Amiga.org
The "Not Quite Amiga but still computer related category" => Alternative Operating Systems => Topic started by: downward_s on January 02, 2007, 07:01:36 PM
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I need to vent.
Do you think people would be very happy if, when you turned on a tap it took a minute to give you any water? Or if, when you turned on the microwave, it locked you out for 30 seconds before heating your food?
Why is it that now, even with the best hardware money can buy, we are still expected to wait so long before we can actually do what we want to do? Boot times on Windows, Mac and Linux are still, when you think about it, unbearable.
I spend a lot of my time writing, and I will ocasionally get ideas in my head, and in a moment's notice I'll want to type them out and store them. I continually curse my PCs for taking so long just to let me access a text editor and type in a paragraph of text. The act of turning on the PC can sometimes take longer than the work I want to do. By the time I've got a blinking cursor, I've forgotten half of the inspiration.
The same is true when all I want to do is copy a file, or download a photo from the camera. The amount of interaction from me is minimal and yet the job still takes forever.
I long for an OS that can boot up instantly, like switching on a TV or turning on a light.
And why not? I remember when my A1200 with a 85mb hard disk would boot up and straight into a text editor in about five seconds. Simple, functional, and extremely friendly. People may snort, but it's how the tool fits the job that counts.
Of course, pen and paper will outclass even a 10Ghz machine, but if you're a disorganised soul like me, it doesn't work that way ;). Until my A1200 broke, I used to type everything and it was a luxury. Now even with the most modern machine, it's an utter pain.
Will we ever see proper 'tools' like this again in computing? Or are we destined to suffer slow, clunky, eye-candy filled, advert ridden, patronising systems which are constantly under threat of being taken over by every bit of software you download?
I'm sure that even when we do get to the stage where processors are many thousands of times faster, and hard disks are replaced with some sort of fast solid state NVRAM, the product (OS) will still be filled with so much extraneous trash that there will be no performance difference from what we use today. The companies of course, will be richer and fatter.
David
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Suspend instead of powering off.
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On a laptop/battery that may see days between use?
It's a solution, but it's inelegant.
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downward_s: sounds like u need a replacement A1200 :lol:
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That's why I still keep a DOS machine around with Wordstar on it. :-D
Plus, the old DOS VGA games are still great.
BTW, I also just got a NIB latest version of Word Perfect for Amiga. Havn't installed it yet though 'cause I'm still trying to find a HD for my A500! I may be a while on that one. :roll:
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What downward_s says is true: somewhere along the way the all-important K.I.S.S. principle has been wholely ignored if not outright banished by computer (especially software) makers.
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On a laptop/battery that may see days between use?
Yes. Why not?
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Yes. Why not?
Because, many's the time, after putting my machine in sleep or suspend that I couldn't get it too wake up. The end result: powering up anyway.
You'll forgive some of us if we don't trust that particular function in so called modern PCs. :-)
Ed.
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EDanaII wrote:
Yes. Why not?
Because, many's the time, after putting my machine in sleep or suspend that I couldn't get it too wake up. The end result: powering up anyway.
You'll forgive some of us if we don't trust that particular function in so called modern PCs. :-)
Ed.
Blame ACPI, not the OS. It's a horrible, bloated specification.
Suspend may or may not work day in day out, dependent on both your OS and your hardware. Neither Linux nor Windows does a good job accommodating all hardware in my experience.
I generally leave my desktop on. It boots XP pretty fast though. Unnecessary startup services / programs are a huge percentage of startup time. BIOS and ACPI could be refined I suppose, but I think that's wishful thinking. You'd get better results endeavoring to clean up your XP/Linux and using suspend/resume if possible.
On the PC as far as word processors, I like AbiWord, it starts up really fast. OpenOffice takes forever, and MS Word, while it starts fast, costs $349USD.
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Apart from Amiga, three other solutions:
Psion 5mx - instantly on/off, and a comprehensive word processor all ready to go (plus a whole lot more!)
Linux - roll your own. My Gentoo-derived system boots in about 15s.
Zeta/BeOS - much faster than OSX, Windows or standard Linux.
Another experiment: starting a highly optimised Linux from hibernation, with an image of the state of the system just after boot-up. I think that could be fast - EXTREMELY fast!
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Fraccy wrote:
Psion 5mx - instantly on/off, and a comprehensive word processor all ready to go (plus a whole lot more!)
I'll second the Psion Series 5 range! Great size, decent keyboard and lasts for ages on a couple of AA batteries, can't beat it for quick note taking!
Also worth looking for is its rarer (and therefore more expensive) brother, the Series 7 or Netbook. 640x480 colour screen, larger keyboard, inbuilt rechargable battery, and similar software to the Series 5.
Both run a very decent OS: Symbian...
- Ali
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@Ali
Plus the 5mx can be hooked up to the Amiga!
http://www.vapor.com/ncp/
I had a look at the Series 7 and Netbook. Great machines, but they seem a bit heavy... And have to be careful with the Netbook, the later versions run Windows CE rather than Symbian.
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Is not just boot times.. A windows/linux pc also seem to lag when you for example try to open something simple as a txt editor, simple mail application or similar. I expect the txt editor to open in a split second after pressing the button, but this just does not happen. Why should i use a modern pc for these tasks when my outdated amiga does the same task in less time? I dont understand why it should be so slow to do something so simple. These delays all add up during a day of usage and will in the end be wasted time... And dont get me started ono the process of shutting down a windows pc...
Just opening Kcalc on my ubuntu amd64 3500+, 1.5gig ram takes around 2 seconds!
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@Tomas
Perhaps because you're running KDE? It's a heavyweight desktop environment; try something lighter such as Fluxbox or even XFCE, and I think you'll find the response time will be significantly better.
Also, console-based applications open a lot faster in X than their GUI equivalents.
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I long for an OS that can boot up instantly, like switching on a TV or turning on a light.
Some reasearch has been done on stateless OSes (like Coyotos (http://www.coyotos.org/)), but nothing is really working in practice, and software for these OSes has to be programmed very differently and carefully, which is probably too much to ask of programmers these days.
Most OSes, even the "quick" ones like BeOS, have long startup times because of all the initialization and verification they have to perform. You don't want a system to go into an infinite loop if something changes or doesn't start up correctly, and you don't want to start writing data all over the place if a storage volume is unclean or insecure.
Hardware also plays a big part. Some devices don't respond instantly, cannot be initialized at the same time as others, have to follow certain standards and procedures, etc. The only way to get an instant-on OS is by redesigning a new architecture from scratch that is not standards-compliant. That means no hardware choices, high prices, spotty compatibility, and long waits between upgrades. Custom, embedded hardware doesn't always perform better than PCs, either. They have their own problems.
I think you'll have to live with sleep mode, or startup times.
My XP machine boots in 15-20 seconds from POST. I feel sorry for people who use prebuilt systems, like HP. Long boot times are usually caused by bad hardware implementation, mismatched hardware, or startup bloatware. I can't honestly say that OSes are the problem, because my system is VERY fast and responsive compared to other machines I've used and/or fixed.
Blame ACPI, not the OS. It's a horrible, bloated specification.
It's usually non-compliant drivers that cause the problem. My dad's machine has trouble, but mine works perfectly.
Also, I used to work on PowerMacs that would NEVER wake up from sleep mode, so it's not just an x86-PC problem.
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Fraccy wrote:
Plus the 5mx can be hooked up to the Amiga!
http://www.vapor.com/ncp/
Ah yes, I remember looking at that back when I owned a Series 3... The networking protocols didn't change between the S5 and S7, as far as I know, so AmigaNCP should work with the Series 7 and Netbook too.
