When I lived in central NH there was someone who lived in the town who proudly drove a white sedan covered in racial epithets using magic marker and scratched into the paint. A hangman's noose was scratched into the trunk along with the phrase "linch all n* * * *rs".
Naturally that's just the most extreme example; far more commonplace was casual ignorant small-talk generalizing about "the blacks"/"the coloreds"/"the hispanics" in gas stations/convenience stores/the barber/etc. And the soft bigotry of low expectations absolutely permeated an area where people could and did go months, years without seeing a nonwhite individual in person.
I have often had the urge to hang numbers. They are problems looking for a place to happen. Letters, on the other hand, are always ready for a chat. ;-)
I'm sorry you understood me to be having fun with - when I was making fun of. When I was a kid (yes, I'm one of the old ones...) the abbreviation for number was "nr" - plural, "nrs" and lynch, if one intended to hang to death, was spelled with a "y".
You don't have to think I am funny any more than either one of us thought the idiot with the car was funny, but the purposeful, obvious misunderstanding of hate-speak accompanied by finger-pointing and laughter is a valid method of calling out idiots. And I think we can agree that the dude with the car was an idiot.
What political factors are you referring to? I think Linux took off because it was easily accessible and widely available, and Linus made a lot of pragmatic choices.
I remember in the 90s how awesome it seemed to get a *nix system for free with a book.
IBM's investment in Linux was political. For decades, IBM's identity was as a platform company. It was becoming a regular loser outside of its enterprise monopoly. It was late to the party on home computing. It created the PC but still lost control of the platform. It tried to recover with OS/2. It was a pretty good platform but they couldn't get the details right. This was was fizzing as well.
Around 1996 they made a pivot. They invested heavily to recreate themselves as a company who sold services based on Windows NT. This was a desperate move, but it worked - by the late 90s they had reinvented themselves as a services business. One of the stories of the late 90s was the way that IBM had reinvented themselves.
Then, shrewdly, they invested heavily in Linux. At a time, FreeBSD was still a much better platform. But Linux had the GPL behind it. The GPL forces people to release changes. This sabotaged the commercial software market, which IBM had already lost. IBM could continue to charge for services and retain their hardware monopoly. This has hurt competitors who had strong footholds in software but who who were less strong in services (Sun, Oracle).
> It tried to recover with OS/2. It was a pretty good platform but they couldn't get the details right. This was was fizzing as well.
Well, it locked up the PS/2 hardware with patents, so nobody could clone it. So non-PS/2 hardware was a lot cheaper, because there were a hundred companies trying to sell it. But that cheaper hardware didn't run OS/2 (at least initially).
But when Microsoft was able to keep pace (more or less) with Windows, nobody wanted the PS/2, because Windows on commodity hardware was good enough, and less expensive.
> Well, it locked up the PS/2 hardware with patents, so nobody could clone it.
The "IBM Compatible" was already well-established though. PS2 architecture plays were an attempt for them to get relevant again, and it didn't work. The main technology that they had was EISA, and there wasn't much edge from having that.
> cheaper hardware didn't run OS/2
I don't think that's quite right. A mate had a PS2 that was bundled with OS/2 4 in 1996. We found that the OS/2 install disks that were bundled with his PS2 wouldn't install to other systems. But I never had trouble getting shrinkwrapped os/2 running on commodity ISA or VESA bus hardware - 2.0, 2.1, 3, 4. I ran it as my main desktop for five years. You did have a poor experience if you didn't have a well-supported video card, and almost nothing was well-supported.
I cannot speak for anyone else but personally in college I went linux instead of a BSD on my desk cause the whole AT&T law suit was still pretty murky and frightening to me.
Yeah, the political factor was that I didn't know anybody who had a copy of Plan 9 to give me, because Bell Labs had a government-granted monopoly on giving people copies of Plan 9. Meanwhile my uncle was sending me SLS disks...
It was pretty much the focal point and poster child for open source (even before open source was picked up as the phrase to describe the movement). back then it was everybody versus microsoft.
In 1969 on the 911S, a front mounted radiator-style cooler
was mounted as standard equipment in the front right fender
well. In 1973, the newer trombone, serpentine, loop or
cooling pipe cooler as it was called, replaced the radiator
style cooler. This style of oil cooler was used through 1983.
Ha! What the hell!? The 911 never actually was a purely air-cooled car, like the Beetle?
And now that I check wikipedia, I learn that the Beetle also had an oil cooler! My god, I've been living a lie.
Except for those engines that don't use oil. (Think toy airplanes.) And oil coolers are also found in some water-cooled engines. My old bike (2000 Honda VFR800) used both water and oil-filled radiators.
Toy airplanes do use oil, it's just mixed in with the fuel.
Many water-cooled cars do have an oil cooler, but it's not the primary means of cooling the engine. In those cases it's more about keeping the oil at a constant temperature.
Oil cooled cars have sump capacities 2x water cooled cars.
Good thing you checked Wikipedia :) I was just about to point out that VW Beetle motors had a smallish oil cooler in (or near) the fan shroud at the front of the engine.
I'm wondering if early Boxsters and 996s might be good values now because there are fixes for the IMS bearing issue on the market. I've read it can be done with a clutch job.
Magnus's collection is beautiful and I love his aesthetic, but I can't help but think it is the ultra wealthy buyers who own a dozen 911s who are driving up the prices into the stratosphere. It might be sour grapes, but honestly, how many Porsche's does one guy need?
