There's a reason why Digidyne vs. Data General may not support Psystar. In the suit, Digidyne's complaint was that the Nova hardware was illegally tied to the RDOS software. On the surface, the Psystar "problem" appears to be the same situation, but, in fact, it's not. At the time, RDOS was really the only practical OS for the Nova hardware (and its clones). There weren't any alternatives. The court recognized this in its ruling, pointing out that it would be economically infeasible to design an equivalent software system to RDOS. Data General conceded that RDOS was the only game in town.
So, the problem in the case of Data General was that the hardware was as close to a commodity as any computer hardware was in the day. And Data General essentially held it hostage with their operating system.
Contrast that with Apple. The hardware is still a commodity. But there are at least two other choices of operating systems that you can use on that hardware: Windows and Linux. So, Apple can make the case that there's no violation here. They're not the only game in town. Yeah, if you want to use OS/X, it's got to be on a Mac, but nothing stops you from building a perfectly competitive, virtually identical system using Windows or Linux.
In the Data General case, you could build a competitive system without Data General's hardware, but without their operating system, it was useless. And if you wanted to buy their operating system, you had to buy their hardware. The Psystar case is different.
From the 6th Circuit ruling:
"The undisputed facts summarized in the district court's opinion establish that a demand existed for NOVA instruction set CPUs separate from defendant's RDOS, and that each element of the NOVA computer system could have been provided separately and selected separately by customers if defendant had not compelled purchasers to take both."
Additionally: "In short, the question is whether the seller has some advantage not shared by his competitors in the market for the tying product."
If Psystar raises either of these claims (which were central to the court's overturning of the lower court's ruling), they're going to have a very tough go of it.
I'm no Apple fanboy - I'd love to see Psystar keep selling computers. But I think that they're going to get steamrolled.
So if your not a laptop user and aren't currently benchmarking your drive how long will it last?
What is the power usage for real world office/ web browsing type use?
That's the question that the test didn't answer. The true measure of SSD versus mechanical hard drive would be to normalize the power usage by analyzing the difference in total number of benchmark runs per drive. I'll bet that the SSDs completed more benchmarks than the hard drive. And if that's the case, then there should be some additional hardware overhead that would account for additional battery power drain.
Maybe a better analysis would be to determine the number of iterations per charge. But the best analysis would be to measure the actual power consumption by the SSDs and hard drive. With the sort of low budget experiment that Tom's did, there's really no way to effectively do that. But a little bit of statistical analysis, with repeated tests and normalization would give an accurate picture of the relative power use between devices.
It's pretty clear that the experiment that Tom's did is flawed, even if the article promises that it can't possibly be wrong (hubris, anyone?)
Chutzpa indeed! Cabela's took that approach in Idaho and actually got a special exemption from the legislature. They claimed that the Internet operation and the retail operation were different companies, so the Internet operation should not collect sales tax in Idaho.
"Bitter", indeed. I saw him in concert 8 or 9 years ago and I was pretty dismayed. His old stuff held up pretty well, but his new stuff was just a whiny old guy grumping around on a stage. I kind of felt bad for him, and especially bad for anybody who was seeing him for the first time.
Something happened to Carlin in the late '80s or early '90s and he stopped being funny and started being whiny. I saw him in concert in '99 or '00 and it was an hour of complaining and whining. Yeah, he did the 7 words and Wonderful WINO, but other than a few "classic" bits, the rest of it was kind of disappointing. And the worst of it was that you could look around the audience and see most everybody else looking like they'd just shelled out their money to listen to some grumpy old man bitch and moan.
To top it off, the show just sort of ended...no big finish, it just ended, almost like he figured out that he was bombing and just quit before he was done.
However...his mid-career stuff was definitely groundbreaking. He definitely changed comedy.
Let me tell you about my experience with tech support. I used to be a manager in the tech support department of what used to be one of the top five computer companies in the US. OK, it's been long enough now, that I feel comfortable enough to say that it was Micron Electronics.
Our tech support was consistently rated number one. Better than Dell. Better than Gateway. Better, even, than Apple. And we worked our asses off to do it. We had two call centers in the US. We had a group dedicated to email support. We had a group that handled escalations from techs who were stumped. We had a couple of guys whose only job was to be available to step into a call if things started to really fall apart. And that was just the consumer side of things.
Our rules were simple: one call, one resolution. No "do this and call back if it doesn't work". The techs were not under intense pressure to get the customer off the phone - they were under pressure to find the problem and fix it the first time.
From a technical point of view, it was a resounding success. We fixed problems, we made unhappy customers happy (most of the time) and our RMAs were generally single components instead of entire computers.
From a cost point of view, it was an utter disaster. One or two TS calls completely erased any profit that the original sale generated. And, once sales volume exceeded a certain point, we had to outsource - although our outsourcing was to Canada and Atlanta. Still, that outsourcing was yet another cost.
Eventually the management above me ordered cost-cutting changes. That meant that support was not what it was. Oh, other things happened, too, with the company. The end result is that Micron Electronics is gone. I left the company when it became apparent that it simply was not going to be economically possible to provide the level of support that I thought was necessary. Not too long after that, the waves of layoffs started.
Now, I don't think that the current incarnation of Micron Electronics outsources their support like Dell does, but I also don't think that they provide the same level of support that we did in the mid 1990's. Of course, back then, it wasn't quite a commodity business like it is now. Unfortunately, nobody provides that level of support anymore, not even Apple, which, I guess, is the gold standard these days.
So I guess my point is that there's some level of support that should be expected from Dell (and others), but given what they charge for a consumer computer, the bar is set pretty low.
Glorified chat room. IRC with a 3D interface. Blah, blah...
I never understood that. Why do people claim the biggest part of their continued stay in a virtual fantasy world is the "social aspect"? Why continue paying for a game you aren't even really playing anymore?
Do these friends you've made just not exist outside of the game? Or is it that these "friendships" are so tenuous that the game is the only thing that keeps you together?
Oh, don't mistake what I wrote - I play the game because it's fun. And that fun is enhanced by the social aspect.
To answer your questions, some of the friends that I made exist outside of the game, some of them, for obvious reasons, are in the game, or, more accurately, on the Internet, because we interact in the game, on some message boards and via Ventrilo.
I would not say that they are particularly tenuous. I still keep in contact with people who don't play Warcraft anymore and I count them as friends. And I've been fortunate enough to be able to visit some of the people that I've met from the game - when I have to travel to San Jose, I let everybody know and we all get together.
So, to cut this long post short, we are all friends who, like most people who are friends, were drawn together by a shared interest. And, as it turns out, most of us have other shared interests, too.
However (just to add a little more length to this post), I'm not between 15 and 35 years old, so maybe I don't fall into the typical WoW demographic.
I'm in a high end guild with a high end character. I don't care about the changes that Bliz made, it really doesn't matter to me. The greater part of the game for me is the social part of it, interacting with people who have come to be my friends over time. We've got members from all over the world and it's really a kick to just have fun.
Yeah, the gaming is obviously a draw, but, at least for me, and for most of the folks I play with, it's not the biggest part.
I think, Bruce, that the difference in this case is that it's being tried in Germany, not the US. I suspect that Germany puts as much value on US precedence as the US puts in Germany's.
"You know, it's kind of sad that in addition to all the other problems we'd have in going back to the Moon - like it's going to take twice as long as it did the first time (15 to 20 years versus 8) - I don't know that we have the mentality today to build upon what we did on Apollo. And it's sort of sad. Because if we went back again next week or next year or in another decade - which we probably won't, unfortunately, because it's going to be another generation - I don't know if we would have the mentality - I don't want to say 'guts' - to take the kind of risks we did when we did it the first time. Landing on the Moon was a risk. And I believe our inability to take risk today wouldn't allow us to do what we did when we did it. And that's a sad commentary; and I really feel strongly about that."
I was 7 years old when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. The astronauts were my heroes when I was growing up. Gene Cernan was right and it breaks my heart.
MTBF in this case is the amount of time that will pass before a drive fails, assuming that it is properly maintained and replaced as the end of its useful lifetime is reached. That failure number is the mean number of hours that pass before a failure occurs under those conditions. It doesn't mean that the drive will last for hundreds of years and it isn't a measure of how many drives were tested (although the number of drives tested does determine the accuracy of the statistic). It just means that if you use the drive properly, it should be a long time before one dies unexpectedly.
Now the real question is...what is the useful lifetime of the drive?
I remember plenty of poorly written textbooks, but I also remember that for each of those cases, the professor apologized for the book, said that it was the best that there was and proceeded to make up for the quality of the book with excellent instruction. I don't mean that the books were poorly formatted or needed pictures - I mean that they were poorly written and badly organized.
A lot of posters have made references to professors who were too engaged with their research to give any time to their students. I'll admit that maybe my school was an exception; Every single one of my engineering (as well as the physics) professors were more than willing to spend as much time out of class to make sure that everyone understood what they were teaching. Sure, they all had research projects, but they were professors first and researchers second. Or maybe professors and researchers in equal measure. All that I know is that if I needed help, it was pretty easy to see the professor.
Are all the problems just exercises in math? Probably - because engineering problems are defined by math. We model reality with math, make changes to those equations and then study the results to determine the effect of those changes. Math tells us why things work - you must understand why something works (or doesn't) before you get creative. Hand-on experience isn't like adding a little salt to the pot and see if it tastes good. Hands-on experience, creative experience comes with a mastery of the "why" something works. And, for good or bad, math is the "why".
As for grade inflation, it happens in engineering classes, too. Perhaps not as much as in other field; I can't say, though, because I'm an engineer, not a historian or economist, right? Just deal with it, be happy that you earned the grade that you earned and move on. Ten years on, your grades won't mean anything.
And regarding counseling, there were a few professors who were pretty bad at both educational and professional counseling, but the majority of the faculty did a great job. In fact, I started an internship after my sophomore year and now, 8 years later, I still work for the company. My adviser was very interested in the work that I was doing and gave me a lot of suggestions that were very helpful. Academically, she helped me craft a schedule that, although it added an extra semester to my four years, worked in a minor in math and physics.
I think that the biggest difference between other engineering schools and the school that I went to is that my school was relatively new (I think that mine was only the fifth graduating class) and the EE student body was small enough that undergrads could actually assist professors in research that would normally be done by grad students. I doubt that anyone has ever done a study on it, but I suspect that there aren't many schools that have more published papers with undergrad coauthors than mine.
But ultimately, I'd say this: if any EE or EE student thinks that what they're doing is boring, then find another career. Sure, the money as an engineer is good, but if you're not happy doing what you're doing, then get out while you're still young.
I used to have me@myself.com from mail.com (I guess they've morphed into something else). I thought that it would be cute. It was an utter waste of my bandwidth.
I used to host nospin.com. You wouldn't believe all of the bizarre crap that came in for Bill O'Reilly. I used to forward them on, but the sheer volume and, well, stupidity made me trash them instead.
I don't think that the whole evolution versus creationism business is as big a deal as you think. It's more a result of a minority of vocal activists attempting to hijack the system to fit their agenda. It gets a lot of media play because they make a lot of noise, but it's hardly a widespread attack on America's school systems.
Besides, the system does tend to be self correcting - a little bit of embarrassment goes a long way.
Pfft - My grandfather's Hallicrafters Sky Buddy radio is going strong after over 60 years...and it's still using the original tubes! It's pretty much only good for AM (my wife won't let me put up an antenna for short wave), but it doesn't sound too bad at all.
It makes me happy to see that there are just as many amateur psychiatrists on Slashdot as there are amateur lawyers. Maybe this will create a whole new category of "Ask Slashdot"!
Slashdot Mirror
There's a reason why Digidyne vs. Data General may not support Psystar. In the suit, Digidyne's complaint was that the Nova hardware was illegally tied to the RDOS software. On the surface, the Psystar "problem" appears to be the same situation, but, in fact, it's not. At the time, RDOS was really the only practical OS for the Nova hardware (and its clones). There weren't any alternatives. The court recognized this in its ruling, pointing out that it would be economically infeasible to design an equivalent software system to RDOS. Data General conceded that RDOS was the only game in town.
