Slashback: HETE, HP, Regression

Slashback with more on cheap satellites, the relative speeds of threads under Linux and two strains of Windows, a skeptical response to the idea that crowds of people are retreating to dial-up access, and some tantalizing hints at products killed along with the HP calculator division. Lies, Damn Lies, Statistics, Benchmarks, Etc. Writing with a followup to the Slashdot post titled, "Who Has Faster Pipes? Linux, Win2000, WinXP Compared" Splinton had this to say: "In this article, Ed Bradford compares semaphores, mutexes and window's critical sections. Pthreads look good, but Win2Ks critical sections are twice as fast again!"

The computing equivalent of Area 51? A short while back HP closed its calculator division. Many have thought HP's calculator department was unprofitable. This was not the case. Many have thought they had no innovation. This was not the case. Turns out that management had 4% workforce to kill and they were part of the cut.

This article explains more. It turns out they had designed several Linux based PDA's ready to produce that were killed by management. Sounds interesting? Go check it out.

The biggest expense was the 12 gross of Estes D engines ... Satellite Designer writes: "The topic of low cost satellites having been mooted here recently, I though I'd alert readers to another such project. The HETE-2 satellite recently located a cosmic gamma-ray burst precisely enough that (with a lot of help from friends) an afterglow was detected, identifying its source. HETE-2 cost $26 million, only 1/3 of what a 'small' scientific satellite normally costs.

A lot of commercial 'off the shelf' technology went into HETE. Nothing from Radio Shack, but there are quite a few parts from Digi-Key onboard. You can't save money by using cheap parts (but you *can* save money by using easily obtainable parts), and you can't achieve reliability by using expensive parts (but you *can* help reliability by using the parts best suited for your application). The radical thing about HETE's parts selection was that it considered parts in the application context (as one would do in a normal engineering process), rather than restricting selection to a QPL assembled to meet irrelevant requirements.

The real trick to keeping costs down is to do the job with as small a team as possible in the minimum time possible. Rather than employing a large team of specialists, HETE's scientific investigators did much of the engineering and technical work. A small, carefully selected engineering team filled in the knowledge gaps."

Quitting isn't easy, and why bother? dmarsh writes: "This new article from C|Net seems to be a total contradiction to last week's "Dump Broadband, Dig Out Your Modem!" thread's article. I guess the important difference being that this one is backed up by an actual survey by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association."

Goes to show, in a large group of people you can probably find at least some who fit nearly any premise. As always, question the source ;)

Comments

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Missing link for Ed Bradford's article

[Sapien__]

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/librar y/l-rt5/?dwzone=linux

Empty <a> blocks aren't terribly useful...

Broadband defections.

[GISboy]

I have to admit, I've considered getting away from cable.

Reason: downloads could hit 400+K/s uploads could hit 200K/s (not bits, bytes).
After a year, down ~= 200+K/s upload capped at 128K/s. Ok, fine and dandy.
Insult to injury came when dowload rate varied (no biggie) but a second cap at 128kbits.
When questioning the provider and calling the corporate office I got "Oh, we meant 128kbits not Kbytes".

Uh, huh.

The sad part is no one noticed the drop off in cable revenues at, or shortly after 2 things:
Killing off the *.divx groups and 'capping people off at the knees' as far as uploads.

By capping off uploads and killing off the divx groups @home completely negated the purpose of broadband

Include the caving into the MPAA w/o so much as a defense of its own customers much less adhering to "innocent until proven guilty" therom.

If DSL could provide a 128Kbyte up/down rate and eliminate the install hassles and provide the service for 20 to 25 bucks a month...I'd jump on that in a heartbeat.
If the had a you want faster, you pay more scheme (which @home does not do...WTF?) I'd use it and I'd *recommend* other cable users do it as well.

I can not tell you how many ppl I've recommended cable to because I lost count.
Now I tell them DSL first, cable second if they don't mind "getting less" for the same amount of money.

"once bitten, twice shy"

Ok, in my case it was a nip first then a bite.

Now I am shying away from recommending cable as a first step. Second step getting away especially if the 'veeceedee' groups start disappearing.

Then a lot of us will have absolutely *NO* reasons for sticking with cable.

critical sections are not equivalent

[paulbd]

the article was about IPC (inter process communication). win critical sections do not provide inter-process facilities. in fact, they don't necessary even work efficiently on SMP systems either. 'nuff said?