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I love motorcycles too. I've owned many sophisticated bikes: Ducatis with their strange Desmodromic heads. With the ability to dial an exchange of torque to hor
by nickbauman 10y ago
I love motorcycles too. I've owned many sophisticated bikes: Ducatis with their strange Desmodromic heads. With the ability to dial an exchange of torque to horsepower at the handlebars. Buells with their fuel-in-frame chassis. My current Suzuki even has 4 sensors in the airbox alone. One that measures the air input pressure. One that measures the oxygen level. One that measures the air temperature. Really amazing performance. It will be in a junkyard within ten years though. I won't be able to find those sensors in a few years.
So all that new and advanced technology doesn't really interest me anymore. I'm looking for a 1969 Honda CL350 right now. They're still around and running fine. They're much simpler and much more maintainable. No Engine Computer. No sensors. Everything really easy to understand.
I kinda want my OS like that too. With all its warts I can keep it running.
- mastax 10y agoWhat OS would be analogous to the Honda in your example? OpenBSD? Plan9? Not Linux, surely. That would be more like the Suzuki, but it used to be an older bike so they left the carburetor in there and next year someone will add an electric motor too.
- eikenberry 10y agoAny free software OS can meet his requirements as they all are transparent to anyone with the time to learn, just like the older bikes. The problem with modern bikes is that all the advanced tech is proprietary and you have no way of understanding it or tinkering with it. IMO you can take any modern distro and strip it down to something understandable. It just takes some time to learn how to strip it down and how what's left works (and this is ongoing, as things are always changing). I'm not saying it's trivial, but neither is learning how to rebuild a motorcycle.
- nickbauman 10y agoExcellent extension to the original analogy.
- SFJulie 10y agoJust remove systemd that is looking like an electronic injection that now requires 4Gb of RAM and a full OS to work and screaming for more.
- moosingin3space 10y agoI don't normally get into these, but this is blatantly false, I'm running systemd on multiple older/smaller computers like an OG Raspberry Pi and an old netbook, and I don't even notice its memory consumption.
- tomc1985 10y agoWe run systemd on 512mb celerons no problem...
- voltagex_ 10y agoI'm sad that 512mb is now considered a small amount. I've got a couple of systems in my drawer that have <128mb.
- lightedman 10y agoI still have my 75 MHz Pentium 12MB EDO RAM laptop running Windows 95 and holding my old BBS sitting in my drawer. Battery is shot but plug it in and it still works.
- AsyncAwait 10y agosystemd works fine even on the RPi.
- eikenberry 10y agoAll systemd related processes (dbus, systemd-*, init, etc) running on my system are using < 25Mb of memory. So that is a bit excessive, even if exaggerating for effect.
- fao_ 10y ago
- vram22 10y ago>IMO you can take any modern distro and strip it down to something understandable. Or strip it up, so to speak, or rather, build it up. Referring to Linux From Scratch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_From_Scratch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_From_Scratch http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
- nickbauman 10y agoI've used OpenBSD in the past and found it much simpler than Linux. But didn't always support what I needed to do. These days I'm doing less but doing it better.
- eatonphil 10y ago> These days I'm doing less but doing it better. On Linux or OpenBSD?
- nickbauman 10y agoBoth
- busterarm 10y agoPretty sure he means OpenBSD and I'm in the same boat. Also, Erlang and Elixir run out of the box on it, so it's suitable for nearly all of my personal projects.
- cassowary 10y agoI've always found the problem with alt os's is that I have to pick my device to match the OS. I just want a small but adequately powerful laptop, so Linux is my only real choice.
- vram22 10y agoInteresting comment. Got to say I agree with the direction of it, to some extent - stable and powerful over newfangled and weak / unstable / buggy / done for glory rather than substance. Do you know about the Royal Enfield Bullet [1] from India? It is not at all as technologically sophisticated as the bikes you mention and others, but it is a fantastic bike to ride. They are selling it in the West, too, from some years. Originally from the Enfield company, UK, then was manufactured in India for many decades (maybe starting around WWII), as the same standard model. Then a decade or more back, the new managing director invigorated the company with better quality, newer models, higher engine capacity (cc) models (like 500 cc), etc. - though I would not be surprised that some fans prefer the old one still - maybe me too, except not ridden it enough, I rode a 250 cc Yezdi much more - also a great bike, almost maintenance free, a successor to the classic Ideal Jawa bike from Czechoslovakia, and also made in India for many years. Yezdi was stopped some years ago, last I read, but the Bullet is still going strong and even being exported, a good amount, to the West. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Enfield_Bullet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Enfield_Bullet https://www.google.co.in/search?q=royal+enfield+bullet https://www.google.co.in/search?q=royal+enfield+bullet A Swiss guy, Fritz Egli (IIRC), was/is a fan and modified some of them (Bullets) over there. It was the subject of a magazine article. I first rode a Bullet in my teens. A real thumper.
