Aside from the problems mentioned here, there's also the other issue that as soon as they exposed/permitted the native core instructions to be used, people would use them and they'd have to support them forever.
(Disclaimer: I don't know that much about chip design, and some bits of the next paragraph may be misleading, half-remembered or misrepresent Intel's motives.)
IIRC, during the x86's long development (or mutation), Intel added some features because they could, and because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Some of those features were never much used, or turned out to be not such a good idea, or were rendered mostly irrelevant by design changes in the next generation. Still, once they'd been included they had to support them for evermore, because they couldn't risk breaking compatibility with code that *did* use them.
Now, I assume that the current chips' RISC cores was designed because it suits Intel's current way of implementing the x86-emulation/execution (and as the other guy said, wasn't designed for end-user/program use). If Intel come up with a smart, new and totally different design/architecture, the way things stand, they could simply replace it with a different core that used different microcode instructions, and change the x86 "wrapper".
If Intel had exposed the microcode of the previous generation, they'd either have to stick with the old core architecture, or include it as emulation. Except because it was emulated, it probably wouldn't run as fast, and old (i.e. *existing*) programs that used the old microcode would probably run slower on the new chips. So they'd be forced to stick with the old architecture.
(Essentially it's the hybrid software/hardware equivalent of (e.g.) someone exposing the implementation details of a Java class simply because they "can" or "someone might want to use it". If in future they want to redesign that class in a more efficient manner, they have to worry about code that used the old implementation's internal workings.)
All because they exposed some microcode functionality which wasn't even meant to be anything more than a "black box" implementation detail- unsuitable for general use- in the first place.
Only 5,000 of these headphones can be made in a year... OR ELSE
Typical conversation in Sennheiser's production department:
Dr. Agonball: "Herr Schneider, what does accounting say about this year's HD 800 production?"
Herr Schneider: "It's over FIVE THOUSAAAAAAAND!" (Crushes $4000 MP3 player)
Dr. Agonball: "WHAT?! FIVE THOUSAND?!"
Would it have really been that difficult to just respond like, "He is no longer with us. No comment...in other news, employees should not falsify or abuse their expense accounts.
IANAL (matter of fact, I'm not even an American), but if they'd phrased it in that or a similar manner where the underlying implication was blatant, would it make any difference to saying it outright?
what if your reaction is "this looks and sounds like ass" ?
What if your reaction is
(1) "Yeah, this is pretty good, but hardly the revolutionary work the summary makes it out to be", then
(2) "Are mashups really the future of music or in truth the *present* of music that's going to look as dated as hippyesque flower power and 'so 2000s' in ten years time?"... and then later on
(3) "This story- and the way it's presented here- is quite Digg-esque, isn't it?"
Multiply this problem by the hundreds of millions of people with crap eyesight, and you begin to see why high-def is a non-starter.
That in itself isn't a good argument; it's not whether there are a lot of people with crap eyesight, it's whether there are enough people with good eyesight- and who care enough to buy the high-def stuff. If they're a significant minority- or a majority- then hi-def can't be ruled out solely on that basis.
Even seven or so years ago I was able to get acceptable quality 128mbps *fixed-rate* MP3s (using notlame) that were noticably better than the stereotypically bad 128mbps downloads. (More here).
The years between 1960 and 1980 are not worth talking about. Especially the 1970s. Other than a few classics like the Godfather, I can not find any redeeming value in 1970s cinema.
That's odd; I'm not into films myself, but I understand that the late-60s to the mid-70s are considered a golden age of cinema by some.
Another way to get that high frequency "kick" is to listen to a cassette recorded with Dolby noise reduction on a desk which doesn't support it (or has it switched off);-)
I read something recently which observed that people who were used to playing back Dolby-ised cassettes through non-Dolby equipment (or leaving Dolby playback turned off) preferred the heightened-treble sound.
Speaking as someone who grew up with a cheapass Dolbyless cassette deck, I can kind of confirm this. I never noticed anything wrong with my prerecorded tapes, and when I did have access to a system with Dolby B I noticed that playback sounded duller with it on (and minus the incorrectly-heightened treble I was used to, of course).
This is like an older version of the phenomenon that the article describes. Though I can't quite get how MP3 degradation is preferred; that's more akin to cassette hiss which (unlike the Dolby treble) I could live with but never actually liked...
A counter-example is the Beatles Let It Be...Naked release, which was produced and engineered by a younger staff on Pro-Tools. It sounds different and is often criticized by the generation familiar with the vintage releases.
At least one person has argued that Let It Be Naked isn't the album as it was "originally intended", but is historical revisionism led by Paul McCartney, and that many of the songs were never intended to be quite *that* stripped down in the first place. That might explain it as well.
And vinyl sales continue to climb past CD sales every year.
Vinyl sales...greater than CD sales? Pass me whatever you're smoking, please.
I'm guessing what he meant was that vinyl sales are climbing at a rate that threatens to pass CD. Which is still bollocks.
I suspect that he's looked at the vinyl market, which has undergone a bit of a revival recently- and has assumed that he can extrapolate that relatively steep but small and localised section of the sales curve.
Then he's compared it to CD sales, noted where the extrapolated curves meet and thought that "OMG! Vinyl sales have increased 25% [or whatever] in the past year and CD sales are declining slowly, at this rate vinyl will pass CD in x years".
Which ignores the fact that vinyl was tiny to start off with, and the dynamics of its niche market are likely more volatile than CDs' (hence you can't extrapolate those small scale curves to a CD-sized market).
The recent growth isn't really spurred by any factor which is likely to apply to the mass market, so while it's nice that more people are using vinyl, this success won't really scale up. The tide is already turning against CDs, not because people are sick of digital and going back to analogue in the main- though that's what's probably spurring the niche vinyl revival- but because they're turning to non-physical downloadable formats. And from that perspective, vinyl is in the same boat as CDs.
I would take a lower quality mp3 on my higher end gear over the higher end CD track on a lower end stereo system.
Yeah, but isn't your expensive system just going to show up the defects in a crappy MP3 in every pristine detail and thus get on your tits whereas the cheap one's ropiness is (ironically) more likely to cover them up?
Maybe it is more...if you grow up listening to nothing but crap (low audio quality or low quality music ON low quality audio), then that is all you know, and generally will pick it over something that quality-wise is superior.
Sad thing is that I've come across tracks I liked on YouTube which had low-dynamic range mono sound, and I listened to them so often that I got used to it, so that when I got the full-quality version I preferred the "YouTube mix" for quite some time (and kind of still do in one case).
Yeah, I noticed that the article linked via the original post (which was made by you, thanks!) mentioned that the (un-)helpful BIOS protection was a problem.
Kids' ears already ruined by in-ear drivers and iPods with enough power to deafen you (thanks, Steve) are probably already hearing-impaired at 16, if not earlier.
This was already a known concern that my teachers were pointing out 20 years ago when I was at secondary school and everyone was going around with cassette Walkmans at full volume.
It'd be interesting to test out those people's hearing today...
MP3-320 may be better than MP3-128, but it's generally overkill. Most people's impression of the quality of 128kbps MP3s comes from the era where most MP3s weren't encoded with VBR.
I don't think that even fixed bitrate 128 mbps is inherently quite as bad as people used to claim. I understand where it got this reputation, because I've listened to downloaded 128 mbps MP3s (*) which are quite clearly compressed with artifacting, etc. and demonstrate why some people used it as the benchmark for convenience-over-quality music.
Yet I encoded stuff for myself at 128mbps fixed-rate around the same time, and it sounds miles better. It's still not hifi, but the difference in quality is noticable.
Why? Good question. It's possible that the crappy downloaded MP3s had been re-encoded, but it's more likely that they were simply done using a low-quality encoder. I used notlame, which was supposedly one of the better ones. IIRC a few years back, the quality of encoders *did* vary quite a bit. Nowadays I'm guessing that the ones in use are much better and much closer in performance- not to mention that higher bitrates and use of VBR make any differences less obvious.
Back to the point; you won't get hifi at 128mbps, but neither should you damn it completely by the quality of a mislabelled MP3 you downloaded from Napster in 1999.
(*) Downloaded via, erm... "non-favoured" channels circa 2001 when most people still used fixed-rate 128mbps.
You could be charitable and assume he's just missed a zero off the end...
You're right; after I'd posted that I realised that I kneejerk responded to what was probably an honest mistake.
It didn't help that I was already somewhat sceptical about his claim that the Apple II was "huge" in the UK. I felt (and still feel) that this was somewhat misleading, although on the smaller scale of an earlier era (pre-Spectrum/C64/PC) and in the field he was working in, he may have had a case. However, I still see no evidence that the Apple II was popular in the same large-scale way that (apparently) it was in the states, and it was certainly never a mass market machine in the way that the later 8-bits were.
most people can't detect changes faster than 1/30th of a second, much less 1/60th.
I'd question that. With PAL at least, traditional interlaced analogue video "looks" different to film in part because movement is updated 50 times a second (albeit per half-frame or field) rather than film's 24/25 fps.
I doubt that 30fps is so much more than 25 that it's indistinguishable from 50 or 60 fields-per-second video, so I'd dispute your assertion.
Your reply was in part directed to the wrong person. If you go back and look at my post, you'll see that the only parts I wrote were "[citation needed]" after indented quotations from the grandparent and the parent post respectively.
Both made blanket statements without any backup, and if you want to see my questioning of that as "trolling", that's your problem.
I personally think that some of your views are overly idealistic. Stuff like
In the coming centuries, copyright will disappear like other out-dated modes of thinking such as Imaginary Property Rights, as people spiritually grow up to the idea that their true value is in what they can give to others, not what they can get from others.
Sorry, but I don't think we're ever going to achieve that Star Trek: The Next Generation style ideal. Maybe we'll get some of the way there, but if we don't have copyright, we'll need to find some other way of rewarding intellectual effort.
It might work for music and such, but expecting people to carry out the more mundane but necessary work for the good of the people is... no offence, but it's not that far from communism and exhibits the same problem of relying on *expecting* (not hoping) that people will behave in the way that the system requires.
If you want to do the dull-as-f*** future equivalent of an administrative office job while I get to be a musician and sleep with lots of pretty girls, that's your choice. Perhaps we won't have such mundane rubbish in the future anyway? I hope not, but I'm not relying on it.
Copyright or whatever replaces it will probably have to change to suit the age we're moving into, but the necessity for it or something like it will remain, whatever the flaws of the current implementation. ST:TNG isn't that practical a basis for a future society.
I remember reading somewhere that the "glass is a liquid that flows" thing was a myth; unfortunately, I don't have the URL, so moving on...
I've heard a figure of something like 10 years for reliable storage of data on flash memory. Again, I don't have the **** link, and this may change as the technology advances anyway. But it doesn't sound like a fantastic long-term bet.
Somewhat grudgingly as someone who dislikes waste, I have to agree with you; a lot of this stuff isn't worth the hassle of keeping and trying to use unless you actually have some interest in and affection for it (e.g. wouldn't dream of throwing out my old 8-bit Atari computers). Giving it away to someone else to offset one's guilt when the hardware is *really* obsolete isn't necessarily doing them a favour either (unless you're quite clear what they're going to do with it).
Part of me wonders what would happen if some unspecified shit hit the fan in a few years time and we'd be grateful for all this "old" and "useless" computer stuff we're throwing out. And there's the similar "some people would be grateful for this".
But that really brings the discussion round to what "old" is. The 40GB drive described above is small by modern standards, but not uselessly so and certainly not obsolete.
OTOH, there are likely still so many genuinely *really* old computers (better part of a decade) out there in yellowing beige boxes that anyone who wanted one would probably be able to get them for free, simply for taking them as many of them as possible off the owners' hands.
Using them you'd realise that you could get a much newer secondhand computer that was miles better for very little. Or upgrading the old computer would be way more expensive than doing the same with a modern PC. (Example; my Dad has an old PC. The graphics card and a hard drive recently failed. AGP 4x cards are pretty rare nowadays- fortunately an 8x one worked, but even AGP in general is quite rare now. Meanwhile, it was surprising how small the selection of readily-available IDE drives was, and how much more expensive the larger models were than their SATA counterparts. He got them anyway, but he kind of understands why I said that past a certain point it makes more sense just to get a new computer).
Keeping old computer equipment is supposedly useful for testing and diagnostics (swapping parts to find out which one is faulty), but even old IDE drives can't be used to test a modern SATA interface!
Slashdot Mirror
Aside from the problems mentioned here, there's also the other issue that as soon as they exposed/permitted the native core instructions to be used, people would use them and they'd have to support them forever .
(Disclaimer: I don't know that much about chip design, and some bits of the next paragraph may be misleading, half-remembered or misrepresent Intel's motives.)
IIRC, during the x86's long development (or mutation), Intel added some features because they could, and because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Some of those features were never much used, or turned out to be not such a good idea, or were rendered mostly irrelevant by design changes in the next generation. Still, once they'd been included they had to support them for evermore, because they couldn't risk breaking compatibility with code that *did* use them.
Now, I assume that the current chips' RISC cores was designed because it suits Intel's current way of implementing the x86-emulation/execution (and as the other guy said, wasn't designed for end-user/program use). If Intel come up with a smart, new and totally different design/architecture, the way things stand, they could simply replace it with a different core that used different microcode instructions, and change the x86 "wrapper".
If Intel had exposed the microcode of the previous generation, they'd either have to stick with the old core architecture, or include it as emulation. Except because it was emulated, it probably wouldn't run as fast, and old (i.e. *existing*) programs that used the old microcode would probably run slower on the new chips. So they'd be forced to stick with the old architecture.
(Essentially it's the hybrid software/hardware equivalent of (e.g.) someone exposing the implementation details of a Java class simply because they "can" or "someone might want to use it". If in future they want to redesign that class in a more efficient manner, they have to worry about code that used the old implementation's internal workings.)
All because they exposed some microcode functionality which wasn't even meant to be anything more than a "black box" implementation detail- unsuitable for general use- in the first place.
$1500 headphones are made. I'm interested in WHY $1500 headphones are made.
Because enough people buy them to make it worth Sennheiser's time.
Only 5,000 of these headphones can be made in a year... OR ELSE
Typical conversation in Sennheiser's production department:
Dr. Agonball: "Herr Schneider, what does accounting say about this year's HD 800 production?"
Herr Schneider: "It's over FIVE THOUSAAAAAAAND!" (Crushes $4000 MP3 player)
Dr. Agonball: "WHAT?! FIVE THOUSAND?!"
What makes pi so special? Support making February 71st e Day!
That would have caused hilarity when I was at school...
(The early 1990s called, they want their drug references back).
Unfortunately, we will never get a Pi day over here, as 3/14 doesn't exist.
What you do is you have (e.g.) Pi Day 2009 on the 3rd of February 2010 (since 14 = 12 + 2) :-)
Its also the anniversary of the summary execution of Jean-Charles De Menezes on a tube train.
execution of who?
Google isn't really your friend, it just pretends it is because you have lots of cool toys.
Back to the point; you won't get hifi at 128mbps
Of course not. 128mbps is 6 orders of magnitude worse than 128kbps.
You should get a prize... or rather, everyone else (myself included) for not spotting and pointing out that stupid mistake earlier :-)
I suspect that one bit every eight or nine seconds isn't going to give the highest quality audio. (^_^)
Would it have really been that difficult to just respond like, "He is no longer with us. No comment...in other news, employees should not falsify or abuse their expense accounts.
IANAL (matter of fact, I'm not even an American), but if they'd phrased it in that or a similar manner where the underlying implication was blatant, would it make any difference to saying it outright?
what if your reaction is "this looks and sounds like ass" ?
What if your reaction is
(1) "Yeah, this is pretty good, but hardly the revolutionary work the summary makes it out to be", then
(2) "Are mashups really the future of music or in truth the *present* of music that's going to look as dated as hippyesque flower power and 'so 2000s' in ten years time?"... and then later on
(3) "This story- and the way it's presented here- is quite Digg-esque, isn't it?"
Multiply this problem by the hundreds of millions of people with crap eyesight, and you begin to see why high-def is a non-starter.
That in itself isn't a good argument; it's not whether there are a lot of people with crap eyesight, it's whether there are enough people with good eyesight- and who care enough to buy the high-def stuff. If they're a significant minority- or a majority- then hi-def can't be ruled out solely on that basis.
Even seven or so years ago I was able to get acceptable quality 128mbps *fixed-rate* MP3s (using notlame) that were noticably better than the stereotypically bad 128mbps downloads. (More here).
The years between 1960 and 1980 are not worth talking about. Especially the 1970s. Other than a few classics like the Godfather, I can not find any redeeming value in 1970s cinema.
That's odd; I'm not into films myself, but I understand that the late-60s to the mid-70s are considered a golden age of cinema by some.
Another way to get that high frequency "kick" is to listen to a cassette recorded with Dolby noise reduction on a desk which doesn't support it (or has it switched off) ;-)
I read something recently which observed that people who were used to playing back Dolby-ised cassettes through non-Dolby equipment (or leaving Dolby playback turned off) preferred the heightened-treble sound.
Speaking as someone who grew up with a cheapass Dolbyless cassette deck, I can kind of confirm this. I never noticed anything wrong with my prerecorded tapes, and when I did have access to a system with Dolby B I noticed that playback sounded duller with it on (and minus the incorrectly-heightened treble I was used to, of course).
This is like an older version of the phenomenon that the article describes. Though I can't quite get how MP3 degradation is preferred; that's more akin to cassette hiss which (unlike the Dolby treble) I could live with but never actually liked...
A counter-example is the Beatles Let It Be...Naked release, which was produced and engineered by a younger staff on Pro-Tools. It sounds different and is often criticized by the generation familiar with the vintage releases.
At least one person has argued that Let It Be Naked isn't the album as it was "originally intended", but is historical revisionism led by Paul McCartney, and that many of the songs were never intended to be quite *that* stripped down in the first place. That might explain it as well.
And vinyl sales continue to climb past CD sales every year.
Vinyl sales...greater than CD sales? Pass me whatever you're smoking, please.
I'm guessing what he meant was that vinyl sales are climbing at a rate that threatens to pass CD. Which is still bollocks.
I suspect that he's looked at the vinyl market, which has undergone a bit of a revival recently- and has assumed that he can extrapolate that relatively steep but small and localised section of the sales curve.
Then he's compared it to CD sales, noted where the extrapolated curves meet and thought that "OMG! Vinyl sales have increased 25% [or whatever] in the past year and CD sales are declining slowly, at this rate vinyl will pass CD in x years".
Which ignores the fact that vinyl was tiny to start off with, and the dynamics of its niche market are likely more volatile than CDs' (hence you can't extrapolate those small scale curves to a CD-sized market).
The recent growth isn't really spurred by any factor which is likely to apply to the mass market, so while it's nice that more people are using vinyl, this success won't really scale up. The tide is already turning against CDs, not because people are sick of digital and going back to analogue in the main- though that's what's probably spurring the niche vinyl revival- but because they're turning to non-physical downloadable formats. And from that perspective, vinyl is in the same boat as CDs.
I would take a lower quality mp3 on my higher end gear over the higher end CD track on a lower end stereo system.
Yeah, but isn't your expensive system just going to show up the defects in a crappy MP3 in every pristine detail and thus get on your tits whereas the cheap one's ropiness is (ironically) more likely to cover them up?
Maybe it is more...if you grow up listening to nothing but crap (low audio quality or low quality music ON low quality audio), then that is all you know, and generally will pick it over something that quality-wise is superior.
Sad thing is that I've come across tracks I liked on YouTube which had low-dynamic range mono sound, and I listened to them so often that I got used to it, so that when I got the full-quality version I preferred the "YouTube mix" for quite some time (and kind of still do in one case).
Yeah, I noticed that the article linked via the original post (which was made by you, thanks!) mentioned that the (un-)helpful BIOS protection was a problem.
Can this be bypassed on all BIOSs?
Kids' ears already ruined by in-ear drivers and iPods with enough power to deafen you (thanks, Steve) are probably already hearing-impaired at 16, if not earlier.
This was already a known concern that my teachers were pointing out 20 years ago when I was at secondary school and everyone was going around with cassette Walkmans at full volume.
It'd be interesting to test out those people's hearing today...
MP3-320 may be better than MP3-128, but it's generally overkill. Most people's impression of the quality of 128kbps MP3s comes from the era where most MP3s weren't encoded with VBR.
I don't think that even fixed bitrate 128 mbps is inherently quite as bad as people used to claim. I understand where it got this reputation, because I've listened to downloaded 128 mbps MP3s (*) which are quite clearly compressed with artifacting, etc. and demonstrate why some people used it as the benchmark for convenience-over-quality music.
Yet I encoded stuff for myself at 128mbps fixed-rate around the same time, and it sounds miles better. It's still not hifi, but the difference in quality is noticable.
Why? Good question. It's possible that the crappy downloaded MP3s had been re-encoded, but it's more likely that they were simply done using a low-quality encoder. I used notlame, which was supposedly one of the better ones. IIRC a few years back, the quality of encoders *did* vary quite a bit. Nowadays I'm guessing that the ones in use are much better and much closer in performance- not to mention that higher bitrates and use of VBR make any differences less obvious.
Back to the point; you won't get hifi at 128mbps, but neither should you damn it completely by the quality of a mislabelled MP3 you downloaded from Napster in 1999.
