One of the things you kept no matter what, even though you disassembled Johnny 5 in the heat of the moment years ago, just in case the vindictive psycho ex decided on a land grab, turn him into scrap.. har har
So what the fuck and years pass and finally you decide it’s time to make slow gradual steps reassembling Johnny 5
One of the things that went completely missing in the intervening years is the wiring loom, though I do have pics of it side cuttered up..lol
But I did all the other shit in the interim, all new wheel bearings, brakes, powder coating, so it wasn’t total neglect, at least, that is what I try to kid myself.
So this bitch is sat there with old oil in her, and one day I decide to botch a basic wiring loom and fire her up…
No Joy, fucking dead. Ah well, the old Yam TCI units were notorious for being crap anyway.
Fucking carbs are full of shit anyway.
Months pass and I decide to give the guys at Ignitech a call, get me a new TCI unit, new coils and HT leads, and locally get new plugs.
Strip, clean and rebuild the carbs, rig up a temp fuel supply with a funnel hanging from the roof of the shop.
Fit the coils, botch in the new TCI unit (thankfully there is no timing adjustments or anything to do on these “old” jap bikes), connect up the battery and crank the bitch.
Sweet fuck all…
Pull the HT lead and try a spare plug on the engine… nuffink…
Flash the coils (after disconnecting from the TCI) with the +ve supply and ZAP, big fat blue spark, no fucking output from the TCI.
Why no output from a brand new TCI, most likely guess is the 33 year old pick-ups on the crank, the one thing I avoided looking at for now, mainly because it means draining the oil and shit, and I was hoping to fire her up on the old oil and warm the motor, before draining, so now really it will require two oil changes, bitch.
Fuck this shit, what are the chances the old rectifier / regulator is still any good… yeah, that’s what I thought too, another case of putting something off and hoping for the best, and then at a later date being stalled again because it didn’t turn out that way.
So chase the boys at Ignitech, they supply pick-ups and rectifiers, gotta identify the right pick-ups first, and asked them in the interim if there is a method they will accept / approve to simulate a pick-up to the TCI unit and drive a coil to spark, just because, you know, so far I have an assumption, not a smoking gun…
The old pick-ups do give 166 Ohms, which is within book spec, but of course that don’t mean they are working worth shit, just means they aren’t burnt out.
Bitch is cranking and you can hear / feel the compression and she is pumping vapours like she should, just needs a fucking spark… then I could have gotten on with making a new wiring loom…
There is a moral here, the moral is the new TCI unit and coils cost me 200 Euros inc shipping, the new Yuasa YTX-20 about 120 Euros, new plugs 15 to 20 Euros, this morning I discovered that whatever tosser I lent my cable crimp tool to hasn’t returned it, and I only had a 2.99 piece of shit, so went out and bought another stripper / crimper, 45 Euros, while we are at it get some more crimps and heat shrink, another 25 Euros… we’re up to 450 ish Euros
Fucking pick-ups are only about 15 Euros each, and about 110 for the new rectifier, so I already spent the bulk of the fucking money to make a 100% brand new ignition and wiring system, oh yeah, 130 Euros for the two carb rebuild kits and consumables etc.
And because the bitch did not get a spark and start, I cannot sit here and say OK, Johnny 5 is alive, now I can proceed and make the wiring loom and all the other shit I have to do to turn this from a project in the workshop to a street legal and reliable bike.
So these days I have free are, at least as far as project bike is concerned, wasted.
All because I delayed buying the pickups and rectifier, because I was trying to save on an oil change…. because I decided this time to buy the bitch some semi synthetic instead of the usual generic stuff, and that shit is 80 Euros a gallon… plus a new filter.
And new headlights are on the list, and the saddle needs remaking or replacing, and being honest the tank needs swapping for a larger one, as it is the old one is full of rust flakes and the pet-cock is seized solid, needs a final drive chain too, so it’s not like it isn’t going to be a money pit for a while yet… I suspect there is a 1,000 Euros without any problems at all in those little things.
And I haven’t, or won’t, actually save any money, by the time the job is done.
And as I type this, the bitch hasn’t sprung into life and filled my workshop with noise and smell and carbon monoxide, which is a bummer.
And this is a really simple ignition system, you just plug things together, there is no adjustments of any kind that can be made to the ignition electrics.
And I still managed to fuck it up, which is the only definition that really applies when you get up with the plan to start that bitch today…
Spoiling a ship for ha’p’orth of tar.
And because I scared myself a couple of days ago, you know “it’s been a few years since the bitch was run last” and then someone asks you when, exactly… so you start digging through your electronic files.
July 2005, so coming up on NINE mother-fucking years, not “a few”, fucking NINE…. it’s getting to the stage of one of those youtube vids, and here she is, last started in 1926….
I was fortunate to grow up in a scholastic system that embraced apartheid, no, so that crap about black and white, but segregating boys and girls.
Girls are like any other wonder drug of programming, the more you are exposed to them, the more alluring they are and the more of their shit you will put up with and the more effort you will expend to gain acceptance by them.
Classrooms are *utterly* different too, not only are there no girls for anyone to impress, you don’t get any “jocks” either… sure, you get one or two boys who start shaving at 14 and are 6 foot and kick ass on the sports fields, but since there are no girls to idolise them they end up talking to everyone, and the class dweeb is quite likely to take the piss out of them to their face.
Anyone who went through old school men only military training (indeed one of the channels our place fed into was the armed forced officer training lark) will know what I am talking about here, Molseworth Jr might be a right cunt, but he was stuck in the same jug as you, which made him one of yours.
Of course all the shit you get from everyone *else* is that everyone who goes to a boys only school is a right homo / shirt-lifter / cocksucker / takes it up the ass / etc.
For my sins I did some short stints in ordinary mixed schools, and I can tell you, anecdotally and factually, that there is *far* more limp wristed wimpy faggy pathetic shit going on in mixed schools… and I’m not talking percentage points or even orders of magnitude, I’m talking a total fucking absence in one and a total lack of anything masculine in the other.
These (boarding) schools used to be particularly harsh awakenings for 11 year olds (at the time 11/12 years old was the 1st year of senior school, hence 1st years or 1st form, in your 5th year you sat O level exams and could in theory leave school and go to work, or stay two more years, lower and upper 6th, sit your A levels, and then go to work, or go on to university of college or an academy / OTC etc) who had up until then either avoided school altogether in the colonies, or managed to attend a local day school, and it doesn’t matter which school you went to 1st and 2nd form was always referred to by some name that involved them shitting themselves, because they were the lowest rung on the ladder.
So the little shits are crying themselves, literally, to sleep every night, and nobody gives a shit, get over it kid, and three weeks later a parcel arrives from home, mummy has sent you your favourite chocolate cake and stuff…. which promptly gets stolen / confiscated / taken by the 3rd former who has the unpleasant duty of nursemaiding you little shits this week, making sure you are all up dressed and washed and down for breakfast, making sure your homework is done during prep, making sure you are washed undressed and in bed for lights out.
Which is only fair, because that is what said 3rd former went through when he was a 1st former…
By the second term of the 1st form, you learned to divvy up all your treats instantly amongst everyone else in the dorm, and if the 3rd former takes it first, say nowt, better still invite him to have some, politely, and he will, and you will get the rest back to divvy up.
It was brutal, in the sense that the regime was so powerful compared to the individual that you could not beat it, you could to some extent choose the manner in which you conformed, but conform you will. Choice does not enter into it.
Several years ago I bumped into a chap, managing director of a company, twin screw diesel yacht and villa in Spain, Jag and Bentley in the direway, yadda yadda, hadn’t seen him for years, “Hey Stinky” I said.. no malice in it.
That was his nickname, and everyone had one, every year had a stinky.
Stinky was the quiet shy guy who was too embarrassed to take his clothes off and wash and shower (not that the showers were ever more than lukewarm) with everyone else, and who didn’t understand having to do shit for himself, so every week on the bed the top sheet went on the bottom, new top sheet and new pillow case, and all your laundry went into the old pillow case, so stinky started to smell.
So the other boys ragged on him, which just made him even more turtle in a shell, so about six weeks into his first term they throw him and all his clothes in the showers, on cold, with a bar of soap, and then the bedclothes, (2 sheets 1 pillowcase 1 blanket 1 counterpane I set of pyjamas) too, and tell him, wash yourself and your clothes stinky, and every morning and evening we do not see you washing with everyone else, we do it to you again…. so stinky spent the night in damp pyjamas in a damp bed, shivering.
He never had to be told again, but 6 years later in the upper 6th he was still “stinky” to the rest of his form, and he shall forever remain so, but only to us.
(In the spirit of full disclosure, stinky responded to my greeting with “Hey cunty”, as I was a procurer of “cunt books” eg porn mags I used to swag (steal) from the 6th)
That sort of thing was not an example of brutality, or anything that stood out, that was perfectly normal day to day routine.
“Sport” was of course compulsory, rugby union, running, hurdles, javelin, discus, and cross country, and of course gym 2 hours a week indoors, you all did them all, no exceptions, no excuses, no allowances. You did not have to be any good at them, but you fucking well did them all.
Broken bones would get you sent off to hospital, anything less it was a sticking plaster or an aspirin, take your pick…. Of course anyone actually being given an aspirin or sticking plaster by the school nurse / matron was purely apocryphal.
If, and I mean if, anyone questioned or commented on any of this, it was to remark that “Boys need toughening up”.
To be strictly fair, the girls equivalents weren’t a hell of a lot better, substitute hockey for rugby and domestic science for woodwork, but the regimes were broadly similar.
But in the same vein, they were unable to have any opportunities to show off in front of boys, so it cut both ways.
Invariably there was always a girls school not too far from a boys school, and so fraternisation with the enemy was inevitable, but it happened out of school hours, and if you got caught actually fucking or worse still there was a pregnancy involved, both parties got expelled “for bringing the school into disrepute” which was of course code for being so stupid you got caught.
Again, anyone who has been through old school military will tell you, just because some things are strictly controlled and regimented, it doesn’t mean there is no wriggle room… and it makes the small victories all the more important.
One of the rules was you always had to wear the standard school tie, and yes, you had to year it around the collar of your shirt, nowhere else, and you also had to tie your tie in a Windsor Knot.
No room for expression there… right?
Wrong.
One of my claims to fame was I always had the smallest knot of anyone ever on my school ties, if you tried to just pull it tight eventually you would tear the thing, I had a secret method that involved the application of certain things that made the threads soft and stretchy and slidely, and you only needed to slide the knot a few inches to take the tie off and put it on, you never had to actually undo it… a win for me amongst my form mates, and a win for me from our chemistry teacher.
So…
The point of all this is you go out into the world after school, and girls are no aliens, you know about them, you aren’t shy or anything, the big thing is you utterly lack the 5 or 6 years of absorbing their shit that you get in mixed schools.
Public (UK public, US private) school girls have said the same thing to me, mixed school guys are such effeminate wimps, or troglodytes… like Nigel above.
When you cater to boys and girls simultaneously, it damages both.
The Hermit is therefore someone who does not habitually socialise and acclimatise with whatever it is they are being a hermit from.
It’s the same sort of gap you get between someone who has never been in the services, and someone who has, they always know each other apart… almost always… ex services guys always think ex boarding school guys are all ex services, even though many of them are not, and are ex cons instead..lol
MGTOW is Hermit life.
Abstaining from female company, especially if you are also able to do so in the work environment, makes you much less socialised and acclimatised and attuned to da wimminz.
In my entire adult life, I have co-habited with females for perhaps 10 years.
Of those ten years, perhaps only 2 were actually sharing a double bed, I’d say another 2 years of twin beds, and the remaining 6 years as separate beds and bedrooms.
For the other 20+ years, I have lived alone. Bachelor Boy.
Hermit Boy.
The “culture shock” for me to move into, for example, some skank’s house who has two daughters, and be the new man of the house and play happy families, is probably as great as the culture shock stinky faced all those years ago.
And, crucially, by the time you do adapt, and socialise, and acclimatise, you will no longer be the same person.
You will no longer be the Hermit.
I am at an age now when many factors conspire against me, there are logarithmically less *young* wimminz interested in someone who is mid fifties, as opposed to mid forties, it’s not a big step in age, but it is for many a step too far.
Kids are another thing, I may be biologically capable, but temperament wise I’m getting too old for all that shit, I’ve seen the film before, and it wasn’t what it was cracked up to be, more re-runs don’t interest me.
Wimminz aren’t blind to this shit either, they just see an old dog who can’t be made to learn new tricks, and there ends their interest… huge, vast, unimaginable difference for a wimminz between a “bachelor” and a “confirmed bachelor”
“Confirmed bachelor” is just as alluring and attractive to wimminz as “Hermit”
Which brings me, finally, to the point of this post.
I see lots of younger MGTOW types, and they are trying to have their cake and eat it, and they will cite George Clooney as indicative of something about wimminz here.
They want to be the socially aware and attuned and acceptable Hermit, who gets offers all the time from 7’s and 8’s and 9’s, but who still does their own thang.
It don’t work like that guys.
I did not end up spending most of my life, and in all probability the rest of my life, living as a Hermit because I chose to live in a cave, and chose to not get involved with Julie and Jackie and Jane.
I ended up in a cave because I became a Hermit, and no fucker wants to live in a cave, least of all with me.
And THAT is what you have to make peace with bro.
You can either be your own Hermit, and accept that no wimminz wants to live in a cave, least of all with you, or you can quit being a Hermit, and allow yourself to be made over into something else entirely, a different person entirely.
Self and isolation, or the death of self and companionship, that is the choice.
Make it well, because by the time you get to my age, which will happen faster than you think, the die will be cast and you won’t get a say in it no more.
Before I dig too far into this, some personal anecdotes.
Back in the day, I decided to experiment with liquid cooled computing. Y’all know the score, much talk about Cray and Flourinert, and a couple of hobby things with water cooling closed circuit style.
Lots of talk, lots of speculation, but no real meat and potatoes.
So, I had a socket 754 Intel lying around having just upgraded, time to play.
After much research I found that “mineral oil” was the thing to go for, for the home hobbyist / experimenter, so where to get it? Eventually I found a place to buy “liquid paraffin”, which is the same thing by a different name, it’s a horse laxative, and you can buy it in gallon cans for not a lot of money.
This stuff is good because it is reasonably viscous, clear, not very hygroscopic, and quite hard to ignite.
So I proceeded to find an old (glass, not acrylic, for thermal transfer and dissipation) fish tank, and set about cutting bits of acrylic to carry everything, and also stripped EVERYTHING down to bare bones, PSU the lot.
I decided to be really clever, and use a pair of WD Raptors (these were fucking expensive back in the day) striped for speed, and cooled by the oil, but out of contact with it, by way of sitting them in some ziplok bags, and yes, I tested the bags for 72 hours first to see if they would degrade.
Now, no well done experiment is a failure, because they all lead to valid and useful data, and such was the case here.
What really killed this experiment was the oil wicking up the insides of the SATA cables, osmosis style, out of the oil and back down again to the SATA connectors in the HD’s and thence to the inside of the HD’s, which of course killed em, stone fucking dead.
It took 10 days to wick in, but it got there in the end.
However, there were quite a few other interesting “discoveries”
1/ It was genuinely, truly, totally fucking silent.
2/ It did not necessarily cool the PC better, but it cooled it more evenly, eg the range of temperatures across the mainboard were all within a degree or so of each other.
