A tax on gas is better than a toll based on mileage for several reasons. First, a per-volume tax on fuel encourages the use of fuel efficient vehicles, which is obviously a good thing. Second, using gps to calculate peoples mileage and tolling them based on that would require an entire new infrastructure including a massive billing department and a device in every vehicle. Also, by switching to a gps based system, you open up the opportunity for creative people to hack some kind of workaround to thier billing and tracking system to avoid payment.
The whole issue of stability is kinda stupid. If a mobo doesn't have some major bug (I remember a couple intel chipsets that caused major problems with the third ram slot back when pc100 was prominen) then you are probably going to have far more crashes from power fluxuations/failures, bad ram, or bad drivers. It's pretty rare that the mobo causes the crash.
Anyway, last September I got a Abit K7-Raid and I've been VERY happy with it. It can handle up to 8 IDE drives, 4 DDR slots (only 2 work with non-ecc though...), and it has 5 PCI slots. No audio though.
The Abit KG7 series boards also have an awesome bios. I overclocked my Tbird 1400 to 1533 without evening opening the case--it's all in the Bios! I also have 3 HDs in it with 3 different OS's on them (RH7.2, win98, and a flavor-o-the-week) and NO LILO OR GRUB!!! Each HD has a normal boot partition for it's respective OS and if I want to boot to a different one, I just have to hit delete to enter the bios at reboot and respecify which HD to boot from. I find that having my bios control which drive to boot from is as easy and more reliable than lilo or grub because each OS gets a complete boot partition to itself. There is a drawback in that you need a seperate HD for each OS, but with the KG7-Raid, you can fit up to 8 IDE drive in there and boot from any of them.
I do the majority of my web browsing with lynx, so obviously I don't see images either. It's great for sites like Slashdot-I can read/. at work in lynx and when the boss walks by, he sees 3 emacs windows and a lynx window and assumes that I'm coding my ass off. Works great, and I highly recommend it.
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A tax on gas is better than a toll based on mileage for several reasons. First, a per-volume tax on fuel encourages the use of fuel efficient vehicles, which is obviously a good thing. Second, using gps to calculate peoples mileage and tolling them based on that would require an entire new infrastructure including a massive billing department and a device in every vehicle. Also, by switching to a gps based system, you open up the opportunity for creative people to hack some kind of workaround to thier billing and tracking system to avoid payment.
The whole issue of stability is kinda stupid. If a mobo doesn't have some major bug (I remember a couple intel chipsets that caused major problems with the third ram slot back when pc100 was prominen) then you are probably going to have far more crashes from power fluxuations/failures, bad ram, or bad drivers. It's pretty rare that the mobo causes the crash.
Anyway, last September I got a Abit K7-Raid and I've been VERY happy with it. It can handle up to 8 IDE drives, 4 DDR slots (only 2 work with non-ecc though...), and it has 5 PCI slots. No audio though.
The Abit KG7 series boards also have an awesome bios. I overclocked my Tbird 1400 to 1533 without evening opening the case--it's all in the Bios! I also have 3 HDs in it with 3 different OS's on them (RH7.2, win98, and a flavor-o-the-week) and NO LILO OR GRUB!!! Each HD has a normal boot partition for it's respective OS and if I want to boot to a different one, I just have to hit delete to enter the bios at reboot and respecify which HD to boot from. I find that having my bios control which drive to boot from is as easy and more reliable than lilo or grub because each OS gets a complete boot partition to itself. There is a drawback in that you need a seperate HD for each OS, but with the KG7-Raid, you can fit up to 8 IDE drive in there and boot from any of them.
I do the majority of my web browsing with lynx, so obviously I don't see images either. It's great for sites like Slashdot-I can read /. at work in lynx and when the boss walks by, he sees 3 emacs windows and a lynx window and assumes that I'm coding my ass off. Works great, and I highly recommend it.