Umm... I think you're the one that is mistaken, I did look at the datasheet on the board- I looked at the block block diagram that Tyan has on their website- The 2050 is off of the secondary CPU, and the 2nd x16 and 1 Gb Lan port (page 2 of the pdf)- everything else is off of the the primary northbridge (2200). Which kinda messes up my idea of what SLI is- I thought the PCI-E cards could talk to each other directly- actually, they have to make hops over 3 different hypertransport links (PCI-E x16 to 2200 to primimary cpu over hypertransport, hypertransport to secondary cpu, hypertransport to 2050, 20 secondary x16 PCI-E.
I wasn't aware of the K8WE- but it is still not a true 2nd x16 slot off of the chipset- it is a second root-hub/north-bridge that hooks up to a 2nd processor- the only way that the primary processor has access to it is through the second processor. I'd like to see how it actually performs- from my non-SMB expert view- it looks like you still have a major bottleneck- the benchmarks aren't that stupendous.
I'm a bit leery of nVidia's chipsets- I'm working with some people that have a couple of the Tyan dual x8 PCIE boards- they've been pretty bad in terms of stability. Very fast, yes, just when they are running. They've got great potential, I just think they need more time and development for stability before I'm comfortable trusting them for any type of server application.
Seriously- if you wanted to build your own custom motherboard, do what the big guys do- go to one of the motherboard makers in Taiwan. You'll need them because they already have relationships with all the CPU and chipset companies. You (or the company that makes the motherboard) would very likely have to use something already released, or enter into some *very* restrictive NDAs to get pre-release silicon, and that would be only if you can convince the silicon manufacturers that they should use up some of their very limited pre-release silicon on you and your project.
It will cost millions and take 6 months to a year to get a good, stable system. Making a motherboard is far from the "just plug it in" stage, particularly when you get to new-ish technology (say, stuff released in the last 3 years). Everybody is still learning how to connect things up right and view the secrets of the development and testing as proprietary.
On the other hand, there is a big problem in what you're asking for- as far as I am aware, The chipset you specify doesn't support 2 x16 PCI-E slots, and opening it up to other chipsets, there are none that offer capability for 2 x16 slots (available now)
The Dell 6850 (rack) or 6800 (tower) can take 16 DIMMSs- 32gig right now, 64 Gig when dial rank 4G DIMMs are available- it even supports hot-plug memory, up to 1.5 TB of storage (5 300GB SCSI drives). Up to 4 processors (Intel 64 bit).
In general, board color doesn't make any difference- the color comes from the solder mask- you can use any color you want. Where I work the color of the solder mask tells you what revision the board is- red boards are the first iteration, usually pretty buggy, lots of reworks. It freaked me out at first when I saw all the red motherboards at Fry's- my first reaction was ACK!-- stay away!
Seriously- where do you get this? The spec for gigabit ethernet (check it for yourself- Clause 40- you can get it for free from the IEEE website) has no mention of "Cat 5e" at all- it specifically states that gigabit ethernet must: Support operation over 100 meters of Category 5 balanced cabling as defined in 40.7 - in 40.7 they state that the bandwidth of the signal is approximately 80 MHz- about the same as 100 Mbit, except that all four pairs are used for transmit and recieve.
I second the recommendation on the SwissTool- all the tools lock, and it has a decent "lock" on the pliers portion (A spring and a flat) which is better than the "friction" lock I've seen on plenty of the other tools available. Another big plus- it has a smooth edged blade and a serrated blade. I've had one for six years, and been very impressed.
The critical aspect you leave out is that Gigabit ethernet is (inherently) Full Duplex. That means that that a 32/33 PCI bus would be saturated at a gigabit out, but have no bandwidth for anything incoming.
In truth, a gigabit ethernet card can saturate a 1X PCI-E link (2Gb/s after the 8B/10B encoding is removed), when sending small packets- basically due to packet overhead.
I'm in the process of building my own "ultimate workshop" and I've already got the computing side set up. I'm using a disk-less workstation connected to a cheap 14" monitor. That monitor is also connected to a DirecTV box via a video to VGA box I got from a discount place for about $40. Added an old set of computer speakers, and I have a set up where I can watch TV (discovery channel in the background usually), listen to music (via DirectTV's music channels) or use the computer (X terminal into my home server). I tied all of this into one little box that I have a fan sucking air into through a filter. The box where I have this is is made positive pressure by the fan, keeping most of the dust out. I sealed it with a piece of plexiglass with magnetic tape around the edges. Of course, my workshop is already wired with Ethernet- as yours should be!
For the keyboard, I couldn't anything I really liked that was sealed (though I'm still looking), so I bought a $10 keyboard at Fry's- I figure I'll just replace it as needed. I'm using an optical mouse- less likely to get gunked up by the gunk on the workbench.
I tried to make sure that mothing I installed had any internal fans- those are the things most likely to get gunked up with dust first.
Of course, once things do get dusty, I have shop-air to blow them out (air-compressor outside, copper piping inside). Watch out- you can generate a lot of static electricity with compressed air- which is why I'll be grounding all the copper piping in my system (which should reduce it somewhat). Blowing out electronics systems is probably not the best idea, since there is usually some water in the compressed air- I've built in a condenser type system to try to get rid of some of the water, but it's not really perfect.
This is a project in continual change (as all proper geek type projects should be)- I'm trying to make it just as I like, but with the ability to change in case I want/need to reconfigure.
Her endocrinologist has called it "type 1.5" and has categorically refused to prescribe insulin, citing a very real possibility that it could kill her- her pancreas *does* produce insulin (so she's not type 1 as I understand it) and her body can use the insulin she produces (so she's not type 2 as I understand it). But we have seen her blood sugar go from over 200 to under 70 in less than an hour.
I don't have her test results handy- but mostly the endocrinologists are left scratching their heads.
Thankfully, her blood sugar has been kept under pretty good control for the past 6 months or so through diet. Going back to the original premise- the best thing I could think for her would be some tool that would monitor the rate of change of her glucose, which could help her avoid the extremes by letting her know to eat something (if going low fast), or to figure out what she did wrong (if going high too fast).
I'm not as concerned about her highs- they tend not to be too extreme (rarely over 200), and very tied to what she has eaten, but her lows... they can be scary.
Well, all that has already been done (including endocrinologists saying "that can't be happening", and "your glucometer must be wrong, your blood sugar can't be that low and still be conscious" and then it checks matches what their hi-tech super doctor's office stuff says). Her blood sugar is under control now (keeping to a low carb diet and monitoring the amount of carbs/meal)... mostly. At this point, there doesn't seem to be anything that medicine can do- her pancreas does work, but just not on schedule. Just like an underdamped differential equation. Every endocrinologist just throws up their hands and gives it all to the dietician.
Just gotta keep an eye out for the occasional extremes (which have been caused on very hot days with dehydration, weird reactions to antihistamines, and by a dumb s*** endocrinologist sending her to drive home after a glucose tolerance test).
My wife has reactive hypoglycemia- which appears to me (an engineer) as an under-damped differential equation- if her blood sugar goes too high too quickly, it will then go low quickly, which has led to intoxication like symptoms, and occasionally, unconsciousness.
A device that can accurately measure rate of change of blood sugar would go a long way towards helping her out- since it could help her predict and avoid the dangerous crashes. Right now, the only way is with test strips, and as many have pointed out, it gets really expensive.
Having just married a high school teacher, I was curious about this- so I started doing a little research in my town (Austin, TX)- the median teacher salary I could find for towns in Texas with a population over 10,000 (the best granularity I could find with a quick search) was about $41K (which is higher than my wife, who has about 10 years experience teaching), and the median salary in Austin is $51K.
Basically, teachers are underpaid. People talk about "summers off"... kind of, but not really- they have mandatory in-service training during the summer- a requirement to get and/or keep their certificate. They don't get all that much leave otherwise- pretty much, during the school year, most of their "personal days" are devoted to the normal day-to day things like medical appointments and sick days.
