Check more often. I have 10mbit both at my apartment and at my office, on two different ISPs. The ISP serving my apartment will be offering 20mbit come fall. A few cable providers, particularly in FiOS areas, are offering 15+ already.
For most people, "smarter" means the AI does things that they didn't expect an AI to do, but would have done themselves if given the choice. It doesn't matter if that's a scripted behavior or if the AI actually "decided" to do it.
My company doesn't really give us workstations at all. We've got some early P4 IBMs that my department has been known to commandeer for our day-to-day use if needed (one of them became our tech server), but for the most part the tech department relies on personal laptops. As a small company (10 employees) we can't really afford high end hardware, and since all of our technicians have fairly powerful notebooks it just became normal for us to use our own gear. Due to my influence, we've pretty much standardized on Macintel hardware running XP and Debian through Parallels.
It's disorganized and would be an administrative nightmare for a larger company, but it works for us. I've got SSH and an X server when I need to work on any of our servers (all Debian), I've got Windows for the few times the web apps we have to use throw a fit under Firefox (damn Broadsoft), and the virtual Debian installs are very close to what's running on the server so we can test with ease.
How about another adapter to convert the existing premium systems output to HDMI? Yup...converting that analog-only output to digital sure has a point. There's a rumor going around that Microsoft would actually make such a thing and I think it's extremely absurd. No matter what plugs in to your TV, it's still coming out of the Xbox as analog so why the hell does it matter? These things if produced will be expensive (sampling HD video from analog and then encrypting it in real time won't come cheap) and will deliver absolutely no benefit.
You mean you can install PCI cards in a Mac? That's news to me. I have never seen a single piece of industry standard architecture inside a Mac and I doubt I ever will. Ha. Here's a partial list of standards and when they first appeared on a Mac: In parentheses is when the technology was introduced and optionally when it first widely adopted by PCs.
SCSI: Mac Plus, January 1986 (1986, immediately in servers, never on the desktop) 30 pin SIMM: Mac Plus, January 1986 72 pin SIMM: Mac LC III, Quadra/Centris 610/650/800, February 1993 (1987, early '90s) PCMCIA: Powerbook 520, May 1994 (1991, early '90s) IDE: Quadra 630, July 1994 (1994, late 80s in prestandard form) 168 pin DIMM: Power Mac 9500, May 1995 (unknown, mid-90s) PCI: Power Mac 9500, May 1995 (1993, mid-90s) SO-DIMM: Mainstreet/Wallstreet Powerbook, March 1998 CardBus: Mainstreet/Wallstreet Powerbook, March 1998 (1995, mid-to-late '90s) USB: iMac, August 1998 (1996, late-90s in to '00s) IEEE 1394: Power Mac G3 B&W, January 1999 (1995, still only found on higher-end PCs) AGP: Power Mac G4, September 1999 (1997, late '90s) DDR Memory: Xserve, May 2002 (unk, early '00s) IEEE 1394b: Power Mac G4, January 2003 (2003) PCI-X: Power Mac G5, June 2003 (1998, never caught on for desktops) USB 2.0: Power Mac G5, June 2003 (2001, early-to-mid '00s) Serial ATA: Power Mac G5, June 2003 (2003, mid '00s) PCI Express: Power Mac G5 Dual Core, October 2005 (2004, mid '00s) DDR2 Memory: iMac G5 w/ iSight, Power Mac G5 Dual Core, October 2005 (unk, mid '00s) ExpressCard: Macbook Pro, January 2006 (2003, mid '00s) FB-DIMM: Mac Pro, August 2006 (unk, mid-to-late 2006 for servers, likely never for desktops) MXM: iMac 24", September 2006 (2004, still rare)
That enough "standard architecture" for you? As of right now, everything but the motherboard formfactor is standard and generally some of the highest-end stuff you can find. Even before that, since the return of Jobs every major part which can be standard has been. Obviously during the PPC era there was no point in using a standard bus or socket since no one else really sold desktop PPC machines, but aside from the mobo and processor everything else was pretty much run of the mill and could be replaced with parts bought at any computer store.
I'm absolutely certain that my circa-1991 IBM PS/1 is completely supported by Linux. 25MHz 486SX, 20MB RAM, 129MB hard drive, and a 2400 baud modem in the ISA slot.
I'll trade you for whatever partially incompatible hardware you've got today, since you don't care about the specs.
In theory, you are correct. In practice, when I buy an OEM copy of Windows, it's up to my judgement to decide if I can rightfully transfer that copy to another PC. Windows Activation tends to say otherwise. I know in practice you can call up and claim any number of things like computer broke, stolen, etc., but from a licensing standpoint you aren't allowed to do that.
But with the Dell OEM copy, they don't really give you that option. They take that right away by not giving you a real install disk that will install on any hardware. You have the license to the software, it's perfectly legal to download a full install disc. You can easily find OEM-license full install discs online, or modify a retail/VLK disc to take OEM keys (it's one line in a config file).
I also happen to think that an OEM license is about as silly as selling someone a set of dishes but telling them they can only use those dishes on one specific table. But I digress. 100% agreed there.
Well, the price I quoted was for an OEM copy of the OS, which has the exact same transferability rights as the one you get from Dell, so the only difference there is having the install media.
Valid point, but future proofing can also help when dealing with broken components.
I'll concede that a computer in this price range is unlikely to be upgraded. In 3-4 years when it becomes too slow for Office Super Duper XXXP 2010 Platinum Edition to load up Word, the user would probably be more likely to just replace the machine with another $350-400 model.
Still, the knowledge that if anything in that computer breaks I would be able to go to ANY computer store in the world and buy a replacement part for at least the next 3-4 years is quite comforting. I guarantee that your S754 parts will be hard to find long before their useful life expires, so a dead part would lead to either replacing good parts just so you can buy new or possibly extended downtime as you search for compatible equipment on the used market.
It's worth noting, I guess, that for those not intending on buying a new OS along with their new hardware (transferring from an older machine, using Linux, etc) the pendulum obviously swings way back the other direction.
Here's the problem with that system: Not future proof
If I buy even the cheapest Dell, I'll be getting either an AM2-socket AMD or a LGA775-socket Intel. I'll also be getting PCI Express. There likely won't be a video card in the PCIe slot, but it'll be there.
With your configuration, I get a Socket 754 AMD chip and AGP, neither of which have any future at all. No new parts are coming out for either or even have for quite a while now.
Now, let's try this the right way.
For reference, here's a Dell Dimension C521, currently priced at $359 + $29.99 shipping + $26.26 Ohio Sales Tax = $415.25 AMD Sempron 3400+ Windows Vista Home Basic 512MB Single Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz - 1DIMM 80GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) 16X DVD-ROM Drive NVIDIA GeForce 6150 LE Integrated Graphics GPU Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio Dell USB Keyboard and Dell 2-button Scroll Mouse 56k Modem
My system, built from Newegg Powmax CP808PL-1 case with 450W PSU - $20.99 Sempron 3400+ - $69.99 DFI C51PV-M2/G Infinity - $93.99 --Provides GeForce 6150 Integrated Graphics and 7.1 Channel Audio Western Digital WD800JD 80GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive - $42.99 Patriot 512MB DDR2-533 - $33.99 LG 8164BI 16X DVD-ROM - $17.99 Rosewill RK-101 Black Keyboard - $3.99 Kingwin KWI-123 USB Optical Mouse w/ Wheel - $3.99 Encore ENF656-ESW-AGPR 56K Fax Modem - $4.99 Windows Vista Home Basic OEM - $95
Total Price - $388.91 + $32.82 shipping = $415.73
That's a 48 cent difference in favor of the Dell. Also remember with the Dell it's already installed, tested, and expected to work right out of the box. With the homebrew machine, you're talking at least 20 minutes assembly if you're really good and then about 1/2 hour installing Windows (the new Vista installer really is a lot faster). Figure for another 1/2 hour downloading/installing the nVidia graphics and chipset drivers after that before you're ready to use it. Unlike some, I'll give that time up though, because going and decrapifying a new Dell, particularly the cheap ones, takes about as long.
In the end, you come out 48 cents poorer, lacking a single source of support if something isn't working right, and with no OS support at all (OEM editions of Windows are to be supported by the system builder, i.e. YOU). I love building my own machines as much as the next person (I haven't owned an OEM desktop in 10 years), but given the choice I'll take the Dell.
TV lags because it is HEAVILY compressed with MPEG2. The maximum bandwidth of an ATSC signal is 19.4mbps, where an uncompressed 1080i feed would be in the 2.2gbps range. 2.2gbps would be infeasible for broadcast TV, but works perfectly with a desktop-level interface such as DVI.
DVI and HDMI connections are completely uncompressed and thus do not introduce any measurable lag. Without having to decode an analog signal, the argument could be made that a DVI/HDMI signal to a digital display such as a LCD, DLP, or Plasma will have slightly less lag than VGA. Of course, the flip side of that is VGA still being the better choice for interfacing with CRTs.
My experience with cable has been exactly opposite of yours, apparently. At my college apartment I have 8mb cable shared amongst four people, all of whom are heavy gamers and regular users of usenet. I also work for a VoIP company, and therefore have a VoIP phone sitting on my desk so I can take support calls during the part of the week that I'm at school. I've never had the bandwidth drop noticably below 8mb, and almost nightly someone's downloading something while everyone else games and we have no lag problems nor does my phone quality suffer.
Heck, at my company's main office we have both a 10mb cable line and a T1. The T1 is pretty much only used for our on-site servers since the bandwidth is just pathetic in comparison to the cable (yea, I still feel weird referring to T1s as slow after growing up with 2400 baud). Most of our customers also run on cable lines, we only bump up to T1s for larger companies where the SLA is important (even though cable downtime is minimal, aside from a recent gas main explosion burning through the HFC fiber we haven't had a single cable outage).
So the MacBooks are, horror of horrors[*], Centrino machines!
[*] welcome to the wonderful world of Intel marketing, Apple. Enjoy your stay. eh....no.
My Core Duo Macbook has an Atheros 802.11a/b/g card. My co-worker's C2D Macbook Pro has a Broadcom 802.11 a/b/g/n card. Apple does not sell Intel wireless and thus is not part of the Centrino marketing machine.
I can't say if this is still the case, but for a while the DRM was added on the client side. This is how PyMusique/SharpMusique worked, they were just iTMS clients that "forgot" to add DRM.
From Apple's end, it was a good thing because the encryption wasn't loading down their servers, but the obvious security flaw was that they should never have trusted the client.
I imagine this has changed, since neither of these programs work anymore.
For anything that could fit on a floppy disk, I'd just hand out a business card with a URL. 1.5MB is cake even on 56k.
Since I'm sure you've got some reason that giving out a physical disk is better, I'll go down that path as well:
Just sticking to Newegg, I was able to find this providing CD-Rs in slim jewel cases for 40 cents a piece, exactly the same price as your floppies but with nearly 500x the storage capacity. If I was buying them in larger quantities (such as for distribution) I know I could get an even better price.
Face it, the floppy disk is dead. It hasn't been useful for backup ever since hard drives broke a few hundred megs, CDs are a far better medium for commercial distribution, and the combination of e-mail and cheap flash drives has destroyed its usefulness for sharing files amongst friends/family.
A 1GB microSD (smaller than a friggin' dime) card cost me $19 recently INCLUDING a carrying case and full-size SD adapter. The full-size SD version is $9.
Looking at Newegg's selection, a 512MB USB drive can be had for $5.
The prices get even better if you can wait for a good deal. Looking at Slickdeals right now, I see a 1GB USB drive for $5, a 2GB SD card for free, and a 4GB USB drive that you could actually earn a small amount by purchasing. Of course all of these prices are after rebates, but the pre-rebate numbers aren't that much either. Flash memory is cheap enough to be nearly disposable now.
OK, I was clearly mistaken. My Macbook did not boot any of my PC OS discs before I installed Boot Camp, but that was also before I had run Software Update which now that I think about it did include a firmware update.
My bad, after looking it to it I concede that you're right.
Intel Macs use EFI instead of the legacy BIOS, so the versions of GRUB and/or LILO shipping with any current Linux distros do not work. GRUB appears to have partial EFI support working on the Mac Mini and LILO has the elilo fork, but at this point neither have made it in to mainstream distros.
What Boot Camp does is it provides BIOS emulation so NTLDR, GRUB, and LILO then work unmodified after the Boot Camp loader has already run. The Boot Camp assistant also provides a non-destructive GUI partitioning tool and allows the user to burn a CD containing all the drivers they'll need for Windows XP on their Mac.
I win by default. I have an original IBM PC/AT keyboard from 1984 that I pull out whenever I need something for my headless servers (they are old boxes with only PS/2 ports and all my other keyboards are USB). It's the oldest keyboard you can readily use on a brand new computer. Since I don't have any devices with a full size DIN AT connector, I cut that off and installed a mini-DIN PS/2 connector.
The keyboard is two years older than me and built sturdy enough that I've stepped on it many times without damaging it. Somehow, I don't think my G15 would survive the same.
Of the three, the only one someone has a choice in is purchasing a stick or automatic car.
The remaining have been forced upon people. Try finding a rotary phone in the store or a tv which has a knob (not buttons on the front) to turn channels with.
Have you gone car shopping recently? Try finding anything with a big engine and a stick. Aside from small cars and cheap trucks, stick shifts are rare in the modern vehicle marketplace. Hell, on my Thunderbird, I had the choice of a V8 engine OR a stick. Most full-size trucks are the same way. That boggles the mind, because the reason I want a stick is the be able to better control how I put more power to the ground, not just to make up for a shitty V6 that can't feel fast with a slushbox.
The problem is a combination of most people now learning on automatics and increased traffic. I love a manual, but I'll be the first to admit gridlock with a stick sucks. Aside from that, people just don't appreciate how much fun a manual can make driving. It makes you care about driving, rather than just pushing the gas and pointing it the right way while putting on makeup/eating/talking. I'd argue that those who drive stick are more attentive behind the wheel because they have to actually think while driving and it's beneficial to plan shifts ahead of time when approaching traffic.
I think the loss if Insert is because while some like you apparently use it, most of the rest of us accidentally hit it when aiming for other keys and then get pissed as we type over a few words without noticing.
Also, using it for Copy and Paste? That's what Ctrl/Cmd + C/V are for, or and middle click, or any of the other standard ways to copy/paste. I've honestly never heard of using Insert in copy/paste operations, and I like to think I'm fairly experienced in the computer world.
U of Toledo does the same thing. Let's just say after going through DE:AD:BE:EF:F0:0D, DE:AD:BE:EF:F0:0F, DE:AD:BE:EF:F0:10, etc. for about 20 iterations they apparently got pissed off and rather than banning my MAC address again they traced it through the switches and physically disconnected all 8 ports in my suite.
They apparently weren't happy about the fact that my (campus only) DC++ server had about 10TB total shared and about 450 regular users constantly transferring gigabytes upon gigabytes across the campus net.
What the hell were you seeing IPX traffic from in 2000? Unless someone in your dorm was running a Netware network that was badly configured, it shouldn't have ever reached your machine. On top of that, unless you had IPX enabled on your computer (another WTF in 2000) you shouldn't have seen it, especially on an ordinary software/home user hardware firewall.
It's not possible yet. The drives have a signature based on the serial number, and just like the games this signature is using a well designed public key encryption scheme. I don't remember the exact algorithm, but it's 2048-bit IIRC.
There has been success in cloning the header to another drive that's been reflashed to have the same serial number as the original, but that's not really reasonable for the average person to do. I also think there's some size tag in the signature, so going up to a larger size doesn't work either.
Slashdot Mirror
Check more often. I have 10mbit both at my apartment and at my office, on two different ISPs. The ISP serving my apartment will be offering 20mbit come fall. A few cable providers, particularly in FiOS areas, are offering 15+ already.
For most people, "smarter" means the AI does things that they didn't expect an AI to do, but would have done themselves if given the choice. It doesn't matter if that's a scripted behavior or if the AI actually "decided" to do it.
My company doesn't really give us workstations at all. We've got some early P4 IBMs that my department has been known to commandeer for our day-to-day use if needed (one of them became our tech server), but for the most part the tech department relies on personal laptops. As a small company (10 employees) we can't really afford high end hardware, and since all of our technicians have fairly powerful notebooks it just became normal for us to use our own gear. Due to my influence, we've pretty much standardized on Macintel hardware running XP and Debian through Parallels.
It's disorganized and would be an administrative nightmare for a larger company, but it works for us. I've got SSH and an X server when I need to work on any of our servers (all Debian), I've got Windows for the few times the web apps we have to use throw a fit under Firefox (damn Broadsoft), and the virtual Debian installs are very close to what's running on the server so we can test with ease.
In parentheses is when the technology was introduced and optionally when it first widely adopted by PCs.
