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>> ^Croccydile:

>> ^LarsaruS:
Ahhh, the Amiga... Some of the best games ever made were on that system. When the Amiga died computer science and capability lost ~10 years. True multitasking, AGA graphics, sound which didn't only go blip and a lot of other awesome features which the PC took ages to get. Heck Windows, afaik, still only fakes multitasking.

Wait... what? There is no doubt that the machine had great capabilities when it was first released, but this statement is a tad off.
When the Amiga died, everything else had superseded it. I seriously doubt the industry lost 10 years. At its release the machine (1985) was in a league of its own, the problem was they didn't really advance the design along as the rest of the industry caught up. When you talk about "fake" multitasking you are describing Windows, MacOS, Linux, etc... task switching is now trivial on modern processors even in software. Hell we have hardware virtualization on modern CPUs now! Switching resolutions on the Amiga between scanlines was pretty cool in 1985 but by the time it died this was no longer necessary as well as video architecture in general rendered this obsolete. Amiga was stuck on the legacy implications of the OCS and its greatest strength became its greatest weakness to advancing by the early 90s. Even AGA was actually a step backwards compared to emerging 16-bit and 24-bit colour PC video cards. Hold and Modify (for HiColor on the Amiga) required use of the CPU for displaying static images when Hi/True Colour PC cards did this simple task in hardware. Ugh!
It didn't matter in the end anyways. Gross mismanagement along with a seemingly trivial patent case on the CD32 put the company under for good. Really a good example at why software patents can be insanity at times. http://xcssa.org/pipermail/xcssa/2005-February/002587.html
Don't get me wrong as I don't mean to pick on you in particular. I just wanted to point out at the end of its life the Amiga was not all roses and unicorns. I would still personally like to have an Amiga 1000 to play with at home sometime


I guess you really do learn something new every day. I hadn't heard of the XOR patent issue. Also, no hard feelings on my side. I tend to get nostalgic when it comes to old systems.

Ha! Start using XOR in your day to day life. Let us know how it turns out.>> ^jwray:

I'm fairly grammar-nazi-ish, but there are a few "correct" usages that I disagree with. I like split infinitives and using "they" as a genderless singular pronoun. Also, English needs to abolish the ambiguous "or" and just use separate words for inclusive or and exclusive or.

Just to let folks know, you can write a² instead of a^2, the latter meaning "a XOR 2" (at least to most programmers).