From: mykes@amiga0.SF-Bay.ORG (Mike Schwartz)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: Amigas are cool
Distribution: world
X-NewsSoftware: GRn 1.16e (7/4/92) by Mike Schwartz & Michael B. Smith
Date: 26 Jul 92 23:45:16 PST
Organization: Amiga makes it possible

In article <1992Jul26.212452.6821@news.iastate.edu> barrett@iastate.edu (Marc N Barrett) writes:
> 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.
>

To me, MP is useful if I want to put my machine on a LAN or WAN and not have
it crash, for whatever reason, from time to time.

> >	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.
>

Marc - the problem with Amiga image processing software is that they should
provide their own VM and should overlay the program, if needed, to make room.
No general purpose VM scheme is going to be as fast or slick as a custom one
designed for the App.

Imagine the thrashing a GP VM algorithm does when you have 1Meg of real RAM
and want to use 1Meg plus 128 bytes of VM.  You will be constantly paging
in and out 128 byte blocks, spending lots of CPU time inside of VM routines,
etc.

Also, your 14 Megs of memory (4 real + 10 virtual) might allow you to load
a 256 color image in the resolution you mention, but you won't get an undo
buffer...

> ---
> | Marc Barrett -MB-  |  email: barrett@iastate.edu
> -----------------------------------------------------

--
Amiga programmer of: GRn, MailMinder, Budokan, Beyond Dark Castle, Dark Castle
Sega Genesis programmer of: Dick Tracy and Marble Madness.
Mike Schwartz  (ames!zorch!amiga0!mykes or mykes@amiga0.sf-bay.org)
1124 Fremont Ave.
Los Altos, CA 94024

Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy