Yes, except that one tile can be a different physical resolution to another tile. Not just scaled by the video hardware, but a different resolution with different signal timings...
It sounds like you are talking about auto-stretch scaling. That the monitor is at 800x600, the game is 320x240 and is automatically up-scaled to 800x600 by the OS. It isn't possible for a monitor to display "multiple resolutions" at once by definition of what a 'resolution' is. Auto-scale also presents aliasing problems without a decent anti-aliasing algorithm.
Yeah, unless you saw it in action, it's hard to imagine. It is exactly like the parent post describes, and you can have two (and only two) different resolutions displayed at once. You could be playing a game at 320x240 and drag your desktop down over half the screen, at a higher resolution. It was a horizontal division between the two (you couldn't have, say, one smaller window of one resolution on a desktop of a larger resolution) and (remember, we're using CRT based monitors here, and hardware that has an intimate knowledge of how the scanlines are driven in the limited range of CRT displays the Amiga supported) and the top half of the screen would be drawn at a different resolution to the bottom half of the screen, or wherever the division was dragged down to. It was pretty magical stuff...
To shutdown the Amiga, you turned it off. There was no delay, no Start->Shutdown...wait possibly forever...
Sorry, you can keep this feature. I, for one, like having things like disk caching that works.
Sliding screens. Why not give each application its own full screen and allow the user to pull down the top menu to slide between these screens.
Fullscreen windows. Why slide them up and down when you can switch with Alt+Tab or Cmd+Tab. Also check out Virtual desktops, you might like them.
Simple speech device. What could be easier than "LIST > speak:" to say a directory listing?
On the Mac at least you can do this: ls | say
Bidirectional linked list filesystem. If you lose a sector or sector link, most of the file could be rebuilt by following links from both ends towards the bad sector. (Disk doctor)
Filesystems have come a long way, check out something like btrfs
The keyboard garage. The 1985 Amiga 1000 keyboard tucked neatly under the computer where it didn't take up desk space, was hidden from children's fingers and was spill-proof.
How about tucking the slim and very flat keyboard on top of the foot of an iMac. Or, use a wireless keyboard where you can move it out of the way anywhere you like.
Tight integration of hardware with O.S. O.k. this works against everything we've been taught about abstracting everything but since the PC world has boiled down to little more than an O.S. monopoly, a hardware monopoly and a graphics card monopoly, why not eliminate some of the levels of abstraction that will never be used and make my 2Ghz PC perform every day tasks at least as well as my 7Mhz Amiga did?
I like to have modern abstractions, like a HAL, so my OS doesn't need to be written in hand-tuned assembly specifically for the hardware I'm running it on. Even in the relatively closed ecosystem that runs Mac OS X there's far more variety in hardware that the one OS image will run on than there was in Amiga land. What kinds of tasks could a 7MHz Amiga do that would cause your 2GHz PC to struggle? I can't think of anything off the top of my head. Even back in the mid 90's when Amiga fans were extolling the virtues of the custom hardware in the Amiga, on the PC side of things we were able to achieve much of the same by brute force. Copper Bars - done by palette switching very quickly in the horizontal retrace interval. Sprites - once again, done using brute force on the CPU, or with graphics card hardware. Even compiling the sprite to assembly to speed up it's operations. Using the blitter to move/copy memory quickly. Done using, once again, brute force or DMA access and done as quickly.
I'm all for nostalgia, but don't let it cloud your vision with just how far computers have done today.
LEDs do generate a fair amount of heat. In an incandescent globe, a lot of the generated heat comes out through the front glass, melting the snow. In an LED light cluster, there are heatsinks on the back that bleed off the excess heat. If you open up one of these new-fangled LED traffic lights, I guarantee that there will be a heatsink in there. All they need to do is design them so that the heatsink can, using heat pipes or something like that, channel the heat out the front of the traffic light - maybe have the heatsink attached to the shield above the light that is trapping the snow...
As much as I love ZFS, one thing it's not good at is for a single removable disk. The inability for Apple to get this working without kernel panicking the machine was one of the many reasons they chose to drop it.
Adobe Acrobat specifically has a Redaction feature that was included for this exact reason.
If you use it properly, you hilight the sections of text or images that you want to be redacted and pick the colour you want the covering rectangle to be. Once you apply the redactions, Acrobat removes the text from the page, removes any indexed text that refers to the redacted text (eg in a TOC link) and also offers to remove just about all the metadata in the PDF as well. Once redacted, the text is simply not in the PDF any more, it's gone. You can delete the rectangle but the text is not underneath it. You can't search for the text and you can't find it hidden in the metadata in the PDF either. It is completely gone.
This is an incredibly easy way to achieve what you want to do as you just hilight the text and click Redact. No drawing fiddly rectangles or anything like that. You can delete the rectangle object but there's nothing underneath it, it's simply there for visual appeal.
Adobe Acrobat specifically has a Redaction feature that was included for this exact reason.
If you use it properly, you hilight the sections of text or images that you want to be redacted and pick the colour you want the covering rectangle to be. Once you apply the redactions, Acrobat removes the text from the page, removes any indexed text that refers to the redacted text (eg in a TOC link) and also offers to remove just about all the metadata in the PDF as well.
The rectangle that it places over the redacted text is then purely there for visual appeal, there is no text underneath it.
Once redacted, the text is simply not in the PDF any more, it's gone. You can delete the rectangle but the text is not underneath it. You can't search for the text and you can't find it hidden in the metadata in the PDF either. It is completely gone.
What's more, this is an incredibly easy way to achieve what you want to do as you just hilight the text and click Redact. No drawing fiddly rectangles or anything like that.
I, whilst not being a programmer, do dabble in programming and I find these "natural syntax" languages, such as AppleScript, to really be read-only languages (as opposed to something like perl that's write only)
Reading through the code for an AppleScript program, it's pretty easy to pick up what's happening even if you're not overly familiar with the language. What is difficult is to write it properly, as it's so close to English, yet it's still got quite a rigid and structured syntax, so you need to use the exact form for it to work.
Obviously he should get what he paid for it. Returning a component of the computer should work similarly.
Sorry, but your analogy does not hold water.
Say I purchase a laptop that's got an external optical drive bundled, it's part of the package and not a separate configure-to-order option. If this optical drive sells for $150 separately, then there's no way I can purchase this laptop and say "I don't need this drive, I want a refund on it" and get $150 back. It simply doesn't work like that.
Over on the Microsoft Excel Team Blog they even give Edward Tufte credit as the inventor of these sparklines.
For Excel 2010 we’ve implemented sparklines, “intense, simple, word-sized graphics”, as their inventor Edward Tufte describes them in his book Beautiful Evidence. Sparklines help bring meaning and context to numbers being reported and, unlike a chart, are meant to be embedded into what they are describing:
Creates a folder that is kept in sync between different computers. You can share files with other dropbox users too via shared folders. 2GB or so of space is free. It also keeps multiple versions of files so you can go back to a previous version of a file if you need to.
I don't have any affiliation with the company, other than being a satisfied user.
If you're on a Mac, there are a couple of good options.
The first is the built-in Keychain. It can save application and website passwords, certificates, secure notes and it's all AES encrypted. As it's built-in, the support for it is pretty good with most apps and most websites. You have a normal login keychain that's automatically unlocked when you log in and remains unlocked (by default). You can have additional keychains with various levels of security over and above the login one - have them lock after a period of inactivity, have them lock when the screensaver is activated, have a different password to access them from your login keychain etc. The keychain can also be synchronised between different computers that you use, so if you create a login to a website on one, you can access the password you used on another one. As this works really well, I now use different randomly generated strong passwords for every site I need a login for - eg Bapdageshem9, negTuthsuc5 or EyHepGoyft8 ( apg -n 1 -m 10 -x 12 -M NCL -d )
If you find that the Keychain isn't up to the task there's 1Password. which does pretty much everything the built-in keychain does, and more...
Well, it's not magic, but it is USB - the Apple 24" display is actually a USB audio device as well with a 2.1 sound system in it (yes, 2 stereo speakers and a separate "sub")
iTunes can stream the same music to multiple AirPort Express Base Stations. A single copy of iTunes can't stream different music to different APEx units, but you can select multiple base stations in the one copy of iTunes.
In iTunes, click on the speakers popup button and there's a menu option for Multiple Speakers which brings up a dialog box asking which speakers (including the computer you're running iTunes on) you want to stream to.
As for an amp - there are lots of cheap (less than $100) TA2020 and TA2024 amps on eBay - they use a well-respected Tripath digital amp. Very efficient (most of the power in to them comes out of the speakers, not out as heat) and you can hook up an amazing variety of speakers without the amp getting too fussed (ie, they don't really care too much about low impedances) and they sound amazingly good for the money spent on them...
The BeagleBoard draws a maximum of 375mA when powered from 5V. This is the whole system running at full tilt, with an SD card etc. That equates to a power draw of 1.875W (0.375 x 5) and realistically you're going to be looking at a much lower power draw than this in regular usage.
I have a BeagleBoard with Ubuntu installed and did an apt-get ubuntu-netbook-remix on it. It took a few hours of pretty much 100% CPU utilisation and the chip was barely warm to the touch...
I've been a fan of the ARM for years, ever since I encountered them in high school in Acorn Archimedes computers. The instruction set was so elegant compared to the i486 and Motorola 68k series chips that it was up against at the time. Flat memory model, none of this segment:offset stuff on the intel platform and a really well-thought-out streamlined set of core instructions.
I've recently got my hands on an ARM platform, and compared to what I was playing with in school, this thing is light-years ahead. 600HMz ARM, 256MB RAM, 256MB NAND Flash, GPU with ~10M polys/sec, SD Card Interface, High-speed USB 2.0 etc etc. It's all on a board that's 3" square, draws something like 1.75W at full tilt (it is powered from one of it's USB ports) and costs $150USD. No moving parts, not even a fan. 100% solid state.
I'm currently running Ubuntu on it, but there are other systems like Angstrom and QNX that will happily boot on it as well. Boot the OS off SD card, swap them out to switch operating environments and it's all good.
I've got no affiliation with Texas Instruments or anything like that, I'm just a happy customer who is amazed at the power of this platform, it's low cost, low power usage and flexibility opens the doors to doing so many things with it...
Try Texas Instruments' BeagleBoard - it's an OMAP3 (ARM Cortex A8) at 600MHz, has an OpenGL ES capable graphics card (10M polys/sec, HD video) and can run off USB power or DC5V. DVI-D + S-Video for the display and they can boot off either the internal flash or an SD card (cheap storage!)
They are $150 and run Linux in various flavours or even the free home use version of QNX if you need hard realtime capabilities.
Running off either 5VDC or USB power, it typically uses 350mA, so it's using just 1.75W of power.
Now, it doesn't have Ethernet built in, but there is an expansion board available that adds this, or there's a USB hub you can get for it with an Ethernet port and you're up and running. Cutting your home server's power usage by a factor of 50 will have a pretty positive ROI.
Installation is pretty easy, you can download a pre-built image, copy it to the SD card, plug the SD card into the beagleboard and up you boot.
The biggest difference is that Vista required a major hardware upgrade to run properly. Then when MS realized that there weren't enough "Vista capable" machines in existence to sell enough copies, they tried to shoehorn it into some platforms where it really couldn't perform. So Vista's failure was mostly the fault of the marketing people overriding the engineered design. Although the performance tuning of things like memory caching and the search service were also big problems.
