That's a fairly clear scam, unless you were shopping Sony and they were offering J. Random Brand. But there are real things on there, too. And if you were to buy 5 TVs you probably could get them somewhere close to half off, but you'd have to pick them up from the port for that price.

As it turns out, and as I would probably have noticed if I paid more attention to model numbers, all the intel chips on this card are DEC clones. Linux, naturally, just calls them tulips. Huzzah!

Also as it turns out, the PCIE interface is weird. It has an almost-PCIEx1-almost-PCIEx16 video card in it which appears to just provide the DVI output for the onboard intel 960 graphics. I'm sure this is old hat to other people but I haven't messed about with an even vaguely modern corporate PC in a while, just clones and servers. Presumably I could still stick a normal X1 card in it.

Around here it gets to 121â occasionally. An ATM in an enclosure doesn't have much of chance without active cooling.

If it has a sun exposure, expect internal temps of 160-180â. My car gets that hot.

Well, somewhere i've got a mystery Quad Tulip with genuine DEC chips, but the NIC I'm planning to use is a Phobox P430TX. It's four totally discrete Intel 21143TD chips with Level One level shifters (whatever you actually call the chips that handle the ethernet line itself) behind an intel 21152AB PCI to PCI bridge. If it doesn't pan out then I've gotta track down that tulip, which is probably deep inside a crate someplace.

Municipality owned infrastructure would be nice but sounds too socialist / Marxist / atheist / Communist / etc. for some people. There are 19 states where it has been outlawed, since "the internet should not operate at the speed of government" or something.

He's a whole damned town!

A mixture of both. The AMT system includes a dedicated ARC cpu, which runs its own OS and functions independently of the host to a large degree; but also can see into, and sometimes make use of, some of the hardware visible to the host system(details depend on version). For communication, for instance, the AMT system has access to the wired NIC below the OS's view(wireless NICs are more complex, I think AMT can do a direct connection to a trusted AP if configured to do so; but can't do VPN without piggybacking on the host OS), and it also has enough hooks into the various peripherals that it can do remote KVM in hardware, by emulating HID devices and snooping the framebuffer, mount an .iso as though it were a connected SATA device, and access some storage and memory locations that are also accessible to the host OS or programs, in order to gather data on system health, software versions, etc.

I'm not exactly sure how the BIOS/UEFI flash and the flash that stores the AMT firmware are related to one another. On computers with AMT, a 'bios update' will often flash both; but I don't know if that's because they are just different areas of the same SPI flash chip, or whether it's just a convenience bundling of two nearly unrelated updaters.

A lot of these el cheapo routers won't take an alternate firmware, they don't run Linux and they don't have sufficient hardware resources in a lot of cases, notably ram and flash. Unfortunately, a lot of these sort of devices have the same name as devices which will take Linux. When you're lucky, a revision number which can be used to determine compatibility appears on the device, but is usually not visible through the packaging.

I strongly suspect that many of those were purchases as snarky "gifts" for men by women as commentary on their lifestyles. Alas, a google search for "truck nuts buyer gender breakdown" did not result in any useful data. Regardless, such a special case can't prove a point. And anyway, I allowed as how there was an alternate and less generous explanation.

That's true, but the QE card came from a yard sale for five bucks, so unless it's bad I think I'm pretty well-off with that one. The machine has one GigE port onboard, and I'll feed that into a D-Link 1Gbps unmanaged switch for a storage segment just for my PC and some Pogoplugs. Everything else in the house is either wireless or 100Mbps, so it won't actually matter at all.

I do have an atheros-chipset wlan PCI card which might do master mode, but it's only 802.11g. If it were 802.11a+n then I'd probably go looking for a PCIE QE card to go next to it.

Well, the one WRT54G I added a fan to still crashed its pathetic little ass off, I never have understood why the community loved those things so well. I tried five of them before I realized that everyone is a fucking idiot, apparently. I don't like to believe that I'm smarter than the masses, both because it looks like an ego trip and because usually that sort of reasoning leads to disappointment, but now I know the WRT54G is garbage across the board. So now I don't trust anyone on this subject.

As it turns out, a whole PC with a case and drives and everything is around fifty bucks, which is dramatically less than a decent home router any more — most of them are well over $100, and many of them over $200! This is completely batshit crazy when I can build a PC with quad-ethernet and Wireless-N for less money brand new if I compromise.

Man, if I have one BM a day, I'm happy. Twenty-five a second? You'd lift off! T minus ten, nine, eight...

People within a bowshot of me have access to both Cable and DSL. I can get neither, but at first glance everyone thinks that my "neighborhood" has both. Then they check and "oh no, we don't serve that address, how odd". Which is why I get my internet access from a semi-local WISP which promises 6Mbps and delivers 5.7. Some of their customers get 20 Mbps, which you will note is still no longer broadband. However, those customers are in areas where there is competition for internet access. AT&T has literally the only fiber run into my entire county, so my ISP brings a signal in via repeaters across four mountaintops, the fourth of which being where my CPE is pointed.

Well for my part, I expect that it's because Pacific Bell, uh I mean Southwestern Bell, uh I mean AT&T has other priorities, and it has nothing to do with the customer base. If you can't remember that far back, Pacific Bell was notorious for splicing copper until well after you couldn't reasonably splice it any more. And back when we had line sharing, they were notorious for stealing any pair without either POTS or a digital circuit on it to give to one of their subscribers, so if you got your access from someone else across their copper you could expect an interruption any time there was inclement weather or not, because either the weather would get into a splice between the CO and your house, or it would get into some other line and they would steal your pair to use to fix it. But it should go without saying that AT&T didn't come into town and replace all that shitty copper, it's still festering there. And so in some places sure, DSL is great, works even farther than expected... and in other places, DSL is hopeless, and Pacific Bell cut their distance limit from an original 17,500 feet to just 14,000 feet and even some of those customers weren't getting anywhere near their advertised bandwidth.

Eventually the DSL ISPs started getting dinged hard for delivering lower-than-promised bandwidth, which made DSL penetration the absolute last priority for telcos. So now you have what we have now, where DSL penetration is piss-poor, and I have to use a craptacular WISP because there's nothing else available to me.

Didn't say that. I said I can't recall ever seeing it. Sorry the difference escapes you.

It's hard to listen on an interface that has been shut off. Or on one that has been unplugged, which if you recall was what I suggested to deal with an always-on laptop network connection. Seems like I admitted they existed, which contradicts the words you tried putting in my mouth earlier.

I know what "wake on lan" is, and I also know that it is a BIOS setting to enable and disable it. Still, you can't "wake on lan" a system that isn't connected to a lan, now can you? That seems like a simpler solution if you are scared of the boogeyman turning your powered-down laptop back on. It's not like you have to crawl under the desk to get to the network connection when you unplug a laptop.

But using the simple solution doesn't allow for an "oh noes, the gov'mint can turn my laptop back on and monitor me, must buy a special laptop to be safe!" FUD campaign.

They all tend to be fairly miserable(though thermal issues are often more a product of the desire to have more space for ugly branding and fewer vents, which can be fixed with a bit of applied violence); but I do have to give the hardware credit for often being rather amazing for the price. The firmware is shit more or less across the board; but it is astounding how much actual computer they can cram into a $20 router.