The additional requirements of "No Child Left Behind" include that all teachers be "highly qualified" means that we will have even fewer people that will be able to work for 20% less than the median rate.
Computers can be a help in the classroom, but without teachers who know how to teach, they are useless.
The development package that they are offering it for appears to be the $5000 mobileGT Total5200 Unfortunately a bit-pricey for my homebuilt telematics project- I'll keep using the old laptop.
with good solid connectors, good helpful specs, doing this stuff shouldnt be that hard. yes, its higher speed, but an idiot like me migh have a chance of making an uber-high-speed board if i use some liberal spacing.
i could be dead wrong.
Ahh... The innocence of youth... Good to set your sights high, but, really, this stuff is hard. All of it. Spacing is only part of it- usually you can get enough spacing if it is 3x to 5x the height of the trace above the ground plane. But if you're talking about differential pairs (like you have to be with PCIE), then everything is different. Basically, once you get into the really fast edge rates, you've got to look at the wire as a transmission line. Remember "Smith Charts?" Most engineering students try to forget them, but hello, they're back!
I'm not just "talking a story" from what I've been reading off of the Internet- if you take a look at my URL, you can find out where I work (hint- rhymes with "hell"). We've just released our first PCIE systems, and they are by no means simple. PCIE is only a small part of the system. Heck, a huge portion of the time spent on a new motherboard is on the BIOS and working around chipset issues. Despite the popular opinion, the company I work for does design systems, working hand-in-hand with the silicon developers, from the first buggy silicon until they ship the first board.
What most people don't realize when they talk about getting a cheap new motherboard from some Asian company is that the systems were not (necessarily) initially brought up and the bugs found over there- most of them were brought up, debugged, and first brought to market by one of the big computer makers in the US. You win because those companies everyone disses spent their effort debugging them to get a slight head-start on the Asian manufacturers.
i'm just a computer engineer (may '05 baby), they dont teach us much about the black art of high speed signalling, but somehow BGA gives me faith. it may mean you have to have your 6 layer board shipped to you, but that seems like an OK tradeoff for being able to design some amazingly high speed hardware without being a signal-foo master.
The high speed busses atually mean you've got to be more of a high speed design master- True, there aren't as many traces, but you have to be much more careful about the traces you do put down. A very frustrating part of the high speed design process is that the signalling is so fast that even putting an additional pF or two of capacitance from a probe can completely change your signal.
For additional info on high speed signalling, check out Howard Johnson and his books. He is a high speed signalling master, and is very good at explaining it. If you ever get a chance to take one of his seminars, jump at it. Very definitely worth the time.
OK, I may be a bit biased (since I work for one of the major PC manufacturers, but not in a software or BIOS related area), but I think the problem with an open BIOS is a lot deeper than the PC manufacturer. While the PC manufacturer's schematics are confidential, the majority of the BIOS work has to do with confidential (NDA restricted) data from the silicon manufacturers. Then there is the underlying code of the BIOS used on the PC manufacturer's board, which is probably licensed from a different company.
Ultimately, to make an open BIOS, the most important piece of cooperation you need is from the chipset manufacturers, but ultimately, you need cooperation from every single one of the manufacturers of every piece of silicon on the board.
Of course, once you've flashed a different BIOS onto the board, don't expect to get any support from the board manufacturer- they try to stand behind their product, but that's hard enough for configurations they have been able to test.
If you're talking about power lines, the electric field decreases at 1/r *not* 1/r^2. As another poster pointed out, inverse square only counts for point source radiators.
I remember reading one of the original papers on turbo coding- (maybe 5 or 6 years ago) and turbo codes are great, but they add latency (which was the point of the original poster in this thread)- the more latency they add, the better they get- they spread the "energy" of a bit of information over a long time period- as you approach infinite latency (useless, of course), you approach Shannon's limit. A little bit of noise only messes up a little bit of the energy in that bit of information, most of the information still gets through.
