🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <19950829.1165CF8.159DF@olympus.net>, dons@olympus.net (Don
Schmelling) wrote:

> Perhaps someone thinks the majority of users do in fact need PMT.

Yea, right.  The majority of users have no idea what PMT is.  Heck, much
of the self-proclaimed technical elite on Usenet have no idea what PMT
means.  Not a week goes by where I don't see a posting saying that PMT
will reduce the number of crashes of their machine, yet we all know that
is due to memory protection, which is an orthogonal issue to the
multitasking scheduler.  I'd be far more impressed if someone had an
example of why CMT is causing the imminent death of Apple as we know it
besides the one of formatting floppies with the Finder.  One example does
not condemn an entire implementation; doing something else while you are
formatting floppies isn't that important to most (obviously not all)
people, no matter how loud or how often you scream that it is.

Of course, this doesn't stop people from thinking they need it, even if
they don't understand what it is.  That is the power of marketing.

> Everyone that wants to complete several tasks in the shortest amount of time
> needs PMT, unless of course they like wasting their time...

If you want to do that, buy seperate machines.  Everything else is a
compromise.   For that matter, a scheduler that does run to completion,
only switching when blocked on a resource, is far quicker overall than
PMT.  It isn't desireable in an interactive system, but it is more
efficient.
-- 
        Nevin ":-)" Liber       nevin@CS.Arizona.EDU    (520) 293-2799