SCSI: Mac Plus, January 1986 (1986, immediately in servers, never on the desktop)
30 pin SIMM: Mac Plus, January 1986
72 pin SIMM: Mac LC III, Quadra/Centris 610/650/800, February 1993 (1987, early '90s)
PCMCIA: Powerbook 520, May 1994 (1991, early '90s)
IDE: Quadra 630, July 1994 (1994, late 80s in prestandard form)
168 pin DIMM: Power Mac 9500, May 1995 (unknown, mid-90s)
PCI: Power Mac 9500, May 1995 (1993, mid-90s)
SO-DIMM: Mainstreet/Wallstreet Powerbook, March 1998
CardBus: Mainstreet/Wallstreet Powerbook, March 1998 (1995, mid-to-late '90s)
USB: iMac, August 1998 (1996, late-90s in to '00s)
IEEE 1394: Power Mac G3 B&W, January 1999 (1995, still only found on higher-end PCs)
AGP: Power Mac G4, September 1999 (1997, late '90s)
DDR Memory: Xserve, May 2002 (unk, early '00s)
IEEE 1394b: Power Mac G4, January 2003 (2003)
PCI-X: Power Mac G5, June 2003 (1998, never caught on for desktops)
USB 2.0: Power Mac G5, June 2003 (2001, early-to-mid '00s)
Serial ATA: Power Mac G5, June 2003 (2003, mid '00s)
PCI Express: Power Mac G5 Dual Core, October 2005 (2004, mid '00s)
DDR2 Memory: iMac G5 w/ iSight, Power Mac G5 Dual Core, October 2005 (unk, mid '00s)
ExpressCard: Macbook Pro, January 2006 (2003, mid '00s)
FB-DIMM: Mac Pro, August 2006 (unk, mid-to-late 2006 for servers, likely never for desktops)
MXM: iMac 24", September 2006 (2004, still rare)
That enough "standard architecture" for you? As of right now, everything but the motherboard formfactor is standard and generally some of the highest-end stuff you can find. Even before that, since the return of Jobs every major part which can be standard has been. Obviously during the PPC era there was no point in using a standard bus or socket since no one else really sold desktop PPC machines, but aside from the mobo and processor everything else was pretty much run of the mill and could be replaced with parts bought at any computer store.
I'm absolutely certain that my circa-1991 IBM PS/1 is completely supported by Linux. 25MHz 486SX, 20MB RAM, 129MB hard drive, and a 2400 baud modem in the ISA slot.
I'll trade you for whatever partially incompatible hardware you've got today, since you don't care about the specs.
Well, the price I quoted was for an OEM copy of the OS, which has the exact same transferability rights as the one you get from Dell, so the only difference there is having the install media.
Valid point, but future proofing can also help when dealing with broken components.
I'll concede that a computer in this price range is unlikely to be upgraded. In 3-4 years when it becomes too slow for Office Super Duper XXXP 2010 Platinum Edition to load up Word, the user would probably be more likely to just replace the machine with another $350-400 model.
Still, the knowledge that if anything in that computer breaks I would be able to go to ANY computer store in the world and buy a replacement part for at least the next 3-4 years is quite comforting. I guarantee that your S754 parts will be hard to find long before their useful life expires, so a dead part would lead to either replacing good parts just so you can buy new or possibly extended downtime as you search for compatible equipment on the used market.
It's worth noting, I guess, that for those not intending on buying a new OS along with their new hardware (transferring from an older machine, using Linux, etc) the pendulum obviously swings way back the other direction.
Here's the problem with that system: Not future proof
If I buy even the cheapest Dell, I'll be getting either an AM2-socket AMD or a LGA775-socket Intel. I'll also be getting PCI Express. There likely won't be a video card in the PCIe slot, but it'll be there.
With your configuration, I get a Socket 754 AMD chip and AGP, neither of which have any future at all. No new parts are coming out for either or even have for quite a while now.
Now, let's try this the right way.
For reference, here's a Dell Dimension C521, currently priced at $359 + $29.99 shipping + $26.26 Ohio Sales Tax = $415.25
AMD Sempron 3400+
Windows Vista Home Basic
512MB Single Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz - 1DIMM
80GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM)
16X DVD-ROM Drive
NVIDIA GeForce 6150 LE Integrated Graphics GPU
Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio
Dell USB Keyboard and Dell 2-button Scroll Mouse
56k Modem
My system, built from Newegg
Powmax CP808PL-1 case with 450W PSU - $20.99
Sempron 3400+ - $69.99
DFI C51PV-M2/G Infinity - $93.99
--Provides GeForce 6150 Integrated Graphics and 7.1 Channel Audio
Western Digital WD800JD 80GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive - $42.99
Patriot 512MB DDR2-533 - $33.99
LG 8164BI 16X DVD-ROM - $17.99
Rosewill RK-101 Black Keyboard - $3.99
Kingwin KWI-123 USB Optical Mouse w/ Wheel - $3.99
Encore ENF656-ESW-AGPR 56K Fax Modem - $4.99
Windows Vista Home Basic OEM - $95
Total Price - $388.91 + $32.82 shipping = $415.73
That's a 48 cent difference in favor of the Dell. Also remember with the Dell it's already installed, tested, and expected to work right out of the box. With the homebrew machine, you're talking at least 20 minutes assembly if you're really good and then about 1/2 hour installing Windows (the new Vista installer really is a lot faster). Figure for another 1/2 hour downloading/installing the nVidia graphics and chipset drivers after that before you're ready to use it. Unlike some, I'll give that time up though, because going and decrapifying a new Dell, particularly the cheap ones, takes about as long.
In the end, you come out 48 cents poorer, lacking a single source of support if something isn't working right, and with no OS support at all (OEM editions of Windows are to be supported by the system builder, i.e. YOU). I love building my own machines as much as the next person (I haven't owned an OEM desktop in 10 years), but given the choice I'll take the Dell.
TV lags because it is HEAVILY compressed with MPEG2. The maximum bandwidth of an ATSC signal is 19.4mbps, where an uncompressed 1080i feed would be in the 2.2gbps range. 2.2gbps would be infeasible for broadcast TV, but works perfectly with a desktop-level interface such as DVI.
DVI and HDMI connections are completely uncompressed and thus do not introduce any measurable lag. Without having to decode an analog signal, the argument could be made that a DVI/HDMI signal to a digital display such as a LCD, DLP, or Plasma will have slightly less lag than VGA. Of course, the flip side of that is VGA still being the better choice for interfacing with CRTs.
My experience with cable has been exactly opposite of yours, apparently. At my college apartment I have 8mb cable shared amongst four people, all of whom are heavy gamers and regular users of usenet. I also work for a VoIP company, and therefore have a VoIP phone sitting on my desk so I can take support calls during the part of the week that I'm at school. I've never had the bandwidth drop noticably below 8mb, and almost nightly someone's downloading something while everyone else games and we have no lag problems nor does my phone quality suffer.
Heck, at my company's main office we have both a 10mb cable line and a T1. The T1 is pretty much only used for our on-site servers since the bandwidth is just pathetic in comparison to the cable (yea, I still feel weird referring to T1s as slow after growing up with 2400 baud). Most of our customers also run on cable lines, we only bump up to T1s for larger companies where the SLA is important (even though cable downtime is minimal, aside from a recent gas main explosion burning through the HFC fiber we haven't had a single cable outage).
[*] welcome to the wonderful world of Intel marketing, Apple. Enjoy your stay. eh....no.
My Core Duo Macbook has an Atheros 802.11a/b/g card. My co-worker's C2D Macbook Pro has a Broadcom 802.11 a/b/g/n card. Apple does not sell Intel wireless and thus is not part of the Centrino marketing machine.
I can't say if this is still the case, but for a while the DRM was added on the client side. This is how PyMusique/SharpMusique worked, they were just iTMS clients that "forgot" to add DRM.
From Apple's end, it was a good thing because the encryption wasn't loading down their servers, but the obvious security flaw was that they should never have trusted the client.
I imagine this has changed, since neither of these programs work anymore.
For anything that could fit on a floppy disk, I'd just hand out a business card with a URL. 1.5MB is cake even on 56k.
Since I'm sure you've got some reason that giving out a physical disk is better, I'll go down that path as well:
Just sticking to Newegg, I was able to find this providing CD-Rs in slim jewel cases for 40 cents a piece, exactly the same price as your floppies but with nearly 500x the storage capacity. If I was buying them in larger quantities (such as for distribution) I know I could get an even better price.
Face it, the floppy disk is dead. It hasn't been useful for backup ever since hard drives broke a few hundred megs, CDs are a far better medium for commercial distribution, and the combination of e-mail and cheap flash drives has destroyed its usefulness for sharing files amongst friends/family.
A 1GB microSD (smaller than a friggin' dime) card cost me $19 recently INCLUDING a carrying case and full-size SD adapter. The full-size SD version is $9.
