For me, it depends on whether it's personal or professional code, or something in between.
My professional code is usually well documented and no bizarre comments. The worst you usually get is "FIXME - (reason)" or "Ugly Hack" The reason being that, while I've been its sole maintainer for years, somebody will eventually take over this job and will need to understand how all of the business rules weave themselves through the library. Plus, it's what's expected of a professional developer. (I will admit that there are more subtle humorous references in the architecture, but not many at all.)
My personal code is more a stream-of-consciousness conversation with the code. You'll often find "WTF was I thinking? This can't possibly work, but it does somehow," or other such. I'll often insert thoughts as I'm reading the code as markers of things to go back and explain to myself in comments later. Consider it a form of code review, except that the reviewer is me, removed by a few weeks from coding it. It really does help point out where I have documentation deficiencies. Then there always the drunk tags, indicating sections of code I may need to rework since I wrote them under the excessive influence..,
My personal favorite is a close friend of mine who went on a coding bender after his girlfriend completely screwed him over. It wasn't a bad thing, we had a lot of microcontroller code to write in a hurry. Unfortunately, we got lots of line labels like "LivsABitchDieDieDie:" (usually with a varying number of dies, or possibly with a number appended.) Surprisingly, most of the code worked and lived on for years, never really needing any maintenance (thankfully....)
I routinely travel with 2 laptops and 2 cell phones. No, I don't trust the luggage monkeys not to steal them, so they all come with me as carry-ons.
Why, you ask? I often tack vacation on the end of work trips, and as such I need both my work laptop (all business, limited disk space left) and my personal (personal projects, software of questionable licensing, maybe pr0n and other things corporate IT wouldn't necessarily approve of...) Likewise with cell phones - mine is mine, and work doesn't even know the number. For them, I carry one that they pay for, but by the same token, I can't use it for personal calls.
So, there you have it - plus add my usual camera body, 3-5 lenses, spare batteries, handheld amateur radio, charging gear, MP3 player, security tokens, tools, etc. and you see why security loves me oh so much. That's why I typically just skip the hassle and drive anywhere I need to go.
the idea of NOT granting immunity to those who cooperated with the government sets a bad precedent No, it upholds the precident that this is a nation of laws (at least in principle), and that we believe in the principle that not even the government is above following them.
Agreed - the real value in a good business systems (read: internal) programmer at most companies is knowing *the business* and seeing how software/hardware can be applied to solving *business problems*. Quite frankly, little of what I write is all that technically challenging. Most of the algorithms are quite simple and time-tested approaches to solving problems. The hard part is figuring out what the business behaviour should be, what data needs to be gathered to drive it, and how best to interact with the users.
Actually I think such a product (CPU + moderate graphics) would quickly find a home, particularly if the incremental cost was significantly less than a separate CPU + GPU. Remember that a large portion of users (including myself) have little need for screamin' video boards. That's particularly true in the corporate sector, where cost is key and I really don't need 60fps at 1920x1200 - all I really need is basic business functionality (2D acceleration) and maybe some decent 3D stuff to account for the coming Vista apocalypse. Sure, there's not much margin in each one, but corporations buy a *lot* of computers for basic business work.
On the upper end, sure, I'd love to see some massive GPU power sitting just across the HT from my Phenom, but really with the few modern games I play, I have little use for it in that manner. It's much more interesting as a flexible, reprogrammable coprocessor very good at matrix ops. Now that I'd use on some of my number crunching servers at work.
Back when I used to work at a repo company in college (did IT stuff, but would occasionally go along on collection trips just for fun), I learned a little secret about collecting judgments against companies of any reasonable size. Short version: If they don't pay, get a court order that gives you the right to go in and sieze property equal to the value of what they owe. Call then sheriff, have him or one of his officers accompany to serve the order. Once appropriately served, head straight for the telecom gear. I guarantee as you're pulling out the PBX, somebody will show up with a check for the amount owed - it's damn hard to do any business without a phone switch!
And this is why, being mostly of UK heritage (mostly Welsh, some English, some Scottish), I've always referred to my ethnicity as simply "honky". My ancestors were certainly not from the Caucasus mountain region. (Yes, I realize the origins of this, and no, my ancestors weren't Hungarian. Now it's just more of a generic racial slur, so I'm okay with it.)
