Date: Fri, 24 May 1996 22:23:10 -0400 From: dennis@etinc.com (Dennis) To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: The view from here (was Re: ISDN Compression Load on CPU) Message-ID: <199605250223.WAA02273@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 Then you're out of context regarding the discussion at hand, which happens to be the ability of an (obviously carefully selected) pc to be used as a 24 X 7 router reliably. db ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Emerging Technologies, Inc. http://www.etinc.com Synchronous Communications Cards and Routers For Discriminating Tastes. 56k to T1 and beyond. Frame Relay, PPP, HDLC, and X.25 for BSD/OS, FreeBSD and LINUX
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