The drive was made by Kenwood. I owned one. The technology was called TrueX and was developed by Zen Research plc (http://www.zenresearch.com). Zen Relearch plc's page appears only to be a death notice.
It was an interesting technology. Quiet CD-ROM drives with massive (up to 72x) speed. Just pray that there wasn't much random access, as the seek time on the drives stunk. It also couldn't extract audio data well above 4x.
I believe Zen had plans (at one time) to extend the technology to DVD's and CD-R's, but as I never saw any products, either I'm hallucinating, or it just wouldn't work the way they wanted.
But it was cool technology.
Re:NOT XBA! Display accelerator for mobile devices
on
Bitboys Silicon Sighted
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Remember that this is a general purpose prototyping board.
You might want to look a little closer at those images, the Altera-based board appears to be a BitBoys design, as they have their name and (c) on the PCB.
However, given that, it might be their general-purpose proto board. The graphics core might be 40k (or fewer) equivalent gates, but it looks like they access the devices over a USB interface, and that takes more gates. And, if you're not sure how big your design will be, it never hurts to have too much FPGA.
While I'm nit-picking the boards, the other board on display is a BGA in a friction-mount connector. Looks like they're expecting to replace that chip quite a bit.
And, a final on-topic-like statement. I work on an embedded device. Acceleration of video at any cost in power is worthless. I'd rather flash 5 screen per second at very low power than 50 screens per second at multi-Watt power consumption. (Reference ATI's mobile graphics solution: low power, but still not as low as StrongARM integrated video.)
Look at their pricing. 1.5M/256K for $40ish, and 3M/384K for $80ish. Why didn't the upload rate double on the high-end offering?
Oh yeah, we're consumers, not supposed to upload, share, or be creative, only eat the drivel provided for us. Why would we want to connect to our computer remotely? Or videoconference? Or share movies from our ReplayTVs?
DVDs are less expensive than CDs because the movie industry has multiple sources of revenue to cover the costs of production.
Movies get advertised for theatrical release, just as CD's are advertised for release. But movies collect money at the box office, from pay-per-view, and from HBO/Showtime, and home release. Even if the order is changing (some things I think I see on DVD before HBO/Showtime), the sources are still there. But CD's have only have home release to recover money for the record industry, as opposed to artists who earn money from touring and other engagements.
DVD prices are adjusted for each region, since hideous use prevention technology is burned into all "legal" players and discs. So while Americans (region 1) get it for $10-$20, Europeans might pay $30 or more for the SAME DISC with a different use prevention code.
CDs, on the other hand, can not be limited to a single market. So, if the industry wants to rip off one market, they must make sure that it can't be bought elsewhere and then imported at a lower price than their artificial market price.
Unless, of course, the RIAA and MPAA ban the sale of used discs. Then the RIAA could ban imports, and the Europeans will get it even worse, if things hold to pattern. Because they won't give up their $18 discs.
The link to the article on www.law.com won't display for me (in Mozilla) because I refuse their audience-tracking cookie. The entire article loads (and I can save it and just read through the raw HTML), but then shuffles me over to a "you must accept our cookie so we can enhance your (advertising) experience on our site."
Something else for Mozilla to "correct" for me, someday. Until then... can we just avoid links to this evil lying entity?
Why will people buy SACDs? Do you have a multi-channel "home theatre" receiver? Why play stereo music (2-channel) when you could have surround (5.1-channel)? The CD is stuck in the stereo world. It cannot change. SACD gets you to multi-channel, which can really make recordings have a lot more depth. It's why concerts "feel" different than listening on the stereo.
That's why people should want SACDs. The SACD/CD hybrid is just a bridge to get us there (and get everyone to buy a new CD player). But the music industry wants us to get there... why? There will be no SACD drive for a home computer. SACDs are not (to my knowledge) readable by a DVD mechanism. But SACDs don't store more data than a DVD, so there will be little or no demand for computer drives. No SACD recorders, either, in my opinion. No ripping of SACD content (just the existing CD layer) or burning of exact SACD copies.
And after the world + dog has purchased SACD equipment, discs will stop carrying the CD "compatability" layer. Now music can't be digitally ripped (although you could still analog copy, but how many people copied tapes at home?) and posted on the 'net. So, the average consumer gets a disc that, with the right equipment, provides multi-channel recordings that "feel" more like a concert, and the music industry feels that they've reduced the CD rip-share-and-burn threat.
