"No, because the point here is to *make money.* You don't ship it to the customer unless he pays for it. And he might decide he wants to pay for it later, so you need to still have it in case he does."
Yes, exactly. That's the way they do it. At least the ones I know.
"Any pro photographer will tell you that 95% of what you shoot is crap."
That depends ENTIRELY on the kind of photography. For example, if it's portraiture like yearbook photos, or wedding photos, or many other such things, the customer decides what's good and what they want to keep, and they typically have the option of coming back and buying more prints later.
In cases like that, you can't prune. You have to keep it all.
Not only does the author of TFA make a false dichotomy ("Everyone falls somewhere on this line..."), he contradicts himself later when he weakly tries to address it by talking about how there are fiscal conservatives who are socially liberal. (Hint: you can't have that and "everyone" falling on a line at the same time. His entire argument just fell apart.)
I don't agree with the political definitions he uses, and I don't agree with his programming definitions either.
All in all, in my opinion he made a fool of himself.
"3 computers and a supervisor? That's already 4 components."
I meant it in an abstract sense, not physically. If you actually built a "supervisor board" it would indeed be a single point of failure. But you can't get around that entirely, unless you have all 4 machines monitoring each other, and "voting" on the results, which would cripple your computing power.
Unless you built special, additional circuitry into each one to do that, of course, in which case you have 4 different "supervisor boards". But you still have them. So the basic concept is no different. But you have just added greatly to your cost, and I assert that you would not have enough additional security to warrant 4 machines rather than just 3.
"If you have t failures among 3t or fewer total nodes, then the failures can happen in a way that cause the functional units to receive so inconsistent information, that they are unable to do anything meaningful."
I think that's a rather large assumption. What do you mean by "information" and "failure"?
It depends on the design. What you do in a case like THIS is simply compare the outputs (relatively simple circuitry), and if one disagrees with the others it is simply shut down until the reason can be determined. It's a replaceable redundant system, not a system in which "failed" nodes continue to communicate with one another. And again: ALL you need to do in this situation is compare the outputs. Nothing else matters.
"I wonder why they didn't think about that. A nice thick, heavy metal box. Easy! Perhaps you should go and work for NASA?"
I'm not stupid. Maybe I could have worded it better, but you missed my point. I wasn't talking about a box primarily for radiaton shielding. My point was that a little more RAM or a little more flash -- even radiation-hardened -- would take only a very tiny bit of additional room inside the box, and weigh hardly anything.
"So, given the constraints, it's a pretty great CPU to have on board."
And I didn't say anything at all about the CPU. If anything, I gave it a sort of left-handed compliment about the MIPS rating.
I am aware of this also. I mentioned that a lot had changed since 1996... when the last two rovers were designed. Slice it however you like, there is still an 8-10 year difference.
"Putting everything in a metal box only helps so much, you still need specifically designed electronics which can handle the odd bit of radiation without dying..."
I'm aware of that. My point was that even radiation-hardened, a little more RAM and a little more flash wouldn't take up very much room inside the box or weigh hardly anything. Therefore: that probably wasn't the reason they didn't include it. They felt they didn't need it.
"Yeah. When talking about programming languages. His choice of words is perfectly fine."
It depends on your perspective I guess. Conceptually, a "higher level" or "meta" process is considered to be "above" those that it supervises. On a hardware level, though, I think they do it the other way around ("Ring 0" on Intel, for example.) But regardless, from an abstract point of view, the process is still "above" the others.
"Given it is radiation hardened specs, those are fabulous!"
Not really. That might have been true 10 years ago.
Hey... they had to radiation-harden this thing against ITSELF.
All I'm saying is: you can bet the hardware is in a well-shielded heavy metal box, and today all it takes is about 1/4 of a cubic inch to squeeze in another GB of RAM or flash.
So I suspect that they are using a system that is a bit more "distributed" (conceptually) than your everyday PC.
"If you had a 3 out of 4 setup with the four computers running identical software, it only takes one software bug to bring down the system."
Not at all. You have a separate "supervisor" board that moderates among the computers. In a case like that, you only need 3 for Damned Good Redundancy, not 4.
But I expect that NASA has good reason to have faith in the reliability of their dual machine.
In all honesty, except for the MIPS figure, that seems like pretty lame hardware for something of this importance.
But I'll bet that it's misleading: the majority of the functions probably aren't performed directly in the CPU and main memory, but by sub-modules running off of PLAs.
It's extremely unlikely they will do anything even remotely resembling a "reboot". Instead they will carefully replace one process at a time, with no restarting.
