A ARM Cortex A9 dual core clocked at 1GHz, that is a top of the line ARM, would run rings around any Atom while consuming a fraction of the power.
The only benchmark I've seen for the A9 was a comment that it's about ~20% faster than the A8. A 1.2 GHz A8 does not run rings around a 1.6 GHz Atom... it's slower.
I'll gladly be proven wrong, but in the mean time I'm not getting my hopes up:-)
And a 1 GHz Cortex-A8 core is probably in that ballpark.
Perhaps. A 530MHz Dothan was about twice as fast as a 600MHz Cortex A8 in a benchmark I saw. That does not mean the A8 is slower for browsing, as a browser is so complex that a simple CPU bench isn't enough. One has to sit down and use the system.
ARM chips are nice, but they are not as fast as Atoms and their low power usage does not guarantee long battery life. It needs to perform at least on the level of a Dothan 600MHz before I'm interested - web surfing is already a pain at that level of performance.
That's what they did by default [if my memory serves me], but you could install something (or change a config option or something) that allowed floppy detection *without* the clicks.
I remember now. Floppy drives are supposed to have a sensor that prevents software from destroying the drive (by crashing the heads into the walls perhaps?). On some Amiga models they had omitted that sensor which was bad since it caused the "no click" fix to destroy the drive.
Also new in Win95 was that you could read/write to a floppy and barely multitask while waiting for the read/write to finish. Most all OSes sucked at the time in different ways regarding removable media.
My Vista box isn't any better than my old Win95 box when it comes to removable media. Still have to wait for hard drives, Cd drives and what not to spin up despite having no intent to use them.
Systems that relied on specific hardware (i.e. Acorn, Amiga, Atari, etc) were capable of this feature. It's nothing special.
The Amiga didn't use special hardware. I'm not entirely sure what they did but the read heads changed from track 0 to 1 and back, casing a ticking noise if the drive was empty.
If SGI had been willing to provide 3D graphics technology to every possible marketplace, they would have probably been able to retain control rather than Microsoft to dominate.
SGIs could do more than 3D graphics. It's possible that they made a mistake emphasizing so much on 3D, resulting in customers thinking of SGI as a high tech company and going to Sun and IBM for servers.
I think the richness of Encarta still hasn't been 100% matched by Wikipedia yet, though the detail and level of content (on an average basis) certainly has been vastly exceeded.
I've seen Encarta used as a source for Wikipedia articles. I did a search just now for "encyclopedia Encarta" (with quotes) and got ~20 articles. Not a whole lot but it's still unfortunate that a potential secondary source has to close down.
No one is going to pay $60 for a mediocre Wolf game when they can play AAA titles instead.
No one is expecting Wolf to be an AAA title, but it's going to sell for the same reason that Farcry, Painkiller, and other not quite AAA but still good FPS titles sold: taste varies. Every time I look at someone's gaming library there's titles in there that I'd throw away if I found it in my backpack, yet I enjoy games such as Fear: Files despite the former being panned by reviewers and gamers alike (rightfully so).
As long as they aren't expecting AAA sales, or even AA sales, it's going to do fine.
Some software may have done this when the user accessed the menus, I'm not sure it was a fundamental OS restriction.
IBrowse, AWeb, AmigaAMP, even the shell has this behavior. It is rather odd, surly the devs must have noticed with the need to hold down the right button to use menus. Mind you, Windows does the same thing when pressing the X (close) button. It's annoying and there's no good reason for it.
Disabling interrupts is still done one modern OSes. There are situations where it needs to be done (so called critical sections) though C= implemented semaphores for later versions of the OS (2.x+) so there's less need to use the Forbid() call.
users mostly disliked apps doing so, mind, but so long as the app eventually returned to the OS it wasn't a total showstopper.
Printing large jobs on the Mac or formatting floppies on Windows was once synonymous with coffee break, as they disabled multitasking for speed (mac) and TSR compatibility (windows):-)
You are basing your argument solely as "AmigaOS must be more unstable than TOS, because it multitasks and is more complex", in the complete absence of any evidence, or even experience of having used TOS.
I didn't say must, I said may, and "evidence" is based comments from people that actually used the two products in the 1985-1989 timeframe. That a new complex OS has more issues than a less complex new OS is something that I find plausible - yes.
Yes, AmigaOS received lots more development, that's why I preferred it. So it had more issues to be resolved? If they were resolved, who cares.
Obviously people do care. I care. When someone state that the Amiga OS is as extremely stable I want to understand what makes it that extremely stable, or OTOH what feature of TOS makes people say they prefer it to AOS.
Modern OSs have vastly more issues that need resolving.
And one of those issues might be why someone prefers an older/simpler OS.
I don't know why you didn't just say TOS was a more primitive OS, rather than making claims of it being more stable, if you didn't actually mean that.
I actually said it was less reliable, not less stable. To the end user it does not matter why the Amiga occasionally glitch during MIDI playback, only that it does.
(Which I said in as a response to an AC stating that musicians fell for ST hype.)
So since Windows XP and OS X are more complex than AmigaOS, TOS and DOS were, they're more unstable? I don't think so.
A more complex OS has more avenues for failure, and indeed for glitch free media playback Windows will never be a perfect choice. That does not mean I think Windows - any version - is less stable than Amiga OS, because I don't.
Well I guess we should throw out all our modern OSs today and go back to the robust TOS!
Amiga OS was not created in a day. Along the way developers fixed bugs and improved stability, however Amiga OS was from the get go a more ambitious project than TOS. Historically more complex projects tend to have more issues that need to be resolved.
Amiga OS 1.0 came out in 1985, 1.3.2 in 1989 (according to here). In contrast, TOS went from 1.0 to 1.04 in the same period - which was the last ST release.
If supporting multitasking inherently makes an OS less stable - even when an OS is only running one application - let's see your evidence for that?
Amiga OS still multitasks when running one application, TOS don't. That does not automatically mean TOS is more stable, but it is a complexity developers did not have to deal with.
The Amiga is still multitasking when running a single application. That means you can get a context switch just as you are about to write to the MIDI port, causing a slight delay that can blow up a buggy algorithm. That is a real problem even today, but much less so as people have more experience dealing with the issue.
Also, the early versions of Amiga OS were not uber stable. Version 1.3.2 came out in 1989, by which time the ST was dying off (I believe).
As I said, AmigaOS lacked memory protection, so a crap application could bring down the OS.
Good applications can also bring down the OS. This is even through today, memory protection or not. I do not know how stable TOS is, as I've never used it, but I do know that it is a simpler OS than the Amiga's OS.
The simpler an OS is the less chance there is for unexpected behavior. Multitasking can and do cause issues that are problematic to deal with, and that are dodged by TOS lack of multitasking and simpler hardware (no co processors), making the system more deterministic and less likely to glitch during a concert.
if you're going to claim that TOS was more robust than AmigaOS, I'd expect to see evidence rather than anecdotes.
I've never used TOS, but I can believe that it worked better for running MIDI applications back in 1985-1990.
If playing music or an animation caused crashes
Animations freezing up when you hold down the right mouse button does not crash the Amiga, but it is annoying. Similarly, opening a directory with many files is slow and seems to freeze things too.
the software you were using happened to be crap
Snort. Heard this argument applied to Windows 3.x/95, Mac and even Vista. Crap applications, drivers, faulty hardware is cause for crashes, but some crashes are also caused by the OS.
From: http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/guide/000.html
Yep, we're working on the re-edit now. There's still just so much that can be done, we can't shoot new material...but it's still going to be tighter, with additional material, new music, and new CGI in many places
Looks like they included new CGI. I've never compared the two episodes but I remember the remake being cleaner (which was probably thanks to VHS:-)
Also according to JMS, the Amigas and Video Toasters were not retired until after season 1.
Lightwave for the PC wasn't released until 1995 and Season 1 was produced in 1994, so you must be right.
Off topic, but the Lurker's Guide is an awesome site. Interviews, air dates, synopsis, it's all there.
Nice that the Amiga was extremely stable for you, but did you actually use the Amiga to produce music back in the day? I've used Amiga OS (wasn't called Amiga OS though) and seen it crash on mundane tasks, and what's with freezing up animations when right clicking? Makes no sense since you do that all the time to access menus and such.
and it never once crashed or lost my work
Never lost work to crashes either. That makes us two; sadly the rest of the world is not as lucky as us:-)
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A ARM Cortex A9 dual core clocked at 1GHz, that is a top of the line ARM, would run rings around any Atom while consuming a fraction of the power.
The only benchmark I've seen for the A9 was a comment that it's about ~20% faster than the A8. A 1.2 GHz A8 does not run rings around a 1.6 GHz Atom... it's slower.
