Whew, I'm glad that the OTHER team.net subscriber in this house has
gotten his share of controversy. There are a couple of things you should
know about Eric Clements, just to put his comments in perspective.
Until a year ago, we had a 386SX at home. I bought it when our oldest
child was born, and Eric thought that if Matthew was still doing fine,
there was no reason that a 12 MHz processor and 42 MB hard drive weren't
doing fine as well.
Then one of my best friend's (who happens to make a living being a
computer geek) took pity on us and gave us a 486DX 66 last year. Eric
thought it was wonderful. So...
I nefariously bought him a racing game complete with pedals and steering
wheel, knowing full well that it wouldn't run on our computer. THEN he
decides to buy a Pentium 200 (which he got just recently and which wasn't
in fact a Pentium 200, but a Pentium 166, and I keep telling him that he
should say something about it, BUT it runs his computer game, so he's
happy).
In all fairness, he's also heard me complaining about the computers in my
research lab which run tons of graphics software and have had major
memory and hard drive problems.
One more final comment: we've been to several autocrosses (in different
regions) this year where computer based systems did fail, and could not
be repaired in time for the event to continue under automatic timing. (I
fully agree with Mark Andy that those were very likely human errors, not
computer errors, but since I've never seen a region that didn't have
people in the timing truck with the computers and there are only so many
computer gurus to go around, it seems as if keeping things simple and
having a back up plan is important.) In one of those events in
particular, some truly spectacular times were recorded. Part of this may
have been because timing and scoring was handled like this: the timing
truck was pretty close to the start but WAY far away from the finish.
One guy sitting in the timing truck with two stopwatches in his hand did
all the timing. Two cars were on course at all times. I was posting the
times, and had some pretty angry folks to deal with.
mlc
married to one of the world's only crotchety old 30 year olds...
(remember the MR2 is the newest vehicle he's ever owned)
'91 MR2 NA
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