Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!efi!tim
From: tim@efi.com (Tim Maroney)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system
Subject: Re: Protected-mode snake oil
Message-ID: <1990Aug14.200525.20562@efi.com>
Date: 14 Aug 90 20:05:25 GMT
References: <1204.26c2fb48@waikato.ac.nz>
Organization: Electronics For Imaging, Inc.
Lines: 25

In article <1204.26c2fb48@waikato.ac.nz> ccc_ldo@waikato.ac.nz (Lawrence
D'Oliveiro, Waikato University) writes:
>Frankly, I'm a little skeptical. As a regular user of both a Mac and
>a VAX/VMS cluster, I'd have to say that the relative frequency of
>crashes of the two systems, leaving aside the times I crash either
>one while debugging my own software, is something in the region of
>10:1. That is, it's not as much as 100:1.

"Leaving aside the times I crash either one while debugging my own
software"?

Lawrence, that's the whole point!  The main user community clamoring
for memory protection is software developers!  I really don't like
crashing my system hundreds of times during development.  It leads to
disk errors, it wastes a lot of time, it sometimes loses my work, it
makes it impossible to trace many errors.

How often have you crashed VMS while developing a user-space
application without special privileges?

Ever?  I doubt it.

Compare that to several times a day for developing an ordinary
Macintosh application.  Dividing by zero leaves an infinite difference
between the two.