This is the part I don't understand. The only thing I can figure out is the Guys In Charge tell the lawyers "Go enforce our copyright", and give them a long leash. The lawyers don't understand business, but do understand law, so they just happily send out C&D letters. Yes, that's pretty much exactly what happens. The lawyers are told to go forth and defend, and from time to time you get some noodlebrain who doesn't think about the PR impact of what they've done (or vastly underestimate the ability of their victim to damage their image). I've gotten several C&Ds in the last decade, and in two out of three cases, I've wound up with an apology from the corporate offices apologizing for their lawyers actions and promising to reign them in. Both were cases of talking about reverse engineering products (specifically firmware/protocols), which the lawyers immediately jumped on as bad. When I publicly posted the hostile letters and then wrote to corporate explaining how my actions only helped them sell more product, the lawyers were leashed again.
Don't exactly know how they calculated the "Current Carrying" column on your provided link, but your description of "conservative" is a massive understatement. Take 12AWG wire, for example. The National Electric Code (the baseline US building code for electrical crap) allows 20 amps via a 12AWG circuit, and you can bet that most household circuits are longer than 100ft. round trip, and that this is sized very conservatively for safety (it's a building code, and they're almost always conservative). Yet this table lists 9.3 amps for 12AWG? I believe the phrase you're looking for is "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?"
Also, consider the headlight wires in your car - usually either 16 or 18 gauge, and they handle 7ish amps on high. Again, not too many cars catch fire due to headlight line failure, yet this table lists them between 2.3 and 3.7A.
The real gotcha is in the connectors, because the joints are where the resistance is - either just from the physical connection, or from inevitable corrosion buildup. That's why the cord on your space heater may be only slightly warm, but the plug is often significantly moreso.
I'm assuming you're just a troll, but well, you look hungry. Exactly what flaws would those be?
For reference, I use PHP like a lot of people use Perl. I'm a hardcore assembly/C developer by day, but realistically, we all need to massage data and such, as well as provide web tools to perform certain tasks. I've written moderately-sized web apps in PHP (about 70 different dynamic pages, with the whole system getting about 100k page loads per business day), and find it quite nice as long as you force yourself to avoid sloppy programming. On the other hand, when I just need to slop some crap together to parse data once or twice, PHP is awesome. (Substitute Perl in there if you're a Perl kind of person - I'm not.)
I'm in exactly the same spot - tried Vista, hated it. Can't stand it for most of the same reasons that others post, so I won't reiterate those. So, I've tried to make the switch to Linux (currently running Ubuntu 7.10). However, there are a couple of things that I can't do. Visual Studio rocks for development. I'm sorry, but nobody else's integrated debugger and project management even comes close. Yes, tried Eclipse/CDT, KDevelop, Anjuta, and a handful of others. Eclipse/CDT had the most polish and was the most usable, and after a couple of weeks of learning to adapt to it, was usable. It was still somewhat sluggish, show-value-on-mouse-over-deferenced struct variables didn't work, refused to display C-style strings in the watch window no matter what I tried, and would occasionally get horribly out of sync with the debug object. Suffice to say I wasn't as effective. I develop platform-neutral libraries, so I don't really care what my development environment is, but it has to not *hurt* my productivity. On the other hand, I'm stuck on Exchange mail servers at work that don't have their IMAP/POP3 functionality turned on. Outlook was my only option in Windows, and it sucks so hard that I find it barely usable (search, in particular, is abysmally slow on large mailboxes, and it's one of my most-used functions). Evolution is an absolute joy. Even going back to Windows for most of my work, I still run Evolution on my linux box via Xming. Photoshop is another one of those apps I don't want to give up. I'm sorry, but I'm not that impressed with Gimp. It just doesn't work the way I want it to, and lacks some functionality relating to RAW files, higher bit depths, etc.
