I understand that a lot of Canadians don't bother to lock their doors. The rate of violent crime there is very low. I think it also has to do with fear.
Well, I guess it depends on our relationship. For example, does he talk to me when he doesn't need something? But most likely C, "sure, dude." I am assuming that the list is fairly short. You know, the essentials. I mean, I'm not going to do the guy's week worth of shopping just because he's laid up for a couple days.
US is ranked 137 in birth rate. If you don't count immigration, we're pretty screwed, since every person needs to have at least 3 kids.
Every person does not "need" to have any number of kids.
Why not count immigration? I don't see how we're screwed. It would take some time for a slight negative popualtion growth to reduce 275 million to a terribly low number. And there is no reason to believe that population would continue to decrease forever.
Personally, I'd like to see fewer people. More open spaces.. less crowed parks/recreation areas, etc. But I guess the REAL problem is the proportion of elderly. I mean, so what if the US has a population of 200 million vs. 275 (or whatever is now)?
I don't know if you're joking, but just to make it clear, cloning does not mean you get a fully grown clone of yourself. You still have to raise it as a child. Why bother with cloning? Just create baby factories where they take donated eggs and sperm and make babies in test tubes. Duh!
Well, personally, I have reinstalled the same copy of windows on the same machine more times than the activation allows (~20?). So, no, I don't try to activate either.
Now that's persistence! If at first you can't make it stable, try, try again.
So do most modern operating systems. GNU/Linux and Mac OS X will also make full use of swap if available, even if there's "enough" RAM.
I don't see that at all. The swap usage on every Linux system I've ever run has stayed near zero as long as there is plenty of RAM. That is, unless at some point you do run out of RAM and something needs to be swapped out. Sometimes it'll stay swappped out if it doesn't get used.. and then swapped back in when it does get used. From what I gather swapping even when there is plenty of RAM is mostly a problem on Windows. I never have that problem on Linux. I'm not sure about OS X because it is harder to tell when the disk is being accessed because my macs are generally quieter. If there is swapping, I'm sure it is because there just isn't enough RAM. Mac apps can take up enourmous amounts of RAM.
Why? If you use Linux, do you define the box by the OS or the hardware? Do you say, "my P4 2GHz" or "my Linux box"? It's exactly the same sort of thing. I have a couple of Linux systems around here - one's on PPC hardware and one's on intel. They're both just "Linux boxes" to me.
But it completely fails to capture what made teh Amiga special. Linux is special at least partially BECAUSE it can run on just about anything. So running Linux on any random piece of hardware is actually part of its appeal/charm. Amigas are kinda like Macs in that part of the appeal is the hardware and the way the OS is well integrated with it. Like they are designed as a whole package.
But AmigaOS4 isn't for "classic enthusiasts" - it's for people who want a modern OS and like the AmigaOS way of doing things.
AmigaOS4 is only "modern" the way Mac OS 9 is modern. I'd even go so far as to suggest that OS 9 is MORE modern and AmigaOS4. But if you like it, that is what matters, I suppose. I'm not trying to make you not like it. I just though you were using it because you were more the "classic enthusiast."
You're obviously far too used to living in a land of badly coded apps then.
It doesn't take a bad programmer to accidentally write to memory outside of the application. And the problem isn't so much that it happens, but that that if you dont' have proper memory protection in the first place, you may never know if it is happening until it really messes up your system. When I am developing on an OS with proper memory protection, I instantly get a seg fault.. and I know exactly where to go to fix it.
There's no reason for well coded apps that expect to be running in an environment with only limited (or no) memory protection to cause any problems.
So you are asking me to believe that only Amiga programmers are so awesome that they never write to memory that they are not supposed to. Because every unprotected OS besides DOS that I have ever run has been an unreliable piece of crap. And the only reason DOS wasn't so bad was because it basically only ran one program at a time, so there wasn't necessarily much harm in writing to random bits of memory (within reason).
I can happily run my OS4 box for over a week of fairly regular usage without a single crash because the apps I'm running EXPECT to run in that kind of environment and so are friendly enough to not trash each others memory.
Oh, sure, they are "friendly." As if programmers in memory protected environments really love seg faulting.
There's a good chance that many embedded operating systems you use every day have no memory protection,
But the programs they run are also a lot simpler and known. But get a general purpose computer with a random set of applications and all bets are off.
but when was the last time your cellphone crashed? (if the answer is "recently", I feel sorry for you, but MOST cellphones don't crash on a regular basis).
Cell phones these days run Java. And I'm pretty sure that Java has certain protections.
If memory protection was such a "MUST HAVE", then it would've been unthinkable for a multitasking OS to ever be written without it, but there are plenty of examples of ones that do.
Nowadays it is practically unthinkable. The only reason it wasn't done in the past was because MMUs were expensive in terms of both cost and performance. Today, only inexpensive embedded devices go without an MMU and memory protection... and I've certainly seen may fair share of unstable embedded devices such as consumer grade wireless routers.
I'm not saying it's worthless of course - I'd love to have a full and advanced memory protection system in AmigaOS, but my main point is that it still works reliably without it.
Amigas in the 21st century are defined by the fact that they run AmigaOS.
I'm sorry, but that just seems lame.
If we're talking classic cars I do know though, give me the super modern version any day
When I was a kid I used to wonder why people didn't collect modern coins. Like if I found a penny that had a mint date of the current year, I thought it was special.. I mean, it was shiny and new, right? Eventually I learned that it is the old coins that people want to collect because they are rare interesting reminders of the past.
Don't expect AmigaOS to ever be a server, nor expect it to be too graceful with shockingly coded apps... but you CAN expect it to run quickly, reliably and be easy, intuitive and fun to use.
Without proper memory management, I wouldn't expect it to be particularly reliable, but whatever.
It's more like a brand new Studebaker was built and a bunch of whiners went around saying "but it's not a REAL Studebaker", despite it having the same look and feel, being able to use all the same accessories, feeling the same to drive (only much smoother and more powerful) and so on, while having some new body streamlining and a modern efficient engine under the hood.
But *can* it use all the same accessories? I thought all plans of making the AmigaOne-4000, for example, were scrapped. And basically the current AmigaOne is just a common PowerPC based motherboard with very little "Amiga" about it besides the OS and the brand name. Am I mistaken?
I'd have much more repsect for someone who showed up at an auto show with an ORIGINAL Studebaker, than some guy who managed to get a modern car with the "Studebaker" label on it. Seriously, which one would you want to see at an auto show?
And what exactly is "classless" about the AmigaOne with AmigaOS4? It's as real an Amiga as you'll get.
Indeed, that *is* as real an Amiga as you'll get. That is my point. Isn't the AmigaOne more or less just a common PPC based motherboard? Wasn't the major draw of the original Amiga the hardware... including the m68k CPU? WIthout any of that you've just got a PC running an archaic OS that doesn't even have proper memory management.
My AmigaOne is just as much an Amiga as those are, and a LOT classier.
The only real difference between then and now is the networking services
Oh, hogwash! All that cool Amiga stuff back in the day was banging on the hardware directly. THe OS provided very little as far as abstraction compared to OSes of today. It goes WAY beyond network services. Seriously, take an OS theory class some day. You'll learn to appreciate what a modern OS does to keep a full featured system running.
The memory protection is important, I'll give you that, but saying 'we have a lot more these days' is a poor excuse - the speed of a modern PC is at around a thousand times that of an original Amiga, maybe more. Yes I guess in a general computing platform where the hardware is not standardised, we have a few more layers between the graphics, sound, networking, etc, but things should still run pretty damn fast, and do it with a bit of flair and polish. To me, Windows something still feels slightly bloated and creaky.
Well, i'm not going to defend Windows. I'm a Linux/OS X user. The computers I use are fast enough. Honestly, I'd rather have more features, functionality, and eye-candy than do the exact same things I did 10 years ago, only 100 times faster. Really, just how "fast" do you want common operations to be?
I think you're totally romanticizing the past... a past when computers were novel. A past when simply being able to print "hello world" and making it fade to black by twiddling the video registers from an assembly program was cool.
I've always thought this as well. Just because we have faster processors and more RAM doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to be efficient. Okay so it's maybe stupid to be optimising a word processor in assembly or something along those lines, but really - all these people who have just grown up with Windows have no concept that something so old could in fact be better.
I'm not going to argue that Windows is particularly efficient with memory, but perhaps you take for granted all that the OS is doing for the user and the developer. Think of all the libraries, network services, graphic accelleration, proper memory protection/managment, interprocess communication, etc. Computers of the past were not, in fact, better. They sucked. From the sounds of it, Amiga OS is still pretty backwards are far as OSes go. I mean, "limited memory protection?" Give me a friekin' break. It's 2007, for gods' sake.
It's like the DEC Alpha or whatever the processor was called - lots of potential, way ahead of the competition, but the management made mistakes (probably totally generalising and getting things wrong here). Consumers need to be better educated:
Maybe you need to be educated on what exactly a modern OS is doing behind the scenes. OSes of the past like DOS, Amiga OS, Mac OS, and Windows 3.1 were "crap" from a computer science perspective. A big reason consumers were stuck with crap like Windows 95 is because not too many people had enough horsepower to run an NT kernel. Even NT 4 before SP 5 was better than Windows 9x.
I, for one, am happy that common PCs finally have the resources to run fully functional OSes (I'm not a Windows user, mind).
