[gentoo-amd64] Re: FAT tools, where ?

[Duncan]

Lie Ryan posted on Sat, 05 Dec 2009 06:17:42 +1100 as excerpted:

> The 8G is small compared to the external's size (120G)

I think I mentioned it, but I still find it amazing... Fry's Electronics 
recently had a USB 1 TB external for $80.  I snagged one.  I'm not 
bragging, as after tax, that's about what they're going for on 
pricewatch.com (no tax but with shipping) now days as well; I'm just 
still so amazed that prices have come down that far.  A TB disk for $80.  
It's just... weird!

Meanwhile, 120 gig... is almost USB thumbdrive size now.  When you said 
"small" 8 gig partition, I was thinking relative to a half terabyte 
drive, at least, and with TB drives at $80 (which I still find almost 
unbelievable), half TB would be models from a year or two ago.  8/120ths 
might be small, but it doesn't look so small when someone's thinking 
8/500ths or 8/1000ths on the one hand, and has just done the GPT 
repartition I mentioned and felt incredibly foolish sticking a measly
1 MiB partition (the BIOS boot partition) on that 1 TB (931 GiB) drive!

Let's see... 1 MiB of 931 GiB... 1/953,344th (actually less, I think it 
was actually 931.5 GiB or so, I could fit nearly 500 of those 1 MiB 
partitions in the rounding error!) of the drive.  That'd be roughly 
comparable to a partition of a byte and a half (three nibbles, 12 bits) 
on a 1.44 MB floppy! (Tho talk about rounding error!)  No wonder I felt a 
bit foolish! =:^)

I guess "small" is relative, and definitely in the eyes of the beholder, 
isn't it?

... I still can't get over terabyte drives, for $80...  I think I'm 
beginning to appreciate how my grandparents must have felt, seeing the 
car overtake the horse and buggy!  I've known I was officially an "Old 
Fart" since the day I was enthusiastically talking about a particular 
album of a particular band (Styx, Killroy was Here, FWIW)... and suddenly 
realized that I wasn't sure which was here first, the guy I was talking 
to, or the album, as he was about old enough to have been /born/ that 
year!  But still, a terabyte for under $100 with enough left over to stop 
for dinner on the way home... incredible!  Talking about a terabyte still 
seems like it should be like talking about a million dollars, yeah, the 
figure exists, but it's something CEOs and governments use in their 
everyday conversation, not something I'm likely to ever see... but now 
that terabyte is under $100 with change left for dinner!

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman