The rope is the rail. The only place you need bearings are the ski towers. Look at a ski lift.
Heck, look at every ski area with a lodge at the top or even an EMT shack. They use the lift to get supplies up. Of course it works. It's in use at every ski area in the world. A purpose built system would be more efficient.
Alpha has an x86 to Alpha JIT compiler that would eventually turn an x86 app into native code. It wasn't enough to keep NT on Alpha.
I think everything else got steamrollered by x86.
MS has the work environment locked up. We all run Windows to AD/Exchange/Office/Sharepoint and other native apps. Maybe some users will get a thin client to a terminal server to run legacy apps with a native web browser locally.
Most home users will just need a web browser on a phone/tablet/laptop/desktop to access everything. They're finding that Windows doesn't need to be a part of that.
I've been using a web browser since 1993, both at home and at work.
I have always had lots of bookmarks and usually want the same set at home and at work. It's always been a pain to combine them without duplicating or losing bookmarks. I used to use my bookmarks.html as my home page.
I've gone from Mosaic to Netscape to Mozilla to Firefox. I tried external sites like delicious but didn't like how it got brought back to my browser. I tried scripts that would merge 2 copies into a master copy.
Foxmarks was the 1st system that did what I wanted. It even helped when I tried Chrome. I love saving a bookmark at work and finding it at home.
I don't want to have to sync anything else. I use different extensions, cookies, logins, etc at home/work. Work has a censoring proxy that blocks some sites. I don't use facebook, youtube, etc at work because they monitor for "excessive usage". I can wait until I get home in any event. I certainly don't want any tabes brought back to work.
The next thing I want to find is a bookmark cleaner to clean out dead links. Some of my book marks might be for a device I power on in summer and off in winter every year and I want to keep those even if they go off the network.
The textbook looks like a good introduction to concepts using computers, but as an IT Systems Administrator, I wouldn't call it IT. Some of the suggestions here are programming, not IT. IT uses programming, but lots of it is user stuff.
For IT concepts:
Something on security, using passwords. Maybe explain it in terms of a diary that you don't want a sibling to read & how to ensure that. The issues of sharing too much online.
How email works. Storing & forwarding. How email addresses are organized.
How an algorithm works. Math, if-then-else, functions. This plus this. Use a spreadsheet. Use a programming language. Use Openoffice macros. Use javascript. Teach concepts.
Teach file organization. Grouping files. Sorting, date formats. Moving files, copying files, backups. Age of data.
Teach about tags, metadata (data about data). File sizes.
Tables, statistics, graphing. How to use it to measure something over time. Outliers. Measuring something scientifically like time/distance, temperature, etc.
Speed is the NASCAR channel. I try to watch MotoGP on it. There was a 3 way battle for 2nd place going on last week and they cut away from it, just as an attack was going on to show 1st place, 4-5 seconds ahead, cruising across the finish. *sigh*
There's lots of cutting away from a race to show a NASCAR repeat. ESPN used to do it with Supercross & cut off the end to show the football draft rerun. At least Speed treats supercross better then ESPN.
FWIW, I heard about an F1 race with 2-3 lead changes in a race. The next week I saw a MotoGP with 4 lead changes in *1* corner.
When I see statement like this, I often think about indoor plumbing. I can imagine the hicks saying "how day the government make me put in indoor plumbing. My outhouse is good enough."
And I say "the day the gov't/power company put something in to remotely turn off my toilet"
I'm all for having something where I can see how much power I'm using minute to minute. The power, gas, phone and water utilities should already be able to do this. I'd love to be able to get the same data on my system in a reasonable timeframe. I'd probably be willing to pay.
But no way am I going to give permission to any of them to turn it off w/o my active involvement. I have my owe computer monitoring my freezer temp, burgler alarms. My garden gets watered during the day, etc.
Corn costs almost twice as much to grow then what the farmer gets paid. So the US gov't subsidies it. 51% + 50% = 101% so the corn farmer gets a profit.
And beef is fed corn because that's the cheapest stuff you can feed them. Cows evolved to eat mainly grass so eventually an all corn diet will cause disease. So you feed them antibiotics. Which has other risks to the population.
And what to do with the manure? You used to spread it on the fields to fertilize the corn. But now the feedlot is > 30 miles from the nearest corn farm so it's too costly to truck to a nearby farm. I bet some of your taxes help pay to dispose of that manure too.
If all you can afford is cheap food, eat it. Long term, you can't survive on raman noodles and other cheap food. FWIW, the cheapest source of organic food is a backyard garden. Even a little bit helps.
We're spending a smaller percentage of income on food then any time in history. And a larger percentage on health care.
I have red-green color-blindness, like 20%(?) of the male population. 99% of the time I can work around it. Traffic lights have 2 keys, position and color. The colors they use look different to me.
I have a hard time with dual color red/green LEDs. Most are light colored and I can't tell the difference. I have issues with some charts that choose light colors as well.
I can read resistor charts, tell between wire colors and can generally do things w/o the red/green.
But as a sysadmin/network admin, I'd *really* like the ability to tell the difference between red/green LEDs instead of having logging in to check.
A DSi: Graphical device with touch screen, WiFi, Web Browser, 2 Cameras, SD card, Custom Cartridge. Does it have IR? Some kind of external port?
There was a embroidery sewing machine that used a GameBoy Color + custom cartridge as its computer. Many sewers back then (1999?) didn't have computers and adding a $200 GameBoy to a $2000 sewing machine was cheaper then a $1000 PC.
Palm PDAs with the infrared port have been used to simulate the spread of a disease through a population. Give all the students the PDAs running the App. One is infected. Everyone starts syncing IR. Now the class tries to find out who had the original infection.
A Palm with a serial port interface to sensors that collect information (button press as a ball rolls across it, sound waves, anything that can be timed).
Distributed quiz answering pads. Send class notes to everyone's DS to read at home. Quizes to research.
There has to be lots of things that can be done beyond "Educational" software.
My 1st admin was Xenix on a 386 with a 40MB MFM drive. I worked as a computer operator before that at a place that had Altos Xenix, SunOS i386, Sequent and DTSS.
Anyways...
You have up to 10MB of data. It can use a serial port. Without hardware handshaking, 9600 baud is the fastest you can expect.
10485760 bytes @ 2400 bytes/sec ~= 73 minutes. Geez, why not just use the serial port?
Plug a PC with a 3 wire serial port cable & a terminal program that can log to file. Even Hyperterm can capure text.
If it's just text, cat it on the Xenix just after you start the capture txt on your terminal.
If it's binary, you have 2 choices.
1) Get something like xmodem, zmodem or kermit running on both ends. 2) uuencode the data to convert it to 7 bit ascii and cat it as above.
compress should be on Xenix to reduce the file size before you transfer. uuencode will convert 3 bytes to 4 bytes. gzip can uncompress.
I had xmodem and zmodem for Xenix back in the day. Since I didn't have a compiler, I had to get a binary from CompuServ's Unix SIG. If I had known about uuencode, I would have used that.
The only problem with uuencode it error checking. You might want to do some kind of checksum on your data. I don't remember the tools. Zmodem and kermit both do error checking. If you have a short cable ( 9600 baud without hardware handshaking, you will get errors. I used to use a 50' 5 wire hardware handshaking cable for zmodem transfers at 115k all the time.
The thing that gets me is that TBL designed the internet protocols we use every day. Yet they are so full of plaintext and the technology to process it is all based around slicing and dicing this data up to turn it back into usable binary data that it's amazing we've come this far on such a rickety technology.
The thing that gets me is Microsoft designed the file formats we use in Office every day. Yet they are so full of binary that's not portable and subject to endianess issues. The tech to slice & dice the data to make it available on portable media such as the web or non intel cpus has to be all reverse engineered. Even Microsoft has issues with backward compatibility. It's amazing this rickety technology has lasted so long.
