Mailing a BD or a few DVDs starts to sound good here.
Agreed
The question then becomes do you do this often enough with the same people that the conviniance and/or cost savings of using one BD rather than a handfull of DVDs outweigh the cost and/or inconviniance of ensuring that you have a BD burner and they have a BD reader? I would guess that for most people the answer to that question is no.
That's cool, we'll just run 5 600GW nuclear reactors because you are impatient. What an awesome solution.
Yeah, we aren't going to give up the things we enjoy like the ability to watch programs when we have time (rather than when the TV schedule places them) to save a few bucks a year or for dubious environmental reasons (watching TV doesn't exactly have a huge footprint per hour compared to many other activities even when you count the cost of standby usage).
Afaict the big issue with sky+ boxes is that they keep a lot of the frontend on and keep both halves of the LNB powered even when in standby mode to support things like automatic firmware upgrades, remote record, anytime etc. You can pu them into a deeper off mode by holding the power button (and sometimes you have to because they crash) but they take annoyingly long to start up again from that mode and of course they can't wake up from that state to record stuff which kind of defeats the object of a sky+ box.
Fuck Americans.
The fact he talks about SKY+ means he is almost certainly not an american or at least not living in american right now.
Being out of sync is BAD but once you tie generators together they will keep each other in sync, so it's really only a concern when you first tie them together.
The thing is at the moment they play with the grid for no reason other than to keep the average number of cycles per second very close to 60 over a long period so clocks stay in sync, it sounds like they are planning to stop doing that.
Also if you want to do any mapping/modding for source based games or in some cases even play the mods (if they use the "SDK base" games) you have to purchase a source based game (it doesn't nessacerally have to be the same game you are mapping for). Promotional offers and other freebies don't get you access to the SDK
Aptitude has a "smarter" dependency resoloution system. "smarter" in the sense that it is more likely to find a soloution but it is also more likely to find a crazy soloution and is a lot slower. It also has an interactive interface which is sometimes useful for dealing with complex situations but is pretty painful to operate.
It also had tracking of unused automatically installed packages, unfortunately for a long time this tracking was buggy leading to BIG problems when mixing apt-get and aptitude. The bug wasn't fixed for a long time and afaict the reason for that was that a large number of people had just accepted it as the waythings were supposed to be. Nowadays the tracking of unused automatically installed packages has been pushed down into libapt so it works with whatever frontend you use.
Afaict the issue of wall warts drawing power when not in use improved considerablly with the move from designs using a transformer as the first stay to switched mode designs (thse do still contain a transformer for isolation reasons but it's much smaller and runs at much higher frequencies). Small cheap mains transformers are notoriously lossy.
Standardising on 12V for laptops has the issue that sooner or later someone will get the "bright" idea to connect them directly to car electrics. That means you either have to design the devices to stand being connected to car electrics or you have to deal with the returns that result from idiots conecting an unsuitable power supply (and not admitted they did so of course).
I don't know about your particular toshiba but every toshiba i've seen with an external power brick* uses a barrel style connector.
The problem with most connectors you see on laptops is the direction of the force needed to remove them. To remove them you need to apply a force very close to directly away from the connector face. pulling in other directions will just tend to jam them in the socket.
In most situations where a cable is likely to be tripped over the force will most likely have a downward component and a component in some random horizontal direction. With magsafe this will pop the connector off. With a conventional connector it is very likely not to.
Though there are other systems that can achive the same outcome of disconnecting a cable that is pulled downwards. For example many third party power bricks have right angled interchangable end peices. A downward force on these cables will cause the end peice to disconnect from the cable. IIRC MS put inline joins in the cables to the pads of the original xbox for similar reasons.
It seems clarkson actually quite liked driving the tesla roadster (though he made a load of dubious moans about the batteries later which got top gear in some hot water) and was impressed when he managed to overtake the car it was based on.
Afaict the roadster's biggest problem was it's price, IIRC it was 2-3 times the price of the lotus elise (essentially the petrol version of the same car). It's going to take a LONG time to pay off that kind of price difference in fuel savings even at british prices.
Was writing harry potter "work"? Is leading microsoft or apple "work"? Is leading the bill and melinda gate's foundation "work"? Is leading canonical "work"?
Some people actually enjoy the work they do and when you are rich you can do it on your terms since you have the capital to invest in setting up your own buisnesses to work in rather than working for "the man".
