there is only one 100% solution: redunand computing centers in a different solar system. You can get close though if you redunand center is on a different continent.
I've paid $35 - $70 for used, 10+ year old IBM M type keyboards. At my local best buy they will sell me a $10 keyboard. They also have other keyboards for more, including up to $70. I takes at most 5 seconds on any of those to conclue I don't want one in my house.
So whatever you think is best, try it out before you buy. With the cheap keyboards typeing is a pain. With the good ones I can't wait to get back to typing.
Re:As a designer of Rambus stuff ....
on
Fortune on Rambus
·
· Score: 2
What the article didn't point out was that each of these ideas were already in RamBus's designs
Perhaps, but you have one year from the time a designe is publicly demonstrated (See a lawyer if you want an exact definition of this) to file for a patent. That is in the US, in most other countries, if it isn't patented when you demonstrate it then you can't patent it.
Well, Most ofthe farmers I know are independant "I can make it on my own" type of people. They hate the thought of taking substidies. However there are bad apples in every bunch. It only takes one farmer to take the goverment aid, and because of what that does to situation (which isn't what you would think without knowing advanced ecconomics and accounting for not all these farmers having done so) they are forced to take those same themselves.
Getting rid of goverment aid would change the situation again, and how isn't exactly clear. Some things have changed since grandpa ran the farm without goverment intervention.
Yep. I chagned, first to voicestream (Accually I had Verizion for a while but didn't like their service) for my phone service. Since I can't afford cell prices for my comptuer I eventially moved. Around Minneapolis there are three local monopoly phone companies that I know of. (Qwest, TDS, and sprint/united) There are also cable and satalite for computers, and wireless is coming. I'm sure not everyone has the latter option, but if you look you could be surprized.
Agreed, but it cuts both ways. get someone who can barely read interested in books and before you know it they will be reading.
These kids are probably too young, but most 13 year old girls I know could quickly get into plundered hearts, and that is motivation to learn to read. there are other adventures good for young boys. (Despite efforts to rid the world of them, sterotypes still seem to hold)
Remember, if you make it interesting they will learn what they need to become good. If you make it boring they will learn to avoid computers. Most inner city kids are smart enough that they could know a lot more then they do if they would apply themselves. Come to think of it, most kids to learns as much as they can. Be alert for exceptions, but be sure to seperate the exceptions from those too lazy to learn.
PS: inner city kids may need an example of a person who has made it more then anything else. Many of these kids do not have a good adult example to look up to. Keep in touch with them, encourage them to make something of their life. There is nothing wrong with not liking comptuers, there is something wrong with not making something of your life when you can.
PPS: I agree with other posts that inner city is a bad term to use here, but it is all we have.
You need 200 tapes of that data anyway! If this system hasn't had regular backups then shame on everyone, fix that problem before considering moving to anouther system. Backups are critical!
Buy 200 tapes, make 2 complete backups, move one offsite, and then think about how you will restore to linux.
No we haven't. Well, if you are amoung the group who can use windoze you have it already. If your like me, windoze will not do what you need it to do, even if you were willing to run it. Belive me, I've considered it.
My boss pays for my boardband connection as part of our work from home plan. (In MN we have enough snow days that it breaks even every year compared to a paid day off for everyone). He has been complaining that my ISDN line is twice what everyone else is paying for broadband. They are also getting much faster speeds. I've considered satalite. My boss would love to save that much money. Problem is I forward a lot of X connections when I work from home. Latency is an issue.
Of course my point is like most Americans other then dial up, my only reasonably priced alternative is satalite. Many parts of the world are just as bad (come to think of it, many don't have phone lines so satalite is the only option)
Accually even that isn't sufficant to call it illegal.
I have personally used a crowbar to remove a window from a house while the rightful owner of the house was away. Of course I was paid by the owner [replace with a more energy efficant window].
Likewise, I could use Decss to remove the encoding from a DVD so that I can create a snippet for use in a scholarly report.