It's more like: the 4X4 is still on the ground, and there are no drills or propellers. It's just that you have to do it E-X-T-R-E-M-E-L-Y S-L-O-W-L-Y, with long pauses between each step. And if you do fall off, despite all the care taken, you lose your house and your car.
"I do not think taking the risk of bricking the rover for a regular software upgrade is worth the danger of bricking the rover..."
I guess it all depends on on (A) what the perceived value of the upgrade is, versus (B) the perceived risk.
It's probably a safe bet that they learned from the Surveyor issue, and built in better tests and safeguards. I imagine -- although I don't really know -- that they have implemented something like the "rolling upgrades" that are common now, which allow processes to replaced on the fly one at a time, without reboot, and with a failsafe revert that runs at a higher level than any of those processes if anything goes wrong.
It isn't like Windows, in which just about every time you install or upgrade something you have to make all the changes then "reboot". They get done one at a time, and they are tested individually after they are made.
It sounds complicated but conceptually it's pretty simple: you have a top-layer monitor program program that accepts commands to replace lower-level processes. All it needs to be pretty "fail-safe" is to wait for a specified period of time for an "okay" signal from Ground Control. If it doesn't receive one in the specified time, it automatically reverts the process back to the old version. It's a little more involved than that, but that's the idea.
Lots of software does that now. A lot has improved since 1996.
That's nice. A nice cozy corner store, does maybe $2000 volume per day? I'm not being sarcastic, but since you gave no other information, how would I know?
"In either event, most people will tell you that, in mature markets, the profit margin is the only thing investors consider, which is best represented as a percentage, not an aggregate. Aggregates only matter for investments in private companies, and of the examples provided... none of them are private."
So, you basically re-worded what I already wrote. The profit margin for commodity retailers like groceries does not change much, so they AREN'T going to be "the darlings" of Wall Street, even if their aggregate is high. That's more-or-less what I stated.
The point is still that you tried to compare a low-margin commodity market to "most" companies, and "most" companies operate on a completely different basis. It's still apples and oranges.
"If you download.a movie or song that you didn't pay for, its called piracy! Look it up."
YOU look it up, in a LEGAL book, dimwit. It has had the SAME legal meaning for around 100 years, maybe more.
It's also DEFINED that way by Federal copyright law. I repeat: copyright infringement (which is what uploading or downloading is), is a CIVIL INFRACTION, not a crime.
PIRACY is the distribution of illegal copyrighted works FOR A PROFIT. Which is a VERY different thing and is a CRIME. It can even be a felony, depending on the severity of the case.
Since most people uploading and downloading have no profit motive, they are NOT "pirates", and they are not criminals. By the 100-year-old DEFINITION of the word in the legal books. That is, at least if you live in the U.S. Repeat, just in case it didn't sink in: In the United States, copyright piracy is a crime. Uploading and downloading for personal use are NOT.
I'm am done with this. If you aren't going to bother to find an authoritative reference and look it up yourself, I have nothing further to say.
"I can only assume you point this out to distract readers from the point;"
Why would you assume that? I'm not trolling, I'm simply saying that you are using inappropriate statistics to try to make YOUR point. (Which, by the way, I have pointed out to you before.)
If you don't think large grocery franchises make good money, you are dreaming. Wal-mart (though admittedly they aren't mainly grocery), Fred Meyer, Safeway, Costco, Sam's, etc., etc., there's a large list.
They aren't "the darlings of Wall Street" in part because their business is relatively steady; there's not much to speculate on.
But in any case, I did use the word "large". I certainly did not try to claim that a mom-and-pop corner grocery is going to make thousands in profit in a day.
"... if population density was the reason for the poor speeds then large cities would have good connections while sparsely populated areas would not."
Yes. But CITIES are not "sparsely populate areas". RURAL areas are. That was MY point.
The so-called "last mile" difference between one city and the next is relatively miniscule compared to the difference between, say, a downtown and a farm 10 miles outside of town.
And that last mile is not necessarily cheaper in "densely populated" cities as opposed to those that are less dense. Sure, people are closer together but a lot of the costs, including property and access (which you need to run your cables, for example) is a lot more expensive per foot.
"I haven't seen any evidence that my ISP throttles File Sharing. I can download legit Torrent files very quickly, but try downloading a movie and it's almost impossible..."
Downloading a movie is filesharing. It is NOT "piracy"!!!
"Piracy" is a legal term, and it means copying and distributing copyrighted works for profit.
