On Sun, 20 Nov 2005 16:35:46 -0500, Nick Holland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Tim wrote: >> Hello >> >> I read in an earlier thread some criticism of a brand I thought was >> reliable/quality with OpenBSD and in general: ASUS. >> >> So what motherboard brand can you rely on for a desktop then? > >Life isn't that simple. > >I suspect almost every manufacturer of almost every product has had >good, if not wonderful products, and real stinkers. One of my favorite >examples goes back 20 years in the hard disk world: one of the worst >disks I remember seeing was the Seagate ST225 (20M, whoo!). One of the >best was...the Seagate ST225. The difference? The early ones were >cutting edge, and it showed. The final ones were trailing edge and it >showed. All the bugs were worked out of their manufacturing process, >and they just worked (and they would probably still be working today, if >20M wasn't such a joke anymore...) > >There may be some "Never buy" brands out there, but there are unlikely >to be any "always safe". > >In the computer industry, by the time you can say with certainty that a >particular product is good and reliable...it has been discontinued for >six months (or if you are worried about reliability, more like two >years). You need longer to verify this than the life cycle of the >product will give you. > >Just to add insult to confusion, one little driver change could make the >difference between a nearly useless board (on say, OpenBSD 3.7) and a >very solid board (on 3.8 or -current). Take the frustrated word of >someone about the old release, you may be cheating yourself out of a >good thing. This certainly isn't an OpenBSD issue -- I'm sure a lot of >people remember the i810 headaches with Win(crash!)do(crash!)ws >9(Crash!)8, but Windows 2000 ran for months at a time on such a system... > >(insert statistics lesson about how one experience with a sample of one >is not always portable to an entire class of products here) > >Get used to it, that's just the way it is. You will have to spend some >money, hope for the best, and roll with it if it doesn't work out. >Either that, or accept very non-cutting edge stuff you find in the >surplus bins of the world, and hope it was well-treated in those surplus >bins (it wasn't). > >Nick. Nick's post contains a lot of common sense but two main problems with common sense are (1) you usually have to learn it the hard way and (2) it ain't all that common. The next time you find yourself drooling over the newest wizz-bang tech, realize you're better off donating the new wizz-bang thing to the project and then getting something else for yourself that has already been proven to work. Sure, you might miss out on the "bragging-rights" of owning the latest and greatest, but buying tech that's a couple years old will save you a lot of headaches. JCR