A great shame Psion stopped making PDAs. I really wanted a colour Series 5-sized machine...
- Ali
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Try Syllable: http://www.syllable.org/
On my machine it boots up to the login screen almost instantly after it's selected in the boot menu. Has pretty good hardware support (not as good as Linux, but miles ahead of other fringe OSes) and a passable browser (slow, missing a few important features at the moment, but supports CSS and Javascript). It's also pretty simple unlike a user-friendly Linux distro that merely wraps the complexity in a simple interface.
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Or use a non electric typewriter.... sounds like you want too much. reminds me of the millions spent to develop a pen that could write upside down with no gravity by nasa all the while the russians used a pencil...
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Is not just boot times.. A windows/linux pc also seem to lag when you for example try to open something simple as a txt editor, simple mail application or similar. I expect the txt editor to open in a split second after pressing the button, but this just does not happen. Why should i use a modern pc for these tasks when my outdated amiga does the same task in less time?
If modern word processors are too bloat why not use old software? Something like Microsoft Word 95?
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@hamtronix
I've heard that one before... (http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp)
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Simply put...I've seen Workbench take a while to load. However, it never seemed to take nearly as much time as Windows. I've used every version of Windows since 95, and they just seem to keep getting worse each time. I am going to be seeing XP64 soon, so we shall see. I do not want to see Vista though...UGH!
The beauty of the AmigaOS was something very simple. It was fast, effecient AND not a bloody space/memory hog. I can remember a time years ago, when NT4 came out. I was running my A500 with 1.5 RAM total and a 50MB hard drive under Workbench 2.1. I remember laughing at my friend with NT4 cause it required I forget how much space and RAM. I could multitask better than he could, using far less space. If I remember, the amount of space for NT4 would've been bigger than my A500 HD.
I still have that 500. If I dusted it off right now I know the thing would go. The same can not be said of the old 486dx50 I have for a prop. I doubt it would go, and I would be lucky to get anything on the box.
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I never used a Psion. I have been living with a Palm 3c for 5 or 6 years now and it's wonderful. It interfaces perfectly with the Amiga's serial port. The Spitfire software is excellent even without a Palm to connect to it. It's amazing there aren't more people who have married these 2 machines.
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Tenacious wrote:
I never used a Psion. I have been living with a Palm 3c for 5 or 6 years now and it's wonderful. It interfaces perfectly with the Amiga's serial port. The Spitfire software is excellent even without a Palm to connect to it. It's amazing there aren't more people who have married these 2 machines.
Hey I have a Palm IIIx...From reading this I could use that thing with an Amiga like I do with my PC?
The things I never knew.
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I've never connected my 3c to a PC.
I think Spitfire is on Aminet.
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David,
I spend a lot of my time writing, and I will ocasionally get ideas in my head, and in a moment's notice I'll want to type them out and store them. I continually curse my PCs for taking so long just to let me access a text editor and type in a paragraph of text. The act of turning on the PC can sometimes take longer than the work I want to do. By the time I've got a blinking cursor, I've forgotten half of the inspiration.
The same is true when all I want to do is copy a file, or download a photo from the camera. The amount of interaction from me is minimal and yet the job still takes forever.
I long for an OS that can boot up instantly, like switching on a TV or turning on a light.
Get an Atari 400 and don't plug a cartridge into it. It literally takes about two seconds to boot into the "textpad". Storage can be an issue though, for that I recommend keeping a VCR hooked up to record the session.
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@gizmo350
I'm still trying to find a HD for my A500! I may be a while on that one.
I have "SCSI external device boxes" for sale. $5 each plus shipping. Get them out of my house, please! :-) Pictures on the stuff for sale website in my sig. Grab one (or two!) and slap in some SCSI type hard drive or something. I probably have the right cables for them, too. Then post about how you got them to work because I don't know anything about them. :-D
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@ GreggBz:
Blame ACPI, not the OS. It's a horrible, bloated specification.
How about if I blame both? :-)
ACPI might be the root cause, but Windows is the visible factor, and since M$ has spend much of their power controlling the standards, why not control this one too.
In any case, it's the entire system we judge, hardware, ACPI, OS and all, and, quite frankly, they suck.
Ed.
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Homer wrote:
downward_s: sounds like u need a replacement A1200 :lol:
Yep, I have been sorely tempted, several times.
However, to go down that road again would mean having yet another machine lying around, and I'm already short of space.
Not to mention that most of my work is done on a laptop. How I'd kill for a laptop with a native AmigaOS!
Then there's my eyes.. I don't fancy going back to using a TV, and 1084s are not very common now!
I'm afraid I've been spoiled by the convenience. If I had a 1200 still around I'd use it, but it wouldn't be practical to set up a new one.
David
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EDanaII wrote:
You'll forgive some of us if we don't trust that particular function in so called modern PCs. :-)
Well, out of all the PCs in this house, including the laptop, there are none of them which will reliably suspend and then wake up. Some of them just shut down, some of them wake up and crash, some of them just go to sleep and never wake up.
Also, at my work I am constantly being called in to 'fix' PCs which have apparently gone completely dead. What has actually happened is that they have been set to suspend themselves after an hour, and no matter what they will just not wake up afterwards, and literally need the plug pulled. I had to go round about 60 machines one day and turn off the automatic suspend just to stop people losing work.
APCI just doesn't work, in my experience. A bit like most features that are supposed to make life easier.. it's just badly implemented.
David
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Tomas wrote:
These delays all add up during a day of usage and will in the end be wasted time... And dont get me started ono the process of shutting down a windows pc...
Yes, I think the definition of 'Realtime OS' has been stretched somewhat since the advent of Windows.
It is scary to think how much of my life has been wasted waiting for systems to boot. It's especially frustrating when you're fault finding. At least I get paid hourly for it..
David
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itix wrote:
Is not just boot times.. A windows/linux pc also seem to lag when you for example try to open something simple as a txt editor, simple mail application or similar. I expect the txt editor to open in a split second after pressing the button, but this just does not happen. Why should i use a modern pc for these tasks when my outdated amiga does the same task in less time?
If modern word processors are too bloat why not use old software? Something like Microsoft Word 95?
When i was talking about a txt editor, i meant something along the lines of notepad and a graphical equalent in the linux world. Even those has a noticable lag before they appear on the screen. Also things like opening a folder or similar seems to take too much time on both linux and windows. I want it to be so snappy that it gives the illusion of appearing right after pressing the button. Of course i cannot expect this with bigger office suites like word or openoffice, but i do expect it with simple and small applications. I guess it is just me who notice these things? :-(
And yes, i have tried lightweight window managers like xfce and fluxbox before. Things seems a bit more reponsive, but is still not optimal to my eye. The only resposive OSes i have used on pc is BeOS and Aros but sadly neither of these are very usable today.
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MskoDestny wrote:
Try Syllable: http://www.syllable.org/
Brilliant. I'm downloading as I type. Thank you!
David
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hamtronix wrote:
Or use a non electric typewriter.... sounds like you want too much. reminds me of the millions spent to develop a pen that could write upside down with no gravity by nasa all the while the russians used a pencil...
LOL
I thoroughly agree. This isn't entirely my point though. I had the almost perfect solution with the A1200. Quick boot, simple interface, stable, friendly, and small. The perfect tool existed.
It's just not so perfect after all these years. It's not physically portable, it doesn't support a decent screen, and the old hardware has become inherently unstable because of its age.
It's also difficult to quickly transfer files from a base Amiga to the PC without much messing about, and unfortunately this transfer is a necessity nowadays.
