Reboot

Royal Oak MI

Description

When you reboot a computer, it's supposed to check the filesystem as part of the startup process. I'm a systems administrator with ~40 years of practical experience going all the way back to my own childhood, and others with similar experience will agree. Checking filesystems is part of starting up a computer. Filesystems are fiercely complicated things. I say 'supposed to' because starting maybe ten years ago, builders of operatng systems started cheating their customers by checking the filesystems AFTER the computer booted. I say 'cheated' because by failing to verify that the fileysystem was clean before booting, the builders of these operating systems introduced a window of opportunity for problems to occur. These builders of operating systems did this because they were in a competition with one another to see who could boot fastest, and the process of checking a filesystem was not dramatic, and so leaving it out of the boot process and doing it behind the scenes, afterwards, while the user checked their email, was not noticed, other than thumbs up from users who liked that their computers booted so fast. Sure, there are boot-time variables you can set to force your preferred operating system to check its flesystems before going multiuser. But that's not the point. We're talking about when it DOESN'T check its filesystems, and why this is even a default behavior - and whether this might not have a connection to our approach towards governance. From the point of view of people who go to a great deal of trouble to make their computers islands of stability and consistency in a universe full of chaos and entropy, this deprecation of filesystem checks at boot time is a major stab in the back - placing perception ahead of engineering is never good, in the long run. So, now, let's see if this has any connection to good governance... When you have a change of government... shouldn't you have an audit, and an inventory, too? Maybe it would eliminate a lot of our troubles if we included a complete audit and inventory in the government cycle of operation. At least once every four years. Maybe make it an annual thing. Why WOULDN'T we want a yearly audit? I propose that rebooting a government should be treated AT LEAST as seriously as rebooting a large corporate server. So enough with the snide comments about those whom would audit our nation's operations. Our nation's operations were originally designed to be open and suject to audit by all. THAT IS THE WHOLE IDEA OF A PAPER BALLOT, MORONS - so it can be audited! DUH. Anyone blocking an audit needs to be put under close scrutiny. What ELSE do they have to hide, is what we need to be asking. Not, 'why do you want to audit the last election'. It's simply not a legitimate question. It's like a suspect caught in a dark alley, asking the cops, 'Why do you want me to empty my pockets'. Audit ON.