How do you reconcile these two statements? What bothers me about the old "90 days" saw is that you don't see an acknowledgment that 90 days was pretty much the guaranteed operational window. People act like day 91 was a precious miracle wrought by god-like engineers. 5 years - that's pretty kick ass and speaks to really well built and designed hardware.
Saying they were "designed to work for 3 months" confuses the idea of an engineering design lifetime and what most people would understand to be a statistically probable lifetime. I think you risk cheapening what they accomplished, when every single rover starts lasting two to twenty times longer than 90 days.
The secret to exceeding expectations is to set them very low. In this case, they built rovers that might last several years, then slapped a "90 day warranty" sticker on them.
The OLPC paved the way for cheap netbooks no question. But if you've ever had an OLPC in your hands, it has a great feel that you're not going to match with any of the netbooks out there. The form factor and construction are pretty great. I'd like to see more hardware platforms with that kind of durable feel designed into them - this is a laptop you could leave on the floorboard of your car, or hand to young children and let them use it in the yard unsupervised.
I have a domain hosted at home with dyndns, and I used to run my own mailserver. One night I got a phishing email for Chase and I forwarded it to "abuse@chase.com". The next web page I requested was redirected to an obnoxious screen informing me that my computer was infected. Wide open west blacklisted my cable modem's MAC address, and after talking to their front line tech for two hours, I wound up switching to a spare cable modem to get back online. Secondary tech wouldn't even discuss it - "Tell him he's infected and get off the call". He couldn't even get my modem off the blacklist.
I hate to actually read the article and then post, but the article makes it clear that the VIA Nano uses less power to perform the benchmark tests than the Intel chip, by taking slightly more power and finishing much faster. Running with 10% less wattage and taking 30% longer to complete is no savings.
[QUOTE] For our MP3 encoding test, the VIA Nano processor used a total of 37,323 watt-seconds (Joules) of energy while the Intel Atom processor used 38,290 watt-seconds (Joules) of energy. [/QUOTE]
Good luck. I spent way too much of my life - years - supporting javascript in IE3 until it got down to 5%. I swore I would never forgive MS for foisting that on me.
[quote] the arrival of Microsoft's Internet Explorer in the same year brought stiff competition [/quote]
There was no competition involved, Internet Explorer 3.0 came preinstalled with Windows 95. When you're online at 14.4 and you've already got a browser, downloading Netscape is a hard sell. There was no way Netscape could overcome that regardless of technological merit. IE3.0 festered with huge market share and really, really painful layout problems for years because it came preinstalled on Windows 95, and the general public wouldn't download a new browser, even to get the latest internet explorer. It was after 2000 before the market share for ie3 got small enough that we didn't need to support it.
I understand your point, and I'm sure the judge sees it that way. I would counter that one gives away delivery and the other "gives away" a physical store, that the physical store is the more expensive of the two.
What I think is interesting though, is that the seller in the brick-and-morter store is also offering free shipping. He has taken the books from the wholesaler to his warehouse, broken up the pallets and delivered them to his stores, and kept his stores warm and well lit, at no additional cost to the buyer above the price of the book. In other words the MSRP of the book includes enough profit to completely cover the cost of his distribution channel.
When Amazon ships the book from a central warehouse to the buyer direct, that end-to-end channel probably has a lower cost than the distribution cost the physical store is "giving away".
The usual arguments for brevity don't apply here - are you worried about the "book" getting too "thick"?
They've started something - a compendium of knowledge - and they're preventing it from growing because they want it to fit a publishing model that no longer applies. Why limit yourself?
Yes, I'm an idiot. The article is specifically about a British law. I'm under the impression that they can coerce keys from you in the US as well though.
I came to say this. Funny enough I was thinking about this the other day. A decryption key might be the only incriminating secret that the 5th amendment doesn't protect you from having to reveal. I'd like very much for this to get in front of the supreme court. Um, not the current court maybe. Lets hang on a few years until the tone of the current court changes. I'd hate to see the 5th amendment be struck down as "inconvenient to law enforcement. 9/11."
