Uh, no. Republican bias = favoring large corporations, at least when it comes to commercial matters. Let's not forget that it was the Reagan administration that created this entire problem by widening the scope of patents.
I don't think bluetooth has enough bandwidth to make hi-fi phones possible. The DAC and amplifiers aren't a huge problem, the main problem would be an appropriate processor chip and the batteries and power supply circuit. And, of course, this would be an extremely niche product, so it would cost a fuckton.
Actually, any decent headphones should be flat down to 20Hz. The problem is, the ears can't hear sub-bass very well, you mostly perceive it with your body. Also, computer soundcards can't drive headphones with frequencies that low because they have shitty AC-coupled amplifiers with cheap tiny electrolytic capacitors. I just tested my soundblaster live, and it distorts horribly below 60Hz, even at low volumes. There is a reason nobody in their right mind builds audio amplifiers with AC-coupled outputs.
You do realize you can easily open the things without cutting anything? They are hotglued and you can open them by simply prying the housings open with a spoon. Google for the exact procedure. Also, the SR40 is a cheapass model and should be avoided; it's not the same design as the other Grado headphones. The SR60 is the cheapest one worth getting.
Have you tried adjusting the headband? It's made of a springy steel and can be adjusted for your head size. I can wear my pair all day comfortably after bending it a little, they do come a little too tight from the factory.
Doubt it. The Supreme Court usually makes a determination with as narrow a scope as possible. Not to mention, the court now has an extreme Republican bias, so there's about a 90% chance they will rule in favor of the patent holder in this case.
Agreed. Sennheiser is quite overhyped, and the stuff under $300 is pretty much circuit city quality -- OK, but not great. The Grados are fairly cheap, sound pretty damn good, and are much more comfortable to use.
Why should that even matter? Want to improve your Google ranking? Pay for some advertisements. Othwerise, you have no right to complain when they remove your crappy index-polluting site from their search engine.
Digital circuits operate entirely on the principle of mathematical logic and their functions have no meaning without that logic.
Bullshit. Digital circuits operate according to electronic principles, not boolean logic. After all, a combinational digital logic gate is generally a variant of a poorly-behaved op-amp. Math just gives a few ways to model, synthesize, and improve these circuits.
Anything that manipulates numbers as an abstract representation of something of "things" be they physical or otherwise is math.
Well, an analog amplifier manipulates numbers too, in its own representation. If an ideal amplifier has a gain of 12dB, the output will always be equal to four times the input. If your amplifier has variable gain, you just built yourself a multiplier. There are analog circuits that will do just about any operation, and you can model any analog circuit mathematically. Yet, these are still patentable.
Algorithms are mathmatical constructs
How is, say, selection sort a mathematical construct? People perform this algorithm manually when they sort just about anything. It existed long before the word "computer" was coined.
Most informed individuals do not agree with software patents. Those who do agree with them are typically employed by or own software firms and therefore have a conflict on interest in the debate.
Those who do not agree with them typically are also employed by software firms (or develop software on their own), and also have a conflict of interest. Really, it's a case of people who do not have any patents getting pissed off at those who do. The only legitimate argument I can see is that the USPTO is doing a very poor job of verifying a patent's novelty and usefulness, but that's true across the board. There are just as many bad patents getting granted outside the software business, and it's a problem that needs to be remedied.
Without software patents this particular type of business would be deterimentally impacted while the rest of the industry and software development in general would benefit.
Would you bother investing money into researching and developing new algorithms if your competitors can reverse engineer your software and use them for free? This is especially relevant for things like compilers and some EDA software. Or what if you develop a revolutionary new approach to doing something? Why would patents not be helpful in these situations?
Whatever, dude. Kids don't need dumbed-down shit. I learned how to use DOS when I was 6 years old, and it didn't even seem very difficult. You could give a child a linux shell prompt, show him how to do basic things, and watch him figure out the rest. People get stupider as they get older, not vice versa. Making it super-easy to use doesn't need to be a huge priority, it just needs to be capable of doing useful things.
The main problem with computers these days is they are overly complicated and opaque. In Windows or Linux, something simple is usually buried under hundreds of layers of abstraction. This is what makes computers complicated. As long as the laptop people keep it really simple and don't try to hide the computer from the user, it should be very accessible for kids.
With all that said, I'm still not entirely sure what the point of this is. Without Internet connectivity, a computer is pretty useless. That money would be much better spent investing in better teachers, textbooks, and school facilities. If anything, computers will reduce student achivement, because students will screw around instead of learning. Computers mainly breed game addiction, calculator dependence, and laziness; there is nothing useful they can do for learning.
Well, you'll get to watch it, just not in the maximum resolution. It will still be better than standard DVD quality, but not by much. In any case, I think regular low-definition TV is good enough for 90% of the people out there, and that this won't be an issue.
10% unemployment is not that bad if there isn't a lot of underemployment and miscounting like there is in the US. The US has an artificially low unemployment rate because the labor department doesn't count all people who are not employed, just the ones recently laid off. They also do not take underemployment into account: someone who works retail or fast food just because they can't find work in his/her profession is considered fully employed. This can give rather misleading numbers.
Except that 99.9% of software ideas require no investment and thus no protection.
Really? You are effectively saying that software ideas materialize out of thin air and do not take any time or money to develop and market. Your assertion is rather absurd.
In any case there is nothing special about software that should permit patenting.
There is nothing special about business methods, pharmaceuticals, mechanical inventions, electronic circuits, and product designs, either. Yet they are all eligible for patent protection.
I have the idea of opening the first hardware store in a small town.
For an invention to be patentable, it must be new and nonobvious. Your example satisfies neither of these criteria and is therefore not patentable. Strawman arguments will not get you very far.
There is no scientific evidence for patents being of any benefit at all in software and a lot of anecdotal evidence saying the opposite.
There is no scientific evidence patents provide benefits in any other fields. In fact, it's not something that can be determined scientifically, since it is impossible to conduct the appropriate experiments.
Most of these were incrementally developed over long periods of time by many people with the "inventors" only putting the final piece in the puzzle.
Again, one of the criteria for patents is that the invention must be nonobvious.
Copyright covers an expression of an idea, patent covers an implementation of an idea.
Completely wrong. Patents are there to protect inventions. A novel algorithm can be an invention.
When one writes software, one is not inventing something.
Only if you are an incompetent programmer. A talented programmer will invent things regularly. Are you saying that, say, the Google PageRank algorithm is not an invention? The dictionary definition of "invention" is "a new device, method, or process developed from study and experimentation". A novel algorithm is certainly an invention.
Software is a simple mathmatical process.
It's not simple, and it's not mathematical. A programmer might use mathematics to analyze some aspect of an algorithm, but algorithms in general are no more mathematical than electronic circuits or mechanical devices. An algorithm can be developed without any application of mathematics.
At most one might be working out the solution to a difficult math problem with a complex algorithm.
Let's use Google PageRank as an example. What difficult math problem are you solving, and why is it a math problem?
There is nothing special about software that should not permit patenting. Lots of products are covered both by copyright and patents. Copyright law does not provide protection for ideas; it only provides protection for a particular expression of an idea. Only patents can protect novel ideas. Patents can clearly serve a purpose for software, which is why they are allowed.
The real problem here is the USPTO failing to follow its own rules. It's as much a problem with software as with anything else; it's just that there are more individuals and small companies developing software, so the issue gets more attention. There are plenty of algorithms which rightly deserve to be patentable. Things like public-key encryption, many of the compression algorithms, and so on.
Not really, considering that in China, a 1kW rating for a power supply apparently means it can supply 400W of actual power. Seriously. Look at the tests Tom's Hardware did on some power supplies. Few of the 500W units could do more than 350W without blowing up. You probably don't want to put more than 200W of load on the things if you want the outputs to be stable.
Just for reference, a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 with 1GB of RAM and a single 7200 RPM hard drive draws a maximum of about 120W at full load. With a really power-hungry videocard, that might go up to 200W. However, one has to use a power supply with a rating of at least 400W. Why? Because the cheap PC power supplies are poorly engineered pieces of junk with seriously inflated ratings.
Well, if you aren't playing games on it, there is little chance of it overheating. Heat is produced when the CPU is heavily loaded. If it's just sitting there idle, it won't dissipate a whole lot of power.
Actually, I am an engineer. In the telecom industry. Working for a Cisco competitor.
