3) The USB headers are not going to have as high of an uptime compared to something dell could build onto the motherboard (in theory, supposing dell does'nt screw up. This is required due to what most server buyers need is reliability for servers that run 24/7/365.25. Adding in what you suggested, the first thing to fail would most likely be either the flash or the adapter.
I take issue with everything you say here.
There is no qualitative reason why USB should not have, as you say, "as high of an uptime" as anything else which plugs into a computer. In fact, the opposite is likely to be true: USB, having finally grown into something that generally doesn't suck, has been tested and revised for over a decade, and is far more likely to be resolutely reliable than any newly-developed interface technology which has not been so rigorously abused. It's a single point of failure, sure, but it share that disadvantage with SCSI, SATA, PCI Express, and all other likely candidates for connection.
I would further like to submit that the first thing to fail in any flash-based installation in a personal computer will be either the flash chip itself, its interface chip (ala "adapter"), or one of the supporting components (resistors, capacitors - that sort of stuff).
Finally, I'd like to speculate that all Dell will be doing is installing a flash device onto a USB bus. The hardware and software to accomplish this were finished years ago, and thus long ago entered the category of being free (as in beer) for Dell (particularly their marketing departments) to take advantage of.
In what way is this functionally different than the same hypervisor being installed on a bootable USB flash drive/IDE-attached CompactFlash card/[insert other stupid-simple method of booting from flash]?
Where do you draw line? How much cost can you tolerate?
I suck at math, so I'm sure that I'm expressing this wrong. But I'll try to answer your question anyway:
B / (W + F + H + P) = T
B is the number of buildings, bridges, or other structures in the USA which generally could use (or could have used) more redundant engineering, whether because of their intrinsic or functional value, the potential for lost life, or the structures' ability of to frighten grown, rational adults for years to come in the event of sudden catastrophic failure.
F is the total spent, or forecast to be spent, fixing the hole in the ground downtown Manhattan where the WTC previously stood, along with repairing the Pentagon building, and the cost of any new developments required to replace the productivity that those structures provided society with.
W is the total amounts spent fighting the most recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, including any post-war cleanup.
H is the sum total of the post-9/11 increase in government security efforts, especially as suggested or funded by the Department of Homeland Security.
P is the total spent by private individuals and corporations to enhance their security, directly or indirectly because of an increase in perceived threat following 9/11. Which leaves us with...
T, as the average additional cost per structure to improve safety and redundancy which could be tolerated.
Even without completing the equation, it sure looks like there's plenty of money for good engineering and construction techniques. It's just not as glamorous if you get it right in the first place -- without a disaster, nobody gets to play hero.
Besides, I'd so much rather have an army of well-paid engineers and iron workers, working steel mills in Ohio and Pennsylvania, more free (libre) movement in public places, and more privacy in private, than the festering mess we have today.
Couldn't they have picked a lesser weapon to start out with? The M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (aka, "The SAW") is a rather brutal and very fast gun. It can fire 725-1000 rounds/minute, depending on how the ammo is fed.
When manually operated, it is often described as a 2-person gun. One person does the aiming and firing. The other person obviously helps manage ammunition, but is also there to periodically (up to once per minute) switch out barrels to keep it from turning soft and warping from the heat.
I think I'd feel better for the people fighting alongside this thing if they had used something a bit slower, at least for the first revision.
I'm an American homeowner living in the midwest, which qualifies me to assert the following: Bullshit.
I drive a 1995 BMW 325i, and a 1996 Pontiac Firebird. The company I work for also provides a GMC Safari (aka Chevy Astro) van, which is needed to haul around tools, materials, and the occasional trailer, but doesn't see any personal use. (Perhaps oddly, my wife does not drive at all.)
The BMW sees duty as the typical vehicle for moving kids, groceries, and short construction material. It's also the vehicle of choice for long trips, as it typically will get about 30 miles per gallon at speeds of around 75MPH.
The car will hold a lot of stuff. It saw a lot of use when we were remodeling some apartments a couple of years ago, hauling things like 5-gallon buckets of paint and toilets and fixtures. Bagged concrete is no problem, since the dust cleans right off of the leather seats. I've used it several times to haul a desktop PC and a PA system (smallish, but plenty for an outdoor party of a hundred heads), with enough room left over for a cooler full of beer. I don't doubt that I could fit hockey gear and groceries and children into it at once.
It's also our primary snow vehicle. It has Blizzaks on dedicated wheels for the winter months, which makes all manner of ice and light or compacted snow a non-issue. Deep snow keeps me grounded until a plow (or enough other vehicles) passes by, due to the low ground clearance on the vehicle, but on those days the local sheriff has typically declared a snow emergency and made non-essential driving illegal anyway.
The Firebird obviously is a totally different vehicle. Wasteful of space, its exterior dimensions dwarf those of the BMW although there's a -lot- less useful room inside. It's primarily purpose is as a fun around-town car, as it's a lot louder and less comfortable than the BMW. However, the car will hold a good amount of stuff, and the wide-opening doors permit things like 6-foot step ladders to sit comfortably in the passenger seat area. I've used it to haul lumber for small construction projects and speaker building; the car will -just- hold an 8-foot 2x6 with the rear seat folded and the hatch closed. Sheet plywood for speaker projects is also no problem; I have the gunthers at Home Depot make a few of the first cuts on their panel saw and the parts just slide right into the back. Larger quantities of longer material ride just fine hanging out of the hatch, properly tied down with a red flag on the end, for the short trip across town.
But, yeah. That's just the small stuff. Bigger things can always be delivered, or a truck rented. The absurdly large and heavy Sony HD CRT in the living room was delivered from the store about two hours after I bought it, by people and equipment made for the job, for free. Sand for leveling a recent above-ground pool project was delivered; not free, but very cheaply. The appliances in my kitchen were all delivered. So on, so forth.
For stuff that can't be delivered for whatever reason, there's cheap rental trucks available. One can get a big, fully-insured U-Haul box truck for less than $25/day+fuel. Home Depot and Lowe's both have rental trucks available on-site, for about $20, which I used once during the the remodeling job mentioned above.
The rental expense really isn't: It takes a lot of truck rentals to cover even one month's payment+insurance on a new F-150, and I've only had to rent a truck a few times ever.
Having said that, I'm nowhere near ambitious enough in my personal life to financially justify owning a truck (inclusive of "SUV"). I sincerely doubt that very many other people here in the US are, either, but they just haven't bothered to stop and look at it that way lately.
Some printers and copiers use a consumable developer, as well as toner. It can be packaged seperately, or togetherly along with the toner in a disposable cartridge, as was the case with the fleet of Sharp printers we used to use at work.
I'd like to further submit that such developer product quite plainly consists of "ultra-tiny particles of toner-like material."
Clearly. But, AFAIK, there is no moral equivilent to dslreports.com as applied to banking, which makes shopping around an expensive (time) proposition.
So I'm waiting a bit for the concept of remote deposits to broaden the market a bit (by removing the need for the bank to have a physical and local presense), after which time I'll be able to more economically search for a new bank.
The bank doesn't deserve to 'eat it' just because they're a bank.
The fuck they don't!
The bank fines me (often quite heavily) every time I make a mistake, and insult me when I attempt to negotiate or clarify the fees.
They even insult me when they make a mistake. Last winter, there was a flood (actually, two of them, about two weeks apart) at my house which destroyed our water heater and furnace. But this seemed OK to me, since I have flood insurance.
So I called the insurance people to file a claim, but they politely informed me that my policy had lapsed due to non-payment, two days before the flood occurred.
The trouble with this is that the flood insurance policy is supposed to be paid automatically by my bank. It's a requirement as a part of the mortgage agreement with the bank; there's an escrow account that I pay into every month, and all of the insurance and property tax comes out of it whenever they're due. Automatically.
In fact, I don't even see the bills, which are sent directly to the bank.
When confronted with the fact that they failed to pay for my flood insurance policy as they are obligated to do, the bank told me there was nothing they could do but mail payment out immediately. It's December; I'm using about 80 Amps worth of electric space heaters attempting (and mostly failing) to keep my house warm, and spending two hours every night doing Bathtime at Grandma's so that my family could at least have hot showers. I can't even hire an HVAC contractor to come and begin work, because there's no money to pay him with (that's what the insurance policy was for!).
But there's nothing they can do. Just a "Sorry for the inconvenience, pal. Hope you have a good Christmas."
So, in all, it took about a month and a half to get sorted out to such an extent that I actually had fucking heat and hot water, due to a clerical error at the bank. Christmas was cold, and the kids didn't get many gifts because of increased living expenses (heaters, electricity, gasoline) and several days wages lost due to time spent fighting with the bankers and the insurance people.
Every time there's a problem in my system and I make a mistake, the bank tells me to fuck myself, no matter how expensive or burdensome it is. And any time there's a problem in the bank's system and they make a mistake, the bank tells me to fuck myself, no matter how expensive or burdensome it is.
So, yeah -- any time I can get free money from the bank, I'll be all over it like flies on shit. It's not my fault their machine can't count. They can go fuck themselves, just like they've implored me to do on so many occasions.
GP was mistaken. Cisco has nothing to do with USR.
USR is owned by 3com and has been for about a decade.
They still make premium modems, and are among the last that do, aside from, perhaps, Multitech.
Hayes, PPI, Supra and Zoom were all drawn-and-quartered some time ago.
It wasn't the buyouts that killed these companies and decimated their product lineup, but the Internet. Aftermarket modem sales flourished before modems were included in off-the-shelf PCs by default.
It was when the general public realized all that was teh Intarwebs that third-party modem sales went into the shitter as the public failed to realize any benefit to paying $100-200 to upgrade from a "free" modem which seemed to be working just fine.
After that, came nearly-universal Ethernet connectivity, removing any chance that consumers who cared about bandwidth would even consider owning a modem, let alone a -good- one.
Blackle.com is almost definitive as a simple, no-frills web page: Two photos, a couple of lines of text, and some manner of counter.
1500W? For what? There's almost no work being done!
I'm reasonably certain that I could serve such a simple page with Apache from low-powered machine like a Linksys WRT54G for a dozen or fewer Watts, without the machine ever breaking a sweat.
Thank you for the correction - it seems that PCIe does not suck as hard as I initially understood, and that you've successfully shed your moron status onto me by your proper use of least-terms while describing bandwidth.
Please allow me to contend that while it does suck a bit less than I thought, it still clearly sucks. A rough quadrupling in overall bandwidth in the 14 years since the introduction of PCI doesn't make me feel very excited about it -- in fact, the sound of one hand clapping in admiration of such a lofty achievement is positively deafening.
That said, I still disagree with you. You keep saying that people are using add-in cards, and I keep seeing that nearly all of the personal computers I come into contact with in my personal and professional life are completely devoid of them, especially now that USB has ceased being a complete abomination.
Time will tell how quick the transition is, but the fact remains that PCI will be far easier to forget about than ISA was.
They've had combined brands for years. Immediately after the Linksys buyout, the products have had dual branding.
For example, a WRT54GL router that I procured recently for a project at work says "Linksys" on the top, but "Cisco Systems" on the front.
My interpretation of the Cisco announcement is that they now intend to fully kill (instead of merely dilute) the Linksys name. I still think it's a bad move, but I'll keep buying their stuff for as long as it remains easily and productively hackable with a huge base of community support, no matter what package it comes in.
But: They're not "full-featured", at least in standard trim. They're only good for NATing a network of computers to Teh Intarwebs.
With something like OpenWRT loaded onto such a device, somewhat more esoteric and useful stuff can be done. But even then, it's just a Linux box, whereas "full-featured" Cisco (non-Linksys) routers run IOS.
Oh, well.
Back on topic: My mother knows what a Linksys router is for. If the one at her house failed, she would be able to produce an equivalent replacement from Wal-Mart without my assistance. Abandoning the Linksys brand for everything to say Cisco will smash this brand-recognition and loyalty; she'd be just as likely to buy one that says "Belkin" as "Cisco."
OK, so PCI-E can be a bit faster, but quoting full-duplex speeds is a bit below the belt (whatever the context) -- like walking into a room full of geeks and talking about 2-gigabit Ethernet links, saying that PCI-E supports 250MB/s shows that you are either a marketing tool, or a pathetic moron.
Moving right along:
The percentage of home computers having -any- expansion slots in use these days is vanishingly small. Sound, ethernet, and video are all typically integrated and adequate for all but a gamer. And even then, the gamer is likely to have a video card as the sole expansion card in the system.
This makes it different than the transition from ISA. My first ISA bus computer was an 8088 which eventually had an MFM controller, a serial/parallel/floppy/realtime clock multi-IO card, another serial port card, a Soundblaster card, an EMS RAM expansion card, a video card, and a tape drive interface card.
Some of these cards were in use for more than ten years in one computer or another, because they continued to be useful. They lasted through VESA Local Bus, they lasted through EISA, and even found their way into machines that were primarily PCI.
But nobody does it like that anymore. The only expansion card I, as a geek, need in order to drive special hardware, these days, is a SCSI card...and that will be disappearing as soon as the last of my Plextor CD-ROM drives gives up.
More-typical home users don't even have that problem. There just isn't any legacy hardware to support anymore, so a long and protracted cycle of phasing out hardware need not exist. The times have changed.
Therefore, I stand by my original point: If any good reason to use PCI-E ever shows up, it will replace PCI overnight.
PCI Express will finally replace PCI when the newer format becomes capable of doing something useful that the old one could not.
Just a thought, but as it stands, there's just about zero advantage for a home user to switch to 1x PCI-e, which is the same speed as PCI.
Sure, PCI is (usually) a shared bus, while PCI-e is point-to-point, but nobody really gives a fuck because they're all using the SATA and ethernet ports on that are built into the motherboard (which generally get their own bus these days, anyway), and they just don't have anything else which is IO-intensive enough to warrant such a defacto-meaningless change.
Now, if 16x PCI-e slots became the norm, and people find an application which actually requires more throughput, you'd see old-school 32-bit PCI disappear overnight.
The question is, then: When will computers and applications stop being stagnant?
Win95 had justified hype? Yeah, ok. If you were lucky, it barely worked, and then only for a few days at a time between system crashes. And a perfect intermediate step it was not: At the same time, OS/2 Warp offered the same level of application support, better hardware support, and very good network support.
Vista "feels a bit like ME"?
No: Windows 2000 felt like ME, with the two of them sharing most user interface conventions.
Vista is unique. It's got user interface features which make using the computer much less painful than prior versions of Windows.
I know that some of them can be added to XP, but that's not the bloody point, as those same third-party mods can also typically just as easily be added to Win2k.
And speed? Vista on my laptop runs, perceptually, about the same as XP did. It's not a fast computer by any means (2-year-old 1.83GHz Pentium M with 1.5 gigs of RAM), but it sure seems OK to me. And the battery lasts about an hour longer than it did with XP.
Things I've noticed that I like about it:
The new start menu - hit Windows button, type partial name of program, press enter: Program loads.
The new SSID-aware firewall, making it easy to share stuff on my home network and at work, and easy to not share it while I'm staying at a hotel.
New power management and sleep functions, which save me time and hassle.
The new search functions in Explorer, which helps me find my stuff more quickly.
Improved bluetooth support.
Flitty, transparent titlebars - they look nice to me, and performance seems just as fast as without.
New administrator tools, like Resource Monitor, which lets one look into what it is that the system is actually doing in ways that I've not ever seen on any OS.
There's a few things I don't like about it:
I've had the USB stack go out to lunch before while frequently (every few minutes)switching hardware, but that may be a hardware problem that I simply didn't trigger under XP (though Google reports that others with this model of computer have).
Nasty DRM. But I've never run into this being an actual problem; VLC works just fine under Vista, so I don't use Microsoft's playback chain at all unless it's something silly like a WMV embedded in a web page.
XP doesn't offer anything really measurable that you can't get easily with free third party tools. More importantly, its performance is not on par with Win2k due to a lot of changes that appearantly aren't really optimized yet.
XP's problem is that there was no need for it. There is no new hardware that isn't supported in Win2k, as it was with USB and WiFi*. There's no must-have new architecture out that requires XP. And the only XP-only software we'll see for quite some time to come are games, and even that only if studios dare being DX9 only**.
That's why I said it's not needed. There will be a need for OSs that support future developments, no doubt. But XP, in its current state, has no selling point.
[You realize I'm mocking you, but please understand that I've seen these putty arguments about Microsoft operating systems before. It's like history repeating itself. These same conversations happened, almost verbatim, 5 years ago -- just like they do over and over again, right now, only with different names.]
[*]: Yeah, I know. 2k doesn't "support" WiFi natively, but the tools provided by the chipset or board vendor are typically just fine, and a million times better than configuring anything network-related under Win9x.
[**]: Of course, both XP and 2k can easily run the same versions of DirectX, so this particular statement isn't really true. This, therefore, is one area where Vista does have an advantage which XP did not...
Swapping to CF is faster than restarting programs after they die of RAM starvation. It also allows more RAM to be used for caching. (Yes, treating the symptoms again - it'd be better to fix the programs/OS to use less memory, or not load at all if they're so unneeded that they get swapped out to free RAM for cache. I'm violating my own logic.)
And it is fairly slow. For example, I was convinced, more than once, that the XP installation process had hung solid because it would sit for such a long time without any indication of progress.
I spent some time Googling the topic before comitting to buy the parts. What I found was a few people who were actually using flash for things like NTFS and swap, and a whole bunch of other people who swore that it would surely begin the apocolypse to ever attempt such a travesty, but nobody seemed to have built such a thing and subsequenly suffered a failure.
Time will tell how long it'll last. I admit to using best-case numbers; we'll see in a few years whether or not it matters.:)
Basically, the reason why Vista didn't sell like hot cakes was simple: It was not needed.
So basically what you seem to be saying is this:
The software is finished. Nothing to see here, please move along.
And since computers are plenty fast enough these days for, well, about everything we expect them to do, I submit that if what you say is true then it is all over: The computer has aligned itself with office furniture in terms of longevity, and has ceased all innovation.
(That's right, everyone. The fad's over. Pack up and go home. Opportunist says computers are solved!)
Of course, this concept is absurd. But then, so is the notion that XP is the be-all, end-all of Microsoft operating systems.
Don't worry: There's a place for people like you, right alongside everyone who is still happy and content with DOS, OS/2, BeOS, or an Amiga.
For the past few months, I have had Windows XP running from a 2-gigabyte compactflash card which is plugged into the IDE bus of a diskless machine.
The card is formatted NTFS, and the swapfile (which does get somewhat heavily used on this low-memory machine) lives there, too.
No problems yet. I don't expect any.
I've also got an old 386 laptop running an old version of Slackware from a 512M card. It works fine, with ext2 as a filesystem mounted rw and a modest swap partition.
Most recently, I added an SD card to my Linksys router. It has both an ext3 rw root and a swap partition, and also works just fine.
I'm just speculating here, but I don't think any of these systems will ever be having any problems with their flash storage wearing out. 512M * 1M write-cycles = more data than any of these machines will ever process, let alone attempt to store.
I'd further like to speculate that if you're using a ramdisk with unionfs, that none of the data which you're trying to prevent from being written to flash is very important anyway. And since it's not important, just fix the offending programs so that they don't bother writing it to disk in the first place.
But it still wouldn't show up as hiss, per se: If, on the duplicating machine, the master has zero groove variation, then the copy will as well.
Things are sure to get a lot more interesting when there's something other than silence happening, but it will probably manifest itself in the form of harmonic or intermodulation distortion, neither of which are generally all that random (being products of the original signal).
If there's no sound with which to move the needle about, then the needle doesn't move. If the needle doesn't move, then the groove doesn't change. And if the groove doesn't change, then the playback device (ideally) produces no sound.
There's simply no mechanism for hiss, as we know it from electronic recordings and instrumentation, to enter the picture.
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3) The USB headers are not going to have as high of an uptime compared to something dell could build onto the motherboard (in theory, supposing dell does'nt screw up. This is required due to what most server buyers need is reliability for servers that run 24/7/365.25. Adding in what you suggested, the first thing to fail would most likely be either the flash or the adapter.
I take issue with everything you say here.
There is no qualitative reason why USB should not have, as you say, "as high of an uptime" as anything else which plugs into a computer. In fact, the opposite is likely to be true: USB, having finally grown into something that generally doesn't suck, has been tested and revised for over a decade, and is far more likely to be resolutely reliable than any newly-developed interface technology which has not been so rigorously abused. It's a single point of failure, sure, but it share that disadvantage with SCSI, SATA, PCI Express, and all other likely candidates for connection.
I would further like to submit that the first thing to fail in any flash-based installation in a personal computer will be either the flash chip itself, its interface chip (ala "adapter"), or one of the supporting components (resistors, capacitors - that sort of stuff).
Finally, I'd like to speculate that all Dell will be doing is installing a flash device onto a USB bus. The hardware and software to accomplish this were finished years ago, and thus long ago entered the category of being free (as in beer) for Dell (particularly their marketing departments) to take advantage of.
In what way is this functionally different than the same hypervisor being installed on a bootable USB flash drive/IDE-attached CompactFlash card/[insert other stupid-simple method of booting from flash]?
It's great to prevent loss of life, but you have to draw the line somewhere.
I thought that I did.
Cheers!
I suck at math, so I'm sure that I'm expressing this wrong. But I'll try to answer your question anyway:
B / (W + F + H + P) = T
Which leaves us with...
Even without completing the equation, it sure looks like there's plenty of money for good engineering and construction techniques. It's just not as glamorous if you get it right in the first place -- without a disaster, nobody gets to play hero.
Besides, I'd so much rather have an army of well-paid engineers and iron workers, working steel mills in Ohio and Pennsylvania, more free (libre) movement in public places, and more privacy in private, than the festering mess we have today.
Wow.
Couldn't they have picked a lesser weapon to start out with? The M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (aka, "The SAW") is a rather brutal and very fast gun. It can fire 725-1000 rounds/minute, depending on how the ammo is fed.
When manually operated, it is often described as a 2-person gun. One person does the aiming and firing. The other person obviously helps manage ammunition, but is also there to periodically (up to once per minute) switch out barrels to keep it from turning soft and warping from the heat.
I think I'd feel better for the people fighting alongside this thing if they had used something a bit slower, at least for the first revision.
In America, I thought it was the government's responsibility to choose who and when to prosecute, not private citizens or corporations.
Can anyone please tell me why this does not seem to be the way that it works in this case?
I'm an American homeowner living in the midwest, which qualifies me to assert the following: Bullshit.
I drive a 1995 BMW 325i, and a 1996 Pontiac Firebird. The company I work for also provides a GMC Safari (aka Chevy Astro) van, which is needed to haul around tools, materials, and the occasional trailer, but doesn't see any personal use. (Perhaps oddly, my wife does not drive at all.)
The BMW sees duty as the typical vehicle for moving kids, groceries, and short construction material. It's also the vehicle of choice for long trips, as it typically will get about 30 miles per gallon at speeds of around 75MPH.
The car will hold a lot of stuff. It saw a lot of use when we were remodeling some apartments a couple of years ago, hauling things like 5-gallon buckets of paint and toilets and fixtures. Bagged concrete is no problem, since the dust cleans right off of the leather seats. I've used it several times to haul a desktop PC and a PA system (smallish, but plenty for an outdoor party of a hundred heads), with enough room left over for a cooler full of beer. I don't doubt that I could fit hockey gear and groceries and children into it at once.
It's also our primary snow vehicle. It has Blizzaks on dedicated wheels for the winter months, which makes all manner of ice and light or compacted snow a non-issue. Deep snow keeps me grounded until a plow (or enough other vehicles) passes by, due to the low ground clearance on the vehicle, but on those days the local sheriff has typically declared a snow emergency and made non-essential driving illegal anyway.
The Firebird obviously is a totally different vehicle. Wasteful of space, its exterior dimensions dwarf those of the BMW although there's a -lot- less useful room inside. It's primarily purpose is as a fun around-town car, as it's a lot louder and less comfortable than the BMW. However, the car will hold a good amount of stuff, and the wide-opening doors permit things like 6-foot step ladders to sit comfortably in the passenger seat area. I've used it to haul lumber for small construction projects and speaker building; the car will -just- hold an 8-foot 2x6 with the rear seat folded and the hatch closed. Sheet plywood for speaker projects is also no problem; I have the gunthers at Home Depot make a few of the first cuts on their panel saw and the parts just slide right into the back. Larger quantities of longer material ride just fine hanging out of the hatch, properly tied down with a red flag on the end, for the short trip across town.
But, yeah. That's just the small stuff. Bigger things can always be delivered, or a truck rented. The absurdly large and heavy Sony HD CRT in the living room was delivered from the store about two hours after I bought it, by people and equipment made for the job, for free. Sand for leveling a recent above-ground pool project was delivered; not free, but very cheaply. The appliances in my kitchen were all delivered. So on, so forth.
For stuff that can't be delivered for whatever reason, there's cheap rental trucks available. One can get a big, fully-insured U-Haul box truck for less than $25/day+fuel. Home Depot and Lowe's both have rental trucks available on-site, for about $20, which I used once during the the remodeling job mentioned above.
The rental expense really isn't: It takes a lot of truck rentals to cover even one month's payment+insurance on a new F-150, and I've only had to rent a truck a few times ever.
Having said that, I'm nowhere near ambitious enough in my personal life to financially justify owning a truck (inclusive of "SUV"). I sincerely doubt that very many other people here in the US are, either, but they just haven't bothered to stop and look at it that way lately.
Some printers and copiers use a consumable developer, as well as toner. It can be packaged seperately, or togetherly along with the toner in a disposable cartridge, as was the case with the fleet of Sharp printers we used to use at work.
I'd like to further submit that such developer product quite plainly consists of "ultra-tiny particles of toner-like material."
FWIW, HTH, HAND, etc.
Clearly. But, AFAIK, there is no moral equivilent to dslreports.com as applied to banking, which makes shopping around an expensive (time) proposition.
So I'm waiting a bit for the concept of remote deposits to broaden the market a bit (by removing the need for the bank to have a physical and local presense), after which time I'll be able to more economically search for a new bank.
The bank doesn't deserve to 'eat it' just because they're a bank.
The fuck they don't!
The bank fines me (often quite heavily) every time I make a mistake, and insult me when I attempt to negotiate or clarify the fees.
They even insult me when they make a mistake. Last winter, there was a flood (actually, two of them, about two weeks apart) at my house which destroyed our water heater and furnace. But this seemed OK to me, since I have flood insurance.
So I called the insurance people to file a claim, but they politely informed me that my policy had lapsed due to non-payment, two days before the flood occurred.
The trouble with this is that the flood insurance policy is supposed to be paid automatically by my bank. It's a requirement as a part of the mortgage agreement with the bank; there's an escrow account that I pay into every month, and all of the insurance and property tax comes out of it whenever they're due. Automatically.
In fact, I don't even see the bills, which are sent directly to the bank.
When confronted with the fact that they failed to pay for my flood insurance policy as they are obligated to do, the bank told me there was nothing they could do but mail payment out immediately. It's December; I'm using about 80 Amps worth of electric space heaters attempting (and mostly failing) to keep my house warm, and spending two hours every night doing Bathtime at Grandma's so that my family could at least have hot showers. I can't even hire an HVAC contractor to come and begin work, because there's no money to pay him with (that's what the insurance policy was for!).
But there's nothing they can do. Just a "Sorry for the inconvenience, pal. Hope you have a good Christmas."
So, in all, it took about a month and a half to get sorted out to such an extent that I actually had fucking heat and hot water, due to a clerical error at the bank. Christmas was cold, and the kids didn't get many gifts because of increased living expenses (heaters, electricity, gasoline) and several days wages lost due to time spent fighting with the bankers and the insurance people.
Every time there's a problem in my system and I make a mistake, the bank tells me to fuck myself, no matter how expensive or burdensome it is. And any time there's a problem in the bank's system and they make a mistake, the bank tells me to fuck myself, no matter how expensive or burdensome it is.
So, yeah -- any time I can get free money from the bank, I'll be all over it like flies on shit. It's not my fault their machine can't count. They can go fuck themselves, just like they've implored me to do on so many occasions.
GP was mistaken. Cisco has nothing to do with USR.
USR is owned by 3com and has been for about a decade.
They still make premium modems, and are among the last that do, aside from, perhaps, Multitech.
Hayes, PPI, Supra and Zoom were all drawn-and-quartered some time ago.
It wasn't the buyouts that killed these companies and decimated their product lineup, but the Internet. Aftermarket modem sales flourished before modems were included in off-the-shelf PCs by default.
It was when the general public realized all that was teh Intarwebs that third-party modem sales went into the shitter as the public failed to realize any benefit to paying $100-200 to upgrade from a "free" modem which seemed to be working just fine.
After that, came nearly-universal Ethernet connectivity, removing any chance that consumers who cared about bandwidth would even consider owning a modem, let alone a -good- one.
Are you high?
Blackle.com is almost definitive as a simple, no-frills web page: Two photos, a couple of lines of text, and some manner of counter.
1500W? For what? There's almost no work being done!
I'm reasonably certain that I could serve such a simple page with Apache from low-powered machine like a Linksys WRT54G for a dozen or fewer Watts, without the machine ever breaking a sweat.
Thank you for the correction - it seems that PCIe does not suck as hard as I initially understood, and that you've successfully shed your moron status onto me by your proper use of least-terms while describing bandwidth.
