On Saturday 04 March 2006 05:00 am, James Knott wrote:
kai wrote:
I can imagine that - for the hardcore geeky type who still thinks of the CLI as a usable interface - this might be a good option.
However, the rest of us want - no, expect - the drive to be available for writing and reading seconds after plugging it in.
I might add, writable at a decent speed. If you can go for dinner and it's still writing when you come back, that is not acceptable. That is, unfortunately, the default situation with SUSE. It worked well previously and they broke it.
Agreed! My mom - on 9.2 - uses her USB cards all the time. She's got two cameras each with SD cards. When I built her system I gave her an all-in-one USB reader/floppy. She - like I - expects to put the card in the slot, have Konq come up and display the files, and then simply copy/xfer and pull it out when done. We also expect it to work at a reasonable speed.
Actually, it won't let you close the Konqueror window until it has stopped writing, so there's no issue, AFAIK.
That certainly beats Windows, where you've got those flying documents that don't let you do anything else. It reminds me of demonstrating OS/2 to people a few years ago. They were amazed that with OS/2, you could actually do something else, while formatting a floppy! ;-)
Heh - I remember back in '94, while working at my first programming job - we had two spare DX/40 IBM MCA computers, which were identical. Since we were already programming for OS/2 (2.1) and had been testing with Warp, we decided to put the new Windows 4.0 (a.k.a. Windows 95) to a speed test. We setup both systems with the base install for each OS (DOS/Win95 and OS/2 Warp) and then created a list of tasks. We opened CLI windows for running compile jobs, setup batch jobs for performing disk actions and put floppies in each drive. We then let each system go to work. The Windows 95 machine took about 30 minutes to perform all the tasks. The OS/2 machine did the same in less than one minute. Unfortunately, OS/2 had many other shortcomings - driver availability, Ugly and non-intuitive UI and an elitist attitude - which doomed it from the start. I supported it for a few more years on IVR systems until I moved on and relegated myself to using NT 4.0. I had tried Linux several times during this period, but it wasn't until about a year ago that it became mature enough - IMO - to be used on a daily basis. I still have a set of OS/2 Warp floppies, by the way. (This along with a copy of OS/2 1.3.)
With Windows, your computer was essentially locked up, during formatting.
Still, is pretty much an issue. Unfortunately the folks in redmond have yet (as of XP) to figure out how to write a pre-emptive multi-tasking kernel. I don't know if linux is pre-emptive or cooperative, but it certianly functions better than NT/XP.
With OS/2, you started the format, and went back to whatever you were doing. You'd then have to check to see if the formatting was finished, because it had such an insignificant impact on performance, that you never noticed it had completed.
-- kai - www.perfectreign.com www.livebeans.com - the new NetBeans community