🚀 go-pugleaf

ibl-juwa@wiso.wiso.uni-dortmund.de (Juergen Wahlmann) writes:

>It's in the hands of the programmers to avoid shipping buggy software with 
>their whole power. Sounds a bit idealistic, I know, but so it has to be.

And doesn't work. Even when you try to avoid bugs "with your whole power",
you still ship buggy software. That's just a fact of life.

>I have had 8MB of RAM installed in my Amiga and I only used virtual RAM for 
>image processing. Even running the Raytracer, the word processor and TeX 
>together does not fill up my memory. I've then add 8MB to do more image 
>processing and since this time I'd never uses VM again.

Which just shows that

a) you _did_ need VM
b) you don't do very resource-hungry stuff.

>Useful software must not be as bloated and recource hungry as MS always states.

That's "needs not". The negation is different in German and English.

And some very useful software _must_ be resource hungry. How would I get
random access to any single frame from a 400 frame sequence, with every
single frame being 25k in size, without using 10M of RAM?

>>Fine.  But please don't tell me that AmigaOS is *better* than UNIX simply
>>because it chose to leave out a whole bunch of features in order to save
>>some memory back in the days when it cost hundreds of dollars per megabyte.

>Curious. Just that mentality provides you with more and more bloated PC-OS's. 

Which, also, have heaps of essential (to me) functionality.

>Why should a system developer write an efficient OS when all the people runs 
>into the shops to buy more RAM, bigger HD's and a faster processor? Why must I 
>have a Pentium with 100MHz to perform my tasks as fast as on my Amiga with a 
>68040/28MHz? Very curious...

Because you use the wrong OS?
I could send you some C code and some data that code works on. We could then
compare how long it took to run that code on your machine and how long on
mine. OK?
There are efficient, lean OSs out. Not as lean as AmigaOS, but doing a whole
lot more, too.

>BTW, Unix runs smooth in 16MB of Ram, AmigaOS in 4MB. That's more than "some 
>memory", isn't it? 

Unix runs smooth in a whole lot less than that. Even Unix+X runs smooth in
8M, once you spend some time on setting things up for saving memory. 
And there is a lot in UNIX (and linux, especially) to save memory that the
Amiga could not save. Extensive sharing of memory, lazy allocation, demand
paging, even the "evil" VM helps (kicking out all your currently unused
daemons and stuff). There is a break-even point at which, with a given
amount of RAM, you not only get the better OS functionality, but also more
available resources for your processes. That point, however, is not at 4M.

>System performance depends on the data throughput. The lesser the OS swaps the 
>faster it is. That's one great advantage of AmigaOS over other OS's.

Yep. An OS that needs to swap but doesn't know how to certainly is very fast
--- in putting up an error message or in crashing. 

Bernie

-- 
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Anybody out there who knows how to connect a Wyse terminal keyboard to a PC
_without_ the terminal in between? Current keyboard lses chracters evr so
oftn.............  Getng wrs al te im. Hp!