"Usability testing is simple enough. You make up some tasks, like "Write a letter on company letterhead, then print it and its envelope". You videotape a few people doing this, with a system that records both the screen and the user's face and voice. You watch the videos (this is the time-consuming part) and note all the places where the user got stuck, had to undo something, or lost time. Those are your usability bugs."
A FEW people? If only... It takes years of labwork and thousands of test subjects and hundreds of researchers and hundreds of millions of dollars to do usability testing and interface design on big products such as a commercial OS like OSX or a package like MS Office or Adobe PhotoShop. It's one reason such software costs the big bucks.
The Open Source world doesn't have that sort of money, excepting when one of the big companies like IBM or Sun release something GPL. The result is crap inconsistent UIs and eyeball-melting colour schemes mixed randomly with attempts to monkey-copy UI gadgets and tricks from three-year-old commercial software.
"...the cluelessness of the Gallileo business model. Charging for something someone else is giving away is so 1990s. It only makes sense if there is something going on here we have not been told about."
Galileo makes high-precision access available to paying customers, the US NAVSTAR reserves that level of accuracy only for US and allied military systems. Some of the Galileo cluster will orbit at higher inclinations than the existing NAVSTAR cluster, making GPS more usable in the far North and far South (although I understand some planned future NAVSTAR satellite deployments will fill in the gaps here too). Galileo can't be switched off or degraded on a whim by a single government unlike the NAVSTAR system, allowing it to be trusted to control civilian aircraft in crowded skies.
The users of GPS will end up with multi-function receivers that can work interoperably with NAVSTAR and Galileo since it would be pointless commercially to do otherwise. Unless NAVSTAR goes commercial or the DoD stops degrading the signal the high-precision customers like airlines and such will use Galileo and pay for the convenience and predictability.
I was chewing the fat with a Linuxhead-turned-MacAddict a few days ago, tossing up ideas about where Apple might go in the future. Friend dragged the stinking corpse of the Newton out of its uneasy grave (he has a thing about PDAs, forgive him). I pointed out that the Newt was buried for a good reason or six, then inspiration struck.
Apples' range of portables has been, to be kind, lacking in features the past couple of years mainly because of their boat-anchor PPC fetish. Apple's Teh Shiny! has been the iPlod range of jewelry and fashion statements, their premier bottom-line enhancement mechanism. Video, hard disks, flash but no sign of an Apple PDA in the mix.
But... imagine an Apple PDA with Aqua, enough smarts to do the look-and-feel kabuki of its bigger brothers, a coat-pocket tablet-gesture device with a 1024x768 display and a Centrino, a shitload of Flash and no battery-sucking hard drive, able to run those new-fangled PPC/x86 fat binaries native. Of course it would be slow and not exactly the device most people whould run PhotoShop on, but as a workalike sibling to the iBooks with all the wireless connectivity Teh Shiny! comes with as standard today I figure it would fly out the door sales-wise.
The killer for this pipe-dream was fitting enough GPU power under the hood, affordable in power consumption terms, to make Aqua usable in less than geological time -- in independent tests, ten out of ten Apple owners never want to see a spinning beachball ever again. I speculated about Cell as a dedicated Aqua graphics engine but from what I've seen about its power consumption that doesn't fly. This device might just do the job though. Hmmm.
The laser writing to a CD or DVD "burns" a stripe of a particular length in the dye to represent the data being written (I'm simplifying somewhat). For best readback that stripe should be straight-edged and consistent width with rounded ends to look like a pressed-disc's "pit" as much as possible. Problem is if the laser just fires up to max power and then switches off at the end, the stripe produced is ragged-edged and variable in width as the disc's dye around the spot heats up and the laser's power characteristic changes during the write due to temperature fluctuations.
To get round this the laser's power is continuously controlled during the write operation in a proprietary manner that the various drive makers keep secret. This results in a stripe shape that's a good approximation to the ideal with nearly-straight sides of about the right width and nicely-shaped ends. The faster a drive writes the less ideal the stripe shape produced and if the disc's dye degrades with age the more likely these stripes will cause read errors. I've found it best to write CDs and DVDs at a speed lower than the drive's max; it's quite rare that you need a disc in a real hurry and with burnproofing and big drive memory buffers in the drive itself it's usually better to just let the computer get on with the writing process while you do something else.
