On Thu, 7/18/13, Charles Steinkuehler <char...@steinkuehler.net> wrote:
Question: Would you design something in today's world that had any sort of hard-coded limit (other than maybe native memory size)? If so, why? I envision a future where gcode files are split into 1 Gig chunks because Microsoft^H LinuxCNC can't handle files bigger than that(*). (*) Obscure reference to the DVD format, and why it uses a collection of 1G VOB files instead of a single large video file. ------------- DVD for video came out circa 1996. 1x speed DVD-ROM drives for computers hit the scene in 1997. Development work started some years earlier. Back then, the most popular hard drive size was a gigantic two gigabytes *unformatted capacity* and 16 *megabytes* of RAM was a mainstream amount though 32 megabytes was becoming popular as RAM hungry Windows 95 gained market share. By the time Windows 98SE was released, 256 megabytes was considered low end but 2 gig hard drives were still very popular due to being much less expensive than drives with larger capacity, like those monster sized 8 gig ones which tended to require special formatting software to trick creaky old BIOS code into working with them. DVD video has been stuck with the same limitations for 17+ years because to ensure every Digital Video Disc will work in every DVD player, no matter how old, it must stay with that old standard, in spite of all the anti-copying tricks the publishers try. Some of the latest attempts have somewhat busted compatibility with some players. The organization that oversees the standard is considering disallowing such discs to bear the official DVD logos and recommending a warning on them that they may not work in all players. P.S. My first hard drive was a *five megabyte* 5.25" full height MFM Tandon. After installing MS-DOS 2.2 and *all* of the software I owned (on 360K floppies) it was half full. Then I did a full backup - onto 360K floppies. As the stack rose above the height of the IBM 5150 PC's case, I said to myself "I'm never doing this again!". ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ See everything from the browser to the database with AppDynamics Get end-to-end visibility with application monitoring from AppDynamics Isolate bottlenecks and diagnose root cause in seconds. Start your free trial of AppDynamics Pro today! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=48808831&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
