ATI AIW.... the digital vcr software plain sucks.
it is a bitch to get working and records in either a special format or (the latest version) Mpeg1 at slightly less than VCD quality.
It will capture to MPEG-2, AVI (with your choice of codecs), or WMV as well. MPEG-2 captures worked pretty well for me, but Huffyuv-compressed AVI captures dropped frames. (A 1.0-GHz Athlon with a pair of 7200-rpm drives in RAID 0 should be more than fast enough to do that...and AVI_IO indicates that it is.)
I still haven't run the cable into my AIW Radeon, but some experimentation capturing taped video with the software bundled with that card showed that it came up short for capturing full-frame (720x480) video with Huffyuv compression. (I'm currently archiving to SVCD Enterprise episodes that my TiVo records, but I'd like to eventually shift over to the AIW for that so I can eliminate the losses from MPEG-to-MPEG transcoding.) There's a capture program you might look into called AVI_IO. With it, I can capture 720x480 29.97 fps video (with Huffyuv lossless compression) and CD-quality audio to a pair of 60GB IBM 120GXPs (in RAID 0) with no dropped frames. It's also supposed to have some timed-recording features, and you can use whatever codecs you have installed (such as DivX;-) if you don't need to be able to edit your video).
It also hasn't crashed on me, so that would at least solve the problem you're having with the Creative Labs software wedging your machine.
Personally, I'm really fond of
Alienware's selection.
The mid-tower case they use for some of their machines looks like the Chieftec DX-01WD. I snagged a couple of 'em for home use...one from PC Club, the other from Newegg. They're available in beige, black, and (IIRC) dark blue. They're made of fairly thick material and are easy to work with (removable 3.5" drive cages, rails stored in the bottom for 5.25" drives, snap-in frames for lots of 80mm fans). They're schweet.
Re:The news value of this article was what?
on
Revolution OS
·
· Score: 2
Other than to plug the movie, which has an undeniable cool factor thanks to appearances by a few/.ers, why was this even posted as a story? Where's the news hook?
Is it the local screenings for this year-old movie? Nope. Slashdot isn't the local events pages of your daily newspaper.
Considering the limited release for the film, I'm not inclined to complain if a few screenings are mentioned for it. Just because it's not on in your neck of the woods isn't much of an excuse.
(I don't live in California, but I'll be there a couple of weeks from now for a homebrew get-together...that's the weekend that it'll be running in Pasadena. That's only about 80 miles from Temecula, so I might wander over that way before returning to Vegas.)
Tivo/TurboNet cards will work without additional software installations, no pulling out your hdd. See
this post by a TiVo employee.
This rocks...when TiVo rolled out v2.5, I had to reinstall the TiVoNET drivers and reconfigure my TiVo to grab its updates that way. (I think I'll still have to crack it open again to reinstall netcat, ExtractStream, and friends. If the upgrade manages to preserve those, that would be even better.)
(Looks like the upgrade hasn't come through to me yet.../proc/version still says "Linux version 2.1.24-TiVo-2.5" after rebooting.)
...that dealt with experiments in sleep deprivation? While it's not likely that Provigil (make note of the spelling...if the editors had read the article, they would've gotten it right) is the result of some clandestine project to create soldiers who never sleep, it would appear to open the door to certain possibilities...
stereotyping germans as people who look away when evil is done is insulting, whether you encapsulate it into a reference to Hogans Heroes or not.
If Hogan's Heroes is so nasty, then explain why it's dubbed into German and broadcast on German TV.
(I'm not joking...I saw it maybe 3 or 4 years ago. My parents and I (they were stationed @ Ramstein; I was visiting) were in Rothenburg (sp?) and it was on one evening...we were out of range for AFN. (Besides, PAL TVs don't pick up NTSC signals too well and AFN carries mostly sports anyway...a fair number of GIs get minidishes, have someone in England send an access card, and watch Sky.))
You do have to wonder a bit about what the Germans might find funny about it, but I guess enough of them do to make it worth carrying.
Ive actually had zero problems with all my IBM drives
I've had zero success with my IBM hard drives. Put simply, IBM hard drives are junk.
I'm more inclined to agree with the original poster. Out of five drives (a 75GXP and two 120GXPs at home, and two 60GXPs at work), all are running with no problems. The two work machines are fired up 24/7, too.
