Utf-8 is the name of the set of all characters formed by the lower 8 bits of unicode, which are all the ascii characters. Since unicode is a variable length encoding, utf-8 can look exactly like ascii to an ascii machine.
Not quite right. Unicode is fixed-size (16 bits), UTF-8 is an variable length encoding of Unicode which, _if the text consists entirely of the 7-bit ASCII subset, will look exactly like ASCII. Other characters (in the larger range, around 0x6000 to 0xFFFF [I'm guessing]) will take up to 3 (maybe 4?) bytes to represent.
Perl and Python are the only languages I can think of that have centralized distribution of a large portion of their add-on libraries and code. And both of these languages have the property that there is only one implementation for them (ie centralized development and distribution)
OTOH, for Java, C, C++, and other such languages, there really isn't much of a centralized force (maybe Sun in the case of Java but I'm more thinking about user community). So maybe that discourages the sort of thing you're looking for. I've certainly never seen a site devoted to collecting and sorting C++ class libraries (though such a thing _would be useful).
But hey, if you want it, set it up! [Maybe VA or Redhat or someone would be interested in supporting it?] I suspect there would be quite a bit of interest for such a thing among Java programmers (though I'm not much of one myself).
Does anyone know why it is that Intel has been having all these problems lately? I mean, first RDRAM and the Camino chipset thing (where they put a piece of metal over one of the DIMM slots to keep you from using it), low yields on the faster P-IIIs, now this. Is it just a string of bad luck, or is Intel doing rushing production on these things in order to compete with AMD, or what?
Starship Troopers was still kind of kid-oriented, Friday definitely is not.
I dunno, Starship Troopers did have some pretty interesting moments, IIRC. Though I read the back of a copy of Friday once (I didn't have any money or I would have bought it) and I'll agree with your second statement. < g >
Still, I personally would recommend it down to around 13/14.
Yeah, I was reading Anne Rice and all kinds of strange horror stuff around that age and it didn't damage me (insert chorus of people I know yelling "Yes it did!"):)
Right now, if you go to a "brick and mortar" music store the average price of an album-length CD is about US$15 to US$17, and already there is talk of the price going to US$18 very soon.
Dunno... the place I buy my CDs from is usually $11-13 new and $7-9 used. And it has a very good selection; better than any of the big electronics chains, at least for the music I prefer.
Given that the duplication cost per CD is measured at about 35-50 US cents (that's including packaging), something tells me that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and its member companies may be conspiring in a price-fixing scheme to keep prices high.
You won't get any argument from me on this point.
Maybe lowering the price of an album-length CD to US$8 to US$9 will definitely help things along, since not only will there far less incentive to pirate the music
Very true. I'd rather buy CDs, simply because I can play them in more places than MP3s. But I can't afford to buy all the CDs I would like to have. So I end up getting MP3s to supplement my musical intake, even though I'm buying at least 3-4 CDs a month.
Remember that scene in Lucifer's Hammer with the surfer in Santa Monica Bay riding the tsunami, up until he smacked into the Barrington Towers apartments?
That was probably my favorite scene in the book. Have you read Inferno? Niven and Pournelle did a remake of Dante, weird and strange.
I really want to read the Ringworld series: I've never been able to find copies in used bookstores.
I've been thinking about reading that sometime... good? The only Heinlein I read was Starship Troopers, which I really liked. Course I probably want to finish off the Foundation Trilogy before that...
In my opinion, Macs would have served the lab better, because (with Foolproof) I've yet to see one actually hacked.
Back "in the day" (maybe 5 or 6 years ago, freshman/sophomore years of high school), Foolproof could be circumvented. I can't remember the details now but I remember I and a bunch of friends 0wn3d a bunch of Macs (along with the PCs which were trivial) at my school.
Though as I remember Foolproof was pretty anal about a lot of stuff (like if you saved a doc and wanted to delete it later), and also didn't protect against a user deleting everyone elses files on the disk (by opening them up and removing and/or altering the data). Probably Mac OS X (with it's yummy *BSD core) will protect against a lot of these problems natively. [It does have multiple users, right?]
Given the number of people I've seen using the RedHat name I assume they are actually making SOME kind of money in license fees... which is more then can be said for most Linux companies.
I certainly hope that Redhat isn't making any money of licensing fees. If they are I'm going to be switching to FreeBSD or SuSE or something in short order. In fact if Redhat tried to charge licensing fees it would probably be illegal, as they don't own the copyright on most of the code used (and so, AFAIK, they cannot sell me the right to use it). Redhat is selling support and packaging.
Although, given that the study has managed to overlook my insignificant but non-zero contributions, maybe I shouldn't propose that.
Yeah, same here. Not like I do a whole lot, just the occasional patch or bug report. But the fact that I seem to have absolutely nothing implies either something is wrong with their methods or people haven't been crediting me in their changelogs.:)
Of course once I actually get around to releasing the projects I've been working on I'll have some stuff on there.
Re:Just answered your own question
on
Why Not Ada?
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· Score: 1
I know more people who write stuff in Ada (dozens) than Forth(0), Objective C(0), Postscript(0), Eiffel(0), or Smalltalk(0):-)
Fair enough.:)
Re:Just answered your own question
on
Why Not Ada?
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· Score: 1
The statement that "Ada is rarely(if ever) taught" is patently untrue. Scores of universities teach Ada as both a foundational language and in advanced courses.
OK, I stand corrected. However, at the colleges/universities where I have taken CS classes (University of Oregon, Oregon State, a community college in Oregon, and Johns Hopkins), they did not have any Ada classes. At JHU, C, C++, Java, Perl, Lisp, and ML are used (C++ and Java are the only ones taught in early classes, the others you just have to pick up).
I know more people who write stuff in Forth (1), Objective C (3 or 4) and PostScript (2), than Ada (0). In fact AFAIK I don't know anyone who even knows Ada.
Just answered your own question
on
Why Not Ada?
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· Score: 1
it is very human-readable (based off of pascal syntax).
Personally, I think that Ada is not particularly human-readable, just wordy (like Pascal or (IMHO) Java). Well written C or C++ is (or at least should be) quite readable (to someone who knows C and C++, of course).
Also, as others have pointed out, relatively few libraries exist for Ada (either written in Ada or bindings for C/C++ libs). Which means you have to either create a binding (hard without support from something like SWIG), write it yourself, or do without. None of which are particularly appealing to most people.
Also, Ada is rarely (if ever) taught. C, C++, and Java are the languages of choice in education and industry, so those are the ones people are going to learn. If Ada took off and everyone was doing it, people would start learning it: few people are going to learn a language they can't really use for anything. But who is going to start some big important project and do it in a language nobody knows? So it's a bit of a catch 22.
I once heard a quote from a mathematician (IIRC he was a professor somewhere). He basically said that most people will not use much more than basic arithmetic (say 6th grade level) in their lives. However, high schools _should_ teach higher level math, because otherwise people with an interest and ability in mathematics might not discover their talent otherwise.
Why are children often forced to memorize multiplication tables and do long division?
Because public education in this society was designed around the time of the Industrial Revolution, when factories needed just a few simple things from their workers:
1) Do what you are told without question
2) Do it again and again and again (ie repetitive tasks) without getting fidgety
Doing stuff like mutiplication tables is good practice for #2. And at the elementary school my younger brothers went to, there was a rule: "You will obey an adult without question". My Mom got mad at that one: an adult? Any adult? One who just walks of the fscking street?!?!? "Come with me, little girl?" "OK, I wouldn't want to break the rules". So you see #1 is well handled in most lower education (and in some cases taken to a dangerous extreme).
As a CS/Math major, I feel that arithmetic is basically useless, in the sense that nobody needs to know long division (or what 11 * 15 is, etc). That's what calculators are for. I feel the same about Calculus (yes, somewhat more deep and much more complex than addition and subtraction but basically just computation; no actual thought required if you know the right techniques). The interesting problems are the ones that computers can't solve.
Perth is such a healthy place that I have seen the building across Milligan Street from Fast Eddy's emit 3in (7 to 8cm) roaches.
Interesting. I met a woman from Sydney last week (a former grad student here). We talked for a bit and she said Perth was a really nice city. Of course I suppose it could be a really nice city that's infested with giant roaches.:)
BTW, these were imported-from-Europe roaches, not the prettier, cleaner native roaches
Assuming you can call any roach "clean" or "pretty". I suppose the small "American" cockroaches aren't too bad (though still totally hateful - found one on a doorframe in my current place about a month ago, and I was not happy).
Baltimore rats are *huge*, not to mention numerous, downright bold, and completely out of hand.
There's one street fairly close to the Peabody Conservatory called Dark Lane that my friends and I have dubbed "Rat Alley".:)
Were you in Baltimore a couple summers ago? Cockroaches (big ones, like 1-1.5 inches long) were everywhere. And cockroaches freak me out much more than rats (cockroaches and spiders are my biggest fears). Wonder if that'll happen again this summer...
and finally going broke and living under an overpass with a 40 oz. bottle of Old English, begging money from passing strangers and carrying on extensive conversations with crows, pigeons, and skinny, mangy rats.
It's not that bad once you get used to it. However, being in Baltimore, instead of speaking with skinny, mangy rats, I talk with big, sleek, cat-sized rats [you have to see these suckers to believe them - they're fscking _huge_]
I don't like to have conversations with crows anymore though: they're always say the same things. "Microsoft Sucks!", "GNU/Linux!", "GPL is not free!", "Hot Grits!". Oh, wait, that's the average/. poster. I guess the crows aren't so bad afterall.:)
are probably a good idea. Though certainly not big ones (if you can find a bunbch of old 300 meg - 1 gig IDE disks cheap you're set). I've seen zip disk based distros that included X and most other stuff (basically we turned a room of NT machines into X-terminals for a programming contest). You really want to have cache locally, and you probably don't want to have to NFS mount/var and/tmp (sounds veeerryy messy to me). Especially because if you reboot the server holding those partitions (or it crashes), probably bad things will happen to all the clients when they can't find a/tmp.
I should think that old Pentiums should work well (there's some place near my house that sells (or sold) 100 Mhz Pentium machines (with 1 Gig disks, 32 megs of RAM, and Ethernet) for $100 - that's where my brothers got their machines). A 15'' monitor is probably another $100. So going that route you'll end up paying $200-$250 for a single box, which not only would work great as an X server, but also do well as a stand-alone machine.
Laptops and LCDs seem a bit expensive for something like this but maybe I'm wrong.
Use WAV (actually I think I mean AIFF, but you know what I mean). Why? Because (assuming you make these things really totally copyright free [which is the right choice for something like this IMHO]), people can use sox or bladeenc or whatever to convert them to the formats they want. WAV is kind of big, but I think for the kind of sounds you're thinking of [small stuff 10 seconds long], that would be OK.
Make sure you include the clip of Linus used in sndconfig (at least on Redhat it is). It's not very clear though: took me about 10 tries before I finally figured out what it was. Yes, I reran sndconfig, even though my sound card was working fine, because I wanted to hear the test sound. Sad, huh? (Yeah I could just play/usr/share/sndconfig/sample.au, but I didn't think of that at the time).
That is definately quite a bit for one day, especially when (at least around here) you can rent then at the video store for about that much and keep them for up to a week. Of course, this is japan, which has a much higher standard of living.
Ah, you have a point there. Didn't think of that.
The notslgia is definately great, but a day is about all I could tolerate of about 95% of those games... Of course, given the extreme numbers of them, there are some really exceptional games for "obsolete" systems, which except for the graphics are better than games today!
Oh, definitely. Shadowrun for SNES is probably the best console game I've ever played (though Zelda: The Ocarina of Time comes fairly close). I tend to only get games I'm really likely to want (or, for older systems, ones that I already played and liked a lot). Otherwise I'd be spending too much money (not to mention time).
Sounds like a ripoff to me. I'd rather just go out and buy the old consoles + games used at pawn shops or garage sales. And (depending on how often you play) it will also be a lot cheaper: I've seen SNESs and Genesiss (Genesii?) for $20-$50, and games for $5 or $10.
Anyway, it'd be fun having a half-dozen consoles, ranging from 8 to 64 bit, sitting near your TV. (Though personally I prefer Nintendo's games anyway, so an N64 and an SNES are all I need).
I would define a physical limitation as something beyond which the _hardware cannot support. In fact I think IDE cannot handle disks larger than some limit that's not that big (IIRC 120 Gig). Hey, maybe that will knock up the volume and drop the price of SCSI! Sounds good to me... Anything that actually limited in the kernel can be gotten around (using 64 bit numbers, or even pairs of them, to represent the needed values).
That said, I don't know what the current limits are for partition sizes in the kernel. Though I've seen a multiple-terrabyte database (holding star maps), that I think may have been running Linux (though it could have been Solaris).
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Utf-8 is the name of the set of all characters formed by the lower 8 bits of unicode, which are all the ascii characters. Since unicode is a variable length encoding, utf-8 can look exactly like ascii to an ascii machine.
Not quite right. Unicode is fixed-size (16 bits), UTF-8 is an variable length encoding of Unicode which, _if the text consists entirely of the 7-bit ASCII subset, will look exactly like ASCII. Other characters (in the larger range, around 0x6000 to 0xFFFF [I'm guessing]) will take up to 3 (maybe 4?) bytes to represent.
Perl and Python are the only languages I can think of that have centralized distribution of a large portion of their add-on libraries and code. And both of these languages have the property that there is only one implementation for them (ie centralized development and distribution)
OTOH, for Java, C, C++, and other such languages, there really isn't much of a centralized force (maybe Sun in the case of Java but I'm more thinking about user community). So maybe that discourages the sort of thing you're looking for. I've certainly never seen a site devoted to collecting and sorting C++ class libraries (though such a thing _would be useful).
But hey, if you want it, set it up! [Maybe VA or Redhat or someone would be interested in supporting it?] I suspect there would be quite a bit of interest for such a thing among Java programmers (though I'm not much of one myself).
And ping and traceroute are the least sophisticated tools possible.
Yes, and as such, they are also the most useful.
I'm just contrasting ST general wholesomeness to Friday's...errrr....less than wholesomeness.
:)
Hmmmm... I think I catch your drift. Wink, wink, nod, nod.
Of course, the ST movie wasn't for kids either...
Yeah, I never saw it but I heard a lot of parents took their kids to it, thinking it would be approproriate for 6-10 yr olds. Oops.
Does anyone know why it is that Intel has been having all these problems lately? I mean, first RDRAM and the Camino chipset thing (where they put a piece of metal over one of the DIMM slots to keep you from using it), low yields on the faster P-IIIs, now this. Is it just a string of bad luck, or is Intel doing rushing production on these things in order to compete with AMD, or what?
Starship Troopers was still kind of kid-oriented, Friday definitely is not.
:)
I dunno, Starship Troopers did have some pretty interesting moments, IIRC. Though I read the back of a copy of Friday once (I didn't have any money or I would have bought it) and I'll agree with your second statement. < g >
Still, I personally would recommend it down to around 13/14.
Yeah, I was reading Anne Rice and all kinds of strange horror stuff around that age and it didn't damage me (insert chorus of people I know yelling "Yes it did!")
Right now, if you go to a "brick and mortar" music store the average price of an album-length CD is about US$15 to US$17, and already there is talk of the price going to US$18 very soon.
Dunno... the place I buy my CDs from is usually $11-13 new and $7-9 used. And it has a very good selection; better than any of the big electronics chains, at least for the music I prefer.
Given that the duplication cost per CD is measured at about 35-50 US cents (that's including packaging), something tells me that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and its member companies may be conspiring in a price-fixing scheme to keep prices high.
You won't get any argument from me on this point.
Maybe lowering the price of an album-length CD to US$8 to US$9 will definitely help things along, since not only will there far less incentive to pirate the music
Very true. I'd rather buy CDs, simply because I can play them in more places than MP3s. But I can't afford to buy all the CDs I would like to have. So I end up getting MP3s to supplement my musical intake, even though I'm buying at least 3-4 CDs a month.
Remember that scene in Lucifer's Hammer with the surfer in Santa Monica Bay riding the tsunami, up until he smacked into the Barrington Towers apartments?
That was probably my favorite scene in the book. Have you read Inferno? Niven and Pournelle did a remake of Dante, weird and strange.
I really want to read the Ringworld series: I've never been able to find copies in used bookstores.
Read "Friday" by Heinlein.
I've been thinking about reading that sometime... good? The only Heinlein I read was Starship Troopers, which I really liked. Course I probably want to finish off the Foundation Trilogy before that...
In my opinion, Macs would have served the lab better, because (with Foolproof) I've yet to see one actually hacked.
Back "in the day" (maybe 5 or 6 years ago, freshman/sophomore years of high school), Foolproof could be circumvented. I can't remember the details now but I remember I and a bunch of friends 0wn3d a bunch of Macs (along with the PCs which were trivial) at my school.
Though as I remember Foolproof was pretty anal about a lot of stuff (like if you saved a doc and wanted to delete it later), and also didn't protect against a user deleting everyone elses files on the disk (by opening them up and removing and/or altering the data). Probably Mac OS X (with it's yummy *BSD core) will protect against a lot of these problems natively. [It does have multiple users, right?]
