I want candy
bubblegum or taffy
Skip to the sweet shop with my sweetheart Sandy
Got my pennies saved so I'm a sugar daddy
I'm her Hume Cronyn she's my Jessica Tandy
I want candy
I'll use a giant drill
Bore it straight into hell
Releasin ancient demons from a
sleeper of a spell
So they can walk upon the earth
And get resituated
And hock the diet pills
MC Pee Pants done created
- MC Pee Pants (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
It has other features that Tivo does not, such as a Firewire port to offload content (which I haven't used yet so I can't really vouch for it).
I would be VERY surprised if the firewire port was even enabled.
The DVR devices from Scientific Atlanta and Motorola both feature a dozen ports (USB, Firewire, ethernet), but most likely they're disabled by either the firmware (never implemented) or the cable company.
With some model satellite receivers (DirecTV only, I think), the serial port on the back of the Tivo hooks up to the serial port on the back of the receiver and changes channels that way.
Actually, there are some cable boxes that will work with the serial port as well.
For the record, the TiVo can either do "IR Blasting" (two IR emitters that you can position) or serial port.
From the TiVo's setup menu, you can select hundreds of different IR configurations, and for each one, you can either do slow, medium or fast. It sometimes will take you a while to get this just right, and you want the faster settings if at all possible (think: changes channels much faster). Of course, if you can get the serial connection to work, then that is best because there is no IR blaster setup and the response time is much faster.
With all this IR blaster hack-ugliness, why have a TiVo? Because their device is much better than the Scientific Atlanta (Time Warner) and Motorola (RCN, Comcast) offerings.
In my NYC apartment, I've got 14 Wi-Fi networks that my iBook can pick up from the couch. Of that, 3 or 4 of them are unprotected (typically indicated by the "Wireless" or "Default" or "Linksys" network name). Strange, there is one "dod.gov" that is also unprotected...
Probably could have chosen a better name for the distro. I mean, Vector sounds cool and all, but the fact is that there are specifically vector processors out there (think Cray, AltiVec and probably the new cell architecture) that require specific coding to take advantage of their vector units. Given that, I'd figure this name should have been reserved for a version of Linux that better took advantage of these architectures.
Thanks for the compliment. I'm not too worried, because if the person who submitted the "ask slashdot" isn't browsing at a level below 5 or 4, then they're not really interested in what people think... and if that is the case, then they're also probably going to miss out on a lot more than we could have possibly covered in this article.
I'm not talking about a manual for your product, I'm talking about keeping track of what you do, what your staff does and what the results are. It may be laborious to do so, but there will be times that you'll be glad you did. Also, you may wonder why something was done a certain way a few years ago; having some kind of knowledge base written down will be invaluable.
Document the code. Make sure that people adopt javadoc-type conventions. Check out Doxygen if you're not doing Java development, and make it a policy that people need to comment their code in places that are not painfully obvious. Programmers can be quite fat headed at times about this, because "hey, I know this, and if you can't read this then you aren't good" or whatever. What is obvious to them might not be obvious to others, and if you want to do a quick scan over some code, its easier to read a comment defining a block than figuring out their "spark of genius du jour" (sometimes people write things overly clever thinking that its more efficient when in reality its not and only making things harder to maintain).
The point of this is that:
Your staff will not be the same forever; people move to other projects or other jobs.
You will forget details.
You will find it difficult to recall exactly what you and your staff did several months ago, especially if the project is large and fast moving.
I'm not saying that the above points are absolute, but in case you do find yourself in any of those positions...
By keeping documentation, you will always be able to back up, defend, promote and prove (or disprove) your ability to manage. Now you just need to make sure you make the right decisions; nothing can help that except experience and good judgment.
If I remember correctly, it only had enough memory to take either 8 640x480 pictures or 32 320x200 pictures. It required a Macintosh and the data was dumped via the serial port.
Not even sure what megapixel it was, but all I know is that the pictures I took with it back in 1994/1995 look horrendous compared to what you could get for free* three years ago.
* specifically, if you bought a refurbished Dell in early 2002, you could get a Logitech camera that was roughly 1MP.
I don't do it much for people outside my immediate family anymore, but I've always claimed to people I like that I have a "friends and family program" (apologies to MCI or AT&T or whoever).
The only person that I still do this kind of work for on a rare, but regular basis is someone who owns an excellent French bakery in NYC. OK, after I fix your computer, I'm walking out with tons of fresh pastries!
