I would further suggest that a good software architect envisages that the software will be rewritten. Maybe several times. This allows for the system to evolve as it gets bigger and handles more of the business or technical needs anticipated of it.
In the great scheme of things if the rider were a board I would agree, but the rider is not a board, they are quite flexible. Certainly some parts of the body reach the ground with mathmatical precision, but other parts are lain there at whatever speed, or with whatever skill, the sentient being in the riding suite can manage.
One attempts to lay ones head slowly on the road if at all possible. Having trashed a few helmets with grazes while crashing at 50-60mph (crashed several times) I can assure you that helmets planted on the ground at these speeds will not survive intact, only human intervention, to bend ones spine, ameliorates the impact.
As the medical community has knocked me off my motorcycle twice (A doctor from Southhampton General, and a trainee Doctor in Sheffield) and the doctors in Peterborough treated me like sh*t after I had been run down by an Army corporal, I for one have no time for these knife wielding butchers, we care to call Doctors.
The medical community gives motorcyclists a tough time. I say if you become a doctor you treat people that are sick and banged up; that is your job. Screw the complaints just do your %$#@ing job.
I program computers, I don't bitch when someone comes to me with a bug! That's my job. We choose the jobs we do.
I ride motorcycles and try to avoid the numbskulls that drive all those steel boxes still thinking they are sitting in an EZ-boy and playing the PS2 game "Commuter killer."
Am I angry when I hear people like you refer to Motorcyclists in this manner, damned sure I am. And if you want one of us aged, knarled, damp, cold, hunting for red blood, motorcyclists to give you an idea of how we feel, don't move from that spot!!
Riding for 24yrs Programming for a living for 22yrs
I marvel to think that anything with a 17 year old circuit board in it is still moving. Give your 350Z 17yrs of abuse, then come back and see if you wish to give this Gent the same criticism.
For a moment think on that old IBM PC-AT, the 6Mhz one that seemed so fast back then. Then remember it's 17 yrs old, and think to yourself : do you really want your kids playing anywhere near it just in case it blows up? I suppose there are a few of those old PC-AT's out there, but nature has a way of turning silicon into junk - electronics do fail. Statistics catch up with electronics, quickly.
The more complex, failure prone stuff in the blackboxes, the higher the probability it will all fail sooner, rather than later.
Noise. Harvard style.
on
Does IT Matter?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Years ago NME opined of the band "Wild Horses," While we have Electricity we will have Bands like this! Today we have the Harvard Business School, and while it exists we will have err, gentlemen, like Carr.
IT does matter. It will continue to matter till such time some far more advanced concept sweeps it aside, just as the computer finally nudged Caxton's Press to one side in the last decade.
The example of using RFID tags at Walmart is actually proving the point that IT does matter. Walmart is one of the most truly, colossally computer intensive companies on the planet. Just ask KMart if Walmarts' IT efforts were worthless and a waste of time.
Without IT as we know it today, companies like GE could not exist. They would collapse under their own weight in paper. They require bleeding edge technology just to manage Terabytes of data, forget about actually doing anything to sift those terabytes and make sense of them. Without Information Technology much of the US economy would not exist. IT matters, it pulled us out of the morass of the 70's, the height of the lack-of-information-technology era.
Carr seems to fail in all points, because he is the quintessential academic. He has no concept of what is at the heart of real business, or that real businesses very heart is now a computer.
No way was Mr Vigne the first to use this term. Even I, humble me, had used the term prior to 1997 (Vigne's book was published in 1999) to express the issues surrounding the understanding of how to reverse engineer software, how to capture the reasons why software was written the way it was.
I think your wrong on both counts: 1) being clean Seems that most true spring water is full of microbial and bacterial life that is generally excused from water purity laws that would have tap water turned off immediately. 2) containing nutritious minerals Heavy metals, dissolved radioactive gases and other such nutritious minerals may be good for you but leave a nasty taste in my mouth.
You really want to reinvent the wheel? You really want to give people an old fashion start at the noble art of code hacking? Well, deep in the Borland Web site is a free download of Turbo Pascal (5.5). It wiped BASIC's clock; it made heroes of Boys; It came with IDE and Debugger, it washed clothes whiter...
An' thee wonder why t' young generation dont understand us naymore...?
Somewhere in all the mess that surrounds LEO is George. George I, II & III. I think (usual provisos about senility apply), George I was the OS on later LEO's. ICL ploughed on with this OS for years. In 1981 I was coding Cobol at ICL on a rare 2966, on VME-B, being hosted on George III - a feat common on IBM machines but less so on ICL.