...called "Rainbows End" due out next August is set about thirty years in the future. It mentions in passing that for Homeland Security and DRM reasons a flip-flop circuit now consists of several thousand transistors. There are moonshine fabs in Bolivia and in the hills of Akansas producing silicon for hackers who want to circumvent the restrictions but possession of such devices is a Federal rap and illegal fabs are destroyed by the US military operating with international support.
Anyone who seriously wants to record HDTV and has a modicum of technical knowledge can bypass all this cruft. Fast A/D converters on the RGB drivers and scan circuitry of an HDTV set plus some code to convert the raw voltages back into pixel data would do it. The same thing in the digital domain would work for LCD drive signals. VEIL, HDMI and other encryption systems will do bupkis to prevent recording at this level because it's directly at the point of display and that HAS to be unencrypted for himan beings to make sense of the visual and auditory data.
and have a look about half-way down the page for the "glow in the dark" keyrings. Quote:
"Inside each GlowRing is a single sealed glass tube which contains a minute amount of active gas that permanently reacts with a luminescent coating."
Translation: "active gas" == tritium.
I've got a couple on order at the moment, for geek-type Xmas presents. They limit sales to UK customers only.
"Please note that due to international regulations regarding this item THIS PRODUCT IS ONLY AVAILABLE TO UK RESIDENTS AND CANNOT BE SENT TO ANY ADDRESS OUT OF THE COUNTRY."
In fact Atlantis was more closely a ripoff of the anime series Nadia: Secret of Blue Water. Plot point after plot point maps from Atlantis to the earlier series, character designs are similar...
This company has built wavepower generators before. One unit they built was designed for ten years operational life in the North Atlantic. The prototype lasted six months in sheltered inshore waters off the coast of Scotland before it broke up in a storm.
Large fixed man-made structures in open seas either need to be incredibly massive or constantly maintained at great expense -- the canonical example is oil rigs. OPD hope these new wavepower units off Portugal can be plonked down and only require expensive servicing occasionally. Given their track record I'm not so sure.
Thank you...you show me the hard drive that holds as much as my tape drive does, then we'll talk.
Well tell us how big your tape drive is and we can discuss it. There's a LaCie USB hard drive case available with a 1.6Tb capacity in one portable box, configurable as a single volume; do you have a tape cartridge that big? As a USB device it can be plugged and unplugged in a running system with a minimal amount of operator intervention and no need to power down and reboot the system. My own HD cartridge USB device allows me to swap multiple 120Gb hard drives in and out of my system similarly without rebooting, and I trust those drives a lot more than I would trust tapes, having been bitten by "bad-tape no. 3 of 5" syndrome before when restoring backups.
Disk to disk backup would require the system to be shutdown, drive added, removed and reboot, configure etc.
Unless they are talking about removable media like CD/DVD/USB devices, this does not make sense.
There are such things as USB hard drives which appear as volumes within the Windows OS, you know. I use such a unit with a cheapo exchangeable ATAPI cartridge bay hacked into it for backup. I call it "tepid-swap"; it's not true hotswap as I have to "stop" the USB device before switching it off but I certainly don't have to shut down the entire system to change the drive fitted in the bay. After I power it up again Windows 2000 automatically recognises the new disk, no reboot necessary.
My question is, what's the last largest settlement outside a class action lawsuit? Any predictions as to a dollar amount? What's Vegas betting? Obviously Wall St. doesn't see this as a problem. And with around $4B in the bank, I don't know that any of this will matter to Apple in the long or short term.
The thing is, as someone else pointed out upstream is that after this suit is over Apple Corps will have a chunk of AAPLs money and AAPL will still be prevented from distributing music under the terms of the 1991 and previous agreements. The money AAPL lose is punishment for breaking these agreements, not a price to buy the rights to publish music under the Apple name. If they've sufficiently pissed off Apple Corps (still privately held by the Beatles and their estates) then those rights might not be available at any price.
