On Mon, 4 Oct 2004, Rob O'Donnell wrote: Yeah, this has kept me wondering, too, even when it broke last time. This is not true. Especially with decent SCSI or SATA based controllers, one only needs to match the "surviving" drive(s) with a drive of AT LEAST the same capacity. If you have a RAID5 set of four 4.3GB drives, and drive #2 dies, you *can* without problems replace it with a 9.1G drive, and the array will be back up. The new drive will only have 4.3G of it used. This was actually a normal procedure to replace old drives with new drives in production arrays.. just replace them one at a time. Controllers that require identical drives in any RAID set are not worth the consideration in a (semi-)critical environment, as identical replacements are not a given. In Jay's case, I'd recomment implementing a SATA-based RAID1 set with two SATA 160G drives- possibly with a third one as offline or online (if the controller supports it) spare. --f

Why didn't I go raid in the first place...... I will have to check, as I haven't looked inside the case of the classiccmp server in a long time. However, I wanted to go with a 1U case so... well... quite frankly I didn't want to take any more rackspace from paying customers than necessary. Probably I was overzealous in this regard as we have a decent amount of free rackspace since we recently added another rack. But in that 1U case, I believe there is only room for one hard drive so raid and mirroring is problematic. Then remember that the motherboard was purchased a few years ago at least, when on-board raid and sata weren't so common for a common motherboard. Add to that the problems which may be present for installing add-on cards in a 1U case, and you may see my dilemma. That all being said - here is a thought. Some time in the next couple weeks I'll make it down to the datacenter and dig into the classiccmp server and see exactly what is in there, how much space for drives & expansion cards, etc. I'll report that back to the list and we can decide what to do. Lots of people paypal'd me to cover the cost of the drive - and provided well over the cost of the drive. I was going to set that money aside for future classiccmp upgrades at first thought... It's up to the people who contributed of course (I don't want to switch the goal after just getting the contributions)... but perhaps I should use the overage to upgrade the server with regards to raid-X and/or sata... Jay --- [This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Virus]

I believe the CDROM could be absconded with. I'd have to check. Heat shouldn't be too much of a problem... as I recall that system has one of those horizontal "squirrelcage" type blowers in it and it moves some serious air! The floppy drive in that case is a slim-line unit, can't put in a regular size one. More thoughts makes me think the classiccmp server has two drives in it. One for OS & addon software, and the other (160gb) for hosting the classic computer related websites and ftp sites. I would bet there's not room for a third. Hummm.... *cough* The server is FreeBSD (which certainly supports network installations). Ok just checked remotely... there is a 20gb drive for OS & apps & misc stuff, then a 160gb drive for websites & ftp sites (and mailing list files). The OS disk is roughly half used, and the data disk is roughly 35% used. I have a ton of HP stuff to put on it though and some other stuff I won't mention publicly (but it's classic computer related), so fairly soon we'll be using about 1/2 the 160gb drive. Jay --- [This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Virus]

Rumor has it that Jay West may have mentioned these words: Yes, they do very well for their size, don't they? ;-) Then don't put in a regular sized one -- put in a laptop drive with a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter (which might have to be modified... that's what Dremel tools are for! ;-) ), and use that rascal as a backup drive. That's what I've been thinking of doing... especially now that they have 7200RPM laptop drives. 'Course, just for fun, could you see a couple of those raided? ;-P I don't know if I'd use 'em for 'data' drives, but for boot/logging drives, the seem to do OK - I even have an IBM drive turned external firewire at home, and it performs *almost* as well as my internal IDE. [[ I built it mainly as "near-offline" storage, but heck -- it's quick enough I use it for a lot of my MPEG transcoding, instead of just storing shows as planned. ]] -- Oh, and you have my permission as well to use my donated funds as you see fit for the server. HTH, Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- Roger "Merch" Merchberger | JC: "Like those people in Celeronville!" sysadmin, Iceberg Computers | Me: "Don't you mean Silicon Valley???" zmerch(a)30below.com | JC: "Yea, that's the place!" | JC == Jeremy Christian

On Mon, 2004-10-04 at 11:00 -0400, cb wrote: So do I at times :-) Unfortunately so. I'm sure I can dream up some use for this thing that doesn't involve it being a PC (and therefore requiring a replacement board). A 1U rack-mount classic machine of some sort. Be a shame not to take advantage of the internal drive bay(s) though, so that would imply something that can use a 3.5" ST506 drive at least (and given the case height, have the controller on the system board) cheers, Jules

While this unit might severly stretch the budget, I have had extremely good luck deploying it for a number of clients.. http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=70 01&CatId=1205 [The above link does NOT mean I endorse making this purchase from the indicated distributor, it was just the first page that gave a good picutre, and specifications]

Doc wrote... That's possible, we'll see when I look at the case. This case has some serious airflow due to the many fans plus the large blower motor. I don't think that the classiccmp server hard drive has failed but twice in about 5 or so years. Not great, but not a really bad failure rate methinks. Never ever ever ever run any raid level in software. It's always a bad idea. I'll have a looksee. Jay --- [This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Virus]

On Mon, 4 Oct 2004, Jay West wrote: Hmm. I wonder how feasible it would be to place two sets of disparate platters inside a single 3.5" form factor drive and have mirroring or RAID handled internally. You could still run it with a standard ATA interface but then there might be a super-set of commands to effect the mirroring/RAID. Hmm... Just a random wild-assed thought. If this is a money-making idea then I want few bucks tossed my way when I'm destitute on a street corner. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

On Monday 04 October 2004 14:58, John Foust wrote: True, but those failure modes are much less common the a media failure or head crash. That brings me to another point, though -- if you had 2 seperate disks in the same enclosure, with no environmental isolation between them, you'd likely kill both disks with a head crash on either one. A head crash in a modern high-speed drive tends to throw a lot of pulverized platter and head bits around inside the disk, damaging the other platters that may not have been involved in the actual crash. So I think you'd need to isolate the sections really-small-bits-of-metal tight) seal; probably doable, but would take up more room that you're pretty low on already. That sure would make an interesting drive :) If it could be pulled off cheap enough, it would be well worth it, too. -- - Dan Wright (dtwright(a)uiuc.edu) (http://www.uiuc.edu/~dtwright) "we are content if we can describe a multitude of other things in terms of... fundamental incomprehensibilities. science is an activity that takes place on the shore of an infinite sea of mystery." chet raymo, "doctor seuss and doctor einstein"

On Mon, 4 Oct 2004, Dan Wright wrote: But when one platter ate its head and is making Bad Noises, you have to replace the "drive" anyhoo, removing 1bad+1good platter from the RAID system. Where's the gain there? Plus yet another specialized device, I'd rather use OTS junk drives and buy more of them.

So build it with MODULAR platters. --- Vintage Computer Festival <vcf(a)siconic.com> wrote: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ===== Tell your friends about the Computer Collector E-mail Newsletter! -- It's free and we'll never send spam or share your email address -- Publishing every Monday(-ish), ask about writing for us -- Mainframes to videogames, hardware and software, we cover it all Visit the museums directory and read about past events at our web site: http://news.computercollector.com Contact us at news(a)computercollector.com 550 readers and counting!

On Mon, Oct 04, 2004 at 09:09:15PM -0500, Jay West wrote: RC25 anyone?!? (grinning, running and ducking) -ethan (for the DEC-impaired, the RC-25 is/was a fixed/removable platter drive with about 25MB each. You had to mount a cart to spin up the internal platter. I _think_ there was one positioner, so it could be kinda slow. Many people have had problems with its reliability) P.S. - having (re-)aquired a VAX-11/725 a year ago August, I'm looking for an RC-25 cart or two. I used to have several, but they disappeared from the same place that my first VAX vanished from when they went out of business (long story). No hurry... I won't be spinning it up for probably about six months. If I had a "better" disk for it, I'd use it. How much do Unibus SCSI cards go for? :-) -- Ethan Dicks, A-130-S Current South Pole Weather at 05-Oct-2004 02:30 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -51.6 F (-46.5 C) Windchill -83.09 F (-64 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 10.9 kts Grid 039 Barometer 691.6 mb (10191 ft) Ethan.Dicks(a)amanda.spole.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html

On Tue, 5 Oct 2004, John Foust wrote: I now use ZIP and JAZ drives for this (mostly in the PDP-11 and VAX range of systems) and that works really well. Of course, capacity is not as great, but it's kinda nice to have a stack of ZIP100 disks labelled "RD53 MicroRSX V4" and such. Also, easy to xfer disk images between my lappy (which has both a ZIP and a JAZ drive) and the test/production systems ;) --f

On Mon, 4 Oct 2004, Ron Hudson wrote: The Amlyn drive had a cartridge holding 5 1.2M 5.25" floppies, that could be accessed one at a time, or as if it were a 6M disk (physically only one disk was loaded at a time). But although it could span disks, it did not use any reasonable "RAID" method. The diskettes had a couple of extra notches cut into them, but were otherwise normal 600 Oersted diskettes.