Looking at Newegg's selection, a 512MB USB drive can be had for $5.
The prices get even better if you can wait for a good deal. Looking at Slickdeals right now, I see a 1GB USB drive for $5, a 2GB SD card for free, and a 4GB USB drive that you could actually earn a small amount by purchasing. Of course all of these prices are after rebates, but the pre-rebate numbers aren't that much either. Flash memory is cheap enough to be nearly disposable now.
OK, I was clearly mistaken. My Macbook did not boot any of my PC OS discs before I installed Boot Camp, but that was also before I had run Software Update which now that I think about it did include a firmware update.
My bad, after looking it to it I concede that you're right.
Intel Macs use EFI instead of the legacy BIOS, so the versions of GRUB and/or LILO shipping with any current Linux distros do not work. GRUB appears to have partial EFI support working on the Mac Mini and LILO has the elilo fork, but at this point neither have made it in to mainstream distros.
What Boot Camp does is it provides BIOS emulation so NTLDR, GRUB, and LILO then work unmodified after the Boot Camp loader has already run. The Boot Camp assistant also provides a non-destructive GUI partitioning tool and allows the user to burn a CD containing all the drivers they'll need for Windows XP on their Mac.
I win by default. I have an original IBM PC/AT keyboard from 1984 that I pull out whenever I need something for my headless servers (they are old boxes with only PS/2 ports and all my other keyboards are USB). It's the oldest keyboard you can readily use on a brand new computer. Since I don't have any devices with a full size DIN AT connector, I cut that off and installed a mini-DIN PS/2 connector.
The keyboard is two years older than me and built sturdy enough that I've stepped on it many times without damaging it. Somehow, I don't think my G15 would survive the same.
The remaining have been forced upon people. Try finding a rotary phone in the store or a tv which has a knob (not buttons on the front) to turn channels with.
Have you gone car shopping recently? Try finding anything with a big engine and a stick. Aside from small cars and cheap trucks, stick shifts are rare in the modern vehicle marketplace. Hell, on my Thunderbird, I had the choice of a V8 engine OR a stick. Most full-size trucks are the same way. That boggles the mind, because the reason I want a stick is the be able to better control how I put more power to the ground, not just to make up for a shitty V6 that can't feel fast with a slushbox.
The problem is a combination of most people now learning on automatics and increased traffic. I love a manual, but I'll be the first to admit gridlock with a stick sucks. Aside from that, people just don't appreciate how much fun a manual can make driving. It makes you care about driving, rather than just pushing the gas and pointing it the right way while putting on makeup/eating/talking. I'd argue that those who drive stick are more attentive behind the wheel because they have to actually think while driving and it's beneficial to plan shifts ahead of time when approaching traffic.
I think the loss if Insert is because while some like you apparently use it, most of the rest of us accidentally hit it when aiming for other keys and then get pissed as we type over a few words without noticing.
Also, using it for Copy and Paste? That's what Ctrl/Cmd + C/V are for, or and middle click, or any of the other standard ways to copy/paste. I've honestly never heard of using Insert in copy/paste operations, and I like to think I'm fairly experienced in the computer world.
U of Toledo does the same thing. Let's just say after going through DE:AD:BE:EF:F0:0D, DE:AD:BE:EF:F0:0F, DE:AD:BE:EF:F0:10, etc. for about 20 iterations they apparently got pissed off and rather than banning my MAC address again they traced it through the switches and physically disconnected all 8 ports in my suite.
They apparently weren't happy about the fact that my (campus only) DC++ server had about 10TB total shared and about 450 regular users constantly transferring gigabytes upon gigabytes across the campus net.
What the hell were you seeing IPX traffic from in 2000? Unless someone in your dorm was running a Netware network that was badly configured, it shouldn't have ever reached your machine. On top of that, unless you had IPX enabled on your computer (another WTF in 2000) you shouldn't have seen it, especially on an ordinary software/home user hardware firewall.
It's not possible yet. The drives have a signature based on the serial number, and just like the games this signature is using a well designed public key encryption scheme. I don't remember the exact algorithm, but it's 2048-bit IIRC.
There has been success in cloning the header to another drive that's been reflashed to have the same serial number as the original, but that's not really reasonable for the average person to do. I also think there's some size tag in the signature, so going up to a larger size doesn't work either.