Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!uunet!convex!egsner!pfloyd!greg From: greg@pfloyd.lonestar.org (Greg Harp) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy Subject: Re: Why are Amigaoids hell bent on proving the Amiga is better ? Message-ID: Date: 30 Jun 91 04:01:17 GMT References: <1991Jun27.170049.21231@grebyn.com> <1991Jun29.005127.17803@grebyn.com> Organization: Not much... Lines: 38 In article <1991Jun29.005127.17803@grebyn.com> ckp@grebyn.com (Checkpoint Technologies) writes: >In article greg@pfloyd.lonestar.org (Greg Harp) writes: >> Ok, so you know the memory is screwed. >>Just what are you going to do about it? Hmmm? Fix it? Sorry... > >Yes, fix it. But at least, don't bet your portfolio on the answers you >got just before your machine printed "MEMORY PARITY ERROR" and crashed. >What do you do now when your machine has a bad memory bit? Nothing, >'cause you may not know it happened. How can you fix the memory with just one parity bit? You can't even be sure that it's not the parity bit that is wrong. Besides, on the PC (not that there aren't other machines that use 9-bit parity memory) the machine just hangs anyway. I can understand maybe not trusting answers you got before the crash, but that's not a feature that sells computers. Buyers are more confident about machines that don't crash as much, which is why the Amiga had such a poor reputation early on. When you're multitasking and you don't have memory protection (which is a problem we're going to have to live with, at least on the lower end Amigas -- there's not a good way to do it) you're going to experience some crashes. A lot of software out there (on all platforms) has bugs, and buggy programs don't get along well with multitasking at all. How often do you see "Segmentation Fault" on Unix boxen? I see it a lot when I use buggy programs like Unix LHarc. As for MSDOS machines, I'm so used to hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del all the time that I catch myself doing it on my Amiga. Under 2.0, when a "Software Failure" occurs the requester's options are "Suspend" and "Reboot" instead of "Retry" and "Cancel." It's a lot nicer to be able to just click Suspend and continue from there... -- -------greg@pfloyd.lonestar.org---greg@pfloyd.UUCP---egsner!pfloyd!greg------- "How I wish. How I wish you were here. We're just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl year after year. Running over the same old ground. What have we found? The same old fears. Wish you were here." -- Pink Floyd