Yet another thing the Amiga can do that Windoze can't.....

[Cymric]

I can't try it, because my system is so dang fast a large scratch directory is already deleted before I can switch to the unzipping program.

[Cymric]

motorollin wrote:
Show-off :-P A directory with hundreds or thousands of small files would take longer to delete. Try your temporary Internet files if you really want to try it.

When I ran the test, I prepared a special directory with 2176 files in 143 subdirectories (overall size +/- 200 MB), and extracted a compressed mudlib with about the same number of files but much smaller average filesize into that directory. Deletion was nearly instantaneous; it took a little longer for the file system to flush out the changes to disk, and this apparently halted the unzipper for a few moments. But you need a really good filing system for this sort of thing to be handled simultaneously. I'm not sure about NTFS's abilities in this regard; I know that ReiserFS4 for *nix laughs at this sort of thing, and still provides maximum throughput when there's 8 tasks asking for data from the filing system concurrently. I seriously doubt FFS is any better, though.

[Cymric]

Here's a few things a basic and barebones PC without connections to the outside world genuinely cannot do that an Amiga can:

1. Measure time with a greater accuracy than 55 ms. Amigas have CIAs which provide microsecond accuracy.

2. Generate raster interrupts the way the Copper can.

3. Display an image based on bitplanes. (Then again, the Amiga cannot really display a chunky image without employing advanced Copper trickery, and then at great loss of resolution. The entire concept is alien to the Amiga hardware, is what I'm saying.) This made the Amiga perfect for sideways 2D scrollers, but absolutely not perfect for 3D games.

4. Attach 9-pins joysticks and mice with ease. (You always had to use a 15-pins port.)

5. PCs do not have standard hardware support for light pens and potmeters. Then again, who uses a light pen nowadays? (I had this one for my Schneider CPC464---very nifty and cool toy.)

6. Nor do they have standard support for analog TV out signals (it depends on your video card) or genlocking (which is now handled in a different way).


Not particularly Earth-shattering, but still: unique abilities!

[Cymric]

MskoDestny wrote: ... a lot of stuff...

Just to be clear on this: my post was written somewhat tongue-in-cheek, to put an end to these silly 'PCs can't do this, while my Amiga can!'-discussions. While in most cases the technology has been superseded, the items on my list remain valid as support of the 'My Amiga can do X, while your PC can't!'-argument .

If you don't need to trigger interrupts and just need to measure time the ACPI PM clock has sub-microsecond resolution.

Aha, this is something new for me. I always wondered how PCs could be so hamstrung, although apparently Microsoft and Intel drew up a specification for a new timer called HPET back in 2002, with a finalisation in 2004. So PCs will finally have access to high precision, low overhead timers---it sure took them bloody long enough!

[Cymric]

da9000 wrote:

Cymric wrote:
...and extracted a compressed mudlib with about the same number of files but much smaller average filesize into that directory. Deletion was nearly instantaneous; it took a little longer for the file system to flush out the changes to disk, ...

which means you conducted the test wrong because all the dirty data was in the file cache. Always wait to flush the dirty data to disk. You can force this by using a proper OS (any Unix, sync is the command), or reading a huge amount of data, which will cause the file cache to flush the dirty data and be filled by other data. I typically do an md5sum of a huge file (movie file) which usually works.

I didn't do the test wrong. The test is about cocurrent deleting of files and addition of files in the same directory by two separate processes. Unfortunately my computer is so quick that the deletion process (minus the synching) is completed before I can start adding new files. Unfortunately, your solution isn't a solution then, because a) I don't need sync, and b) your description of sync doesn't match with what you describe is required: sync doesn't wait with buffer flushing. What I really need is a custom program which starts up two separate tasks which are given the go-ahead with a signal to both---whether there's flushing out data somewhere along the way is not really a concern for this test. And even then I would have to be careful because this is a problem rife with race conditions, and highly dependent on how the unlink()-process traverses the directory trees as well as how the unzip-process locks extracted files (if at all).

Come to think of it, the entire test is a stupid excercise to begin with precisely because of all these race conditions.

[Cymric]

Guys, before I get clobbered by lots of angry Amigans and PC-users: My message about what PCs can't and Amigas can was more or less tongue-in-cheek. Of course I know that many of the listed hardware specs are quite outdated, long since superseded by other and far better electronics, and therefore really no longer a sales or even usage point. I also got a few 'benefits' wrong: I stand corrected. Nevertheless, the fact that a piece of hardware is neolithic is of no concern for my little list: it still is something computer A can do what computer B---in its most standard configuration---cannot. We all capiche this?

Please, do add more information on crude hardware hacks: always nice to hear how people circumvented technical limitations of the machine.