So SACDs are good for the consumer (surround-sound recordings), but SACDs are bad for the consumer (no equipment to excercise fair-use rights in the digital domain will be produced, although you could still make analog copies).
Nope, sorry, wrong answer. There is the COPA and the COPPA. Really sneaky, I must admit, to make a very nice-sounding bit of legislation (COPPA, no collection of information from people 13 and under) and a very nasty bit of legislation (COPA, prevent children from seing anything that violates "community standards") have such similar abbreviations. I doubt most of your elected representatives even know the difference, though, and they're lobbied by these people.
Support COPA: $50k, check. Support COPPA: $50k, check. Re-election campagin without having to worry about support from your constituents: Pricele$$.
This just seems so obvious to me (which is probably why the Media Oligarchy has never thought of it):
Make non-30-second commericals.
Make complete commerical breaks that are not 30-second multiples.
Now all of those 30-second skip buttons are useless, because they'll skip into the show and have to rewind and then fast forward again etcetera. That's why I never bothered to fast forward commericals on a VCR--it was too much hassle. Oh, 30-second skip on my TiVo? Cool... zap zap zap done.
Heck, one 40-second commerical to end the break, and now everyone has to rewind.
Pointless additional recollection: For some reason I recall an old Sports Illustrated story from the early 90's (say, 1992) about the "TV of the Future," with 10 second commericals, because you can get a really catchy pitch done in 10 seconds.
The open-source community has not in total done as many man-years of computer security code reviews as Microsoft. The open-source community tends to consider these things before implementation, reducing the need to do a full-bore code review afterward.
Why? Because the designer added comments during writing that describes the "safety" state of everything. These types of comments make the code review process faster, because you know the assumptions of the code and can look for where those assumptions may be incorrect or incorrectly implemented.
So it's your choice: software that's been well-designed (or at least reasonably designed) from the beginning, or software that's been quickly scrubbed for errors that don't lend themselves to quick discovery.
(Although I personally believe that somewhere at Microsoft there are some people doing good up-front design work... way to go Solitare team!)
You just GOTTA run this on a super text console (768 rows and 1024 columns) to appreciate the beauty of the design. No more annoying graphics, just pure ASCII goodness. My only problem is that the Quake ASCII renderer and Qt-Console fight over the text display, and the Quake ASCII get re-rendered by Qt-Console. Really freaky, it looks like....
But why should your right-click on the desktop to change the screen's resolution? Or the screen saver? Shouldn't those be "properties" of the computer?
User-friendliness for beginner computer users leads us to "a single method to do everything," even when that single method is woefully inadequate.
User-friendliness for advanced computer users leads to specialized interfaces that must be remembered (EMACS, vi, etc).
In the short term, the one-size-fits-all gets you going, but for long term productivity you'll want those CTRL-ALT-BACKSLAH and ESC ESC ] commands.
I can't keep up with a 433 MHz Celeron. So I have two choices:
1. Run distributed.net and find optimal golum rulers.
2. Update to a "bloated" new version of Windows that will do a few neat things for me with those extra cycles, and still run some d.net blocks.
Ask InfoWorld to run a real processor-intesive task (say, COMPILING Office XP/Mozilaa/etc), something that isn't drawing-limited.
User-interactive programs well be UI-limited before CPU-limited. Processing tasks are CPU-limited. Doesn't matter that Word can deal with 1000 words a second, I only type 60 per minute. So what if automatic spell checking, grammar checking, Microsoft Thought Police (tm), and other things slow Word down to 1000 words a minute, it's still faster than I can type.
I like Ximian GNOME for much the same reason: I can trade off my unused cycles for some graphical glitz. It's still faster than I am.
There are lies; there are damn lies; and then there are Benchmarks.
QoS is not (directly) about who gets screwed. Only paranoid bandwidth junkies who are afraid about having to pay market value for their bandwidth think about it that way.
The concept behind QoS is that some data streams depend not only on getting data, but getting it in a timely manner (voice, video, real-time nuclear control protocols). Other data streams don't care about how long it takes to deliver, just so the data comes through (ftp, mail, news).
In a general store-and-forward system (like every router & switch I've ever seen), every packet is treated equally. Meaning that the ftp/mail/news packet can get through and make my voice/video packet "late" and therefore unusable.
Quality of Service is all about asking the network if it can provide a certain bandwidth with a certain latency. (QoS as releated to connection contracts is a different matter, which is better termed Traffic Policing.) The network decides if it can provide this to me, and sets up routing tables to handle the connection. The routers now see my new voice/video packet coming in and let it jump the queue ahead of the ftp/web/news packet, because it now understands that the voice/video is worthless unless it gets there on time.
