The problem with Bochs is not just that it is beta quality. It is useful for a subclass of things people use VmWare for, like kernel development, some debugging stuff.
But for running windows, and windows apps under Linux on a daily basis it is not your best bet. Bochs is too slow and will probably always be too slow given the attitude I see from folks on their mailing list. They say the focus is on accuracy over usability. But their other problem is they are stuck under the weight of an implementation with a less than optimal pure emulation solution.
If you want Free software your best bet currently is QEMU. It is definitely in its early stages but it already runs circles around Bochs since QEMU dynamically translates the code.
And Plex86 is out of the running since they have chosen only to support running virtual Linux machines.
Copying and use are different things. You need to understand the difference.
Your typical slashdotter is FOR copyable, changeable software, and for licenses which allow that. Your typical slashdotter ABIDES by licenses that prevent copying and changing but allow normal use, usually by avoiding the software altogether since there are usually Free alternatives.
Apply this line of thinking to movies: this is a license that prevents copying but also attempts to prevent normal use, that is, displaying that damn movie any way you like. Not copying or in any other way making multiple instances... but just the normal action of displaying it is somehow to be controlled.
This is what is offensive about such overly restrictive licenses. When I buy something I expect to get some fair use rights too. But restrictive licensing, encrpytion, drm, etc have the effect of preventing you getting even normal use out of the things you buy.
Export from OO.Org to PDF or older rev of Word, send via email to Windows pc, walk to Windows connected PC, open the file in Acrobat and print. Or you could run an FTP server on the Linux box and FTP the file to the printer connected machine from a command prompt.
In general though the better problem to solve is getting your Linux box running Samba added to the domain. The local net admin is your friend.
I don't know. I haven't read any books about the Gita, I just read the Gita.
The translation I read was published by Penguin Classics I think. It had some criticism in the foreword I think that might help to understand it.
One important fact is that "The Song of the Lord" (the Baghavad Gita) is a little sliver of the Mahabharat. The setting is Arjuna in a chariot driven by Krishna... he is faced with the prospect of going to war against many people some members of his own family. Krishna explains how even this which he does not wish to do and seems wrong can be considered Right action.
There was a PBS production of the Mahabarata which you might want to look for.
The point of the "monoculture" idea in relation to browsers is that internet security is best served by having many different browsers, rather than just one since then they won't all have the same vulnerabilities.
The theory is that heterogeneity builds resistance into the system.
As far as I can tell, this incident doesn't challenge that idea...
I am currently working, with Leo Brodie's approval, and with the help of several members of the Forth community on publishing an editable LaTeX version (also PDF) under a Creative Commons license.
So it will be preserved for the ages even though it is out-of-print.
Another goal is to update it for ANS Standard Forths.
The book had the opposite effect on me. It freed me a bit from my hard driving mindset to finish my studies and go make lots of money... I made a detour into expanding my mind with a lot of philosophy and Eastern religion stuff. Spent a little more time at the community college exploring than I probably should have. But given where my life is today I wouldn't change a thing.
Sometimes I think the book should have a "Intellectually Dangerous" warning label on it.
That said, I still think every programmer should read it. Be warned though, this is heady stuff.
I saw it more as explaining how Western Philosophy, which is the basis of science, including computer science and programming shapes our thinking about problems.
Phaedrus pursues this "break everything into smaller provable pieces" way of thinking till he separates himself from his own cultural mythos.
It is by his own intellectual excess that he ends up no longer eating and sitting in a pool of his own piss.
To me it is both a manual about how to think, but also a cautionary tale about keeping balance. You shouldn't take everything apart. You shouldn't pursue your own philosophy to excess. You still need to be part of the world as long as you have a body.
I'm not sure I want to dissect it too much... for those who haven't, read it, grok it, you'll find out why you read it later (you might try reading after fasting, then right after reading it, watch Groundhog's Day... don't ask, just do).
One aspect is that of Right Action. The Gita teaches us to follow the path of Right Action without Desire for the particular end. This has direct applications in engineering. Why must I spend my time testing and documenting? I hate it it's boring. Don't desire for the testing and documentation phase to end. Just do what you're supposed to do.
When you look across the battle lines and see your QA and Management families lined up, and you understand that you must put them through extensive pain in the war we call a Release, don't worry about it. Just do what you are Supposed to do.
Sorry if this sounds a little metaphysical. It is also probably Wrong in some ways. But grok it anyway I promise it will help.
MTBF means mean time between failure, not mean writes between failure.
If you really want to know how many times you can erase a sector of flash, that is defined. Typical consumer flash devices are rated for 100,000 erasures. However, the actual factors that go into lifetime are:
1. How good the wear leveling algorithms are 2. How full the flash disk is 3. How much space you have altogether 4. How often the processes you normally run write to the flash disk 5. Number of erasures your flash part is rated for
No one is going to be able to figure out what that means for them except by measuring actual use... i.e. trying it out while the disk driver is instrumented in some way.
In general I think the best advice is:
1. Keep a large percentage of the flash disk free 2. Keep files that are truly temporary/intermediate files, logs, etc. in ram disk. 3. Try it for a day and see what files are changing on the disk, and see if you can get those moved to RAM disk. Some you can't, like your working files (documents).
The mistake you make is thinking that everything that can be coded must go through a long drawn out design phase. For all code that doesn't, which I'd wager is most software that gets created on a daily basis, it is enough to know in broad strokes know what the problem is and get to work producing something that does what you want. That doesn't necessarily mean coding, but it could very well all be done by one good programmer.
The thought that the waterfall method of hashing a spec and design out for months before any development can begin only comes from those in involved in larger projects... > 50,000 SLOCs... that are created in a herculean effort to produce a mammoth piece of software which must perform to a rigid set of specifications.
Even in large projects, rigid adherence to waterfall method has never worked. You always wished you had spent some time prototyping (read: designing and coding) to figure out the problems you only discover after you get into implementation phase and realize there are problems with the spec.
Good coding does require skill, that's a fact but the skill doesn't take more than 2 years to acquire, I think. Design is a more significant skill and the best programmers bring the skills of a designer to the table as well.
The fact is that most of the time rough design and coding is done by the same person: the programmer. In such cases it rarely makes sense to spec and design then farm it out.
If you're actually going to specify design and validate things to a degree that the only errors that are possible (a herculean feat beyond anyone's imagination) are coding errors, why bother even farming it out at that point? If the task you have created for the outsourced coder is just translating spec to code, there's barely even a task there. How many lines a day can you type when you don't have to think about it? I can code a couple of thousand lines a day if the thing is already design.
That said I have found that corporations are on a kick that they don't want to shrink their in-house development staffs. This doesn't automatically translate to "outsource to India" which is a very big step even for large corporations. Rather they tend to rely on local software contractors.
Unfortunately this is the only real solution I could find.
What he is really asking for is a call bridge. A device like Talkswitch 24 can do this, but it can only use cell phone as a remote extension not as one of the incoming lines. I don't think there's a widget like that.
Now then, I can imagine someone building such a thing. Take asterix, then you need to find some PCI card which implements the same protocol as the cell phone network you are on. You need another card to connect to your analog phone line.
Anyone know who sells cell phone pci cards, or external USB PCI cards?
Alternatively I guess you could just rig up your cell phone to a good soundcard, and connect to control the device via the serial port. Depending on the API to the phone, you should be able to get commands to the phone to dial, detect when someone is calling and send a command to answer it.
Not rocket science... someone must have done this already.
When I'm in my house I regularly have my cell phone forwarded to my telephone. In fact once you do that you can turn the cell phone off since the call is routed completely by the cell phone company.
That gives you a phone number that always works... my cell phone is pretty spotty inside my house.
I suppose some cell phone services might not offer the feature but Cingular does in Southern California at least...
It is what it is... this has been the plotline from the beginning of the show. Do you really give that much weight to marketing hype which came before the first episode aired? I didn't give it any weight.
In essence, we are seeing the birth of the federation... lots of first meetings with different species/cultures.
I can't imagine any marketing literature which would say "see the birth of the federation unfold without effect of time travel"
Maybe you would be happier if you took the show at face value, rather than being upset it's not the show you would write given the chance.
However given that UPN has a lot of shows targeted at blacks, and DS-9 had a black captain, if I were you I wouldn't leave my ass hanging out in the wind like that.
Anyway, I think "space ghetto" is an extremely myopic and overly simplistic view of the show to the point of being basically wrong. Yeah when the feds first get to ds-9 it is a mess, but by the end of the first season everything is in pretty much working order, at least insofar as the NCC-1701D was ever in working order.
And as far as the Bajorans, although the Cardassians had basically been using them as slave labor, their vibrant culture survived the occupation. So yes they had recently liberated (themselves) from the Cardassians, but though wounded as a people, being ex-slaves didn't in any way define them.
