Wait, I'm supposed to mention "Synfig" here and say that it is a nice and free vector animation application. Then you reply and say you tried it once it it wasn't very good, then I say the recent versions are better, and you just fob that off.

Interesting question but ruined by the line: "If Commodore and the Amiga had survived and thrived" makes it much harder to answer. The Amiga did well for 6-7 years despite Commodore, not because of it, and I believe that Amiga would have had a much better chance to thrive without Commodore. That said, the last chance (and a slim one at that) Amiga had to have a life after Commodore was back in 1995 when the Commodore UK management buyout failed and Commodore's assets went to Escom, who themselves imploded not much after. With a good management, a bunch of fore-site and a massive amount of luck the Amiga could have lived on in a more meaningful way. Just off the top of my head, they could have open sourced the OS and harnessed the community to port it to ARM. They could have licensed hardware designed out to third parties to bring out low-cost machines, it had the potential to be the raspberry pi of it's day.

I'm seeing a real lack of imagination in answering such a hypothetical question, not to mention a lack of understanding of the Amiga. For that matter, there is a massive mis-understanding of Commodores strengths as well. Commodores main strength was driving down the cost of their machines, quite frequently they out-innovated their competitors by producing machines that used fewer chips and were cheaper to produce. Before they went belly-up they were apparently in negotiations with motorola to see if they could licence the 68k chips so they could integrate an amiga chipset directly onto the chip, which would have given us a functioning APU back in the 90's.

Sure, the original Amiga relied very much on it's custom chips, but, contrary to a lot of people notions, it was always possible to write software that used the OS libraries and didn't program the hardware directly. Such software would have been immune to the hardware upgrades that the Amiga would have required over time. With the AGA upgrade to the Amiga chipset Commodore no longer released all the documentation for the hardware and forced programmers to use the OS libraries in order to use the new features of the chipset. Newer upgrades to the chipset could have advanced this idea even further until eventually the point would have been reached where the original chipset could have been emulated in software to run the older non OS-friendly programs.

Another thing people always bring up is the piracy problem. A CD-based Amiga wouldn't have had such a problem (at least until CD copiers became more common, i.e. the late 90's), and Commodore tried to bring out a CD based machine, the CDTV, unfortunately nobody at commodore had the vision to bring out a home computer with a CD drive (until the CD32 years later) and instead we got a piece of hifi equipment, what were they smoking?

Back to the question at hand, for Commodore to have survived just the 90's their management team would have to have been replaced wholesale in the mid to late 80's. Then they would have to make some far reaching decisions that would have looked almost insane at the time. In particular they would have to have dropped their line of PC clones (which is where they made their massive losses in the mid 90's), or at least just licensed out their name for another company to badge. Management would have then had all engineering focus on the Amiga (and not stupid side tracks like the C64GS, wtf) and producing a new chipset for release in CD-based computer (not hifi) in 1990. This chipset would have to have been more advanced than AGA (and released more than 2 years earlier) and probably using VRAM so that it could drive VGA monitors as well as TV's. And the machine they produced would have to have gotten over their famous penny pinching that hobbled the Amiga 1200 (SD floppy (not HD), no Fast ram and slow 14Mhz cpu when a 28Mhz chip was just a few more $'s). Then to get people developing on such a machine they needed to give away a decent development environment instead of charging a small fortune for just the documentation. For a final pice of fantasy, if Commodore had open-sourced and given away its hypertext system "Amigaguide" back in 1990....

The country was definitely NOT doing everything right, the government allowed a massive property bubble to develop, and most of Irelands crash was caused by the popping of said bubble. Putting the brakes on such a bubble should have been an easy thing for the government to do, they just didn't have the guts/brains/(insert other body parts here) to do it.

Most poster here seem to agree that Javascript is a very useful and versatile language to know. It runs on more devices than any other language, and as others have mentioned it can be considered the assembly language of the web. The major downside is that it's not a great language, too many quirks, odd syntax, no real API, and other problems. One way to get around the language issues is to compile another language into javascript. GWT allow you to write programs in Java and compile them into robust Javascript that will work exactly the same across all browsers. So you get the advantages of Java, with it's more mature language with it's robust development and debug tools, with the run's in browser advantages of Javascript. I find it very useful for my own web-based personal projects.

My grandad hated power lines and pylons cluttering up the landacape, now everybody has gotten used to them and only a tiny minority complain about them any more. Turbines are in the same position and some people will complain about them until they go to their grave, but everybody else will get used to them becaue we need them for power.