TBL didn't use a binary format for a reason. I have LaTeX documents created on a VAX in 1987 that have been used on DOS, DTSS, MacOS, OS/2, Windows 95, Linux, SunOS, Solaris. The could still be used today. A Word document created in 1987 or even 1995, not so much. There would be issues going from Windows 95 to MacOS as well.
Going back further, some mainframes had chat room type apps.
I started using the conferencing on DTSS in 1980. I met lots of people and even dated one or two. Dartmouth College provided accounts to all the Dartmouth community and even local high school students (which was how I got mine). There were other colleges on the east coast that could connect into the conferencing as well. I heard of a few people that met & married this way.
There was an explosion of use when Dartmouth brought in Macintoshes and dorm access in 1984+. There was a decline in the quality of chat (distracted users) when Multifinder started getting used (1990?) and people put chat in the background.
I spend lots of time debugging non-FOSS app nstallation scripts. The apps I deal with are often ports from Windows that make lots of eroneous assumptions about a Solaris or Linux box. The security settings are often wrong. They'll use a custom installation script instead of the OS standard packages. When the next version of the app comes out, I have to do it again.
Once the app is installed, I have to install & maintain a license server. When users can't run the app, I have to check the license server to see if it's running. Or if more people are trying to run it vs the number of licenses. If the licenses are in use, I can tell the user to wait a bit until someone else finishes. Or figure out how to kick a user off if he's gone on vacation. I have to balance the cost of the licenses vs the usage. I have to write my own tools or buy expensive ones to track that. If I need to move my server to new hardware, I have to reinstall every license after providing the vendor with information from my new server. Some vendors charge $$ for the rehosting, but most do not.
Some apps have lots of information on Google. Many only have the vendor docs which usually assume every just works. Or they require a custom viewer or search.
With FOSS, someone has usually created a package, rpm, etc for my OS. Or they use the standard, freely available configure and install tools (GNU configure, perl Makefile.PL, Ruby gem, etc). I'd love to see vendors use these install tools instead of writing their own. Just so I don't have to learn yet another tool.
FOSS doesn't have license servers. That frees up major parts of my time, speeds up users, etc. If I need to renew support contracts, the apps are not going to stop working because I'm a few days late. Most non-FOSS will extend a license when you call to review, but you get a stoppage from when the license expires until you get the new license from the vendor.
Most FOSS gets documented and put on the web. I can google others experiences in blogs, wikis and forums in addition to the official docs and web sites. Most of them will point out issues and workarounds that are not in the offical documentation.
If the app does what is needed and is not FOSS, I'll buy it. But there's no way a non-FOSS app using a license server is easier to support then a FOSS app. I'm not talking buggy apps. Those exist on both sides.
I like the bridge analogy. It's well understood in terms of security, relability and accountability. The problem is mapping physical bridge flaws to software flaws. Then defining exceptions due to misuse, environment and unknown or acts of god.
An engineer has a 4 year degree, then takes the EIT exam. With an EIT, they are mentored by a PE for X years, keep a journal. They can then take the PE exam. They get a stamp that's legally binding to put on blueprints, etc. The builders can't bid on contracts w/o a PE stamp on the design. Deviations w/o a stamp incur legal liability.
So a new bridge is needed. The old one is torn down, a temporary bridge is put up until funding for the new bridge is obtained. It needs a stamp. The funding doesn't happened and the new bridge gets put off by the politicians. The temp bridge is now 30 years old. temp bridges are rated for 10 years and have a 2x factor of safety. It collapses with a car on it (White River Jct, VT in the 90s).
IMO, the bridge was over built. It should have failed 10 years earlier:-)
Other scenarios, other locations: The temp bridge is rated for 10 tons. Someone drives a 20 ton vehicle over it & it fails. A car strikes one of the support beams. The town skips painting & other maintenance. Ice builds up duing a 100yr flood against the main pillar, The town starts using salt on the roads because climate change now freezes the road all the time. The contractor didn't use the specified bolts. Lightning strikes the bridge (& it has no towers so lightening rods are not needed). Winds make the bridge sway. Someone builds a tower nearby that increases the wind effect.
