I've never seen outward behavior with such permanence toward an unrelated person from an Irish-derivative. I do have a habitually-drunken German-derivative friend from whom such a random antic would never be particularly surprising, however.
Then again, most of the Irish derivatives I know are directly related to me, and we all seemed to spend most our childhood actively trying to quite literally kill each other before everyone moved away (presumably, for the prosperity of the clan) once they became adults. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of them was married (twice!) to the aforementioned German derivative.
Indeed, it might not be an accident that it is an alleged castle instead of an actively maintained one. It seems likely, based on my experience with this particular genetic group, that at some point they all fled in different directions out of fear of eachother.
Family Christmas parties are, needless to say, very entertaining.
I guess I'll stick to my uneducated work with computers and communications, then...
It's funny. I (essentially) can't be CEO of a big company company or design plumbing/electric/HVAC without a degree, even though all of these things are always logical and simple to break down into manageable chunks.
But I can design and build critical communication infrastructure for public safety, law enforcement agencies, and defense-related government entities without any sort of degree or licensing, even though failure on my part really will put lives at risk, and the job itself is sometimes anything but logical.
(I do carry a pile of insurance against myself, but the day I file a claim due to a mistake on my part is the same day I apply to flip burgers at McDonald's.)
I can only speak for US Navy Submarines. There are no connections to any reactor systems to any network of any kind.
So the reactor systems are operated by having people manually operate them by turning valves and pulling levers?
That must be a steampunk's idea of heaven.
(The above is written with a firm dose of sarcasm. While I'm reasonably sure you meant something very different, "any network of any kind" is literally so broad that it might be construed to include even a mechanical linkage of moderate complexity.)
As a drunken Irish derivative, who is not precisely Irish but whose mother's family does (allegedly) have a castle over there somewhere:
I must hasten to admit that I have lit myself on fire many times. It has always been an accident, and I have so far always either been coherent enough to snuff the blaze, or able to wake up quickly enough to do the same.
I have no doubt that many another Irishman have had similar problems, and that a certain percentage of them were either too inebriated to adequately react or simply too dead at the time to respond at all.
I wouldn't assume that: SSDs are sold for speed, not capacity and sometimes not even reliability.
If keeping two copies of anything hurts benchmark performance significantly, there's a good chance that it just won't bother doing it at all -- as a design decision.
A DVD player (and most other consumer electronics which have upgradeable firmware) has a totally different set of design goals, with "speed of writes" not being among them at all.
That all said: I'd like to see it be a user-selectable option. There's plenty of instances where an end-user would willingly opt for greater speed over improved reliability (gamers are fond of RAID 0, after all), and plenty of other instances where reliability is considered far more important than speed.
Useless? I mean, getting free grub from the DFAC is nice and all, but it'd sure be nice to also get free grub when the DFAC isn't around (ie: while on leave).
I like that the benefits are based on qualifying for foodstamps and medicaid, but at least they're semi-provided by Walmart because they train employees to sign up for and use those services.
During my brief stint in the US Army, the drill instructors spent an hour or two one evening going over finances with the group. A good portion of that was spent explaining how to get food stamps to supplement the shit pay.
Now go back 20 years with a copy of parchive for the fine submitter, please, so that this Ask Slashdot article can fade from its existence in the present.
You might be close to the only chemistry nerd here, though it certainly seems that there should be more of you...
I myself just learn things as I go, and try to be as thorough as I can when picking up a new subject that I'm unfamiliar with. And though chemistry is a very interesting subject to me and I won't be done learning until I'm dead, I just haven't had a good reason to learn much about it yet. Maybe that will change some day.
So, thanks for the brief dissertation. I shan't confuse isopropyl alcohol and ethanol again.
The guys at the shop just use it occasionally for general cleaning on small electronics, so they're not exactly bathing in it.
Things have a lot more potential to be interesting down there on the rare occasion when they decide that the isopropyl isn't doing the job, and then reach for the big red can of methanol race fuel that otherwise would've been used for the boss's sprint car...
Nobody here seems to actually be discussing purity.
At work, the guys in the shop use 99% isopropyl alcohol, and often joke that the contents of the bottle is likely 100%, but that it rapidly drops to 99% after opening. (I presume that it is intentionally adultered with poison, like most other industrial forms of ethanol, but I must say I've never tried to drink the stuff.)
The best denatured alcohol I can find at a drug store is 93%, which is pretty good (though full of poison), but there's better options (above).
According to the Wikipedia, distillation alone cannot increase the purity of alcohol beyond 95.6%. Everclear itself is only 95% pure.
My suggestion: Buy a container of Techspray "99%," and a container of 190-proof Everclear. Use the former to cleanse the drive's heads, and the latter to cleanse the spirit, while possibly substituting the latter according to taste.
Are you using new/clean hardware, or a 3.5" Toshiba drive that was manufactured in 1990 and which has spent at least a decade actively playing the role of dust collector?
Myself, I've have had far better luck with old floppies than old floppy drives.
So as a first step, I'd try different hardware and see what that accomplishes. And any old hardware really should be at least partially disassembled, cleaned thoroughly, and oiled appropriately.
The second step would be calibration. There are two very different ways to do this: Calibrate the drive to what it should be (there are kits+software for this), or calibrate it to what produces the best signal with a particular disk (requires an oscilloscope and a bit of a clue).
Done this way, you might well find that your data can be perfectly restored, which will eliminate the need to guess at what the missing bits might be.
It's probably fair to say that my 325 might be less reliable than a (good) Japanese car, but I might also be pickier about my car than others might be and fix things more readily: Someone who did not push the car hard would probably have never noticed the failing ball joints, for instance, and I don't know that a casual inspection (when getting brakes or tires or whatever) would have uncovered it either. (I noticed it on a right turn on the interstate at a triple-digit speed as a slight but sudden change in steering angle, and thereafter drove the thing very softly until I got it sorted. I don't know that the forces applied by a mechanic doing routine maintenance would simulate that very well, or that an average driver would notice it at all in normal driving conditions. A less-aggressive driver might have safely ridden upon those ball joints for a hundred thousand more miles...)
So I think we're splitting hairs there, honestly, though it's interesting to me that you think a 5-series would be substantially worse. (I've never made that comparison before.)
But it'd also be fair to say that I'd never have as much fun in a (good) FWD Japanese car as I have in my RWD BMW, and I like having fun with cars. I want a clear choice between slight natural understeer*, power oversteer, and throttle-lift oversteer, with neutral handling being somewhere in between the latter two, all under the command of the loud pedal. A FWD vehicle doesn't normally give me anything but variations on understeer unless I'm particularly and bruskly abusive with very late braking, handbrake turns, or other techniques that I just don't enjoy.
I find myself more able to deftly avoid other drivers' stupidity when driving the BMW than I have anything else, just because it is both predictable and quite fast in its handling...plus, the brakes are able to leave a bruise across one's chest from the seatbelt.
*: I can eliminate the tendency for the BMW to understeer with a slightly larger rear swaybar and an hour or two, but meh: I sometimes lend the car to others for days at a time, and I want to get it back in one piece, so I err toward BMW's better judgement and focus my improvements elsewhere.
I admit that 140k doesn't sound too surprising for a sanely-driven Accord. But what sort of off-road activities was that other Accord tasked with? 250k is getting right up there in impressiveness, with any normal car, without regular and expert maintenance. I had a boss (and good friend) once who had a middle-90's Accord which was creeping up there in mileage, but it took some major internal engine work to get it there. (On the other hand, he was more picky than I am.)
And you're right. I would probably hate the RL: I've never really taken Honda/Acura very seriously because they never seem to produce a good RWD car that isn't absolutely silly-expensive, and I've had my fill of FWD cars.
The 325i, with its 50/50 weight distribution, goes like a tractor when fitted with good winter tires in up to 8 or 9 inches of fresh snow, and handles completely boringly on glare ice (which is a very good thing)...despite its absurdly-low factory "sport" suspension, worn and haggard over 16 years, which currently leaves the meat of the front end about 4.5" off of the ground. I've had far worse luck, particularly on ice, with absolutely everything else I've ever driven -- irrespective of speed. I trust this car to get me where I've got to go, damn near no matter what, and I've pulled other cars out of ditches with it. My friends joke that they're surprised I don't have a plow attachment for it.
I have considered, and not completely ruled-out, buying some Nascar-style spring rubbers to temporarily increase the ground clearance for occasions of particularly-deep snow: Beyond about 8 or 9 inches, it can have a very hard time successfully pushing/digging through the stuff, and my job sometimes requires that I get there even if it's impossible.
Your on-ramp story is amusing, though: Volvos are mostly known to be saf
Now, granted, I've only driven American cars otherwise...
But the old girl's got 186k on her now. No electrical problems to speak of (knock on wood). It did eat an automatic transmission once at about 165k, but please realize that the fact that I always drive this car like I just stole it may have had a big impact on the longevity of that part: It's probably more telling of my driving style than the quality of the 4-speed GM-built 4L30E.
To be clear about the level of abuse given: The car has been been completely air-born on more than one spirited drive, and pretty much every drive is spirited (as my wife would attest). I really must say that it's not the transmission's fault that it died.:) But even in death, that transmission still got me home.
And the replacement Getrag 5-speed manual is working just fine. The conversion fit together just like Lego.
I don't know if the 3 is sturdier than the 5, but it's certainly more common around here (mostly because it is cheaper). BMW tends to use the same basic driveline in their models (though the 7 series is obviously very different because it's absolutely huge and heavy, and the all of the M cars are somewhat different because they're intended to be track-ready), so that's all the same. The wiring, accessories, trinkets, interior and bodywork/chassis all tend to be somewhat different between models, but I've never any real trouble with any of that...
And I don't know where you're from, so it may or may not be important to have the more common model. Where I'm at (small town Ohio) I've had to pay my mechanic (who is absolutely brilliant, but whom works by the hour) to learn my car. Larger cities will already have reputable shops already familiar with the details of a BMW, and/or some that don't work on anything anything but. Not everyone is blessed with a brilliant and trustworthy mechanic, to be sure, but depending on where you're at you might find that it's easy to find an indy shop with folks who can work on one without learning everything.
The maintenance worth talking about (ie: aside from the transmission), to date, has been as such:
Valve cover gasket, front brakes, plugs/connectors/coils, the usual tires and oil, front control arms/ball joints, and inner tie rod ends (the outer ends will need done soon), a refill of R-134a, and one small $20 weld on the exhaust system where a short crack formed after the catalytic converter (the rest of the exhaust plumbing, and the muffler, is still working and looking fine and shows no sign of giving up soon). Plus the systemically-bad cooling system stuff I referred to earlier, all of which I knew was coming.
Most of it just seems completely reasonable to me, and seems likely to happen on anything with enough time or miles (how many miles were on your Accord?) no matter the driving style.
Other than the tie rod ends, welding, and transmission swap, I've done done that all myself in my driveway, usually in the winter, with basic tools (a torque wrench, a socket set, and patience). The car is holding up extremely well, I think, especially given my preferred driving style.
That all said: It's really a matter of budgeting. BMW does have maintenance schedules for their vehicles (known as "Inspection I" and "Inspection II"), which if followed both conservatively and with a great deal of prudence, should result in an eternity of a well-running car. I can't currently afford that level of perfection, but if you can then it's easy.
I did tally up my expenses not so long ago, and I figure I've got $10,000 total in this car that I've absolutely flogged for the past 6 or 7 years, including everything (and the tranny, and the car itself) but fuel.
Which is about $0.16 per mile driven. For the silly grin it gives me every time I get behind the wheel, and the knowledge that it has so far neglected to fail getting me from A to B in badness ranging from a tornado, to several massive fl
If an officer knocks on my door and asks "Do you mind if we have a look around?" and I say "No problem. Get to it," there's no warrant required, since they've got my permission.
Similarly, with a camera: If an officer knocks on my door and asks "Do you mind if we tie into your camera system," and I say "go ahead," then there is also no warrant necessary: I've given them consent.
More to the point, I don't even think it's a public-vs-private sort of thing. If I've got cameras installed at my own home or business (inside or outside - it doesn't matter), and want I LEO looking through them and/or archiving them, then that should be completely permissible.
Now, of course, I would never submit affirmatively to any such request ("I do not consent to any searches, officer. Am I free to go?"). But I most certainly do fully support the rights of others to do as they please in their own interaction with law enforcement.
My (non-government) employer used to track my cell phone, using VZW's Field Force Manager system. It wasn't a completely unreasonable request since I was doing field work for them, and I was just as able to use it to show that I was working when/where I said I was as they were to do the opposite.
It worked, but it was a pain in the ass. The battery in the phone would go from a full charge to nothing in less than an hour in areas of poor or zero signal, and it was impossible to actually turn the software off (it would magically turn itself back on again), so it was going 24/7 and I found myself completely frustrated by having to keep the thing both available to me and tied to a charger at all times. And this with an old dumb Motorola handset with an extended battery, which prior to the tracking software would work for a week or two (!) without charging.
It's not so much that I don't trust my boss (I do, very much), but that the process of asking myself if I should trust my boss which bothered me, along with always being mindful to keep the stupid thing plugged in. Between questioning my circle of trust and always looking for a place to charge up, I really became very angry about the whole thing.
Eventually, I changed the configuration (on the cloud side of things) to turn off at around 5:30PM, which helped a hugely with my sanity, and kept my battery usage low during most non-work hours. (I never asked anyone before making this adjustment to the system (oh, durnit - must've forgot) and nobody ever changed it back...)
But even then, I was bothered by an overzealous manager who would keep track of me even while I was at lunch and who would question every activity. So I bought a little Faraday cage from dealextreme, and started using that at lunch, or if I had time off during the week.
And that restored a little bit more of my sanity.
Eventually, after the release of the Motorola Droid, I convinced the boss that I should have a fancier phone. Unfortunately, at that time the Droid did not support Field Force Manager (it might by now), so the notion of automatic tracking just sort of disappeared and I haven't been tracked by my employer since.
My sanity was almost fully restored: Almost, because I also lost the ability to show that I actually was where I said I'd been.
Later on, I quit that hourly job and started doing contract work for the same folks. Now, nobody gives a fuck where I'm at or what I'm doing, as long as the work gets done and the customer is happy. I am thus currently running at 100% sanity, and everyone else is happy too. (I still have my own office area at the shop, but nobody has expected me to fill it ever since, and I haven't actually seen it in months.)
The moral of this story is simple: If your boss is tracking you and you don't like it for whatever reason, offer to quit and become a contractor.:)
My wife (who is homebound due to a workers comp issue) watches Netflix streaming. A lot.
She complains continuously that they do not have the latest releases available to stream, but then she finds herself a new (to her) TV series and watches that.
And when I say "watches," I mean "vigorously consumes". She starts from episode 1, and goes until she reaches the end.
She uses up to about 450 gigabytes per month of bandwidth doing this, by my measurement.
