Slashback: HETE, HP, Regression
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 $26 million, only 1/3 of what a 'small' scientific satellite normally costs.A lot of commercial 'off the shelf' technology went into HETE. Nothing from Radio Shack, but there are quite a few parts from Digi-Key onboard. You can't save money by using cheap parts (but you *can* save money by using easily obtainable parts), and you can't achieve reliability by using expensive parts (but you *can* help reliability by using the parts best suited for your application). The radical thing about HETE's parts selection was that it considered parts in the application context (as one would do in a normal engineering process), rather than restricting selection to a QPL assembled to meet irrelevant requirements.
The real trick to keeping costs down is to do the job with as small a team as possible in the minimum time possible. Rather than employing a large team of specialists, HETE's scientific investigators did much of the engineering and technical work. A small, carefully selected engineering team filled in the knowledge gaps."
Quitting isn't easy, and why bother? dmarsh writes: "This new article from C|Net seems to be a total contradiction to last week's "Dump Broadband, Dig Out Your Modem!" thread's article. I guess the important difference being that this one is backed up by an actual survey by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association."
Goes to show, in a large group of people you can probably find at least some who fit nearly any premise. As always, question the source ;)
but only because I'm moving and the &^%$# phone company isn't offering DSL there yet.
But if people don't need DSL, then dropping back makes sense. After all, it IS money!
I guess the important difference being that this one is backed up by an actual survey by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association
Certainly sounds impartial.
Takahashi Rumiko made beats! DON, taku, DON, taku. . .
.. because I had to. My line provider went bankrupt. How often has that happened lately?
I wonder whether (1) this many people signed up for the service during the period, or (2) this many people finally received their hardware/installation. Everybody knows that the pool of broadband installers is vastly outnumbered by the pool of broadband salespeople. No flamebait here, just wondering if the mass sign-up occurred in 2Q or 3Q...
Also, consider the source of the statistics ("Our research shows that our product is 100% safe...")
My broadband provider starting sticking extra fees into my bill earlier this year. It's only $6/month, but it's still lame as hell. I'm revolting by dusting off my ol' 56K USR at home & taking advantage of that T-1 at work. BellSouth can rip off someone else.
wow, I hadn't heard about HP closing off its calculators division, it's such a shame, as a (still) proud owner of an HP 48sx I'm really saddened by this turn of event.
Maybe some slashdotters don't know it, but before the current palm-craze, HP's calculators were *the* portable thing to program for (at least in my university, I remember being amazed that somebody got pacman working on the HP).
To think that a whole division like that, with great products and a great vision was axed just to get the stock price a few bucks up in the short term seems really backwards, but I guess that's what's happening far too often in this period of stock-price-driven management.
:(
Question the source? I'm shure my telephone/cable company has been hard at work installing that transponder in the box 25' from my house since January. Every month I call...."Yes sir it should be any time now....."
Vote early. Vote often. Vote CowboyNeal.
The other difference between the two articles is that the latter one is talking about Cable in particular, rather than "broadband" (i.e. both Cable and DSL).
I used to have DSL. When I moved, I tried a Cable Modem instead. I found the quality of my connection was better, and the service technicians were far more knowledgeable. Of course, that reflects more on the individual companies (Verizon for DSL vs. Charter for Cable) than it does on DSL vs. Cable, but considering the number of people I know who gave up on DSL because of technical problems, I wouldn't be surprised if DSL is losing business to Cable.
Here in Pasadena, Cable is cheaper and they can come install it within a day or two of your order. When I got DSL, I had to wait six weeks for the first visit, and it took them quite a few tries to get it working.
this [survey] is backed up by an actual survey by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association.
;)
-Slashback
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
-Timothy
Well, OK, let's question the source. the National Cable & Telecommmunications Assosciation is "is the principal trade association of the cable television industry in the United States". So basically, they're the RIAA of the cable industry. And they just published a survey that says that consumers are subscribing to broadband in mass quantitites.
Ok, I question the source. This is like Shell Oil publishing a study that concludes that burning gasoline provides valuable fertilizer for wetlands. Why give PR machines free press?
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
Many have thought HP's calculator department was unprofitable. This was not the case.
If their calculator division was making money, then why on earth was it chosen to be closed down? They should have chosen something that was loosing them money. If there were no departments loosing money, then they shouldn't have had to cut *any* departments.
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
More information about the very new Mandrake Gaming Edition with The Sims seems to be available here and pre-orders seem to be opened at MandrakeStore. Just wanted to let you know because I find this stuff extremely _cool_ :-)
I heard that people aren't flocking like sheep to buy Windows XP, which is good news if it is true.
