20 Mar
2007
20 Mar
'07
9:32 a.m.
On 3/20/07, Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
(Actually, there's an interesting issue here:
"modern" computer users
generally seem to have very little concept of "how big" some piece of data is.
We were all taught to know the limits of the medium, but that seems to have
gone out the window these days. It actually wouldn't surprise me to find that
half the people out there trying to suck down whole sites aren't driven by
greed or lack of consideration, but simply because they don't appreciate that
it's a *lot* of data they're dealing with)
Like the time (10 years ago ;-) that a user tried to vi a 30MB file on
an old Sun box... he was astonished that he couldn't do it. The
problem was that vi wanted to buffer the edits in /var/tmp which had
about 10MB free. Things did not go well.
He couldn't understand why that failed when editing 1MB-2MB files
worked just fine. He just didn't see the difference. A file was a
file.
-ethan