On Wed, 22 Jan 2003, Jos Hulzink wrote:

> On Wed, 22 Jan 2003, Fabio Alemagna wrote:
>
> > On Wed, 22 Jan 2003, Jos Hulzink wrote:
> > > Yeah, but if you think well about this, you would see that it doesn't work
> > > in the general case.
> >
> > Sorry, you're just wrong there: it has worked in the general case for
> > ages, since AmigaOS was born.
>
> Yeah yeah. Amiga OS, the greatest OS of them all. AmigaOS was not a
> general case, it was an OS for a very specific hardware platform, with
> very strict rules about hardware. AmigaOS had no backbuffer for 64
> graphical consoles. The Amigas had one big advantage: They had hell a lot
> of memory for that era, and a damn good graphics processor.

Disinformed, aren't you? This is not the place to discuss amigas, but I'd
invite you to use the present tense when talking about AmigaOS, 'cause it
still exists (version 4.0 is due out by next month, to be run on a PPC
only platform), and also because there exist one free alternative to
AmigaOS, which is AROS, and another commercial alternative which is
MorphOS, and everyone of dem deals perfectly with the issue we're
discussing here. I'll explain in another email how's that possible.

Let me remind you, though, that AmigaOS can use gfx cards just like any
other OS around.

> > > And that is what I / we try to tell you the entire
> > > time. I assume your OS forgets the ratio between video memory and main
> > > memory or lacks consoles. In the general case an application must be able
> > > to deal with the situation it can't draw on, for there will always be a
> > > user with a configuration where background buffers just don't work.
> >
> > Please, just make some examples.
>
> Easy, all cases where the user doesn't have a lot of memory:

AmigaOS and its applications are well known to not require "lot of
memory": it's not unusual to find Amiga users who are happy to run their
amigas with 64 MB of ram with multiple screens et all.

> > There is only one case in which the app should be stopped, and I'll
> > explain it in another email, in all other cases the default should be to
> > let the application run, you chose whether with backingstoore or not.
>
> That's what I say: It is allowed to run on, while it behaves.

NO. It's _always_ allowed to run. That's a must in a well designed system,
any other approach is flawed by principle. In my not so humble opinion, of
course.


> And we let
> nothing but the application itself decide whether it should be stopped or
> not.

The application should have the option to decide to be stopped, but the
default should be to not stop it. That's the only thing that makes sense.

> > What?! The user doesn't have to switch? Are you next time going to say
> > that the OS doesn't have to multitask, it's just a feature, amnd if it
> > wants to multitasks then it has to pay the price of slow multitasking?
>
> Indeed. If a user wants to run 30 apps at the same time, that's his
> choice.

LOL :) Dude, get a clue about computing...

Fabio Alemagna

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