So, as saddened as I am that Netflix's new pricing scheme has finally come to shove, I am moreover disheartened that I have allowed such a travesty to fester to such an extent that it affects all of us.
I would like to take this opportunity to apologize. I am unreservedly sorry for my wife's behavior and any impact that it may have upon you and your family.
Oh. And the other thing: BMW has a history of being tight-lipped with their factory service documentation, so there's a similarly long heritage of free and open piracy when it comes to such things.
It's somewhat like the Streisand Effect: The harder they try to keep information to themselves, the more widely available it becomes. (except, unlike the Streisand Effect proper, nobody at BMW seems to mind when their information is freely shared by third parties after it somehow leaks out.)
Anyway, based on the RL, you might be looking for a 5 (any vintage) or a newer 3 (which are a good bit larger than the older ones). And if you do find yourself seriously considering one, do your research: Despite me sounding like a used car salesman, BMWs do have issues.
The early E36 3-series (1993-1996ish) is well-known to be plagued by cooling system issues, for instance. Every single plastic part of the entire bloody cooling system is prone to sudden catastrophic failure, from the thermostat housing, to the radiator necks, to the expansion tank, to the water pump, and even the mechanical fan.
But what's awesome about this widely-known failure mode is that BMW fixed it by using an improved plastic compound which doesn't fail so suddenly, and they tend to put dates on their OEM parts so you have an idea of what you've actually got, and the problem is widely known, and there are aftermarket and OEM (even if not sourced through BMW) fixes for all of it.
To be fair, it was their first foray in using so many plastic cooling system parts, and they failed quite miserably. But they've learned from it, I strongly doubt that it will ever happen again, and replacements that aren't inherently flawed are widely available and reasonably cheap -- even if they say BMW on them.
On my car, the radiator had already been replaced with a new BMW unit made with improved materials, so I don't worry about that (though others often replace it with a third-party unit with aluminum necks). I proactively replaced the plastic thermostat housing with an aftermarket aluminum one, removed the stock mechanical fan (the cars also come with electric fan, which works fine by itself in most normal conditions), and replaced the water pump with a unit using a metal impeller instead of plastic.
I did not preemptively replace the expansion tank, which exploded one hot afternoon in a parking lot with a noise not dissimilar to that of a shotgun. Which, incidentally, was the only single time my old BMW left me stuck somewhere... But the parts counter at the BMW dealer was flexible enough to let me pre-pay for an expansion tank over the phone and let me pick it up as the dealership was closing up shop for the day, and I got the car back up and running properly right there in the parking lot with a small socket set and a screwdriver. (I probably could have done the whole job using only the BMW factory toolkit*, if I'd bothered to try.)
Anyway, I knew better: I should have replaced that tank far sooner. It's an easy fix, and I knew it was a problem, and I should've really just taken care of it...especially since I get a much better deal online for BMW parts online than I do from the nearest dealer (this isn't always the case -- in some localities, the BMW parts counter is the cheap place to buy proper parts).
But the point is, research it. You should do this before you buy anything (would you have bought your RL if you knew it was a timebomb?). Every manufacturer has systemic problems with their cars (though not always as spectacular as Toyota) but at least with BMW, the problems have easy-to-find solutions in these enlightened times of teh Intarwebs, largely because of the intelligent and literate community that surrounds them.
And if researching BMWs in particular, be mindful that they're referred to by chassis style instead of model and generation, or model year. Googling for "1995 BMW 325i problems" returns rather lacking results compared to "E36 problems," even though the
I thought I'd hate a BMW, too. The wife found one on a used lot. It was flashy, bright red, and I found the prospect terrifying (having already told myself, long before, that I would never buy a BMW that did not come with a complete and detailed service history).
But then I drove it, it sold itself based on performance, and I found myself negotiating a deal. After driving it for awhile, I began to appreciate how just about everything about it made sense. And as the parts started wearing out (as parts tend to do as miles wear on), I discovered just how nice it is to work on a car where every system, no matter how complicated it seems, is simple and logical...and that even the fasteners and suspension bits are such that they don't rot in the Ohio winter (unlike every American car I've worked on), so it's painless to take things apart.
Even little electrical upgrades, like remote start/keyless entry, or an aftermarket radio are a joy. (I still get a kick out of rolling up the windows from the remote, mostly because of how easy it was to get the car to perform that function.)
And the forums. If there's anything one needs to do to any aspect of this car, someone fairly intelligent has already done it and documented the hell out of it....which is the complete opposite of my experience with a 4th-gen Firebird.
I thought we were supposed to use every third release:
Windows 3.0 Windows 3.1 Windows for Workgroups 3.11 Windows 95 Windows 95 OSR1 Windows 95 OSR2 Windows 95 OSR2.5 Windows 98 Windows 98SE Windows ME Windows 2000 Windows XP Windows Vista Windows 7 Windows 8
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Your natural right to profit is trumped by my inalienable right to peaceably assemble.
Have you watched the movie THX-1138?
I have, and I'm not so sure that I'm interested in having Watson be in charge of my health.
Wow. Fork you!
