabbed Apple with Windows. He stabbed numerous palmtop computer makers by signing an alliance and THEN announcing Windows CE. He'll probably stab Sun next with Java - he's certainly already well on his way there, setting up the dominos so he can play Microsoft as the good guy against Sun's arrogance.) Microsoft's fleet of communications satellites - if they were any other company it would be no big deal, but with Microsoft, we're paranoid already. And the Microsoft advocates have the nerve to ask why. My only response is: if Netscape sent up a fleet of communications satellites, Microsoft would accuse them of spying on the consumer. It's not Netscape - it's Microsoft, and therefore somehow above reproach. Having billions of dollars in the bank does not place anyone above ethics. It doesn't automatically make you the Antichrist either - a fact many people overlook - but it does, to a certain extent, impart a sense of responsibility to the bearer of that money. Were Gates out there playing the corporate good guy, making alliances and keeping them instead of buying companies and people, writing good software and holding to industry standards instead of inventing triangular wheels, writing (good) software for the Mac and Amiga and OS/2 and UNIX instead of just stealing ideas from them, giving people tools to maintain privacy and individuality and creativity instead of taking them from us, and generally being less like a politician and more like someone genuinely concerned with the future, this wouldn't be a problem. That's not the case.

I ignore Microsoft as much as possible. Microsoft's bullshit does not cause my Amiga to crash every time they buy a company - all they're doing to personally hurt me is to slowly keep me from growing, by eating up market share thus making it harder to get newer and niftier Amiga and Mac software to let me do better things. That, and release browsers and other Internet-based standards that I cannot use from the Amiga. But in three years or five years, it may be a different story. When the Amiga and Mac fall from 9% market share down to 1%, very possible, and it becomes impossible to find software for either, or browse the Explorer-optimized Microsoft brand Internet with either, I and every other Amiga person will be forced to go to Microsoft brand operating systems - not because we want to, not because Windows is better, but because we're no longer permitted the choice. Imagine a world where General Motors makes 99% of the cars. Imagine a world where you can buy Coke but not Pepsi. Imagine a TV dial with 20 NBC affiliates but no ABC or CBS or cable. Imagine a world in which Michael Jackson, by virtue of his incredible record sales, is the only musician whose albums you can buy in a record store. Even where Microsoft has a technical edge, I am still obligated to pick and choose the software I want to use, and if I want to choose a third-party product, neither Microsoft nor their corporate groupies have any right to take that choice from me.

Microsoft inspires negativity. Most programmers, show them an idea, and they'll concede it's possible - difficult, perhaps, "nontrivial," but with enough manpower and time and resources it can be done. With Microsoft in the picture, though, you hear lots of "can'ts." An idea, if a product based on it fails in the marketplace, is inherently flawed and unworkable. A product that someone else made but Microsoft hasn't duplicated yet is "impossible" - to those who don't watch the industry - even when you show them such a product running on a Mac or Amiga, it must be a hoax. There's a certain stagnation in the industry these days - companies are afraid to tackle really cool ideas because they know or suspect Microsoft or another insanely large and rich company will beat them to it - and they're probably right, when Microsoft sees someone with a good idea, they steal it, and often beat them to market because they have a sickeningly large (and often quite talented) development staff. If Microsoft doesn't do it, nobody else will either - and Microsoft isn't doing everything. Everything they do is done with a Microsoft thumbprint so you never forget who owns your machine. They take steps to ensure that the word Microsoft appears on your screen at all times - sit at a Windows machine for awhile and see if you don't notice this. How often does an Amiga pop up and remind you it was made by Commodore? (The Apple menu, arrogant though it is, at least stays in the corner unobtrusive - and can be replaced with careful ResEditing.) Microsoft is neither user-friendly nor programmer-friendly; they're Microsoft friendly and all else is a happy accident.

Anyone who thinks Microsoft is the end-all and be-all must not be too bright about other things either.

Unfortunately I don't have the luxury of pretending Microsoft doesn't exist - just as I don't have the luxury of pretending there are no street gangs or serial killers or car thieves or suicide cult leaders in the world. The trick is, it's not that Microsoft should never have existed - a Microsoft with 35% share of the OS market would not be a bad thing at all - but rather, that they are currently far bigger than necessary, and are far too influential in things we would not otherwise tolerate Bill Gates influencing if he hadn't already snuck in. (MSNBC, anyone?) Microsoft has embodied the corporate spirit of the 1990's - that technology and customers are less important than politics. If the 1980's were the decade of corporate greed, the 1990's must be way off the scale by comparison. Microsoft does not care about quality - or about ease of use - just market share. They would rather own 90% of a market by shipping shitty products than own 80% of a market by shipping well-made products - that they occasionally DO ship well-made products (a recent thing, mind you) does not let them off the hook. But it's still amazing how many people forgive them for things no other company would EVER get away with - and condemn other companies for far less significant things. Politics. All of it. I'm convinced there's something in the human heart that makes politics - or at least "the art of choosing one's friends" - an innate part of human character.

But at any rate, at least there's a degree of good news for the Amiga at long last - the Gateway purchase is perhaps a good thing in the final analysis.

Next week, expect the Rumor Mill to have a slightly different look. I'm adding - and removing - sections, reworking the graphics a bit, and knocking out the back wall and adding a bedroom. It'll be cool.