Hrm... the feisty female first officer is a stretch. Given they are Bajorans, and they had given us to expect in TNG that all Bajoran females are continually on the rag, I think this is a coincidence.
For captain as a religious figure, I dunno maybe. It's an old theme (Lord Jim/The Secret Sharer... (Apocalypse Now)) but I guess I'll give you that.
For recently liberated alien race... well, the Bajoran/Cardassian story arc went back well into TNG. When was the idea to have been pitched?
For cranky chief of security... still very broad strokes there. Coincidence on the level of Hmm Makes You Think like Kennedy/Lincoln assassination spooky connections. Nothing even slightly conclusive IMO.
Space Ghetto? WTF? Is that supposed to mean something? Or are you just a bigot?
DS-9 was the best of the trek series IMO, for the following reasons:
Fantastic writing, acting right out of the gate Awesome story arcs Politics & religion in the same show... real tension between people and individuals that reflects reality more than any other trek I've seen. A previously militaristic Cardassian station after the Occupation, now Bajoran, under Federation administration. Remind you of anything? It's layered, complex, interesting. THere were very few bad/cheesy episodes unlike TOS and Voyager. TNG is the only one that compares and I like it for orthogonal reasons.
That is also my recollection of the scuttlebut. The similarities between them are limited to "darker universe, space station" though so I don't think you can really call plagiarism there.
Anyway in my opionion DS-9 was much more watchable than B-5 ever was. The acting on B-5 was not tolerable to me (Andreas Katsulas excepted... but hey, I consider him a Star Trek actor anyway...). Nor was the writing. The ideas, plotlines were good.
Maybe these guys are good in the broad strokes, and maybe with star trek production crews and budgets behind them they could pull something off.
There are reasons for choosing a dedicated firewall over a add-on software to a general purpose computer.
Having worked for a firewall company, you are correct, there is no inherent difference between the software in a firewall that runs on your computer and one that runs on separate hardware... a so called "hardware firewall" (the correct term I would use is "dedicated firewall")
Hardware firewall are just dedicated computers. They don't generally implement hardware state machines, or whatever. They are typically an embedded OS and TCP/IP stack with stateful packet inspection, NAT, application level gateways, etc. No sane person would try to implement that in silicon, and certainly not silicon that can be kept up-to-date. It's software, plain and simple.
HOWEVER. You should not run your firewall on your general purpose computer.
A dedicated firewall defaults to being "safe" out of the box, unlike your typical operating system. It doesn't have a lot of crap running on it that could be compromised. The amount of software on there is minimal (depend on that... the economics of mass producing hardware enforces that rule for you).
Another way to think about it is: if the hacker is battling to get into your network, would you rather have him hacking away at a little box on the edge of your network that will probably trip alarms and if compromised just fail closed, or would you rather have him on your desktop hacking away directly trying to get in, where, when he defeats your desktop firewall, he's inside the gates?
Well I take Enterprise at face value not from the marketing hype I didn't really pay a lot of attention to before the show started.
No running plot lines in the show make any sense without time travel. The temporal cold war IS the basis of the show. It runs through just about every episode. All the so-called inconsistencies/.'ers bitch about are all related to deleterious affects of it.
However, if they wanted to make the idea of the show more understable, the could call it "Enterprise: Fight for the Future" or some such. The feeling I get from the show is that there is a future, the one we all understand from other Trek shows, which is in danger. The whole point of Enterprise, is, in the face of rampant attacks from time travellers on the timeline, to by and large preserve the future that we are expecting to see.
Time travel is not just one aspect. Your rotational inertia comparison is just not right. If I'd said Enterprise is based on the transporters not working good your analogy would be correct. That's not what I said though.
The temporal cold war is the basis of the series. If you don't think so, you're just not paying attention.
Now could they have told the story of the early federation without time travel? Yes, but they could NOT have told a story about the early beginnings of the federation under attack by time travellers from the future without time travel.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with Bochs is not just that it is beta quality. It is useful for a subclass of things people use VmWare for, like kernel development, some debugging stuff.
But for running windows, and windows apps under Linux on a daily basis it is not your best bet. Bochs is too slow and will probably always be too slow given the attitude I see from folks on their mailing list. They say the focus is on accuracy over usability. But their other problem is they are stuck under the weight of an implementation with a less than optimal pure emulation solution.
If you want Free software your best bet currently is QEMU. It is definitely in its early stages but it already runs circles around Bochs since QEMU dynamically translates the code.
And Plex86 is out of the running since they have chosen only to support running virtual Linux machines.
Copying and use are different things. You need to understand the difference.
Your typical slashdotter is FOR copyable, changeable software, and for licenses which allow that. Your typical slashdotter ABIDES by licenses that prevent copying and changing but allow normal use, usually by avoiding the software altogether since there are usually Free alternatives.
Apply this line of thinking to movies: this is a license that prevents copying but also attempts to prevent normal use, that is, displaying that damn movie any way you like. Not copying or in any other way making multiple instances... but just the normal action of displaying it is somehow to be controlled.
This is what is offensive about such overly restrictive licenses. When I buy something I expect to get some fair use rights too. But restrictive licensing, encrpytion, drm, etc have the effect of preventing you getting even normal use out of the things you buy.
You probably just need a better projector. It's all about the Lumens.
So WG really was a trailblazer... his "we don't give a dern" license is pretty close to a BSD license.
And truth to tell, unless this statement was somehow recinded, it looks suspiciously like a license to me.
Just what I was thinking...
Export from OO.Org to PDF or older rev of Word, send via email to Windows pc, walk to Windows connected PC, open the file in Acrobat and print. Or you could run an FTP server on the Linux box and FTP the file to the printer connected machine from a command prompt.
In general though the better problem to solve is getting your Linux box running Samba added to the domain. The local net admin is your friend.
I don't know. I haven't read any books about the Gita, I just read the Gita.
The translation I read was published by Penguin Classics I think. It had some criticism in the foreword I think that might help to understand it.
One important fact is that "The Song of the Lord" (the Baghavad Gita) is a little sliver of the Mahabharat. The setting is Arjuna in a chariot driven by Krishna... he is faced with the prospect of going to war against many people some members of his own family. Krishna explains how even this which he does not wish to do and seems wrong can be considered Right action.
There was a PBS production of the Mahabarata which you might want to look for.
The point of the "monoculture" idea in relation to browsers is that internet security is best served by having many different browsers, rather than just one since then they won't all have the same vulnerabilities.
The theory is that heterogeneity builds resistance into the system.
As far as I can tell, this incident doesn't challenge that idea...
So what was your point?
I am currently working, with Leo Brodie's approval, and with the help of several members of the Forth community on publishing an editable LaTeX version (also PDF) under a Creative Commons license.
So it will be preserved for the ages even though it is out-of-print.
Another goal is to update it for ANS Standard Forths.
Interesting...
The book had the opposite effect on me. It freed me a bit from my hard driving mindset to finish my studies and go make lots of money... I made a detour into expanding my mind with a lot of philosophy and Eastern religion stuff. Spent a little more time at the community college exploring than I probably should have. But given where my life is today I wouldn't change a thing.
Sometimes I think the book should have a "Intellectually Dangerous" warning label on it.
That said, I still think every programmer should read it. Be warned though, this is heady stuff.
That's not how I read it.
I saw it more as explaining how Western Philosophy, which is the basis of science, including computer science and programming shapes our thinking about problems.
Phaedrus pursues this "break everything into smaller provable pieces" way of thinking till he separates himself from his own cultural mythos.
It is by his own intellectual excess that he ends up no longer eating and sitting in a pool of his own piss.
To me it is both a manual about how to think, but also a cautionary tale about keeping balance. You shouldn't take everything apart. You shouldn't pursue your own philosophy to excess. You still need to be part of the world as long as you have a body.
I'm not sure I want to dissect it too much... for those who haven't, read it, grok it, you'll find out why you read it later (you might try reading after fasting, then right after reading it, watch Groundhog's Day... don't ask, just do).
One aspect is that of Right Action. The Gita teaches us to follow the path of Right Action without Desire for the particular end. This has direct applications in engineering. Why must I spend my time testing and documenting? I hate it it's boring. Don't desire for the testing and documentation phase to end. Just do what you're supposed to do.
When you look across the battle lines and see your QA and Management families lined up, and you understand that you must put them through extensive pain in the war we call a Release, don't worry about it. Just do what you are Supposed to do.
Sorry if this sounds a little metaphysical. It is also probably Wrong in some ways. But grok it anyway I promise it will help.
For a Programmer:
Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Baghavad Gita
The C Programming Language
Thinking Forth
MTBF means mean time between failure, not mean writes between failure.
