If I were to believe Alibaba's seller, I could get 5 of them for the same price as 1 TV from Costco. Yeah, that sounds legit.
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.
At some point, you have to start trusting people/organizations/companies.
What you're really saying is, "You don't have a choice, so just suck it up, princess. Privacy is so 20th century."
No, you don't have to trust people/organizations/companies who have not earned your trust. You are the one paying. Use the power you have as a consumer. Weaponize your purchasing power.
And always, always reserve the right to just say "Nope, I don't need it, I don't want it, and I'll find another way."
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.
The threat of competition prevents long term monopolies from persisting.
explain how that works. you've just made a statement of unsupported belief
i've explained to you reality, straightforward: a high cost of entry into the market prevents competition. high cost alone
you have opposed my description of reality. that's fine, you don't have to agrere with me
but you have to be able to explain how or why i am wrong. you have not done that
"go read my religious literature" is not an argument
if you can't make your case in plain language, that says something doesn't it?
an unsupported faith in an unsupported statement is trendy nonsense
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.
a fiber rollout for a large city costs {X}
{X} is huge
therefore {X} is a barrier for competition
what's the difficulty with grasping this straightforward concept exactly?
you are?
He's a whole damned town!
Put OpenWrt on it and problem over.
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.
Right. Because either everyone they know is buying TruckNutz, or it is entirely logical to want nuts on your truck. No emotion to it.
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.
You're better off with the quad ethernet card being pcie and the wlan card pci, especially if the ethernet is 1gb or more.
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.
If the biggest problem you have is with cooling, stop being a wimp and just drive a fan off the serial console port connector inside. Pretty much all consumer routers have one.
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.
Yes. I have the option to buy a 25BM/s line.
Man, if I have one BM a day, I'm happy. Twenty-five a second? You'd lift off! T minus ten, nine, eight...
so explain it to me
Software production is assumed to be a line function, but it is run like a staff function. -- Paul Licker
