the network will see an explicit hang-up message from the handset and not measure it as a dropped call. This will also happen on those calls where the call is not actually dropped but is degraded to the point where the the participants give up on it as a means of communication.
and also don't forget that on the web (at least with every browser i've tried) ISO-8859-1 is interpreted as WINDOWS-1252. The two encodings are very similar with the difference being that in the 80-9F block 8859-1 has control codes that are rarely used while 1252 has curly quotes, the euro sign and some other little bits and peices.
"As Microsoft notes, users get frustrated when devices fail to work because their batteries are backwards. Worse, some products may be damaged permanently by being fed with improper power polarity. "
I was pointing out that the second of those statements is only a problem if current best practices for battery contact design aren't being followed for some reason.
All this new Porsche does is give a smoother faster ride than the old one... No it ammounts to saying this porshe that is claimed to give a smoother faster ride only gives a faster ride not a smoother one.
It's probably as cheap to make as regular battery contacts. It won't be, it requires more peices of material in the contacts themselves (twice as many contacts plus an extra insulating peice) and more wiring (since you have to take both the positive and negative leads to both ends of each battery slot).
BTW you can make contacts that protect against damge from backwards insertion far simpler (and i've seen them in equipment) just by shaping the plastic right at the positive end (basically you put the positive contact inside a slot so the flat negative end can't touch it). The only advantage of these new contacts over that style is that they allow things to work both ways round.
Just hope it is as reliable as normal contacts. Indeed I have two main concerns with this
1: reliability, how long will these fancy contacts last.
2: failure modes, when normal battery contacts fail they tend to fail by just not making good contact, they can then be cleaned, bent back into shape etc. This thing looks like it could easilly fail in a way that shorts out the battery and looks like it would be difficult to fix poor contacts without ruining the mechanism.
Not only that, they patented an inferior alternative. Diode bridges are near useless for dealing with individual AA or similar cells. In a bridge the power must go through two diodes. Assuming a drop of 0.2V per diode (which is pretty good) then on a nimh cell you'd be throwing away a third of your voltage just on the diodes.
This thing is mechanical, and looks to be designed with very tight tolerances. mmm, I can see reliability being a problem with this design. Compatibility with the various brands of batteries that can be subtyly different shapes my be a problem too.
With LaTeX you can change the standard fonts as easily as you change them in Word The thing with latex is it does it's "own thing" regarding fonts. So if you want to use consistent fonts in your latex document and in the files you are embedding you have to either find a way to turn latex fonts into system fonts* or a way to turn system fonts into latex fonts. The instructions i've found for doing at least the latter of these seemed very complex ( http://www.radamir.com/tex/ttf-tex.htm ).
* by which I mean fonts that can be installed on the system and used by ordinary apps. Afaict that usually means truetype or opentype.
1: you can use hyperref (plus the extra package whose name I can't remember right now which is needed to make hyperref link figures in a sane way). This makes the final document much nicer but it also helps you to find stuff while working on it. 2: it takes "images" in a selection of common formats (JPG, PNG and PDF) while old fassioned latex insists on eps (which is quite a rare format these days).
Still it doesn't fix what are for me the biggest annoyances in latex.
1: quotes, to get decent looking quotes in latex you have to use a pair of backticks for opening quotes and a pair of single quotes for closing quotes. I understand the history behind this but it's annoying not to be able to enter text in the normal way and have it dealt with decently. 2: lack of instant feedback, the "close file in acrobat", "compile", "reopen file in acrobat", "find where you were in the document" cycle gets very annoying during the tweaking phase*.
* IMO writing a good document splits into two phases. During the writing phase I just write stuff without worrying too much about what it lookes like. Then comes the tweaking phase where I try to balance between things like avoiding people having to turn pages to look between figures and thier associated text, size of figures vs general flow of the document and keeping whitespace under control (some whitespace is good don't get me wrong but too much looks ugly)
Disclaimer i have a degree in electronic systems engineering but motors aren't really my strong point and this is from memory, some of the details may be slightly off.
Isn't there a power loss because of the inversion? Every motor must contain changing currents somewhere. A rotating device where all currents were constant would rotate to the position of lowest potential energy and stay there.
A traditional DC motor achieves this by using a commutator to supply current to coils on the rotor which is suspended in a fixed magnetic field (generated either by DC fed electromagnets or by permanent magnets). This is a simple method that works well but it's relatively high maintinance. The brushes wear out over time and in doing so also produce carbon dust (usually the brushes are made of carbon) which can cause other problems. As the brushes wear you also get arcing which generates lots of electrical interference. The "universal motor" (commonly seen in electric drills and similar) which can run off either DC or AC works on basically the same principles.
A synchronous motor has a permanent magnet rotor sitting in a field that changes at a speed related to the input AC frequency. They work best on polyphase AC but with some trickery can be made to work on single phase AC. They are very good at maintinaing a thier natural speed transitioning smoothly between acting as motors and as generators but basically their speed can only be changed as a function of the input frequency. Permanent magnets are also a relatively expensive way of making motors .
A "brushless DC motor" (as seen in your cdrom drive) is a synchronous motor with a feedback control system bolted on so that the rather than having a motor that either runs at one speed or stalls you have a motor that behaves more like a traditional DC motor but without the problems of brushes.
An induction motor is the final basic category. In this type the rotating field induces magnetism in the rotor which then causes forces to turn it it. In these motors the induced field in the rotor "slips" causing the motor to turn slower than the magnetic field (how much slower dpeends on the load). This design has the massive advantage that it avoids both brushes (unreliable) and permanent magnets (expensive).
I wouldn't really count XML as "human readable" It really depends on the type of content (things like vector graphics are never going to be easy to read in a text form) how the particular xml subtype was designed and in the case of machine generation whether the generator bothers to format the output nicely.
well formatted html or xhtml is IMO pretty good for human readability.
And don't get me started on the heap of escape characters! "as in a normal quote" needs to be escaped for not to be confused with "a --> ä! granted... "a is faster to type than ä but or is again easier to remember than replacing a batch of special characters with a pile of special characters. This is probablly the thing that pisses me off most about tex, the inability to type normal english text in a natural manner because common characters have special meaning.
Personally i'm somewhere in the middle IMO wireless mice are great in quite a few situations but in an ordinary desktop computer setup they are more hassle then they are worse.
BTW does anyone know of any mouse of a decent brand and readilly availiable from a reliable supplier that is designed to work both wired and wireless (like how a PS3 controller operates)? To me this would be the best of both worlds, set and forget reliability when used at a desk but the flexibility to operate wireless when desired. When I searched a found one or two but they were all from brands i'd never heard of selling through "direct from the far east" type sites.
Everyone is also free to use it. The ONLY restriction on it is redistribution - if you make changes, you have to distribute your changes. A common intepretation (including notablly the opinion of the organsation that originally wrote the license) of the GPL (whether it is correct I am not qualified to answer on) is that distritbuting code that linkes against GPL code even dynamically makes the whole application one work that must be offered under GPL compatible (read: either GPL or completely free) terms
This matters because not only is the mysql server under the GPL, the client access libraries are too (with a few exceptions for certain popular opensource projects).
IIRC one stage mysql were going even further and trying to claim that they had a copyright on the wire protocol so you couldn't even cleanroom the client access libraries to get arround this. From what I can gather (IANAL) this probablly wouldn't have held up in court but still just the threat of legal action would be sufficiant to put many people off.
There are plenty of proprietary database products out there, so there was never an anti-trust concern over MySQL Agreed on this point
You don't have to take the database engine offline to use the data with a different database engine. Has anyone ever made an engine that can safely access the undelying tables of a running database server, it sounds like a recipie for disaster to me.
The parent post to the on e you replied to did. No he did not.
MP3, AAC and H.264 are not proprietary. They are maintained by international standards bodies and developed by consensus. More precisely they are maintained by the "Moving Picture Experts Group" (MPEG) who are an ISO/IEC working group.
Other MPs are statistically irrelevant. Normally that would be the case but afaict those "other MPs" are why we ended up with a tory+lib coalition. lab+lib would have more seats than the tories but would not have got an outright majority due to the presence of smaller parties.
Standards need to be COMPLETELY open, even to those who don't want to follow your rules, if you want them to do well. How about HDCP? Getting the stuff needed to implement the standard requires you to agree to enforce thier rules. That hasn't stopped nearly all HDTVs and a lot of monitors from supporting it.
BBC, ITV, C4 and Five are the main free to air broadcasters in the UK and all of them have ondemand services on computers. For a TV or STB vendor selling in the UK access to ondemand TV from all the major free channels is a pretty attractive feature and one i'm sure they would be prepared to sign a fairly restrictive agreement to get.
And once the installed base of hardware starts supporting the system I'd expect it to spread to broadcasters in other countries.
I can understand that App Store is like a debian repository Note that on a debian based system adding a repositry to your sources.list, adding the repositries signing key to your trusted list (or ignoring the warning in the next step) and then running updates is tantamount to giving the repositry admin root on your system.
That said, it's a pretty useless medium of communicating any significant amount of data. GPRS or even WAP are much more efficient Hell even old fassioned GSM dialup is way faster and more efficiant.
I thought most phones that could talk to a PC could at least do an old fassioned GSM data call (which is very slow by modern standards but still fast comared to this).
A friend of mine has an old HP dos based PDA which has a socket in the back for a nokia 2110 and we managed to get it to dial up an ISP and access email.
Yea, AMD kept PATA on their southbridge to this day, while Intel dropped it back in 2006 with ICH8. Why didn't that lead to a switch to AMD? BTW, Probably because it was trivial for motherboard vendors to add PATA back for those that wanted it.
interestingly, there are more recent Intel motherboards with ISA than AMD motherboards, wonder why? My guess is that it's because intel is the known and trusted brand of PC processors. If you are going to build a motherboard to be marketed to conservative industrial types and you are going to have to add extra chips to support ISA whichever chipset you use why not use the most known and trusted brand of CPU?
max 8 PCIe 2.0 lanes? wow that is way to few! It is IMO on the stingy side but it's not quite as bad as you are making it out (and it's better than the current equivilents).
A video card eats up about 8-16 just for video. The 16 PCIe lanes for graphics come directly off the CPU (or off the IOH on higher end platoforms) so they aren't included in that 8 we are discussing here.
add sata 6 about 4 Assuming you mean sata 6GBPs that will be getting itegrated in the chipset
usb 3 2-4?? mmm
What this basically means is that motherboards based on these chipsets will have to do one of the following 1: be very stingy with onboard perhiperhals that aren't part of the chipset 2: be very stingy eith expansion slots 3: cut into the graphics card lanes (which will piss off gamers) 4: use PCIe switch chips and/or a PCIe to PCI bridge (drives up the cost)
And almost all of the AGP graphics cards are lame too - they won't do 1920x1280, Is that resoloution a typo, 1920x1080 and 1920x1200 are common and both can be driven quite happilly by a geforce 6200 (which is fairly easy to get in AGP) as long as you aren't gaming on the system.
And while there are 500MB PATA disk drives, nobody's really selling them any more, mmm assuming you meant 500GB you can still get them but the cost is high compared to SATA ones so the controller card is probablly a better bet.
And most of the new motherboards than have PCI-e and SATA only have enough PATA ports to drive a CD/DVD player, not to put one or especially two 500 MB disks on it Most current boards have one IDE port that can drive two drives. Personally given that optical drives are so bloody cheap these days I'd suggest putting the optical drive(s) on SATA and keeping the IDE port free for hard drives.
Despite the inflamatory/. headline it's not as though intel is saying "NO PCI". The higher end chipsets will apparently still have PCI and even the low end chipsets should be able to be used with a seperate PCIe to PCI bridge chip.
most on board chips use pci Most boards don't have a whole lot of stuff that isn't integrated into the chipset anyway and when they do these days it tends to be mostly stuff that is too fast to really work well on PCI (firewire being a notable exception).
Note that just because device manager (or whatever your operating systems equivalent is) says something is on the PCI bus doesn't mean it is really on a PCI bus. Afaict most systems these days have a virtual top-level PCI bus from which the real PCI bus and PCIe controllers in the system branch (PCIe is designed to look like PCI to software).
and using pci-e for some of them is a waste of lanes. mmm, lane shortages are already a problem for the more featurefull motherboards on the LGA1156 platform (and it's not helped by the fact that desktop board vendors usually CBA to provide a bloody block diagram so you can tell what compromises have been made before choosing). This new platform will apparently increase the lane count slightly but I still see it being a problem.
Most on board sound is still pci based. No it isn't the core of the sound is integrated into the southbridge. The codec* is then connected to the southbridge over a specialist bus
Most severs have on board pci video and I don't x1 pci-e video chips out there. Some server/workstation boards do indeed still use PCIe but the intel one I have (SC5650WS) does use PCIe x1 (at least according to the diagrams in the manual)
*Note: the term codec has at least two meanings in the computer industry, probablly more. In this context it means a chip that provides both analog to digital and digital to analog conversion.
Slashdot Mirror
the network will see an explicit hang-up message from the handset and not measure it as a dropped call.
