it great to have the Amiga back in the shops again? Admittediy, it would be nice if it were in more shops and being actively promoted, but hey, at toast it's there, right? But what about the next génération of Amigas? These new PowerPC-based beasties, how witt they fare in the big, compétitive world of home computing? The otd Commodore attitude of building down to spec to save cash can't continue with the new owners of the Amiga, and here's why. From about 1990 the computer industry has buitt up enough momentum to ensure that new products get introduced more and more frequentty took at the compétition for smatt physical size removable media. We had a 128Mb Magnéto Optical drive about four years ago which was sluggish enough when reading, but unbearably stow when writing to a disk. Now we have Zip and EZ drives, and tater this year we witt get Jaz and SyJet drives that hotel around a gigabyte on a smatt 3.5" cartridge and transfer at rates that would acceptable in a hard drive. To top it att off, scientists now reckon that they can increase the storage capacity of hard drives some twentyfold due to a process that works around the magnetic résistance of the media. Now how about the poor otd Amiga? Wett, as much as it may seem at the moment, 4.2Cb is your timit when it comes to storage space there's no more room in the RDB (Rigid Disk Block) that is stored on every hard drive and hard drive partition. The reason for this is that the RDB is only 32-bits tong and as we att know from studying our binary, the largest number you can have in 32-bits is in the 4.2 bittion range, hence the timit on size. Previously, this hasn't mattered for Amiga owners, but with desktop video and hard drive hungry apptications, the amount of space we need is going to grow incrementatty, and anyway, why should we be restricted in this fashion? After att, a few years back Amiga owners were laughing at the fact that our PC owning friends coutel only have 32Mb partitions, but who's laughing now? tfs not just storage space thats becoming an embarrassment. The Amiga supports