3/ It weighs a lot more than you think.
4/ Note the 120mm fan, yes, fans do work in oil, just slower, and pure convection alone wasn’t nearly as optimal as sticking a fan in there to stir it up.
5/ note also the fans on CPU and northbridge, same story.
6/ In an air cooled PC the coolant “leaks” everywhere, but since it is air it don’t matter, in this one the coolant leaked everywhere too, hence the containment vessel of the fish tank… the big difference is the thermal mass of the contained coolant, this thing would take 30 minutes of gaming to even nudge the overall coolant temp.. I experimented first with 4 x 150 watt aquarium heaters BTW.
7/ You really, really, really need a fixed and stable build, hardware wise, it’s hard to describe the mess when you try to pull one component or add some RAM etc…. once it is lagged in oil you DARE not put any power on it after you pull it, and thin layer of oil is a great insulator.
8/ Add some LED’s, and one word, “Aurac” from Blakes 7, woot…
Prior to this you ended up running air cooled, and if you ran rack mount kit, particularly 1U kit, that meant lots of noisy little 40 mm fans running in harmonic like bombers engines, this shit on the right was in the hallway, and you could hear it all over the house.
But ultimately, this back-story is just that, it is a back-story to highlight what it means to indulge in Personal Computing.
Nowadays world and dog can go out and buy a Raspberry Pi, , its the modern equivalent of those 100 electronic experiments peg board toys you used to get, which were 10 different ways to wire up a bell, 10 different ways to wire up a light, and … no… no op amp, 555 timer, or anything else, so everyone who bought the fucking thing is going to do the same “experiments”
I know, I’ll go and buy a 3d extrusion printer, and download the same skull file everyone else does, the same iphone cover everyone else does, the same naked woman everyone else does.
It’s not PERSONAL.
The big problem with this is that unless you get to play with something, you don’t get to learn… I made a living for a year or two in the sweet spot between discovering that 99% of laptop batteries contained 18650 li-on cells, and all you needed was them and a charge regulating circuit and the “fuse” chip, all of which I could get from china cheap and fresh, and after-market batteries becoming a mainstream business… an option that was only possible because I could play, which is something you can only do with YOUR property.
YOU never own an iphone or ipad, it is “sold” to you under licence.
Now we are even going away from that, cloud compute is all about using some remote CPU power, so your device doesn’t need any, some remote storage, so your device doesn’t etc… and you really can’t play with something that is 75 millisecond ping away somewhere, who knows where…
This part has been delayed a week, because I have ummed and aahed about this next bit.
Amongst the other junk I have in my workshop are a couple of ex UK MOD EHT sources, they came out of the back of big radar sets, 12 VDC current limited to an amp or two in and a nice fat spark at the rate of 5 to 7 a second out that will jump a 5 mm air gap with ease, so we are probably looking at around 10 KV minimum.
I got these and a dozen big 3 farad 350 V caps for an experiment.
A couple of years ago a guy I know is around, we start playing, we discuss this, I say yes, the voltages are *similar* to a piezo kitchen gas igniter, but if it goes to your finger while the gas igniter will make you yelp and then it will pass, with these babies it will really fucking hurt, and it will still hurt 24 hours later too, much more current (I have had this argument before too, coil or electronic ignition vs a magneto) so don’t ask me why but we got to zapping some various old bits of electronics, and it turning into junk.
He decides he wants a EHT generator.
I tell him plasma globes have the same sort of thing, (but much less powerful) just break it apart, throw away the globe and the base, you’ll get a tiny PCB and the EHT wand and a 12 V supply jack.
Couple of days later he has made this thing up, he shows it to me, 8 x AA cells and a bunch of self amalgamating tape and an old marigold glove and he has a portable zapper.
I have no idea why, maybe it is just me, but it never occurred to me to question WHY he wanted this, and it was only later that I recalled saying “oh yes, won’t make a difference” and proceeded to demonstrate that applying the EHT to the end of a CAT5 cable, with the other end 10 metres away plugged into some crappy old D link 4 port home switch, was still instant death to the D link.
Only later being after (I can talk about this now) I heard that the ISP he worked at lost a whole rack of switches and routers, basically half their infrastructure.
No obvious reason why either, the whole lot just didn’t do what it should, some boxes power cycled endlessly, some powered up but did nothing, some didn’t power up, none of them worked, and of course the server room was sealed, and he didn’t have a key, but he did have access to the other end of the CAT5 that went into one port one ONE of these switches….
This is not an isolated incident, I know, but can’t prove, of at least a dozen other incidents of this scale, all different people and places, it’s the dirty little secret, JEDEC vramp and uramp, silicon chips and proms and fpga etc are all hideously susceptible to high voltages, and if you limit the current there are no visual clues whatsoever.
I only discovered this by accidentally meeting a guy called Tom, I needed an electronics whizz for a project, I found Tom, Tom made a steady living potting two female RS232 sockets in a short piece of poly pipe, of course inside the poly pipe and potting was an opto-isolator.
So periodically someone new stumbles across this dirty little secret, and decides to have some mischief, or revenge, or just plain I wonder what will happen if,,, oh shit… and because almost nobody experiments any more, nobody but the likes of me has any inkling what is going on when a bit of expensive electronics suddenly stops working or starts acting very strangely.
Now I personally know of at least two people who have used this method to circumvent what we can call “reluctant” “cough” Seagate “cough” warranty departments, who would accept a DOA return, but not something with an intermittent fault, or which worked, but nowhere near where it was supposed to.
It is anecdotal and a rumour, but I was told of one northern uk police department where an orifice accidentally discharged his taser getting into the car, the barbs went into the wiring loom under the dash / footwell, and took out *everything* not just the onboard computers and digital video, but the vehicle electronics as well.
The point that I am trying to address here, is that the lack of Personal Computing removes the opportunity from everyone to learn anything of any depth greater than what icon to hit with what gesture to open an app, and this includes those who end up designing, building, maintaining and working with this kit.
Everything has a switch mode PSU now, which is a *very* flexible piece of kit, gone are the days (in countries with a 220 VAC mains supply) of causing much hilarity and issuance of magic smoke by turning off a co-workers PC at the wall, putting the switch on the back of the PSU to 110, and sitting back and waiting.
But the flexibility of the switch mode PSU and its ability to “eat” almost anything has also led to the creation of a whole new breed of UPS’s and inverters that put out modified sine wave, where modified means it looks like a set of escher stairs, it’s got fuck all to do with sine waves.
Because I love you guys, and I am a generally fluffy and cool guy, I just went out back, pulled a brand new DC power supply from a brand new in the box 500 quid cisco router with 12 VDC in, and look what you see.
(Yes, I know it looks like AC, but it is really just the ripple on DC)
0.2 V per div, and three pics taken about a second apart, not only is there AC ripple, it is quite significant, and variable, ranging from around 0.6 V to 1.0 V, there is also a significant amount of higher order transient noise, you can SEE where the DC rectification is being done badly by cheap components, that themselves rely on some sort of capacitance and tolerance in the input stage of the device being powered.
Yes, it’s a shitty old single trace 40 MHz Hitachi, but it still works, and it is light years ahead of “no scope and relying on the label on the device in question”
Now I’m not an electronics guy, but to me, if I was telling an electronics guy to build me a 12 VDC PSU for a 500 quid router, and he produced that, the cunt would be looking for a new job.
I’d expect 12 VDC plus or minus 0.12 V, which is only 1% tolerance, and I’d expect fuck all ripple, which is only a couple of 50 cent caps in the PSU output stage… which would also prevent start up spike and shit.