(no, I'm not fat, but I'm willing to run a few extra miles after that one:-)
Because its features are still current, and the point is that current OSes still don't match the features available 11 years ago in OS/2. That's a sad statement.
I've seen this statement numerous times over and over in forums about any old/unpopular/deprecated/dead operating system. For example, I can't count how many times I've heard people mention that there were features in the Amiga OS that still aren't in modern operating systems (e.g. "assign" command). Usually, when these comments come out, they're also using such a tone as in "those other operating systems are SURELY inferior without feature XX".
C'mon. It's easy to make a blanket statement such as this, but without qualification, whats the point? I can easily say that OS X doesn't have multiple resolutions on the same screen, a feature created more out of hardware limitations of the time, but why do we need such a thing these days? Sure, I'd love to see something like Amiga "assign", but Windows' "subst" gets close, and OS X / Linux has mount; I'd then claim that therefore, "assign" isn't exactly necessary.
First of all, Apple had complete freedom in choosing their hardware; if you want to argue that the 68000 was a bad choice, Apple only has themselves to blame for it. They could have used one of the many alternative processors, or they could have added a trivial MMU outside the processor, like everybody else did.
The lack of an MMU was a conscious design decision. In fact, Apple DID have an MMU for the 68000 in the Lisa. Cost was the primary reason for not putting it in the Mac, and the engineers felt that as long as programs were well behaved, they could live without it. Of course, the original Mac OS also did not have multitasking, so the MMU was even less of a necessity.
I used registerfly for about 6 months before I switched to another provider (http://www.1and1.com).
The problem I had was that one day my domain disappeared. I tried to politely go through the correct channels, and found that there was only the online support live chat system (the phone number that I did eventually find only rings an answering machine from which I never received a call back). I was told that my domain was down because they were doing server upgrades.
They were apparently doing server upgrades for over a week.
I had to prove that I had a valid contract and that I had paid for the service. Additionally, they kept trying to tell me that they no longer were in the web hosting service and that my domain was now being run by another company. After contacting the other company, they told me that they had no idea what I was talking about and that it was registerfly who was supposed to be in charge of my domain. Back and forth, big headaches and never a straight answer. Additionally, the live chat service is unbelievably slow (takes them almost 45 minutes to an hour until someone actually types anything) and I had to do this a few times after having my connection dumped well into the wait. After all this, I couldn't get a refund for the remainder of my 1 year contract. Luckily, I had my DNS registration elsewhere, so I just switched to another provider and left.
I don't normally speak about my experiences, but this thread is about reliable ISP and web hosting services. As such, I felt that it was necessary to at least post my experience with this company. I don't know if they've changed in the last several months, but I will say that I have been much happier with 1and1.com so far. The features are better (e.g. sftp VS web based form upload) and feels more professional. Remember, don't judge a company by how glossy the web site is. Do your research; I only discovered after the fact that registerfly has some bad history. Check out Web Hosting Talk or Internet Forum first.
Actually, I remember from the book "Hard Drive" (Bill Gates autobiography) that he actually practices his hand writing several times a day. He does this to maintain the muscular control in his hands, so that it isn't completely lost by the use of a keyboard. Sounds like a good idea.
Forget the thumbs, these things pump out some serious RF radiation that at least sounds like it could be damaging to the reproductive system.
I've got a Blackberry 6280, and when I put this thing anywhere near an amplified speaker (speaker phone, guitar amplifier, restaurant stereo), if there is any communication, you hear it loud and clear. Email coming in? BAAAHHT-BAT-BAT-BADDA-BADDA-BAAHHHHHT-BAT-BAAAHT-B ADDA (etc). Can't be good for my boys.
The bad? Someone on the other end of the phone has theirs next to the speaker phone and blasts your ears while you're talking to them.
The good? Its almost a prank that Steve Wozniak would be proud of. There is one particular restaurant that I to go for lunch sometimes that you can sit at a table that has the house stereo behind it. Put the blackberry on one end of the table, and the stereo blasts that sound into the restaurant, take it away and the stereo is fine. Now just screw with the waiters as they try to figure out why the stereo keeps making that sound.
the "Macintosh Insanely Great" is rendered in White and Blue on Black screen. That could have been done with a IIgs.
The IIgs didn't come out for at least another year. I don't know the release date off hand, but it was either mid-to-late 1985 if not early 1986.