My point-n-shoot camera's viewfinder got dirty. I opened it to clean it out, and touched the capacitor for the flash light (12v). It knocked me unconcious and burned my hand.
Yeah, 12v can bite.
The flash capacitor is about 4kV, not 12V. The whining noise after you fire it is the inverter pumping the cap back up for the next shot. It's also not current-limited, delivering all power it can to the flashtube in a few milliseconds. The TV EHT supply you mention later *is* current limited hence it gives less of a perceived shock even though the voltage is much higher.
I've taken belts from a camera's flash cap before now; they made my arm muscles spasm and throw the camera across the room.
There was a "gimmick" science-fiction story based on this idea written back in the Sixties and published in Analog. The story was called "Shortstack" after the story's main character, Short, and written by Walt and Leigh Richmond. The story used the upward rush of the hot air to keep the flexible plastic chimney erect and at night powered the turbine to pump air up to maintain the chimney's integrity.
CLV is constant linear velocity and is what the first generation CD players used. That meant the data passed under the head at a constant speed, 150kbytes/second. The further out on the disc the slower the disc turned as each turn had more data than close-in.
Once the speeds went up the manufacturers moved to CAV or constant angular velocity where the disc spins at a predetermined speed and the data comes in at different rates depending on the head position over the disc. What really happens is there's a table of different CAVs stored in the drive's firmware depending on the absolute position on the disc. Close into the hub the disc spins faster, further out it spins slower. If there are a lot of errors it will slow down to try and read the data better. On a 48x drive there might be as many as 12 different CAV speeds available to the firmware.
True for region 1. I neglected to mention that I'm in the UK, and Disney screwed up our releases.
If they mess up Spirited Away, then I'll start importing from Australia.
The UK Region 2 release is not coming from Buena Vista but from Optimum, the same bunch that arranged the (rather limited) cinema release in the UK last autumn. That's not to say they'll not fuck up too but they did release 35mm cinema prints in both sub and dub formats. Those prints are still running on the arthouse circuit (Edinburgh at the Filmhouse is late March, frex). It's a wonderful movie to see on the big screen.
The European phase of WWII was won by Russia. The Germans spent 90 percent of their military efforts on trying to stop the Russians in 1944 after the turning point. Without that other front (which cost the Russians tens of millions of casualties) the Allies would have had a much harder time of it after the Normandy invasion in June 1944. Possibly they would have been repulsed.
The Russians did in fact fight the Japanese. The battle-hardened Red Army launched an attack on Japanese forces in Manchuria in early August 1945 and went through them like a hot knife. A month later they took and occupied the Sakhalin Islands which were, like Okinawa, Japanese national territory. It was a major reason for the Japanese surrender in September.
Actually, CD-RW (or DVD+RW) are better for longevity than just plain CD-R
CD-Rs use a dye to record information. CD-RW use the phase-change method.
Nope. Both CD-R and CD-R/W discs use a dye substrate that is discoloured by the laser heating it. The CD-R/W is different only in that the dye will (mostly) revert if it is reheated at a lower temperature than the actual data write process. There is no magneto-optical process at all in CD writers.
CD-R/W dye reflectivity is less than the all-or-nothing dye used in CD-Rs. This makes CD-Rs
more readable for longer-term storage.
As for writing speed, the slower the better even in superfast drives. The laser writes pit-shaped ovals of varying lengths in the dye but it's not a simple on-off process but a carefully designed (and highly proprietary) energy waveform supplied by the laser driver chip to the laser itself. The slower the write process the more perfect the pit shapes written and the less chance of read errors later even if the edges of the pit degrade through time.
For real archival storage I recommend Mylar-based paper tape and a nuclear-bomb-proof ASR-33 teletype.
Two Western Digital Drives, both advertised as 40GB.
Out of the box, one has 37GB usable, the other has 32GB usable.