This will also happen on those calls where the call is not actually dropped but is degraded to the point where the the participants give up on it as a means of communication.
and also don't forget that on the web (at least with every browser i've tried) ISO-8859-1 is interpreted as WINDOWS-1252. The two encodings are very similar with the difference being that in the 80-9F block 8859-1 has control codes that are rarely used while 1252 has curly quotes, the euro sign and some other little bits and peices.
TFA makes the following claims.
"As Microsoft notes, users get frustrated when devices fail to work because their batteries are backwards. Worse, some products may be damaged permanently by being fed with improper power polarity. "
I was pointing out that the second of those statements is only a problem if current best practices for battery contact design aren't being followed for some reason.
All this new Porsche does is give a smoother faster ride than the old one...
No it ammounts to saying this porshe that is claimed to give a smoother faster ride only gives a faster ride not a smoother one.
It's probably as cheap to make as regular battery contacts.
It won't be, it requires more peices of material in the contacts themselves (twice as many contacts plus an extra insulating peice) and more wiring (since you have to take both the positive and negative leads to both ends of each battery slot).
BTW you can make contacts that protect against damge from backwards insertion far simpler (and i've seen them in equipment) just by shaping the plastic right at the positive end (basically you put the positive contact inside a slot so the flat negative end can't touch it). The only advantage of these new contacts over that style is that they allow things to work both ways round.
Just hope it is as reliable as normal contacts.
Indeed I have two main concerns with this
1: reliability, how long will these fancy contacts last.
2: failure modes, when normal battery contacts fail they tend to fail by just not making good contact, they can then be cleaned, bent back into shape etc. This thing looks like it could easilly fail in a way that shorts out the battery and looks like it would be difficult to fix poor contacts without ruining the mechanism.
Not only that, they patented an inferior alternative.
Diode bridges are near useless for dealing with individual AA or similar cells. In a bridge the power must go through two diodes. Assuming a drop of 0.2V per diode (which is pretty good) then on a nimh cell you'd be throwing away a third of your voltage just on the diodes.
This thing is mechanical, and looks to be designed with very tight tolerances.
mmm, I can see reliability being a problem with this design. Compatibility with the various brands of batteries that can be subtyly different shapes my be a problem too.
With LaTeX you can change the standard fonts as easily as you change them in Word
The thing with latex is it does it's "own thing" regarding fonts. So if you want to use consistent fonts in your latex document and in the files you are embedding you have to either find a way to turn latex fonts into system fonts* or a way to turn system fonts into latex fonts. The instructions i've found for doing at least the latter of these seemed very complex ( http://www.radamir.com/tex/ttf-tex.htm ).
* by which I mean fonts that can be installed on the system and used by ordinary apps. Afaict that usually means truetype or opentype.
PDFlatex improves things for a couple of reasons
1: you can use hyperref (plus the extra package whose name I can't remember right now which is needed to make hyperref link figures in a sane way). This makes the final document much nicer but it also helps you to find stuff while working on it.
2: it takes "images" in a selection of common formats (JPG, PNG and PDF) while old fassioned latex insists on eps (which is quite a rare format these days).
Still it doesn't fix what are for me the biggest annoyances in latex.
1: quotes, to get decent looking quotes in latex you have to use a pair of backticks for opening quotes and a pair of single quotes for closing quotes. I understand the history behind this but it's annoying not to be able to enter text in the normal way and have it dealt with decently.
2: lack of instant feedback, the "close file in acrobat", "compile", "reopen file in acrobat", "find where you were in the document" cycle gets very annoying during the tweaking phase*.
* IMO writing a good document splits into two phases. During the writing phase I just write stuff without worrying too much about what it lookes like. Then comes the tweaking phase where I try to balance between things like avoiding people having to turn pages to look between figures and thier associated text, size of figures vs general flow of the document and keeping whitespace under control (some whitespace is good don't get me wrong but too much looks ugly)
Disclaimer i have a degree in electronic systems engineering but motors aren't really my strong point and this is from memory, some of the details may be slightly off.
Isn't there a power loss because of the inversion?
Every motor must contain changing currents somewhere. A rotating device where all currents were constant would rotate to the position of lowest potential energy and stay there.
A traditional DC motor achieves this by using a commutator to supply current to coils on the rotor which is suspended in a fixed magnetic field (generated either by DC fed electromagnets or by permanent magnets). This is a simple method that works well but it's relatively high maintinance. The brushes wear out over time and in doing so also produce carbon dust (usually the brushes are made of carbon) which can cause other problems. As the brushes wear you also get arcing which generates lots of electrical interference. The "universal motor" (commonly seen in electric drills and similar) which can run off either DC or AC works on basically the same principles.