QoS, the FedEx of the Internet.
U.S. Postal Serivce, the standard "who cares when it gets there" delivery method.
What I find interesting is that Schmeiser is counter-suing Monsanto for contaminating his crop.
If his neighbor buys the seed, and he doesn't, but a bee pollenates between the two plants (I assume this happens, but I don't know for sure), and his seeds start to contain the Monsanto 'patented genes', then what? The decision Monsanto won says that he STILL owes them royalties.
I think this is the ultimate form of 'viral' marketing -- by selling to one farmer, and shutting up for a long time, they could (potentially) get all farmers in Canada (and, potentially, the U.S.) to owe them money.
*sniff* Hmmm... *sniff* *sniff* something smells rotten. *sniiiiiiiiff* I think it's coming from the patent offices around the world...
Actually, (IIRC) Wind River (the makers of VxWorks) will give you a warranty for their software in specific applications (say, life support device), IF you (a) pay them enough $$$ and (b) allow them to review some aspects of the final design. I doubt this allows the customer's customer to sue Wind River directly, but it probably allows the customer to recover something after the customer's customer comes after them.
Actually.... The n in an OC-n will be 3*(4^x), with the exception of OC-1. Therefore, we are currently at 3*(4^4). Therefore, the next step up from an OC-768 (n=3*4^4) is OC-3072 (n=3*4^5).
Or we can call this an OC-3k and simplify the numbers as we continue up the scale. My job is making ATM network testers, and I really don't want to be talking about OC-Thirty-Seventy-Two connections in my meetings, but OC-Three-Kay works for me.
But the Europeans have it a bit better, as they get rid of the silly factor-of-three (which is due to the DS3 standard) and base their STM-1 on an E4 of data (140 megabit). So, STM-n where n=4^x. An OC-768 is equal to an STM-256, and the next generation will be STM-1024. Gets us back to those nice computer-ish numbers. Just to make the OC-1024 poster feel a bit better.
Now this is an April Fool's gag! When can we expect to see a Swedish Chef-to-English mangler in Slashcode? Or on Babelfish!
Who needs English! I'd try and parody here, but I'd really do bad, bad, bad... but if we could apply it to comments... might make the First Post/Natalie Portman/etc comments better.:^)
This is a good step forward, but it's not the type of switch most people assume when they see the word 'switch'. It looks like Agilent has the world's first pure optical cross connect, which is a significant development.
Single fibres are never installed, there are always multiples, so that if one gets damaged/breaks/hit by backhoe, there is another that (hopefully) didn't get damanged, and the equipment switches to the backup. That's the application I see for this Agilent development.
Transmitters for 2.4 Gbit/S optics are EXPENSIVE, can generate a lot of HEAT, and are fairly LARGE. So if you have multiple redundant connections, you currently need mulitple redundant transmitters! Not a great investment... BUT if you can take 1 transmitter and use a 'pure-optical switch' (better known, probably, as a cross-connect) to connect it to one of N possible fibres, well... it saves money and could improve reliability.
Not only that, but it's independent of the actual technology on the fibre. So it can switch OC-3's (155 MHz-ish), OC-12's (622 MHz-ish), OC-48's (2.4 GHz-ish), and wave-division multiplexed (multi-wavelength lasers on a single fibre) without caring about it... 'cause it's just a mirror!
This is a Good Thing (tm). HP might not be the first to do it (I had a college professor that was using microelectronic machines [MEMS] to do something similar), but it seems they might be the first to mass-product it.
It all depends on the hardware/software in question. Having not played with software RAID recently, I defer judgement on speed. But hardware RAID has a few advantages over software.
Most notably, you're offloading a processing chore from the CPU, which will make the main CPU more available. It also means that the RAID controller can do 'background' chores, like verifying the volumes when no accesses are pending, rebuilding a volume after a disk failure (assuming the RAID set has redundancy).
But I wouldn't knock IDE RAID for hobbyists: IDE disks are cheaper, and there is a performance boost. And most implementations (I believe this is true for FasTrack66) fool the OS into thinking the RAID set is just a plain ol' IDE hard disk!
And the main point: will software RAID be better than no RAID at all (for the very cost-conscious)? In a reasonable implementation, the answer should be yes.