I got one of the Time Warner DVRs when Time Warner first offered them in Austin. It was a piece of crap. Crashed all the time, the "pause live TV" feature never really worked for me, the last straw was when it crashed, taking all my recorded programs with it. I took it back. I'm about to ditch Time Warner for DirectTV. For the price they charge, they just aren't worth it.
Serial is not faster than parallel *but* it is far easier to design with- when you get really high speed links, you have to start getting a lot more careful about how you place the wires down- as you go up in frequency, wires start looking more like transmission lines and you need to start looking at crosstalk between lines and EMI issues.
To stay with parallel busses, the connectors would have to be huge (if they were small, crosstalk would be a big problem). Because processing power is getting cheaper, it makes the processing required behind serial a lot easier.
Also, parallel busses were often multi-point busses, but as you increase in speed, because of the transmission line issues- that doesn't work very well, so you must go point-point between all devices, and running point-point parallel busses between a lot of devices is a *nightmare*.
The biggest problem with static is not immediate catastrophic damage, but with shortening the life of components- the static may not have killed it first off, but the components will be more likely to fail. A static discharge that you can't even feel will weaken the oxide (the O part of CMOS) to cause it to eventually fail.
I worked in a factory where they tried to "clean up" for a quality inspection by painting the walkways. We had an immediate surge in the number of failures due to static, but what was more interesting was the long term failures- parts that passed all the tests initially, but ended up getting returned a few weeks or months later (at a much higher rate than normal).
I had Time Warner's PVR since a few days after they released it in Austin- and I just took it back. The problems I had:
1) The box is slow- particularly when recording- if you choose to record one channel and watch another- changing channels take a few seconds, though all the keypresses on the remote get queued. Really irritating when surfing around. 2) The box frequently 'forgot' programming, and when I told it to 'record every episode' of a show- it would record some, not others, and it was pretty unpredictable. 3) The 'pause live TV' feature takes a while to actually start up (it doesn't record by default) and for some reason, it stopped working altogether. It would just end up giving me a blank screen. 4) A bunch of the programs I recorded ended up being corrupted. 5) (and final straw) It suddenly stopped with an 'unrecoverable write error'
Considering that I was paying nearly $100/mo for cable service (Digital+HBO+PVR+regular set-top) It just wasn't worth it.
Though they advertize it as $10/mo- not really- my bill dropped by about $18/mo when I swapped the PVR for a normal digital set-top box.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm... I think you're the one that is mistaken, I did look at the datasheet on the board- I looked at the block block diagram that Tyan has on their website- The 2050 is off of the secondary CPU, and the 2nd x16 and 1 Gb Lan port (page 2 of the pdf)- everything else is off of the the primary northbridge (2200). Which kinda messes up my idea of what SLI is- I thought the PCI-E cards could talk to each other directly- actually, they have to make hops over 3 different hypertransport links (PCI-E x16 to 2200 to primimary cpu over hypertransport, hypertransport to secondary cpu, hypertransport to 2050, 20 secondary x16 PCI-E.
I wasn't aware of the K8WE- but it is still not a true 2nd x16 slot off of the chipset- it is a second root-hub/north-bridge that hooks up to a 2nd processor- the only way that the primary processor has access to it is through the second processor. I'd like to see how it actually performs- from my non-SMB expert view- it looks like you still have a major bottleneck- the benchmarks aren't that stupendous.
I'm a bit leery of nVidia's chipsets- I'm working with some people that have a couple of the Tyan dual x8 PCIE boards- they've been pretty bad in terms of stability. Very fast, yes, just when they are running. They've got great potential, I just think they need more time and development for stability before I'm comfortable trusting them for any type of server application.
Seriously- if you wanted to build your own custom motherboard, do what the big guys do- go to one of the motherboard makers in Taiwan. You'll need them because they already have relationships with all the CPU and chipset companies. You (or the company that makes the motherboard) would very likely have to use something already released, or enter into some *very* restrictive NDAs to get pre-release silicon, and that would be only if you can convince the silicon manufacturers that they should use up some of their very limited pre-release silicon on you and your project.