Given the number of people I've seen using the RedHat name I assume they are actually making SOME kind of money in license fees... which is more then can be said for most Linux companies.
I certainly hope that Redhat isn't making any money of licensing fees. If they are I'm going to be switching to FreeBSD or SuSE or something in short order. In fact if Redhat tried to charge licensing fees it would probably be illegal, as they don't own the copyright on most of the code used (and so, AFAIK, they cannot sell me the right to use it). Redhat is selling support and packaging.
Although, given that the study has managed to overlook my insignificant but non-zero contributions, maybe I shouldn't propose that.
:)
Yeah, same here. Not like I do a whole lot, just the occasional patch or bug report. But the fact that I seem to have absolutely nothing implies either something is wrong with their methods or people haven't been crediting me in their changelogs.
Of course once I actually get around to releasing the projects I've been working on I'll have some stuff on there.
I know more people who write stuff in Ada (dozens) than Forth(0), Objective C(0), Postscript(0), Eiffel(0), or Smalltalk(0) :-)
:)
Fair enough.
The statement that "Ada is rarely(if ever) taught" is patently untrue. Scores of universities teach Ada as both a foundational language and in advanced courses.
OK, I stand corrected. However, at the colleges/universities where I have taken CS classes (University of Oregon, Oregon State, a community college in Oregon, and Johns Hopkins), they did not have any Ada classes. At JHU, C, C++, Java, Perl, Lisp, and ML are used (C++ and Java are the only ones taught in early classes, the others you just have to pick up).
I know more people who write stuff in Forth (1), Objective C (3 or 4) and PostScript (2), than Ada (0). In fact AFAIK I don't know anyone who even knows Ada.
it is very human-readable (based off of pascal syntax).
Personally, I think that Ada is not particularly human-readable, just wordy (like Pascal or (IMHO) Java). Well written C or C++ is (or at least should be) quite readable (to someone who knows C and C++, of course).
Also, as others have pointed out, relatively few libraries exist for Ada (either written in Ada or bindings for C/C++ libs). Which means you have to either create a binding (hard without support from something like SWIG), write it yourself, or do without. None of which are particularly appealing to most people.
Also, Ada is rarely (if ever) taught. C, C++, and Java are the languages of choice in education and industry, so those are the ones people are going to learn. If Ada took off and everyone was doing it, people would start learning it: few people are going to learn a language they can't really use for anything. But who is going to start some big important project and do it in a language nobody knows? So it's a bit of a catch 22.
The reason you think "no actual thought is required" is that you have learned it by rote
Of course I did. As did everyone else in my calc classes. Hell, that's what the professor told us to do.
I once heard a quote from a mathematician (IIRC he was a professor somewhere). He basically said that most people will not use much more than basic arithmetic (say 6th grade level) in their lives. However, high schools _should_ teach higher level math, because otherwise people with an interest and ability in mathematics might not discover their talent otherwise.
Why are children often forced to memorize multiplication tables and do long division?
Because public education in this society was designed around the time of the Industrial Revolution, when factories needed just a few simple things from their workers:
1) Do what you are told without question
2) Do it again and again and again (ie repetitive tasks) without getting fidgety
Doing stuff like mutiplication tables is good practice for #2. And at the elementary school my younger brothers went to, there was a rule: "You will obey an adult without question". My Mom got mad at that one: an adult? Any adult? One who just walks of the fscking street?!?!? "Come with me, little girl?" "OK, I wouldn't want to break the rules". So you see #1 is well handled in most lower education (and in some cases taken to a dangerous extreme).
As a CS/Math major, I feel that arithmetic is basically useless, in the sense that nobody needs to know long division (or what 11 * 15 is, etc). That's what calculators are for. I feel the same about Calculus (yes, somewhat more deep and much more complex than addition and subtraction but basically just computation; no actual thought required if you know the right techniques). The interesting problems are the ones that computers can't solve.
Perth is such a healthy place that I have seen the building across Milligan Street from Fast Eddy's emit 3in (7 to 8cm) roaches.
:)
Interesting. I met a woman from Sydney last week (a former grad student here). We talked for a bit and she said Perth was a really nice city. Of course I suppose it could be a really nice city that's infested with giant roaches.
BTW, these were imported-from-Europe roaches, not the prettier, cleaner native roaches
Assuming you can call any roach "clean" or "pretty". I suppose the small "American" cockroaches aren't too bad (though still totally hateful - found one on a doorframe in my current place about a month ago, and I was not happy).
Baltimore rats are *huge*, not to mention numerous, downright bold, and completely out of hand.
:)
There's one street fairly close to the Peabody Conservatory called Dark Lane that my friends and I have dubbed "Rat Alley".
Were you in Baltimore a couple summers ago? Cockroaches (big ones, like 1-1.5 inches long) were everywhere. And cockroaches freak me out much more than rats (cockroaches and spiders are my biggest fears). Wonder if that'll happen again this summer...
and finally going broke and living under an overpass with a 40 oz. bottle of Old English, begging money from passing strangers and carrying on extensive conversations with crows, pigeons, and skinny, mangy rats.
/. poster. I guess the crows aren't so bad afterall. :)
It's not that bad once you get used to it. However, being in Baltimore, instead of speaking with skinny, mangy rats, I talk with big, sleek, cat-sized rats [you have to see these suckers to believe them - they're fscking _huge_]
I don't like to have conversations with crows anymore though: they're always say the same things. "Microsoft Sucks!", "GNU/Linux!", "GPL is not free!", "Hot Grits!". Oh, wait, that's the average
are probably a good idea. Though certainly not big ones (if you can find a bunbch of old 300 meg - 1 gig IDE disks cheap you're set). I've seen zip disk based distros that included X and most other stuff (basically we turned a room of NT machines into X-terminals for a programming contest). You really want to have cache locally, and you probably don't want to have to NFS mount /var and /tmp (sounds veeerryy messy to me). Especially because if you reboot the server holding those partitions (or it crashes), probably bad things will happen to all the clients when they can't find a /tmp.
I should think that old Pentiums should work well (there's some place near my house that sells (or sold) 100 Mhz Pentium machines (with 1 Gig disks, 32 megs of RAM, and Ethernet) for $100 - that's where my brothers got their machines). A 15'' monitor is probably another $100. So going that route you'll end up paying $200-$250 for a single box, which not only would work great as an X server, but also do well as a stand-alone machine.
Laptops and LCDs seem a bit expensive for something like this but maybe I'm wrong.
Use WAV (actually I think I mean AIFF, but you know what I mean). Why? Because (assuming you make these things really totally copyright free [which is the right choice for something like this IMHO]), people can use sox or bladeenc or whatever to convert them to the formats they want. WAV is kind of big, but I think for the kind of sounds you're thinking of [small stuff 10 seconds long], that would be OK.
/usr/share/sndconfig/sample.au, but I didn't think of that at the time).
Make sure you include the clip of Linus used in sndconfig (at least on Redhat it is). It's not very clear though: took me about 10 tries before I finally figured out what it was. Yes, I reran sndconfig, even though my sound card was working fine, because I wanted to hear the test sound. Sad, huh? (Yeah I could just play
That is definately quite a bit for one day, especially when (at least around here) you can rent then at the video store for about that much and keep them for up to a week. Of course, this is japan, which has a much higher standard of living.
Ah, you have a point there. Didn't think of that.
The notslgia is definately great, but a day is about all I could tolerate of about 95% of those games... Of course, given the extreme numbers of them, there are some really exceptional games for "obsolete" systems, which except for the graphics are better than games today!
Oh, definitely. Shadowrun for SNES is probably the best console game I've ever played (though Zelda: The Ocarina of Time comes fairly close). I tend to only get games I'm really likely to want (or, for older systems, ones that I already played and liked a lot). Otherwise I'd be spending too much money (not to mention time).
Sounds like a ripoff to me. I'd rather just go out and buy the old consoles + games used at pawn shops or garage sales. And (depending on how often you play) it will also be a lot cheaper: I've seen SNESs and Genesiss (Genesii?) for $20-$50, and games for $5 or $10.
Anyway, it'd be fun having a half-dozen consoles, ranging from 8 to 64 bit, sitting near your TV. (Though personally I prefer Nintendo's games anyway, so an N64 and an SNES are all I need).
I would define a physical limitation as something beyond which the _hardware cannot support. In fact I think IDE cannot handle disks larger than some limit that's not that big (IIRC 120 Gig). Hey, maybe that will knock up the volume and drop the price of SCSI! Sounds good to me... Anything that actually limited in the kernel can be gotten around (using 64 bit numbers, or even pairs of them, to represent the needed values).
That said, I don't know what the current limits are for partition sizes in the kernel. Though I've seen a multiple-terrabyte database (holding star maps), that I think may have been running Linux (though it could have been Solaris).