As much as there are valid reasons to use much memory, most of what we waste memory on now is purely bad software engineering. I used to have no problem running lots of different apps at once in 2MB RAM on my Amiga. Now, lots of apps will need more memory for good reasons - if I open hundreds of tabs in a web browser of course the documents will take a lot of memory - but that doesn't change the fact that we've gotten extremely complacent, and it comes at a cost. I'm writing this on a laptop with 1GB of memory that's at the moment extremely sluggish because of swapping. I'm not running much - certainly nothing justifying swapping just to change applications, but it does.
Then something is wrong with the particular OS you are running.
Actually, this Amiga OS 4 business is more like someone driving around in a "modern" immitation of a 50's Studebaker. Taking all the fuel problems, the safety problems, etc and making something that kinda looks like a 50's Studebaker. That isn't cool. An authentic 50's Studebaker all tricked out might be cool, but a cheap immitation with none of the class of the original is not.
Since when is $150 for a stick of SODIMM DDR2 cheap? I just bought a GB for my thinkpad and I can't help but think of the 30 hours of minimum-wage cashiering it took to enjoy a little extra memory...
If simply switching applications causes thrashing, you're probably not on a system with expensive memory. You're probably running some PC100 based system with 32MB of RAM or something.
-matthew
Re:Switching XP - Amiga
on
AmigaOS 4
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Just because a resource is abundant and cheap isn't a reason to abuse it. You don't waste water, do you?
The point is that you really shouldn't be swapping to/from disk just to switch between applications. There is being efficient with memory... and then there is being a total cheapass who refuses to upgrade beyond 64MB of RAM.
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How can they make those claims? Someone might actually buy that thinking they can transmit power.
I understand that a lot of Canadians don't bother to lock their doors. The rate of violent crime there is very low. I think it also has to do with fear.
-matthew
Right, so 2, or maybe slightly more to account for early death, would seem to be the optimal birth rate. 3 would be a significant increase.
-matthew
Well, I guess it depends on our relationship. For example, does he talk to me when he doesn't need something? But most likely C, "sure, dude." I am assuming that the list is fairly short. You know, the essentials. I mean, I'm not going to do the guy's week worth of shopping just because he's laid up for a couple days.
-matthew
Every person does not "need" to have any number of kids.
Why not count immigration? I don't see how we're screwed. It would take some time for a slight negative popualtion growth to reduce 275 million to a terribly low number. And there is no reason to believe that population would continue to decrease forever.
Personally, I'd like to see fewer people. More open spaces.. less crowed parks/recreation areas, etc. But I guess the REAL problem is the proportion of elderly. I mean, so what if the US has a population of 200 million vs. 275 (or whatever is now)?
-matthew
I don't know if you're joking, but just to make it clear, cloning does not mean you get a fully grown clone of yourself. You still have to raise it as a child. Why bother with cloning? Just create baby factories where they take donated eggs and sperm and make babies in test tubes. Duh!
-matthew
Wow, your neighbors will get you groceries? I have to try that some day. ;-)
-matthew
Mmm, Techno-Dystopia. Is that some new sub-sub-genre of electronic music?
Anyway, I'd like to think that I'll last more than one generation. I mean, a generation is only, what, 25 years or so?
-matthew
Now that's persistence! If at first you can't make it stable, try, try again.
Yeah, but those same geeky pirates probably know enough to sidestep validation.
-matthew
I don't see that at all. The swap usage on every Linux system I've ever run has stayed near zero as long as there is plenty of RAM. That is, unless at some point you do run out of RAM and something needs to be swapped out. Sometimes it'll stay swappped out if it doesn't get used.. and then swapped back in when it does get used. From what I gather swapping even when there is plenty of RAM is mostly a problem on Windows. I never have that problem on Linux. I'm not sure about OS X because it is harder to tell when the disk is being accessed because my macs are generally quieter. If there is swapping, I'm sure it is because there just isn't enough RAM. Mac apps can take up enourmous amounts of RAM.
-matthew
But it completely fails to capture what made teh Amiga special. Linux is special at least partially BECAUSE it can run on just about anything. So running Linux on any random piece of hardware is actually part of its appeal/charm. Amigas are kinda like Macs in that part of the appeal is the hardware and the way the OS is well integrated with it. Like they are designed as a whole package.
AmigaOS4 is only "modern" the way Mac OS 9 is modern. I'd even go so far as to suggest that OS 9 is MORE modern and AmigaOS4. But if you like it, that is what matters, I suppose. I'm not trying to make you not like it. I just though you were using it because you were more the "classic enthusiast."
-matthew
It doesn't take a bad programmer to accidentally write to memory outside of the application. And the problem isn't so much that it happens, but that that if you dont' have proper memory protection in the first place, you may never know if it is happening until it really messes up your system. When I am developing on an OS with proper memory protection, I instantly get a seg fault.. and I know exactly where to go to fix it.