It might be good news, but not for alternative OSs. It simply means that M$ has saturated the market with their previous versions of Windows, and there aren't any compelling reasons to change. Anybody who was going switch from Win98, just switched to Win2K or ME, and isn't about to run out and buy XP. That said, they ain't buying Linux either.
Takahashi Rumiko made beats! DON, taku, DON, taku. . .
You saw Windows XP at Fry's? I'm assuming you mean you saw a demo computer running XP, and not that you merely saw the box sitting on a shelf. By your logic, I could say "I saw Linux at my friend's house and was not impressed. It was nothing but text and stuff."
I shouldn't have to tell you that the interface isn't the OS. If everyone judged Linux by its interface and nothing else (which, unfortunately, is often the case), people would have an absurdly skewed view of Linux. Think about how many different window managers and themes there are for Linux. Just because one of them looks like shit doesn't mean the underlying OS kernel sucks.
The same holds true for Windows. Sure, the interface may be full of goofy alpha blending and unnecessary menu fade-ins and mouse pointer shadows and other things, but when you replace explorer.exe with a third-party shell (or merely disable the extra eye candy via the Control Panel), all that stuff goes away and you're left with what is without a doubt the most stable version of Windows I've ever seen.
I'm not saying any of those technologies are in XP, I don't know, I have it (via MSDN) but have no intention of installing it on any machines, as you say, there simply isn't any real incentive.
The Linux interfaces show the traditional SVR5 semaphores to be the slowest performers while the pthread mutexes are the fastest.
well duh. Just look at the section of the man pages -- semop is in section 2 (system calls) and pthreads are in section 3 (library calls). As a general rule of thumb, system calls will be slower than library calls (a context switch is involved).
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In principle, I think it makese sense: bandwidth as a public resource, an essential service.
My reservation is that, if it's government run, a few whiny idiots in the community can turn around and slap filters on it, and start using it to regulate what THEY don't like.
So.. as long as the charter that runs it is about being purely available... it's great.
2. "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
q='echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"';s=\';b=\\;echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"
Yeah, BUYING. BUYING RedHat. BUYING Mandrake, etc. I would imagine that people switching from Windows are more likely to buy a boxed, supported distro.
Takahashi Rumiko made beats! DON, taku, DON, taku. . .
Empty <a> blocks aren't terribly useful...
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.
If it is not on fire, it is a software problem.
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?
QWest is just starting up DSL in my area so I'll be dumping my overpriced ISDN connection as soon as my DSL line is up and running. That should cancel out your DSL retreat.
>operating environments run
Last time I looked, Solaris cost absolutely nothing. You can download ISO images of the latest release from Sun, burn them yourself, and run it without any license fees, etc, at all on any Sun box with less than eight CPUs, no matter what you're using the machine for (business or personal). If you want a development environment, you can get the Forte compiler suite and a 30-day license (which can be renewed indefinitely) as a free download, or you can get all the GNU goodies at Sunfreeware. When it comes to applications, the StarOffice suite is also a free download. All you have to pay for is the machine itself, electricity to run it, and an Internet connection for the downloads.
Of course critical sections are fast - that's what they were designed to be. The tradeoff is that they can't be used for IPC, so the comparision in the article is misleading .
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http://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml
"I saw XP benchmarks at Tom's Hardware and was not impressed. Damned if I know why, but it gets 25-50% lower 3D framerates at the same games with the same (ATI & NVidia) hardware."
Granted, if it's really as stable as Microsoft promises this time (and about half of the Windows 2000 users I know didn't have any stability problems), then that may be worth it. I get similarly curtailed framerates in Linux by making the same tradeoff, and I think it's worth it... but I'd like to know how many game players who went out to buy XP were making a conscious decision for stability over speed.
It all depends... In my experience (DSL at parent's home, DSL at work, Cable at 3 apartments), DSL lines have generally had much better uptime and more consistent bandwidth. This is not to say that they have never gone down.. they all have. Also, I've had the fastest download speeds on Cable.
My experience is the general case, but other people like yourself have had different results. I think it all comes down to the number of subscribers in your area, and the competency of your provider.
Here in California, Cingular Wireless seems to have the worst service of any cell phone provider. However, I consider GSM (the type of network they use) to be the best network technologically. So why do they have all these problems? It all happened when they made the name-switch from PacBell to Cingular, and I believe the major problem is they have reached capacity. Bad planning? Bad management?
It's a mixed bag wherever you go.
Actually, critical sections are fast only if there is low contention for them. As soon as threads start contending for them, performance goes out the window. They also don't scale well with the number of threads, and they exhibit horrible performance degradations if the priority of the contending threads is not at a maximum. There is a great summary of the issues at http://world.std.com/~jmhart/csmutx.htm.
I've had Roadrunner access via Time Warner cable for over two years now, and despite various problems, un less they triple the rates I'll never unsubscribe. And so far as I know, the net number of broadband users is still going up on an exponential curve. But I can understand the reasons for the earlier statistics...
The exact determination is that "more people than ever are leaving broadband". Not that the ranks are shrinking, but that a greater number of people are terminating accounts. Obviously, as you increase your customer base, if the same percentage of people unhook every month due to dissatisfaction or because they can't afford it any more, then of course the gross number will increase.
Hmm, hope someone updates, that sounded interesting.
The reason why pthreads 'look pretty good' speed-wise is because the pthread library provides user level threads as opposed to a kernel level threads. User level threads have their own scheduler and are much quicker to swap out--less data to save than during a kernel thread context switch. Meanwhile, pthread semaphores (and condition variables) should also be faster depending on the user-to-kernel thread mapping scheme (windows 2k maps each user thread to a kernel thread, for example; I think linux uses a many-to-many mapping). This'll reflect in how fast threads go through their critical sections because they may have to wait shorter/longer to get access to them.
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Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
But the biggest problem with XP is its rampant commercialism. Windows, other Microsoft applications, and third party applications constantly bug you for personal information, registration information, etc. And who knows what information it's sending out behind my back. And I already spent about $100 on third party utilities.
Altogether, XP is something I could do without: it runs on applications I want to run, and the software I need to run on it is not particularly high quality. The only reason I have it is because Microsoft has managed to monopolize the market so much that there are applications you simply have to use in business and that only run on Windows. Yuck.
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Its a shame.
I don't think I would ever have passed all the number crunching civil engineering classes and the dreaded EIT (engineer licencing test) without my trusty 32s.
I lothe regular calculators now...
When It got stolen with my bookbag (uggg) I got the 42s. even better! 2 lines of stack on the screen!!! I still use it. Durable too.
Maybe its not as big a deal now that calculators can enter equations with parens..
I was thinking of wipping up a desktop calculator that did rpm.... Maybe its time..
Then you ditch the connection. Just because they raise the price isn't a good reason to dump it.
Hell, my employer hasn't hired anyone or let anyone go from my group in the last year so just to make up for raises and what not our product will cost at least 7% more. If our customers thought like you, we'd be screwed (but so would our competitors).
The register has a piece about Bill Gates "fibbing" about sales, but even the uber skeptical Register can't deny that it is selling very brisquely. The story is here. [theregister.co.uk]
You should work on your reading comprehension friend. What that article is implying, and not surprisingly so, is the MS is dropping FUD about XP sales... that they are changing there tune for no good reason when they MUST assuredly know exactly how many theyve sold, through each channel and EXACTLY what the numbers are.... the quotes from M$ have been contradictory and vague... more likely a sign that XP isnt doing as well as the marketroids would like the public to believe.
In short, your comment is a perfect non-sequitur.
Technically, "pthreads" ("POSIX threads") is just an API which can be provided by any thread library. And yes, technically, you can get a user-level threads package that implements pthreads.
But I think you were referring to Linuxthreads, the pthreads implementation used by GNU libc on Linux. Linuxthreads is kernel-level, not user-level.
Semaphores and mutexes may be implementation mostly in user space (I don't know for sure) but thread creation/destruction/scheduling is definitely based on real kernel threads.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
I've had the misfortune to have done some work on Windows NT, and the question that I could not answer from skimming the article was, "Were the installs of Windows uniprocessor or multiprocessor?"
In Windows, the critical section code will become a single bit test and set instruction on an uniprocessor system (which, being a single machine instruction, is very fast), but a much more complicated operation on a mulitprocessor build.
Under Linux, you don't have to explicitly compile your program to support multiprocessor, so I would guess that Linux is using a more SMP friendly implementation of a mutex than a uniprocessor build of Windows.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Where do you get $2450 to $3950? You must be looking at Sun's RAM prices - which are outrageous. 512meg modules for the Blade 1000 are $58.49 right now from Crucial; which means that you can get 2gig of RAM for the machine for a little over $200. For disks, you can use normal IDE drives, or add a commonly-available PCI SCSI card (Symbios 8751SP) for around $50, and then use SCSI devices.
