From an Australian (the land of 5 intra-program ad breaks per hour + inter-program ads + watermarks + on-screen popup advertising + running programs 20 minutes over time + pseudo-random program pre-emption + no EPG, not to mention our government's digital inaction plan) POV, the one thing the BBC does do well is act as a brake on the excesses of the commercial channels.
That's right - all Australian commercial networks do all the things listed above every single day on every single prime-time program. I wonder how long the before UK's commercial channels would start doing the same if the BBC wasn't offering a viable alternative?
It's just a pity that our national broadcaster (not "public broadcaster"; a difference overlooked by many) the ABC is crippled by government interference and a lack of funding, and is unable to provide a worthwhile alternative to all those commercial excesses.
Let me tell you, BitTorrent is a blessing - even if only to highlight how well off UK and even US FTA television viewers are compared to us...
... and he pointed out a large many-story high concrete pillar... there to absorb the backward wave of water...
Yup, very probably. I don't know about that particular installation, but the Snowy Mountains scheme here in Australia has something very similar - big caverns bored out and connected to the through-mountain tunnels are used to damp the shock wave caused when the gates are closed. Basically a giant version of the anti-hammer devices you can get for your household plumbing.
Buggered if I can find a diagram of it on-line though...
And Australia ('Australian Standard Classification of Religious Groups').
Having said that, the Australian government and lega system has always tended to a broad interpretation of 'religion'. From the PDF:
"For the purposes of the law, the criteria of religion are twofold: first, belief in a Supernatural Being, Thing or Principle; and second, the acceptance of canons of conduct in order to give effect to that belief, though canons of conduct which offend against the ordinary laws are outside the area of any immunity, privilege or right conferred on the grounds of religion."
I'm 40 - young enough to have missed the whole Beatles phenomena, old enough to have been brought up steeped in their effect on popular culture. While I was never a fan - being brought up on the better styles of country music, and developing my own tastes in the 70's sort of precludes that - I realised the Beatles actually did some good stuff. So, a few years ago, I bought the box set.
What a revelation that was.
There's a lot more good Beatles music than you remember. Everybody can name the big ones, but the rest of the catalogue is absolutely stuffed with good music you've forgotten about, or never even heard. And, unlike today, there's remarkably little crap on any of their albums - pick any one and I guarantee you'll at least appreciate, if not outright like, 3/4 of the tracks. And that missing 1/4 won't be cringeworth dross either. When was the last time you bought something new like that?
And for some strange reason, against all popular opinion, this all comes together on "Magical Mystery Tour". This is the point where their pop stuff meets their rock and experimental stuff, and drags George Harrison's Indian mysticism fetish along for the ride.
What bothers me about TiVo is that they are in a conflict-of-interest situation.
What conflict of interest?
You swapped your marketing data + some cash for the convenience of a Tivo; Tivo took the cash and onsold the marketing data for more cash. No conflict of interest there, unless you didn't read the Terms Of Service when you bought the thing - and whose fault is that?
At some point, they may decide that the needs of the media companies are more profitable than the needs of the users. (I would argue that this monitoring move is one example.)
Given that this has been their modus operandi since the beginning, I'd argue that that point was reached before they'd sold a single unit!
I'm not praising them - I'm not in a position to own a Tivo, and wouldn't own one even if I was - but I'd not about to condemn them either for doing what they've said they were doing since day 1.
(Read that last paragraph: I'm not even in the US; everything I know about Tivo has come from/. and their website; and even I knew that they were doing this all along. Anyone who actually owns one and didn't know this only has themselves to blame...)
...since there are several alternative applications for transferring music to your iPod.
How do you know they don't suffer from the exact same problem?
Ah, right, because one of them was once a popular "stick-it-to-the-man" product before it was fellated into crapulence by AOL, and the others are "open source" and therefore infallible. Now I see where you're coming from...
Why can't the iPod find the files on its own? I might be out somewhere and not have the software. The fact is that the IPOD works that way to give apple control over the content people put on the device.
You're right. It's so totally unlike the iRiver H10, which only requires you to be running WinXP & WMP10*!
(* US models only, I know - but even on the non-US firmwares you still need to use the iRiver Plus app or a 3rd-party loader if you want to search, browse by artist, etc...)
This is not putting down trade-type training, and to those thinking of being critical of my stance... Consider this: Would you want a high school graduate fresh out of school installing the electrical wiring in your house? Wouldn't you want a trade with some education doing it?
