This is exactly the sort of thinking I am talking about. This is the way the current software industry thinks.
Right, and that's all that's important. Reality is not important, only perception, and more specifically, the perception of the people who run these companies.
So you spend a little more on labor and a little less on parts. I know buyers are price-conscious but I doubt many would actually choose the reliability trade-off here.
Again, no. You obviously don't understand how cheap parts are, and how expensive labor is. Adding a potentiometer to the gas pedal, and some wires to the electrical connector (which is already there for other electrical parts, such as the brake switches), is not significantly more expensive than a bowden cable at the volumes that carmakers operate at. Labor, however, is extremely expensive, and probably the largest cost in the car.
but saving money is a lousy reason, not least because either the savings evaporates on software engineering costs, or you wind up killing people with bugs.
Software engineering is NRE. You do it once, and it applies to millions of units. It's not like they have to do it all over again for each model either; the engine control software is likely the same across every model the carmaker makes, with a few different variables for different engine sizes. So software costs are neglible (plus, they have to write software for the engine control computer anyway; a few more lines to deal with the throttle isn't a big deal).
Saving money is ALWAYS a good reason. If your product is cheaper, you get more customers. If your product is more expensive, you get less customers, and maybe go out of business. And killing people with bugs is rare in cars, and even with some payouts is cheaper than spending more on engineering and parts and assembly. Didn't you watch Fight Club? And if you disagree, what kind of car do you drive? Does it cost over $100,000? If not, then you're a hypocrite for buying a cheap car instead of a Rolls-Royce which is well-known for having lots of redundancy.
No, it's more than that: it has a penetration through the firewall (which means some kind of rubber grommet usually), and connections to both the throttle pedal and to the throttle body. On top of that, there's usually some extra brackets to route the cable.
When you account for all these things, that's a bunch of assembly steps that some worker has to do, while crawling around under the dashboard and under the hood. That takes a lot of time. With an electronic throttle, you don't have to do all that; the pedals are a complete assembly, the throttle body is part of the engine and all the connections to that are done during engine assembly. The engine is then dropped in, and a few electrical connections made to the wire harnesses that were installed earlier. The pedals are bolted in as a complete assembly, and again all the electrical connections made all at once with a single connector being plugged in. With electrical connections, lots of connections can be made by plugging in a single connector. Not so with bowden cables.
Exactly. A better way to look at it is that Apple WAS shut down, just like Dell suggested. Instead of just being dissolved, however, it was bought out by a different company, called "NeXT". That company then used the Apple brand name and logo to market its own products, and was enormously successful.
There have been mechanical failures with accelerators sticking open as well, with nothing much the driver can do in that case except to try and brake against it or kill the engine (very dangerous too if someone in a panic just turns the key, as the steering wheel can mechanically lock).
Totally wrong and stupid.
In any normal car, you simply disengage the transmission if the accelerator sticks. In a stick-shift, this is as easy as depressing the clutch pedal (and then shifting to neutral for extra safety). In an automatic, you just bump the gearshift to "N". In most cars I've seen, you don't even have to press the button to do so, you can just push it from D to N (where it stops; it requires a button-press to move to the next gate, which is Reverse, for obvious reasons).
This doesn't mean every driver (especially the automatic drivers) is smart enough to shift to neutral if the accelerator sticks, but it's a simple and effective way to render the engine harmless.
The main reason for throttle-by-wire that I can see is reduced assembly cost. It's easier to build a car in modules and then plug in some wire harnesses than to install mechanical linkages in various places.
And that's simply what it boils down to: Techs are really bad at self marketing. We still mostly rely on getting the job done and getting it done well and hoping that people will notice. Bullshit, people don't care. People only listen to the loudmouth who keeps tooting his own horn.
It's like something I keep telling my wife over and over when she complains about workplace gossip: People believe what they're told.
It doesn't matter what you tell people; if you tell them that the Grim Reaper himself chased you while you were at some park, they'll believe you just as long as they personally know you. They won't ask questions challenging the veracity of your story, they'll just accept that whatever you claim is real. Likewise, if they run around telling people that you're "hostile" towards them, even if you have no interaction with them at all, they'll believe this and rally to that person's side against you. People believe what they're told. And so it goes with management goons: they tell everyone how important they are, and people believe them.
