h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I wonder if Bill G. had anything to say about hard drives when he said that no-one would ever need more than 640k of ram...

I think he still believes he's right.
Just look how Windoze puts all the memory
in the swapfile on the harddrive....

I had a hard drive the other day. People kept on cutting me off and then I ran out of gas.

The le Mans 24 Hours, that'd be a hard drive (especially if you did it all by yourself )

I don't drive, either floppy or hard, so I couldn't possibly comment.
I tried an internal modem once, but it hurt when I walked.

Enough already.

I don't swap, atleast not often. I have three netscapes on the go, and the current memory situation is:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 62896 60084 2812 24004 1800 22220
-/+ buffers/cache: 36064 26832
Swap: 167032 0 167032

I suspect something will make it to swap eventually.. I'm beginning to wonder if allocating all that swap space was a really stupid idea.

I have thirty users on my network, each of which has, as is current form, several gigabytes of local hard disk space on their machine. On the network servers I have made available several volumes of network drive space, each of which is typically 25Gb in logical size. Do they put their files on the network drives where I can back them up? Nope, they lose them on their local hard disks, and then complain when (A) They can't find them again, or (B) their hard disk goes bearings-up and even if they could find them before, they can't now, or (C) Windows writes to the disk, which usually means the filesystem is sh***ed beyond recovery anyhow. Funny how when I dump the first few sectors of a corrupted disk that doesn't boot any more, and find the words 'Microsoft Word Document' embedded half-way up the boot block.

Windows - The swiss cheese of operating systems.

Enough of that.

My sister makes clocks and other decorative items out of hold hard disk peices I give her. Most 3.5" platters still look quite nice; the new ones are silver and shiny (the old ones had metal oxides on them and looked rusty, apart from the ones which had crashed, which had dirty reat grooves worn in them by a head weighing 0.1g...)

The magnets in those drives for the head actuators are remarkably strong. Don't do what my boss did, and leave it on top of your monitor to decorate it. One permanently gaussed monitor coming up....

man, i'm too drunk and stoned to read all your words, but i really feel that if i read them all, i would probably agree with them. * tee hee hee *.@

Good thing you didn't have a winchester.

Now there's a nice place

I have some hardware souvenirs like that: mine are a couple of platters out of some crashed removable disk packs that belonged to a
Wang VS-86 (don't ask). They make excellent minimalist wall art and can also be worn as rather low-slung halos by drunken adults.

Each platter is approximately 15 inches in diameter and represents 2.5 MB of fried data.

I've got a couple of three-disk 15" Fujitsu 168Mb eagles to take apart one day. These are the 19" rackmounts where you can see the disk works. When the top surface got scarred, we played 'see if we can make pretty patterns' by programming the drive to move the heads in a zigzag in time with the disk rotation. It sorta worked, but...

(Obviously a hardware nut with too much time on his hands. - Ed.)

Winchesters, don't remind me. In my lab at work we have some platters out of an old "Washing Machine" type drive. My boss told me about the disk races they used to have. Glad I wasn't around way back then

I blame it on the failure to put windows
in those early DP bunkers. Did your installation
have false floors with A/C, and a constant
roaring sound? Sensory dprivation tanks had
nothing on a secure DP department.

Lil

My father has some computer art in the form of a big copper disk (is it a hard drive?) that used to belong to a computer at his law firm. It's been bent to form a sort of scupture. This is what his firm's computer guru does to these disks when they're too old, so that no one can come back and read the data on them. He then signs them and gives (sells?) them to partners at the firm.

~Liz

I *am* the DP department.

Consequently I turned the two Win/WG 3.11 systems they gave me into Linux boxes.
These particular servers are still linux boxes to this day, although one now runs the company web server, and the other just sits there and looks after development file serving. We are no longer running kernel 1.1.59, although our backup server is still running 1.2.8. (Personally, I'm on 2.2.14 until 2.2.15 is out).

Windows -- The swiss cheese of operating systems.

recycling is admirable.@