There's something wrong with your beetle. Max speed pre 1972 should be at least 75 mph. With the late transaxle, you should be able to attain 80 comfortably. 90% of the time, it's either poor compression (ring job time) or bad tuning (spark too far advanced = excessive knocking under load on the top end).
They went bankrupt because of simple free market economics.
Where there's fraud and corruption, there's someone trying to make a buck through means other than hard work. A company whose executives would rather lie and cheat than to put in an honest day's work, is a company that has learned to avoid competing. The avoidance of competition breeds incompetence.
I work for a government contractor, in a field where there's only a couple of competitors left. The government simply hands out contracts in turn to these few companies, because if they gave them out to the best competitor, the others would go out of business, and they'd be left with a monopoly. The end result: none of these companies actually competes with eachother anymore. They sit around waiting for the inevitable handouts.
Competition is the only answer, but 99% of the business world would rather chew off their own leg than to compete. Look at Microsoft - as soon as Apple built their own Web Browser (Safari), they packed up their marbles and went home (IE:mac).
The other thing that drives these companies bankrupt, of course, is that there's a lot of fraud going on undetected, where the executives are hiding a lot of the money offshore. These people will never be caught. It's like how Stan Lee got ripped off by Sony, his contract gave him a percentage of Spider Man's gross profit, and Sony managed to make the highest selling movie of last summer look as if they lost money, on paper.
For privately held companies, we have to allow this, their private accounting practices are none of our business. Do business with these people at your own risk. But for publicly traded companies, there isn't enough transparency in the accounting process to adequately police these bastards. And, of course, the Republican agenda of de-regulation and privatization have gutted the government's ability to police America's businesses. One scandal after another, and this is really only the tip of the iceberg.
It's all part of their recently announced scheme(s) - to invest $8B in R&D, hire 5000 new (Indian) workers. They're going to sink this money, then in a year, come out with NEW statistics showing how they've actually improved the situation.
Well - ain't gonna happen until they ditch MFC and rewrite Explorer.exe. With DotNET, that's half the battle. As long as their runtime is solid. . .
Ever had it freeze because the threading model used in Explorer.exe is garbage, has been since 1995, and Microsoft never bothered fixing it?
Ever have your system hang because explorer.exe was stuck trying to read a bad CD-ROM, or a network drive that dropped out?\
Even Apple re-wrote their file-system browser (Finder -> MultiFinder -> OS X Finder -> Panther Finder) several times. Windows schmucks have been stuck with the same lame-ass Explorer.exe for 8 years.
Nothing to do with Windows, and everything to do with the buggy, crappy, poorly documented, unstable, MFC framework these "poorly written" apps are 99% coded in.
Wow, I grew up worrying about Nuclear Annihilation by the Russians. Now, my kids can grow up worrying about Nuclear Annihilation from the Pakistanis. Or being burned alive for eating a Hamburger - six of one, half-dozen of the other. . .
I'm a pretty smart guy, and for most problems, sure I can fix those. But every once in a while, you run into something that's been obfuscated by black-box-engineering. You can't figure out what the problem is, without seeing inside. In some cases, it's as simple as spending your money on an incredibly overpriced "xxx Unleashed" book. In other cases, you have to swap out bad hardware, and it could be one of a couple of dozen possible components. Do you stock your own supply of spare parts? Can you purchase them at cost, or do you have to pay retail for them?
Finally - you'll always eventually hit some problem that you simply can't find answers for, either in expensive documentation - or PAID (cha-ching$$$) support calls to a vendor. Where you get endlessly jerked around. Personally, I could do every facet of this job, except this one, and love it. When I get stumped - and I know the answer's in there, but for a lack of good documentation, you're just plain stuck - as a freelancer.
Hell, even when I've worked for Big Software Company Dot Com, and we had clout with Microsoft - I would hit problems that even Microsoft developer support could not explain. That's a crappy position to be in, and exactly why I am a believer in Open Source. If you can't find someone who understands their own f0cking source code, then you can at least go in and look yourself.
I'm just saying - as a standalone freelance technical consultant, you don't have clout with the vendors, and you can't get the truly nasty problems fixed. Period.
On the other hand, getting $100/hr taking apart iMacs to get CD's out of froze-up slot-loading CD drives ain't a bad way to make a living.
I'm still getting automated emails 3 years later from Earthlink telling me that they're very sorry but DSL is STILL not available in my area. I checked with them first. Then I checked with PacBell, signed up with them straight off.
I've been very happy with their service so far. Very rarely is there any outage.
However, they have jacked up the price from $30/mo to $50/mo. However, a local DSL provider who did offer me service a few years back was charging $100/mo. On the pretense that they offered "premium extras". I don't even use the extras I get from PacBell.
Anyway, I hope we get some competition in this market soon. I'm sick of hearing about how Canadians get DSL for $12/mo.
I was laid off last September, and was able to find a job within 60 days, (making much less). The ONLY reason I got that job was due to contacts. My boss liked my resume, and really needed someone in my position, but the whole company is in a hiring freeze. So my boss hired me, pulled some strings, but if I had had to get the resume through their HR, it would have been shitcanned.
Since then, I've applied for every position I've seen open up, and I've been spamming my resume at every local shop that hires geeks. The only responses I've gotten were to say that they could not afford me.
I've also hit up other contacts I know who are local, and more often than not, they tell me that their company is in trouble, and they want to know if my company is hiring, if I could hook them up.
I'm wondering if these guys are familliar with Arictle 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which is the basis of our Copyright law, and the language justifying copyright in the first place:
"to promote the useful arts and science"
Nowhere in there does it guarantee an owner a successful business, or a certain amount of profit.
So why does it matter, even for the Mom and Pop shop, when in their definition of Fair Use, has more or less of a degree of effect on the market for the Property in question?
In fact, it should not, and their #4 definition of Fair Use in their answer to Question 7 is complete and utter BULLSHIT.
I can't believe NOBODY asked about how the DoJ can possibly justify the treatment of Kevin Mitnick, and how his rights were violated like a teenage groupie in a pro-basketball star's hotel room.
Hey, the conservative politicians play the same zero-sum game:
"If some lazy, stupid person is on welfare because they don't get a job, and is collecting money from the state, which comes from taxes on Rich people, then it takes all incentive away from that Rich person to work hard, and soon we have a whole society of takers, and no givers. And God doesn't like takers."
- - - - . . . our economies may focus around land (where we can live with all our robot servants), art, and knowledge and other things that are uniquely human.
Sorry to say, I think you're probably grossly overestimating that which is "uniquely human".
I dunno, some mornings, I'm grumpy, and would MUCH rather interact with the consistency and reliability of a machine to get my caffeine (the coffee machine) than a human (starbucks).
There are times and situations when you want a human, sure. But I think there's a definate market for machines.
Look at Technical Support.
For a computer problem - I VERY OFTEN find that I can solve an issue much more quickly, and cheaply, by googling message boards, than I can by calling up some undertrained inexperienced phone monkey with an incomprehensible accent like The Simpson's Apu.
It's like the end of Jurassic Park, when the kids and the scientists are all cornered by the Velociraptors, and suddenly, the T-Rex comes along, and tries to eat one of the Velociraptors, and then the other two attack the T-Rex, and the humans escape.
It's great when two evils decide to attack eachother.
This is why competition is good, and monopolies are bad.
The US Govt - by the way, has a monopoly on awarding patents.
"Backup tapes are known to fail as well... That's why you make two of each, and send one off-site. "
No! That's crazy!
You make seven copies, do differential backups, rotate them in a Tower of Hanoi scheme, and keep the least-recently-used tapes offsite, and they can be updated every 64 backups. Or the two LRUs, and they're updated every 32 backups.
I don't really give a flying f*ck how distanced from the wealthy I am. I'd just like to have at least the standard of living my parents had. I'd like to raise my kids in the same or better lifestyle I was raised in. Is that a crime? I don't mind working hard for it. I don't mind studying and learning new skills.
But when the Corps all start going overseas to hire workers that do what I do - that puts a downward pressure on the labor market. Which means my standard of living declines. (and it HAS).
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There's something wrong with your beetle. Max speed pre 1972 should be at least 75 mph. With the late transaxle, you should be able to attain 80 comfortably. 90% of the time, it's either poor compression (ring job time) or bad tuning (spark too far advanced = excessive knocking under load on the top end).
. . . it's called Cygwin. . .
They went bankrupt because of simple free market economics.
Where there's fraud and corruption, there's someone trying to make a buck through means other than hard work. A company whose executives would rather lie and cheat than to put in an honest day's work, is a company that has learned to avoid competing. The avoidance of competition breeds incompetence.
I work for a government contractor, in a field where there's only a couple of competitors left. The government simply hands out contracts in turn to these few companies, because if they gave them out to the best competitor, the others would go out of business, and they'd be left with a monopoly. The end result: none of these companies actually competes with eachother anymore. They sit around waiting for the inevitable handouts.
Competition is the only answer, but 99% of the business world would rather chew off their own leg than to compete. Look at Microsoft - as soon as Apple built their own Web Browser (Safari), they packed up their marbles and went home (IE:mac).
The other thing that drives these companies bankrupt, of course, is that there's a lot of fraud going on undetected, where the executives are hiding a lot of the money offshore. These people will never be caught. It's like how Stan Lee got ripped off by Sony, his contract gave him a percentage of Spider Man's gross profit, and Sony managed to make the highest selling movie of last summer look as if they lost money, on paper.
For privately held companies, we have to allow this, their private accounting practices are none of our business. Do business with these people at your own risk. But for publicly traded companies, there isn't enough transparency in the accounting process to adequately police these bastards. And, of course, the Republican agenda of de-regulation and privatization have gutted the government's ability to police America's businesses. One scandal after another, and this is really only the tip of the iceberg.
MORALS are relative.
Ethics are not. Ethics are empirical.
NECESSITY is the mother of invention.
Not perpetual royalty payments.
It's all part of their recently announced scheme(s) - to invest $8B in R&D, hire 5000 new (Indian) workers. They're going to sink this money, then in a year, come out with NEW statistics showing how they've actually improved the situation.
Well - ain't gonna happen until they ditch MFC and rewrite Explorer.exe. With DotNET, that's half the battle. As long as their runtime is solid. . .
Ever had an App like Explorer.exe crash?
Ever had it freeze because the threading model used in Explorer.exe is garbage, has been since 1995, and Microsoft never bothered fixing it?
Ever have your system hang because explorer.exe was stuck trying to read a bad CD-ROM, or a network drive that dropped out?\
Even Apple re-wrote their file-system browser (Finder -> MultiFinder -> OS X Finder -> Panther Finder) several times.
Windows schmucks have been stuck with the same lame-ass Explorer.exe for 8 years.
Crashes where the system hangs, or the error is not trapped.
Nothing to do with Windows, and everything to do with the buggy, crappy, poorly documented, unstable, MFC framework these "poorly written" apps are 99% coded in.
Wow, I grew up worrying about Nuclear Annihilation by the Russians. Now, my kids can grow up worrying about Nuclear Annihilation from the Pakistanis. Or being burned alive for eating a Hamburger - six of one, half-dozen of the other. . .
doesn't always work - unfortunately.
Not in OS X.
They fixed that BUG.
Now, when you drag a volume to the trash, the trash icon changes to an Eject symbol. Get it?
I'm a pretty smart guy, and for most problems, sure I can fix those. But every once in a while, you run into something that's been obfuscated by black-box-engineering. You can't figure out what the problem is, without seeing inside. In some cases, it's as simple as spending your money on an incredibly overpriced "xxx Unleashed" book. In other cases, you have to swap out bad hardware, and it could be one of a couple of dozen possible components.
Do you stock your own supply of spare parts? Can you purchase them at cost, or do you have to pay retail for them?
Finally - you'll always eventually hit some problem that you simply can't find answers for, either in expensive documentation - or PAID (cha-ching$$$) support calls to a vendor. Where you get endlessly jerked around. Personally, I could do every facet of this job, except this one, and love it. When I get stumped - and I know the answer's in there, but for a lack of good documentation, you're just plain stuck - as a freelancer.
Hell, even when I've worked for Big Software Company Dot Com, and we had clout with Microsoft - I would hit problems that even Microsoft developer support could not explain. That's a crappy position to be in, and exactly why I am a believer in Open Source. If you can't find someone who understands their own f0cking source code, then you can at least go in and look yourself.
I'm just saying - as a standalone freelance technical consultant, you don't have clout with the vendors, and you can't get the truly nasty problems fixed. Period.
On the other hand, getting $100/hr taking apart iMacs to get CD's out of froze-up slot-loading CD drives ain't a bad way to make a living.
I'm still getting automated emails 3 years later from Earthlink telling me that they're very sorry but DSL is STILL not available in my area. I checked with them first. Then I checked with PacBell, signed up with them straight off.