George-III had some multi-user features, but mostly they used it just for multi-processing.
VME-K and VME-B which were meant to be new OS's inherited quite a bit of George and were still in use till at least the late-80's on 2900 and 3900 series ICL kit.
I grew up in Lincolnshire, grew up among literally dozens of active and deserted bases from both World Wars. The Lincoln Edge is noted for having airfields along most of its length (some 20-30 miles). Lincolnshire used to have 1% of its land area under concrete runways, even today only 5% of the county has tree cover!
I now live in New Jersey, and it too has something of the same phenomenon. New Jersey was covered in Aircraft factories by 1945. They flew directly out of these factories to the front lines in Britain and Europe. Today many of the larger former Curtis-Wright and Lockheed airfields are Municipal fields, but many of the smaller ones have simply disappeared.
It's just another little bit of our heritage that is disappearing under Urban sprawl.
I, too, was once a first year CS student (back when the 8080 was a cool processor, meaning it was good, not that the latest PIV runs hotter in comparison, if you know what I mean %-) ) Fortunately, I had done summer work and a year out before doing my University course, so I knew that what this person has written about was simply not true. Now, that was my experience. Your experience and everyone elses experience WILL vary. That is life.
To tell a 1st yr CS, or any other student, that the way to get a pay raise is X, or that you don't document if you have written code correctly, is simply asking for trouble from all the people that will later in their lives start to send you letter bombs having learned a different truth.
As for the Glossary, there are words there that the individual has incorrectly used, several of the words have alternative real meanings. I grant several of the words are just inventions, but even those have real equivalents in meaning - showing a complete lack of lexicon or research on the part of the author.
Probably true, but I felt as I read the thing that the author did not understand that making the sort of gross generalizations they were making they were falling into the very same same holes that all other pontificators on the subject fall into. The understanding of how we work becomes a very personal thing, it is brash move for the author to suggest that THIS IS HOW IT IS. Hence the Twaddle, myth, etc.
The script reads like a collections of untruths, half-truths, whinings, myths and philosophical twaddle. The person writing it does not have the experience to write it, nor the insightfulness to realise they should just put up and get back to work. Clearly written after too long a session in front of the glowing tube.
The Glossary is outright wrong; maybe it's the footnote from some SNL show on educational tom-foolery?
This rambling, ill-thought out work would be a terrible handicap to some junior scholar thinking they could read this and jump into the big pot we call IT.
I guess if it gets published the author can collect their royalties. My advice to those that ask me, and many do, will be to avoid this like the plague.
I believe this is actually quite a common problem. The Bulger case in the UK which just two years ago saw the spread of images of the juvenile offenders, even though the boys were clearly minors, being a painful example. But it is not limited to the internet. It is a problem that has always existed. The US Freedom Of Information Act is widely used by journalists from many countries to find out what their own governments are doing in regards to defense spending, international diplomacy, etc, particularly where there is some US component. The UK governement is always having problems with former secret service folk publishing tell-all books down south, in Australia (from which we get the lovely saying: Being economic with the truth. The meaning of which is "a barefaced lie, but only in most of its detail, there may have been some fact, maybe..." and that said by the Queen's representative.)
Given that local people dealing with local issues are rarely influenced by the press 2000 miles away, it is not frequently all that much of a bother, except to people that have something to hide. In court cases where identities of rape victims are publicized, it's certainly hard on the victims, if they or anyone around them finds out. I have to think the average Canadian Juror is not reading the Jo'Burg Times to find out what is happening in the case they are sitting on, though.
Being British and part of a UK brain drain to the USA, I have always wondered - aloud at times - if Britain ended up with a net increase in Cranial Capacity as a consequence of me leaving???
I mean unrestricted access, hardware level twiddling access. Just like each of has with our PC's. It's the only way that a machine can be made to reach its limits. Addressing memory at B8000H allowed hundreds of programs to directly access the screen on DOS era PC's, this allowed vastly improved screen write performance. It is also there to an extent in Direct-X. Only by tweaking a mainframes hardware could you find out what it can really do. That requires unfettered access - yes, delete the OS files! Crash the sucker.