I've never seen outward behavior with such permanence toward an unrelated person from an Irish-derivative. I do have a habitually-drunken German-derivative friend from whom such a random antic would never be particularly surprising, however.
Then again, most of the Irish derivatives I know are directly related to me, and we all seemed to spend most our childhood actively trying to quite literally kill each other before everyone moved away (presumably, for the prosperity of the clan) once they became adults. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of them was married (twice!) to the aforementioned German derivative.
Indeed, it might not be an accident that it is an alleged castle instead of an actively maintained one. It seems likely, based on my experience with this particular genetic group, that at some point they all fled in different directions out of fear of eachother.
Family Christmas parties are, needless to say, very entertaining.
I guess I'll stick to my uneducated work with computers and communications, then...
It's funny. I (essentially) can't be CEO of a big company company or design plumbing/electric/HVAC without a degree, even though all of these things are always logical and simple to break down into manageable chunks.
But I can design and build critical communication infrastructure for public safety, law enforcement agencies, and defense-related government entities without any sort of degree or licensing, even though failure on my part really will put lives at risk, and the job itself is sometimes anything but logical.
(I do carry a pile of insurance against myself, but the day I file a claim due to a mistake on my part is the same day I apply to flip burgers at McDonald's.)
So the reactor systems are operated by having people manually operate them by turning valves and pulling levers?
That must be a steampunk's idea of heaven.
(The above is written with a firm dose of sarcasm. While I'm reasonably sure you meant something very different, "any network of any kind" is literally so broad that it might be construed to include even a mechanical linkage of moderate complexity.)
Nay. That's easy, too -- and I only did it for a couple of months.
As a drunken Irish derivative, who is not precisely Irish but whose mother's family does (allegedly) have a castle over there somewhere:
I must hasten to admit that I have lit myself on fire many times. It has always been an accident, and I have so far always either been coherent enough to snuff the blaze, or able to wake up quickly enough to do the same.
I have no doubt that many another Irishman have had similar problems, and that a certain percentage of them were either too inebriated to adequately react or simply too dead at the time to respond at all.
I wouldn't assume that: SSDs are sold for speed, not capacity and sometimes not even reliability.
If keeping two copies of anything hurts benchmark performance significantly, there's a good chance that it just won't bother doing it at all -- as a design decision.
A DVD player (and most other consumer electronics which have upgradeable firmware) has a totally different set of design goals, with "speed of writes" not being among them at all.
That all said: I'd like to see it be a user-selectable option. There's plenty of instances where an end-user would willingly opt for greater speed over improved reliability (gamers are fond of RAID 0, after all), and plenty of other instances where reliability is considered far more important than speed.
Cool!
Hopefully it'll gain enough popularity that it can survive better than than the Itanium, Alpha, PPC, and MIPS ports of Windows.
I'm not holding my breath, though.
Useless? I mean, getting free grub from the DFAC is nice and all, but it'd sure be nice to also get free grub when the DFAC isn't around (ie: while on leave).
During my brief stint in the US Army, the drill instructors spent an hour or two one evening going over finances with the group. A good portion of that was spent explaining how to get food stamps to supplement the shit pay.
Yeah, cool.
Now go back 20 years with a copy of parchive for the fine submitter, please, so that this Ask Slashdot article can fade from its existence in the present.
Wow, that's a lot of blockquote.
You might be close to the only chemistry nerd here, though it certainly seems that there should be more of you...
I myself just learn things as I go, and try to be as thorough as I can when picking up a new subject that I'm unfamiliar with. And though chemistry is a very interesting subject to me and I won't be done learning until I'm dead, I just haven't had a good reason to learn much about it yet. Maybe that will change some day.
So, thanks for the brief dissertation. I shan't confuse isopropyl alcohol and ethanol again.
The guys at the shop just use it occasionally for general cleaning on small electronics, so they're not exactly bathing in it.
Things have a lot more potential to be interesting down there on the rare occasion when they decide that the isopropyl isn't doing the job, and then reach for the big red can of methanol race fuel that otherwise would've been used for the boss's sprint car...
Meh.
Nobody here seems to actually be discussing purity.
At work, the guys in the shop use 99% isopropyl alcohol, and often joke that the contents of the bottle is likely 100%, but that it rapidly drops to 99% after opening. (I presume that it is intentionally adultered with poison, like most other industrial forms of ethanol, but I must say I've never tried to drink the stuff.)
The best denatured alcohol I can find at a drug store is 93%, which is pretty good (though full of poison), but there's better options (above).
According to the Wikipedia, distillation alone cannot increase the purity of alcohol beyond 95.6%. Everclear itself is only 95% pure.
My suggestion: Buy a container of Techspray "99%," and a container of 190-proof Everclear. Use the former to cleanse the drive's heads, and the latter to cleanse the spirit, while possibly substituting the latter according to taste.
Rinse and repeat as necessary.
Is this a good place to lament that I recently tossed a working IDE LS-120 Superdisk drive?
Are you using new/clean hardware, or a 3.5" Toshiba drive that was manufactured in 1990 and which has spent at least a decade actively playing the role of dust collector?
Myself, I've have had far better luck with old floppies than old floppy drives.
