Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Path: sparky!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!convex!constellation!a.cs.okstate.edu!greaham
From: grea...@a.cs.okstate.edu (GREAHAM DARIN DONA)
Subject: Letter to Commodore
Message-ID: <1992May5.061516.1380@a.cs.okstate.edu>
Organization: Oklahoma State University, Computer Science, Stillwater
Date: Tue, 5 May 92 06:15:16 GMT
Lines: 88
* Posted for a friend who doesn't have his machine any longer *
AN OPEN LETTER TO COMMODORE
I have taken a great intrest in your Amiga escapades as of late and have
noticed a very disturbing pattern developing. As the lower price and
increasing capability of PC's have appeared in the marketplace, you seem
to be deliberately pricing yourself out of the American market. If this
is your strategy it is working quite well, as I have had 3 clients
willing to buy A3000 Towers with upgraded graphics (ala DMI) and
sound (SunRize AD1016) walk out on me because of your increasing
unwillingness to lower costs.
Another area I have great problems in selling is your antiquated 1985
technology. Where once the Amiga was THE name in video graphics, you
have now given the lead to your Apple counterparts as they continue to
upgrade their graphics capabilites while lowering costs via joint ventures
and subsidies. If you were to look in any of the recent professional
video journals (Broadcast Engineering, Videography, Television Broadcast)
you would see how the Amiga is all but dwarfed by the recent insurgence
of Mac based graphics workstations. Is this another strategy of your
marketing department?
But probably the worst problem in the entire works is your dealer
network, or lack thereof. I have worked for three separate dealers
in two different states and the amount of bad business deals and price
gouging you let them get away with is what made me go independent.
But now you can't even get the dealers you set up to get equipment to
the purchasers. I recently drove to Dallas to buy an A3000 system
for a client and the store there told me it could have the A3000
within one week. One month later they were still having problems
getting a straight answer out of you for just the current pricing.
After all of this I have just a few suggestions to add, and all of
these you have probably heard before. This is what I wonder, if users
have been telling you what is wrong with your products and services
for the past 8 years, why have you not acted upon it?
The pricing structure for your Amiga line is too high for the
technology it bears.
Build in 24bit graphics and 16bit sound, don't force users to wait
2 to 3 years after a computer comes to market just to get yesterday's
standards.
Give your machines faster processors, you're not Apple, so don't build
the same machine over and over with the same chips and just rename it.
Give us more standard memory. If the A3000 only comes with 2MB, how
many programs do you think will actually run on it, especially the
graphics intensive ones that you advertise it for in the video magazines.
Abandon putting 880K floppies in your machines, it is a real embarrassment
to tell someone that the pictures they create won't fit on a disk,
even with compression.
Please do all of us a favor and remove the GURU and Software/Hardware
Failure flashing screen. We already get the requestor that tells us
this information, and it never would have happened if the OS had been
using the MMU anyway.
If I want to spend money upgrading my Amiga to todays standards
(24bit BUILT-IN graphics, 16bit sound, SCSI-II bus, 68030 or better,
and at least 4MB of memory and an 120MB hard drive) I could just go
out an buy a Silicon Graphics Personal Iris Workstation, at it's
introductory cost of $8000.00. For this amount they give me a 17"
non-interlace monitor and 2.88MB floppy, as well as a 386MB SCSI-II
harddisk, 20bit sound, and DAT drive. Now that you have workstation
makers intruding upon your territory maybe you had better start looking
forward to being compared to the Apple's and IBM's of the past, because
the future lies in high-end low cost graphics and sound.
The technology exists to make your products faster, better, and
cheaper than the competition and yet you continue to build machines
like we were living in the past. I sold my machine recently, an
upgraded A2000 with a GVP accelerator and the like, and I must say
I am glad, because the more I look back at the money it took for me
to do graphics on the Amiga, the more these new platforms are looking
like they are for me. In these hard economic times there is no such
thing as product loyalty. The only loyalty we have is to the almighty
dollar, and it says "your money is best spent elsewhere."