Close to zero percent of the people uploading and downloading files via P2P are "pirates"... that would defeat their whole purpose.
I'm not picking, this is an important point!!! Filesharing (uploading/downloading via P2P) is a civil infraction. Piracy is a crime. In some cases, a very serious crime.
"But she's clearly advocating for greed as a motivating factor, when viewed through any outside lens."
A big part of the Objectivist philosophy is to never take or accept something one has not earned via one's own efforts. So "greed" cannot possibly be involved, if you accept that the common use of the word implies exploitation of others (as in "corporate greed"). But I admit it is somewhat dependent on your definition. That's what I mean when I say it.
"Her villains were caricatures of attitudes..."
Yes, definitely. She exaggerated to get her point across. So? I disagree very strongly that it did not represent real actions by real people. Remember, her whole philosophy was built around things she saw while growing up in the Soviet Union. Power-grabbing under the guise of "helping" the worker.
"You claim none of the people who hate Rand have read her."
No, I didn't. In response to GP I claimed "the roving band of nitwits" had not read her.
"I've read her, liked her for a time, then realized she wasn't really that good."
Still irrelevant, because I wasn't commenting about that. My comments, were, specifically:
(A) The "roving band of nitwits" think when she wrote about "selfishness" she really meant "greed". My point being that Rand used a meaning for "selfish" that does not occur in the dictionary.
And (B) that she made at least one good point, no matter how bad her writing was.
"The average profit margin for most businesses in the US is around 5.5%. The average profit margin for a grocery store is about 0.8%."
Yes, but percent margin is an inappropriate measure to use in this situation.
One of the reasons for the small grocery margin (and how they can get away with it and stay in business), is that they do vastly higher volume than most other kinds of stores. So while their margin might be 0.8%, give or take (I have seen it reported as high as 2%), what really matters is that a store can still make $30,000 profit per day.
"That was part of their agreement to buy NBC Universal."
That's right. I knew it was an agreement with the FCC, but my memory was not complete. I was thinking that the FCC was threatening litigation. Instead, they wanted to prevent Comcast from discriminating based on where the content was coming from... as they are now doing with their game content.
Slashdot Mirror
"No, because the point here is to *make money.* You don't ship it to the customer unless he pays for it. And he might decide he wants to pay for it later, so you need to still have it in case he does."
Yes, exactly. That's the way they do it. At least the ones I know.
"Any pro photographer will tell you that 95% of what you shoot is crap."
That depends ENTIRELY on the kind of photography. For example, if it's portraiture like yearbook photos, or wedding photos, or many other such things, the customer decides what's good and what they want to keep, and they typically have the option of coming back and buying more prints later.
In cases like that, you can't prune. You have to keep it all.
Not only does the author of TFA make a false dichotomy ("Everyone falls somewhere on this line..."), he contradicts himself later when he weakly tries to address it by talking about how there are fiscal conservatives who are socially liberal. (Hint: you can't have that and "everyone" falling on a line at the same time. His entire argument just fell apart.)
I don't agree with the political definitions he uses, and I don't agree with his programming definitions either.
All in all, in my opinion he made a fool of himself.
"3 computers and a supervisor? That's already 4 components."
I meant it in an abstract sense, not physically. If you actually built a "supervisor board" it would indeed be a single point of failure. But you can't get around that entirely, unless you have all 4 machines monitoring each other, and "voting" on the results, which would cripple your computing power.
Unless you built special, additional circuitry into each one to do that, of course, in which case you have 4 different "supervisor boards". But you still have them. So the basic concept is no different. But you have just added greatly to your cost, and I assert that you would not have enough additional security to warrant 4 machines rather than just 3.
"If you have t failures among 3t or fewer total nodes, then the failures can happen in a way that cause the functional units to receive so inconsistent information, that they are unable to do anything meaningful."
I think that's a rather large assumption. What do you mean by "information" and "failure"?
It depends on the design. What you do in a case like THIS is simply compare the outputs (relatively simple circuitry), and if one disagrees with the others it is simply shut down until the reason can be determined. It's a replaceable redundant system, not a system in which "failed" nodes continue to communicate with one another. And again: ALL you need to do in this situation is compare the outputs. Nothing else matters.
"I wonder why they didn't think about that. A nice thick, heavy metal box. Easy! Perhaps you should go and work for NASA?"
I'm not stupid. Maybe I could have worded it better, but you missed my point. I wasn't talking about a box primarily for radiaton shielding. My point was that a little more RAM or a little more flash -- even radiation-hardened -- would take only a very tiny bit of additional room inside the box, and weigh hardly anything.
