Subj : Re: 555 - afterthought
To   : Ed Vance
From : Ky Moffet
Date : Thu Dec 19 2024 22:54:00

ED VANCE wrote:

> Your mention of Pentium 4 caused me to think of the original Pentium that
> couldn't add 2 plus 2.

Nothing so simple. It happened only under very rare and specific 
circumstances.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug

If you were crunching a pile of non-integer numbers, where 
ten-thousanths were significant, it could accumulate to enoiugh to throw 
off the calculation, but ordinary users never saw any effect.

People like to rag on the Pentium, but AMD was much worse. I compared 
errata sheets for Intel and AMD and AMD had 4x as many problems. The one 
I ran into was that a 32bit CPU could only run the bus at 16bit speeds, 
cutting system performance in half. I saw that again with AMD's early 
64bit CPUs that could only run a 32bit OS. Windows will downshift but 
linux pukes it back. And they knew about it the first time, I knew 
someone who ragged on them til an engineer showed up and told him the 
problem and replaced his bad CPU. Otherwise they've never admitted to 
it. HP knew about it too, I think, because they sold PCs with this bad 
CPU with 32bit Vista instead of 64bit. And aside from the memory 
limitation, a 64bit OS is waaaaaaaaaaay faster than the same OS in 32bit.

> So You were on the bleeding edge getting a XP box.

Actually I downloaded XP from one of the Usual Suspects, just to take a 
look, but I liked it and I still use it.  For a long time it was a dual 
boot on what was originally a WinME box that I'd built 2 years before.

> Shortly before AIO Printers/Scanners were sold I REALLY WANTED a Scanner.
> I paid a few cents less than one kilobuck (USD) for a 14 inch HP scanner and
> enjoyed it 1 or 2 years until I visited a friend and saw their AIO that they

I bought one of those good HP SCSI scanners off eBay for something like 
$30 back around 2002 (it was the first thing I ever bought there). It 
was so much faster than a parallel port scanner it wasn't funny -- 30 
seconds vs 15 minutes. A few years later I got another of the same model 
for free. Now I have an Epson Perfection someone gifted me, but way less 
use for a scanner.

> paid <>$300.00(USD) for.
> Now AIO's are much cheaper.

The problem with the typical all-in-one is that the scanner is 
relatively poor quality. Back in the day many would only do 150dpi when 
300 or 600 was standard for standalone scanners. I have a somewhat newer 
AIO  and it can't be convinced to scan at better than 150dpi. Which 
really isn't good enough.
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