Darren New wrote:

>> Leaving aside hardware [bad drivers can screw up any OS], 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.
> 
> Remote desktop. USB. Networking. 3D accelerated graphics. Memory 
> protection. Virtual memory. 64-bit OS support. Remote management. Access 
> control policies. Performance monitoring. Clustered drives. RAID. 
> Multi-OS boot. Support for about 63,417 different chunks of hardware.

OK then. Most of what you just listed is *hardware*, not *software*. Let 
us examine what's actually software...

Networking, and anything that requires networking. AmigaDOS can't really 
do this. (There is a facility to do some primitive thing with the 
parallel port to set up a sort of 2-node NFS. And it works 
transparently.) If the hardware had existed, you could probably set up 
real networking. But, out of the box, there is no TCP/IP. So that's a 
useful thing that AmigaDOS doesn't have.

Multiple users and access control is missing.

Hardware support is... down to 3rd parties. If they write the drivers, 
you can use it. If they don't, you can't.

Performance monitoring? I can do that. Oh, wait, aren't you the guy who 
claimed that AmigaDOS doesn't have premptive multitasking?

Multi-OS boot? Strange - I also run Debian Linux on my Amiga. :-P

>> 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.)
> 
> You're struggling to think of something *you* use.
> 
>> The point is, some bugs are more serious than others. Where I work, 
>> Word is constantly crashing.
> 
> Aren't you the one that's still using 10-year-old Word97?

We were using Word 97. We're now [mostly] using Word 2003. [At least, 
certainly the report writers are - and nobody else uses it very much.] 
Still crash-happy. Mainly due to our customer's corrupted document 
templates, but that's no excuse; software should NOT crash just because 
you fed it bad data. Graceful failure, anyone?

>> Interesting. When I got my laptop, it crashed within 14 *seconds* of 
>> being turned on.
> 
> One would think that would be either a misinstalled OS or a hardware 
> problem.

If that were the case, visiting Windows Update a few times presumably 
wouldn't have fixed it...

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

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