It will cost millions and take 6 months to a year to get a good, stable system. Making a motherboard is far from the "just plug it in" stage, particularly when you get to new-ish technology (say, stuff released in the last 3 years). Everybody is still learning how to connect things up right and view the secrets of the development and testing as proprietary.
On the other hand, there is a big problem in what you're asking for- as far as I am aware, The chipset you specify doesn't support 2 x16 PCI-E slots, and opening it up to other chipsets, there are none that offer capability for 2 x16 slots (available now)
The Dell 6850 (rack) or 6800 (tower) can take 16 DIMMSs- 32gig right now, 64 Gig when dial rank 4G DIMMs are available- it even supports hot-plug memory, up to 1.5 TB of storage (5 300GB SCSI drives). Up to 4 processors (Intel 64 bit).
In general, board color doesn't make any difference- the color comes from the solder mask- you can use any color you want. Where I work the color of the solder mask tells you what revision the board is- red boards are the first iteration, usually pretty buggy, lots of reworks. It freaked me out at first when I saw all the red motherboards at Fry's- my first reaction was ACK!-- stay away!
Seriously- where do you get this? The spec for gigabit ethernet (check it for yourself- Clause 40- you can get it for free from the IEEE website) has no mention of "Cat 5e" at all- it specifically states that gigabit ethernet must: Support operation over 100 meters of Category 5 balanced cabling as defined in 40.7 - in 40.7 they state that the bandwidth of the signal is approximately 80 MHz- about the same as 100 Mbit, except that all four pairs are used for transmit and recieve.
I second the recommendation on the SwissTool- all the tools lock, and it has a decent "lock" on the pliers portion (A spring and a flat) which is better than the "friction" lock I've seen on plenty of the other tools available. Another big plus- it has a smooth edged blade and a serrated blade. I've had one for six years, and been very impressed.
In truth, a gigabit ethernet card can saturate a 1X PCI-E link (2Gb/s after the 8B/10B encoding is removed), when sending small packets- basically due to packet overhead.
I'm in the process of building my own "ultimate workshop" and I've already got the computing side set up. I'm using a disk-less workstation connected to a cheap 14" monitor. That monitor is also connected to a DirecTV box via a video to VGA box I got from a discount place for about $40. Added an old set of computer speakers, and I have a set up where I can watch TV (discovery channel in the background usually), listen to music (via DirectTV's music channels) or use the computer (X terminal into my home server). I tied all of this into one little box that I have a fan sucking air into through a filter. The box where I have this is is made positive pressure by the fan, keeping most of the dust out. I sealed it with a piece of plexiglass with magnetic tape around the edges. Of course, my workshop is already wired with Ethernet- as yours should be!
For the keyboard, I couldn't anything I really liked that was sealed (though I'm still looking), so I bought a $10 keyboard at Fry's- I figure I'll just replace it as needed. I'm using an optical mouse- less likely to get gunked up by the gunk on the workbench.
I tried to make sure that mothing I installed had any internal fans- those are the things most likely to get gunked up with dust first.
Of course, once things do get dusty, I have shop-air to blow them out (air-compressor outside, copper piping inside). Watch out- you can generate a lot of static electricity with compressed air- which is why I'll be grounding all the copper piping in my system (which should reduce it somewhat). Blowing out electronics systems is probably not the best idea, since there is usually some water in the compressed air- I've built in a condenser type system to try to get rid of some of the water, but it's not really perfect.
This is a project in continual change (as all proper geek type projects should be)- I'm trying to make it just as I like, but with the ability to change in case I want/need to reconfigure.
Her endocrinologist has called it "type 1.5" and has categorically refused to prescribe insulin, citing a very real possibility that it could kill her- her pancreas *does* produce insulin (so she's not type 1 as I understand it) and her body can use the insulin she produces (so she's not type 2 as I understand it). But we have seen her blood sugar go from over 200 to under 70 in less than an hour.
I don't have her test results handy- but mostly the endocrinologists are left scratching their heads.
