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I like the SIIG Premium Aluminum Keyboard. Its solid, quiet, and above all... it looks great.

I know this is slightly off-topic since we're talking about laptops, but for encrypting desktops I recommend:

http://siig.com/product.asp?catid=106&pid=474
or
http://siig.com/product.asp?catid=106&pid=475

It's 56-bit DES, but it's better than nothing and would stop most thieves.

I know this is slightly off-topic since we're talking about laptops, but for encrypting desktops I recommend:

http://siig.com/product.asp?catid=106&pid=474
or
http://siig.com/product.asp?catid=106&pid=475

It's 56-bit DES, but it's better than nothing and would stop most thieves.

That's not quite true.

I guess you mean this card and this non-existant SIIG card.

If you take a peek at SIIGs PCIe card (NN-E38012-S1), it has an extra TI chip on it that looks like it's hooked directly to the bus. Probably a PCI-PCIe bridge like this. The FW400 version ( NN-E20012-S1) has no such chip. That's probably what is causing the 1394b cards to be /54.

Extra bridge chip notwithstanding, if it was actually impossible to put it in given the timeframe, I'd like to hear somebody apologize for the downgrade and say they'll put it back in RevB. I use that port and I'm not even a video professional. I can imagine that those guys are already not very happy about the state of Pro Apps and universal binaries.

Put one hard drive power supply in the Pelican case, use the other one with the hard drives to back your systems up. Even with my MP3 collection, I can still use one of these drives to back up my Macintosh and quite a bit of other stuff. Use the other drive to back up Windows and UNIX boxes, nothing fancy, mount the drive and drag entire filesystems over or tar them up and copy them over. Unmount drives from system, put into Pelican case, put Pelican case in gun safe. Backup systems as needed. I figure that if shit goes down and I need to bail on my house that I'm going to make a stop at the gun safe for a few items, so it's the natural place to put the hard drive case.

In case of bad things happening to to gun safe, retrieve weapons, passport, emergency cash and hard drives. Head out to car and head to safety. No fuss, no muss. Much easier than the idiocy that Cringely describes.

Since 2002, I have been using the SIIG Raid 0 http://www.siig.com/product.asp?pid=424 card on a 1999 Sawtooth G4 with 0.48TB of internal storage. Hardware-wise, this is an OEM Acard card; also available from Sonnet and Miglia.

No disk failures to date ---I backup weekly with Apple's Backup 2.0

Here are some benchmarks that compare software RAID 0 performance (included free with OS X) vs. hardware RAID 0: http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/OSX/OSX_RAIDvsIDE_Card_ RAID.html

What happens when you can't plug these things into our PCs anymore? Will we see the return of the I/O card?

What do you mean "The return of" the I/O card? We still sell them (in a PCI version) all the time.

No matter if your using laptops or PC's, SIIG still makes quite a few cards with 'legacy' ports; Including serial controlers...

Bunch of babies... Can't look nothin' up for yourselv's? =]

One of my friends pointed Unicomp to me a while back. They make the old IBM keyboards

Thanks for the pointer! I just dug an old-school IBM keyboard (those all-metal ones) up at work, so nice...just wish it was a little quieter.

My favorite keyboard is an old 101 key "Suntouch" made by Siig. It's got just the right amount of "clickyness" and the right stroke distance for me (just slightly less force needed to depress and just a little smaller stroke distance than the classic IBM one, at least that's how it feels to me). My first one was getting worn out and I found this one at Goodwill, of all places - just about jumped for joy.

• LP video cards, w/TV out
• pv-956 TV Tuner
• Much TV Slim tuner card
• parallel cards, serial cards, USB cards, raid cards
• video, RAID, GB network, FibreChannel, SCCI, etc...
• Some GeForce2mx cards will fit in low-profile spaces, once you replace the metal mounting bracket.

As I understand it, this is for the short-reach side of fiberoptics, not the long haul (100km +) or even metro (sub 50km) markets, but for very short reach, i.e. C.O. to home (sub 4,000 feet). Instead of running glass fiber, you can actually use plastic fiber in some very short reach applications. Bringing the cost of the transcievers required in the actual customer prem would be very cool indeed.

But let's not kid ourselves. Fiberoptic Ethernet Cards sell for under $100. Reducing this cost would help, but it won't solve the problem that there's no fiber in the ground to 99% of houses in America.

Neat science project, though.

First off, I think you've made a number of incorrect assumptions. My views are based on years of corporate experience, including PC rollouts. Please read my responses below. Understand that I am the only person who gave you an useable, DOS/real-mode solution. And it's not as expense as you think.

SCSI is not that cheap! Perhaps for a home system, but my company is betting it's business on the systems that we buy. That means quality, reliability, and driver issues are a big deal to us.

So are mine! You think I've been fired for buying SCSI all these years? More $$$ does NOT equal quality. I go through specific products below ... (and note that NONE say "Adaptec" -- been burnt by their crap too many times).

Each change in a driver results in a different build of the OS image. If we use a no-name SCSI card, each time the support chipset changes we need to build a new image. This is very expensive for us to maintain.

All of the cards I use have quite stable drivers. Of course when you buy something new, you shouldn't expect it to work. You should always wait ~6 months for the bugs to clear out. But when if you'd waited 5 years for good Adaptec Linux drivers, then you'd get quite irritated.