I've got a 40Gb IBM Deathstar drive which has jumper settings to allow it to imitate a 32Gb drive. There was a hard addressing limit of 32GB in the IDE spec a while back which meant some older machines wouldn't handle a drive which claimed to be >32Gb. This jumper setting allowed the IBM drive to work on these older machines even though it lost about 20% of its rated capacity. You might want to check the manufacturer's website for jumper configuration info for your drive in case this is the same thing. As I recall the IBM drive came with the jumpers set to default to the 32Gb configuration.
If you enjoy SF written by cultish wackjobs...any others I've missed in this "subgenre"? I'm seriously interested.
James P. Hogan is a Veliskovskian True Believer and this is showing through more and more in his newer writings. There are also quite a few believers in the Singularity (aka Rapture of the Nerds) who are writing SF and furthermore getting it published although since its the sort of thing Slashdot readers dream about it's probably not a cult but a "common interest".
sounds to me like you forgot to select the nwtworking part of the package while you selected the development selection. as fo 9.0 mandrake have been very easy to set up
I had 1.6Gb of HDD space to take an OS plus some apps. I let the Mandrake installation decide what to put in there. What it gave me was a whole load of things like compilers (which I'd need to hand-patch the kernel or whatever) and zero networking support. The W98Se install I followed this with gave me no compilers (as MS doesn't expect the user to have to patch the OS by themselves) but it did give me networking and it all fit in 500Mb (including, I think, swap space). Linux is bloatware but it can be trimmed back by a knowledgeable user. Windows is bloatware too but it's on a diet and watches what it eats.
It's not necessary to be all that "savvy" anymore. If you're running a stock box, you can have a SuSE or Mandrake system running on the 'net with a high speed link in less time than it takes to install WinXP.
Just leave it at the default workstation settings, and answer the questions -- same as you do for Windows.
I tried that recently, using the latest professional copy of SuSE (8.2?) After asking me a lot of questions the installer started up the DVD and failed to find any of the files it was wanting to install. I gave up and loaded Windows 2000 instead which seemed a lot less inquisitive.
I don't think I've ever successfully managed to install Linux on a box -- no, I tell a lie, there was the one that I squeezed into restricted hard disk space allowing it to choose what to put in -- Mandrake 9.0 if I recollect. When I started it up I found it had not put in any networking or dial-up support as it couldn't fit it into the 1.6Gb I had allocated. There were a lot of compilers and other stuff I didn't need though (what does a user need a compiler for?) I went back to Windows which fit on 500Mb with networking.
...manufacturing, but can anyone tell me why they can't just make the things (CPU) bigger?
Speed and cost. The smaller the chip the less signal lag between transistors and the faster the chip can run. The smaller the chip the more chips can be made per "slice" of silicon wafer hence reducing the cost per chip. Unfortunately switching faster dissipates more heat in a smaller area. Temperature increases are exponential, not linear with chip size reduction.
I can envisage AMD and Intel eventually moving to a CPU carrier that has an integral liquid cooling block bonded directly to the silicon, giving up on air-cooling via third-party heatsink/fan combinations.
Slashdot Mirror
Animats sez:
"Usability testing is simple enough. You make up some tasks, like "Write a letter on company letterhead, then print it and its envelope". You videotape a few people doing this, with a system that records both the screen and the user's face and voice. You watch the videos (this is the time-consuming part) and note all the places where the user got stuck, had to undo something, or lost time. Those are your usability bugs."
A FEW people? If only... It takes years of labwork and thousands of test subjects and hundreds of researchers and hundreds of millions of dollars to do usability testing and interface design on big products such as a commercial OS like OSX or a package like MS Office or Adobe PhotoShop. It's one reason such software costs the big bucks.
The Open Source world doesn't have that sort of money, excepting when one of the big companies like IBM or Sun release something GPL. The result is crap inconsistent UIs and eyeball-melting colour schemes mixed randomly with attempts to monkey-copy UI gadgets and tricks from three-year-old commercial software.
"...the cluelessness of the Gallileo business model. Charging for something someone else is giving away is so 1990s. It only makes sense if there is something going on here we have not been told about."
