A friend of mine, 20 years ago, had a Beta VCR, the cheapest one the mfg made. One day he opened it up to play, and discovered that by clipping some wires, he could mod it up to EXACTLY the same as a model that sold for $250 more.
The wires were even labelled; timer: 3 day/14 day, etc.
It's also interesting to see what misleading labelling makes people think they're getting more when they're getting less.
I had a friend who owned an electronics dealership. He sold camcorders, among other things. He showed me a shady practice done by at least one camcorder manufacturer. A fictitious example; if he sells, say, a CRV-510 camcorder, the same manufacturer will also make a CRV-515 model, and it will only be sold in large lots to big box resellers like Best Buy, etc. The consumer will see the "bigger model number" and assume it's a better model. It will look identical, and will superficially perform the same. It will probably have some cheap, useless feature that's implemented 100% in firmware (like more fade/wipe patterns or something) so they can have more bullet points on their box.
However, it will have hidden things that are not generally touted which will be inferior; the CCD will have 100,000 less imaging pixels, the S/N ratio of the video amps will be a bit less good, the D/A converters will be cheaper and more noisy, or something. Nothing that Joe Sixpack would even know what you're talking about if you mentioned it. But they'll think they're making a smart purchase buying it at Wal*Mart, and be convinced that the mom & pop down the street are just trying to rip them off.
A friend of mine worked a summer job in a paint factory where they canned spray paint. He loaded labels into the machine. Same cans of paint, it was the labels that determined whether it was a high end brand or some random house brand.
I worked a summer job in a plant that processed and canned pickles. We put sliced pickles in 5 gallon buckets and slapped Burger King, Long John Silvers, Wendy's, etc labels on them. Interestingly, the only one that was different was McDonalds. They had a special recipe for spices, and they were the 800 pound gorilla, so they could make the suppliers make special batches for them.
In the case of digital photos, IMHO it's worth taking every precaution. As I posted elsewhere, I make a backup copy on another machine, and also burn two CD-R copies, and one goes to work as an offsite. Also each CD-R has 50MB of PAR2 recovery files on it.
I have several hundred 9-year-old CD-R discs in my basement (yes, ok, it's an old pr0n GIF collection). I hadn't pulled them out in years and years, but last month I decided to check. I pulled two 50-packs at random, and ran Nero's CD surface scan on them. About 5% had one or two read errors that were fully recoverable (you would not have noticed them when reading from the OS; Nero checks for soft read errors) so CD-R is better than some people have let on.
Now, if you're buying the cheapest crap you can find, then you're going to have problems. There are several brands I won't buy anymore, I've had them either not burn at all, or have bad data 1 month later. But the good stuff (Mitsui gold, for one) I'm pretty confident will last 25 years or more, and though I probably won't be totally on top of all my data, my digital photos WILL get proper attention, and will get copied to new media formats as they come out.
It's not a PITA at all if you do it regularly. Few people are filling more than one CD-R per month. I fill a couple on a vacation (typically 600-800 photos at 6 megapixels for a 1.5 week vacation), but most of the year a CD will take me 6 to 8 weeks.
You're right, my digital photos are the only thing on all my systems that I'd actually cry if I lost. I'd be really irritated by the rest, but I'd live with it. That's why, since I had access to a CD burner, I've made two copies on CDR - one stays here, one goes to work.
Nowadays I'm also burning 50MB of PAR2 files onto each CDR. Also I make DVD-R's as a third copy when there's enough to fill a DVD, but this happens less often; I still use CD-R because I can burn a full one every few weeks with new photos. If I was using just DVD-R I'd either have to wait several months to fill it up, or use the non-standard DVD multisession, which I've been told (by a Nero pop-up window) will only be properly recognized by Windows XP (though I'm sure Linux probably will read it as well, or if it doesn't, will eventually). With CD-R, if it's been a few weeks and I can't fill a CD, I can use CD multisession to backup a partial CD, then fill it later. With the price of CDs, I also don't mind just tossing the old CD and re-recording with more data on it.
I also replicate my entire photo collection to a hard drive on another computer every time I put a significant number of new photos on it (just got back from an event/vacation/etc).
I don't know of a single person who doesn't want to keep more $$$ in their pocket.