Thankfully, her blood sugar has been kept under pretty good control for the past 6 months or so through diet. Going back to the original premise- the best thing I could think for her would be some tool that would monitor the rate of change of her glucose, which could help her avoid the extremes by letting her know to eat something (if going low fast), or to figure out what she did wrong (if going high too fast).
I'm not as concerned about her highs- they tend not to be too extreme (rarely over 200), and very tied to what she has eaten, but her lows... they can be scary.
Well, all that has already been done (including endocrinologists saying "that can't be happening", and "your glucometer must be wrong, your blood sugar can't be that low and still be conscious" and then it checks matches what their hi-tech super doctor's office stuff says). Her blood sugar is under control now (keeping to a low carb diet and monitoring the amount of carbs/meal)... mostly. At this point, there doesn't seem to be anything that medicine can do- her pancreas does work, but just not on schedule. Just like an underdamped differential equation. Every endocrinologist just throws up their hands and gives it all to the dietician.
Just gotta keep an eye out for the occasional extremes (which have been caused on very hot days with dehydration, weird reactions to antihistamines, and by a dumb s*** endocrinologist sending her to drive home after a glucose tolerance test).
My wife has reactive hypoglycemia- which appears to me (an engineer) as an under-damped differential equation- if her blood sugar goes too high too quickly, it will then go low quickly, which has led to intoxication like symptoms, and occasionally, unconsciousness.
A device that can accurately measure rate of change of blood sugar would go a long way towards helping her out- since it could help her predict and avoid the dangerous crashes. Right now, the only way is with test strips, and as many have pointed out, it gets really expensive.
Having just married a high school teacher, I was curious about this- so I started doing a little research in my town (Austin, TX)- the median teacher salary I could find for towns in Texas with a population over 10,000 (the best granularity I could find with a quick search) was about $41K (which is higher than my wife, who has about 10 years experience teaching), and the median salary in Austin is $51K.
... kind of, but not really- they have mandatory in-service training during the summer- a requirement to get and/or keep their certificate. They don't get all that much leave otherwise- pretty much, during the school year, most of their "personal days" are devoted to the normal day-to day things like medical appointments and sick days.
Basically, teachers are underpaid. People talk about "summers off"
The additional requirements of "No Child Left Behind" include that all teachers be "highly qualified" means that we will have even fewer people that will be able to work for 20% less than the median rate.
Computers can be a help in the classroom, but without teachers who know how to teach, they are useless.
The development package that they are offering it for appears to be the $5000 mobileGT Total5200 Unfortunately a bit-pricey for my homebuilt telematics project- I'll keep using the old laptop.
with good solid connectors, good helpful specs, doing this stuff shouldnt be that hard. yes, its higher speed, but an idiot like me migh have a chance of making an uber-high-speed board if i use some liberal spacing.
i could be dead wrong.
Ahh... The innocence of youth... Good to set your sights high, but, really, this stuff is hard. All of it. Spacing is only part of it- usually you can get enough spacing if it is 3x to 5x the height of the trace above the ground plane. But if you're talking about differential pairs (like you have to be with PCIE), then everything is different. Basically, once you get into the really fast edge rates, you've got to look at the wire as a transmission line. Remember "Smith Charts?" Most engineering students try to forget them, but hello, they're back!
I'm not just "talking a story" from what I've been reading off of the Internet- if you take a look at my URL, you can find out where I work (hint- rhymes with "hell"). We've just released our first PCIE systems, and they are by no means simple. PCIE is only a small part of the system. Heck, a huge portion of the time spent on a new motherboard is on the BIOS and working around chipset issues. Despite the popular opinion, the company I work for does design systems, working hand-in-hand with the silicon developers, from the first buggy silicon until they ship the first board.
What most people don't realize when they talk about getting a cheap new motherboard from some Asian company is that the systems were not (necessarily) initially brought up and the bugs found over there- most of them were brought up, debugged, and first brought to market by one of the big computer makers in the US. You win because those companies everyone disses spent their effort debugging them to get a slight head-start on the Asian manufacturers.
