Under certain conditions, steel has no fatigue limit either. That is one of the reasons why gears and valve springs fail after extended usage. Given enough cycles, in certain applications, steel will fail. However, if you rate the valve springs to in excess of 100 million cycles, the rest of the vehicle will wear out first.

The F-150 is the most popular pickup truck. An entrenched market for pickup trucks exists to supply home handymen, construction workers, farmers, repair people, landscapers, and pretty much anyone that needs to carry open loads of approaching 1 ton. (Half-ton pickups are usually capable of carrying more than 1/2 ton in a pinch.) Also, if you are towing, pickup trucks can pull large trailers (like fifth wheel trailers.) So anyone interested in sub-transport sized towing, often purchases a pickup truck. On this side of the Atlantic, "caravaners" tow their trailers with trucks. Also, if you are using a work truck, you are probably carrying loads like timbers, pipes, gravel or manure, that are entirely unsuitable for a bus.

While many trucks are made in smaller quantities, Ford sells one type of high-volume pickup truck - the F-150. GM sells its pickup truck under two different brands (GMC and Chevrolet), so it doesn't sell the as many trucks per brand. The passenger car market in North America is very fragmented, almost without a top-selling car. Thus, a top-selling commercial vehicle is now the top-selling vehicle overall.

I think the description "GUI's are not fully funtional yet" summarizes the situation. Even Microsoft eventually went back to the command line. At one point, almost all of Microsoft's tools used the Windows GUI interfaces. It quickly became obvious that the GUI interfaces didn't support remote deployment, automation, etc. Then they wrote power shell, and gave all their tools command line interfaces again.

Programs like LabView, and some of the process control (DCS) and programmable logic control (PLC) vendors have graphical programming interfaces. PLC Ladder Logic is probably the most basic visual programming metaphor ever developed, because the relay ladder logic corresponds to simple boolean AND/OR operations. The LabView interface is more fully featured. However, it takes a very big picture in LabView to accomplish the work of a simple procedural function in most programming languages. I couldn't imagine doing a sophisticated program with that interface. PLC ladder logic looks dense in comparison to the picture based function blocks of LabView.

Additionally, I have frequently found myself modifying VisualBasic Forms and VisualC++ Resource Files at the source level instead of using the graphical interface, because the change I am trying to accomplish can be done much faster from source than from the GUI. It really makes me think that GUI interfaces are missing a fundamental level of programmability.

the NSA automatically identifies telemarketers, and does nothing.

If I were google, I would download images in all incoming messages regardless if they are intended for real email boxes or not. This would let them know which websites are being used for spam. The spam detector could use this information by pattern matching every image (regardless of relabling or website copying), and mark spam accordingly.

I remember when every airline seat had a satellite phone (at $10/minute) that you could use to call whoever you want. I just assumed Flight 93 was one of these flights. I also remember CNN having reports of phone calls on September 11th/12th.

Marketing loves dealing with superlatives. ATI started with the Graphics Wonder card. After a while, new cards came out, and more superlatives were required. Combinations of superlatives were the new convention, ie: the VGA Wonder Plus, and the Graphics Ultra Pro. After the 3D Pro Turbo Plus card, no one tried using superlatives again.

ATI then proceeded to start naming Radeon cards 7000, 8000 and 9000 series. After MIPS 10k, no one wanted numbers larger than 10,000. As such, ATI tried the Radeon 300 series, and eventually made it to the X850 series, before trying 4 digit numbers again (ATI X1200 through AMD HD 8990).

Now ATI is copying the Intel i7-3220 convention and using dashed three digit numbers. Hence R9-260X. It is getting difficult for ATI/AMD to number the new cards differently than the old cards. Anyone want the 3D Pro Turbo Plus convention back again?

"Yes, Minister" is used as an orientation manual. Apparently, new cabinet ministers and even backbenchers in both the UK and Canada (and probably Australia) use them as such. There is some really good material in the programs about what tactics the bureaucracy can use to stop things, and how to overcome the resistance.

Remember: Just because the civil service follows your instructions - does not mean anyone wants the result!

It doesn't take long to do the economic calculations and justify giving drugs to addicts for free. Crime is very expensive. Criminals steal $50 by smashing windows that costs $3000 to replace. A heroin addict needs a great deal of money to pay for his habbit. That means one addict can cost society $100,000 to $1,000,000 dollars a year, very easily. Worse, jailing addicts does not eliminate this cost. Jail costs on the order of $100,000 per year, and doesn't cure an addicts addiction.

In comparison, forcing a heroin addict into therapy and giving them a supply of heroin can cost as little as $5,000 per year. The expense pays for itself after one robbery. Additionally, the drug dealers go bust - they have nothing to sell. This ends a great deal of gang related turf war crime too. Some heroin addicts, if given a safe and reliable supply of the drug, can even hold down jobs. This means they pay taxes - which wouldn't happen if they were in jail.

Unfortunately, the US likes to punish criminals. We jail more people in the US as a percentage of the population than anywhere else in the world. We fail to understand that addicts will do whatever is required to cover their addiction. As such, jail is not a deterrent. All jail does is increase the cost and amount of the crime. A different approach is needed to overcome addiction. Something that does not force addicts to crime to pay for their addiction.

In America (and Canada, Britain, and Australia) the law is based on an adversarial legal process. If everyone is friends, then this process doesn't really work. Theoretically, the government isn't supposed to be friends with anyone. The founding father's never trusted government, and hence they built in safeguards to protect the country from tyranny. Today's situation where the government is closely linked to large corporations is a new and different form of tyranny. Unfortunately, this was not invisaged when the founding father's wrote the constitution, and hence the courts are not set up to deal with it.

Plan 9 was Bell Labs successor to Unix. It was used to test many new concepts like Unicode and UTF-8, and has some pioneering features for clusters/networks of computers. I think most current operating systems including Windows and Linux have implemented concepts that were tested on Plan 9. For more information try plan 9 google search.

The university system was set up to preserve and expand knowledge. The tenure system works well in that regard. Most tenured professors keep doing research, and keep graduating PhDs. Witness the number of retired (Professor Emeritus) professors that are still active in their fields.

Once you realize that universities were never meant to teach large numbers of undergraduate students, then the problems start becoming obvious. What does research and tenure have to do with undergraduate teaching? If you are lucky, in the fourth year you might start to get current knowledge in most engineering programs. Everything taught before that has been known since the 1950's (and often much earlier like the 1700's). As such, current research has almost nothing to do with the undergraduate program. Even current employment trends, on the whole, have nothing to do with the curriculum of the undergraduate program at most universities. (Witness the large number of liberal-arts majors and the correspondingly small number of associated liberal-arts jobs.)

The explosion that is about to happen is that:
a) students want to pay for something that gets them a job,
b) universities were never originally structured for job training, and
c) the universities have no funding formula to pay for the practical facilities for practical job training. This means that students graduate without practical skills, and this makes them unemployable.

We are heading to a world where we have many highly-educated, unemployed, indebted and poor former university students.

rsync to the backup drive with the --backup switch. That way if the file system decides to overwrite a bunch of key files with 0 length files, your backup keeps the originals. It might take you a while to restore, but at least the originals are still there.

The backup heirarchy:
- Natural disasters occur rarely.
- Hardware failures occur infrequently.
- Software failures occur more frequently.
- User failures occur often.
- The unexpected happens all the time.

On Wallstreet, public companies must always maximize short term profits, whereas private companies can make decisions to ensure long-term profitability. Hopefully, in a big corporation, maximizing short-term profits will also maximize long-term profits. However, that does not always occur.

A good example of the difference in strategy is the American auto industry. The public companies (GM, Ford, Chrysler) routinely underperform, and often lose money. However, lots of privately held or privately controlled companies consistently make money. Magna is a good example of this. These companies keep a lid on their costs, and do not do anything to impair the long-term profits of the company.

I was at an analysts presentation on the mistakes GM, Ford, and Chrysler made. Every single mistake involved optimizing short-term profits at the expense of long-term profits. Individually, none of these decisions would have bankrupted GM. However, after a pattern of decades of short-term optimization, GM was broke.

If Dell wants to compete with HP, they only need to accept a 0.25% less per year return on investment than Wall Street. A private investor can make that decision, because he knows that if the company is well-managed, then the investment will pay off.

Having access to cheap capital in a discipllined, well-managed company is a huge advantage. The big companies engage in endlessly complicated financial manipulations to boost short-term profits. In a private company the decision is easy: focus on outcomes that maximize the long-term success of the company.

In a well-managed private company, there is no Enron-like manipulations that destroy the long-term shareholder value. Thus, Dell can adopt a strategy where it ensures its products are competitive and sell, and then wait for HP to implode. After some of HP's recent CEOs, it is a probably a safe bet that HP will implode. That would leave Dell as the only large North American PC vendor, which would be a pretty nice place to be (for Dell).