What's funny about Switzerland is that back when the EU was getting started everyone thought that any country that didn't join would be isolated by trade and immigration barriers.
But actually Switzerland managed to negotiate a deal with the EU where Swiss citizens can work in the EU without a work permit. The reverse is not the case though. And they managed to opt into the bits of the EU's trade rules they thought were in their interest.
So in a very real sense Switzerand is proof that you don't need to liberalise immigration or allow dubious multinational organisations to dicate policy to be an economic success.
You keep talking about a 'rural state' and 'small town America' and that makes me think that you're only looking for jobs in one place. But if I were in the US I'd find a job and move to where it was. In fact why stay in the US? I've worked in half a dozen countries actually and I can thoroughly recommend working abroad. Obviously if your catchment area for jobs is the whole world you have a much better chance of getting a good one.
Plus it opens things up socially too. If I went to bar with my friends/colleagues in the UK I'd spend all night talking just to them. If go to a bar in Asia or Europe I pretty much have to make an effort to talk to people. If you're just another engineer in your native country, women you meet in bars are not going to be too interested. But if you're obviously foreign they most certainly are.
Hell I'd never go back to the UK, even though I could probably get a very good job there now.
With all due respect, he could have nailed your hide to the wall in a theological discussion... Bwahahaha! The internet really is serious business to you, isn't it?
But people aren't paying for something they could get 'for free'. Windows is a very different thing to Linux. Go read The Old New Thing for why in detail. Raymond Chen describes a mindset - that new releases of the OS should support old software even if it is buggy, that software interfaces are contracts that should not be broken, and that software designers should make choices for their users rather that presenting them with a load of questions they cannot possibly answer. That's completely missing in the 'free software' world. I've installed Linux a couple of times, fiddled around for a couple of weeks until all the bits of my PC more or less work. But they never work as well as they did in Windows. Eventually I end up nuking it and reinstalling Windows because the Linux 'equivalent' of some Windows applications I use all the time is completely amateurish and user hostile.
And they are not paying very much. Suppose I buy a laptop for $1500. It comes with a copy of Windows which costs say $50 to the PC vendor (I read an article somewhere that estimated the cost of Windows to Dell was $50). But the PC vendor will install a load of trialware on it that I need to uninstall. My guess is that they get paid a kickback for doing that because a percentage of people will buy it at the end of the trial. So the effective cost of Windows is probably less. Under $50 every time I buy a new PC every three years is not a lot of money. Hell I'd pay a lot more to avoid the dreaded Linux fault threshold if I had to.
I always thought the three laws of robotics were kind of unbelievable. I think if you were smart enough to know how to apply them, you'd also be smart enough to weasel out of them.
You can see with humans. We have very strongly ingrained laws against theft for example, taught to us by our parents but large numbers of people can rationalize them away if they need to.
Now you could argue that if you designed an intelligent system you could stop this by programming them in. But probably when truly self aware machines are built they won't really be programmed by a human, they will be the result of some sort of evolutionary algorithm, or will be big chunks of thinking hardware that self organises as it 'grows up' like the human brain does. Or maybe they'll be based on some quantum system where decisions collapse out of a superposition of all the possibilities like Roger Penrose thinks.
Any of these possibilities seem far more likely than a team of engineers designing them from a specification like current computer. You can tell them the difference between right and wrong and convince them to behave well but they'll have all the weaselling skills we have when their interests are threatened. I think that sort of free will is essentially indispensable in anything which has human levels of consciousness.
Of course you could have a programmed hypervisor that supervised the rest of the machine. But the problem is that current programmed systems are far too primitive to be truly moral. Morality requires a mental model of other people, a sense of empathy in fact. And I think a system that could do that would be able to rationalize its own bad behaviour.
So it seems like you can either be conscious and have free and understand sin but be capable of it, or not conscious and completely incable of understanding it.
It's a bit like the theological argument that God accepts human sin as the price for human free will. Maybe Asimov should have read more theology.
I don't get it really. Microsoft's software is so pervasive and I've spent ages using Windows, writing Windows applications and drivers, even if I mostly do embedded code.
I've used lots of other OSs too, and I really don't see what's so bad about Microsoft. Even their aggressive businesses are quite useful since I know if I knock up quick Windows application with Visual C++ I can reach 90% of the market. You can do pretty much anything you want in userland with Win32 and in kernel mode with WDM. Basically their stuff works fine for me. I don't know why other technical people have such problems with it.
You are correct in that these features do not appear in any commercial version of OS/2. I did not claim that; only that Windows NT was based on the original OS/2 version 3.0 specification (more on that below!). Regardless: I may be incorrect, but...... IRPS was introduced in NT 3.51 as part of the new device driver model. Windows NT 3.1 (the original Windows NT) did NOT contain that feature)....
One of Microsoft's goals from the start I think was to get a 32 bit version of the 16 bit Windows API running on a 32 bit kernel with a VMS like IO system tweaked a bit to be SMP friendly and processor independent. Dos took over from CPM when the market moved from the Z80 to the x86 and CPM-86 was late and bad. I think Bill Gates was paranoid that Microsoft would be destroyed by a analagous move to Risc SMP.
The original main architecture was the i860 ( codenamed N Ten ). Apparently the internal codename was Windows NT.
Later the main architecture was x86 with secondary support for a bunch of Risc architectures. One of them, Alpha was kept alive internally to allow them to port to 64 bit.
No DPCs are another VMSism. They are a way to avoid spending too much time at a raised IRQL (another VMSism that is implemented in Vax hardware and emulated on x86 until the APIC supported it natively)
However, these are tiny details of the bigger picture. The main feature set: Threads, pre-emptive multitasking, priority-based scheduling, support for SMP, layered architecture, pluggable file systems, application level insulation (i.e. one application can't take everything down), paged memory management (page swapping instead of segment swapping) all originate from the original OS/2 v3.0 specification*).
Yeah, and that was based on the NT kernel. The difference was that the main userland API would use 32 bit version of OS/2 APIs to please IBM rather than Windows ones. If you read Showstopper by G Pascal Zachary there's a funny account of a meeting where an obnoxious Microsoft employee presented the new 32 bit main API for "OS/2 3.0" to IBM. To IBM's horror every single function was almost identical to Win16 with all the pointers extended to 32 bits, and totally different to OS/2. None of OS/2's function had equivalents. At that point the OS was still called OS/2 3.0. Somewhat latter it was renamed Windows NT, the same as the internal Microsoft codename. All of which is funny, it reminds me of a bad sci fi series where a shadowy bad guy turns out to be the main bad guy (who you thought was dead) in disguise.
NB! This is different from the actual commercial product "OS/2 version 3.0" , which is derived from the OS/2 2.x code base! Confusing, I know! The history behind this is as follows: IBM and Microsoft co-developed OS/2 1.x [16-bit operating system]. When it became time to migrate to 32-bit Microsoft claimed that it was difficult for them to travel between Seattle and Bocca Raton, Florida, where IBM labs resided. They convinced IBM to take upon themselves the implementation of the first, Intel-only, 32-bit version [which became OS/2 2.0 and base for later versions of OS/2], and to leave Microsoft to work on the next-gen portable OS/2 [which was to be some future 3.x version of OS/2]. However, Microsoft soon abandoned OS/2 and used the know-how and specifications for developing Windows NT.
You may be too young to remember, and possibly mis-informed. (The winne
They forecast that the share price would drop, which it did, and then they bought it cheap just like lots of other companies. Some people complained that about it but Gartner forecast they would have accidents unless they went to live on a desert island. And sure enough, those that didn't leave did have accidents. No one messes with Gartner now.
It reminds me of those insipid company newsletter I occasionally get emailed which are inept propaganda.
"We scored a design win in France"
Translation: The CEO spent a couple of weeks there eating good food and bumped into one of his school mates in a restaurant and pretended to do some work. Funny how they don't mention he picked a legal fight with another megacorp that caused the project I was working on with them to get cancelled. And it's not we you brainwashed drone.
"Competitor technology not picked in Nigeria"
Well great. I guess we paid a bigger bribe than them. If you subtract the bribe how much did we actually make.
"Project moneyburner a success"
Yeah, because we all worked unpaid overtime and the only customer was internal.
Old programs will still run on an in order design, they will just run slower.
And if a CPU can do instruction reordering on the fly in hardware it shouldn't be too hard to do it at compile time. Of course the resulting binary would only be optimised for one microarchitecture - e.g. for POWER6 but it would still run on the POWER7, just in an optimised way.
Actually the whole article is utter bollocks. They talk about 5 billion instructions per second. But
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER6
Each core has two integer units, two binary floating-point units, and a decimal floating-point unit, and is capable of two way SMT. The binary floating-point unit incorporates âoemany microarchitectures, logic, circuit, latch and integration techniques to achieve [a] 6-cycle, 13-FO4 pipeline,â according to a company paper.[6] Unlike the servers from IBM's competitors, the POWER6 has hardware support for decimal arithmetic and will include the first decimal floating-point unit integrated in silicon. More than 50 new floating point instructions handle the decimal math and conversions between binary and decimal.[7] This is a feature being added to the processors powering IBM's System z.[8] So it has a 5Ghz clock rate but can actually manage a bit more than 5 Bips peak. But
A notable difference from POWER5 is that IBM moved from an out-of-order design to an in-order design, a drastic change which should require software recompilation for top performance. However, the processor still achieves significant performance improvements even with unmodified software, according to the lead engineer on the POWER6 project.[2] Hmmph. I'd bet it's got a really long pipeline to reach that clock speed.
The POWER6 has approximately 790 million transistors and 341 mm large fabricated on an 65 nm process. It was released on the 8th June 2007, at speeds of 3.5 GHz, 4.2 GHz and 4.7 GHz[2], but the company has noted prototypes have reached 6 GHz.[3] POWER6 reached first silicon in the middle of 2005[4]. Wow it's huge, almost twice the size of a Core 2 Duo.
I think IBM is doing taking the NetBurst approach - a long pipeline to get to high frequencies. Plus it's a server chip only used in their servers so they can design for a much higher TDP than Intel or AMD and rely on water cooling.
I think this guy is spot on http://aceshardware.freeforums.org/praising-the-power-6-design-t426.html
Later this year Intel will release the 65 nm bulk CMOS Tukwila and it will likely easily outperform the 65 nm SOI CMOS Power6 on the benchmarks of most interest to buyers of business critical servers despite running at less than half its clock frequency and having less than half its socket level bandwidth. IBM might have created a better product and closer competitor to Tukwila better if Power6 had been a quad design based on a Power5 core worked over to improve performance/power but then its wouldn't have the mega- giga for headlines in the WSJ and given IBM Micro a measure of bragging rights to help justify its continued existence.;-)
Actually the other obnoxious BAE story I heard from the same person was that they had a company wide meeting in the Gulf War one of the speakers said something like "on the upside we're bound to get n new orders for Tornados", n being number shot down so far by the Iraqis.
I feel the same way about my local pizza place. They offered a deal where you got as much salad as you could eat for $20 per year. I'd skip lunch and breakfast and go there every day and wolf down 5 kilos from the salad bar. It got really popular - the only people that went in there would do the same. Never order Pizza, just the salad bar. Saved me a fortune.
Sometimes people would come in and complain that there was no salad to go with their $20 pizza. We'd tell them to complain to the manager. He'd complain to us, and we'd tell him he sold us the cards, better buy more salad. He tried to make us use smaller plates but we'd just chow down like pigs, noses in the salad bar. Then he tried to put nose guards around the bar but we broke them down.
Then suddenly the Pizza place closed and the new owners stopped offeing the all the salad you can eat for $20 per year. Now it's full of families who spend $20 each on pizza each visit. Shame really.
I had a friend who had a summer job at BAE. One of the other students spilled some solvent on the wing of one of the military aircraft they were building. His boss yelled at him and told him he'd destroyed something worth millions of pounds but he kept working there. He didn't hear anything about the problem for months. Then he asked his boss and was told the there were a lot of discussions and eventually BAE managed to get the government to pay way more than the cost of the damage, so they were actually quite grateful to him.
Don't try to use government procurement as a model for the Internet, it's full of things like this.
Instead let the ISPs decide. Some will buy vast amounts of upstream bandwidth so that everyone has dedicated bandwidth to the outside world. They can sell this at a very high price to network neutrality advocates.
Some will sell vastly contended network access cheaply to the clueless.
And hopefully some will have a moderate amount of upstream bandwidth and use QOS or throttling so that I can be sure my web pages load quickly and youtube videos play smoothly even if large downloads run a bit slower during peak usage.
Why not just slipstream them? You usually want to put in a extra SP too, so you might as well put in the mass storage drivers too.
In fact mass storage drivers is a bit of mismomer. I think most of the time theproblem is that the Bios on a new machine puts the SATA controller in AHCI mode instead of of legacy compatible mode. XP doesn't include AHCI drivers.
So it's sort of handy to put the Intel MaAHCI drivers on your slipstreamed XP+SP2 CD. I know it works on boards with an Intel SATA countroller in AHCI mode which must be quite a common case. You could add other ones as you find them.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually France is on message now with Sarkozy in charge so probably not.
I believe they are available in kit form from Ikea in Teheran.
tl;dr. An hero now!
That just shows you live in a fascist state with cheesewire controls. Here we are allowed to carry cheesewire for self defense.
Hey I resent that. I'm one of your Foes. Damn proud of it too.
http://slashdot.org/~calebt3/foes/
I'm going to post this wikipedia article to try to make up for the karma hit for everything else I post on this topic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nunavut
I believe the phrase is "Do it, faggot"
Pic, related
What's funny about Switzerland is that back when the EU was getting started everyone thought that any country that didn't join would be isolated by trade and immigration barriers.
But actually Switzerland managed to negotiate a deal with the EU where Swiss citizens can work in the EU without a work permit. The reverse is not the case though. And they managed to opt into the bits of the EU's trade rules they thought were in their interest.
So in a very real sense Switzerand is proof that you don't need to liberalise immigration or allow dubious multinational organisations to dicate policy to be an economic success.
You keep talking about a 'rural state' and 'small town America' and that makes me think that you're only looking for jobs in one place. But if I were in the US I'd find a job and move to where it was. In fact why stay in the US? I've worked in half a dozen countries actually and I can thoroughly recommend working abroad. Obviously if your catchment area for jobs is the whole world you have a much better chance of getting a good one.
Plus it opens things up socially too. If I went to bar with my friends/colleagues in the UK I'd spend all night talking just to them. If go to a bar in Asia or Europe I pretty much have to make an effort to talk to people. If you're just another engineer in your native country, women you meet in bars are not going to be too interested. But if you're obviously foreign they most certainly are.
Hell I'd never go back to the UK, even though I could probably get a very good job there now.
What about Kibbutz?
But people aren't paying for something they could get 'for free'. Windows is a very different thing to Linux. Go read The Old New Thing for why in detail. Raymond Chen describes a mindset - that new releases of the OS should support old software even if it is buggy, that software interfaces are contracts that should not be broken, and that software designers should make choices for their users rather that presenting them with a load of questions they cannot possibly answer. That's completely missing in the 'free software' world. I've installed Linux a couple of times, fiddled around for a couple of weeks until all the bits of my PC more or less work. But they never work as well as they did in Windows. Eventually I end up nuking it and reinstalling Windows because the Linux 'equivalent' of some Windows applications I use all the time is completely amateurish and user hostile.
