***People talk about there being a breakthrough, but no one has ever defined what that is. How will we know when it happens?***
You'll know when you walk into the big box store and say "I want one of those", and the salesman says "You want that with Windows or Linux? Now about our extended warranty..."
Last time I looked, the House and Senate had subpoena power. If they want to investigate what Bush administration has been up to with the telcos, they can simply haul the telcos, the administration officials, or both into a hearing and compel them to testify. A few contempt citations should clarify the issue of who did what and why rather quickly.
Maybe getting a formal refusal to investigate from the FCC is somehow a necessary preliminary to getting to the bottom of this nonsense. I hope so.
Come on folks let's move on this. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that there are people out there who will be only to happy to testify in detail about what has been done and why and are just waiting for someone to ask..
National Security? Betcha not. Anyone with a very long memory will recall that the Nixon administration's first ploy in trying to elude Watergate was to invoke National Security. After that was laughed off, they switched to executive privilege. Have we learned nothing? The best way to deal with miscreants in high places is to expose the facts about what they have been doing to the light of day.
***And yes, surfing the Wikipedia is almost always personal use. It is not a legitimate resource that you would use while writing a proposal you intend to turn in to your boss.***
I don't know how you came to this quite remarkable conclusion, but I think that there is a flaw in your thinking somewhere. Increasingly Wikipedia IS a legitimate resource for getting a first take on a subject that one is not familiar with. I wouldn't base an important decision entirely on what the Wikipedia says, but as a starting point, it is often (I'd say usually) a better starting point than a broadly focused Google search.
Just to make sure that I'm not fantasizing, I picked some subjects that I know enough about to judge the adequacy and where the knowledge was not gained through the Wikipedia. The articles on Black Hole Routing and Forland Basins (a geologic term) were perfectly OK. On the other hand, there wasn't anything on Python's for... else construct. (Conventional for loop followed by a block to be executed it break is not used to exit the for loop).
Overall, I can't think why one wouldn't go to Wikipedia first. If you're doing serious research, you need to go further of course. But you need to do that with any encyclopedia -- including Britannica which is far from error/bias free and was (the last time I looked) weak on many fields like Information Technology where Wikipedia is pretty good.
The article deals with a different issue -- employees playing with Wikipedia when they are supposed to be doing what they are paid for. In fact, it specifically says that the objection wasn't to the Wikipedia per se and that there wouldn't have been a problem if the employees had been editing Wikipedia entries on subjects related to their work.
I'd say that an 86 is a very old car. For most models (there are exceptions) getting some parts for a car much more than 15 years old starts to get iffy and for those of us who live or have driven much in road salt country, there's not so much car there after about 12-15 years as there was initially. So, I'd say anything older than about 1990 would qualify as a very old car. Also, the design of the front end and engine compartment changed rather dramatically in the late 1980s and early 1990s as engines became transverse mounted, tranmissions moved into line with them also transverse, and the engines switched from carburetors to computer controlled fuel injection while simultaneously piling on more and more emissions control equipment.. None of the cars in our driveway today has a carburetor, distributor, or driveshaft.
Try replacing the water pump on almost any car built since about 1990 and get back to me. Yes, replacing the water pump on our late 84 Ford Fairlane was a snap (But the car itself was a real piece of junk. I was infinitely pleased to pay the junk yard $25 bucks to haul it away). The water pump was high up on the front of the engine and easily accessible once the serpentine belt was removed. I'd guess that your VW is a similar engine design. Replacing the water pump on the 89 Mazda 626 would have been an enlightening experience for you and it was relatively simple as the crankshaft pulley was held on by six 10mm bolts that didn't have to be torqued to 80ft lb. (Some Hondas I'm told require a lot more than 80lbs). As for a lever to hold the crank. We're clearly not communicating here. There's nothing to apply the lever to. You could use a pipe wrench to hold the crankshaft pulley but the books tell you not to because you'll probably gouge the pulley which will then eat accessory belts. I think some cars (none of ours regretably) have a hex head molded onto the front of the crankshaft pulley that you can use to hold the pulley while torquing down the bolt. But they are an exception, not the rule.
***I used to do all my own work and had no problem rebuilding a carburetor...***
If you can rebuild a carburetor, you can work on a modern car. You'll need some sort of manual and/or an Alldata subscription and some tools. And you'll need to research each and every job on each and every car before you tackle it. But mostly it's just removing bolts and nuts, hanging parts, and putting things back together just like it has always been.
There are a few major differences from your old car.
The computer that controls fuel/error mix is digital rather than analog. No, it doesn't work much better, but it doesn't tar up and the bearings don't wear out. There are a bunch of sensors that it needs -- most of which work fine most of the time.
The front end is much more complicated, because the front wheels drive the car, but still have to be able to turn. But the parts are (usually) relatively accessible.
The engines are wedged in sideways and there is poor access to most things. Even changing an oil filter can be frustrating.
There is a bunch of emissions control stuff hung off the engine. They will turn on annoying lights on the dashboard if you offend them. Sometimes they turn them on anyway just for the hell of it.
No, I don't know why the sparkplug wires are hidden under covers on some cars.
Dealers are held in low regard by most motor-heads... as are quicky lub places. Mostly, competent independent mechanics are preferred.
***The fact that we're racing to the moon again is a depressing statement about what we've been doing recently.***
You're right, but for the wrong reason. You have progress and motion confused. Going to the moon for the sake of going to the moon is pointless. If you want pointless and exciting, the National Football League, NASCAR, and major league baseball will provide that for you at essentially zero cost to the taxpayers.
Spend many billions on scientific research? I'm in favor of it. There's a payback -- maybe not direct, but it's there. There is a reason that the US leads the world in information technology and that is largely that we spent a lot of money in the second half of the 20th Century learning what works and what doesn't.
So, a few billion for a huge atom smasher -- fine (within limits). billions for unmanned probes to Mars, Mercury, Titan -- sure. Get some rocks back... Please bring some rocks back. Figure out how to get reliable broadband to rural areas? Pretty good idea.
Many tens of billions for a pointless space station, ill conceived space shuttle, and manned return to the moon. That's nuts for the US. Been there, done that. Got a good reason for going back? Thought not. If China wants to spend billions on a Lunar expedition -- fine. More power to them. I'd rather they spent money on moon landings than on building aircraft carriers.
***I make my money on time. My time is worth $125/hour. If you don't want to pay that, don't call me.I make my money on time. My time is worth $125/hour. If you don't want to pay that, don't call me.***
If you are actually that good, more power to you. Personally, I am maybe a $40 an hour guy. I can fix most stuff, but I sometimes get stuck for days on stuff that should only have taken me an hour or two at most.
My problem is that most of the $100+ guys I've dealt with aren't even as good as I am. They wander through life, making a living, fixing some stuff and leaving a trail of bad decisions and broken configurations behind them.
I suspect that the only answer is to slow down the speed of technology deployment to a rate that ordinary practicioners can keep up with. But that's likely not going to happen. At least not in any tidy way.
It must be a VERY old car. In most cars built in the past two decades, the engine is mounted transversley. The water pump is driven by the timing belt, not the fan belt (which no longer drives the fan(s)). A smaller number of cars have the water pump under the timing belt cover, but driven by an accessory belt so that a busted water pump won't break the timing belt. In either case, getting to the water pump is a lot of work -- need to remove the accessory belt(s); remove the crankshaft pulley; possibly remove a engine mount; remove the timing belt covers; might consider replacing the timing belt while you're there; remove the water pump. Then put everything back together -- right. All this has to be done with next to no clearance to the engine compartment wall.
Can I replace a water pump on one of these beauties in four hours? Sure. If everything goes right. But sometimes it doesn't. e.g. On our 98 Camry, you'd have to pull the crankshaft pulley. Possibly not a problem if you have a healthy impact wrench. But to reinstall it, you probably need to jam the flywheel with a screwdriver to keep the engine from rotating when you reach over at about half the torque the book calls for on the crankshaft pulley bolt. Jamming the flywheel calls for removing an exhaust system support bracket. But the bolts on that are surely going to be rusted into a lump that calls for nuclear weapons to get them loose.
Also, for most parts there are a lot of choices of manufacturer -- new vs rebuilt, etc. The mechanic will generally pick one that he can get delivered to him in a couple of hours and thinks will last beyond your mean time to blame mechanics. That will likely not be the (probably perfectly OK) $100 water pump you put in. And he will mark the price up some anyway. He is in business y'know.
Some amount of dealing with problems is probably built into that $768 -- which may well have included replacing the timing belt -- not the fan belt. (Timing belts are cheap and need to be replaced every 90K-140K miles-kilometers or so anyway). So I think that $768 isn't really a rip-off price. It's possibly a bit high -- depends on the local labor rates. As I understand it, the normal procedure is to look up the time for the repair in a book (or in the computer output from Alldata), maybe adjust it if the vehicle has obvious problems like lots of rusted bolts then multiply by the shop labor rate and add the marked up cost of the part.
If your car is rear wheel drive with a fore-aft mounted engine and an accessible water pump, then $768 probably is a rip-off. But I'm guessing that it isn't because replacing the water pump on one of those probably wouldn't have taken your sister's boyfriend four hours unless he drank both sixpacks before starting the job.
***Well, as others have pointed out it's better (from a civil liberties perspective) to have these people be wasteful and incompetent than highly effective and dangerous.***
I suppose that suggesting not having them at all is unAmerican?
