🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <40uj55$gub@goonsquad.spies.com>,
Maynard Handley  <maynardh@apple.com> wrote:

>Something the people in this thread don't seem to understand:
>UNIX and NT are multi-user OS's. MacOS is (and will be for the 
>foreseeable future)  a personal OS.

  Yes, and your point?

  From the point of view as a _user_ of these operating systems,
Unix wins over MacOS when I want to leave the box.  Why?  Because
I don't have to enter thirty-seven different passwords when I
want to get at other machines, read email, look at Meeting Maker,
etcetera, etcetera.   MacOS gives me a pretty interface, while
Unix lets me do my work without interrupting me for passwords
every time I turn around.


>However a personal system is a different sort of beast. When one is 
>playing a game, or capturing video for example, one does NOT want other 
>processes sneaking in and grabbing time.

   Why not?  If I've only got one processor, I'm certainly not
going to lock everything else out just because I'm doing something
that's moderately time-critical (and, speaking of things being
locked out, when the local Mac decides that, yes, it REALLY wants
to see what's happening on the ethernet, it will lock me out, never
mind that I might be in the middle of doing a video capture or playing
some k-k00l video game -- no, when it gets done snooping on those
IMPORTANT QuickMail packets, it will give the processor back to me,
but only in the fullness of time.)

  If you design multitasking in at the start, you don't get bodges
like this; you might lose a little bit additional cpu, but that
lossage will be spread out over time, not dropped on you all of a
sudden when you're about to get rid of that pesky MIG-21 that you
just spent 45 minutes tracking down.

                 ____
   david parsons \bi/ orc@pell.com
		  \/