:-)
I'll gladly be proven wrong, but in the mean time I'm not getting my hopes up
And a 1 GHz Cortex-A8 core is probably in that ballpark.
Perhaps. A 530MHz Dothan was about twice as fast as a 600MHz Cortex A8 in a benchmark I saw. That does not mean the A8 is slower for browsing, as a browser is so complex that a simple CPU bench isn't enough. One has to sit down and use the system.
ARM chips are nice, but they are not as fast as Atoms and their low power usage does not guarantee long battery life. It needs to perform at least on the level of a Dothan 600MHz before I'm interested - web surfing is already a pain at that level of performance.
That's what they did by default [if my memory serves me], but you could install something (or change a config option or something) that allowed floppy detection *without* the clicks.
I remember now. Floppy drives are supposed to have a sensor that prevents software from destroying the drive (by crashing the heads into the walls perhaps?). On some Amiga models they had omitted that sensor which was bad since it caused the "no click" fix to destroy the drive.
:-)
Or so the all caps warning said
Also new in Win95 was that you could read/write to a floppy and barely multitask while waiting for the read/write to finish. Most all OSes sucked at the time in different ways regarding removable media.
My Vista box isn't any better than my old Win95 box when it comes to removable media. Still have to wait for hard drives, Cd drives and what not to spin up despite having no intent to use them.
If you had a better quality floppy drive, it was almost silent, but the cheaper models did go BZZT-CLANK-BZT every minute or so.
I saw a floppy drive benchmark in an old computer mag. Gave me a chuckle, especially since I thought all floppy drives were created equal.
Systems that relied on specific hardware (i.e. Acorn, Amiga, Atari, etc) were capable of this feature. It's nothing special.
The Amiga didn't use special hardware. I'm not entirely sure what they did but the read heads changed from track 0 to 1 and back, casing a ticking noise if the drive was empty.
The problems with DMA continued well into the XP era, particularly with optical drives which would often reset to PIO mode for no apparent reason.
IIRC scratched CDs could knock down the CD drive into PIO mode.
It was obviously going to be all downhill for SGI when they replaced their cool cube logo with the useless text logo....
Boring sells in business.
If SGI had been willing to provide 3D graphics technology to every possible marketplace, they would have probably been able to retain control rather than Microsoft to dominate.
SGIs could do more than 3D graphics. It's possible that they made a mistake emphasizing so much on 3D, resulting in customers thinking of SGI as a high tech company and going to Sun and IBM for servers.
I think the richness of Encarta still hasn't been 100% matched by Wikipedia yet, though the detail and level of content (on an average basis) certainly has been vastly exceeded.
I've seen Encarta used as a source for Wikipedia articles. I did a search just now for "encyclopedia Encarta" (with quotes) and got ~20 articles. Not a whole lot but it's still unfortunate that a potential secondary source has to close down.
No one is going to pay $60 for a mediocre Wolf game when they can play AAA titles instead.
No one is expecting Wolf to be an AAA title, but it's going to sell for the same reason that Farcry, Painkiller, and other not quite AAA but still good FPS titles sold: taste varies. Every time I look at someone's gaming library there's titles in there that I'd throw away if I found it in my backpack, yet I enjoy games such as Fear: Files despite the former being panned by reviewers and gamers alike (rightfully so).
As long as they aren't expecting AAA sales, or even AA sales, it's going to do fine.
http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/wolf.htm
I tested that. Had to "OC" my emu to 16 MHz to run smooth, but it works!
Also, Firefox 1 arrived less than a year after IE6, and its standard support is probably on par with IE7.
IE6: 27 August 2001
:-)
Firefox 1.0: November 9, 2004
Wow, the years really are getting shorter
Some software may have done this when the user accessed the menus, I'm not sure it was a fundamental OS restriction.
IBrowse, AWeb, AmigaAMP, even the shell has this behavior. It is rather odd, surly the devs must have noticed with the need to hold down the right button to use menus. Mind you, Windows does the same thing when pressing the X (close) button. It's annoying and there's no good reason for it.
users mostly disliked apps doing so, mind, but so long as the app eventually returned to the OS it wasn't a total showstopper.
Printing large jobs on the Mac or formatting floppies on Windows was once synonymous with coffee break, as they disabled multitasking for speed (mac) and TSR compatibility (windows) :-)
You are basing your argument solely as "AmigaOS must be more unstable than TOS, because it multitasks and is more complex", in the complete absence of any evidence, or even experience of having used TOS.