You can easily standardize on one SCSI chipset, the TekRam TRM-S1040:

• Low-cost end-user boards, TekRam DC-3x5U/UW series:
  • $15-20 UltraSCSI TekRam DC-315U for internal/external SCSI peripherials (no BIOS) -- This is probably all you need!. Much faster, cheaper, better and more compatible than Adaptec's AIC-7850-powered 2906
  • ~$40 UltraSCSI TekRam DC-395U for booting devices (BIOS) -- cheaper and better than Adaptec's AIC-7880-powered 2930 IMHO
  • ~$60 UltraWide TekRam DC-395UW for 40MBps Wide devices (BIOS)
• Single driver for all boards in series
• Excellent, direct vendor cross-OS support, DOS, 9x, NT/2000, Linux, *BSD, Solaris, SCO, NetWare, BeOS -- including full boot disks for just about any flavor. Check them all out -- especially Linux, *BSD or BeOS users, never seen such support!
• Although the chipset is just over one year old, I have seen 0 issues with drivers since March of 2000.

We cannot afford to put a Zip, Jaz, CD-R/RW and DVD-RAM/RW drive on every PC in my office. Instead, we have one or more external ones and put a $15-20 TekRam DC-315U in each system. Works great! Also great for cloning when I don't want to hit my server/network too hard (in the middle of the day), let alone transfer loads of data between systems. In Linux, I can even load/unload the TekRam S1040 driver on-the-fly, flipping drives on/off various systems without a reboot/shutdown. It's _awesome_ bay-bee!

As far as other experiences, I recently had to chuck my Adaptec AHA-2940UW (AIC-7880) in my Linux server because it is a POS (in 6 years of using Adaptec on Linux, I have yet to have a good experience thanx to their non-direct support). The sucker refused to work properly with a new, $4,000 Exabyte Mammoth2 60/150GB tape drive (talk about "betting my company's business" on a SCSI card!). I replaced it with an $60 Advansys (now owned by ConnectCom) chipset-based card:

• $60 UltraWide SIIG AP-40 Pro -- also readily available at your local computer/electronics store (although you'll pay about $99 retail).
• Advansys is known for their excellent direct driver development, and broad OS support (first vendor to officially support Linux -- way back in 1995)
• Has full per-device configuration in BIOS, just like Adaptec (i.e. Ctrl-A at boot). Works much better and more compatible with more devices than Adaptec IMHO!

But if you need faster still, Symbios Logic (now owned by LSI Logic) is always faster and more ubiquious than Adaptec. So much so that Adaptec attempted to buy Symbios out (since they were kicking Adaptec's butt in the OEM and FibreChannel market). You'll be interested in the popular 53c895/1010-series:

• Mid-cost, end-user boards in the TekRam DC-390U2 series -- 53c895 Ultra2/LVD (aka Ultra80) chipset:
  • $100 TekRam DC-390U2B for single channel Ultra80/LVD (or UltraWide) channel
  • $130 TekRam DC-390U2W for single channel Ultra80/LVD and isolated UltraWide bus
• Dual-channel, 32/64-bit PCI end-user boards in the TekRam DC-390U3 series -- 53c1010 Ultra160/LVD chipset:
  • $175 TekRam DC-390U2W for single channel Ultra160/LVD (or UltraWide) plus single channel UltraWide legacy
  • $235 TekRam DC-390U2D for dual-channel Ultra160/LVD (or UltraWide)
• Symbios Logic 53c8xx-series supported natively in just about every OS -- many chipset are upward compatible (with exception of 53c1010 that requires a new driver -- but still better than Adaptec's cards, especially their newer ones)
• Better than Adaptec performance at any chipset/protocol (usually by an average of 5-10%)
• Widely supported, numerous OEMs, >10 year-old 8xx-series design/support
• The best damn cabling/converter bundle I've ever seen in a kit (boy is Adaptec stingy!)

And when it comes to hardware RAID, Adaptec is just NT/Netware-only. As such, I prefer DPT or, better yet, StrongArm ASIC-powered Mylex RAID controllers with broad OS support (and better performance too).

So what brand are you blindly putting your faith in? Eh?

SCSI hard disks are much more expensive than IDE. I just checked pricewatch, and a roughly equivalent SCSI drive was around $200 more than it's EIDE counterpart (36GB)

And those IDE drives can be put in a $20-40 enclosure and made to work at 20MBps+, right? Not! When it comes to external (isn't that what we are talking about, eh?), IDE is a joke -- with slow as molassas USB (even in 12Mbps/1.5MBps "fast" mode) being the only option (although new ATAPI-to-FireWire bridges, like this Ultra33 one from Intito, is changing that -- although it requires OEM firmware/programming). Plus we're back to the DOS/real-mode issue (even for FireWire). Only SCSI is "ready-to-go" external.

Now you can compare GB/$ all you want. You do NOT need the latest SCSI drives. Go with a late-model 9-18GB SCSI drive. I mean, how much storage do you need? We're only talking $100-200 for the drive, another $20-40 for the enclosure and another $10-30 for cabling and termination, max. You could do it for under $150, including cables and termination, if you pinch your pennies (and buy your stuff mail-order -- use Cyberguys for SCSI cables/terminators). Plus, you must be looking at 7,200-10,000rpm RPM drives -- don't make the mistake of comparing 5,400rpm IDE drives to obviously much faster SCSI drives.

-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith

If you need more ide slots, get an ide expansion card. I have one by siig ( www.siig.com), works great, but it looks like they only go up to 33Mb/s. Should be OS independent.
Also maybe of interest is a hardware RAID 1 setup (look at www.arcoide.com) for ~$230. It goes on your ide port and splits to two hard drives, and is OS independent. It's supposed to work at 66mb/s. It works fine on NT, I'll know how it works on Linux at 66mb/s next week (or whenever the new one gets here...). I know this won't give the speedup of striping, but it I don't worry so much about a hard drive crashing. You could use this as part of a RAID 10 setup (http://www.acnc.com/raid10.html). Also, you should have similar size drives for this.

Mike