20 Mar
2007
20 Mar
'07
12:32 p.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
20 Mar
20 Mar
12:42 p.m.
On 3/20/07 12:32 PM, "Ethan Dicks" <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote:
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.
Heck, I still have users who try to use vi to edit files that are larger
than /var/tmp and /var/tmp is upwards of 8 gigabytes!
--
Christopher L McNabb Tel: 540 231 7554
Senior Systems Engineer Email: cmcnabb at vt.edu
Virginia Tech ICBM: 37.205622N 80.414595W
ARS: N2UX Grid Square: EM97SD
12:45 p.m.
Ethan Dicks wrote:
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.
I think it is a lot more fundamental than that; nothing that goes on
"in the box" is real to most people.
At some level they understand that it can _become_ real, but disk
space, bandwidth, power drain, and basic maintenance are completely
automagical to the average user.
That also, I think, applies directly to online communication - saying
something online isn't *really* saying it. I can't see a kid like Hex
Star acting like that in a face-to-face group of adult men. Actually, I
think a lot of us tend to be much more vociferous in online discussions.
It's a natural tendency.
Doc
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