(*) Downloaded via, erm... "non-favoured" channels circa 2001 when most people still used fixed-rate 128mbps.
You could be charitable and assume he's just missed a zero off the end...
You're right; after I'd posted that I realised that I kneejerk responded to what was probably an honest mistake.
It didn't help that I was already somewhat sceptical about his claim that the Apple II was "huge" in the UK. I felt (and still feel) that this was somewhat misleading, although on the smaller scale of an earlier era (pre-Spectrum/C64/PC) and in the field he was working in, he may have had a case. However, I still see no evidence that the Apple II was popular in the same large-scale way that (apparently) it was in the states, and it was certainly never a mass market machine in the way that the later 8-bits were.
most people can't detect changes faster than 1/30th of a second, much less 1/60th.
I'd question that. With PAL at least, traditional interlaced analogue video "looks" different to film in part because movement is updated 50 times a second (albeit per half-frame or field) rather than film's 24/25 fps.
I doubt that 30fps is so much more than 25 that it's indistinguishable from 50 or 60 fields-per-second video, so I'd dispute your assertion.
Both made blanket statements without any backup, and if you want to see my questioning of that as "trolling", that's your problem.
I personally think that some of your views are overly idealistic. Stuff like
In the coming centuries, copyright will disappear like other out-dated modes of thinking such as Imaginary Property Rights, as people spiritually grow up to the idea that their true value is in what they can give to others, not what they can get from others.
Sorry, but I don't think we're ever going to achieve that Star Trek: The Next Generation style ideal. Maybe we'll get some of the way there, but if we don't have copyright, we'll need to find some other way of rewarding intellectual effort.
It might work for music and such, but expecting people to carry out the more mundane but necessary work for the good of the people is... no offence, but it's not that far from communism and exhibits the same problem of relying on *expecting* (not hoping) that people will behave in the way that the system requires.
If you want to do the dull-as-f*** future equivalent of an administrative office job while I get to be a musician and sleep with lots of pretty girls, that's your choice. Perhaps we won't have such mundane rubbish in the future anyway? I hope not, but I'm not relying on it.
Copyright or whatever replaces it will probably have to change to suit the age we're moving into, but the necessity for it or something like it will remain, whatever the flaws of the current implementation. ST:TNG isn't that practical a basis for a future society.
I remember reading somewhere that the "glass is a liquid that flows" thing was a myth; unfortunately, I don't have the URL, so moving on...
I've heard a figure of something like 10 years for reliable storage of data on flash memory. Again, I don't have the **** link, and this may change as the technology advances anyway. But it doesn't sound like a fantastic long-term bet.
Somewhat grudgingly as someone who dislikes waste, I have to agree with you; a lot of this stuff isn't worth the hassle of keeping and trying to use unless you actually have some interest in and affection for it (e.g. wouldn't dream of throwing out my old 8-bit Atari computers). Giving it away to someone else to offset one's guilt when the hardware is *really* obsolete isn't necessarily doing them a favour either (unless you're quite clear what they're going to do with it).
Part of me wonders what would happen if some unspecified shit hit the fan in a few years time and we'd be grateful for all this "old" and "useless" computer stuff we're throwing out. And there's the similar "some people would be grateful for this".
But that really brings the discussion round to what "old" is. The 40GB drive described above is small by modern standards, but not uselessly so and certainly not obsolete.
OTOH, there are likely still so many genuinely *really* old computers (better part of a decade) out there in yellowing beige boxes that anyone who wanted one would probably be able to get them for free, simply for taking them as many of them as possible off the owners' hands.
Using them you'd realise that you could get a much newer secondhand computer that was miles better for very little. Or upgrading the old computer would be way more expensive than doing the same with a modern PC. (Example; my Dad has an old PC. The graphics card and a hard drive recently failed. AGP 4x cards are pretty rare nowadays- fortunately an 8x one worked, but even AGP in general is quite rare now. Meanwhile, it was surprising how small the selection of readily-available IDE drives was, and how much more expensive the larger models were than their SATA counterparts. He got them anyway, but he kind of understands why I said that past a certain point it makes more sense just to get a new computer).
Keeping old computer equipment is supposedly useful for testing and diagnostics (swapping parts to find out which one is faulty), but even old IDE drives can't be used to test a modern SATA interface!
I have many students in class that don't have them and could use a free one.
Trust me, they probably won't be impressed if you offer them a 120MB hard drive.