I want to keep my money instead of paying taxes because I don't like many of the things the government spends money on. If I could earmark money, say, to education, NASA, diplomatic efforts to improve world relations, research into nuclear energy and green energy, etc, and keep them away from maintaining nuclear weapons, supporting totalitarian regimes, etc, then I'd be happy to give them back their $600 and more.
At the time that they sent out the checks, I grumbled that I wish they wouldn't do it. Yes, I took the money, and put it against my Visa balance, but I'd rather they'd kept it, because it's just going to lead to more trouble down the way.
I was very happy when the US government finally balanced the budget, and grow increasingly dismayed when Bush thinks of new ways to destroy the budget with each passing day.
It is not at ALL certain that the structures we found were fossillized bacteria. In fact, the majority opinion is that they are places where crystals formed, and have since been leeched out. This kind of structure is common on earth, and has been found by the MER rovers all over the place.
You didn't steal anything, but you did steal: you stole into the shop. Remember, kids, some words mean more than one thing.
OK, thanks. The def makes sense in that light. But of course, that's NOT AT ALL the sense that the word is being used in when you say you "stole a dvd".
To use the other example in this thread, cow is a mammal, but you can also "cow" someone meaning intimidate (cow in this case being used as a transitive verb). It doesn't mean they've been turned into a cow, and just because "steal" has another possible meaning, doesn't mean that sense of the word applies to copyright infringement.
The only "property" that the owner is being denied when you make an unauthorized copy of a movie is the intangible value of the ability to sell you a legitimate copy. It's arguable that this does not actually exist, because you would not have ever bought a copy in the first place. Also, I have eventually bought several movies that I had previously gotten copies of, so it's even arguable that the intangible has not been denied.
Probably what's required is similar to the ADA in the US. You need to allow them to use a browser that allows them to read the text out and override the colors you've tried to force, or put the text into a text-to-speech engine, etc. Images should have ALT tags. Stuff like that.
Where'd you get those defs? By your #2, I can "get something surreptitiously" by, say, putting on a disguise and going to an adult bookstore and buying a video; is that theft? Seems like it is by your definition, though I didn't steal anything and nobody's been wronged. Your def pretty clearly indicates that aquiring something while being sneaky is theft, and does not regard whether a legal transaction occurred or not. I submit that your definition is not just flawed, but wrong.
Here's Mirriam Webster's def: 1 a : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it b : an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property.
It's clear under this def that you must deprive the rightful owner of their ownership of property.
No, you can't. SmartMedia is an old, obsolete and brittle format, and it topped out at 128M. You CAN get big cards in other formats; I have a 1GB CompactFlash, and 4GB and higher are on the market (though the price curve goes steep at > 1-2GB).
But DVD recorders will not be obsolete! People want to watch their favorite programs, but they will also want to store them for later viewing (without having to pay a second time).
Yes, they will, because they will honor the broadcast flag, and they're about to turn that on and make it illegal for you to try to record that football game/sitcom.
Hang on to your analog devices, in 10 years your only way to record a TV program may be to point a camcorder at the screen, and they may even figure out a way around that (change the sync rate or something).
Have you seen this? Yeah. How do I take that on vacation, or to my mom's house, who doesn't even have a dial-up service that isn't long distance?
As for broadband availablity: I don't hold out much hope for rapid (within 10 years would be "rapid") deployment of truly ubiquitous broadband.
The pundits are saying "broadband will be everywhere" when what they really mean is "broadband will be everywhere that I care about."
I live near Ann Arbor, MI, which has a pretty high connectivity rate, but even so there are people within a few miles of me that can't get broadband, and no company is even looking at pulling cable to their areas. Even if a company started today, they wouldn't have anything for 2 years.
Remember, for DVD to be "obsolete" there has to be no practical market for it. As long as there are people who can't get movies any other way, there's a market for it.
There are a LOT of people living in rural areas that still don't have cable TV even available, what, 30+ years after it was started? And cable TV is much more profitable than internet per household. True, they can get satellite, but satellite internet is expensive and not scalable.
I would be willing to put $100 on the table and say that in 10 years, it will still be EASY to find houses that not only don't have broadband, but can't get it. I might even venture to say that it would be easy to do so in any state, let alone country. It might even be easy to do so while staying within middle income (without going to trailer parks in the sticks).
20 years ago was 1984. You were using a 300 baud acoustic modem then? I know they were still around but I don't think they were being sold. I had a 1200 baud Prometheus in 1984. There were 2400s and even a little faster (proprietary) modems then.
