Looking for dialup hardware solution

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 02:50:18PM -0400, Christopher Browne wrote:
> 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 lack of ethernet certainly makes me NOT want one.  Firewire would
have been nice too.

> 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.

Some laptops have express slots which are PCI express.

> 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.

Yeah, which is part of why I am not personally a fan of laptops.

> 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 :-).

Many don't contain built in video.  It depends what you buy.  If you buy
the cheapest thing around then yes it will have built in video.

> 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 :-).

And worked great until people started wanting video and animated
graphics, at which point it started to suck.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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