Ah. So we should be fanless, then. Show me the fanless Ciscos.
You pointed out yourself that they have fewer fans. Obviously, entirely passive cooling is impossible.
Sure. It's all there. I can monitor fan speeds, chassis temperatures, individual temperatures on all four CPUs, and individual temperatures on all ten disks. What's your point?
Are they actually monitored? Are you going to get advance warning before something dies? Unless you rig up an elaborate monitoring system, this is not a standard feature in a PC. Not to mention, if you have ten disks, the MTBF on those is going to be rather low. There's a good reason routers don't have disks.
Yep. All fans specified as hot-swap.
What chassis do you use? Because I have never seen a rackmount PC that can have its fans replaced without pulling it out.
Lick my sack. I could lose that much from a *single sale* if I was down for an hour. As in *one of hundreds*.
Yeah, right. It's pretty obvious you are still in college. Either that or you like to play russian roulette with your network.
After about a year of uptime, one of my Ciscos starts showing rather bizarre behavior which can only be solved by a reboot.
Yeah, well, my Linux routers show bizzare behavior like that about once a month. And I have to say, you must be the only person with such bad luck. Everyone I've talked to says it's very rare to have a router die. PCs die all the time.
Then when one of your interface cards from Cisco failed, your sales department would have to kiss my ass about the service interruption.
When one of those PCs dies, your ass is out of there. Just wait until the executives find out you've been cheaping out on critical network infrastructure.
Do you even know what the fuck you are talking about? Sounds like you've never seen anything other than the toy Cisco routers you picked up at the local surplus auction. Have you heard of the 7600 series, perchance? Or even visited Cisco's website? The higher-end routers can do something like 240 Gbps. No PC can even do a tenth of that.
As I said, standard 32-bit 33MHz PCI cannot even handle gigabit ethernet. The maximum theoretical burst transfer rate is only 133MBps, and that's shared between the network card and all other PCI cards. And the CPU sure as hell is a bottleneck -- just how fast do you think it can talk to the PCI bus? Sure, with a high-end machine you might be able to service one or two gigabit interfaces, but that's still in the "low-end router" area. Not to mention, that machine will be working rather hard.
Yeah, but can you afford the downtime caused by unreliable equipment? As I said, a $50 WRT54G can do almost everything a $5000 Cisco can. The problem is, it can't do it reliably.
Uh, dude, Cisco makes more than 15-year-old low-end shit. Yeah, their really-cheap, really-low-end stuff is a bit more expensive than the competition. But try making a PC route 30 or 40 1-gigabit fiber interfaces like some of the midrange ciscos, and you'll quickly see why Cisco is still in business. The standard PC architecture is not capable of servicing even a single gigabit interface unless you use PCI-X, and even then the CPU is a major bottleneck. Doing more than a couple is impossible.
As a comparison, many of my servers have 6-14 fans, in redundant push-pull pairs. To make it better, if a fan dies, the rest of the fans SPEED UP to compensate.
Sure, because having 14 unreliable fans is better than quality components and proper thermal analysis and engineering. The problem is, fans suck in lots of dust. Which then tends make things worse. Not to mention, what kind of alarm alerts you that the fans are dying? Would you know if a PC started overheating due to, say, dust accumulation or a slowed-down fan? Can you swap out the fans without powering down the machine?
If I don't have a spare for each sitting on a shelf, I can drive three blocks and have a temporary replacement for the PC in twenty minutes
I think it's pretty obvious you don't work at a serious company. In a company with 1500 employees, a total network outage for one hour will cost more than $75,000 just in lost employee productivity. The actual cost will be much greater. You don't have time to fuck around for an hour or two while the network is down. And guess what, if the main router goes down, the whole network goes down. Let's see, you saved $2,000 on equipment and caused hundreds of thousand bucks' worth of damage. Sounds like a great tradeoff.
The 3+ year uptimes on a dozen machines that I had to kill just to move them to a different facility was just an illusion.
Just the fact that you consider a 3-year uptime to be something exceptional speaks volumes about the general unreliability of PCs. For a router, an uptime of 5 years is not particularly amazing. Most off-the-shelf Dells fail within two years or so -- either a fan, a hard drive, or something else. How many machines have you had that ran for 5 years without a reboot while working hard the whole time?
