Date: Fri, 24 May 1996 15:35:13 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: dennis@etinc.com (Dennis) Cc: hackers@freebsd.org, freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: The view from here (was Re: ISDN Compression Load on CPU) Message-ID: <8957.832977313@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 24 May 1996 14:06:49 EDT." <199605241806.OAA01368@etinc.com>
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> These are the words of your "leader"? Being realistic about one's own strengths and weaknesses has never been a sin in any of the military manuals I've ever read (to continue your metaphor). Overestimating your abilities, on the other hand, generally presages disaster. > Most of this is your own fault, for buying cheap unknown cards, Be nice, Dennis - I was speaking "in the large" here. I don't, for the record, buy cheap unknown cards. I don't buy preconfigured systems, either. I buy systems assembled from a very carefully selected component list because I've been burned too many times by crappy (which is to say most) PC hardware. However, we in the FreeBSD project aren't in the hardware business, we're software vendors and we don't get a whole lot of say over what "our hardware" is going to look like. The best we can do is shoot for a high "approval rating", e.g. we dump the latest version on the net and a hoard of PC users shuffles over and sniffs it for awhile, finally holding up little index cards with numbers printed on them. We shoot for a 9.0, sometimes we get a 6.5 :-) In any case, that's the process and we really don't get to bitch and whine too much about what the _average_ PC hardware looks like if we want to get a high score, we just have to make it as robust as we can. That's why a lot of this talk about what one _can_ do with a PC is largely pointless. One can do a lot of things if one controls all the variables, but in our "market" that's about as far from being the case as one can get. You only need to satisfy one basic type of PC user in your market, Dennis, and that's a nice luxury to have. I speak from the perspective of someone who sees people trying to do _all sorts_ of things with PCs right now, and some of those things are simply not (IMO) appropriate. Jordan
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