So said Fred Brooks in his masterpiece on software devolpment.
There is no way to really figgure out how something should be designed without designing it wrong the first time. If you have expirence it means you can throw away parts (ie your ascii module gets thrown away for a unicode module), but the only way to get expirence is to do it wrong.
The system I'm working on now has some problems, but they are not bad overall. Surprizingly, the areas we thought would be a problem aren't so bad, while the ares we all worried (what will happen when the customer does x) turn out not to be a problem. Until software hits the real world you don't know how it will be used, and thus you don't know how it will need to be changed.
Oh, I work flexable hours, and while the office is an idustrial area it isn't downtown. last I checked 4 buses a day go by work, and they all go down town. Some people I work with are faced with a 10 minute drive (I think they should walk...), or 2 hours on the bus. Seriously, the fastest the bus could get them to work is 2 hours. Then once in a while I decide to work late and fix a problem, and I've missed the last bus.
Contary to popular belief, a suit and tie can be more comfortable then jeans and a t-shirt. however you need a tailor to custom make a suit to fit you exactly. If your boss flys you to a third world country (thailand is good) and gives you an two grand of spending money you can have a suit that looks great (to those who think suits look nice), and is comfortable. In the US expect to pay $30,000 for the same service. I strongly recomend anyone faced with wearing a suit for more then funerals to do this.
For the majority of (US/north america) based people who have cars running on Gasoline: ethanol is fairly easy to make at home (you need a special goverment license to make enough for your car, but that isn't a big deal). All modern cars have to run fine on 10% ethanol, but often gas you buy already has that. Ford sells vechicals designed to run on e-85, which is 85% ethanol, and I know where several E-85 pumps are.
Old carbrated cars were easy to modify to run on ethanol, just replace the carb with a 4 barrel, adjust half for gas and half for ethanol. Computer cars are more difficult, because you have to programgram the computer and you don't get source. (There are efforts to re-write car computers as open source, but so far they have not worked better then OEM)
The best things you can do today is refuse to buy a car that isn't design to run on E-85 or other renewable fuel. Ford sells them, so when you look at GM, tell the salesmen you like it, but your gonna buy the Ford due to E-85. Remember, one person demanding e85 isn't worth bothering with. a few thousand lost sales due to e-85 hits the bottom line.
US law doesn't apply in the UK (and vise versa), but both countries atempt to influence each other. Keep an eye on us (we keep and eye on you), to prevent the bad things the other guys are doing from happening to you.
Your right though, you need a UK version of this book.
Some companies will go for this, some will not. A lot of it depends on how good you are and what you are giving up.
All the half time people live with the fact that their advancement oppertunoities are limited compared to us 40/hr people have. (Note I said 40 hr/week, not 70. 40 hr/week is the norm here, and I've refused jobs where it wasn't)
Before you do this though, figgure out what you will do with your time. I love playing my mandolin, but I wouldn't want to play it 4 extra hours a day. I love fishing, but fishing every day gets boring. Card games are fun, but everyone else will be at work, so who to play with... That said, there is plenty to do just remember you won't have money. If what you want to do really will take up 4 more hours a day without getting boring or costing more money then do it.
I can't belive/. responses have ignored this important point: There are many things that can be done, some of which are right, and some of which are legal. A few are both.
Don't touch this situation without a lawyer who knows this area of law. Most likely you will be told to keep your mouth shut as even if you can win the law suits, the cost isn't worth it.
There is also a possibility that you could find a lawyer willing to do a class action law suit against your compititor if you can prove several customers have been left open like that. This is again dangerious gorund, but you can potentially pull it off. Don't bad mouth any compitition who doesn't misconfigure things like that.
Whatever you do, make sure your lawyer is informed. their job is to save your rear end, but they can't do that if you don't tell them what is going on.
Accually the i386 could access several terabytes of memory. However when you go over 4Gb you have to get into segmented memory. Memory segments were very difficult to get right in DOS (not sure about other systems, but few used segmented memory) so nobody bothered implimenting them. (Accually this isn't true, microsoft implimented segmented memory in win32, but that seems more to break OS/2 then because there was a gain from it)
4 gigabytes comes from having 32 bits. (2 to the 32nd power is 4 billion something)
Forget the technical aspects. You can deal with them. I know of ISPs that have made NT work (years ago, 4.0 with no service packs) good enough to be considered the most reliable ISP in town.
Marketing is where it is all at. If people don't know you are there, they won't sign up.
Switching ISPs isn't easy, if the other one is good enough they will stay. I can handle a few discounnects, much easier then I can handle all the people who know my email address. So you are mostly selling to those who don't have a isp. Better service will help them decide to take you. Don't count on switching anyone unless they piss their customers off.
If you are a cut rate ISP, you don't need redundant servers. Just install openBSD on a pc, with apache, sendmail, and a radius server and you are ready to go for the first month. (Virtual ISPs are good in the US but not for where you are)
In some respects it is easier to sell a over priced ISP with servce and reliabilty, but you need redunant servers and the ability to keep things up. When I called UUnet about a T1 line they told me that as part of their price (twice the other quotes!) they qould gaurentiee the line stays up, even if it is someone else's fault they take the hit (don't charge, and fix it).
But you need to start with marketing. Who are your customers, where do they live, how much do they make, what kind of computer do they have... Figgure that out, and then figgure what they can afford to pay for. Then figgure out how you will tell them about your service.
Worry more about which newspaper adds you take out. You should spend more time doing interviews for the local paper(s), radio, and TV. If they don't know you are there they will not come. For every dollar of technical you spend do two marketing. For every minute of technical work do two marketing.
don't plan on making money for the first year. That means you live off of your day job, wife, or savings.
160 cusomters is a good number. Out of that you need to pay for two t1s (one for data, one for dial up), and make payments on your servers and the modem bank. Don't forget rent, utilities, and your wages. Labor is less then then you would think. Use that number to figgure out what you need to charge to achive the level of support you want. (Remember quality costs money)
Once you are close to a 10:1 modem ratio cut back on marketing, but make sure you maintain it. (or expand your number of lines, depending on how many more customers you can reasonably get.
Accually you don't need a $200 installation geek. Your equipment must be either professionally installed, or certified. However the definition of a professional is pretty meaningless. If you are paid to do something you are a professional, which says nothing about your ability to do it right.
Note that you still need to meet regulations. So if you put a 500 watt amp on your signal they will get you, no matter how professional your system is put up. (.5 watts is the biggest amplifer you can buy, and even then the manufactures make a big deal that you cannot run the better antennas with it)
Back in the '60s (?, maybe 70s) IBM had a mainframe printer that could to 50 or 100 (units, but I can't remember if it was cps or pages or whatever) the only difference was where a belt was set, and you could buy an upgrade which amounted to a tech coming out and changing the belt.
In that case, the faster version was running right on the edge of what the pritner could do, and so you paid extra for the upgrade because IBM has to deal with a lot more warrentie work on the faster model.
Really it is what you can get. Money cannot buy speed. Cable is faster then DSL and after you factor in all the costs often cheaper, so long as you don't need peak hour connectivity. Satalite is really quick, (latency is a big issue) and only slightly more then the others. Dial-up is slow, and second most expenseive if you have a dedicated line. ISDN is slow (faster then dial up, but only if you pay double ISP charges for 128k), and most expensive.
Where I live ISDN is the fastest I can get without dealing with latency. My boss pays for the line though, I couldn't afford it on my own. I'm thinking about satalite, because ISDN isn't fast enough.
something like half the country (US) cannot get either cable modem or DSL.
We have guildlines, that state something different, but i've noticed it comes down to a management decision "Is the pain of shipping with this bug outwieghed by the cost of fixed it?"
