Re: Pirates of Silicon Valley

["Robert R. Dell" <robertdell@sprintmail.com>]

Steve Mentzer wrote:

> >
> >        The Mac OS has lagged behind on >technicalities<, it actually works
> >much better than Windows does with its many "features" most of the time.
> >Even this is gap is being filled quickly, though, as the Mac OS leaps
> >forward into the future and leaves Windows FAR, FAR behind (Memory
> >Protection: http://www.MacKiDo.com/Myths/memoryprotection.html,
> >Multitasking: http://www.MacKiDo.com/Myths/mt.html)
> >
>
> I am so glad about you posting those links. I sent them to a couple of unix and
> NT programmers in my department. They are still reading them, but all of them
> said <in one way or another> "Where did you find this crap?"

Actually, I'm a bit open minded on computers and I don't automaticly say "crap" when somebody tells me something I don't want to hear or posts something like "Microsoft leaps ahead ... ".  I just read it, if I choose not to beleive it then I don't.  If it's from a known news source then I'm tempted to believe it much more than if it came from Joe down the street.  The problem is that the people that test the Mac versus PC are usually Mac magazines and the PC users think it's just a load of hogwash.  I saw one article in PC magazine a year or two back about Mac VS PC and it reflected the same results that Macworld had.  I showed it to the programmer at work and he said "That's bull".  His tune changed when I brought my machine into work Thursday and compared it with one of their new 450 MHz machines (even though I think I may be running slower than I should be running).  You'll ask me now what machine was it and tell me specifics on what could have slowed it down and so on but those
questions I don't know the answers to.  All I can tell you is this for my machine and the following was dragged from one application to my email program without copying and pasting (a feature I have yet to see on the PC but don't know all features about them also).


Hardware overview
Machine ID: 510
Model name: Power Macintosh G3 series
Keyboard type: Apple Extended Keyboard
Attributes: Audio card
Processor info: PowerPC G3
Machine speed: 333 MHz
FPU: Built-in

Mac OS overview
Finder: 8.6
System: 8.6  US
Active enabler: None
At Ease: Not installed
QuickTime: 4.0
File sharing: is off

Memory overview
Disk cache: 7.96 MB
Virtual memory: is off
Built-in memory: 256 MB
  Location  Size Memory type
  J3     128 MB   DIMM
  J4     64 MB   DIMM
  J5     64 MB   DIMM
Video memory: 6 MB
Backside L2 cache: 1 MB

ID = 0
CD-ROM drive
Driver version: Not available
Mac OS partitions: 0
Removable media: Yes
Vendor: SONY
Revision number: 1.0p
Product ID: CD-ROM CDU601-25
Serial number:

No mounted media inserted

ID = 4
Hard drive
Driver version: 8.1.2f1
Mac OS partitions: 1
Removable media: No
Vendor: QUANTUM
Revision number: 6.4
Product ID: LP240S GM240S01X
Serial number:
Unformatted size: 234 MB

Quantum LP240S
Volume format: Mac OS Extended (HFS+)
Size: 233.66 MB
Space Available: 8.24 MB
Percent full: 96
Write protected: No
Is being file shared: No

ID = 5
Removable media
Driver version: Not available
Mac OS partitions: 0
Removable media: Yes
Vendor: IOMEGA
Revision number: J.02
Product ID: ZIP 100
Serial number:

No mounted media inserted

ID = 0
Hard drive
Driver version: 8.1.2f1
Mac OS partitions: 1
Removable media: No
Vendor: QUANTUM
Revision number: 5520
Product ID: VIKING II 9.1WSE
Serial number: 199829640625
Unformatted size: 8.50 GB

MacintoshHD
Volume format: Mac OS Extended (HFS+)
Size: 8.50 GB
Space Available: 3.16 GB
Percent full: 62
Write protected: No
Is being file shared: No

Slot $F1
Display card
Card type: display
Card name: ATY,mach64_3DUPro
Card model: ATY,GT-C
Card ROM #: 113-XXXXX-1.1
Card revision: 92
Card vendor ID: 1002
VRAM size: 6 MB

Display
Screen Size (pixels): 1600 x 1200
Grays/Colors: Thousands
Resolution (dpi): 72 x 72
Additional Information: Main screen





>
>
> I will just highlight one section of the document...
>
>   "Much of windows messaging (like COM and OLE) just pass around pointers to
>   each others memory. So they are protected, except where they share - and they
>   have to share quite a bit"
>
> This is a load of crap. The writer obviously has NO knowledge of Win32
> architecture, especially COM.
>
> If you have a program which calls a COM component (ActiveX/OLE run on COM), the
> only way you can cause GPF's in the COM components address space is if that
> component runs INPROC (which means it runs in the same process, hence the same
> memory map/address space), and the only way to do that would be to know exactly
> what address space the member data resides at. COM objects do not expose member
> data. You can only access it via an interface method or property.

I won't comment on the rest of this posting but WILL comment on this.  The only way you can implement memory protection is if you EMULATE the processor that you are running on.  This means that if you are using a Mac or PC, to protect memory locations you must emulate the PPC or Pentium respectively in order to trap out all accesses of the memory locations outside the range of an application's range.  The CPU does no protection of memory itself and allows 4 gigs of memory accesses all the time (assuming a 32 bit address bus).  There can be hardware components added to the system to cause a trap when certain locations are accessed and they might be programmable but that would make your machine almost twice it's current cost.  What made me think of this is the fact that my 333 MHz PPC processor executed native instructions at almost the exact same speed of the emulated 68k instructions which tells me that my PPC machine instructions are emulated rathert than executed directly from the
processor.  This may be going on in the PC environment as well.  Now add the fact that the newest OS appears to be slowing down the actual machine execution of software and the possibility of emulating machines becomes even more credible.