So, here's to Win7 not sucking. At this point, I have real reasons to go to Linux (Evolution is so much better that it almost makes it worth it, and OO.org is good enough for document interchange), but there are a few things that I really, really need Windows for still. XP won't last forever, so either free software needs to close some gaps, or MS needs to not blow it on Win7.
Um, unless you live up in the air, lack of a reliable ground is your own damn fault no matter where you live. It's provided by a giant rod out by the meter, connected to the ground conductors, and pounded deep into just what you'd expect - the ground.
Eh, say what? If I get paid, how exactly would union rules stop me from blogging? My server, my content, how exactly are they going to stop me? Not that I'd even consider joining any sort of idiotic bloggers union anyway, but I can't understand your comment.
I've got an idea. Why don't we make all minors walk around with an artificial (if necessary, or just pump 'em up on Big Macs) beer belly and a Nixon mask? 'Cuz nobody's gonna want that...
So far, my job is secure, but we've terminated most of our contractors. Thus all the work they were doing (and we were all behind already) now falls back on the full-timers (eg, myself). So I'm getting killed with work at work, still not making any more money at it (salaried), and things are tough otherwise due to rising prices (energy costs, lower value of the dollar, etc.) What am I going to do with my spare time? Probably something that stands a chance of making me a little extra cash. (It also doesn't help that I'm recently divorced, and have gone from a household running on two engineers' salaries to only my own.) I'd love to get back to regular contributions to OSS projects, but at the moment the ol' budget needs more on the income side. Once the economy gets better and my paycheck goes up again (while hopefully my workload goes down), I'll get back to it.
Re:We need this type of thing done in the classroo
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Hand-Made Vacuum Tubes
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As an electrical engineer - hell yes, they should be taught. Probably not in-depth like transistors, but as a technology, the basics should at least be covered. I also happen to be somewhat of an amateur historian of electrical power systems, and there's a lot many of my fellow EE students could have learned from some amazingly old stuff. Simple and elegant are two concepts often lost on them, but not on the clever EEs of the late 1800s / early 1900s. I'm not saying that we should go back to using rotary converters and all manner of other cantankerous electromechanical contraptions, but there's a way of thinking to be learned from them.
Agreed - I run CentOS everywhere on my personal and non-production work stuff. Part of corporate policy for putting servers on our production floor, however, is that the OS must have a support contract. (Don't debate the wisdom of the policy - I think it's pretty bogus in a lot of cases, too, but there's no way around it - I've tried.) Gee, who am I going to pick? In the next six months, my group alone will spend some $12k with RH for support services.
Plus, all of the CentOS users running on such a wide variety of hardware only speeds up the bug-finding process.
I agree with your sentiment that as soon as you provide a magic hammer ("national security"), then suddenly everything starts to look like a nail, but somehow you have to make exceptions for sensitive topics. My suggestion would be that any national security discussions whose immediate disclosure would compromise an operation must still be recorded, but their release can be delayed by up to 10 (?) years, depending on the situation. That would cover things like impending bombings, when you don't want your target running away, or strategic weapons programs (not necessarily nuclear, just anything very advanced).
Otherwise, I agree. Every "on the clock" minute of a government official's behaviour should be public record, free for others to record, and open to scrutiny by all. The government feels free to watch us in all sorts of ways, yet they don't like to be watched. Funny, I think in many democracies they've forgotten that it's the populace from which they draw their power, and to whom they are always accountable.
Likewise, never heard of trading out calipers. Usually I just give them a visual once-over for any problem seals or corrosion, slap on some new pads, and bolt everything back together. I have taken to just putting on new rotors, though - turns out new cheap rotors ($7) are less expensive than machining the old ones (local shop wants $10/each). I usually change out the fluid about once a year, but I drive a lot and most of it is in the mountains, and the DOT3 that pours out is usually pretty disgusting.
But hey, whatever works for you on those preloaded calipers. Bleeding an ABS system can be a bitch, though, so personally I try not to do it any more than I have to.
Agreed - as someone who watched countless *academic* activities suffer every time the various sports programs needed money at my alma matter (despite the countless zillions their rights licensing brought in), I've always thought it was a complete travesty to everything higher education is about. Sports scholarships should be eliminated, and these jocks (at least the ones that are only there to play ball, and not really educate themselves) should go where they belong - minor league teams (which, I might add, the NFL could really use some sort of development league, much like minor league baseball and basketball teams produce players for MLB and the NBA).
I'm probably the only person who actively cheers for whatever team is opposing my old university, just out of sheer hatred for the football program. Yeah, I've got anger issues.
Why the hell should it use a gig just sitting there on boot? I haven't told it to do a goddamn thing other than boot, and I'd stripped out most of the crapware that was starting. I realize there's a lot that goes into bringing up a system, but it's so massively disproportional to XP and quite a bit slower. Also, if it was cache, then why did it keep increasing (by about the same amounts as XP) as I started other processes? And then started paging out to disk when I hit the end of physical memory?
No, I'm sorry, but at least a large portion of that wasn't cache. Vista raw boot: 943MB - XP raw boot: 143MB That's called bloat and inefficient coding. Vista - slow as fuck, but pretty. Really I'd rather have ugly but responsive.
If your comment was about XP and not Vista, I might agree. I'm a very happy XP user. However, last weekend I bought a new laptop when my old one crapped out. Obviously it had Vista, so I tried to use it for a couple of days. Between the fact it was abysmally slow, consumed a gig of memory just sitting there, kept asking me if I wanted to do things (yes, I know about limited user privileges, but this is Windows, for god's sake, where everything needs administrator), and I couldn't find a damn thing, well... the best compliment I could give it was that it was pretty. Add to that the fact I don't even get a damned OS install disk anymore, and I was significantly less than thrilled about its long term sustainability.
So, I decided to downgrade (upgrade?) back to XP. HP's own website basically said "DON'T DO IT, MAN, IT'LL NEVER WORK" and provided exactly no XP drivers, only Vista. Yeah, like I'm going to believe that. So I did, and after nearly ten hours of collecting drivers from other sources (occasionally having to change vendor IDs and the like to get them to load), I had it running perfectly.
The thing that bugs me most is that HP has the drivers - the hardware in this new box isn't anything all that revolutionary, or different from what was found in their old XP offerings. There's no reason they couldn't have put up the necessary XP drivers - most of them I got from HP's site, just under other models. The only possible explanation is that MS is sitting in the background, threatening to flog them mightily if they dared not do everything possible to push this steaming pile known as Vista upon us.
Oh, and yes, it dual-boots into Ubuntu 7.10 just fine.
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For me, it depends on whether it's personal or professional code, or something in between.
My professional code is usually well documented and no bizarre comments. The worst you usually get is "FIXME - (reason)" or "Ugly Hack" The reason being that, while I've been its sole maintainer for years, somebody will eventually take over this job and will need to understand how all of the business rules weave themselves through the library. Plus, it's what's expected of a professional developer. (I will admit that there are more subtle humorous references in the architecture, but not many at all.)
My personal code is more a stream-of-consciousness conversation with the code. You'll often find "WTF was I thinking? This can't possibly work, but it does somehow," or other such. I'll often insert thoughts as I'm reading the code as markers of things to go back and explain to myself in comments later. Consider it a form of code review, except that the reviewer is me, removed by a few weeks from coding it. It really does help point out where I have documentation deficiencies. Then there always the drunk tags, indicating sections of code I may need to rework since I wrote them under the excessive influence..,
My personal favorite is a close friend of mine who went on a coding bender after his girlfriend completely screwed him over. It wasn't a bad thing, we had a lot of microcontroller code to write in a hurry. Unfortunately, we got lots of line labels like "LivsABitchDieDieDie:" (usually with a varying number of dies, or possibly with a number appended.) Surprisingly, most of the code worked and lived on for years, never really needing any maintenance (thankfully....)
Most likely, the core has been laser trimmed in such a way that it's not even connected any more. Almost certainly no way to re-enable it.
For that matter, why would you suspect the rest might be dodgy? They've passed functional testing.
I routinely travel with 2 laptops and 2 cell phones. No, I don't trust the luggage monkeys not to steal them, so they all come with me as carry-ons.
