Looking for dialup hardware solution

[Christopher Browne]

On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 11:49 PM, Walter Dnes <walterdnes-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>  Thanks to everybody who replied
>
> On Sat, Jul 12, 2008 at 10:12:58PM -0400, Evan Leibovitch wrote
>
>> There are some USB solutions, that have the advantage that they can
>> also work on laptops
>
>  I'm looking at getting an ASUS EEE one of these days.  So that's a
> consideration.
>
>> (or desktops that will soon ship without regular PCI either)
>
>  Huh??? Are all add-ons supposed to be USB?  And how are video cards
> going to be handled (assuming you don't want to settle for the onboard
> video chip)?

Well, consider that Apple deployed the "Air" laptop which only has
physical connections for:
a) power
b) USB

Note that that does NOT include an Ethernet connection; to get on a
network, you either go wireless, or use a USB-based Ethernet adaptor.

These strike me as reasons to prefer not to buy an "Apple Air" laptop,
but that's not the point.

The point is that there are indeed products out there where the intent
is, indeed, that you don't have a zillion kinds of interfaces, and
pointedly don't have a PCI/AGP bus connection to play with.

That almost always the case with laptops, today; you get to use the
GPU that was bundled with the laptop, and if you want something else,
then you basically need to look for another laptop.

For this to happen to desktop machines should not come as a staggering
surprise.  There has already been considerable tendancy in this
direction; motherboards now frequently (perhaps mostly?) include the
graphics support.  Increasingly, it's only if you want a graphics card
so powerful that it adds so much power consumption and heat
dissipation that it would melt the motherboard that you have a
separate graphics card :-).

This shouldn't come as a shock or surprise or as *totally* appalling
to us; running X across a 10BaseT connection has been a perfectly
reasonable idea since before they had 100BaseT :-).

-- 
http://linuxfinances.info/info/linuxdistributions.html
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and
expecting different results." -- assortedly attributed to Albert
Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Rita Mae Brown, and Rudyard Kipling
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists