msm@comp.lancs.ac.uk (Mark S Madsen) (06/14/91)
In article <2802@moscom.UUCP> mcc@moscom.UUCP (Mike Corbett) writes: >In article <14192@dog.ee.lbl.gov> osborn@ux1.lbl.gov (James R Osborn) writes: >> Besides if the !@#$%^&* Amiga is >>!@#$%^&* hot, then why hasn't it dominated the market? Maybe the >>Amiga marketing dweebs are as big a jerks as arcTANgent... You were doing OK until you came out with this bit, James. >You mean the Amiga isn't dominating the Video/Multimedia market? Oh, for goodness' sake! Take a look at the following line: Newsgroups: comp.multimedia ^^^^^^^^^^ Get the idea? You will find there are other groups for Amiga, NeXT, Macs, PCs &c &c. Why don't you crosspost all your arguments to those groups (don't forget to add comp.sys.atari-st to the newsgroups line) and stay there in future. If you guys want to play in the multimedia newsgroup, try to have something to say about multimedia, OK? Now, to justify my own posting, and to give you all an idea of what this newsgroup is about, let me open something for discussion which I consider to be a little more edifying. Our group is analysing specification requirements for multimedia, and we are looking at synchronisation as being a central requirement of any practical multimedia system. How do you other people out there see this issue? Does anyone have a handle on coping with the criticality/priority problems posed by different data/object types? Looking forward to some constructive discussion, Mark -- ______________________________________________________________________ Mark S Madsen +44-524-65201x3819 msm@comp.lancs.ac.uk Department of Computing, Lancaster University, LA1 4YR, UK ______________________________________________________________________
osborn@ux1.lbl.gov (James R Osborn) (06/15/91)
OK, OK, this is absolutly the last thing I will say on this topic. Let me apologize for fishing. I could not resist rubbing yet another pompous know-it-all into a frenzy. (I am pretty good at fishing it seems.) I was not trying to bash the Amiga at all, only the typical snobery of Amiga users. It's funny how people get so personal about their hardware. And as for open-mindedness, you know "arc", you made quite a few assumptions about who I am just because I posted from an account at a lab. I happen to be an engineer and a person, not an "Oxy-Infested la-bore-atory freek." The reason I brought "market" into the discussion is precisely because I get so tired of hearing about how fantastic, great, easy, cheap, incredible, mind-blowing, fast, etc. the Amiga is. I think it is reasonable to ask "if it's everything you say it is, why don't people buy it?" I also think my answer to that question is reasonable: "the Amiga marketing people suffer from the same attitude problems as most Amiga users." I will not be posting anything else on this topic. If you would like to continue the battle, "arc" (or any other Amigasnob), let's do it via email. -- James Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory osborn@ux1.lbl.gov
scott@blueeyes.kines.uiuc.edu (scott) (06/16/91)
In article <14318@dog.ee.lbl.gov> osborn@ux1.lbl.gov (James R Osborn) writes: > >OK, OK, this is absolutly the last thing I will say on this topic. Let me >apologize for fishing. I could not resist rubbing yet another pompous >know-it-all into a frenzy. (I am pretty good at fishing it seems.) I was not >trying to bash the Amiga at all, only the typical snobery of Amiga users. >It's funny how people get so personal about their hardware. I don't think "snobbery" is the right word here - "religious fanaticism" is much more apt for describing SOME computer users (you know the type I mean - the ones who participate in these stupid "my computer is better than yours" flame wars). I'm not sure what causes this (must be a great Psych Ph.D dissertation buried in there somewhere), but it seems to occur most often in owners of "underdog" platforms, i.e. those that don't sell as well as ISA-based machines. Perhaps the fact that their chosen platform is outsold by a couple orders of magnitude in terms of units sold really frosts their fritters - who knows? Whatever it is, it turns them into harddisk-thumping JehovAmiga's Witnesses, who then descend upon the net and attempt to convert others to their cause (or at the very least slam the owners of other platforms for their "stupidity" for not choosing God's Gift to Computing instead). I often wonder if some sort of deprogramming therapy would be helpful to these types - I mean, it works for former Moonies and Scientologists; why wouldn't it work for these Amiga Worshippers, too? -- Scott Coleman tmkk@uiuc.edu "Unisys has demonstrated the power of two. That's their stock price today." - Scott McNealy on the history of mergers in the computer industry.