Why, you ask? I often tack vacation on the end of work trips, and as such I need both my work laptop (all business, limited disk space left) and my personal (personal projects, software of questionable licensing, maybe pr0n and other things corporate IT wouldn't necessarily approve of...) Likewise with cell phones - mine is mine, and work doesn't even know the number. For them, I carry one that they pay for, but by the same token, I can't use it for personal calls.
So, there you have it - plus add my usual camera body, 3-5 lenses, spare batteries, handheld amateur radio, charging gear, MP3 player, security tokens, tools, etc. and you see why security loves me oh so much. That's why I typically just skip the hassle and drive anywhere I need to go.
Agreed - the real value in a good business systems (read: internal) programmer at most companies is knowing *the business* and seeing how software/hardware can be applied to solving *business problems*. Quite frankly, little of what I write is all that technically challenging. Most of the algorithms are quite simple and time-tested approaches to solving problems. The hard part is figuring out what the business behaviour should be, what data needs to be gathered to drive it, and how best to interact with the users.
Actually I think such a product (CPU + moderate graphics) would quickly find a home, particularly if the incremental cost was significantly less than a separate CPU + GPU. Remember that a large portion of users (including myself) have little need for screamin' video boards. That's particularly true in the corporate sector, where cost is key and I really don't need 60fps at 1920x1200 - all I really need is basic business functionality (2D acceleration) and maybe some decent 3D stuff to account for the coming Vista apocalypse. Sure, there's not much margin in each one, but corporations buy a *lot* of computers for basic business work.
On the upper end, sure, I'd love to see some massive GPU power sitting just across the HT from my Phenom, but really with the few modern games I play, I have little use for it in that manner. It's much more interesting as a flexible, reprogrammable coprocessor very good at matrix ops. Now that I'd use on some of my number crunching servers at work.
Back when I used to work at a repo company in college (did IT stuff, but would occasionally go along on collection trips just for fun), I learned a little secret about collecting judgments against companies of any reasonable size. Short version: If they don't pay, get a court order that gives you the right to go in and sieze property equal to the value of what they owe. Call then sheriff, have him or one of his officers accompany to serve the order. Once appropriately served, head straight for the telecom gear. I guarantee as you're pulling out the PBX, somebody will show up with a check for the amount owed - it's damn hard to do any business without a phone switch!
And this is why, being mostly of UK heritage (mostly Welsh, some English, some Scottish), I've always referred to my ethnicity as simply "honky". My ancestors were certainly not from the Caucasus mountain region. (Yes, I realize the origins of this, and no, my ancestors weren't Hungarian. Now it's just more of a generic racial slur, so I'm okay with it.)
Have you priced natural gas during the winter? A burning fuselage close enough to provide radiant heat is definitely a selling point.
Don't exactly know how they calculated the "Current Carrying" column on your provided link, but your description of "conservative" is a massive understatement. Take 12AWG wire, for example. The National Electric Code (the baseline US building code for electrical crap) allows 20 amps via a 12AWG circuit, and you can bet that most household circuits are longer than 100ft. round trip, and that this is sized very conservatively for safety (it's a building code, and they're almost always conservative). Yet this table lists 9.3 amps for 12AWG? I believe the phrase you're looking for is "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?"
Also, consider the headlight wires in your car - usually either 16 or 18 gauge, and they handle 7ish amps on high. Again, not too many cars catch fire due to headlight line failure, yet this table lists them between 2.3 and 3.7A.
The real gotcha is in the connectors, because the joints are where the resistance is - either just from the physical connection, or from inevitable corrosion buildup. That's why the cord on your space heater may be only slightly warm, but the plug is often significantly moreso.
"I hope your server doesn't try to "signal" the server in the next stall ...."
Why not? Can't servers one day dream of being a senator, too?
I'm assuming you're just a troll, but well, you look hungry. Exactly what flaws would those be?
For reference, I use PHP like a lot of people use Perl. I'm a hardcore assembly/C developer by day, but realistically, we all need to massage data and such, as well as provide web tools to perform certain tasks. I've written moderately-sized web apps in PHP (about 70 different dynamic pages, with the whole system getting about 100k page loads per business day), and find it quite nice as long as you force yourself to avoid sloppy programming. On the other hand, when I just need to slop some crap together to parse data once or twice, PHP is awesome. (Substitute Perl in there if you're a Perl kind of person - I'm not.)
I'm in exactly the same spot - tried Vista, hated it. Can't stand it for most of the same reasons that others post, so I won't reiterate those. So, I've tried to make the switch to Linux (currently running Ubuntu 7.10). However, there are a couple of things that I can't do. Visual Studio rocks for development. I'm sorry, but nobody else's integrated debugger and project management even comes close. Yes, tried Eclipse/CDT, KDevelop, Anjuta, and a handful of others. Eclipse/CDT had the most polish and was the most usable, and after a couple of weeks of learning to adapt to it, was usable. It was still somewhat sluggish, show-value-on-mouse-over-deferenced struct variables didn't work, refused to display C-style strings in the watch window no matter what I tried, and would occasionally get horribly out of sync with the debug object. Suffice to say I wasn't as effective. I develop platform-neutral libraries, so I don't really care what my development environment is, but it has to not *hurt* my productivity. On the other hand, I'm stuck on Exchange mail servers at work that don't have their IMAP/POP3 functionality turned on. Outlook was my only option in Windows, and it sucks so hard that I find it barely usable (search, in particular, is abysmally slow on large mailboxes, and it's one of my most-used functions). Evolution is an absolute joy. Even going back to Windows for most of my work, I still run Evolution on my linux box via Xming. Photoshop is another one of those apps I don't want to give up. I'm sorry, but I'm not that impressed with Gimp. It just doesn't work the way I want it to, and lacks some functionality relating to RAW files, higher bit depths, etc.
So, here's to Win7 not sucking. At this point, I have real reasons to go to Linux (Evolution is so much better that it almost makes it worth it, and OO.org is good enough for document interchange), but there are a few things that I really, really need Windows for still. XP won't last forever, so either free software needs to close some gaps, or MS needs to not blow it on Win7.
Um, unless you live up in the air, lack of a reliable ground is your own damn fault no matter where you live. It's provided by a giant rod out by the meter, connected to the ground conductors, and pounded deep into just what you'd expect - the ground.
Eh, say what? If I get paid, how exactly would union rules stop me from blogging? My server, my content, how exactly are they going to stop me? Not that I'd even consider joining any sort of idiotic bloggers union anyway, but I can't understand your comment.
I've got an idea. Why don't we make all minors walk around with an artificial (if necessary, or just pump 'em up on Big Macs) beer belly and a Nixon mask? 'Cuz nobody's gonna want that...
I mean, think of the children!
So far, my job is secure, but we've terminated most of our contractors. Thus all the work they were doing (and we were all behind already) now falls back on the full-timers (eg, myself). So I'm getting killed with work at work, still not making any more money at it (salaried), and things are tough otherwise due to rising prices (energy costs, lower value of the dollar, etc.) What am I going to do with my spare time? Probably something that stands a chance of making me a little extra cash. (It also doesn't help that I'm recently divorced, and have gone from a household running on two engineers' salaries to only my own.) I'd love to get back to regular contributions to OSS projects, but at the moment the ol' budget needs more on the income side. Once the economy gets better and my paycheck goes up again (while hopefully my workload goes down), I'll get back to it.
As an electrical engineer - hell yes, they should be taught. Probably not in-depth like transistors, but as a technology, the basics should at least be covered. I also happen to be somewhat of an amateur historian of electrical power systems, and there's a lot many of my fellow EE students could have learned from some amazingly old stuff. Simple and elegant are two concepts often lost on them, but not on the clever EEs of the late 1800s / early 1900s. I'm not saying that we should go back to using rotary converters and all manner of other cantankerous electromechanical contraptions, but there's a way of thinking to be learned from them.
Agreed - I run CentOS everywhere on my personal and non-production work stuff. Part of corporate policy for putting servers on our production floor, however, is that the OS must have a support contract. (Don't debate the wisdom of the policy - I think it's pretty bogus in a lot of cases, too, but there's no way around it - I've tried.) Gee, who am I going to pick? In the next six months, my group alone will spend some $12k with RH for support services.
Plus, all of the CentOS users running on such a wide variety of hardware only speeds up the bug-finding process.
I agree with your sentiment that as soon as you provide a magic hammer ("national security"), then suddenly everything starts to look like a nail, but somehow you have to make exceptions for sensitive topics. My suggestion would be that any national security discussions whose immediate disclosure would compromise an operation must still be recorded, but their release can be delayed by up to 10 (?) years, depending on the situation. That would cover things like impending bombings, when you don't want your target running away, or strategic weapons programs (not necessarily nuclear, just anything very advanced).
Otherwise, I agree. Every "on the clock" minute of a government official's behaviour should be public record, free for others to record, and open to scrutiny by all. The government feels free to watch us in all sorts of ways, yet they don't like to be watched. Funny, I think in many democracies they've forgotten that it's the populace from which they draw their power, and to whom they are always accountable.
Likewise, never heard of trading out calipers. Usually I just give them a visual once-over for any problem seals or corrosion, slap on some new pads, and bolt everything back together. I have taken to just putting on new rotors, though - turns out new cheap rotors ($7) are less expensive than machining the old ones (local shop wants $10/each). I usually change out the fluid about once a year, but I drive a lot and most of it is in the mountains, and the DOT3 that pours out is usually pretty disgusting.
But hey, whatever works for you on those preloaded calipers. Bleeding an ABS system can be a bitch, though, so personally I try not to do it any more than I have to.
Agreed - as someone who watched countless *academic* activities suffer every time the various sports programs needed money at my alma matter (despite the countless zillions their rights licensing brought in), I've always thought it was a complete travesty to everything higher education is about. Sports scholarships should be eliminated, and these jocks (at least the ones that are only there to play ball, and not really educate themselves) should go where they belong - minor league teams (which, I might add, the NFL could really use some sort of development league, much like minor league baseball and basketball teams produce players for MLB and the NBA).
I'm probably the only person who actively cheers for whatever team is opposing my old university, just out of sheer hatred for the football program. Yeah, I've got anger issues.
Why the hell should it use a gig just sitting there on boot? I haven't told it to do a goddamn thing other than boot, and I'd stripped out most of the crapware that was starting. I realize there's a lot that goes into bringing up a system, but it's so massively disproportional to XP and quite a bit slower. Also, if it was cache, then why did it keep increasing (by about the same amounts as XP) as I started other processes? And then started paging out to disk when I hit the end of physical memory?
No, I'm sorry, but at least a large portion of that wasn't cache. Vista raw boot: 943MB - XP raw boot: 143MB That's called bloat and inefficient coding. Vista - slow as fuck, but pretty. Really I'd rather have ugly but responsive.
If your comment was about XP and not Vista, I might agree. I'm a very happy XP user. However, last weekend I bought a new laptop when my old one crapped out. Obviously it had Vista, so I tried to use it for a couple of days. Between the fact it was abysmally slow, consumed a gig of memory just sitting there, kept asking me if I wanted to do things (yes, I know about limited user privileges, but this is Windows, for god's sake, where everything needs administrator), and I couldn't find a damn thing, well... the best compliment I could give it was that it was pretty. Add to that the fact I don't even get a damned OS install disk anymore, and I was significantly less than thrilled about its long term sustainability.
So, I decided to downgrade (upgrade?) back to XP. HP's own website basically said "DON'T DO IT, MAN, IT'LL NEVER WORK" and provided exactly no XP drivers, only Vista. Yeah, like I'm going to believe that. So I did, and after nearly ten hours of collecting drivers from other sources (occasionally having to change vendor IDs and the like to get them to load), I had it running perfectly.
The thing that bugs me most is that HP has the drivers - the hardware in this new box isn't anything all that revolutionary, or different from what was found in their old XP offerings. There's no reason they couldn't have put up the necessary XP drivers - most of them I got from HP's site, just under other models. The only possible explanation is that MS is sitting in the background, threatening to flog them mightily if they dared not do everything possible to push this steaming pile known as Vista upon us.
Oh, and yes, it dual-boots into Ubuntu 7.10 just fine.