Re: [gentoo-user] system uptime

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On 31/08/2015 10:50, Peter Humphrey wrote:
> On Sunday 30 August 2015 18:26:49 Mick wrote:
> 
>> Modern appliances with Green stickers on them (whatever they're called) are
>> more efficient by design.  To some extent this is also true with PCs.  I
>> still have an old Pentium 4 32bit running a couple of test environments and
>> back up storage.  I can assure you that the room gets hot after it has been
>> running for a couple of hours!  :-)
> 
> The desktop machine I'm referring to (an Amari "workstation") dates from 2009. 
> It has an i5 processor, 16GB RAM* and two 2GB SSDs as the main power sinks. It 
> sits (runs) in a boxroom 6ft square and keeps it comfortably warm. I haven't 
> noticed any change in ambient temp since the SSDs replaced spinners.
> 
> * Whoever named that Random Access had a strange understanding of English. The 
> last thing I want from memory is random access! How much better it would have 
> been to call it something like Direct Access. Oh well - much too late now.
> 


It's random access to distinguish it from serial access. In the early
early days there were a lot of strange methods being tried to build
memory - like dots on a cathode ray tube! To get to bit you wanted, you
had to wait till the scanning beam reached that part of the screen -
serial access. Addressable memory on a grid pattern came much later.

Random Access really means "able to access any random address as fast as
any other random address".

RAM is also not the opposite of ROM :-)

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com