BL> What's the bandwidth of USB?

DD> The throughput of usb is 1.1Mbps.

 Bugger that for a game of soldiers, then. I wondered if I could use
USB instead of a network.

DD> The wireless NETWORK link has to deal with power limits vs
DD> distance, and overheads to combat interference? [...]

 All networks do the same thing, sending packet headers, checksums,
and encryption, but it only amounts to 10-20% extra. Power and
distance have nothing much to do with it.. it either works or it
doesn't.

BL> My 486 and Win311 was perfectly adequate... but to go 32-bit I
BL> had to upgrade. We're close to the end now, with 400MHz bus and
BL> 80Gb hard drives. 

DD> 80Gb hard drives "near the end"? Much larger ones are easily
DD> obtainable already.

 I meant that 80GB is already too large, just as 3GHz and 400MHZ bus
is already too fast - for all practical purposes. I bought my new
computer on Friday: 2.6G ATHLON/333M bus, 512K L2 cache, 256MB RAM, 80
GB drive... all for $600. The funny part is that *now* it is fast
enough to run Win98 at the same speed the old 486 uased to run Win311!

 I've been using Win98 (and Linux) for three years now and I have
come to the conclusion that neither of them are any more reliable than
DOS and Win31... except that every time you open something, Win98 and
Linux check the registry and slows down because it does. To me, the
idea of a registry is insane! It's on the hard drive, and if anything
is going to stuff up, it's the hard drive! Everything else is
non-mechanical and will probably work reliably, forever.

 I've been using computers for 20 years now. My original 386 had a
dicky RAM chip that went queer in hot weather, with that result that I
had to reboot occasionally. Since then, the only thing that goes wrong
is Windows itself, or the hard drive crashes. In 20 years, I've had
four hard drives die... but never lost one bit in the RAM! What is the
point of putting the registry on the *least* reliable part of the
machine? And what does it do anyway? If the hard drive crashes, you're
rooted.

 But... with a 2.9GHz ATHLON, it boots pretty quickly now (5
seconds). Of course, the old 16-bit Win311 is basically instantaneous.

Regards,
Bob
  

--- BQWK Alpha 0.5