As much as I like to bash Microsoft, the case of Vista Capable machines being an absolute dog's breakfast was actually due to pressure from OEMs. OEMs didn't want hardware sales to drop with only expensive machines being Vista Capable, so they put pressure on MS to allow these magic stickers to be placed on low-powered machines that weren't really up to the task. MS tried to stand firm for a while but eventually relented and that's how we ended up with the mess that occurred. So, it was marketing departments that forced this upon us, but it wasn't entirely Microsoft's fault...
Yes, that makes sense - I can see it would be difficult to truly load-balance a single TCP stream over two links. Either way, this will probably be what my client wants as they can have someone sucking up 100% upstream bandwidth on one link with the VPN and internet traffic for everyone else should be unaffected.
Something like one of these Linksys units is probably just what I need. I've got a couple of sites on business-grade ADSL2+ with Annex M. They receive fantastic downstream bandwidth (on the order of 20Mbs) but upstream is less than 1Mbs. Increasing the downstream speed probably wouldn't do too much for them as they rarely have that completely maxed out, but increasing the upstream would be very useful for people who VPN into the office. All the incoming VPN connections could quite happily come through one link, but load-balancing the upstream data would make a big difference in this case...
What this gives you is a very cheap way to get Mac OS X Server with unlimited client licenses and the ability to have mirrored hard drives for storage. I also have used Minis as workgroup servers for quite some time now, and whilst I use external FW800 RAID 5 volumes for data storage, it has always irked me that the internal storage has no redundancy. Now it does. Sold.
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Yes, except that one tile can be a different physical resolution to another tile. Not just scaled by the video hardware, but a different resolution with different signal timings...
Okay, that makes no sense.
It sounds like you are talking about auto-stretch scaling. That the monitor is at 800x600, the game is 320x240 and is automatically up-scaled to 800x600 by the OS. It isn't possible for a monitor to display "multiple resolutions" at once by definition of what a 'resolution' is. Auto-scale also presents aliasing problems without a decent anti-aliasing algorithm.
Yeah, unless you saw it in action, it's hard to imagine. It is exactly like the parent post describes, and you can have two (and only two) different resolutions displayed at once. You could be playing a game at 320x240 and drag your desktop down over half the screen, at a higher resolution. It was a horizontal division between the two (you couldn't have, say, one smaller window of one resolution on a desktop of a larger resolution) and (remember, we're using CRT based monitors here, and hardware that has an intimate knowledge of how the scanlines are driven in the limited range of CRT displays the Amiga supported) and the top half of the screen would be drawn at a different resolution to the bottom half of the screen, or wherever the division was dragged down to. It was pretty magical stuff...
To shutdown the Amiga, you turned it off. There was no delay, no Start->Shutdown...wait possibly forever...
Sorry, you can keep this feature. I, for one, like having things like disk caching that works.
Sliding screens. Why not give each application its own full screen and allow the user to pull down the top menu to slide between these screens.
Fullscreen windows. Why slide them up and down when you can switch with Alt+Tab or Cmd+Tab. Also check out Virtual desktops, you might like them.
Simple speech device. What could be easier than "LIST > speak:" to say a directory listing?
On the Mac at least you can do this:
ls | say
Bidirectional linked list filesystem. If you lose a sector or sector link, most of the file could be rebuilt by following links from both ends towards the bad sector. (Disk doctor)
Filesystems have come a long way, check out something like btrfs
The keyboard garage. The 1985 Amiga 1000 keyboard tucked neatly under the computer where it didn't take up desk space, was hidden from children's fingers and was spill-proof.
How about tucking the slim and very flat keyboard on top of the foot of an iMac. Or, use a wireless keyboard where you can move it out of the way anywhere you like.