Micah Stroud - former Amiga Owner
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Path: sparky!uunet!munnari.oz.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!qdpii!davidme
From: davi...@qdpii.comp.qdpi.oz.au (David Meiklejohn)
Subject: Re: Letter to Commodore
Message-ID: <1992May6.050823.7659@qdpii.comp.qdpi.oz.au>
Organization: Qld Dept Primary Industries
References: <1992May5.061516.1380@a.cs.okstate.edu>
Date: Wed, 6 May 1992 05:08:23 GMT
Lines: 70
In article <1992May5.061516.1...@a.cs.okstate.edu> grea...@a.cs.okstate.edu
(GREAHAM DARIN DONA) writes:
>
> Please do all of us a favor and remove the GURU and Software/Hardware
> Failure flashing screen.
Where have you been? The guru's gone... As for the "flashing screen", this
is called an alert. The idea is that, when the system's in a really bad way,
either an application or the OS is able to get the attention of the user
(things are serious) and provide some information, without needing to have
Intuition operational. This isn't a bug - it's a feature! ;-)
ASIDE:
Since the Amiga first came out, it's been criticised for crashing too often.
People thought the guru meditation messages were signs of a shoddy computer
or OS. And yet, I see PCs crashing more often than my Amiga does. But,
there's a fundamental difference. When a PC (running DOS) crashes, the only
sign is that it's frozen. You hit the keys, and it just beeps at you because
the buffer's full, or maybe it doesn't even do that much. So, you think "it
must have crashed". Ah, well, you just hit Ctrl-Alt-Del and watch it reboot.
Nothing unusual, and no great problem.
But, on the Amiga, when a task crashes, the OS will almost always notice the
problem. It almost never just freezes - nine times out of ten, you'll get a
"software failure" requestor. You get the chance to save your work in other
applications, or to finish formatting that disk, or whatever, before you
reboot the system. Then, we used to get that dreaded flashing red screen.
You notice it. This is an event! So, it sticks in your mind, and you remember
the crash. You don't just reboot without thinking, like you would on a PC.
So, because the OS is clever enough to draw attention to crashes, the user
becomes more aggravated. Why? I don't really know - I'm not into psychology.
I do know that the phenomenum isn't limited to Amigas - Windows 3.0 users
complain that the OS is buggy when they see too many Unrecoverrable Application
Errors, yet I haven't found Windows to crash any more often than DOS. It's
just more visible, so it gets noticed. Yet, surely it's better to have crashes
brought to your attention, instead of wondering if the machine's gone down, or
just slow?
> and it never would have happened if the OS had been
> using the MMU anyway.
Wrong. You'd still get the requestor, because programs will still crash.
Under UNIX, instead of a requestor, you get a core dump. The difference is
that an MMU lets the OS limit the damage to one task, and, if the OS has
resource tracking, it can clean up after it. On the Amiga, it's usually
possible, even after a crash, to clean up and save your work in any other
apps you're running. You'll lose your work in the task that crashed no matter
what the OS is, of course (unless you like picking through core dump images).
Since AmigaOS doesn't provide resource tracking, it would still be necessary
to reboot after a crash to get back whatever resources the task was using.
So, not having task protection isn't really a big problem.
> The technology exists to make your products faster, better, and
> cheaper than the competition
If so, why aren't the competition using this technology? Wouldn't they all
want "faster, better, cheaper" products than their competitors?
> Micah Stroud - former Amiga Owner
And, another one bites the dust. And, another one's gone, and another one's
gone...
--
David Meiklejohn | Internet : davi...@qdpii.comp.qpdi.oz.au
Computer Systems Officer, QDPI | Fax : +61 70 92 3593
Mareeba, Australia | Voice : +61 70 92 1555
Path: sparky!uunet!wupost!psuvax1!psuvm!mbs110
Organization: The Leader Desslok School of Diplomacy
Date: Wednesday, 6 May 1992 02:50:49 EDT
From: Norman St. John Polevaulter <MBS...@psuvm.psu.edu>
Message-ID: <92127.025049MBS110@psuvm.psu.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: Letter to Commodore
References: <1992May5.061516.1380@a.cs.okstate.edu>
<1992May6.050823.7659@qdpii.comp.qdpi.oz.au>
Lines: 38
In article <1992May6.050823.7...@qdpii.comp.qdpi.oz.au>,
davi...@qdpii.comp.qdpi.oz.au (David Meiklejohn) says:
>ASIDE:
>Since the Amiga first came out, it's been criticised for crashing too often.
>People thought the guru meditation messages were signs of a shoddy computer
>or OS. And yet, I see PCs crashing more often than my Amiga does...
> [nifty line of reasoning deleted]
As another aside, I'd like to throw in a data point. Since I traded up to
it last October, and excepting obviously dangerous situations (such as,
oh, say, trying to run Eurodemos or any other programs well-known to be
flaky, or debugging C code) my Amiga 3000 has, to the best of my memory,
not crashed ONCE.
That's right! I fire it up with half a dozen applications and just zoom
along without a care in the world, literally. I don't think, "Hmm, if I
go back to Workbench and run program xxx there might be a Guru, so I'd
better save my work before I go ahead..." at all, I just DO it. And it works.
Seamlessly and instantaneously.
Contrast to the PS/2s and Mac IIs here at the University. They make me
nervous -- particularily the Macintoshes which I am forced to resort to
to do desktop publishing (damnably clever of Apple to push LaserWriters
into every campus in the nation...) I'll give them credit, they don't
crash PARTICULARILY often... but when they do, you don't even get a nice
"System Error -- Task Held" requester and a chance to save your work.
You get either a cute little box with a bomb in it, or a frozen screen,
or (more likely) both. And I get those considerably more often than I
get guru messages or the equivalent on my A3000.
Make mine Amiga, thanks.
[Your blood pressure just went up.] Mark Sachs IS: mbs...@psuvm.psu.edu
DISCLAIMER: Penn State cares about my money, not my opinions.
"All my father wanted to do was make a toaster you could really set the
darkness on -- and you perverted his work into those horrible machines!"
Path: sparky!uunet!haven.umd.edu!darwin.sura.net!mips!spool.mu.edu!umn.edu!
lynx!hydra.unm.edu!kholland
From: kholl...@hydra.unm.edu (Kiernan Holland)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: Letter to Commodore
Message-ID: <z+fkfvc@lynx.unm.edu>
Date: 6 May 92 20:29:25 GMT
Article-I.D.: lynx.z+fkfvc
References: <1992May5.061516.1380@a.cs.okstate.edu>
<1992May6.050823.7659@qdpii.comp.qdpi.oz.au> <92127.025049MBS110@psuvm.psu.edu>
Organization: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
Lines: 116
In article <92127.025049MBS...@psuvm.psu.edu> MBS...@psuvm.psu.edu
(Norman St. John Polevaulter) writes:
>In article <1992May6.050823.7...@qdpii.comp.qdpi.oz.au>,
>davi...@qdpii.comp.qdpi.oz.au (David Meiklejohn) says:
>
>>ASIDE:
>
>>Since the Amiga first came out, it's been criticised for crashing too often.
>>People thought the guru meditation messages were signs of a shoddy computer
>>or OS. And yet, I see PCs crashing more often than my Amiga does...
The thing that everybody knows is that Amiga could be cut down
crash-wise if it would use a MMU for its processes. But as every blind Amigan
thinks, CBM will solve this one. Bull sh*t, when Steve Jobs has better
deals than CBM, you know there is something wrong.
True PC's crash but that depends on your operating system.
If you are talking about UNIX, they should not crash (well not easily).
But MSDOS will. MSDOS implies PC, but PC doesn't necessarily imply
MSDOS. But that is not how everyone treats PC's. Steve Jobs is even
planning to release NeXTOS for the 486 computers. If that happens
you'll be wishing you had sold your Amiga becuase the 486 PC's will not
crash anymore.
>> [nifty line of reasoning deleted]
>
>As another aside, I'd like to throw in a data point. Since I traded up to
>it last October, and excepting obviously dangerous situations (such as,
>oh, say, trying to run Eurodemos or any other programs well-known to be
>flaky, or debugging C code) my Amiga 3000 has, to the best of my memory,
>not crashed ONCE.
Big whoop. Give it up, no one finds these multi-tasking Amiga discussions
interesting anymore. I can multi-task better on a UNIX system
becuase I never crash. But if I want to run eurodemos, I'll get a
Amiga 500 and compile while I groove.
>
>That's right! I fire it up with half a dozen applications and just zoom
>along without a care in the world, literally. I don't think, "Hmm, if I
Bull sh*t if I ever heard it. I am a 5 year Amiga user (almost ex)
that have crashed upto 10,000 times at least, and the fear is still there.
I have a special CLI open for if something should ever happen. It is
really very hard to be productive when some really screwy utility
wants top crash the entire system. The reason why this is possible
is that Amigados does not use a MMU. If the task that was crashing the system
was to allocate memory faster than you can get to your CLI and programs
to save, you crash. Amigados 2.0 will just ask you if you want to
suspend the task, which shows you how wimpy CBM is. They do not even use the MMU
which really sucks.
>go back to Workbench and run program xxx there might be a Guru, so I'd
>better save my work before I go ahead..." at all, I just DO it. And it works.
>Seamlessly and instantaneously.
Now try this, run PKUNZIP and Zip a file on your hard drive.
Do this about 3 times. First you should get 9 bad blocks on your
hard drive and crash at the same time. If you are using HAMGIF,
try viewing pictures in a directory that
doesn't exist, that should crash you in 1 minute
til you create a directory named after the file.
Xoper just doesn't work in 2.0 (well the version I have).
Another one is using Intuitracker and any comunnications
program at the same time. Or if you run any older eurodemos
you will get most of your memory trashed and you will crash
eventually.
Even if you try using a program that tries allocating more ram than
you have, you will crash.
Though it has become better since Amigados 1.1,
it is still there. When I think I can get away with running
several programs and try multi-tasking, I will almost surely
crash. Have you ever had the problem where if you change screens
where the resolutions are mixed between interlace and non-interlace
and you accidently get a screen which is supposed to be interlaced
but is not, and you crash. This is on 1.3 on my AMiga 3000
but 2.0 takes up more ram. If I added more ram I would probably
have less crashes but I hardly ever see the GURU anymore, at least.
>
>Contrast to the PS/2s and Mac IIs here at the University. They make me
>nervous -- particularily the Macintoshes which I am forced to resort to
>to do desktop publishing (damnably clever of Apple to push LaserWriters
>into every campus in the nation...) I'll give them credit, they don't
>crash PARTICULARILY often... but when they do, you don't even get a nice
>"System Error -- Task Held" requester and a chance to save your work.
>You get either a cute little box with a bomb in it, or a frozen screen,
>or (more likely) both. And I get those considerably more often than I
>get guru messages or the equivalent on my A3000.
They don't make me nervous, but I use UNIX 90% of the time so
I never crash at all, hardly at all. If those systems make you nervous
then you must really be a paranoid. The Amiga makes me more nervous.
So far I have been the computer Aide here that this school for 1 year
and I have really seen only a handful of (mostly ASM prog-students doings)
crashes on the PS/2's. As for the MAC's, I have crashed one only once
and that was about a year ago. UNIX systems don't crash, they give you core
dumps. Now if you use MSwindows on a PC, you will see crashes butonce you get
things working right, you will never see another crash. So far, our
SU's have installed Xwindows (for 300 dollars) to our Gateway (386sx)
and it is doing alright. I use the gateway mostly for scanning
in pictures with our flat-bed, which I take home to colorize on
my Amiga (one of the only things Amiga's are good for) becuase we
have a B/W scanner.
>
>Make mine Amiga, thanks.
>
>[Your blood pressure just went up.] Mark Sachs IS: mbs...@psuvm.psu.edu
> DISCLAIMER: Penn State cares about my money, not my opinions.
> "All my father wanted to do was make a toaster you could really set the
> darkness on -- and you perverted his work into those horrible machines!"
Path: sparky!uunet!munnari.oz.au!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!
apple!apple!netcomsv!mork!harp
From: h...@netcom.com (Gregory O. Harp)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: Letter to Commodore
Message-ID: <7cfkz!m.harp@netcom.com>
Date: 6 May 92 23:46:27 GMT
References: <1992May5.061516.1380@a.cs.okstate.edu>
<1992May6.050823.7659@qdpii.comp.qdpi.oz.au> <92127.025049MBS110@psuvm.psu.edu>
<z+fkfvc@lynx.unm.edu>
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services (408 241-9760 guest)
Lines: 128
kholl...@hydra.unm.edu (Kiernan Holland) writes:
>Big whoop. Give it up, no one finds these multi-tasking Amiga discussions
>interesting anymore. I can multi-task better on a UNIX system
>becuase I never crash. But if I want to run eurodemos, I'll get a
>Amiga 500 and compile while I groove.
Never crash, eh? Must be some Unix port _I've_ never heard of, and
I've probably heard of most of 'em.
>Now try this, run PKUNZIP and Zip a file on your hard drive.
[Description of crash deleted.]
This is broken software. You shouldn't use it if you like your hard
drive.
>Xoper just doesn't work in 2.0 (well the version I have).
This is an old and OS-dependant hack.
>Another one is using Intuitracker and any comunnications
>program at the same time. Or if you run any older eurodemos
>you will get most of your memory trashed and you will crash
>eventually.
This is a well-known problem that is the fault of the Intuitracker
programmer(s). The timer is improperly allocated for use by the
software. There is an approved way to do this and they didn't
use it.
>Even if you try using a program that tries allocating more ram than
>you have, you will crash.
You must be running some funky version of AmigaDOS that I don't have.
Where _DO_ you get these OSes (see reference to un-crashable Unix
above). I'm running 2.04, and I can attempt to allocate more memory
that I have free without a crash. I just wrote a little program the
other day that allocated all of the free memory in the system in order
to verify some things about the new memory I installed. Since it was
a quick-n-dirty program I just allocated chunks until the allocation
failed (i.e. I was out of memory). No crash.
>Though it has become better since Amigados 1.1,
The understatement of the millenium.
>it is still there. When I think I can get away with running
>several programs and try multi-tasking, I will almost surely
>crash.
I'll have to have a talk with my A3000. I'm quite disturbed that it
hasn't been crashing like it is apparently supposed to, according to
you.
Here's an AmigaDOS usage hint: If you find a program that crashes
your machine, delete it. Find something else to do the job. I
would have thought this was obvious, but apparently not.
>Have you ever had the problem where if you change screens
>where the resolutions are mixed between interlace and non-interlace
>and you accidently get a screen which is supposed to be interlaced
>but is not, and you crash. This is on 1.3 on my AMiga 3000
>but 2.0 takes up more ram. If I added more ram I would probably
>have less crashes but I hardly ever see the GURU anymore, at least.
Yes, the bug you describe is in an old version of the OS. Shall we
drag out all of the bugs in all old revs of all OSes and denounce each
of them? I remember seeing plenty of crashes in OS/2 1.3, Mac System
6.0.3 and pre-3.1 Windows. The Mac OS and Windows 3.1 still crash,
but I can't comment about OS/2 2.0 since I haven't seen it (I plan to,
though).
As for AmigaDOS 2.0 taking up more RAM, well, yes it does. Not
much, though. Certainly not as much as Mac System 6->7 or OS/2
1.3->2.0, though. If you bought and A3000 and you now don't
want to buy more RAM, nobody here is going to cry for you. I
have 10 megs in my A3000 and you're get _no_ sympathy from me.
RAM is cheap.
AmigaDOS usage hint #2: Stop using out-of-date versions of the OS.
>They don't make me nervous, but I use UNIX 90% of the time so
>I never crash at all, hardly at all. If those systems make you nervous
Unixen, while they rarely crash, do so occasionally. When they do,
they do it very badly. One of our Aviion boxes panicked several
times the other day. Quite annoying.
>then you must really be a paranoid. The Amiga makes me more nervous.
>So far I have been the computer Aide here that this school for 1 year
>and I have really seen only a handful of (mostly ASM prog-students doings)
>crashes on the PS/2's.
Well, the PCs here crash. MSDOS machines crash in general. You
were complaining about the lack of MMU usage in AmigaDOS, well MSDOS
makes even less use of a 386 than AmigaDOS does of an 030.
You don't have to program a PC in assembly to crash it, but it helps.
;-) Programming them mostly in C, I have found that it is quite easy
to crash them. A pointer error or something like that and boom.
Actually, the proper term would probably be screech since the machine
just locks up.
>As for the MAC's, I have crashed one only once
>and that was about a year ago.
You've been quite lucky.
>UNIX systems don't crash, they give you core
>dumps.
Or panics.
>Now if you use MSwindows on a PC, you will see crashes butonce you get
>things working right, you will never see another crash.
Windows _does_ crash, yes. However, your conditions for preventing
crashes holds true for about every OS in existance (yes, including
AmigaDOS -- just to keep some smartass from saying it ;) ).
You're free to rant and rave all you want, but at least be reasonable
about it. If you're using old or buggy software under and old rev of
an operating system, expect crashes.
Greg
--
---------------Greg-Harp----------------h...@netcom.netcom.com---------------
"We're not hitchhiking anymore. We're riding!" -- Ren