"Kernel patching always sounded totally esoteric, and more than a
little scary to me. I mean, downloading beta software and patching
it into my kernel source tree? It wasn't long ago that just the
thought of compiling a new kernel was frightening to me."
"I kept listening to the hardware types at work (I'm a Windoze
programmer) talking about the ways they were spicing up their
systems. They were talking about how the latest thing in IDE drives
is UDMA/ATA66. The interface features burst data transfers of up to
66 MB/second, and, if you use a third party controller card, allows
you to have up to 8 IDE devices in a single computer. UltraDMA also
allows IDE drives to be larger, up to 128 MB. I was almost out of
hard drive space, so my Christmas present to myself was a new IBM
13.5 gig, 7200 rpm, 2 MB cache UDMA/ATA66 drive. Of course, I
couldn't see myself putting that drive onto on of my old-fashioned
PCI IDE ports. Instead, I went out and ordered a Promise controller
card."