Yup. By the same token, I wouldn't want the EE who specced and designed the switchboard &/or distribution in a large commercial building to be the one installing it either. There's too much on that side of the fence for the EE to be aware of it all; at the very best they may be able to apply their engineering knowledge to solve the problems encountered, but still they'll be slow, inefficient, and probably wrong. At the average level, they just couldn't do it - the practicalities, the solutions to which are quite often lumped under the designation "tricks of the trade", are too large for them to overcome without at least some trade knowledge.
Wouldn't you want a well educated doctor operating on you that has had an additional two years of specialty training in some obscure area rather than a GP?
Leaving out the very few involved in research or very high specialties, it's easily arguable that most medical doctorin' - the 90%+ of it comprising GPs and most specialists and surgeons - is more akin to a highly skilled trade than a true engineering-type profession. You have a problem (disease), and work out how to apply the standard solution (cure) in practice. If the solution doesn't work or isn't practical, you try the next solution down the line - or work out how to combine 2 solutions into 1 workable one. That's good trade-level skills, not engineering level...
(I don't expect too many medical doctors to agree with me on that, although I personally know a few who do;-)
An engineer will understand why UTP wiring needs to be terminated with the proper pairings.
Agreed.
An electrician will just test conductivity on the pins and assume the job is done.
No, a dickhead electrician will do that. And in the trades and professions, just as on/., there's plenty of dickheads...
Usually there is a reason behind the "overcomplicating" that engineers do.
And there is the real difference between an engineer and a competent tradesman (be they electrician, technician, plumber, whatever). The engineer understand the reasons and applies their knowledge accordingly. The competent tradesman doesn't necessarily need to understand the reasons - they just need to appreciate that there are reasons, and that that's why they should follow the instructions / rules / practices.
And it does flow both ways - while the engineer knows the theory, they should also have an appreciation of any practicalities faced at implementation. By the same token, while the tradesman knows the practicalities, they should also have an appreciation of the engineering behind it all.
Many people misunderstand this. A good tradesman is equally as valuable as a good engineer, just in slightly different way in a slightly different domain.
The DVD spec was finalised in September 1995. The first players appeared (in Japan) in November 1996. The first players appeared in the US in March 1997. DVD players did not become widespread in the US until Christmas 1998 / early 1999.
DVD-CSS was cracked sometime in September 1999, and DeCSS was released into the wild on October 6, 1999. That's 4 years after the spec was finalised, 3 years after players first became available, 2 1/2 years after players became available in the US, and nearly 1 year after they became commonplace.
HDCP, AACS, and the whole trusted path thing is considerably more complicated and considerably more secure than CSS ever was.
I'll let everybody else make their own conclusions from that, and lay their own bets as to when it might be cracked...
And at least with a Windows machine you can see it hasn't got an IP, whereas all you can do with embedded clients is swear at them and go poking around in the client/server logs and peek at what's happening on the wire...
FWIW, the ISC reference server works fine. I run it in conjunction with pdnsd and a set of scripts to keep everything synchronised.
No, I'm saying the spec is ambiguous, and the server - as well as the clients - fail to account for all those ambiguities. I *expect* embedded clients to skimp on the details sometimes, but not my servers.
(Lest you think I'm picking on crap non-open-source software in clients, the udhcpc client in Busybox fails for exactly this reason.)
FWIW, the ISC reference server dhcpd covers the ambiguities - and, as the reference implementation, shouldn't all the other servers follow the same lead?
Leaving aside the fact that the EV crowd are somewhat notorious for overstating their gains and understating their losses, and just going by your quote and figures, 2kW still only equates to a fraction of what is needed. Rough back-of-the-envelope calculations show that 10% seems to be a bit on the generous side, but I'll let it stand - after all, it still shows that 2kW is, as I said, a small fraction of what is needed.
Cars need so much horsepower specifically because engines do a poor job of covering the range of loads
Presumably you're meaning "petrol" engines here, but it applies nearly equally to electric motors. Yes, electric motors have a much flatter provided power curve - but their efficiency isn't flat (many people seem to conflate the two). Unlike petrol engines, electric motors have maximum power draw when their torque is at maximum i.e. starting from 0RPM. Theoretically, minimum power draw is at maximum RPM, but physics and design practicalities work against that, so it's actually shifted down towards the middle of the RPM range. Stop-start traffic kills the overall efficiency of electric systems far more than anything else, and far more than you seem to estimate - 60%~80% reduction in overall range during stop-start city driving is the figure I see from the EV people locally.