Now, with all of the above, I am not suggesting that ordinary commercial kit should be able to withstand the direct application of 10 KV, but I am suggesting that only a fucking lunatic would interconnect a rack containing upwards of 100k worth of kit with CAT5, which is an ELECTRICAL conductor first and foremost, and not say to themselves, hmmm, this means that anything that hits anything in this rack is going to hit everything in this rack, I might wanna take some precautions here…
220 or 110 volts AC would have done as good a job as the EHT, it would just have left evidence, magic smoke and burnt tracks and tripped breakers. Hell I can remember seeing articles about in in dead tree magazines, cat 5 and RJ 11 and coax all wired to mains sockets and called variations of “modem buster” etc.
Personal Computing is then the difference between knowing various bits and pieces of biology and medicine and first aid, and having an app on your iphone to take your pulse.
Personal computing is the difference between owning and maintaining and driving your own car, or calling the cab company, and not actually knowing if you are being taken on the quickest and most direct route… you see, there are always follow on bits of ignorance that lead from initial bits of ignorance… give up the role of driver, you give up the role of navigator too…
Computing has become such a fundamental and intricate part of every day life, that a lack of personal computing of necessity means being ignorant of much of every day life.
It simply is not possible for you to grasp or understand most of it.
High Frequency Trading, you have no hope of understanding what it REALLY is, unless you have prior knowledge of the old racket where the mob used to get the horse race results from a town 500 miles away before the bookies did… hell there was even a good film about a guy who did it in Australia, can’t remember what it is called now.
If you, reading this, could see all those pictures and knew what they depicted without the need for captions, and if you could follow everything discussed here without the need to google it, then you are blessed my son, and I’ll wager, you are someone who has direct experience of Personal Computing.
If you had difficulty, then I will wager you have no direct experience of Personal Computing, just Computing, with your sealed for life, non customisable, as it comes from the factory, tamper proof, sold under licence only, computing device.
And as computing is inherent to modern life, that should scare you… lots.
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In closing, EHT is no fucking joke, any spark is an arc, and any arc is a conductor, if you happen to create a current path via an arc to some powerful source, eg 440 VAC, the consequences could be not merely painful or expensive but fatal.
If you want to play with EHT, at the very least always keep your feet insulated from ground, and one hand in your pocket, preferably your favourite hand.
If you want to zap things with EHT, see the first point above, disconnect them from ALL power sources first, and all further electrical connections and interconnects.
I went to one of “those” schools, expensive, so you had 11 year old boys running around calling each other cretins instead of shitbag.
Every sunday one unfortunate inmates H^H^H^ pupils would be selected to go up on the altar and read the gospel, you were told a few days beforehand both that it was your turn, and what gospel you were expected to read, so you could practice.
Mine was supposed to the the letter to the ephesians, whoever the fuck they were, but on the morning in question I was told no, that one isn’t being done now, it’s going to be teh letter to teh cretans….. so I got dared to stand up and say the letter to teh cretins… no fucking way I said, I’m already in enough trouble and second in the all time school league table of corporal punishments in one term.
But, the human brain is a funny old thing, and so there I was, desperately telling myself to say cretans, not cretins, and so the words pop out of my mouth, St Paul (or whoever it was) letter to the cretins… much tittering from the assembled, except for the warders H^H^H^ teechers… oh shit…
For some reason today I was taken back to that time, I said the thing I was telling myself not to say under any circumstances.
It was about morals, and ethics, and standards.
These fuckers running stuff, they have none, so any that we have a merely a hindrance.
“What’s worse, one child being raped or one thousand children dying?”
Obviously it’s the thousand dying, it doesn’t require any thought or computation at all, in fact the only time the answer is any different is if the one in question is my own flesh and blood, and the thousand are in some far off land.
I dunno, maybe it is a function of increasing age, but all the sacred moral and ethical cows are dying like plump piglets in a biafran village…. and fuck you and everyone else who rode in on the horse that tries to gaslight that question above into me being pro-paedo.
You know, we all have bigger fucking fish to fry, and bigger cunts to hang from trees on the village green.
If I hadn’t been separated on pain of imprisonment from my own children, I am 100% confident in my ability to protect them from any hordes of wandering paedos…. protecting them from our glorious leaders, not so fucking much.
Of course if your kids are dead in shallow graves from the socio-economic collapse and world war three, they have nothing to fear from paedos, it just seems a little extreme to me as a countermeasure.
Come a global collapse, say a friend asked me to care for and raise her daughters, as in hers, no ours, none of my DNA in there, what’s in it for me? If I don’t get to fuck them?
I’m not asking this question from a paedo perspective, I’m asking it from a purely mercenary perspective.
The *reason* I am asking it from a purely mercenary perspective is to highlight the hypocrisy, our western (which decreasingly means US foreign policy) attitude to the Ukraine is after all a purely mercenary one, as was our attitude to Syria, Iran, Iraq, Libya, etc etc etc.
And if it is all hypocrisy, then surely hypocrisy on a grand scale involving tens or hundreds of thousands is worse than hypocrisy one small child at a time.
Which is the greater evil?
And then ask yourself, what policy at home allows our glorious leaders to continue that, with our tacit blessing, while also rendering us unable to compete, as the man armed with morals and ethics will surely lose to the mercenary.
I was already given the choice of sacrificing myself futilely, or simply walking away, either way my kids are taken from me by force by the state.
You think any other child on the planet is worth more to me?
They are not worth anything to our glorious mercenary leaders, so it is you, dear reader, with your morals and your ethics and your standards, who is out of fucking touch.
So you’re having a dream, and next thing you know you’re riding in a vehicle that you know is scrapped, rapping with a guy you know is dead, discussing some shit that happened yesterday, and then you’re flying, it’s all crazy impossible shit, but it’s just a dream hey….
… so then some fuckwit will talk about interpreting dreams, how they are the mind’s way of sorting shit, analysing shit, filing shit… it’s all bollocks.
It’s all bollocks because dreams are just the ripples on the surface of the mind, of course in a dream, nothing that breaks the dream is permitted, because after all, this isn’t a scenario being run in the whole mind, you may well have 16 gigs of ram in there, but that shit is asleep, and the dream is just an 8 kilobyte demo being run in the on board cache, it just doesn’t have the processing power to run a proper simulation, so not only are corners cut and reality suspended for the duration, but the very fact that corners have been cut and reality has been suspended is itself prohibited from being seen… there just ain’t the system resources.
Back in the day I played with dogs and acid, I was on the acid, the dogs weren’t, but I got an insight into small brain size, intellect wise, you can process shit in great detail, but only one thing at a time, easy to get distracted, or surprised, and the last thing you were doing is just forgotten man.
So I’m chatting to one of my fellow employees today over a coffee or three after yet another pointless job, we’re shooting the shit, and it gets to HQ staff, which includes some of the wimminz, who are as much use as tits on a bull… and we discuss the latest piece of insanity from a skank ho I used to pump and dump before she got too crazy for me to put up with.
So he says to me “Do you think all wimminz are crazy then?”
So I look at him and think for a moment, and say “It is interesting, the way you phrase that question, you have a default assumption that all wimminz are not crazy, and I must argue that they are…. What if that is not the case, why start from an assumption that being crazy is not the default state for wimminz?”
Which gets us into a potentially difficult discussion about what is the definition of crazy, before we can say crazy is a default yes or no assumption for all wimminz.
Except it isn’t, to me, all that difficult, if you listen to the words people actually use, eventually they are telling you all about themselves, not what they SAY, or CLAIM, but the words they actually use, for example wimminz will talk about another chapter, like their life is a fucking book, eg a fucking fictional novel…. hello… did you listen?
And the best / easiest layman’s description that I can come up with that answers the question, WHAT THE FUCK, when some insane act or deed or words come out of a wimminz, is this.
It’s all a fucking dream.
Corners are cut and reality is suspended for the duration, and the 9 million ton elephant in the corner is the fact that corners are cut and reality is suspended for the duration.
What’s the phrase you hear an old man use time and time and time again when talking to a young man who is cunt struck from hanging around wimminz all the time.
Fucking wake up boy.
Listen to the words.
The yanks (used to) say “airhead”, but it means the same thing, the bitch’s skull is full of dreams, and not dreams like men mean, dreams about being a racing driver or shit, but DREAMS, dreams that embody cut corners and suspended reality, ludicrous, preposterous, stupid shit that no conscious waking intellect could maintain.
Cartoons.
So, lets do some empirical analysis.
You wish to achieve a change from state A to state B in a wimminz.
You have two options, which one is a logical conscious male brain likely to select as the strategy most likely to work, and what will an experienced red pill mother-fucker tell you will actually work?
1/ I’m the man you’ve always dreamed of, and you’re my bitch.
2/ I’m a reliable and practical man with a trade and many skills, you’ll never have to worry about your car breaking down or the washing machine door refusing to open, I have a good job, the family is healthy so genetically our kids would be good…. yadda yadda yadda.
We have already stipulated the the REASON corners are cut and reality is suspended in dreams is simply because the tiny piece of the brain doing the dreaming simply does not have the processing capacity for anything that complex.
How the fuck do you expect option #2 in blue above to fit into said 1k input buffer without destroying the whole dream state?
Wake the fuck up boy.
Here is a FUCKING FACT for your waking and conscious intellect to process.
You KNOW, either first or second hand, of a whole fucking raft of cases where a wimminz wakes up, having dreamt that her boyfriend cheated on her, and proceeds to give him a fucking hard time for what the dream him did to the dream her, and when he, quite logically, says WTF bitch, you’re giving me shit for something YOU dreamt about in YOUR fucking head, she gets even more irate on his ass….
You KNOW that shit actually fucking happens in the real world.
Is there any way you can explain this shit away in a rational conscious intellect?
Or is it the sort of thing that can only fly in dreamland when you’re riding with a dead guy in a car tat got crushed ten years ago, discussing something that happened to you yesterday, when the car suddenly starts flying….
So why not start with a default assumption that being crazy is the natural state for wimminz, and the definition of crazy in this context meaning to live in a fucking dreamworld.
I mean, really, you take the high all bitches are sane road, and I’ll take the low all bitches are crazy road, and I’ll be in poontang land afore ye…
So, going on from the last part, and the two guys sat 400 yards away from each other on opposite sides of a river, in scenario 1 with two mobile phones, and the network is down so they can’t talk to each other, and in scenario 2 with two walkie talkies, so they can.
In scenario 2 you have a PERSONAL comms device, using the word personal in the same way that personal was used in personal computer originally.
Since it is 2014 and we are all on about the cloud and virtualised services, chromeboxes, chromebooks, Valve Steam, MMORGs, Dropbox, Office 365, Gmail, Hotmail, web hosting, and just about everything else you can think of, it is all excluded from the definition of “personal”.
It is for this reason that I have always been a proponent of the NAS box, and keeping either an old Cobalt RAQ lying around, or an old laptop that you could run AMP on or go the whole hog and go LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) and then whack in all the services required to make it an email and web server and mebbe DNS and DHCP too.
If you can cut the network connection and it either stops working, OR, degrades in any way, it ain’t personal buddy.
Sadly, what we are looking at is an across the board marketing drive to make as many things as possible not personal.
This is compounded by users, a blog I follow now and again is The slog, and as we can see from that linked article, despite many years of battling the technology, the author is still immensely frustrated with computing in general.
The *reason* he is frustrated is quite simple, and ironic, given the stuff he talks about in his blog, not just a failure to adapt and learn, but a refusal to do so.
Guess what, he has bought a crappy little Acer laptop and is whining about the end of XP and why the new browser choice thing in his new laptop is there and why IE doesn’t play nicely with Gmail.
I have precisely zero sympathy.
Same way I had zero sympathy with Bill and others claiming that running a website / blog / forums is so hard and so difficult and so time consuming and so expensive.
You’re fucking doing it wrong, cunts.
You are demanding all the control that you get with PERSONAL computing, and also demanding all the lack of intervention or maintenance or customisation or responsibility that you get with NON-PERSONAL computing.
You can’t have it both ways… a market that Apple exists to exploit, neither fish nor fowl yet claiming to be better than both.
I’m an engineer by trade, been playing with computers since the dawn of personal computing, and my day job is making the network work for business of all sizes up to and including fortune 50. I have designed bespoke computer hardware, and I am not talking about building a custom PC from off the shelf components here. I have access to the very top levels of the backbone itself where the infamous GCHQ / NSA black boxes reside.
*I* am the fucker you want to listen to, if you want an honest and impartial opinion on things like apple build quality or WindowsXP or cloud computing etc.
Not because I am a smart ass know it all who is always right, but because at least I can offer a PROFESSIONAL opinion worthy of consideration.
But, like the comments section in the slog in that article, people who do not work professionally with all this stuff are giving opinions, it’s like going to a murder trial and asking a coroner how likely it is that this death by poisoning was not deliberate, or the DNA lab guy to tell you how unlikely it is that this positive match could occur if the guy in question is actually innocent.
These questions get asked, and opinions get given, but Carl Sagan was no more of an expert than me in wood framing, so why should his opinion even be listened to? If you want to know about the Centauri binary system, ask Sagan, if you want to get to the moon, ask Von Braun…. not Sagan.
The point that I hope you will understand here is that the PERSONAL in personal computing did not JUST mean you had all those resources locally under your control, it also meant you had all those resources locally under your control…lol.. eg, it is not anyone else’s problem to maintain that shit, or manage it, or anything else.
If you were incapable or unwilling to exert that control, then personal computing is not for you.
Do you want central heating and a thermostat that is set once when the system is installed and then you close the cover and never ever look at the system again?
Or do you want a gas or electric or coal fire in each room, you turn it on, you turn it up or down, you turn if off, or forget to, or forget to turn it on so you have no hot water, yadda yadda yadda.
“OH FUCK!” is well known to those who embraced personal computing when it was new, because you had so much control and so little automation that it was a fairly regular occurrence to lose everything you had spent all morning working on, until you learned the lessons, lessons that still serve me to this day in my day job, and make others look at me and say that guy knows his onions, not because I do, but because I don’t take anything on trust and document everything and my first priority is always to be able, at worst, to roll back to the situation when I walked in the door.
And that little word I used up there is the key, automation, it is the flip-side of personal, in this context.
John Ward at the Slog is complaining about IT tech because he isn’t interested in learning how to control stuff so it can be personal and work reliably, and he is also unhappy with the lack of control that comes when things are automated.
There are only two items on the menu, you take full control and responsibility and make it personal, or you opt for the convenience of automation and make it non-personal.
Both options have serious drawbacks, this, essentially, is life.
For whatever reasons, and it is well outside the scope of this series of posts to delve into those reasons, the facts are that the options being presented to Joe Public are trending to ever greater extremes of non-personalised central and automated control, and very small amounts of personalised individual and bespoke tailoring.
It is also outside the scope of this series of posts to delve into what the fuck we are all doing with the vast amounts of personal time liberated by giving up personal control, shades of the modern housewife with the washing machine, tumble dryer, dishwasher, microwave, refrigerator, freezer, mixer, juicer, electric can opener, toaster, hoover, spray cans of everything, disposable nappies and everything, and yet they have no time now to keep a house in order…
But, we can observe, since the personal is disappearing from computing, what are the future likely trends.
Well, if you were in the so called “Arab Spring” riots when the state turned off the mobile networks and internet access, having a copy of serval mesh on your android phone and a Cheshire Catalyst packet radio install / set up on your PC, you are either a dangerous subversive, or a go to guy, depending who has you in their sights.
The Serval Project ***IS*** PERSONAL, in the same sense of the word that personal computers were personal.
Which, in closing part three of this series, gives us something else to think about, before part four.