I know this is such an old thing to say here, but give me an Amiga laptop with, USB, SVGA output and a decent keyboard and I'll be incredibly happy.
David
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jorkany wrote:
Get an Atari 400 and don't plug a cartridge into it. It literally takes about two seconds to boot into the "textpad". Storage can be an issue though, for that I recommend keeping a VCR hooked up to record the session.
lol! Well that is also my problem with the A1200 now. None of my PCs have floppy drives any more, and a couple of them don't even have a serial port. I used to use a SCSI Zip250, but that died a long time ago with the click of death.
You can do it if you expand the Amiga with a NIC or USB card or CDRW, but then you're quickly removing the simplicity, especially on a vanilla A1200, which will quickly need expanded to cope.
I really love the all-in-one hardware of a laptop with a good screen and good keyboard. Reminds me of the A1200, it's just that the OS and software is so damn inefficient.
David
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Starrunner wrote:
Simply put...I've seen Workbench take a while to load.
Yes, it can do if you heavily expand it. However, if you strip the startup sequence to go straight into what you will be mainly using the machine for, it can be usable in the time it takes the monitor to warm up. For me this was just an incredible feature.
However, it never seemed to take nearly as much time as Windows.
On some motherboards the POST is longer than the bootup time on my heavily expanded 1200T, when I had one.
I've used every version of Windows since 95, and they just seem to keep getting worse each time.
To be fair I personally think XP was a huge improvement in boot time and stability. However, it's still crap, in the real world.
I have done an experiment.. if I do a clean install of XP SP2, disable everything except critical features, disable all extra hardware (parallel/serial/NIC), turn off all autodetection in the BIOS and skip the memory check, and make sure everything is defragged; the quickest I can boot my fastest machine into a blinking cursor is still over one minute after pressing the power button.
David
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First, disable any RAM checking in the BIOS during powerup....that will shave a few seconds off boot time.
Next, use TWEAKUI and set it so that you get an early boot menu. This way, you will see a boot menu before windows even begins to be loaded. You can manually choose DOS from the menu, or you can set the timer for something short like 5 seconds.
Write a script in your DOS autoexec.bat file so that when MS-DOS starts WordPerfect for DOS or a text editor is automatically run.
This should all happen in under 20 seconds.
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Write a script in your DOS autoexec.bat file so that when MS-DOS starts WordPerfect for DOS or a text editor is automatically run.
Hmm, this is definitely an interesting idea. However, I presume I'd lose NTFS access?
I may try it if Syllable doesn't work out.
David
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Hmm, this is definitely an interesting idea. However, I presume I'd lose NTFS access?
I don't know anything about that, but the whole idea of the early startup menu is that you're pre-empting Windows and running your modern computer as a bare-bones DOS box. DOS (and Wordperfect for DOS) should be blazingly fast on a modern computer.
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weirdami wrote:
@gizmo350
I'm still trying to find a HD for my A500! I may be a while on that one.
I have "SCSI external device boxes" for sale. $5 each plus shipping. Get them out of my house, please! :-) Pictures on the stuff for sale website in my sig. Grab one (or two!) and slap in some SCSI type hard drive or something. I probably have the right cables for them, too. Then post about how you got them to work because I don't know anything about them. :-D
----------------------------------------------------
LOL, I just got rid of a couple of those. Would still require an Amiga 500 SCSI interface. Nice try though!
:-P
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MskoDestny wrote:
Try Syllable: http://www.syllable.org/
Now posting this from ABrowse in Syllable :-D
I like it. Unfortunately it doesn't like 3 of the PCs I tried it on, and simply hangs.. even on failsafe. Will see if I can sort that out..
David
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@Tenacious
I have an old PalmOS Zire, would this spitfire thing work if I replace the USB cradle with a rs232 (or more likely a bdn9 w/ rs232 adapter) serial cradle? I've recently moved my Amiga into my main office in the bedroom, and left the XP laptop in my daughters room, and moving from one to the other can be a hassle. (Especially after she gets older and needs a bit of privacy.. not an issue at 3 months, but I like the computer arrangment, eg. keep the Winblows XP POS out of site :-D)
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@downward
If you can get ahold of another 1200, you could use the super-72 driver to get it into 800x600 resolution, though some monitors are kinda picky about using the Amiga's scanrates, though there are a slew of super-72 monitor drivers on Aminet that might work. I found an old 20" monitor once, and I managed to get it to run on my Amiga, though gave it up because lots of my video games use NTSC, and while I could play them on the TV set next to my computer, the European video games that were hard coded to PAL wouldn't work. Though just firing up a text editor should be fine. You can also establish a null-modem connection to a windows pc and use Cloanto's Amiga Explorer to x-fer the text files, which will display properly on word, even with the peciliar end of line system the Amiga txt files use. Also, if space is an issue, an A600HD might work, which (I believe, correct if wrong, please) has ECS, and can use scan-doubled screen which should work with most VGA monitors, though under ECS these modes are limited to 2 bitplanes (4 colors). I also recall somebody gutting an A600 case and putting it into a laptop, though that involves some good amount of hardware knowledge. (I've considered it myself with my 600, though I need an old laptop with the PCMCIA port in the right spot, a coclinco mouse/keyboard adapter, a scandoubler, and the pinouts for the various aspects of the PC like the trackball/mouse, lcd display, and keyboard, plus a 4xeide adapter for cd-rom support, and probably an external HDD floppy drive, not to mention alot of free time, solder, and absence of anybody easily offended by profuse streams of verbal profanity) Anyway. getting a bit too chatty here, so I'll move on, hoping I've blabbed something helpful.
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Starrunner wrote:
Simply put...I've seen Workbench take a while to load. However, it never seemed to take nearly as much time as Windows. I've used every version of Windows since 95, and they just seem to keep getting worse each time. I am going to be seeing XP64 soon, so we shall see. I do not want to see Vista though...UGH!
My Windows 2000 machine is pretty much okay. It's the first stable Windows I've used, I can lock it down very well thanks to the clear access to all kinds of services and administration policies, and so forth. It's awaiting log on in about 20 seconds or so after a cold boot: that's really not too bad.
The beauty of the AmigaOS was something very simple. It was fast, effecient AND not a bloody space/memory hog. I can remember a time years ago, when NT4 came out. I was running my A500 with 1.5 RAM total and a 50MB hard drive under Workbench 2.1. I remember laughing at my friend with NT4 cause it required I forget how much space and RAM. I could multitask better than he could, using far less space. If I remember, the amount of space for NT4 would've been bigger than my A500 HD.
Granted, but NT4 was supposed to do much more than the humble Amiga too, so the comparison isn't very fair. Networking needed to be initialised, driver structures for any kind of graphics or sound or networking device installed, proper multi-threaded multi-tasking, some idea of multiuser capabilities, and so forth, und so weiter. If you don't need all of the above, and you run rock-solid software which doesn't try to be funny, yes, then the small footprint is definitely an advantage. But considering that running Amigas in a stable fashion proved near impossible for me (the machine always experienced unexpected lock ups, nearly always causing invalidated drives to boot) eventually forced me to go PC. First Windows 95, then 98, and with the advent of USB (which 98 never properly supported), Windows 2000. 2k is a souped-up NT4, and despite being a little rough around the edges in terms of user friendliness, quite good for you telling the machine what you want to do. With XP, I get the feeling I'm treated as a dumb user.
I'm not saying that Windows is the pinnacle of stability, but it has improved over the years to the point where crashes indicate something really wrong, like faulty memory chips or dodgy hardware. Software still does become unresponsive from time to time, but at least the rest of the machine keeps on going.
