Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!jato!jdickson From: jdickson@jato.jpl.nasa.gov (Jeff Dickson) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech Subject: Re: Why Amiga Gurus???? Message-ID: <1991Feb8.171115.8856@jato.jpl.nasa.gov> Date: 8 Feb 91 17:11:15 GMT References: <1991Jan31.035105.14277@usenet.ins.cwru.edu> <156@dogmelb.dog.oz.au> Reply-To: jdickson@jato.Jpl.Nasa.Gov (Jeff Dickson) Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA Lines: 49 In article t22918@ursa (Matt Ranney ) writes: >david@dogmelb.dog.oz.au (David Le Blanc) writes: > >>Unix boxes 'segmentation fault' or 'core dump' or sometimes have >>to reboot!, Macinsloshes give 'System Error'. IBM pc's simply lock, > >Why can't Amiga's handle failed tasks like the Unix OS can? What happened to IBM PCs and Macintoshes? >I'd be perfectly >happy to have my computer tell me that a task failed, and all it's allocated >resources had been returned. I'm not an OS programmer, so I don't know why >this would cause a problem, or how hard it would be, so could someone answer >this? > >I had my Amiga for 45 minutes, and had GURU'ed it just by opening messing >with things on the Workbench 1.3 and Extras disk. These are commercial >programs, and I wasn't really doing anything out of the ordinary. > >-- >Matt Ranney >t22918@ursa.calvin.edu Software development on the Amiga can be a long drawn out process depending on how often the Amiga Guru's in the interim. But the Guru number is informative and often helps you steer in the right direction to fix the problem. Better than the competition - they just lock up snd don't tell you s___! What really bugs me, is that some of the Amiga utilities can cause the Amiga to guru. Take the note pad utility. If you select the menu item "save as" then "save", the machine will guru. Sure it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but because one is above the other sometimes you can goof. Seems like some kind of resource tracking could be implemented since permission to use many resources is through a particular interface (i.e. OpenDevice(), OpenLibrary()). But this has flaws, because sometimes you just clone objects that correspond to devices (i.e. Serial Device). To do memory tracking seems expensive. I still slave unto my 7.1 MHZ A2000. I don't want the overhead of the OS to be increased much more than it is already in V2.0. Jeff a good deal of overhead (CPU and memory).