“Bleeding edge” is the label for people (“early adopters”) who buy new technologies so early that they have to deal with all the bugs and problems that the technologies’ creators failed to solve in their rush to market.
I have always tried to avoid the bleeding edge, but I’m also interested enough in new technologies that I itch to toy with them. Usually, I grab semi-new technologies a generation or two after their introduction, once there’s been a little time to iron out the glitches and bring the prices down. (On the same theory, I will never buy a computer with the fastest processor — you can always save money buying one two or three notches slower than the fastest around, and you’ll never notice the difference.) I think this puts me at the trailing edge of the bleeding edge — the scabby edge, perhaps.
So it is that, a year or two after the 802.11b/WiFi revolution took all geekdom by storm, I have finally joined the bandwagon — with a little help from a book I’m happy to recommend, Adam Engst and Glenn Fleishman’s “Wireless Networking Starter Kit.” (Engst’s “Internet Starter Kit” was the book I used to put my Macintosh on the Net back in 1994, so this all felt right.)
What has amazed me, as I added wireless to my existing home network with its DSL connection, is how absurdly cheap the hardware is. I got a perfectly good Netgear wireless router box for $70 with a $20 rebate (and I see that in the two weeks since I bought it its price has gone down another $10); the PC card for my laptop was even cheaper — $80 but with a $50 rebate. OK, I know all this 802.11b gear is being dumped because a new generation of faster, backwards-compatible 802.11g wireless equipment is coming on the market and the manufacturers are unloading the less desirable old stock. I don’t know how any of these companies are making money, but in the meantime, there are tons of amazing bargains out there. The wireless equipment doesn’t cost much more than the ethernet cabling and hub you’d use to build a wired equivalent.
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