***There may be, but this is just the time-zone. It doesn't change the UTC time.***
Of course. But it does change the conversion from UTC to/from local. Care to bet that no software that runs on Debian can be exploited in some unfortunate way if the UTC-local conversion is wrong by an hour... especially in a complex networked world where some interfacing software will use the correct conversions? And of course, there are possibly interfaces to the Windows world out there which -- the last time I looked -- mostly runs on local time.
***Prices shoot up like that when there is to way too much credit.***
A bit more complex than that. You also need for lenders to be making imprudent loans. It is perfectly possible -- at least in theory -- to be awash in credit, but not to be using it to fuel huge bubbles. You up margin requirements on securities, have minimum down payment requirements, forbid issuing of most types of financial derivatives, etc. Without NINJA (No Income, No Job, no Asset) loans and the like, the bubble has trouble forming. For example, at one point in the 1990s, interest rates in Japan were literally zero. You could borrow all the money you wanted if you had good credit. But the people who wanted to borrow money didn't have good credit and the people who had good credit had no interest in borrowing. Not only was there no bubble, there wasn't even a modest surge in economic activity.
***Also, if Apple does NOT brick the hacked iPhones, it will go bankrupt and we will all be condemned to using old 386 pcs with DOS 5.0 for our computing needs.***
Between Apple's not recognizing user's legal rights to pick their own service provider, Vista, DRM, the constant stream of worms, viruses, exploits, adware, Google Earth crashing my X-Windows sessions, etc, etc --DOS 5.0 on a 386 DX40 is beginning to look pretty good. Can we go back to DARPANet, Fidonet and Compuserve and try again? Please. I promise that we'll do better next time.... really.
***Don't you see something inherently wrong with that? Not to be snide, but why would you continue to put up with such problems?***
It has to some sort of combination of :
Masochism
Slow Learning
Application Lock In
I don't have any problem with these. I'm sure that Microsoft will provide the Masochists with years of pleasure. Slow learners will probably figure out some day that there are less painful ways to use computers. I would assume that those who are locked in would be working on a strategy to get clear.
***My general point is that I am opposed to rural subsidies of any kind.***
Care to elaborate?
Irrational prejudice?
Rural subsidies are a moral hazard issue. You are only trying to protect the sheep from degenerate farmers?
It's bibilical. Something in Leviticus or Revelation perhaps?
You had a bad experience with a tree that has left you scarred for life? If the memory isn't too painful, how about sharing the details?
You may be under the misaprehension that rural Americans are subsidized by urban and suburban Americans. Hard to tell, but conventional wisdom is not so. rural folks get a break on phone service. Urban folks get mass transit subsidies paid for in part by rural gasoline taxes. Purportedly it all just about averages out.
***Homesteaders, survivalists, folks with second homes,...***
Hey man, I grew up around small boats and live in Vermont. I understand living off the grid. But, I think that I can safely say that few Americans are prepared to live with wood stoves, minimal refrigeration, and no air conditioning. In fact, living off the grid is a way of life, not a minor inconvenience. I think that most Americans are going to be pulling 20 KwHr or more per day off the grid.
You can generate your own electricity to get over rough spots in the current flow from your solar cells. But you have to be a masochist or a mechnical genius to keep a small engine generator running reliably. There are more reliable engines of course -- an automobile engine and a good sized inverter would work, but my cocktail napkin calculations say that you'll need to upgrade the alternator considerably.
***A week's worth of autonomy is not at all unheard of.***
Sure, it's easy if all you need to do is power a laptop, a radio, a small TV, and a few fluorescent bulbs. But that gets old for most folks pretty quickly.
***That said, I'll go out on a limb and guess that your average slashdotter probably has a higher level of electricity consumption than most.***
You might think so, but I'd guess not. I'd guess that slashdotters are disproportionally apartment and dorm dwellers. Not suburban home owners. Heating and cooling one of those monstrosities (I live in one myself) uses a remarkable amount of power. Add refrigeration, a freezer, diswashing, allways-on TVs in half the rooms, etc, etc. More than enough to offset a couple of power hungry PCs even with CRT monitors I think..
***So? Why should people in rural areas have their power subsidized by people who live in cities?***
For starters, municipal wi-fi is not a rural subsidy. Rural broadband is, but that would seem to be built into the existing Universal Service Fund. An interesting question is exactly what the big Telcos did with the money that was supposed to get broadband out to the boondocks. Some small phone companies seem to have gotten the money and used it to roll out broadband. Why do Waitsfield Telecom customers in Hinesburg, Vermont have DSL whereas Verizon customers in Westford about the same distance out in the other direction don't? I suspect that the answer to that question -- were it to be sought out -- might lead to some prosecutions.
