Invisible wrote:
> So what you're saying is that if hardware is complicated, it is 
> impossible to develop quality software?

Obviously not. But it's impossible to develop it for the same price in 
the same timeframe with the same quality.

>> Ha.  Compare what Windows XP does with your Amiga OS.  Think about 
>> hardware support, multi-processor support, multi-user support, 
>> multi-APIs for everything, wireless networking, and a million other 
>> things.
> 
> Why do we *need* multi-APIs for everything in the first place?

Because otherwise your older programs won't run. We need it because 
people don't give away the source for their commercial software.

> 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.

> 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?

> 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.

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

Post a reply to this message

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

Yet, funny enough, when I boot Linux, it screams "FAT support is ALPHA!" 
  Depends on your priorities. I haven't ever had Word actually crash on 
me, either.

> 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?

If you're going to go along that line, the first Windows machine was 
8-bit, and now they're up to 64-bit. :-) The first Amiga was a 32-bit 
machine running on a 16-bit bus.

> 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.

Yeah. Better than X-Windows used to be at the same time.

> [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...]

Yep. On the other hand, the original Amiga books described how to frob 
the hardware.

Note that Windows supports DOS programs that bypass the OS in exactly 
the same way, and it WORKS.

> 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?

It depends who you are. Aren't you the one complaining about lack of USB 
support in your NT machines?

> 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?

Same way you do for Linux errors. You google the text of the error 
message, or search for it on MSDN.

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

There's lots you can do. You just don't know how. That's why they give 
you the stack dump and such.  "Wow, if only I could read a core file, 
I'd be able to tell which program is dumping core!" :-)

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

Post a reply to this message

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?

Post a reply to this message

Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> DCOM launch, I can't disable this one,

That means you need it.

> Machine Debug Manager (C:\Program files\Common files\Microsoft 
> Shared\VS7DEBUG\MDM.EXE), which I don't need since I use gdb, not Visual 
> Studio debugger. Why is this even *installed*??

Because you asked it to be at one point. I think it's also a kernel 
debugger, btw.

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

Post a reply to this message

Invisible wrote:
> So why bother making a quality product when people will buy crap?

Right.

> Of course, if there were actually some viable competition, people would 
> realise that it is *not* "normal" for computer software to be buggy and 
> unreliable, and people would switch.

What's not "viable" about Linux et al?

> Unfortunately, thanks to M$, this 
> situation will never arise. If anybody starts making really good 
> software, they'll just get bought...

And how does MS "buy" Linux?


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

Post a reply to this message

Invisible wrote:
> No - but selling cars which you know are going to crash at least once 
> every 52 days... well, if a company tried to do that, they'd be shut 
> down. However, for software it seems it's OK to sell a malfunctioning 
> product.

I don't know what you're doing, but I've had production servers that ran 
for years on Windows without a problem.

> Well, sure, if there were an alternative,

And why isn't Linux an alternative?  Why isn't Mac OS X an alternative?

> But what about, say, Word? There's quite a few other word processors out 
> there - and in past times there were even more. And most of them were a 
> lot more reliable than Word...

So why aren't they alternatives? MS isn't buying every word processor 
company.

> Apple requires you to buy new hardware, so it's not purely a software 
> decision. Linux is nice, but... well, it's fundamentally designed for 
> UNIX nerds. So if you're not, good luck... Besides, I'm not convinced 
> that the whole UNIX design is particularly coherant. (E.g., autoconf 
> exists.)

Ding ding ding!  MS's product advantage is that it *can* be used by 
naive users without a lot of expense.

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

Post a reply to this message

Darren New wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>> Personally, I don't think so. People have created products like 
>> OpenOffice and KOffice and so forth, and they work. Reliably.
> 
> Yet, funny enough, when I boot Linux, it screams "FAT support is ALPHA!" 

hi, I can't help but notice your timezone is wrong.  This is 2008.  We 
can write to NTFS partitions from LiveCDs, let alone simple FAT which 
BTW is the standard format in thumbdrives, which work just fine as well.

Perhaps it's time to test a new Linux distribution?  From the 2000's?

Post a reply to this message

Darren New wrote:
> Aren't you the one that's still using 10-year-old Word97?

yeah, he should update Word and you should install a decent modern Linux 
distro.

Post a reply to this message

Darren New wrote:

>> [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...]
> 
> Yep. On the other hand, the original Amiga books described how to frob 
> the hardware.
> 
> Note that Windows supports DOS programs that bypass the OS in exactly 
> the same way, and it WORKS.

The PC has the hardware necessary to do this with sane performance 
levels. The Amiga didn't.

>> 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?
> 
> It depends who you are. Aren't you the one complaining about lack of USB 
> support in your NT machines?

OK, so USB support goes into the list of useful things Windows can do 
that AmigaDOS can't.

>> If there were anything I could do to find out, I'd do it. 
>> Unfortunately, there isn't.
> 
> There's lots you can do. You just don't know how. That's why they give 
> you the stack dump and such.  "Wow, if only I could read a core file, 
> I'd be able to tell which program is dumping core!" :-)

Only hyper-nerds are going to be able to get anything remotely useful 
out of a dump file. To everybody else, it's just wasted disk space.

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

Post a reply to this message

Darren New wrote:
> And why isn't Linux an alternative?  Why isn't Mac OS X an alternative?

Linux is cheap but doesn't run Windows software or ports of major 
popular commercial software like Photoshop, AutoCAD or World of Warcraft 
without Wine and crashes.

Mac does run ports of most of them but is too expensive.

I'm still confident Linux will make more inroads in the desktop to the 
point of Adobe feeling an urge to port its major apps.

> So why aren't they alternatives? MS isn't buying every word processor 
> company.

The issue is that any word processor coming by should handle doc format 
perfectly -- no matter how good it is at an open format like ODF -- 
because that's what people send you and expect from you.  Not an easy 
task reverse enginneering an obscure, undocumented format like that.

I've never had any trouble opening any doc, xls or ppt from email 
attachments friends mail me, but those are hardly office production 
examples, so I can't be 100% sure.

OTOH, I've successfully opened older doc formats with OpenOffice while 
Word was complaining the format was too old. :)

Post a reply to this message