Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!wuarchive!sdd.hp.com!think.com!rpi!batcomputer!alchemy!judge
From: judge@alchemy.tcnet.ithaca.ny.us (rory toma)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: AMIGA
Message-ID: <8u6k22w162w@alchemy.tcnet.ithaca.ny.us>
Date: 7 May 91 16:48:18 GMT
References: <5054@dirac.physics.purdue.edu>
Organization: Alchemy International, Ithaca, N.Y.
Lines: 37

murphy@gibbs.physics.purdue.edu (William J. Murphy) writes:

> >In article <17564@cbmvax.commodore.com> daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Hay
> >
> >   that would have made far more impact for the same price than the DSP.  
> >   Especially a DSP that can't be used for mathematics; something most 
> >   Workstations just about require these days is at least 1.5-2 MFLOPS or be
> 
> While the Amiga with the GVP A3000/50 accelerator board may have placed the 
> Amiga at the top end a few months ago, I certainly wouldn't buy and Amiga
> if I wanted to do serious gronking of calculations.  The reason is I don't 
> like the added worry of errant tasks writing into the low memory and crashing
> the machine.  This is not to say that it can't happen on the NeXT, You can cr
> the window server by trying to run bad PostScript code.  
> 
> There is of course another solution, that is to write out the intermediate
> results of a simulation or job.  For most of the thousands of CPU hours we
> have logged on our NeXTs, I don't think that it is worth the extra effort to
> write intermediate results when a job lasts 0.3 to 3.0 hours.  When the jobs
> get in to the range of days and weeks, then it is worth the trouble.
> 
> So what's the point.  When I developed software on my Amiga, I regularly
> crashed because I am not a great C programmer.  I didn't appreciate rebooting
> once for every compile and test cycle.  On the NeXT or any UN*X system with
> memory protection (I suppose we have to include OS-2 and VMS) it takes someth
> more drastic than "int *data; data=0;" to crash the machine.
> 
> Bill Murphy
> murphy@physics.purdue.edu
> Anything above the line beneath the line below is false.
> ________________The Line Beneath________________________

OK, then run UNIX on an Amiga... The nice thing about AmigaOS is that it 
is very useful, quick and takes up a very small space. My current system 
file space is at 4 megs, which includes a heck of a lot of PD xtras.

rory