Of course, your real point seems to be that the plural of anecdote is not data, which is true.

Exactly. Incidentally, most of my machines have Thermaltake supplies - I'm not one to skimp on parts either. I'm still not getting where Apple thought $400 was an appropriate price for a 350 watt supply though.

Almost all of my co-workers with PC's have suffered fan failures, power supply failures, etc etc and gone through at least one replacement cycle in that time.

On the flip side, I've had:

2000 Mac Pro - drive failure, power supply failure (and Apple wanted $400 for the replacement supply)
2001 iMac - CD-ROM failure
2004 iBook - 2x power supply failures
2008 MacBook - power supply failure, and a PMU firmware issue that Apple denied yet quietly fixed a few weeks later

In contrast, over the last 20 years I've owned seven PCs, five of which I built myself. One drive failure, one power supply failure, and no other issues to speak of.

Of course.

Their "investigation" (and I use the term loosely) is already complete, they identified what went wrong, and fixed it, all in a matter of days?

I'm guessing they knew what went wrong shortly before the landing when they saw the telemetry indicating they were out of fluid.

that allowed a major mistake to make it into the design and not be detected during testing

This *was* detected during testing.

Think of it as evolution in action. You can stay on one planet while some disaster takes it out. We have lots of choices of disaster, don't we? The human race can continue via those "space nutters".

Sure, we should try to avoid the disaster, etc., but planets are not forever.

I'm not an Obama fan, and I'm certainly not a Holder fan. However, if Holder's actions result in eliminating most of the bogus seizures that have been going on, I'll be more than happy to give him due credit for it.

It can be difficult to get the cops to follow the law.

It can often be difficult to get the cops to even know the law.

...that, while this part of the conversation might not have been the strongest part of the interview, systemd has won an amazing number of technical battles.

FWIW IMHO, absolutely no, a unified development approach is not the main benefit of systemd. The new functionality is absolutely worth the transition pain. Not only can you control (kill) whole classes of processes more simply than ever, but you also get lightweight containers as a door prize.

OpenBSD is trying to move from rc.conf.local and inittab into per-daemon startup/shutdown init.d scripts.

It's a shame that someone didn't swoop in with bare-bones unit file functionality (no cgroups, obviously). At least, with a unit file, PID 1 can launch a non-root process, which is hard with SysVinit (I do wonder if I've written my shim correctly).

Reprobates of Unusual Size? I don't believe they exist.

This is very true. Another issue is not that there's anything embarrassing or bad, but the sheer work of producing documents for a lawsuit can be be very expensive. If you do keep emails or other records beyond the legal retention limits they can still be subpoenaed, but if you destroy them on a regular schedule, well, can't produce what you don't have.

There will be one final CM11 milestone release before they switch to CM12. How do we confirm the final will have this patch?

Hopefully we'll find out eventually.

I think you are missing the application for an Open gate array.

It is not really for you and your company. You don't have any particular interest in the open part, and thus you and your company don't fit the demographic of the sort of user we would want. We don't need your money. I can do the first runs of this using Mosis and its ilk for chump change, and go from there.

It simply doesn't matter if it's 32 nm or 15 nm or 50 nm. What matters is that the user can completely understand the bitstream and produce their own tools for it. We have no shortage of users who want that.

It doesn't matter if it is on the leading edge in terms of cost, speed, power, thermal efficiency, or size. It matters that it's open.

And maybe we can do something that you can't do with any integrated circuit available to you, which is verify from first principles that the manufactured device is without deliberately hidden security back-doors. Because we don't have intellectual property to hide and thus we don't mind producing it in a way that would make it capable of being examined.

So, I am not particularly worried about what foundry I'll use and whether I can compete on the same playing field as Xylinx and Altera. I have my own playing field, with radically different rules from the ones they are using. I have my own customers to satisfy.

One well-known market would be immediately available and very eager to embrace an open FPGA, namely EE education.

Yes. EE education and academic research.

There is also the security problem. How can you determine from first principles that the chip really contains what it says it does? Insoluble with any commercial component. Maybe we could make ours sufficiently visible.

So, my feeling is that we could get a grant for this.