On Fri, 13 Oct 2000, Peter Hyde wrote:
> "Home maintained?" What does that mean? Are we supposed to
> do something with cars apart from driving???
As far as home maintenance of cars goes, I know how to check my oil,
water, fill the gas, replace the wipers, I do have a bit of a problem with
the internals, I keep installing pies and drinks, and whilst I uninstall
them, they seem to leave alot of crap in the registry (floor), this
saturday I plan the bi-monthly "format/reinstall" so that I feel
comfortable having females in the car :)
Anyway, I remeber my Austin and my brothers Escort, with the help of a
wise old man who knew about cars, we occasionally spent the weekend fixing
and/or replacing things that broke, admittidly, the old guy did most of
the work and I was "standing around looking pretty" (oh i miss -those-
days). Anyway, then came my Mazda, open the boot and er, wtf? The
engines all enclosed, I know where to check and change my oil, but for
anything else. forget it :)
Cars have changed, and now that they have all these fancy on board
computers for various things, alot of the time, you need a professional
mechanic to fix and/or replace parts that in the older cars -could- be
done at home.
I can change my tires and wipers and oil, thats like changing my
soundcard, and hard drive, however, for the internals, like the O/S, or
the engine, thats something for the pros. I neither have the tools, or
the knowledge, and thanks to Mazda/Microsoft, I don't have the source code
to their engine.
At least with linux, I can grep the source code for that obscure error
message, analyise the code and read the surrounding comments and find out
what's causing the problem. I also have the tools neccesary to fix that
same problem. Now, I'm no kernel hacker, but I know some, and on one
occasion I had this happen, he fixed the problem, sent me a 10 line patch,
which I applied and voila, unlimited gas and a wound back meter.
The simpler a computer becomes on the outside, the higher chance it's
going to be more complex on the inside.
Mark
--
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