From owner-freebsd-hackers Fri May 24 12:44:31 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id MAA21847 for hackers-outgoing; Fri, 24 May 1996 12:44:31 -0700 (PDT) Received: from etinc.com (etinc.com [204.141.244.98]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id MAA21830 for ; Fri, 24 May 1996 12:44:26 -0700 (PDT) Received: from dialup-usr11.etinc.com (dialup-usr11.etinc.com [204.141.95.132]) by etinc.com (8.6.12/8.6.9) with SMTP id PAA01539; Fri, 24 May 1996 15:49:47 -0400 Date: Fri, 24 May 1996 15:49:47 -0400 Message-Id: <199605241949.PAA01539@etinc.com> X-Sender: dennis@etinc.com X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Version 2.0.3 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: davidg@Root.COM From: dennis@etinc.com (Dennis) Subject: Re: The view from here (was Re: ISDN Compression Load on CPU) Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk David G writes... >>Most of this is your own fault, for buying cheap unknown cards, >>discouraging and ridiculing commercial vendors for charging for >>things that are worth it and not giving away their work, and using >>software thats been slapped together by someone who doesnt have >>enough time to spend on it to make it really work well. > > Jordan's talking about other quality issues, like a poorly designed bus and >rail design that allows for cards to become unseated fairly easily and the >general lack of quality with 99.9% of the motherboards on the market. In this >case, I'm refering to poor Q/A at the factory (bad cache ram, etc), poor >BIOSes, etc. ...and then there's interoperability problems between various >cards with various motherboards. This is one advantage that Sun machines have >that PCs will never have - all the hardware is pretty much made by one vendor >and this cuts down the interoperability/reliability problems dramatically. >For those of us that come from minicomputer backgrounds (DEC PDP and VAX), >it's all too obvious to us where the shortcomings are in PC hardware. Granted...but it isnt an impossible task to find the good products. A router sitting in the corner isnt going to have cards pop out, and if your building/selling routers obviously you need to do you homework. We're talking about routing a few Mbits per second here...theres not a lot going on that the hardware has to be perfect. dennis ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Emerging Technologies, Inc. http://www.etinc.com Synchronous Communications Cards and Routers For Discriminating Tastes. 56k to T1 and beyond. Frame Relay, PPP, HDLC, and X.25 for BSD/OS, FreeBSD and LINUX