[quote] several people picked #3 and #4, arguing some version of "People under 18 have less developed judgment." (I still say that doesn't matter, because you're talking about comparing a person under 18 who smokes, with a person over 18 who smokes, and their judgment in both cases is the same, etc.) [/quote]
You seem to be saying "An adult who chooses to smoke has the same poor judgment as a youth who choose to smoke", that is, choosing to smoke is proof of poor judgment in an adult. However, poor judgment in this context means an inability to make rational choices rather than a history of bad choices. You and I might believe smoking is a bad decision, but choosing to smoke is not defacto proof of inability to make rational choices.
Most people would say that a youth has, on average, less ability to weigh the long-term implications of their choices than an adult. An adult has presumably weighed the costs and benefits of smoking and made a decision, a youth lacks the ability to weigh the costs and benefits rationally.
I got hosed last week forwarding a phishing email. I got a fake chase bank email - I've been getting them a lot lately - and I forwarded it to abuse@chase.com, like I always do. The next link I click gets hijacked and I'm looking at a WoW page that says my network has been disabled because I have a virus that's sending out phishing emails.
45 minutes later I finally convince the guy that I'm pretty sure my ubuntu box is not infected. Apparently they locked out my connection by dropping a new bin file onto my cable modem that locks out mail service - "noemail.bin". So then we spend 20 minutes trying to get the bin file updated on my cable modem, which is apparently now not accepting updates. The guy asks sheepishly "Any chance you have another cable modem lying around?" Which, strangely, I do, so we get service back up on that modem.
And I say "you really shouldn't cripple people's hardware when they forward phishing emails", and he says, "why don't you try forwarding it again, I really can't believe that was it".
Unfortunately I was all out of cable modems, so I declined.
Not only could the guy not tell me about the rule that tripped the block, he couldn't get anyone to even talk to him about it. His upstream guy told him "just say it's a virus" and hung up on him. And he had no mechanism to open a trouble ticket either, although he told me he'd mention it to his supervisor.
If we think in terms of the link module being an abstraction layer, and we write drivers against this abstraction layer, then the driver is essentially a data file that the interpreter parses in order to operate the video. this kind of abstraction allows a kind of "write once" driver to work across many systems.
I would argue that the ndiswrapper module is already this kind of abstraction layer, to the extent that ndis is a driver standard for network. maybe video performance requirements mean we're still running so close to the hardware that this isn't practical, but if we could support a wrapper type interface for video we would gain support for many new and future hardware devices.
I've been a fedora core user for some time and I decided to try Ubuntu on a recently donated dell 933. I have been pleased with the ease of setup and install and the intuitive package tools so far. Most amazing to me was that my old MA101 USB wireless adapter "Just Worked(tm)". No ndiswrapper install, no kernel stack size recompile, no headache. I was just on the network. Amazing. Core seems to go out of it's way to make ndiswrapper hard to use. I may switch all my boxes to Ubuntu.
Much better to have them see the full spectrum of OSs. It would be a disservice if they only saw windows, which they probably already use everywhere else.
You nailed it. I would hope Google and Yahoo and Amazon would go immediately to active blocking rather then blowing off Bell South and letting them degrade service. If they let this slide, even without paying, then the people who DO pay will perform better and the arms race begins. If they block all access from Bell South nets, customers will leave BS in droves. They can nip this in the bud if they are proactive.
Your comment got rated funny, but this is no joke. Do you think bell south is going to offer service FASTER THEN THEY ALREADY OFFER if you pay up? Of course not - the shipping metaphor he keeps using breaks down. They aren't offering ground VS air service here. What he is doing is threatening to degrade service if you don't pay.
Slashdot Mirror
they went for a 2-3x underestimation.
...
This is all borrowed time, and very unexpected.
How do you reconcile these two statements? What bothers me about the old "90 days" saw is that you don't see an acknowledgment that 90 days was pretty much the guaranteed operational window. People act like day 91 was a precious miracle wrought by god-like engineers. 5 years - that's pretty kick ass and speaks to really well built and designed hardware.
