Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!nuchat!sugar!karl From: karl@sugar.hackercorp.com (Karl Lehenbauer) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: guru errors, bombs, lockups Message-ID: <3650@sugar.hackercorp.com> Date: 20 Mar 89 00:22:58 GMT References: <1981NU140487@NDSUVM1>, Organization: Sugar Land Unix - Houston Lines: 29 In article , bader+@andrew.cmu.edu (Miles Bader) writes: > ...; I get just as pissed when a machine shows "cute little > bombs." When a computer gets to this point, slick visual design is > pretty irrelevant. How is the phrase "guru meditation" offensive, anyway? The phrase "guru meditation" is offensive because it is arcane and, well, guru-ish. I would prefer something like "System Crashed." and a little help beyond the guru number (GOMF sort of does this), saying "The program that caused the crashed was probably xxx" and an explanation of what went wrong, to the degree possible, like "memory free list was corrupted," etc. The Guru is certainly better for debugging than a silent lockup, a la most crashes under DOS. Crashes are something Mac people (and PC people who are heavily into TSR programs, etc) have just had to learn to live with, and it's something they don't much want to talk about, even while they're badmouthing the Amiga for the way it handles crashes. An MMU is ultimately the answer; Hackercorp's Unix systems stay up for weeks at a time, even when we write and run buggy code that would crash an unprotected system. Plus, debugging and getting going again after a trap is a lot easier -- no need to reboot, plus Unix sdb can be used on core dumps. Unfortunately, Commodore's apparently not going to do any sort of MMU version of AmigaDOS, which is a pity because there is a lot of stuff you can do with the Amiga exec that you can't do with Unix. -- -- uunet!sugar!karl | "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." -- | -- Ford Prefect -- Usenet BBS (713) 438-5018