On 9 Feb 2000 06:01:40 -0500, Nieminen Juha wrote:
>Ron Parker <ron### [at] povrayorg> wrote:
>  If the program does not need those things, do they hurt it? I don't think
>that multitasking, memory protection, etc. is a bad thing even if the program
>doesn't need them (the program can't do any harm to your computer if it's
>protected).

Sometimes, the program has to do some harm to your computer.  Take a BIOS flash
update (not necessarily your motherboard BIOS, but some other BIOS.)  Its only
goal in life is to do things to your hardware that are not normal operations.
The sort of protection against unvalidated hardware accesses that would 
normally be good is bad in this case.  Besides, multitasking, memory protection,
etc. take code and resources.  Resources are scarce in many embedded systems to 
begin with, and more code means more things that can break.

I'm not saying I agree with the notion that DOS is somehow better in that 
regard, since it seems to me that code with no OS at all or with a custom 
embedded OS would be even more streamlined for these purposes, but DOS is a 
nice compromise OS with lots of cheap, available tools.  

If I were doing it myself, of course, I'd probably choose Linux anyway, but DOS
does have its place, even today.

-- 
These are my opinions.  I do NOT speak for the POV-Team.
The superpatch: http://www2.fwi.com/~parkerr/superpatch/
My other stuff: http://www2.fwi.com/~parkerr/traces.html

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