I've got a SunBlade 1000 (their UltraSPARC-III based "big daddy" workstation) on my desk here at home, and have a Blade 100 (with Expert3D-Lite, an additional $1K graphics option) at work, and for day-to-day use (windowmaker, Mozilla, SSH, etc) they're "just about" the same, despite the 400mhz CPU speed difference and 256k of L2 cache versus 8MB, for the tasks I do all the time.
Sun has been giving Solaris away for free for a little over two years now, AFAIK.
OTOH, if you just want 32-bit Unix performance, you're going to be rather envious of your cubemate who bought a Dell OptiPlex GX 150 P3/1.13 512M 80G for the same price, and plopped Debian on it....
Signed, :-/
An Ultra 10 owner who switched from Solaris 8 to Debian/SPARC
Some of their problems have been related to the fact that their team is very small. So, it is possible to make things too cheap.
HETE's operations team is indeed too small. HETE-2 was ready for launch in January, 2000 (it was integrated with the rocket!), but after the Mars lander failure NASA got cold feet and ordered it shipped back to MIT for additional testing. HETE-2's operations were also funded below the HETE project's minimum estimate of operations costs. Since people without long term support need to find new jobs, this combination meant that several people left for new employment either before launch (having already lined up new jobs before the delay) or shortly afterward. While a reduction in the team's size post launch was intended, what happened was too drastic. This definitely made it harder.
It would have been fine if they had no time constraints, but it seems that spending most of the first year essentially in a kind of engineering mode is a bad thing.
Part of the trouble is that HETE needed to be well calibrated before it could generate useful results. A mission like Chandra could do a lot of interesting stuff (especially pretty pictures) before its calibration was finished. Astrometric calibration takes time, however.
In any case, this extra time has not added much to the overall mission cost.
Is there anyway that the community (esp. NASA) could have helped bring things on line sooner?
A launch in January 2000, when HETE was ready, would have helped. Adequate funding of the operations phase would have helped.
Patience also would have helped, I think. The HETE team, NASA, and the community were all impatient for results. This meant that there was an emphasis on working through the inevitable operational problems rather than taking the time to fix them. A team that is too small cannot do both in parallel. Once some of the more time consuming problems had been fixed, positive feedback set in: operations became less labor intensive which meant more time was available to fix problems.
The article author also pulls no punches on his opinions of these fine folks.
I think I have some email to send, my self.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Subscribe to external news sources - probably put you down $10/mo. Sure, that's ANOTHER $10 a month out of your pocket. But if you're feeling squirley, consider what that costs the provider.
The traffic used to have a set cost as defined by upkeep of the internal network - call it "internal cost". Now the same traffic has that internal cost as well as the cost associated with increased traffic from the upstream provider. Its possible that the cost of this external traffic is less than the cost of providing better usenet service. Its also very possible this same traffic now has considerably higher cost.
In any case - you get better usenet service.
In a truly competitive market, other companies would come in to fill the gap left by the departing ones. The problem is, the companies that currently dominate broadband come from industries that are used to having government imposed monopoly status: cable and telephone. The monopoly status is starting to go away in the cable industry, but is persisting for telephone, especially in regards to the "final mile."
Yeah, and in the best of all possible worlds...Monopoly status is not imposed by the government in the sense that the government forbids competition; by and large what they do is amelioration of the effects of an existing monopoly (price controls, etc.) Government does not impose monopoly status so much as it acknowledges an existing reality. You seem to forget that it was government "interference" that opened telephone lines up to DSL competitors in the first place, but that's inconvenient, so we'll just forget that, right? Of course, the RBOCs' incentive for doing so was access to long-distance markets they couldn't get into after the AT&T breakup. One of the many woes that introduced to the average consumer was no longer having to hide extra telephones when the repairman came by. Don't forget choosing your long distance carrier.
Cable was deregged under George I. Guess what? Prices went up. Natural gas prices in GA went up when they deregged last year. CA's electricity woes are partially due to a badly-planned dereg, but the consumers still had to take it up the ass. While competition is always good for the competitors (i.e., drive wholesale up by bidding because we're different companies and therefore not a monopoly,) it's not always good for consumers. Rather than parrot armchair libertarianism, maybe you should look at deregulation on a case-by-case basis and support it where it lowers costs to consumers and oppose it where it doesn't. Unless you have a financial stake in a company assraping consumers in the name of the "free market" you really shouldn't have a dog in this fight. If you do have a financial stake in such a company, you should say so up front so there's no confusion. If your interest is strictly ideological I can't see any explanation other than that you favor the concentration of wealth in the hands of a very few people even when that doesn't include you because you somehow find these people more accountable than politicians who can be voted out or recalled.
The first wave of DSL providers had tremendous problems getting the incumbent carriers (ILECs) to give them support when there were line problems. The ILECs didn't want them to succeed because they wanted to offer their own DSL but hadn't managed to get their act together yet. They had no incentive to provide good service and every incentive to provide bad service. Result: bad service
Who's going to provide those incentives to good service? The Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, or the government? Remember it took legislation just to get the cable companies to answer the phone.
So what you're really talking about is a government "solution" to a problem that was created by government in the first place. No thanks.
In a truly free market you could be bought and ground up for pet food. Never forget that.
--
Freeper Logic
I very much agree with this. Part of my definition of an operating system is that it is stable. Windows 98 is not stable. Therefore, it cannot be truly called an operating system.
I should not have to pay for junk, especially when it is deliberate junk. If Win XP is stable, then it should be a free upgrade to all those who paid for Windows 95 and 98 and ME, and suffered enormously from the shortcomings that were deliberately left there to try to get us to pay more.
Microsoft is, partly, the enemy of its customers.
Bush's education improvements were
Fire Carleton Fiorino.
Bush's education improvements were
Does anyone else make high quality calculators? Or are there any good math programs for PDAs?
The real problem is entropy.
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What you've discovered, even if you don't seem to be aware of it, is that delivering high speed connections isn't as simple as selling, say, lettuce. There is no skill in selling, growing, or shipping lettuce. You simply do it. Companies work very hard at doing it as inexpensively as possilbe, which makes them large profits. This same mentality has been applied to the cable television industry for years. Get X number of channels into a viewers home (disregard if they're good or not) and charge enough to make a profit.
Now hop over to cable broadband industry. It takes (gasp) skill to implement a WAN/MAN. The technology isn't so simple that you can just pick random parts off a shelf and expect everything to work brilliantly. We should hope that either companies like yours begin to dominate and spread their philosophy of good engineering or that technology improves to the point that setting up a WAN is as simple as setting up a LAN for a game of Quake.
Many of them are infix. Just some of thier high-end calcs are RPN.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Funny thing is the difference I see in download speeds between the Linux and Windows computers I have on my network. I run everything through a Linux NAT box. Nothing out of the ordinary -- a P200 with a pair of plain old 10/100 PCI NIC's, but I can regularly pull 250K bytes/sec through it, if I go to somewhere like www.kernel.org that has screaming fast servers.
However, I run the same download on any one of the Windows computers behind the firewall, all of which have faster processors than my main Linux box, and the best they can squeak out is something like 50K bytes/s. Same site, same file, same firewall, similar NIC's, and I get about 1/10 the effective download speed.
Now there's an great testimonial for how bloody fast Win98 is... :-/
Your Servant, B. Baggins
What I'm wondering is how the synchronization primitives SCALE with number of threads. Really, who uses synchronization for *single-threaded* applications? I'd like to see graphs over thread count and see how operating systems handle higher contention over shared resources. In this test, no blocking was going on whatsoever, because it was just one thread locking and unlocking.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Uptime is a measure of how long a system has been running without a reboot. Uptime generally requires stability, assuming the machine in question is actually doing something. But I could boot up a fresh, clean install of Windows 95 and (after patching the 49.7 day registry uptime counter bug) let it sit in a corner doing nothing, and the damn thing would probably keep running till the next Ice Age.
Stability, on the other hand, is a measure of many things. Mostly it is a measure of how well an operating system responds to instability in software. Linux is incredibly good at this; when a program on Linux crashes or has a problem, the OS steps over it and keeps right on going. Windows has been notoriously bad at this, until Windows 2000 and XP.
Now, if you re-read my message, you'll notice that nowhere did I claim that I thought Windows XP was more stable than Linux. I merely claimed that it was more stable than previous versions of Windows. Furthermore, since Windows XP, as you said, has been out for about a month now, it would be impossible (and incredibly stupid) to rate its stability by comparing the uptime of a Windows system with that of a Linux system.
To illustrate my point (that uptime does not always equal stability), back when uptimes.net was running full force, I achieved an uptime of about 155 days from a beta version of Windows 2000 running on a Pentium 166 with 64 megs of RAM, serving up lots of dynamic webpages at wonko.com. In the end, I had to turn the machine off because I moved.
Now, the only reason I achieved that incredible uptime with a beta OS running on inferior hardware was that it wasn't doing a whole lot. It was just running IIS and MSSQL Server, and that was about it. Now, if I had been serving Slashdot off that box, it probably wouldn't have lasted a week. Thus, we see that uptime != stability.
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