Tight integration of hardware with O.S. O.k. this works against everything we've been taught about abstracting everything but since the PC world has boiled down to little more than an O.S. monopoly, a hardware monopoly and a graphics card monopoly, why not eliminate some of the levels of abstraction that will never be used and make my 2Ghz PC perform every day tasks at least as well as my 7Mhz Amiga did?
I like to have modern abstractions, like a HAL, so my OS doesn't need to be written in hand-tuned assembly specifically for the hardware I'm running it on. Even in the relatively closed ecosystem that runs Mac OS X there's far more variety in hardware that the one OS image will run on than there was in Amiga land. What kinds of tasks could a 7MHz Amiga do that would cause your 2GHz PC to struggle? I can't think of anything off the top of my head. Even back in the mid 90's when Amiga fans were extolling the virtues of the custom hardware in the Amiga, on the PC side of things we were able to achieve much of the same by brute force. Copper Bars - done by palette switching very quickly in the horizontal retrace interval. Sprites - once again, done using brute force on the CPU, or with graphics card hardware. Even compiling the sprite to assembly to speed up it's operations. Using the blitter to move/copy memory quickly. Done using, once again, brute force or DMA access and done as quickly.
I'm all for nostalgia, but don't let it cloud your vision with just how far computers have done today.
LEDs do generate a fair amount of heat. In an incandescent globe, a lot of the generated heat comes out through the front glass, melting the snow.
In an LED light cluster, there are heatsinks on the back that bleed off the excess heat. If you open up one of these new-fangled LED traffic lights, I guarantee that there will be a heatsink in there. All they need to do is design them so that the heatsink can, using heat pipes or something like that, channel the heat out the front of the traffic light - maybe have the heatsink attached to the shield above the light that is trapping the snow...
As much as I love ZFS, one thing it's not good at is for a single removable disk. The inability for Apple to get this working without kernel panicking the machine was one of the many reasons they chose to drop it.
Adobe Acrobat specifically has a Redaction feature that was included for this exact reason.
If you use it properly, you hilight the sections of text or images that you want to be redacted and pick the colour you want the covering rectangle to be. Once you apply the redactions, Acrobat removes the text from the page, removes any indexed text that refers to the redacted text (eg in a TOC link) and also offers to remove just about all the metadata in the PDF as well. Once redacted, the text is simply not in the PDF any more, it's gone. You can delete the rectangle but the text is not underneath it. You can't search for the text and you can't find it hidden in the metadata in the PDF either. It is completely gone.
This is an incredibly easy way to achieve what you want to do as you just hilight the text and click Redact. No drawing fiddly rectangles or anything like that. You can delete the rectangle object but there's nothing underneath it, it's simply there for visual appeal.
Adobe Acrobat specifically has a Redaction feature that was included for this exact reason.
If you use it properly, you hilight the sections of text or images that you want to be redacted and pick the colour you want the covering rectangle to be. Once you apply the redactions, Acrobat removes the text from the page, removes any indexed text that refers to the redacted text (eg in a TOC link) and also offers to remove just about all the metadata in the PDF as well.
The rectangle that it places over the redacted text is then purely there for visual appeal, there is no text underneath it.
Once redacted, the text is simply not in the PDF any more, it's gone. You can delete the rectangle but the text is not underneath it. You can't search for the text and you can't find it hidden in the metadata in the PDF either. It is completely gone.
What's more, this is an incredibly easy way to achieve what you want to do as you just hilight the text and click Redact. No drawing fiddly rectangles or anything like that.
I, whilst not being a programmer, do dabble in programming and I find these "natural syntax" languages, such as AppleScript, to really be read-only languages (as opposed to something like perl that's write only)
Reading through the code for an AppleScript program, it's pretty easy to pick up what's happening even if you're not overly familiar with the language. What is difficult is to write it properly, as it's so close to English, yet it's still got quite a rigid and structured syntax, so you need to use the exact form for it to work.
Obviously he should get what he paid for it. Returning a component of the computer should work similarly.
