Xref: utzoo comp.sys.ibm.pc:28904 comp.sys.amiga:33919
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mcnc!rti!bcw
From: bcw@rti.UUCP (Bruce Wright)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: OS/2 vs AmigaDOS
Summary: Not intended to offend ...
Message-ID: <2962@rti.UUCP>
Date: 17 May 89 00:34:32 GMT
References: <2134@iitmax.IIT.EDU> <5625@microsoft.UUCP> <5664@microsoft.UUCP> <2656@ssc-vax.UUCP>
Organization: Research Triangle Institute, RTP, NC
Lines: 29

In article <2656@ssc-vax.UUCP>, coy@ssc-vax.UUCP (Stephen B Coy) writes:
> I'm sorry if this came off as a flame but the tone of your response
> implied that I was too ignorant to know what I was talking about and
> this offended me a touch.

The posting wasn't intended to imply anything particular ... as I said,
I haven't seen the article and had no idea what's in it (your later
postings have helped somewhat).  Sometimes I have seen benchmark articles 
in magazines which were stated with *extreme* confidence by their authors
who obviously didn't understand what it was that they were measuring -
sometimes this may not be obvious to someone who reads the article but is
not familiar with the specific product.

If OS/2 is *really* taking 40% of the CPU away from a pure compute-bound
process on an otherwise idle machine then something is wrong -- I don't
know of *ANY* multitasking system that is *THAT* bad.  I suspect that
there is some hidden variable (such as a call to a clock timer or some-
thing) that is causing the difference - do you have the source to the
actual benchmark that they ran?  I have heard of such "innocuous" system
calls really messing up benchmarks in funny ways that are not always
easy to understand or predict.

Please don't be offended by my previous posting - it wasn't meant to be
trying to imply anything particular about you or anybody else.  It was
written with very little information about the specific case you brought
up.  My only point was that when trying to get quantitative data from
the popular press you need to have several pounds of salt available.

						Bruce C. Wright