On Wed, Oct 21, 1998 at 06:15:08AM -0400, Alan Harnum wrote:
Gosunkugi Hikaru saved the message on his computer with the
others. The hard drive on his obsolete 486-DX was nearly full; he
made
a
note to clear out some old messages before checking mail again.
Five years have passed since the end of the manga, right? Even if
you
consider the manga to have ended in 1996, that still makes it 2001.
A 486-DX isn't just obsolete by that time, it's an antique... Heck,
the one and a half year old computer I have now (Pentium something
or other) is already obsolete, and in three years, it'll be an
antique.
If you want to stickle for details, I'd give Hikaru something more
powerful than a 486-DX as his obsolete computer...
Now, come on, here. I'll give you a practical example: konatsu.ml.org
is a 486DX2-66 with 20MB of RAM. It handles my incoming mail (~400
messages
per day), the Synopses List submission line, the webpage, and it
provides
Internet connectivity to the rest of my home network via Linux's
ultra-neat
IP Masquerade function. I've never seen it's load average go above 0.1
in
normal use. (actually, it's usually stuck at 0.0) In other words, it
could handle many, many times the load it does now without much
trouble.
You're talking to a person whose last submission to the Synopses list
address at konatsu.ml.org never showed up on the list, so... ;p
Not my fault!!! :)
The dropped synopses from this past week were caused by a misconfiguration
in the mailserver at Florencio's ISP.
This for a computer that is hopelessly obsolete, and will be an antique
in a couple more years... :D
Five years (even three years, counting from 1998 and assuming HaM takes
place in 2001) is a pretty long time in computer terms.
I know that very well. I've been involved in the computer world in some
way, shape, or form for the last 15 years. As such, I've seen some
things change, and some things stay remarkably constant. The IA32
instruction set is one of those constants, having not changed much
since the 386 was introduced. (Some things have been added, such as
the MMX extensions. As a whole, these extensions aren't terribly useful,
and are little used.)
In any case, 'obsolete' all too often simply means, 'unable to adequately
run the latest 3-D gorefest', which is rather silly.
And there's no
evidence Hikaru's hooked up to a network here; it's a single computer
for personal use.
Ummm... he's reading his email? It's pretty hard (although not
impossible) to get email to your computer without being at least
temporarily connected, say, through a PPP dialup link.
Look at it this way... You can check your mail with a 486 today;
what's
preventing you from being able to do so in 2001?
Nothing at all. I only pointed it out because it seemed to me a
distinct possibility that Gary chose a computer for Hikaru that would be
obsolete _today_ rather than obsolete five years from now.
Possibly. It's Gary's call. I didn't see any problem with it.