TigerDirect has the 3COM 3c510 NAT Router for $49, no rebates, that's the real price!
It includes:
1 port WAN (DSL/Cable Modem)
4 port 10/100 Switch
Parallel port with Print server
Serial port with FAX and dialout sharing support.
Why so cheap? It's a discontinued model.
BUT... the insides are exactly the same as models sold by SMC, D-LINK and others, and you can use the drivers and firmware upgrade from the original maker (AMIT) in Taiwan which you can find here:
http://www.amit.com.tw/download/firmware/
The printer server works with standard LPD support in Linux.
Unfortunately, the S2510U3NG has RAMBUS RAM, so that kind of kicks it out of the price running.
It says it's the 7899W SCSI chip, that is the same one as the new Dual AMD board, so I assume the specs are identical.
As we all know, PriceWatch is mostly Chaos, but that's why it's so great, the prices and descriptions are updated by the vendors, not by someone at PriceWatch.
I was fooled by the 3950U2B description which said 160mb per second, which I guess is both 80mb channels running at the same time.
Can you recommend another Dual Socket 370 board with onboard video and dual lan adapters that is substantially cheaper than the Tyan I was comparing it to?
I don't think anyone is suggesting Tyan in general is drasticly overpriced, rather than this new Dual AMD board seems expensive to those familiar with the inexpensive PIII boards out there.
But when you add up the processor, Dual LAN and SCSI the huge price difference disappears.
You can try going with a company that uses unified drivers.
For instance NVidia offers the same driver set for everything from the TNT, TNT2, up to the GEForce2 Ultra (and maybe GEForce3).
Matrox is also famous for offering unified driver sets going back to the original matrox millenium.
ATI is doing a poor job of supporting Win2000 even with their latest and greatest. There was a recent comparison of Win2000 vs Win98 drivers from ATI and NVidia, and the ATI drivers performed terribly! In some cases 1/2 the speed when tested under Win2000. Plus buggy (some tests could not be completed).
Anyone already running Win2000 is familiar with the "Signed Drivers" problem.
Win2000 supports signed drivers, guess what? Have I ever see a signed driver from anyone besides Microsoft?
As far as I can remember... Nope!
So everytime I install a driver I get a nasty warning of unknown danger from Microsoft. Make that warning an error/abort, and then you have Whistler.
Would hardware people take all this more seriously if they HAD to have their drivers signed? Nahhh, they will just tell you to turn the requires signing feature off!
Source for the 15,000 number (it's not the number of voters registered to "Reform party", rather the number registered as the "Independent Party")
Here is the article, judge for yourself:
Article& lt;/B>
In Palm Beach County, the Reform Party's Buchanan received 3,407 votes - 1 percent of the vote - at the final tally.
In neighboring Broward County, which Democrats argue has similar demographics to Palm Beach County, Buchanan pulled just 789 votes - close to 0 percent of the vote.
But NewsMax.com reviewed Board of Elections records for both counties.
Records show that Palm Beach County is not similiar to Broward County in voter registration. There are far more members of the Independent Party in Palm Beach County than in Broward County.
According to the Florida supervisor of elections, Broward County has only 119 members of the Independent Party.
Palm Beach County, on the other hand, has a whopping 14,551 members of the Independent Party.
In fact, it has the highest Independent registration in Florida.
Buchanan received 1 percent of the vote in Palm Beach County. In all the counties in Florida where there is significant Independent Party membership, Buchanan got a similiar 1 percent.
Palm Beach County gave Buchanan no more support proportionally than any other county with high Independent Party registration
On March 12, 1996, Pat Buchanan won 8,788 votes in the Republican primary from the four congressional districts that share Palm Beach County. In Rep. Wexler's 19th congressional district, Buchanan won his largest vote of the four -- 2,961.
Buchanan's top strategist in the 1996 nomination race, Human Events editor Terry Jeffrey, explains that by the time of the 1996 Florida primary, the fight was essentially over. Buchanan had lost South Carolina on March 2, and five other primaries, including Georgia's on March 5. Still, with the nomination lost, and Buchanan not campaigning in Palm Beach (he made only a brief appearance in Miami on March 6), over 8,000 diehard Buchanan Brigaders voted in support of his message.