And they are not paying very much. Suppose I buy a laptop for $1500. It comes with a copy of Windows which costs say $50 to the PC vendor (I read an article somewhere that estimated the cost of Windows to Dell was $50). But the PC vendor will install a load of trialware on it that I need to uninstall. My guess is that they get paid a kickback for doing that because a percentage of people will buy it at the end of the trial. So the effective cost of Windows is probably less. Under $50 every time I buy a new PC every three years is not a lot of money. Hell I'd pay a lot more to avoid the dreaded Linux fault threshold if I had to.
I always thought the three laws of robotics were kind of unbelievable. I think if you were smart enough to know how to apply them, you'd also be smart enough to weasel out of them.
You can see with humans. We have very strongly ingrained laws against theft for example, taught to us by our parents but large numbers of people can rationalize them away if they need to.
Now you could argue that if you designed an intelligent system you could stop this by programming them in. But probably when truly self aware machines are built they won't really be programmed by a human, they will be the result of some sort of evolutionary algorithm, or will be big chunks of thinking hardware that self organises as it 'grows up' like the human brain does. Or maybe they'll be based on some quantum system where decisions collapse out of a superposition of all the possibilities like Roger Penrose thinks.
Any of these possibilities seem far more likely than a team of engineers designing them from a specification like current computer. You can tell them the difference between right and wrong and convince them to behave well but they'll have all the weaselling skills we have when their interests are threatened. I think that sort of free will is essentially indispensable in anything which has human levels of consciousness.
Of course you could have a programmed hypervisor that supervised the rest of the machine. But the problem is that current programmed systems are far too primitive to be truly moral. Morality requires a mental model of other people, a sense of empathy in fact. And I think a system that could do that would be able to rationalize its own bad behaviour.
So it seems like you can either be conscious and have free and understand sin but be capable of it, or not conscious and completely incable of understanding it.
It's a bit like the theological argument that God accepts human sin as the price for human free will. Maybe Asimov should have read more theology.
I don't get it really. Microsoft's software is so pervasive and I've spent ages using Windows, writing Windows applications and drivers, even if I mostly do embedded code.
I've used lots of other OSs too, and I really don't see what's so bad about Microsoft. Even their aggressive businesses are quite useful since I know if I knock up quick Windows application with Visual C++ I can reach 90% of the market. You can do pretty much anything you want in userland with Win32 and in kernel mode with WDM. Basically their stuff works fine for me. I don't know why other technical people have such problems with it.
You are correct in that these features do not appear in any commercial version of OS/2. I did not claim that; only that Windows NT was based on the original OS/2 version 3.0 specification (more on that below!). ... ... IRPS was introduced in NT 3.51 as part of the new device driver model. Windows NT 3.1 (the original Windows NT) did NOT contain that feature). ...
Regardless: I may be incorrect, but
Yes it did. And so did VMS.
http://windowsitpro.com/Windows/Articles/ArticleID/4494/pg/2/2.html
One of Microsoft's goals from the start I think was to get a 32 bit version of the 16 bit Windows API running on a 32 bit kernel with a VMS like IO system tweaked a bit to be SMP friendly and processor independent. Dos took over from CPM when the market moved from the Z80 to the x86 and CPM-86 was late and bad. I think Bill Gates was paranoid that Microsoft would be destroyed by a analagous move to Risc SMP.
The original main architecture was the i860 ( codenamed N Ten ). Apparently the internal codename was Windows NT.
Later the main architecture was x86 with secondary support for a bunch of Risc architectures. One of them, Alpha was kept alive internally to allow them to port to 64 bit.
Deferred Procedure Calls (DPCs) is part if Windows Driver Model (WDM) which was fully implemented only in Windows 2000 (see http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc264476.aspx).
No DPCs are another VMSism. They are a way to avoid spending too much time at a raised IRQL (another VMSism that is implemented in Vax hardware and emulated on x86 until the APIC supported it natively)
However, these are tiny details of the bigger picture. The main feature set: Threads, pre-emptive multitasking, priority-based scheduling, support for SMP, layered architecture, pluggable file systems, application level insulation (i.e. one application can't take everything down), paged memory management (page swapping instead of segment swapping) all originate from the original OS/2 v3.0 specification*).
