Slashdot Mirror
Japanese Auto Makers Teaming Up To Create Standard OS
CNet is reporting that Japanese car manufacturers are teaming up to develop a standard automotive operating system. "Just as computer operating systems [...] allow multiple applications to communicate with one another, an automotive operating system enables different driving systems to work together. The standard automotive operating system from Japan will include everything from fuel injection, brakes and power steering to power windows. Currently, certain mechanical car parts are interchangeable from model to model. Smart car parts that operate off a common software standard would enable that kind of convenience to continue, while allowing them to communicate more easily with other smart components in a car."
But will it run rinux?
According to another Yomiuri article, BMW, DaimlerChrysler and other European automakers are jointly developing a next-generation OS and are expected to complete a prototype in 2008. ...a year earlier.
run Lin - oh, never mind!
-WtC
*insert sig*
Creator of RPerl, Scouter, Juggler, Mormon, Perl Monger, Serial Entrepreneur, Aspiring Astrophysicist, Community Organiz
But does it run Linux?
~Eien no Inori wo Sasagete~ Searching for my Hatsumi...
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
One more thing that can break... er... *crash*
Honestly, putting an OS in a car seems like a solution looking for a problem as the saying goes.
Your car gets 1000 miles to a single tank of gas?
That's awesome.
Hey, maybe the American auto manufacturers will adopt Win-ICE for you. (FORD - Fix Or Reboot Daily).
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." - Shepard Book Quoting Malcolm Reynolds
Hehe, that would be amusing... and neato at the same time actually. Who knows how many useful & dangerous apps could be made...
TRON is an embedded OS that Japan tried to use as a general-purpose desktop OS as well back in the late '80s, but was stopped from doing so by a Federal Government lawsuit claiming it was anti-competitive:
http://www.tron.org/index-e.html
Or is this an extension to TRON? (The article is really slim), though it seems to be about OSEK:
http://www.osek-vdx.org/
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Microsoft has announced that it is partnering with a Japanese automaker to incorporate Windows Vista Auto Edition with all of their car systems.
In other news, family of 4 dies as their Japanese car careens off of a cliff after experiencing a BSOD in their Microsoft Windows Vista Auto Edition software.
And they said zombies weren't real!
"We don't want you tinkering with the cars you buy from us."
Wow, this is truly going to be revolutionary, allowing automakers to finally produce truly interchangable parts. [/sarcasm] Anybody else feel pretty certain they'll still change the shape and size and mounting locations on every single part every year so that there will still be almost no compatibility between models and years and so forth? What does this really buy us?
"The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them..."
-ubuntu others as you would have others ubuntu you.
I believe that's called a traffic jam.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Does this mean your car can get hacked? Wonder what the complications might be.
Can someone explain this article to me using a car analogy?
Your car gets 1000 miles to a single tank of gas?
Rebooting computers in cars has nothing to do with starting or stopping the engine. The computer systems in most modern day cars maintain state by a trickle charge from the batteries. You need to disconnect the battery for a period of time to reset them.
It would bring a whole new meaning to "blue screen of death"
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
This topic sounds very interesting, but I just can't face this thread and the millions of "if Microsoft made cars" jokes that I'm sure are coming.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
I really hope they don't go the "OS for battleships" direction and just take a regular OS and tailor it for cars. An OS that is going to help operate a car should be built using signal logic and work like a low level state machine. Like this: http://www.rebelscience.org/Cosas/COSA.htm or at least build it around a functional lambda calculus based language like haskell or erlang (see wikipedia). The last thing we need is random segfaults while we're driving.
as an aside-- please don't critize my suggestion without at least first reading up on functional lambda calculus based programming languages and COSA.
Its already been done by others, hell even microsoft made some Windows CE modifications to make it automobile friendly. This is really only useful if they all actually USE the same protocols across the board. If everyone comes in and makes their own unique way of controlling each individual component it won't be real helpful.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
At one time i was afraid they should take some general purpose OS and cram into cars.
HTTP/1.1 400
"We had reached the first 1.0rc of CarOS in mid December. Little did we know that all the smart components would communicate together at an exponential rate until achieving sentience in less than a week. Our Japanese research facility was destroyed and the Auto-Bot empire was born..."
-AC, sekrit underground bunker, July 30th 2017
What about the OSEK/VDX standards and the AUTOSAR initiative?
http://www.osek-vdx.org/
http://www.autosar.org/find02_ns6.php
all you have to do is press alt-ctrl-delete ;-)
A mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer, and a software engineer are driving along when they start heading downhill. The brakes go out, and as the passengers panic, the driver manages to just barely swing the car to safety, narrowly averting a short trip off of a tall cliff.
With the car stopped, the engineers all get out and discuss what must have gone wrong.
The mechanical engineer says "we must have lost a brake line or something."
The electrical engineer suggests there was a problem with the ABS system.
The software engineer suggests they all drive back up the hill and go back down to see if it happens again.
The Slashdotter tied up in the trunk mumbles "I, for one, eagerly await our new standard OS overlords."
Currently, certain mechanical car parts are interchangeable from model to model.
Currently? Back in my teens, in the 80s, I hung out with a family that built street machines. There used to be this company called GMC and it had others called Chevrolet and Pontiac, et al. We could take a bell housing off a 66 Pontiac whatever and fit it perfectly to a 68 Chevrolet whatever. ALL water thermostat housings between all of these makes were the same. I can remember helping my dad with his 69 Ford Bronco to replace a cracked thermostat housing, and when we went to the junkyard the dude pulls out a huge box of ford thermostat housings -- even between Ford cars they were different. You could fit a Nova front-end to a Ventura and all the bolts matched. Anyone toying around with American cars from the 60s learned to love the GMs, especially Chevys....
GMCs, and especially Chevys, from the 60s, were God's gift to cars and auto mechanics and it was all interchangeable. Couple this with the raw power of those cars (yes yes, environment concerns and all that) and those are some of the best memories of my life....
Hehe, currently.... Reminds me of my daughter saying, "way back in the 90s...."
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
I would bet this is more likely:
To prevent newer and compatible parts from working in older systems to force you to upgrade your whole vehicle.
Maybe they are catching on that we're catching on that all they offer from year to year are different cup holders, body panels, and paint jobs.
Ha ha, crash? Crash? Get it? I think I'll punch myself in the face so that I can sleep through the next few retards that respond with the same lame ass joke.
But will this car run.. Linux?
If we can get all the cars to use a common language, doing diagnostics could be made much easier. OBD2 that all cars sold in North America currently have, can be useful, but is quite limited in what it can do.
Does this mean I won't be able to buy a car running Microsoft Windows (tm) for Internal Combustion Engines (Win-ICE)? I was so looking forward to having to reboot my car every 1000 miles...
Would you really want MS-Windows? Your insurance rates for crashes.....
...only if there's a button on the steering wheel that transforms the car into a 20 foot tall battle robot. Or a sexbot. Or both. At the same time.
The Toyota Unicron. Yeah, yeah, gimme some of that.
Main competitor? The Kia GoBot.
Ha ha ha ha! Go-bots....
This will make chipping easier, the firmware in some cars is restricted for various reasons. Often it's a compromise of all the regulations for each country where it is sold.
I think you mean a RED screen of death...
My PC's motherboard maintains a constant voltage from the PSU and, indeed, the on-board battery.
I guess I need to disconnect the PSU and pop out the MB battery to reboot my pooter.
I see this as a definite plus. First off, the non-scientific reason I like this idea is they're not running Microsoft Windows. No one needs that junk in their car.
The real interesting part of this is what it means for the cost of manufacturing a vehicle. Theoretically the cost of the software running the car will be distributed throughout the car companies. Therefore, all car companies will experience lowered cost of manufacture (especially if the software manages to replace some current part of the car)...and thus car prices should go down.
I *do* hope you're a girl (or gay and proud)...
Quack, quack.
Thought almost ALL cars around the world used VxWorks for their embedded systems.
Japan has used the uTRON RTOS specification for ages. This can be though of as similar to a light-weight POSIX specification that allows code to be ported relatively easily across RTOSs that have uTRON interfaces. This makes it realtively simple to interface code at the task level.
Remember folks that cars these days are packed with CPUs and are really just networks on wheels.
This exercise is more about setting a standardised architecture and set of interfaces that allows better integration of more complex elements.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
An annoying side-effect of all the electronics in current cars is that it's become impossible to replace the sound system (or at least the head unit): all too often, the head unit is linked to the satnav display, and on more expensive cars, the stereo is a main interface element for the entire car (BMW iDrive and similar systems). Also, the HU is built into the dashboard, instead of being in a DIN slot.
This means you're stuck with the limited quality and features of the headunit, and adding things like an amplifier, CD changer, MP3 player and extra speakers (e.g. a subwoofer) are hard or impossible.
With a standard OS, it should be possible to separate the head unit from the rest of the car, and still use the HU to interface with the car.
I wonder if you troll in Germany, you'll be on Autobahn.
This happened in Phoenix, Arizona.
Many years ago, when I was in college and poor, I bought a truly beat to death VW Baja for $800. It had tiny little wheels for drag racing for some odd reason, and great big sand wheels up front. The front end and the back end were fiberglass, with all the sheet metal cut off roughly with a torch; the front bumper was, I kid you not, the GAS TANK. I had to buy some new seat belts out of a wrecked beetle to bolt in because the originals had been cut out. The car sounded like a helicopter, you could barely hear yourself think. It had a souped-up 1800cc engine that was the greasiest, ugliest thing I'd ever seen in my life.
I really liked that car. It was fast as hell and totally terrifying to drive.
One time, my ex girlfriend tried to make fun of my car by flying past it in her mustang (over Camelback Mountain). I let her get just past me and I stomped on the gas; I flew past her and got the thing up over 100 mph before making the crest of the mountain (this was on the upward side, mind you).
Even better, one time I was sitting at a stoplight and this creepy ASU kid and his girlfriend were making fun of my car from their convertible. I looked over at them, and when the light turned green, stomped the accelerator and popped the clutch. The damn thing popped a wheelie and I almost had a heart attack. But it was worth it, the kid was so surprised he forgot to go and got cut off by traffic.
Still... I ended up selling it for the same 800 bucks to another college kid. He took it out in the desert, floored it, shot off the top of a sand dune, and obliterated the car. Amazingly, the kid survived and called me up to ask for his 800 bucks back! I said "what are you, nuts? Consider it a stupidity tax" and hung up.
Sigh... Poor car...
Obviously some kind of emoticon might have prevented your trollification <:o)
But what do I know, we seem to be entering an era of anti-anti-microsoft bashing...
--
Resistance is futile
Once these things start connecting to smart phones and laptops, and are thereby connected to the outside world... viruses!
I think a particularly funny one would be to lower the windows and make them unable to go up as long as the windshield wipers are on.
I think a particularly not funny one would be to somehow mess with the steering/breaking/stability systems to deliberately cause people to drive off the road.
I can see every major component being connected with a TCP/IP stack. Everyone can write whatever calls they want to be available & manufacturers could choose the ones they want.
However I can also see the case (of my 1996 Mitsubishi Eclipse spyder) that I can't get through inspection because it won't complete a drive cycle... (For example: I have to cold start, then drive at 60MPH without sloshing the fuel for the EVAP test. Considering I live in the middle of a city & have to drive 20min before hitting a highway where I can drive 60 - this is a problem...)
It is great that the software in cars will be standardized, but how about the driving experience.
I drive different rental cars every week and I am amazed at how dissimilar the controls are.
I suggest that the automakers, or our government, make the controls and indicators for:
gear shifter, emergency brake, lights, turn signals, wipers, speedometer, fuel gauge, pedals, gas cap, side mirrors, window controls, emergency flasher, panel dimmer, power locks and cruise control, standardized on all cars.
How many accidents have occurred because the driver was looking for or trying to use a control incorrectly.
machinator omnis sine licentia
If all else fails, I'll have to build kit cars or pay custom shops to remove all this crap they're putting in standard models. Thanks for all the choice.
As for the stereo, the only audio file formats I use are flac and vorbis. Fortunately I (like many slashdotters) have the skills to create my own car audio system. In fact, my next vehicle I'm going to have a linux powered jukebox - just because I can.
Cop: I am putting you under arrest for DWI.
Driver/Linux hacker: But officer, WINE is not an intoxicant.