So as a first step, I'd try different hardware and see what that accomplishes. And any old hardware really should be at least partially disassembled, cleaned thoroughly, and oiled appropriately.
The second step would be calibration. There are two very different ways to do this: Calibrate the drive to what it should be (there are kits+software for this), or calibrate it to what produces the best signal with a particular disk (requires an oscilloscope and a bit of a clue).
Done this way, you might well find that your data can be perfectly restored, which will eliminate the need to guess at what the missing bits might be.
It's probably fair to say that my 325 might be less reliable than a (good) Japanese car, but I might also be pickier about my car than others might be and fix things more readily: Someone who did not push the car hard would probably have never noticed the failing ball joints, for instance, and I don't know that a casual inspection (when getting brakes or tires or whatever) would have uncovered it either. (I noticed it on a right turn on the interstate at a triple-digit speed as a slight but sudden change in steering angle, and thereafter drove the thing very softly until I got it sorted. I don't know that the forces applied by a mechanic doing routine maintenance would simulate that very well, or that an average driver would notice it at all in normal driving conditions. A less-aggressive driver might have safely ridden upon those ball joints for a hundred thousand more miles...)
So I think we're splitting hairs there, honestly, though it's interesting to me that you think a 5-series would be substantially worse. (I've never made that comparison before.)
But it'd also be fair to say that I'd never have as much fun in a (good) FWD Japanese car as I have in my RWD BMW, and I like having fun with cars. I want a clear choice between slight natural understeer*, power oversteer, and throttle-lift oversteer, with neutral handling being somewhere in between the latter two, all under the command of the loud pedal. A FWD vehicle doesn't normally give me anything but variations on understeer unless I'm particularly and bruskly abusive with very late braking, handbrake turns, or other techniques that I just don't enjoy.
I find myself more able to deftly avoid other drivers' stupidity when driving the BMW than I have anything else, just because it is both predictable and quite fast in its handling...plus, the brakes are able to leave a bruise across one's chest from the seatbelt.
*: I can eliminate the tendency for the BMW to understeer with a slightly larger rear swaybar and an hour or two, but meh: I sometimes lend the car to others for days at a time, and I want to get it back in one piece, so I err toward BMW's better judgement and focus my improvements elsewhere.
I admit that 140k doesn't sound too surprising for a sanely-driven Accord. But what sort of off-road activities was that other Accord tasked with? 250k is getting right up there in impressiveness, with any normal car, without regular and expert maintenance. I had a boss (and good friend) once who had a middle-90's Accord which was creeping up there in mileage, but it took some major internal engine work to get it there. (On the other hand, he was more picky than I am.)
And you're right. I would probably hate the RL: I've never really taken Honda/Acura very seriously because they never seem to produce a good RWD car that isn't absolutely silly-expensive, and I've had my fill of FWD cars.
The 325i, with its 50/50 weight distribution, goes like a tractor when fitted with good winter tires in up to 8 or 9 inches of fresh snow, and handles completely boringly on glare ice (which is a very good thing)...despite its absurdly-low factory "sport" suspension, worn and haggard over 16 years, which currently leaves the meat of the front end about 4.5" off of the ground. I've had far worse luck, particularly on ice, with absolutely everything else I've ever driven -- irrespective of speed. I trust this car to get me where I've got to go, damn near no matter what, and I've pulled other cars out of ditches with it. My friends joke that they're surprised I don't have a plow attachment for it.
I have considered, and not completely ruled-out, buying some Nascar-style spring rubbers to temporarily increase the ground clearance for occasions of particularly-deep snow: Beyond about 8 or 9 inches, it can have a very hard time successfully pushing/digging through the stuff, and my job sometimes requires that I get there even if it's impossible.
Your on-ramp story is amusing, though: Volvos are mostly known to be saf
It's the most reliable car I've ever had.
Now, granted, I've only driven American cars otherwise...
But the old girl's got 186k on her now. No electrical problems to speak of (knock on wood). It did eat an automatic transmission once at about 165k, but please realize that the fact that I always drive this car like I just stole it may have had a big impact on the longevity of that part: It's probably more telling of my driving style than the quality of the 4-speed GM-built 4L30E.
To be clear about the level of abuse given: The car has been been completely air-born on more than one spirited drive, and pretty much every drive is spirited (as my wife would attest). I really must say that it's not the transmission's fault that it died. :) But even in death, that transmission still got me home.
And the replacement Getrag 5-speed manual is working just fine. The conversion fit together just like Lego.
I don't know if the 3 is sturdier than the 5, but it's certainly more common around here (mostly because it is cheaper). BMW tends to use the same basic driveline in their models (though the 7 series is obviously very different because it's absolutely huge and heavy, and the all of the M cars are somewhat different because they're intended to be track-ready), so that's all the same. The wiring, accessories, trinkets, interior and bodywork/chassis all tend to be somewhat different between models, but I've never any real trouble with any of that...
