The article on pavlov's humans makes the interesting suggestion that software should automatically email the developer every time a bug arises. I would just like to point out that a free email client for X, exmh, has been doing this for a while now. I guess you can chalk this up to the free-software-did-it-first category.
The bit about X swamping the pci bus is news to me, but it makes a lot of sense. In my experience, though, (and this is with a much slower cpu) mpg123 without options will always skip when I do any substantial amount of accessing on IDE disks. The amount of disk transfer it will get through without skip seems directly proportional to the size of buffer I tell mpg123 to use. If you're running on scsi disks, this shouldn't be an issue, but otherwise it would be another good reason to crank up that buffer size.
So, is this a nonissue for people with AGP video cards?
There was a writeup in the Linux Gazette on this a few months ago; you can find it at http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue34/jachim.html . They basically added a secondary IDE controller to a normal Linux PC, for a total of 4 ide channels, and filled all the spare IDE units with CDRom drives for a total of 7 cdroms and whatever fit on the boot drive served. The biggest trick was probably finding a large enough case, but we're all getting good at that by now, right? By combining this approach with the first one suggested (copying CD contents to a big honkin IDE hard drive) you could get an extremely large amount of storage on line for very little money. And yes, Virginia, performance under heavy load would suck, and no you would not want to do something silly like this with your main mail, home directory, or SQL server; with a reasonable amount of traffic the machine's usefulness for other tasks would become extremely limited due to the amount of interrupt activity generated by those 4 IDE channels. However, it would be one very cost effective way to get a large amount of data dependably available and on-line.
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The article on pavlov's humans makes the interesting suggestion that software should automatically email the developer every time a bug arises. I would just like to point out that a free email client for X, exmh, has been doing this for a while now. I guess you can chalk this up to the free-software-did-it-first category.
The bit about X swamping the pci bus is news to me, but it makes a lot of sense. In my experience, though, (and this is with a much slower cpu) mpg123 without options will always skip when I do any substantial amount of accessing on IDE disks. The amount of disk transfer it will get through without skip seems directly proportional to the size of buffer I tell mpg123 to use. If you're running on scsi disks, this shouldn't be an issue, but otherwise it would be another good reason to crank up that buffer size.
So, is this a nonissue for people with AGP video cards?
There was a writeup in the Linux Gazette on this a few months ago; you can find it at http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue34/jachim.html . They basically added a secondary IDE controller to a normal Linux PC, for a total of 4 ide channels, and filled all the spare IDE units with CDRom drives for a total of 7 cdroms and whatever fit on the boot drive served. The biggest trick was probably finding a large enough case, but we're all getting good at that by now, right? By combining this approach with the first one suggested (copying CD contents to a big honkin IDE hard drive) you could get an extremely large amount of storage on line for very little money. And yes, Virginia, performance under heavy load would suck, and no you would not want to do something silly like this with your main mail, home directory, or SQL server; with a reasonable amount of traffic the machine's usefulness for other tasks would become extremely limited due to the amount of interrupt activity generated by those 4 IDE channels. However, it would be one very cost effective way to get a large amount of data dependably available and on-line.
$.02