So you are asking me to believe that only Amiga programmers are so awesome that they never write to memory that they are not supposed to. Because every unprotected OS besides DOS that I have ever run has been an unreliable piece of crap. And the only reason DOS wasn't so bad was because it basically only ran one program at a time, so there wasn't necessarily much harm in writing to random bits of memory (within reason).
Oh, sure, they are "friendly." As if programmers in memory protected environments really love seg faulting.
But the programs they run are also a lot simpler and known. But get a general purpose computer with a random set of applications and all bets are off.
Cell phones these days run Java. And I'm pretty sure that Java has certain protections.
Nowadays it is practically unthinkable. The only reason it wasn't done in the past was because MMUs were expensive in terms of both cost and performance. Today, only inexpensive embedded devices go without an MMU and memory protection... and I've certainly seen may fair share of unstable embedded devices such as consumer grade wireless routers.
Yeah, you have uptimes of up to a week. Congrats.
-matthew
I'm sorry, but that just seems lame.
When I was a kid I used to wonder why people didn't collect modern coins. Like if I found a penny that had a mint date of the current year, I thought it was special.. I mean, it was shiny and new, right? Eventually I learned that it is the old coins that people want to collect because they are rare interesting reminders of the past.
-matthew
Without proper memory management, I wouldn't expect it to be particularly reliable, but whatever.
-matthew
But *can* it use all the same accessories? I thought all plans of making the AmigaOne-4000, for example, were scrapped. And basically the current AmigaOne is just a common PowerPC based motherboard with very little "Amiga" about it besides the OS and the brand name. Am I mistaken?
I'd have much more repsect for someone who showed up at an auto show with an ORIGINAL Studebaker, than some guy who managed to get a modern car with the "Studebaker" label on it. Seriously, which one would you want to see at an auto show?
-matthew
Indeed, that *is* as real an Amiga as you'll get. That is my point. Isn't the AmigaOne more or less just a common PPC based motherboard? Wasn't the major draw of the original Amiga the hardware... including the m68k CPU? WIthout any of that you've just got a PC running an archaic OS that doesn't even have proper memory management.
If you say so.
-matthew
Oh, hogwash! All that cool Amiga stuff back in the day was banging on the hardware directly. THe OS provided very little as far as abstraction compared to OSes of today. It goes WAY beyond network services. Seriously, take an OS theory class some day. You'll learn to appreciate what a modern OS does to keep a full featured system running.
Well, i'm not going to defend Windows. I'm a Linux/OS X user. The computers I use are fast enough. Honestly, I'd rather have more features, functionality, and eye-candy than do the exact same things I did 10 years ago, only 100 times faster. Really, just how "fast" do you want common operations to be?
I think you're totally romanticizing the past... a past when computers were novel. A past when simply being able to print "hello world" and making it fade to black by twiddling the video registers from an assembly program was cool.
-matthew
I'm not going to argue that Windows is particularly efficient with memory, but perhaps you take for granted all that the OS is doing for the user and the developer. Think of all the libraries, network services, graphic accelleration, proper memory protection/managment, interprocess communication, etc. Computers of the past were not, in fact, better. They sucked. From the sounds of it, Amiga OS is still pretty backwards are far as OSes go. I mean, "limited memory protection?" Give me a friekin' break. It's 2007, for gods' sake.
Maybe you need to be educated on what exactly a modern OS is doing behind the scenes. OSes of the past like DOS, Amiga OS, Mac OS, and Windows 3.1 were "crap" from a computer science perspective. A big reason consumers were stuck with crap like Windows 95 is because not too many people had enough horsepower to run an NT kernel. Even NT 4 before SP 5 was better than Windows 9x.
I, for one, am happy that common PCs finally have the resources to run fully functional OSes (I'm not a Windows user, mind).
-matthew
Then something is wrong with the particular OS you are running.
-matthew
Actually, this Amiga OS 4 business is more like someone driving around in a "modern" immitation of a 50's Studebaker. Taking all the fuel problems, the safety problems, etc and making something that kinda looks like a 50's Studebaker. That isn't cool. An authentic 50's Studebaker all tricked out might be cool, but a cheap immitation with none of the class of the original is not.
-matthew
If simply switching applications causes thrashing, you're probably not on a system with expensive memory. You're probably running some PC100 based system with 32MB of RAM or something.
-matthew
The point is that you really shouldn't be swapping to/from disk just to switch between applications. There is being efficient with memory... and then there is being a total cheapass who refuses to upgrade beyond 64MB of RAM.
-matthew
Welcome to the 1990's, Amiga!
-matthew
Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
-matthew