From: davidme@qdpii.comp.qdpi.oz.au (David Meiklejohn)
Subject: Re: VistaPro & clones
Organization: Qld Dept Primary Industries
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 1993 11:11:29 GMT

In article <72822@cup.portal.com> Harv@cup.portal.com (Harv R Laser) writes:
>
>Nevermind the fact that the Amiga version of Vista Pro has more features
>in it than the MS DOS version has. And it renders much faster. I've
>had them running side by side, with the same .scape file loaded, and
>as close-to-same features set up in the control panels, one on a
>386SX machine, one on a 2500/30, and it was no contest, speed wise.

Come on now - it's hardly fair to pit a 386SX against a 68030.  If you want
to compare the speed of software on two platforms, make sure the two platforms
perform comparably in the area being measured.  For standard integer work, a
25MHz '030 (like in the 2500/030) is about as fast as a 33MHz 386DX.  I don't
know if Vista uses floating point for its rendering, but it probably does.
If the Amiga version is using the 68882, you've got a problem getting a close
match in the Intel world.  For example, running the Savage trancendentals
benchmark, my 25MHz '030/'882 is as fast as a 25MHz 486DX (SAS/C 5.10 vs MS C
6.00, with '030 code on the Amiga and inline FPU instructions for both).
However, I'd expect rendering to be much quicker on a 486DX than an 030/882,
because real programs are affected by integer performance.  So, it's tricky.

Probably the best thing you could do would be to the Amiga with whatever PC
costs the same amount.  That would be interesting, but I think the PC would
win...  :-(

>Semi-related to this, I was reading ClariNet Newsbytes yesterday (I can't
>repost the article here due to copyright restrictions) but a new product
>press release for a Windows product had been posted. The sole purpose of
>this new $99 product is to let Windows users delete disk directories. 
>::rubbing eyes:: yeah you read it right. It deletes disk directories
>and their subdirs and their contents if any.  Now I don't pretend to
>be intimate with Windows, in fact we haven't even slept together, but
>apparently there are some horrible genuflections one has to go thru
>to delete a Windows dir and its contents, without having to resort to
>going down to DOS to do it. So this $99 product lets a Windows user
>delete dirs and subdirs and contents without having to drop down to DOS.
>Imagine that. For a mere hundred bucks. 

Actually, I'm not sure how you'd do it (easily) by dropping down to DOS.
"del" won't do it for you.  Personally, I use a nifty "rm" command that
does recursive deletion, and much more besides.  Then there's dedicated
utilities like "deldir".  But, your basic DOS user doesn't have such things -
they come from the public domain.  They just struggle with deleting the
contents of each and every subdir individually (answering "yes, I'm sure"
each time), then rmdiring them all, level by level.  My sadistic side finds
all this quite funny...

So, a quick question to those who know - does OS/2 have a real delete command?
I already know that you can delete hierarchies with WPS - I want to know
about the command line.  Also, PD commands need not apply.


-- 
David Meiklejohn (davidme@qdpii.comp.qdpi.oz.au)
 - PC's, Unix, and networks by day, Amigas by night...
Currently residing in Mareeba, Far North Queensland, Australia
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy