This is not a sensible idea at all. Not just because of the access times, however, but due to the way that many tape drives write to the tape.

Each write operation to a tape moves the End Of Data mark to the position on tape where the last write operation finished. This prevents the drive from reading beyond the end of useful data. Now, if someone were to try to use a tape drive for random writes, the End Of Data mark will be in the wrong place, preventing access to the rest of the data lying beyond that point.

Tapes do still have their uses in certain organisations, but trying to use tapes as large disks is pointless from a technical point of view, unless you are prepared to restore the entire contents to disk cache in order to edit a file, and then re-write the new tape contents back down to tape in linear fashion.

sorry, bad pun...
Couldn't resist it.

Not sure if parent post was serious, but just in case:

Embarcadero _is_ the successor to Borland/Codegear for Delphi and also C++ Builder.

My company has been using C++ Builder for over 10 years and find the Rapid Application Development aspect of it ideal for rapid prototyping and also for building full-scale real-time, distributed data acquisition and analysis systems. So, if learning Delphi/Pascal doesn't float your boat, then stick with C++.

The latest version of Builder (XE2) also provides application development for Macs as well as Windows, although their support for boost libraries is not quite so strong. But the original poster probably doesn't want to learn too much boost, so that may not be an issue.

What complete and utter madness....

I actually bought one of these as soon as I saw it advertised in the UK. My work involves developing software for Windows, and we are interested in touch-screen devices, so it seemed reasonable to give it a go. The Android option is a free bonus.

It was disappointing to see Android 1.6 only, and now that it seems 2.2 is available, I'll upgrade.

I agree with the review article that the Windows 7 OS (Explorer, etc.) is not well-suited to touch operation. Try re-sizing a window to see how hard it is. Can you see the cursor change to a double-headed arrow? No!

The device appears identical (except for branding) to the Novatech nTablet http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/prods/laptops/NNB-869.html. Novatech sells a fake-leather cover for their tablet with a keyboard built-in. For developing software, this makes the device usable.

The USB ports are supported by Android as well as Windows, so if you want to drive Android with a keyboard and mouse, you can!

If you look at TFA more closely, you will see that this is a contributed piece, not the BBC's view at all. The author is credited at the foot of the article as being an external contributor.

By all means, let's have a discussion about GM foods, but please let's not confuse the medium and the message in the original post.

Sorry to be pedantic, but the aeroplane that crashed in Lockerbie following mid-air detonation of a bomb was Pan-Am flight 103, not TWA.

(There was a TWA mid-air explosion more recently, after flight 800 took off from New York, believed to be due to frayed electrical wiring inside the fuel tanks.)

Actually, yes. Four cores would do very nicely for several of the applications developed by the company I work for.

We produce real-time data acquisition and analysis systems for multi-channel data in the audio bandwidth and above. Some of our programs have several threads per channel, and on a 128-channel system I believe we have seen over 500 threads running...

Anything that can allow our software to do more real-time analysis on the captured data without compromising the low-latency display update rates demanded by our customers is great news. Admittedly our application area is not a typical case, but I'm sure we're not alone.