The high speed busses atually mean you've got to be more of a high speed design master- True, there aren't as many traces, but you have to be much more careful about the traces you do put down. A very frustrating part of the high speed design process is that the signalling is so fast that even putting an additional pF or two of capacitance from a probe can completely change your signal.
For additional info on high speed signalling, check out Howard Johnson and his books. He is a high speed signalling master, and is very good at explaining it. If you ever get a chance to take one of his seminars, jump at it. Very definitely worth the time.
Ultimately, to make an open BIOS, the most important piece of cooperation you need is from the chipset manufacturers, but ultimately, you need cooperation from every single one of the manufacturers of every piece of silicon on the board.
Of course, once you've flashed a different BIOS onto the board, don't expect to get any support from the board manufacturer- they try to stand behind their product, but that's hard enough for configurations they have been able to test.
If you're talking about power lines, the electric field decreases at 1/r *not* 1/r^2. As another poster pointed out, inverse square only counts for point source radiators.
How are they going to talk about Rishasthra? (or in other words, inter-species sex, often done as part of diplomacy/trade agreements).
I remember reading one of the original papers on turbo coding- (maybe 5 or 6 years ago) and turbo codes are great, but they add latency (which was the point of the original poster in this thread)- the more latency they add, the better they get- they spread the "energy" of a bit of information over a long time period- as you approach infinite latency (useless, of course), you approach Shannon's limit. A little bit of noise only messes up a little bit of the energy in that bit of information, most of the information still gets through.
Boot from USB is available already- I purchased a USB flash drive a few months ago and it came with utilites to make it bootable.
I got one of the Time Warner DVRs when Time Warner first offered them in Austin. It was a piece of crap. Crashed all the time, the "pause live TV" feature never really worked for me, the last straw was when it crashed, taking all my recorded programs with it. I took it back. I'm about to ditch Time Warner for DirectTV. For the price they charge, they just aren't worth it.
Serial is not faster than parallel *but* it is far easier to design with- when you get really high speed links, you have to start getting a lot more careful about how you place the wires down- as you go up in frequency, wires start looking more like transmission lines and you need to start looking at crosstalk between lines and EMI issues.
To stay with parallel busses, the connectors would have to be huge (if they were small, crosstalk would be a big problem). Because processing power is getting cheaper, it makes the processing required behind serial a lot easier.
Also, parallel busses were often multi-point busses, but as you increase in speed, because of the transmission line issues- that doesn't work very well, so you must go point-point between all devices, and running point-point parallel busses between a lot of devices is a *nightmare*.
For really high speed, serial is the way to go.
The biggest problem with static is not immediate catastrophic damage, but with shortening the life of components- the static may not have killed it first off, but the components will be more likely to fail. A static discharge that you can't even feel will weaken the oxide (the O part of CMOS) to cause it to eventually fail.
I worked in a factory where they tried to "clean up" for a quality inspection by painting the walkways. We had an immediate surge in the number of failures due to static, but what was more interesting was the long term failures- parts that passed all the tests initially, but ended up getting returned a few weeks or months later (at a much higher rate than normal).
I had Time Warner's PVR since a few days after they released it in Austin- and I just took it back. The problems I had:
1) The box is slow- particularly when recording- if you choose to record one channel and watch another- changing channels take a few seconds, though all the keypresses on the remote get queued. Really irritating when surfing around.
2) The box frequently 'forgot' programming, and when I told it to 'record every episode' of a show- it would record some, not others, and it was pretty unpredictable.
3) The 'pause live TV' feature takes a while to actually start up (it doesn't record by default) and for some reason, it stopped working altogether. It would just end up giving me a blank screen.
4) A bunch of the programs I recorded ended up being corrupted.
5) (and final straw) It suddenly stopped with an 'unrecoverable write error'
Considering that I was paying nearly $100/mo for cable service (Digital+HBO+PVR+regular set-top) It just wasn't worth it.
Though they advertize it as $10/mo- not really- my bill dropped by about $18/mo when I swapped the PVR for a normal digital set-top box.