"So, given the constraints, it's a pretty great CPU to have on board."
And I didn't say anything at all about the CPU. If anything, I gave it a sort of left-handed compliment about the MIPS rating.
"... One does not simply fly to Mars."
I am aware of this also. I mentioned that a lot had changed since 1996... when the last two rovers were designed. Slice it however you like, there is still an 8-10 year difference.
"Putting everything in a metal box only helps so much, you still need specifically designed electronics which can handle the odd bit of radiation without dying..."
I'm aware of that. My point was that even radiation-hardened, a little more RAM and a little more flash wouldn't take up very much room inside the box or weigh hardly anything. Therefore: that probably wasn't the reason they didn't include it. They felt they didn't need it.
"Yeah. When talking about programming languages. His choice of words is perfectly fine."
It depends on your perspective I guess. Conceptually, a "higher level" or "meta" process is considered to be "above" those that it supervises. On a hardware level, though, I think they do it the other way around ("Ring 0" on Intel, for example.) But regardless, from an abstract point of view, the process is still "above" the others.
"Given it is radiation hardened specs, those are fabulous!"
Not really. That might have been true 10 years ago.
Hey... they had to radiation-harden this thing against ITSELF.
All I'm saying is: you can bet the hardware is in a well-shielded heavy metal box, and today all it takes is about 1/4 of a cubic inch to squeeze in another GB of RAM or flash.
So I suspect that they are using a system that is a bit more "distributed" (conceptually) than your everyday PC.
Whitespace and the Red Planet would probably not get along.
"If you had a 3 out of 4 setup with the four computers running identical software, it only takes one software bug to bring down the system."
Not at all. You have a separate "supervisor" board that moderates among the computers. In a case like that, you only need 3 for Damned Good Redundancy, not 4.
But I expect that NASA has good reason to have faith in the reliability of their dual machine.
In all honesty, except for the MIPS figure, that seems like pretty lame hardware for something of this importance.
But I'll bet that it's misleading: the majority of the functions probably aren't performed directly in the CPU and main memory, but by sub-modules running off of PLAs.
It's extremely unlikely they will do anything even remotely resembling a "reboot". Instead they will carefully replace one process at a time, with no restarting.
It isn't anything like that at all.
It's more like: the 4X4 is still on the ground, and there are no drills or propellers. It's just that you have to do it E-X-T-R-E-M-E-L-Y S-L-O-W-L-Y, with long pauses between each step. And if you do fall off, despite all the care taken, you lose your house and your car.
Haha, I wrote pretty much the same thing, at about the same time. See below.
"I do not think taking the risk of bricking the rover for a regular software upgrade is worth the danger of bricking the rover..."
I guess it all depends on on (A) what the perceived value of the upgrade is, versus (B) the perceived risk.
It's probably a safe bet that they learned from the Surveyor issue, and built in better tests and safeguards. I imagine -- although I don't really know -- that they have implemented something like the "rolling upgrades" that are common now, which allow processes to replaced on the fly one at a time, without reboot, and with a failsafe revert that runs at a higher level than any of those processes if anything goes wrong.
It isn't like Windows, in which just about every time you install or upgrade something you have to make all the changes then "reboot". They get done one at a time, and they are tested individually after they are made.
It sounds complicated but conceptually it's pretty simple: you have a top-layer monitor program program that accepts commands to replace lower-level processes. All it needs to be pretty "fail-safe" is to wait for a specified period of time for an "okay" signal from Ground Control. If it doesn't receive one in the specified time, it automatically reverts the process back to the old version. It's a little more involved than that, but that's the idea.
Lots of software does that now. A lot has improved since 1996.
"works as a general manager for a grocery store"
That's nice. A nice cozy corner store, does maybe $2000 volume per day? I'm not being sarcastic, but since you gave no other information, how would I know?
"In either event, most people will tell you that, in mature markets, the profit margin is the only thing investors consider, which is best represented as a percentage, not an aggregate. Aggregates only matter for investments in private companies, and of the examples provided... none of them are private."
So, you basically re-worded what I already wrote. The profit margin for commodity retailers like groceries does not change much, so they AREN'T going to be "the darlings" of Wall Street, even if their aggregate is high. That's more-or-less what I stated.
The point is still that you tried to compare a low-margin commodity market to "most" companies, and "most" companies operate on a completely different basis. It's still apples and oranges.
"If you download.a movie or song that you didn't pay for, its called piracy! Look it up."