I don't believe I've seen anyone point this out yet... I recall WinCE being termed "Windows, Consumer Edition" when it was first released. Now, M$ is coming along with Windows 2000, and eventually a product called Windows 2000 Consumer, meant for the Win9x user (as opposed to Windows 2000 Professional for the WinNT user). Seems to me that M$ is simply cleaning out the namespace so that they can use Windows 2000 Consumer as a product name and not get it confused too much with WinCE in their marketing department.
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The drive was made by Kenwood. I owned one. The technology was called TrueX and was developed by Zen Research plc (http://www.zenresearch.com). Zen Relearch plc's page appears only to be a death notice.
It was an interesting technology. Quiet CD-ROM drives with massive (up to 72x) speed. Just pray that there wasn't much random access, as the seek time on the drives stunk. It also couldn't extract audio data well above 4x.
I believe Zen had plans (at one time) to extend the technology to DVD's and CD-R's, but as I never saw any products, either I'm hallucinating, or it just wouldn't work the way they wanted.
But it was cool technology.
However, given that, it might be their general-purpose proto board. The graphics core might be 40k (or fewer) equivalent gates, but it looks like they access the devices over a USB interface, and that takes more gates. And, if you're not sure how big your design will be, it never hurts to have too much FPGA.
While I'm nit-picking the boards, the other board on display is a BGA in a friction-mount connector. Looks like they're expecting to replace that chip quite a bit.
And, a final on-topic-like statement. I work on an embedded device. Acceleration of video at any cost in power is worthless. I'd rather flash 5 screen per second at very low power than 50 screens per second at multi-Watt power consumption. (Reference ATI's mobile graphics solution: low power, but still not as low as StrongARM integrated video.)
Look at their pricing. 1.5M/256K for $40ish, and 3M/384K for $80ish. Why didn't the upload rate double on the high-end offering?
Oh yeah, we're consumers, not supposed to upload, share, or be creative, only eat the drivel provided for us. Why would we want to connect to our computer remotely? Or videoconference? Or share movies from our ReplayTVs?
DVDs are less expensive than CDs because the movie industry has multiple sources of revenue to cover the costs of production.
Movies get advertised for theatrical release, just as CD's are advertised for release. But movies collect money at the box office, from pay-per-view, and from HBO/Showtime, and home release. Even if the order is changing (some things I think I see on DVD before HBO/Showtime), the sources are still there. But CD's have only have home release to recover money for the record industry, as opposed to artists who earn money from touring and other engagements.
DVD prices are adjusted for each region, since hideous use prevention technology is burned into all "legal" players and discs. So while Americans (region 1) get it for $10-$20, Europeans might pay $30 or more for the SAME DISC with a different use prevention code.
CDs, on the other hand, can not be limited to a single market. So, if the industry wants to rip off one market, they must make sure that it can't be bought elsewhere and then imported at a lower price than their artificial market price.
Unless, of course, the RIAA and MPAA ban the sale of used discs. Then the RIAA could ban imports, and the Europeans will get it even worse, if things hold to pattern. Because they won't give up their $18 discs.
The link to the article on www.law.com won't display for me (in Mozilla) because I refuse their audience-tracking cookie. The entire article loads (and I can save it and just read through the raw HTML), but then shuffles me over to a "you must accept our cookie so we can enhance your (advertising) experience on our site."
Something else for Mozilla to "correct" for me, someday. Until then... can we just avoid links to this evil lying entity?
Why will people buy SACDs? Do you have a multi-channel "home theatre" receiver? Why play stereo music (2-channel) when you could have surround (5.1-channel)? The CD is stuck in the stereo world. It cannot change. SACD gets you to multi-channel, which can really make recordings have a lot more depth. It's why concerts "feel" different than listening on the stereo.
That's why people should want SACDs. The SACD/CD hybrid is just a bridge to get us there (and get everyone to buy a new CD player). But the music industry wants us to get there... why? There will be no SACD drive for a home computer. SACDs are not (to my knowledge) readable by a DVD mechanism. But SACDs don't store more data than a DVD, so there will be little or no demand for computer drives. No SACD recorders, either, in my opinion. No ripping of SACD content (just the existing CD layer) or burning of exact SACD copies.
And after the world + dog has purchased SACD equipment, discs will stop carrying the CD "compatability" layer. Now music can't be digitally ripped (although you could still analog copy, but how many people copied tapes at home?) and posted on the 'net. So, the average consumer gets a disc that, with the right equipment, provides multi-channel recordings that "feel" more like a concert, and the music industry feels that they've reduced the CD rip-share-and-burn threat.