IBM, even today, is a collosal entity. They do very little with the mainframes in terms of finding new niches for these machines. In Raleigh we had a lab with 14 AS/400's, 2 Status systems and some 370's (even some desktop versions - PC/370 - was an ugly thing), few were really 'used.' I came from an environment where I had access to Intel ICE equipment, even helping to write an app note on putting 386's into Protected mode - going to IBM was eye-opening, there was just so little creativity there.
The relationship between Mainframes and PC's is symbiotic. The mainframe will not die because it doesn't need to, it's a great database server and middleware engine; the PC is a great distributor of power to the people, and is much more approachable.
There are people here talking about mainframes like they were still fronted by white coated engineers and programmed through the front panel switches! This is a case of listening too closely to your University lecturers and not looking out the window.
Mainframes are faster than is generally comprehensible to the average PC programmer, but they are also as inflexible as a steel bar. GUI apps can be written for mainframes (seen some - they were ugly, check out some of the OfficeVision modules) but it is not their strength. Additionally, you can't take one home in the back of your bicycle and play with it while watching football. PC's might lack the bandwidth, but anyone with enough money or initiative can get one and play with it to their hearts content. Crashing a PC or trashing its Operating System is acceptable - something is generally learned. It's much harder to get that sort of access to a mainframe. However I would lay odds-on that just like every other system out there, any competent programmer could crash a mainframe and destroy its OS in hours if given unrestricted access. These are machines, they are good at what they do. They are stunningly expensive, and while they play chess well they play Quake appallingly.
Only seismic data!!?? Remember your web history... One of the first web hacks was the theft of seismic data from a quirky place in Norway. Turned out to be a NATO listening post and the data was Soviet nuclear bomb test seismic activity...
We've been looking at some of the Proxim products (formerly Agere, formerly Lucent) to do just this sort of point to point networking of 802.11b. The big radio (10w) and antenna (14db) are said to give 70+ miles range with no obstructions. A friend tells me the range is achieved with some level of help from the troposphere.
Not for nothing but... We need to look inward before tossing stones around here. Since Feb 2000, the release date of Windows 2000, there have been a significant number of Linux version releases. If you simply count commercial releases, both RH and SuSE have had 6 major releases (6.2, 6.3, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 8.0). Okay, you say, but that's not how I keep up with releases - I download and compile patches or full source and keep up-to-the minute accurate with my releases... Well in Feb 2000 the Kernel stood at about version 2.2.20 (give or take a few). Kernel 2.4 came out about 12 months later (some 10 or so versions of 2.2 later), 2.5 was release November last year after 15 releases of 2.4, and there have now been 47 releases of the 2.5 beta.
So to keep up with the Joneses, in Linux terms, you would have compiled and installed about 72 kernels. Not to mention all the Apache (et al) releases.
And people are complaining that 3 Win2K Service Packs in 2 years is too much!!! And that the feature change rate is too uneven!
Get a life!
The.NET servers look to be fairly good upgrades. Microsoft has had a history of cancelling versions and releases, delaying new products and generally being slow about getting stuff on the shelves for years. If you remember everyone was commenting that Windows 95 (the first version with a year instead of a version number) only just got in under the wire before they were going to have to rename it Windows 96. Windows NT 4.0 was itself over 18 months late if you take an optimistic view of it. Closer to home was that Windows ME should never have been released and instead should have skipped straight to an XP like version, but that got canned. This is not new, not something to worry about. It's just how these things work, the future is unpredictable, getting there from here is not simply a release every 6 months.
How short your collective memories are... Porsche has been designing computers for years. Certain of the Commodore PET 8000 series boxes were Porsche designed - I think the PET 8096 was reworked by them - and these came out in the early 1980's.
It's not Intrinsically Safe so the laptop survives, it's Intrinsically Safe so that it does not cause the dangerous chemicals, gasses whatever to explode and hence destroy Dell and Operator. That is why the Dell laptop is not as good as the GoBook for dragging around, say, a Hydrogen production facility.
Surprised no one has mentioned Newark Airport and it's a stunning monorail system. 'Stunning' because I am always amazed that I manage to get off it alive. I just hope L-V gets a better setup than EWR.
Slashdot Mirror
I would further suggest that a good software architect envisages that the software will be rewritten. Maybe several times. This allows for the system to evolve as it gets bigger and handles more of the business or technical needs anticipated of it.
In the great scheme of things if the rider were a board I would agree, but the rider is not a board, they are quite flexible. Certainly some parts of the body reach the ground with mathmatical precision, but other parts are lain there at whatever speed, or with whatever skill, the sentient being in the riding suite can manage.
