Amiga security compared to other OS

[Megol]

So you complain that using a standard menu that is clearly labeled isn't discoverable? Honestly that seems like complaining for its own sake.

[Mrs Beanbag]

it's not clearly labelled. it is completely unlabelled. there is no menu bar.

the standard way to resize a window is just to drag it with the mouse, not to open a hidden dialog and type a number into a box. i'm obviously not the only one to have this problem given there's a thread on StackOverflow about it.

[Megol]

Properties/Layout isn't labeled?

The reason you can't drag to size is backwards compatibility with programs expecting a 80 characters wide text screen. But adjust the screen buffer width and then one can drag it up to the buffer size. The difference? If one does that then it's the _user_ that selects to have less compatibility by default. And compatibility have been MS bread and butter.

BTW the Unix solution to resizing is frankly a hack. The MS solution have less chance of failing but isn't really a good solution either.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by NorthWay

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

I read it years ago, but never took the resource tracking bit seriously since it was never implemented. Which OS had resource tracking in 1985, BTW?

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by kolla

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

For obvious reasons, I've never run AS225, but I have run AmiTCP since 1994, still do, and have it on original disks with (quite good) documentation.
And of course it was a bad port. In order to put TCP/IP in AmigaOS, NSDI basically took half of the BSD kernel, as well as much of the userland including etc/passwd, bin/ls, and ported it to the Amiga, which faciliatated a lot of bad ports from UNIX. Credit where credit's due, they also made a lot of good adaptations, such as file notification support, an ARexx interface and so on.
RoadShow seems to take a different approach, dispensing with the AMITCP:db directory and arcade commands.

[NorthWay]

Originally Posted by idrougge

Which OS had resource tracking in 1985, BTW?

Erm... was that a rhetoric question?

Anything multiuser probably. Unixen, VMS, MVS. GECOS?
Not sure about OS-9. Probably not Lisa.

[Megol]

Originally Posted by NorthWay

Erm... was that a rhetoric question?

Anything multiuser probably. Unixen, VMS, MVS. GECOS?
Not sure about OS-9. Probably not Lisa.

Don't forget Mac OS. It used a "handle" mechanism for tracking (essentially a indirection of pointers). I would be surprised if Lisa didn't use the same mechanism.
Also QNX, DESQview (at least partially) and IIRC even the original GEOS.

[Mrs Beanbag]

there's nothing mystical about resource tracking, it doesn't require an MMU, i've thought about patching it into Exec myself just to prove it.

[Megol]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

there's nothing mystical about resource tracking, it doesn't require an MMU, i've thought about patching it into Exec myself just to prove it.

Indeed.
BTW wasn't the intention that CAOS would build on the existing Exec and do the tracking at a higher level?

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by Megol

Indeed.
BTW wasn't the intention that CAOS would build on the existing Exec and do the tracking at a higher level?

yes it seems so, if i read that document correctly, but existing Amiga software obviously uses Exec directly, but i think we could easily build a wrapper around Exec that provides this sort of functionality.

Just patch "free" and "allocmem" &c to keep reserved memory blocks in a doubly linked list for each task.

[commodorejohn]

Originally Posted by Megol

Don't forget Mac OS. It used a "handle" mechanism for tracking (essentially a indirection of pointers). I would be surprised if Lisa didn't use the same mechanism.

I've never looked at the Lisa API myself, but I wouldn't bet on it. The Resource Manager and its associated approach to memory management were almost entirely the work of Mac Team member Bruce Horn (a Xerox alumnus who also designed the Finder,) and from his account it doesn't sound like the kind of thing most other people at Apple were doing, at the time.

[NorthWay]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

Just patch "free" and "allocmem" &c to keep reserved memory blocks in a doubly linked list for each task.

At the far back of my head I remember something about an article where someone wrote up a way of how you could attach allocations to the task structure.

Anything you allocate and leave behind after you exit will crash&burn. Think Setfunction().

[Nosferax]

Funny enough, the first computer virus I ever saw in my life was the mouse inverter virus on my A1000 circa 1986 or so....

[Minuous]

Resource tracking really is trivial...it's just a matter of tracking what task allocates what resource. And it would greatly improve AmigaOS. (But some kind of opt-in system would likely be needed to handle eg. tasks that allocate resources on behalf of another task.)

[commodorejohn]

Yeah, that's where it gets tricky, particularly since the Amiga's message-passing system is based around just handing over pointers to memory and who knows what happens to it from there...