And for the moments when inspiration hits, I carry around a little notebook with an old-fashioned fountain pen. Now to remember to keep the reservoir filled up with ink, because that is of course the standard DOS you experience with those things...
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Hmm, downward_s,
Your Amiga answer then is an A600 with an internal hard drive, and a PCMCIA card for transferring files to the pc
:lol:
Good for sorting out your retro games needs too :-D
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downward_s wrote:
The act of turning on the PC can sometimes take longer than the work I want to do. By the time I've got a blinking cursor, I've forgotten half of the inspiration.
...
I long for an OS that can boot up instantly, like switching on a TV or turning on a light.
My PowerMac G5 boots up just as quick as my Amiga 3000, about 15 seconds. Even faster when waking up from "deep sleep". And my XP x64 system isn't too bad either, about 30 seconds.
I enjoy the quickness of my home PCs compared to the 2000+ machines that I have to support on a daily basis with my job. I'd say the average load time for any desktop PC in my company is about four minutes. Laptops are worse, nearly doubling that time.
Beware of the future as we become more reliant on high end technology. HD DVD players are basically fancy media computers now, and actually do take 20 to 60 seconds to "boot" up before playing a movie. I can't wait until computers do become integrated into stoves and microwaves, it may very well take half a minute to boot your kitchen to cook your meal before you know it.
:-D
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My PowerMac G5 boots up just as quick as my Amiga 3000, about 15 seconds. Even faster when waking up from "deep sleep". And my XP x64 system isn't too bad either, about 30 seconds.
What is your definition of booting? XP boots to the login screen pretty fast on a modern pc, but the sad part is that it still takes twice that time before it let you run anything due to the fact that it is still loading stuff in the background. So the fast boot time of XP is mainly just an illusion in my opinion.
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Tomas wrote:
What is your definition of booting? XP boots to the login screen pretty fast on a modern pc, but the sad part is that it still takes twice that time before it let you run anything due to the fact that it is still loading stuff in the background. So the fast boot time of XP is mainly just an illusion in my opinion.
With a dual core processor and RAID, I'm talking 30 seconds from power up to Explorer desktop icons appearing. Granted the PC then accesses the Internet right thereafter for virus definition updates, but I have no problem launching up Media Player or or any Office application during that time.
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I just tested two Mac systems for boot times and then time to load a word processor so you could start typing.
The first machine is a Mac Classic running System 6.0.8 (the last version of the Mac system written entirely in machine code.) I booted the machine and ran MacWrite Pro. Total time from start to the time to start typing 1 minute and 20 seconds.
The second machine is an Intel Mac mini running 10.4.8 and then booting Microsoft Word. Time from cold boot to word processing was 1 minute and 15 seconds.
I actually expected the Classic to be quicker.
I have a Toshiba laptop...the boot on it is horrible. Hit the button and come back in an hour to run software. This will be my last PC. The Intel Mac, with Apple's Boot Camp, also runs XP MUCH faster than any other PC I've seen...
Bob
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this isnt a very benficial thread imho
amiga- no modern browser, office software, hardware support, but...
it boots fast!!!!!
i dont sit around booting my computers all the time. weather it boots in 2 seconds or 50 as long as it does what i need it to do when it is booted. booting to me is probably the least important part of running a computer, as long as it finishes who cares.
the reason modern machines take a while to load is because of all the stuff we expect them to do. wedont expect much of our amigas in terms of modern apps, because there arent many. my amiga is super smooth running its half meg apps too, but if i have alot of serious work to do i use the pc.
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geeze sorry about the rant. i see these kinds of thread too often. people complaining about the pcs that they use everyday and which do everything they ask. ok you dont like ms; ok you dont like windows. but all oss have drawbacks and benefits.
you dont want a decent os because any os you get will have some drawback to turn against, and any company that produces said os and succeeds will do something you dont like.
crap another rant. ummm...
[color=ff0000]Aros Rules[/color][/b][/i]
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@ Kvasir
I bought a Zire 72 (in addition to the Palm IIIc) last year and it seems to only have USB interface. I would love to use an adapter to RS-232 to interface it to my Amiga. Is anyone using a RS-232 to USB adapter? I haven't seen such an animal.
@ no-one in particular (this is NOT personal)
I'm always amused by the Computer Science guys who {bleep} about the Amiga's lack of protected memory and the Amiga's inherent instability. Everyone has a belly-button and an opinion. I appearently live in a different world. I use the usual software packages nearly every day and very rarely experience a crash. After a reset, I'm back up and running in about 5 seconds. I never have to replace a corrupted C-MOS set-up, registry file, desktop file, or swap partition. I had a bad partition one time under FFS (now use PFS2). Modern OSes are great, in my opinion, if you can study them from afar and don't have to live with them.
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KThunder wrote:
this isnt a very benficial thread imho
I did warn everyone about this being a rant, in my first line of text. :)
Besides, is it not beneficial to point out what would make things better? Or is it more beneficial to pay your money for top of the range hardware, and just quietly accept the problems you have with it?
amiga- no modern browser, office software, hardware support, but...
it boots fast!!!!!
You didn't understand what my problem was. I didn't want a modern browser, office software, or extensive hardware support. If I want to use these, I have my pc, and I put up with the boot times.
I am talking about having fast access to specific, small, simple applications which allow me to do my work without having to fight through layers of crap that I don't need.
I mean, it's like trying to watch TV, but the TV set has to wire up your coffee machine, your dryer, your microwave and your vacum cleaner before you see any channels.. "just in case" you might want to use them later.
If I want to send an email in a hurry with one line of text which will potentially take me seconds to write, I don't see why it should take me minutes to do it.
I also admitted earlier that my A1200 was not as useful to me in the modern world given its hardware limitations.
if i have alot of serious work to do i use the pc.
It really depends on what your serious work entails. :)
David
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Tenacious wrote:
@ no-one in particular (this is NOT personal)
Of course it isn't. But your argument is still a variant of 'I think it is so, therefore it must be so'. Therefore, one counter example is sufficient to dispense with your argument:
Try some program development for a change. In C, preferably, with some advanced pointer handling where anyone but the Truly Great Ones is sure to fsck up, and then watch the Amiga crash and burn like there is no tomorrow. It is not a coincidence that in the RKRMs it is always highly recommended to run Enforcer (http://www.sinz.org/Michael.Sinz/Enforcer/index.html) besides your code!
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@downward_s:
Methinks you should install DOS and WP5.1 on an aging PC---say 1 GHz or so :P. At the speeds of today, DOS will be at your command in a second or so, and WP5.1 in even less than that.
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Tomas wrote:
When i was talking about a txt editor, i meant something along the lines of notepad and a graphical equalent in the linux world. Even those has a noticable lag before they appear on the screen. Also things like opening a folder or similar seems to take too much time on both linux and windows. I want it to be so snappy that it gives the illusion of appearing right after pressing the button. Of course i cannot expect this with bigger office suites like word or openoffice, but i do expect it with simple and small applications. I guess it is just me who notice these things? :-(
And yes, i have tried lightweight window managers like xfce and fluxbox before. Things seems a bit more reponsive, but is still not optimal to my eye. The only resposive OSes i have used on pc is BeOS and Aros but sadly neither of these are very usable today.
Try:-
su
<passwd>
apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade;
apt-get install prelink
cd /
prelink -afmRv
The 'R' needs to be a capital 'R', not lowercase 'r'.
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beller wrote:
The Intel Mac, with Apple's Boot Camp, also runs XP MUCH faster than any other PC I've seen...
