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Date:      Wed, 17 Jul 1996 10:29:06 -0400
From:      dennis@etinc.com (Dennis)
To:        "Michael L. VanLoon -- HeadCandy.com" <michaelv@HeadCandy.com>
Cc:        hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: mitsumi CD-ROM 
Message-ID:  <199607171429.KAA23687@etinc.com>

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M. VanLoon writes...

>>With every purchase, a good consumer makes a value judgement. Frankly
>>I get more utility out of 5 PCs than I do with 1 of whatever you recommend...
>>particularly when its my money.
>
>Well, when you consider that most of the stuff that is dirt cheap is
>only dirt cheap because everyone got on that bandwagon and made it
>dirt cheap by buying that stuff in mega quantities, you're kind of
>shooting yourself in the foot.  If you could have gotten SCSI to
>achieve "critical mass" among the masses instead of IDE, it would
>probably be cheaper right now (if IDE even existed after such a
>thing).
>
>Sure there's a balance.  Maybe you just plain get more utility out of
>a higher quantity of cheaper stuff.  But on the other stand, sometimes
>taking a stand for The Right Cause may actually help lead the clueless
>masses in the right direction.  Of course, only sometimes... it takes
>a lot of convincing to convince the masses that you know better than
>the used car salesman who works down at Circuit City now, and tried to
>sell them that PeeCee with the IDE modem.

"Knowing better" isnt the issue. I have countless PCs in my lab, and only
my servers have SCSI. I dont need scsi for most of what I do, and to pay
$30 extra for it would be a waste, $150 or $200 is a mega waste
When I load a linux distrubution (I download FreeBSD), I slap on a cheap 
IDE CDROM, load it up, and then put it back on the shelf. I dont have to 
worry about whether the brand of SCSI controller i have is supported, or 
shared memory, or I/O or anything else. 

I also "know" that hand-tailored clothing is better and last longer
than "mass-produced" clothing, but I dont wear suits very often and I'm quite
happy buying jeans from a discount Levi's distributor.

To no-doubt spurn another wide-eyed debate among the academics, I also
dont want a bus-mastering controller stealing the bus from my more-critical
communications in a router-system where disk functions are secondary.

dennis




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