elg@elgamy.raidernet.com (Eric Lee Green) (06/17/91)
From article <14318@dog.ee.lbl.gov>, by osborn@ux1.lbl.gov (James R Osborn): > mind-blowing, fast, etc. the Amiga is. I think it is reasonable to ask "if > it's everything you say it is, why don't people buy it?" I also think my > answer to that question is reasonable: "the Amiga marketing people suffer from > the same attitude problems as most Amiga users." What? Marketing people? Commodore? That's almost as big of an oxymoron as "Amiga dealer"! :-):-):-). I've talked to a lot of the Commodore tech folks and they know what they're doing... they've done a darn good job of putting together a good hardware platform and operating system on a shoestring budget. But as far as marketing goes... -- Eric Lee Green (318) 984-1820 P.O. Box 92191 Lafayette, LA 70509 elg@elgamy.RAIDERNET.COM uunet!mjbtn!raider!elgamy!elg
arctngnt@amiganet.chi.il.us (Bowie J Poag) (06/18/91)
Regarding Amiga fanaticism: I agree with you...As far as the Amiga is concerned, where very touchy when it comes to comparing systems. We look at IBMs, Macs, and all we do is yawn. I mean, you cant blame us for disliking it. Its natural. Which would you rather have at your disposal, a Testarossa or a lime-green Yugo? We seem like a very misunderstood group, I agree. BUT. That still dosent overshadow the fact that we CAN, and DO offer multimedia for the masses. More so than any of the "big 3" in the industry put together. Heh, and deprogramming isnt the answer. Theres nothing wrong being being proud of your machine. Look at it this way; If Commodore was to finally ADVERTISE for a change, I wouldnt have to do their job for them.. Give Me Amiga, Or Give Me Death! Arctangent ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ psst......ever wonder why the comp.sys.amiga.multimedia newsgroup is more active than the comp.sys.multimedia newsgroup? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/ Flicker turns me on. -BJP | Get back into the SeX PiSToLs if you program in Arctangent, Naperville IL. | C. It helps. // ---------------------------- \X/ A M I G A ! \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
braudes@seas.gwu.edu (Bob Braudes) (06/18/91)
It appears that the requests to turn this into a technical newsgroup are not receiving the attention which they deserve. Is there anybody else there who would like to see a _moderated_ newsgroup in which serious multimedia discussions can be held? Thanks.
johna@gold.gvg.tek.com (John Abt) (06/18/91)
Some of us do not know anything about the Amiga. Could someone post, in simple terms, devoid of BS, just exactly what it is about the Amiga that makes it a good multimedia platform? Just curious, John Abt
tmkk@uiuc.edu (K. Khan) (06/18/91)
The following post has nothing to do with multimedia. If you aren't following the ArcTangent discussion, feel fre to hit 'n' now - you won't miss anything important. ;-) In article <arctngnt.7790@amiganet.chi.il.us> arctngnt@amiganet.chi.il.us (Bowie J Poag) writes: >Regarding Amiga fanaticism: > >I agree with you... At least we can agree on SOMEthing! >If Commodore was to finally ADVERTISE for a change, I wouldnt have to do >their job for them.. Who ever told you that you HAVE to do Commodore's advertising for them? And in a newsgroup such as this where juvenile computer-slamming discussions are off-topic to begin with? I can just picture how you do Commodore's advertising job for them - My guess is you go around from door to door with a stack of WatchTower - er, I mean, Amiga brochures, - in your hand. Or perhaps you shave your head, put on a bedsheet, and accost people in airports. You're a regular Hare KrishnAmiga, I'll wager. I'll bet you play a mean tamborine, too. Perhaps one day you'll realize that your religious rantings, replete with numerous spelling and grammatical errors, do nothing to further your cause. In fact, by behaving as you do and annoying great numbers of people on the net, you are doing Commodore and the machine you love so dearly a great DISservice. Do yourself (and Commodore!) a favor - give it a rest.
bheil@scout-po.biz.uiowa.edu (06/19/91)
In article <2561@gold.gvg.tek.com> johna@gold.gvg.tek.com (John Abt) writes: >Some of us do not know anything about the Amiga. Could someone >post, in simple terms, devoid of BS, just exactly what it is about >the Amiga that makes it a good multimedia platform? > >Just curious, John Abt > Others have given good reasons for why the Amiga is a good multimedia platform. I'd like to offer one (or two) more: CDTV With CDTV there is a low cost (list ~$900, going for <$750) delivery platform. Joe Public has never seemed too interested in a $3000 computer sitting on his desk at home, enter CDTV. It has the support of 6 years of Amiga developing behind it, and the advantages of fairly inexpensive development machines (eg stock Amiga 2000's and 3000's). A CD-ROM add-on for the Amiga 500 will provide the same capabilities as CDTV has for all those who currently own A500's. NOTE: This add-on is not officially available though it has been shown.
elg@elgamy.raidernet.com (Eric Lee Green) (06/20/91)
From article <2561@gold.gvg.tek.com>, by johna@gold.gvg.tek.com (John Abt): > Some of us do not know anything about the Amiga. Could someone > post, in simple terms, devoid of BS, just exactly what it is about > the Amiga that makes it a good multimedia platform? Okay. As a non-rabid-fanatic type, I guess I can do that. Do note that I am posting this message from an Amiga, which means that some of my non-Amiga details may be inaccurate. However, I've seen much of the stuff out there for the Amiga. Okay, first of all: video output. This isn't such a big deal today, since ISA and Mac cards exist to do the same thing, but every Amiga puts out genlock-ready NTSC. The professional-quality genlocks (which are around $300-$600, depending on what you want) have inputs for an external video source and external synch. The Amiga graphics chip set is capable of synching to that external synch. I.e., no additional hardware required beyond the genlock, if you're wanting video. Double-buffering is ridiculously easy with the Amiga. All Amigas come with the capability. In addition, access to the framebuffer is fairly fast if you're careful about what video mode you're using... especially on the Amiga 3000 series, which has a 32-bit path to video RAM (I know of no IBM-type video buffers with such a path, except perhaps some of the Microchannel cards). Amiga hard drive controllers, too, are generally fairly fast, which is important for getting the data into memory in the first place... again, this is especially true of the Amiga 3000 series, which has a 32-bit DMA controller that can easily handle anything up to the limits of SCSI-1 (which is about 4mb/sec... still a bit faster than the fastest SCSI hard drives, which can only do about 2.2mb/sec continuously). When you're trying to display fast animations and have realistic sampled sounds running simultaneously, having that bandwidth becomes critical. Drawbacks: Amiga resolution is not state-of-the-art. It is fine for most titling needs, e.g., if you want to run a cable directory channel off of your Amiga (which is what a large percentage of cable companies are doing now), but if you're wanting to put out spectacular ray-traced images, you need to buy a more expensive display option. The three with which I am familiar are the Ham-E, DCTV, and the Video Toaster. Ham-E and DCTV are simple video enhancers. The Video Toaster is a whole lot more. Talking about the Video Toaster... this $1500 widget has the big blurb "A TV studio in a box!" on it. Which it isn't, but it does have a number of interesting features. It does a bunch of wipes, fades, etc. between a number of video sources, both internal and external sources, it has a built-in genlock of course though all these sources must be time-base-corrected, and it has its own video frame buffer which has much better color availability than the standard Amiga display. (Note that since we're talking NTSC here, color availability, rather than absolute horizontal resolution, is more what's needed, to allow smoother transitions with less fringing etc.) It can capture frames from an external source and then you can use the video image manipulation tools that come with it to do all sorts of things such as, say, draw a mustache on a politician's face :-), or wrap the image around a ray-traced ball. (A ray tracer and a paint package comes with the Toaster). The Toaster has a couple of problems, though... it's not QUITE the best thing since sliced bread. It doesn't run on the latest Amiga 3000 computers, and it sucks up a whole lot of system resources doing its thing, making multitasking sluggish. Second: the operating system. The Amiga operating system is a nice lightweight near-real-time message-passing multitasking kernal with a whole bunch of weirdness shoved on top of it. The weirdness sometimes confuses people and gets in the way, but the near-real-time part is ideal for multimedia presentations. A typical presentation, consisting of video and sound orchestrated by, say, a slide-projector-like button on the end of a cord, is relatively easy. You can show an animation and have the music still running at full speed, for example, since you can spawn off seperate tasks for each one. You can also control a laserdisk player while doing all of this, or a MIDI port, or maybe both, I'm not quite sure since I've never had a laserdisk player, and you can be controlling these while your presentation is in progress. All of this is currently-available stuff, that you can either do from scratch or do with currently-available scripting tools such as The Directory, CanDO, or AmigaVision. Third: software. The Amiga has a huge number of video paint packages, ray tracers, texture mappers, titlers, character generators, flippers, transitioners, animators, you name it. From what I understand, on ISA setups you generally