...besides nobody who will live much longer than another 2-3 years even knows who Bill Joy, or a SPARC let alone a 360 was)...
That would be a Sun 3/60, not 360, as in IBM 360. BTW, thanks for giving me only 2-3 years more to live, Doc...
US refineries produce less diesel (~10%) per barrel of oil than European refineries (~25%), preferring gasoline as an end product. Unfortunately, it's not a matter of turning a few knobs to adjust fractional outputs. It would take creating new refineries (not likely to happen - NIMBY and expensive, difficult regulatory hurdles) or retooling existing plants (expensive and counterproductive for existing vehicles).
Same deal with a Samsung netbook that I purchased because of its semi-ruggedness (NB30). Out of the box BIOS was junk (ACPI problems, as usual, manifested as dropping keystrokes due to odd, periodic, momentary machine stalls), and the BIOS updater runs only under Windows. You can't even run the BIOS package (.exe) on another machine and manually extract the BIOS - updater recognizes that it's on a different machine and refuses to run.
Contacting Samsung was an exercise in futility. Tech support kept insisting I run the
My mistake was not making this a dual boot machine, just to keep Windows around for such work. It's become standard operating procedure for me now to dual boot any machine that's likely to need a BIOS update (Dell, to their credit, is not one of these vendors). And with the tendency of vendors not to include CD/DVD restore media, I'll have to use some other install media to reinstall Windows just to perform what should be a simple BIOS update.
This being an IT project, I predict it will take 5 years longer than planned, cost 10x the initial budget, and still never really work quite right.
Fixed that for you.
This being a large, overarching, overreaching government project, I predict that it will take 10 years longer than planned, cost 50x the initial budget, and be cancelled halfway through by a shift in the political winds.
Fixed that for you.
I have set several limits on whether or not I will work on a "friends and family" computer issue. First, unless I've managed the box from day 1, I will not work on a Windows box unless it's less than two years old. I just don't have the time nor the patience to deal with old, slow hardware plus "Windows rot" and the related cruft that goes with a less-than-fresh Windows installation. Second, I make sure that the owner of the machine understands that I am not responsible for any negative outcome of my working on the machine. If I break it, the owner gets to keep all the pieces. Expectations are set low at the beginning. I can't tell you how many times I've been given a box that's well past saving (hardware issues, malware infestations beyond repair, etc.) and the owner expects a quick miracle. It just doesn't work like that most of the time.
It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.
