Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
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From: rjc@churchy.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Ray Cromwell)
Subject: Re: YOU PEOPLE HAD BETTER GET WIT THE PROGRAM!! (Was: Re: Commodore Business Machines)
Message-ID: <1991Jun24.230638.7865@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu>
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Organization: The Internet
References: <1991Jun24.131045.4403@news.iastate.edu> <1991Jun24.150701.1686@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> <14248@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Mon, 24 Jun 91 23:06:38 GMT
Lines: 77

In article <14248@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> navas@cory.Berkeley.EDU writes:
>In article <1991Jun24.150701.1686@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> es1@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Ethan Solomita) writes:
>>	2) How is the Amiga clipboard inferior? You haven't
>>presented that. You simply said it was unsupported and that is
>>why it sucks. That proves nothing. Try proving something.
>>	-- Ethan
>
>Of course it does, Ethan.  Look, the clipboard exists mainly for people
>actually INTERESTED in providing a reasonable user interface.  If it isn't
>used, it is definitely inferior to one that is.  Don't you think?

  No, the design isn't inferior, it's the implementation that is.
The Amiga clipboard.device is very robust and can take any type of
data. If developers don't support it, that doesn't make the clipboard.device
itself inferior, it makes the implementation inferior in practice.

>Let's say Apple stuck an AMD 29000 chip into every Mac to speed up graphics.
>Except that their operating system would need to be rewritten to support it --
>and they never did that.  Does that make their design inferior or superior to
>the Amiga chipset?
>
>Inferior, of course.  All these Mac-heads would be sitting there talking about
>their cool graphics chips, and we'd be telling them that they were NEVER
>USED, so WHAT'S THE POINT?  Would you then say, well just because they were
>never used doesn't make it inferior?

   Your example is flawed. The clipboard.device has been in the OS
since the beginning and nothing had to be rewritten. A more accurate example
would be if Apple made some interface routines for the AMD and developers
didn't use it. That doesn't make the AMD itself inferior to the Amiga
chipset, it makes the implementation of it's use inferior.

>Or, perhaps more realistically, they provide for DMA driven activity in their
>top of the line model, but never updated their OS to support it....

  Still the wrong example. A better example would be if there were
OS routines for using the DMA chip but Application developers refused to use it.

>Same thing goes for OS's and software.
>
>Take a pill, dude, our OS doesn't even have Paste(), Copy() or Cut()
>routines -- sure the equivalents may only be twenty lines of code, but it's
>sixty lines of code that isn't in the OS.

   Sheesh, what a nitpick. It takes about 12 lines of code to do a 
Cut() to the clipboard. If a developer is so lazy that he can't
implement a very easy routine like this than he needs to pack up his
computer and head for the IBM. Apple's problem is they like to put
EVERYTHING in the OS. Hell, they may as well incorperate Microsoft
Word into the OS with a single function cal{, void Word(char *path);
Just so you know, 2.0's iffparse.library includes 2 calls,
OpenClipBoard and CloseClipBoard which aid the programmer who is too lazy
to set up an IORequest.

  So we have concluded
1) The Amiga clipboard.device is totally open in design and supports
the same amount of data that the Mac's does. (contrary to
Marc's uninformed statement that it supports ASCII only)
2) The clipboard.device never took off because Amiga developers choose
not to support the clipboard (and some of them don't even support the
Amiga OS, e.g. bypass it and go to the hardware, etc) There is nothing
Commodore can do about this, the users must demand an end to this 
and not buy products that break the rules.

  When you talk about the Amiga's clipboard, you must distinguish between
the clipboard _itself_ and how developers choose to use it.

>David Navas                                   navas@cory.berkeley.edu
>	2.0 :: "You can't have your cake and eat it too."
>Also try c186br@holden, c260-ay@ara and c184-ap@torus


--
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