(There are potential ways around this - keeping the electric motor running during "stops" at its maximally efficient RPM & using flywheel gearboxes for energy storage is one I know has been investigated. Unfortunately, doing that tends to more than negate the overall gain from using a smaller HP motor with high starting torque.)
I'll concede the gain from running the pony engine whilst sitting during the day; I didn't factor that in. But in that case the real solution is still to use the (slightly) higher efficiency and (definitely) cleaner AC supply to recharge.
(Don't get me wrong - we need EVs, and we need them now. There is no magical total "one size fits all" replacement solution on the horizon (at least, not one that is as efficient an energy store as petrol), and every little bit helps - so waiting for that mythical solution is paramount to deliberate ignorance. But lets not be blind to the practicalities...)
Now right there, for me, is where a large part of the "religion is teh 3vil!!1!" internet athiest nutjobs fall down.
The Old Testament : leaving out the genealogical bits, it's basically the story of a wrathful, vengeful, interventionist God.
The New Testament : leaving out the backstory & the bits of the Apocrypha that crept in, it's basically a story showing how one "man", though his actions and deeds, can change the world in the long run.
The Qur'an : but for a couple of quirks of fate, it could have been the New Testament. Really, it's not that much different.
Judaism : based on the Old Testament + its own accumulated philosophical cruft.
Christianity : based on the New Testament + its own accumulated philosophical cruft.
Islam : based on the Qur'an + its own accumulated philosophical cruft.
Given that, you'd expect Judaism - the religion based on a vengeful, directly interventionist, bloodthirsty book - to be the vengeful, directly interventionist, bloodthirsty religion, right? Yet, (leaving aside the idea that they might all be sitting back waiting for everyone else to kill each other before taking over themselves;-) it's not. It's the New Testament, and arguably its close cousin the Qur'an, that has turned out to be the source of that sort of religion.
My personal opinion is that this is because it shows that vengeful, directly interventionist, bloodthirsty actions aren't just the domain of a God - men (or at least something that looks and mostly acts like a man) can participate too. The Old Testament shows us that God can be a spiteful moody prick; the New Testment gives us free reign to act this way too...
All religion is inherently a bad thing, even when "good" things are done in it's name, because it is based on a falsehood, i.e., a superstitious belief in the supernatural
Look, I'm as agnostic/athiest as the next guy, but c'mon, anti-religion nuts are just as crazy any annoying as religious nuts.
You're seriously trying to argue that a basically pacifist* philosophy developed over 2000+ years is much more inherently harmful than a belief in solid evidence + whatever shit you make up to suit yourself, fill in the holes, and glue it all together?
At the very least, religion gives you the benefit of having other people around you with similar basic beliefs to occasionally tell you "no, you're wrong"...
(*Yeah, yeah, bring up the history of the the Crusades, Charlemagne, the various Inquisitions, and your peculiarly American fundie doctor-killers and radio nutjobs. I'm not talking about them, I'm talking about the Christian philosophy - y'know, "do unto others...", "love thy neighbour...", etc, etc.
About the only thing I can say is bad about religion is that focussed belief seems to inherently cause more and greater hurt in the world than unfocussed belief. Think about that for a while, and ponder who the bad guy there really is - organised region, or human nature?**)
(**No, not the band - though sometimes I wonder about that too...)
Unfortunately, it's true for most of the rest of the western world - indeed, most of the rest of the world - as well.
Despite all the hydro in e.g. Canada & China, nuclear in e.g. the US & Europe, & natural gas in e.g. Africa & the subcontinent, burning coal is the primary source of electrical energy in the world today by a large margin.
Just to put things into a perspective most (car-conscious) people will be more familiar with : 2kW = ~2.7 horsepower.
Not a lot in the big scheme of things - for example, it's a tiny fraction of the HP in a Prius' petrol engine (~75HP) - even when you don't take into account conversion inefficiencies & storage losses.
In other words: you'll need a lot bigger engine than that.
... PR companies spend a good portion of their budgets on honest-to-god research...
Yes, they do. But do they also release that data publicly?
Of course not. They massage it, tailor it, spin it, and sell it to brands with both bad and rising reputations in order to...
strategize to overcome or bolster that perception.
What's truly the funny / story here is that the Landor survey isn't about Sony - it's about selling themselves. And the fact that NetworkWorld have used that survey +/.'s dislike/distrust of Sony to increase their own brand further by riffing on the "bad" reputation Sony has in these parts.
(In other words, it's a slightly sophisticated troll to get themselves linked on the front page of/. & other tech sites. More marketing. Seems to have worked, doesn't it?;-)
Just because the data came from a marketing company doesn't mean that the data in and of itself is faulty - I'd be more interested in knowing WHO they asked their questions to.
Really? I'd be more interested in who paid for that particular use of the data (marketing companies aren't stupid; they DO run surveys off their own back - and then massage and spin the results to suit each client, in order to sell the same data as many times as possible), and the reasons behind why it was necessary.
DNSmasq is actually pretty broken when it comes to providing DHCP services for certain (mainly embedded type) clients - Google for problems associated with the XBox, network printers, etc, etc.
(Client sends a request, DHCP server responds with an offer, client hangs. It's tied up with exactly how the offer packet should be structured, and where in it the offered IP goes.)
As far as I can tell (and, any real DHCP gurus out there, please correct me), it's down to a oversight on the part of the DHCP spec as to exactly where the offered IP should go (header, payload, or both), and overly simplified DHCP clients (who just look at the header, saving the overhead of parsing the whole packet).
The most unrealistic depiction of computers in that movie was the way they were writing a cross-platform application that would run on everything from desktops to cellphones.
Slashdot Mirror
From an Australian (the land of 5 intra-program ad breaks per hour + inter-program ads + watermarks + on-screen popup advertising + running programs 20 minutes over time + pseudo-random program pre-emption + no EPG, not to mention our government's digital inaction plan) POV, the one thing the BBC does do well is act as a brake on the excesses of the commercial channels.
That's right - all Australian commercial networks do all the things listed above every single day on every single prime-time program. I wonder how long the before UK's commercial channels would start doing the same if the BBC wasn't offering a viable alternative?
It's just a pity that our national broadcaster (not "public broadcaster"; a difference overlooked by many) the ABC is crippled by government interference and a lack of funding, and is unable to provide a worthwhile alternative to all those commercial excesses.
Let me tell you, BitTorrent is a blessing - even if only to highlight how well off UK and even US FTA television viewers are compared to us...
Buggered if I can find a diagram of it on-line though...
Having said that, the Australian government and lega system has always tended to a broad interpretation of 'religion'. From the PDF
Y'know, nobody ever mentions "Magical Mystery Tour"...
I'm 40 - young enough to have missed the whole Beatles phenomena, old enough to have been brought up steeped in their effect on popular culture. While I was never a fan - being brought up on the better styles of country music, and developing my own tastes in the 70's sort of precludes that - I realised the Beatles actually did some good stuff. So, a few years ago, I bought the box set.
What a revelation that was.
There's a lot more good Beatles music than you remember. Everybody can name the big ones, but the rest of the catalogue is absolutely stuffed with good music you've forgotten about, or never even heard. And, unlike today, there's remarkably little crap on any of their albums - pick any one and I guarantee you'll at least appreciate, if not outright like, 3/4 of the tracks. And that missing 1/4 won't be cringeworth dross either. When was the last time you bought something new like that?
And for some strange reason, against all popular opinion, this all comes together on "Magical Mystery Tour". This is the point where their pop stuff meets their rock and experimental stuff, and drags George Harrison's Indian mysticism fetish along for the ride.
You swapped your marketing data + some cash for the convenience of a Tivo; Tivo took the cash and onsold the marketing data for more cash. No conflict of interest there, unless you didn't read the Terms Of Service when you bought the thing - and whose fault is that? Given that this has been their modus operandi since the beginning, I'd argue that that point was reached before they'd sold a single unit!
I'm not praising them - I'm not in a position to own a Tivo, and wouldn't own one even if I was - but I'd not about to condemn them either for doing what they've said they were doing since day 1.
(Read that last paragraph: I'm not even in the US; everything I know about Tivo has come from
Ah, right, because one of them was once a popular "stick-it-to-the-man" product before it was fellated into crapulence by AOL, and the others are "open source" and therefore infallible. Now I see where you're coming from...
(* US models only, I know - but even on the non-US firmwares you still need to use the iRiver Plus app or a 3rd-party loader if you want to search, browse by artist, etc...)
