scott wrote:

> No, but with complicated hardware, users expect complicated software, 
> and with that comes bugs.  Sure, even I could probably write a word 
> processor that rivalled what I had on my Acorn, and given a suitable 
> amount of time could make it pretty stable.  But everyone would laugh at 
> it.

Personally, I don't think so. People have created products like 
OpenOffice and KOffice and so forth, and they work. Reliably.

>> Leaving aside hardware
> 
> But I think that's one of the key points.  Windows must work with every 
> possible piece of hardware that's available now, PLUS it has to work 
> with anything that might come out in the future...  Can't imagine Amiga 
> coming out with a new 64-bit dual core machine, and then you being able 
> to use the same Amiga OS you had before with it...

Interesing you should say that. You're aware of course that the fist 
Amiga was a 16-bit machine, and the later ones were 32-bit? Or that 
originally the graphics hardware only supported 12-bit colour, and later 
added 24-bit colour? Or that originally you could only have 6 bits per 
pixel and later you could have 8?

And - most importantly - you can take an application written back when 
we only had 6 bits per pixel, and run it on a screen operating at 8 bits 
per pixel. And it can share the screen with other applications and 
change parts of the colour table and so on and so forth, and WORK.

[Assuming it does all this through the OS. The Big Problem the Amiga had 
is that since the hardware is "always" the same, a lot of software 
bypasses the OS. Obviously this breaks horribly when the hardware 
changes...]

>> What does Windoze actually do that 
>> AmigaDOS doesn't? Well, let's see now. It has networking. It's 
>> multi-user and has access permissions. It... uh... no, I'm struggling 
>> to think of anything else new it has. That seems to be able it, 
>> really. (Unless you count IE as part of the OS.)
> 
> Just have a browse through the services running on your machine...

So Windows is designed to do a bunch of unecessary stuff in the 
background by default. I consider this a design flaw. What *useful* 
stuff does Windows do that AmigaDOS doesn't?

>> Almost all software possesses something you could describe as a "bug". 
>> The point is, some bugs are more serious than others. Where I work, 
>> Word is constantly crashing.
> 
> Oh yeh, you're still running Word 1985 or whatever :-)  Word only 
> crashed here when we had a buggy printer driver (but then so did any 
> other application that tried to print - it's just we mostly used Word).

Word 2003, currently. Which, in fairness, seems slightly less buggy. But 
still nowhere near as reliable as we'd like.

>>  The hours we've wasted because Word has crashed and eaten somebody's 
>> work... I don't hear any stories of POV-Ray crashing half way through 
>> a million-hour render.
> 
> POV crashed on me during a long animation render, gave me a "variable 
> not declared" or something error, even though it'd just rendered 1000 
> copies of the exact same SDL file previously...

That's not a crash, that's a parse error. Most likely due to a subtle 
interaction in your SDL code...

>> Interesting. When I got my laptop, it crashed within 14 *seconds* of 
>> being turned on.
> 
> And how many other XP machines exhibited this behaviour?  I've used XP 
> (along with friends) right back from the pre-release versions of XP, and 
> the only time I've seen that behaviour is due to bad hardware.  Once it 
> was a faulty RAM stick, another time was a dodgy hard drive, and the 
> third time was heat sink detachment!

Don't forget MS Blaster. [The only virus I've ever had the misfortune to 
come across. Nice how McAfee automatically removed it. Or at least, it 
*would* have been nice if it had...]

>> But even so, here at work I look after a large cluster of PCs. And 
>> usually in any given week at least one of them will give be a BSOD.
> 
> So what's the most common cause of BSODs then?

And how in the name of God do you find out what *causes* one?

I mean, sure, it tells you what was happening at the exact instant the 
crash happened, but how do you find out what the actual problem is?

All the STOP messages I get are either UNHANDLED_KMODE_EXCEPTION or 
IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. Could be anything.

> Once a week on various 
> machines sounds like some broken software/driver that everyone has 
> installed...

Yeah, probably. But how the hell do you find out what it is?

>> Indeed, just this weekend, one of the servers rebooted itself due to 
>> one...
> 
> And what was the reason for that?  If it was my server I would want to 
> find out exactly which driver/program/hardware caused the BSOD.

If there were anything I could do to find out, I'd do it. Unfortunately, 
there isn't.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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