On Mon, 4 Oct 2004, Ron Hudson wrote: FLOPPY RAID! WHAT A GREAT IDEA!!! It would be fun to watch! Never mind all the lovely noises... Actually, you could probably optimize for seek... Imagine a 6-foot rack of 5" (or better, 8") flops all HONK HONKing.

On Tue, 5 Oct 2004, Nico de Jong wrote: UGH! What a nightmare!! Pretty funny from here though. My old FidoNet code ran just fine in 128K (K, not M) because it was all small-model and ran in OVERLAYS (via PSA's plink). Performance wasn't too bad, but still it was a lot of drive honking, luckily I got to overlay Fido vs. FidoNet, user interface sections vs. scheduler, etc. Hard disk was "recommended" (sic). But it wasn't like that, which sounds awful. I assume they are not still running it!

We're off the question though... Sellam asked about doing RAID among platters od different specs in ONE drive. --- Ade Vickers <avickers(a)solutionengineers.com> wrote: ===== Tell your friends about the Computer Collector E-mail Newsletter! -- It's free and we'll never send spam or share your email address -- Publishing every Monday(-ish), ask about writing for us -- Mainframes to videogames, hardware and software, we cover it all Visit the museums directory and read about past events at our web site: http://news.computercollector.com Contact us at news(a)computercollector.com 550 readers and counting!

Not classic software related but.. Theoretically, you could use Veritas Volume Manager on a floppy disk, divvy it up into two plex's then mirror the two plex's to each other. Oh look.. a ~700K mirrored 3.5" floppy disk.. <snicker> David PS: Yes, now that I've thought of it, I'm definitely going to have to see if I can't find a VxVM eval license, and try it out here at work. :-D On Tue, 5 Oct 2004, Ade Vickers wrote:

oooh! I am going to have to try this on my iBook... Anyone have 4 more USB zip 100 drives they wanna donate? (jes kiddin) :^) On Oct 5, 2004, at 2:46 AM, Ade Vickers wrote:

At 01:22 AM 10/5/2004, Tom Jennings wrote: Saw it recently on Slashdot - http://ohlssonvox.8k.com/fdd_raid.htm . Someone tricked OS X into making a USB floppy RAID. - John

What about RRPT or RSPC as a storage medium??? It should be exteremely reliable and good for archiving also.... [R.R.P.T. = Rudundant Rolls of Paper Tape] [R.S.P.C. = Redundant Stacks of Punched Cards]

On Oct 5, 2004, at 6:56 AM, David V. Corbin wrote: I once was wondering if a backup software could be written that writes to laser printer. Backups would be read in with a scanner.. Hmm limit usable area to 8"x10" = 80 sq in. 600 dpi = 48mb per page. One way to strike a blow against the paperless office.

On Tue, 5 Oct 2004, Fred N. van Kempen wrote: Sounds intriguing. I'd be interested to know what hardware they are using. Certainly not the Cauzin SOftStrip? -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

Hi, Ron Hudson &lt;ron.hudson(a)sbcglobal.net&gt; I remember reading about a system like that, wrote data as a pattern of dots on a laser printer and read using a primitive scanner (it was a while ago and definitely on-topic). Developed by someone in Germany I think. A query in various newsgroups a while back turned up no info. -- Cheers, Stan Barr stanb(a)dial.pipex.com The future was never like this!

In message &lt;200410051751.SAA02663(a)citadel.metropolis.local&gt;al>, Stan Barr writes: You folks are bad for the sanity. You've gotten me thinking about implementing a PDF417[1] reader. I've done some barcode decoding stuff at work, but I've managed to avoid doing any 2-D stuff. Now I may not be able to resist. [1] For those who may not be familiar with it, PDF417 is a standard 2-D barcode. It's something like a bunch of really short (vertically) 1-D barcodes stacked on top of each other. It's not the densest thing in the world, but you could get a lot more on a piece of paper than printing text to OCR later. Most FedEx Ground labels have examples of this code. (UPS labels have a different 2-D code called Maxicode.) Brian L. Stuart

Tom Jennings wrote: BYTE magizine years ago had a printed media format at one time. you may want to check on what they did. BYTE also had something once on a very low cost write only media, I wonder what happend to them.

