[SLL] All my 64bit Ubuntu's stopped booting...so far my 32bit UbuntuME still goes

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Dec 20, 2007, Robert Woodcock wrote:
>On Thu, Dec 20, 2007 at 12:30:47PM -0800, Chuck Wolber wrote:
>> On Thu, 20 Dec 2007, Howard Gibson wrote:
>> >    With my Linux boxes, I have a three hour rule.  If I cannot fix a 
>> > Linux box in well below three hours, I reformat the root partition and 
>> > re-install everything.  The Linux install takes three hours.  The beauty 
>> > of Free Software is that I have the install media, and there are no 
>> > licensing issues.
>>
>> [...]
>> 
>> 1. Persist with a problem, solve it once and then push a fix (or 
>> suggestion) upstream. Even if the OSS project ignores your input, Google 
>> will make sure it's available to others.
>> 
>> 2. If you don't solve it in 3 hours, reinstall and don't waste time making 
>> the community aware of the problem.
>
>Also, regardless of what software you are using, there are some truisms at
>work:
>
>* Computers are deterministic. They will do the same thing every time,
>  regardless of whether that thing is correct or incorrect.

Would that that were true.  When my wife was trying to get four
copies of here Docteral dissertation printed from M$-Word on
Windows 3.1, it was bout 160 pages.  I say about as no two print
jobs ere the same length so she finally gave up and had Kinkos
make three copies from one original.  If she had told me what the
problem was, She was printing via Samba (or perhaps it was Locus'
PC-Interface at that time), and I could have disabled the printer
on the Xenix machine so I could catch the print file to make
multiple copies.  Perhaps she was tired of me bitching about
problems with Windows :-).

>* If the software is violating the principle of least surprise, THAT IS A
>  BUG in the software.

An excellent book on this is ``The Inmates Are Running the
Asylum'' by Alan Cooper.  He goes into the problems with software
which is poorly designed (he maintains the most software isn't
designed, but just happens).

Bill
--
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