Orchid XP v7 wrote:
>> 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*. 

No it's not. For that which is hardware, add the phrase "support for" in 
front, then.

> But, out of the box, there is no TCP/IP. So that's a 
> useful thing that AmigaDOS doesn't have.

And there's a whole bunch more to "networking" than just "TCP/IP stack".

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

Not true. (1) look at how many of your device drivers on your Windows 
box are authored by Microsoft.  (2) The device drivers alone aren't 
enough if there isn't a way of integrating them into the rest of the 
system. (Granted, the Amiga had a fairly elegant way of integrating 
things into the system.)

Consider, for example, the pain you went through on an Apple ][ to use 
the disk drive card. And if Apple Basic didn't have a way to "print to 
the card in slot N", even that wouldn't have worked. Nowadays, of 
course, everyone does this.

Windows has to support all the infrastructure for loading and using and 
unloading device drivers, in addition to the drivers. Yes, the Amiga had 
that too, as do most modern OSes where you no longer recompile the 
kernel to add devices. Just saying that the complexity there isn't 100% 
in the drivers, and the more flexible it is for drivers, the more 
compliated it is in the OS.

> Performance monitoring? I can do that.

You can? You can tell how many process switches per second are 
happening, and whether you're slow because you're doing too many memory 
allocations or too many disk reads or writes? You can map your graph of 
SQL queries per seond on the same table as your graph of network 
retransmissions per second to see if the SQL server is being slowed down 
by that overhead? Cool.

> Oh, wait, aren't you the guy who 
> claimed that AmigaDOS doesn't have premptive multitasking?

Never. You must have me confused with someone else.

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

Fair enough. I haven't really used an Amiga since the 1000/500 days. Who 
is selling it nowadays?

> software should NOT crash just because 
> you fed it bad data. Graceful failure, anyone?

Commercial software. Someone did a study

>>> 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...

If the file is corrupt on the disk, and a later update replaces that 
file, I'd expect that would fix it, yah.

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

Post a reply to this message