Cymric wrote:
Proper shutdown procedures are necessary to make sure all buffers and caches are flushed out to disk before the power is cycled. You also want to make sure that perhaps some automatic save-all or issue-a-warning-to-users script is invoked when someone inadvertedly cycles the power of presses the three-finger-salute. Or even make sure that not all people can reset your beloved machine. I'm sure some of you have had inquisitive family members poking around the machine...
Oh god no. If the software is written properly, there should never need to be a shut down procedure. If the shutdown procedure isn't
instant I wouldn't want it on any computer system I would willingly purchase. When I purchased my last development computer system for Java, I made for damn sure the case had a reset button on the front. The world is turning into an onslaught of mac addicts who don't care when they get the disk back.
80% of the computing world are 100% computer stupid and really don't know any better than what they are told. They believe the grass on the other side of the monitor is always greener (there's a jab in the eye of XP for ya). In today's world, it's bigger, better, faster, now or not worth it. There are even magazines devoted to how the world could improve on effeciency even without computers. The ultimate computer system has no feel of a standard computer, rather an extension of your own personal habbits/thoughts. It reminds me of my first published works titled "Would you like fries with that?" which covered the next steps in the computer industry after CD-Rom drives were included as standard. If I can find it, I'll scan it in and post a link for you to read. In a nutshell, the computer industry has gone backwards with the inclusion of a shutdown procedure.
Think about it... do you have to shut down your TV? What about your radio? Does your car have a button on the dashboard called "shutdown" before you can turn it off? Why is it, that every digital appliance out there (except computers with some operating systems) have no shut down procedure and are instant on/off machines? The answer to that; people have no desire of having to shut down things they use on a daily basis. If a digital appliance is a part of the daily life, there shouldn't be an additional step to turn something off, or even telling somthing to turn off only to wait 5 or 30 seconds before it does. Just imagine what it would be like if irons had a shut down procedure.
The RAM-disk is an archaic piece of software which is no longer necessary with modern file caching and high bus transfer speeds. With the A1000 and A500, the RAM-disk was a useful way of speeding up file accesses, as the only alternative was the maddeningly slow disk drive. Modern OSes (and thus, I hope, OS4) cache all file system accesses, reading in and writing out changes in big and thus efficient chunks. (Hence the need for a proper shutdown procedure.) There is absolutely zero need for a classic Amiga-style manual RAM-disk. A good cache contains all of its functionality and more, and works automatically too.
Archiac RAM-disk? Right now the slowest point in EVERY computer system is the hard drive. The fastest point outside of CPU/GPU is RAM. Why would anyone want to devote their entire operating system with the basis of a hard drive for primary data access is beyond me. With WindowsXP the more memory you give it, the more memory it takes for caching which eventually leads to slower performance overall. While XP has a way to turn on a RAM-disk there are people who pay near $300 for a professional package to install into windows so they can have this feature? If I had enough memory to do it, I'd run my development system off a RAM-disk but thanks to WindowsXP and how it handles memory, it's not possible. When I was working at Gateway, one of the key web computers was run entirely on RAM-disk. The boot times were insane of maybe 2 or 3 seconds. Everything was done in RAM except for the database, and even then it wasn't cached or pooled. The one time we had a power spike hard enough to crash that server it was back up and running from a cold boot in a matter of 4 seconds (from start time to serve time) with only 1 or 2 lost customers. The initial storage was from a static drive which held the operating system. On cold boot it was dumped into ram and modified with a small script file. I have a ram drive I use when I'm making a new cdrom image, it's tons faster than trying to work with some of the interfaces out there.
The short of it: Unless the shutdown procedure is instant, I don't want it. Ram-disk, though archiac, should not be removed from the OS, nor should it be pivital. Virtual Memory can be good if the OS is done right, put it in but don't make it a full-time feature.
Oh yes, a single registry file is extremely bad design as well. A program should be able to run without any additional settings/files outside the initial drawer. An "uninstall" program should not be needed to remove software from a computer. Dead program settings only take up more room than needed. On the other hand, I am all for icon archives. I also think executable files with icon information embeded within under the strict ability to edit/remove/change/use the old icon structure along with them would be okay as well.
There are tons of things I want in the next AmigaOS but also tons of things I want to keep. I still have the narrator device from 1.3 that I use in 3.9 if that tells you anything.
:pint:
