I admit I'm not too familiar with the W126 series. There aren't many old (or newish) Mercedes' available for sale or on the road here in NW Ohio for whatever reason; I don't know if I'd even recognize one if I saw one. I'm not really very opposed to Mercedes, in general, but it seems so rare around here, and I've already paid a good mechanic by the hour to get up to speed on my E36 BMW . . .
I must say that if I were in the market for another vehicle at the moment, I'd probably be shopping specifically for either a rebuilt E30 M3 or a stock E36 M3, or a 1998+ LS1- and Torsen-equipped F-body.
And, yes, I realize that those are polar opposite ideas of what "fast" means. But I spent a few quality years driving an absurdly reliable fourth-gen Firebird with a big V6, low-geared posi rear end, and stiff suspension, and have a fond and inalienable appreciation for the fun that is GM's middle-late 90's rear-drive cars. I want more of that kind of sideways, twitchy, tire-smoking joy -- the 325i outside is way too sticky (unAmerican?) for that.
A deer killed that Firebird. I had the BMW's front end apart replacing the control arms and all eight front ball joints, so I took the Firebird out that night instead. It didn't think too kindly of a mid-sized doe appearing from the dark nothingness in the median at 65MPH, but it was able to controllably decelerate quickly enough to avoid having that furry cunt go through the windshield, and it protected its occupants just fine.
The insurance company refused to fix it, saying the repairs were more than book. We took the money and bought a '79 Firebird hardtop, with a big grumbly Pontiac 301 and dual glass-pack exhaust with no cats. It'll be a fun car once I have the (new!) carb tuned up and and I get a chance replace every rotten rubber bit in the suspension with polyurethane. The body is in good shape for a high-mileage 30-year-old car. A little naval jelly, bondo, and paint, and it'll look great, but it's gonna be a lot of work and money anyway...
(Should'a also shaken loose of the $450 they wanted in salvage for the "wrecked" '96 Firebird, bought it back, and fixed it anyway. I'll never find another one with that combination of features and fun, let alone in purple. Live and learn.)
I drove an old friend's all-original (aside from suspension maintenance) '77 Camaro two days ago. Nothing special: base trim, Chevy 305, 3-speed auto, sane gears. But with 33k miles, one owner, and having always been waxed and kept in a garage its entire life (and not seen rain in over 15 years), its original paint is perfectly shiny and it drives almost like a new car. That was nice. I took a lot of notes on what to do with the '79 Firebird while tooling around in that Camaro. (I could not, in good conscious, explore the limits of that car. He'd have let me, and wouldn't have felt bad if I ruined everything, but I just...couldn't. We went plenty fast, but I went around turns like my grandma would have, and braked even earlier.)
(For how long do you suppose we can hijack this dead thread talking about antique cars at +1 before our karma bonus disappears?)
1. New ball joints. Only lasts for a few seconds after starting when very cold. Doesn't happen at all if waiting > a few seconds before attempting to turn wheel. Fluid issue. 2. It's a manual gearbox. Fluid issue. 3. Have you seen an oil pressure gauge in -10 degree F weather? It's an ugly thing, showing you all about how your 10W40 is more like high-pressure sludge than a useful lubricant at such temperatures. Fluid issue. (I should be using 5W40 synthetic in my car in this climate, but it's impossible to find at a sane price.)
Of course, this is just my 12 year experience with maintaining my own cars...
I'm not into physical science much, at all, but it seems to me that the following is true:
Hard drives have an ideal temperature range. It is generally printed on the label, or at least in the datasheet. And cooler doesn't always mean better: It's a hard drive, not a CPU.
The oils in the bearings are designed for a specific temperature range -- too cool, and it's too viscous and won't work as well. Too warm, and it's too thin and won't work as well. The bearing surfaces themselves (except, perhaps, for the newer FDB stuff) are designed to be used at a certain temperature; too hot or too cool, and the clearances and preload will change.
Just like my bicycle. It works fine on a nice warm day; when it gets to about 5 degrees F, the grease in the rear derailleur is so sluggish that it can barely change gears.
Just like my car. It runs like poop when it's very cold out. The steering is sluggish until the power steering fluid warms up; the transmission shifts harshly until the transmission fluid warms up; the engine runs rough until the oil warms up. Cooler isn't better -- my car runs best at about 190 degrees F.
All of this applies to hard drives, just as well as it does to anything else with close-fitting moving parts. Just because it's part of a computer does not mean that it wants to live its life inside of an icebox.
And having said all that, I see no compelling reason why it would be a difficult task to design a hard drive which will be happy and complacent inside of a densely-packed 100 degree ambient data center. Such a drive might not like regular room temperature very well, but: So what.
Back in the day, my ISP had a Unix box (I forget the flavor). It was their web server, their FTP server, their mail server, and so on./etc/passwd was wide-open, and non-shadowed.
As someone who has previously had to choose between a 60% efficient natural gas furnace, and a 95% efficient gas furnace, I call bullshit on at least one of your claims. The 95% model was priced cheaply enough to place it firmly into no-brainer territory. Meanwhile, reaping the remaining 5% of waste energy out of the system is deep into the realm of diminishing returns.
Furthermore, parts and service profits don't have any direct correlation to efficiency gains: As an HVAC manufacturer, would you rather service a 60% efficient unit, or a 95% efficient unit? I'd wager it really doesn't matter...
A friend of mine has a couple of W123's (I forget the years), which look like a smaller 126. Both are 6-cylinder diesels. One is automatic and turbo, the other is manual and NA. The NA one came first, which he did a little fixing up to (dash cover, fast-and-cheap body work, a layer of black paint), attempting to make it look nice (and of course, it ran just fine without assistance). The turbo one came later, and was bought only because it should be easy to move the turbo bits over to the other car. They're both amazing cars, due at least to their longevity, and they look good going down the road, but...
I still like my E36 BMW better.:) I've got a spare engine for it, along with a nearly complete assortment of spare electronics and expensive, fidgety bits like ABS pumps. I have three good sets of wheels and tires for the car (with spares), plus another lesser set. The Getrag manual it has now should be easy to fix when it breaks (at least, compared to the GM 4L30E automatic that it came with). It's either twitchy or refined, depending on how you drive it, and will pull close to 1G in a turn.
After four years, I'm still learning how to drive the thing to its limits. That, to me, is far more rewarding than reliability will ever be (not that the car has been particularly unreliable...). That said, I don't know that I'd enjoy a newer one anywhere near as much.
And compared to a modern Ford truck: Holy fuck. My boss has a late model F150, and asked me to put a remote start into it. I felt pretty confident, having just completing the same task on my BMW with ease, but I failed miserably on the F150 -- there's just too many fucking wires. Why, on a truck, is there a bundle of cabling the size of my wrist running under the driver's side door sill? Why are so many of them the same colors? WTF is so important back there, other than lighting, ABS, windows, doors, and a fuel pump? This thing was nasty, undocumented (the BMW folks have far better documentation online than the Ford folks), and difficult at every stretch. Part of my day job involves wiring up police cars out of Crown Vics and Impalas, but I gave up on this F150.
Its value has held up just fine for me, though the blue book disagrees with my opinion.
I'm perfectly happy with the car, and intend to keep it running forever. It's fantastic that tech is finally catching up with a 14-year-old car that I bought for around 1/10th its original price. (The C5 doesn't count.)
The total cost of ownership on this thing (even with the recent transmission woes) has been sow low that it's silly, and it's a joy to work on. It's the best car I've ever driven. And the guts of it are like an engineering class, where you get to see how the whole world would've worked had the Germans won the war.
Generally, when I buy expensive stuff, I don't want service. I don't want opinions. I'm technically adept, I've done my research, and I only want to get the thing that I've already picked out, in advance, for the lowest price I can get in town. I don't want to ask questions. I don't need help understanding what "HDMI" is, or why stainless steel might be a good option, or what the different modes on a washing machine do -- I don't care. So many salespeople just want to waste my time -- sometimes I want to say something like "What are you, a fucking vulture?" when they follow me around the store.
Accordingly, I get right down to the meat and potatoes of beating the piss out of the price until I get the salesperson into an "at least some money is better than no money" mode, and then I walk. Over at the next store, I'll price shop based on the low-ball quote I got earlier. And then, depending on which salesperson told me the fewest lies, I'll pick one place or the other and go with it, with a big, huge preference toward whatever store actually has one in stock. (Because, see, if -nobody- has it in stock, then I might as well order it from Newegg or Amazon, pay even less, and not have to figure out how to get it home today.)
The less time they spend playing this (entirely predictable) game, the quicker they'll have me out the door, with either some money or no money, and the quicker they can move onto something else. And it's easy to gauge how successful it is: If my negotiations aren't going so well today, one place or the other will offer me a free extended warranty before I hit the parking lot.
Sometimes, though, I -do- want service. When I buy a new furnace for my house, I want them to spend the time adjusting it to perfection. When I had the transmission in my BMW swapped from a (dead) automatic to a manual, I wanted attention to detail.
I bought a new bike for my son back in January. A fancy name-brand BMX thing from a proper bike shop. The gentleman at the store (who seemed to be the owner) was courteous, and helpful, and patient. I did not haggle on price. And in fact, later that afternoon, I was back in the same shop buying a new bike for myself. I also did not haggle over price on that. He was gracious; I'd also picked out a small bike bag and a bottle and holder for it, which he was now more than happy to provide for free. Good stuff, though similar bikes (with lousier welding) were for sale at half the price at Wal-Mart.
I pay for good service, when it is desired. The rest of the time, I'm happy to be treated like the asshole that I portray myself as, as long as it's fast.
I don't tip at a coffeehouse if all they do is charge me $1.80 and hand me an empty cup. I do tip if they fill it for me. I don't tip at restaurants for bad or mediocre service. I do tip for good service, sometimes as much as 80%.
I'm both the worst and the best customer. I don't care.:) If a salesperson has to qualitative function in the purchase other than ringing up my stuff for me, then they're really no more useful than the minimum-wage til-monkey at Wal-Mart. A good salesperson, therefore, generally recognizes what I'm after and will spend as little time dealing with me as possible, or be as patient and helpful as possible, whatever the case may be today.
That's because most driving happens within 5Km of home. (If more people spent more of their time making longer trips, this would be a different number.) Correlation != causation. So on, so forth. Just because you've been tired within 5Km of home, and most accidents happen within 5Km of home, does not indicate that drivers are sleepiest within 5Km of home.:)
In this context, whether it is anecdotal or statistical, I really fail to see how this figure makes any difference when talking about long-distance driver fatigue.
ABS sensor moved away from the axle? Good theory. Thing is, the ABS sensor is fixed to the same assembly as the axle is.
Here is an exploded diagram part of the front end of a 1995 BMW. Part 7 is the ABS sensor. Follow the line down, and you'll see that it fits into a hole which is fixed near the bottom of the strut along with the axle itself. (Not shown is the toothed wheel which the sensor "sees," but it would be attached to the moving portion of the axle and therefore also pretty well incapable of moving away from the axle without horrors like wheels falling off.)
It's a very typical arrangement -- I only offer the BMW drawing because it was easy for me to find.
That all said... I've had experience with failing ABS, too. Used to drive a Chevy Beretta which would disable the ABS (and turn on the dashboard warning light) within a few seconds of driving. Turned out that the sensor at one of the rear wheels was wired poorly; the wires went through a split loom tube which rested right on top of the solid rear axle. As the suspension moved up and down, it eventually wore a hole in the loom, and then through the wire itself, grounding things that needn't be grounded.
A few times, the system failed to disable itself as neatly as described above, and in those instances it was always interesting to attempt to stop (lots of pedal resistance, lots of ABS noise, not much stopping). I was able to fix it by extending the wires a few inches and rerouting the loom slightly.
Sliding through a major intersection, would you rather be in a big SUV or a small sedan?
I'd rather not slide at all. That, sir, is the difference.
I'm much safer in my compact, rear-drive BMW than in an SUV. Why? I can out-maneuver and out-brake a typical SUV on any surface, any time of the year. I have selected for the car the best tires I can afford, I feed it the best brakes I can get my hands on, and I maintain my car better than anyone I know. In the winter, I drive on dedicated, high-profile winter tires. They're loud and uncomfortable, but they work -- even on ice. In the summer, I have dedicated, low-profile summer tires. They're loud, and just as uncomfortable, but the car stops like it's been glued in place even during a cloudburst.
The soccermom SUV driver, on the other hand, is rolling around on whatever lousy all-season tires that it came with from the factory. These tires are *not* designed for maximum grip, and physically cannot offer the braking performance of a tire which is engineered for a particular road surface. They're built for maximum tread life, maximum comfort, and minimum noise.
And absolute braking performance? Please. The SUV weighs twice as much. I can execute a panic stop on dry pavement in my little sedan, and it will slow down so violently that it will leave a bruise on your collarbone from the momentum of your body against the seatbelt. The SUV, on the other hand, will also stop...eventually.
And it goes further than that.
I don't have a rear-seat entertainment system with a built-in Playstation. I don't have rear-seat radio controls for the kids to fuck around with. I mean: It's a motor vehicle, not a rolling daycare center. My kids have learned, just as I did, to behave themselves in the car without this needless shit, and to do so without distracting me from my primary objective: Driving the car.
I understand the machine and its limitations, and I try very hard to be aware of my surroundings, the condition of the road, and the actions of others. But I cannot control the actions of others; I can only react to them. I want this reaction to be as quick and purposeful as possible.
No, sir. I wish not to slide through the intersection AT ALL. And when you do so in an SUV, I'll be hard on the brakes to try to save you from yourself.
A better rhetorical question, therefore, is this: When sliding an SUV through an intersection, would you rather be T-boned by another SUV, or not at all?
My 1995 BMW does that (sans beeping, thankfully, and called Automatic Stability Control instead of traction control), and it's a little more advanced than most basic traction control systems: It monitors, among other things, the yaw of the vehicle. It's difficult to get the car to oversteer enough that the rear end slides much, but when it does, the standard operating procedure is thus: Mash the accelerator, and steer in the direction that you want the car to go. It will then reduce throttle (there is a separate, fly-by-wire throttle plate in the intake, just for this) as needed, and brake wheels individually until the car is again going in a straight line.
End result is that even if you do manage to get the car to slide, it will recover neatly without fishtailing. Fancy stuff.
I've been in a couple of accident involving other cars while driving.
One was my fault; I wasn't paying attention. Brake lights ahead. Paid attention too late, stabbed at the brake pedal, and got both the brake pedal and the gas, slowed down a bunch, and then my foot slipped the rest of the way off of the brake (onto the gas). I actually hit the guy in front of me twice. Distracted? Yeah, a bit. My sister had killed herself a few days earlier, and so everything was a big blur for awhile back around that time. Nobody hurt, minor damage all around, the dude I ran into was nice about the whole thing. My fault, though, for sure -- I shouldn't have been anywhere near a car at that point in my life.
The other was not my fault. Was stopped at a red light, with my foot on the brake, in the left turn lane. There was a Metro behind me, doing the same thing. And we'd been sitting there, for half a minute or so, and I hear tires screech. Then, a crunch. And then, more tires. And a bit of shattering glass as the Metro was shoved into the back of my '85 LeSabre, positively ruining the front of that car (and denting the bumper on the Buick just slightly).
However, I've successfully avoided hundreds of accidents. Folks never seem to see my little bright red BMW headed toward them when they decide it's an appropriate time to turn directly in front of me. I drive with my headlights on, too, but it doesn't seem to help much... Consequently, I have soft tires with outstanding wet and dry traction for the summer, and Blizzaks for the winter (which actually grip OK on smooth ice), and I've always been able to slow down and maneuver away from these crazy people. I don't think I'd have been as successful in doing this in a lesser car.
Sometimes, I wish I had that old Buick again, and Darwin at my side.
Your first suggestion, while probably very effective, would seem to not do the best job possible. Due to my work in radio communications, I get to spend some quality time in 911 dispatch centers listening to reports of drunk drivers come in from well-meaning drivers.
And it seems pretty consistent: Any time that a call comes in about a car "operating erratically, all over the road, possible Code 20" the deputies organize (and nearby reserve units are activated away from their newspapers at home), and the assumption is that they're out to find some crazy drunk before he kills someone. They're alarmingly successful (even in this sparsely-populated county) at finding and stopping the vehicle in question.
So as good as your intentions are, be aware that there may be unintentional side-effects. Being pulled over and questioned is a pretty lousy outcome for trying to shake a tailgater.
Eh? On a 4-lane (or more) road, there's positively no reason to tailgate. None. (This assumes, of course, that people ahead are using lanes properly. The left lane is THE FUCKING PASSING LANE. The right lane IS THE FUCKING DRIVING LANE. PASS ON THE LEFT, and GET THE FUCK OVER. But I digress; this is a separate problem...)
This leaves rural 2-lane roads, and city streets.
Where, precisely, should you go to "get out of the way? Off into the ditch? Onto the sidewalk? Should you patiently wait for a driveway to come along, so you can pull into it and allow the tailgater can pass, and then riskily back your car out into traffic? Take the next available right turn, and then proceed to go around the block? Why the fuck should one not be allowed to just, you know, drive without being tailgated?
In a grander sense, why should it ever be acceptable for someone in a free society ever be intimidated by anyone for any reason when they've done nothing wrong?
I'm all for driving fast, when there's room to do so and conditions permit. Currently, I'm a little bummed that after an automatic-to-manual swap on my BMW, the 3.91:1 rear end gearing left over from the automatic drivetrain is such that the car tops out in fifth gear at a paltry 120MPH (and boy, does it get there in a hurry). But the key there is: When conditions permit. If the conditions of the road involve a Chrysler about six feet from my rear bumper, I'll drive at a speed appropriate for such conditions. When conditions improve, I'll accelerate again.
My main goal is safety, particularly when involving the lives of others around me. On the other hand, if being safe means that some asshole in an F150 learns that it's faster to not tailgate, then Pavlov wins and Darwin gets a break.
Are you to tell me that it's impossible to run a BASIC interpreter on an 80MHz MIPS core with 32k of RAM?
I mean, honestly: I remember the VIC-20 and the TRS-80 model 1. This whole modern concept of "it can't run BASIC" seems positively absurd on so many levels. But if that's really how things are...
An Ubuntu desktop for me. A Gentoo general-purpose box for the network. An Xubuntu desktop box for my daughter. A couple of Linksys WRT54G's. There's another machine here which runs various Linuxes, purely as an OS exploration toy. There's also an iMac G3 which has Ubuntu on it. None of these machines have Apache installed.
Some of my usage (particular the Ubuntu parts) is very typical. Some of the rest is also rather typical (though most owners of older WRT54G routers are oblivious to the fact that they own a Linux box). Really, the only thing I have which is particularly out-of-the-ordinary is the catch-all Gentoo machine.
I just don't see the merit in publishing local Web applications on my own network with Apache. And for stuff that I want to use anywhere, there's Dreamhost (or Facebook, or Myspace, or whatever the kids are all about these days).
So, yes: I think my case counts as "generally." And with that, I'd like to restate my claim: Generally, Apache is not part of a typical Linux install.
Part of the reason why the Logitech speakers sound better is, in all probability, because they're nearfield speakers being used in the environment they were designed for.
You'll hear so much more room resonance and reverb with a bigger, more "proper" setup where the speakers are many feet away from your head than you will with nearfield speakers. On the other hand, the Logitech speakers, with their tiny, wide-dispersion drivers, will sound like crap in your home theater compared to your other system. All of those room modes and echoes and other crap which is excited by the wide pattern will detract from the original signal.
And, for this reason, one tends to prefer fairly directional speakers for longer range listening, and wider-dispersion speakers for close-range listening.
Different speakers for different needs. Just like with headphones vs. loudspeakers, nearfield/far-field loudspeakers are another game of technical and social tradeoffs.
It's more fun to watch a movie with a good 7.1 system with friends scattered about on furniture, than it is to watch it on a PC with a small monitor and "computer speakers" by oneself or maybe with one other person. And it's more fun to do either of those two things, than to watch that same movie with headphones and an even smaller screen -- even though the headphones (even if they're "lousy") are extremely likely to be more detailed and accurate than the speakers in this comparison.
(I'd have thought that this might be a good link to help illustrate my point, but it's really not. And the related articles are worse.)
I've had many enjoyable sessions listening to all manner of good recordings (of all manner of music, from bluegrass to techno) on the local NPR station. This station has seemingly avoided the entirety of the loudness war for at least the 18 years that I, myself, have been listening to it.
Before Internet streaming and this newish concept of "podcasting" made it all not matter anymore, I used to have a good sound card, a good dedicated FM tuner, and a high-gain FM antenna pointed at NPR. I used to record a few musical and entertainment programs from it, with cron jobs and LAME with carefully-selected parameters. I'd play these recordings for folks sometimes.
If it were music, they'd ask me what CD it was from. If it were people talking, the astute would notice that it didn't sound like people talking through microphones and loudspeakers -- it sounded like someone talking in the same room. They'd ask how it was possible, and I'd smugly respond "Oh, I just recorded this off of the radio..."
Just because it's broadcast, doesn't mean it must be bad. On the contrary, FM can be amazingly good. It just usually isn't.:(
My Linux boxes don't have Apache on them. Every stupid little program I have that wants to have its own web site already includes some other means wrangling HTTP (like, say, mediatomb).
So: I don't need Apache on my machines, and therefore it isn't there. I do rent time on a shared Linux webhost, and they run Apache, but that's not mine.
I'm a quiet snob. I have a big, full sine, always-active Tripp-Lite UPS. It lives in the closet where I can't hear its screaming Delta cooling fan. (I'd switch the fan out for something less noisy, but somehow I fear that Tripp-Lite probably used minimal heatsinking on the inverter and made up for it with a loud, fast fan.)
The loudest computer I have is a quad-core Q6600 SLI 9800GT Alienware box. And even it is pretty quiet, now that I've rewired the extra case fans (all five of them) into the motherboard and choked their speed down in BIOS. It runs nice and cool, too. *shrug*
At work, I recently installed a quad-core Dell Precision desktop box with two hard drives and some manner of fancy quad-output video card whose precise model escapes me. It's like a whisper.
Other quiet systems I have aren't as impressive, but are certainly quiet: An old Athlon XP with carefully-directed airflow. Passively-cooled GPU with the blank panel missing to direct intake air over its heatsink, open 3.5" cover on the front where the hard drives are (again, to use intake air to directly cool the components). There is also a big, slow-moving fan on a big solid copper heatsink for the CPU, which is knocked down even further by using the fan outputs on the (quiet) Antec power supply. It's hard to tell that it's running, and the components are never more than just barely warm to the touch.
There's another old K6-2 which just runs some fancy audio processing 24x7 in Windows XP with KX audio drivers; it's diskless, running completely from a CF card (the system predates SSD). CPU and GPU are passively cooled. The only moving part is a slow-moving, thermostatically-controlled Arctic Cooling model that I've installed in the power supply.
I don't understand folks these days, thinking that if a system is fast, that it must also be screamingly-loud. If anything, a loud desktop computer is full of bearings which will wear out and die sooner than they might otherwise, and it will accumulate so much dust inside that all of that extra airflow starts to become counter-productive after a few months.
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I admit I'm not too familiar with the W126 series. There aren't many old (or newish) Mercedes' available for sale or on the road here in NW Ohio for whatever reason; I don't know if I'd even recognize one if I saw one. I'm not really very opposed to Mercedes, in general, but it seems so rare around here, and I've already paid a good mechanic by the hour to get up to speed on my E36 BMW . . .
I must say that if I were in the market for another vehicle at the moment, I'd probably be shopping specifically for either a rebuilt E30 M3 or a stock E36 M3, or a 1998+ LS1- and Torsen-equipped F-body.
And, yes, I realize that those are polar opposite ideas of what "fast" means. But I spent a few quality years driving an absurdly reliable fourth-gen Firebird with a big V6, low-geared posi rear end, and stiff suspension, and have a fond and inalienable appreciation for the fun that is GM's middle-late 90's rear-drive cars. I want more of that kind of sideways, twitchy, tire-smoking joy -- the 325i outside is way too sticky (unAmerican?) for that.
A deer killed that Firebird. I had the BMW's front end apart replacing the control arms and all eight front ball joints, so I took the Firebird out that night instead. It didn't think too kindly of a mid-sized doe appearing from the dark nothingness in the median at 65MPH, but it was able to controllably decelerate quickly enough to avoid having that furry cunt go through the windshield, and it protected its occupants just fine.
The insurance company refused to fix it, saying the repairs were more than book. We took the money and bought a '79 Firebird hardtop, with a big grumbly Pontiac 301 and dual glass-pack exhaust with no cats. It'll be a fun car once I have the (new!) carb tuned up and and I get a chance replace every rotten rubber bit in the suspension with polyurethane. The body is in good shape for a high-mileage 30-year-old car. A little naval jelly, bondo, and paint, and it'll look great, but it's gonna be a lot of work and money anyway...
(Should'a also shaken loose of the $450 they wanted in salvage for the "wrecked" '96 Firebird, bought it back, and fixed it anyway. I'll never find another one with that combination of features and fun, let alone in purple. Live and learn.)
I drove an old friend's all-original (aside from suspension maintenance) '77 Camaro two days ago. Nothing special: base trim, Chevy 305, 3-speed auto, sane gears. But with 33k miles, one owner, and having always been waxed and kept in a garage its entire life (and not seen rain in over 15 years), its original paint is perfectly shiny and it drives almost like a new car. That was nice. I took a lot of notes on what to do with the '79 Firebird while tooling around in that Camaro. (I could not, in good conscious, explore the limits of that car. He'd have let me, and wouldn't have felt bad if I ruined everything, but I just...couldn't. We went plenty fast, but I went around turns like my grandma would have, and braked even earlier.)
(For how long do you suppose we can hijack this dead thread talking about antique cars at +1 before our karma bonus disappears?)
Perhaps the Dutch should stick to wind power.
1. New ball joints. Only lasts for a few seconds after starting when very cold. Doesn't happen at all if waiting > a few seconds before attempting to turn wheel. Fluid issue.
2. It's a manual gearbox. Fluid issue.
3. Have you seen an oil pressure gauge in -10 degree F weather? It's an ugly thing, showing you all about how your 10W40 is more like high-pressure sludge than a useful lubricant at such temperatures. Fluid issue. (I should be using 5W40 synthetic in my car in this climate, but it's impossible to find at a sane price.)
Of course, this is just my 12 year experience with maintaining my own cars...
Indeed.
I'm not into physical science much, at all, but it seems to me that the following is true:
Hard drives have an ideal temperature range. It is generally printed on the label, or at least in the datasheet. And cooler doesn't always mean better: It's a hard drive, not a CPU.
The oils in the bearings are designed for a specific temperature range -- too cool, and it's too viscous and won't work as well. Too warm, and it's too thin and won't work as well. The bearing surfaces themselves (except, perhaps, for the newer FDB stuff) are designed to be used at a certain temperature; too hot or too cool, and the clearances and preload will change.
Just like my bicycle. It works fine on a nice warm day; when it gets to about 5 degrees F, the grease in the rear derailleur is so sluggish that it can barely change gears.
Just like my car. It runs like poop when it's very cold out. The steering is sluggish until the power steering fluid warms up; the transmission shifts harshly until the transmission fluid warms up; the engine runs rough until the oil warms up. Cooler isn't better -- my car runs best at about 190 degrees F.
All of this applies to hard drives, just as well as it does to anything else with close-fitting moving parts. Just because it's part of a computer does not mean that it wants to live its life inside of an icebox.
And having said all that, I see no compelling reason why it would be a difficult task to design a hard drive which will be happy and complacent inside of a densely-packed 100 degree ambient data center. Such a drive might not like regular room temperature very well, but: So what.
Back in the day, my ISP had a Unix box (I forget the flavor). It was their web server, their FTP server, their mail server, and so on. /etc/passwd was wide-open, and non-shadowed.
I leave the rest for the imagination.
As someone who has previously had to choose between a 60% efficient natural gas furnace, and a 95% efficient gas furnace, I call bullshit on at least one of your claims. The 95% model was priced cheaply enough to place it firmly into no-brainer territory. Meanwhile, reaping the remaining 5% of waste energy out of the system is deep into the realm of diminishing returns.
Furthermore, parts and service profits don't have any direct correlation to efficiency gains: As an HVAC manufacturer, would you rather service a 60% efficient unit, or a 95% efficient unit? I'd wager it really doesn't matter...
Heh.
A friend of mine has a couple of W123's (I forget the years), which look like a smaller 126. Both are 6-cylinder diesels. One is automatic and turbo, the other is manual and NA. The NA one came first, which he did a little fixing up to (dash cover, fast-and-cheap body work, a layer of black paint), attempting to make it look nice (and of course, it ran just fine without assistance). The turbo one came later, and was bought only because it should be easy to move the turbo bits over to the other car. They're both amazing cars, due at least to their longevity, and they look good going down the road, but...
I still like my E36 BMW better. :) I've got a spare engine for it, along with a nearly complete assortment of spare electronics and expensive, fidgety bits like ABS pumps. I have three good sets of wheels and tires for the car (with spares), plus another lesser set. The Getrag manual it has now should be easy to fix when it breaks (at least, compared to the GM 4L30E automatic that it came with). It's either twitchy or refined, depending on how you drive it, and will pull close to 1G in a turn.
After four years, I'm still learning how to drive the thing to its limits. That, to me, is far more rewarding than reliability will ever be (not that the car has been particularly unreliable...). That said, I don't know that I'd enjoy a newer one anywhere near as much.
And compared to a modern Ford truck: Holy fuck. My boss has a late model F150, and asked me to put a remote start into it. I felt pretty confident, having just completing the same task on my BMW with ease, but I failed miserably on the F150 -- there's just too many fucking wires. Why, on a truck, is there a bundle of cabling the size of my wrist running under the driver's side door sill? Why are so many of them the same colors? WTF is so important back there, other than lighting, ABS, windows, doors, and a fuel pump? This thing was nasty, undocumented (the BMW folks have far better documentation online than the Ford folks), and difficult at every stretch. Part of my day job involves wiring up police cars out of Crown Vics and Impalas, but I gave up on this F150.
Bah. :)
Its value has held up just fine for me, though the blue book disagrees with my opinion.
I'm perfectly happy with the car, and intend to keep it running forever. It's fantastic that tech is finally catching up with a 14-year-old car that I bought for around 1/10th its original price. (The C5 doesn't count.)
The total cost of ownership on this thing (even with the recent transmission woes) has been sow low that it's silly, and it's a joy to work on. It's the best car I've ever driven. And the guts of it are like an engineering class, where you get to see how the whole world would've worked had the Germans won the war.
Interesting.
Is there nowhere else that people go on a regular basis? Church? Friends? Family? Work?
It takes all kinds.
Generally, when I buy expensive stuff, I don't want service. I don't want opinions. I'm technically adept, I've done my research, and I only want to get the thing that I've already picked out, in advance, for the lowest price I can get in town. I don't want to ask questions. I don't need help understanding what "HDMI" is, or why stainless steel might be a good option, or what the different modes on a washing machine do -- I don't care. So many salespeople just want to waste my time -- sometimes I want to say something like "What are you, a fucking vulture?" when they follow me around the store.
Accordingly, I get right down to the meat and potatoes of beating the piss out of the price until I get the salesperson into an "at least some money is better than no money" mode, and then I walk. Over at the next store, I'll price shop based on the low-ball quote I got earlier. And then, depending on which salesperson told me the fewest lies, I'll pick one place or the other and go with it, with a big, huge preference toward whatever store actually has one in stock. (Because, see, if -nobody- has it in stock, then I might as well order it from Newegg or Amazon, pay even less, and not have to figure out how to get it home today.)
The less time they spend playing this (entirely predictable) game, the quicker they'll have me out the door, with either some money or no money, and the quicker they can move onto something else. And it's easy to gauge how successful it is: If my negotiations aren't going so well today, one place or the other will offer me a free extended warranty before I hit the parking lot.
Sometimes, though, I -do- want service. When I buy a new furnace for my house, I want them to spend the time adjusting it to perfection. When I had the transmission in my BMW swapped from a (dead) automatic to a manual, I wanted attention to detail.
I bought a new bike for my son back in January. A fancy name-brand BMX thing from a proper bike shop. The gentleman at the store (who seemed to be the owner) was courteous, and helpful, and patient. I did not haggle on price. And in fact, later that afternoon, I was back in the same shop buying a new bike for myself. I also did not haggle over price on that. He was gracious; I'd also picked out a small bike bag and a bottle and holder for it, which he was now more than happy to provide for free. Good stuff, though similar bikes (with lousier welding) were for sale at half the price at Wal-Mart.
I pay for good service, when it is desired. The rest of the time, I'm happy to be treated like the asshole that I portray myself as, as long as it's fast.
I don't tip at a coffeehouse if all they do is charge me $1.80 and hand me an empty cup. I do tip if they fill it for me. I don't tip at restaurants for bad or mediocre service. I do tip for good service, sometimes as much as 80%.
I'm both the worst and the best customer. I don't care. :) If a salesperson has to qualitative function in the purchase other than ringing up my stuff for me, then they're really no more useful than the minimum-wage til-monkey at Wal-Mart. A good salesperson, therefore, generally recognizes what I'm after and will spend as little time dealing with me as possible, or be as patient and helpful as possible, whatever the case may be today.
Wouldn't it be easier to just carry a couple extra 8 or 16GB cards, and forget about the problem?
That's because most driving happens within 5Km of home. (If more people spent more of their time making longer trips, this would be a different number.) Correlation != causation. So on, so forth. Just because you've been tired within 5Km of home, and most accidents happen within 5Km of home, does not indicate that drivers are sleepiest within 5Km of home. :)
In this context, whether it is anecdotal or statistical, I really fail to see how this figure makes any difference when talking about long-distance driver fatigue.
ABS sensor moved away from the axle? Good theory. Thing is, the ABS sensor is fixed to the same assembly as the axle is.
Here is an exploded diagram part of the front end of a 1995 BMW. Part 7 is the ABS sensor. Follow the line down, and you'll see that it fits into a hole which is fixed near the bottom of the strut along with the axle itself. (Not shown is the toothed wheel which the sensor "sees," but it would be attached to the moving portion of the axle and therefore also pretty well incapable of moving away from the axle without horrors like wheels falling off.)
It's a very typical arrangement -- I only offer the BMW drawing because it was easy for me to find.
That all said... I've had experience with failing ABS, too. Used to drive a Chevy Beretta which would disable the ABS (and turn on the dashboard warning light) within a few seconds of driving. Turned out that the sensor at one of the rear wheels was wired poorly; the wires went through a split loom tube which rested right on top of the solid rear axle. As the suspension moved up and down, it eventually wore a hole in the loom, and then through the wire itself, grounding things that needn't be grounded.
A few times, the system failed to disable itself as neatly as described above, and in those instances it was always interesting to attempt to stop (lots of pedal resistance, lots of ABS noise, not much stopping). I was able to fix it by extending the wires a few inches and rerouting the loom slightly.
But SUVs are objectively safer in many ways too.
