>> Well... have you opened the bonnet of your car recently? I notice 
>> newer cars have a big sheet of plastic under there, but beyond that 
>> it's still pretty much a case of "if you don't know what a distributor 
>> is, you probably shouldn't touch this - otherwise you might die". At 
>> least computers don't physically kill you if you make a mistake. ;-)
> 
> Except vehicle manufacturers don't want their customers fiddling under 
> the hood, computer hardware manufacturers should at least video 
> game/processor/etc retailers should.

Mmm, true...

> Well last time we had this thread I mentioned the motherboard 
> daughterboard setup combined with a hot-swap facility. Simple slots on 
> the back, press the button and the daughterboard disengages and you pull 
> it out and slot the new one in place.

We have some 10 year old Dell PCs that do exactly this. Press a button 
and the case falls apart. (I think it's meant to unclip, but actually it 
just falls apart.) Press another button and the daughterboard with all 
the PCI stuff on it unclips and slides out of the case. (Don't ever try 
to put it back though...)

> Have a dedicated slot for the CPU, 
> one for the memory, and one for the video card, with the rest being 
> generic PCI-type slots. Similar generic front slots (with a dedicated 
> boot slot) for extra hard drives, floppy drives, CD, DVD, tape, etc.

Well now, if you buy a big expensive server, they actually come with 
hot-swappable drive bays. Take an empty draw out. Put the HD inside it. 
Slot it into the front of the case. Done.

A computer case like that should only set you back... oh, I don't know, 
a few thousand pounds.

Actually, try this:

http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/



> Think how it stands at the moment someone has a computer with one DVD 
> player and a floppy drive, he's never used the floppy drive in his life 
> and wants to replace it with another DVD rewriter or Blu-ray player. 
> What's he got to do to make that happen?

The problem with all of this is that somebody has to design a set of 
nice slots that everybody will manufacture to. (Otherwise you won't be 
able to buy parts from other suppliers and slot them into your machine!)

If you buy something like a HP BladeCenter you can slot more CPUs, RAM, 
HDs, etc. into and out of it without even powering it off. But you can 


So, in summary, the technology exists, it's just wickedly expensive 
right now. Because the only people who "need it" are the 
high-availability guys who want to hot-swap mission-critical components 
in some big datacenter somewhere. I guess if the industry decides that 
normal people might "want" this kind of thing they *might* get their act 
together... but don't hold your breath.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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