Early on everyone else's definition is what we use. Several months before shipment (and things are normally fairly good then) management does a bug review and decides what the priority is. At that point:
Sev 1: data corruption, or serious crash. encountered often and no work around. Affects major features. Cannot ship.
Sev 2: above, but we know exatly how to cause it, if you don't do that things work okay. Can ship to beta customers, but not to production use.
Sev 3: Not as serious, but a black eye. Fix if at all possibal. But work arounds exist, and in general we can live without. If it affects a minor feature we can turn off, then it is always this level. Anything shiped with this level or problem goes into the release notes. Before shipping management has to review each and decide to wait while it is fixed or ship now.
Sev 4: Minor. Deseriable to fix, but rare enough that we can just document it.
Note that for sev 3 and 4, there is a chance that if the feature in question isn't a major one we will disable it instead of fixing it. Also only major features can be sev 1 or 2, as we can't disable them.
How many bugs are they finding, and what severity are they? This speaks to the quality of the system design and the quality of the engineers working on the system. If there are few bugs found and fixed, you can be confident you have a good system going out. If there are a lot of bugs found and fixed, I would worry that there are a lot more left undiscovered.
the above is only true is the testing group is good. If they run one test case continiously they can miss a lot of bugs. (This has been known to happen, generally when many seemingly different cases all exercise the ame code path).
In theory this can be do. It isn't that hard either, just walk through all the data structures in the kernel and write them to disk. For most memory, just tell the swaper to swap that task out and all your tasks have their registers saved automaticly.
Now for the problem: when saving state you need to save more then just the CPU. Getting the simple case to work is probably very easy. However every hardware part needs to be re-initialized to the same state it was in before. Somethings won't care, (keyboard likely) others are easy to work around. (just act like a virtual console switch). Others can be very hard to (think of scsi drivers where some program is reading from a file)
Don't forget that you can't save the state of your disk driver while you are writing that state out, unless you are careful to avoid half written registers.
This is an interesting and doable project. If you want it do it. Remember this is was linux is about: scratching your own itch and then sharing with others. If you get this working great, if not you will have least learned.
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there is only one 100% solution: redunand computing centers in a different solar system. You can get close though if you redunand center is on a different continent.
amen
I've paid $35 - $70 for used, 10+ year old IBM M type keyboards. At my local best buy they will sell me a $10 keyboard. They also have other keyboards for more, including up to $70. I takes at most 5 seconds on any of those to conclue I don't want one in my house.
So whatever you think is best, try it out before you buy. With the cheap keyboards typeing is a pain. With the good ones I can't wait to get back to typing.
What the article didn't point out was that each of these ideas were already in RamBus's designs
Perhaps, but you have one year from the time a designe is publicly demonstrated (See a lawyer if you want an exact definition of this) to file for a patent. That is in the US, in most other countries, if it isn't patented when you demonstrate it then you can't patent it.
Well, Most ofthe farmers I know are independant "I can make it on my own" type of people. They hate the thought of taking substidies. However there are bad apples in every bunch. It only takes one farmer to take the goverment aid, and because of what that does to situation (which isn't what you would think without knowing advanced ecconomics and accounting for not all these farmers having done so) they are forced to take those same themselves.
Getting rid of goverment aid would change the situation again, and how isn't exactly clear. Some things have changed since grandpa ran the farm without goverment intervention.
Yep. I chagned, first to voicestream (Accually I had Verizion for a while but didn't like their service) for my phone service. Since I can't afford cell prices for my comptuer I eventially moved. Around Minneapolis there are three local monopoly phone companies that I know of. (Qwest, TDS, and sprint/united) There are also cable and satalite for computers, and wireless is coming. I'm sure not everyone has the latter option, but if you look you could be surprized.
Agreed, but it cuts both ways. get someone who can barely read interested in books and before you know it they will be reading.
