I haven't heard a conclusion or summing up of you arguments yet. If you are on the Amiga side of the argument I challenge you to condense all your arguments into one post and conclude why or in what sense you think PC architecture "is still playing Amiga catchup"
We've had plenty of responses from the PC side that make perfect sense so the ball is in your court. The gauntlet has been thrown at your feet.
Make coherent finalised argument or else just admit you are trolling for the sake of flames.
Some preliminaries:
1. Who appointed you to judge whether "the responses from the PC side make perfect sense". Give examples of these perfectly-sensible arguments that do not centre around the raw processing power of modern hardware, but instead focus on the user-experience. In particular focus on the 90%+ of PC's in the real world that run on Windows, most of which are XP machines with single core CPU's with 1 gig or less ram running vital security software that strangles the hardware. Thats the experience of most users.
2. The question is not: "Can an Amiga do everything as fast as PC". Can the Amiga open 78 MP pictures, encode DVD/audio as fast as a PC blah blah. Can your PC do it as fast as IBM supercomputers? Thats simply new hardware crunching numbers faster than old hardware. Its a meaningless argument. Take raw processing power out of the equation, what do you have left? The user experience.
3. PC =x86 hardware running Windows for anywhere between 90 and 95% of the worlds computers. Its therefore reasonable to say "PC"= computer that runs Windows.
4. I only need to demonstrate ONE area where the PC is still playing catch-up.
Do you think the Amiga can be used in any serious business environment without security software installed and be a mission critical system?
An A1200 with 8 meg ram and OS 3.1 can be used to write letters, store customer accounts, issue mail shots, print receipts, analyse financial data using spreadsheets. The software is there, and the hardware is capable. The basics of business don't change, even if computer hardware and OS's do. Whether people choose to use it or not is a different question. Format your drive with PFS 3 or SFS and you won't lose data on your hard drive even if your switch the power off mid-write. You can back it up if you want to CD-RW like we still do at my job on a PC. You won't lose your data. If your Amiga hardware is flaky then don't blame the system, fix the hardware. Mission critical enough? Secure enough? Amiga will do the job.
Two current real world examples: My dentist uses Scala on an A1200 with a touch screen to display information in the waiting room. He scans images with a UMAX scsi scanner, and set it all up himself. My dentist is also my brother. An aged-care facility uses an A500 (!!) to display meal times, announcements etc 24/7 to all of the residents room TV's and to TV's throughout the facility, and this is set up by the receptionist!! It boots off a floppy in 10 second. A PC can do digital signage as its now called, but at a cost of many thousands of $ both in hardware, software, professional set up costs.
Is that how the Amiga is streets ahead of the PC? Is that what this thread is about? Windows ? not PCs? How come your arguments are not consistent?
Oh the linux fan boys: i can get a responsive fast PC by compiling my own custom kernel, and with 4 cores at 2600 mhz and huge CPU caches and 4 gig RAM running at 1333 mhz and a 640 MB GPU overclocked it can boot a few seconds faster than a 15 year old computer with crippled CPU card.
And now the typical Linux user: "just bought a PC, booted with ubuntu/mandriva/fedora/PCLinuxOS 09 blah blah and i get a kernel panic/white screen/vesa only video/no sound/mobile modem not detected/no wireless/doesn't see hard drive. Search through gazillion forums to find: sorry your chipset/video card/sound/modem/wireless isn't supported, wait for the next kernel in 6 months. Or follow this obscure guide which doesn't work. oh yeah thats right it doesn't, its out of date, go to this guide..still no luck? wait 6 months..new kernel/distro, Ok i can boot and install but....refresh is funny on my screen/wireless doesn't work/sound is scratchy/ wait 6 months more..yep it works, except for the wireless. And my printer. Should have got a HP printer. But it IS a HP. Is it a supported model...erm no. Packages are great: but what i wan't isn't in the repo: tough. OK I installed something from the repo, it said it needed to download dependencies, so i said yes, and now I can't boot, something about KDE..what did you install? Oh yeah that installs a small library that KDE uses but was updated and KDE will need to be updated and you can do that by cutting and pasting CLI commands..BUT I can't boot. Sorry boot using your installation CD..blah blah blah.
Amiga: stick workbench floppy in, switch on, follow instructions, boot. Hardware detected, configured. Done. Soft reset. Boot off hard rive. Install app software: double click on install icon. Done.
Which user-experience would you prefer?
1. Boot times: Amiga's boot faster. No question. Even if you allow for the additional processes that the PC has to perform at boot times, PC hardware resources are many, many factors greater than that available to an Amiga. Put another way: the Amiga does less at boot time, but has less hardware resources to do it with. Waiting is waiting, no matter why it happens. And no hibernating isn't a solution because you can hibernate on PC but you may not awaken from it and its not a HUGELY faster than cold booting anyway.
2. greater malware prevalance on PC introduces higher risk of data loss, passwords being stolen, identity theft. Third party security software is mandatory, but that diminishes the responsiveness and therefore the quality of the user experience.
3. general responsiveness of the GUI fluctuates on Windows PC's far more than Amiga. AmigaOS prioritises user input eg mouse pointer, menu opening when background tasks are running more highly than Windows. I experience more wait cursors on a Win PC than i do on Amiga.
Thats enpough for tonight.