Sorry, but your analogy does not hold water.
Say I purchase a laptop that's got an external optical drive bundled, it's part of the package and not a separate configure-to-order option. If this optical drive sells for $150 separately, then there's no way I can purchase this laptop and say "I don't need this drive, I want a refund on it" and get $150 back. It simply doesn't work like that.
Over on the Microsoft Excel Team Blog they even give Edward Tufte credit as the inventor of these sparklines.
https://www.dropbox.com/
"Free for Windows, Mac, and Linux"
Creates a folder that is kept in sync between different computers. You can share files with other dropbox users too via shared folders. 2GB or so of space is free. It also keeps multiple versions of files so you can go back to a previous version of a file if you need to.
I don't have any affiliation with the company, other than being a satisfied user.
If you're on a Mac, there are a couple of good options.
The first is the built-in Keychain. It can save application and website passwords, certificates, secure notes and it's all AES encrypted. As it's built-in, the support for it is pretty good with most apps and most websites. You have a normal login keychain that's automatically unlocked when you log in and remains unlocked (by default). You can have additional keychains with various levels of security over and above the login one - have them lock after a period of inactivity, have them lock when the screensaver is activated, have a different password to access them from your login keychain etc. The keychain can also be synchronised between different computers that you use, so if you create a login to a website on one, you can access the password you used on another one. As this works really well, I now use different randomly generated strong passwords for every site I need a login for - eg Bapdageshem9, negTuthsuc5 or EyHepGoyft8 ( apg -n 1 -m 10 -x 12 -M NCL -d )
If you find that the Keychain isn't up to the task there's 1Password. which does pretty much everything the built-in keychain does, and more...
Well, it's not magic, but it is USB - the Apple 24" display is actually a USB audio device as well with a 2.1 sound system in it (yes, 2 stereo speakers and a separate "sub")
iTunes can stream the same music to multiple AirPort Express Base Stations. A single copy of iTunes can't stream different music to different APEx units, but you can select multiple base stations in the one copy of iTunes.
In iTunes, click on the speakers popup button and there's a menu option for Multiple Speakers which brings up a dialog box asking which speakers (including the computer you're running iTunes on) you want to stream to.
As for an amp - there are lots of cheap (less than $100) TA2020 and TA2024 amps on eBay - they use a well-respected Tripath digital amp. Very efficient (most of the power in to them comes out of the speakers, not out as heat) and you can hook up an amazing variety of speakers without the amp getting too fussed (ie, they don't really care too much about low impedances) and they sound amazingly good for the money spent on them...
So, Apple aren't disabling support after all for a CPU/Chipset that they never supported in the first place?
The BeagleBoard draws a maximum of 375mA when powered from 5V. This is the whole system running at full tilt, with an SD card etc. That equates to a power draw of 1.875W (0.375 x 5) and realistically you're going to be looking at a much lower power draw than this in regular usage.
I have a BeagleBoard with Ubuntu installed and did an apt-get ubuntu-netbook-remix on it. It took a few hours of pretty much 100% CPU utilisation and the chip was barely warm to the touch...
Power figures are quoted from the latest Hardware Reference Manual - warning PDF link...
You're right, a 600MHz ARM can not decode 1080p HD video, a 2-odd GHz Core 2 Duo (with no other hardware acceleration) struggles to do that.
The Beagleboard also has a ::href="http://www.bdti.com/procsum/tic64xx.htm">TMS320C64x DSP that can decode HD video.
TI also make a DaVinci SoC that can do realtime HD transcoding - decoding and reencoding.
Over on YouTube is a beagleboard doing 720p HD video already...
I've been a fan of the ARM for years, ever since I encountered them in high school in Acorn Archimedes computers. The instruction set was so elegant compared to the i486 and Motorola 68k series chips that it was up against at the time. Flat memory model, none of this segment:offset stuff on the intel platform and a really well-thought-out streamlined set of core instructions.