As I and many others have discussed, in what I describe as Men vs Wimminz and Niggerz, men seek to understand and control and change the environment, wimminz and niggerz seek the easy way out, the short cut, the instant gratification.
Indeed, personal computing has always had this “criticism” levelled at it, it was not all inclusive, it wasn’t cuddly, it wasn’t easy, it didn’t come in pink… and then comes all the shaming language, it is sad, lonely, creepy, living in the basement.
Before I close, I want to take a diversion, into something that at first seems quite irrelevant.
I’m just about to get a new company car, as the lease has expired on the old one.
The new one has automatic lights, automatic wipers, parking sensors (it could have auto park and auto not hit things in front, for extra money) it could but doesn’t have an auto box, it even has an electronic handbrake, with auto hold, stop at the lights and it automatically applies and holds the brakes, until and unless I put it in gear and raise the clutch and depress the accelerator to move off.
This, make no mistake, is a COMPUTER CONTROLLED CAR, but, NOT a personal computer controlled car, I cannot change anything, I can’t change the engine mapping, the auto hold thresholds, the wiper thresholds, nothing.
None of you who have grown up since the computer revolution are really aware of how far these things have penetrated, and why the whole concept of personal computing is so fundamental and important.
Not everything is best done digitally in microseconds, a relaxing coffee, a leisurely shit, a good hard fuck, none of these things would be improved… and yet… when I was a lad, there was no choice, you flicked your zippo open a certain way, you smoked a certain cigarette, you had a way of walking, talking, dressing, the beat goes on, so in some sense I have sympathy for all these wimminz, which is all of them, on dating sites and suchlike demanding that men make an effort and not just the same old lines, but when all the expressions of individuality that we have are removed, and all we have is sterile text, what choice is there?
Even if a wimminz is not on a dating site, a fucking site, whatever, you still end up communicating via SMS, fuckbook update, email, whatsapp.
And also, back when I was a boy and before, you maybe had a “choice” of 50 eligible girls, as in that was the entire pool, now in the digital age, I can click through that many profiles on OKC in one minute.
Yes, this is all yet another aspect of The Personal Computer, or rather what happens when you have computing power that is NOT personal.
And so we move forward into an age they are calling “the internet of things” where everything from refrigerators to lightbulbs are going to be given processing power, and linked together, and yet again, none of it is PERSONAL.
*IF* you find any true personal computing done today in 2014, I guarantee it will be amongst that small sub-set of humanity that is the independent Man going his own way, not the wimminz, not the niggerz, not the corporations, not the states, not the religions or belief systems, not the communities.
It is a revolution AT LEAST as fundamental and significant to humanity as electricity and internal combustion combined, and yet it is a revolution that the majority of humanity want no personal involvement or effort or responsibility for, preferring instead the non-personalised, centralised and automated.
Then, following the other pics, carefully dis-assemble them, strip all the jets and other components, give them a quick clean.
Get a nice clean stainless crock pot, add 150 ml of biological washing powder, and add warm water while stirring to 3/4 full.
Place the ingredients in the crock pot and fill remaining space with warm water.
Place on the gas ring and bring to the boil, then turn the gas down to minimum and simmer gently for 20 minutes.
Turn the gas off and allow to stand, cool, and marinade overnight.
Make proper man coffee
.
In the morning flush with **copious** quantities of warm water, and clean with a toothbrush, preferably one of the ex’s, then fire up compressor and dry, ready to serve.
(before I get stuck in too far, it is already obvious from comments and messages that not everyone agrees with my take, that’s fine, everything I say is always of necessity and personal viewpoint, but that does not necessarily make it invalid, just because it is not your viewpoint, just because it differs from yours… these things are / were true at the time, both to me, and those who I met)
So, in part one we hopefully got the point across that the PC as we know it today, and the OS, is really an iterative function that survived 25+ years of marketing and sales, rather than an iterative function that evolved through 25+ years of refinement and development and natural selection.
If you watched The Pirates of Silicon Valley (itself a retelling rather than a fly on the wall CCTV compilation) hopefully you came away with the idea that Gates and Microsoft won simply because Gates and Microsoft excelled at “business”.
Don’t forget you could just go out and buy a personal computer in 1975, the Altair 8800, this was already out there in the environment that Woz and Jobs and Gates et al found themselves in.
But stories like these are incomplete, in ways that you won’t understand without also having watched things like James Burke’s “Connections” series from the seventies.
You also have to follow stories like BBC Horizon “Now the Chips are Down” from 1977, talking about the “Fairchildren” and Intel and so on, and stories about the development of spinning rust, hard disk technology. And none of the above are sufficient unless you also watched the 8 part series BBS, The Documentary, from 2001, particularly part 8, compression, the true story of PKZip… so many shades of Q-DOS and Microsoft.
And out of this frothing sea of pre-biotic stew, life crept and crawled ashore.
I’m in my fifties, and that is as young as you can be and remember the introduction of consumer devices featuring the electronic transistor in the commercial marketplace…. so in many ways it is also as young as you can be and also remember the silicon chip, and computing, and then personal computing, all coming in for the first time.
So, hell, I have a dial up modem ring-tone on my Samsung Note2, you’d be amazed how few actually know what that noise is….
It’s a bit like meeting some chick in her late thirties, you only have her word on how many cocks she has ridden, how many three/ four / moresomes, how many porn flicks, whereas I grew up with her, I know ALL that shit.
You get some more data points, for example you watch all those films I mention above, which will take you 10 or 12 hours, and now you think you know everything, you don’t, you are just more informed and less ignorant.
You will never get the perspective I have, unless you also went to school, and they taught you about ASCII 5 hole punched tape and matrices, because this was the shit you were going to need to know, in this new world of computers… probably barely 6 years after those schoolroom lessons I had my own 8 bit personal computer, and you typed shit into it on an alphanumeric keyboard to make it work…. to this day I have never either actually PERSONALLY used a punched tape or matrix to program or input data into a computer.
SO, we are talking about Personal Computers, and in many ways this Socket 2011 i7 X79 SSD Win7 job I am typing this on is doing EXACTLY the same job as my first 8 bit monstrosity and acoustic coupler giving me 300 cps and 4/500 quid a month phone bills into various BBS’s etc.
It is allowing and facilitating me communicating with other individuals, too dispersed around the planet to simply walk out my door and 10 minutes down the road to meet.
As Personal Computers advanced, again, my early ones did remarkably similar things, I played games, I played with editing graphics, I played with music, I played with I/O… in many ways it was the same device you’d find at work, was that a work computer or a personal computer, good question.
Because although “personal computer” has one meaning, which is a computer in your home that is not your work computer on your desk at work that your employer owns, it is your personal car, not your company car, it originally had another meaning entirely.
The original meaning of “personal computer” meant “not a thin client or dumb terminal“, eg processing etc was done locally, not remotely on the mainframe.
My mobile phone works this way, it is just a thin client / dumb terminal for the telco “mainframe” network of towers and switching and routing centres etc.
If we are stood 400 yards away from each other on the opposite sides of a river, and the telco “mainframe” goes down, what we now call “no signal”, then we cannot talk to each other or send SMS to each other, these are not “personal” voice and SMS communication devices in the way that two walkie talkies would be.
This is a vital point that you really need to think about and absorb, before we can move on to part 3.
The modern analogy to the personal computing revolution that my generation lived through, is if you could go out and buy a mobile phone, no sim, no telco contract, no nothing, and talk DIRECTLY to any other person on the planet.
DIRECTLY in this case means the call goes directly to them, it doesn’t depend on or route through the telco system at all.
IN THEORY mesh networking could ultimately do this.
In practice the middle ground is no voice calling of any kind, nor 2g, or 3g, or anything else, just wireless network data comms and VOIP, as far as the network is concerned your VOIP call is routed the same way your email is, over the same circuits, with possibly some QOS to differentiate the two, but that is about it.
Once you can grasp this, the universal personal communications device that requires no sim and no telco and no contract and no usage billing or allowances, and nobody else’s permission to use, but makes direct calls to whoever you wish, wherever they are, then you are ready for part three.
Back in the day, I had an Acorn A5000, it needed an OS upgrade, so I contacted Acorn and they sent me, free of charge, a small packed with four EEPROM chips, and that was how you upgraded the OS, remove the four RISCOS 3.0 chips, insert the four RISCOS 3.5 chips, job done.
Speaking as an engineer, sticking the OS in ROM like this is a wonderful thing, it pretty much makes it immune to malware corruption and so on, so I can really *get* the fact that the designers of the Acorn / Archimedes range, being engineers first and foremost, saw this as a fantastic design feature.
The fact is, MS *could* do this, it’s not much different to having the gold build release which is now on DVD, and all the myriad updates downloaded separately, but, you couldn’t actually *apply* them to the OS, you’d have to LOAD them at boot, not PATCH the files in question, still, it could be done, if you were prepared to re-write windows from the ground up.
The middle ground here is flashing a BIOS with an updated later version, it’s not technically impossible, or even very hard to do, the only issue is once you start out from a different design ethos, which is what IBM did with the PC spec, you can no longer do it and remain within the PC spec, technically, you are no longer selling what was once known as an “IBM Compatible PC”
If you have read my recent shit about lightweight cheap craptops and windows 8 and downgrades to windows 7, you’ll be forgiven for having a lot of sympathy for what I am about to say.
The IBM PC spec included the fundamental principle that you could take a bunch of inert but compatible hardware, add initially on floppy, later on CD, now on DVD, the OS install media, and end up with a working PC.
*perhaps* you would then have to whack in some separate floppy / CD / DVD that contained drivers, to make certain components work, or work better, but, and this is crucial, these installers functioned from within a working PC with an already working windows environment and desktop.
*perhaps* your network card would not work without these drivers, perhaps your graphics card would not show the full feature set, perhaps the hard disk worked in PIO mode, but the bottom line was despite all these, you had a working PC, WIMP GUI and all.
So even if you had these relatively minor issues, you could resolve them, trivially, onsite.
Now, going back to the cheapola windows 8 craptops with UEFI etc, (if you haven’t read those posts, perhaps you should now, or this may not make sense) since by definition they utterly fail on every level to do what it says in red text above, particularly the bold underlined sentence at the end, and by utterly fail I mean it is outright impossible to do, not just difficult, or technical, or time consuming, but impossible, to my mind, these devices cannot be called PC’s.
Technically they have more in common with a tablet, forget the fact that they have a keyboard and come in a clamshell case and so on, the only way they can work is if you blow a disk image on to the disk, specifically tailed for that specific set of hardware, at build time.
No longer is it a set of inert components, now the hard disk has an image blown to it.
No longer can you get a functioning windows environment *just* from standard OS install media and inert components alone.
This is a pretty good description of a tablet, or a gaming console, or a set top box, or any other specialised device.
I will ask you to note that throughout the IBM Compatible PC period, which to my mind started with MS Windows 3.1, at no point where servers ever referred to as PC’s, even though they were in many ways broadly similar, and shared many common components, and even common physical characteristics, definitions, layouts, such as ATX etc.
People did not lie so much back then, even for example Dell and Compaq, who had a nasty habit of rewiring cabling a different way from the ATX standard, would correctly call their device a PC, but would not make the false claim that it was an ATX device.
Today, Toshiba and Samsung and probably all the rest of them too make a whole range of devices that are cheap and nasty, cut down UEFI, and are not PC’s.
I haven’t been able to say anything about this before, but thanks to Build 2014 Microsoft has finally let half the cat out of the bag, now you can choose between the truly crap Windows 8 “tiles”, or the classic start menu system, and Sinofsky is history.
See, the thing is, deals were done, and it is the nature of things that it takes a long time from deals being done to the final effects being manifested.
But one of the deals that were done was to do with the saturation of the PC market, nobody was ignorant of the fact that any old XP machine could be given a new lease of life with an SSD, and really, windows 7 only sold because is was pre-installed on new boxen, almost nobody went out and bought the DVD.
Intel wanted to get rid of the BIOS and go with UEFI, it’s cheaper, and allows for hardware to be made more platform agnostic, a north-bridge chip-set written for a X79 can’t be used in much anything else, a generic 32 bit wide bus controller could conceivably be used in almost anything, depending on size and power consumption.
ARM and Samsung were eating everyone else’s lunch, and the nightmare scenario for everyone was a practical and efficient and affordable FPGA, just whack a bunch of them together with interconnects and tell them, you will be the bus controller, you will be the CPU, you will be the gfx subsystem…
Meanwhile Asus and HP and Toshiba and everyone else are looking at the end of the PC hardware market, fuck it, XP and an SSD in an XP era box is good enough, so build costs have to be slashed, if fuckers won’t buy a 1,000 quid laptop, we’ll just have to build a 300 quid laptop, and don’t forget all the OLPC (on laptop per child) hoo hah was doing the rounds.
But, put a like for like OS on this new breed of hardware, and people are going to complain BITTERLY about how slow and crap it is, compared to for example a stinkpad T series.
In fact, the only way you could get marketing to make these things seem attractive is to build the same thing and put Andoid on them, oh.. wait…where is my IE?
And so it was, that the hardware sellers are the tail wagging the dog, responsible for the vast majority of MS operating system and office suite sales, so they say to MS, we want this NEW operating system to look and feel different to the OLD operating system, that way, people cannot compare the two, and secretly, even if they do, they will blame fucking windows, and not our sucky hardware.
Windows 8 is a *good* operating system, put it on *good* hardware and it fucking rocks, you do realise that Windows Server 2012 is just Windows 8 once the first stage bare install is done, then you start adding modules like DHCP / DNS controllers, AD controller, SQL server etc…. so Windows 8 is at heart a fucking server quality OS, it is not a piece of shit.
But, Sinofsky and others agreed to make it look “different to windows 7” because their biggest by far customers in volume terms, hardware builders, demanded it.
I was even told, though I give this somewhat less credibility, that Office365 came from the same place, because frankly trying to run a local copy of Office 2010 on these crapware devices is a lesson in pain and patience.
If you look carefully at the marketing, nowhere will you find these devices actually described as “Personal Computers”, instead they talk about mobile computing, which could as well be applied to my samsung phone… it’s the same as the dearth of “ATX” in blurbs that dell and compaq were punting out a few years ago when they were chasing the desktop biz market, and wanted to undercut everyone else by 200 notes a box.
And so, to conclude part one;
It is important to realise that really good choices made by engineers (put the OS in EEPROM) can fucking bomb when it comes to marketing, because suddenly nobody ELSE can market THEIR shit, using your shit as their platform.
It is important to realise that really clever choices such as the IBM Compatible PC and ATX allowed for a great deal of flexibility, Compaq could rewire the apparently ATX format molex cables and still legitimately claim IBM Compatible PC, they just did not claim it was an ATX, just like almost no craptop claims what chipset it used, but note the previous post on the tosh and stinkpad, the stinkpad DID list the chipset used, it said Intel QM77 Express.
It is important to realise that what an OS looks like and what is does is as important as where you put it, so that other people can use it as their platform in their marketing shit.
It is important to realise that for the bulk buyer, EVERYTHING is customisable, NO supplier, no matter how big, can say there it is, take it or leave it…. a famous example of this was Samsung LCD tellys bought through the Dixons/Curry/Comet group had a cut down operating system compared to the ones bought direct from Samsung or a smaller reseller, which is 100% of how the 46″ 7 series in the Comet window was 200 quid cheaper than the 46″ 7 series in the small resellers window…. you were not buying the same fucking thing.
Windows 8 is actually a great OS, better than Windows 7, IF YOU BUY THE FUCKING OEM INSTALL DVD and DIY, and it is the work of moments to kill the tiles and bring back the classic start menu.
Back in the day, there was a utility that Joe Public could use, to cut the Win98se installed disk footprint down to 17 megabytes, yes, you read that right, megabytes,it was magic for embedded systems that would otherwise have struggled to run windows 3.1…. those tools are still available, just not to joe public, and the win8 install on a new 300 quid craptop has very little in common with the one you get from an OEM DVD.
Even on a cut to the bone minimum spec Atom based device, the BIOS and chipset will account for 2% of the component cost…. call it ten bucks a unit, if your production run is 50,000 units, there is a half a million dollars right there to chip away at, and if you can leverage that and also buy a cut down and fucked up hard disk, with a weedier than wholesale onboard chipset and drive interface code, and save another ten bucks a disk, but it doesn’t matter, because you no longer have a requirement to do a bare metal install, and so on and so forth.
Now Microsoft, you want to come to this party, and be the per-installed OS on this range of 50k units, and the 5 sister ranges, which are basically all the same thing with some arbitrary marketing crippling going on, well, there’s quarter of a million sales of windows and office up for grabs, OK, we just need you to go ahead and alter this a bit… cheers…
Device A B and C are identical, apart from the performance and price, and turning A into B into C is literally identical to remapping the ECU in your car, sure, pay the licence and we will unlock the other core, pay another licence and we will unlock the core clock multiplier by another two x.
The difficulty here is that you as the consumer will make only one single purchase, will not be aware of any of these back room shenanigans, and will do exactly what the craptop manufacturers want, THEY made a sale, YOU blame Microsoft and Windows 8.
It is fact, and it is truth, that from place A decision A1 which leads you to place B is a perfectly valid and sane and optimal decision, and from place B decision B1 leads you to a place C, and so on.
It is also fact, and also truth, that you can find yourself in place W, the only options you can see are more valid and sane and optimal decisions, which will lead you to X, Y and Z….
and yet….
… simultaneously, you can find yourself in place W, and find that only a morass of insanity and stupidity can possibly explain how you got there, from place A.
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions”
Sadly we have also come to a place where the person in place W can all in their defence the fact that none of the decisions A1 to V1 inclusive, when taken individually, which is they way they took them, were perfectly rational and normal and legal and it’s really not my fault so help me out here.
And in truth, it’s hard not to have some sympathy for that argument, or the person who finds themselves in place W, but there is a difference between feeling sympathy, and excusing.
You and you alone must carry the responsibility for being in place W, and all those decisions A1 to V1 inclusive.
———————————————————————-
If “place W” is the cell you spend your last night in before heading out to see madam guillotine in the morning, that text in purple will be applied to you.
If “place W” is a senior position in government or finance or service industry, it won’t.
I have long maintained that if you are hit by a bullet, it makes not the slightest difference to you, or the wound, or anything else practical, if it was a deliberate enemy act or an accidental blue on blue chance in a million.
But there comes a point when it comes to mitigating risk a, so Nukinnd consequences where you go from “I guess it is *possible* that could happen” to “It’s only a question of time“, and that fact is if you make decisions in succession as described above, A1 to V1 inclusive, then it is only a question of time.
It only becomes I guess it is possible if each subsequent decisions factors in ALL the previous positions and places, and the additional overall command choice is made, is this going to move me nearer to A or to z, if things go wrong?
We are essentially describing the difference between men, and wimminz and niggerz, I’ve talked before about decision trees.
Even if you have NO other information, simply choosing the option that maximises the future possible choices is always the best option, so nuking Milford Haven in September is better than nuking it tomorrow, something may arise in June that makes me want to go there, I can’t imagine what right now, but that’s the whole fucking point innit.
The options in case of course have to be real, not illusory, so giving me the option of passing up on a fuck with the local village bike, and passing up on a fuck with some gorgeous billionairess Ukrainian sex bomb are not the same thing.
Similarly the offer of a fuck now, and a fuck tomorrow, are not the same thing.
Invariably, when hindsight says that, for example, decision H1 was a bad choice, what it really means is that neither were all the options actually considered, nor were all of the options that were considered unweighted, and considered only on their own merits, and not on a perceived end goal.
You may have seen the video doing the rounds of an Aventador ploughing into a small cheap french car in London, sure, the Lambo driver was clearly exceeding the speed limit, but also clearly the other driver cut across the traffic.
Neither of these are uncommon in city traffic, indeed you can argue that if you tried to do everything properly you would not make any progress at all, but, it doesn’t affect the fact that neither driver actually thought that their current actions had about 5 seconds to get them into an “accident” and a situation that neither one of them would have voluntarily chosen.
In common with most if not all of the infamous Russian dash cam car crash videos, once you replay events there is a crushing inevitability about them all, and yet, none of them deliberately set out to wrap it up.
I was always “lucky” riding down the roads on my motorsickle, I’m still here with two arms and two legs, but you get lucky by always having as many options as possible about where on that road you were going to go…. this is not an analogy to the text in red above about even if you have no other data, always choose the thing that gives you the most future options, this is EXACTLY that very same thing, just one of millions of actual practical applications of it.
If you leave yourself the room and therefore time to go left or right or just put it down and sit on it, you got so many more options that the other guy who crowds the offside rear of the car in front looking to overtake.
I know, I’ll get on my mountain bike and do this 10 foot jump on to concrete, I mean really, just how many options are you leaving yourself, bike meets nuts, face meets concrete, arms meet street furniture, etc etc… oh yeah, and that one chance of “I pull this stunt off”
FOR
FUCKING
WHAT
Did these cunts not grow up playing and injuring themselves and so learning the lesson that some “stunts” are just plain fucking stupid????
Apparently not.
Rand is quoted as saying something along the lines that you can deny reality, but you can’t deny the effects of denying reality.
Rand was wrong, because there is a difference between denying reality and actually putting it to the fucking test.
I must have been six or seven when my dad warned me that a knife I was playing with was sharp, I said no it isn’t dad, and proceeded to prove it by drawing the blade across the palm of my other hand, and watched with horror as it opened up and blood flowed out and it started to hurt, a lot…
Sympathy my ass, he just looked at me and shook his head in disgust and said “stupid boy”
Same shit with falling out of trees and shooting each other with bows and arrows and air rifles and throwing stones and cutting down trees and setting fire to things and building dams and all the rest.
If you didn’t get the opportunity to fuck up in small and unimportant and painful ways, you didn’t learn just how much fucking up could hurt, or how much longer that hurt lasted than any short term wins of gains you got from doing the thing in question anyway…
You know, like, It’s not my fault that based upon my (truthful) answers to 300 OKCupid questions, it has decided that the only thing that gets an 80% or greater match is 16, slim body, blonde hair, pretty face, and monster tits, or that no black chick ever scores more than 0%, or that all the chicks with red dyed hair or hoopy earrings come up as 99% enemy.
It’s just that I made enough mistakes along the way to learn some lessons, so now my answers aren’t what they once might have been.
I’ll level with you, there is a reason that the man (me) my psycho skank ho ex described to the secret family courts as violent and dangerous and aggressive didn’t go from being fucking angry but in control to losing my temper and getting medieval on her ass and basically fucking up all her shit for life.
The reason was the stepping stones of reasonable response and escalation to her response and escalation would soon see me at a place where only a morass of insanity and stupidity can explain how I got there, from where I was 24 hours earlier, and the reason I could see that was I had already learned the smaller and less expensive lessons.
My psycho skank ho ex, she’d have wound up a T5 paraplegic, and regretted it, and not understood how it could possibly have happened, because she never ever learned the smaller and less expensive lessons, and the big lessons only come by and by now and again, and then it is too late.
