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Re: Print to SHR

aiiadict@gmail.com wrote:


the hard disk guys continue
to out-run Moore with density and speed improvements.



It seems to me that reliability has gone down.  I haven't owned a ton
of
the new big drives, but I have had 2 40GB, 1 80 GB go bad on me in the
last 4 years.


The new ferrofluid bearings have helped a lot, and the error
correction is now much stronger.

My experience has been that some manufacturers were having some
reliability problems, but that overall, reliability has improved.

And now, with inexpensive 300GB drives, one can easily afford RAID 1
mirroring, which takes individual drive reliability out of the
equation.


If it weren't for massive consolidation and the cost reductions
that come from economies of scale, things would be even dryer in
silicon valley.




I read another article about speedup of CPU's...  The entire
motherboard
circuitry was on a chip.  The chip was glued to the board (non-
upgradeable)
There were fewer bus speed restrictions, because the bus is in the
chip.

I wonder when we'll get these?


We won't, in mainstream PCs--expandability is critical to
enable building useful systems.

And the only bus speed improvement that really matters now is
memory bus speedup ("north bridge"), but for most applications,
a 2MB-4MB cache insulates the processor from memory quite effectively.


If any of you guys want a speedup, try installing windows 98 on your
hard
drive..  Install WindowsXP after, and it'll be dual boot.  Windows 98
FLYS
on a 2ghz machine.  Feels like an Apple II with an accelerator does..

I like Applewin..  Hold the Scroll Lock key and compiling things in
merlin
goes QUICK..


Just hit Ctl-D and Merlin will skip outputting to the screen--
now *that's* flying!

-michael

NadaNet networking for Apple II computers!
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it's seriously underused."