Galileo makes high-precision access available to paying customers, the US NAVSTAR reserves that level of accuracy only for US and allied military systems. Some of the Galileo cluster will orbit at higher inclinations than the existing NAVSTAR cluster, making GPS more usable in the far North and far South (although I understand some planned future NAVSTAR satellite deployments will fill in the gaps here too). Galileo can't be switched off or degraded on a whim by a single government unlike the NAVSTAR system, allowing it to be trusted to control civilian aircraft in crowded skies.
The users of GPS will end up with multi-function receivers that can work interoperably with NAVSTAR and Galileo since it would be pointless commercially to do otherwise. Unless NAVSTAR goes commercial or the DoD stops degrading the signal the high-precision customers like airlines and such will use Galileo and pay for the convenience and predictability.
Apples' range of portables has been, to be kind, lacking in features the past couple of years mainly because of their boat-anchor PPC fetish. Apple's Teh Shiny! has been the iPlod range of jewelry and fashion statements, their premier bottom-line enhancement mechanism. Video, hard disks, flash but no sign of an Apple PDA in the mix.
But... imagine an Apple PDA with Aqua, enough smarts to do the look-and-feel kabuki of its bigger brothers, a coat-pocket tablet-gesture device with a 1024x768 display and a Centrino, a shitload of Flash and no battery-sucking hard drive, able to run those new-fangled PPC/x86 fat binaries native. Of course it would be slow and not exactly the device most people whould run PhotoShop on, but as a workalike sibling to the iBooks with all the wireless connectivity Teh Shiny! comes with as standard today I figure it would fly out the door sales-wise.
The killer for this pipe-dream was fitting enough GPU power under the hood, affordable in power consumption terms, to make Aqua usable in less than geological time -- in independent tests, ten out of ten Apple owners never want to see a spinning beachball ever again. I speculated about Cell as a dedicated Aqua graphics engine but from what I've seen about its power consumption that doesn't fly. This device might just do the job though. Hmmm.
To get round this the laser's power is continuously controlled during the write operation in a proprietary manner that the various drive makers keep secret. This results in a stripe shape that's a good approximation to the ideal with nearly-straight sides of about the right width and nicely-shaped ends. The faster a drive writes the less ideal the stripe shape produced and if the disc's dye degrades with age the more likely these stripes will cause read errors. I've found it best to write CDs and DVDs at a speed lower than the drive's max; it's quite rare that you need a disc in a real hurry and with burnproofing and big drive memory buffers in the drive itself it's usually better to just let the computer get on with the writing process while you do something else.
Anyone who seriously wants to record HDTV and has a modicum of technical knowledge can bypass all this cruft. Fast A/D converters on the RGB drivers and scan circuitry of an HDTV set plus some code to convert the raw voltages back into pixel data would do it. The same thing in the digital domain would work for LCD drive signals. VEIL, HDMI and other encryption systems will do bupkis to prevent recording at this level because it's directly at the point of display and that HAS to be unencrypted for himan beings to make sense of the visual and auditory data.
and have a look about half-way down the page for the "glow in the dark" keyrings. Quote:
"Inside each GlowRing is a single sealed glass tube which contains a minute amount of active gas that permanently reacts with a luminescent coating."
Translation: "active gas" == tritium.
I've got a couple on order at the moment, for geek-type Xmas presents. They limit sales to UK customers only.
"Please note that due to international regulations regarding this item THIS PRODUCT IS ONLY AVAILABLE TO UK RESIDENTS AND CANNOT BE SENT TO ANY ADDRESS OUT OF THE COUNTRY."
White Hat or Black Hat? http://www.antipope.org/charlie/fiction/moderator. html
Correcting you to be polite -- it takes 4.2J to raise the temperature of 1g of water by 1 degree celsius.
In fact Atlantis was more closely a ripoff of the anime series Nadia: Secret of Blue Water. Plot point after plot point maps from Atlantis to the earlier series, character designs are similar...
This company has built wavepower generators before. One unit they built was designed for ten years operational life in the North Atlantic. The prototype lasted six months in sheltered inshore waters off the coast of Scotland before it broke up in a storm.
Large fixed man-made structures in open seas either need to be incredibly massive or constantly maintained at great expense -- the canonical example is oil rigs. OPD hope these new wavepower units off Portugal can be plonked down and only require expensive servicing occasionally. Given their track record I'm not so sure.
Thank you...you show me the hard drive that holds as much as my tape drive does, then we'll talk.
Well tell us how big your tape drive is and we can discuss it. There's a LaCie USB hard drive case available with a 1.6Tb capacity in one portable box, configurable as a single volume; do you have a tape cartridge that big? As a USB device it can be plugged and unplugged in a running system with a minimal amount of operator intervention and no need to power down and reboot the system. My own HD cartridge USB device allows me to swap multiple 120Gb hard drives in and out of my system similarly without rebooting, and I trust those drives a lot more than I would trust tapes, having been bitten by "bad-tape no. 3 of 5" syndrome before when restoring backups.
Disk to disk backup would require the system to be shutdown, drive added, removed and reboot, configure etc.
Unless they are talking about removable media like CD/DVD/USB devices, this does not make sense.
There are such things as USB hard drives which appear as volumes within the Windows OS, you know. I use such a unit with a cheapo exchangeable ATAPI cartridge bay hacked into it for backup. I call it "tepid-swap"; it's not true hotswap as I have to "stop" the USB device before switching it off but I certainly don't have to shut down the entire system to change the drive fitted in the bay. After I power it up again Windows 2000 automatically recognises the new disk, no reboot necessary.
The thing is, as someone else pointed out upstream is that after this suit is over Apple Corps will have a chunk of AAPLs money and AAPL will still be prevented from distributing music under the terms of the 1991 and previous agreements. The money AAPL lose is punishment for breaking these agreements, not a price to buy the rights to publish music under the Apple name. If they've sufficiently pissed off Apple Corps (still privately held by the Beatles and their estates) then those rights might not be available at any price.
My point-n-shoot camera's viewfinder got dirty. I opened it to clean it out, and touched the capacitor for the flash light (12v). It knocked me unconcious and burned my hand.
Yeah, 12v can bite.
The flash capacitor is about 4kV, not 12V. The whining noise after you fire it is the inverter pumping the cap back up for the next shot. It's also not current-limited, delivering all power it can to the flashtube in a few milliseconds. The TV EHT supply you mention later *is* current limited hence it gives less of a perceived shock even though the voltage is much higher.
I've taken belts from a camera's flash cap before now; they made my arm muscles spasm and throw the camera across the room.
There was a "gimmick" science-fiction story based on this idea written back in the Sixties and published in Analog. The story was called "Shortstack" after the story's main character, Short, and written by Walt and Leigh Richmond. The story used the upward rush of the hot air to keep the flexible plastic chimney erect and at night powered the turbine to pump air up to maintain the chimney's integrity.
Nowadays we'd use Viagra.
CLV is constant linear velocity and is what the first generation CD players used. That meant the data passed under the head at a constant speed, 150kbytes/second. The further out on the disc the slower the disc turned as each turn had more data than close-in.
Once the speeds went up the manufacturers moved to CAV or constant angular velocity where the disc spins at a predetermined speed and the data comes in at different rates depending on the head position over the disc. What really happens is there's a table of different CAVs stored in the drive's firmware depending on the absolute position on the disc. Close into the hub the disc spins faster, further out it spins slower. If there are a lot of errors it will slow down to try and read the data better. On a 48x drive there might be as many as 12 different CAV speeds available to the firmware.
True for region 1. I neglected to mention that I'm in the UK, and Disney screwed up our releases.
If they mess up Spirited Away, then I'll start importing from Australia.
The UK Region 2 release is not coming from Buena Vista but from Optimum, the same bunch that arranged the (rather limited) cinema release in the UK last autumn. That's not to say they'll not fuck up too but they did release 35mm cinema prints in both sub and dub formats. Those prints are still running on the arthouse circuit (Edinburgh at the Filmhouse is late March, frex). It's a wonderful movie to see on the big screen.
The Russians did in fact fight the Japanese. The battle-hardened Red Army launched an attack on Japanese forces in Manchuria in early August 1945 and went through them like a hot knife. A month later they took and occupied the Sakhalin Islands which were, like Okinawa, Japanese national territory. It was a major reason for the Japanese surrender in September.
CD-Rs use a dye to record information. CD-RW use the phase-change method.
Nope. Both CD-R and CD-R/W discs use a dye substrate that is discoloured by the laser heating it. The CD-R/W is different only in that the dye will (mostly) revert if it is reheated at a lower temperature than the actual data write process. There is no magneto-optical process at all in CD writers.
CD-R/W dye reflectivity is less than the all-or-nothing dye used in CD-Rs. This makes CD-Rs more readable for longer-term storage.
As for writing speed, the slower the better even in superfast drives. The laser writes pit-shaped ovals of varying lengths in the dye but it's not a simple on-off process but a carefully designed (and highly proprietary) energy waveform supplied by the laser driver chip to the laser itself. The slower the write process the more perfect the pit shapes written and the less chance of read errors later even if the edges of the pit degrade through time.
For real archival storage I recommend Mylar-based paper tape and a nuclear-bomb-proof ASR-33 teletype.
I've got a 40Gb IBM Deathstar drive which has jumper settings to allow it to imitate a 32Gb drive. There was a hard addressing limit of 32GB in the IDE spec a while back which meant some older machines wouldn't handle a drive which claimed to be >32Gb. This jumper setting allowed the IBM drive to work on these older machines even though it lost about 20% of its rated capacity. You might want to check the manufacturer's website for jumper configuration info for your drive in case this is the same thing. As I recall the IBM drive came with the jumpers set to default to the 32Gb configuration.
That's what you get when you use a point-and-click interface with a killer app.
James P. Hogan is a Veliskovskian True Believer and this is showing through more and more in his newer writings. There are also quite a few believers in the Singularity (aka Rapture of the Nerds) who are writing SF and furthermore getting it published although since its the sort of thing Slashdot readers dream about it's probably not a cult but a "common interest".
I had 1.6Gb of HDD space to take an OS plus some apps. I let the Mandrake installation decide what to put in there. What it gave me was a whole load of things like compilers (which I'd need to hand-patch the kernel or whatever) and zero networking support. The W98Se install I followed this with gave me no compilers (as MS doesn't expect the user to have to patch the OS by themselves) but it did give me networking and it all fit in 500Mb (including, I think, swap space). Linux is bloatware but it can be trimmed back by a knowledgeable user. Windows is bloatware too but it's on a diet and watches what it eats.
Just leave it at the default workstation settings, and answer the questions -- same as you do for Windows.
I tried that recently, using the latest professional copy of SuSE (8.2?) After asking me a lot of questions the installer started up the DVD and failed to find any of the files it was wanting to install. I gave up and loaded Windows 2000 instead which seemed a lot less inquisitive.
I don't think I've ever successfully managed to install Linux on a box -- no, I tell a lie, there was the one that I squeezed into restricted hard disk space allowing it to choose what to put in -- Mandrake 9.0 if I recollect. When I started it up I found it had not put in any networking or dial-up support as it couldn't fit it into the 1.6Gb I had allocated. There were a lot of compilers and other stuff I didn't need though (what does a user need a compiler for?) I went back to Windows which fit on 500Mb with networking.
Speed and cost. The smaller the chip the less signal lag between transistors and the faster the chip can run. The smaller the chip the more chips can be made per "slice" of silicon wafer hence reducing the cost per chip. Unfortunately switching faster dissipates more heat in a smaller area. Temperature increases are exponential, not linear with chip size reduction.
I can envisage AMD and Intel eventually moving to a CPU carrier that has an integral liquid cooling block bonded directly to the silicon, giving up on air-cooling via third-party heatsink/fan combinations.