Invisible wrote:
>> And you could use the same OS version with all these hardware 
>> configurations?
> 
> No - principly because much of the OS is in ROM. If it weren't, they'd 
> have probably designed it so you can.

Probably not.

>>> 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?
>>
>> Virtual memory
> 
> OK. The Amiga lacked the necessary hardware for that.

Unnecessary, obviously.


>> automatic updates
> 
> Which is only necessary because the software wasn't done right in the 
> first place.

Which is why only one version of Kickstart was ever released, yep yep.

>> protecting itself from nasty programs that try to access things they 
>> shouldn't
> 
> Hasn't UNIX been doing this for the last 40 years?

Lots of machines did. Amiga didn't. That's the point.  You didn't ask 
for what MS did that nobody else did. You asked for what MS did that 
Amiga didn't.

>> plug and play
> 
> The hardware for that didn't exist at the time.

Yes it did. It was called SOTS (Slap On The Side). And the Amiga even 
had a very clever mechanism for finding the drivers and initializing a 
change of devices. Few vendors used it, tho.

> (Although AmigaDOS does 
> support hot-swapping PCMCIA cards seemlessly.)

Not the A1000. Oh, wait, everything was perfect, so they couldn't have 
added that.

>> hibernating
> Doesn't really require much OS support, does it?

It requires a tremendous amount to do it right.

>> encryption
> Would be fairly trivial to add.

You would be surprised.  It requires, amongst other things, protected 
memory.

>> It is *not* normal behaviour, no matter what you might think of MS.
> 
> Ah, I see. So all PCs that use M$ products do this, but it's not 
> "normal"? Interesting definition. ;-)

But not all PCs that use MS products do this. Maybe all *yours* do, but 
there are global businesses that run on Windows machines. I'm working 
with one that actually abandoned Linux because it was too unreliable for 
their purposes, and they have something like 30,000 computers running 
24x7 scattered across the USA.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

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