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Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

When you buy a pickup truck, they tell you how much load it can haul in addition to the weight of the truck itself. They don't say, "Sorry, by 'three-ton capacity' we really meant 'one-ton' because the truck weighs two."

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But they also tell you it has a 350HP motor and don't say how much of that energy is needed to run the power steering, the AC, and just push through the inefficiencies of the transmission system. They will tell you its towing capacity but they won't say that the capacity includes gross vehicle weight, so if you put a quarter ton of supplies in the truck bed you have to remove a quarter ton from the 'towing capacity.'

There are numbers and there are numbers right?

Actually, horsepower is rated in SAE net numbers, which includes a full accessory load.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsepower#SAE_net_power

Some accessories, not all. And specifically not the transmission. They are not quoting you horsepower at the wheels, which is the number you would actually care most about.

If you're saying we should aspire to be as honest as the car industry, could we perhaps aim a little higher and aim for perhaps as honest as the nutritional supplement industry or the mafia?

'This is a natural health product, and by that we mean that we don't want to tell you that the nutritional value of our so-called Vitamin Water is actually no better than drinking a soft drink.'

Horsepower is fairly useless in cars and trucks and buyers know this. If you care about speed, that's what 0-60 is based on as it factors in power/weight. If you care about hauling stuff, you care about how much it can tow and how much it can put in its bed.

This is a roundabout way of saying that Microsoft has a problem on its hands.

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