are limited to whatever tools come with the board that you buy. On the Mac, you have QuickDraw, which allows device-independence, but the Mac has other problems. None of the Macintosh input devices are interrupt-driven, they're all polled I/O, so responsiveness in a multiple-source environment can be problematic. Similarly, none of the standard Macintosh I/O is DMA-driven, and the standard Macintosh hardware doesn't have any co-processor to offload graphics manipulation. Again, responsiveness suffers when you're trying to do a half-dozen things at once. (Such as, e.g., control a MIDI device and animate a presentation at the same time). Also note that until release 7 of the Mac OS, you had to do a whole lot of kludgery to do two things at the same time, kludgery such as stuffing pieces of code into the interrupts... stuffing code into the interrupts most definitely hurts responsiveness, and can cause music to get off-key if you're taking up too much interrupt time (i.e., you can "lose" interrupts). This has definite ramifications on your ability to be a "multi"-media machine (where "multi" assumes that you're doing more than one thing at once). Compared to Mac and MS-DOS, the Amiga is clearly superior as a multimedia machine. It is possible to get equivalent results from both, but at a far higher cost, and with a certain clumsiness (such as code running in interrupts, etc.) Another system which has been mentioned is the NeXT. The NeXT would be ideal, except that its current release of Mach doesn't have any real-time extensions. This is especially problematic in the case of MIDI, where accurate time-stamping of inputs, and accurate timing of outputs, is necessary to get good results. The jerkiness of normal Unix doesn't bode for smooth animations or smooth control of a laserdisk player, either. The machine has potential. But the operating system will have to be brought up to modern levels of responsiveness in order for that potential to be realized. There's also the software problem, and the problem with getting studio-quality NTSC out of the machine, but neither of those are insurmountable -- third parties can easily handle those. The OS problem, on the other hand, is something that NeXT themselves are going to have to tackle, if they wish to position the machine as a multimedia platform. == Eric Lee Green (318) 984-1820 P.O. Box 92191 Lafayette, LA 70509 elg@elgamy.RAIDERNET.COM uunet!mjbtn!raider!elgamy!elg Looking for a job... Unix/Amiga/C... tips, leads appreciated.
arctngnt@amiganet.chi.il.us (Bowie J Poag) (06/22/91)
Oooooooh, the wrath of Khan. Im scared. Why dont YOU give it a rest? Any publicity is good publicity. Commodore had no publicity. Now THAT's simple to understand, right? Should hope so... \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/ Flicker turns me on. -BJP | Get back into the SeX PiSToLs if you program in Arctangent, Naperville IL. | C. It helps. // ---------------------------- \X/ A M I G A ! \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
mcfarlin@mmedia.UUCP (David McFarling) (06/23/91)
In article <3321@sparko.gwu.edu>, braudes@seas.gwu.edu (Bob Braudes) writes: > > It appears that the requests to turn this into a technical newsgroup are > not receiving the attention which they deserve. Is there anybody else > there who would like to see a _moderated_ newsgroup in which serious multimedia > discussions can be held? > > Thanks. Definately! Dave mmedia!mcfarlin
kaufman@eecs.nwu.edu (Michael L. Kaufman) (06/23/91)
In article <3321@sparko.gwu.edu>, braudes@seas.gwu.edu (Bob Braudes) writes: > It appears that the requests to turn this into a technical newsgroup are > not receiving the attention which they deserve. Is there anybody else > there who would like to see a _moderated_ newsgroup in which serious > multimedia discussions can be held? No. If you really want to turn this group into a place where technical discussions can occur, start a few technical discussions. It always amuses me when people think that a certain class of articles will magicaly start to appear if they moderate a newsgroup. Do you really believe that there masses of people out there with technical multimedia articles who are saying, "I'm not posting until they stop allowing all that lowbrow stuff." It might be different if this group had 100s of messages a day. Then maybe you could argue that maybe people were not posting because they didn't want their articles to be buried in a crowd. But what do we have here? Maybe ten or so on a busy day. This group does not have such a high vloume that we need to start pruning articles. Michael -- Michael Kaufman | I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on kaufman | fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in @eecs.nwu.edu | the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be | lost in time - like tears in rain. Time to die. Roy Batty