From owner-freebsd-hardware Wed Mar 10 11:44:18 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Received: from cannon.ma.ikos.com (cannon.ma.ikos.com [137.103.105.19]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id AD57615128 for ; Wed, 10 Mar 1999 11:44:16 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from tich@cannon.ma.ikos.com) Received: from lonesome.ma.ikos.com (lonesome [137.103.105.44]) by cannon.ma.ikos.com (8.9.1/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA15656 for ; Wed, 10 Mar 1999 14:45:19 -0500 (EST) From: Richard Cownie Received: (from tich@localhost) by lonesome.ma.ikos.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) id OAA20584 for freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org; Wed, 10 Mar 1999 14:45:18 -0500 (EST) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 14:45:18 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199903101945.OAA20584@lonesome.ma.ikos.com> To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Subject: PC WinModem (my last comment) Sender: owner-freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Well, I guess I kicked open a can of worms here, let me just answer the last two points and then I'll shut up and do some real work. Jack O'Neill wrote: >Start a download and try to format a floppy at the same time. >Unless they've done some rewriting of their code the download >will fall apart even with a real modem. .. which would mean that there are problems with Windows floppy formatting, but that a WinModem is no worse than a "real" modem in this respect. Chuck Robey wrote: >And FreeBSD isn't very likely to support it at all, because it's an >incredible waste of computing power. You make it sound like being >incredibly cheap is a virtue. The simple minded thing just offloads all >the signal processing of a modem onto your processor, which means it >can't do anything else useful while the modem's going. That isn't I do believe that being incredibly cheap is a virtue. If we can't agree on that then we inhabit different worlds and don't have much chance of agreeing on anything. As for the wastage of cpu cycles, my cpu doesn't have a meter that charges me per instruction executed. Most of the time it's doing nothing. According to the manual for my WinModem, it requires at least a Pentium 75MHz - I have a Cyrix MII PR300, which is probably at least 3 x faster than a Pentium 75MHz, so it's very likely that the modem uses only 30% of the cpu even when going flat out (there could be some context-switching effects, but this is a reasonable guess). Subjectively, the machine does not stop responding when the modem is running - indeed it doesn't seem noticeably slower. I believe that real people have put in a lot of hard work to make WinModem's that do the job and can be bought for $15-20. As an engineer I would like us to give them due credit and not describe their carefully-engineered products as "pieces of trash" without prsenting any evidence for this view. OK I'm done with this topic now. Richard Cownie (tich@ma.ikos.com) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message