[rescue] I'm one happy geek

[Brian Hechinger]

On Mon, Jun 25, 2001 at 01:32:04AM -0400, Joshua D. Boyd wrote:
> I personally think that USB is rather nice.  I wonder if it would be

i'm not saying i don't like it, just that i have nothing that uses it. :)

> possible to get working via a USB PC Card, and a sbus PC card thing.
> Those sorts of USB cards probably wouldn't be supported by solaris though.

probably not, the USB card would have to have Solaris specific drivers for it
to work right.  which i'm sure don't exist.  oh well.  maybe it's time to
break down and buy a SunBlade 100.  oh wait, that takes money, i'm completely
short of that.  :)

> Anyway, the things I like about USB are that it is hot-plugable, and
> virtually limitless expandability.  I never have enough serial ports.  If
> I had my way, the machine I'm at now would have a minimum of 6 serial
> ports (one for mouse, one for wacom tablet, one for Palm, one for camera,
> one for serial consoles of other machines, and one for my serial printer).

my sparc20 only has 2 serial ports, which kinda sucks, but it's real easy to
get a large number of serial ports on my VAXentoys.  although that isn't real
useful for the type of stuff you need to do, but then, we have different needs.

> Everything I have on serial is fairly easy to get on USB though (worst
> case, use USB to serial adapters), and while getting more than 2 serial
> ports is a pain, hooking 6+ usb devices isn't.  The only problem is that
> most serial->usb adapters are unsupported by real OSs.

yeah, but since it's so easy to find what you are looking for in native USB, 
that shouldn't be a problem, right?

> As to DSSI/MFM/ESDI, I've never heard of the first, and I find that later
> two to big rather intimidating (and I'm told they are inferior to SCSI).

DSSI is kinda like SCSI, used in the "big" VAXentoys (VAX 4000 and up? someone
correct me if i'm wrong, but i don't think i am) and rather nice.  sadly all
DSSI disks are rather slow since none of them are real modern, and so, usually
5400rpm and older, bigger, slower, more heat creating and more power consuming.
but they work real nice, i've never had any trouble with them anyway.

MFM/ESDI can both be a giant PITA, no, s/can be/are/ but they are what you
usually find on older boxes.  both of my PDP machines have MFM and my IBM RTs
both have ESDI disks.  both are a PITA to find as well, so once these die,
i'm pretty much up shit creek without a paddle.

> I'm IDE/SCSI (IDE dominates as to the most megabytes, but I have more SCSI
> drives).  I'd love to dump IDE, but I'm told that DVD roms actually are
> superior on IDE over SCSI. Something about SCSI not dealing well with
> varying block sizes was the reasoning I was given.

either way, you can't beat IDE for the price per MB.  performance isn't so
shabby anymore these days, but reliability isn't good from what i hear, and
you are still very limited to number of spindles in a machine.  not a big deal
for your average desktop box, but that's not what i specialize in. :)

> My problem is that I want more disk capacity and CPU power than I can
> afford by sticking to the superior solutions.  However, this comes back to
> bite me in time wasted trying to keep things working (I'm currently
> resorting to a source build of XFree 4.1.0 to try and fix some silly
> problems with 3D acceleration).

3D acceleration?  uhm, what's that? :)

> A SS20 might have better bus bandwidth than a modern PeeCee, but the
> modern PeeCee still renders video frames faster, and transforms matrixes
> faster.

i use the onboard SX, a GX and a TGX.  i don't think any of them even know how
to spell matrices, let alone transform them. :)

render video frames faster? my SX can barely keep it's head above water. :)

-brian (old slow hardware compliments old slow brain)