Even worse is their customer service -- when you try and RMA a hard drive, they send you "refurbished" hard drives, which is just a nice way of saying that they are hard drives that others have already RMAd!
...and how is this different from what every other hard-drive manufacturer does? If you ship a dead drive to Seagate or Western Digital or Maxtor or whoever, you're going to more than likely get a refurb back (and I have a refurbed Maxtor on the shelf at work to prove it). After all, you're not sending them a new drive for replacement...why would they replace a used drive with a new drive?
I agree, but can't live with the amount of screenspace the toolbars/adbars take up...
The reason Opera is a non-starter for me is that it's an MDI application. I don't want all my browser windows in one big "box." That it's adware doesn't help things much either (though I could more than likely filter the ads at the proxy server).
I just snagged a Mozilla binary...last time I tried it was several months ago. It seems to be fast enough (seems about the same as IE), and it has more finely-grained security preferences than IE. (I had turned off JavaScript except for trusted sites because I was tired of pop-ups and pop-unders. In addition to blocking those, it looks like Mozilla can also prevent sites from fscking with the status bar or resizing the browser window.)
The few problems I've run across with Mozilla so far seem to be fixable. The default navigation buttons are huge and ugly, but the Lo-Fi theme fixes that. There's no Google Toolbar, but the search behavior of the address bar can be fixed so it uses Google instead of Nutscrape.
I've been using Internet Explorer pretty much since it was introduced nearly seven years ago. The few pre-3.0 advantages that Nutscrape had over IE weren't enough to get me to switch. Since then, IE had pretty much gotten better and better while Nutscrape stagnated. Early Mozilla builds showed promise, but weren't ready for prime time (hey, it's only a beta). With more and more holes being found in IE (especially this latest hole...at least the sample exploit only launched Minesweeper instead of opening goatse.cx or something similarly nasty), I'm beginning to wonder if now might be a good time to make the switch to Mozilla.
Can you share with the rest of the group where you get 5c a minute 24/7, with no monthly fee?
The dial-around I've been using for the past few years does that. If your calls are at least 10 minutes each (and they usually will be), you end up paying a nickel per minute. You don't have to pay for the phone company to switch you over, either; you punch in seven extra digits before the number. (If you end up finding someone even cheaper, you then don't have to pay again to switch away.)
Why not switch to just using a cellular phone for all your calls?
I've considered doing that, but wireless service is too unreliable around here (Las Vegas) for that. I've had service through Nextel and Nevada Bell (now called Cingular), and currently go through AT&T Wireless. My sister has service through Sprint PCS. None of them will give you seamless service anywhere you go in town, and the further away from the middle of town you get (I'm up on one of the mountains in the northeast), the worse it gets.
With Sprint sending all sorts of bogus calls through to my home number (pick up and no one's there) and with the majority of the remaing calls coming from fscking telemarketers who've gotten my number at some point in the past 10 years, this new service sounds attractive. I've had very few reliability issues with my cable-modem service (just need to make sure my website doesn't get/.'d like it did over the weekend when I mirrored that page with the Gigabit Ethernet NIC roundup:-) ), and they're only charging $5 more than I'm currently paying for phone service. Factor in that the 500 minutes can be long-distance (at the nickel-a-minute I've been paying, that's potentially a $25 value right there) and I'm strongly tempted to give Sprint the heave-ho. (Sprint also isn't helped by the fact that today they fscked up DSL for nearly everybody in Vegas who uses it...good thing we have both cable-modem and DSL service at work. Those idiots can't keep a DSLAM running to save themselves.)
How do you download a browser without a browser? Do you expect people to use ftp.exe?
Back in 1995 when IE was first released, that's exactly how I obtained it. (No kidding!) I ended up snagging Plus! a few weeks later, but I think IE might've already been bumped up a few releases from what was on the Plus! CD.
I got one of those 1998 K6-II's that didn't run Linux.
Didn't those get swapped out, or wasn't there some workaround put into Linux to deal with it? I've never run across that problem (just started loading up the latest Gentoo last night on my spare computer, which runs a 300-MHz K6-2).
Have heard of similar problems with AMD's latest.
...and what might those problems be? FUD from the Intel boosters, most likely. Linux From Scratch runs pretty nicely on an Athlon XP 1600+, plugged into an nForce 420D-based motherboard (got a server at work using that).
The re-warmed disco-era garbage that is x86-64 is disappointing beyond belief.
...and Itanic isn't? x86 might not be the best instruction set in the world, but if you don't want to throw out all of your old software, you're stuck with it. (Remember, since you don't have source for everything, recompiling isn't a
solution all the time. Even if you have the source, moving from 32-bit to 64-bit won't always be trivial.)
I remember a day where almost every popular computer mag, PC Magazine, PC Week, the now-defunct Compute, etc. had source code listings in the back that you typed in yourself, usually in Assembly language. They weren't toy programs either, but usually useful utilities, like file managers, text editors, games, etc. Not commercial quality, but still amazing for something that you could enter in by hand.
Those listings, despite being a pain to enter and debug, taught me most of my early programming and software design knowledge before I formally learned it in school, and probably did so for others.
I still have the last seven or so years' worth of Nibble (for the uninitiated, it was a magazine for the Apple II with program listings). I already had BASIC pretty much figured out, but I got up to speed on 6502 assembly language that way. I even managed to sell them a couple of my programs, one of which was published in the April 1990 issue (it's an add-on to BASIC to read the color of a pixel on the Hi-Res screen and return it to your program).
Ever since I first got to play with an Apple Scanner (the original B&W flatbed model) hooked up to a Mac back in '89 or '90 (and used it to scan in a program...saved lots of typing:-) ), I figured that eventually I'd OCR the whole collection—articles, programs, and all. Eventually, I'll accumulate enough round tuits to scan 'em in...maybe they'll go up on my website or something.
You call yourself a geek, and you say "there's nothing wrong with instant coffee"? Heathen!:-) You're supposed to grind the beans right before use, and use a drip coffeemaker, espresso machine, or French press to brew your caffeine fix.
you can use flash to develope powerful clientside applications that load faster and look nice than Java and there is no need for serverside crap so no reloading the webpage.
Other than a slight increase in processor load, what's wrong with "serverside crap?" It allows you to remove most client dependencies, and it keeps your software on your machine...all that users will get are the results. (This might not be as much of a concern with open-source code, but not everything is open source.) With SSI and CGI, I can create a website that will render optimally in everything from IE to Lynx to a cell-phone browser or a text-to-speech program. It can even take Nutscrape's idiosyncracies into account and completely rewrite standards-compliant HTML so that it'll render properly. It enables the widest possible audience and minimizes bandwidth requirements. Instead of (for instance) sending a program down the pipe to calculate MPEG bitrates for SVCD mastering, I can put up a webpage that accepts needed inputs from the user and spits out the result.
As for "looking nice," while that isn't a Bad Thing, it isn't everything either. Maybe the fact that Flash is often abused is more a statement against the people who implement it than against the technology itself, but there is still something to be said against tools that at least appear to encourage form at the expense of function.
They lost my business MONTHS ago. It is because of their return policy.
About a year and a half ago, I picked up a few small things at one of the local stores, including a book (The Bear and the Dragon) as a Christmas gift for somebody. I ended up getting a copy of the book myself that year...but I already had it. I figured I'd head in a few days after Christmas, turn it in, and get something else.
They wouldn't take it back because they said they didn't sell it. Never mind that I had bought the exact same book from them a few weeks earlier. The "customer-service" rep must've thought she was auditioning for Seinfeld or something, as she did a fairly good impersonation of the Soup Nazi.:-|
I went a couple doors down to Barnes & Noble. Even though I had never bought a copy of that book there, they took it with no hassles. I picked out two or three paperbacks and got a gift card with the difference to apply to a future purchase.
I wore the blue shirt for nearly five years...but with that lack of customer service, Best Buy can fsck off now for all I care. Some would probably say they're no better, but Circuit City, Costco, and Sam's Club have been getting my "toy" purchases more recently. At least none of them have tried to screw me yet.
Nope... apparently Pricewatch.com has D-Link 8-port 10/100/1000baseT auto-detect switches listed for under $150!
D-Link's site is nearly impossible to navigate (maybe it requires JavaScript, which I've shut off), but the Pricewatch description of the DES-1009G indicates that Gigabit Ethernet is only available on one port as an uplink connection; the rest of the switch is your run-of-the-mill 10/100 job. The DGS-1008T is D-Link's 8-port unmanaged 10/100/1000 switch; the cheapest entry on Pricewatch for that is $595.
