ben@epmooch.UUCP (Rev. Ben A. Mesander) (01/06/91)
> This was written by somebody, but the attribution got lost in someone's editor: >-> So in return, here's _my_ own beefs <g>: First, the unspeakable >-> horror of today's CS majors who rely on hardware to catch their >-> mistakes. Second, the unrealistic expectation that inexpensive >-> personal computers should have Yeah? Well one of _my_ own beefs is the expectation that all users of the Amiga should have to play beta-tester for software to see if it will guru thier machine under any set of circumstances (low memory, other programs grabbing resources, etc.) while still trying to get important work done. It's easy to say "don't use use it if it guru's your machine", but quite another to discover an error path nobody tested in an editor in the middle of an hour long compile, resulting in a guru, followed by the old backup, format, and restore. We can't expect *every* user to test all the software we write, and neither are we perfect programmers. An MMU and a robust file system are good insurance policies against losing work. -- | ben@epmooch.UUCP (Ben Mesander) | "Cash is more important than | | ben%servalan.UUCP@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu | your mother." - Al Shugart, | | !chinet!uokmax!servalan!epmooch!ben | CEO, Seagate Technologies |
rlawrence@halluc.FIDONET.ORG (Richard Lawrence) (01/06/91)
-> So in return, here's _my_ own beefs <g>: First, the unspeakable -> horror of today's CS majors who rely on hardware to catch their -> mistakes. Second, the unrealistic expectation that inexpensive -> personal computers should have Hmmm. Well, this one goes both ways in my mind. While I agree that it's not terrible that the Amiga's current OS doesn't make use of an MMU (not present in most Amiga machines), it's a royal pain in the arse that it doesn't do resource recovery - and the major reason it doesn't is because it wasn't that feasible without an MMU. An MMU is not a magical wand that keeps you from killing your machine with errant tasks. I can make OS/2 rollover and play dead just as well as I can AmigaDos. :-) -> a $99 Tandy CoCo-3... it's got an MMU :). And I'd be terribly -> surprised if Amiga Unix doesn't use it. Further, I think you're -> right that _eventually_ Good Lord, it would be horrible to see a Unix that doesn't try to protect itself. Luckily, just like AT&T's 5.4 (which is what it is anyway) our Unix gracefully whines when a task errors out with nice little segmentation errors that don't shut down everything else. -Rich Lawrence, Sysop:Hallucination 703-425-5824 Amiga/Atari/Mac rlawrence@halluc.fidonet.org CI$:71101,2272 Fido: 1:109/345 -- Richard Lawrence - via FidoNet node 1:109/345 UUCP: ...!uunet!halluc!rlawrence INTERNET: rlawrence@halluc.FIDONET.ORG