Any IBM Power / AIX fans out there?

[Tony Duell]

> > It amazes me that uou'd need a locksmith to do that. I would have thought 
> > any halfway decent hacker would know how to dismantle a lock, and would 
> > even know how to re-pin most common locks. 
> 
> Dismantle, yes. Fragment, absolutely. Re-pin, no.
> 
> I greatly respect your acumen, bot all of us are as dexterous, and you keep
> saying stuff like that as if it's a mortal sin not to be as adept or
> confident with a soldering iron or other hardware but yet still consider
> oneself a "decent hacker." I'm all thumbs with that stuff, and I'd rather

FWIW, I do not consider myself to be anything like good enough to be a 
hacker, decent or otherwise.

> have someone who knows how to do it, do it, then wreck hardware because I
> keep getting browbeaten about how I can't do it myself and should.

The only way to learn is to practice. Period. Yes, you will make 
mistakes, and at first you'll probably do things that at the time you 
don't have the skill to put right. You will end up with bits all round 
the room :-) (I speak from experience here). But you will also gain 
experience. Slowly you'll find you'll be able to get things back together 
again, that you will know what to undo and in what order, and so on. 

Obviously you don't practice on some rare/important (to you) machine. In 
this case, you might want to buy/obtain similar cabinet locks with the 
sole purpose of pulling them apart so as to see how they're made, and 
knowing that you probably won't get them all back togenter again. After a 
bit you will feel like working on your IBM system without worrying that 
you'll damage it.

This is not a flame, but the attitude I find difficult to understand is 
not that you don't know something (damnit, there's plenty I don't 
know...), but that you don't intned to learn it. As I said , there's 
plenty I don't know, but I feel that should I need to work on <foo>, then 
I'll take the time to try to understand what I am doing...

-tony