Bob
Boot Camp is a boot loader, not an XP accelerator. And the Intel Mac probably has an ASUS motherboard. (http://www.maconintel.com/news.php?article=162)
Powermacs are quality made, yet the hardware isn't magic. They're basically expensive PCs.
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@GreggBz
Sorry, didn't mean to imply that Boot Camp was some sort of accelerator. As you said, it's just a loader for XP. I was just remarking on the SPEED at which XP booted. No magic just quality computers with well integrated software...
Bob
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@ downward_s:
APCI just doesn't work, in my experience. A bit like most features that are supposed to make life easier.. it's just badly implemented.
Yup, and, personally, as a firm beleiver in the KISS philosophy, what's the better approach? A system that has to save the current state of the OS before it shuts down so that you can start it up quickly? Or an OS that just starts up quickly?
I prefer the solution with "the least moving parts." :-)
Ed.
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EDanaII wrote:
@ downward_s:
APCI just doesn't work, in my experience. A bit like most features that are supposed to make life easier.. it's just badly implemented.
Yup, and, personally, as a firm beleiver in the KISS philosophy, what's the better approach? A system that has to save the current state of the OS before it shuts down so that you can start it up quickly? Or an OS that just starts up quickly?
I prefer the solution with "the least moving parts." :-)
Ed.
I'd prefer the one that won't need to be started up more than once in a blue moon, this same one would also allow me to close the lid take a train or flight for four hours then instatly be back to the state i left it in when I open the lid.
Oh, I already have that? Silly me.
Linux, Windows XP, Mac OS X. Take your pick, they all provide this functionality.
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KThunder wrote:
geeze sorry about the rant. i see these kinds of thread too often. people complaining about the pcs that they use everyday and which do everything they ask. ok you dont like ms; ok you dont like windows. but all oss have drawbacks and benefits.
you dont want a decent os because any os you get will have some drawback to turn against, and any company that produces said os and succeeds will do something you dont like.
crap another rant. ummm...
[color=ff0000]Aros Rules[/color][/b][/i]
The only thing i miss in AmigaOS is memory protection and some full opengl support. Otherwise i think the OS is pretty much perfect for me.
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Tomas wrote:
When i was talking about a txt editor, i meant something along the lines of notepad and a graphical equalent in the linux world. Even those has a noticable lag before they appear on the screen. Also things like opening a folder or similar seems to take too much time on both linux and windows. I want it to be so snappy that it gives the illusion of appearing right after pressing the button. Of course i cannot expect this with bigger office suites like word or openoffice, but i do expect it with simple and small applications. I guess it is just me who notice these things? :-(
...Here on OS X, TextEdit, Preview, Calculator, the Flickr uploader all start in under a second. Navigating folders in the Finder is instantaneous. The only unreasonable wait I have is for iTunes, which has become horrifically bloated.
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Need a fast OS to run applications like word processors and such? Try MS-DOS! Seriously, get a Pentium class or better old system, slap on MS-DOS (or just the DOS portions of Win9x), and go for it. It boots nearly instantly, depending of course on your drivers (CDROM drivers usually take the longest, since they have an init delay). Use DOS based programs, they'll pop up quick!
I miss DOS.
AROS has some decent small applications, and boots quick as well. Dunno how well that'll work for ya, but it's a start.
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check out http://www.freedos.org/
Dos is easy to use, and its easy to roll out single solutions for things. I have a freedos floppy i made which pops up telex. I use a few old machines from time to time as simple text terminals.
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MenuetOS is an Operating System in development for the PC written entirely in 32/64bit assembly language, and released under License. It supports 64 and 32 bit x86 assembly programming for smaller, faster and less resource hungry applications.
Menuet has no roots within unix or the posix standards, nor is it based on any particular operating system. The design goal has been to remove the extra layers between different parts of an OS, which normally complicates programming and create bugs.
Menuet's application structure is not specifically reserved for asm programming since the header can be produced with practically any other language. However, the overall application programming design is intended for easy 64/32 bit asm programming. Menuets responsive GUI is easy to handle with assembly language.
http://www.menuetos.net/ (http://www.menuetos.net/)
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Get an electric typewriter with 16k of ram and a floppy drive, they start up in a second or two, instant word processor.
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NT4 was supposed to do much more than the humble Amiga too, so the comparison isn't very fair. Networking needed to be initialised, driver structures for any kind of graphics or sound or networking device installed, proper multi-threaded multi-tasking, some idea of multiuser capabilities, and so forth.
Well, the Amiga does initialize graphics and sound drivers, if you have a graphics or audio card. Otherwise RTG etc. wouldn't work. Same goes for networking devices. And are you really saying that Windoze has "proper multi-threaded multi-tasking" and Amiga does not? Blatantly wrong.
I'm not saying that Windows is the pinnacle of stability, but it has improved over the years to the point where crashes indicate something really wrong,
No, it hasn't. I remember when XP had just been released I went into the computer shop and had tried out the included Microsoft-approved pinball game. Within 5 minutes XP had
crashed. I walked out laughing.
amiga- no modern browser, office software
Yes there is. I use AWeb and it works fine for all the 1000+ pages I visit. There's also IBrowse and Voyager of course. I don't understand why some people seem to hate Amiga browsers. I haven't yet seen any sites where use of Java, Flash, ActiveX or such crap is actually of any benefit to the user. If such things were ported to AWeb I would regard this as a bad move, as it would be needlessly adding bloat and useless features.
As for office software, there's plenty of that around too. Granted, most of the best office software is commercial, but that applies to nearly every platform, not just the Amiga. Except Linux of course, I'm not sure if there's any commercial office software for that but that is probably due to lack of any market for it.
APCI just doesn't work, in my experience. A bit like most features that are supposed to make life easier.. it's just badly implemented.
Agreed. Also I'm lucky if I can even get Windoze to shut down, it only succeeds about 10% of the time. The rest of the time it just hangs and I have to reboot manually and get hassled for supposedly not turning the damn thing off properly.
you dont want a decent os because any os you get will have some drawback to turn against
What about OS3.9? Very close to perfect IMHO: fast, friendly, powerful, compatible, what more do you want!?
Why is it that now, even with the best hardware money can buy, we are still expected to wait so long before we can actually do what we want to do?
I've wondered this too. It seems people have been conditioned since the Windows 3.x days to accept waiting for long periods for things to load/initialize. To me it is unacceptable, the solution is simple: don't run bloated crap, run something lean and mean. There has been a decline in the amount of software benchmarking that is done by eg. magazines. If people keep buying and using bloatware the situation will never get better.
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Minuous wrote:
amiga- no modern browser, office software
Yes there is. I use AWeb and it works fine for all the 1000+ pages I visit. There's also IBrowse and Voyager of course. I don't understand why some people seem to hate Amiga browsers. I haven't yet seen any sites where use of Java, Flash, ActiveX or such crap is actually of any benefit to the user. If such things were ported to AWeb I would regard this as a bad move, as it would be needlessly adding bloat and useless features.
Two critical websites for me which require the use of JAVA... Radar images from the National Weather Service (US), and the web based version of Yahoo! messenger (since I prefer the real deal, not clones... and Yahoo! isn't likely to release an AmigaOS or AROS version of it).
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If Yahoo don't want to support the Amiga then why are you supporting THEM?! Why would you want to use a web-based interface to an IM client, I suppose you read your emails through a web-based interface too!? LOL
And the weather example points out the bias most governments, who are supposed to be platform-neutral, have again the Amiga. Again, I would not use such useless, platform-centric "services" as a matter of principle. When they notice no one is using it they might start to ponder why, and change their policies.
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CannonFodder wrote:
http://www.menuetos.net/ (http://www.menuetos.net/)
Interesting! Lots of stuff to play with now!
