Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> The PC has the hardware necessary to do this with sane performance 
> levels. The Amiga didn't.

Yes. So? Does that mean it isn't a complicated and useful feature?

> 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.

Generally, the source code is sufficient.

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

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Gail Shaw wrote:

> And I highly doubt that MS pays people to sell their software. That's not
> exactly a good way to do business. Windows pre-installed on a PC is cheaper
> than windows bought seperatly. Means the retailers can get more of a profit
> margin, which makes share holders very happy.

I was thinking more "we'll give you this big bulk discount on a bunch of 
Windows CDs, but only if you sign this agreement not to offer any other 
OS"...

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

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Orchid XP v7 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> I think it's not so much a case of "Linux isn't ready for the desktop", 
> but rather "Linux is misplaced on the desktop". But I don't see anybody 
> developing anything else currently...

  Linux is just superb in my desktop.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Darren New wrote:

>> 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.
> 
> Generally, the source code is sufficient.

Cool. Let me just contact the makers of every device driver I'm running 
and we can see where th... no, wait, that won't work. ;-)

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

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"Orchid XP v7" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message
news:47b1ea7b$1@news.povray.org...

> > 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.

It's really not hard. All you need is a debugger and the symbols files.
Without the symbols file, you need to be able to read assember. Not
recommended.
At least that's true of the memory dumps I've had before. YMMV.

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"Gail Shaw" <initialsurname@sentech sa dot com> wrote in message 
news:47b1bde6@news.povray.org...
>
> "Darren New" <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote in message
> news:47b1365a$1@news.povray.org...
>
>> I took over (technically) at one place and made the rule that such was
>> disallowed.
>
> The last coding standard I wrote was 6 pages long. Included things like:
> No cursors
> Don't distinct every
> Don't use functions on columns in the where clause
> Don't use SELECT *
> All tables shall have a primary key
> Evaluate all new tables (and modified existing tables) for indexes
>
> Pity none of the devs bother reading it. It would save them some time when 
> I
> review their code. <evil grin>

It's a good list, but it's rather sad that this isn't common-sense, isn't 
it?  :-)

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Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> Yet, funny enough, when I boot Linux, it screams "FAT support is ALPHA!" 
>   I must have missed that. Where does it say it?

In the text that scrolls up the screen during boot, when /etc/fstab 
includes a windows FAT32 partition in the list.

>   I have never had any problems with FAT support. Maybe it's just me.

Me neither. You need to read what I write more closely.

>> Yeah. Better than X-Windows used to be at the same time.
> 
>   Yes, Unix sucks big time. You should never use it. Demand your money
> back immediately.

I didn't say UNIX sucks. I said X-Windows wasn't color-depth independent 
  as early as the Amiga was. Again, it's that reading comprehension thing.

>> Note that Windows supports DOS programs that bypass the OS in exactly 
>> the same way, and it WORKS.
> 
>   I believe the list of DOS games which don't work anymore in current hardware
> with the current Windows is larger than the list of DOS games which do.

Yep, probably. How many Amiga 1000 games are compatible with whatever 
the latest Amiga is?  How many 10-year-old Mac programs that directly 
address hardware run under OS X now?  (Honest questions - maybe they all 
do, I dunno.)

I was simply pointing out that Windows has useful features that the 
Amiga doesn't, and these features are non-trivial.

>   Yes, like once I tried to install some modem drivers into a WinXP
> system, and at the end of the installation it said "failed to install
> driver", nothing more, nothing less. Not a single hint about why it
> failed.

FWIW, you can go into the "hardware manager" and find the failed device 
in the list and ask it what the problem was.  Linux is definitely better 
with its error messages. If I wanted to annoy the Linux enthusiasts, I'd 
add "because they need to be!" ;-)

Of course, a lot of times, if something fails like that, you don't 
really have much information to give, because if you knew what was wrong 
and how to fix it, you would have done so already.

>   Now, try to google without an internet connection because you just
> failed to install the driver necessary for the internet connection.

Go over to the next machine and google it.

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

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Gail Shaw wrote:

> The last coding standard I wrote was 6 pages long. Included things like:
> No cursors
> Don't distinct every
> Don't use functions on columns in the where clause
> Don't use SELECT *
> All tables shall have a primary key
> Evaluate all new tables (and modified existing tables) for indexes

Just being curios... What's a 'cursor', and why is that bad?

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

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"Jeremy M. Praay" <jer### [at] questsoftwarecmo> wrote in message
news:47b1fd2b$1@news.povray.org...

> It's a good list, but it's rather sad that this isn't common-sense, isn't
> it?  :-)
>

Tell me about it. Half the devs don't even know how to do performance tests
on their code. I ask them how long a query takes to run and they look at me
like I was speaking klingon.

Best one was late last year. I'm reviewing one guy's code and a view that
he's written concerns me. So I run the query on the dev server, in the DB he
was using. I watch it for around 30 sec, then go to get coffee. It was still
running when I got back. (Total 8 min or so)

I call him over and tell him that it's totally unacceptable, he needs to go
and review the query. He comes back not 5 mon later and tell me, with a big
smile, that the view now rund in 5 seconds.

I run the new query and, at about the 5 sec mark, the first 20 or so rows
appear in the result pane. The query carries on executing. At 3 min, I call
the guy over and tell him there's still a problem.

"But," he says, "on my machine it finished in 5 seconds" I go to his
machine. He runs the query. The first few rows return in about 6 seconds.
"There!" he says, pointing at the still executing query "See, it's done"

<sigh>

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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?

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