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On Thu, 21 Mar 2013 17:16:20 -0400, Warp wrote:
> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospam com> wrote:
>> > The only way that the Amiga would outperform a P4 would be if you
>> > added some busy loops into the program to deliberately make it
>> > slower.
>
>> Just launch Microsoft Office - that'll add the requisite number of busy
>> loops.
>
>> (Mostly joking)
>
> I don't own it, but I'm pretty certain that if I launched MS Office,
> I would not notice any slowdown anywhere.
>
> Andrew's problem is that he's saying "I run program A on the Amiga and
> program B on the PC, and the former is more responsive than the latter."
>
> So what? That's like saying that rendering one frame of some CGI movie
> on a 1000-computer renderfarm using Maya takes 48 hours, while rendering
> some scene with POV-Ray on a 80486 takes 5 minutes. Does that mean that
> the 80486 or POV-Ray are faster than Maya on the 1000-computer
> renderfarm?
>
> If we are comparing, we should compare the *same thing*, not different
> things.
>
> For instance, let's see how fast the Amiga opens a 2048x1536 full color
> PNG image, applies some gaussian filter to it, and saves it back to PNG,
> and let's compare it to a PC.
You're assuming a lot about the environment though - my point (aside from
joking about it) was that Amiga generally didn't do a lot of multitasking
(though it was one of the early multitasking OSes IIRC), so it could
actually have a more responsive interface than modern systems that are
doing a lot more than an older system.
It's the complement to Moore's law (some call it May's Law).
Jim
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> I want to get a digital frame to sync up the Astronomy Picture of the Day
> to.
That *does* sound kind of righteous... One of the guys at work has that
as their Windows backdrop.
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On Thu, 21 Mar 2013 21:39:10 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>> I want to get a digital frame to sync up the Astronomy Picture of the
>> Day to.
>
> That *does* sound kind of righteous... One of the guys at work has that
> as their Windows backdrop.
I occasionally pick them up and use them myself as wallpapers, too. Some
digital frames can deal with an RSS feed input, and APOD provides one. :)
Jim
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> You're assuming a lot about the environment though - my point (aside from
> joking about it) was that Amiga generally didn't do a lot of multitasking
> (though it was one of the early multitasking OSes IIRC), so it could
> actually have a more responsive interface than modern systems that are
> doing a lot more than an older system.
On the contrary, it seems to me that Windows tends to run absolutely
everything in a single thread, meaning that if anything happens which
takes some time (e.g., waiting for the CD to spin up, waiting for the
network, reading from floppy disk), the entire system becomes
unresponsive. The Amiga seems to be a lot more threaded; it might take
45 seconds to load all those filenames from floppy disk, but the actual
disk *window* opens faster than you can blink.
I think the other issue is virtual memory. The Amiga doesn't have it.
The OS doesn't support it, and the version of the 68000 they used lacks
an MMU, so you can't have it even if you want it. Around the 1990s PCs
typically had nowhere near enough RAM to prevent excessive paging. Why,
one of the PCs at college used to take *twenty minutes* to load MS
Access. An SQL database under AmigaOS took about 15 seconds to load.
The other thing is networking. Windows seems to assume that all network
shares operate at LAN speed. If you try to browse a slow network share,
the whole system becomes unresponsive. The Amiga, by contrast, has no
networking support in the first place. And nobody installs software onto
a network share and expects an Amiga to run it at local speeds...
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On Thu, 21 Mar 2013 21:46:33 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> On the contrary, it seems to me that Windows tends to run absolutely
> everything in a single thread, meaning that if anything happens which
> takes some time (e.g., waiting for the CD to spin up, waiting for the
> network, reading from floppy disk), the entire system becomes
> unresponsive.
I don't think that it runs everything as one thread (it doesn't,
clearly), but that I/O blocking isn't handled very effectively/gracefully
in some cases.