I was hoping the headline was going to read "Flying Cars."
Rumor has it that it will be based on an open-source operating system and will be called Rynix.
This public service announcement was brought to you by the letters "R" and "L". :-O.
Windows Automotive is Microsoft's entry into the car OS field. Its not XP or Vista based, but based on Windows CE, pretty much a totally different OS (intended for embedded use), only sharing the name Windows.
IMHO, its not too bad, Windows CE is maturing and is standing up well to the test of time, so Windows Automotive 5.0 shouldn't be as bad as people think. However, time will tell. Also, Windows Automotive doesn't appear to be for the critical controls of a car (if stuff is drive-by-wire), but more for powering and controlling the car's gadgets (radio, A/C.) For critical control of a vehicle, I'd much rather go with an embedded OS that has done its time in life safety areas(Green Hills Integrity RTOS for example)
Maybe this is something MS should look into (and I'm not being sardonic, as any research in this field where even a single bug can kill or cause tremendous damage is good research), making a version of Windows CE that is intended for safety applications.
... what about all those 3-party drivers?
There was talk a while back about Ford using embedded Windows for managing engine functions and other operational systems in the vehicle (with the exception of the most critical parts, although that was not clear from reports). I don't know if they actually decided to follow through with it, but if they did then that would be yet another blow to the quality of the American automobile against the Japaneses and European makes. It is probably better that they (the Japanese auto makers) are developing this OS fram scratch since neither Windows or Linux is really designed to be a real-time OS for critical applications (i.e. avionics and flight systems, engine management, and nuclear power plant controllers). Those systems which do exist in this arena tend to be highly specialized anyway so it probably doesn't make sense to try and adapt the avionics or flight control systems of airliners to managing an automobile engine.
So, if the OS is not free, then will that mean that RMS won't ride in these vehicles? I see a new GNU project on the horizon!
Let's play video games with mailmanZERO
Could I say that Linux powers my windows?
By law, they have to support OBD2 diagnostics; this spec provides a limited number of diagnostic indicators that (theoretically) can be accessed and interpreted the same on all vehicles. The OBD2 spec is even available - not officially, but Google is your friend.
So far so good - some standardization, albeit government enforced. But there's more; there's a lot more useful diagnostic information available from the vehicle systems than OBD2 shows. So the manufacturers extend the protocol and define other trouble codes and ways of accessing them. These extensions aren't documented, and they're often designed to be as obscure and impenetrable as possible. Every manufacturer has different proprietary extensions and they change them at whim.
The dealership service departments have the dedicated computer that talks to that manufacturer's cars; it knows all the codes. But independent service shops don't have those dedicated machines or any information about how to read the extended codes from a vehicle. The manufacturers refuse to provide any information to anyone at any price; you can't even buy the diagnostic machine from them unless you're one of their dealers.
They've been doing this for years; various lawsuits have come and gone but the manufacturers still won't share the information that mechanics need to service their cars effectively. The manufacturers like it this way; it drives more business to the dealership service departments and prevents third-party parts companies from making less-expensive replacement parts. This is the status quo; even the Japanese manufacturers play the same game.
So let's consider the possibility of a standardized automotive operating system or architecture. Would the manufacturers use it? If it offered greater reliability or reduced build costs they'd go for it. But before it hit the dealers they'd "fix" it so that their parts and service divisions would continue to enjoy their competitive advantages...
When it was discovered that some Chevy built engines were put into Cadillacs they sued the hell out of GM.
Thank GOD it isn't Microsoft! I'll happily run any car from anywhere by anybody else, as long as Microsoft didn't design the OS. It is mathematically impossible that anybody else could do a worse job.
Why does every potential problem have to have a "government enforced" solution? Why not have some personal responsibility for your own actions instead? Are you that stupid that the government has to make each and every decision for you so you don't hurt yourself?
Creative Demolition
I'm a mechanic by hobby and an IT guy by trade. I don't want those two to combine. Besides, do we really need more shit to worry about under the hood?
The game.
http://www.fia.com/resources/documents/198095623__ 05_07_2006_wmsc_decisions.pdf
... Hmm - I think that last paragraph might already be covered, no?
