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On Thu, 29 Dec 1994, Randal Whittle wrote: > > Delighted. > > Delighted--meaning you'd love to stick your thoughts in here, or > delighted because you think this is a good idea (moving to a PowerMac)? always delighted to pontificate.... of course, it was worth what you paid for it. re:multitasking, I said MacOS wasn't so hot on it. > Not particularly, unless it is to Download files via modem in > the background. Spooling off printing jobs would be nice too, but Windows > sucks at that too (though 3rd party products pick up the slack). Will > the Mac do that okay? The mac print monitor does a fine job. it's really no better than print manager, except it provides better feedback. Unlike the Windows print manager, it doesn't spool stuff off to disk. This is good speed-wise with documents less than 3 pages, but you will spend more time waiting for a release from the word processor. There may be a way to make it spool more to memory, but the ones we use at work do little in the way of large print jobs, so they're untweaked (if in fact they are tweakable) > I mean if you are a programmer doing massive re-compiles while > you edit some other piece of code, then by all means--OS/2 is for you! > The rest of us have minimal need for multitasking. Well, I dunno. If you're doing any networking, it can be valuable. I often have 3-8 tcpip client windows open at once (WWW, telnet, gopher, ftp, archie, news) and often leave one xfering data to watch other stuff. I guess it's a personal thing.... > True, but speed isn't one of them. No, but the speed advantages are in operations that involve passthrough, shifting and addition. Start doing mult. and you're up to CISC speed on that instruction, and memory addressing is, if I recall, limited to one mode: register. (just checked: correct) I don't mean to sound like I'm bashing RISC - it's impressive, though I don't want to write compilers for it. It's just that I wanted to mention where the speed gains are achieved, because Intel has already worked on increasing the piplining in the 80x86 series, (They can call it the P5 all they want, it's still an 86...) and I think they're working on implementing variable length clock cycles. So the CISC platform is not necessarily going to be left in the dust by the PowerPC chip... > Sure--just watch a PowerMac emulate Windows. ;) Heheh. The add-in board is an excellent solution to that. I'm normally disinclined towards emulation, but you can't beat the price on the Houdini board (or whatever they're calling it now).