Oxygen is toxic if the partial pressure is too high, IIRC pure oxygen at normal (roughly sea level) atmospheric pressure pure oxygen is not good long term but isn't immediately hazardous to health (though I belive it is a major fire risk).
As the overall pressure reduces (e.g. high altitude flying) you want to increase the fraction of oxygen, as the overall pressure increases (e.g. deep diving) you want to decrease the fraction of oxygen so the partial pressure remains about the same.
Right. I believe the real question is: "can they detect if an mp3 file is pirated or not?". A GOOD QUESTION!
And the answer is SOMETIMES
If a version of a file meets the following criteria
1: it has been detected on a major pirate network 2: it has enough defect's or other identifying features that it is highly unlikely an independent rip would produce an identical file 3: it does not match any copy sold through a legal service
Then IMO they have pretty strong evidence that it is pirate,certainly enough to start sending out threats and probablly even enough to convince a court. Afaict as much as people wish it to be otherwise it is not legal to download a copy from a pirate network and use it as a substitute for a legal copy.
The problem is while it is possible to prove some files are pirate it is not generally possible to prove a file is clean or even to prove that it won't in the future become detectable as pirate.
The trouble with bitbills of course is that you have to trust that the guy printing them is on the level. If they guy who prints them keeps copies of the keys then he can instantly make all the unredeed bitbills he has printed worthless and transfer all the bitcoins back to himself.
They could prove that a file was common on P2P networks and had sufficiant defects or other identifying marks that it was highly unlikely a random user would end up with an identical file from their own rip.
1: a whitelist of files that are identical to copies sold by legitimate services or "perfect" CD rips. 2: a blacklist of files that were found on P2P networks and have sufficiant defects or other idenitifying features that it is unlikely they would match any non-pirate's copy.
You could then go through a file collection sorting files into white, black and grey. The technical aspects of implementing such a tool are trivial.
However the problems are
1: it's pretty hard to find every file that is out there on legit services and basically impossible to find every file that is out there on P2P. 2: Afaict it is also bloody hard to get a perfect rip of a track from CD (and that is before you start considering the encoding options) 3: your CD rips will probablly not be on either the whitelist or the blacklist (see point 1), unfortunately it is likely that many pirate files won't be either (see point 1). Unfortunately not being on the tool's blacklist doesn't nessacerally mean the file isn't on the music industries blacklist. 4: most people outside of the music industry would probablly not want to give them a helping hand by building a list of "probablly pirate" tracks and those trying to track down pirates and extort money from them are unlikely to want to release their lists either.
Afaict you could do a whole rack pretty easilly using a standard UPS bypass switch.
1: Connect bypass switch and UPS to mains 2: Connect bypass switch to rack (which is still connected to mains) 3: Disconnect rack from mains 4: connect UPS to bypass switch (which should then switch out of bypass mode) 5: disconnect UPS and bypass switch from mains.
A basic UPS would probablly work fine (you don't want a UPS that tries anything too clever) if you connected it's input to it's mains, then it's output to the server then disconnected mains from the server and finally disconnected mains from the UPS. A purpose designed device could probablly do it even more easilly.
are you saying that it was easier to supply 10KW of power to an entire cabinet than it would have been to supply 400W of power to a single server?
Could well be
Consider what would be involved in de-racking a server while keeping it powered. If it doesn't have a pair of redundant PSUs (and afaict a lot of low end servers of don't) then bascially you only option would be to splice into the power cord close to the server (before it disapears into the maze of wiring in the rack). Splicing mains voltages in the restrictive conductive envrionment of a rack sounds dangerous to me and the spliced connection would have to be done very carefully to make sure it didn't fall apart as the server was de-racked. Even if the does have redundant PSUs then the non-locking power connectors mean it would be very easy to accidently lose power.
If you take the whole rack you can either splice into the power cables before they enter the rack (where you have much more room to work) or just plug your kit into the racks existing power distribution. You can then have experts deal with how best to get inside the individual servers later.
Most companies don't have "The Feds turn up with search warrants and take all your stuff, including backup tapes" as a threat they plan for in their backup strategy. Off site backup doesn't protect against this.
Short of backups accross multiple continenets and a plan for fleeing the country even if the cops don't want you to leave there isn't much you can do against a determined seziure action directed at you.
However this story does indicate some things you can do to reduce the affect on you of the collatoral damage of an action like the one in TFA. Many of those actions are things that also help to mitigate other risks
For customers:
1: Rent directly from the datacenter. Renting from an intermediary (especially a small one)increases the chance of the agents being unable to accurately identify what they want and therefore taking a lot more and also increases the risk of the provider having trouble providing relief for it's customers. 2: If your requirements justify it rent whole racks so you don't have other peoples stuff sharing a rack with you. 3: Assume that loss of all stuff in company X's datacenters is a reasonable risk. Mitigate by using a different companies datacenters for each
For providers:
1: have a presense in multiple datacenters. 2: spread your critical infrastructure in a DC accross multiple racks, making sure those racks have no common customers. Obviously this is only possible when you have more than a couple of racks.
I'd think you could set up a rack chassis very quickly if you just stacked the servers in and didn't bother to bolt most of them into the rack (just enough that it didn't collapse on you) and didn't bother with fancy cabling (just throw in a powe and network cord to each machine). Have someone in an office cloning hard drives to drop into the rigs.
No it wouldn't be pretty, no you wouldn't have hardware raid but i'd think you could get a lot of capacity up pretty quickly this way a bigger problem is likely to be actually getting and paying for the hardware.
Frankly it seems like if you could get colocated in the same rack as your target there would be less risky ways of taking them out than setting the FBI on yourself.
Actually, there's nothing stopping people from creating a fractional-reserve banking system based on Bitcoin.
Fractional reserve banking relies on a bank keeping a portion of deposits (the reserve) and lending out the rest.
If the value of bitcoins suddenly goes up by a factor of 10 (which is far from implausable given bitcoin's fixed money supply and still relatively small community) and you took out a sigificant bitcoin denominated loan you are likely to have BIG problems repaying it. That means only an idiot would take out a bitcoin denominated loan and if bitcoin prices rise significantly said idiots are very likely to default on a bitcoin denominated loan all at once (a massive systemic risk).
A bank that took deposits in bitcoins but made loans in other currencies would have even worse problems if the value of bitcoin rose significantly.
Er, no, however one that was 100% oxygen (or pretty much any gas) would be just as toxic for you and me
IIRC 100% oxygen at normal atmospheric pressure is survivable at least for a while and 100% oxygen at low pressure is fine. 100% anything else is going to render you unconscious very quickly and dead reasonably quickly.
But I agree with you there is no need to regulate oxygen or nitrogen emissions, they are large fractions of the air and we don't emit anywhere near enough of them to significantly impact those fractions.
The question is where does CO2 fit in, it is found naturally in the air but afaict human activities are substantially increasing the proportion.
That is because the slug is old hardware, wasn't exactly high end when it was released and was bought in large numbers by linux hobbyists. So it's well-known but slow. The shortage of ram doesn't exactly help either (it's possible to upgrade it but it's not for the feint hearted). Modern arm hardware is faster though there are speed issues caused by the floating point mess.
AIUI the big issue on ARM is lack of a standard platform.
On a PC you can assume you have a BIOS that can load stuff from HDD and execute it in an environment with basic disk access services. You can assume the addresses of most of the basic hardware (real time clock, interrupt controllers etc) You can generally assume there is a PCI bus for auto-configuration of other devices and that PCI bus has it's configuring space mapped to the processor in a standard way. There is a standard way of reading out how much ram there is and how it's mapped and so on. These things mean you can build one kernel and use it with one bootloader on pretty much any PC.
On arm afaict there is no standard platform. Therefore each arm processor and sometimes each arm board needs specific support to tell the kernel things like how to find out where stuff is mapped in the processors address space, how to find out how much ram there is and all the other quirks of the new system. Often these things are hacked up as quickly as possible by vendors who want to get a working system out which appears to be what is pissing linus off*.
There is also the floating point mess. ARM has been used with many floating point units over the years. Right now there is one that is most common and debian at least seem to have decided that the way to go is to build two ports, armel for systems without FPUs (or systems with unsupported FPUs) and armhf for systems with vfp but if vfp falls out of favour then they will be left with either adding yet another port or trying to hack something up. Also afaict there is no easy way to migrate between different debian arm ports without reinstalling.
* and afaict pissing linus off is bad because if he doesn't merge code then it tends to bitrot unless it has very active maintainers.
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Mailing a BD or a few DVDs starts to sound good here.
