This is Why I Don't Change My Oil

[eschaider]

People talk about Black Swan events that presumably no one could have predicted and the catastrophic effect they can have on in-place operating processes. There are also tipping point analogs that are equally important to pay attention to.

I think the original forum Black Swan event was the advent of social media forums. They provided an essentially unregulated platform for all types and kinds of uninformed keyboard commandos to have their 15 minutes (or less) of fame — an event and experience that was much harder to duplicate on a moderated website.

That said, there were also multiple tipping points that defied recovery and presaged disastrous endings. Some of those would be the transition from car builders to car integrators, where you buy a rolling or other semi-finished chassis and complete the job (this was me). There are not too many FasterPatricks who do or are capable of doing a ground-up build from literally nothing. That not-so-subtle change in membership changes the fortunes of the site.

The next transition was the appearance of the owners, who thought the cars were some sort of an investment and began the fruitless how much I paid vs. how much I made at sale banter. The increasingly older and harder-to-find enthusiast who built their cars for what they were, not how much they could be sold for, has all but disappeared from the forums.

Although I appreciate my car for what it is and what it represents as a special data point on the automotive performance timeline, I was a buyer of a chassis and a builder of a not-period correct powertrain for essentially a toy I had wanted for more than 40 years. I am definitely not a FasterPatrick.

Further aggravating all of this is the continuing use of extraordinarily outdated forum software. Software that speaks volumes about the owner’s ability and interest to maintain the site. Many of the advertisers, like many of the original builders, have been lost in the ether over the years.

Like the tipping point analog, once you become sufficiently over-extended, there is no recovery. I fear that, that is true of Club Cobra. We should enjoy it (to the extent we can) before it finally augers into the ground. It does not appear to have a recovery path available to it.

[Tom Wells]

Ed & patrick,

I don't think this will keep me from changing my oil...

Tom

[eschaider]

Originally Posted by Tom Wells

Ed & patrick,

I don't think this will keep me from changing my oil...

Tom

You're right, Tom! I agree.

This is just an ongoing itch that I need to scratch from time to time. It really doesn't belong in this thread. When I saw it, I could not restrain myself from commenting. I should not have, not because the viewpoint is wrong or flawed, but because this is the wrong thread.

[twobjshelbys]

Originally Posted by eschaider

Like the tipping point analog, once you become sufficiently over-extended, there is no recovery. I fear that, that is true of Club Cobra. We should enjoy it (to the extent we can) before it finally augers into the ground. It does not appear to have a recovery path available to it.

I'm not at all familiar with the underlying database system that the forum software uses. However, it is noteworthy that this forum, out of the hundreds I've been active in or walked by in the past 20 years, this one is the ONLY ONE that has these repeated kinds of failure modes. The forum database snake starts to eat its tail until it gets so twisted up that it can't service requests any more then it goes off the air. The powers that be perform undisclosed magic and it comes back on the air, but never really performs as well as other forums using the same data base system. These failure modes wreak of corrupted database tables that evade the standard database repair tools. The best we can hope for is status quo - partially cloudy to cloudy with intermittent rain and snow.

There are still enough new interested Cobra owners - either from buying a used car or still even building their own kit and the few die hards that do it from scratch. For those this forum is a treasure and without the knowledge most of them would fail. Hopefully it'll stay "alive" until the last old Cobra enthusiast hangs up the steering wheel.

I think the original forum Black Swan event was the advent of social media forums.

History lesson of discussion software. It has been around since before the internet as most of you know it. Before the internet there was Arpanet, the community of which was limited to defense and educational institutions. Eventually some large companies, including IBM and DEC were allowed to join Arpanet. We all accessed our systems at work or with 300, then 1200, then 38.4K and finally 56K modems. You couldn't tolerate today's content at those data rates, yet in some parts of the country dial up is still used (satellite internet isn't much faster but is taking over). Last I checked Earthlink still had dial up access in some areas. [At one time DEC, along with IBM and several other large companies, owned a Class A network range 16.0.0.0 with a subnet mask of 255.0.0.0. That was very early in the days and I don't think there are any Class A nets any more.]

Within the early Arpanet there were these "reflector" based user groups that were collected under the global name of Usenet. You got an email digest of the last 24 hours of content, and to send content you sent an email to the reflector root and it sent it out to everyone who subscribed. Internet porn actually started there The Usenet was topic oriented although not threaded. Usenet still exists.

Then a fellow named Len Kawell who worked for DEC created a tool called VAXNotes. VAXnotes existed only with DEC's internal network. Much of the VMS multi-site work was in Notes. Our storage site used them for our products. If you used notes the forum software here is a natural growth. Notes files were single topic. So in today's forums you could have an "Operating System" forum that had as subforums, VMS, Unix, Windows. But that was a natural extension as storage and network bandwidth grew.

"Notes files" were supposed to be used for business purposes only. But the company didn't complain about non-business Notes Files as long as they didn't bog down the network. Remember, in the 80s the company networks were tied together using 56K leased line modems... I remember when DEC activated its first satellite based network link and the networking software had to have a release to deal with packet latencies. I administered the intra-site network in Colorado Springs for about a year and also hosted two "Notes" files - TV and Movies. I lost track of all of them when our storage division got sold to Quantum.

Len eventually left DEC and took his Notes concept and expanded it through Lotus to become Lotus Notes. Lotus Notes was a full blown enterprise database system. It had email and a forum/Notes like structure but was much more than that. I used Lotus Notes at Seagate. I liked the email system, Gmail took some getting used to. Other Lotus customers were IBM and I think Oracle. Seagate eventually switched to Google for email and the forum stuff wasn't widely used so it fizzled out. I think there are some business functions that still use Notes but they're buried deep inside finance.

Then along came things like Facebook and their friends. They serve the same function but don't have threaded. Technical things that have discrete subjects don't survive with the hit and run nature of Facebook. The history is lost in a few days. Threaded organization is needed to keep things focused (although hijacking even happened in VAXnotes).

I should write a book...

[patrickt]

Originally Posted by twobjshelbys

i'm not at all familiar with the underlying database system that the forum software uses. However...

...

I should write a book...

tldr.

[cycleguy55]

Originally Posted by twobjshelbys

I'm not at all familiar with the underlying database system that the forum software uses. However, it is noteworthy that this forum, out of the hundreds I've been active in or walked by in the past 20 years, this one is the ONLY ONE that has these repeated kinds of failure modes. The forum database snake starts to eat its tail until it gets so twisted up that it can't service requests any more then it goes off the air. The powers that be perform undisclosed magic and it comes back on the air, but never really performs as well as other forums using the same data base system. These failure modes wreak of corrupted database tables that evade the standard database repair tools. The best we can hope for is status quo - partially cloudy to cloudy with intermittent rain and snow.

There are still enough new interested Cobra owners - either from buying a used car or still even building their own kit and the few die hards that do it from scratch. For those this forum is a treasure and without the knowledge most of them would fail. Hopefully it'll stay "alive" until the last old Cobra enthusiast hangs up the steering wheel.


History lesson of discussion software. It has been around since before the internet as most of you know it. Before the internet there was Arpanet, the community of which was limited to defense and educational institutions. Eventually some large companies, including IBM and DEC were allowed to join Arpanet. We all accessed our systems at work or with 300, then 1200, then 38.4K and finally 56K modems. You couldn't tolerate today's content at those data rates, yet in some parts of the country dial up is still used (satellite internet isn't much faster but is taking over). Last I checked Earthlink still had dial up access in some areas. [At one time DEC, along with IBM and several other large companies, owned a Class A network range 16.0.0.0 with a subnet mask of 255.0.0.0. That was very early in the days and I don't think there are any Class A nets any more.]

Within the early Arpanet there were these "reflector" based user groups that were collected under the global name of Usenet. You got an email digest of the last 24 hours of content, and to send content you sent an email to the reflector root and it sent it out to everyone who subscribed. Internet porn actually started there The Usenet was topic oriented although not threaded. Usenet still exists.

Then a fellow named Len Kawell who worked for DEC created a tool called VAXNotes. VAXnotes existed only with DEC's internal network. Much of the VMS multi-site work was in Notes. Our storage site used them for our products. If you used notes the forum software here is a natural growth. Notes files were single topic. So in today's forums you could have an "Operating System" forum that had as subforums, VMS, Unix, Windows. But that was a natural extension as storage and network bandwidth grew.

"Notes files" were supposed to be used for business purposes only. But the company didn't complain about non-business Notes Files as long as they didn't bog down the network. Remember, in the 80s the company networks were tied together using 56K leased line modems... I remember when DEC activated its first satellite based network link and the networking software had to have a release to deal with packet latencies. I administered the intra-site network in Colorado Springs for about a year and also hosted two "Notes" files - TV and Movies. I lost track of all of them when our storage division got sold to Quantum.

Len eventually left DEC and took his Notes concept and expanded it through Lotus to become Lotus Notes. Lotus Notes was a full blown enterprise database system. It had email and a forum/Notes like structure but was much more than that. I used Lotus Notes at Seagate. I liked the email system, Gmail took some getting used to. Other Lotus customers were IBM and I think Oracle. Seagate eventually switched to Google for email and the forum stuff wasn't widely used so it fizzled out. I think there are some business functions that still use Notes but they're buried deep inside finance.

Then along came things like Facebook and their friends. They serve the same function but don't have threaded. Technical things that have discrete subjects don't survive with the hit and run nature of Facebook. The history is lost in a few days. Threaded organization is needed to keep things focused (although hijacking even happened in VAXnotes).

I should write a book...

I heard about Lotus Notes and thought it was a great idea long before I went to work for IBM. The whole concept of collaboration, groupware and applications that could be built by end-users made a lot of sense to me. When I then landed at an IBM subsidiary in 1991 and was later exposed to Lotus Notes I thought it was great. The subsidiary I was working for was in the IT services and data centre outsourcing business, and they supported many customers that ran MS Exchange and Outlook. Let's just say the problems their users encountered with Exchange and Outlook (e.g. corrupt OST and PST files, locked out accounts, etc.) were far greater than the problems we had with Notes, but there was no way they were going to abandon MS to get on board with IBM's offering. They had drunk the Kool-Aid. Sigh.

To this day I'm still convinced Notes and Domino were far better than Exchange and Outlook, but the IBM products were the Sony Betamax while Microsoft's were the VHS of the day. Better marketing beat better products.

BTW, in 2018 IBM sold Lotus and its products to HCL, and you can still buy / license Notes and Domino: https://www.hcl-software.com/notes