Yeah, and that was based on the NT kernel. The difference was that the main userland API would use 32 bit version of OS/2 APIs to please IBM rather than Windows ones. If you read Showstopper by G Pascal Zachary there's a funny account of a meeting where an obnoxious Microsoft employee presented the new 32 bit main API for "OS/2 3.0" to IBM. To IBM's horror every single function was almost identical to Win16 with all the pointers extended to 32 bits, and totally different to OS/2. None of OS/2's function had equivalents. At that point the OS was still called OS/2 3.0. Somewhat latter it was renamed Windows NT, the same as the internal Microsoft codename. All of which is funny, it reminds me of a bad sci fi series where a shadowy bad guy turns out to be the main bad guy (who you thought was dead) in disguise.
NB! This is different from the actual commercial product "OS/2 version 3.0" , which is derived from the OS/2 2.x code base! Confusing, I know!
The history behind this is as follows: IBM and Microsoft co-developed OS/2 1.x [16-bit operating system]. When it became time to migrate to 32-bit Microsoft claimed that it was difficult for them to travel between Seattle and Bocca Raton, Florida, where IBM labs resided. They convinced IBM to take upon themselves the implementation of the first, Intel-only, 32-bit version [which became OS/2 2.0 and base for later versions of OS/2], and to leave Microsoft to work on the next-gen portable OS/2 [which was to be some future 3.x version of OS/2]. However, Microsoft soon abandoned OS/2 and used the know-how and specifications for developing Windows NT.
You may be too young to remember, and possibly mis-informed. (The winne
The NT Kernel is nothing like the OS/2 kernel. IRPS, DPC and IRQL are central to NT and don't exist in OS/2.
They forecast that the share price would drop, which it did, and then they bought it cheap just like lots of other companies. Some people complained that about it but Gartner forecast they would have accidents unless they went to live on a desert island. And sure enough, those that didn't leave did have accidents. No one messes with Gartner now.
Why does slashdot keep running these stories?
It reminds me of those insipid company newsletter I occasionally get emailed which are inept propaganda.
"We scored a design win in France"
Translation: The CEO spent a couple of weeks there eating good food and bumped into one of his school mates in a restaurant and pretended to do some work. Funny how they don't mention he picked a legal fight with another megacorp that caused the project I was working on with them to get cancelled. And it's not we you brainwashed drone.
"Competitor technology not picked in Nigeria"
Well great. I guess we paid a bigger bribe than them. If you subtract the bribe how much did we actually make.
"Project moneyburner a success"
Yeah, because we all worked unpaid overtime and the only customer was internal.
I love that column
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33930
It pretty much invented the extreme advertising meme.
Old programs will still run on an in order design, they will just run slower.
And if a CPU can do instruction reordering on the fly in hardware it shouldn't be too hard to do it at compile time. Of course the resulting binary would only be optimised for one microarchitecture - e.g. for POWER6 but it would still run on the POWER7, just in an optimised way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER6 Each core has two integer units, two binary floating-point units, and a decimal floating-point unit, and is capable of two way SMT. The binary floating-point unit incorporates âoemany microarchitectures, logic, circuit, latch and integration techniques to achieve [a] 6-cycle, 13-FO4 pipeline,â according to a company paper.[6] Unlike the servers from IBM's competitors, the POWER6 has hardware support for decimal arithmetic and will include the first decimal floating-point unit integrated in silicon. More than 50 new floating point instructions handle the decimal math and conversions between binary and decimal.[7] This is a feature being added to the processors powering IBM's System z.[8] So it has a 5Ghz clock rate but can actually manage a bit more than 5 Bips peak. But A notable difference from POWER5 is that IBM moved from an out-of-order design to an in-order design, a drastic change which should require software recompilation for top performance. However, the processor still achieves significant performance improvements even with unmodified software, according to the lead engineer on the POWER6 project.[2] Hmmph. I'd bet it's got a really long pipeline to reach that clock speed. The POWER6 has approximately 790 million transistors and 341 mm large fabricated on an 65 nm process. It was released on the 8th June 2007, at speeds of 3.5 GHz, 4.2 GHz and 4.7 GHz[2], but the company has noted prototypes have reached 6 GHz.[3] POWER6 reached first silicon in the middle of 2005[4]. Wow it's huge, almost twice the size of a Core 2 Duo.
