Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!ames!ucsd!nosc!baron!ryptyde!dant From: dant@ryptyde.UUCP (Daniel Tracy) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy Subject: Re: The Amiga's Future Message-ID: <16@ryptyde.UUCP> Date: 4 Jun 91 09:47:16 GMT References: <6678@vela.acs.oakland.edu> <1991Jun03.053144.3208@ariel.unm.edu> <1991Jun4.003619.3661@news.iastate.edu> <1991Jun4.025024.823@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu> Reply-To: dant@ryptyde.UUCP (Daniel Tracy) Organization: Ryptyde Timesharing Lines: 53 Responding to the following: "NON-Flicker displays are expensive, NTSC incompatible, and only useful for TEXT processing. In short, if a machine doesn't have an interlaced display mode, it sucks. Removing flicker from the Toaster would be idiotic. For drawing/rendering for broadcast video, flicker is acceptable." I agree that interlaced video is necessary for NTSC compatibility, but when you're not planning on exporting to NTSC interlacing is obviously just a method of making up for low processing (or I/O) speed. Computers without an "interlaced display mode" hardly suck, as this conversion is handled by the D/A device! " BTW, I think System 7.0 is a big failure/joke. It is incredibly slow on anything less than an 030 with lots of ram. I've been reading many accounts of users running even a simple application with a clock program in the background and having the system become incredibly jerky and slow. One user in comp.sys.mac.system accounts of running tetris and "superclock" resulting in the game becoming really sluggish (on an LC). This is pathetic, I can run multiple copies of tetris on my A500 with a term program, and a clock and all of them run at near full speed. I've noticed Apple has defined a new interprocessing scripting language which some magazines have hailed "revolutionary". This disgusts me since it sounds suspicously like a rip-off of REXX/(Perl|Awk|etc). IMHO Apple made a bad move not adopting Rexx since ANSI is "standardizing" and IBM is reembracing it." First of all, you obviously know very little about Macintosh's. The future scripting language for the Mac, AppleScript, is nothing like REXX. System 7.0 is NOT significantly slower than System 6.x except in some instances that are program-specific, like when a program updates the scroll bar too often (White Knight updates its scroll bars about 50x more than Apple recommends). They used to be able to get away with this, but with 8-bit color patterns for the scroll bars, they now pay a performance penalty for it. "Superclock" isn't even a program at all, it's a System Extension. The problem may have been the Tetris game, but I can't imagine something like Tetris being affected by something like the above. I haven't noticed performance differences in most of my programs. Ah, I think I know what the problem was. System 7.0 installs itself with enough Virtual Memory to double your System RAM, by default. He may not have turned this off. Anyway, I don't see how an Amiga user can complain about the Mac OS. The Macintosh's OS is just as far ahead of the Amiga's as Amiga hardware is ahead of Mac hardware. "[Why did I bring up the Mac? Well Marc would have brung it up anyway, and I happen to despise the Mac environment (too confining) and it's condescending interface. ]" Again, I don't see it. Care to be more specific? Anything in particular you can't do, or you just don't know how to use a Macintosh? Again, the Macintosh OS has far more features/power.