Re: PC or Mac?

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <010220020840588012%gwestonREMOVE@CAPSattbi.com>,
Greg Weston  <gwestonREMOVE@CAPSattbi.com> wrote:
 
> In article <a3dk33$1ln$1@merope.saaf.se>, Paul Schlyter
> <pausch@saaf.se> wrote:
> 
>>> The Macintosh Plus offered external expansion capabilities.  And SCSI
>>> has some advantages over IDE (namely the number and variety of devices
>>> which can be attached to a single bus).
>>  
>> I'm well aware of the advantage of SCSI, thank you, but the major
>> advantage of IDE is low price, which matters in a mass market.  And
>> even if SCSI is better, IDE is still good enough for most users.
>> 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.
 
>>> Apple never really switched over to PC format floppies.  All floppies
>>> are formatted with the Macintosh filesystem by default, but we can
>>> read PC floppies.
>>  
>> Then how come I can read, on PC's, the floppies created on my wife's
>> Mac?  (she has a Powerbook).  Those diskettes contain resource forks
>> and the like (as hidden files), but I can access all those files
>> without problem - and I'm not using any kind of special software - it
>> works fine right on my 14-year old PC.  If that Mac isn't using the
>> PC format on diskettes, how come I can do this?
> 
> The Mac will happily write to FAT disks with essentially no warning to
> the user. If she used floppies that came formatted for PCs and never
> reformatted them as HFS disks, you would experience exactly what you
> describe.
 
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...)
 
-- 
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