Another problem is that lots of programs create files on filesystem at startup, such as pid files, log files, cache files, and distros put those directories where they live in the on-disk filesystem, even though they are small, and ephemeral, there is no point in keeping them after a reboot, and logs should be sent to another host, not stored on the local machine.
Part of the reason to switch to better init systems is start-up speed, which on mobile devices is really important (and totally unimportant on servers). However, no one is going to be able to set up their laptop or tablet or whatever to reliably send logs to another host. We're talking consumer gear here, not stuff used by IT pros. Being able to redirect/copy logs to another host is a great feature of course, for server admins or other people who desire to set that up for better administration of their mobile devices, but expecting that of normal users is lunacy.
While don't dispute that many machines do have problems, since Linux can give you a horribly different experience depending not only on the distro you've chosen but also the hardware you're using, my laptop works almost perfectly in recovering from sleep, in fact I do this all the time, many times a day. I'm using a Dell Latitude E6400 with Mint KDE.
In my experience and observation, the business laptops tend to be MUCH better supported in Linux than the consumer ones. So if you're not already using one, get a Thinkpad or Latitude, and skip the rest. It also helps to get a slightly older model, as more of the bugs will be worked out. My laptop is probably at least 5 years old now (got it used on Ebay), and for most uses it's more than adequate. It's not like hardware is advancing much in performance these days anyway, and the screens on laptops are actually inferior now to what was typical 5+ years ago.
The people who can make better bike pumps are not the same people who can make better bike tires. The person who's tired of his bike tires going flat might have resources and expertise in building a better pump, but no ability whatsoever to make better tires.
Fixing problems in the kernel isn't really possible for people working at a distro on an init system. Fixing those problems requires access to hardware documentation, and examples of hardware to test on. They don't have either of those, which is why hardware bugs like that exist in Linux.
Comparing Mark to Steve Jobs is quite a stretch. For all his faults, Steve was really good at knowing what consumers would like, and what would sell. Mark doesn't seem to have this aptitude at all. He has all the control-freak characteristics of Steve, without the positive traits that made him so successful. Maybe he fancies himself as the Steve Jobs of Linuxland, but he's doing a piss-poor job of living up to that.
But surely you don't reboot Linux so often that it is a major concern whether it takes 1 minutes or 10?
On servers, no. Laptops, however, are a different animal. Yes, you can avoid some reboots just by using the normal suspend and hibernate modes (IF hibernate works on your laptop), but not all, particularly when there's a kernel update. People generally like to have laptops that can start up and shutdown quickly, particularly when Windows can do it so fast these days.
Why not just make the journal in a standardized format, that can be read by any other system? If I need to look inside a.zip or.tar.gz file, I don't need tools on a specific computer to do that; I can copy those files to any computer and look at them with zip/unzip or tar/gzip. Why should it be any different with systemd logfiles? You shouldn't need to use the computer that generated those files to read the files, just the same tool on another computer. If that's a problem, then there's a serious failure in implementation.
We've had technology to replace monitors for well over 20 years now. I tried one on at a trade show back in 2000. It was like the old "Private Eye" monitor from the early 1990s, which was red-on-black CGA only, but this one was 1024x768 full-color SVGA IIRC. You wear the device on your head like glasses, and it has a small arm that extends in front of your eye. While wearing it, a virtual screen appears to hover in front of you.
What ever happened to these devices, I have no idea. They'd be great for working privately, or for using with a portable device.
This wouldn't be a problem. Niven, like many other sci-fi authors (including whoever wrote the script for the more-recent movie "The Island") obviously failed to predict artificially-grown (or 3D-printed) organs. Moreover, Niven obviously didn't understand the problems with tissue rejection, something the "The Island" screenwriter had a better understanding of (which is why the plot required growing clones for wealthy people wanting a supply of organs to harvest).
By the time we're actually successful in extending lives greatly, we'll have the technology to grow replacement organs for ourselves. We're already growing artificial skin using a patient's cells, and artificial meat for consumption. The technology for much of this stuff will be fairly cheap.
