You can't put hardly anything on a rescue floppy. Conversely, I can put a full suite of diagnostic tools, partition software, anti-virus applications, password recovery tools and then some on a CD and still have plenty of room for expansion. Alternatively, I can put an entire usable Linux distribution on a CD.

I haven't used a rescue floppy in well over a decade.

I think you'll find it can be quite the opposite, actually. In Ontario, Canada we've had new legislation implemented that's aimed at protecting consumers and forcing them to be aware of their rights and obligations under an automotive contract, yet people still brazenly autograph it as quickly as possible so as to move on with other things.

In point of fact, it is now mandated by law in Ontario that all sales contracts contain the following text, in bold-face 12 point font, with the first two words being mandated to be in 14 point font. The wording must be directly adjacent to the signature line so as to give the consumer every opportunity to read it prior to finalizing the contract. Vis;

Sales Final. Please review the entire contract, including all attached statements, before signing. This contract is final and binding once I have signed it unless the motor vehicle dealer has failed to comply with certain legal obligations. No other promises or terms have been made to me that are not part of this contract.

It's amazing how many customers come into the dealership days later asking why they can't just "forget the whole thing", or who demand other things be "thrown in" that are not part of the contract, or who don't understand the clauses on the reverse of the contract that talk about liquidation of damages from one's deposit should they fail to accept delivery or pay. "Oh, I didn't know that's what that said"

I'm not asking people to read the fine print, but it would be nice if they'd atleast read the 14 point bold face print that's 1 inch away from their signature.

I don't think you quite understand the sub-prime finance market.

Try this. Start paying half the minimum payments on all your credit cards and loans, skip every other month on everything, pick 2-3 debts that you don't like and just stop paying for them entirely. After about a year, go into your bank and ask if that 4.9% is still available.

Who's arguing?

My bone of contention is with people who object to the way these flakes are treated. They've already proven that they can't handle debt responsibly, so they go to near-prime lenders. Then they prove they can't handle that responsibly, so they go to sub-prime lenders who install tracking devices in their vehicles with remote kill switches. They're lucky to have a car at their disposal in the first place. (n.b. Many of these people don't have the credit card room available to put a deposit down on a rental car, nor do they typically have the cash on hand to leave a cash deposit)

If they disable the device, they also disable their car. Further, the device either sends an SOS or, failing that, the system sends an alert that the device has gone offline and the lien holder immediately dispatches somebody to collect the vehicle.

Disclaimer; I'm a sales manager at a car dealership.

That all depends on how much money they get up front, how many payments you make, the age/mileage of the vehicle at the outset and what condition the vehicle is in once it's repossessed.

These lenders do need to make as much money as possible on every loan to cover the losses on the others. I've seen cars repossessed with more than $10k owing on them that are in such bad shape they get stripped for parts and net the lender between $200-1000. How do you expect them to absorb that loss if they haven't been making $3000+ on other clients?

Both are typically correct. To get themselves into the situation where these types of loans would be an option, one would have to argue that many of these customers lack a certain level of intelligence or, at the very least financial savvy. The desperation comes into play when you consider that these people typically have no other option. We just delivered a vehicle to a client a few days ago with one of these devices installed. It was difficult to get hold of this lady because the members of her household were screening calls to avoid the creditors who are still after her for unpaid debts. Had she not taken the high risk car loan we arranged for her she'd be taking the bus. Period.

Not only that, but in most areas the tax laws stipulate that you can't recover the taxes from a car loan. Vis;

• Original purchase price: $20000.
• Freight, fees, tarrifs: $2000.
• Sub-Total: $22000.
• PST + GST (Ontario, Canada) @ 13% combined: $2860
• Total to be financed: $24860.

To make things simple I'll use 0% APR financing on the loan. Supposing on this loan, let's make it a 60 month term, you're making payments of $414.34/month and you make the first 12 payments before your loan enters default status. So you've now paid $4972.08 towards your loan, leaving an outstanding balance of $19887.92 remaining. So now the financial institution repossesses the vehicle and needs to recover that amount of money. Using the 30% depreciation "rule of thumb" let's say the car is now worth $14000. That leaves the loan upside-down by $5887.92 that has to be collected somehow.

The beauty of the tax laws is that taxes will be paid once again by the new buyer so all in all the government wins, but we the consumers lose out because the financial institution has to jack up interest rates and service charges to make up for the shortfall of $6k that the original buyer is almost certainly not going to repay.

With the trend of ever increasing personal debt load on typical North American consumers, the trend towards longer terms, lower payments and less (or no) down payment, people are finding themselves in a negative equity situation on their car loans for longer and longer as they're paying the principal balances significantly slower than the depreciation curve of their vehicles. When financing first became commonplace it was normal to put upwards of 20-50% down and take a financing term that did not exceed 36 months. Granted, interest rates were often in the double digits, but with that much down and terms so short it wasn't really an issue. It was also quite common to pay off one's car loan before the end of the term and then {gasp!} drive it for several more years before trading it or making another purchase.

This allowed people to walk into their next loan with, again, 20-50% cash down plus equity in their trade resulting in upwards of 30-80% down on their next vehicle.

Alas, 84 month finance terms are becoming the norm, 96 month terms aren't as outrageous as they once were and consumers and banks keep talking seriously about 108 and 120 month terms. Welcome to the society where once you're in debt, you're always in debt. Buy now, pay later.

I, for one, am not on the debt treadmill, but I do take advantage of 0% finance offers wherever possible so the money I have in my savings account can earn between 3-8% while the store foots the cost of borrowing. Go on you debt whores; continue paying my way with your high interest payments.

But I digress...

If you could convince consumers to pay 90% of the original retail price for a 1 year old car, it wouldn't depreciate so heavily now, would it?

The price and depreciation of cars is driven primarily by the consumers that purchase them second hand. When a consumer walks onto the lot and expects to pay 30-40% less for a 1 year old car than its original asking price, the car has thusly depreciated by 30-40%.

If the price of the car is reduced at source it causes accelerated depreciation, resulting in a further drop in resale value of the pre-owned vehicle.

Ok, I suppose you're free to have your beliefs but it happened about 2 months ago.

See, the keyboard isn't the problem, the configuration architecture and modular nature of the new X Windows System is the problem. Apparently you have to take steps(!!!) to ensure you have the proper support for basic input devices compiled into the system and configured in the config section in order to make it work.

My mouse worked, my keyboard and mouse both work at the console, however my keyboard does not work under X Windows.

{sigh} Denial of a long standing problem does not make the problem go away.

I used to scoff at people who would make these claims myself. Then I started working full time in a non-IT environment where suddenly the computer was a means to and end rather than the end itself. I no longer have the time to tinker, re-configure, re-compile, re-install or scour forums, FAQs, info pages and IRC channels to find the solutions to problems I encounter. In my day to day life I need my computers to Just Work and Linux does not accomplish this goal. The development is too scattered, dependencies change and it still happens far too often that a system will depend on multiple versions of a given dependency.

I'm sorry to say it but Linux will never grow or develop to take over in the corporate world. It's just spinning its wheels towards niche status.

I know you're going to catch even more flak for that comment than you already have, but I'll throw my $0.02CDN into the hat.

I've been a Linux user for well over a decade. I used to run/administer it on more machines than I could likely count today. My personal laptop, desktop(s) both at home and at work all ran Linux. I still have a server at home hosting my personal vanity domain that runs a Linux installation.

That being said, I'm no simpleton when it comes to Linux. I've rolled my own distro from the kernel, glibc and gcc on up, I've used half a dozen distributions, various package management systems including pre-compiled and those that require me to compile my individual apps and everything in between. I've gotten away from Linux on the desktop over the last few years (my new job is a Windows only environment and uses computers merely as tools) so I decided to try to awaken the Linux installation on my desktop at home.

Would you believe I spent hours getting it all up to date only to discover that my keyboard would not work under X Windows! I tried a PS/2 keyboard, a USB keyboard, a wireless USB keyboard; nothing. Best I ever got was to get the number pad at the right working, but that does not a usable environment make.

So I gave up. I banged my head against a wall long enough before I decided that if they can screw up a simple human interface, it's no longer fun.

BTW, even with a package management system I still had to fight dependancies and their collisions along the way. So you're 100% correct; Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing.

Hah! My personal favourite is the Windows XP method whereby it pops up a dialog box saying "Windows has sucessfully installed updates. Your computer needs to be restarted for these updates to take effect. Reboot Now, Reboot Later" with "Reboot Now" as the default option. If you're in the middle of, say, typing something when that nuisance of a dialog pops up and you hit space or enter you'll suddenly find yourself in the middle of a reboot cycle when it's least opportune; like in the middle of a sentence.

Thank-you, but the point I was responding to which created this thread was thus;

The trouble with most UPS battery tests is they involve putting the stuff on battery... If you have a server with redundant power supplies- then you can have each power supply attached to a different UPS, then you can test each UPS one by one, hopefully without the server going down due to one UPS failing the battery test.

To which I responded about the need to stress test your entire setup to verify that it works. In point of fact, I'd still recommend that option to the person who asked the question in the first place because ultimately that's what's going to tell them where they need to investigate. The other options, as I see them, break down thusly;

• Stall for time while they test and replace individual components which becomes quite expensive and time consuming and doesn't involve a comprehensive solution and typically leads to a spaghetti setup of mismatched components.
• Wait for a power failure to tell them what's wrong (they never come at an opportune moment)
• Plan a full-scale power-down test while nothing mission critical is happening and investigate and document the failures and come up with a comprehensive plan to attack the situation.
• Do nothing and hope for the best.

The fact of the matter is this; every data centre worth its salt I've ever worked, visited or used as a client had the ability to tell me when was the last time they did a full power-down test, how long it lasted and what the results were. In almost all cases the results were "everything continued to function as normal".

Regardless whether there are 30 or 3000 employees at this company, it sounds as if this collection of servers is mission-critical and therefore people's livelihood depends on their uptime. If they don't take this power redundancy seriously now they're going to be in a world of hurt when the inevitable power failure hits them.

But in a data centre you don't face the risk of drowning and/or perishing. Also, it's really easy to convince yourself that your setup works because you've carefully and methodically powered down each backup source individually, but it's near impossible to determine the stress that would be placed on a network by a power failure unless you simulate one. Obviously you have to take steps before hand to make sure your stuff is reliable and you're not going to run a full shutdown while everyone is accessing the data (that, by the way, is a lovely strawman everyone is putting up).

The fact of the matter is, if you're not confident enough in your data centre's reliability to throw the switch, your data centre just isn't reliable enough.

What if the power goes out on Wednesday?

The best way to test your power backup system is to throw the main switch and see what fails. How are you going to react in a power failure if you don't have that data? What good is your backup if it only works in carefully prepared, controlled and documented test scenarios?