WAR IS PEACE
/.'s lameness filter, and wonders whether it's high pass or low pass...)
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
COKE IS IT
(One questions the utility of
Yup. By the same token, I wouldn't want the EE who specced and designed the switchboard &/or distribution in a large commercial building to be the one installing it either. There's too much on that side of the fence for the EE to be aware of it all; at the very best they may be able to apply their engineering knowledge to solve the problems encountered, but still they'll be slow, inefficient, and probably wrong. At the average level, they just couldn't do it - the practicalities, the solutions to which are quite often lumped under the designation "tricks of the trade", are too large for them to overcome without at least some trade knowledge.
Leaving out the very few involved in research or very high specialties, it's easily arguable that most medical doctorin' - the 90%+ of it comprising GPs and most specialists and surgeons - is more akin to a highly skilled trade than a true engineering-type profession. You have a problem (disease), and work out how to apply the standard solution (cure) in practice. If the solution doesn't work or isn't practical, you try the next solution down the line - or work out how to combine 2 solutions into 1 workable one. That's good trade-level skills, not engineering level...
(I don't expect too many medical doctors to agree with me on that, although I personally know a few who do
No, a dickhead electrician will do that. And in the trades and professions, just as on
And there is the real difference between an engineer and a competent tradesman (be they electrician, technician, plumber, whatever). The engineer understand the reasons and applies their knowledge accordingly. The competent tradesman doesn't necessarily need to understand the reasons - they just need to appreciate that there are reasons, and that that's why they should follow the instructions / rules / practices.
And it does flow both ways - while the engineer knows the theory, they should also have an appreciation of any practicalities faced at implementation. By the same token, while the tradesman knows the practicalities, they should also have an appreciation of the engineering behind it all.
Many people misunderstand this. A good tradesman is equally as valuable as a good engineer, just in slightly different way in a slightly different domain.
Speak for yourself. I'll be in my bunk...
A little history...
The DVD spec was finalised in September 1995. The first players appeared (in Japan) in November 1996. The first players appeared in the US in March 1997. DVD players did not become widespread in the US until Christmas 1998 / early 1999.
DVD-CSS was cracked sometime in September 1999, and DeCSS was released into the wild on October 6, 1999. That's 4 years after the spec was finalised, 3 years after players first became available, 2 1/2 years after players became available in the US, and nearly 1 year after they became commonplace.
HDCP, AACS, and the whole trusted path thing is considerably more complicated and considerably more secure than CSS ever was.
I'll let everybody else make their own conclusions from that, and lay their own bets as to when it might be cracked...
Note to OP: Lamb Chop is not your girlfriend...
Pity, no, it doesn't ;-).
And at least with a Windows machine you can see it hasn't got an IP, whereas all you can do with embedded clients is swear at them and go poking around in the client/server logs and peek at what's happening on the wire...
FWIW, the ISC reference server works fine. I run it in conjunction with pdnsd and a set of scripts to keep everything synchronised.
No, I'm saying the spec is ambiguous, and the server - as well as the clients - fail to account for all those ambiguities. I *expect* embedded clients to skimp on the details sometimes, but not my servers.
(Lest you think I'm picking on crap non-open-source software in clients, the udhcpc client in Busybox fails for exactly this reason.)
FWIW, the ISC reference server dhcpd covers the ambiguities - and, as the reference implementation, shouldn't all the other servers follow the same lead?
Presumably you're meaning "petrol" engines here, but it applies nearly equally to electric motors. Yes, electric motors have a much flatter provided power curve - but their efficiency isn't flat (many people seem to conflate the two). Unlike petrol engines, electric motors have maximum power draw when their torque is at maximum i.e. starting from 0RPM. Theoretically, minimum power draw is at maximum RPM, but physics and design practicalities work against that, so it's actually shifted down towards the middle of the RPM range. Stop-start traffic kills the overall efficiency of electric systems far more than anything else, and far more than you seem to estimate - 60%~80% reduction in overall range during stop-start city driving is the figure I see from the EV people locally.
(There are potential ways around this - keeping the electric motor running during "stops" at its maximally efficient RPM & using flywheel gearboxes for energy storage is one I know has been investigated. Unfortunately, doing that tends to more than negate the overall gain from using a smaller HP motor with high starting torque.)
I'll concede the gain from running the pony engine whilst sitting during the day; I didn't factor that in. But in that case the real solution is still to use the (slightly) higher efficiency and (definitely) cleaner AC supply to recharge.
