Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!quiche!genius From: genius@cs.mcgill.ca (Michel NGUYEN) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy Subject: Re: Amiga basher Message-ID: <1991Jun17.160936.14622@cs.mcgill.ca> Date: 17 Jun 91 16:09:36 GMT References: <56@ryptyde.UUCP> <1991Jun16.170632.22749@sugar.hackercorp.com> Sender: news@cs.mcgill.ca (Netnews Administrator) Organization: SOCS, McGill University, Montreal, Canada Lines: 84 In response to Peter da Silva, >No, you set the serious computation app at -1, and let it soak up the CPU >time. It still gets nearly 100% of the CPU. Read the last message I wrote: >Mandel was eating all the spare CPU time. I just paused it, and now PM shows >as near to zero CPU time usage as I can tell, no matter what *interactive* >tasks I run. So it was virtually unaffected by them. >That's what real-time process scheduling is all about. >No, at priority 0. Mandel is at -1. Think about it. It's clearer to me now. Any process at -1 will have maximum priority over the other ones at > -1. That's however will not change anything at all. Even if you have the best real-time process scheduling in the world, and if the CPU is already running at 100%, when you throw in a CPU intensive apps, the overall performance will be degraded, not matter what. But I guess it does not apply in your case as most of the time you seem to have a lot (if not only) of *interactive* apps with iddle and waiting time. You cannot throw in an intensive CPU apps into a CPU already working at 100% and expect the same overall performance. If you still don't understand what I mean, tell me and I'll mail you an uudecoded TIFF picture. I know you can play a couple of animated demos, play a stereo sound music, downloading a couple of meg of files and archiving and compute a Mandelbrot image (320x200x32??) and format a diskette with your Amiga very nicely. But I don't. I don't format diskettes everyday, I don't play demos everyday, I rarely download files at 2400 baud. But I work everyday. So while I work, I work. Sure I play games, but I don't swicth between work and games/demo/sounds as easyly as the Amiga or Unix do. Maybe it's my flaws. >Hundreds of Macs, all of which die horribly as soon as I start doing what >I consider normal things on them. X-windows, with many of the same design >flaws as the Mac, and which take a 17 MIPS CPU to get the same responsiveness >as my 0.7 MIPS Amiga 1000. Microsoft Windows, which is gorgeous but an >excersize in frustration. Yes it takes a "17 MIPS" machine for X-windows, but it is more than just any window manager or process manager or GUI, it has all the system protocol for communication and networking (Client/server), that's where the real power of X and it's not an OS. But I guess you already know that also. What are the flaws in X? Have you ever try X in Amiga 3000UX? Windows in a 386sx is faster. Yes Windows 3.0 is "an exercice in frustration". But considering that Windows 3.0 is working on top of DOS which is a brain-dead OS, I say "chapeau!" for Windows. >Oh, and the original Xerox Star and 1100 running Smalltalk and Interlisp-D. >As well as any number of older UNIX windowing systems that, simply because >they had to run in small systems, were conservative of resources. Really, >the 68010-based 3b1 was more responsive under WM or MGR than a sparc-1 >under X. >You can cover up poor design by throwing MIPS at it, or adapt to it so it >doesn't hurt you too much, but it doesn't go away. Throw in Mathematica, a couple of rendering or fractal computations and you will see how poor is ANY design. When you will need more than 17 MIPS (but I doubt it considering what you do most of the time) one day, I guess you will not upgrade to a 68040, it only shows how poor design the 68030 is. >"God created the world in 7 days because he didn't have to worry about > backwards compatibility". Yeah, but it took more than 7 mega years for EVOLUTION to get from a simple Ameoba to Homo Sapiens, because of backwards compatibility. >-- >Peter da Silva. `-_-' . > 'U` "Have you hugged your wolf today?" *************************************************************************** "L'Avocat du Diable" ***************************************************************************