I've been very happy with their service so far. Very rarely is there any outage.
However, they have jacked up the price from $30/mo to $50/mo. However, a local DSL provider who did offer me service a few years back was charging $100/mo. On the pretense that they offered "premium extras". I don't even use the extras I get from PacBell.
Anyway, I hope we get some competition in this market soon. I'm sick of hearing about how Canadians get DSL for $12/mo.
Over the years, Gartner has done far more grevious harm to the Technology industry than SCO. They're the paid psy-ops wing of Microsoft.
They've burned every last ounce of their credibility, and yet, highly paid, highly educated CIO's still listen to and believe their garbage.
I was laid off last September, and was able to find a job within 60 days, (making much less). The ONLY reason I got that job was due to contacts. My boss liked my resume, and really needed someone in my position, but the whole company is in a hiring freeze. So my boss hired me, pulled some strings, but if I had had to get the resume through their HR, it would have been shitcanned.
Since then, I've applied for every position I've seen open up, and I've been spamming my resume at every local shop that hires geeks. The only responses I've gotten were to say that they could not afford me.
I've also hit up other contacts I know who are local, and more often than not, they tell me that their company is in trouble, and they want to know if my company is hiring, if I could hook them up.
In my opinion - it's BAD. Very BAD.
I'm wondering if these guys are familliar with Arictle 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which is the basis of our Copyright law, and the language justifying copyright in the first place:
"to promote the useful arts and science"
Nowhere in there does it guarantee an owner a successful business, or a certain amount of profit.
So why does it matter, even for the Mom and Pop shop, when in their definition of Fair Use, has more or less of a degree of effect on the market for the Property in question?
In fact, it should not, and their #4 definition of Fair Use in their answer to Question 7 is complete and utter BULLSHIT.
Of course, take this with a grain of salt.
Persuading people to agree with their view is what they do for a living. They're very good at it. Their BMW's show it.
I can't believe NOBODY asked about how the DoJ can possibly justify the treatment of Kevin Mitnick, and how his rights were violated like a teenage groupie in a pro-basketball star's hotel room.
Your definition of "fair use" is interesting.
I'd like to see where #4, in particular, is documented in law. The basis for the first 3 is in the 1996 American Telecomunnications Act.
Where does #4 come from?
Or did some RIAA lobbyist invent it?
Hey, the conservative politicians play the same zero-sum game:
"If some lazy, stupid person is on welfare because they don't get a job, and is collecting money from the state, which comes from taxes on Rich people, then it takes all incentive away from that Rich person to work hard, and soon we have a whole society of takers, and no givers. And God doesn't like takers."
- - - -
. . . our economies may focus around land (where we can live with all our robot servants), art, and knowledge and other things that are uniquely human.
Sorry to say, I think you're probably grossly overestimating that which is "uniquely human".
I dunno, some mornings, I'm grumpy, and would MUCH rather interact with the consistency and reliability of a machine to get my caffeine (the coffee machine) than a human (starbucks).
There are times and situations when you want a human, sure. But I think there's a definate market for machines.
Look at Technical Support.
For a computer problem - I VERY OFTEN find that I can solve an issue much more quickly, and cheaply, by googling message boards, than I can by calling up some undertrained inexperienced phone monkey with an incomprehensible accent like The Simpson's Apu.
It's like the end of Jurassic Park, when the kids and the scientists are all cornered by the Velociraptors, and suddenly, the T-Rex comes along, and tries to eat one of the Velociraptors, and then the other two attack the T-Rex, and the humans escape.
It's great when two evils decide to attack eachother.
This is why competition is good, and monopolies are bad.
The US Govt - by the way, has a monopoly on awarding patents.
"Backup tapes are known to fail as well... That's why you make two of each, and send one off-site. "
No! That's crazy!
You make seven copies, do differential backups, rotate them in a Tower of Hanoi scheme, and keep the least-recently-used tapes offsite, and they can be updated every 64 backups. Or the two LRUs, and they're updated every 32 backups.
I don't really give a flying f*ck how distanced from the wealthy I am. I'd just like to have at least the standard of living my parents had. I'd like to raise my kids in the same or better lifestyle I was raised in. Is that a crime? I don't mind working hard for it. I don't mind studying and learning new skills.
But when the Corps all start going overseas to hire workers that do what I do - that puts a downward pressure on the labor market. Which means my standard of living declines. (and it HAS).