I've been watching US College hockey for a long time. Most rinks have a Zamboni. They last a long time. I've seen a few new ones and usually the go electric because the propane ones generate CO2 and that's not good indoors. I've seen rinks add a 2nd Zamboni for faster resurfacing between periods too.
Zamboni isn't the only maker of ice resurfacers. I bet most rinks in the US are Zamboni though. I remember Union College in Schenectedy had another brand.
FWIW Clarkson University gave Mr Zamboni and honorary degree in 1988 in recognition of his engineering achivement in creating the ice resurfacer.
Look at Windows NT for Alpha. DEC had an excellent JIT compiler that would convert x86 apps into native code Alpha as they were being used. Eventualy the whole app would be native. Not quite as well a real native, but close enough.
Apple did emulation with 68k to PPC, even running some of the OS in it. I think there was something for PPC to x86 too.
If something like that could be created, I can see a possible future for Windows on non x86. It didn't end well for the Alpha. Windows CE or Mobile does run on Arm. That could have a future on Arm, but it still make users switch from the familiar Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
The rope is the rail. The only place you need bearings are the ski towers. Look at a ski lift.
Heck, look at every ski area with a lodge at the top or even an EMT shack. They use the lift to get supplies up.
Of course it works. It's in use at every ski area in the world. A purpose built system would be more efficient.
You forgot Itanium. Server 2008 runs on Itanium.
Alpha has an x86 to Alpha JIT compiler that would eventually turn an x86 app into native code. It wasn't enough to keep NT on Alpha.
I think everything else got steamrollered by x86.
MS has the work environment locked up. We all run Windows to AD/Exchange/Office/Sharepoint and other native apps. Maybe some users will get a thin client to a terminal server to run legacy apps with a native web browser locally.
Most home users will just need a web browser on a phone/tablet/laptop/desktop to access everything. They're finding that Windows doesn't need to be a part of that.
Connie Willis wrote an interesting story called Remake.
All dead actors rights were under license and it was more cost effective to use dead actors then unknown live actors.
http://www.amazon.com/Remake-Connie-Willis/dp/0553374370
I've been using a web browser since 1993, both at home and at work.
I have always had lots of bookmarks and usually want the same set at home and at work. It's always been a pain to combine them without duplicating or losing bookmarks. I used to use my bookmarks.html as my home page.
I've gone from Mosaic to Netscape to Mozilla to Firefox. I tried external sites like delicious but didn't like how it got brought back to my browser. I tried scripts that would merge 2 copies into a master copy.
Foxmarks was the 1st system that did what I wanted. It even helped when I tried Chrome. I love saving a bookmark at work and finding it at home.
I don't want to have to sync anything else. I use different extensions, cookies, logins, etc at home/work. Work has a censoring proxy that blocks some sites. I don't use facebook, youtube, etc at work because they monitor for "excessive usage". I can wait until I get home in any event. I certainly don't want any tabes brought back to work.
The next thing I want to find is a bookmark cleaner to clean out dead links. Some of my book marks might be for a device I power on in summer and off in winter every year and I want to keep those even if they go off the network.
The textbook looks like a good introduction to concepts using computers, but as an IT Systems Administrator, I wouldn't call it IT. Some of the suggestions here are programming, not IT. IT uses programming, but lots of it is user stuff.
For IT concepts:
Something on security, using passwords. Maybe explain it in terms of a diary that you don't want a sibling to read & how to ensure that. The issues of sharing too much online.
How email works. Storing & forwarding. How email addresses are organized.
How an algorithm works. Math, if-then-else, functions. This plus this. Use a spreadsheet. Use a programming language. Use Openoffice macros. Use javascript. Teach concepts.
Teach file organization. Grouping files. Sorting, date formats. Moving files, copying files, backups. Age of data.
Teach about tags, metadata (data about data). File sizes.
Tables, statistics, graphing. How to use it to measure something over time. Outliers. Measuring something scientifically like time/distance, temperature, etc.
In the southern US, some weeds have already developed a resistance to weeds.
The techniques those farmers currently use for large scale farming need to be changed.
Speed is the NASCAR channel. I try to watch MotoGP on it. There was a 3 way battle for 2nd place going on last week and they cut away from it, just as an attack was going on to show 1st place, 4-5 seconds ahead, cruising across the finish. *sigh*
There's lots of cutting away from a race to show a NASCAR repeat. ESPN used to do it with Supercross & cut off the end to show the football draft rerun. At least Speed treats supercross better then ESPN.
FWIW, I heard about an F1 race with 2-3 lead changes in a race. The next week I saw a MotoGP with 4 lead changes in *1* corner.
When I see statement like this, I often think about indoor plumbing. I can imagine the hicks saying "how day the government make me put in indoor plumbing. My outhouse is good enough."
And I say "the day the gov't/power company put something in to remotely turn off my toilet"
I'm all for having something where I can see how much power I'm using minute to minute. The power, gas, phone and water utilities should already be able to do this. I'd love to be able to get the same data on my system in a reasonable timeframe. I'd probably be willing to pay.
But no way am I going to give permission to any of them to turn it off w/o my active involvement. I have my owe computer monitoring my freezer temp, burgler alarms. My garden gets watered during the day, etc.
Indeed. I've heard of Solaris 2.4 apps (1996ish) running on Solaris 10.
Or an NFS v1 client on DOS running against an NFS v4 server on Solaris 10.
Corn costs almost twice as much to grow then what the farmer gets paid. So the US gov't subsidies it. 51% + 50% = 101% so the corn farmer gets a profit.
And beef is fed corn because that's the cheapest stuff you can feed them. Cows evolved to eat mainly grass so eventually an all corn diet will cause disease. So you feed them antibiotics. Which has other risks to the population.
And what to do with the manure? You used to spread it on the fields to fertilize the corn. But now the feedlot is > 30 miles from the nearest corn farm so it's too costly to truck to a nearby farm. I bet some of your taxes help pay to dispose of that manure too.
If all you can afford is cheap food, eat it. Long term, you can't survive on raman noodles and other cheap food. FWIW, the cheapest source of organic food is a backyard garden. Even a little bit helps.
We're spending a smaller percentage of income on food then any time in history. And a larger percentage on health care.
FWIW *all* farming was organic before chemical fertilizers and pesticides were developed after WWII.
ZFS dedupe in OpenSolaris is also Open Source.
I've gotten 11% dedup savings on 1.04 TB of a 1.82 TB volume.
Add compresson savings and ECC (so bad bits don't happen silently).
I'm hoping it will be in btrfs so Linux will have it.
I have red-green color-blindness, like 20%(?) of the male population. 99% of the time I can work around it. Traffic lights have 2 keys, position and color. The colors they use look different to me.
I have a hard time with dual color red/green LEDs. Most are light colored and I can't tell the difference. I have issues with some charts that choose light colors as well.
I can read resistor charts, tell between wire colors and can generally do things w/o the red/green.
But as a sysadmin/network admin, I'd *really* like the ability to tell the difference between red/green LEDs instead of having logging in to check.
I wonder how often they crash a veggie grower's seedlings.
I have a few racks of lights and over 50 tomato seedlings growing on a heating mat.
A DSi: Graphical device with touch screen, WiFi, Web Browser, 2 Cameras, SD card, Custom Cartridge. Does it have IR? Some kind of external port?
There was a embroidery sewing machine that used a GameBoy Color + custom cartridge as its computer. Many sewers back then (1999?) didn't have computers and adding a $200 GameBoy to a $2000 sewing machine was cheaper then a $1000 PC.
Palm PDAs with the infrared port have been used to simulate the spread of a disease through a population. Give all the students the PDAs running the App. One is infected. Everyone starts syncing IR. Now the class tries to find out who had the original infection.
A Palm with a serial port interface to sensors that collect information (button press as a ball rolls across it, sound waves, anything that can be timed).
Distributed quiz answering pads. Send class notes to everyone's DS to read at home. Quizes to research.
There has to be lots of things that can be done beyond "Educational" software.
My 1st admin was Xenix on a 386 with a 40MB MFM drive. I worked as a computer operator before that at a place that had Altos Xenix, SunOS i386, Sequent and DTSS.
Anyways...
You have up to 10MB of data. It can use a serial port. Without hardware handshaking, 9600 baud is the fastest you can expect.
10485760 bytes @ 2400 bytes/sec ~= 73 minutes. Geez, why not just use the serial port?
Plug a PC with a 3 wire serial port cable & a terminal program that can log to file. Even Hyperterm can capure text.
If it's just text, cat it on the Xenix just after you start the capture txt on your terminal.
If it's binary, you have 2 choices.
1) Get something like xmodem, zmodem or kermit running on both ends.
2) uuencode the data to convert it to 7 bit ascii and cat it as above.
compress should be on Xenix to reduce the file size before you transfer. uuencode will convert 3 bytes to 4 bytes. gzip can uncompress.
I had xmodem and zmodem for Xenix back in the day. Since I didn't have a compiler, I had to get a binary from CompuServ's Unix SIG. If I had known about uuencode, I would have used that.
The only problem with uuencode it error checking. You might want to do some kind of checksum on your data.
I don't remember the tools. Zmodem and kermit both do error checking. If you have a short cable ( 9600 baud without hardware handshaking, you will get errors. I used to use a 50' 5 wire hardware handshaking cable for zmodem transfers at 115k all the time.
The thing that gets me is that TBL designed the internet protocols we use every day. Yet they are so full of plaintext and the technology to process it is all based around slicing and dicing this data up to turn it back into usable binary data that it's amazing we've come this far on such a rickety technology.
The thing that gets me is Microsoft designed the file formats we use in Office every day. Yet they are so full of binary that's not portable and subject to endianess issues. The tech to slice & dice the data to make it available on portable media such as the web or non intel cpus has to be all reverse engineered. Even Microsoft has issues with backward compatibility. It's amazing this rickety technology has lasted so long.
TBL didn't use a binary format for a reason. I have LaTeX documents created on a VAX in 1987 that have been used on DOS, DTSS, MacOS, OS/2, Windows 95, Linux, SunOS, Solaris. The could still be used today. A Word document created in 1987 or even 1995, not so much. There would be issues going from Windows 95 to MacOS as well.
IRC predates ICQ by many years.
Going back further, some mainframes had chat room type apps.
I started using the conferencing on DTSS in 1980. I met lots of people and even dated one or two.
Dartmouth College provided accounts to all the Dartmouth community and even local high school students (which was how I got mine).
There were other colleges on the east coast that could connect into the conferencing as well.
I heard of a few people that met & married this way.
There was an explosion of use when Dartmouth brought in Macintoshes and dorm access in 1984+. There was a decline in the quality of chat (distracted users) when Multifinder started getting used (1990?) and people put chat in the background.
Lawns have a place, but shouldn't define a yard.
I live near Boston & I don't water my lawn.
I've dug up some to put in a garden which I do drip irrigate.
Some people in town have fruit trees and garden all over the yard. No room for grass.
Makes it harder to play catch of course, but still looks nice...
They've got it 100% covered with bark now.
In any event, who the hell waters their lawn?
ARM
No, really. It's beat Intel in phones, mp3 players (ipod). It's coming on Netbooks.
From the bottom where Intel came from to beat the others.
FOSS is FREE only if you don't value your time.
I spend lots of time debugging non-FOSS app nstallation scripts. The apps I deal with are often ports from Windows that make lots of eroneous assumptions about a Solaris or Linux box. The security settings are often wrong. They'll use a custom installation script instead of the OS standard packages. When the next version of the app comes out, I have to do it again.