So, the problem in the case of Data General was that the hardware was as close to a commodity as any computer hardware was in the day. And Data General essentially held it hostage with their operating system.
Contrast that with Apple. The hardware is still a commodity. But there are at least two other choices of operating systems that you can use on that hardware: Windows and Linux. So, Apple can make the case that there's no violation here. They're not the only game in town. Yeah, if you want to use OS/X, it's got to be on a Mac, but nothing stops you from building a perfectly competitive, virtually identical system using Windows or Linux.
In the Data General case, you could build a competitive system without Data General's hardware, but without their operating system, it was useless. And if you wanted to buy their operating system, you had to buy their hardware. The Psystar case is different.
From the 6th Circuit ruling:
"The undisputed facts summarized in the district court's opinion establish that a demand existed for NOVA instruction set CPUs separate from defendant's RDOS, and that each element of the NOVA computer system could have been provided separately and selected separately by customers if defendant had not compelled purchasers to take both."
Additionally: "In short, the question is whether the seller has some advantage not shared by his competitors in the market for the tying product."
If Psystar raises either of these claims (which were central to the court's overturning of the lower court's ruling), they're going to have a very tough go of it.
I'm no Apple fanboy - I'd love to see Psystar keep selling computers. But I think that they're going to get steamrolled.
How much money is the OSX86 project generating? And what hardware are they selling?
So if your not a laptop user and aren't currently benchmarking your drive how long will it last?
What is the power usage for real world office/ web browsing type use?
That's the question that the test didn't answer. The true measure of SSD versus mechanical hard drive would be to normalize the power usage by analyzing the difference in total number of benchmark runs per drive. I'll bet that the SSDs completed more benchmarks than the hard drive. And if that's the case, then there should be some additional hardware overhead that would account for additional battery power drain.
Maybe a better analysis would be to determine the number of iterations per charge. But the best analysis would be to measure the actual power consumption by the SSDs and hard drive. With the sort of low budget experiment that Tom's did, there's really no way to effectively do that. But a little bit of statistical analysis, with repeated tests and normalization would give an accurate picture of the relative power use between devices.
It's pretty clear that the experiment that Tom's did is flawed, even if the article promises that it can't possibly be wrong (hubris, anyone?)
Chutzpa indeed! Cabela's took that approach in Idaho and actually got a special exemption from the legislature. They claimed that the Internet operation and the retail operation were different companies, so the Internet operation should not collect sales tax in Idaho.
I guess that would make me grumpy, too.
"Bitter", indeed. I saw him in concert 8 or 9 years ago and I was pretty dismayed. His old stuff held up pretty well, but his new stuff was just a whiny old guy grumping around on a stage. I kind of felt bad for him, and especially bad for anybody who was seeing him for the first time.
Something happened to Carlin in the late '80s or early '90s and he stopped being funny and started being whiny. I saw him in concert in '99 or '00 and it was an hour of complaining and whining. Yeah, he did the 7 words and Wonderful WINO, but other than a few "classic" bits, the rest of it was kind of disappointing. And the worst of it was that you could look around the audience and see most everybody else looking like they'd just shelled out their money to listen to some grumpy old man bitch and moan.
To top it off, the show just sort of ended...no big finish, it just ended, almost like he figured out that he was bombing and just quit before he was done.
However...his mid-career stuff was definitely groundbreaking. He definitely changed comedy.
Let me tell you about my experience with tech support. I used to be a manager in the tech support department of what used to be one of the top five computer companies in the US. OK, it's been long enough now, that I feel comfortable enough to say that it was Micron Electronics.
Our tech support was consistently rated number one. Better than Dell. Better than Gateway. Better, even, than Apple. And we worked our asses off to do it. We had two call centers in the US. We had a group dedicated to email support. We had a group that handled escalations from techs who were stumped. We had a couple of guys whose only job was to be available to step into a call if things started to really fall apart. And that was just the consumer side of things.
