The 'discreet structures with graph theory' course sounds like it'll be more use for things like systems programming, databases, compilers and the like, whilst the other sounds like it'll be more use if you want to go into graphics or scientific programming.

To me, the term 'rip off' implies some kind of intentional deceit. From reading the article, it appears that BB's "optimization technicians" are simply incompetent and unaware of it. Now that BB have been made aware of the poor results of their "optimization", I would hope they would withdraw the service and sell remaining pre-optimized stock without the optimization premium. To continue to do otherwise would indeed be a "rip off".

To "purchase" a product with the intent from the outset of using it to fulfil some short-term need then returning it is "ripping off" the vendor (unless they're naïve/customer-focussed enough to allow 'free trials' and evaluation periods).

Sure; I used to run something like 680x276 on my 8852 monitor. No-one ever enjoyed using interlaced modes, though, even on PCs. The AA chipset also supported PC-like resolutions and there were even third-party graphics cards that mounted early PC accelerated VGA chipsets (e.g. Trident, Tseng, S3) on Zorro cards. That doesn't really change the point I was making as most people used Amigas most of the time in 320x256 (PAL), 320x200 (NTSC) with 32/64/HAM colour palettes, 640x256 (PAL) or 640x200 (NTSC) with a 4 colour palette which are all tiny resolutions by current standards; they were even kinda pokey by 1995 PC standards.

Even worse than that, at least one model, the Q8300 Core2Quad both does and does not have VT, depending on the sSPEC code; SLB5W doesn't, SLGUR does. Good luck trying to buy one of those online and being sure of what you're gonna get!

To shutdown the Amiga, you turned it off. There was no delay, no Start->Shutdown...wait possibly forever...

The Amiga didn't commit changes to disc synchronously, but it provided no sure-fire way to flush all pending write buffers.

Sliding screens. Why not give each application its own full screen and allow the user to pull down the top menu to slide between these screens.

That was a workaround for low resolution displays with small colour palettes. With 1920x1200, 24bpp displays being common place these days, it's easier to just have applications in windows. Remember that nearly 15 Amiga "hi-res" (640x256 for PAL) screens will fit in on a single desktop these days. And we have virtual desktops and multihead, if you need more than that.

Simple speech device. What could be easier than "LIST > speak:" to say a directory listing?

speechd claims to provide equivalent functionality

Bidirectional linked list filesystem. If you lose a sector or sector link, most of the file could be rebuilt by following links from both ends towards the bad sector. (Disk doctor)

On the other hand, we have RAID1(0), RAID scrubbing and SMART these days. If used correctly, you're less likely to lose a bad sector in the first place. Furthermore, Amiga floppy handling was particularly unsafe; writing a sector caused the whole track to be rewritten, without verification (unless you used TrackSalve to patch trackdisk.device, If you insist, you can always use the affs (Amiga FFS) filesystem under Linux. Thought I'm not a filesystem expert, I suspect that it's been superceded by more modern filesystems.

The keyboard garage. The 1985 Amiga 1000 keyboard tucked neatly under the computer where it didn't take up desk space, was hidden from children's fingers and was spill-proof.

USB rollable waterproof keyboards made out of rubber?

Tight integration of hardware with O.S. O.k. this works against everything we've been taught about abstracting everything but since the PC world has boiled down to little more than an O.S. monopoly, a hardware monopoly and a graphics card monopoly, why not eliminate some of the levels of abstraction that will never be used and make my 2Ghz PC perform every day tasks at least as well as my 7Mhz Amiga did?

And cement those monopolies further and make it hard to expand in the future (cf. the trouble Amigans had to go to to introduce support for 'chunky' graphics devices and 24bpp displays)? No thanks.

Have you actually been able to save and locate receipts and warranty papers for some random device you bought 2 years ago? I can't find a receipt after 2 months. After 1 year the thermal receipts really begin to deteriorate

Simple solution: buy a cheap home file and use it, and photocopy or scan thermal receipts whilst they're still readable.

Same here, but my 69 year old dad and CentOS. Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, gramps, get_iplayer, gcdmaster, k3b, pidgin and he's happy. As other posters have mentioned, I get a little flurry of problems and queries when I'm forced to upgrade him to the latest version of the distro, but after a month or so, I go months without hearing of any difficulties.

As for hardware support, he knows to ask me for recommendations before he buys anything, so I can check it's compatible.

If there's a task he wants to do, he just describes it, I research it and give him a recipe for using it.

For support, I keep sshd listening so I can fix stuff remotely most of the time. This really impresses him, and he likes not having to bother with patches and anti-virus updates.

Admittedly, I've never tried it with Xming. But it's fine with a Linux/Xorg/openssh X server on a LAN. It's slow across ADSL/WAN, though.

I got sick of MythTV locking up, crashing, and the constant non-stop twiddling with my configuration because I could never get things quite right.

That doesn't chime with my experience of MythTV at all. It took about a day of solid fiddling to get core functionality working, and about a month of on-off work to get most of the other stuff working. It takes maybe half a day when I do a combined hard disc/distro/MythTV upgrade. The rest of the time, it JFWs. I run it on very modest hardware; a P4 2.53GHz (used to be a Celeron 1.7GHz), 768MB RAM and an nVidia 440MX video card. I use 3 physical DVB-T tuners which I multiplex to give 6 virtual tuners.

The only reliability issues I can report are a) /var filling up when I've borrowed space for non-MythTV tasks and forgotten to release it later (doh!) b) the frontend crashing sometimes when playing MP3s; I suspect marginally-corrupt files c) the backend having crashed inexplicably maybe once or twice in the three years I've been running it; quite possibly parsing data that's been broadcast as corrupt, or been corrupted by local RF noise.

It may not have intelligent filtering, but MythTV's ability to easily schedule recordings using an EPG makes it trivial to speculatively record things that if one had to use discrete appliances one might not bother setting to record.

It's true that I'm watching more TV since I've had my MythTV box, but I'm pretty sure the quality of the TV I'm watching has improved. For a start, I've virtually eliminated my old habit of channel-surfing through hours and hours of the reality TV pap that's shown in peak hours and replaced it with watching movies, documentaries and quality comedy instead.

Um, what's wrong with:

desktop$ ssh -Y mythtv
mythtv$ mythtv-setup

Sure, you need the X libraries on the MythTV backend, but there's no need to run X on it!

Speak for yourself. My MythTV system has been happily recording and playing back TV for over three years. I used Jarod C. Wilson's guide. I think it took about a day to get the core functionality working, then I got the rest (emulator games, playback improvements, IR remote behaviour) tweaked to my liking over the course of the next month.

I picked up WoG for US$2. I'd never played it before and had never been bothered enough to even download the demo. Effectively, I was happy to pay US$2 to take a chance on something which I might not like or play at all, or I might love and play relentlessly. I wouldn't have regretted that US$2 if I played it once and never bothered again.

I should add that I'm not a big gamer; I get all my games used for £1-4 for PSX, original XBox and PC and generally stick to recognised AAA titles. I pay similar prices for movie DVDs. Only CDs and DVD box sets get better prices out of me; anywhere from £8 to £16 usually.

Wouldn't be the first time Israel decided to go level somebody else's reactor

Or even the second.