Date   : Sun, 06 Sep 2009 01:22:32 +0200
From   : rick@... (Rick Murray)
Subject: OT Only Connect

Philip Pemberton wrote:

>> These products are ideal for ruggedized applications and specially
> ROFLMAO!

I thought you'd like that.


> as extremely thinly sliced Tesco Value brand Cheddar.

I remember that stuff. Horrid, didn't deserve to blight the good name of 
my favourite cheese.
IIRC, Tesco's blue/white stripey cheddar was extremely rugged - it could 
BOUNCE.


> Which one's more likely to disintegrate if you look at it wrong? :)

Soggy Ryvita.


> Go watch one of those old black-and-white movies -- the sort that 
> feature gangsters shooting Tommy guns.

I think there's some little unknown FTA channel on satellite showing 
that sort of cr*p in between endless reruns of stuff like The Beverley 
Hillbillies.

Why don't they ever rerun USEFUL old stuff, like, say "Dark Shadows" 
(and I'm talking about the one from the fifties, not the horrid late 
'80s remake).


> That's the sound the little buggers make!

Good description, though. I can imagine it.


> it had a tinfoil lid and a glue seal.

I've seen that. It looked shockingly fragile.


> No, it NEVER bailed out THAT quickly.

Well, you know, kids today. No attention span whatsoever. ;-)


> And who could forget:
>   Cat full
> (But I don't have a cat!)

I used to like "Drive?".
No thanks, don't have my licence.


> Mainly because I like to wake up and then check my email while
 > I'm eating breakfast.

Ditto.

 > Not easy to do when you're waiting 25 minutes for fsck to run.

Ah, there's the benefit of Windows right there. I can press the power 
button on Azumi, and check my emails a couple of minutes later. I tend 
to power up go put the kettle on while waiting for the antivirus and 
'doze and all to check it's up to date...

Of course, this doesn't proclude the possibility of disc error. That's 
why it is useful to go to command line and run CHKDSK once in a while.
People - never bother with XP's Scandisk. It is beyond **** and actually 
*failed* to find, on a corrupted USB device, as many errors as would 
fill three screenfuls.


> headcrash, at some point in their lives they'd crap all over the NVRAM. 
> First power-cycle after the NVRAM got nuked, they'd start overwriting 
> random disk sectors, or the Service Zone. Once that happened, you were 
> basically screwed.

NVRAM? It's a bloody harddisc! Why can't it just write to itself?!?!?


> IBM stuck their heads in the sand when confronted

You mean like supposedly exploding phones and media players from a 
certain manufacturer named after a hard green (or red) fruit that is 
frequently used as a filling in pies?


> That'll be an aluminium-platter drive with a shock-absorber then. No way 
> glass platters would survive that kind of abuse.

Of the drives I have opened up (all dead, a working harddisc is still 
useful!), they've all been metal platter.


> About the same as most HDDs. There's always something that can go wrong, 
> and usually when that happens the drive will completely pack in (as 
> opposed to, say, dropping back to a read-only mode that still allows you 
> to recover your data).

I was under the impression that a failing SSD would indeed go either 
read only or start mapping out bad sectors without replacing them with 
anything...? I guess time will tell.

At least, on the bright side, a defective memory cell is a more 
recoverable problem than a head crash or dead motor.


Best wishes,

Rick.

-- 
Rick Murray, eeePC901 & ADSL WiFI'd into it, all ETLAs!
BBC B: DNFS, 2 x 5.25" floppies, EPROM prog, Acorn TTX
E01S FileStore, A3000/A5000/RiscPC/various PCs/blahblah...