One attempts to lay ones head slowly on the road if at all possible. Having trashed a few helmets with grazes while crashing at 50-60mph (crashed several times) I can assure you that helmets planted on the ground at these speeds will not survive intact, only human intervention, to bend ones spine, ameliorates the impact.
As the medical community has knocked me off my motorcycle twice (A doctor from Southhampton General, and a trainee Doctor in Sheffield) and the doctors in Peterborough treated me like sh*t after I had been run down by an Army corporal, I for one have no time for these knife wielding butchers, we care to call Doctors.
The medical community gives motorcyclists a tough time. I say if you become a doctor you treat people that are sick and banged up; that is your job. Screw the complaints just do your %$#@ing job.
I program computers, I don't bitch when someone comes to me with a bug! That's my job. We choose the jobs we do.
I ride motorcycles and try to avoid the numbskulls that drive all those steel boxes still thinking they are sitting in an EZ-boy and playing the PS2 game "Commuter killer."
Am I angry when I hear people like you refer to Motorcyclists in this manner, damned sure I am. And if you want one of us aged, knarled, damp, cold, hunting for red blood, motorcyclists to give you an idea of how we feel, don't move from that spot!!
Riding for 24yrs
Programming for a living for 22yrs
Not Goths, but if you had lived in Murray Hill, NJ at the time (the AT&T Getto) you might have wanted for this type of excitement!
The F22 and B2 aside, there are no aircraft the USAF flies that were designed and build in the time frame that Windows has come into being.
The F22 only just fits the time period; it started its software development process in the days of Windows 3.0.
No aircraft has Windows based Flight Control systems, not even the civil stuff.
Though that is not to say flight qualified software doesn't reset.
I marvel to think that anything with a 17 year old circuit board in it is still moving. Give your 350Z 17yrs of abuse, then come back and see if you wish to give this Gent the same criticism.
For a moment think on that old IBM PC-AT, the 6Mhz one that seemed so fast back then. Then remember it's 17 yrs old, and think to yourself : do you really want your kids playing anywhere near it just in case it blows up? I suppose there are a few of those old PC-AT's out there, but nature has a way of turning silicon into junk - electronics do fail. Statistics catch up with electronics, quickly.
The more complex, failure prone stuff in the blackboxes, the higher the probability it will all fail sooner, rather than later.
Years ago NME opined of the band "Wild Horses," While we have Electricity we will have Bands like this! Today we have the Harvard Business School, and while it exists we will have err, gentlemen, like Carr.
IT does matter. It will continue to matter till such time some far more advanced concept sweeps it aside, just as the computer finally nudged Caxton's Press to one side in the last decade.
The example of using RFID tags at Walmart is actually proving the point that IT does matter. Walmart is one of the most truly, colossally computer intensive companies on the planet. Just ask KMart if Walmarts' IT efforts were worthless and a waste of time.
Without IT as we know it today, companies like GE could not exist. They would collapse under their own weight in paper. They require bleeding edge technology just to manage Terabytes of data, forget about actually doing anything to sift those terabytes and make sense of them. Without Information Technology much of the US economy would not exist. IT matters, it pulled us out of the morass of the 70's, the height of the lack-of-information-technology era.
Carr seems to fail in all points, because he is the quintessential academic. He has no concept of what is at the heart of real business, or that real businesses very heart is now a computer.
IT a commodity? Only if peoples brains are such.
Experience is knowing what NOT to write.
That experience takes years to fathom. Given new technologies and languages, it's a remarkably difficult skill to fully appreciate.
No way was Mr Vigne the first to use this term. Even I, humble me, had used the term prior to 1997 (Vigne's book was published in 1999) to express the issues surrounding the understanding of how to reverse engineer software, how to capture the reasons why software was written the way it was.
:
You can read my defuddled mess at
maclean-nj.com
I think your wrong on both counts:
1) being clean
Seems that most true spring water is full of microbial and bacterial life that is generally excused from water purity laws that would have tap water turned off immediately.
2) containing nutritious minerals
Heavy metals, dissolved radioactive gases and other such nutritious minerals may be good for you but leave a nasty taste in my mouth.
You really want to reinvent the wheel? You really want to give people an old fashion start at the noble art of code hacking? Well, deep in the Borland Web site is a free download of Turbo Pascal (5.5). It wiped BASIC's clock; it made heroes of Boys; It came with IDE and Debugger, it washed clothes whiter...
