Ben Kochie <ben at nerp.net> wrote: > > I agree.. the x86 hardware needs a re-vamp. and hopefully the 64bit > platforms will get most of that fixed. Heh, I think that the Pentium was actually supposed to drop the legacy x86 support. The same was supposed to be true for their 64-bit chips, though I thought I heard that they are going to be x86 compatible as well. Unfortunately, I think that Intel, Microsoft, or someone has been rubbing off on other companies who have been putting out consumer hardware. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention before, but there seem to be a lot of buggy chipsets out there. I think there are some manufacturers who believe that `consumer-grade' means that there can be four times as many bugs when it gets shipped. That's a bad mode of thought, in my opinion, as many consumers can really push their hardware. Conversely, look into any server room and you're probably going to find at least a handful of PCs. This means that some really important stuff could be depending on potentially buggy `consumer-grade' hardware. Part of my reason for looking at different architectures is to get away from that mode of thought. I'd be willing to pay 2x or 3x the `consumer' price in order to get hardware that has been more fully tested, and is therefore less likely to completely toast my data. Unfortunately, it appears that sellers want me to pay even more (4x-10x or more) to get such a level of quality. Who am I? NASA? -- _ _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _ ___ _ _ __ I'll listen to reason / \/ \(_)| ' // ._\ / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__ when it comes out on CD \_||_/|_||_|_\\___/ \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __) [ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ]