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Can't Apple do SOMETHING to eliminate the spinning beach ball?
I mean, I would rather my cursor just remain a cursor. (I'm sure at this point someone will point me to a utility that removes the ball) Outline the app's window(s) with some highlight showing the APP, not the OS in general, is experiencing delays.
Did BeOS ever have (to do) this?
Will/would it require a (micro)kernel rewrite?
Okay, small gripe over.
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Well no matter how fast the processor is there will always be something else to bog down the system, Hard Drives, network, whatever. If there is nothing for the CPU to process, you have to wait.
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But in a bazillion cycles per second, the frontmost app SHOULD be able to devote a few cycles every second to bring it UP to a 'slow-down' versus a complete non-responsive app.
If I am focused on the front-most app, I would prefer to have a setting that allows me to instruct the 21st-century computational device to devote 70% to what I'm doing, and not get interrupted or preempted by Software Update, Mail, iChat, etc. in the background.
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nearly every SBOD I see is caused by disk latency. It's true that a given application could be smart enough to do speculative reads so as to have the data when it needs it. However, there is a physical limit to the amount of data you can pull off a disk.
One could implement APIs such that the frontmost application has complete control of the CPU, HD, peripherals, etc. as needed. If you follow that trail, you'll wind up in OS 9.
Frankly, I'll take the occasional SBOD in exchange for my scanner driver not locking me out of my printer driver, photoshop, and my mailer.
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I still would like a boot system folder or OS/partition or user account that was set up to turn off extensions ala OS 9 to eek out performance when desired. No background stuff to check for printing, palmsync, etc.
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Well you can do that, just a base system install with only the app you want to use.
Like raz said, back in OS 9 we didn't have preemptive multitasking, it was pretty much all or nothing.
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Ah, if only Casady and Greene could have stayed with us.
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[quote RAMd®d]Ah, if only Casady and Greene could have stayed with us.
In a way iTunes keeps them with us in a much broader market than they could ever create.
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This may not answer your question, but have you tried having an Activity Monitor window open while using the computer to see if there isn't some particular app (maybe a background activity) that is misbehaving and creating these spinning beach balls?
LyleH
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