21 years ago - and boy, does it seem *weird* to write that - my first programming experience was with a very funky old machine called the PERQ.

Yup, I remember the PERQ. Some of them found their way to Norway too :-)

Musing somewhat related to toasters: Like GigE pushing against the limits of a 1500 byte MTU, isn't it about time we start moving to 1K or larger block sizes on our SCSI drives? In the age of FibreChannel and Ultra160, shuffling all those wee blocks about seems silly, given that filesystems are using 1K, 2K, 4K and larger logical block sizes.

You may want to check out the Usenet newsgroup comp.arch, which has a rather interesting discussion about just that. Look for the thread with subject line

Re: 4M pages are a bad idea (was Re: AMD 64bit Hammer CPU and VM)

Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug@nethelp.no