I didn't say must, I said may, and "evidence" is based comments from people that actually used the two products in the 1985-1989 timeframe. That a new complex OS has more issues than a less complex new OS is something that I find plausible - yes.
Yes, AmigaOS received lots more development, that's why I preferred it. So it had more issues to be resolved? If they were resolved, who cares.
Obviously people do care. I care. When someone state that the Amiga OS is as extremely stable I want to understand what makes it that extremely stable, or OTOH what feature of TOS makes people say they prefer it to AOS.
Modern OSs have vastly more issues that need resolving.
And one of those issues might be why someone prefers an older/simpler OS.
I don't know why you didn't just say TOS was a more primitive OS, rather than making claims of it being more stable, if you didn't actually mean that.
I actually said it was less reliable, not less stable. To the end user it does not matter why the Amiga occasionally glitch during MIDI playback, only that it does.
(Which I said in as a response to an AC stating that musicians fell for ST hype.)
So since Windows XP and OS X are more complex than AmigaOS, TOS and DOS were, they're more unstable? I don't think so.
A more complex OS has more avenues for failure, and indeed for glitch free media playback Windows will never be a perfect choice. That does not mean I think Windows - any version - is less stable than Amiga OS, because I don't.
Well I guess we should throw out all our modern OSs today and go back to the robust TOS!
Amiga OS was not created in a day. Along the way developers fixed bugs and improved stability, however Amiga OS was from the get go a more ambitious project than TOS. Historically more complex projects tend to have more issues that need to be resolved. Amiga OS 1.0 came out in 1985, 1.3.2 in 1989 (according to here). In contrast, TOS went from 1.0 to 1.04 in the same period - which was the last ST release.
If supporting multitasking inherently makes an OS less stable - even when an OS is only running one application - let's see your evidence for that?
Amiga OS still multitasks when running one application, TOS don't. That does not automatically mean TOS is more stable, but it is a complexity developers did not have to deal with.
The Amiga is still multitasking when running a single application. That means you can get a context switch just as you are about to write to the MIDI port, causing a slight delay that can blow up a buggy algorithm. That is a real problem even today, but much less so as people have more experience dealing with the issue.
Also, the early versions of Amiga OS were not uber stable. Version 1.3.2 came out in 1989, by which time the ST was dying off (I believe).
This is even through today
Sight, meant true and blame my blind trust in the spell checker.
As I said, AmigaOS lacked memory protection, so a crap application could bring down the OS.
Good applications can also bring down the OS. This is even through today, memory protection or not. I do not know how stable TOS is, as I've never used it, but I do know that it is a simpler OS than the Amiga's OS.
The simpler an OS is the less chance there is for unexpected behavior. Multitasking can and do cause issues that are problematic to deal with, and that are dodged by TOS lack of multitasking and simpler hardware (no co processors), making the system more deterministic and less likely to glitch during a concert.
if you're going to claim that TOS was more robust than AmigaOS, I'd expect to see evidence rather than anecdotes.
I've never used TOS, but I can believe that it worked better for running MIDI applications back in 1985-1990.
If playing music or an animation caused crashes
Animations freezing up when you hold down the right mouse button does not crash the Amiga, but it is annoying. Similarly, opening a directory with many files is slow and seems to freeze things too.
the software you were using happened to be crap
Snort. Heard this argument applied to Windows 3.x/95, Mac and even Vista. Crap applications, drivers, faulty hardware is cause for crashes, but some crashes are also caused by the OS.
From: http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/guide/000.html
Yep, we're working on the re-edit now. There's still just so much that can be done, we can't shoot new material...but it's still going to be tighter, with additional material, new music, and new CGI in many places
Looks like they included new CGI. I've never compared the two episodes but I remember the remake being cleaner (which was probably thanks to VHS :-)
Also according to JMS, the Amigas and Video Toasters were not retired until after season 1.
Lightwave for the PC wasn't released until 1995 and Season 1 was produced in 1994, so you must be right.
Off topic, but the Lurker's Guide is an awesome site. Interviews, air dates, synopsis, it's all there.
and it never once crashed or lost my work
Never lost work to crashes either. That makes us two; sadly the rest of the world is not as lucky as us :-)
Somewhere there is an alternate universe where Windows 95/98/ME/Vista never happend, where OS/2 was the major OS on desktops.
I'm glad I'm not in that universe. Shudder.