That's funny, usually I don't even know what I want to watch. If I feel like watching something, I like to flip open the DVD binder and start browsing.
DVDs/CDs won't go away until there is ubiquitous broadband, including in the mountains, in the car, out on a boat, and everyone has terabytes of crash-protected (RAID or whatever) storage (I don't want $8000 worth of movie purchases depending on a hard drive not crashing).
Heck, broadband isn't even available everywhere in major cities right now, contrary to what the pundits say, let alone in your car where the kids want to watch a movie. Sure there are a few mobile broadband pilots starting out, but how long will it be before Verizon/whoever can take 100,000 peole simultaneously streaming movies from their home server to the back seat of their minivans in the middle of the drive across Kansas, and do it for pennies an hour?
I think this person is a LITTLE wrong on "home computer games" being 16 bit by then.
However, for arcade games, state of the art then was 16 bit. Pole Position was released about then I think, and the arcade I worked at for a summer job got a brand new one. I checked out the schematics. It had two Z80 peripheral CPUs, one to do the quadraphonic sound and some other tasks, and one to draw clouds and other background stuff. The main CPU was a Z-8000, which was the 16-bit version of the Z-80.
There were other 16-bit systems, though I wasn't as familiar with them. Some were running 68000's, some were stuff like the 8088 or 80186.
I listed my copy of Sphere on DVD (hey, it came free with a DVD player a few years ago!). Minimum bid 50 cents, $3 S&H. No bids. Relisted. No bids. Gave up, not worth screwing with.
"television will be a wonderful medium for the masses to enjoy the benefits of culture and education."
The truth is that people make any general purpose media or device do what they want to do, or relegate it to irrelevancy. What most people want is to be passively entertained (couch potatoes). Build a device that can only be used for lofty goals, and nobody will buy it.
If you watch the polls and see that Fred is the 37th voter that day, then examining the 37th vote on the CD-ROM tells you how Fred voted, right? With paper ballots, the ballots all get shuffled before being counted.
You can still match things up the same way on paper. Around here anyway, the ballots (optical mark/sense) are sequentially numbered, and the start/end/spoiled numbers are matters of public record. If you know Fred is voter # 37, and the ballot slips started with 10001, and 10020 is spoiled, then his ballot is # 10038. Pick it out of the pile and see how Fred voted.
Observing the voting order would be the only way though; you can't tell by looking at the paper after the fact who voted #37 in this system. They have a tearoff system for assigning ballots, so there's no linking the two once they're torn apart (OK, forensically they could do it given a lot of time).
Actually, I use PowerDVD under W2K and have no problems with it. It's never caused me any trouble at all. Can say the same for WinDVD or several other products. Also it makes it very easy to play images ripped to hard drive, VOB files, etc. It does all the language, audio track, multiangle, etc that I've ever tried on it.
What's the problem with it, exactly? Is it only a problem on the Linux version? How does it compare to the Windows version of Xine:-)?
Then do what I'm doing. Go back and read the golden age stuff. I'm working on the Med Ship series now, and Doc Smith is always good for a quick couple of hours. A.E. van Voght, Heinlein of course, there are hundreds and hundreds of titles, all great.
Technology is actually increasing my reading. I don't generally get a chance to carry books around with me, but I always have my palm. With a 512M SD card in there, I not only have about 10 hours of NPR programs to listen to, and a couple hundred photos, I've got about 100 books in there as well.
Sure, I prefer paper, though the new 320x320 screens are quite good so I don't care that much either way anymore. But I ALWAYS have 100 books on me, usually 2 or 3 of them in progress, and I can read any of them any time I have to wait 5 or 10 minutes for something.
Drop a promise controller in it, and no problem. I had 4x160's running in an old pentium at one time, and the mainboard could only handle 2GB drives directly.
I used the controller that came with the Maxtor drives; it was Maxtor branded, but it was made by Promise. They're supported by default in the pre-built Linux kernels.
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A friend of mine, 20 years ago, had a Beta VCR, the cheapest one the mfg made. One day he opened it up to play, and discovered that by clipping some wires, he could mod it up to EXACTLY the same as a model that sold for $250 more.
The wires were even labelled; timer: 3 day/14 day, etc.
It's also interesting to see what misleading labelling makes people think they're getting more when they're getting less.
I had a friend who owned an electronics dealership. He sold camcorders, among other things. He showed me a shady practice done by at least one camcorder manufacturer. A fictitious example; if he sells, say, a CRV-510 camcorder, the same manufacturer will also make a CRV-515 model, and it will only be sold in large lots to big box resellers like Best Buy, etc. The consumer will see the "bigger model number" and assume it's a better model. It will look identical, and will superficially perform the same. It will probably have some cheap, useless feature that's implemented 100% in firmware (like more fade/wipe patterns or something) so they can have more bullet points on their box.
However, it will have hidden things that are not generally touted which will be inferior; the CCD will have 100,000 less imaging pixels, the S/N ratio of the video amps will be a bit less good, the D/A converters will be cheaper and more noisy, or something. Nothing that Joe Sixpack would even know what you're talking about if you mentioned it. But they'll think they're making a smart purchase buying it at Wal*Mart, and be convinced that the mom & pop down the street are just trying to rip them off.
A friend of mine worked a summer job in a paint factory where they canned spray paint. He loaded labels into the machine. Same cans of paint, it was the labels that determined whether it was a high end brand or some random house brand.
I worked a summer job in a plant that processed and canned pickles. We put sliced pickles in 5 gallon buckets and slapped Burger King, Long John Silvers, Wendy's, etc labels on them. Interestingly, the only one that was different was McDonalds. They had a special recipe for spices, and they were the 800 pound gorilla, so they could make the suppliers make special batches for them.
In the case of digital photos, IMHO it's worth taking every precaution. As I posted elsewhere, I make a backup copy on another machine, and also burn two CD-R copies, and one goes to work as an offsite. Also each CD-R has 50MB of PAR2 recovery files on it.
I have several hundred 9-year-old CD-R discs in my basement (yes, ok, it's an old pr0n GIF collection). I hadn't pulled them out in years and years, but last month I decided to check. I pulled two 50-packs at random, and ran Nero's CD surface scan on them. About 5% had one or two read errors that were fully recoverable (you would not have noticed them when reading from the OS; Nero checks for soft read errors) so CD-R is better than some people have let on.
Now, if you're buying the cheapest crap you can find, then you're going to have problems. There are several brands I won't buy anymore, I've had them either not burn at all, or have bad data 1 month later. But the good stuff (Mitsui gold, for one) I'm pretty confident will last 25 years or more, and though I probably won't be totally on top of all my data, my digital photos WILL get proper attention, and will get copied to new media formats as they come out.
It's not a PITA at all if you do it regularly. Few people are filling more than one CD-R per month. I fill a couple on a vacation (typically 600-800 photos at 6 megapixels for a 1.5 week vacation), but most of the year a CD will take me 6 to 8 weeks.
You're right, my digital photos are the only thing on all my systems that I'd actually cry if I lost. I'd be really irritated by the rest, but I'd live with it. That's why, since I had access to a CD burner, I've made two copies on CDR - one stays here, one goes to work.
Nowadays I'm also burning 50MB of PAR2 files onto each CDR. Also I make DVD-R's as a third copy when there's enough to fill a DVD, but this happens less often; I still use CD-R because I can burn a full one every few weeks with new photos. If I was using just DVD-R I'd either have to wait several months to fill it up, or use the non-standard DVD multisession, which I've been told (by a Nero pop-up window) will only be properly recognized by Windows XP (though I'm sure Linux probably will read it as well, or if it doesn't, will eventually). With CD-R, if it's been a few weeks and I can't fill a CD, I can use CD multisession to backup a partial CD, then fill it later. With the price of CDs, I also don't mind just tossing the old CD and re-recording with more data on it.
I also replicate my entire photo collection to a hard drive on another computer every time I put a significant number of new photos on it (just got back from an event/vacation/etc).
I don't know of a single person who doesn't want to keep more $$$ in their pocket.
I want to keep my money instead of paying taxes because I don't like many of the things the government spends money on. If I could earmark money, say, to education, NASA, diplomatic efforts to improve world relations, research into nuclear energy and green energy, etc, and keep them away from maintaining nuclear weapons, supporting totalitarian regimes, etc, then I'd be happy to give them back their $600 and more.
At the time that they sent out the checks, I grumbled that I wish they wouldn't do it. Yes, I took the money, and put it against my Visa balance, but I'd rather they'd kept it, because it's just going to lead to more trouble down the way.