Also, where does most of the money come from to build and maintain roads? More from cars than from cyclists, right? Perhaps separate cycle roads is the answer, but who is paying for them? I don't think motorists will volunteer, unless they cycle a lot as well.
It's called "taxes", something that decent governments in first-world countries use for all kinds of useful public-works projects. Bike roads are a worthy investment since they make citizens healthier, and in first-world countries, that saves taxpayer money by reducing health-care costs. Of course, shitty backwards third-world countries that don't have socialized medicine won't have that worry and won't care about their citizens all being horrifically unhealthy and obese.
Exactly. The US Constition is a failure; if a law that's blatantly unConstitutional can stand for a decade or more (being renewed multiple times, even), then obviously the Constitution isn't very effective in preventing unConstitutional laws, and obviously lacks decent mechanisms to prevent that from happening.
That's the tactic of all the Powers that Be: divide and conquer, bread and circuses. They keep us divided with "wedge issues" like gay marriage and abortion, so we're distracted from the really important issues like the disappearance of the middle class and the destruction of the economy.
It doesn't, because most Americans are happy with it this way. They believe that lobbying == "free speech", because Fox News tells them so. And those that disagree insist that we need to elect the Democrats (who also get all this lobbying $$$, but somehow it's different for them, because Democrats are all good and virtuous while Republicans are all evil) to prevent the evil Republicans from being elected.
It's not going to change until the economy gets so bad and the country so crippled that groups of States secede from the Union, and the Federal government in Washington is powerless to stop it. Hopefully, that'll come sooner rather than later, so the better-run regions can rebuild their economies quickly and pass progressive legislation to fix things, rather than waiting too long and having their economies utterly wrecked by all the political problems, like what happened in Rome (everyone moved out of the cities, forgot all their specialized skills and technology, and became unskilled serfs working for feudal lords).
They don't need to. They only need to get someone inside the US to record the show and send it to them, so they can do whatever editing they do and release it.
Um, no, drivers are not ticketed for any of those things, pretty much ever. The only things people ever get tickets for are speeding and DUI (and these days, running red lights in places where there's photo enforcement). No one ever gets tickets for things like tailgating or other dangerous driving acts, except in the extremely rare case a cop who cares happens to be there and see them doing something horribly blatant like driving on the wrong side of the road. As for turn signals, I've never, ever, seen a cop use a turn signal.
Yeah, that'll work well. After you get creamed by a speeding SUV, you can pull out your gun and shoot the driver. Oh wait, you can't, because you were just run over by him and now you're dead or paralyzed.
I never said all cyclists were good, responsible riders. Obviously, that's not the case. However, I'm sure your statements are patently false, since you use the word "never" and try to allege that ALL riders are exactly like that, which is of course absurd.
Regardless, the big difference between stupid cyclists and stupid drivers is that, when a stupid cyclist fucks up, it's extremely unlikely anyone's going to die or be seriously injured (except the cyclist), whereas when a stupid driver fucks up and a cyclist is involved, the death or maiming of the cyclist is almost assured.
Finally, as a car driver myself, I see totally stupid moves by other drivers all the time. They "never" stop for stop signs or red lights, ride on the wrong side of the road, don't signal turns, ride after dark without lights, and generally break every traffic law on the books. I never see them losing their licenses for these things.
Germany can't be compared to the US, it's apples and oranges. In Germany, people have to pay ~$5,000 to hire a tutor to teach them how to drive properly, and they have to pass rigorous examinations to make sure they're good drivers. There's also stringent enforcement of drivers in Germany, including ticketing people who drive in the left lane without passing. People who suck at driving simply don't drive, they take public transit. In the US, there is no driver testing except for some silly rubber stamps, there's no driver training, and there's no enforcement of any driving rules except for speeding and DUI (drunk driving). Any moron who wants to can drive a car or truck, and they can drive as recklessly as they want as long as they're not drunk or speeding, and nothing will be done about them. Talking on the phone and texting while driving are perfectly legal here in most places; that's surely not the case in Germany or other European countries. This is why you can't expect drivers to not simply hit cyclists; the drivers here are dangerous morons.
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This is exactly the sort of thinking I am talking about. This is the way the current software industry thinks.
Right, and that's all that's important. Reality is not important, only perception, and more specifically, the perception of the people who run these companies.
So you spend a little more on labor and a little less on parts. I know buyers are price-conscious but I doubt many would actually choose the reliability trade-off here.
Again, no. You obviously don't understand how cheap parts are, and how expensive labor is. Adding a potentiometer to the gas pedal, and some wires to the electrical connector (which is already there for other electrical parts, such as the brake switches), is not significantly more expensive than a bowden cable at the volumes that carmakers operate at. Labor, however, is extremely expensive, and probably the largest cost in the car.
but saving money is a lousy reason, not least because either the savings evaporates on software engineering costs, or you wind up killing people with bugs.
Software engineering is NRE. You do it once, and it applies to millions of units. It's not like they have to do it all over again for each model either; the engine control software is likely the same across every model the carmaker makes, with a few different variables for different engine sizes. So software costs are neglible (plus, they have to write software for the engine control computer anyway; a few more lines to deal with the throttle isn't a big deal).
Saving money is ALWAYS a good reason. If your product is cheaper, you get more customers. If your product is more expensive, you get less customers, and maybe go out of business. And killing people with bugs is rare in cars, and even with some payouts is cheaper than spending more on engineering and parts and assembly. Didn't you watch Fight Club? And if you disagree, what kind of car do you drive? Does it cost over $100,000? If not, then you're a hypocrite for buying a cheap car instead of a Rolls-Royce which is well-known for having lots of redundancy.
No, it's more than that: it has a penetration through the firewall (which means some kind of rubber grommet usually), and connections to both the throttle pedal and to the throttle body. On top of that, there's usually some extra brackets to route the cable.
When you account for all these things, that's a bunch of assembly steps that some worker has to do, while crawling around under the dashboard and under the hood. That takes a lot of time. With an electronic throttle, you don't have to do all that; the pedals are a complete assembly, the throttle body is part of the engine and all the connections to that are done during engine assembly. The engine is then dropped in, and a few electrical connections made to the wire harnesses that were installed earlier. The pedals are bolted in as a complete assembly, and again all the electrical connections made all at once with a single connector being plugged in. With electrical connections, lots of connections can be made by plugging in a single connector. Not so with bowden cables.
That's true, but has anyone bothered to do it yet? Cars have had electronic throttles for quite a few years now, and I haven't heard of that feature.
Exactly. A better way to look at it is that Apple WAS shut down, just like Dell suggested. Instead of just being dissolved, however, it was bought out by a different company, called "NeXT". That company then used the Apple brand name and logo to market its own products, and was enormously successful.
There have been mechanical failures with accelerators sticking open as well, with nothing much the driver can do in that case except to try and brake against it or kill the engine (very dangerous too if someone in a panic just turns the key, as the steering wheel can mechanically lock).
Totally wrong and stupid.
In any normal car, you simply disengage the transmission if the accelerator sticks. In a stick-shift, this is as easy as depressing the clutch pedal (and then shifting to neutral for extra safety). In an automatic, you just bump the gearshift to "N". In most cars I've seen, you don't even have to press the button to do so, you can just push it from D to N (where it stops; it requires a button-press to move to the next gate, which is Reverse, for obvious reasons).
This doesn't mean every driver (especially the automatic drivers) is smart enough to shift to neutral if the accelerator sticks, but it's a simple and effective way to render the engine harmless.
The main reason for throttle-by-wire that I can see is reduced assembly cost. It's easier to build a car in modules and then plug in some wire harnesses than to install mechanical linkages in various places.
And that's simply what it boils down to: Techs are really bad at self marketing. We still mostly rely on getting the job done and getting it done well and hoping that people will notice. Bullshit, people don't care. People only listen to the loudmouth who keeps tooting his own horn.
It's like something I keep telling my wife over and over when she complains about workplace gossip:
People believe what they're told.
It doesn't matter what you tell people; if you tell them that the Grim Reaper himself chased you while you were at some park, they'll believe you just as long as they personally know you. They won't ask questions challenging the veracity of your story, they'll just accept that whatever you claim is real. Likewise, if they run around telling people that you're "hostile" towards them, even if you have no interaction with them at all, they'll believe this and rally to that person's side against you. People believe what they're told. And so it goes with management goons: they tell everyone how important they are, and people believe them.