Agreed
The question then becomes do you do this often enough with the same people that the conviniance and/or cost savings of using one BD rather than a handfull of DVDs outweigh the cost and/or inconviniance of ensuring that you have a BD burner and they have a BD reader? I would guess that for most people the answer to that question is no.
That's cool, we'll just run 5 600GW nuclear reactors because you are impatient. What an awesome solution.
Yeah, we aren't going to give up the things we enjoy like the ability to watch programs when we have time (rather than when the TV schedule places them) to save a few bucks a year or for dubious environmental reasons (watching TV doesn't exactly have a huge footprint per hour compared to many other activities even when you count the cost of standby usage).
Afaict the big issue with sky+ boxes is that they keep a lot of the frontend on and keep both halves of the LNB powered even when in standby mode to support things like automatic firmware upgrades, remote record, anytime etc. You can pu them into a deeper off mode by holding the power button (and sometimes you have to because they crash) but they take annoyingly long to start up again from that mode and of course they can't wake up from that state to record stuff which kind of defeats the object of a sky+ box.
Fuck Americans.
The fact he talks about SKY+ means he is almost certainly not an american or at least not living in american right now.
Being out of sync is BAD but once you tie generators together they will keep each other in sync, so it's really only a concern when you first tie them together.
The thing is at the moment they play with the grid for no reason other than to keep the average number of cycles per second very close to 60 over a long period so clocks stay in sync, it sounds like they are planning to stop doing that.
Also if you want to do any mapping/modding for source based games or in some cases even play the mods (if they use the "SDK base" games) you have to purchase a source based game (it doesn't nessacerally have to be the same game you are mapping for). Promotional offers and other freebies don't get you access to the SDK
Aptitude has a "smarter" dependency resoloution system. "smarter" in the sense that it is more likely to find a soloution but it is also more likely to find a crazy soloution and is a lot slower. It also has an interactive interface which is sometimes useful for dealing with complex situations but is pretty painful to operate.
It also had tracking of unused automatically installed packages, unfortunately for a long time this tracking was buggy leading to BIG problems when mixing apt-get and aptitude. The bug wasn't fixed for a long time and afaict the reason for that was that a large number of people had just accepted it as the waythings were supposed to be. Nowadays the tracking of unused automatically installed packages has been pushed down into libapt so it works with whatever frontend you use.
IIRC they didn't actually regulate phone chargers, they just threatened to regulate them...
Afaict the issue of wall warts drawing power when not in use improved considerablly with the move from designs using a transformer as the first stay to switched mode designs (thse do still contain a transformer for isolation reasons but it's much smaller and runs at much higher frequencies). Small cheap mains transformers are notoriously lossy.
Standardising on 12V for laptops has the issue that sooner or later someone will get the "bright" idea to connect them directly to car electrics. That means you either have to design the devices to stand being connected to car electrics or you have to deal with the returns that result from idiots conecting an unsuitable power supply (and not admitted they did so of course).
and some vendors will ship really cheap shitty bricks that are far less efficiant than any manufacturer would dream of shipping.
I don't know about your particular toshiba but every toshiba i've seen with an external power brick* uses a barrel style connector.
The problem with most connectors you see on laptops is the direction of the force needed to remove them. To remove them you need to apply a force very close to directly away from the connector face. pulling in other directions will just tend to jam them in the socket.
In most situations where a cable is likely to be tripped over the force will most likely have a downward component and a component in some random horizontal direction. With magsafe this will pop the connector off. With a conventional connector it is very likely not to.
Though there are other systems that can achive the same outcome of disconnecting a cable that is pulled downwards. For example many third party power bricks have right angled interchangable end peices. A downward force on these cables will cause the end peice to disconnect from the cable. IIRC MS put inline joins in the cables to the pads of the original xbox for similar reasons.
It seems clarkson actually quite liked driving the tesla roadster (though he made a load of dubious moans about the batteries later which got top gear in some hot water) and was impressed when he managed to overtake the car it was based on.
Afaict the roadster's biggest problem was it's price, IIRC it was 2-3 times the price of the lotus elise (essentially the petrol version of the same car). It's going to take a LONG time to pay off that kind of price difference in fuel savings even at british prices.
It depends how you define "work".
Was writing harry potter "work"?
Is leading microsoft or apple "work"?
Is leading the bill and melinda gate's foundation "work"?
Is leading canonical "work"?
Some people actually enjoy the work they do and when you are rich you can do it on your terms since you have the capital to invest in setting up your own buisnesses to work in rather than working for "the man".