I've recently got my hands on an ARM platform, and compared to what I was playing with in school, this thing is light-years ahead. 600HMz ARM, 256MB RAM, 256MB NAND Flash, GPU with ~10M polys/sec, SD Card Interface, High-speed USB 2.0 etc etc. It's all on a board that's 3" square, draws something like 1.75W at full tilt (it is powered from one of it's USB ports) and costs $150USD. No moving parts, not even a fan. 100% solid state.
I'm currently running Ubuntu on it, but there are other systems like Angstrom and QNX that will happily boot on it as well. Boot the OS off SD card, swap them out to switch operating environments and it's all good.
http://automatica.com.au/blog/2009/10/the-beagleboard/
http://beagleboard.org/
I've got no affiliation with Texas Instruments or anything like that, I'm just a happy customer who is amazed at the power of this platform, it's low cost, low power usage and flexibility opens the doors to doing so many things with it...
Try Texas Instruments' BeagleBoard - it's an OMAP3 (ARM Cortex A8) at 600MHz, has an OpenGL ES capable graphics card (10M polys/sec, HD video) and can run off USB power or DC5V. DVI-D + S-Video for the display and they can boot off either the internal flash or an SD card (cheap storage!)
They are $150 and run Linux in various flavours or even the free home use version of QNX if you need hard realtime capabilities.
The design is quite open - check out the System Reference Manual
Running off either 5VDC or USB power, it typically uses 350mA, so it's using just 1.75W of power.
Now, it doesn't have Ethernet built in, but there is an expansion board available that adds this, or there's a USB hub you can get for it with an Ethernet port and you're up and running. Cutting your home server's power usage by a factor of 50 will have a pretty positive ROI.
Installation is pretty easy, you can download a pre-built image, copy it to the SD card, plug the SD card into the beagleboard and up you boot.
The biggest difference is that Vista required a major hardware upgrade to run properly. Then when MS realized that there weren't enough "Vista capable" machines in existence to sell enough copies, they tried to shoehorn it into some platforms where it really couldn't perform. So Vista's failure was mostly the fault of the marketing people overriding the engineered design. Although the performance tuning of things like memory caching and the search service were also big problems.
As much as I like to bash Microsoft, the case of Vista Capable machines being an absolute dog's breakfast was actually due to pressure from OEMs. OEMs didn't want hardware sales to drop with only expensive machines being Vista Capable, so they put pressure on MS to allow these magic stickers to be placed on low-powered machines that weren't really up to the task. MS tried to stand firm for a while but eventually relented and that's how we ended up with the mess that occurred. So, it was marketing departments that forced this upon us, but it wasn't entirely Microsoft's fault...
Yes, that makes sense - I can see it would be difficult to truly load-balance a single TCP stream over two links. Either way, this will probably be what my client wants as they can have someone sucking up 100% upstream bandwidth on one link with the VPN and internet traffic for everyone else should be unaffected.
Something like one of these Linksys units is probably just what I need.
I've got a couple of sites on business-grade ADSL2+ with Annex M. They receive fantastic downstream bandwidth (on the order of 20Mbs) but upstream is less than 1Mbs. Increasing the downstream speed probably wouldn't do too much for them as they rarely have that completely maxed out, but increasing the upstream would be very useful for people who VPN into the office. All the incoming VPN connections could quite happily come through one link, but load-balancing the upstream data would make a big difference in this case...
Yet you have a holiday called the Fourth of July...
Outside? What is this place? Tell me more.
It's like this really big room, with a bright blue ceiling. It's on the other side of this door that is usually locked...
What this gives you is a very cheap way to get Mac OS X Server with unlimited client licenses and the ability to have mirrored hard drives for storage. I also have used Minis as workgroup servers for quite some time now, and whilst I use external FW800 RAID 5 volumes for data storage, it has always irked me that the internal storage has no redundancy. Now it does. Sold.