USB and such (was: Mac Mini)

[Hans Franke]

Am 2 Dec 2005 7:47 meinte Cini, Richard:

> On Behalf Of Jules Richardson

>> Yep, personally I'd only buy a Mac mini if it was 10-20% bigger and came
>> with some real ports - say serial, parallel, and SCSI. Then it'd be a nice
>> compact well-designed machine with some useful connectivity too. It seems
>> that no matter what the USB-advocates say, bodging that sort of stuff on
>> top of Universal Screwed-up Bus plain doesn't work...

Well, what do you need? USB is a prety good system and delivers an
interface for all actual stuff I ever need. Originaly I was also
quite sceptic of USB, but after digging into the low level structure,
I became somewhat of an evangelist (*1). And if you realy want to
do high speed disks there's still the fire wire port for high
thruput to a single device (*2).

Printers (at least the ones I tried) run faster on USB, and I can't
find any real reason for serial on an average Desktop anymore (*3).
Last but the not least, the usual 'I still have a 10 MB SCSI drive
I want to connect isn't realy an argument.

> Doesn't that essentially get you a VIA EPIA motherboard (except for the
> SCSI)? Only problem there is that it doesn't run OSX.

Well, for the PC-World, such little EPIA boxes are what I usualy
recommend to (non tech *4) people. small, silent, and more than
they ever need to run Word.

Gruss
H.

*1 - In fact, if I had to design a new system today, I would use
     USB as a bus structure to be used for add on cards. Simple
     handling, no interface problems, no electrical problems,easy
     driver structure and fast enough for almost everything, even
     including graphics.

     To be OT again: does anybody remember the PC375 that used
     SCSI as bus system for it's I/O cards? USB _IS_ todays SCSI.

*2 - If disk size and speed is THAT cruical, the MiniMe might be
     the wrong choice in the first place. Get yourself a big fat
     tower.

*3 - If someone comes up with DSL or Modems here, I would suggest
     that by jumping from a bridge it's more fun to loose your mind.
     A router costs a few bucks and takes away a whole universe of
     problems.

*4 - And I learned that even a lot of tech educated people like
     the idea of a small 'just-use-it' box.

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