I think IBM is doing taking the NetBurst approach - a long pipeline to get to high frequencies. Plus it's a server chip only used in their servers so they can design for a much higher TDP than Intel or AMD and rely on water cooling.
I think this guy is spot on
http://aceshardware.freeforums.org/praising-the-power-6-design-t426.html Later this year Intel will release the 65 nm bulk CMOS Tukwila and
it will likely easily outperform the 65 nm SOI CMOS Power6 on the
benchmarks of most interest to buyers of business critical servers
despite running at less than half its clock frequency and having
less than half its socket level bandwidth. IBM might have created
a better product and closer competitor to Tukwila better if Power6
had been a quad design based on a Power5 core worked over to
improve performance/power but then its wouldn't have the mega-
giga for headlines in the WSJ and given IBM Micro a measure of
bragging rights to help justify its continued existence.
Actually the other obnoxious BAE story I heard from the same person was that they had a company wide meeting in the Gulf War one of the speakers said something like "on the upside we're bound to get n new orders for Tornados", n being number shot down so far by the Iraqis.
I feel the same way about my local pizza place. They offered a deal where you got as much salad as you could eat for $20 per year. I'd skip lunch and breakfast and go there every day and wolf down 5 kilos from the salad bar. It got really popular - the only people that went in there would do the same. Never order Pizza, just the salad bar. Saved me a fortune.
Sometimes people would come in and complain that there was no salad to go with their $20 pizza. We'd tell them to complain to the manager. He'd complain to us, and we'd tell him he sold us the cards, better buy more salad. He tried to make us use smaller plates but we'd just chow down like pigs, noses in the salad bar. Then he tried to put nose guards around the bar but we broke them down.
Then suddenly the Pizza place closed and the new owners stopped offeing the all the salad you can eat for $20 per year. Now it's full of families who spend $20 each on pizza each visit. Shame really.
Most of those projects were vast cost overruns.
I had a friend who had a summer job at BAE. One of the other students spilled some solvent on the wing of one of the military aircraft they were building. His boss yelled at him and told him he'd destroyed something worth millions of pounds but he kept working there. He didn't hear anything about the problem for months. Then he asked his boss and was told the there were a lot of discussions and eventually BAE managed to get the government to pay way more than the cost of the damage, so they were actually quite grateful to him.
Don't try to use government procurement as a model for the Internet, it's full of things like this.
Instead let the ISPs decide. Some will buy vast amounts of upstream bandwidth so that everyone has dedicated bandwidth to the outside world. They can sell this at a very high price to network neutrality advocates.
Some will sell vastly contended network access cheaply to the clueless.
And hopefully some will have a moderate amount of upstream bandwidth and use QOS or throttling so that I can be sure my web pages load quickly and youtube videos play smoothly even if large downloads run a bit slower during peak usage.
Why not just slipstream them? You usually want to put in a extra SP too, so you might as well put in the mass storage drivers too.
In fact mass storage drivers is a bit of mismomer. I think most of the time theproblem is that the Bios on a new machine puts the SATA controller in AHCI mode instead of of legacy compatible mode. XP doesn't include AHCI drivers.
So it's sort of handy to put the Intel MaAHCI drivers on your slipstreamed XP+SP2 CD. I know it works on boards with an Intel SATA countroller in AHCI mode which must be quite a common case. You could add other ones as you find them.