Saying they were "designed to work for 3 months" confuses the idea of an engineering design lifetime and what most people would understand to be a statistically probable lifetime. I think you risk cheapening what they accomplished, when every single rover starts lasting two to twenty times longer than 90 days.
... did they overship Linux pcs by a ratio of 6:4?
The secret to exceeding expectations is to set them very low. In this case, they built rovers that might last several years, then slapped a "90 day warranty" sticker on them.
The OLPC paved the way for cheap netbooks no question. But if you've ever had an OLPC in your hands, it has a great feel that you're not going to match with any of the netbooks out there. The form factor and construction are pretty great. I'd like to see more hardware platforms with that kind of durable feel designed into them - this is a laptop you could leave on the floorboard of your car, or hand to young children and let them use it in the yard unsupervised.
I have a domain hosted at home with dyndns, and I used to run my own mailserver. One night I got a phishing email for Chase and I forwarded it to "abuse@chase.com". The next web page I requested was redirected to an obnoxious screen informing me that my computer was infected. Wide open west blacklisted my cable modem's MAC address, and after talking to their front line tech for two hours, I wound up switching to a spare cable modem to get back online. Secondary tech wouldn't even discuss it - "Tell him he's infected and get off the call". He couldn't even get my modem off the blacklist.
If you're pissed off, then do something. And don't confuse posting a rant on /. with doing something.
If your senator and representative don't know you by name, you're not trying hard enough.
I hate to actually read the article and then post, but the article makes it clear that the VIA Nano uses less power to perform the benchmark tests than the Intel chip, by taking slightly more power and finishing much faster. Running with 10% less wattage and taking 30% longer to complete is no savings.
[QUOTE]
For our MP3 encoding test, the VIA Nano processor used a total of 37,323 watt-seconds (Joules) of energy while the Intel Atom processor used 38,290 watt-seconds (Joules) of energy.
[/QUOTE]
Good luck. I spent way too much of my life - years - supporting javascript in IE3 until it got down to 5%. I swore I would never forgive MS for foisting that on me.
[quote]
the arrival of Microsoft's Internet Explorer in the same year brought stiff competition
[/quote]
There was no competition involved, Internet Explorer 3.0 came preinstalled with Windows 95. When you're online at 14.4 and you've already got a browser, downloading Netscape is a hard sell. There was no way Netscape could overcome that regardless of technological merit. IE3.0 festered with huge market share and really, really painful layout problems for years because it came preinstalled on Windows 95, and the general public wouldn't download a new browser, even to get the latest internet explorer. It was after 2000 before the market share for ie3 got small enough that we didn't need to support it.
I understand your point, and I'm sure the judge sees it that way. I would counter that one gives away delivery and the other "gives away" a physical store, that the physical store is the more expensive of the two.
What I think is interesting though, is that the seller in the brick-and-morter store is also offering free shipping. He has taken the books from the wholesaler to his warehouse, broken up the pallets and delivered them to his stores, and kept his stores warm and well lit, at no additional cost to the buyer above the price of the book. In other words the MSRP of the book includes enough profit to completely cover the cost of his distribution channel.
When Amazon ships the book from a central warehouse to the buyer direct, that end-to-end channel probably has a lower cost than the distribution cost the physical store is "giving away".
The usual arguments for brevity don't apply here - are you worried about the "book" getting too "thick"?
They've started something - a compendium of knowledge - and they're preventing it from growing because they want it to fit a publishing model that no longer applies. Why limit yourself?
This just in from Barber Magazine: You Need A Haircut!
Yes, I'm an idiot. The article is specifically about a British law. I'm under the impression that they can coerce keys from you in the US as well though.
