winmodems aren't so bad
on
LinModems?
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· Score: 3
I know I am probably going to be flamed for this but I don't think winmodems are really such a bad thing for home use in the same way IDE drives are not so bad for home use. I have an 28k external modem for my linux mach. and a 56k internal which i basically got for free from tigerdirect when I bought my machine.
I think if you are logged in all day and run jobs in the background on a regular basis then by all means you should get a real modem, but to be honest everything i've ever done on the windoze side of the box (which basically involves downloading the random piece of software) the winmodem has pretty much worked exactly as specified and i get 56k transfers basically for free (which isn't so bad really).. running netscape isn't exactly CPU intensive:) Moreover, just to test out what the degradation really was like, I had the machine play mpegs (video) (I have no mpeg card so it was softwarebased decompression) at the same time and got less than 10% loss, still well above a typical 28k modem. (Incidentally the box is an AMD 350-K2 w/ 64 megs of sdram, to give you an idea of the power)
I think if you are trying to build a $200 box for your parents so they can send email, read cnn news and other crap, winmodems are the way to go, since one of the nice things about linux is legally building costeffective machines where every penny counts, i think it would be nice to take advantage of the cheap hardware. (In the same way we now all take advantage of cheap IDE drives which are also more cpu intensive than your typical SCSI drive at home)
just so you know, more than likely if i actually buy a modem it'll be external etc but thats only because most of us are more than typical online users. (Incidentally i think i'll switch to SCSI as well next time around, mostly because 4 IDE device limit is out of control) but again the performance loss is really negligable as far as I can tell for doing typical home use stuff (not games obviously) but real_audio,surfing,email etc..
That totally accounts for the difference!! Typical 80 column code uses 1/2 the # of lines:)
How do you guys do your commenting btw.. i've taken to putting comments on the 90th+ col. or so.. that way I dont normally have to look at it (it totally breaks up the continuity of the code by putting it above and below the code *imho*)
But still it is a simple shift over to read what ever snappy comments i've come up w/ woohoo!
Cool thanks!.. It'll be good to see what the reasoning is.. I think at worst if the numbers are right it'll show us where to optimize some of the code:)
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I know I am probably going to be flamed for this but I don't think winmodems are really such a bad thing for home use in the same way IDE drives are not so bad for home use. I have an 28k external modem for my linux mach. and a 56k internal which i basically got for free from tigerdirect when I bought my machine.
:) Moreover, just to test out what the degradation really was like, I had the machine play mpegs (video) (I have no mpeg card so it was softwarebased decompression) at the same time and got less than 10% loss, still well above a typical 28k modem.
I think if you are logged in all day and run jobs in the background on a regular basis then by all means you should get a real modem, but to be honest everything i've ever done on the windoze side of the box (which basically involves downloading the random piece of software) the winmodem has pretty much worked exactly as specified and i get 56k transfers basically for free (which isn't so bad really).. running netscape isn't exactly CPU intensive
(Incidentally the box is an AMD 350-K2 w/ 64
megs of sdram, to give you an idea of the power)
I think if you are trying to build a $200 box for your parents so they can send email, read cnn news and other crap, winmodems are the way to go, since one of the nice things about linux is legally building costeffective machines where every penny counts, i think it would be nice to take advantage of the cheap hardware. (In the same way we now all take advantage of cheap IDE drives which are also more cpu intensive than your typical SCSI drive at home)
just so you know, more than likely if i actually buy a modem it'll be external etc but thats only because most of us are more than typical online users. (Incidentally i think i'll switch to SCSI as well next time around, mostly because 4 IDE device limit is out of control) but again the performance loss is really negligable as far as I can tell for doing typical home use stuff (not games obviously) but real_audio,surfing,email etc..
That totally accounts for the difference!! Typical 80 column code uses 1/2 the # of lines :)
How do you guys do your commenting btw.. i've taken to putting comments on the 90th+ col. or so.. that way I dont normally have to look at it
(it totally breaks up the continuity of the code by putting it above and below the code *imho*)
But still it is a simple shift over to read what ever snappy comments i've come up w/ woohoo!
Cool thanks!.. It'll be good to see what the reasoning is.. I think at worst if the numbers are right it'll show us where to optimize some of the code :)