However, the//e would have been perfectly capable of rendering somewhat sharp white and blue on black graphics if in double hi-res mode (560x192, if I remember correctly).
The other fairly important "improvement" of the PII over the Pentium Pro was that the Pentium Pro was heavily optimized for 32-bit code. On a 200MHz PPro, if you ran 16-bit code, it was estimated that it ran equivalent to a 166MHz Pentium I. The PII basically "fixed" this problem, most likely because Intel realized that there was still a boat load of 16-bit code out there (look inside Win95/98/ME).
The specs on that one look great. I guess the only thing that the Belkin line that I mentioned has over this is that it supports PS/2 devices. Unfortunately, I've never plugged in any USB devices into my switch, so I can't really vouch for it. However, the specs claim that I should be able to use my regular PS/2 keyboard and mouse to control a USB computer. Haven't plugged in the iBook yet; maybe that's tonight's experiement:-)
It looks like it was a signed 16-bit value from the detail in the article (32,767 maximum schedule changes a month). Why they would possibly need the sign is beyond me. Regardless, having 32767 schedule changes in a month? Must track every flight in the world.
At $500, though, I would pick one up along with a $50 keyboard/monitor switch and start playing around with it.
I don't want to discourage anyone from doing what you describe, but you might want to avoid the $50 KVM switch.
Sure, back in the old days I used a $30 physical A/B/C/D switch for VGA connections which worked fine with my Amiga (15kHz) and VGA (31kHz), but as soon as you crank the resolutions and frequencies up, the cheap KVMs don't hold up.
If you want to do it right, you need a good KVM. Specifically, you need to look at the specs of the device, and how high a bus rate it can handle; this makes all the difference in your display quality. Personally, I use a Belkin OmniView 4-port PS/2 & USB device (vendor page here) which has worked great for me. You can get it cheaper, and despite what I found on pricegrabber about the device (reviews), I have had no problems. Unfortunately, it doesn't QUITE end there, though. You still need cables, and you can't get away with cheap cables; you should really go with the ones that Belkin sells, since they're up to spec. I tried the $15 cables, and your screen ghosts pretty bad.
In the end, total cost for the 4-port KVM I bought? With 2 sets of high quality cables and another set of cheap cables, I ran nearly $190, though I probably could have done better by going online. YMMV.
(note: I don't work for Belkin and have no particular love for the company, its just that I did a little research and found this to be the best product circa early 2002)
nvidia bought them. so you are seeing return of the same technology.
Actually, though they both use the same acronym (SLI), the technology that 3Dfx used is completely different.
3Dfx's SLI technology was Scan Line Interleave, which the two chips were responsible for doing odd/even lines. For example, GPU #1 was doing odd scanlines, and GPU #2 did even scanlines.
nVidis's SLI technology is Scalable Link Interface, and is actually one of two modes: Split Frame Rendering (SFR) or Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR). The difference is that SFR gives some "half" of the top screen to GPU #1, and gives the remainder to GPU #2. I didn't say 50/50, because it actually varies based on polygon complexity on the screen as a whole. This can achieve a 1.8x improvement in rendering speed (not 2.0x), and has low latency in regards to responding to changing "input" events. AFR is the idea that GPU #1 does frame 1, GPU #2 does frame 2, GPU #1 does frame 3, GPU #2 does frame 4, etc. This can achieve a 2.0x frame rendering improvement, but suffers from latency.
In regards to the latency, think about it this way. You're in a 3D FPS game and standing right in front of a wall or simple image. You can move your point of view quickly and the rendering is extremely fast because its a simple scene. However, you turn around 180 degrees to a VERY complex scene, which starts putting heavy load on the GPU. With SFR, it will be slow, but your response time to moving around in that environment will be what you'd expect with a single GPU (in regards to latency between input event and frame rendering, not counting time to actually render frame). With AFR, however, GPU #1 might take (say) 2 seconds to render the frame while GPU #2 only took.5 seconds (assuming the next frame was very simple to render; different view, perhaps). Its difficult to give a good example, but basically, the timing will be way off. This isn't to say that AFR is bad. In fact, it can produce higher FPS than SFR, but the input latency is a risk.
While there may be some GPU synchronization technology lifted from 3Dfx, the rendering schemes behind the SLI technologies is entirely different. I doubt that the synchronization technology from 3Dfx even matters, since many microprocessor companies have this kind of capability (see: Intel Xeon, Sun SPARC, IBM PowerPC, etc.)
