Now I'm wondering how few people know about Micros~1's lastest stunt on folks' XP boxes where those folks THOUGHT they had specified
**No Automatic Updates**.
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...and your "perusing the web" thing is thinking WAY too small. Think **purpose-built software** and **sandbox for untested corporate COMBINATIONS**. Think about those deployments that are multi-thousand-seat business-critical installs.
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...then there are the developers (etc.) who need control of their environments for SPECIFIC reasons.
JeffM jeffm snipped-for-privacy@email.com posted to sci.electronics.design:
There is some truth in this, also consider what happens when you add an "office suite" to the equation. Then again, there is the user training issues. Far too many people refuse to learn how to handle tools other than what they "learned on". IBM wrote the book on vendor lock-in, MS has made very few additions, if any.
Spoken like a nerd. When the majority of folks buy something, they want to Just Work.
Lots of folks miss the big picture at this point. The fact that Linux CAN be had pre-installed means that ALL the hardware has a Linux device driver. At that point, you can install the distro of your choice.
...and according to Mossberg, those might be an equal choice. The plain-vanilla Ubuntu install that Dell is doing reflects ZERO EFFORT on their part. Just shameful. Open sourse takes another cheap shot from the Windoze establishment.
Yep. I had a former lady friend that was like that. She bought a new car and drove it for about 10,000 miles without ever changing the oil. When the engine seized, she couldn't understand why driving an automobile had to be such a complicated affair. Let's just say that expectations and understanding vary considerably among the GUM (great unwashed masses). I have customers with computers that are only a little better.
Perhaps my circle of aquaintences are strange, but the ones that are Linux users tend to constantly reinstalling, reconfiguring, and rebuilding their installations. I know of several that try every new release and mutation that looks interesting. I don't know what they're looking for, but apparently they haven't found it.
I've been dealing with Dell since the days when they were supplying some AT&T Unix mutation (forgot the acronym) pre-installed. Also Apple with A/UX pre-installed, and Compaq with Red Hat pre-installed. Also SCO Unix on HP and IBM servers pre-installed. I have some observations:
None of them worked perfectly out of the box.
The effort saved in not having to do the install was about 30-60 minutes. Everything else was the same.
Guaranteed hardware compatibility was a moving target because of firmware changes on plugin cards and BIOS's. Keeping the drivers in sync was almost impossible to the point where one vendor (forgot whom) was shipping a driver CD with *ALL* the drivers out of date or malfunctional. Support never had a good list of the "latest" driver versions.
Nobody did much testing and relied on customer feedback to identify problems.
Linux support was either spectacularly good or totally useless. There was also an awful lot of "this would be a good time to learn vi" type of exercises on the phone in order to fix things.
Nobody was delivering up to date installations with the latest kernel.
Even the NAS (network attached storage) vendors can't get their act together. Most supply reinstall CD's for their Linux based operating system, which is fatally out of date, and often doesn't work with replacement drives that have slightly different firmware.
I believe pre-installed Linux is a great idea if you're doing production line installs for multiple desktops on identical machines. However, if each machine is even slightly different, you might as do the install yourself as all you've saved is the initial 30-60 minutes.
--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
The lady that the post was about wasn't into LED thingies. She just wanted it to go.>
Doesn't matter what I drive. Nope... not one bit. Even when I drove a car that had ZERO idiot lights, I didn't let the oil go below any critical levels.
What does the manual say? Many of them still say 3K or 5K. I am wondering whether that is just the mfgs being overly careful, plus it's not their wallet that pays for the oil.
Please let me know when you're able to distinguish between attacking what a person advocated or says, as opposed to a personal attack.
Actually, I don't recall exactly how many miles. I think it was
10,000 miles but it might have been either more or less. It was about
10 months after she bought the car. It blew on a drive from California to Florida. I also can't recall the make and model, or whether the oil loss was from burning oil or leakage, but will ask at the next opportunity. We haven't talked for many years.
Incidentally, have you ever done an analysis of what's in the oil on a brand new car? It's full of cast iron schrapnel from the castings and the machining debris. The assumption is that the first oil change will clear out all the metal crud before it can do any damage. However, if the oil isn't changed, the stuff makes a nifty abrasive.
