On Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 7:16 PM, Marcel Kilgus <[email protected]>wrote:
> Plastic wrote: > > I think the point here is that emulators have to emulate something. If > > there's nothing innovative to emulate, even the emulator cannot move > forward > > - it can just go faster at the same old stuff. > > I think this is a logical fallacy here. Why should an emulator be > restricted to the things actual hardware can do? Emulators had TCP/IP > on QDOS for years now. *Of course* this is because it's magnitudes > easier to implement when the host OS already provides this > functionality, but that's hardly the emulator's fault. Should the > emulators have waited for the hardware platforms to first have TCP/IP? It IS a logical fallacy if you consider an emulator that doesn't emulate something pre-existing but does something original to still be an "emulator" for the literal meaning of the word. It's plain reality that emulators were a necessary response to a lack of progress in clock speeds and availability of the M68K architecture. It's true that introducing new features in an emulator does introduce greater hardships for people producing original hardware, as the first good implementation usually becomes the predominant standard. However, that is not the emulator's problem - it's just unfortunate that it is the hardware designer's problem to overcome when an emulator beats him to market and he has a choice of being compatible or 'true to the platform'. That's reality. > > Marcel, it is not my intent to "brush QPC aside." In fact, the opposite > is > > true. However, for the purposes of the initial survey, I am simply > finding > > out the proportions of people using paid vs free emulators vs original > > hardware and replacement hardware. > > Point taken. I still somewhat think simply including the 4 or 5 > emulators would already have given you a complete and detailed > overview of what people use, without the need for a second survey to > drill into the details... in any case, I didn't want this here to be > such a huge thing. Sorry. I decided not to because it's not that simple. There are emulators that run on only one OS, and emulators that exist in many versions across many OS (like uQLx). All emulators are not equal, but even the same emulator is not equal across version numbers (people sometimes do not upgrade) or operating systems (people sometimes do not upgrade) or hardware specifications (people sometimes do not upgrade, or choose to utilise older hardware) For this reason, I just wanted an indication of how the usage was split across platforms and host OS to give me perspective to write the right questions. The survey is well designed to find out what it is designed to find out - it isn't designed to find out everything - there's plenty of room for that in the Summer, Fall and Winter surveys ;) Let's see what this survey says, and discuss it and see how it informs us about the community and the assorted ecosystems interrelate - remembering always that at the end of the day, all the segments are - equally or unequally - dependent on each other. Think of it as peeking under the skirt instead of ripping all the clothes off ;) The early indications are that there's going to be some interesting surprises, and I have some very good questions forming in my mind already for the next survey. I hope everyone had a great and productive weekend. I did :) Dave _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