Tom Jennings &lt;tomj(a)wps.com&gt; wrote: Cauzin SoftStrip. Basically a 2-D barcode, read with a handheld scanner. -- Don Hills (dmhills at attglobaldotnet) Wellington, New Zealand It's ironic that people who are too smart to engage in politics are governed by people who are not as smart.

At 11:17 AM 10/6/04 +1200, Don Hills wrote: I have one of the readers, and curiously the format did NOT die, but moved to commercial applications like trade show badges. I wonder if anybody ever reverse engineered the code so that softstrips could be read on a scanner?

I've got news for you. They still do the same type of thing. There are hidden signals all over the sperctrum. There ARE benefits to owning a GOOD surveillance reciever :-) Joe At 07:14 PM 10/7/04 -0400, you wrote:

Hi, John Lawson &lt;jpl15(a)panix.com&gt; said: The BBC still do this on their 198KHz long wave transmitter, easily heard by switching the receiver to ssb mode. -- Cheers, Stan Barr stanb(a)dial.pipex.com The future was never like this!

Now , that is interesting ! I'll have to look that up. Great. Geoff. ----- Original Message ----- From: "John Lawson" &lt;jpl15(a)panix.com&gt; To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" &lt;cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Friday, October 08, 2004 12:14 AM Subject: Clandestine data - was: media what died a'bornin' --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.775 / Virus Database: 522 - Release Date: 08/10/04

Did anyone ever use 8-track cartridges for storing data? I've seen them used for echo machines, and a variant is still used for storing jingles and idents for radio stations, although minidisc and sample-based systems have largely taken over. Did any manufacturer produce a data version of the minidisc? Gordon.

FWIW, I have one or two of these. They were scsi and worked great for their time. Don Hills wrote:

On Thu, 7 Oct 2004, Vintage Computer Festival wrote: Wang. I have two carts (clear plastic, jumble-wound endless loops). I think there was a thread about it only a few months ago.

On Tue, 5 Oct 2004, Tom Jennings wrote: These were issued as "Floppy ROM" in several issues of Interface Age. Very neat. There were discussions on the list years ago about programs being sent out over the radio as in the UK so you would plug your radio output into your computer's cassette input to receive the program: mass software distribution! There was also a discussion about bouncing signals off the moon to create a delay-line memory of sort. What if we were to preserve software by encoding it as audio and bouncing it off the moon? I figure we could probably save a few old programs that way :) -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

This was also done on Sunday afternoons in the mid 80's by a local rock station, KZOK in Seattle, WA. The broadcast was 300 baud and you just hooked your modem to your radio. g. -- "I'm not crazy, I'm plausibly off-nominal!" Proud owner of 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind.

At 12:52 AM 10/8/2004, Jos Dreesen wrote: Back in June 2001, this mailing list discussed the Infocipher modems, circa 1990, an early cable-television-based broadcast mechanism. 9600 baud, 24 hours a day, in a compressed, packeted and repeating stream. Megabytes a day, back in the days of 2400 baud modems. Makes you think this would be a great value-added for today's cable Internet providers. Instead of fighting P2P, sell it as an extra. If it was a one-way stream, it would give the system extra bandwidth. It would be a great way to let people download encoded video, for example, like pay-per-view or a sliding window of shows, as the BBC proposes. Click on the shows you want, wait a day, and they appear on your hard disk. - John

This sounds very similar to the UK Teletext system (which is, indeed, used to provide subtitles for deaf people, along with many 'pages' of information). As I mentioned last night, this was used to distribute software for the BBC micro. Interesting thing : The page number is a 3 digit BCD number, but nowhere in the hardware are the invald BCD nybbles (1010..1111) ever prohibited. Pages with such numbers can't be selected on a normal TV, but can be decoded and displayed by a computer-controller teletext decoder. And such pagesd certainly exist... -tony

Hi, ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) said: On my tv one of the Welsh channels (S4C, I think) shows page numbers like 14A 1E5 etc as it's counting when searching for a page. I've not been able to get any of the pages to display even by entering 149 and pressing "up" to see if it counts in hex :-) -- Cheers, Stan Barr stanb(a)dial.pipex.com The future was never like this!

