At the time that was relevant, wasn't SCSI specifically preferred for recording because IDE was particularly vulnerable when you had Windows 9x's mediocre multitasking and tiny buffers? I know there was very much a window of "close every other piece of software while burning".
An 8x SCSI drive would be preferrable to an 8x IDE drive, but he was obviously trying to sell what thought he could unload with that half-truth.
I know even long after IDE was mainstreamed, cost-no-object builds (think Boot/Maximum PC's annual Dream Machine) would have SCSI for reasons like that.
I intentionally chose Southwest for my last flight because the old policies -- included bags and free-form seating-- made me feel better about the experience. I didn't need the free checked bags, but I appreciated not being pressured into guessing exactly how many pairs of pants I'm going to need for a trip I booked 3 months in advance.
I know I'm not the industry's ideal customer-- taking solo tourist-class flights booked long in advance, once or twice a year, and not churning frequent flyer points, but that doesn't mean I want to be treated with contempt.
To be honest, that feels like an entire direction the travel sector needs to focus on. I'm paying hundreds of dollars to sit in your lowest-bid Metal Death Tube or stay in your Totally Not A Bedbug Sanctuary, stop treating me like a transient who walked into a Rodeo Drive boutique because I don't have Triple Ytterbium Status.
The address space didn't have to start at 0. In fact, address 0 contains interrupt vectors. I suspect most of the CP/M compatibility was about starting at specific addresses within a given segment (isn't that why .COM executables are placed at 0x100?)
I blame Intel by having the boot address at FFFF0. That guarantees you need ROM at the top of memory rather than loading boot code and sticking frame buffers in low memory, and starting user RAM at like 0x20000.
White box systems didn't really acquire onboard I/O til the late 486/early 586 era, but it was pretty common on name-brand systems to integrate IDE/floppy/serial/parallel and usually video.
I wonder what risks the bubble has for them. If they can sell every $30K AI accelerator they make right now, that might cause them to overextend, committing to up-front capacity or long term projects that are financed by the current spend patterns, or just neglecting other parts of their product line.
If the hype dies and they're back to selling 5090s to gamers, can they afford to pay those bills?
Historically the answer has been "no". When a company pivots to doing something that becomes 90% of their revenue, there is no way to go back to doing whatever the 10% was. Imagine NOKIA going back to manufacturing gumboots, which is how that company started out!
That's probably the saddest part. They can still pay thrd even pay off the debts from the bubble bursting just doing what they used to rely on.
But we know that won't be enough for shareholders and their stock would tank regardless. Because 2020's speciation isn't about having a reasonable long term portfolio. It's just extremely abundant pumping until you need to dump and pump the next trend. It's not enough these days to be a good, sensible business.
I have the feeling nobody knows what to do in terms of selling Ethernet for home use right now.
The moonshot efforts are around better Wi-Fi, which is, of course, at best a "good enough" solution that keeps people from running proper wires. But even as someone eager for hard-line networks, I wouldn't have good advice for a typical consumer.
If you run copper in your walls, you're really only good up to 10Gb and perhaps not even that. But if you want an optical-centric solution, that's an entirely new ecosystem that's a lot more complex. It's not just "buy a box of cable at the Home Depot and a crimp tool" anymore-- your devices might need 10GbE cards and SFP modules, you'll probably need some switches that still expose copper ports.
I wonder if there's a market for optical versions of the early "LAN in a box" kits that came with a couple of cheap ISA bus cards and a spool of cable-- just selling to people something that's all-inclusive and eliminates high-frustration mismatched parts.
I'm surprised that especially financial service providers don't have a very clear "in the event of death/emergency" flow. I know you can sometimes label an account payable-on-death/joint-ownership/trust/other weird tax-dodge shaped things, but that doesn't solve the technical problem of "how do I log in and initiate my claim when Grandpa kicks the bucket."
I prepared the fire-safe paper, but I can imagine my family getting stuck at the institutions who demand 2FA and probably won't have access to my phone or email at the time.
The whole point is that you aren't supposed to be able to login and continue business as usual. You need to call or write to the financial institution and provide proper legal documentation (death certificate) before you can assume control of the account.
That's fine for financial accounts, but people have hundreds of accounts, and you don't know which ones are the ones that matter beforehand. Is it your family member's AO3 stories that you want? Or maybe the login to the web forum that was their primary social outlet in old age? This assumes that those non-financial sites even have a process to let you in.
I assumed much of the PC industry wasn't doing "design" so much as "what's available in stock and quantity."
Only the largest players-- the Dells and HPs and Acers-- really made much design decisions with custom cases and peripherals, but their teams might have some interesting stories to tell. It might be hard to turn it into a mainstream appeal story, rather than a industrial design tech-journal one.
Considering how big a thing custom keyboards are on desktops, I could see a very viable market for more keyboard options as an upsell. If they swapped out the entire case top (or at least a large panel including the trackpad and keyboard) as a single FRU, the options could be impressive.
Regular keyboard with stupid trackpad: included
Backlit keyboard: +$30
7-row non-trackpad keyboard: +$60
7-row backlit: +$100
All glass programmable touchscreen monstrosity: +$400
There was a narrow window when TV and monitor products used the same panels.
TVs got bigger very quickly after LCD took over-- there were a few years where they had ~22-25" sets as the small "dorm room" size models, but you walk into Best Buy and there's barely anything smaller than 32" now.
Conversely, mainstream desktop screens didn't get much above 27" before you started going exotic, so the typical monitors you're putting on a million desktops are not using the same panels as TVs.
I suppose you could say that a "master glass" could be cut into 16:9 panels for both TVs and monitors, but wouldn't it require the two panel sizes to use the same pixel density?
>I suppose you could say that a "master glass" could be cut into 16:9 panels for both TVs and monitors, but wouldn't it require the two panel sizes to use the same pixel density?
Also they shared the same COGs(chip-on-glass) to drive the TFT panels. That's why laptops had the same HDTV 1366x768 resolutions.
An 8x SCSI drive would be preferrable to an 8x IDE drive, but he was obviously trying to sell what thought he could unload with that half-truth.
I know even long after IDE was mainstreamed, cost-no-object builds (think Boot/Maximum PC's annual Dream Machine) would have SCSI for reasons like that.
reply