From: barrett@iastate.edu (Marc N Barrett)
Subject: Re: Amigas are cool
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames, IA
Date: Sun, 26 Jul 1992 21:24:52 GMT

In article <1992Jul26.093409.3092@desire.wright.edu> fheitkamp@desire.wright.edu writes:
>In article <1992Jul25.214840.24771@ctr.columbia.edu>, jerry@connection.prospect.com (Jerry Shekhel) writes:
>> hawk@pnet01.cts.com (John Anderson) writes:
>>>                                                                            > 
>>>
>>>However, none of these operating systems rival the power of Kickstart or    
>>>OS/2. Kickstart compares very favorably to OS/2 in power.
>>>
>> 
>> This is where I disagree.
>> --
>Jerry,
>
>	Have you ever even been near an Amiga?  An I really mean have you used
>	an Amiga with 2.04 for a sufficient length of time to get over the
>	initial "it's not Windows or OS/2 shock."  If so, I think you would
>	find that is very comparable in functionality to Windows or OS/2.
>
>	As far as memory protection, I fail to see the big deal about not
>	having it.  If you run good software, your memory should never get
>	trashed.  Now if your a developer, that's a different story.
>	I mean you have to kill -9 processes on Un*x occasionally.

   Too many people regard memory protection as being only useful to the 
programmer.  This is not true.  I regard memory protection as being analogous
to circuit breakers in a house.  You could say that if appliance manufacturers
made their products better then cicuit breakers would not be needed, but this
completely misses the point.  Memory protection is for the USER, to protect
him or her from only one badly written program crashing everything.  I agree
that programmers should continue to strive for bug-free software, but to say
memory protection is not necessary because programmers should write 100% 
bug-free code is unrealistic, because software will never be 100% bug free.

>	As for VM, it again is over-rated.  you can always put in more
>	memory.

   RAM will always be more expensive than hard drive space.  One of the things
that Amigas as badly limited in due to its lack of virtual memory is image
processing.  On Macs with 4M of RAM and 10M of virtual memory, I have been
able to due wonders with large 2500x3300 scanned images, using Photo Shop.
By comparison, with ADPro on a 6M Amiga 3000, I run out of memory when I try
to load images larger than 1024x768.

>> +-------------------+-----------------------+--------------------------------+
>> | Jerry J. Shekhel  | Molecular Simulations | Time just fades the pages      |
>> | Drummers do it... | Inc.  Waltham, MA USA | in my book of memories.        |
>> |    ... In rhythm! |     (617) 890-2888    |              -- Guns N' Roses  |
>> +-------------------+-----------------------+--------------------------------+
>> |           ...! [ princeton mit-eddie bu sunne ] !polygen!jerry             |
>> |                            jerry@polygen.com                               |
>> +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
>
>Fred Heitkamp,  ** Not claiming any organization **
>

---
| Marc Barrett -MB-  |  email: barrett@iastate.edu
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Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy