Amiga security compared to other OS

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by kolla

Idrougge: you are aware that there is nothing "amiga philosophy" about AmigaOS filesystem layout, and that S:, L:, T: etc are legacy from a different OS, namely TRIPOS? The original genuine Commodore Amiga Operating System, CAOS, has been said to be much more UNIX like interms of filesystem layout. Imagine how different things could have been if CAOS was implemented and TRIPOS never was used. It would also have simplified the path forward a lot.

The original genuine CAOS was still-born, and for as long as there's been an AmigaOS, the TRIPOS underpinnings have been part of it, and have been kept and improved by Commodore and its successors.
But by all means, tell me how it would have simplified the way forward a lot.

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by idrougge

Or that piece of shit called Amiga, mind you. You know, the VT100 terminal is 40 years old now, but it is still state-of-the-art in UNIX land.

What would you suggest replacing it with? In what ways is it inadequate? It's a million years ahead of the cmd.exe included with windows.

[Vot]

Erm accidental post, wrong thread. Admin delete this post.

[Megol]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

What would you suggest replacing it with? In what ways is it inadequate? It's a million years ahead of the cmd.exe included with windows.

You argue like a 12 year old. Have you ever done anything to that standard? It is simply shit. And the Windows comment? Comparing a shell to a text terminal standard?!?

[kolla]

I have owned both vt220, vt320 and a vt510, all of wich much more state-of-the-art than vt100.

More *ix like paths could have simplified porting of software and made the system less "schizofrenic", almost any networked Amiga today support unix style notation for paths simply because of all the software requiring it. It's messy, to say the least. Resource tracking would helped a lot for stability.

[NorthWay]

The Amiga has a lot of shortcomings, many of which C= was painfully aware of. One of those is applications and application installation.

And before you mention Installer, that is not what I am thinking of: Try to install an application and then move it to another partition or directory. Using WB. Or whatever really - did you get all the dependent files with you when you moved it?
I don't think C= had any definitive solution, but I think they pondered upon having a special kind of directory that contained all belonging files and by naming would know what the executable inside was named.

OTOH, I am still waiting for the *nix world to come up with a proper solution to the nightmare of version dependence. So far they have become very good at doing workarounds, but they behave like they drank metanol for breakfast if you have just a single minor point too low on the release number of a library.

And the viability of the Amiga today?
C= did a telling test with Diskdoctor: They saved it on a floppy disk and then started it, telling it to repair the disk. It basically committed suicide and made the disk useless. After that they simply stopped distributing it.
The analogy would be to start a debugging monitor and write all over memory and see how well the machine survived that (or make a minimal program that does the same). If you go down in flames then you should rethink what you are doing in 2015.

And still, I love the Amiga. I don't see much of a path forwards, but plenty of sideways possibilities. If any of the enhanced FPGA projects ever get released that will be good.
Any path forward wont be Amiga compatible, but it could be _heavily_ inspired (i.e. identical for the end user); there is a bit of research done on SASOS (Single Address Space Operating System - yes, that sounds strangely familiar) which targets 64bit systems. Wait and see. Like always.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by Megol

You argue like a 12 year old. Have you ever done anything to that standard? It is simply shit. And the Windows comment? Comparing a shell to a text terminal standard?!?

At least can be any width, not limited to 80 columns wide like cmd.exe! It's more like a legacy text mode DOS emulator than a shell.

Originally Posted by NorthWay

And before you mention Installer, that is not what I am thinking of: Try to install an application and then move it to another partition or directory. Using WB. Or whatever really - did you get all the dependent files with you when you moved it?

This of course depends on the application. It is certainly possible to design an application that you can just drag anywhere you like and it will still work. The ones i hate most are the ones that require to put Assigns in the startup-sequence.

[NorthWay]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

This of course depends on the application.

Not really. This is more of a philosophical discussion. C= was looking towards the Mac and how they handled it (without being satisfied with it IIRC).
If you see the icon for an application you should simply be able to drag it to somewhere else and magic happens in the background unbeknownst to you. That was the level of user-friendliness C= was aiming for - you and me are way too much of a power-user and perfectly able to handle and fix any missed files and directories.

Don't you remember back in the days of the 120M floptical? Mac users would innocently randomly walk around and test Macs in shops and just insert a disk and drag applications over wholesale. $10000 worth of apps coming home with you in the pocket. Now _that_ was rich. Or poor. Or something.

[Mrs Beanbag]

haha, i do remember that, i don't know exactly how it worked though.

but what i meant was, there was never any standard way for software to install, so standards varied. there were applications you could copy to anywhere you liked, just as you mention you could do on the Mac. And there were other applications you couldn't move at all without a lot of hassle. Or sometimes you couldn't even install them at all if you didn't call your install drive DH1: or whatever.

[daxb]

I agree to Mrs Beanbag. Its all about the developer how they release their software. The most do/did it right with just copy to a programm directory as an installation. You cam move it how you like and it will always work. Installer itself isn`t the problem. Only the wrong use of it. In simplest form it gives some information to the user, ask for the directory and then just copy. Of course it is not always so simple and there are exceptions. Fonts and Libs for example.

Using assigns is in most cases a bad idea. There is progdir: since 2.x or 3.1. Assign command is for the user and for the OS IMHO. It just doesn`t make sense to have dozens of programm assigns beside the user and OS ones.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

What would you suggest replacing it with? In what ways is it inadequate? It's a million years ahead of the cmd.exe included with windows.

I don't even understand why you're comparing it to cmd.exe. Is that the state of the art now, or what? It's that kind of complacency that makes things stand still at a 1970s level.
Just open a terminal in OSX and try to write a character with a value higher than 7-bit ASCII and watch the system come up with innovative ways to destroy what you just wrote. Try to treat it as a part of the overall system, with the same line editing commands as the rest of the system, and watch your terminal being filled with unparsed control codes. Ask yourself why you must use control and escape sequences to do things which could be done using menus, windows or the system qualifier keys. Or why something like KingCON or VincED seems heathenous to users of *sh shells.

Originally Posted by kolla

More *ix like paths could have simplified porting of software and made the system less "schizofrenic", almost any networked Amiga today support unix style notation for paths simply because of all the software requiring it. It's messy, to say the least.

Bad ports are bad, I think that's what you're saying.

Originally Posted by kolla

Resource tracking would helped a lot for stability.

Agreed. Of course, it was not an option in 1985, but the question is to how to introduce it after the fact.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by idrougge

Just open a terminal in OSX and try to write a character with a value higher than 7-bit ASCII and watch the system come up with innovative ways to destroy what you just wrote.

i just tried it in Ubuntu.

[strim]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

i just tried it in Ubuntu.

Actually, it works in OS X too. No problem. I've been using UTF-8 in OS X terminal for years. Never had single issue with it.

Tab completion, file names, file contents. It works.

[Mrs Beanbag]

it does seem to struggle a bit with Arabic but Hebrew is fine so i'm guessing it's the font. Line editing is really weird with a mixture of text directions, though.

[NorthWay]

Originally Posted by idrougge

Agreed. Of course, it was not an option in 1985, but the question is to how to introduce it after the fact.

Did you read the Andy Finkel article about CAOS from Amiga Transactor #1?
Check it out here if not: http://www.thule.no/haynie/caos.html

[kolla]

Originally Posted by idrougge

Bad ports are bad, I think that's what you're saying.

Yeah, from AS225 through AmiTCP to RoadShow, all IP stacks on Amiga are just bad ports.

Agreed. Of course, it was not an option in 1985, but the question is to how to introduce it after the fact.

Of course it was an option in 1985, plenty of other operating systems back then had it.

[Megol]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

At least can be any width, not limited to 80 columns wide like cmd.exe! It's more like a legacy text mode DOS emulator than a shell.

I guess you never use the command prompt in Windows? Because you are, like totally wrong! </teenager mode>

Maximum for my screen width and selected font/size: about 256 characters visible, the logical screen width can be higher.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by Megol

I guess you never use the command prompt in Windows? Because you are, like totally wrong! </teenager mode>

Maximum for my screen width and selected font/size: about 256 characters visible, the logical screen width can be higher.

i do use it, although i generally don't use Windows at all unless i really have to. ok then how do you do it? because try as i might it won't resize sideways by the normal means using the mouse. (On Windows 7)

ok i got it
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3...haracters-wide
but seriously... i mean... seriously...

[Megol]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

i do use it, although i generally don't use Windows at all unless i really have to. ok then how do you do it? because try as i might it won't resize sideways by the normal means using the mouse. (On Windows 7)

ok i got it
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3...haracters-wide
but seriously... i mean... seriously...

Hmm? Yes I don't understand why MS doesn't support dragging to size the window but it isn't really a big problem?

Edit: Well actually I do understand why (backwards compatibility) but don't think it is relevant anymore.

[Mrs Beanbag]

that they chose to hide such basic functionality in a menu option, such that apparently quite a lot of people don't even know about it... from a usability design point of view that is very much a problem.