Re: Old Man ....Re: The end ......?

From: Maleki (maleki_m__at_hotmail.com)
Date: 10/27/04 

Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 10:23:46 -0500

On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 22:17:57 -0500, Old Man wrote:

>
> At present, the 120 GB HD has a 20 GB partition (Drive D:)
> to store Windows XP back-up recovery (now useless), and a
> 100 GB partition (drive C:), of which 60 GB is free.
>
> Sure, of that 40 GB, there's some porn, but since that's
> downloaded via 56 kbs phone modem, which takes online
> time from sci.physics, it occupies an insignificant amount
> of space.
>
> The music library (~ 60 CD copies) consists of about 5 GB
> of WMA files. The ebook library holds > 300 books.
> 4 GB of digital camera JPGs (not porn); Scanned images
> of text books and financial records; 7 years of "sent"
> sci.physics messages; Fine Art .images downloaded from
> the Louvre; Then there's Physical Review, "The First 100
> Years"; Encyclopedia Britannica; World Atlas; Dictionary;
> all self contained, without the need to insert CDs or DVDs.
>
> The external (Fire Wire) HD is 160 GB, and holds uncompressed
> backups for 3 different computers. It's near full (30 GB free).
>

I know that of course, I mean you've filled it with typical
stuff, and I say you're still not using your computer for
something more than a storage place. I only get to feel what
I've got when it runs my programs to compute answers for me.
That's something that even the most fanciful software
available cannot do. And that particular use, what a PC is
really about, doesn't need much hardware resources, and as I
said even an XT did great for me. On my present PC I can get
results of computations faster than I could in school using
VAX minicomputers (in the 80s). The idea of reshuffling
previously existing methods of storage, communication, and
publishing into a "personal computer" is not original, while
the idea of any person being able to program and run them at
home _is_.

Of course for some type of problems hardware resources
(especially speed) become an issue. But there is distributed
computing one may attempt. I remember some guy about ten
years back computed the paths of the object that fell into
Jupiter using a single 386 pc. It took the PC 2.5 months of
computation to get it accurately enough. That of course is
not much fun. He did show, nevertheless, that the object
will fall into Jupiter and posted the results and what he'd
done on the net. 

-- 
     nafahmidim nazr dAsht yA kaffAreh.
Quantcast