I was very happy when the US government finally balanced the budget, and grow increasingly dismayed when Bush thinks of new ways to destroy the budget with each passing day.
It is not at ALL certain that the structures we found were fossillized bacteria. In fact, the majority opinion is that they are places where crystals formed, and have since been leeched out. This kind of structure is common on earth, and has been found by the MER rovers all over the place.
You didn't steal anything, but you did steal: you stole into the shop. Remember, kids, some words mean more than one thing.
OK, thanks. The def makes sense in that light. But of course, that's NOT AT ALL the sense that the word is being used in when you say you "stole a dvd".
To use the other example in this thread, cow is a mammal, but you can also "cow" someone meaning intimidate (cow in this case being used as a transitive verb). It doesn't mean they've been turned into a cow, and just because "steal" has another possible meaning, doesn't mean that sense of the word applies to copyright infringement.
The only "property" that the owner is being denied when you make an unauthorized copy of a movie is the intangible value of the ability to sell you a legitimate copy. It's arguable that this does not actually exist, because you would not have ever bought a copy in the first place. Also, I have eventually bought several movies that I had previously gotten copies of, so it's even arguable that the intangible has not been denied.
Probably what's required is similar to the ADA in the US. You need to allow them to use a browser that allows them to read the text out and override the colors you've tried to force, or put the text into a text-to-speech engine, etc. Images should have ALT tags. Stuff like that.
Where'd you get those defs? By your #2, I can "get something surreptitiously" by, say, putting on a disguise and going to an adult bookstore and buying a video; is that theft? Seems like it is by your definition, though I didn't steal anything and nobody's been wronged. Your def pretty clearly indicates that aquiring something while being sneaky is theft, and does not regard whether a legal transaction occurred or not. I submit that your definition is not just flawed, but wrong.
Here's Mirriam Webster's def:
1 a : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it b : an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property.
It's clear under this def that you must deprive the rightful owner of their ownership of property.
you can already get 1GB SmartMedia cards.
No, you can't. SmartMedia is an old, obsolete and brittle format, and it topped out at 128M. You CAN get big cards in other formats; I have a 1GB CompactFlash, and 4GB and higher are on the market (though the price curve goes steep at > 1-2GB).
But DVD recorders will not be obsolete! People want to watch their favorite programs, but they will also want to store them for later viewing (without having to pay a second time).
Yes, they will, because they will honor the broadcast flag, and they're about to turn that on and make it illegal for you to try to record that football game/sitcom.
Hang on to your analog devices, in 10 years your only way to record a TV program may be to point a camcorder at the screen, and they may even figure out a way around that (change the sync rate or something).
OK, you're right. In that case, my new laptop has (I believe) a 600 baud, 56Kbps modem.
Good points on the other stuff too.
Have you seen this?
Yeah. How do I take that on vacation, or to my mom's house, who doesn't even have a dial-up service that isn't long distance?
As for broadband availablity: I don't hold out much hope for rapid (within 10 years would be "rapid") deployment of truly ubiquitous broadband.
The pundits are saying "broadband will be everywhere" when what they really mean is "broadband will be everywhere that I care about."
I live near Ann Arbor, MI, which has a pretty high connectivity rate, but even so there are people within a few miles of me that can't get broadband, and no company is even looking at pulling cable to their areas. Even if a company started today, they wouldn't have anything for 2 years.
Remember, for DVD to be "obsolete" there has to be no practical market for it. As long as there are people who can't get movies any other way, there's a market for it.
There are a LOT of people living in rural areas that still don't have cable TV even available, what, 30+ years after it was started? And cable TV is much more profitable than internet per household. True, they can get satellite, but satellite internet is expensive and not scalable.
I would be willing to put $100 on the table and say that in 10 years, it will still be EASY to find houses that not only don't have broadband, but can't get it. I might even venture to say that it would be easy to do so in any state, let alone country. It might even be easy to do so while staying within middle income (without going to trailer parks in the sticks).
20 years ago was 1984. You were using a 300 baud acoustic modem then? I know they were still around but I don't think they were being sold. I had a 1200 baud Prometheus in 1984. There were 2400s and even a little faster (proprietary) modems then.
Floppies are optional on Dells. I haven't put a floppy drive in a PC I've built for 2 years or so. I do put in multiformat memory card readers though.