Thanks!
David
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MenuetOS is an Operating System in development for the PC written entirely in 32/64bit assembly language...
What a terrible waste of time. Coding in assembly language is a thing for dinosaurs or embedded applications, not for operating systems. Optimising compilers nowadays produce assembly code which is nearly as good as humans can make it; only when we get truly creative do we still hold the edge. But that requires extraordinary amounts of effort.
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have you done any programming? assembly or otherwise?
all compillers produce slightly different code, some are more efficient than others but none is as good as hand coding. some of us actually like assembly coding. with assebly you can conrol exactly how the machine runs in every respect.
actually operating systems are alot better if written in assembly or c, c with inline can be quite good if used carefully.
all compillers produce the same code that humans would using the generalizing effect of different commands since they get their info from us. you talk as if they are artificially intellegent or something. ad btw it doesnt take extraordinary amounts of effort. for small projects and anything that works in an environment it usually takes less. since you dont have to worry about what library files etc will do with other programs and what ou are doing. you just write the code you want to write.
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KThunder wrote:
have you done any programming? assembly or otherwise?
Be serious. You have been a member of A.org for as long as I have, and that means you should know at the very least that I know my way around a C-compiler. In my case, SAS/C, AztecC and gcc.
I can also code in MC680x0 assembly, and did spend a few days in 80x86 when I had to circumvent several copy protection mechanisms. It was fun writing code for a CPU which resembles a stackmachine, although the general shortage of registers is annoying after a while. When I was a small Cymric, I learned Z80-assembly on my Schneider CPC464, although I was too young and inexperienced to make full use of it---that would now no longer be the case.
I have coded my own 'bare metal' demos on the Amiga. I have programmed dozens of utilities over the course of my PhD in order to analyse data. I have coded server-side web utilities to (ab)use CGI. I have quite some experience with compiler construction (as I find the concept of programmable virtual machines intruiging), and will delve into the mysteries of automatic memory management once my thesis is out the door.
I may not be a skilled programmer, and I certainly don't make my living from it. But I do know enough to understand what it takes, and to hold my own for a while amongst professionals.
all compillers produce slightly different code, some are more efficient than others but none is as good as hand coding.
That was the case a decade ago. Nowadays the effort of streamlining the code produced by an optimising compiler does not outweigh the time you gain by doing it yourself. You also get higher-level expression syntax, maintainability and readability nearly for free. Those are exceedingly big plusses in my book.
some of us actually like assembly coding. with assebly you can conrol exactly how the machine runs in every respect.
That is valid argument, and if you prefer the smell of bare metal, I'm not stopping you. But that doesn't mean I have to agree with the choice of you working in assembly for a certain project. And that's precisely what I'm doing here. For some things you still need to resort to assembly language simply because they don't have a proper higher level-equivalent---things like setting up the CPU in the proper 'mode', controlling the FPU-settings, bus communication, and so forth. Those are the fun bits too. But once those routines are in place, let the compiler handle the chore of translating your ideas into assembly language.
actually operating systems are alot better if written in assembly or c, c with inline can be quite good if used carefully.
I don't know of many operating systems which don't use a mixture of assembly and C.
all compillers produce the same code that humans would using the generalizing effect of different commands since they get their info from us. you talk as if they are artificially intellegent or something.
To some extent they are: we've programmed their logic, after all. They are as good as the ideas which go into them, and by now, those ideas are quite good. But they excel at one thing: doing the same thing over and over again. They don't get tired. They don't get sloppy. They do the job as we tell them to. If I take a look at this list of tips (http://mark.masmcode.com/) which I need to keep memorized while coding in assembly to make sure that things remain efficient, my first gut instinct is: let the computer handle this. Especially in the case of timing loops and bus accesses. If I'm working on an idea, I want to see that idea working, not be bogged down in the details of how I should implement it.
Compilers suck at global optimisations, but that's the job of their human masters, really. A compiler cannot look at the code and tell the programmer 'Lookie here now: you're coding B-trees, but isn't a skiplist or hashtable better suited for your needs?' Compilers don't guard against bad algorithms.
ad btw it doesnt take extraordinary amounts of effort. for small projects and anything that works in an environment it usually takes less. since you dont have to worry about what library files etc will do with other programs and what ou are doing. you just write the code you want to write.
Sure. Only with a higher-level language it goes much, much, much more quickly.
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soooo basically you agreed with most of what i said but disagree that it is worth it. for the fun of it or whatever.
ok thats cool, somebody agrees with me, since they did write the os.
you did kindof contradict yourself though which was a part of my point. global optimizations are a part of program planning, with good modularity and proper planning keeping an entire system optimized is possible but that is true no matter the programming method. but on a smaller scale also even optimized compillers use more generalized code than can be done by hand.
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Buy a Mac and never turn it off.
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MenuetOS has been around for ages, guys!
The compilers they had back then were probably a lot less effective than they are now. :-)
As for the topic, it's all about matching the OS with suitable HW. My main PC flies after I've spent a few hours optimizing Windows XP. Unless you really have to re-boot for some reason, then the hibernation function gets the system up and running in seconds.
I haven't used Syllable since it changed it's name from AtheOS, but it was a fun OS to play around with.
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Back in the day when instructions had a specific ammount of ticks and when registers refrenced in opcodes actually represented the reality of what was in the processor core and when you knew precisely how many ticks it took to fetch a byte from memory and the abscense of on die instruction caching you could make a serious argument about designing your algorithm around a processors instruction set.
Times have changed. That function that you just called might live in the cache at that moment of time, in case great, or it may have to be fetched from ram. No way to predict what the case will be. Instructions are broken down into micro ops now, and executed out of order and in parallel based on best case prediction hardware.
In many cases a nice hand rolled assembler routine will look really efficient but in reality stalls out the pipeline on every iteration, then you've got a shiney assembler chunk of garbage.
A lot of the optimisations they make in the processor cores are based on the output of the major compilers. In many cases not coding your asm like the compiler would results in wasted cycles.
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many assembly coders nowadays know all about caches etc and how to code specifically for them. knowing exactly how the actual pipelines work etc can result in speedups. there are several emulator coders and c/inline coders who do this extensively. see emulators.com for one.
if you know how a specific pipeline runs and how much cache you have etc you can code for that.
you can also order memory accesses and instuction streams around the architecture.
people think they have billions of instuctions per second now so who cares about optimization you can write a program quickly and not worry about code size or speed. i mean we all have a gig of ram at least right?
thats how you end up with operating systems that take up gigabytes of space on a hard drive and take several minutes to fully load.
that is what this thread is about, someone wants a small efficient os that loads very quckly and does what he needs and thats it. not a gargantuan chunk of code that loads a hundred libraries and apps and protections and other crap that he doesnt need.
if you just want to send a simple email to a freind or something xp is way way overkill
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ok back on topic a sec,
do they still sell webtv boxes? those boot instantly and have some simple apps and stuff.
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Woudln't I have to profile for each processor series to take advantage of the pipeline stuffing tricks? Different profiling and code for each of Celeron, PIV, PentiumM,D and Core Duo? Along with each of the series in the AMD family?
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KThunder wrote:
ok back on topic a sec,
do they still sell webtv boxes? those boot instantly and have some simple apps and stuff.
It still exists. I saw one in BestBuy a few months ago.
http://www.msntv.com/pc/
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Or are we destined to suffer slow, clunky, eye-candy filled, advert ridden, patronising systems which are constantly under threat of being taken over by every bit of software you download?
Yes
If modern word processors are too bloat why not use old software? Something like Microsoft Word 95?
