My biggest gripe is when a complex subsystem (e.g. audio in recent distros) lacks a "10,000ft perspective". Sure, I can read about all the bits and pieces, but there's simply nothing that treats it as a _system_. Fine to handwave about "this maps this to that", but for crying out loud how much effort does it take to draw a )(*^&)^ block diagram showing the sense and direction of said mappings? Another prime example: KDE (and perhaps Gnome) initialization. How about a step-by-step runthrough of how the various blocks are started, what starts them, where they all read configuration data from, etc, etc. If this exists now, my apologies, but I spent a horrendous amount of time working out how a desktop session figures out the paths of its .kde and Desktop directories from square one. It's _almost_ explained properly in several places, but until I wrote a script to dynamically modify ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs at KDE login it insisted on defaulting back to the "well known" directories for the initial phases. Can I really be the only person who needs to keep their KDE desktops disjoint across host machines when using a common home directory?

Heh. The "Town Hall Meeting" effect at work! Gotta love it...

$50 million in debt, no one disputes. The floundering part is where many might take issue. There's no such thing as a startup (civic or commercial) that is without debt. This was a large project with a long time-horizon to self-sufficiency and no one ever claimed otherwise. The attempts at sacking the city's chief administrator are self-serving and politically motivated in an effort at bringing down the mayor. It's interesting how the state official leveling charges at the city's handling of finances was the prime mover behind granting Fairpoint their approval to take over Verizon's landline operations in VT. This despite any number of well-reasoned warnings that they were simply not equal to the task, either in terms of experience or financial resources.

has had a municipal fiber-to-the-premises system for the past two years. I doubt I would have been alive long enough to see FIOS rolled out, particularly since the outfit that Verizon dumped^H^H^H^H^H^H sold their landline infrastructure to, Fairpoint, has just filed bankruptcy. Comcast, the only other game in town, has been howling to the state regulators about the sheer UNFAIRNESS of a publically-owned body actually implementing something that they had no intention of providing (in their neverending quest at maximizing shareholder value). Most recently, certain parties (first two guesses don't count) have been agitating to have the city shut down Burlington Telecom over perceived financial malfeasance. After all, it's downright UN-AMERICAN to have such an important piece of infrastructure exist without money flowing into corporate coffers!

Embedded systems biz? Perhaps. But the general technique is as old as electronics trade shows. My dad worked for a major manufacturer of spectrum analyzers during the late 50s. Putting mockups together in order to create buzz or measure interest was absolutely commonplace. My favorite story: Marketing was thinking about entering a new target market. They made up a product, printed preliminary spec sheets showing a complete dummy and dragged an empty box replete with meters, dials, labels and das blinkenlights to the IEEE show. It was met with underwhelming enthusiasm and the project was cancelled. Net development costs squandered? About 2 days in the model shop and one photo session :-) A classic in the annals of technical marketing!

Um, IBM _did_ port AIX to x86. Version 1.x was available on late 80s microchannel hardware. And, while this is not well known, there also was a mostly-complete 4.4BSD port to the ROMP (PC/RT). It was done as a spare-time project and the company probably never knew it existed.

An electrical generator does not run in isolation, but is generally connected together with and synchronized to other similar devices. When the water disappears that generator becomes in effect a large AC motor with no load on it. Back-EMF from the local grid can then spin it up past its rated operating speed.

Let's not forget to mention a critical component of planned obsolescence: inability or unwillingness to provide service documentation. I can pickup a complete service and calibration manual for a 50-year old Tektronix oscilloscope without any problems, but the manufacturer of a 16 year old professional audio component is unable to supply technical data on its internals, claiming they were lost or discarded! Over the past decade, this excuse (or a close variant) has become a common response to manual requests. Really, how much effort does it take to maintain a digitized version or copyable master?