It will know what we want to watch
That's funny, usually I don't even know what I want to watch. If I feel like watching something, I like to flip open the DVD binder and start browsing.
DVDs/CDs won't go away until there is ubiquitous broadband, including in the mountains, in the car, out on a boat, and everyone has terabytes of crash-protected (RAID or whatever) storage (I don't want $8000 worth of movie purchases depending on a hard drive not crashing).
Heck, broadband isn't even available everywhere in major cities right now, contrary to what the pundits say, let alone in your car where the kids want to watch a movie. Sure there are a few mobile broadband pilots starting out, but how long will it be before Verizon/whoever can take 100,000 peole simultaneously streaming movies from their home server to the back seat of their minivans in the middle of the drive across Kansas, and do it for pennies an hour?
I think this person is a LITTLE wrong on "home computer games" being 16 bit by then.
However, for arcade games, state of the art then was 16 bit. Pole Position was released about then I think, and the arcade I worked at for a summer job got a brand new one. I checked out the schematics. It had two Z80 peripheral CPUs, one to do the quadraphonic sound and some other tasks, and one to draw clouds and other background stuff. The main CPU was a Z-8000, which was the 16-bit version of the Z-80.
There were other 16-bit systems, though I wasn't as familiar with them. Some were running 68000's, some were stuff like the 8088 or 80186.
I listed my copy of Sphere on DVD (hey, it came free with a DVD player a few years ago!). Minimum bid 50 cents, $3 S&H. No bids. Relisted. No bids. Gave up, not worth screwing with.
I've had some other crap go wanting as well.
In addition, it's is NOT possessive, so this sentence reads (expanded):
"and, with the north pole's magnetic field at about 10-15 percent it is strength of 150 years ago"
As a friend once said, "an apostrophe is not a warning that an S is coming up"
"television will be a wonderful medium for the masses to enjoy the benefits of culture and education."
The truth is that people make any general purpose media or device do what they want to do, or relegate it to irrelevancy. What most people want is to be passively entertained (couch potatoes). Build a device that can only be used for lofty goals, and nobody will buy it.
If you watch the polls and see that Fred is the 37th voter that day, then examining the 37th vote on the CD-ROM tells you how Fred voted, right? With paper ballots, the ballots all get shuffled before being counted.
You can still match things up the same way on paper. Around here anyway, the ballots (optical mark/sense) are sequentially numbered, and the start/end/spoiled numbers are matters of public record. If you know Fred is voter # 37, and the ballot slips started with 10001, and 10020 is spoiled, then his ballot is # 10038. Pick it out of the pile and see how Fred voted.
Observing the voting order would be the only way though; you can't tell by looking at the paper after the fact who voted #37 in this system. They have a tearoff system for assigning ballots, so there's no linking the two once they're torn apart (OK, forensically they could do it given a lot of time).
Easiest way is to install prefbar, then you can switch back and forth instantly. it's at mozdev, google for it.
Actually, I use PowerDVD under W2K and have no problems with it. It's never caused me any trouble at all. Can say the same for WinDVD or several other products. Also it makes it very easy to play images ripped to hard drive, VOB files, etc. It does all the language, audio track, multiangle, etc that I've ever tried on it.
:-)?
What's the problem with it, exactly? Is it only a problem on the Linux version? How does it compare to the Windows version of Xine
Then do what I'm doing. Go back and read the golden age stuff. I'm working on the Med Ship series now, and Doc Smith is always good for a quick couple of hours. A.E. van Voght, Heinlein of course, there are hundreds and hundreds of titles, all great.
Technology is actually increasing my reading. I don't generally get a chance to carry books around with me, but I always have my palm. With a 512M SD card in there, I not only have about 10 hours of NPR programs to listen to, and a couple hundred photos, I've got about 100 books in there as well.
Sure, I prefer paper, though the new 320x320 screens are quite good so I don't care that much either way anymore. But I ALWAYS have 100 books on me, usually 2 or 3 of them in progress, and I can read any of them any time I have to wait 5 or 10 minutes for something.
Drop a promise controller in it, and no problem. I had 4x160's running in an old pentium at one time, and the mainboard could only handle 2GB drives directly.
I used the controller that came with the Maxtor drives; it was Maxtor branded, but it was made by Promise. They're supported by default in the pre-built Linux kernels.