CompuServe Messages

Mark – let me say just one thing – I believe, with all my heart, that buying a 4000 now is a mistake. It's broken, and there (currently) is no fix. That's what I'll tell anyone who asks me squarely; it's only one person's opinion, after all. :^). "Here, sir, buy this Chevy; it's perfect, except there is no drivers seat. GM is working on that problem, and will give you a drivers seat if and when they come up with one; perhaps this will be covered under warranty. In the meantime, you can sit on this orange crate; GM has carefully made it removable so it will be little trouble to change. Yes, it's true that previous orange crates were welded to the frame; however, they no longer manufacture the vehicle that way." —————– Regarding the developers conference in Pasadena, you should know better than to say ANYTHING about that… you'll find yourself forbidden to attend future conferences or meetings in short order, I expect. —————– Your opinions on VM are really pretty funny, almost not worth responding to except that you're so deluded. It amazes me that you spout confidential information from a NDA covered meeting, and then make confused allegations as to why I said whatever I might have said. It is a fact that what I asked for would have benefitted ASDG, Black Belt, and Nova equally – NOT just "us". It could have saved Nova a great deal of work, perhaps, depending on where they were in their design. Perhaps not, could also easily have been too late. Whatever. Further, it would have benefitted SoftLogic, Gold Disk, and any other developer with a serious application that can, under any circumstance, make a large demand on memory. Just try loading in a large 24bit image (you know, say, 5100×6600 by 24 bits…. it's "only" about a hundred megabytes of memory) into PageStream and you'll find out what good VM would be REAL fast. :^) The only reason VM's not critical today in the Amiga market because it's NOT THERE. it IS there in the Mac market, and it IS there in the Windows market – why do you think that is so? You think it's because some myopic, self-serving, selfish, lazy developer cornered MicroSloth and said "gimme!" even though it wasn't good for the windows market as a whole? Not a chance. It's there because it's CRITICAL, Mark. It's in the Mac because it's CRITICAL. It's in UNIX systems because it's CRITICAL. It's in other operating systems because it's CRITICAL. If it wasn't CRITICAL, you can *BET* they'd leave it out. It's a pain in the butt, it requires extra, expensive hardware, and it ALSO requires a bit of thought at the OS level, not to mention education of the developers. You seem to be somehow convinced that all the OTHER computer manufacturers are STUPID and CBM is SMART. Wrong! As long as the Amiga OS is crippled by no VM, it won't be critical to the Amiga market. And the Amiga market will remain more towards the toy side than the professional side. You can bet that we could, if we were minded to, patch the operating system itself as other developers have done and make an MMU based VM. We could also build in local non-MMU based paging, as you see in ImageFX. And, you can bet that we probably won't. In the context of doing CBM's work for them, funny you should mention AmigaGuide. We're already using (some might say wasting) some of our resources creating a working help system for the Amiga which provides most of the visual goodies that Windows help does, since AmigaGuide does not, and according to the author, will not, for AmigaDOS 2.0. We're NOT happy about it, either – but AmigaGuide just doesn't cut it for decent looking hypertext help. Foo. I think I'll go make a hot chocolate. Every time someone gets me *seriously* considering CBM at length, I get heartburn. –Ben …via AutoPilot