lubuntu-desktop team mailing list archive

[Jonathan Marsden <jmarsden@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 05/24/2011 01:17 AM, Yorvyk wrote:

> A 700 MHz PIII Celeron with 256 MiB of PC100 RAM and a 100 MHz drive 
> is quite usable.  A 200 MHZ PIII Celeron and 128 MiB of 66MHz RAM 
> with a 33 MHz drive is dog slow.  If you add a screen reader into
> the mix I think the later set-up would become unusable.

I'm now confused.

(A) I am not used to seeing drive (presumably hard disk drive)
performance being measured in Mhz -- what *is* this?

The common ways to gauge hard drive performance that I know of are:

 * sustained data transfer rate (in MBytes/sec)
 * sustained I/O operations per second (IOPS/sec)

Lower level (and IMO less useful) measures include average seek time,
and rotational latency... those are measured in milliseconds, not MHz.
Conventional hard drives are (generally speaking) never bottlenecked by
their theoretical maximum interface data transfer speed, so this is not
a useful drive performance metric (but *is* sometimes measured in MHz...
so maybe that is what you are using?).

(B) This message seem to imply that "accessibility" means "screen
reader", but there is no specification saying that which Phill has
pointed us to yet.

I suggest that blindness or lack of visual acuity are not the only
things requiring accessibility accommodation in an OS.  They *might* be
the #1 priority for accessibility improvements to Lubuntu -- but without
a clear specification (blueprint), we do not know this!

Jonathan