Hi Guys,

It's me again.
Okay first things first, before I degenerate this into spam which some
people hate, I will get a short mention on things concerning fanfics.

Painted Smile was good in a sense that it had a lot of emotional power.
Kudos to Richard for the fanfic.  But a question though, does it come after
serendipity or before or somewhere in between the events of that fanfic.
This is because it would be a miracle seeing that Ranma gave birth at the
end of serindipity and in this fanfic s/he was only pregnant. :-)

Anyway, I liked it.  There is a bit of a problem though, why is ranma sooooo
mad ?  In the previous fics he acted / looked like s/he loved kentaro, but
in this fic, s/he doesn't seem to love kentaro.
Oh well, probably all that hormone has gone to his/her head.  (No offence
ladies, I kidding) ;-p

okay, okay I said I liked it.  Keep up the good work Richard.  We'll be
waiting for the other parts... :-)))

As for the fic I was looking for, I now remember the name, it's Nodoka's
Mistake.  I wonder whether it will be finished or not...

I'll be reading the other fics that were passed to me soon, got too much
work.. thanks everybody.


Okay, some of you guys wanted to know what ssa disks are ?  Well, it's a
disk interconnection technology created by IBM.  It is able to transfer data
at 80 MB/s.  The disks are all connected in a loop structure for better
availability and robustness.
What's more if one disk on the loop fails, data can still travel through the
other loop.  If one of the loops are pulled out or disks are pulled out just
like that your computer will not crash, unlike scsi.
The disks / architecture of the subsystem is automatically created on the
fly as you add or take away disks (so far on specific unix system / windows
NT with ssa adapters installed).  You do not have to specify the addresses
like scsi.  S***, forget scsi, it's crap.  In ssa, the more disks you put in
the higher it scales.  And the data transfer is not arbitrated as in scsi or
fc-al.  All disks can transfer data at the same time unlike scsi, or for
that matter fc-al.  Distance between devices can go up to 25m and up to 2.4
km with fibre optics.
What's more you can connect up to the recommended 96 drives per ssa adapter.
ssa   Serial Storage Architecture (SSA) is part of IBM's seascape
architecture.  It uses scsi addressing which is automatically configured by
the adapter/system.  For more info, you can check out the website :
http://www.storage.ibm.com.

The company I work for did a demonstration of ssa vs. scsi on a pc server
and the throughput was twice the amount of scsi.  There were five scsi disks
attached transferring data and as for the ssa there was 8 disks 4 on one
disk subsystem and another 4 on another all connected in a loop on to the pc
server. Using 2 scsi disks, transfer rate was 5000K+ on SSA it was around
7000K+. On 5 scsi disks, transfer rate was around 2000-3000K+. On ssa with 8
disks, it was around 8000K+.

Thank you everybody.

That's all folks.

Cheers,
Saran

Always glad to help, that is if there is anything worthwhile for me...