So SACDs are good for the consumer (surround-sound recordings), but SACDs are bad for the consumer (no equipment to excercise fair-use rights in the digital domain will be produced, although you could still make analog copies).
Nope, sorry, wrong answer. There is the COPA and the COPPA. Really sneaky, I must admit, to make a very nice-sounding bit of legislation (COPPA, no collection of information from people 13 and under) and a very nasty bit of legislation (COPA, prevent children from seing anything that violates "community standards") have such similar abbreviations. I doubt most of your elected representatives even know the difference, though, and they're lobbied by these people.
Support COPA: $50k, check.
Support COPPA: $50k, check.
Re-election campagin without having to worry about support from your constituents: Pricele$$.
This just seems so obvious to me (which is probably why the Media Oligarchy has never thought of it):
Make non-30-second commericals.
Make complete commerical breaks that are not 30-second multiples.
Now all of those 30-second skip buttons are useless, because they'll skip into the show and have to rewind and then fast forward again etcetera. That's why I never bothered to fast forward commericals on a VCR--it was too much hassle. Oh, 30-second skip on my TiVo? Cool... zap zap zap done.
Heck, one 40-second commerical to end the break, and now everyone has to rewind.
Pointless additional recollection: For some reason I recall an old Sports Illustrated story from the early 90's (say, 1992) about the "TV of the Future," with 10 second commericals, because you can get a really catchy pitch done in 10 seconds.
The open-source community has not in total done as many man-years of computer security code reviews as Microsoft. The open-source community tends to consider these things before implementation, reducing the need to do a full-bore code review afterward.
Why? Because the designer added comments during writing that describes the "safety" state of everything. These types of comments make the code review process faster, because you know the assumptions of the code and can look for where those assumptions may be incorrect or incorrectly implemented.
So it's your choice: software that's been well-designed (or at least reasonably designed) from the beginning, or software that's been quickly scrubbed for errors that don't lend themselves to quick discovery.
(Although I personally believe that somewhere at Microsoft there are some people doing good up-front design work... way to go Solitare team!)
West Virginia University has something that sounds awfully similar to this in their Personal Rapit Transit (PRT) system (http://www.arc.wvu.edu/transportation/PRT.html). The WVU PRT has been in service since 1975. More information (and a very nice picture) at http://www.nis.wvu.edu/Releases_Old/wvu_beats_disn ey.html.
But why should your right-click on the desktop to change the screen's resolution? Or the screen saver? Shouldn't those be "properties" of the computer?
User-friendliness for beginner computer users leads us to "a single method to do everything," even when that single method is woefully inadequate.
User-friendliness for advanced computer users leads to specialized interfaces that must be remembered (EMACS, vi, etc).
In the short term, the one-size-fits-all gets you going, but for long term productivity you'll want those CTRL-ALT-BACKSLAH and ESC ESC ] commands.
I can't keep up with a 433 MHz Celeron. So I have two choices:
1. Run distributed.net and find optimal golum rulers.
2. Update to a "bloated" new version of Windows that will do a few neat things for me with those extra cycles, and still run some d.net blocks.
Ask InfoWorld to run a real processor-intesive task (say, COMPILING Office XP/Mozilaa/etc), something that isn't drawing-limited.
User-interactive programs well be UI-limited before CPU-limited. Processing tasks are CPU-limited. Doesn't matter that Word can deal with 1000 words a second, I only type 60 per minute. So what if automatic spell checking, grammar checking, Microsoft Thought Police (tm), and other things slow Word down to 1000 words a minute, it's still faster than I can type.
I like Ximian GNOME for much the same reason: I can trade off my unused cycles for some graphical glitz. It's still faster than I am.
There are lies; there are damn lies; and then there are Benchmarks.
The concept behind QoS is that some data streams depend not only on getting data, but getting it in a timely manner (voice, video, real-time nuclear control protocols). Other data streams don't care about how long it takes to deliver, just so the data comes through (ftp, mail, news).
In a general store-and-forward system (like every router & switch I've ever seen), every packet is treated equally. Meaning that the ftp/mail/news packet can get through and make my voice/video packet "late" and therefore unusable.
Quality of Service is all about asking the network if it can provide a certain bandwidth with a certain latency. (QoS as releated to connection contracts is a different matter, which is better termed Traffic Policing.) The network decides if it can provide this to me, and sets up routing tables to handle the connection. The routers now see my new voice/video packet coming in and let it jump the queue ahead of the ftp/web/news packet, because it now understands that the voice/video is worthless unless it gets there on time.
