Douglas,
This time my inbox has you as arriving at 12/31/69
while the date on your post is 3 August 2099.
Why 69? And your Dilbert comic is exactly what I have to do
to reboot my machine except it is unplugging the scanner from
the machine. It was suggested that my running the machine
ahead could have screwed up the clocks in other programs.
Something that makes sense to me since I am not a programmer.
I will discuss it tomorrow with my hotrod mechanic but the thing
that makes be wonder is why so many other people are reporting the
same thing. Synchronicity? Or incompetence. I don't have to
be an expert at everything so I'm perfectly comfortable at admitting
my computer incompetence. The problem for me is how many
science and computer types wander in to my studio singing
impossibly and become riled if I speak to them with the same
attitude they show about my incompetence as a computer
mechanic.
I know that I need their business and so I am kind and work with
their arrogance and insecurity at feeling foolish. Because an art
without an audience has no purpose. But do they know the same
thing about their product? I doubt it. They just don't seem to care.
Or is this some expression of their own inner insecurity with the
complexity they don't understand themselves? This is the reason
that New York City got rid of the private subway companies and
decided to run the while system in an organized regulated fashion,
with just a little private enterprise to keep the socialists honest.
I suspect that eventually the medical system will go the same way.
And now it may be the virtual system as well. I've been a part of
the private enterprise system in the arts for all but 13 years of my
professional life. I happened to like it but I can't believe how foolish
my colleagues are in their irresponsibility. They are creating the very
world that will crush us all in favor of a more regular, predictable
life. I have heard people on this list praise the private life but then
they are hired and work for giants which is no different that a civil
service job. Even the upper management at IBM under the Watson
era referred to the company as socialism.
It is said that much work is lost in computer complexity and
crashes. How much more work is lost in having to be your own
mechanic, your own doctor, your child's teacher supervisor, your
own lawyer, etc. That was the point of logical positivism. The
development of efficiency through professionalism. Right?
They said it would "work" but it doesn't.
So is it better to
have a large system with built in incompetence or many little
systems. Either way it seems that we are impotent to change
the situation. So we just wait to see if the the clock breaks on
the Nuclear Power Station cooling system and whether we have
12 hours to live after the system blows. I'm sure there was a similar
feeling amongst those Japanese who felt they could withstand anything
after the fire storms in Tokyo, but the Inola Gay and the Little Guy
changed all of that for whose who survived.
Hubbell was in space and just money. But this havoc is not and
shows that the private sector is impotent when faced with large
issues other than mass production of relatively non complicated
products.
Do the non Capitalist computers have the same Y2K issue and if
so why?
REH