- trentnelson 10y agoHey, Royal Enfield! My uncle was behind the company that was the sole distributor of Royal Enfield for Australia/NZ for a good decade or so (sold the business a few years ago).
- vram22 10y agoInteresting.
- fstephany 10y agoMy cousin and two of his friends recently did New Delhi - Brussels[0] on 1971, 1973 and 1974 Royal Enfields.They made it but they got a lot of mechanical problems. I guess that was part of the fun ;) I almost bought a Bullet Classic 500 (sold with injection in Europe). It is probably much more reliable but it is probably a bit too limited for a 100km daily commute. I went with a modern Triumph Street Twin instead. The mechanic told me he had to plug the bike to the computer to start it the first time. I don't know if he was joking but it made me feel uneasy. [0]: http://theroyalsilkroad.com/bikes.html http://theroyalsilkroad.com/bikes.html
- busterarm 10y agoI did similar with cars, though I still have the ECU to deal with. Eventually I'll replace that with a Megasquirt, because I can repair/replace all the components and know how the whole system works. When I thought I wanted a bike, I looked around for a Condor A350.
- hinkley 10y agoOccasionally when I run out of analogies for why convoluted systems are not 'flexible', I reach for a half-remembered homage, that I encountered as a teenager, about the Chevy Straight 6. This was not a fancy engine. It was not a particularly powerful engine. Not a single thing on it or about it was exceptional. Because it was easy to work on and with add-ons and modifications it could be coaxed into doing things it wasn't really meant to do. It was just solid and got out of your way. So engineers and hobbyists tinkered and tinkered and got something over 2.5x the original horsepower out of the thing. Unix commands might be solid, but the 'get out of your way' bit is what troubles me. People will lament otherwise good engines that are hard to work on because of a design flaw or the way they're laid out. Unix is falling down here. It's just that everyone else is at least as bad. But a guy can dream.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y agoThe single most disastrous failing of UNIX is the assumption that everyone wants to be a programmer - or if they don't want to be a programmer, they damn well should become a programmer anyway. It's nonsense. Programming as it's done today - which is strongly influenced by UNIX ideas - is the last thing most users want to do. They have absolutely no interest in the concepts, the ideas, the assumptions, the mindset, the technology, or the practical difficulties of writing software. UNIX set human-accessible computing back by decades. It eventually settled into a kind of compromise at Apple, where BSD supplied the plumbing and infrastructure and NeXT/Apple's built a simplified app creation system on top of it, which could then be used to build relatively friendly applications. But it's still not right, because the two things that make UNIX powerful - interoperability and composability - didn't survive. They were implemented in a way that's absolutely incomprehensible to non-programmers. Opaque documentation, zero standardisation for command options, and ridiculous command name choices all make UNIX incredibly user hostile. Meanwhile the underlying OS details, including the file systems and process model - never mind security - fall somewhat short of OS perfection. The real effect of UNIX has been to keep programming professional and to keep user-friendly concepts well away from commercial and academic development. Programming could have been made much more accessible, and there's consistent evidence from BASIC, Hypercard, VBA, the HTML web, and even Delphi (at a push) that the more accessible a development environment is made, the more non-developers will use it to get fun and/or useful things done. UNIX has always worked hard to be the opposite - an impenetrably hostile wall of developer exceptionalism that makes the learning curve for development so brutally steep it might as well be vertical. UNIX people like to talk about commercial walled gardens as if they're the worst possible thing. But UNIX is a walled garden itself, designed - whether consciously or not - to lock out non-professional non-developer users and make sure they don't go poking at things they shouldn't try to understand.
- sedachv 10y ago> It will be in a junkyard within ten years though. I won't be able to find those sensors in a few years. Not true. You will be able to get an aftermarket ECU that can just ignore the sensors and run in open-loop mode. That will be exactly the same as running with carburetors: fixed fuel/air ratio that is almost always wrong. This is also the failure mode for OBDII cars - sensor failures lead to the ECU running in open-loop mode, which lowers MPG and increases emissions, which will eventually foul the catalytic converters. > I'm looking for a 1969 Honda CL350 right now. They're still around and running fine. They're much simpler and much more maintainable. My wife has owned a CB175 and a CB550. Both required tons of work and were maintenance nightmares. They really are piece of shit bikes when it comes to reliability when compared to most Japanese bikes from 1990 onward. The prices old Honda bikes command on the market are completely out of whack with what you get because of strong demand from both the vintage bike enthusiast and hipster demographics. I would not ride one if it was given to me for free.
- mulmen 10y agoMaintenance "headaches" are part of the appeal of old bikes. It's much easier to learn how an internal combustion powered vehicle works on an old Honda bike than a new one, or on a new car. Compared to other bikes of their day these are very simple to maintain and they were designed from the start to be kept running by the average person. It really depends on what you are looking for in a bike. If enjoying turning a wrench on a Saturday makes me a hipster then pass the beard wax.
- rangibaby 10y agoI used to share your opinion, but hours of searching for no longer-made parts and obscure wrench sizes and other tools that often simply don't exist anymore cooled my enthusiasm somewhat (fixing 1960s camera lenses)
- mulmen 10y agoAll the fasteners I have seen are standard metric sizes, what speciality tools are you referring to? The side cover screws can be stubborn but even a Philips #3 with an impact driver ($20.00 at the pawn shop) pops them right off. Conversion kits to standard allen head screws are cheap, on the order of $50.00 for the whole engine. There is a special nut on the oil spinner but that's the only specialty tool I can think of on the bike until you start actually disassembling the whole thing and you don't even have to remove it to do an oil service. I guess the shock/steering head adjuster is a specialty tool? But that was included with the bike so not hard to find either. Parts can be a bit harder but since these things were so popular it's a lot easier than any other bike from 1969. Also the aftermarket is huge if you don't care about staying totally stock.
- criddell 10y agoI have a Kawasaki KLR 650. Kawasaki has been selling pretty much the same bike since 1987. No fuel injection or ABS. They are very inexpensive (new ones can be had for about $6000). There's a running joke in the community that every year the main update on the new model is bold new graphics. Spare parts are easy to find and there are a lot of aftermarket parts. The downside is that the bike is basically a late '80's bike. 40ish horsepower, poor fuel economy, weak brakes, poor handling, etc... But, like lots of people say, it's more fun to drive a slow bike fast than a fast bike slowly. I love it.
- mulmen 10y agoI have a 1973 CL350 which I am currently getting back on the road. They are fantastic bikes, largely because they are robust, dead simple and Honda made tens of thousands of them. Having said that, they did have some components that have not aged well. The number one flaw on these bikes in my opinion is the stock carburetors. Honda used a constant velocity type carburetor which in theory provides very smooth throttle action and is easier to ride. In reality the vacuum diaphragm is a very delicate part that frequently fails with tiny air holes that leak vacuum, causing a mismatch in the throttle input between the cylinders (twin carb two cylinder, one per cylinder). This is a similar failure mode to your modern Suzuki air pressure sensor failing. The other pain point is the mechanical points in the ignition system. This is an area of constant fiddling with adjustment and new condensers. It's much preferred to simply replace the points system with a "modern" (1980s technology) electronic ignition system. This removes the moving parts and greatly extends the life of a tune-up. Old bikes are super cool and the 350 platform is a fantastic one but even back then bikes had "high tech" parts that did not age well and gaps where better tech had not been invented. The great thing about the 350 platform is that due to its popularity people are still coming up with solutions. In this way a Honda 350 is similar to Unix.
- holri 10y agoLike my Moto Guzzi from the 1970ies. It is so simple built, you can adjust the valves during a gas stop. There is a great virtue in simple design, it seems to be forgotten nowadays. Like the famous Russian rocket engineer Koroljow (built Sputnik) said: Everyone can build complicated
- pjc50 10y agoThis kind of thing comes up a lot in discussions of operating systems, and while you and I might want to get "under the hood" the majority of users never want to do that, and know they don't know what they'd be doing if they got there. And accept that a sealed system might be safer (more secure) for them. Being able to maintain it yourself is a benefit, but having to maintain it when there's another maintenance-free option is unappealing. Hence UNIX (of a sort) is actually quite popular on both iPhones and Android - but not in ways accessible to the user. Even if you do have to replace Android devices every few years because the manufacturer won't maintain them either.