Re: Damm Small Linux

From: Joel Kolstad (JKolstad71HatesSpam_at_Yahoo.Com)
Date: 11/27/04 

Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2004 09:38:24 -0800

Joerg,

"Joerg" <notthisjoergsch@removethispacbell.net> wrote in message
news:9oRpd.27531$6q2.9653@newssvr14.news.prodigy.com...
> That is true. But with a (manually) switched parallel port I did pretty
> much the same stuff as with USB.

Fair enough, and I suppose I did too, but IMO USB is a _much_ better
interface than the parallel port ever was. People were constantly having
problems with, e.g., scanners connected to dongles, multiple dongles
stacked, printers piggybacked on scanners... ugggh!

A USB stack -- while far from trivial -- is also not _too_ huge; I expect it
could be readily achieved in <100k with some effort.

> Multitasking with Windows is often a joke. I am using two PCs or more
> simultaneously because one alone is too slow for me. You switch to another
> window and then nothing happens for many seconds until a task in the other
> one is finished.

Under Windows XP, multi-tasking is pretty smooth _so long as you don't have
a program trying to hog all the CPU time_ (and so long as you haven't run
out of RAM and Windows is swapping to the hard drive -- it crawls in such
cases). Manually setting a program's priority lower using task manager does
the trick. It would be nice if Windows were a little 'improved' in this
regard; UNIX boxes don't seem to have this problem.

> There were routines for DOS which let you do the same and also went past
> the 1MB extender limit.

Yeah, remember Desqview and Carousel? Pretty sweet programs, at the time.

> There is a reason Bob Pease stuck with VW Bugs.

A lot of people I know these days take these old cars and slap a third-party
microcontroller-based engine control system on them! :-)

---Joel

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