I usually use a magnetic drain plug, which has shown metal filings for about the first 2,000 miles on my previous 67 Mustang and 72 International 1210 pickup. Although officially, modern engines don't require breaking in the rings, my observations show some metal in the oil for the first few thousand miles. After that, it quickly disappears. (Note: This does not follow orthodoxy).
When I was much younger, I managed to seize my mothers 60 Ford Falcon after running it for about 10,000 miles without an oil change. It had about 80,000 miles on the engine when it froze. What oil was left was like tar. That became my first car and I got to do my first engine rebuild.
Incidentally, my diesels would get oil changes every 2500 miles, the big pickups every 3500 miles, and my conventional passenger cars, about 5000 miles.
--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
-- "Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it." (Stephen Leacock)
Lubricants degrade in other ways than that, especially when run at high temperatures.The companies that "reclaim" lubricants do a lot of complicated chemistry.
--
"Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference
is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more
durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it."
(Stephen Leacock)
That's usually the problem: "What oil was left..." Many older cars or those of a not-so-pristine quality build actually burn some oil. Then when the oil is older and the red lamp comes on, poof. Just imagine, if a car consumed 1/4-1/2 a quart per 1000 miles, what would be left after
10,000 miles besides a chunk of molasses?
With our cars we are blessed. The oil level right before the 3000 miles change is the same as what was put in. No oil burning to speak of.
I'm not 100.0% sure of the exact mileage at which it seized. However, it didn't blow up because of lack of oil. I think it was lack of oil pressure. The hydraulic lifters filled full of tar, which caused them to stick open, thus delaying valve closing. That caused an initial lack of power, followed rapidly by burned valves, warped valve stems, and lots of valve noise. The valve noise should have given her plenty of warning, but it was probably too late by then. Once the engine cooled down with the stuck lifters and burned valves, it was over. Sorry about the sketch details, but it was long ago, and I never saw what happened to the vehicle after it seized.
I also seized my parents 60 Ford Falcon (200cid straight 6 cyl) by driving it for 10,000 miles without an oil change. This engine had solid lifters so the mechanism was different. I rolled into a gas station for a pit stop and couldn't get the engine started. The mechanic took a look and calmly noted that 5 out of 6 cylinders had almost no compression. What the lack of oil had done was seize the pistons and kill the compression by scoring the cylinder walls. I expected to see the crankshaft bearings also frozen, but that wasn't the case when eventually rebuilt the engine. For the curious, the oil pressure light was working but never came on. It did smoke somewhat from burning oil, but in the early 60's, oil burners were fairly common.
Now that we've drifted way off topic, I would like to mention that all this was just an example of how many people want things to "just work", without exerting the slightest effort into understanding how they work, which by implication should give them a clue as to now not to destroy them. That applies to computers as well as automobiles. If you fail to understand how they function, either assumption or oversight is going to cause something to break.
In some cases (such as myself), I find it necessary to destroy something before I can really understand it, which largely explains my domain name, LearnByDestroying.com. I learned computers the same way. I bought one of the original dual floppy IBM PC's in 1983(?). I went alphabetically through the list of commands and when I got to FDISK, I managed to destroy the floppy. If I had wanted it to "just work", I would have stopped there and begun complaining about the awful and unfathomable computers. Instead, I figured out what I had done wrong, vowed not to repeat the mistake, and did it again when I tried the FORMAT command. A few years later, I repeated these mistakes with a hard disk. Even later, I've lost count of how many unbootable Linux systems I've created. If I had adopted a "just works" philosophy, with no attempt at understanding what was happening, how it worked, and how to recover, I would be among the Greek Chorus of Linux detractors complaining that Linux is so difficult, so hard to learn, etc.
Those that can not learn from their mistakes, are condemned to repeat them. Those that will not learn are condemned to invent them.
--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Funny... that should make today's engines worse than those of the sixties or seventies then, as "modern" engines run about 30 to 50 F hotter than they did back then.
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