Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!newstop!texsun!texbell!ficc!peter From: peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Macintosh OS Message-ID: <-E=3GG8@xds13.ferranti.com> Date: 14 Jun 90 17:46:46 GMT References: <8767@odin.corp.sgi.com> <369@three.MV.COM> Reply-To: peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) Organization: Xenix Support, FICC Lines: 53 In article <369@three.MV.COM> cory@three.MV.COM (Cory Kempf) writes: > Which brings up a point that *I* was going to let slide... I made a post > suggesting that a well written *USER* oriented program would check for > events frequently... then several people > posted such fine examples of *USER* oriented programs as Ray Tracers and > Compilers. Give me a break! No. I won't give you a break. a) The first point you missed is that not all programs are user-oriented (or, to be more precise, well suited to being implemented as an editor). Computationally intensive programs are the most common example of this, but what about such things as print spoolers? b) The second point you missed is that even some editor-type programs *are* computationally intensive. Frequent calls to GetNextEvent will slow down your massive spreadsheet recalcs. CAD programs with decent renderers spend a lot of time doing 3-d clipping calculations. > And I have yet to see a shrink wrapped > ray trace program. Sculpt-3d for the Amiga was the first shrink-wrapped ray-tracer that I know of, but the equally computationally intensive Videoscape-3d, which is a scanline renderer, came out about the same time. There are now quite a few programs of this type (Turbo Silver, Caligari, etc...). Just because you haven't seen a class of programs doesn't mean its members comprise the null set. > A nice toy for academics, but a waste of disk space > to the avarage user. And they do not have much of a UI either. Sure they do. You have to get the object in somehow. Sculpt-3d has quite a sophisticated CAD-style front end. Videoscape uses a set of separate programs with varying user-interfaces to perform the same task. > A well written set of cooperating > tasks will run at least as fast as a set of preemptively scheduled tasks. And... > On a GUI based system, they will run (as perceived by the user) better. These are completely unsupported assertions, and demonstrably wrong. The Amiga GUI doesn't have nearly the polish of the Mac (though the new O/S is much nicer than the old one), but it's also had a hell of a lot less development money put into it. On the subject of scheduling, however, it is light-years ahead of the Mac. Even under a heavy task load the stock Amiga 1000 is faster, more consistent, and more responsive than even a Mac-II with a couple of active tasks under Multifinder. -- Have you hugged your wolf today? Peter da Silva. `-_-' +1 713 274 5180. 'U`