Jim
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>> On the contrary, it seems to me that Windows tends to run absolutely
>> everything in a single thread, meaning that if anything happens which
>> takes some time (e.g., waiting for the CD to spin up, waiting for the
>> network, reading from floppy disk), the entire system becomes
>> unresponsive.
>
> I don't think that it runs everything as one thread (it doesn't,
> clearly), but that I/O blocking isn't handled very effectively/gracefully
> in some cases.
I seem to recall that when I first experienced Linux, it seemed faster
than Windows. Then again, it may have just been me *imagining* that it
was faster, because that's what I wanted to believe.
Either way, I concur with your analysis - Windows tended to be awful at
dealing with blocking. In particular, it was always *hopeless* at trying
to cancel things.
AmigaOS is designed to run entirely off of slow-arse 3.25" floppy disks.
Those guys *had* to design the OS to deal with the delays effectively.
And the platform has special graphics blitting hardware, which the OS
makes maximum use of for snappy visual responses. (It also has hardware
sprite overlay, for a responsive mouse pointer.)
If you run Debian (which has no special optimisations for such
hardware), you find that it crawls along alarmingly slowly. I mean, slow
to the point that you can't tell if the OS is actually functioning or
not. Twenty minutes for GNOME to start!
Today Windows seems a lot less laggy than it used to be. Whether that's
due to code improvements or just the vast hardware performance increases
is anybody's guess...
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On Thu, 21 Mar 2013 22:03:04 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>>> On the contrary, it seems to me that Windows tends to run absolutely
>>> everything in a single thread, meaning that if anything happens which
>>> takes some time (e.g., waiting for the CD to spin up, waiting for the
>>> network, reading from floppy disk), the entire system becomes
>>> unresponsive.
>>
>> I don't think that it runs everything as one thread (it doesn't,
>> clearly), but that I/O blocking isn't handled very
>> effectively/gracefully in some cases.
>
> I seem to recall that when I first experienced Linux, it seemed faster
> than Windows. Then again, it may have just been me *imagining* that it
> was faster, because that's what I wanted to believe.
I don't think so - Linux deals with blocking I/O differently - though
arguably, when the block device I/O buffers fill up, the system load does
spike and the side effects aren't very pretty.
> Today Windows seems a lot less laggy than it used to be. Whether that's
> due to code improvements or just the vast hardware performance increases
> is anybody's guess...
It's probably a little of both.
Jim
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On 21/03/2013 9:39 PM, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>> I want to get a digital frame to sync up the Astronomy Picture of the Day
>> to.
>
> That *does* sound kind of righteous... One of the guys at work has that
> as their Windows backdrop.
I used to have that. Now I have the BBC test card W
I have a Nasa image as my logon screen.
--
Regards
Stephen
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Orchid Win7 v1 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Thing is, your typical user cares about "I click on this folder, and it
> takes 15 seconds to open" verses "I click on this folder and the window
> opens in under 200ms". To a user, that *is* "the same thing".
There's a certain language that you use that's different from normal
language. In order to understand it, one requires some interpretation.
For example, when you say "15 seconds", what that really means is
"0.15 seconds". Or when you say "postal-stamp sized", what that really
means is "postal-card sized". Or when you say "constantly" (eg. "the
screen has to be constantly cleaned") what you really mean is "every
two weeks." Or when you say "2 inches" (eg. "you have to look at the
screen from 2 inches away") it really means "20 inches."
--
- Warp
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Orchid Win7 v1 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> On the contrary, it seems to me that Windows tends to run absolutely
> everything in a single thread, meaning that if anything happens which
> takes some time (e.g., waiting for the CD to spin up, waiting for the
> network, reading from floppy disk), the entire system becomes
> unresponsive.
I have a theory: You actually live in a parallel universe where things
are different, and somehow there's a rift in the multi-dimensional
space-time continuum that causes your posts to leak to this universe
from yours.
--
- Warp
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