Bleah!

[altivo]

Too tired to make a real post I am. Oh, it's Wednesday again, no wonder.

Looks like we need to add memory to about eight machines at work in order to get around some limitations in the new version of Userful software. Fortunately, they're old Pentium III class Dells, all the same model, and the memory upgrade will cost about $18 for each machine. That I can do without busting any budgets.

Their tech support has a hard time understanding why we don't just buy new machines. After all, these are "so" old. But they still work just fine, and it shouldn't be necessary to use some turbocharged overpowered equipment just to fetch catalog records. The difference between $150 to upgrade eight machines' memory or a minimum of $8000 to replace those machines is not insignificant and especially not in the current economic climate.

After I said the foliage colors were disappointing here this year, today I drove from Woodstock to Harvard on US14 right at noon with the sun out and the sky clear. There was a lot of color on that route, plenty of reds, oranges, yellows and rusts. Missing were the pinks and purples we sometimes get, but still the display wasn't bad at all.

Trip to Ohio is in the balance due to a vehicle failure (not mine.) We may still be able to go, but if we take my car, then the desired cargo definitely can't fit. It will be just the two furries and luggage. To be decided...

Comments

[cozycabbage.livejournal.com]

I know that SATA has something like a 3.0 Gbps maximum (theoretical), but what's the maximum on IDE? A bit of searching shows numbers across the board, so I assume it has everything to do with which controller I buy?


The latest drives have had another price drop, actually. The Intel X-25 I mentioned is about $250 for 80GB. I think a 64GB SDHC card is about $80, but those seem pretty slow. From what I've read, camera chips are optimized to quickly write large files (such as photos), so the random access on those things would be terrible.

When it comes to solid state, you don't want to touch old things. They're worse AND more expensive. I found it funny, looking through the flyers, that 1GB DDR costs more than 2GB DDR2. (Which is slightly off topic, being DRAM, but the idea is the same.)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

A faster IDE controller will do nothing for you as long as the data bus feeding the controller is limited to 133MHz (or 66MHz in even older machines.) The slowest link controls the speed of transfer, period. In those days we sped things up by using techniques like DMA to offload tasks from the processor onto the controllers. Even DMA is limited to the data rate of the bus, though.

As for old solid state stuff, the RAM for the 16 Pentium 3 systems I have here is much cheaper than newer RAM modules required by newer machines. Sure, it doesn't work in those newer machines, why should it? But in the machines for which it was designed, it works just fine. The price of 512MB of RAM for these machines is less than the original price of the 64MB that came in the machines back when they were made. I don't see that as bad, but rather as an advantage. Memory always gets cheaper over time. Back in about 1982 I paid $100 for 16KB of RAM and it was a good price. (Yes, KB, not MB.) I worked on an IBM mainframe system that had only about 128KB of real memory itself, but had very impressive virtual memory capabilities and speed so that any of the hundred or more processes it was running at a given time might have access to up to 2GB, which was amazingly huge back then.

Nowadays that $100 will buy a GB or more of RAM, but the performance you get for it is all eaten up by wasteful code that spends most of its time painting pretty pictures rather than delivering the useful data that is really needed.