Re: Drivers, Upgrades and SW design (was Re: Dedicated Z-wave sites?)

[Marc_F_Hult <MFHult@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2 Jan 2007 07:48:13 -0500, "Robert Green"
<ROBERT_GREEN1963@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
<CbidnXiEvYM6yAfYnZ2dnUVZ_sSmnZ2d@xxxxxxx>:

>"Dean Roddey" <droddey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
>news:tZIgh.31398$wP1.14116@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> "Robert Green" <ROBERT_GREEN1963@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
>> news:_s2dnf4eBMnszh7YnZ2dnUVZ_ua3nZ2d@xxxxxxxxxx
>> > You don't do much gaming, do you?  You can get sometimes find a driver
>> > per week at some of the high end video card support sites.  As more
>> > feedback and problem reports arrive, the fixes soon follow.  The same
>> > is true for BIOS's in any new motherboard.  You can see them issued >>
> once a week, after a new board is released.  Some of these fixes are >> >
notminor cosmetic polish, either.
>
>> No, I don't. And we are talking about automation, not gaming, so I'm not
>> sure what the relevance is.
>
>Easy, dude!  We *were* talking about PCs and the things that make them
>stop working in *general* or at least one of us was!  (-:  I'm afraid
>you're taking my comments as slams against CQ, and they're certainly NOT
>meant to be.  Along those more general lines, we were discussing driver
>problems and whether a typical end user had any way to tell whether an HA
>item he had purchased came with reliable drivers or "junk" drivers.  I
>made that point because some of the buggiest, crappiest drivers and
>application software I have ever come across came from big name companies
>like Nikon, Panasonic and Sony.
>
>As for gaming issues, didn't that signal we might *not* be talking about
CQ
>exclusively?

Rest of 634 (!) lines deleted

Bobby:

Some restraint is required if one is to be successful.

One can break any PC ever built and one of the most dependable ways to
break a PC-based instrument controller like a HA PC is to also use it to
run games. It has always been this way. Remember the USCD-Pascal-based
Flight Simulator which took over the whole PC?

The temptation to keep adding programs and hardware and drivers to a PC is
great. Here's a photo of a part of my mobile environmental research lab ca
1989 with a early backplane 80386-16 running software I wrote to control a
gas chromatograph with multiple detectors, and a mass spectrometer, and
valves and pumps and temperature and pressure and flow sensors.
http://mn.water.usgs.gov/bemidji/gif/field1990/Marc's%20GC%20setup.jpg

Do you think that I also ran games on it?

... Marc
Marc_F_Hult
www.ECOntrol.org