Obsolete ram is actually quite cheap if you check ebay. And if you're so worried about price you probably missed this story: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/10/23/2312219/hyperion-promises-an-amigaos-netbook where Hyoperion is working on a low-cost PPC Amiga Netbook to run AmigaOS 4.x on

You're kinda missing the point,just because OS9 is so slow doesn't mean that AmigaOS will be. I've used PPC Amiga machines (expanded old 68k machines not the newer pure PPC machines) to load slashdot, and they did it way faster than 45 seconds.

I'll fill in the parts you are missing, with GWT, you can use plain old Java to program WebGL using gwtgl, check out: http://code.google.com/p/gwtgl/

No, The Amiga came out over a year before the Archimedes

You are very sadly deluded if you think that a 16Mhz 68000 could run circles around a 100Mhz ARM. Saying something that stupid means your whole argument collapses. I was a big Amiga fan back in the day, but I would never dream of saying that an Amiga with its 7Mhz 68000 could perform faster than a basic Acorn Archimedes with its 8Mhz Arm 2. Load up any 3d game that was common to both platforms (Zarch/Virus) and watch them side by side. The Amiga loses (The Amiga wins in 2d games though because of its powerful blitter :-) ). Also the Atom is a CISC chip and saying that one CISC chip (Pentium-M) can beat another (Atom) to a bloody pulp has other implications. Surely then, one RISC chip can beat another to a bloody pulp and they do. The rest of your so-called argument is also flawed. You think that CISC is good because the instructions are complicated and they can do more. Unfortunately it's these complications that make it harder to do what chip designers have been resorting to these past few years, that is coaxing CPU's to run more than one instruction at a time. Even you should be able to understand that this is easier to do if the instructions are simpler.

The standard of writing at "Ars Technica" have declined far more than AMD's relative performance to Intel.

You're not going to use it regardless I suspect. I on the other hand will use it because it will run the majority of my non-game applications without platform emulation. Applications that will fly on a 800Mhz PPC. Using an emulated amiga is missing the whole point, with just the AmigaOS between you and the hardware you retain the Amiga's legendary responsiveness. And the Amiga was not "dead" when PPC was added and moving to the PPC itself was hardly done without support. It was well know that Commodore was planning to move the Amiga platform to HP's PA-RISC chips, but with the demise of commodore (and PA_RISC), the owners of the Amiga added official PPC support to AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9, then the OS was fully ported in versions 4.0 and 4.1. Just because you think that a change of hands should kill a platform does not mean that I should think the same thing. And yes, it is a hobby system, what is wrong with that. Just because a number of people enjoy using an updated version of a 1986-era operating system does not make them freaks, or retarded. They enjoy using a system that is light weight, yet easy enough for regular people to understand, and one that is different from the orthodox Windows/Mac/Linux triumvirate. I suspect you would be seriously shocked if you ever left your narrow web-surfing confines and visited a site like osnews, where many people engage in the heretical acts of discussing, using and building alternatives to mainstream operating systems. Regardless of what you think about the Amiga, AmigaOS has survived the demise of many owners and it continues to improve, just deal with it.

It'll run demos very smoothly with "RunInUAE", compatability is not an issue. And the OS is the direct decendent of the original Commodore port of TripOS. And a pile of money for a niche computer it is not, and besides the Amiga has historically positioned it's low end machines in exactly the same $300 to $500 bracket. If that's not enough for you, then I'll leave you to you own definition of what "The One True Amiga" is. For the rest of us, the definition of an Amiga has moved on, if the mac could move from 68k to PPC, then why can't the amiga, and a "junky linux desktop from 1997" it isn't. AmigaOS has kept is light weight and responsiveness along with it's other nifty features like the system-wide scripting language and datatypes etc.

Again, You are completely wrong, where are you getting this mis-information? AmigaOS has always had forward compatability. Not Commodores policy, can you point me to a link that says that Commodore wanted to ditch compatability with each OS release. Yes, AmigaOS2.x did indeed support the vast majority of 1.3 software. And there were very few instances of software working on 2.0 but not on 3.x. And now with AmigaOS 4.x it will run most of the 3.x stuff. Sure there were a few examples of software that would not work on new versions of the OS, but that's the case with all operating systems. And the Amiga did not fail, Commodore did :-)

If you had read any of the article you would have found out that the machine is going to cost in the $300 to $500 range, so not a "pile of money". And if you knew anything about AmigaOS 4.x it's actually very compatible with software from previous versions of AmigaOS.

Where are you getting your information, you could not be more wrong. I can run a lot of my original AmigaOS 1.3 software on my new install of the recently released AmigaOS 4.1.