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Borszczuk wrote:
> On Sunday 09 January 2005 03:14 J. Clarke wrote:
>
>> maintenance that puts their data at risk. There the 100 Mb/sec LAN is
>> sometimes a bottleneck--remember, you don't have to _fill_ a gigabit pipe
>> for it to be useful.
>
> True, however gigabyte ethernet ain't that widely popular.
Yet. Pricing is such that it's about to start pushing 100TX off the shelves
in the mass-market stores. Gigabit NICs can be had new for ten bucks and 5
port switches for 55. In other words it's reaching the point that the
labor to screw the pieces together costs more than the silicon.
I remember a time when 100 mb/sec was "the impossible dream", then later
that it was incredible high-end stuff that ran only on fiber. At the time
it didn't seem useful for PCs. Gigabit's going the same way but the price
is coming down a lot faster.
> In your case
> you may really need it for your work. For me, even 10 would suffice as I
> don't care fetching other big stuff from the net. Instead I'd preffer
> wifi on board since wherever I got, the hotspot is present.
>
>>>> Bluetooth
>>> do you *really* needs that built-in?
>> Depends on what one does with the machine--there are times when that
>> bluetooth dongle sticking out looks decidedly fragile.
>
> Definitely. But the question needs to answered by the potential buyer.
> If he only *thinks* he will be using BT daily (instead of *knowing*
> that) he may end the game within a week, after trying to connect
> everything in you area or syncing mobile addressbook over and over.
Personally I use it every day--I first investigated it when I found that my
wireless keyboard borked every time the kid across the street got out his
radio controlled car. I looked for a spread-spectrum keyboard and found
that Bluetooth is spread-spectrum, so I was an early adopter on bluetooth
keyboards. Since then I've acquired other Bluetooth stuff and found that
it is one of those things that is more useful in the reality than in the
abstract--if you don't have it you wonder what you'll do with it but if you
do have it then you find all kinds of things to do with it. It certainly
doesn't add enough to the cost of a machine at this point (a Bluetooth USB
dongle costs about 17 bucks retail, a chip in the machine is a lot less) to
make it anything to agonize over.
--
--John
Reply to jclarke at ae tee tee global dot net
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)