Oxygen is toxic if the partial pressure is too high, IIRC pure oxygen at normal (roughly sea level) atmospheric pressure pure oxygen is not good long term but isn't immediately hazardous to health (though I belive it is a major fire risk).
As the overall pressure reduces (e.g. high altitude flying) you want to increase the fraction of oxygen, as the overall pressure increases (e.g. deep diving) you want to decrease the fraction of oxygen so the partial pressure remains about the same.
Right. I believe the real question is: "can they detect if an mp3 file is pirated or not?". A GOOD QUESTION!
And the answer is SOMETIMES
If a version of a file meets the following criteria
1: it has been detected on a major pirate network
2: it has enough defect's or other identifying features that it is highly unlikely an independent rip would produce an identical file
3: it does not match any copy sold through a legal service
Then IMO they have pretty strong evidence that it is pirate,certainly enough to start sending out threats and probablly even enough to convince a court. Afaict as much as people wish it to be otherwise it is not legal to download a copy from a pirate network and use it as a substitute for a legal copy.
The problem is while it is possible to prove some files are pirate it is not generally possible to prove a file is clean or even to prove that it won't in the future become detectable as pirate.
The trouble with bitbills of course is that you have to trust that the guy printing them is on the level. If they guy who prints them keeps copies of the keys then he can instantly make all the unredeed bitbills he has printed worthless and transfer all the bitcoins back to himself.
They could prove that a file was common on P2P networks and had sufficiant defects or other identifying marks that it was highly unlikely a random user would end up with an identical file from their own rip.
To do such a thing you would have to define
1: a whitelist of files that are identical to copies sold by legitimate services or "perfect" CD rips.
2: a blacklist of files that were found on P2P networks and have sufficiant defects or other idenitifying features that it is unlikely they would match any non-pirate's copy.
You could then go through a file collection sorting files into white, black and grey. The technical aspects of implementing such a tool are trivial.
However the problems are
1: it's pretty hard to find every file that is out there on legit services and basically impossible to find every file that is out there on P2P.
2: Afaict it is also bloody hard to get a perfect rip of a track from CD (and that is before you start considering the encoding options)
3: your CD rips will probablly not be on either the whitelist or the blacklist (see point 1), unfortunately it is likely that many pirate files won't be either (see point 1). Unfortunately not being on the tool's blacklist doesn't nessacerally mean the file isn't on the music industries blacklist.
4: most people outside of the music industry would probablly not want to give them a helping hand by building a list of "probablly pirate" tracks and those trying to track down pirates and extort money from them are unlikely to want to release their lists either.
Afaict you could do a whole rack pretty easilly using a standard UPS bypass switch.
1: Connect bypass switch and UPS to mains
2: Connect bypass switch to rack (which is still connected to mains)
3: Disconnect rack from mains
4: connect UPS to bypass switch (which should then switch out of bypass mode)
5: disconnect UPS and bypass switch from mains.
And if they have this magic splicing capability
A basic UPS would probablly work fine (you don't want a UPS that tries anything too clever) if you connected it's input to it's mains, then it's output to the server then disconnected mains from the server and finally disconnected mains from the UPS. A purpose designed device could probablly do it even more easilly.
are you saying that it was easier to supply 10KW of power to an entire cabinet than it would have been to supply 400W of power to a single server?
Could well be
Consider what would be involved in de-racking a server while keeping it powered. If it doesn't have a pair of redundant PSUs (and afaict a lot of low end servers of don't) then bascially you only option would be to splice into the power cord close to the server (before it disapears into the maze of wiring in the rack). Splicing mains voltages in the restrictive conductive envrionment of a rack sounds dangerous to me and the spliced connection would have to be done very carefully to make sure it didn't fall apart as the server was de-racked. Even if the does have redundant PSUs then the non-locking power connectors mean it would be very easy to accidently lose power.
If you take the whole rack you can either splice into the power cables before they enter the rack (where you have much more room to work) or just plug your kit into the racks existing power distribution. You can then have experts deal with how best to get inside the individual servers later.
Most companies don't have "The Feds turn up with search warrants and take all your stuff, including backup tapes" as a threat they plan for in their backup strategy. Off site backup doesn't protect against this.
Short of backups accross multiple continenets and a plan for fleeing the country even if the cops don't want you to leave there isn't much you can do against a determined seziure action directed at you.
However this story does indicate some things you can do to reduce the affect on you of the collatoral damage of an action like the one in TFA. Many of those actions are things that also help to mitigate other risks
For customers:
1: Rent directly from the datacenter. Renting from an intermediary (especially a small one)increases the chance of the agents being unable to accurately identify what they want and therefore taking a lot more and also increases the risk of the provider having trouble providing relief for it's customers.
2: If your requirements justify it rent whole racks so you don't have other peoples stuff sharing a rack with you.
3: Assume that loss of all stuff in company X's datacenters is a reasonable risk. Mitigate by using a different companies datacenters for each
For providers:
1: have a presense in multiple datacenters.
2: spread your critical infrastructure in a DC accross multiple racks, making sure those racks have no common customers. Obviously this is only possible when you have more than a couple of racks.
I'd think you could set up a rack chassis very quickly if you just stacked the servers in and didn't bother to bolt most of them into the rack (just enough that it didn't collapse on you) and didn't bother with fancy cabling (just throw in a powe and network cord to each machine). Have someone in an office cloning hard drives to drop into the rigs.
No it wouldn't be pretty, no you wouldn't have hardware raid but i'd think you could get a lot of capacity up pretty quickly this way a bigger problem is likely to be actually getting and paying for the hardware.
Frankly it seems like if you could get colocated in the same rack as your target there would be less risky ways of taking them out than setting the FBI on yourself.
Actually, there's nothing stopping people from creating a fractional-reserve banking system based on Bitcoin.
Fractional reserve banking relies on a bank keeping a portion of deposits (the reserve) and lending out the rest.
If the value of bitcoins suddenly goes up by a factor of 10 (which is far from implausable given bitcoin's fixed money supply and still relatively small community) and you took out a sigificant bitcoin denominated loan you are likely to have BIG problems repaying it. That means only an idiot would take out a bitcoin denominated loan and if bitcoin prices rise significantly said idiots are very likely to default on a bitcoin denominated loan all at once (a massive systemic risk).
A bank that took deposits in bitcoins but made loans in other currencies would have even worse problems if the value of bitcoin rose significantly.
Er, no, however one that was 100% oxygen (or pretty much any gas) would be just as toxic for you and me
IIRC 100% oxygen at normal atmospheric pressure is survivable at least for a while and 100% oxygen at low pressure is fine. 100% anything else is going to render you unconscious very quickly and dead reasonably quickly.
But I agree with you there is no need to regulate oxygen or nitrogen emissions, they are large fractions of the air and we don't emit anywhere near enough of them to significantly impact those fractions.
The question is where does CO2 fit in, it is found naturally in the air but afaict human activities are substantially increasing the proportion.
That is because the slug is old hardware, wasn't exactly high end when it was released and was bought in large numbers by linux hobbyists. So it's well-known but slow. The shortage of ram doesn't exactly help either (it's possible to upgrade it but it's not for the feint hearted). Modern arm hardware is faster though there are speed issues caused by the floating point mess.
AIUI the big issue on ARM is lack of a standard platform.
On a PC you can assume you have a BIOS that can load stuff from HDD and execute it in an environment with basic disk access services. You can assume the addresses of most of the basic hardware (real time clock, interrupt controllers etc) You can generally assume there is a PCI bus for auto-configuration of other devices and that PCI bus has it's configuring space mapped to the processor in a standard way. There is a standard way of reading out how much ram there is and how it's mapped and so on. These things mean you can build one kernel and use it with one bootloader on pretty much any PC.
On arm afaict there is no standard platform. Therefore each arm processor and sometimes each arm board needs specific support to tell the kernel things like how to find out where stuff is mapped in the processors address space, how to find out how much ram there is and all the other quirks of the new system. Often these things are hacked up as quickly as possible by vendors who want to get a working system out which appears to be what is pissing linus off*.
There is also the floating point mess. ARM has been used with many floating point units over the years. Right now there is one that is most common and debian at least seem to have decided that the way to go is to build two ports, armel for systems without FPUs (or systems with unsupported FPUs) and armhf for systems with vfp but if vfp falls out of favour then they will be left with either adding yet another port or trying to hack something up. Also afaict there is no easy way to migrate between different debian arm ports without reinstalling.
* and afaict pissing linus off is bad because if he doesn't merge code then it tends to bitrot unless it has very active maintainers.