Another problem is that lots of programs create files on filesystem at startup, such as pid files, log files, cache files, and distros put those directories where they live in the on-disk filesystem, even though they are small, and ephemeral, there is no point in keeping them after a reboot, and logs should be sent to another host, not stored on the local machine.
Part of the reason to switch to better init systems is start-up speed, which on mobile devices is really important (and totally unimportant on servers). However, no one is going to be able to set up their laptop or tablet or whatever to reliably send logs to another host. We're talking consumer gear here, not stuff used by IT pros. Being able to redirect/copy logs to another host is a great feature of course, for server admins or other people who desire to set that up for better administration of their mobile devices, but expecting that of normal users is lunacy.
While don't dispute that many machines do have problems, since Linux can give you a horribly different experience depending not only on the distro you've chosen but also the hardware you're using, my laptop works almost perfectly in recovering from sleep, in fact I do this all the time, many times a day. I'm using a Dell Latitude E6400 with Mint KDE.
In my experience and observation, the business laptops tend to be MUCH better supported in Linux than the consumer ones. So if you're not already using one, get a Thinkpad or Latitude, and skip the rest. It also helps to get a slightly older model, as more of the bugs will be worked out. My laptop is probably at least 5 years old now (got it used on Ebay), and for most uses it's more than adequate. It's not like hardware is advancing much in performance these days anyway, and the screens on laptops are actually inferior now to what was typical 5+ years ago.
The people who can make better bike pumps are not the same people who can make better bike tires. The person who's tired of his bike tires going flat might have resources and expertise in building a better pump, but no ability whatsoever to make better tires.
Fixing problems in the kernel isn't really possible for people working at a distro on an init system. Fixing those problems requires access to hardware documentation, and examples of hardware to test on. They don't have either of those, which is why hardware bugs like that exist in Linux.
Comparing Mark to Steve Jobs is quite a stretch. For all his faults, Steve was really good at knowing what consumers would like, and what would sell. Mark doesn't seem to have this aptitude at all. He has all the control-freak characteristics of Steve, without the positive traits that made him so successful. Maybe he fancies himself as the Steve Jobs of Linuxland, but he's doing a piss-poor job of living up to that.
But surely you don't reboot Linux so often that it is a major concern whether it takes 1 minutes or 10?
On servers, no. Laptops, however, are a different animal. Yes, you can avoid some reboots just by using the normal suspend and hibernate modes (IF hibernate works on your laptop), but not all, particularly when there's a kernel update. People generally like to have laptops that can start up and shutdown quickly, particularly when Windows can do it so fast these days.
Why not just make the journal in a standardized format, that can be read by any other system? If I need to look inside a .zip or .tar.gz file, I don't need tools on a specific computer to do that; I can copy those files to any computer and look at them with zip/unzip or tar/gzip. Why should it be any different with systemd logfiles? You shouldn't need to use the computer that generated those files to read the files, just the same tool on another computer. If that's a problem, then there's a serious failure in implementation.
We've had technology to replace monitors for well over 20 years now. I tried one on at a trade show back in 2000. It was like the old "Private Eye" monitor from the early 1990s, which was red-on-black CGA only, but this one was 1024x768 full-color SVGA IIRC. You wear the device on your head like glasses, and it has a small arm that extends in front of your eye. While wearing it, a virtual screen appears to hover in front of you.
What ever happened to these devices, I have no idea. They'd be great for working privately, or for using with a portable device.
This wouldn't be a problem. Niven, like many other sci-fi authors (including whoever wrote the script for the more-recent movie "The Island") obviously failed to predict artificially-grown (or 3D-printed) organs. Moreover, Niven obviously didn't understand the problems with tissue rejection, something the "The Island" screenwriter had a better understanding of (which is why the plot required growing clones for wealthy people wanting a supply of organs to harvest).
By the time we're actually successful in extending lives greatly, we'll have the technology to grow replacement organs for ourselves. We're already growing artificial skin using a patient's cells, and artificial meat for consumption. The technology for much of this stuff will be fairly cheap.