PRESS RELEASE
WORLD MOTOR SPORT COUNCIL
The World Motor Sport Council met in Paris on July 5, 2006. The following decisions were taken:
FORMULA ONE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP
Bridgestone has been selected as the official tyre supplier to the FIA Formula One World
Championship in 2008, 2009 and 2010*.
Microsoft MES has been selected as the official ECU supplier to the FIA Formula One World
Championship in 2008, 2009 and 2010.
Due to a significant increase in cornering speeds in Formula One this season, the World Motor
Sport Council agreed to consult with the Formula One Technical Working Group regarding possible
measures to slow the cars.
For those of us that happen to be happy with the stereo that came with the car, the upside is no more having to take the thing apart and hide it every time you leave the car somewhere and no more smashed windows and some wires hanging out of your dash when you come back to it...
I, for one, welcome our new fully integrated un-steal-able car stereo overlords!
As an experienced automotive embedded software engineer, I can say for sure this OS standard will bring nothing to the industry that isn't already in place. There are extensive standards for diagnostics, operating systems, safety systems, and pretty much everything else you can think of. I think the enthusiastic nature of many of the replies to this thread is an indication of a larger problem with how the US automakers are portrayed. Most people assume that it's good simply because the Japanese are doing it. Had a US automaker come out with this announcement, they would have be destroyed for being so far behind. Over and over again the media gives the Japanese and Europeans credit for technologies/strategies that have been in place for years. While they do bring a great deal of new technology to the table, no one gives US automakers credit for their contributions. For example, those of you BMW drivers (me included), your transmissions are most likely GM hydra-matics (http://prnewswire.co.uk/cgi/news/release?id=21160 ). BMW also has widely used Chrysler developed engines in the past (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritec_engine). Mercedes drivers might be interested to learn that Mercedes does not even have an engine software department. Nearly 100% of this task is outsourced to Bosch, who supplies the same software to numerous other auto manufacturers (as well as the electronics to go with it). This trend of sharing and partnerships is present all throughout the industry and the framework for interchangeably sharing software has existed for years. In short there is really no technology gap from one auto manufacturer to the next (the exception being hybrid development at Toyota and fuel cells at GM). Everyone is buying the same systems from the same suppliers.
The quality difference comes from US executives looking to increase the per vehicle margin by saving 5 cents here and 10 cents there at the cost of long term quality. In fact most of you would be interested to know that your 2007 Toyotas have powertrain electronics technology dating back to 1997. This is not a bad thing as it leads to high reliability, but don't be fooled into thinking that something is high tech just because it is Japanese. The bottom line is that whether its BMW, Toyota, GM, Ford, etc...most vehicles share many of the same parts and it's the cost reduction mindset of US executives that leads to the quality differentiation.
That would be terrible. ODB2 is based on CAN which was designed specifically for cars. Replacing CAN with a less rugged, higher latency, master/slave layer like USB would be dumb.
Perhaps you could put some more smarts into each car talking to the components under the hood via CAN and then have it spit out a detailed message over USB or even print it on an LCD. But then your adding cost and have to decide how much it's really worth.
Really, why would different manufacturers want to make things more interoperable? This would in the long run reduce the need to buy particular brands, especially for repair parts, and cut into thir bottom lines.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's not a bug, it's a feature...
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
What's in it for the manufacturers? This OS doesn't seem to extend to the hardware design, so I doubt we'll be seeing replaceable/interchangeable ECUs. (It will most likely be an interchangeable communication protocol with proprietary hardware.) Were system development costs that high that a joint specification would actually cut spending significantly enough to make financial sense? Or is there some other motive? A new OS alone really means nothing to the consumer, it's all about how it may or may not be implemented, mainly with diagnostics equipment.
I'm all for having engineers get more input from the computer before they start a diagnosis of a problem. Right now the difference between the OBD2 and proprietary analyzers are quite large. With OBD2 it will tell you that the fuel mixture is screwed up. With the proprietary analyzers, it will often tell you that the MAF is shot, and by the way, cylinder 6 isn't firing correctly.