And I don't know where you're from, so it may or may not be important to have the more common model. Where I'm at (small town Ohio) I've had to pay my mechanic (who is absolutely brilliant, but whom works by the hour) to learn my car. Larger cities will already have reputable shops already familiar with the details of a BMW, and/or some that don't work on anything anything but. Not everyone is blessed with a brilliant and trustworthy mechanic, to be sure, but depending on where you're at you might find that it's easy to find an indy shop with folks who can work on one without learning everything.
The maintenance worth talking about (ie: aside from the transmission), to date, has been as such:
Valve cover gasket, front brakes, plugs/connectors/coils, the usual tires and oil, front control arms/ball joints, and inner tie rod ends (the outer ends will need done soon), a refill of R-134a, and one small $20 weld on the exhaust system where a short crack formed after the catalytic converter (the rest of the exhaust plumbing, and the muffler, is still working and looking fine and shows no sign of giving up soon). Plus the systemically-bad cooling system stuff I referred to earlier, all of which I knew was coming.
Most of it just seems completely reasonable to me, and seems likely to happen on anything with enough time or miles (how many miles were on your Accord?) no matter the driving style.
Other than the tie rod ends, welding, and transmission swap, I've done done that all myself in my driveway, usually in the winter, with basic tools (a torque wrench, a socket set, and patience). The car is holding up extremely well, I think, especially given my preferred driving style.
That all said: It's really a matter of budgeting. BMW does have maintenance schedules for their vehicles (known as "Inspection I" and "Inspection II"), which if followed both conservatively and with a great deal of prudence, should result in an eternity of a well-running car. I can't currently afford that level of perfection, but if you can then it's easy.
I did tally up my expenses not so long ago, and I figure I've got $10,000 total in this car that I've absolutely flogged for the past 6 or 7 years, including everything (and the tranny, and the car itself) but fuel.
Which is about $0.16 per mile driven. For the silly grin it gives me every time I get behind the wheel, and the knowledge that it has so far neglected to fail getting me from A to B in badness ranging from a tornado, to several massive fl
If an officer knocks on my door and asks "Do you mind if we have a look around?" and I say "No problem. Get to it," there's no warrant required, since they've got my permission.
Similarly, with a camera: If an officer knocks on my door and asks "Do you mind if we tie into your camera system," and I say "go ahead," then there is also no warrant necessary: I've given them consent.
More to the point, I don't even think it's a public-vs-private sort of thing. If I've got cameras installed at my own home or business (inside or outside - it doesn't matter), and want I LEO looking through them and/or archiving them, then that should be completely permissible.
Now, of course, I would never submit affirmatively to any such request ("I do not consent to any searches, officer. Am I free to go?"). But I most certainly do fully support the rights of others to do as they please in their own interaction with law enforcement.
It will be on display for another 4 hours and 2 minutes. Better hurry.
My (non-government) employer used to track my cell phone, using VZW's Field Force Manager system. It wasn't a completely unreasonable request since I was doing field work for them, and I was just as able to use it to show that I was working when/where I said I was as they were to do the opposite.
It worked, but it was a pain in the ass. The battery in the phone would go from a full charge to nothing in less than an hour in areas of poor or zero signal, and it was impossible to actually turn the software off (it would magically turn itself back on again), so it was going 24/7 and I found myself completely frustrated by having to keep the thing both available to me and tied to a charger at all times. And this with an old dumb Motorola handset with an extended battery, which prior to the tracking software would work for a week or two (!) without charging.
It's not so much that I don't trust my boss (I do, very much), but that the process of asking myself if I should trust my boss which bothered me, along with always being mindful to keep the stupid thing plugged in. Between questioning my circle of trust and always looking for a place to charge up, I really became very angry about the whole thing.
Eventually, I changed the configuration (on the cloud side of things) to turn off at around 5:30PM, which helped a hugely with my sanity, and kept my battery usage low during most non-work hours. (I never asked anyone before making this adjustment to the system (oh, durnit - must've forgot) and nobody ever changed it back...)
But even then, I was bothered by an overzealous manager who would keep track of me even while I was at lunch and who would question every activity. So I bought a little Faraday cage from dealextreme, and started using that at lunch, or if I had time off during the week.
And that restored a little bit more of my sanity.
Eventually, after the release of the Motorola Droid, I convinced the boss that I should have a fancier phone. Unfortunately, at that time the Droid did not support Field Force Manager (it might by now), so the notion of automatic tracking just sort of disappeared and I haven't been tracked by my employer since.
My sanity was almost fully restored: Almost, because I also lost the ability to show that I actually was where I said I'd been.
Later on, I quit that hourly job and started doing contract work for the same folks. Now, nobody gives a fuck where I'm at or what I'm doing, as long as the work gets done and the customer is happy. I am thus currently running at 100% sanity, and everyone else is happy too. (I still have my own office area at the shop, but nobody has expected me to fill it ever since, and I haven't actually seen it in months.)
The moral of this story is simple: If your boss is tracking you and you don't like it for whatever reason, offer to quit and become a contractor. :)
My wife (who is homebound due to a workers comp issue) watches Netflix streaming. A lot.
She complains continuously that they do not have the latest releases available to stream, but then she finds herself a new (to her) TV series and watches that.