I came to say this. Funny enough I was thinking about this the other day. A decryption key might be the only incriminating secret that the 5th amendment doesn't protect you from having to reveal. I'd like very much for this to get in front of the supreme court. Um, not the current court maybe. Lets hang on a few years until the tone of the current court changes. I'd hate to see the 5th amendment be struck down as "inconvenient to law enforcement. 9/11."
http://xkcd.com/221/
[quote]
several people picked #3 and #4, arguing some version of "People under 18 have less developed judgment." (I still say that doesn't matter, because you're talking about comparing a person under 18 who smokes, with a person over 18 who smokes, and their judgment in both cases is the same, etc.)
[/quote]
You seem to be saying "An adult who chooses to smoke has the same poor judgment as a youth who choose to smoke", that is, choosing to smoke is proof of poor judgment in an adult. However, poor judgment in this context means an inability to make rational choices rather than a history of bad choices. You and I might believe smoking is a bad decision, but choosing to smoke is not defacto proof of inability to make rational choices.
Most people would say that a youth has, on average, less ability to weigh the long-term implications of their choices than an adult. An adult has presumably weighed the costs and benefits of smoking and made a decision, a youth lacks the ability to weigh the costs and benefits rationally.
I got hosed last week forwarding a phishing email. I got a fake chase bank email - I've been getting them a lot lately - and I forwarded it to abuse@chase.com, like I always do. The next link I click gets hijacked and I'm looking at a WoW page that says my network has been disabled because I have a virus that's sending out phishing emails.
45 minutes later I finally convince the guy that I'm pretty sure my ubuntu box is not infected. Apparently they locked out my connection by dropping a new bin file onto my cable modem that locks out mail service - "noemail.bin". So then we spend 20 minutes trying to get the bin file updated on my cable modem, which is apparently now not accepting updates. The guy asks sheepishly "Any chance you have another cable modem lying around?" Which, strangely, I do, so we get service back up on that modem.
And I say "you really shouldn't cripple people's hardware when they forward phishing emails", and he says, "why don't you try forwarding it again, I really can't believe that was it".
Unfortunately I was all out of cable modems, so I declined.
Not only could the guy not tell me about the rule that tripped the block, he couldn't get anyone to even talk to him about it. His upstream guy told him "just say it's a virus" and hung up on him. And he had no mechanism to open a trouble ticket either, although he told me he'd mention it to his supervisor.
If we think in terms of the link module being an abstraction layer, and we write drivers against this abstraction layer, then the driver is essentially a data file that the interpreter parses in order to operate the video. this kind of abstraction allows a kind of "write once" driver to work across many systems.
I would argue that the ndiswrapper module is already this kind of abstraction layer, to the extent that ndis is a driver standard for network. maybe video performance requirements mean we're still running so close to the hardware that this isn't practical, but if we could support a wrapper type interface for video we would gain support for many new and future hardware devices.
I've been a fedora core user for some time and I decided to try Ubuntu on a recently donated dell 933. I have been pleased with the ease of setup and install and the intuitive package tools so far. Most amazing to me was that my old MA101 USB wireless adapter "Just Worked(tm)". No ndiswrapper install, no kernel stack size recompile, no headache. I was just on the network. Amazing. Core seems to go out of it's way to make ndiswrapper hard to use. I may switch all my boxes to Ubuntu.
Much better to have them see the full spectrum of OSs. It would be a disservice if they only saw windows, which they probably already use everywhere else.
Do they get to wear brown shirts too?
You nailed it. I would hope Google and Yahoo and Amazon would go immediately to active blocking rather then blowing off Bell South and letting them degrade service. If they let this slide, even without paying, then the people who DO pay will perform better and the arms race begins. If they block all access from Bell South nets, customers will leave BS in droves. They can nip this in the bud if they are proactive.
Your comment got rated funny, but this is no joke. Do you think bell south is going to offer service FASTER THEN THEY ALREADY OFFER if you pay up? Of course not - the shipping metaphor he keeps using breaks down. They aren't offering ground VS air service here. What he is doing is threatening to degrade service if you don't pay.
That's not pay for performance, it's blackmail.
Now that they've innovated IE into the core of Windows I don't see how they can replace it with another browser.
Integrating IE tightly into Windows wasn't just a way to flout the antitrust rulings, it was a Really Good Idea (tm).