PC still playing Amiga catchup

[smerf]

I feel cheated the floppy has been left behind... Oh wait you can have adf files.

2GB USB flash drive ~$15. Pack of ten floppy disks ~$5. PC floppy drive ~$15

I think that is the definition of obsolete.


Notice: To be taken as directed. Please read the label and consult a Doctor if symptoms persist.

Hi,

@Fanscale,

Wow, we can tell your rich, because you shop the high class stores, or maybe you don't know how to shop, I just bought 2  2 gig usb flash drives for $9.95, thats 4 gig of CF drive space for $9.95 and not used either. As far as floppies, I just go through the dumpsters in back of the computer stores, sometimes dumpster diving could bring you some surprising stuff, like four 1.1ghz computers with 30 gig hard drives and 512 mbyte memory. @ external scsi enclosures, and over 500 floppy disks of which 100 where of the 720 K brand.

smerf

[ElPolloDiabl]

(my wife chucked my other 1000 since the day she sat down naked in front of my 1080 monitor and said do you know what this means, and I answered, yes your blocking my monitor,

Ooh, ooh I know...
Both are works of art by two great masters.

[Trev]

Ooh, ooh I know...
Both are works of art by two great masters.

Oh, that has so many choice follow ups. If only this weren't a family-friendly board....

[smerf]

Too funnny!!  We now have a "good" and "bad" side of the catch up game.  Floppies are still being made and still being used..on PC's.  Never ever saved any amiga program to an audio cassette ( can it be done)

Hi,

@stefcep2,

Yes it can, just get a stereo phono plug, plug it in the stereo output of the Amiga, and then take the other side and plug it into your cassette player. You know have a way to record the tracks of analog music to your cassette player.

Oh, you said programs, hmmm this might be a tough one, I do know that they had made a backup program that used to save / backup your programs to a video cassette recorder (VCR) and I believe Amiga Computing had the plans in one of their rags on how to build it, but darn the magazines were one of the things my wife chucked during the move.  I am sure that with a little modification you could probably record it to a cassette tape because I know that back in 1978 I built one for the C64, it wasn't that hard to build either.

smerf

[smerf]

AGAIN.  ANSWER THE QUESTION:  DO DIFFERENT PRECOMPILED SCHEDULER MODULES EXIST AND CAN THEY BY SIMPLY DROPPED INTO THE LINUX KERNEL?  IF SO WOULD THE AVERAGE USER PREFER THIS TO A SIMPLE DOUBLE-CLICK INSTALLATION?

Average user doesn't care one way or the other. Average user doesn't even know what a scheduler is. Folks who do care are usually configuring machines to provide services, and a kernel recompile is a hell of a lot easier to deal with than tweaking apache or mysql for optimal performance.[/QUOTE]

Hi,

at  [-f filename] [-l] [-m] [-d job [job ...]] TIME

smerf

[koaftder]

Average user doesn't care one way or the other. Average user doesn't even know what a scheduler is. Folks who do care are usually configuring machines to provide services, and a kernel recompile is a hell of a lot easier to deal with than tweaking apache or mysql for optimal performance.

Hi,

at  [-f filename] [-l] [-m] [-d job [job ...]] TIME

smerf[/QUOTE]

What does the windows equivalent of chron have to do with what's been discussed?

[stefcep2]

AGAIN.  ANSWER THE QUESTION:  DO DIFFERENT PRECOMPILED SCHEDULER MODULES EXIST AND CAN THEY BY SIMPLY DROPPED INTO THE LINUX KERNEL?  IF SO WOULD THE AVERAGE USER PREFER THIS TO A SIMPLE DOUBLE-CLICK INSTALLATION?

Average user doesn't care one way or the other. Average user doesn't even know what a scheduler is.

I see we are back to the "Pro-Amiga: "Amiga can do x better". pro-PC: "i don't use or need x, i don't care, it therefore doesn't matter. PC wins" train of argument agin.

Folks who do care are usually configuring machines to provide services, and a kernel recompile is a hell of a lot easier to deal with than tweaking apache or mysql for optimal performance.

And its even easier to just use a different kernel with a different schedule thats already been compiled for you and is already in the repo there for you.  But thats not the point:  Neither are as easy and configurable and as powerful as just double clicking an icon and selecting your scheduler from a GUI that includes several choices, and allows further configuration options for individual tasks, from the same GUI.  An average AMiga user can do this without ny knowledge of coding or compiling code, and back in the day most of the members of the Amiga group I belonged to did it.  NO PC OS OR THIRD PARTY UTILITY THAT I KNOW OF ALLOWS THIS, NOR HAS ANYONE DEMONSTRATED THATS IT IS AVAILABLE OR EVEN POSSIBLE.

[stefcep2]

This setting changes the length of the quantum assigned to tasks. By default, the applications/programs setting assigns a quantum of 2 ticks to background threads and 6 ticks to threads owned by the foreground process. The background services setting assigns a quantum of 12 ticks to all threads. You can also modify the default and boosted tick counts.

So, Windows doesn't allow you to change the scheduler, but it does allow you to change the behavior of the scheduler.

Linux allows you to change the scheduler, but the different schedulers are sometimes just variations on the same theme, i.e. variable v. fixed quantums.

Both systems implement some form of priority boosting. Windows supports accounting (scheduling metadata) through various add-ons. Linux probably does, too, but I don't know off the top of my head.

But none let you set the priority of individual tasks.  The Windows system decides what is a "program" and what is a "background" task.  You may for example want a higher priority given to a *particular* task in the background, but not to other background tasks.  Windows won't let you do this: any task whose window you haven't made active becomes a background task, and will eventually get lower priority to any task whose window is active, or vice versa depending on if you give more cpu time to "programs" or "background" tasks.

[persia]

Yeah but how many wind chimes can the average PC user need?  


Originally Posted by stefcep2  
Too funnny!! We now have a "good" and "bad" side of the catch up game. Floppies are still being made and still being used..on PC's. Never ever saved any amiga program to an audio cassette ( can it be done)

[the_leander]

We're not talking about some individual's capability to program.  We are talking about OBJECTIVELY which is better-- having ASM and C together is better than just C.  Similarly, having API and direct hardware access is better than just API.

But it is not objective when you're dismissing a huge chunk of where issues lay. It would be objective only if you take into account peoples skills. I tried explaining this to you earlier but you dismissed it because it didn't fit in with your magical fairyland.

More applications use digital joystick since it's superior to analog input.

Citation. Now.

You are using a self-contradictory argument.  First you state I don't get to dismiss pots and then you go later and dismiss light pens.

You're bitching at someone else dismissing a highly specialised and none too often used tech?

Hypocrite much?

Gameports were on audio cards a few years ago and supported by XP.  Even your USB is slower to read than a MOVE.W on Amiga.

As has been shown, USB can be made to poll as fast, if not faster then ithe Amigas.

Have you actually shown an Amiga game yet that uses even a tenth of your supposed 1khz response time?

You have no choice but to read analog.  If you had both analog and digital (like Amiga), you will see how quickly people would have used digital in majority of cases.

Citations, do you have any?

We are comparing with REALITY-- PCs have mainly relied on gameport for joystick input and Amiga has relied on digital joysticks.  When you write a game, you have to live with REALITY of what's out there.

The reality is that there hasn't been a Gameport based joystick, digital or otherwise released for sale in at least 6 years. It's all USB.

I compared to both since both are out there.

Good luck trying to find a supply of Gameport joysticks. You'll need it.

But he is correct, if you're going to make a comparason you do so on what is actually in use, we're not even talking top end gear here either, USB has been the standard pretty much this whole century. Even by the time of Windows2000 Gameport was considered legacy.

To do anything else would be an excersise in redundancy. What's next, you prove Amigas are superior to PC's because of ISA?

[stefcep2]

It's true that my current system has a multiformat card reader where the floppy might fir but my old AMD duron has a floppy disk drive and I never had any problems using it with either Win2K, WinXP or Linux.

I do fully recognise the "floppy death" syndrome that seems to infect PC's from a decade ago when people were using Win9x. I think it had more to do with the design of Windows than the hardware.

Actually, my work PC also has a floppy drive. Let me mount /dev/floppy and see what it does...

Floppy lock-outs happens on Win XP.  Never tried on my vista laptop.

Yes with Linux, you have to mount it, I just have to stick the floppy in and the amiga knows a about it

Here's another example: try to format a disk, which was probably dodgy.  Win PX kept trying and trying and trying for minutes, locking me out totally.  The amiga would try three times, then give up and tell you it can't do the format, takes a few seconds, at no stage did it lock me out.

[stefcep2]

I feel cheated the floppy has been left behind... Oh wait you can have adf files.

2GB USB flash drive ~$15. Pack of ten floppy disks ~$5. PC floppy drive ~$15

I think that is the definition of obsolete.


Notice: To be taken as directed. Please read the label and consult a Doctor if symptoms persist.

1.  You can buy them.
2.  If you can buy them, the manufacturers are making money on them.
3.  If they are making money on them, people are buying them.
4.  If people are buying them, they are using them.
5.  If people are using them, they are not obsolete.

[stefcep2]

It's only relevant to people when try to prove that a system that has had no development on it for the past 15 years is suddenly better then the latest tech.

So why are there Linux kernels compiled with different schedulers readily available in most Linux repo's?  Must mean the Linux user community has already had this very discussion, and felt the need to re-compile their kernel with a new scheduler, just to try to catchup to the Amiga?  Kernels with different schedulers exist because they offer something the standard one doesn't.  Whether you want to make use of it is besides the point.

[koaftder]

It's all down to the trolling at this point. One fellow wants to state that a computer from the 80's is superior by comparing it to interfaces the PC hasn't used in years. And now we have an argument that the floppy disc isn't obsolete. I say that if you are going to dwell in this inanity, then you know what to sit on and where to cut your self with that metal floppy disk shield.

The amiga was great because back in the day the graphics knocked your socks off. Commodore made bad decisions and went tits up and the innovation stopped. I still use the Amiga to this day because I love those old games and enjoy repairing the hardware as it progressively fails. I wouldn't bother fixing an old PC. But I'm not so deluded that I think other architectures haven't surpassed the Amiga 1,000 times over, and I enjoy the new hardware we have at our disposal today.

And... Still running AROS on a junk machine and love the new developments, looking forward to Anubis.

[Hammer]

Hi,

@Hammer,

Would you care to repharase that, your CPU may use 35 watts, but what size is your power supply, your video card, your audio chips or card, your hard drive, your CD-ROM player (or DVD) your memory, your USB ports, and your fancy little cpu cooler.

add them all up

and your computer is probably equal to one heck of a room heater

It's a Q1 2008 "gaming" 15.4"  laptop. According RMclock, the entire system consumes around 25 watts to 55 watts.

[stefcep2]

It's all down to the trolling at this point.
The amiga was great because back in the day the graphics knocked your socks off.

The Amiga was great for a lot of reasons other than the graphics.  But if the A500's graphics is what made it great for you, then I'll take that into account when giving any credibility to what you post.