Re: [9fans] Plan 9

[Tomas <psycho@pobox.com>]

On Tue, 6 Nov 2001 at 10:31am, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:

> forsyth@vitanuova.com writes:
>
> > the aim was to avoid the PC user having to put a network card
> > in the machine to use ADSL. most machines (now) have got USB,
> > but haven't got ether on the motherboard, which is just as
> > well because when they do include one, it's often something
> > stupid.
>
> Yes, as cheap as decent 10/100 cards are these days, onboard
> ethernet seems silly. As far as not wanting to put in a card...
> I thought most of the people who didn't want to open the case
> and put in an expansion card used either MacOS or Windows
> (because they use whatever came on the hard drive when they
> bought the thing).

Or they could be like me, and just hate fiddling with the
hardware. I recently tried to install a new graphics card and a
new hard drive in my computer, and got so frustrated by the
experience that I wrote a 250+ lines rant about it. In the end,
after upgrading the BIOS, I still haven't gotten the graphics
card to work, and the BIOS doesn't detect the new hard drive, but
Linux does detect it so I hope that will allow me to install and
boot Win* and Plan 9 from the new hard drive through use of LILO
(since Plan 9 under VMWare not yet seems to work).

Some people like to dig into hardware, some like to dig into
software, and some just like to use computers without sinking
their teeth into neither hardware nor OS/software. If computers
and computing is to evolve, we computer professionals have to
accept that all these categories of people (and more) exist, and
try to make computers and software that they can use without
occasionally wanting to smash the monitor with a baseball bat.

I've gotten so fed up with fiddling with PC hardware recently
that I think my next PC will be a Dell or Gateway or something
instead of the built-it-myself one I now have. That way I'm
fairly sure the hardware will work together.

/Tomas