Yes, occasionally, ethernet cards *do* fail. But so do t3 cards.
Just don't say that at the interview if you ever want to work in a real-world IT department. You would _not_ be hired.
As for "suspect hardware", are you telling me that Cisco's fans, power supplies, and network modules aren't just as susceptible to failure as a regular server?
I work at a telecom manufacturer that competes with Cisco. I guarantee you that we do a hell of a lot more engineering, testing, and quality control on our units than any cheap Intel server manufacturer ever did. Most of the white-box server manufacturers just buy cheap Chinese-designed crap for power supplies, fans, motherboards, and so on, with no real quality control, testing, or engineering involved.
Our units all have multiple fans for reliability, all sorts of temperature sensors and alarms, hot-swap support, and so on. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. For example, every component from every manufacturer is thoroughly tested by an in-house lab for meeting the specs, reliability, and so on. Every defective warranty return gets a postmortem to determine the cause of failure. You would not believe how much time and money is spent on testing the firmware before it gets released. There is a lot of work that goes into putting out a dependable product, and that's the first place corners get cut when someone tries to do stuff cheaply.
Sure, there is a high-end where a white-box PC won't handle it. But for any job that a white-box *can* handle, it will be VASTLY cheaper than a Cisco.
Yeah, well a Linksys router is vastly cheaper than a Cisco, too. The problem is, it's not very dependable. And neither is a white-box PC. You can have as many hot spares as you want, but it won't help much if the box craps out and you aren't right there to switch it over. I suppose it would work if you can tolerate a few one-hour outages a year, but most places need their network 24/7. Buying good-quality equipment is cheap insurance.
Uh, dude, a USB controller would be lucky to push 50 megabits. And that's with horrible latency and lots of lost packets. Converting high-speed network interfaces to USB would also be dog-slow and expensive. You might have a shot with PCI. The main problem is the lack of suitable software, and the bottleneck the CPU would create. And, of course, the complete lack of reliability. There is no way a standard PC will give you 99.99% uptime. You would be much better-off going out and buying a router from a Cisco competitor, they do exist.
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Uh, no. Republican bias = favoring large corporations, at least when it comes to commercial matters. Let's not forget that it was the Reagan administration that created this entire problem by widening the scope of patents.
I don't think bluetooth has enough bandwidth to make hi-fi phones possible. The DAC and amplifiers aren't a huge problem, the main problem would be an appropriate processor chip and the batteries and power supply circuit. And, of course, this would be an extremely niche product, so it would cost a fuckton.
Actually, any decent headphones should be flat down to 20Hz. The problem is, the ears can't hear sub-bass very well, you mostly perceive it with your body. Also, computer soundcards can't drive headphones with frequencies that low because they have shitty AC-coupled amplifiers with cheap tiny electrolytic capacitors. I just tested my soundblaster live, and it distorts horribly below 60Hz, even at low volumes. There is a reason nobody in their right mind builds audio amplifiers with AC-coupled outputs.
You do realize you can easily open the things without cutting anything? They are hotglued and you can open them by simply prying the housings open with a spoon. Google for the exact procedure. Also, the SR40 is a cheapass model and should be avoided; it's not the same design as the other Grado headphones. The SR60 is the cheapest one worth getting.
Have you tried adjusting the headband? It's made of a springy steel and can be adjusted for your head size. I can wear my pair all day comfortably after bending it a little, they do come a little too tight from the factory.
Doubt it. The Supreme Court usually makes a determination with as narrow a scope as possible. Not to mention, the court now has an extreme Republican bias, so there's about a 90% chance they will rule in favor of the patent holder in this case.
Agreed. Sennheiser is quite overhyped, and the stuff under $300 is pretty much circuit city quality -- OK, but not great. The Grados are fairly cheap, sound pretty damn good, and are much more comfortable to use.
Why should that even matter? Want to improve your Google ranking? Pay for some advertisements. Othwerise, you have no right to complain when they remove your crappy index-polluting site from their search engine.
Digital circuits operate entirely on the principle of mathematical logic and their functions have no meaning without that logic.
Bullshit. Digital circuits operate according to electronic principles, not boolean logic. After all, a combinational digital logic gate is generally a variant of a poorly-behaved op-amp. Math just gives a few ways to model, synthesize, and improve these circuits.
