I do hope I don't get to work tomorrow to find MSE has updated itself to V2.

I'm in the process of taking over responsibility of our entire IT and it's a nightmare of mis-matched, outdated hardware and utterly pathetic security policies (lack thereof). There are Win 2000 machines on the network with no AV installed and there are XP machines with MSE installed, a terminal services server (Win 2008, the 'Vista' version) with AVG on it.

Oh, and the company I work for is an insurance broker. Security somewhat essential.

MSE nags a little. It whines if you don't run a full scan every now and then. It also brings PC's to a crawl during any sort of scan. This I know because my PC at work goes into slow-ass mode at 11am every day.

AVG has also seen its fair share of false-positive-fuck-your-system-up debacles. So has Norton/Symantec and McAfee.

NOD32 and Kaspersky might have, but I don't remember.

Did you not do a little research before you jumped on the Symantec train? Everyone's heard of Norton, but that isn't necessarily a good thing.

If you want a high-class solution, it's Kaspersky, NOD32 or F-Secure.

Currently, I like NOD. Previously, I liked MSE. Next month, I'll probably like Kaspersky.

For mercy, sir!

You want to muck about with user training to get them to use OpenOffice? I know it's mostly compatible and lookey-likey with MS Office, but 'mostly' doesn't cut it with office workers. Office workers despise change, hate the unknown and will go into mutiny if you take the usual and replace it with something different just to save a little (OK, a lot of) money.

Dell server, DROBO filestore and a bunch of really cheap desktops will cover many usage needs.

Windows 2003 was never a workstation OS. Windows 2000 was. The upgrade path from 2000 for professionals was to XP SP1, and that is exactly what happened.

This the same one where the projected time can drift from the time displayed on the front of the clock?

Yeah, real confusing :)

What are you doing every time you visit a web page? WWW = double u double u double u = 2*(2+1) 2*(2+1) 2*(2 + 1)

What?

It's also potentially a low-bandwidth way of broadcasting encoded messages.

What makes you think this wouldn't be expensive? SSD's are inherently expensive.

Anyway, I have little sympathy with users who don't have a clue how to work a computer properly. Either they should clue up, or be happy to pay through the nose when stuff goes wrong which they don't know how to fix. That's the harsh reality of life.

I couldn't fix my car myself, so I'd have to pay out to get it sorted by a professional (or even a non-pro who knew enough to get the job done).

Sure, OEM's are taking liberties by charging stupidly high amounts for retrospective supply of recovery disks, but they're only charging what people are willing to pay.

I bet you were popular!

They're exceptionally rugged machines. You can pull An Amiga 1200 apart whilst it's running and it won't crash unless you do something daft like unplug the accelerator board.

I'd worry, using a PC (or Mac, or Linux box) in any live-show environment. They're so damn fragile and sensitive to their environment. An Amiga 1200 will happily run in environments a Panasonic Toughbook would balk at.

The lack of memory protection never really was a big problem during the heights of the Amiga's reign. The Amiga was successful despite never coming as standard with a CPU equipped with an MMU, a feature which is an absolute necessity, these days.

*Developing* software on an MMU-equipped Amiga was a bonus. You were able to run 'enforcer' in the background to catch calls to uninitialised pointers. You could also see other people's programs misbehaving (e.g. MaxsBBS, anyone remember that?).

The greatest thing the Amiga had was a really elegant set of API's coupled with extensive documentation. Can you imagine how different the computing scene would be today if Nvidia and ATI routinely pushed out comprehensive hardware docs?

Imagine as well how much speed we would be able to eke out of software if we were able to dump (most of) the OS and hit the hardware, or at least drop into a single-tasking mode?

Since none of this is ever likely to happen, we will just have to live with OS overhead, unpredictable CPU-cache states and a reliance on closed-source hardware drivers.

VGA was introduced in 1987, the same year Commodore released the A500. By the time the A1200 was released in 1992, VGA as a video interface was well established.

What-if futures are the dreams of many ex-Amiga owners. Personally, I consider the issue entirely moot. We have Cray supercomputer performance from mobile phones, these days. Any amount of progress, whether it stemmed from our timeline of IBM-PC clones winning out as the dominating force, or the alternate timeline of Amiga OS based computing being the leader, we would still be in a mostly similar position today.

The only real difference is the GUI. Hardware would have been the same, though maybe Power CPU's instead of Intel may dominate. Graphics cards would be the same, hard drives, RAM, motherboards... the whole top-to-bottom of the PC tech industry would be doing very similar things, no matter what. Convergent evolution.

We would still have our Java's, our Flash, our legacy features still present in our CPU's and BIOS. Malware would still exploit the same weaknesses and the internet would still use the same protocols and run at the same speeds.

The question you should really ask is: What would things be like today if Amiga coding ethic was now the main driving focus of software development?