BTW, I have the entire site downloaded. Maybe I'm insane to even think about mirroring a/.'ed article on my home cable-modem link, but here it is. I've converted all the charts to PNG so they'll load slightly faster, and I got rid of most of the godawful "super-31337" yellow-on-black text to improve readability. You can also choose this link to download the entire page (images and all) in one shot.
Of course, it'd be hard to generate all these complaint letters. So what you do is, build the Google API into an Outlook virus, which looks for published DMCA letters on Google and sends an automatic complaint. Soon the entire Internet will be crippled by the DMCA deluge...
Google would just bitchslap whoever wrote and/or used such a utility, in the same way that a Comcast netblock was recently locked out because someone in that block ran a spambot against Google.
Remember the DeCSS debacle? You got into trouble just for linking to that...
Maybe if your site happens to be one of the (relatively) few that the MPAA and its goons stumbled across. As one DeCSS "metasite" put it, though, "you have one bat and there are 100 million holes." I've had it up on my website for a fairly long time. I even have links up at some of the metasites, and Google has cached the page. I have never gotten a C&D. I'm sure the same holds true for many other sites that carry DeCSS.
Macs seem to work fine without "lagacy" ports... no floppy drive even.
That only happend because Steve Jobs cranked up his Reality Distortion Field® to full power. I understand that more than a few people grumbled about losing their ADB and SCSI ports.
Giving up PS/2 as "legacy" is pretty much insane. There is no reasonably priced KVM switch that does BOTH USB and PS/2, and I'm not getting USB for my 486 firewall any time soon.
IBM model M keyboards also tend to not work too well when plugged into USB ports (read: they don't work at all). Most of the newer keyboards feel like they have mush under the keys.
(There might well be USB-to-PS/2 converters available...but that would seem to be a kludge. Ditto for USB-to-serial and USB-to-parallel...is it really that big a deal to keep the two PS/2 ports, two serial ports, and one parallel port that belong on every computer?)
I admit that SCSI can be a royal pain in the ass to set up though.
Where does this myth come from? SCSI is only marginally more difficult to get running than IDE:
Make sure every device has a unique ID.
Make sure termination is enabled only at the ends of the chain.
Make sure at least one device supplies termination power (most SCSI cards do, but some of the cheaper ones don't).
For maximum performance, don't mix LVD and SE devices (your LVD devices will more than likely support faster signaling rates than a single-ended interface can deliver).
I've used SCSI devices for 12 years (started with a hard drive for my Apple IIe), and I've never run into the difficulties that some people mention.
Slashdot Mirror
It will capture to MPEG-2, AVI (with your choice of codecs), or WMV as well. MPEG-2 captures worked pretty well for me, but Huffyuv-compressed AVI captures dropped frames. (A 1.0-GHz Athlon with a pair of 7200-rpm drives in RAID 0 should be more than fast enough to do that...and AVI_IO indicates that it is.)
It also hasn't crashed on me, so that would at least solve the problem you're having with the Creative Labs software wedging your machine.
Considering the limited release for the film, I'm not inclined to complain if a few screenings are mentioned for it. Just because it's not on in your neck of the woods isn't much of an excuse.
(I don't live in California, but I'll be there a couple of weeks from now for a homebrew get-together...that's the weekend that it'll be running in Pasadena. That's only about 80 miles from Temecula, so I might wander over that way before returning to Vegas.)
This rocks...when TiVo rolled out v2.5, I had to reinstall the TiVoNET drivers and reconfigure my TiVo to grab its updates that way. (I think I'll still have to crack it open again to reinstall netcat, ExtractStream, and friends. If the upgrade manages to preserve those, that would be even better.)
(Looks like the upgrade hasn't come through to me yet.../proc/version still says "Linux version 2.1.24-TiVo-2.5" after rebooting.)
Doesn't the NyQuil tend to cancel out the No-Doz? There's a reason you normally only take NyQuil at night...
...that dealt with experiments in sleep deprivation? While it's not likely that Provigil (make note of the spelling...if the editors had read the article, they would've gotten it right) is the result of some clandestine project to create soldiers who never sleep, it would appear to open the door to certain possibilities...
If Hogan's Heroes is so nasty, then explain why it's dubbed into German and broadcast on German TV.
(I'm not joking...I saw it maybe 3 or 4 years ago. My parents and I (they were stationed @ Ramstein; I was visiting) were in Rothenburg (sp?) and it was on one evening...we were out of range for AFN. (Besides, PAL TVs don't pick up NTSC signals too well and AFN carries mostly sports anyway...a fair number of GIs get minidishes, have someone in England send an access card, and watch Sky.))
You do have to wonder a bit about what the Germans might find funny about it, but I guess enough of them do to make it worth carrying.
I'm more inclined to agree with the original poster. Out of five drives (a 75GXP and two 120GXPs at home, and two 60GXPs at work), all are running with no problems. The two work machines are fired up 24/7, too.
The reason Opera is a non-starter for me is that it's an MDI application. I don't want all my browser windows in one big "box." That it's adware doesn't help things much either (though I could more than likely filter the ads at the proxy server).
I just snagged a Mozilla binary...last time I tried it was several months ago. It seems to be fast enough (seems about the same as IE), and it has more finely-grained security preferences than IE. (I had turned off JavaScript except for trusted sites because I was tired of pop-ups and pop-unders. In addition to blocking those, it looks like Mozilla can also prevent sites from fscking with the status bar or resizing the browser window.)
The few problems I've run across with Mozilla so far seem to be fixable. The default navigation buttons are huge and ugly, but the Lo-Fi theme fixes that. There's no Google Toolbar, but the search behavior of the address bar can be fixed so it uses Google instead of Nutscrape.
I've been using Internet Explorer pretty much since it was introduced nearly seven years ago. The few pre-3.0 advantages that Nutscrape had over IE weren't enough to get me to switch. Since then, IE had pretty much gotten better and better while Nutscrape stagnated. Early Mozilla builds showed promise, but weren't ready for prime time (hey, it's only a beta). With more and more holes being found in IE (especially this latest hole...at least the sample exploit only launched Minesweeper instead of opening goatse.cx or something similarly nasty), I'm beginning to wonder if now might be a good time to make the switch to Mozilla.
They make TiVoNET for that...
The dial-around I've been using for the past few years does that. If your calls are at least 10 minutes each (and they usually will be), you end up paying a nickel per minute. You don't have to pay for the phone company to switch you over, either; you punch in seven extra digits before the number. (If you end up finding someone even cheaper, you then don't have to pay again to switch away.)
I've considered doing that, but wireless service is too unreliable around here (Las Vegas) for that. I've had service through Nextel and Nevada Bell (now called Cingular), and currently go through AT&T Wireless. My sister has service through Sprint PCS. None of them will give you seamless service anywhere you go in town, and the further away from the middle of town you get (I'm up on one of the mountains in the northeast), the worse it gets.
With Sprint sending all sorts of bogus calls through to my home number (pick up and no one's there) and with the majority of the remaing calls coming from fscking telemarketers who've gotten my number at some point in the past 10 years, this new service sounds attractive. I've had very few reliability issues with my cable-modem service (just need to make sure my website doesn't get /.'d like it did over the weekend when I mirrored that page with the Gigabit Ethernet NIC roundup :-) ), and they're only charging $5 more than I'm currently paying for phone service. Factor in that the 500 minutes can be long-distance (at the nickel-a-minute I've been paying, that's potentially a $25 value right there) and I'm strongly tempted to give Sprint the heave-ho. (Sprint also isn't helped by the fact that today they fscked up DSL for nearly everybody in Vegas who uses it...good thing we have both cable-modem and DSL service at work. Those idiots can't keep a DSLAM running to save themselves.)
Back in 1995 when IE was first released, that's exactly how I obtained it. (No kidding!) I ended up snagging Plus! a few weeks later, but I think IE might've already been bumped up a few releases from what was on the Plus! CD.
Didn't those get swapped out, or wasn't there some workaround put into Linux to deal with it? I've never run across that problem (just started loading up the latest Gentoo last night on my spare computer, which runs a 300-MHz K6-2).
I still have the last seven or so years' worth of Nibble (for the uninitiated, it was a magazine for the Apple II with program listings). I already had BASIC pretty much figured out, but I got up to speed on 6502 assembly language that way. I even managed to sell them a couple of my programs, one of which was published in the April 1990 issue (it's an add-on to BASIC to read the color of a pixel on the Hi-Res screen and return it to your program).