Our rules were simple: one call, one resolution. No "do this and call back if it doesn't work". The techs were not under intense pressure to get the customer off the phone - they were under pressure to find the problem and fix it the first time.
From a technical point of view, it was a resounding success. We fixed problems, we made unhappy customers happy (most of the time) and our RMAs were generally single components instead of entire computers.
From a cost point of view, it was an utter disaster. One or two TS calls completely erased any profit that the original sale generated. And, once sales volume exceeded a certain point, we had to outsource - although our outsourcing was to Canada and Atlanta. Still, that outsourcing was yet another cost.
Eventually the management above me ordered cost-cutting changes. That meant that support was not what it was. Oh, other things happened, too, with the company. The end result is that Micron Electronics is gone. I left the company when it became apparent that it simply was not going to be economically possible to provide the level of support that I thought was necessary. Not too long after that, the waves of layoffs started.
Now, I don't think that the current incarnation of Micron Electronics outsources their support like Dell does, but I also don't think that they provide the same level of support that we did in the mid 1990's. Of course, back then, it wasn't quite a commodity business like it is now. Unfortunately, nobody provides that level of support anymore, not even Apple, which, I guess, is the gold standard these days.
So I guess my point is that there's some level of support that should be expected from Dell (and others), but given what they charge for a consumer computer, the bar is set pretty low.
Ahh...
Glorified chat room.
IRC with a 3D interface.
Blah, blah...
I never understood that. Why do people claim the biggest part of their continued stay in a virtual fantasy world is the "social aspect"? Why continue paying for a game you aren't even really playing anymore?
Do these friends you've made just not exist outside of the game? Or is it that these "friendships" are so tenuous that the game is the only thing that keeps you together?
Oh, don't mistake what I wrote - I play the game because it's fun. And that fun is enhanced by the social aspect.
To answer your questions, some of the friends that I made exist outside of the game, some of them, for obvious reasons, are in the game, or, more accurately, on the Internet, because we interact in the game, on some message boards and via Ventrilo.
I would not say that they are particularly tenuous. I still keep in contact with people who don't play Warcraft anymore and I count them as friends. And I've been fortunate enough to be able to visit some of the people that I've met from the game - when I have to travel to San Jose, I let everybody know and we all get together.
So, to cut this long post short, we are all friends who, like most people who are friends, were drawn together by a shared interest. And, as it turns out, most of us have other shared interests, too.
However (just to add a little more length to this post), I'm not between 15 and 35 years old, so maybe I don't fall into the typical WoW demographic.
I'm in a high end guild with a high end character. I don't care about the changes that Bliz made, it really doesn't matter to me. The greater part of the game for me is the social part of it, interacting with people who have come to be my friends over time. We've got members from all over the world and it's really a kick to just have fun.
Yeah, the gaming is obviously a draw, but, at least for me, and for most of the folks I play with, it's not the biggest part.
There has to be a car analogy somewhere around here...
I think, Bruce, that the difference in this case is that it's being tried in Germany, not the US. I suspect that Germany puts as much value on US precedence as the US puts in Germany's.
Still, it does appear to be a stretch.
Gene Cernan, in the mission summary:
"You know, it's kind of sad that in addition to all the other problems we'd have in going back to the Moon - like it's going to take twice as long as it did the first time (15 to 20 years versus 8) - I don't know that we have the mentality today to build upon what we did on Apollo. And it's sort of sad. Because if we went back again next week or next year or in another decade - which we probably won't, unfortunately, because it's going to be another generation - I don't know if we would have the mentality - I don't want to say 'guts' - to take the kind of risks we did when we did it the first time. Landing on the Moon was a risk. And I believe our inability to take risk today wouldn't allow us to do what we did when we did it. And that's a sad commentary; and I really feel strongly about that."
I was 7 years old when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. The astronauts were my heroes when I was growing up. Gene Cernan was right and it breaks my heart.
...users must register any electronics that use the frequency involved in Wi-Fi communications...
Extrapolating from the summary, does that include microwave ovens, too?
[cough][cough]DIPLOMA MILL[cough][cough]
Just because you don't know what MTBF means doesn't mean that it's a marketing ploy.
