[No Subject]

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

Hurrah for Bruce! I have always been impressed with the level of
intelligence and literacy on this list (for the most part, and with a few
notable exceptions). Now we find that some XyWriters know that
traditional verse scans as well as rhymes.
	Apropos of AMD vs. Intel, there are other reasons for preferring the
former. About the time of MMX (which I seem to recall was introduced by
AMD, while Intel was dithering around with Pentium Pro and Pentium II),
Intel stopped supporting parity and its more advanced form, ECC RAM,
except on servers, while AMD supported both, at least through the K6-2,
and possibly later.
	As for obsolesence, modern hardware is very robust. I suspect some of my
current machines will be running when I am--or all that is mortal of me
is--dust and ashes. The thing we need to vehemently insist on is file
compatability: any new hardware has to be able to read old media and old
file formats. And we need to start collecting driver files. I'm going
crazy right now with a second-hand Compaq Pentium Pro: Compaq sold it as
a server, and supports only DOS, Novell Netware, NT (3 & 4), 2000, OS/2,
and various flavors of UNIX/Linux. No Win 9x. The OS can be installed,
but there seem to be no Windows 9x drivers for the VGA card (well, we
could replace that) or the SCSI controller, which cannot be removed, so
I've got RAM conflicts and a weeping screen.
Patricia
Patricia