An' thee wonder why t' young generation dont understand us naymore...?
Somewhere in all the mess that surrounds LEO is George. George I, II & III. I think (usual provisos about senility apply), George I was the OS on later LEO's. ICL ploughed on with this OS for years. In 1981 I was coding Cobol at ICL on a rare 2966, on VME-B, being hosted on George III - a feat common on IBM machines but less so on ICL.
George-III had some multi-user features, but mostly they used it just for multi-processing.
VME-K and VME-B which were meant to be new OS's inherited quite a bit of George and were still in use till at least the late-80's on 2900 and 3900 series ICL kit.
Imagine MS-DOS at 40 years old? Eyyyyhhhh!
I grew up in Lincolnshire, grew up among literally dozens of active and deserted bases from both World Wars. The Lincoln Edge is noted for having airfields along most of its length (some 20-30 miles). Lincolnshire used to have 1% of its land area under concrete runways, even today only 5% of the county has tree cover!
I now live in New Jersey, and it too has something of the same phenomenon. New Jersey was covered in Aircraft factories by 1945. They flew directly out of these factories to the front lines in Britain and Europe. Today many of the larger former Curtis-Wright and Lockheed airfields are Municipal fields, but many of the smaller ones have simply disappeared.
It's just another little bit of our heritage that is disappearing under Urban sprawl.
I, too, was once a first year CS student (back when the 8080 was a cool processor, meaning it was good, not that the latest PIV runs hotter in comparison, if you know what I mean %-) ) Fortunately, I had done summer work and a year out before doing my University course, so I knew that what this person has written about was simply not true. Now, that was my experience. Your experience and everyone elses experience WILL vary. That is life.
To tell a 1st yr CS, or any other student, that the way to get a pay raise is X, or that you don't document if you have written code correctly, is simply asking for trouble from all the people that will later in their lives start to send you letter bombs having learned a different truth.
As for the Glossary, there are words there that the individual has incorrectly used, several of the words have alternative real meanings. I grant several of the words are just inventions, but even those have real equivalents in meaning - showing a complete lack of lexicon or research on the part of the author.
Probably true, but I felt as I read the thing that the author did not understand that making the sort of gross generalizations they were making they were falling into the very same same holes that all other pontificators on the subject fall into. The understanding of how we work becomes a very personal thing, it is brash move for the author to suggest that THIS IS HOW IT IS.
Hence the Twaddle, myth, etc.
Hope I didn't disturb anyones sleep.
Better yet,
BELGIUM! MAN! BELGIUM!
The script reads like a collections of untruths, half-truths, whinings, myths and philosophical twaddle. The person writing it does not have the experience to write it, nor the insightfulness to realise they should just put up and get back to work. Clearly written after too long a session in front of the glowing tube.
The Glossary is outright wrong; maybe it's the footnote from some SNL show on educational tom-foolery?
This rambling, ill-thought out work would be a terrible handicap to some junior scholar thinking they could read this and jump into the big pot we call IT.
I guess if it gets published the author can collect their royalties. My advice to those that ask me, and many do, will be to avoid this like the plague.
Well, I guess I just sank my Karma!
I believe this is actually quite a common problem. The Bulger case in the UK which just two years ago saw the spread of images of the juvenile offenders, even though the boys were clearly minors, being a painful example. But it is not limited to the internet. It is a problem that has always existed. The US Freedom Of Information Act is widely used by journalists from many countries to find out what their own governments are doing in regards to defense spending, international diplomacy, etc, particularly where there is some US component. The UK governement is always having problems with former secret service folk publishing tell-all books down south, in Australia (from which we get the lovely saying: Being economic with the truth. The meaning of which is "a barefaced lie, but only in most of its detail, there may have been some fact, maybe..." and that said by the Queen's representative.)
Given that local people dealing with local issues are rarely influenced by the press 2000 miles away, it is not frequently all that much of a bother, except to people that have something to hide. In court cases where identities of rape victims are publicized, it's certainly hard on the victims, if they or anyone around them finds out. I have to think the average Canadian Juror is not reading the Jo'Burg Times to find out what is happening in the case they are sitting on, though.
Being British and part of a UK brain drain to the USA, I have always wondered - aloud at times - if Britain ended up with a net increase in Cranial Capacity as a consequence of me leaving???