(Don't get me wrong - we need EVs, and we need them now . There is no magical total "one size fits all" replacement solution on the horizon (at least, not one that is as efficient an energy store as petrol), and every little bit helps - so waiting for that mythical solution is paramount to deliberate ignorance. But lets not be blind to the practicalities...)
The Old Testament : leaving out the genealogical bits, it's basically the story of a wrathful, vengeful, interventionist God.
The New Testament : leaving out the backstory & the bits of the Apocrypha that crept in, it's basically a story showing how one "man", though his actions and deeds, can change the world in the long run.
The Qur'an : but for a couple of quirks of fate, it could have been the New Testament. Really, it's not that much different.
Judaism : based on the Old Testament + its own accumulated philosophical cruft.
Christianity : based on the New Testament + its own accumulated philosophical cruft.
Islam : based on the Qur'an + its own accumulated philosophical cruft.
Given that, you'd expect Judaism - the religion based on a vengeful, directly interventionist, bloodthirsty book - to be the vengeful, directly interventionist, bloodthirsty religion, right? Yet, (leaving aside the idea that they might all be sitting back waiting for everyone else to kill each other before taking over themselves
My personal opinion is that this is because it shows that vengeful, directly interventionist, bloodthirsty actions aren't just the domain of a God - men (or at least something that looks and mostly acts like a man) can participate too. The Old Testament shows us that God can be a spiteful moody prick; the New Testment gives us free reign to act this way too...
You're seriously trying to argue that a basically pacifist* philosophy developed over 2000+ years is much more inherently harmful than a belief in solid evidence + whatever shit you make up to suit yourself, fill in the holes, and glue it all together?
At the very least, religion gives you the benefit of having other people around you with similar basic beliefs to occasionally tell you "no, you're wrong"...
(*Yeah, yeah, bring up the history of the the Crusades, Charlemagne, the various Inquisitions, and your peculiarly American fundie doctor-killers and radio nutjobs. I'm not talking about them, I'm talking about the Christian philosophy - y'know, "do unto others
About the only thing I can say is bad about religion is that focussed belief seems to inherently cause more and greater hurt in the world than unfocussed belief. Think about that for a while, and ponder who the bad guy there really is - organised region, or human nature?**)
(**No, not the band - though sometimes I wonder about that too...)
Unfortunately, it's true for most of the rest of the western world - indeed, most of the rest of the world - as well.
Despite all the hydro in e.g. Canada & China, nuclear in e.g. the US & Europe, & natural gas in e.g. Africa & the subcontinent, burning coal is the primary source of electrical energy in the world today by a large margin.
Just to put things into a perspective most (car-conscious) people will be more familiar with : 2kW = ~2.7 horsepower.
Not a lot in the big scheme of things - for example, it's a tiny fraction of the HP in a Prius' petrol engine (~75HP) - even when you don't take into account conversion inefficiencies & storage losses.
In other words: you'll need a lot bigger engine than that.
Linux: Where the customers eat shit, and get told "Submit a patch or run back to Micro$uck$ Windoze, n00b!"
(Disclaimer: I'm a Mac user. And a Windows user. And a Linux user, and an OpenBSD user, and
Of course not. They massage it, tailor it, spin it, and sell it to brands with both bad and rising reputations in order to
What's truly the funny / story here is that the Landor survey isn't about Sony - it's about selling themselves. And the fact that NetworkWorld have used that survey +
(In other words, it's a slightly sophisticated troll to get themselves linked on the front page of
Really? I'd be more interested in who paid for that particular use of the data (marketing companies aren't stupid; they DO run surveys off their own back - and then massage and spin the results to suit each client, in order to sell the same data as many times as possible), and the reasons behind why it was necessary.
THAT'S when you learn somethin'...
DNSmasq is actually pretty broken when it comes to providing DHCP services for certain (mainly embedded type) clients - Google for problems associated with the XBox, network printers, etc, etc.
(Client sends a request, DHCP server responds with an offer, client hangs. It's tied up with exactly how the offer packet should be structured, and where in it the offered IP goes.)
As far as I can tell (and, any real DHCP gurus out there, please correct me), it's down to a oversight on the part of the DHCP spec as to exactly where the offered IP should go (header, payload, or both), and overly simplified DHCP clients (who just look at the header, saving the overhead of parsing the whole packet).