Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!mtunx!pacbell!ames!oliveb!sun!pepper!cmcmanis From: cmcmanis%pepper@Sun.COM (Chuck McManis) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech Subject: Re: Amiga and the MMU (Re: Suggestion for 1.4) Message-ID: <56806@sun.uucp> Date: 16 Jun 88 17:28:01 GMT References: <611@myrias.UUCP> <11640001@hpfcdc.HP.COM> <2110@sugar.UUCP> <5580@xanth.cs.odu.edu> Sender: news@sun.uucp Reply-To: cmcmanis@sun.UUCP (Chuck McManis) Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View Lines: 35 In article <5580@xanth.cs.odu.edu> kent@xanth.UUCP (Kent Paul Dolan) writes: > ... how about making this a widely distributed beta >release (like to everyone) that does something gross like write "beta >release" in two inch high letters across the bootup screen, and accompany >it with a note saying "we think this is going to break a lot of software; >please try it and report problems that look like to your >third party software vendor and to ; THIS TEST RELEASE >IS NOT KNOWN TO BE SAFE TO USE WHILE DOING OPERATIONS ON VALUABLE DATA, >KEEP EXTRA FREQUENT BACKUPS; don't discard your 1.2 or 1.3 workbench disks >yet." >Kent, the man from xanth. Unfortunately it wouldn't work. It would be almost OK to just release it to all registered developers (Commercial and Certified) because they know what "beta" means. Unfortunately, users have no idea of what the significance of that word is. Just the other day at the local computer store where some user was surreptiously bragging that he already had 1.3, he told me that the internal name for the workbench at Commodore was "Gamma Workbench." And, that they were not releasing it until the new chips were out. He assured me it was already done (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). The other problem with this scheme is that by asking for feedback on what it will break, you imply you will fix it so that it doesn't break those things. And that is probably a false hope. Anyway, all I can say is that I hope the port to the 68020 with MMU has an option in it to protect a task that a developer writes (RunProtected maybe) so that a developer can be *sure* that his/her program is not doing anything that damages the rest of the system. In so doing, the reliability of all Amiga's goes up because the code they run is much more well behaved. And the development cycle speeds up because those same developers don't have to reboot when their code goes awry. --Chuck McManis uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis BIX: cmcmanis ARPAnet: cmcmanis@sun.com These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.