Once the app is installed, I have to install & maintain a license server. When users can't run the app, I have to check the license server to see if it's running. Or if more people are trying to run it vs the number of licenses. If the licenses are in use, I can tell the user to wait a bit until someone else finishes. Or figure out how to kick a user off if he's gone on vacation. I have to balance the cost of the licenses vs the usage. I have to write my own tools or buy expensive ones to track that. If I need to move my server to new hardware, I have to reinstall every license after providing the vendor with information from my new server. Some vendors charge $$ for the rehosting, but most do not.
Some apps have lots of information on Google. Many only have the vendor docs which usually assume every just works. Or they require a custom viewer or search.
With FOSS, someone has usually created a package, rpm, etc for my OS. Or they use the standard, freely available configure and install tools (GNU configure, perl Makefile.PL, Ruby gem, etc). I'd love to see vendors use these install tools instead of writing their own. Just so I don't have to learn yet another tool.
FOSS doesn't have license servers. That frees up major parts of my time, speeds up users, etc. If I need to renew support contracts, the apps are not going to stop working because I'm a few days late. Most non-FOSS will extend a license when you call to review, but you get a stoppage from when the license expires until you get the new license from the vendor.
Most FOSS gets documented and put on the web. I can google others experiences in blogs, wikis and forums in addition to the official docs and web sites. Most of them will point out issues and workarounds that are not in the offical documentation.
If the app does what is needed and is not FOSS, I'll buy it. But there's no way a non-FOSS app using a license server is easier to support then a FOSS app. I'm not talking buggy apps. Those exist on both sides.
I like the bridge analogy. It's well understood in terms of security, relability and accountability. The problem is mapping physical bridge flaws to software flaws. Then defining exceptions due to misuse, environment and unknown or acts of god.
An engineer has a 4 year degree, then takes the EIT exam. With an EIT, they are mentored by a PE for X years, keep a journal. They can then take the PE exam. They get a stamp that's legally binding to put on blueprints, etc. The builders can't bid on contracts w/o a PE stamp on the design. Deviations w/o a stamp incur legal liability.
So a new bridge is needed. The old one is torn down, a temporary bridge is put up until funding for the new bridge is obtained. It needs a stamp. The funding doesn't happened and the new bridge gets put off by the politicians. The temp bridge is now 30 years old. temp bridges are rated for 10 years and have a 2x factor of safety. It collapses with a car on it (White River Jct, VT in the 90s).
IMO, the bridge was over built. It should have failed 10 years earlier :-)
Other scenarios, other locations:
The temp bridge is rated for 10 tons. Someone drives a 20 ton vehicle over it & it fails. A car strikes one of the support beams. The town skips painting & other maintenance. Ice builds up duing a 100yr flood against the main pillar, The town starts using salt on the roads because climate change now freezes the road all the time. The contractor didn't use the specified bolts. Lightning strikes the bridge (& it has no towers so lightening rods are not needed). Winds make the bridge sway. Someone builds a tower nearby that increases the wind effect.
Zamboni has had electrics for a long time.
I've been watching US College hockey for a long time. Most rinks have a Zamboni. They last a long time. I've seen a few new ones and usually the go electric because the propane ones generate CO2 and that's not good indoors. I've seen rinks add a 2nd Zamboni for faster resurfacing between periods too.
Zamboni isn't the only maker of ice resurfacers. I bet most rinks in the US are Zamboni though. I remember Union College in Schenectedy had another brand.
FWIW Clarkson University gave Mr Zamboni and honorary degree in 1988 in recognition of his engineering achivement in creating the ice resurfacer.
Maybe even JIT?
Look at Windows NT for Alpha. DEC had an excellent JIT compiler that would convert x86 apps into native code Alpha as they were being used. Eventualy the whole app would be native. Not quite as well a real native, but close enough.
Apple did emulation with 68k to PPC, even running some of the OS in it. I think there was something for PPC to x86 too.
If something like that could be created, I can see a possible future for Windows on non x86. It didn't end well for the Alpha. Windows CE or Mobile does run on Arm. That could have a future on Arm, but it still make users switch from the familiar Windows.