Please allow me to contend that while it does suck a bit less than I thought, it still clearly sucks. A rough quadrupling in overall bandwidth in the 14 years since the introduction of PCI doesn't make me feel very excited about it -- in fact, the sound of one hand clapping in admiration of such a lofty achievement is positively deafening.
That said, I still disagree with you. You keep saying that people are using add-in cards, and I keep seeing that nearly all of the personal computers I come into contact with in my personal and professional life are completely devoid of them, especially now that USB has ceased being a complete abomination.
Time will tell how quick the transition is, but the fact remains that PCI will be far easier to forget about than ISA was.
They've had combined brands for years. Immediately after the Linksys buyout, the products have had dual branding.
For example, a WRT54GL router that I procured recently for a project at work says "Linksys" on the top, but "Cisco Systems" on the front.
My interpretation of the Cisco announcement is that they now intend to fully kill (instead of merely dilute) the Linksys name. I still think it's a bad move, but I'll keep buying their stuff for as long as it remains easily and productively hackable with a huge base of community support, no matter what package it comes in.
But: They're not "full-featured", at least in standard trim. They're only good for NATing a network of computers to Teh Intarwebs.
With something like OpenWRT loaded onto such a device, somewhat more esoteric and useful stuff can be done. But even then, it's just a Linux box, whereas "full-featured" Cisco (non-Linksys) routers run IOS.
Oh, well.
Back on topic: My mother knows what a Linksys router is for. If the one at her house failed, she would be able to produce an equivalent replacement from Wal-Mart without my assistance. Abandoning the Linksys brand for everything to say Cisco will smash this brand-recognition and loyalty; she'd be just as likely to buy one that says "Belkin" as "Cisco."
OK, so PCI-E can be a bit faster, but quoting full-duplex speeds is a bit below the belt (whatever the context) -- like walking into a room full of geeks and talking about 2-gigabit Ethernet links, saying that PCI-E supports 250MB/s shows that you are either a marketing tool, or a pathetic moron.
Moving right along:
The percentage of home computers having -any- expansion slots in use these days is vanishingly small. Sound, ethernet, and video are all typically integrated and adequate for all but a gamer. And even then, the gamer is likely to have a video card as the sole expansion card in the system.
This makes it different than the transition from ISA. My first ISA bus computer was an 8088 which eventually had an MFM controller, a serial/parallel/floppy/realtime clock multi-IO card, another serial port card, a Soundblaster card, an EMS RAM expansion card, a video card, and a tape drive interface card.
Some of these cards were in use for more than ten years in one computer or another, because they continued to be useful. They lasted through VESA Local Bus, they lasted through EISA, and even found their way into machines that were primarily PCI.
But nobody does it like that anymore. The only expansion card I, as a geek, need in order to drive special hardware, these days, is a SCSI card...and that will be disappearing as soon as the last of my Plextor CD-ROM drives gives up.
More-typical home users don't even have that problem. There just isn't any legacy hardware to support anymore, so a long and protracted cycle of phasing out hardware need not exist. The times have changed.
Therefore, I stand by my original point: If any good reason to use PCI-E ever shows up, it will replace PCI overnight.
PCI Express will finally replace PCI when the newer format becomes capable of doing something useful that the old one could not.
Just a thought, but as it stands, there's just about zero advantage for a home user to switch to 1x PCI-e, which is the same speed as PCI.
Sure, PCI is (usually) a shared bus, while PCI-e is point-to-point, but nobody really gives a fuck because they're all using the SATA and ethernet ports on that are built into the motherboard (which generally get their own bus these days, anyway), and they just don't have anything else which is IO-intensive enough to warrant such a defacto-meaningless change.
Now, if 16x PCI-e slots became the norm, and people find an application which actually requires more throughput, you'd see old-school 32-bit PCI disappear overnight.
The question is, then: When will computers and applications stop being stagnant?
Win95 had justified hype? Yeah, ok. If you were lucky, it barely worked, and then only for a few days at a time between system crashes. And a perfect intermediate step it was not: At the same time, OS/2 Warp offered the same level of application support, better hardware support, and very good network support.
Vista "feels a bit like ME"?
No: Windows 2000 felt like ME, with the two of them sharing most user interface conventions.
Vista is unique. It's got user interface features which make using the computer much less painful than prior versions of Windows.
I know that some of them can be added to XP, but that's not the bloody point, as those same third-party mods can also typically just as easily be added to Win2k.
And speed? Vista on my laptop runs, perceptually, about the same as XP did. It's not a fast computer by any means (2-year-old 1.83GHz Pentium M with 1.5 gigs of RAM), but it sure seems OK to me. And the battery lasts about an hour longer than it did with XP.
Things I've noticed that I like about it:
The new start menu - hit Windows button, type partial name of program, press enter: Program loads.
The new SSID-aware firewall, making it easy to share stuff on my home network and at work, and easy to not share it while I'm staying at a hotel.
New power management and sleep functions, which save me time and hassle.
The new search functions in Explorer, which helps me find my stuff more quickly.
Improved bluetooth support.
Flitty, transparent titlebars - they look nice to me, and performance seems just as fast as without.