Jeffrey says that it is "completely believable to me" that there were 3,000 Buchanan supporters again voting for their man in the Palm Beach area this Tuesday. "Over 8,000 people cast a symbolic vote for Pat and his message after he was eliminated from competition in 1996."
Palm Beach has 15,000 registered Reform Party members and Broward County has less than 200 registered Reform Party members.
3400 votes for Buchanan is directly in line with every other Florida county that has a similar number of registered Reform Party members.
Buchanan has a residence in Palm Beach as does a close relative. He received 8000 votes in he Republican primary in Florida.
There are more Reform Party registered voters in Palm Beach county measured as a percentage of total registrations than in any other county in Florida.
Want to copy a couple files across the network? DAVE might be fine.
Want to actually run software across the network? Or GASP, actually access files, maybe do cross development with CodeWarrior?
Forget DAVE! Dave is not industrial strength, Dave is flakey, Dave is not ready for prime time.
(by the way, ever try and search Usenet or the web for info on a product with a name so freakin common that you can't find anything? Imagine if Linux was called "John", BLEAH!)
I pounded on the Apple reps at a OSX developer conference in June, they knew nothing about Samba, still towing the "we support cross platform networking" when that basicly means TCP/IP and oh by the way, if you want to share files, use AppleTalk. Some other developers stood up and said people had gotten Samba to run on OSX. But that's not exactly nice and friendly, and built into the pretty little interface, is it?
The saving grace at this point is the pretty decent Appletalk support over TCP/IP built into Win2000. Without it, cross platform file access from a Mac to Windows would be pretty grim...
I assume by "we" he means the People (although in reality it's the Party). If it were the people, you can rest assured most people do _not_ like pollution, etc. I see nothing wrong with using tax as a way to fight this kind of thing.
Then I guess "we" the people do _not_ like people getting rich... since that's what "progressive" taxation goes after.
Just buy a pile of internal ZIP drives, they are cheap, common, and reliable "enough". They meet your under $40 criteria.
If you think flash memory is a cheap alternative because the readers are cheap, you are ignoring the cost of media.
If you are thinking longer term, internal CDRW drives can be had for around $100. Consider that the media is less then $2 per GB (ZIP is around $50 per GB, Flash is around $1500 per GB).
Or take that $40 per computer and buy a couple tons of floppy disks, offer them free.... Or sell them below cost, say 10 cents each.
To my eyes, the jpeg block compression artifacts appear to be the real source of ugliness in that screenshot, not lack of antialiasing.
I went back and looked at a blown up copy, the JPEG artifacts add some light fuzz, but if you trim out all the inbetween greyscale and concentrate on Black and White pixels, it still looks dreadful, particularly the italics.
I'm blown away by how fast PCMCIA compact flash interfaces are, faster than your local harddrive! And it's so painless, just plug it in, no drivers, every recent OS supports it. The USB flash readers are so sad in comparison.
I see all this talk of hot swap with SCSI. I've never seen this work well with a PC (how do you deal with termination?). Are you rebooting each time you plug/unplug? Or are you using the SCSI only for this one device?
Isn't firewire a serialized SCSI protocol? Why not go with firewire? The cables are cheaper and longer (PriceWatch says $12 for 10 feet, $18 for 15feet), adapters are cheaper (PriceWatch says under $40). And firewire is designed to handle hotswap. I don't know about Linux support, but the latest WinXX and Win2000 have built in support, and all the recent Macs have it built in. It's over 30x the speed of USB.
It's sad that USB has ended up as our only common "fast connect". Why aren't we all using 100BT Ethernet? It's so fast, cheap and common! Is simple TCP/IP that hard to do on these little devices? Granted it's not firewire, but by definition it's networkable! The adapters are borderline free, and the cables are as cheap as phone wire (it's even common to make your own cables, try that with firewire).