If you really want to know how many times you can erase a sector of flash, that is defined. Typical consumer flash devices are rated for 100,000 erasures. However, the actual factors that go into lifetime are:
1. How good the wear leveling algorithms are
2. How full the flash disk is
3. How much space you have altogether
4. How often the processes you normally run write to the flash disk
5. Number of erasures your flash part is rated for
No one is going to be able to figure out what that means for them except by measuring actual use... i.e. trying it out while the disk driver is instrumented in some way.
In general I think the best advice is:
1. Keep a large percentage of the flash disk free
2. Keep files that are truly temporary/intermediate files, logs, etc. in ram disk.
3. Try it for a day and see what files are changing on the disk, and see if you can get those moved to RAM disk. Some you can't, like your working files (documents).
The mistake you make is thinking that everything that can be coded must go through a long drawn out design phase. For all code that doesn't, which I'd wager is most software that gets created on a daily basis, it is enough to know in broad strokes know what the problem is and get to work producing something that does what you want. That doesn't necessarily mean coding, but it could very well all be done by one good programmer.
The thought that the waterfall method of hashing a spec and design out for months before any development can begin only comes from those in involved in larger projects... > 50,000 SLOCs... that are created in a herculean effort to produce a mammoth piece of software which must perform to a rigid set of specifications.
Even in large projects, rigid adherence to waterfall method has never worked. You always wished you had spent some time prototyping (read: designing and coding) to figure out the problems you only discover after you get into implementation phase and realize there are problems with the spec.
Good coding does require skill, that's a fact but the skill doesn't take more than 2 years to acquire, I think. Design is a more significant skill and the best programmers bring the skills of a designer to the table as well.
The fact is that most of the time rough design and coding is done by the same person: the programmer. In such cases it rarely makes sense to spec and design then farm it out.
If you're actually going to specify design and validate things to a degree that the only errors that are possible (a herculean feat beyond anyone's imagination) are coding errors, why bother even farming it out at that point? If the task you have created for the outsourced coder is just translating spec to code, there's barely even a task there. How many lines a day can you type when you don't have to think about it? I can code a couple of thousand lines a day if the thing is already design.
That said I have found that corporations are on a kick that they don't want to shrink their in-house development staffs. This doesn't automatically translate to "outsource to India" which is a very big step even for large corporations. Rather they tend to rely on local software contractors.
Unfortunately this is the only real solution I could find.
What he is really asking for is a call bridge. A device like Talkswitch 24 can do this, but it can only use cell phone as a remote extension not as one of the incoming lines. I don't think there's a widget like that.
Now then, I can imagine someone building such a thing. Take asterix, then you need to find some PCI card which implements the same protocol as the cell phone network you are on. You need another card to connect to your analog phone line.
Anyone know who sells cell phone pci cards, or external USB PCI cards?
Alternatively I guess you could just rig up your cell phone to a good soundcard, and connect to control the device via the serial port. Depending on the API to the phone, you should be able to get commands to the phone to dial, detect when someone is calling and send a command to answer it.
Not rocket science... someone must have done this already.
When I'm in my house I regularly have my cell phone forwarded to my telephone. In fact once you do that you can turn the cell phone off since the call is routed completely by the cell phone company.
That gives you a phone number that always works... my cell phone is pretty spotty inside my house.
I suppose some cell phone services might not offer the feature but Cingular does in Southern California at least...
It is what it is... this has been the plotline from the beginning of the show. Do you really give that much weight to marketing hype which came before the first episode aired? I didn't give it any weight.
In essence, we are seeing the birth of the federation... lots of first meetings with different species/cultures.
I can't imagine any marketing literature which would say "see the birth of the federation unfold without effect of time travel"
Maybe you would be happier if you took the show at face value, rather than being upset it's not the show you would write given the chance.
Understood, then, I apologize.
However given that UPN has a lot of shows targeted at blacks, and DS-9 had a black captain, if I were you I wouldn't leave my ass hanging out in the wind like that.
Anyway, I think "space ghetto" is an extremely myopic and overly simplistic view of the show to the point of being basically wrong. Yeah when the feds first get to ds-9 it is a mess, but by the end of the first season everything is in pretty much working order, at least insofar as the NCC-1701D was ever in working order.
And as far as the Bajorans, although the Cardassians had basically been using them as slave labor, their vibrant culture survived the occupation. So yes they had recently liberated (themselves) from the Cardassians, but though wounded as a people, being ex-slaves didn't in any way define them.
Hrm... the feisty female first officer is a stretch. Given they are Bajorans, and they had given us to expect in TNG that all Bajoran females are continually on the rag, I think this is a coincidence.
For captain as a religious figure, I dunno maybe. It's an old theme (Lord Jim/The Secret Sharer... (Apocalypse Now)) but I guess I'll give you that.
For recently liberated alien race... well, the Bajoran/Cardassian story arc went back well into TNG. When was the idea to have been pitched?
For cranky chief of security... still very broad strokes there. Coincidence on the level of Hmm Makes You Think like Kennedy/Lincoln assassination spooky connections. Nothing even slightly conclusive IMO.
Space Ghetto? WTF? Is that supposed to mean something? Or are you just a bigot?
DS-9 was the best of the trek series IMO, for the following reasons:
Fantastic writing, acting right out of the gate
Awesome story arcs
Politics & religion in the same show... real tension between people and individuals that reflects reality more than any other trek I've seen. A previously militaristic Cardassian station after the Occupation, now Bajoran, under Federation administration. Remind you of anything? It's layered, complex, interesting. THere were very few bad/cheesy episodes unlike TOS and Voyager. TNG is the only one that compares and I like it for orthogonal reasons.
That is also my recollection of the scuttlebut. The similarities between them are limited to "darker universe, space station" though so I don't think you can really call plagiarism there.
Anyway in my opionion DS-9 was much more watchable than B-5 ever was. The acting on B-5 was not tolerable to me (Andreas Katsulas excepted... but hey, I consider him a Star Trek actor anyway...). Nor was the writing. The ideas, plotlines were good.
Maybe these guys are good in the broad strokes, and maybe with star trek production crews and budgets behind them they could pull something off.
Dunno.
That's a dumb argument. If you think ST is a turd, well a turd in stasis is just a preserved turd.
Geez my Windows XP is bug ridden and crashy. Ah better put it in stasis.
Hmm this cheese has gone bad. It's growing mold. Better put in stasis.
Hey, you're an idiot. I know how to fix that. Let's put YOU in stasis.
The best way to fix problems, is to FIX THEM. If you have constructive suggestions lay them out. Saying "give it a rest" is not helpful.
The folks currently in charge created DS-9, my favorite trek. Roddenberry could never have created DS-9. Not his style.
Therefore, I don't think you are right.
There are reasons for choosing a dedicated firewall over a add-on software to a general purpose computer.
Having worked for a firewall company, you are correct, there is no inherent difference between the software in a firewall that runs on your computer and one that runs on separate hardware... a so called "hardware firewall" (the correct term I would use is "dedicated firewall")
Hardware firewall are just dedicated computers. They don't generally implement hardware state machines, or whatever. They are typically an embedded OS and TCP/IP stack with stateful packet inspection, NAT, application level gateways, etc. No sane person would try to implement that in silicon, and certainly not silicon that can be kept up-to-date. It's software, plain and simple.
HOWEVER. You should not run your firewall on your general purpose computer.
A dedicated firewall defaults to being "safe" out of the box, unlike your typical operating system. It doesn't have a lot of crap running on it that could be compromised. The amount of software on there is minimal (depend on that... the economics of mass producing hardware enforces that rule for you).
Another way to think about it is: if the hacker is battling to get into your network, would you rather have him hacking away at a little box on the edge of your network that will probably trip alarms and if compromised just fail closed, or would you rather have him on your desktop hacking away directly trying to get in, where, when he defeats your desktop firewall, he's inside the gates?
Well I take Enterprise at face value not from the marketing hype I didn't really pay a lot of attention to before the show started.
/.'ers bitch about are all related to deleterious affects of it.
No running plot lines in the show make any sense without time travel. The temporal cold war IS the basis of the show. It runs through just about every episode. All the so-called inconsistencies
However, if they wanted to make the idea of the show more understable, the could call it "Enterprise: Fight for the Future" or some such. The feeling I get from the show is that there is a future, the one we all understand from other Trek shows, which is in danger. The whole point of Enterprise, is, in the face of rampant attacks from time travellers on the timeline, to by and large preserve the future that we are expecting to see.
Time travel is not just one aspect. Your rotational inertia comparison is just not right. If I'd said Enterprise is based on the transporters not working good your analogy would be correct. That's not what I said though.
The temporal cold war is the basis of the series. If you don't think so, you're just not paying attention.
Now could they have told the story of the early federation without time travel? Yes, but they could NOT have told a story about the early beginnings of the federation under attack by time travellers from the future without time travel.