There is a chart in the article about bus width, speed and FLops of various consoles over the years. If I remember correctly, the Intellivision was a 16 bit bus, not 8 bit as stated. The chip, some sort of General Instruments processor, was in fact a 16 bit chip.
In regards to the Sega Saturn, you can't exactly use it as a reason for people wanting or not wanting a CD based system, either. CDs were still new at the time, and no console had proven their worth at that time. Sure, there were a few games that emerged for the 32X or Sega CD (and also the Amiga CD32, to a lesser extent) that had shown some full motion video (FMV) content, but nothing showing how the capacity could really be used.
The Saturn never made a huge impact on the US. You simply won't find a large installed base of them, partially to blame because it was too soon after Sega's Genesis-based CD systems that were somewhat incompatible with each other. Not enough support and games that didn't really drive the demand for CD-based games put a hurt on the market.
Slashdot Mirror
I want candy
bubblegum or taffy
Skip to the sweet shop with my sweetheart Sandy
Got my pennies saved so I'm a sugar daddy
I'm her Hume Cronyn she's my Jessica Tandy
I want candy
I'll use a giant drill
Bore it straight into hell
Releasin ancient demons from a
sleeper of a spell
So they can walk upon the earth
And get resituated
And hock the diet pills
MC Pee Pants done created
- MC Pee Pants (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
Man, that song is a RIP-OFF of one of Pootie Tang's top hits!
Heck, I remember when I wanted to write a hack to use the unused memory from my 1MB SVGA card as main memory. Then again, my 286 only had 1MB itself..
I would be VERY surprised if the firewire port was even enabled.
The DVR devices from Scientific Atlanta and Motorola both feature a dozen ports (USB, Firewire, ethernet), but most likely they're disabled by either the firmware (never implemented) or the cable company.
Actually, there are some cable boxes that will work with the serial port as well.
For the record, the TiVo can either do "IR Blasting" (two IR emitters that you can position) or serial port.
From the TiVo's setup menu, you can select hundreds of different IR configurations, and for each one, you can either do slow, medium or fast. It sometimes will take you a while to get this just right, and you want the faster settings if at all possible (think: changes channels much faster). Of course, if you can get the serial connection to work, then that is best because there is no IR blaster setup and the response time is much faster.
With all this IR blaster hack-ugliness, why have a TiVo? Because their device is much better than the Scientific Atlanta (Time Warner) and Motorola (RCN, Comcast) offerings.
In my NYC apartment, I've got 14 Wi-Fi networks that my iBook can pick up from the couch. Of that, 3 or 4 of them are unprotected (typically indicated by the "Wireless" or "Default" or "Linksys" network name). Strange, there is one "dod.gov" that is also unprotected...
My two cents..
is this a drive?
Thanks for the compliment. I'm not too worried, because if the person who submitted the "ask slashdot" isn't browsing at a level below 5 or 4, then they're not really interested in what people think... and if that is the case, then they're also probably going to miss out on a lot more than we could have possibly covered in this article.
I'm not talking about a manual for your product, I'm talking about keeping track of what you do, what your staff does and what the results are. It may be laborious to do so, but there will be times that you'll be glad you did. Also, you may wonder why something was done a certain way a few years ago; having some kind of knowledge base written down will be invaluable.
Document the code. Make sure that people adopt javadoc-type conventions. Check out Doxygen if you're not doing Java development, and make it a policy that people need to comment their code in places that are not painfully obvious. Programmers can be quite fat headed at times about this, because "hey, I know this, and if you can't read this then you aren't good" or whatever. What is obvious to them might not be obvious to others, and if you want to do a quick scan over some code, its easier to read a comment defining a block than figuring out their "spark of genius du jour" (sometimes people write things overly clever thinking that its more efficient when in reality its not and only making things harder to maintain).
The point of this is that:
- Your staff will not be the same forever; people move to other projects or other jobs.
- You will forget details.
- You will find it difficult to recall exactly what you and your staff did several months ago, especially if the project is large and fast moving.
I'm not saying that the above points are absolute, but in case you do find yourself in any of those positions...By keeping documentation, you will always be able to back up, defend, promote and prove (or disprove) your ability to manage. Now you just need to make sure you make the right decisions; nothing can help that except experience and good judgment.
Not even sure what megapixel it was, but all I know is that the pictures I took with it back in 1994/1995 look horrendous compared to what you could get for free* three years ago.
* specifically, if you bought a refurbished Dell in early 2002, you could get a Logitech camera that was roughly 1MP.
The only person that I still do this kind of work for on a rare, but regular basis is someone who owns an excellent French bakery in NYC. OK, after I fix your computer, I'm walking out with tons of fresh pastries!
(no, I'm not fat, but I'm willing to run a few extra miles after that one :-)
I've seen this statement numerous times over and over in forums about any old/unpopular/deprecated/dead operating system. For example, I can't count how many times I've heard people mention that there were features in the Amiga OS that still aren't in modern operating systems (e.g. "assign" command). Usually, when these comments come out, they're also using such a tone as in "those other operating systems are SURELY inferior without feature XX".
C'mon. It's easy to make a blanket statement such as this, but without qualification, whats the point? I can easily say that OS X doesn't have multiple resolutions on the same screen, a feature created more out of hardware limitations of the time, but why do we need such a thing these days? Sure, I'd love to see something like Amiga "assign", but Windows' "subst" gets close, and OS X / Linux has mount; I'd then claim that therefore, "assign" isn't exactly necessary.
rant off..
The lack of an MMU was a conscious design decision. In fact, Apple DID have an MMU for the 68000 in the Lisa. Cost was the primary reason for not putting it in the Mac, and the engineers felt that as long as programs were well behaved, they could live without it. Of course, the original Mac OS also did not have multitasking, so the MMU was even less of a necessity.
The problem I had was that one day my domain disappeared. I tried to politely go through the correct channels, and found that there was only the online support live chat system (the phone number that I did eventually find only rings an answering machine from which I never received a call back). I was told that my domain was down because they were doing server upgrades.
They were apparently doing server upgrades for over a week.
I had to prove that I had a valid contract and that I had paid for the service. Additionally, they kept trying to tell me that they no longer were in the web hosting service and that my domain was now being run by another company. After contacting the other company, they told me that they had no idea what I was talking about and that it was registerfly who was supposed to be in charge of my domain. Back and forth, big headaches and never a straight answer. Additionally, the live chat service is unbelievably slow (takes them almost 45 minutes to an hour until someone actually types anything) and I had to do this a few times after having my connection dumped well into the wait. After all this, I couldn't get a refund for the remainder of my 1 year contract. Luckily, I had my DNS registration elsewhere, so I just switched to another provider and left.
I don't normally speak about my experiences, but this thread is about reliable ISP and web hosting services. As such, I felt that it was necessary to at least post my experience with this company. I don't know if they've changed in the last several months, but I will say that I have been much happier with 1and1.com so far. The features are better (e.g. sftp VS web based form upload) and feels more professional. Remember, don't judge a company by how glossy the web site is. Do your research; I only discovered after the fact that registerfly has some bad history. Check out Web Hosting Talk or Internet Forum first.
Actually, I remember from the book "Hard Drive" (Bill Gates autobiography) that he actually practices his hand writing several times a day. He does this to maintain the muscular control in his hands, so that it isn't completely lost by the use of a keyboard. Sounds like a good idea.
I've got a Blackberry 6280, and when I put this thing anywhere near an amplified speaker (speaker phone, guitar amplifier, restaurant stereo), if there is any communication, you hear it loud and clear. Email coming in? BAAAHHT-BAT-BAT-BADDA-BADDA-BAAHHHHHT-BAT-BAAAHT-B ADDA (etc). Can't be good for my boys.
The bad? Someone on the other end of the phone has theirs next to the speaker phone and blasts your ears while you're talking to them.
The good? Its almost a prank that Steve Wozniak would be proud of. There is one particular restaurant that I to go for lunch sometimes that you can sit at a table that has the house stereo behind it. Put the blackberry on one end of the table, and the stereo blasts that sound into the restaurant, take it away and the stereo is fine. Now just screw with the waiters as they try to figure out why the stereo keeps making that sound.
The IIgs didn't come out for at least another year. I don't know the release date off hand, but it was either mid-to-late 1985 if not early 1986.
However, the //e would have been perfectly capable of rendering somewhat sharp white and blue on black graphics if in double hi-res mode (560x192, if I remember correctly).
The other fairly important "improvement" of the PII over the Pentium Pro was that the Pentium Pro was heavily optimized for 32-bit code. On a 200MHz PPro, if you ran 16-bit code, it was estimated that it ran equivalent to a 166MHz Pentium I. The PII basically "fixed" this problem, most likely because Intel realized that there was still a boat load of 16-bit code out there (look inside Win95/98/ME).
The specs on that one look great. I guess the only thing that the Belkin line that I mentioned has over this is that it supports PS/2 devices. Unfortunately, I've never plugged in any USB devices into my switch, so I can't really vouch for it. However, the specs claim that I should be able to use my regular PS/2 keyboard and mouse to control a USB computer. Haven't plugged in the iBook yet; maybe that's tonight's experiement :-)
It looks like it was a signed 16-bit value from the detail in the article (32,767 maximum schedule changes a month). Why they would possibly need the sign is beyond me. Regardless, having 32767 schedule changes in a month? Must track every flight in the world.
I don't want to discourage anyone from doing what you describe, but you might want to avoid the $50 KVM switch.
Sure, back in the old days I used a $30 physical A/B/C/D switch for VGA connections which worked fine with my Amiga (15kHz) and VGA (31kHz), but as soon as you crank the resolutions and frequencies up, the cheap KVMs don't hold up.
If you want to do it right, you need a good KVM. Specifically, you need to look at the specs of the device, and how high a bus rate it can handle; this makes all the difference in your display quality. Personally, I use a Belkin OmniView 4-port PS/2 & USB device (vendor page here) which has worked great for me. You can get it cheaper, and despite what I found on pricegrabber about the device (reviews), I have had no problems. Unfortunately, it doesn't QUITE end there, though. You still need cables, and you can't get away with cheap cables; you should really go with the ones that Belkin sells, since they're up to spec. I tried the $15 cables, and your screen ghosts pretty bad.
In the end, total cost for the 4-port KVM I bought? With 2 sets of high quality cables and another set of cheap cables, I ran nearly $190, though I probably could have done better by going online. YMMV.
(note: I don't work for Belkin and have no particular love for the company, its just that I did a little research and found this to be the best product circa early 2002)
Actually, though they both use the same acronym (SLI), the technology that 3Dfx used is completely different.
3Dfx's SLI technology was Scan Line Interleave, which the two chips were responsible for doing odd/even lines. For example, GPU #1 was doing odd scanlines, and GPU #2 did even scanlines.
nVidis's SLI technology is Scalable Link Interface, and is actually one of two modes: Split Frame Rendering (SFR) or Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR). The difference is that SFR gives some "half" of the top screen to GPU #1, and gives the remainder to GPU #2. I didn't say 50/50, because it actually varies based on polygon complexity on the screen as a whole. This can achieve a 1.8x improvement in rendering speed (not 2.0x), and has low latency in regards to responding to changing "input" events. AFR is the idea that GPU #1 does frame 1, GPU #2 does frame 2, GPU #1 does frame 3, GPU #2 does frame 4, etc. This can achieve a 2.0x frame rendering improvement, but suffers from latency.
In regards to the latency, think about it this way. You're in a 3D FPS game and standing right in front of a wall or simple image. You can move your point of view quickly and the rendering is extremely fast because its a simple scene. However, you turn around 180 degrees to a VERY complex scene, which starts putting heavy load on the GPU. With SFR, it will be slow, but your response time to moving around in that environment will be what you'd expect with a single GPU (in regards to latency between input event and frame rendering, not counting time to actually render frame). With AFR, however, GPU #1 might take (say) 2 seconds to render the frame while GPU #2 only took .5 seconds (assuming the next frame was very simple to render; different view, perhaps). Its difficult to give a good example, but basically, the timing will be way off. This isn't to say that AFR is bad. In fact, it can produce higher FPS than SFR, but the input latency is a risk.
While there may be some GPU synchronization technology lifted from 3Dfx, the rendering schemes behind the SLI technologies is entirely different. I doubt that the synchronization technology from 3Dfx even matters, since many microprocessor companies have this kind of capability (see: Intel Xeon, Sun SPARC, IBM PowerPC, etc.)
There is a chart in the article about bus width, speed and FLops of various consoles over the years. If I remember correctly, the Intellivision was a 16 bit bus, not 8 bit as stated. The chip, some sort of General Instruments processor, was in fact a 16 bit chip.
The Saturn never made a huge impact on the US. You simply won't find a large installed base of them, partially to blame because it was too soon after Sega's Genesis-based CD systems that were somewhat incompatible with each other. Not enough support and games that didn't really drive the demand for CD-based games put a hurt on the market.