New administrator tools, like Resource Monitor, which lets one look into what it is that the system is actually doing in ways that I've not ever seen on any OS.
There's a few things I don't like about it:
I've had the USB stack go out to lunch before while frequently (every few minutes)switching hardware, but that may be a hardware problem that I simply didn't trigger under XP (though Google reports that others with this model of computer have).
Nasty DRM. But I've never run into this being an actual problem; VLC works just fine under Vista, so I don't use Microsoft's playback chain at all unless it's something silly like a WMV embedded in a web page.
To each his own, I guess.
XP doesn't offer anything really measurable that you can't get easily with free third party tools. More importantly, its performance is not on par with Win2k due to a lot of changes that appearantly aren't really optimized yet.
XP's problem is that there was no need for it. There is no new hardware that isn't supported in Win2k, as it was with USB and WiFi*. There's no must-have new architecture out that requires XP. And the only XP-only software we'll see for quite some time to come are games, and even that only if studios dare being DX9 only**.
That's why I said it's not needed. There will be a need for OSs that support future developments, no doubt. But XP, in its current state, has no selling point.
[You realize I'm mocking you, but please understand that I've seen these putty arguments about Microsoft operating systems before. It's like history repeating itself. These same conversations happened, almost verbatim, 5 years ago -- just like they do over and over again, right now, only with different names.]
[*]: Yeah, I know. 2k doesn't "support" WiFi natively, but the tools provided by the chipset or board vendor are typically just fine, and a million times better than configuring anything network-related under Win9x.
[**]: Of course, both XP and 2k can easily run the same versions of DirectX, so this particular statement isn't really true. This, therefore, is one area where Vista does have an advantage which XP did not...
Swapping to CF is faster than restarting programs after they die of RAM starvation. It also allows more RAM to be used for caching. (Yes, treating the symptoms again - it'd be better to fix the programs/OS to use less memory, or not load at all if they're so unneeded that they get swapped out to free RAM for cache. I'm violating my own logic.)
:)
And it is fairly slow. For example, I was convinced, more than once, that the XP installation process had hung solid because it would sit for such a long time without any indication of progress.
I spent some time Googling the topic before comitting to buy the parts. What I found was a few people who were actually using flash for things like NTFS and swap, and a whole bunch of other people who swore that it would surely begin the apocolypse to ever attempt such a travesty, but nobody seemed to have built such a thing and subsequenly suffered a failure.
Time will tell how long it'll last. I admit to using best-case numbers; we'll see in a few years whether or not it matters.
Basically, the reason why Vista didn't sell like hot cakes was simple: It was not needed.
So basically what you seem to be saying is this:
The software is finished. Nothing to see here, please move along.
And since computers are plenty fast enough these days for, well, about everything we expect them to do, I submit that if what you say is true then it is all over: The computer has aligned itself with office furniture in terms of longevity, and has ceased all innovation.
(That's right, everyone. The fad's over. Pack up and go home. Opportunist says computers are solved!)
Of course, this concept is absurd. But then, so is the notion that XP is the be-all, end-all of Microsoft operating systems.
Don't worry: There's a place for people like you, right alongside everyone who is still happy and content with DOS, OS/2, BeOS, or an Amiga.
Anecdotes:
For the past few months, I have had Windows XP running from a 2-gigabyte compactflash card which is plugged into the IDE bus of a diskless machine.
The card is formatted NTFS, and the swapfile (which does get somewhat heavily used on this low-memory machine) lives there, too.
No problems yet. I don't expect any.
I've also got an old 386 laptop running an old version of Slackware from a 512M card. It works fine, with ext2 as a filesystem mounted rw and a modest swap partition.
Most recently, I added an SD card to my Linksys router. It has both an ext3 rw root and a swap partition, and also works just fine.
I'm just speculating here, but I don't think any of these systems will ever be having any problems with their flash storage wearing out. 512M * 1M write-cycles = more data than any of these machines will ever process, let alone attempt to store.
I'd further like to speculate that if you're using a ramdisk with unionfs, that none of the data which you're trying to prevent from being written to flash is very important anyway. And since it's not important, just fix the offending programs so that they don't bother writing it to disk in the first place.
You're treating the symptoms, not the problems.
True, to a point.
But it still wouldn't show up as hiss, per se: If, on the duplicating machine, the master has zero groove variation, then the copy will as well.
Things are sure to get a lot more interesting when there's something other than silence happening, but it will probably manifest itself in the form of harmonic or intermodulation distortion, neither of which are generally all that random (being products of the original signal).
You're thinking too much :)
If there's no sound with which to move the needle about, then the needle doesn't move. If the needle doesn't move, then the groove doesn't change. And if the groove doesn't change, then the playback device (ideally) produces no sound.
There's simply no mechanism for hiss, as we know it from electronic recordings and instrumentation, to enter the picture.
I have a "gut feeling" consisting of the two poorest families that I know having both cable television and HDTVs.
This is not due to government mandate, but is instead just blatantly excessive: The TVs in question are fucking huge.