[From Dick Robertson,2009.02.26.1125CDT]
[From Bill Powers (2009.02.26.0300 MST)]
It’s amazing how long it takes my brain to see something
obvious. I’ve been struggling for days with a computer that has things
wrong with its operating system, and spending hours looking up
remedies on the Web and trying to figure out how to carry them out, or
simply trying to understand what they mean. And making mistakes that
cure > one problem and cause another.
Boy, this sounds so familiar. And most of the time I’m even worse off because I don’t know to look up the remedies. Like-- when I bought me computer about four years ago it came with what I supposed was a legel Windows XP pro. It worked with few problems for a few years, then about about a year ago I started getting messages, “your Windows is not legal.” I want back to the vendor. He swore it was legal and had me bring in my machine. I did and they removed the message for a while, but didn’t do anything else. Pretty soon the message was back. I gave up on driving the ten miles to haul the thing back every time that happened. They sent me a survey asking something about my experience with their product, or whatever. I sent them a reply that I had bought my machine in good faith believing I had a legal OS, so why were they trying to extort me to pay the second time for something i’d alreary bought, instead of going to the vendor.
No answer to that, but the “illegal” messages kept coming. Now they have installed some kind of trojan horse that I can’t find and can’t fix that turned my destop black and keeps the Illegal message on all of the time. When I click on the “resolve now” area it opens up Internet Explorer which, after a while, comes on with “Can’t print the page.” Round and round it goes.
Fred Nickols has been asking about practical applications of
PCT. I can see a great big one here. Let’s take all those error
messages and > throw them in the trash, and in their place build little
programs that fix errors when they are detected.
Sounds good to me, but I have to depend on others for the fixes.
I guess the repair database wouldn’t help my current problem. I wonder though, whether some kind of solution doesn’t already exist–isn’t it what UBUNTU does"
Let’s start a letter-writing campaign: NO MORE ERROR MESSAGES!.
Every time there is an error and it gets fixed, make a sketch of the
control system that could do it and mail it to Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.And Fred, maybe you can start doing that with industrial designs.
Best, Bill P.
Best,
Dick R