Completely not correct.
MTBF in this case is the amount of time that will pass before a drive fails, assuming that it is properly maintained and replaced as the end of its useful lifetime is reached. That failure number is the mean number of hours that pass before a failure occurs under those conditions. It doesn't mean that the drive will last for hundreds of years and it isn't a measure of how many drives were tested (although the number of drives tested does determine the accuracy of the statistic). It just means that if you use the drive properly, it should be a long time before one dies unexpectedly.
Now the real question is...what is the useful lifetime of the drive?
...those that understand what MTBF means and those that don't.
I remember plenty of poorly written textbooks, but I also remember that for each of those cases, the professor apologized for the book, said that it was the best that there was and proceeded to make up for the quality of the book with excellent instruction. I don't mean that the books were poorly formatted or needed pictures - I mean that they were poorly written and badly organized.
A lot of posters have made references to professors who were too engaged with their research to give any time to their students. I'll admit that maybe my school was an exception; Every single one of my engineering (as well as the physics) professors were more than willing to spend as much time out of class to make sure that everyone understood what they were teaching. Sure, they all had research projects, but they were professors first and researchers second. Or maybe professors and researchers in equal measure. All that I know is that if I needed help, it was pretty easy to see the professor.
Are all the problems just exercises in math? Probably - because engineering problems are defined by math. We model reality with math, make changes to those equations and then study the results to determine the effect of those changes. Math tells us why things work - you must understand why something works (or doesn't) before you get creative. Hand-on experience isn't like adding a little salt to the pot and see if it tastes good. Hands-on experience, creative experience comes with a mastery of the "why" something works. And, for good or bad, math is the "why".
As for grade inflation, it happens in engineering classes, too. Perhaps not as much as in other field; I can't say, though, because I'm an engineer, not a historian or economist, right? Just deal with it, be happy that you earned the grade that you earned and move on. Ten years on, your grades won't mean anything.
And regarding counseling, there were a few professors who were pretty bad at both educational and professional counseling, but the majority of the faculty did a great job. In fact, I started an internship after my sophomore year and now, 8 years later, I still work for the company. My adviser was very interested in the work that I was doing and gave me a lot of suggestions that were very helpful. Academically, she helped me craft a schedule that, although it added an extra semester to my four years, worked in a minor in math and physics.
I think that the biggest difference between other engineering schools and the school that I went to is that my school was relatively new (I think that mine was only the fifth graduating class) and the EE student body was small enough that undergrads could actually assist professors in research that would normally be done by grad students. I doubt that anyone has ever done a study on it, but I suspect that there aren't many schools that have more published papers with undergrad coauthors than mine.
But ultimately, I'd say this: if any EE or EE student thinks that what they're doing is boring, then find another career. Sure, the money as an engineer is good, but if you're not happy doing what you're doing, then get out while you're still young.
I used to have me@myself.com from mail.com (I guess they've morphed into something else). I thought that it would be cute. It was an utter waste of my bandwidth.
I used to host nospin.com. You wouldn't believe all of the bizarre crap that came in for Bill O'Reilly. I used to forward them on, but the sheer volume and, well, stupidity made me trash them instead.
Evolution versus creationism...not invading Iraq or dancing. I think that you forgot to read what I wrote.
I don't think that the whole evolution versus creationism business is as big a deal as you think. It's more a result of a minority of vocal activists attempting to hijack the system to fit their agenda. It gets a lot of media play because they make a lot of noise, but it's hardly a widespread attack on America's school systems.
Besides, the system does tend to be self correcting - a little bit of embarrassment goes a long way.
Pfft - My grandfather's Hallicrafters Sky Buddy radio is going strong after over 60 years...and it's still using the original tubes! It's pretty much only good for AM (my wife won't let me put up an antenna for short wave), but it doesn't sound too bad at all.
It makes me happy to see that there are just as many amateur psychiatrists on Slashdot as there are amateur lawyers. Maybe this will create a whole new category of "Ask Slashdot"!
Yeah! They're currpt! Enricgh the lawyers!