A synchronous motor has a permanent magnet rotor sitting in a field that changes at a speed related to the input AC frequency. They work best on polyphase AC but with some trickery can be made to work on single phase AC. They are very good at maintinaing a thier natural speed transitioning smoothly between acting as motors and as generators but basically their speed can only be changed as a function of the input frequency. Permanent magnets are also a relatively expensive way of making motors .
A "brushless DC motor" (as seen in your cdrom drive) is a synchronous motor with a feedback control system bolted on so that the rather than having a motor that either runs at one speed or stalls you have a motor that behaves more like a traditional DC motor but without the problems of brushes.
An induction motor is the final basic category. In this type the rotating field induces magnetism in the rotor which then causes forces to turn it it. In these motors the induced field in the rotor "slips" causing the motor to turn slower than the magnetic field (how much slower dpeends on the load). This design has the massive advantage that it avoids both brushes (unreliable) and permanent magnets (expensive).
I wouldn't really count XML as "human readable"
It really depends on the type of content (things like vector graphics are never going to be easy to read in a text form) how the particular xml subtype was designed and in the case of machine generation whether the generator bothers to format the output nicely.
well formatted html or xhtml is IMO pretty good for human readability.
And don't get me started on the heap of escape characters! "as in a normal quote" needs to be escaped for not to be confused with "a --> ä! granted... "a is faster to type than ä but or is again easier to remember than replacing a batch of special characters with a pile of special characters.
This is probablly the thing that pisses me off most about tex, the inability to type normal english text in a natural manner because common characters have special meaning.
Personally i'm somewhere in the middle IMO wireless mice are great in quite a few situations but in an ordinary desktop computer setup they are more hassle then they are worse.
BTW does anyone know of any mouse of a decent brand and readilly availiable from a reliable supplier that is designed to work both wired and wireless (like how a PS3 controller operates)? To me this would be the best of both worlds, set and forget reliability when used at a desk but the flexibility to operate wireless when desired. When I searched a found one or two but they were all from brands i'd never heard of selling through "direct from the far east" type sites.
Everyone is also free to use it. The ONLY restriction on it is redistribution - if you make changes, you have to distribute your changes.
A common intepretation (including notablly the opinion of the organsation that originally wrote the license) of the GPL (whether it is correct I am not qualified to answer on) is that distritbuting code that linkes against GPL code even dynamically makes the whole application one work that must be offered under GPL compatible (read: either GPL or completely free) terms
This matters because not only is the mysql server under the GPL, the client access libraries are too (with a few exceptions for certain popular opensource projects).
IIRC one stage mysql were going even further and trying to claim that they had a copyright on the wire protocol so you couldn't even cleanroom the client access libraries to get arround this. From what I can gather (IANAL) this probablly wouldn't have held up in court but still just the threat of legal action would be sufficiant to put many people off.
There are plenty of proprietary database products out there, so there was never an anti-trust concern over MySQL
Agreed on this point
You don't have to take the database engine offline to use the data with a different database engine.
Has anyone ever made an engine that can safely access the undelying tables of a running database server, it sounds like a recipie for disaster to me.
The parent post to the on e you replied to did.
No he did not.
MP3, AAC and H.264 are not proprietary. They are maintained by international standards bodies and developed by consensus.
More precisely they are maintained by the "Moving Picture Experts Group" (MPEG) who are an ISO/IEC working group.
MPEG != MPEG LA
Other MPs are statistically irrelevant.
Normally that would be the case but afaict those "other MPs" are why we ended up with a tory+lib coalition. lab+lib would have more seats than the tories but would not have got an outright majority due to the presence of smaller parties.
Standards need to be COMPLETELY open, even to those who don't want to follow your rules, if you want them to do well.
How about HDCP? Getting the stuff needed to implement the standard requires you to agree to enforce thier rules. That hasn't stopped nearly all HDTVs and a lot of monitors from supporting it.
BBC, ITV, C4 and Five are the main free to air broadcasters in the UK and all of them have ondemand services on computers. For a TV or STB vendor selling in the UK access to ondemand TV from all the major free channels is a pretty attractive feature and one i'm sure they would be prepared to sign a fairly restrictive agreement to get.
And once the installed base of hardware starts supporting the system I'd expect it to spread to broadcasters in other countries.