These kids are probably too young, but most 13 year old girls I know could quickly get into plundered hearts, and that is motivation to learn to read. there are other adventures good for young boys. (Despite efforts to rid the world of them, sterotypes still seem to hold)
Remember, if you make it interesting they will learn what they need to become good. If you make it boring they will learn to avoid computers. Most inner city kids are smart enough that they could know a lot more then they do if they would apply themselves. Come to think of it, most kids to learns as much as they can. Be alert for exceptions, but be sure to seperate the exceptions from those too lazy to learn.
PS: inner city kids may need an example of a person who has made it more then anything else. Many of these kids do not have a good adult example to look up to. Keep in touch with them, encourage them to make something of their life. There is nothing wrong with not liking comptuers, there is something wrong with not making something of your life when you can.
PPS: I agree with other posts that inner city is a bad term to use here, but it is all we have.
You need 200 tapes of that data anyway! If this system hasn't had regular backups then shame on everyone, fix that problem before considering moving to anouther system. Backups are critical!
Buy 200 tapes, make 2 complete backups, move one offsite, and then think about how you will restore to linux.
No we haven't. Well, if you are amoung the group who can use windoze you have it already. If your like me, windoze will not do what you need it to do, even if you were willing to run it. Belive me, I've considered it.
My boss pays for my boardband connection as part of our work from home plan. (In MN we have enough snow days that it breaks even every year compared to a paid day off for everyone). He has been complaining that my ISDN line is twice what everyone else is paying for broadband. They are also getting much faster speeds. I've considered satalite. My boss would love to save that much money. Problem is I forward a lot of X connections when I work from home. Latency is an issue.
Of course my point is like most Americans other then dial up, my only reasonably priced alternative is satalite. Many parts of the world are just as bad (come to think of it, many don't have phone lines so satalite is the only option)
Accually even that isn't sufficant to call it illegal.
I have personally used a crowbar to remove a window from a house while the rightful owner of the house was away. Of course I was paid by the owner [replace with a more energy efficant window].
Likewise, I could use Decss to remove the encoding from a DVD so that I can create a snippet for use in a scholarly report.
So said Fred Brooks in his masterpiece on software devolpment.
There is no way to really figgure out how something should be designed without designing it wrong the first time. If you have expirence it means you can throw away parts (ie your ascii module gets thrown away for a unicode module), but the only way to get expirence is to do it wrong.
The system I'm working on now has some problems, but they are not bad overall. Surprizingly, the areas we thought would be a problem aren't so bad, while the ares we all worried (what will happen when the customer does x) turn out not to be a problem. Until software hits the real world you don't know how it will be used, and thus you don't know how it will need to be changed.
Great theory, now make it work.
Oh, I work flexable hours, and while the office is an idustrial area it isn't downtown. last I checked 4 buses a day go by work, and they all go down town. Some people I work with are faced with a 10 minute drive (I think they should walk...), or 2 hours on the bus. Seriously, the fastest the bus could get them to work is 2 hours. Then once in a while I decide to work late and fix a problem, and I've missed the last bus.
Contary to popular belief, a suit and tie can be more comfortable then jeans and a t-shirt. however you need a tailor to custom make a suit to fit you exactly. If your boss flys you to a third world country (thailand is good) and gives you an two grand of spending money you can have a suit that looks great (to those who think suits look nice), and is comfortable. In the US expect to pay $30,000 for the same service. I strongly recomend anyone faced with wearing a suit for more then funerals to do this.
For the majority of (US/north america) based people who have cars running on Gasoline: ethanol is fairly easy to make at home (you need a special goverment license to make enough for your car, but that isn't a big deal). All modern cars have to run fine on 10% ethanol, but often gas you buy already has that. Ford sells vechicals designed to run on e-85, which is 85% ethanol, and I know where several E-85 pumps are.
Old carbrated cars were easy to modify to run on ethanol, just replace the carb with a 4 barrel, adjust half for gas and half for ethanol. Computer cars are more difficult, because you have to programgram the computer and you don't get source. (There are efforts to re-write car computers as open source, but so far they have not worked better then OEM)
The best things you can do today is refuse to buy a car that isn't design to run on E-85 or other renewable fuel. Ford sells them, so when you look at GM, tell the salesmen you like it, but your gonna buy the Ford due to E-85. Remember, one person demanding e85 isn't worth bothering with. a few thousand lost sales due to e-85 hits the bottom line.