Ever since I first got to play with an Apple Scanner (the original B&W flatbed model) hooked up to a Mac back in '89 or '90 (and used it to scan in a program...saved lots of typing :-) ), I figured that eventually I'd OCR the whole collection—articles, programs, and all. Eventually, I'll accumulate enough round tuits to scan 'em in...maybe they'll go up on my website or something.
You call yourself a geek, and you say "there's nothing wrong with instant coffee"? Heathen! :-) You're supposed to grind the beans right before use, and use a drip coffeemaker, espresso machine, or French press to brew your caffeine fix.
Other than a slight increase in processor load, what's wrong with "serverside crap?" It allows you to remove most client dependencies, and it keeps your software on your machine...all that users will get are the results. (This might not be as much of a concern with open-source code, but not everything is open source.) With SSI and CGI, I can create a website that will render optimally in everything from IE to Lynx to a cell-phone browser or a text-to-speech program. It can even take Nutscrape's idiosyncracies into account and completely rewrite standards-compliant HTML so that it'll render properly. It enables the widest possible audience and minimizes bandwidth requirements. Instead of (for instance) sending a program down the pipe to calculate MPEG bitrates for SVCD mastering, I can put up a webpage that accepts needed inputs from the user and spits out the result.
As for "looking nice," while that isn't a Bad Thing, it isn't everything either. Maybe the fact that Flash is often abused is more a statement against the people who implement it than against the technology itself, but there is still something to be said against tools that at least appear to encourage form at the expense of function.
About a year and a half ago, I picked up a few small things at one of the local stores, including a book (The Bear and the Dragon) as a Christmas gift for somebody. I ended up getting a copy of the book myself that year...but I already had it. I figured I'd head in a few days after Christmas, turn it in, and get something else.
They wouldn't take it back because they said they didn't sell it. Never mind that I had bought the exact same book from them a few weeks earlier. The "customer-service" rep must've thought she was auditioning for Seinfeld or something, as she did a fairly good impersonation of the Soup Nazi. :-|
I went a couple doors down to Barnes & Noble. Even though I had never bought a copy of that book there, they took it with no hassles. I picked out two or three paperbacks and got a gift card with the difference to apply to a future purchase.
I wore the blue shirt for nearly five years...but with that lack of customer service, Best Buy can fsck off now for all I care. Some would probably say they're no better, but Circuit City, Costco, and Sam's Club have been getting my "toy" purchases more recently. At least none of them have tried to screw me yet.
D-Link's site is nearly impossible to navigate (maybe it requires JavaScript, which I've shut off), but the Pricewatch description of the DES-1009G indicates that Gigabit Ethernet is only available on one port as an uplink connection; the rest of the switch is your run-of-the-mill 10/100 job. The DGS-1008T is D-Link's 8-port unmanaged 10/100/1000 switch; the cheapest entry on Pricewatch for that is $595.
BTW, I have the entire site downloaded. Maybe I'm insane to even think about mirroring a /.'ed article on my home cable-modem link, but here it is. I've converted all the charts to PNG so they'll load slightly faster, and I got rid of most of the godawful "super-31337" yellow-on-black text to improve readability. You can also choose this link to download the entire page (images and all) in one shot.
Google would just bitchslap whoever wrote and/or used such a utility, in the same way that a Comcast netblock was recently locked out because someone in that block ran a spambot against Google.
Maybe if your site happens to be one of the (relatively) few that the MPAA and its goons stumbled across. As one DeCSS "metasite" put it, though, "you have one bat and there are 100 million holes." I've had it up on my website for a fairly long time. I even have links up at some of the metasites, and Google has cached the page. I have never gotten a C&D. I'm sure the same holds true for many other sites that carry DeCSS.
That only happend because Steve Jobs cranked up his Reality Distortion Field® to full power. I understand that more than a few people grumbled about losing their ADB and SCSI ports.
IBM model M keyboards also tend to not work too well when plugged into USB ports (read: they don't work at all). Most of the newer keyboards feel like they have mush under the keys.
(There might well be USB-to-PS/2 converters available...but that would seem to be a kludge. Ditto for USB-to-serial and USB-to-parallel...is it really that big a deal to keep the two PS/2 ports, two serial ports, and one parallel port that belong on every computer?)
Where does this myth come from? SCSI is only marginally more difficult to get running than IDE:
I've used SCSI devices for 12 years (started with a hard drive for my Apple IIe), and I've never run into the difficulties that some people mention.