Also, where does most of the money come from to build and maintain roads? More from cars than from cyclists, right? Perhaps separate cycle roads is the answer, but who is paying for them? I don't think motorists will volunteer, unless they cycle a lot as well.
It's called "taxes", something that decent governments in first-world countries use for all kinds of useful public-works projects. Bike roads are a worthy investment since they make citizens healthier, and in first-world countries, that saves taxpayer money by reducing health-care costs. Of course, shitty backwards third-world countries that don't have socialized medicine won't have that worry and won't care about their citizens all being horrifically unhealthy and obese.
Exactly. The US Constition is a failure; if a law that's blatantly unConstitutional can stand for a decade or more (being renewed multiple times, even), then obviously the Constitution isn't very effective in preventing unConstitutional laws, and obviously lacks decent mechanisms to prevent that from happening.
That's the tactic of all the Powers that Be: divide and conquer, bread and circuses. They keep us divided with "wedge issues" like gay marriage and abortion, so we're distracted from the really important issues like the disappearance of the middle class and the destruction of the economy.
It doesn't, because most Americans are happy with it this way. They believe that lobbying == "free speech", because Fox News tells them so. And those that disagree insist that we need to elect the Democrats (who also get all this lobbying $$$, but somehow it's different for them, because Democrats are all good and virtuous while Republicans are all evil) to prevent the evil Republicans from being elected.
It's not going to change until the economy gets so bad and the country so crippled that groups of States secede from the Union, and the Federal government in Washington is powerless to stop it. Hopefully, that'll come sooner rather than later, so the better-run regions can rebuild their economies quickly and pass progressive legislation to fix things, rather than waiting too long and having their economies utterly wrecked by all the political problems, like what happened in Rome (everyone moved out of the cities, forgot all their specialized skills and technology, and became unskilled serfs working for feudal lords).
A lucky shot, sir!
They don't need to. They only need to get someone inside the US to record the show and send it to them, so they can do whatever editing they do and release it.
Um, no, drivers are not ticketed for any of those things, pretty much ever. The only things people ever get tickets for are speeding and DUI (and these days, running red lights in places where there's photo enforcement). No one ever gets tickets for things like tailgating or other dangerous driving acts, except in the extremely rare case a cop who cares happens to be there and see them doing something horribly blatant like driving on the wrong side of the road. As for turn signals, I've never, ever, seen a cop use a turn signal.
Yeah, that'll work well. After you get creamed by a speeding SUV, you can pull out your gun and shoot the driver. Oh wait, you can't, because you were just run over by him and now you're dead or paralyzed.
I never said all cyclists were good, responsible riders. Obviously, that's not the case. However, I'm sure your statements are patently false, since you use the word "never" and try to allege that ALL riders are exactly like that, which is of course absurd.
Regardless, the big difference between stupid cyclists and stupid drivers is that, when a stupid cyclist fucks up, it's extremely unlikely anyone's going to die or be seriously injured (except the cyclist), whereas when a stupid driver fucks up and a cyclist is involved, the death or maiming of the cyclist is almost assured.
Finally, as a car driver myself, I see totally stupid moves by other drivers all the time. They "never" stop for stop signs or red lights, ride on the wrong side of the road, don't signal turns, ride after dark without lights, and generally break every traffic law on the books. I never see them losing their licenses for these things.
Germany can't be compared to the US, it's apples and oranges. In Germany, people have to pay ~$5,000 to hire a tutor to teach them how to drive properly, and they have to pass rigorous examinations to make sure they're good drivers. There's also stringent enforcement of drivers in Germany, including ticketing people who drive in the left lane without passing. People who suck at driving simply don't drive, they take public transit. In the US, there is no driver testing except for some silly rubber stamps, there's no driver training, and there's no enforcement of any driving rules except for speeding and DUI (drunk driving). Any moron who wants to can drive a car or truck, and they can drive as recklessly as they want as long as they're not drunk or speeding, and nothing will be done about them. Talking on the phone and texting while driving are perfectly legal here in most places; that's surely not the case in Germany or other European countries. This is why you can't expect drivers to not simply hit cyclists; the drivers here are dangerous morons.