Lies.
Sliding through a major intersection, would you rather be in a big SUV or a small sedan?
I'd rather not slide at all. That, sir, is the difference.
I'm much safer in my compact, rear-drive BMW than in an SUV. Why? I can out-maneuver and out-brake a typical SUV on any surface, any time of the year. I have selected for the car the best tires I can afford, I feed it the best brakes I can get my hands on, and I maintain my car better than anyone I know. In the winter, I drive on dedicated, high-profile winter tires. They're loud and uncomfortable, but they work -- even on ice. In the summer, I have dedicated, low-profile summer tires. They're loud, and just as uncomfortable, but the car stops like it's been glued in place even during a cloudburst.
The soccermom SUV driver, on the other hand, is rolling around on whatever lousy all-season tires that it came with from the factory. These tires are *not* designed for maximum grip, and physically cannot offer the braking performance of a tire which is engineered for a particular road surface. They're built for maximum tread life, maximum comfort, and minimum noise.
And absolute braking performance? Please. The SUV weighs twice as much. I can execute a panic stop on dry pavement in my little sedan, and it will slow down so violently that it will leave a bruise on your collarbone from the momentum of your body against the seatbelt. The SUV, on the other hand, will also stop...eventually.
And it goes further than that.
I don't have a rear-seat entertainment system with a built-in Playstation. I don't have rear-seat radio controls for the kids to fuck around with. I mean: It's a motor vehicle, not a rolling daycare center. My kids have learned, just as I did, to behave themselves in the car without this needless shit, and to do so without distracting me from my primary objective: Driving the car.
I understand the machine and its limitations, and I try very hard to be aware of my surroundings, the condition of the road, and the actions of others. But I cannot control the actions of others; I can only react to them. I want this reaction to be as quick and purposeful as possible.
No, sir. I wish not to slide through the intersection AT ALL. And when you do so in an SUV, I'll be hard on the brakes to try to save you from yourself.
A better rhetorical question, therefore, is this: When sliding an SUV through an intersection, would you rather be T-boned by another SUV, or not at all?
Thanks for playing!
My 1995 BMW does that (sans beeping, thankfully, and called Automatic Stability Control instead of traction control), and it's a little more advanced than most basic traction control systems: It monitors, among other things, the yaw of the vehicle. It's difficult to get the car to oversteer enough that the rear end slides much, but when it does, the standard operating procedure is thus: Mash the accelerator, and steer in the direction that you want the car to go. It will then reduce throttle (there is a separate, fly-by-wire throttle plate in the intake, just for this) as needed, and brake wheels individually until the car is again going in a straight line.
End result is that even if you do manage to get the car to slide, it will recover neatly without fishtailing. Fancy stuff.
I've been in a couple of accident involving other cars while driving.
One was my fault; I wasn't paying attention. Brake lights ahead. Paid attention too late, stabbed at the brake pedal, and got both the brake pedal and the gas, slowed down a bunch, and then my foot slipped the rest of the way off of the brake (onto the gas). I actually hit the guy in front of me twice. Distracted? Yeah, a bit. My sister had killed herself a few days earlier, and so everything was a big blur for awhile back around that time. Nobody hurt, minor damage all around, the dude I ran into was nice about the whole thing. My fault, though, for sure -- I shouldn't have been anywhere near a car at that point in my life.
The other was not my fault. Was stopped at a red light, with my foot on the brake, in the left turn lane. There was a Metro behind me, doing the same thing. And we'd been sitting there, for half a minute or so, and I hear tires screech. Then, a crunch. And then, more tires. And a bit of shattering glass as the Metro was shoved into the back of my '85 LeSabre, positively ruining the front of that car (and denting the bumper on the Buick just slightly).
However, I've successfully avoided hundreds of accidents. Folks never seem to see my little bright red BMW headed toward them when they decide it's an appropriate time to turn directly in front of me. I drive with my headlights on, too, but it doesn't seem to help much... Consequently, I have soft tires with outstanding wet and dry traction for the summer, and Blizzaks for the winter (which actually grip OK on smooth ice), and I've always been able to slow down and maneuver away from these crazy people. I don't think I'd have been as successful in doing this in a lesser car.
Sometimes, I wish I had that old Buick again, and Darwin at my side.
Your first suggestion, while probably very effective, would seem to not do the best job possible. Due to my work in radio communications, I get to spend some quality time in 911 dispatch centers listening to reports of drunk drivers come in from well-meaning drivers.
And it seems pretty consistent: Any time that a call comes in about a car "operating erratically, all over the road, possible Code 20" the deputies organize (and nearby reserve units are activated away from their newspapers at home), and the assumption is that they're out to find some crazy drunk before he kills someone. They're alarmingly successful (even in this sparsely-populated county) at finding and stopping the vehicle in question.
So as good as your intentions are, be aware that there may be unintentional side-effects. Being pulled over and questioned is a pretty lousy outcome for trying to shake a tailgater.
Eh? On a 4-lane (or more) road, there's positively no reason to tailgate. None. (This assumes, of course, that people ahead are using lanes properly. The left lane is THE FUCKING PASSING LANE. The right lane IS THE FUCKING DRIVING LANE. PASS ON THE LEFT, and GET THE FUCK OVER. But I digress; this is a separate problem...)
This leaves rural 2-lane roads, and city streets.
Where, precisely, should you go to "get out of the way? Off into the ditch? Onto the sidewalk? Should you patiently wait for a driveway to come along, so you can pull into it and allow the tailgater can pass, and then riskily back your car out into traffic? Take the next available right turn, and then proceed to go around the block? Why the fuck should one not be allowed to just, you know, drive without being tailgated?
In a grander sense, why should it ever be acceptable for someone in a free society ever be intimidated by anyone for any reason when they've done nothing wrong?