YOU look it up, in a LEGAL book, dimwit. It has had the SAME legal meaning for around 100 years, maybe more.
It's also DEFINED that way by Federal copyright law. I repeat: copyright infringement (which is what uploading or downloading is), is a CIVIL INFRACTION, not a crime.
PIRACY is the distribution of illegal copyrighted works FOR A PROFIT. Which is a VERY different thing and is a CRIME. It can even be a felony, depending on the severity of the case.
Since most people uploading and downloading have no profit motive, they are NOT "pirates", and they are not criminals. By the 100-year-old DEFINITION of the word in the legal books. That is, at least if you live in the U.S. Repeat, just in case it didn't sink in: In the United States, copyright piracy is a crime. Uploading and downloading for personal use are NOT.
I'm am done with this. If you aren't going to bother to find an authoritative reference and look it up yourself, I have nothing further to say.
"I can only assume you point this out to distract readers from the point;"
Why would you assume that? I'm not trolling, I'm simply saying that you are using inappropriate statistics to try to make YOUR point. (Which, by the way, I have pointed out to you before.)
If you don't think large grocery franchises make good money, you are dreaming. Wal-mart (though admittedly they aren't mainly grocery), Fred Meyer, Safeway, Costco, Sam's, etc., etc., there's a large list.
They aren't "the darlings of Wall Street" in part because their business is relatively steady; there's not much to speculate on.
But in any case, I did use the word "large". I certainly did not try to claim that a mom-and-pop corner grocery is going to make thousands in profit in a day.
"That was kind of his point"
No, it wasn't.
"... if population density was the reason for the poor speeds then large cities would have good connections while sparsely populated areas would not."
Yes. But CITIES are not "sparsely populate areas". RURAL areas are. That was MY point.
The so-called "last mile" difference between one city and the next is relatively miniscule compared to the difference between, say, a downtown and a farm 10 miles outside of town.
And that last mile is not necessarily cheaper in "densely populated" cities as opposed to those that are less dense. Sure, people are closer together but a lot of the costs, including property and access (which you need to run your cables, for example) is a lot more expensive per foot.
"I haven't seen any evidence that my ISP throttles File Sharing. I can download legit Torrent files very quickly, but try downloading a movie and it's almost impossible..."
Downloading a movie is filesharing. It is NOT "piracy"!!!
"Piracy" is a legal term, and it means copying and distributing copyrighted works for profit.
Close to zero percent of the people uploading and downloading files via P2P are "pirates"... that would defeat their whole purpose.
I'm not picking, this is an important point!!! Filesharing (uploading/downloading via P2P) is a civil infraction. Piracy is a crime. In some cases, a very serious crime.
"But she's clearly advocating for greed as a motivating factor, when viewed through any outside lens."
A big part of the Objectivist philosophy is to never take or accept something one has not earned via one's own efforts. So "greed" cannot possibly be involved, if you accept that the common use of the word implies exploitation of others (as in "corporate greed"). But I admit it is somewhat dependent on your definition. That's what I mean when I say it.
"Her villains were caricatures of attitudes..."
Yes, definitely. She exaggerated to get her point across. So? I disagree very strongly that it did not represent real actions by real people. Remember, her whole philosophy was built around things she saw while growing up in the Soviet Union. Power-grabbing under the guise of "helping" the worker.
"You claim none of the people who hate Rand have read her."
No, I didn't. In response to GP I claimed "the roving band of nitwits" had not read her.
"I've read her, liked her for a time, then realized she wasn't really that good."
Still irrelevant, because I wasn't commenting about that. My comments, were, specifically:
(A) The "roving band of nitwits" think when she wrote about "selfishness" she really meant "greed". My point being that Rand used a meaning for "selfish" that does not occur in the dictionary.
And (B) that she made at least one good point, no matter how bad her writing was.
"The average profit margin for most businesses in the US is around 5.5%. The average profit margin for a grocery store is about 0.8%."
Yes, but percent margin is an inappropriate measure to use in this situation.
One of the reasons for the small grocery margin (and how they can get away with it and stay in business), is that they do vastly higher volume than most other kinds of stores. So while their margin might be 0.8%, give or take (I have seen it reported as high as 2%), what really matters is that a store can still make $30,000 profit per day.
"That was part of their agreement to buy NBC Universal."
That's right. I knew it was an agreement with the FCC, but my memory was not complete. I was thinking that the FCC was threatening litigation. Instead, they wanted to prevent Comcast from discriminating based on where the content was coming from... as they are now doing with their game content.