QoS, the FedEx of the Internet.
U.S. Postal Serivce, the standard "who cares when it gets there" delivery method.
If his neighbor buys the seed, and he doesn't, but a bee pollenates between the two plants (I assume this happens, but I don't know for sure), and his seeds start to contain the Monsanto 'patented genes', then what? The decision Monsanto won says that he STILL owes them royalties.
I think this is the ultimate form of 'viral' marketing -- by selling to one farmer, and shutting up for a long time, they could (potentially) get all farmers in Canada (and, potentially, the U.S.) to owe them money.
*sniff* Hmmm... *sniff* *sniff* something smells rotten. *sniiiiiiiiff* I think it's coming from the patent offices around the world...
Actually, (IIRC) Wind River (the makers of VxWorks) will give you a warranty for their software in specific applications (say, life support device), IF you (a) pay them enough $$$ and (b) allow them to review some aspects of the final design. I doubt this allows the customer's customer to sue Wind River directly, but it probably allows the customer to recover something after the customer's customer comes after them.
Or we can call this an OC-3k and simplify the numbers as we continue up the scale. My job is making ATM network testers, and I really don't want to be talking about OC-Thirty-Seventy-Two connections in my meetings, but OC-Three-Kay works for me.
But the Europeans have it a bit better, as they get rid of the silly factor-of-three (which is due to the DS3 standard) and base their STM-1 on an E4 of data (140 megabit). So, STM-n where n=4^x. An OC-768 is equal to an STM-256, and the next generation will be STM-1024. Gets us back to those nice computer-ish numbers. Just to make the OC-1024 poster feel a bit better.
Who needs English! I'd try and parody here, but I'd really do bad, bad, bad... but if we could apply it to comments... might make the First Post/Natalie Portman/etc comments better. :^)
I am prepared for OFFTOPIC points... fire away!
This is a good step forward, but it's not the type of switch most people assume when they see the word 'switch'. It looks like Agilent has the world's first pure optical cross connect, which is a significant development.
Single fibres are never installed, there are always multiples, so that if one gets damaged/breaks/hit by backhoe, there is another that (hopefully) didn't get damanged, and the equipment switches to the backup. That's the application I see for this Agilent development.
Transmitters for 2.4 Gbit/S optics are EXPENSIVE, can generate a lot of HEAT, and are fairly LARGE. So if you have multiple redundant connections, you currently need mulitple redundant transmitters! Not a great investment... BUT if you can take 1 transmitter and use a 'pure-optical switch' (better known, probably, as a cross-connect) to connect it to one of N possible fibres, well... it saves money and could improve reliability.
Not only that, but it's independent of the actual technology on the fibre. So it can switch OC-3's (155 MHz-ish), OC-12's (622 MHz-ish), OC-48's (2.4 GHz-ish), and wave-division multiplexed (multi-wavelength lasers on a single fibre) without caring about it... 'cause it's just a mirror!
This is a Good Thing (tm). HP might not be the first to do it (I had a college professor that was using microelectronic machines [MEMS] to do something similar), but it seems they might be the first to mass-product it.
It all depends on the hardware/software in question. Having not played with software RAID recently, I defer judgement on speed. But hardware RAID has a few advantages over software.
Most notably, you're offloading a processing chore from the CPU, which will make the main CPU more available. It also means that the RAID controller can do 'background' chores, like verifying the volumes when no accesses are pending, rebuilding a volume after a disk failure (assuming the RAID set has redundancy).
But I wouldn't knock IDE RAID for hobbyists: IDE disks are cheaper, and there is a performance boost. And most implementations (I believe this is true for FasTrack66) fool the OS into thinking the RAID set is just a plain ol' IDE hard disk!
And the main point: will software RAID be better than no RAID at all (for the very cost-conscious)? In a reasonable implementation, the answer should be yes.
I don't believe I've seen anyone point this out yet... I recall WinCE being termed "Windows, Consumer Edition" when it was first released. Now, M$ is coming along with Windows 2000, and eventually a product called Windows 2000 Consumer, meant for the Win9x user (as opposed to Windows 2000 Professional for the WinNT user). Seems to me that M$ is simply cleaning out the namespace so that they can use Windows 2000 Consumer as a product name and not get it confused too much with WinCE in their marketing department.