If the DSL goes down, or your machine crashes, your ISP's SMTP server should take care of your inbound mail. Absolutely no problem, as long as both MTAs and your domain's DNS are set up properly.
And that mail stays in limbo until you get your server or DSL line back up, or have your ISP redirect the mail. I had my DSL line down for 4 weeks!
And I wonder how long the ISP's SMTP server will hold/forward that mail before sending back tons of bounce messages.
And if the problem was that ISP's connectivity in the first place, you are still screwed.
The whole point of going with someone like Panix is: Cheap stability. They are one of the oldest ISPs still in business, and the largest one with shell as the center of their business (as opposed to a sideline so a few techies can maintain their CGI scripts).
Transfering more than 128MB at USB speeds is pretty damn slow... so I question the point of buying a USB harddrive.
But if you must, you could buy a new Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox MP3 player. It runs on AA batteries, and besides being a portable USB harddrive, it's a dandy MP3 jukebox! It's $432 on Pricewatch.
Plus it's designed as a consumer electronics device, meant to be carried around and run off batteries, so I suspect it will last much longer than a kludged up IDE to USB converter box.
Netcom, the largest commercial Shell account provider disappeared the end of last month.
I considered using a DSL line for incoming mail. What happens if the line goes down or my machine crashes? I wanted stability!
Most of us found Panix as the best national shell provider (larget, most stable, been in business the longest, least likely to be bought out or transformed into a portal/AOL clone, most technical staff, reputation for keeping it all going).
It's $10 a month, or $100 a year.
You can read all about our experiences moving to Panix (and other providers) in alt.netcom.emeritus
(I also use their wildcard domain name email forwarding, (another $100 a year) so my email address will never change again).
that's weird...my box at work over the summer with a Geforce256 64MB ran UT perfectly with no jerkiness whatsoever at 1024x768 32bit
Notice the discussion is on the MX, the inexpensive GeForce2 card with 32mb of SDRAM (not DDRAM).
Any idea what your 64mb card cost when you bought it before last summer? My guess, $400.
As a side note, it turns out there is a trick to get decent performance out of UT. You can use a special patched up OpenGL driver that supports the compressed textures. Not only is it smoother, but it looks better!
Note these are pre-compressed higher-res textures, not the compressed on the fly low-res ones you see in Quake3 with texture compression. This is fills that second CD in UT you've never had a use for.
www.windrivers.com has a nice list of processor prices from PriceWatch.
It's right on the front page, at the lower right, updated frequently.
Includes all the AMD, and Intel processors in current production.
Slashdot Mirror
TigerDirect has the 3COM 3c510 NAT Router for $49, no rebates, that's the real price!
It includes:
1 port WAN (DSL/Cable Modem)
4 port 10/100 Switch
Parallel port with Print server
Serial port with FAX and dialout sharing support.
Why so cheap? It's a discontinued model.
BUT... the insides are exactly the same as models sold by SMC, D-LINK and others, and you can use the drivers and firmware upgrade from the original maker (AMIT) in Taiwan which you can find here:
http://www.amit.com.tw/download/firmware/
The printer server works with standard LPD support in Linux.
Oh please! No new ideas on the modern era of SF writers?
Just look at some of those other recent Hugo winners like Vernor Vinge, or Neal Stephenson, or Joe Haldeman, or William Gibson.
What has changed is the audience.
Look at the huge Star Wars, Star Trek catalog (which keep growing and growing, like a cancer on the SF section).
Look at the increase in Fantasy, with fewer SF titles in the SF/Fantasy section.
Although I really enjoy Lois McMaster Bujold's books, I think they barely fall into the SF catagory.
Unfortunately, the S2510U3NG has RAMBUS RAM, so that kind of kicks it out of the price running.
It says it's the 7899W SCSI chip, that is the same one as the new Dual AMD board, so I assume the specs are identical.
As we all know, PriceWatch is mostly Chaos, but that's why it's so great, the prices and descriptions are updated by the vendors, not by someone at PriceWatch.