Yes and no.
US law doesn't apply in the UK (and vise versa), but both countries atempt to influence each other. Keep an eye on us (we keep and eye on you), to prevent the bad things the other guys are doing from happening to you.
Your right though, you need a UK version of this book.
Some companies will go for this, some will not. A lot of it depends on how good you are and what you are giving up.
All the half time people live with the fact that their advancement oppertunoities are limited compared to us 40/hr people have. (Note I said 40 hr/week, not 70. 40 hr/week is the norm here, and I've refused jobs where it wasn't)
Before you do this though, figgure out what you will do with your time. I love playing my mandolin, but I wouldn't want to play it 4 extra hours a day. I love fishing, but fishing every day gets boring. Card games are fun, but everyone else will be at work, so who to play with... That said, there is plenty to do just remember you won't have money. If what you want to do really will take up 4 more hours a day without getting boring or costing more money then do it.
I can't belive /. responses have ignored this important point: There are many things that can be done, some of which are right, and some of which are legal. A few are both.
Don't touch this situation without a lawyer who knows this area of law. Most likely you will be told to keep your mouth shut as even if you can win the law suits, the cost isn't worth it.
There is also a possibility that you could find a lawyer willing to do a class action law suit against your compititor if you can prove several customers have been left open like that. This is again dangerious gorund, but you can potentially pull it off. Don't bad mouth any compitition who doesn't misconfigure things like that.
Whatever you do, make sure your lawyer is informed. their job is to save your rear end, but they can't do that if you don't tell them what is going on.
Accually the i386 could access several terabytes of memory. However when you go over 4Gb you have to get into segmented memory. Memory segments were very difficult to get right in DOS (not sure about other systems, but few used segmented memory) so nobody bothered implimenting them. (Accually this isn't true, microsoft implimented segmented memory in win32, but that seems more to break OS/2 then because there was a gain from it)
4 gigabytes comes from having 32 bits. (2 to the 32nd power is 4 billion something)
Forget the technical aspects. You can deal with them. I know of ISPs that have made NT work (years ago, 4.0 with no service packs) good enough to be considered the most reliable ISP in town.
Marketing is where it is all at. If people don't know you are there, they won't sign up.
Switching ISPs isn't easy, if the other one is good enough they will stay. I can handle a few discounnects, much easier then I can handle all the people who know my email address. So you are mostly selling to those who don't have a isp. Better service will help them decide to take you. Don't count on switching anyone unless they piss their customers off.
If you are a cut rate ISP, you don't need redundant servers. Just install openBSD on a pc, with apache, sendmail, and a radius server and you are ready to go for the first month. (Virtual ISPs are good in the US but not for where you are)
In some respects it is easier to sell a over priced ISP with servce and reliabilty, but you need redunant servers and the ability to keep things up. When I called UUnet about a T1 line they told me that as part of their price (twice the other quotes!) they qould gaurentiee the line stays up, even if it is someone else's fault they take the hit (don't charge, and fix it).
But you need to start with marketing. Who are your customers, where do they live, how much do they make, what kind of computer do they have... Figgure that out, and then figgure what they can afford to pay for. Then figgure out how you will tell them about your service.
Worry more about which newspaper adds you take out. You should spend more time doing interviews for the local paper(s), radio, and TV. If they don't know you are there they will not come. For every dollar of technical you spend do two marketing. For every minute of technical work do two marketing.
don't plan on making money for the first year. That means you live off of your day job, wife, or savings.