That said, these computer analyzers should be making repairs cheaper and better, but to the contrary it seems like all they're doing is breeding a whole generation of "engineers" that don't even know how to use a torque wrench, and will over torque your oil pan when they install a new gasket, giving you a nice'n'fresh leak 6 months after the job. Argh. One more reason I do my own automotive work...
I've never been in an accident, I take responsibility for my actions, and I take exception to being called stupid, by some self-proclaimed NEO-"pathological-techno-fetishist-with-social-def icit", who probably doesn't have anything more than a driver's permit.
If a majority of the population sees the value in such a proposition, and convinces their administration to create driver UI standards, than this is probably for the greater good. Whereas you would probably apply your anarchistic rant to driving on the same side of the road as everyone else.
machinator omnis sine licentia
You can't even compare it to embedded Linux -- which is generally rock-solid and capable of running in almost anything -- because Linux is not real-time. (Neither is Windows or OS X or BSD, by the way.)
I mean, sure, there are plenty of so-called "real-time" applications that these OSes work perfectly well for. Audio, for instance -- Protools, Ardour, etc. But it's a bit like Java -- while on average, you know how long something is going to take to process, you don't have any guarantees. (In Java's case, the garbage collector might decide to run at exactly the moment you need something important to happen.)
"real-time" means that you can actually guarantee, often with mathematical proofs, that a given thing will happen by a given deadline, and usually the deadlines are much shorter than anything a modern desktop OS can handle. It means you can say things like "If the sensor reads foo, I need a shutdown command sent to the nuclear reactor within 20 milliseconds." Done properly, you can actually guarantee beyond a shadow of a doubt that this will happen -- and in 20 milliseconds, not 21. On a desktop OS, there's just no guarantee -- for all you know, a filesystem driver, of all things, could lock the whole IO system up for half a second.
That's not to say that you can't make Linux realtime -- there are projects to do so. It's also not to say that you can't build a desktop out of a realtime OS. But right now, as far as I know, there are no real-time OSes which are used for anything other than embedded apps which actually need the real-time capability.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Understand, there's software and then there's software. There is actually a company which specializes in test-driven development to the point where they actually will develop a product in the same amount of time, but charge twice as much for it, because there will be NO bugs (or "defects") at release. Other companies would spend half their time developing, and the other half testing and squashing bugs, and there would still be a dozen bugs there.
So, the level of software that will be directly controlling the car will be pretty much un-crackable.
Now, the smart phones and laptops, maybe, but those won't be connected directly to steering and such. As much as everyone wants to have the James Bond car, which you can drive by remote control, I'm fairly sure auto manufacturers have thought of what you just did, and really, really don't want to be held liable for that kind of bullshit. So basically, no James Bond cars until the industry as a whole moves to that level of stability and security.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
In Soviet Russia car networks YOU!
In years past I had talks with Ford to develop a new operating system for all Ford vehicles, but it didn't work out. At the same time, Ford had their own project exploring a vehicle based on interchangeable components, which is just as stillborn.
The sad truth of the matter is major players have no interest in competition-enabling standards. In fact it's a little surprising that Japan is considering it, considering the massive vested interests of their own. Dynamic change like this is going to be driven by the Yugos and Hyundai's of the world, if nothing but for the simple fact that they have the least to lose.
Tart!
:)
Quack, quack.
So, I'm sorry, but your desire to tweak your car comes a very distant second to my desire to have safer air.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
gm's commonality vs ford's plethora of designs explains a lot about their relative financial success, doesn't it? and the krauts learned the logistic advantages of common design the hard way: in ww2, they had unique ammo for each of their small arms, while the commies designed their s.a. to a common cartridge...
a Beowulf cluster of this ?
{{.sig}}
You say its vanished? Then why are auto parts stores one of the fastest growing industries and they are putting stores on nearly every street corner?
Agreed, actual shops that do the repair for you are dwindling, but are being replaced by DIY parts stores.
Personally i think its partly the economy: People have less cash so are forced do more things themselves more instead of taking it to a repair center, but that's just a guess.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Oh, stop your kvetching. Your post was an obvious bit of groupthink aimed at whoring up some karma. It wasn't even funny. Actually, when I read your post I though "who modded that funny?" His post actually made me laugh. Know why? It was original. Your post wasn't. Sorry. Thanks for playing.