mimus

from

man diskseek

"Several people have noticed that Linux has a bad tendency of killing
floppy drives. These failures remained completely mysterious, until
somebody noticed that they were due to huge layers of dust ac***ulating in
the floppy drives. This cannot happen under Messy Dos, because this
excuse for an operating system is so unstable that it crashes roughly
every 20 minutes (actually less if you are running Windows). When
rebooting, the BIOS seeks the drive, and by doing this, it shakes the
dust out of the drive mechanism. diskseekd simulates this effect by
seeking the drive periodically. If it is called as diskseek, the drive
is seeked only once."

I take it "Messy Dos" is LinuxSpeak for MSDOS? I found it more stable
than that, under Win98 . . . .

But this is pretty funny, anyway.

(Even ignoring "seeked" for "sought".)

--

When a system is set up to accomplish some goal, a
new entity has come into being--the system itself.
No matter what the "goal" of the system, it
immediately begins to exhibit system behavior; that
is, to act according to the general laws that govern
the operation of all systems. Now the system itself
has to be dealt with.

< _Systemantics_

clay

What's a floppy drive? *g*

mimus

They're still useful for carrying around word processor files and source
files.

Fast, simple, reliable, much less likely to cause mental distress than
CD-Anything.

I insisted on one on this system, much to the dismay of the hardware d00ds.

--
..sigzip:*

nathan eckenrode

Removeable Flash drives are even easier and for the most part are platform
agnostic

mimus

Fast, simple, reliable and _cheap_.

(Fixed.)

I guess the floppy drive designers didn't build in periodic drive
dust-flushes because they figured usage and reboots would take care of it.

--
..sigzip:*

vincent

i actually never really had any probs with windows at all....except that
i don't ever wanna give another cent to bill and co, and that there was
always a virus or worm lurking somewhere, waiting for my kids to pick it
up.....
XP worked straight out of the box fine, but started to lag after a
while, linux saves me so much time in monotonous system maintenance that
comes with MS
anyway, i am happy with ubuntu, i don't dual boot anymore, i don't
emulate either, if i wanted to run windows apps, i'd install windows
ubuntu just makes life easier and better and gives me more time to do
what i want to do, you can't get that with windows, you spend all your
time running scans for this and that and wondering how anyone can say
that the PC saves people time......if ya aint got winda'z

cbfalconer

Other things to insist upon having: real parallel and serial ports,
no USB keyboards, and (most important) ECC memory.

--
Chuck F (cbfalconer@yahoo.com) (cbfalconer@maineline.net)
Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.
<http://cbfalconer.home.att.net> USE maineline address!