Anything that manipulates numbers as an abstract representation of something of "things" be they physical or otherwise is math.
Well, an analog amplifier manipulates numbers too, in its own representation. If an ideal amplifier has a gain of 12dB, the output will always be equal to four times the input. If your amplifier has variable gain, you just built yourself a multiplier. There are analog circuits that will do just about any operation, and you can model any analog circuit mathematically. Yet, these are still patentable.
Algorithms are mathmatical constructs
How is, say, selection sort a mathematical construct? People perform this algorithm manually when they sort just about anything. It existed long before the word "computer" was coined.
Most informed individuals do not agree with software patents. Those who do agree with them are typically employed by or own software firms and therefore have a conflict on interest in the debate.
Those who do not agree with them typically are also employed by software firms (or develop software on their own), and also have a conflict of interest. Really, it's a case of people who do not have any patents getting pissed off at those who do. The only legitimate argument I can see is that the USPTO is doing a very poor job of verifying a patent's novelty and usefulness, but that's true across the board. There are just as many bad patents getting granted outside the software business, and it's a problem that needs to be remedied.
Without software patents this particular type of business would be deterimentally impacted while the rest of the industry and software development in general would benefit.
Would you bother investing money into researching and developing new algorithms if your competitors can reverse engineer your software and use them for free? This is especially relevant for things like compilers and some EDA software. Or what if you develop a revolutionary new approach to doing something? Why would patents not be helpful in these situations?
Whatever, dude. Kids don't need dumbed-down shit. I learned how to use DOS when I was 6 years old, and it didn't even seem very difficult. You could give a child a linux shell prompt, show him how to do basic things, and watch him figure out the rest. People get stupider as they get older, not vice versa. Making it super-easy to use doesn't need to be a huge priority, it just needs to be capable of doing useful things.
The main problem with computers these days is they are overly complicated and opaque. In Windows or Linux, something simple is usually buried under hundreds of layers of abstraction. This is what makes computers complicated. As long as the laptop people keep it really simple and don't try to hide the computer from the user, it should be very accessible for kids.
With all that said, I'm still not entirely sure what the point of this is. Without Internet connectivity, a computer is pretty useless. That money would be much better spent investing in better teachers, textbooks, and school facilities. If anything, computers will reduce student achivement, because students will screw around instead of learning. Computers mainly breed game addiction, calculator dependence, and laziness; there is nothing useful they can do for learning.
Well, you'll get to watch it, just not in the maximum resolution. It will still be better than standard DVD quality, but not by much. In any case, I think regular low-definition TV is good enough for 90% of the people out there, and that this won't be an issue.
10% unemployment is not that bad if there isn't a lot of underemployment and miscounting like there is in the US. The US has an artificially low unemployment rate because the labor department doesn't count all people who are not employed, just the ones recently laid off. They also do not take underemployment into account: someone who works retail or fast food just because they can't find work in his/her profession is considered fully employed. This can give rather misleading numbers.
Except that 99.9% of software ideas require no investment and thus no protection.
Really? You are effectively saying that software ideas materialize out of thin air and do not take any time or money to develop and market. Your assertion is rather absurd.
In any case there is nothing special about software that should permit patenting.
There is nothing special about business methods, pharmaceuticals, mechanical inventions, electronic circuits, and product designs, either. Yet they are all eligible for patent protection.
I have the idea of opening the first hardware store in a small town.
For an invention to be patentable, it must be new and nonobvious. Your example satisfies neither of these criteria and is therefore not patentable. Strawman arguments will not get you very far.
There is no scientific evidence for patents being of any benefit at all in software and a lot of anecdotal evidence saying the opposite.
There is no scientific evidence patents provide benefits in any other fields. In fact, it's not something that can be determined scientifically, since it is impossible to conduct the appropriate experiments.
Most of these were incrementally developed over long periods of time by many people with the "inventors" only putting the final piece in the puzzle.
Again, one of the criteria for patents is that the invention must be nonobvious.
Copyright covers an expression of an idea, patent covers an implementation of an idea.
Completely wrong. Patents are there to protect inventions. A novel algorithm can be an invention.
When one writes software, one is not inventing something.
Only if you are an incompetent programmer. A talented programmer will invent things regularly. Are you saying that, say, the Google PageRank algorithm is not an invention? The dictionary definition of "invention" is "a new device, method, or process developed from study and experimentation". A novel algorithm is certainly an invention.
Software is a simple mathmatical process.
It's not simple, and it's not mathematical. A programmer might use mathematics to analyze some aspect of an algorithm, but algorithms in general are no more mathematical than electronic circuits or mechanical devices. An algorithm can be developed without any application of mathematics.
At most one might be working out the solution to a difficult math problem with a complex algorithm.
Let's use Google PageRank as an example. What difficult math problem are you solving, and why is it a math problem?
There is nothing special about software that should not permit patenting. Lots of products are covered both by copyright and patents. Copyright law does not provide protection for ideas; it only provides protection for a particular expression of an idea. Only patents can protect novel ideas. Patents can clearly serve a purpose for software, which is why they are allowed.
The real problem here is the USPTO failing to follow its own rules. It's as much a problem with software as with anything else; it's just that there are more individuals and small companies developing software, so the issue gets more attention. There are plenty of algorithms which rightly deserve to be patentable. Things like public-key encryption, many of the compression algorithms, and so on.
Not really, considering that in China, a 1kW rating for a power supply apparently means it can supply 400W of actual power. Seriously. Look at the tests Tom's Hardware did on some power supplies. Few of the 500W units could do more than 350W without blowing up. You probably don't want to put more than 200W of load on the things if you want the outputs to be stable.
Just for reference, a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 with 1GB of RAM and a single 7200 RPM hard drive draws a maximum of about 120W at full load. With a really power-hungry videocard, that might go up to 200W. However, one has to use a power supply with a rating of at least 400W. Why? Because the cheap PC power supplies are poorly engineered pieces of junk with seriously inflated ratings.
Well, if you aren't playing games on it, there is little chance of it overheating. Heat is produced when the CPU is heavily loaded. If it's just sitting there idle, it won't dissipate a whole lot of power.
It's obvious that you're not an engineer.
Actually, I am an engineer. In the telecom industry. Working for a Cisco competitor.
Ah. So we should be fanless, then. Show me the fanless Ciscos.
You pointed out yourself that they have fewer fans. Obviously, entirely passive cooling is impossible.
Sure. It's all there. I can monitor fan speeds, chassis temperatures, individual temperatures on all four CPUs, and individual temperatures on all ten disks. What's your point?
Are they actually monitored? Are you going to get advance warning before something dies? Unless you rig up an elaborate monitoring system, this is not a standard feature in a PC. Not to mention, if you have ten disks, the MTBF on those is going to be rather low. There's a good reason routers don't have disks.
Yep. All fans specified as hot-swap.
What chassis do you use? Because I have never seen a rackmount PC that can have its fans replaced without pulling it out.
Lick my sack. I could lose that much from a *single sale* if I was down for an hour. As in *one of hundreds*.
Yeah, right. It's pretty obvious you are still in college. Either that or you like to play russian roulette with your network.
After about a year of uptime, one of my Ciscos starts showing rather bizarre behavior which can only be solved by a reboot.
Yeah, well, my Linux routers show bizzare behavior like that about once a month. And I have to say, you must be the only person with such bad luck. Everyone I've talked to says it's very rare to have a router die. PCs die all the time.
Then when one of your interface cards from Cisco failed, your sales department would have to kiss my ass about the service interruption.
When one of those PCs dies, your ass is out of there. Just wait until the executives find out you've been cheaping out on critical network infrastructure.
You are mistaken. Apple cores will degrade quite rapidly if you bury them. Hell, you will probably even get an apple tree in that spot.
Do you even know what the fuck you are talking about? Sounds like you've never seen anything other than the toy Cisco routers you picked up at the local surplus auction. Have you heard of the 7600 series, perchance? Or even visited Cisco's website? The higher-end routers can do something like 240 Gbps. No PC can even do a tenth of that.
As I said, standard 32-bit 33MHz PCI cannot even handle gigabit ethernet. The maximum theoretical burst transfer rate is only 133MBps, and that's shared between the network card and all other PCI cards. And the CPU sure as hell is a bottleneck -- just how fast do you think it can talk to the PCI bus? Sure, with a high-end machine you might be able to service one or two gigabit interfaces, but that's still in the "low-end router" area. Not to mention, that machine will be working rather hard.
Yeah, but can you afford the downtime caused by unreliable equipment? As I said, a $50 WRT54G can do almost everything a $5000 Cisco can. The problem is, it can't do it reliably.
Uh, dude, Cisco makes more than 15-year-old low-end shit. Yeah, their really-cheap, really-low-end stuff is a bit more expensive than the competition. But try making a PC route 30 or 40 1-gigabit fiber interfaces like some of the midrange ciscos, and you'll quickly see why Cisco is still in business. The standard PC architecture is not capable of servicing even a single gigabit interface unless you use PCI-X, and even then the CPU is a major bottleneck. Doing more than a couple is impossible.
As a comparison, many of my servers have 6-14 fans, in redundant push-pull pairs. To make it better, if a fan dies, the rest of the fans SPEED UP to compensate.
Sure, because having 14 unreliable fans is better than quality components and proper thermal analysis and engineering. The problem is, fans suck in lots of dust. Which then tends make things worse. Not to mention, what kind of alarm alerts you that the fans are dying? Would you know if a PC started overheating due to, say, dust accumulation or a slowed-down fan? Can you swap out the fans without powering down the machine?
If I don't have a spare for each sitting on a shelf, I can drive three blocks and have a temporary replacement for the PC in twenty minutes
I think it's pretty obvious you don't work at a serious company. In a company with 1500 employees, a total network outage for one hour will cost more than $75,000 just in lost employee productivity. The actual cost will be much greater. You don't have time to fuck around for an hour or two while the network is down. And guess what, if the main router goes down, the whole network goes down. Let's see, you saved $2,000 on equipment and caused hundreds of thousand bucks' worth of damage. Sounds like a great tradeoff.
The 3+ year uptimes on a dozen machines that I had to kill just to move them to a different facility was just an illusion.
Just the fact that you consider a 3-year uptime to be something exceptional speaks volumes about the general unreliability of PCs. For a router, an uptime of 5 years is not particularly amazing. Most off-the-shelf Dells fail within two years or so -- either a fan, a hard drive, or something else. How many machines have you had that ran for 5 years without a reboot while working hard the whole time?
Yes, occasionally, ethernet cards *do* fail. But so do t3 cards.
Just don't say that at the interview if you ever want to work in a real-world IT department. You would _not_ be hired.
As for "suspect hardware", are you telling me that Cisco's fans, power supplies, and network modules aren't just as susceptible to failure as a regular server?
I work at a telecom manufacturer that competes with Cisco. I guarantee you that we do a hell of a lot more engineering, testing, and quality control on our units than any cheap Intel server manufacturer ever did. Most of the white-box server manufacturers just buy cheap Chinese-designed crap for power supplies, fans, motherboards, and so on, with no real quality control, testing, or engineering involved.
Our units all have multiple fans for reliability, all sorts of temperature sensors and alarms, hot-swap support, and so on. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. For example, every component from every manufacturer is thoroughly tested by an in-house lab for meeting the specs, reliability, and so on. Every defective warranty return gets a postmortem to determine the cause of failure. You would not believe how much time and money is spent on testing the firmware before it gets released. There is a lot of work that goes into putting out a dependable product, and that's the first place corners get cut when someone tries to do stuff cheaply.
Sure, there is a high-end where a white-box PC won't handle it. But for any job that a white-box *can* handle, it will be VASTLY cheaper than a Cisco.
Yeah, well a Linksys router is vastly cheaper than a Cisco, too. The problem is, it's not very dependable. And neither is a white-box PC. You can have as many hot spares as you want, but it won't help much if the box craps out and you aren't right there to switch it over. I suppose it would work if you can tolerate a few one-hour outages a year, but most places need their network 24/7. Buying good-quality equipment is cheap insurance.
Uh, dude, a USB controller would be lucky to push 50 megabits. And that's with horrible latency and lots of lost packets. Converting high-speed network interfaces to USB would also be dog-slow and expensive. You might have a shot with PCI. The main problem is the lack of suitable software, and the bottleneck the CPU would create. And, of course, the complete lack of reliability. There is no way a standard PC will give you 99.99% uptime. You would be much better-off going out and buying a router from a Cisco competitor, they do exist.