Thats what I do. I'm quite happy with MS Office 2000 on Windows and ClarisWorks 4 on the Mac.
I am always moaning about the bloat in modern software, but sometimes I just think, sod those bad new programmes. Use what works. Even if it is 10 years old. (Oh, and Microsoft Word 2007 requires a 500MHz processor and 256MB RAM as a minimum).
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whats really amazing to me is that some people think that is totally acceptable. "of course you need a 1gz cpu and 512 megs of ranm to surf the net"
when is it going to be too much. when you need 50gigs of hd space for your os 3ghz cpu and 2gigs of ram just to send a simple email or write a letter.
i use win98 on a 900mhz athalon it flies compared to my fathers 3ghz pIV. i have a pIV mobo and winxp but i havent really seen the need to downgrade yet. i could use the extra horsepower for emulation but thats about it.
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KThunder wrote:
many assembly coders nowadays know all about caches etc and how to code specifically for them. knowing exactly how the actual pipelines work etc can result in speedups. there are several emulator coders and c/inline coders who do this extensively. see emulators.com for one.
Be serious (again). When coding an operating system you really don't want to be bothered with this stuff. This is bitfscking at its best. Operating systems are about ideas how to cope with conflicting issues like fast access to limited resources, stability, driver support, and scalability. Not about optimising the code to fit the pipeline architecture for a very specific CPU.
if you know how a specific pipeline runs and how much cache you have etc you can code for that. you can also order memory accesses and instuction streams around the architecture.
This is a boring and painstaking task best done by a optimising compiler. These are peephole optimisations, and humans will have a really hard time beating the compiler. The compiler can generate quite good to very good code for any CPU at the flick of a switch; humans will find that very hard.
You seem to be stuck in the state when slapping 'assembly' on a product made it 'better' and 'more optimised' and 'faster'. Compilers have evolved. Humans have not.
people think they have billions of instuctions per second now so who cares about optimization you can write a program quickly and not worry about code size or speed. i mean we all have a gig of ram at least right?
No, you've got that all wrong. It depends on your design specifications. If you want to code a tiny lightweight OS, there's nothing stopping you. Multiple such designs exist. But going assembly doesn't mean it's lightweight. It just means you have too much time on your hands to be able to code such a complex system. If the developers had gone C, the system would have at most taken two floppies instead of one, and now I'm being exceedingly harsh on the compiler.
thats how you end up with operating systems that take up gigabytes of space on a hard drive and take several minutes to fully load.
No, that's feature creep. Tons and tons and tons of extras a tiny handful of people expect out of the box from the computer. A googol of drivers is included for the most exotic types of hardware. A kazillion graphics, sounds, fonts, helpful documents, compatibility programs and what-not are included. And so forth, und so weiter.
The kernel files of any 'big' OS are really not big. I believe Windows 2000's kernel is about 700 KB or thereabouts. My Linux kernel is about 900 KB.
that is what this thread is about, someone wants a small efficient os that loads very quckly and does what he needs and thats it. not a gargantuan chunk of code that loads a hundred libraries and apps and protections and other crap that he doesnt need. if you just want to send a simple email to a freind or something xp is way way overkill
Aye. But my statement was that coding MenuetOS in assembly is a waste of time, as the exact same performance would have been obtained by going C. Take a look at SkyOS (http://www.skyos.org/), for example. Same idea, but lightyears ahead of MenuetOS.
Back on topic of the original thread: perhaps SkyOS isn't such a bad idea for the OP. It is actively developed, very fast, has nice features, is perfectly usable, has a small footprint, and so forth. I might investigate it in the future.
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KThunder wrote:
whats really amazing to me is that some people think that is totally acceptable. "of course you need a 1gz cpu and 512 megs of ranm to surf the net"
My point exactly. Has anyone but me noticed we've had no net gain in speed since the inception of personal computers? Sure, we've gone from a couple of MHz in clock cycles to a couple of GHz... But I'm still watching my OS draw my data on the screen a little at a time. I'm still waiting for applications to load. I'm still waiting, and we've had a thousand fold increase in CPU speed! WTF?!
If it weren't for the fact Win98 crashes horribly on this machine, I would not be using Win2k. I'm trying desperately to avoid the "Windows eXPerience." And the most resource hogging OS of all time, Windows Vista, is soon to be unleashed upon the masses... Next time I build a machine, I'll have little choice but to use that, as it'll likely be a 64-bit dual core CPU I use.
Oh, and by the way... Why use Yahoo! messenger, and their JAVA based mail frontend, and the NWS JAVA radars? JAVA is about as platform independant as it gets!
You know, I think the folks over at VMWare have an opportunity to help everyone out. They could come up with a platform independant OS that acts as a emulation layer between whatever hardware it's running on and whatever OS you wish to use. No more "host operating system" like Windows or Linux... A direct hardware banging OS all its own. Sort of like "Amiga Anywhere" for operating systems.
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I run Win98se with the unofficial service pack on a celeron 550 that was left out on the street to be picked up by the local hard garbage collection. It had 64 meg ram 8m agp card, 16 bit sound 20 gig hard drive, keyboard, mouse and and the cmos battery was dead so it wouldn't boot. 2 dollars later and an extra 128 meg ram and this machine flies and is rock stable: i emulate using winuae and when running rtg software it is faster than my 060 A4000 (with the windows overhead !!!). On the windows side I run older software eg ClarisWorks 4: boots in under 5 seconds; photoshop 5 LE, Firefox, Zonelabs 5 firewall, little mp3 encoding app i found on a cover disc. Most PC's are slow because the current OS and apps are made to run on next gen HW specs esp memory to get you to upgrade. Live with it, because thats the computing business model that will never change, because it is highly profitable. I wonder how Win98se would run on a 3 ghz machine with 1 gig ram? The other problem is that people buy stuff with "features" they will never use or learn how to use without taking into account what they will do egI wrote my final year high school English essays using Prowrite on an A500 with 2.5 meg ram. All I needed was a word processor that had scalable fonts, spell checker, format tools: why do students now need 3ghz machines to write an essay, the task is the same isn't it.
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I wonder how Win98se would run on a 3 ghz machine with 1 gig ram?
Not very well, I'm afraid. Windows 98 starts using all availible RAM over a certain size as disk cache, so even if you have 2 GB of RAM in a machine you'd not be able to use all of it. :-)
However, you make a good point; most modern applications are filled with unneccesary eye-candy.
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cymric,
>You seem to be stuck in the state when slapping 'assembly' on a product made it 'better' and 'more optimised' and 'faster'. Compilers have evolved. Humans have not.
no we havent evolved but we designed the cpus and apps and code them. assembly coders arent stuck in the middle ages (80s) they now do code for this stuff. compillers are good but if they are perfect why do they all provide inline capabilities, you yourself admitted that all major oss are written in c and assembly.
weather or not this stuff is a waste of time is up to the people wasting (or not) their time, many assem coders do it cause it is fun.
we could argue this for pages and not get anywere i think assembly is usefull for many things and you dont. i actually havent done much coding in a few months and i am a offset lithographic pressman not a coder so im not argueing my livelyhood here.
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downward_s wrote:
On a laptop/battery that may see days between use?
It's a solution, but it's inelegant.
So get a Tandy model 100 or, even better, a Tandy WP2. Days to weeks on a set of AA's with use, months to years(!) off/standby. Even interfaces with Amigas using Term etc. See:
http://www.8bit-micro.com/wp2wp3.htm
Someone at an Amiga user group meeting gave me a M-100, and I liked it so much I tracked down a WP2, which has an 80 col display and is much thinner. I use it for just the type of thing you are tlaking about. Not only is it 'instant-on', it draws so little power you can connect to a small wall wort power supply and never turn it off manually. 8 bit processors may not be much use for Desktop Publishing, but they are more than sufficient for Text Editing.