As for why you should subsidize anybody else. I can only suggest that you compare and contrast the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and Ayn Rand. There's a good summary of Hobbes philosophy here. You probably won't like it at first, but think about it for a few years. Is Hobbes wrong about the life of man in the natural state being "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short"? Do you really want to stand up against General Motors, ADM, General Dynamics, or any of the world's dozens of nutcase leaders (our own not excepted) without laws and society to back you up? The price you pay for belonging to society is paying for things for others when you might prefer not to.
But note that subsidizing municipal Wi-fi may not be a good idea. It is obviously good public policy to use subsidies only where they will do substantial good at comparatively modest costs. It's unclear --to me at least -- that the benefits of municipal wi-fi justify any non-trivial investment.
***I tried the Santa Monica one and it sucks too much even for email checking.***
That's interesting. I lived many years in the area, and I't think that Santa Monica would be a near perfect candidate for municipal wi-fi. Densly populated by US standards -- around 10,000 people per square mile. Mostly flat, very few natural coverage holes except along the beach front. Highly educated, high income.
If municipal wi-fi doesn't work well there, it's probably going to have the same problems or worse in other places.
***I am still waiting for the day when the only "cable" coming into my house is for electricity, even that I would love to get rid of if zoning would permit solar panels.***
The zoning thing will eventually resolve itself for most people. But I am curious about where you plan to store maybe 100KwHr of electricity as a reserve against a week of cloudy weather.
***Why is that? Electricity distribution works very well without government.***
Actually, no. Until the government got involved -- over the LOUD protests of the private utilities -- electrical service in rural areas was virtually non-existent. Pretty much like exactly like broadband and Wi-Fi today in fact. Read this Wikipedia link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Utilities_Service
This has to be a first. You post an articulate thoughtful post on Slashdot (On Slashdot!!! My first thought was that this guy has to be nuts). You get bashed. And provoke a storm of articulate answers defending on-line civility and bashing the arrogant jackasses who prevail in some Unix communities.
You sir, are a miracle worker. Have you given any thought running for God in the next elections in your country?
BTW, did you read the whole thread on Kerneltrap? Down near the end someone points out that chroot(2) and chroot(8) are not the same thing -- something that most of the participants in the argument probably knew, but seem not to have considered relevant. Turns out that much of the snapping and snarling over there in this case is looks to be caused by the fact that Unix has two related things that have the same name but behave differntly and are not the same thing.
***yee people are never happy are yee? they dont update their product => microsoft == evil they do update their product => microsoft == evil seems its a no win situation no matter what they do***
You're right to some extent. This being Slashdot, Microsoft would be blamed for something even if they brokered a lasting peace between Isreal and the Palestinians, cured cancer, or brought global worming to a screeching halt.
But in this specific case, what they did was quietly load updates onto computers whose owners naively believed that they had turned automatic updates off. (Not so easy to kill a Microsft automatic update mate. Not only do you have to shoot it at least twice with silver -- not lead -- bullets, but you need to drive a cedar stake impregnated with garlic through its pancreas). And they exacerbated that because the update was defective. Just maybe they deserve a bit of criticism on this one.
***Er, what? I'm pretty sure things like security and stability were a little higher on Microsoft's 'reasons to move to NT' list than upgrade breakage.***
Not to mention the reduced cost of supporting only one code base.
I have to agree with you. Too bad that the "better" security in NT turned out to be a fantasy.
The only major bad update I can recall in Windows 98 Windows Update was an Intel originated patch that broke IDE disk access on many machines. Fortunately, automatic update wasn't all that widely used at the time, so the bad update was not the total disaster that it might be today. Still and all, you'd think that some people might have taken that as a warning to only use automatic update for really critical patches.
I can see why you would think that, but I'm not sure that it is true. It is true that the user interface level in graphical software is an intricate structure whose interactions are complex and difficult to follow. It might be just barely possible to untangle Windows 95 and see how the parts fit together. I spent a couple of years trying and I think I was making progress. Windows 98, NT, and (from what I can see Apple software) are simply beyond my comprehensiojn and I think beyond most people's.
After a few years of updates and software installation, whether on Windows or Mac OS X... almost every system is in a slightly broken state, and you just hope it isn't intolerably broken. Talk to any average mom 'n dad and they'll say "Things that used to work fine on our computer aren't working any more, I guess it's just time to buy a new computer."
Ayupp. That's a problem OK. Example, A little utility program on Windows called Neutron that reads time from a network time server and sets the computer clock simply quit working a few weeks ago -- apparently for all users anywhere -- on all versions of Windows -- and with all NTP servers not just time-nw.nist.gov. No one seems to have the slightest idea why. Other similar programs for Windows or Linux still work.
Problem is that buying a new computer doesn't necessarily fix the problems.
***(no, I can't speak to Linux so if Linux solves all these problems I plead ignorance), ***
It has the same problems (and worse), but the layering and interactions of the programs are more visible. Bad documentation (and some Unix documentation gives new meaning to the word awful) trumps no documentation every time.
OK, OK, that's not really what you meant, and it's not your point
=====
If you ask me, the real problem is updates. Let's say that one update in 50 is significantly defective -- which is, IMHO, quite optimistic. Let us further guess that 50% of the defective updates introduce new unexpected problems rather than failing to (fully) fix the existing problem -- they do test these things. At least I hope they do. What is likely to get past testing is errors in areas that no one thought would be affected. Lets assume that there are 10 updates a week on average, and that the average time from first report to fix is four weeks.
If you just uncritically load updates, you'll download new grief every 10 weeks or so and take four weeks to get it fixed. that means that five times a year, you'll unwittingly install a significant new problem and that about 40% of the time you'll be living with one or more of these things.
IMO, the best strategy -- at least for larger operations -- is to evaluate each and every patch, and to load only those which seem absolutely necessary. Even that is not going to work all the time.
As for updates that you aren't asked about... A truly bad idea. Hopefully Microsoft and other operations that believe in automatic updates will learn their lesson from this relatively modest (we hope) fiasco and will never ever do THAT again. Memo to organizations that do that. If your QA -- who are overworked, underpaid, and probably need a vacation -- screws up at the wrong time and you put an important business sector offline for days or weeks, you are looking at a major league class action suit. Don't expect the shrinkwrap EULA to protect you.
***Considering that you get folks like SAC who set the PAL codes for all their nukes to 00000***
Got a reference on that? The only relevant things I can find on Google are your post and an article in German that credits the story to USA Today which is not my idea of a really reliable news source. Searching the USA Today archives for "pal code" and "pal codes" gets no relevant hits.
I am pretty skeptical that actually happened with a live, deployed nuclear weapon. The reason is that before a nuclear system can be deployed, it undergoes a nuclear safety audit. I worked on a system that was undergoing one of those and I can tell you that it was thorough, extensive, expensive, and took years. There is no way that the possibility of all zero 0 PAL codes on real warheads would be acceptable to even a half assed audit.
Slashdot Mirror
You'll know when you walk into the big box store and say "I want one of those", and the salesman says "You want that with Windows or Linux? Now about our extended warranty ..."
Maybe getting a formal refusal to investigate from the FCC is somehow a necessary preliminary to getting to the bottom of this nonsense. I hope so.
Come on folks let's move on this. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that there are people out there who will be only to happy to testify in detail about what has been done and why and are just waiting for someone to ask. .
National Security? Betcha not. Anyone with a very long memory will recall that the Nixon administration's first ploy in trying to elude Watergate was to invoke National Security. After that was laughed off, they switched to executive privilege. Have we learned nothing? The best way to deal with miscreants in high places is to expose the facts about what they have been doing to the light of day.
I don't know how you came to this quite remarkable conclusion, but I think that there is a flaw in your thinking somewhere. Increasingly Wikipedia IS a legitimate resource for getting a first take on a subject that one is not familiar with. I wouldn't base an important decision entirely on what the Wikipedia says, but as a starting point, it is often (I'd say usually) a better starting point than a broadly focused Google search.
Just to make sure that I'm not fantasizing, I picked some subjects that I know enough about to judge the adequacy and where the knowledge was not gained through the Wikipedia. The articles on Black Hole Routing and Forland Basins (a geologic term) were perfectly OK. On the other hand, there wasn't anything on Python's for ... else construct. (Conventional for loop followed by a block to be executed it break is not used to exit the for loop).
Overall, I can't think why one wouldn't go to Wikipedia first. If you're doing serious research, you need to go further of course. But you need to do that with any encyclopedia -- including Britannica which is far from error/bias free and was (the last time I looked) weak on many fields like Information Technology where Wikipedia is pretty good.
The article deals with a different issue -- employees playing with Wikipedia when they are supposed to be doing what they are paid for. In fact, it specifically says that the objection wasn't to the Wikipedia per se and that there wouldn't have been a problem if the employees had been editing Wikipedia entries on subjects related to their work.
Try replacing the water pump on almost any car built since about 1990 and get back to me. Yes, replacing the water pump on our late 84 Ford Fairlane was a snap (But the car itself was a real piece of junk. I was infinitely pleased to pay the junk yard $25 bucks to haul it away). The water pump was high up on the front of the engine and easily accessible once the serpentine belt was removed. I'd guess that your VW is a similar engine design. Replacing the water pump on the 89 Mazda 626 would have been an enlightening experience for you and it was relatively simple as the crankshaft pulley was held on by six 10mm bolts that didn't have to be torqued to 80ft lb. (Some Hondas I'm told require a lot more than 80lbs). As for a lever to hold the crank. We're clearly not communicating here. There's nothing to apply the lever to. You could use a pipe wrench to hold the crankshaft pulley but the books tell you not to because you'll probably gouge the pulley which will then eat accessory belts. I think some cars (none of ours regretably) have a hex head molded onto the front of the crankshaft pulley that you can use to hold the pulley while torquing down the bolt. But they are an exception, not the rule.
If you can rebuild a carburetor, you can work on a modern car. You'll need some sort of manual and/or an Alldata subscription and some tools. And you'll need to research each and every job on each and every car before you tackle it. But mostly it's just removing bolts and nuts, hanging parts, and putting things back together just like it has always been.
There are a few major differences from your old car.
No, I don't know why the sparkplug wires are hidden under covers on some cars.
Dealers are held in low regard by most motor-heads ... as are quicky lub places. Mostly, competent independent mechanics are preferred.
You're right, but for the wrong reason. You have progress and motion confused. Going to the moon for the sake of going to the moon is pointless. If you want pointless and exciting, the National Football League, NASCAR, and major league baseball will provide that for you at essentially zero cost to the taxpayers.
Spend many billions on scientific research? I'm in favor of it. There's a payback -- maybe not direct, but it's there. There is a reason that the US leads the world in information technology and that is largely that we spent a lot of money in the second half of the 20th Century learning what works and what doesn't.
So, a few billion for a huge atom smasher -- fine (within limits). billions for unmanned probes to Mars, Mercury, Titan -- sure. Get some rocks back ... Please bring some rocks back. Figure out how to get reliable broadband to rural areas? Pretty good idea.
Many tens of billions for a pointless space station, ill conceived space shuttle, and manned return to the moon. That's nuts for the US. Been there, done that. Got a good reason for going back? Thought not. If China wants to spend billions on a Lunar expedition -- fine. More power to them. I'd rather they spent money on moon landings than on building aircraft carriers.
If you are actually that good, more power to you. Personally, I am maybe a $40 an hour guy. I can fix most stuff, but I sometimes get stuck for days on stuff that should only have taken me an hour or two at most.
My problem is that most of the $100+ guys I've dealt with aren't even as good as I am. They wander through life, making a living, fixing some stuff and leaving a trail of bad decisions and broken configurations behind them.
I suspect that the only answer is to slow down the speed of technology deployment to a rate that ordinary practicioners can keep up with. But that's likely not going to happen. At least not in any tidy way.
Can I replace a water pump on one of these beauties in four hours? Sure. If everything goes right. But sometimes it doesn't. e.g. On our 98 Camry, you'd have to pull the crankshaft pulley. Possibly not a problem if you have a healthy impact wrench. But to reinstall it, you probably need to jam the flywheel with a screwdriver to keep the engine from rotating when you reach over at about half the torque the book calls for on the crankshaft pulley bolt. Jamming the flywheel calls for removing an exhaust system support bracket. But the bolts on that are surely going to be rusted into a lump that calls for nuclear weapons to get them loose.
Also, for most parts there are a lot of choices of manufacturer -- new vs rebuilt, etc. The mechanic will generally pick one that he can get delivered to him in a couple of hours and thinks will last beyond your mean time to blame mechanics. That will likely not be the (probably perfectly OK) $100 water pump you put in. And he will mark the price up some anyway. He is in business y'know.
Some amount of dealing with problems is probably built into that $768 -- which may well have included replacing the timing belt -- not the fan belt. (Timing belts are cheap and need to be replaced every 90K-140K miles-kilometers or so anyway). So I think that $768 isn't really a rip-off price. It's possibly a bit high -- depends on the local labor rates. As I understand it, the normal procedure is to look up the time for the repair in a book (or in the computer output from Alldata), maybe adjust it if the vehicle has obvious problems like lots of rusted bolts then multiply by the shop labor rate and add the marked up cost of the part.
If your car is rear wheel drive with a fore-aft mounted engine and an accessible water pump, then $768 probably is a rip-off. But I'm guessing that it isn't because replacing the water pump on one of those probably wouldn't have taken your sister's boyfriend four hours unless he drank both sixpacks before starting the job.
I suppose that suggesting not having them at all is unAmerican?
Of course. But it does change the conversion from UTC to/from local. Care to bet that no software that runs on Debian can be exploited in some unfortunate way if the UTC-local conversion is wrong by an hour ... especially in a complex networked world where some interfacing software will use the correct conversions? And of course, there are possibly interfaces to the Windows world out there which -- the last time I looked -- mostly runs on local time.
A bit more complex than that. You also need for lenders to be making imprudent loans. It is perfectly possible -- at least in theory -- to be awash in credit, but not to be using it to fuel huge bubbles. You up margin requirements on securities, have minimum down payment requirements, forbid issuing of most types of financial derivatives, etc. Without NINJA (No Income, No Job, no Asset) loans and the like, the bubble has trouble forming. For example, at one point in the 1990s, interest rates in Japan were literally zero. You could borrow all the money you wanted if you had good credit. But the people who wanted to borrow money didn't have good credit and the people who had good credit had no interest in borrowing. Not only was there no bubble, there wasn't even a modest surge in economic activity.
Between Apple's not recognizing user's legal rights to pick their own service provider, Vista, DRM, the constant stream of worms, viruses, exploits, adware, Google Earth crashing my X-Windows sessions, etc, etc --DOS 5.0 on a 386 DX40 is beginning to look pretty good. Can we go back to DARPANet, Fidonet and Compuserve and try again? Please. I promise that we'll do better next time. ... really.
It has to some sort of combination of :
I don't have any problem with these. I'm sure that Microsoft will provide the Masochists with years of pleasure. Slow learners will probably figure out some day that there are less painful ways to use computers. I would assume that those who are locked in would be working on a strategy to get clear.
Care to elaborate?
You may be under the misaprehension that rural Americans are subsidized by urban and suburban Americans. Hard to tell, but conventional wisdom is not so. rural folks get a break on phone service. Urban folks get mass transit subsidies paid for in part by rural gasoline taxes. Purportedly it all just about averages out.
Hey man, I grew up around small boats and live in Vermont. I understand living off the grid. But, I think that I can safely say that few Americans are prepared to live with wood stoves, minimal refrigeration, and no air conditioning. In fact, living off the grid is a way of life, not a minor inconvenience. I think that most Americans are going to be pulling 20 KwHr or more per day off the grid.
You can generate your own electricity to get over rough spots in the current flow from your solar cells. But you have to be a masochist or a mechnical genius to keep a small engine generator running reliably. There are more reliable engines of course -- an automobile engine and a good sized inverter would work, but my cocktail napkin calculations say that you'll need to upgrade the alternator considerably.
***A week's worth of autonomy is not at all unheard of.***
Sure, it's easy if all you need to do is power a laptop, a radio, a small TV, and a few fluorescent bulbs. But that gets old for most folks pretty quickly.
***That said, I'll go out on a limb and guess that your average slashdotter probably has a higher level of electricity consumption than most.***
You might think so, but I'd guess not. I'd guess that slashdotters are disproportionally apartment and dorm dwellers. Not suburban home owners. Heating and cooling one of those monstrosities (I live in one myself) uses a remarkable amount of power. Add refrigeration, a freezer, diswashing, allways-on TVs in half the rooms, etc, etc. More than enough to offset a couple of power hungry PCs even with CRT monitors I think..
For starters, municipal wi-fi is not a rural subsidy. Rural broadband is, but that would seem to be built into the existing Universal Service Fund. An interesting question is exactly what the big Telcos did with the money that was supposed to get broadband out to the boondocks. Some small phone companies seem to have gotten the money and used it to roll out broadband. Why do Waitsfield Telecom customers in Hinesburg, Vermont have DSL whereas Verizon customers in Westford about the same distance out in the other direction don't? I suspect that the answer to that question -- were it to be sought out -- might lead to some prosecutions.
As for why you should subsidize anybody else. I can only suggest that you compare and contrast the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and Ayn Rand. There's a good summary of Hobbes philosophy here. You probably won't like it at first, but think about it for a few years. Is Hobbes wrong about the life of man in the natural state being "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short"? Do you really want to stand up against General Motors, ADM, General Dynamics, or any of the world's dozens of nutcase leaders (our own not excepted) without laws and society to back you up? The price you pay for belonging to society is paying for things for others when you might prefer not to.
But note that subsidizing municipal Wi-fi may not be a good idea. It is obviously good public policy to use subsidies only where they will do substantial good at comparatively modest costs. It's unclear --to me at least -- that the benefits of municipal wi-fi justify any non-trivial investment.
That's interesting. I lived many years in the area, and I't think that Santa Monica would be a near perfect candidate for municipal wi-fi. Densly populated by US standards -- around 10,000 people per square mile. Mostly flat, very few natural coverage holes except along the beach front. Highly educated, high income.
If municipal wi-fi doesn't work well there, it's probably going to have the same problems or worse in other places.
The zoning thing will eventually resolve itself for most people. But I am curious about where you plan to store maybe 100KwHr of electricity as a reserve against a week of cloudy weather.
Actually, no. Until the government got involved -- over the LOUD protests of the private utilities -- electrical service in rural areas was virtually non-existent. Pretty much like exactly like broadband and Wi-Fi today in fact. Read this Wikipedia link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Utilities_Service
You sir, are a miracle worker. Have you given any thought running for God in the next elections in your country?
BTW, did you read the whole thread on Kerneltrap? Down near the end someone points out that chroot(2) and chroot(8) are not the same thing -- something that most of the participants in the argument probably knew, but seem not to have considered relevant. Turns out that much of the snapping and snarling over there in this case is looks to be caused by the fact that Unix has two related things that have the same name but behave differntly and are not the same thing.
You're right to some extent. This being Slashdot, Microsoft would be blamed for something even if they brokered a lasting peace between Isreal and the Palestinians, cured cancer, or brought global worming to a screeching halt.
But in this specific case, what they did was quietly load updates onto computers whose owners naively believed that they had turned automatic updates off. (Not so easy to kill a Microsft automatic update mate. Not only do you have to shoot it at least twice with silver -- not lead -- bullets, but you need to drive a cedar stake impregnated with garlic through its pancreas). And they exacerbated that because the update was defective. Just maybe they deserve a bit of criticism on this one.
Not to mention the reduced cost of supporting only one code base.
I have to agree with you. Too bad that the "better" security in NT turned out to be a fantasy.
The only major bad update I can recall in Windows 98 Windows Update was an Intel originated patch that broke IDE disk access on many machines. Fortunately, automatic update wasn't all that widely used at the time, so the bad update was not the total disaster that it might be today. Still and all, you'd think that some people might have taken that as a warning to only use automatic update for really critical patches.
I can see why you would think that, but I'm not sure that it is true. It is true that the user interface level in graphical software is an intricate structure whose interactions are complex and difficult to follow. It might be just barely possible to untangle Windows 95 and see how the parts fit together. I spent a couple of years trying and I think I was making progress. Windows 98, NT, and (from what I can see Apple software) are simply beyond my comprehensiojn and I think beyond most people's.
After a few years of updates and software installation, whether on Windows or Mac OS X ... almost every system is in a slightly broken state, and you just hope it isn't intolerably broken. Talk to any average mom 'n dad and they'll say "Things that used to work fine on our computer aren't working any more, I guess it's just time to buy a new computer."
Ayupp. That's a problem OK. Example, A little utility program on Windows called Neutron that reads time from a network time server and sets the computer clock simply quit working a few weeks ago -- apparently for all users anywhere -- on all versions of Windows -- and with all NTP servers not just time-nw.nist.gov. No one seems to have the slightest idea why. Other similar programs for Windows or Linux still work.
Problem is that buying a new computer doesn't necessarily fix the problems.
***(no, I can't speak to Linux so if Linux solves all these problems I plead ignorance), ***
It has the same problems (and worse), but the layering and interactions of the programs are more visible. Bad documentation (and some Unix documentation gives new meaning to the word awful) trumps no documentation every time.
Whereas documented updates are magically OK?
OK, OK, that's not really what you meant, and it's not your point
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If you ask me, the real problem is updates. Let's say that one update in 50 is significantly defective -- which is, IMHO, quite optimistic. Let us further guess that 50% of the defective updates introduce new unexpected problems rather than failing to (fully) fix the existing problem -- they do test these things. At least I hope they do. What is likely to get past testing is errors in areas that no one thought would be affected. Lets assume that there are 10 updates a week on average, and that the average time from first report to fix is four weeks.
If you just uncritically load updates, you'll download new grief every 10 weeks or so and take four weeks to get it fixed. that means that five times a year, you'll unwittingly install a significant new problem and that about 40% of the time you'll be living with one or more of these things.
IMO, the best strategy -- at least for larger operations -- is to evaluate each and every patch, and to load only those which seem absolutely necessary. Even that is not going to work all the time.
As for updates that you aren't asked about... A truly bad idea. Hopefully Microsoft and other operations that believe in automatic updates will learn their lesson from this relatively modest (we hope) fiasco and will never ever do THAT again. Memo to organizations that do that. If your QA -- who are overworked, underpaid, and probably need a vacation -- screws up at the wrong time and you put an important business sector offline for days or weeks, you are looking at a major league class action suit. Don't expect the shrinkwrap EULA to protect you.
Got a reference on that? The only relevant things I can find on Google are your post and an article in German that credits the story to USA Today which is not my idea of a really reliable news source. Searching the USA Today archives for "pal code" and "pal codes" gets no relevant hits.
I am pretty skeptical that actually happened with a live, deployed nuclear weapon. The reason is that before a nuclear system can be deployed, it undergoes a nuclear safety audit. I worked on a system that was undergoing one of those and I can tell you that it was thorough, extensive, expensive, and took years. There is no way that the possibility of all zero 0 PAL codes on real warheads would be acceptable to even a half assed audit.