I'm all for driving fast, when there's room to do so and conditions permit. Currently, I'm a little bummed that after an automatic-to-manual swap on my BMW, the 3.91:1 rear end gearing left over from the automatic drivetrain is such that the car tops out in fifth gear at a paltry 120MPH (and boy, does it get there in a hurry). But the key there is: When conditions permit. If the conditions of the road involve a Chrysler about six feet from my rear bumper, I'll drive at a speed appropriate for such conditions. When conditions improve, I'll accelerate again.
My main goal is safety, particularly when involving the lives of others around me. On the other hand, if being safe means that some asshole in an F150 learns that it's faster to not tailgate, then Pavlov wins and Darwin gets a break.
Are you to tell me that it's impossible to run a BASIC interpreter on an 80MHz MIPS core with 32k of RAM?
I mean, honestly: I remember the VIC-20 and the TRS-80 model 1. This whole modern concept of "it can't run BASIC" seems positively absurd on so many levels. But if that's really how things are...
An Ubuntu desktop for me. A Gentoo general-purpose box for the network. An Xubuntu desktop box for my daughter. A couple of Linksys WRT54G's. There's another machine here which runs various Linuxes, purely as an OS exploration toy. There's also an iMac G3 which has Ubuntu on it. None of these machines have Apache installed.
Some of my usage (particular the Ubuntu parts) is very typical. Some of the rest is also rather typical (though most owners of older WRT54G routers are oblivious to the fact that they own a Linux box). Really, the only thing I have which is particularly out-of-the-ordinary is the catch-all Gentoo machine.
I just don't see the merit in publishing local Web applications on my own network with Apache. And for stuff that I want to use anywhere, there's Dreamhost (or Facebook, or Myspace, or whatever the kids are all about these days).
So, yes: I think my case counts as "generally." And with that, I'd like to restate my claim: Generally, Apache is not part of a typical Linux install.
Part of the reason why the Logitech speakers sound better is, in all probability, because they're nearfield speakers being used in the environment they were designed for.
You'll hear so much more room resonance and reverb with a bigger, more "proper" setup where the speakers are many feet away from your head than you will with nearfield speakers. On the other hand, the Logitech speakers, with their tiny, wide-dispersion drivers, will sound like crap in your home theater compared to your other system. All of those room modes and echoes and other crap which is excited by the wide pattern will detract from the original signal.
And, for this reason, one tends to prefer fairly directional speakers for longer range listening, and wider-dispersion speakers for close-range listening.
Different speakers for different needs. Just like with headphones vs. loudspeakers, nearfield/far-field loudspeakers are another game of technical and social tradeoffs.
It's more fun to watch a movie with a good 7.1 system with friends scattered about on furniture, than it is to watch it on a PC with a small monitor and "computer speakers" by oneself or maybe with one other person. And it's more fun to do either of those two things, than to watch that same movie with headphones and an even smaller screen -- even though the headphones (even if they're "lousy") are extremely likely to be more detailed and accurate than the speakers in this comparison.
(I'd have thought that this might be a good link to help illustrate my point, but it's really not. And the related articles are worse.)
I've had many enjoyable sessions listening to all manner of good recordings (of all manner of music, from bluegrass to techno) on the local NPR station. This station has seemingly avoided the entirety of the loudness war for at least the 18 years that I, myself, have been listening to it.
Before Internet streaming and this newish concept of "podcasting" made it all not matter anymore, I used to have a good sound card, a good dedicated FM tuner, and a high-gain FM antenna pointed at NPR. I used to record a few musical and entertainment programs from it, with cron jobs and LAME with carefully-selected parameters. I'd play these recordings for folks sometimes.
If it were music, they'd ask me what CD it was from. If it were people talking, the astute would notice that it didn't sound like people talking through microphones and loudspeakers -- it sounded like someone talking in the same room. They'd ask how it was possible, and I'd smugly respond "Oh, I just recorded this off of the radio..."
Just because it's broadcast, doesn't mean it must be bad. On the contrary, FM can be amazingly good. It just usually isn't. :(
It does?
My Linux boxes don't have Apache on them. Every stupid little program I have that wants to have its own web site already includes some other means wrangling HTTP (like, say, mediatomb).
So: I don't need Apache on my machines, and therefore it isn't there. I do rent time on a shared Linux webhost, and they run Apache, but that's not mine.
Ok. Is $8.44, shipped, cheap enough for an iPhone 3G video cable with authentication chip?
Looky looky.
*nod*
I'm a quiet snob. I have a big, full sine, always-active Tripp-Lite UPS. It lives in the closet where I can't hear its screaming Delta cooling fan. (I'd switch the fan out for something less noisy, but somehow I fear that Tripp-Lite probably used minimal heatsinking on the inverter and made up for it with a loud, fast fan.)
The loudest computer I have is a quad-core Q6600 SLI 9800GT Alienware box. And even it is pretty quiet, now that I've rewired the extra case fans (all five of them) into the motherboard and choked their speed down in BIOS. It runs nice and cool, too. *shrug*
At work, I recently installed a quad-core Dell Precision desktop box with two hard drives and some manner of fancy quad-output video card whose precise model escapes me. It's like a whisper.
Other quiet systems I have aren't as impressive, but are certainly quiet: An old Athlon XP with carefully-directed airflow. Passively-cooled GPU with the blank panel missing to direct intake air over its heatsink, open 3.5" cover on the front where the hard drives are (again, to use intake air to directly cool the components). There is also a big, slow-moving fan on a big solid copper heatsink for the CPU, which is knocked down even further by using the fan outputs on the (quiet) Antec power supply. It's hard to tell that it's running, and the components are never more than just barely warm to the touch.
There's another old K6-2 which just runs some fancy audio processing 24x7 in Windows XP with KX audio drivers; it's diskless, running completely from a CF card (the system predates SSD). CPU and GPU are passively cooled. The only moving part is a slow-moving, thermostatically-controlled Arctic Cooling model that I've installed in the power supply.
I don't understand folks these days, thinking that if a system is fast, that it must also be screamingly-loud. If anything, a loud desktop computer is full of bearings which will wear out and die sooner than they might otherwise, and it will accumulate so much dust inside that all of that extra airflow starts to become counter-productive after a few months.