At 01:47 PM 10/8/2004, Fred Cisin wrote: These days, PC-based video cards decode it, too, and use it to trigger events... e.g., as soon as they mention "Hitler", record 30 minutes, or beep, etc. - John

At 04:25 PM 10/5/2004, ben franchuk wrote: This list discussed Cauzin and other interesting 2D barcode technologies back in November and December 1998, if you want to look in the archives. http://www.paperdisk.com/ was also mentioned. I saw something in the NY Times today about software in cellular phones that recognizes a new circular barcode that encodes a URL (and given the example, it looked like it used a "tiny URL" scheme to map a low-density number to a longer URL kept in a server's database.) http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/07/technology/circuits/07kiosk-side.html - John

At 05:45 AM 10/7/2004, Vintage Computer Festival wrote: I still think it's a good idea. It'll show up in a thumb-drive-size device someday, maybe talking to your PC with USB or Bluetooth, or perhaps it all gets integrated into our next phones. We all need a quick way to exchange small bits of info: URLs, phone numbers, vCards. Scanning barcodes is an easy way to "remember" something you saw in print. I think an audio-based "barcode" is needed, too - imagine if your gizmo would automatically record the small bits of digital info it heard while it was with you - jingles from the radio and TV, something someone beamed to you over the phone, etc. What an interesting engineering problem: design an audio encoding suitable for a few dozen bytes that was pleasant-sounding to the ear, yet had a chance to work over AM radio or telephone. It could even just be the standardized start and end tones to bracket a snippet of audio that the device would record and decode later. Bring your gizmo to your PC or handheld or phone and share those bits of data, present them in a scrolling list... Very handy! - John

On Tue, 5 Oct 2004, ben franchuk wrote: That was the Cauzin SoftStrip system. I always wanted one back in the day but my limited teenage budget precluded its purchase. I eventually got one to add to my collection, though I've never had the time to try it out. It seemed like a good idea. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

On Mon, 4 Oct 2004, Vintage Computer Festival wrote: Umm, well, no... I just think it's a really bad idea! :-) (Sorry I couldn't resist...)

The HD business is a tough one to crack. Instead, you should patent the idea and sell it to Toshiba, Quantum, Western Digital, or Seagate. --- Vintage Computer Festival &lt;vcf(a)siconic.com&gt; wrote: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ===== Tell your friends about the Computer Collector E-mail Newsletter! -- It's free and we'll never send spam or share your email address -- Publishing every Monday(-ish), ask about writing for us -- Mainframes to videogames, hardware and software, we cover it all Visit the museums directory and read about past events at our web site: http://news.computercollector.com Contact us at news(a)computercollector.com 550 readers and counting!

Off-topic: speaking of storage, did ya'll see the announcement of the new Palm device this week? It has a built-in 160-something-MB flash drive, and Bluetooth. That means, in theory, you can carry it around as a wireless HD. I think Linksys and Toshiba already make wireless HD units, but either way it's cool. --- Vintage Computer Festival &lt;vcf(a)siconic.com&gt; wrote: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ===== Tell your friends about the Computer Collector E-mail Newsletter! -- It's free and we'll never send spam or share your email address -- Publishing every Monday(-ish), ask about writing for us -- Mainframes to videogames, hardware and software, we cover it all Visit the museums directory and read about past events at our web site: http://news.computercollector.com Contact us at news(a)computercollector.com 550 readers and counting!

On 05/10/2004, at 8:33 PM, Jules Richardson wrote: I seem to recall that (IBM?) demonstrated a RAID based on 1.8" CF based hard drives. If they could get the amount of storage up a little (say 100G for each drive) then you could easily have a nice raid in a very small space - if you had it mounted in such a way as to allow easy removal then failures could be handled very easily. Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Davies(a)kerberos.davies.net.au Melbourne | "If soccer was meant to be played in the Australia | air, the sky would be painted green"

----- Original Message ----- From: "SP" &lt;caa007216(a)ono.com&gt; To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" &lt;cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Tuesday, October 05, 2004 8:23 AM Subject: Microsoft Patent over FAT denied I think McDonalds owns the patent on FAT in the USA.

