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From: peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: FACC
Message-ID: <405@sugar.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 16-Jul-87 17:49:22 EDT
Article-I.D.: sugar.405
Posted: Thu Jul 16 17:49:22 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 19-Jul-87 06:51:01 EDT
Organization: Sugar Land UNIX - Houston, TX
Lines: 39
Keywords: Problems, suggestions.

We just bought FACC, and immediately noticed a few things that are, um,
not optimal. It's really cool, and I understand a new version (FACC II?)
is coming out, but...

Point.	Facc does not allow the number of buffers to be specified ahead
	of time, a problem for CLI fans who don't want to have to lean on
	the "more" gadget whenever it comes up. How about "FACC +500K"?
	It takes a while to get the buffers up to 1700.

Point.	Facc doesn't background itself. We can't think of a good reason to
	run Facc from the CLI other than background, so why not do it
	anyway. After all, what's 48 bytes compared to 128K?

Question. When Facc caches stuff, does it cache the whole track read in
	when the block is read? If not, is there any good reason why it
	shouldn't? If so, is there any way to defeat it for folks with
	little 512K machines?

Question. Does FACC II come up with a window by default? We would prefer
	that it just be runnable from the startup-sequence without
	bragging.

Question. Does FACC preferentially cache directory and file header blocks.
	If not, I'd like to suggest that FACC II do so.

I remember reading something about someone's idea for making FACC a disk
cache rather than a drive cache. That seems an admirable idea, and would
make any sort of RAM disk far less important. Is it possible without total
rewrite? It's depressing to watch 1600 buffers go out the window when you
pop a disk.

I like the dithered background to the FACC window. A nice touch. Making the
window borders the standard color for such things would be an even nicer one.
Off the top of my head I'd like to propose a new "law of computing", to wit
da Silva's rule #3: don't do things differently just for the sake of being
different... product differentiation isn't worth it. Or, why is Marauder so
fancy when all I want to do is back up disks?
-- 
-- Peter da Silva `-_-' ...!seismo!soma!uhnix1!sugar!peter (I said, NO PHOTOS!)