Re: PC or Mac?

[Greg Weston <gwestonREMOVE@CAPSattbi.com>]

In article <a3em9h$3pa$1@merope.saaf.se>, Paul Schlyter
<pausch@saaf.se> wrote:

> >> SCSI is really needed only on servers and other machines having a
> >> heavy load of disk activity.
> > 
> > You'd be surprised. I worked it out 2 years ago and discovered that -
> > given my salary (which is fairly average in the tech sector) - the time
> > savings realized from SCSI over IDE in my desktop machine would pay for
> > the cost differential over the course of a year. And, of course, it
> > would be in service for well over a single year.
>  
> That assumes that the waiting time for disk access is completely
> wasted and can be used for nothing.  Personally my mind doesn't go
> completely blank while I'm waiting -- often I'm still thinking about
> the problem I'm trying to solve while waiting.  Quick turn-around
> times is of course nice, but it may not save you as much time as you
> want to believe: you are then tempted to rebuild your project more
> quickly, and you'll end up with more failed rebuilds because you
> didn't think enough when fixing that bug....
>  
> But you could of course perform the experiment: exchange your IDE
> disk to a SCSI disk, use it for one year, and see if your profits
> really did increase enough to cover the cost of the SCSI disk.
>  
> Simple math is one thing - real life can be something quite different.

I'm quite aware of that and it was real-life situations upon which I
based my calculations. I have nearly 20 years of development experience
covering a dozen distinct platforms and a wide variety of hardware.
Please don't presume I don't know where my time goes.

> >>> Apple never really switched over to PC format floppies.
> >>  
> >> Then how come I can read, on PC's, the floppies created on my wife's
> >> Mac?
> > 
> > The Mac will happily write to FAT disks with essentially no warning to
> > the user.
>  
> She used floppies I once bought her - since I wasn't aware then that
> the Mac can read/write PC formatted floppies, I was careful getting
> floppies which were "preformatted for the Mac" (whatever that may
> mean...)

That would mean they were formatted with and HFS directory structure
(as opposed to a FAT structure). I don't know your exact circumstances.
If you can read on an x86 box floppies that she's writing from her Mac,
she's writing to FAT floppies. Convenient for file transfer, but if you
don't need it it's unnecessarily slow for her.