Yes, back in those days I also had a 386, although mine had 8MB RAM. I could therefore get away with only using 8MB of my 120MB ATA disk for swap. Today, I use 0MB of my 160GB SATA SSD, and also 0MB of the 320GB ATA that I use for my /opt.

NO! They were way ahead of us for awhile. But now they're way behind, because we've mandated low-sulfur diesel and they haven't, at least not all of them.

The issue is that there were always fine particulates, and they can't be trivially filtered out. But perhaps you missed it when we discussed here that gasoline engines produce as much soot as diesels, and it is all of the exceptionally-fine kind. Now that the big stuff is being filtered out of the diesel exhaust, all we have left is a relatively small amount of that PM2.5.

Ideally we'd do away with the ICEs entirely and eliminate all that crap, get down to worrying about how to eliminate it from the tires. But what's really pathetic is that we've had the technology at least since the 1800s to solve all of these problems. It's called electrified rail. With modern levels of traffic, it is worthwhile to have people in packets smaller than train cars, however, yet with the distances which must be covered the vehicles must have their own power storage. Current battery and self-driving vehicle technology permits just this particular use case. We have every piece we need to replace cars entirely with PRT save for the will, starting in the densest city centers and moving outwards in stages related primarily to the availabilty of parking.

AHEM. Back on topic. "invisible smoke doesn't mean it's better" is exactly why diesel is better than gasoline. And yet, soot isn't even the worst emission that cars produce! It's unburned hydrocarbons, also known as raw fuel. And by their nature, diesels which are running properly run lean all the time, that's just how they operate. That means they're burning their fuel. It also means they produce more NOx, but that's why diesels now have catalysts.

It does if you're subaru and you've got opposed cylinders and thus it doesn't have to be heavier, and the whole world is moving towards turbocharged gasoline direct injection anyway which means the engines cost just as much as diesels. and guess what? they foul their intake valves more than diesels do! hilarity ensues.

It is the cleanest fuel. We discussed here on slashdot how (gasoline-driven) cars emit more black carbon than previously thought) and the diesels are more efficient so you actually wind up with diesel as the cleanest fuel once you get the traps and filters and piss injection and whatnot. It's true that gasoline direct injection is close, but it's also true that it takes less energy to make diesel than gasoline, that diesel contains more energy than gasoline per liter, and that diesel is less volatile and thus less hazardous to transport and store than gasoline. All in all, it is the superior fuel. Also, it can be made from biological feedstocks including oils from algae, waste animal fats, and so on, and with proper seals and fuel line linings mixed to any proportion with petrodiesel.

Diesel is a better fuel than gasoline in every single way. If, like Subaru, you build your diesel with opposed cylinders, it doesn't even have to be big and heavy because vibration is inherently cancelled by the design. It's just better. The TGDIs are just as expensive as TDIs. So the only thing wrong with Diesel fuel here in the USA is the taxes, and the only thing wrong with it in France is that they want to get rid of it, probably for a reason mentioned elsewhere in this discussion — it's taxed less there.

Since you are an anonymous coward, your anecdote is worth even less than the usual nothing. Even if your veracity were assured, we have no idea where you are. We know only that you are cowardly, and make both typos and unsubstantiated statements.

They don't even have beam weapons. They're not LASERs, they're "blasters".

long ago, you needed swap, though. And it wasn't until XP that you could reasonably attempt to run Windows NT without swap without it exploding.

That's my take. I don't know of anyone who did turn it down, because BIG SHINY. (Not just ooh shiny, but BIG SHINY.)

OCZ? That's probably why it survived.

So were those all consumer-level drives, or were any of them sold as "enterprise"?

I haven't laptop-shopped in a long while, I'm kind of awash in them right now, but last time I looked even most fairly low-end laptops were offered either with a small SSD or a larger HDD; say, 40/250, 80/400, 120/500, something like that. The very-lowest-end machines (netbooks) were coming with as little as 4GB flash, but up to 16 or rarely 32GB as you say. It was however often on a module that you could upgrade if it wasn't already a 32GB.

I've only had one 3.5" drive warn me with scary noises before the noises were so scary that they frightened it out of giving me any data. In fact, the first 3.5" drive I had fail did so silently but with the smell of smoke — turned out that it (a Seagate half-height RLL drive whose ST- number shall remain forgotten if I am lucky, I could use that space for phone numbers) had experienced stiction and then burned the stepper power trace off the board. By the time a jumper wire had been soldered across the trace, the drive cooled down and it spun up and functioned again. The next time it stuck hard and burned the trace off again, so I just popped the case lid off without damaging the foam gasket, reached in and spun the spindle with my thumbs and then popped the lid back on after giving it a quick puff to blow any dust off the top platter, soldered on another jumper, and it worked faithfully until I retired it. I believe that was a 40MB with at least three platters, if you could see 'em you could've about counted the cylinders. It never made a bad noise through the whole experience, and it was basically an antique by modern standards.

I did have one 2.5 inch drive develop massive bearing whine before failure, but I've had two fail silently.

don't you? I do. It's compressed, too. And what's more, you can have this on your phone. Most of the alternate Android kernels I've tried have come with zRam support, but it was also [relatively] recently added to Ubuntu as a default feature.

actual swap is so 1990s. even in the last decade I was mostly disabling it. in fact, I don't have any swap enabled on any computers, from 128MB RAM (the least of anything I've got, now — and they're pogoplug v4s and a dockstar) up to 8GB. This only caused me problems in Windows 7, where Java shits itself when trying to use 3GB out of 8GB (yes, it's 64-bit) even when I have no other foreground applications whatsoever. But then, Windows is what it is, incredibly polished in some areas, an incredible turd in others. Kind of like Linux. All I want is video from my firewire camera (which is working fine, actually, in spite of being literally one of the earliest examples, an iBot) in V4L applications. Is that really too much to ask? Apparently yes, yes it is. And sadly, it used to work, I've done it before. v4l2-loopback doesn't work and vloopback doesn't build, I haven't yet figured if the right diddling can make that happen or if the interfaces it needs are gone.

You mean the typical wal-mart shopper? I'm guessing 640k should be enough for anyone.

No, it didn't. It was sleazy, it was wrong, it was something that we should not tolerate from any gaming company, but it was part of the deal for a review copy up front and every respectable gaming review outlet turned them down. Yeah, you read that right.