Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cbmvax!rutgers!mailrus!uflorida!gatech!hubcap!disd From: disd@hubcap.UUCP (Gary Heffelfinger) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Mr. Pournelle is brain-dead. News at 11:00. Message-ID: <3060@hubcap.UUCP> Date: 26 Sep 88 20:08:21 GMT Distribution: na Organization: Clemson University, Clemson, SC Lines: 43 Well, we'd always suspected it, but now it has been confirmed. Witness the following, reprinted without permission from "Chaos Manor" in the October 1988, Byte ragazine: Comments within []'s are mine. "The game of the month would have been F/A-18 Interceptor from Electronic Arts for the Amiga, but there was a problem. Once in a while someone gets lucky and gets to play the game, but most of us can't get past the crazy code-wheel 'security' system. It's far more complicated than the game itself [sure, Jerry]. I might even prefer copy protection, except that Electronic Arts is the outfit that had a scheme for the Commodore 64 that caused the machine to bash its disk drives out of alignment [true]. Heaven knows what they could do to an Amiga. [Hmmm. And just what are you implying here, Jerry?] We'll tell you more about F/A-18 Interceptor when when we can find a cryptographer to help us with the code wheel." Geez! How tough is it to spin a few wheels? Annoying, maybe, but rocket science it is not. In addition to the above burbling, he continued his unfounded statements about how the Amiga is not stable enough to recommend to unsophisticated users. Maybe, but I think he's underestimating the average computer user. A writer friend of mine, knows nothing about CLI, but he get's his work done just fine on the Amiga using Word Perfect. No loss of data in the year or so that he's been using it. (Though, I admit that we had a close call. :-) To his credit, he did make the following statement: "I did notice that at my party people stood in line to play with the Amiga." That tell ya somethin', Jerry? -- Gary Heffelfinger --- Employed by, but not the mouthpiece of Clemson University. ---=== Amiga. The computer for the best of us. ===---