There's not really enough ultra wealthy collectors to buy up the sheer amount of stock.
It's part fashion, it's part bubble, it's part QE. But the people driving up the prices are just regular guys buying the cars they've wanted for a while. Once supply dwindles, price goes up and creates a positive feedback loop.
It will all calm back down in a few years, where values will stay is anyones guess.
In my opinion I think it's generally the hipster crowd latching on to a new cool. It happens to every sub-culture. Obviously there is a limit to the supply of old things but I think you will find that once the new shiny cool of vintage old stuff dissipates the crowd move on and guys like Magnus are still there decades later doing their thing.
The custom motorcycle scene is a good example of this. So much new stuff flooded the market and everyone, including the new guys got bored. The shift to the old vintage and "garage" built stuff became the new hotness and now the old guard are having to pay stupidly high prices for half a cracked case and two burnt out pistons.
New comers with money buy up everything. Eventually though, either they don't have a clue what they are doing and/or give up soon after and just store the shit with the other failed quarter/mid life crisis dreams.
The fact that you've attached "hipster" to anything involving internal combustion engines means that you're just using "hipster" to mean "the other", like how neocons use "communist" or neoliberals use "fascist" to refer to each other.
I do think there is a subculture of "hip" motorheads. Look at Zeitgeist (bar in SF) for instance. I think Magnus is someone who qualifies as being able to push fashion trends.
Like brc said, the guys who had Porsche wall posters in high school in the 70 and 80's finally got wealthy enough to afford their dream cars. I think something similar happened with the muscle cars. Once the prices started to climb, then other forces also came into play as well but it was the initial yearning for the dream cars of their youth that started it I think.
I have a vintage 911. It is fun as hell when the thing is running right, but it is never running right. Even the years they call "bullet proof" don't hold a candle to the reliability of a modern Japanese sports car (which I've also owned).
When you start to pull the car apart you see all the hacks that had to be done to modernize the car to keep the original chassis design alive. My favorite is the air conditioning. It is obvious that air conditioning was not part of the original design. Another favorite is the oil cooler under the front fender. There are oil lines that go all the way from the back of the car to the front just for cooling. The original car didn't have them because the engines were much smaller and ran cooler.
If anyone is considering buying an air cooled 911, I'd say unless you've cashed out a bunch of stock that is blowing a hole in your pocket, stay away. With the current cost of parts any common problem with the cars could easily be a $10k fix. Ask me how I know.
For me it was a Subaru STI. I enjoyed it more in almost every way than the Porsche, other than how it looked. My father has a nice 90s Miyata. I've driven it quite a bit and for the money it is a pretty well thought out and fun vehicle. He's got less into the whole car than I have in my Porsche engine and trans.
They discontinued it for the most basic reason any company stops producing a low-volume product: the demand just wasn't there. And it still isn't as much as predicted, as is evident by the slightly underwhelming sales of the Subaru BRZ and Toyota FR-S/86.
Thanks for commenting. Yes, the A/C is useless (pre-1984) then almost useless until the 964 and the 993 got it right.
As for a $10K repair bill, it's certainly possible, especially if you recently bought the car and/or get hit with some internal engine/trans problems.
These air-cooled 911's seem to be worth keeping on the road at least. There are many examples of other still high-end cars that just depreciate relentlessly until the last owner gets hit with a repair bill that's more than the car is worth and it goes to the junkyard.
This looks interesting, but I don't totally understand how it works. How is the key changed every time on the server? It looks like it requires server side support.
I have a few of their basic model keys. They have implemented OATH-HOTP as well as their own OTP scheme and HMAC-SHA1 challenge-response. You can also embed a static password. The keys have two slots and both of them can be used for any of the supported schemes.
They have some fancier keys that support a 'universal 2 factor' standard which I think they may have had a hand in creating.
I've used mine in OATH-HOTP and HMAC-SHA1 along with KeePass to do two-factor on my password db. You do need a server-side or peer component to initially sync with to do OTP or challenge-response.
The new U2F protocol removes the need to have a central authentication server - the authentication process is just between the U2F device and the authenticating service. For more details, you can see: https://developers.yubico.com/U2F/
The YubiKey does support the OATH-event based OTPs as described above, but the Yubico OTP takes advantage of the fact users do not need to type in anything to make the OTPs longer and more secure.
Each Yubico OTP has a plain text public ID as the first 12 characters of the OTP. This is used to identify the YubiKey which generated the OTP without having to perform any OTP processing. The remaining 32 characters of the OTP are an AES-128 bit encrypted hash. This hash is made of the Private ID, a string known only to the YubiKey and Authentication server, to further validate the OTP.
In addition to the Private ID, the OTP also contains counters tracking how many times the YubiKey has been power cycled (usage) and how many OTP events it has preformed since it's last power on (session). These counter values are stored in the authentication server and checked for each OTP. If the usage counter is less than the value on the server, or if the session counter is less than or equal to the value on the server, the OTP is rejected as a replay attack.
This means the YubiKey OTP will not get out of sync with the validation server, as well as adding additional randomness to the OTPs generated.
5 blades with a lotion strip similar to other multi-blade razors. They're sold in 4 packs with their main selling point being that they are half the price of gillette razors while being the of similar quality with a much nicer/weightier handle.
