Screw Drivers and PDF Files

[Tony Duell]

> 
> >> You are making life difficult if to don't have a tool for reading
> >> PDF files.  I think you can buy a nice one for a few hundred
> >> dollars.
> > You can buy a used PC for tens of dollars.
> 
> Including the monitor and the license fees for all the necessary bits
> of software?  And including someone to be its sysadmin?  I'm certainly
> not about to baby along a machine running closed-source software.

And inclduing somebody to maintain the hardware? I sure as hell am not 
going to try to maintain any machine that doesn't have full schematics 
available, and I do not intend to try reverse-engineering a modern PC 
that's full of undocumented ASICs in BGA packages that I can't probe the 
connections of.

You like open-soruce software. So do I (well, having the source available 
is enough, even if it's not open in the FSF sense [1]). I also want my 
hardware to be as well docuemtned.

[1] For example, I bought (second hand) the HP71 IDS manuals. Volume 3 is a 
complete commented source of the system ROM. It's not 'open' in the FSF 
sense, in that it's copyrighted by HP and you can reproduce it, or sell 
products containing it, or... but I do have the source code to hand if I 
want to understand how something works, or where a system variable is 
stored, or...

-tony