I can understand that App Store is like a debian repository
Note that on a debian based system adding a repositry to your sources.list, adding the repositries signing key to your trusted list (or ignoring the warning in the next step) and then running updates is tantamount to giving the repositry admin root on your system.
That said, it's a pretty useless medium of communicating any significant amount of data. GPRS or even WAP are much more efficient
Hell even old fassioned GSM dialup is way faster and more efficiant.
I thought most phones that could talk to a PC could at least do an old fassioned GSM data call (which is very slow by modern standards but still fast comared to this).
A friend of mine has an old HP dos based PDA which has a socket in the back for a nokia 2110 and we managed to get it to dial up an ISP and access email.
Yea, AMD kept PATA on their southbridge to this day, while Intel dropped it back in 2006 with ICH8. Why didn't that lead to a switch to AMD? BTW,
Probably because it was trivial for motherboard vendors to add PATA back for those that wanted it.
interestingly, there are more recent Intel motherboards with ISA than AMD motherboards, wonder why?
My guess is that it's because intel is the known and trusted brand of PC processors. If you are going to build a motherboard to be marketed to conservative industrial types and you are going to have to add extra chips to support ISA whichever chipset you use why not use the most known and trusted brand of CPU?
max 8 PCIe 2.0 lanes? wow that is way to few!
It is IMO on the stingy side but it's not quite as bad as you are making it out (and it's better than the current equivilents).
A video card eats up about 8-16 just for video.
The 16 PCIe lanes for graphics come directly off the CPU (or off the IOH on higher end platoforms) so they aren't included in that 8 we are discussing here.
add sata 6 about 4
Assuming you mean sata 6GBPs that will be getting itegrated in the chipset
usb 3 2-4??
mmm
What this basically means is that motherboards based on these chipsets will have to do one of the following
1: be very stingy with onboard perhiperhals that aren't part of the chipset
2: be very stingy eith expansion slots
3: cut into the graphics card lanes (which will piss off gamers)
4: use PCIe switch chips and/or a PCIe to PCI bridge (drives up the cost)
And almost all of the AGP graphics cards are lame too - they won't do 1920x1280,
Is that resoloution a typo, 1920x1080 and 1920x1200 are common and both can be driven quite happilly by a geforce 6200 (which is fairly easy to get in AGP) as long as you aren't gaming on the system.
And while there are 500MB PATA disk drives, nobody's really selling them any more,
mmm assuming you meant 500GB you can still get them but the cost is high compared to SATA ones so the controller card is probablly a better bet.
And most of the new motherboards than have PCI-e and SATA only have enough PATA ports to drive a CD/DVD player, not to put one or especially two 500 MB disks on it
Most current boards have one IDE port that can drive two drives. Personally given that optical drives are so bloody cheap these days I'd suggest putting the optical drive(s) on SATA and keeping the IDE port free for hard drives.
Despite the inflamatory /. headline it's not as though intel is saying "NO PCI". The higher end chipsets will apparently still have PCI and even the low end chipsets should be able to be used with a seperate PCIe to PCI bridge chip.
most on board chips use pci
Most boards don't have a whole lot of stuff that isn't integrated into the chipset anyway and when they do these days it tends to be mostly stuff that is too fast to really work well on PCI (firewire being a notable exception).
Note that just because device manager (or whatever your operating systems equivalent is) says something is on the PCI bus doesn't mean it is really on a PCI bus. Afaict most systems these days have a virtual top-level PCI bus from which the real PCI bus and PCIe controllers in the system branch (PCIe is designed to look like PCI to software).
and using pci-e for some of them is a waste of lanes.
mmm, lane shortages are already a problem for the more featurefull motherboards on the LGA1156 platform (and it's not helped by the fact that desktop board vendors usually CBA to provide a bloody block diagram so you can tell what compromises have been made before choosing). This new platform will apparently increase the lane count slightly but I still see it being a problem.
Most on board sound is still pci based.
No it isn't the core of the sound is integrated into the southbridge. The codec* is then connected to the southbridge over a specialist bus
Most severs have on board pci video and I don't x1 pci-e video chips out there.
Some server/workstation boards do indeed still use PCIe but the intel one I have (SC5650WS) does use PCIe x1 (at least according to the diagrams in the manual)
*Note: the term codec has at least two meanings in the computer industry, probablly more. In this context it means a chip that provides both analog to digital and digital to analog conversion.
http://www.adek.com/ATX-motherboards.htm