I mean unrestricted access, hardware level twiddling access. Just like each of has with our PC's. It's the only way that a machine can be made to reach its limits. Addressing memory at B8000H allowed hundreds of programs to directly access the screen on DOS era PC's, this allowed vastly improved screen write performance. It is also there to an extent in Direct-X. Only by tweaking a mainframes hardware could you find out what it can really do. That requires unfettered access - yes, delete the OS files! Crash the sucker.
IBM, even today, is a collosal entity. They do very little with the mainframes in terms of finding new niches for these machines. In Raleigh we had a lab with 14 AS/400's, 2 Status systems and some 370's (even some desktop versions - PC/370 - was an ugly thing), few were really 'used.' I came from an environment where I had access to Intel ICE equipment, even helping to write an app note on putting 386's into Protected mode - going to IBM was eye-opening, there was just so little creativity there.
The relationship between Mainframes and PC's is symbiotic. The mainframe will not die because it doesn't need to, it's a great database server and middleware engine; the PC is a great distributor of power to the people, and is much more approachable.
There are people here talking about mainframes like they were still fronted by white coated engineers and programmed through the front panel switches! This is a case of listening too closely to your University lecturers and not looking out the window.
Mainframes are faster than is generally comprehensible to the average PC programmer, but they are also as inflexible as a steel bar. GUI apps can be written for mainframes (seen some - they were ugly, check out some of the OfficeVision modules) but it is not their strength. Additionally, you can't take one home in the back of your bicycle and play with it while watching football. PC's might lack the bandwidth, but anyone with enough money or initiative can get one and play with it to their hearts content. Crashing a PC or trashing its Operating System is acceptable - something is generally learned. It's much harder to get that sort of access to a mainframe. However I would lay odds-on that just like every other system out there, any competent programmer could crash a mainframe and destroy its OS in hours if given unrestricted access. These are machines, they are good at what they do. They are stunningly expensive, and while they play chess well they play Quake appallingly.
Only seismic data!!?? Remember your web history... One of the first web hacks was the theft of seismic data from a quirky place in Norway. Turned out to be a NATO listening post and the data was Soviet nuclear bomb test seismic activity...
We've been looking at some of the Proxim products (formerly Agere, formerly Lucent) to do just this sort of point to point networking of 802.11b. The big radio (10w) and antenna (14db) are said to give 70+ miles range with no obstructions. A friend tells me the range is achieved with some level of help from the troposphere.
Not for nothing but... We need to look inward before tossing stones around here. Since Feb 2000, the release date of Windows 2000, there have been a significant number of Linux version releases. If you simply count commercial releases, both RH and SuSE have had 6 major releases (6.2, 6.3, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 8.0). Okay, you say, but that's not how I keep up with releases - I download and compile patches or full source and keep up-to-the minute accurate with my releases... Well in Feb 2000 the Kernel stood at about version 2.2.20 (give or take a few). Kernel 2.4 came out about 12 months later (some 10 or so versions of 2.2 later), 2.5 was release November last year after 15 releases of 2.4, and there have now been 47 releases of the 2.5 beta.
.NET servers look to be fairly good upgrades. Microsoft has had a history of cancelling versions and releases, delaying new products and generally being slow about getting stuff on the shelves for years. If you remember everyone was commenting that Windows 95 (the first version with a year instead of a version number) only just got in under the wire before they were going to have to rename it Windows 96. Windows NT 4.0 was itself over 18 months late if you take an optimistic view of it. Closer to home was that Windows ME should never have been released and instead should have skipped straight to an XP like version, but that got canned. This is not new, not something to worry about. It's just how these things work, the future is unpredictable, getting there from here is not simply a release every 6 months.
So to keep up with the Joneses, in Linux terms, you would have compiled and installed about 72 kernels. Not to mention all the Apache (et al) releases.
And people are complaining that 3 Win2K Service Packs in 2 years is too much!!! And that the feature change rate is too uneven!
Get a life!
The
How short your collective memories are... Porsche has been designing computers for years. Certain of the Commodore PET 8000 series boxes were Porsche designed - I think the PET 8096 was reworked by them - and these came out in the early 1980's.
It's not Intrinsically Safe so the laptop survives, it's Intrinsically Safe so that it does not cause the dangerous chemicals, gasses whatever to explode and hence destroy Dell and Operator. That is why the Dell laptop is not as good as the GoBook for dragging around, say, a Hydrogen production facility.
Surprised no one has mentioned Newark Airport and it's a stunning monorail system. 'Stunning' because I am always amazed that I manage to get off it alive. I just hope L-V gets a better setup than EWR.