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From: ali@rocky.STANFORD.EDU (Ali Ozer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Note on Atari newsgroup
Message-ID: <201@rocky.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: Wed, 18-Mar-87 12:47:28 EST
Article-I.D.: rocky.201
Posted: Wed Mar 18 12:47:28 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 20-Mar-87 02:21:57 EST
References: <8703180813.AA29897@cory.Berkeley.EDU>
Reply-To: ali@rocky.UUCP (Ali Ozer)
Organization: Stanford University Computer Science Department
Lines: 37

---
Well, sometimes the amount of misinformation floating around in the atari.st
newsgroup gets a bit too much... In fact, even their Atari support person,
Alex L. (who recently appeared on the net, seemingly after the outcry from
newsgroup readers about the lack of Atari support), is as misinformed about
the Amiga as some of the readers... Just recently someone complained about the
Atari "_" bug, and one of Alex's reponses was that the Amiga is the only
machine you can crash by following the boot instructions *exactly*. Of course
this generated a message or two from fellow Amigans, and it turns out that
Alex was referring to a time when he and (the computer critic and expert) 
Jerry Pournelle tried to boot the Amiga... Sigh, with technical expertise like
that, I think they do need to be corrected once in a while...

Gosh, even Commodore's George Robbins posts informative messages about the
ST on their board. How many times have we had ST people post messages here?
I remember one from several months ago when the person posting it was mumbling
about how superior the ST was to the Amiga...

As long as the messages don't get to be of the religious type, I think such
postings to other boards is useful (and even necessary!). And none of the
recent (long) messages about '010 and '020 compatibility have been all
that religious --- Just informative.

On a totally seperate topic, I recently bought Robert Peck's "Programmer's
Guide to the Amiga," after reading a recommendation here on comp.sys.amiga.
I'm glad I did --- It's a good book. I just read parts of it, but it has
thought me a lot about the parts of the Amiga I didn't know about (such
as the AmigaDOS Lock stuff, etc)... It presents facts in a clear and concise
fashion, and has a lot of examples (which seem to be tested and working,
but I haven't verified this). One bug I've found is the misspelling of
Tom Rokicki's name as Thomas. And in another page there is mention of
"mutual exclusion for gadgets," but just in a paragraph, and without
examples... Well, as clearly stated in the Enhancer manual, mutual
exclusion hasn't been implemented yet... But, in any case, it's a good
book so I second the rec.

Ali Ozer, ali@rocky.stanford.edu