160 cusomters is a good number. Out of that you need to pay for two t1s (one for data, one for dial up), and make payments on your servers and the modem bank. Don't forget rent, utilities, and your wages. Labor is less then then you would think. Use that number to figgure out what you need to charge to achive the level of support you want. (Remember quality costs money)
Once you are close to a 10:1 modem ratio cut back on marketing, but make sure you maintain it. (or expand your number of lines, depending on how many more customers you can reasonably get.
Accually you don't need a $200 installation geek. Your equipment must be either professionally installed, or certified. However the definition of a professional is pretty meaningless. If you are paid to do something you are a professional, which says nothing about your ability to do it right.
Note that you still need to meet regulations. So if you put a 500 watt amp on your signal they will get you, no matter how professional your system is put up. (.5 watts is the biggest amplifer you can buy, and even then the manufactures make a big deal that you cannot run the better antennas with it)
Back in the '60s (?, maybe 70s) IBM had a mainframe printer that could to 50 or 100 (units, but I can't remember if it was cps or pages or whatever) the only difference was where a belt was set, and you could buy an upgrade which amounted to a tech coming out and changing the belt.
In that case, the faster version was running right on the edge of what the pritner could do, and so you paid extra for the upgrade because IBM has to deal with a lot more warrentie work on the faster model.
Really it is what you can get. Money cannot buy speed. Cable is faster then DSL and after you factor in all the costs often cheaper, so long as you don't need peak hour connectivity. Satalite is really quick, (latency is a big issue) and only slightly more then the others. Dial-up is slow, and second most expenseive if you have a dedicated line. ISDN is slow (faster then dial up, but only if you pay double ISP charges for 128k), and most expensive.
Where I live ISDN is the fastest I can get without dealing with latency. My boss pays for the line though, I couldn't afford it on my own. I'm thinking about satalite, because ISDN isn't fast enough.
something like half the country (US) cannot get either cable modem or DSL.
We have guildlines, that state something different, but i've noticed it comes down to a management decision "Is the pain of shipping with this bug outwieghed by the cost of fixed it?"
Early on everyone else's definition is what we use. Several months before shipment (and things are normally fairly good then) management does a bug review and decides what the priority is. At that point:
Sev 1: data corruption, or serious crash. encountered often and no work around. Affects major features. Cannot ship.
Sev 2: above, but we know exatly how to cause it, if you don't do that things work okay. Can ship to beta customers, but not to production use.
Sev 3: Not as serious, but a black eye. Fix if at all possibal. But work arounds exist, and in general we can live without. If it affects a minor feature we can turn off, then it is always this level. Anything shiped with this level or problem goes into the release notes. Before shipping management has to review each and decide to wait while it is fixed or ship now.
Sev 4: Minor. Deseriable to fix, but rare enough that we can just document it.
Note that for sev 3 and 4, there is a chance that if the feature in question isn't a major one we will disable it instead of fixing it. Also only major features can be sev 1 or 2, as we can't disable them.
How many bugs are they finding, and what severity are they? This speaks to the quality of the system design and the quality of the engineers working on the system. If there are few bugs found and fixed, you can be confident you have a good system going out. If there are a lot of bugs found and fixed, I would worry that there are a lot more left undiscovered.
the above is only true is the testing group is good. If they run one test case continiously they can miss a lot of bugs. (This has been known to happen, generally when many seemingly different cases all exercise the ame code path).
In theory this can be do. It isn't that hard either, just walk through all the data structures in the kernel and write them to disk. For most memory, just tell the swaper to swap that task out and all your tasks have their registers saved automaticly.
Now for the problem: when saving state you need to save more then just the CPU. Getting the simple case to work is probably very easy. However every hardware part needs to be re-initialized to the same state it was in before. Somethings won't care, (keyboard likely) others are easy to work around. (just act like a virtual console switch). Others can be very hard to (think of scsi drivers where some program is reading from a file)
Don't forget that you can't save the state of your disk driver while you are writing that state out, unless you are careful to avoid half written registers.
This is an interesting and doable project. If you want it do it. Remember this is was linux is about: scratching your own itch and then sharing with others. If you get this working great, if not you will have least learned.