When the CMOS battery in my ThinkPad died, the machine became unusable. It would not boot because it could not remember the time. I think that this is a bad way to design a BIOS, but I don’t get to choose which BIOS I use (yet, keep your eyes peeled for OpenBIOS as it matures). I knew I needed to replace the CMOS battery, because the rest of the machine works very nicely.

What I discovered is that no one is willing to do this without at least a hundred bucks, which is idiotic. I learned from my research that the CMOS battery is encased in packaging, is difficult to remove on many ThinkPad models, and must be purchased as a specialty item via eBay or IBM. The technicians I spoke to where not able to order it until they had the laptop in their hands, because apparently there are different batteries for different 600X machines. I now believe that this is bullshit, and that they are simply too eager for my money to actually provide advice.

Rather than submit to the whims of the extortionists, I started removing screws and panels from my ThinkPad in search of the mythical battery. I found it in the RAM access hatch (I only needed to remove one screw) which is above (below?) the removable drive chassis (CDROM, DVDROM, etc.). It connects to the motherboard via two leads going into a specialty plug, and those leads connect to the battery via simple paddles. The battery and the paddles are held together by a short length of heat-shrink tubing. This sounds way more complicated than it is. The battery cover has the battery type printed on it, CR2025, which is a standard lithium battery I replaced at Blacks for $6. I detached the leads from the old battery, attached them to the new battery (being careful to replicate the polarity of the old one) with a length of electrical tape. I plugged it into the wee slot, replaced the panel, booted the machine and set the clock. It was essentially effortless, if you don’t count the visits to laptop repair shops and the subsequent anxiety.

Simple repairs can, in fact, be simple.

This interview with Bruce Perens is pretty interesting, and many good points were made. I know that I would love it if all of the Linux distributions did things the same way at the lowest levels. Of course, I’d also like the kernel developers to take security as seriously as the developers at OpenBSD, but first things first.

An interesting quote from the interview is this: "It used to be that there were lots of nuts with ideas in the world, but they were isolated nuts. In this day and age, there are no isolated nuts. You can always find in the world of the Internet 50 nuts just like you, and what do you call 50 nuts like you? A start-up company!"

The principle differentiator between open and closed source software these days is supposedly support. The quality gap between the two camps has either closed or Open Source is widely recognized to be superior. The primary reason today for not adopting an open source solution (where there is a business case for doing so) is that there may not be any support for the software. This is certainly a big part of the FUD campaign pursued by Microsoft against Open Source and Linux. I suggest that “the support myth” is just that – mythical.

If you use Windows, are you free to contact Microsoft and ask for help? No, not really – you maintain a busy in-house staff to take care of this for you, and to reinstall the operating system or reboot the workstation or server (!) as your primary troubleshooting methods. If there is a glitch in Word, can you do anything about it? No, you can’t. You can complain and whine, but you cannot fix it or get it fixed. Once a new version of Word is out, you can take your chances and buy a new license, and then hope that your problem got fixed, and that any new features don’t break your workflow, render your old documents unreadable or require a new training course. Most closed source software “support” is not supportive, and can only help you in narrow ways when the software is broken, but never when it’s wrong.

A common complaint of those confronted with the Open Source model is the claim that while you are permitted to change the source of your software, you lack the expertise to do so, which makes it a non-advantage. The counter to this is that, if you need a feature or a bug fix, you can simply sponsor a hack-a-thon to get it implemented, supporting the community and getting your needed fix far faster and more cheaply than hiring a consultant or having fully customized software written. There are a lot of changes required in the way that people think of software development in an Open Source world, but those changes will be easier to make once you shed your belief in the outmoded “support myth”.