About multitasking, what's best : AmigaOS, Linux, or Winblows XP ?

[tonyvdb]

Piru wrote:
@tonyvdb

Yes it is multi-tasking but its not "true" multi-tasking.

Well by that definition AmigaOS isn't true multitasking either.

In a way your right but I'm sure you would agree that the Amiga will be far more efficient at it. And as I mentioned before try formating more then one drive at the same time on a PC

[motorollin]

tonyvdb wrote:
on the Amiga you can format more then one drive/partition at the same time. Try doing that on a PC. :-D

So what? How often do you actually do that? I don't exactly think that's a good test of how good an OS is at multitasking.

--
moto

[stopthegop]

So what? How often do you actually do that? I don't exactly think that's a good test of how good an OS is at multitasking.

Its merely one example.  And why isn't a good test?  

[Speelgoedmannetje]

motorollin wrote:

tonyvdb wrote:
on the Amiga you can format more then one drive/partition at the same time. Try doing that on a PC. :-D

So what? How often do you actually do that? I don't exactly think that's a good test of how good an OS is at multitasking.

--
moto

I disagree.
It shows how it manages it's resources.
(/me rants how many times he had some read/write error with winblows because of lousy disk management)

[tonyvdb]

I'm not sure how much of this is done by the Newtek cards but still running a video project in the switcher involves running a ton of processes at the same time. The Amiga does just fine doing that. There is no way a windows machine with as little ram and CPU speed could even dream of doing that even today.

[ptek]

So I ask :

Is there a perfect multitasking machine on this planet ?

The multitask theory seems well defined, but is there a perfect implementation of it ? Or the current implementations on Linux and Winblows NT based get close to it, but loses from unefficient resource managment/memory swap effects ?

As I can read on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga
the Amiga has pre-emptive multitasking ... Is this wikipedia entry wrong ?

Is the pre-emptive multitasking the perfect multitasking ?

[Speelgoedmannetje]

The multitask theory seems well defined, but is there a perfect implementation of it ?

Apart from programs wich are programmed by me, there is no perfect program in the world so there's not a perfect implementation of multitasking either.

the Amiga has pre-emptive multitasking ... Is this wikipedia entry wrong ?

No it isn't wrong.

Is the pre-emptive multitasking the perfect multitasking ?

No.
It's just multitasking. Co-operative multitasking can rather be called program switching rather than multitasking.

[Piru]

@tonyvdb

I'm sure you would agree that the Amiga will be far more efficient at it.

I don't see much difference from technical point of view.

And as I mentioned before try formating more then one drive at the same time on a PC

And as I said already, it's more the sucky floppy controller and it being ISA HW (cpu polled crap), not software.

[Piru]

@tonydvb

I'm not sure how much of this is done by the Newtek cards but still running a video project in the switcher involves running a ton of processes at the same time. The Amiga does just fine doing that. There is no way a windows machine with as little ram and CPU speed could even dream of doing that even today.

I have to disagree really. Assuming you had the equal functionality in the software and hardware, I see no reason why equally specced windows box couldn't handle it. Windows itself requires larger memory footprint, but other than that it should be fine.

But why would you want to limit your video editing to something like the old amiga solutions? Or why would you deliberately want to run something like video editing on 10-15 year old PC?

[ptek]

@Speelgoedmannetje,

But pre-emptive is better than co-operative multitasking, right ?

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Piru wrote:
@tonydvb
But why would you want to limit your video editing to something like the old amiga solutions?

Because it works fine? :-)

[ptek]

@Piru

As far i understood, tonyvdb was refering to HD drive formatting, not floppy.

[Piru]

@ptek

But pre-emptive is better than co-operative multitasking, right ?

Well, you can't find any co-operative multitasking OSes around anymore, does that answer your question? :-)

[Speelgoedmannetje]

ptek wrote:
@Speelgoedmannetje,

But pre-emptive is better than co-operative multitasking, right ?

Definately. As I stated, co-operative multitasking can hardly/not be called multitasking.
But pre-emptive multitasking comes also in multiple flavours, like Round Robin.

[Piru]

As far i understood, tonyvdb was refering to HD drive formatting, not floppy.

I have never seen ANY problems with that, the performance is just fine. Formatting HDD is hardly CPU bound, the CPU usage is 1-2% when formatting anyway.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Piru wrote:
@tonydvb

I'm not sure how much of this is done by the Newtek cards but still running a video project in the switcher involves running a ton of processes at the same time. The Amiga does just fine doing that. There is no way a windows machine with as little ram and CPU speed could even dream of doing that even today.

I have to disagree really. Assuming you had the equal functionality in the software and hardware, I see no reason why equally specced windows box couldn't handle it. Windows itself requires larger memory footprint, but other than that it should be fine.

No it's not fine. Windows is tied and glued together, not designed with these features. I have had too many problems with Windows to call it fine.