And when I say "watches," I mean "vigorously consumes". She starts from episode 1, and goes until she reaches the end.
She uses up to about 450 gigabytes per month of bandwidth doing this, by my measurement.
So, as saddened as I am that Netflix's new pricing scheme has finally come to shove, I am moreover disheartened that I have allowed such a travesty to fester to such an extent that it affects all of us.
I would like to take this opportunity to apologize. I am unreservedly sorry for my wife's behavior and any impact that it may have upon you and your family.
-adolf, #21054
Oh. And the other thing: BMW has a history of being tight-lipped with their factory service documentation, so there's a similarly long heritage of free and open piracy when it comes to such things.
It's somewhat like the Streisand Effect: The harder they try to keep information to themselves, the more widely available it becomes. (except, unlike the Streisand Effect proper, nobody at BMW seems to mind when their information is freely shared by third parties after it somehow leaks out.)
Anyway, based on the RL, you might be looking for a 5 (any vintage) or a newer 3 (which are a good bit larger than the older ones). And if you do find yourself seriously considering one, do your research: Despite me sounding like a used car salesman, BMWs do have issues.
The early E36 3-series (1993-1996ish) is well-known to be plagued by cooling system issues, for instance. Every single plastic part of the entire bloody cooling system is prone to sudden catastrophic failure, from the thermostat housing, to the radiator necks, to the expansion tank, to the water pump, and even the mechanical fan.
But what's awesome about this widely-known failure mode is that BMW fixed it by using an improved plastic compound which doesn't fail so suddenly, and they tend to put dates on their OEM parts so you have an idea of what you've actually got, and the problem is widely known, and there are aftermarket and OEM (even if not sourced through BMW) fixes for all of it.
To be fair, it was their first foray in using so many plastic cooling system parts, and they failed quite miserably. But they've learned from it, I strongly doubt that it will ever happen again, and replacements that aren't inherently flawed are widely available and reasonably cheap -- even if they say BMW on them.
On my car, the radiator had already been replaced with a new BMW unit made with improved materials, so I don't worry about that (though others often replace it with a third-party unit with aluminum necks). I proactively replaced the plastic thermostat housing with an aftermarket aluminum one, removed the stock mechanical fan (the cars also come with electric fan, which works fine by itself in most normal conditions), and replaced the water pump with a unit using a metal impeller instead of plastic.
I did not preemptively replace the expansion tank, which exploded one hot afternoon in a parking lot with a noise not dissimilar to that of a shotgun. Which, incidentally, was the only single time my old BMW left me stuck somewhere... But the parts counter at the BMW dealer was flexible enough to let me pre-pay for an expansion tank over the phone and let me pick it up as the dealership was closing up shop for the day, and I got the car back up and running properly right there in the parking lot with a small socket set and a screwdriver. (I probably could have done the whole job using only the BMW factory toolkit*, if I'd bothered to try.)
Anyway, I knew better: I should have replaced that tank far sooner. It's an easy fix, and I knew it was a problem, and I should've really just taken care of it...especially since I get a much better deal online for BMW parts online than I do from the nearest dealer (this isn't always the case -- in some localities, the BMW parts counter is the cheap place to buy proper parts).
But the point is, research it. You should do this before you buy anything (would you have bought your RL if you knew it was a timebomb?). Every manufacturer has systemic problems with their cars (though not always as spectacular as Toyota) but at least with BMW, the problems have easy-to-find solutions in these enlightened times of teh Intarwebs, largely because of the intelligent and literate community that surrounds them.
And if researching BMWs in particular, be mindful that they're referred to by chassis style instead of model and generation, or model year. Googling for "1995 BMW 325i problems" returns rather lacking results compared to "E36 problems," even though the
I thought I'd hate a BMW, too. The wife found one on a used lot. It was flashy, bright red, and I found the prospect terrifying (having already told myself, long before, that I would never buy a BMW that did not come with a complete and detailed service history).
But then I drove it, it sold itself based on performance, and I found myself negotiating a deal. After driving it for awhile, I began to appreciate how just about everything about it made sense. And as the parts started wearing out (as parts tend to do as miles wear on), I discovered just how nice it is to work on a car where every system, no matter how complicated it seems, is simple and logical...and that even the fasteners and suspension bits are such that they don't rot in the Ohio winter (unlike every American car I've worked on), so it's painless to take things apart.
Even little electrical upgrades, like remote start/keyless entry, or an aftermarket radio are a joy. (I still get a kick out of rolling up the windows from the remote, mostly because of how easy it was to get the car to perform that function.)
And the forums. If there's anything one needs to do to any aspect of this car, someone fairly intelligent has already done it and documented the hell out of it....which is the complete opposite of my experience with a 4th-gen Firebird.
Anyway, just my experience.
I thought we were supposed to use every third release:
Windows 3.0
Windows 3.1
Windows for Workgroups 3.11
Windows 95
Windows 95 OSR1
Windows 95 OSR2
Windows 95 OSR2.5
Windows 98
Windows 98SE
Windows ME
Windows 2000
Windows XP
Windows Vista
Windows 7
Windows 8