Month: January 2005

The Micro-AmigaOne and Amiga OS4 Developer Prerelease (Update 1) : Page 1

The Micro-AmigaOne and Amiga OS4 Developer Prerelease (Update 1) : Page 1 — via Steve DeKorte.

Steve asks: “But why call a new OS running on new hardware ‘Amiga’. What would that mean?”

Well, the version Ars reviewed would actually run classic Amiga programs, so that’s a strong point in favor of is being “the same.” But things always grow and change. Not only was Mac OS X not the same as MacOS 9, MacOS 9 had fairly little in common with the first versions of Mac’s System software. Identity is trajectory, a path through time, not always a straight line.

This Ars Technica review fascinated me because it’s the most credible movement I’ve seen in the direction of a New Amiga. I would love the Amiga to return, if for no other reason, to bring some diversity to the world of operating systems, which have been reduced to two: “Windows variants” and “Unix variants.” Amiga was more Unixy than the Mac back in the day, but the Mac is much more unixy than it once was, and the Amiga’s latest incarnations are about as un-unixy as they always were.

I’m not gonna hold my breath, of course — the Amiga is always “just about to come back.” But the fact that you can plop down x number of dollars and get real hardware with a real operating system and you can read in this review just what it is like, is pretty darn cool.

Imagining Iran is the USSR

VERY interesting take on what the White House is thinking about Iran, via the New York Daily News:

Pentagon neoconservatives – hard-liners who include Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz – believe that surgical strikes on a small list of military targets will minimize civilian casualties and may spark an uprising by reformers against the ruling fundamentalist mullahs, current and ex-officials said.

Hersh told CNN that if targets are lined up by this summer, U.S. attacks could soon follow.

They “want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible,” a Pentagon consultant told Hersh.

Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz believe that, just as with some Soviet-bloc countries, “the minute the aura of invincibility the mullahs enjoy is shattered … the Iranian regime will collapse,” the consultant said.

Yet Rep. Peter King (R-L.I.) of the House International Relations Committee said, “I wouldn’t assume the Iranian regime will just collapse.”

With combat operations still raging in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the hunt for weapons of mass destruction came up empty, Bush would have to explain fully a new call for military action against Iran, King said.

“He’d have to get the people behind it,” King told the Daily News. “But you’d have to factor in that the American public would be somewhat suspicious.”

But Bush aides are “compulsively optimistic” that the mullahs have a fragile hold on power, and they are sure to strike soon, predicted defense analyst John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org.

They’re clinging to the “Reagan defeated the USSR, we can do the same thing” myth. The thing is, Reagan didn’t defeat the USSR. The USSR changed from within. We didn’t demonstrate the hard liners’ fragile hold on power in the USSR by bombing it. If we had, the Earth would probably be a lot less populated and a lot more radioactive today.

In fact, that most important thing in the dismantling of the Soviet regime, according to Michael Nagler, an expert on nonviolent action, was that there were thousands of well trained nonviolent activists throughout the Soviet Union, ready to act in case of a coup by hard-liners against Gorbachev. The coup came. The tanks rolled. The nonviolent resisters came out in droves and opposed the tanks, putting their lives on the line. The tanks stopped. It was over. If they had run from the tanks, or fought the tanks, we might still have a USSR around today.

And Reagan and the American military had NOTHING TO DO WITH ANY OF THIS.

We could probably overthrow the worst of the Fundamentalist mullahs who run Iran. We could train the people of Iran in nonviolent resistance. That is what changed India. That is what changed America. That is what made the change in Russia permanent.

But nonviolence is not a tool that America has learned to use yet, despite its demonstrated power. It’s not even in our consciousness, which is why the nonviolent resisters in Russia were barely covered by American media and are still unknown to most people in the West outside activists and theorists of nonviolent action, like Nagler.