The magazine costs L.6000 with CDRom and has 354 pages, many of which are full of publicity. The first thing that you see is more energy and fantasy in the announces, but maybe because in Italy dealers make advertisements, not producers directly. Anyway, the magazine is good and it tries to explain to the user the way softwares and hardwares work. It's a shame that there are so many litteral translations...
Let's see the products. PC, PC and PC (and a little bit of MAC). Everyone is a Pentium, everyone has its own CDRom, its 16mega Ram and the IntelInside advertisement; fast everyone casts a pair of million (fortunatelly when on Amiga you exceede US$1000 they begin to shout).
Because PC is the top, the PC has a good market, all Amigans would like to have some PC products (or at least, someone would), let's see two of them. Hey, they are speaking about Explorer. Let's start with this.
"MSIE [...] a flexible and complete browser. Its dimensions: 8MB full version [...] In Full version files of MSIE 3 takes about 15Mb in Windows System directory, and entire installation procedure need SOME TENs OF MEGABYTES FREE to decompress files". And then the perl: "if you have space problems in C: drive..." (here they say you can move cache into a compress drive, good idea!!! As you may know, GIFs and JPEGs, main material downloaded from the WEB, are very packable!!!)
Note, we are loosing our time with AWeb and IB, because MSIE supports "recent HTML extensions, tags, frames and style sheets". What about Amiga and its browsers???
If MSIE is free ("and note, it gifts something to users", because without it you cannot enter inside some sites), we need something that isn't that free. So, for US$100 we can buy a... DeInstaller!!! Have you installed a program on Win95 (Plug&Play, easy, comfy) and now you want to delete it? Go into one shop and buy one of the two products avaible to do this work for you! They are easy, and allows you to delete all files or just some of them, they tell you when the file has been used the last time and, just to be sure, they can backup it in a safe place.
This is a typical example where optimization is a mirage, where more you have, more you trash. Programs presented as "revolutionary" (I am not speaking about those I have talked so far) trying to do things that somewhere else is normal. Perhaps it is the market, a tangible sign that the machine is alive and that computers, just like any other product, are avaible to everyone and the user has to be kept comfy and filled with offers to make him buy, buy, buy.
Maybe, Amiga situation, just like others "minor" platforms is different because they were not "victims" of globalization and for this reason they are going to disappear? Maybe, to see pages of that magazine, well written and created, convinced me, if I ever need it, that the place I am in, even with all its problems, is undoubtely the best, cleaner, genuine, not yet victm of multi-nationals.
I know I am going against the usual thoughts, but I hope that Amiga will NEVER become as the scenaries of a world we often see... through a window.
This write is born as a message, more than an article, that's why there is a so dialoguing tone. Thank you to Fabio Rotondo for desired it inside Amiga Blast!
Scritto da: Gabriele Favrin e-mail: gfavrin@mbox.vol.it