I was fooled by the 3950U2B description which said 160mb per second, which I guess is both 80mb channels running at the same time.
Can you recommend another Dual Socket 370 board with onboard video and dual lan adapters that is substantially cheaper than the Tyan I was comparing it to?
I don't think anyone is suggesting Tyan in general is drasticly overpriced, rather than this new Dual AMD board seems expensive to those familiar with the inexpensive PIII boards out there.
But when you add up the processor, Dual LAN and SCSI the huge price difference disappears.
You have to factor in the CPU prices.
From PriceWatch:
TYAN DUAL AMD $565
(includes onboard video, lan, scsi)
Duron 900Mhz $64 X 2
Total $689
TYAN DUAL PIII $222
(includes onboard video, lan)
PIII 1Ghz $184 X 2
Adaptec 3950 SCSI $129
Total $719
In early benchmarks, the Duron 900mhz is comparable to the 1Ghz PIII.
Tyan is only painful if you have zero use for SCSI. (everyone needs LAN, and onboard video is just an cheap annoyance).
(of course the flaw in this argument is RAM prices, but if you buy namebrand stuff, it turns out the registered isn't so much more)
She has one phone line (cancelled the other one when the price went up).
She will never pay $50 a month for broadband, not when dialup is $20 or less.
Same with my sister, and three brothers, cousins, aunts, uncles and so on. I'm the only one paying for broadband.
Are all my relatives hicks? Nope, just cheap. They don't see enough benefit to go through the hassle and expense.
Dvorak is correct, widespread broadband is MUCH further off than any analysts have been speculating.
(to be fair, one brother had DSL, but has moved to Germany where he cannot get broadband at his apartment).
They don't sell males, only sterile females.
The big hoopla is over them growing the females in ocean farms (a big net). Fish escape from the farms on a regular basis.
The risk is that one of those escaped fish will be the 1 in a million that wasn't sterile.
Then you start to ask how they are going to breed. Do salmon ever breed in the open ocean, don't they return to where they were born to lay eggs?
You can try going with a company that uses unified drivers.
For instance NVidia offers the same driver set for everything from the TNT, TNT2, up to the GEForce2 Ultra (and maybe GEForce3).
Matrox is also famous for offering unified driver sets going back to the original matrox millenium.
ATI is doing a poor job of supporting Win2000 even with their latest and greatest. There was a recent comparison of Win2000 vs Win98 drivers from ATI and NVidia, and the ATI drivers performed terribly! In some cases 1/2 the speed when tested under Win2000. Plus buggy (some tests could not be completed).
Anyone already running Win2000 is familiar with the "Signed Drivers" problem.
Win2000 supports signed drivers, guess what? Have I ever see a signed driver from anyone besides Microsoft?
As far as I can remember... Nope!
So everytime I install a driver I get a nasty warning of unknown danger from Microsoft. Make that warning an error/abort, and then you have Whistler.
Would hardware people take all this more seriously if they HAD to have their drivers signed? Nahhh, they will just tell you to turn the requires signing feature off!
Source for the 15,000 number (it's not the number of voters registered to "Reform party", rather the number registered as the "Independent Party")
Here is the article, judge for yourself:
Article& lt;/B>
In Palm Beach County, the Reform Party's Buchanan received 3,407 votes - 1 percent of the vote - at the final tally.
In neighboring Broward County, which Democrats argue has similar demographics to Palm Beach County, Buchanan pulled just 789 votes - close to 0 percent of the vote.
But NewsMax.com reviewed Board of Elections records for both counties.
Records show that Palm Beach County is not similiar to Broward County in voter registration. There are far more members of the Independent Party in Palm Beach County than in Broward County.
According to the Florida supervisor of elections, Broward County has only 119 members of the Independent Party.
Palm Beach County, on the other hand, has a whopping 14,551 members of the Independent Party.
In fact, it has the highest Independent registration in Florida.
Buchanan received 1 percent of the vote in Palm Beach County. In all the counties in Florida where there is significant Independent Party membership, Buchanan got a similiar 1 percent.
Palm Beach County gave Buchanan no more support proportionally than any other county with high Independent Party registration
From National Review:
On March 12, 1996, Pat Buchanan won 8,788 votes in the Republican primary from the four congressional districts that share Palm Beach County. In Rep. Wexler's 19th congressional district, Buchanan won his largest vote of the four -- 2,961.
Buchanan's top strategist in the 1996 nomination race, Human Events editor Terry Jeffrey, explains that by the time of the 1996 Florida primary, the fight was essentially over. Buchanan had lost South Carolina on March 2, and five other primaries, including Georgia's on March 5. Still, with the nomination lost, and Buchanan not campaigning in Palm Beach (he made only a brief appearance in Miami on March 6), over 8,000 diehard Buchanan Brigaders voted in support of his message.
Jeffrey says that it is "completely believable to me" that there were 3,000 Buchanan supporters again voting for their man in the Palm Beach area this Tuesday. "Over 8,000 people cast a symbolic vote for Pat and his message after he was eliminated from competition in 1996."
A few tidbits I picked up this morning:
Palm Beach has 15,000 registered Reform Party members and Broward County has less than 200 registered Reform Party members.
3400 votes for Buchanan is directly in line with every other Florida county that has a similar number of registered Reform Party members.
Buchanan has a residence in Palm Beach as does a close relative. He received 8000 votes in he Republican primary in Florida.
There are more Reform Party registered voters in Palm Beach county measured as a percentage of total registrations than in any other county in Florida.
For me the most valuable resource on the Web that is in risk of disappearing is Dejanews.
We've already lost everything older than one year, and now what's left is being sold off to some unnamed party.
How much legal strong arming by some pro-censorship or copyright protection group will be required to remove it forever? Not to mention the COS.
I use Dejanews daily, and would sorely miss even this now diminished archive.
Want to copy a couple files across the network? DAVE might be fine.
Want to actually run software across the network? Or GASP, actually access files, maybe do cross development with CodeWarrior?
Forget DAVE! Dave is not industrial strength, Dave is flakey, Dave is not ready for prime time.
(by the way, ever try and search Usenet or the web for info on a product with a name so freakin common that you can't find anything? Imagine if Linux was called "John", BLEAH!)
I pounded on the Apple reps at a OSX developer conference in June, they knew nothing about Samba, still towing the "we support cross platform networking" when that basicly means TCP/IP and oh by the way, if you want to share files, use AppleTalk. Some other developers stood up and said people had gotten Samba to run on OSX. But that's not exactly nice and friendly, and built into the pretty little interface, is it?
The saving grace at this point is the pretty decent Appletalk support over TCP/IP built into Win2000. Without it, cross platform file access from a Mac to Windows would be pretty grim...
Somehow this reminds me of WinModems, such a clever idea to drive the modem with software instead of hardware... it will work just as well, right?
Hmmm... doesn't seem to have worked out that way.
I assume by "we" he means the People (although in reality it's the Party). If it were the people, you can rest assured most people do _not_ like pollution, etc. I see nothing wrong with using tax as a way to fight this kind of thing.
Then I guess "we" the people do _not_ like people getting rich... since that's what "progressive" taxation goes after.
Just buy a pile of internal ZIP drives, they are cheap, common, and reliable "enough". They meet your under $40 criteria.
If you think flash memory is a cheap alternative because the readers are cheap, you are ignoring the cost of media.
If you are thinking longer term, internal CDRW drives can be had for around $100. Consider that the media is less then $2 per GB (ZIP is around $50 per GB, Flash is around $1500 per GB).
Or take that $40 per computer and buy a couple tons of floppy disks, offer them free.... Or sell them below cost, say 10 cents each.
I'm blown away by how fast PCMCIA compact flash interfaces are, faster than your local harddrive! And it's so painless, just plug it in, no drivers, every recent OS supports it. The USB flash readers are so sad in comparison.
I see all this talk of hot swap with SCSI. I've never seen this work well with a PC (how do you deal with termination?). Are you rebooting each time you plug/unplug? Or are you using the SCSI only for this one device?
Isn't firewire a serialized SCSI protocol? Why not go with firewire? The cables are cheaper and longer (PriceWatch says $12 for 10 feet, $18 for 15feet), adapters are cheaper (PriceWatch says under $40). And firewire is designed to handle hotswap. I don't know about Linux support, but the latest WinXX and Win2000 have built in support, and all the recent Macs have it built in. It's over 30x the speed of USB.
It's sad that USB has ended up as our only common "fast connect". Why aren't we all using 100BT Ethernet? It's so fast, cheap and common! Is simple TCP/IP that hard to do on these little devices? Granted it's not firewire, but by definition it's networkable! The adapters are borderline free, and the cables are as cheap as phone wire (it's even common to make your own cables, try that with firewire).
If the DSL goes down, or your machine crashes, your ISP's SMTP server should take care of your inbound mail. Absolutely no problem, as long as both MTAs and your domain's DNS are set up properly.
And that mail stays in limbo until you get your server or DSL line back up, or have your ISP redirect the mail. I had my DSL line down for 4 weeks!
And I wonder how long the ISP's SMTP server will hold/forward that mail before sending back tons of bounce messages.
And if the problem was that ISP's connectivity in the first place, you are still screwed.
The whole point of going with someone like Panix is: Cheap stability. They are one of the oldest ISPs still in business, and the largest one with shell as the center of their business (as opposed to a sideline so a few techies can maintain their CGI scripts).
There is this cute little USB memory drive that's not much bigger than a big USB plug.
/ 0,3679,2601806,00.html
It's called the Trek ThumbDrive, here is a review from last July:
http://www.techtv.com/freshgear/firstlook/story
Here is their homepage:
http://www.usbmedia.com/
Capacity : 16/32/64/128MB
Transfering more than 128MB at USB speeds is pretty damn slow... so I question the point of buying a USB harddrive.
But if you must, you could buy a new Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox MP3 player. It runs on AA batteries, and besides being a portable USB harddrive, it's a dandy MP3 jukebox! It's $432 on Pricewatch.
Plus it's designed as a consumer electronics device, meant to be carried around and run off batteries, so I suspect it will last much longer than a kludged up IDE to USB converter box.
Netcom, the largest commercial Shell account provider disappeared the end of last month.
I considered using a DSL line for incoming mail. What happens if the line goes down or my machine crashes? I wanted stability!
Most of us found Panix as the best national shell provider (larget, most stable, been in business the longest, least likely to be bought out or transformed into a portal/AOL clone, most technical staff, reputation for keeping it all going).
It's $10 a month, or $100 a year.
You can read all about our experiences moving to Panix (and other providers) in alt.netcom.emeritus
(I also use their wildcard domain name email forwarding, (another $100 a year) so my email address will never change again).
Has anyone else noticed how bad the fonts look in that screenshot? Yikes! Looks like Windows 2.0.
Still an area where X lags behinds windows, both the font renderer and the lack of anti-aliasing.
that's weird...my box at work over the summer with a Geforce256 64MB ran UT perfectly with no jerkiness whatsoever at 1024x768 32bit
Notice the discussion is on the MX, the inexpensive GeForce2 card with 32mb of SDRAM (not DDRAM).
Any idea what your 64mb card cost when you bought it before last summer? My guess, $400.
As a side note, it turns out there is a trick to get decent performance out of UT. You can use a special patched up OpenGL driver that supports the compressed textures. Not only is it smoother, but it looks better!
Note these are pre-compressed higher-res textures, not the compressed on the fly low-res ones you see in Quake3 with texture compression. This is fills that second CD in UT you've never had a use for.
Here is the article:
Texture Compression in UT
I've tried this on a GEForce2 MX, and the results are quite nice, very pretty at 1024x768 32bit
Sadly, it's still not as snappy as my VooDoo3 3000 on a similar processor.
www.windrivers.com has a nice list of processor prices from PriceWatch. It's right on the front page, at the lower right, updated frequently. Includes all the AMD, and Intel processors in current production.