Wang 300 Calc

On 13/09/2007, Gordon JC Pearce <gordonjcp at gjcp.net> wrote: Absolutely 100% concur. That was criminally stupid. USB is great for basic low-bandwidth I/O devices. Simple, robust and does the job. For more complex devices - scanners, printers, all-in-one devices and so on - I've had a few problems. For high-performance storage peripherals - disk drives, optical drives etc. - I don't much like it and prefer Firewire. USB2 and the wretched marketing fiasco of "USB full speed" versus "USB high speed" and so on has been a disaster. Because marketdroids (who should all, /pace/ Bill Hicks, be shot) complained that they didn't want their devices labelled "slow" or USB1 to equate to "slow"), instead of a nice clear distinction - USB2 = fast, USB1 = slow - we have a mess of confusing phrases instead. Horrible. And whereas it's convenient that USB1 and USB2 use the same cables, there should be mandatory labelling of which standards are supported, because not all USB1 cables, designed for 12Mb/s, can handle the 480Mb/s of USB2. All USB2 cables, hubs and devices should say, clearly and distinctly, that they are USB2. They don't. I've also, horrifyingly, seen at least 1 USB2 external disk case that used an A-connector (the computer end) for /both/ ends of its cable, which means that it included an A-to-A cable, which is prohibited. This would allow a naive user (i.e. most of them) to connect 2 PCs back to back over the cable, resulting in an expensive bang and release of magic smoke. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508