Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!crdgw1!uunet!stanford.edu!neon.Stanford.EDU!torrie From: torrie@cs.stanford.edu (Evan Torrie) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy Subject: Re: De-macification of the Amiga (Re: The Amiga's Future) Message-ID: <1991Jun25.055430.1316@neon.Stanford.EDU> Date: 25 Jun 91 05:54:30 GMT References: <1991Jun22.213406.13336@neon.Stanford.EDU> <13361@uwm.edu> Sender: torrie@neon.Stanford.EDU (Evan James Torrie) Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Ca , USA Lines: 61 gblock@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Gregory R Block) writes: >From article <1991Jun22.213406.13336@neon.Stanford.EDU>, by torrie@cs.stanford.edu (Evan Torrie): >> I assume there are lots of good points to back up that assertion. >There are, but there's no point. It's >pointless, and it's pretty well based on tastes... So they aren't technical points, but merely opinions? Doesn't sound like a good enough reason to say blankly "it sucks"... >> I would guess most power users will find out as soon as they start >> using System 7, if they bother to look at the Hints and Tips in various >> magazines, online forums etc. ResEdit has always been one of the >> primary tools in any power user's repertoire. >Does ResEdit come with the OS? :) It doesn't come on the System disks, but it's free if you want it... (i.e. it's available for ftp, as well as on user group disks, it even has its own book in the shops now). >Still sounds like a way of getting >around something the OS has set up. If it was meant to do it, it >would do it. I repeat. It's not the OS which has the responsibility for what the application decides it can open. It only reflects (via auto-highlighting) what the application author has indicated he wants the Finder to do in the case of drag-and-drop. >> I don't think so. In fact, if you look at many of the great ideas, they're >> great because they combine two or more disparate approaches into a single >> combination which has the good features of both, but eliminates the bad. >Which? Well, lots of examples in Computer Science... e.g. priority scheduling schemes. You take Unix which has process aging of priorities, and a real-time scheduler like Amiga OS, and combine the two so that all processes with priorities above 0 are done on a real-time basis [i.e. run to completion], while those under 0 are aged like Unix. (This is, I believe what VMS supports). Also segments vs page-based OS memory schemes. Segments give you protection over the exact extent of your process, but are inflexible in terms of requiring contiguous space. Pages don't require contiguous space, but they have internal fragmentation at the end of your process, because they must be a fixed size. Therefore, you can combine the two (as IBM does in its mainframe architectures) to have pages within segment tables - thereby giving you exact protection, but the flexibility of paging. Similar things occur in architecture... caches for example. You have main memory, which is big, but slow, and internal registers, which are fast, but few. Combine the two ideas, and you have a cache - reasonably large [to satisfy most requests], yet fast enough to keep the processor from stalling too often. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Evan Torrie. Stanford University, Class of 199? torrie@cs.stanford.edu "And in the death, as the last few corpses lay rotting in the slimy thoroughfare, the shutters lifted in inches, high on Poacher's Hill..."