Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
From: dnavas@oracle.uucp (David Navas)
Subject: BLAZEBIRD [the wrapup to Re: Oh my God! Help my friend....]
Organization: Oracle Corporation, Redwood Shores CA
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1992 16:30:12 GMT
X-Disclaimer: This message was written by an unauthenticated user
              at Oracle Corporation.  The opinions expressed are those
              of the user and not necessarily those of Oracle.

It starts out calm, it gets better at the end, I hope :)

In article <1992Nov20.011148.9969@ncsu.edu> linville@garfield.catt.ncsu.edu (John W. Linville) writes:
>David,

Yawn.  Morning!  :)

>Your post was (as usual) a well-reasoned and fair comparison.

[Eyes pop open]  So THAT's why no one was responding to them!
And I thought it was because they just weren't getting out.  Great, thanks,
I'll try and do better :)

>tracing and similar tasks can be handled by a PC just as well as they can be
>handled by an Amiga.  Plus, with a PC, you can get some real CPU speed for
>a reasonable price.

Yeah, sounds about right to me.
Having made my living off programming these things, though, I'd commit
hari-kari before I'd buy a PC ;)

>As far as me being no more informed than the guy that I referred to as a
>moron, at least I was not dumb enough to say something like 'PCs can't and
>never will multitask,' which is essentially what he said.

Yep, that was a stupid thing to say (although I don't exactly remember it that
way?).  What I remember happening was an Amiga owner stating as fact that the
Amiga multitasked better than OS/2 (better == faster), and a certain OS/2 fan
stating as fact that the IBM OS/2 multitasked better than the Amiga.

And to prove the point, this ridiculous ray-tracing example was given, which
proves absolutely nothing for either side!  As I recall, this was not the
doing of John (for the record), but really, you let yourself be dragged
into discussing irrelevancies.... :)

Here's some free advice for both sides:
	Amiga -- compare large-data message passing times between foreground
		 and background tasks with a lot of low priority background
		 tasks.

	OS/2 -- compare the responsiveness of the foreground process when
		-large- numbers of background processes are chugging away,
		and come up with some decent example for showing off what
		dynamic variation can accomplish for you (the real problem is
		that that option doesn't seem available for the foreground
		proces, pity that :( ).

I don't -know- what will happen, but I suspect that the Amiga's model of
programming is better suited at treating the system as one big process
with lots of prioritized threads, and OS/2's model is better suited for
large numbers of separate applications.

Personal Opinion rather than researched fact.  Do your own research, I
have an (admitted) bias against PCs which may or may not have any basis at
all in fact.

>P.S.  As far as I know, OS/2's scheduling algorithm has essentially not
>changed since 1.3 (at least in the context of this discussion).  

Great, now I can really act like I know what I'm saying ;)

Okay, that said, I think I need to get more into the spirit of things.

-THIS IS WHERE IT GETS BETTER!  AH BWHAHAHAHA-

FALCON RULEZ!  CAN -STRAP- ON WRIST HAS 030 *P*O*W*E*R* AND BIGGER WINGSPAN
THAN A1200.  WHO WANTS STUPID NUMBERED COMPUTER ANYWAY?
FOR JUST $1000, YOU TOO CAN OWN COMPUTER WITH ^A^M^A^Z^I^N^G^ MOTOROLA
$10 DSP CHIP.  DON'T BE STOOPID BUY FALCON -- SOARS THROUGH OWN
VAPOR LIKE F15 FIGHTER JET.

Hey, that gives me a great idea for a future Amiga model name -- the
-Blackbird-.  It flies so high and so fast, it'll leave your innards over
three separate continents, and that's before you plug the thing in....

[Drat, I hit that CAPSLOCK key again, sorry, let's try again!]

Announcing:
BLAZEBIRD, the ONLY /W/O/R/T/H/Y/ successor to the SR Blackbird.  This AMAZING
AMIGA computer will literally sweep you off your feet, displace you by
7.14 light years [Ed. disclaimer: slightly less if running in PAL video modes]
before you can say Ninja Turtles are JUST STOOPID TURTLES FOR CRYING OUT LOUD.
[Ed. disclaimer: Commodore Intl not responsible for the loss of time with your
loved ones due to the effects of special relativity.]

HOW CAN SUCH AN AMAZING MACHINE EXIST NOW, IN OUR TIME?  EASY!  Commodore has
gone to a proprietary optical-only technology.  So it travels at the speed of
light because it -is- light!  It's so light you could hold it in one hand --
it's almost VAPOR-light!

All those other computers are JUST -SUB-LIGHTSPEED COMPUTERS, MAN.  So give it
up, get a life, GET A BLAZEBIRD -- IT'LL *A*M*A*Z*E* YOUR FALCON FRIENDS AS
IT RIPS BY THE FALCON SO FAST, THE VACUUM LEFT BEHIND IT CAUSES FALCON TO
EXPLODE INTO TINY BITS OF MEAT.  THE SUPERHEATED AIR then COLLAPSES onto
FALCON MEAT and heats it into CRISPY LITTLE CRITTERS cereal -- 9 essential
vitamins and minerals for a balanced breakfast.

It's great ALSO for APPLE-BIT cereal, and for maiming and frying all PC folk.
Both those too stupid to realize they have a computer that's incapable of
doing what it's doing AND Political Critter folk who persist in this
INANE habit of posting politically ridiculous stances in ANY COMP.SYS group
anywhere.

[So how'd I do?  I'm awake now, anyway, all that shouting tends to do that ;)]
David C. Navas						dnavas@oracle.com
Working for, but not speaking on behalf of, Oracle Corp.