On Tue, 2004-10-05 at 07:41 -0700, Ron Hudson wrote: Heh, nice one. I've still got a copy of James Willing's account (posted 6 years ago to this list) about a drive shipped with a Northstar machine way back when that exploded in quite a spectacular way. Makes for an interesting read. About the most exciting these days are capacitors letting go in things - computers just aren't dangerous any more! :-) cheers Jules

----- Original Message ----- From: "Tom Jennings" &lt;tomj(a)wps.com&gt; To: &lt;julesrichardsonuk(a)yahoo.co.uk&gt;uk>; "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" &lt;cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Tuesday, October 05, 2004 2:27 PM Subject: now there's a good head crash <SNIP> Most dangerous hardware in my collection: DEC RA82 Hard Drive - With that big AC motor and pully, I'm sure it would take your arm off if you ventured inside. Quadex Q5000 Mini - Even grounded properly, touching the sides gives you a nasty shock. Fortunately you don't have to touch it much once it's running. HP 7XXX plotter - gave me a nasty papercut once while I prematurely grabbed at it's output.

On Wed, 6 Oct 2004 21:38:39 -0400, Bob Shannon &lt;bshannon(a)tiac.net&gt; wrote: It has been my experience that just a crappy PC harddrive will stop a .45 ACP. They don't do so well against a 7.62x54R, though.

Here is something I dont understand. .45 is about 11,5 mm, while 7.62 is uuuuhhh 7.62 mm. How can the .45 come out worst? Nico (sniper in Danish National guard) --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.768 / Virus Database: 515 - Release Date: 22-09-2004

The .45 runs Windows The 7.62 runs Linux [or maybe it has something to do with velocity....]

On Thu, 7 Oct 2004, Nico de Jong wrote: Amount of powder driving the thing, and volumetric stuff. .45acp is subsonic, most of the NATO junk >> mach1. Energy...

I regularly use hard disk platters for target practice. This has become a bit of a tradition with my group of 'Redneck Geeks'. Of course, I only have a Remington .22 SportsMaster (I'm only a resident after all, I've decided it's not worth attracting attention to myself just to own weapons). A single 3.5" platter will usually stop a .22 LR round, but not always, and not after you've hit it a few times and stressed the metal. We hang the holed platters into mobiles. Will be useful one day when I actually have a kid. (Assuming my wife doesn't get all funny about those sharp edges, she does that now and then) JP

On Thu, 7 Oct 2004, Jay West wrote: Why not set up a group of ten at a considerable distance,... hire a pinsetter,....

Bob wrote... Odd, precisely because they are using a flat heavy round to 'smack' the pin, is exactly WHY you've probably seen shots come back at you. The 7.62x39 rounds go into the pin and come very cleanly out the back. But the heavy semiflexible coating keeps the target whole, it almost self-seals on entry and exit after the bullet passes through it. Maybe older pins are not coated with this thick plastic over a wooden core, but mine are. Completely wooden pins with no thick plastic coating would disintegrage and split up after the first shot or two. Handgun sport? Nah, I disagree. Shooting pins (at least the way I described, on a wire).... from 100 yards away is decidedly not a 'handgun sport'. Jay West

Now, you don't have many of these over in the US, but in the UK and Europe we have those lovely old Citroens with the hydraulic suspension (Rolls-Royce use a cheap and crappy copy of it for their own cars). I have some dead CD-ROM drives lying about, that are about the same height as the gap between the ground and the chassis longeron on not-quite-full-height (you can adjust the ground clearance with a control inside the car), and full height (for jacking it up) gives enough space to fit a CD-ROM with a couple of bits of wooden packing (to protect the underseal). So, to reiterate, with the suspension fully pressurised (no travel, everything on the upper stop) the ground clearance is around 10", with the suspension fully depressurised it's around 2". Will a CD-ROM support 2000kg of car? Gordon.

On Mon, 4 Oct 2004, John Foust wrote: I agree, the slight increase in complexity of two physical drives is vastly offset by the increase in reliability. YOu have to look at what fails -- and it's the rotating junk that dies, not as often the electronics. For classicmp, how about off-machine rsync copies? Even a simplistic 2nd internal drive and a cron rsync drive 1 to drive 2 gets you a lot of results for little effort. Personally, I'd go RAID5 and a second machine outside the datacenter both.

Reminds me of the person who did not understand why using two partitions of the same drive for mirrors was not the brightest idea in the world...