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my powerbook g3(Firewire) gets about 12-14 hours on two 7500mAh batteries, 6-7 on one 7500mAh. My old mac portable gets 6 hours/12 without HD on it's single 5Ah battery, it's too bad CBM never made an amiga laptop..
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KThunder wrote:
no we havent evolved but we designed the cpus and apps and code them. assembly coders arent stuck in the middle ages (80s) they now do code for this stuff. compillers are good but if they are perfect why do they all provide inline capabilities, you yourself admitted that all major oss are written in c and assembly.
I specifically addressed this: to have a clean way in which you can access system resources C has no abstraction for. MMU tables, setting up FPU control bits, sending data over various data buses, and so forth.
weather or not this stuff is a waste of time is up to the people wasting (or not) their time, many assem coders do it cause it is fun.
If it is for fun, then we are in agreement. If it is meant for a serious project with people intending to gain a lot of second-party support and the like, or when dealing with complex ideas (such as those underlying an operating system), then we are not in agreement.
we could argue this for pages and not get anywere i think assembly is usefull for many things and you dont. i actually havent done much coding in a few months and i am a offset lithographic pressman not a coder so im not argueing my livelyhood here.
You seem to have a knack for deliberately misunderstanding me, or misrepresenting what I write. Truly, I may not be able to write fluent Shakespearian english considering it's not my native language, but I have a hard time drawing the above conclusion ' don't think assembly is usefull [sic] for many things' from my contributions to this thread. Either way, I've made my points several times now, I'm not going to elaborate them any further. Enjoy your bashing the bare metal.
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i was trying to close the (useless) discussion, but was a bit clunky at it.
i didnt deliberately misunderstand you. you feel that there are a few things assem is useful for correct? there are many things you dont think it is useful for.
the fact that there are operating systems and apps written entirely in assem mean that i am at least partially right. and the fact that most oss and apps are written in c and inline mean that you are at least partially right.
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stefcep wrote:
I wonder how Win98se would run on a 3 ghz machine with 1 gig ram?
Actually, they won't run at all, in my experience. Even a nice clean install with all the proper drivers, Win98se became extremely unstable when I upgraded this machine with a 2GHz Athlon XP. Might just be this board, or bad drivers. But I've had no trouble under Win2k, or Linux or any other OS.
Alas, I fear the same issues when it's time to upgrade again.
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KThunder wrote:
ok back on topic a sec,
do they still sell webtv boxes? those boot instantly and have some simple apps and stuff.
No, I don't think so, but if you want one, Mom will gladly sell you hers cheap, as she is very happy with her G4 iBook now that she has gotten used to making video phone calls for free over Skype with her iSight camera. (Mom is 78 )
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koaftder wrote:
KThunder wrote:
ok back on topic a sec,
do they still sell webtv boxes? those boot instantly and have some simple apps and stuff.
It still exists. I saw one in BestBuy a few months ago.
http://www.msntv.com/pc/
Microsoft bought out WebTV. They still make these things. If one was to buy one of these things, I would highly recommend getting a new one, as the older models get support dropped at an alarming rate.
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Boot-times are a mixed experience;
-I've had an A1200 that took 1min+ to boot WB,
-an XP machine that takes maybe 30-45 seconds,
-another XP box that takes 2min+ to boot,
-an old win98 machine boot in about 30secs.
-Kubuntu on my laptop seems to take forever (1-2min),
-whereas Win2000 on the same machine boots in about half the time and resumes from hybernation in about 20-30 seconds.
-My crusty old C64 booted instantly, but took 3min+ to load anything useful.
Im surprised PC's boot as fast as they do, considering the hardware comes form 1000's of different vendors and modern OS's have so many features built in. Its absolutely no surprise that some people experience long boot-times.
In short, if you just want to take quick notes now and then, a full desktop OS isnt the right tool for the job. What you need is a handheld of some variety.
Hopefully, with hybrid magnetic/flash storage tech on the horizon, PC boot-times will improve.
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>>I wonder how Win98se would run on a 3 ghz machine with 1 gig ram?
>Actually, they won't run at all, in my experience. Even a nice clean install with all the proper drivers, Win98se became extremely unstable when I upgraded this machine with a 2GHz Athlon XP. Might just be this board, or bad drivers. But I've had no trouble under Win2k, or Linux or any other OS.
Well, I'm using a 2.4GHz P4 with Win98SE and it works fine here. Still end up waiting for things to load, etc. sometimes but it would be worse if I downgraded to something like XP.
Plus, XP's compatibility is dismal, when I was using it, half the programs on my HD wouldn't run correctly, and no new features that I could see. And it's ugly as hell. I don't know why anyone would bother with it.
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Plus, XP's compatibility is dismal, when I was using it, half the programs on my HD wouldn't run correctly, and no new features that I could see. And it's ugly as hell. I don't know why anyone would bother with it.[/quote]
I agree, the blue and orange color scheme (sound familiar ala workbench 1.2) is ugly and slows things down so when I have used XP I just turn all of the eye candy off and it looks like Win 2000
Minuous wrote:
>
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@Orig poster
DeLi Linux stands for "Desktop Light" Linux. It is a Linux Distribution for old computers, from 486 to Pentium MMX 166 or so. It's focused on desktop usage. It includes email clients, graphical web browser, an office package with word processor and spreadsheet, and so on. A full install, including XOrg and development tools, needs not more than 350 MB of harddisk space.
The trick is, that DeLi Linux uses only "lightweight" alternative software. If you are looking for the newest KDE, GNOME or Mozilla, DeLi Linux will not make you happy. The test computer is a 486 laptop with 16 MB RAM, and all apps which comes with DeLi Linux are running smoothly.
"Why the heck make a Linux for such old crap ?" you may ask. There are still many computers around with the configuration mentioned above, it would be a shame to waste them. Many people simply cannot buy a 4 Ghz machine for 1000 $ or more, but they can buy a Pentium I 133 for 50 $ from ebay. Many people are still happy with the computer they bought five years ago. Especially in the so-called third world, new hardware is not affordable. Well, there's still Windows95 or Windows 3.1, which will run on these machines, too. But these versions are not supported by MS anymore, they are no longer in production, and finally, you will not get any software for this old Windows version.
http://delili.lens.hl-users.com/ (http://delili.lens.hl-users.com/)
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And there is always my personal favourite, if only for the lighting fast performance using the copy to ram option.
Austrumi Linux (http://cyti.latgola.lv/ruuni/index_en.html)
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>finally, you will not get any software for this old Windows version.
Ha, you won't?
Obviously you don't know where to look. There's plenty for everyone to download.
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Just wanted to say thanks to everyone for the links to alternative OS projects. SkyOS looks particularly interesting.
Having great fun messing about with them, but more importantly, they are actually useful.
David
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Hi,
So get a Tandy model 100 or, even better, a Tandy WP2. Days to weeks on a set of AA's with use, months to years(!) off/standby. Even interfaces with Amigas using Term etc.
I have worked with such things in the past, but to be honest I find the screens are usually a limiting factor. Perhaps I have just become spoiled with good text editors, but I find it difficult to judge the flow of text and the general feel of things with a display that is only a few columns tall.
I'm finding that an old worthless laptop with DOS, a small hard disk, and a text editor installed is a really good tool for the job. It doesn't touch the friendliness or power of a good editor on the Amiga, but the fact that it is portable makes up for that somewhat.
David