Seriously, have all the old schoolers gone underground? This is news for nerds that is really gonna fucking matter and we get nothing?

Maybe being owned has cost us something here we are gonna regret.

Act.

http://www.savetheinternet.com

Just, No.

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/27/1626243

Nothing needs to be said. Writing should not be a crime.

FYI, the text of what he wrote is at the chicago tribune ... not particularly pleasant, but hardly worth an arrest warrant.

Rupert started it with this:

Fairbanks to St. Petersburg.
Great circle distance: 3,840 miles
Google directions distance: 9,631 miles
My score: 2.508

I answered by stretching his route slightly: Kantishna Station, Alaska to Skarsvag, Norway. It's a pretty long journey no matter how you look at it.

Google's route: 10,411 miles
Great circle distance: 3,141 miles
It has a score of only 3.315, but it'll take 34 days to make the journey!

This one seemed like a good North American entry:
Google's route
gets a score of 3.7.

But North America is tricky. Just about every goat and Jeep trail is mapped, and we Americans cannot abide straight lines that aren't paved. Rupert's still managed to find some good ones: Route to distance gives a very respectable 5.6.

I've headed over to the Balkans, where the maps are usefully short on detail. Here's my latest entry. Lecce, Italy to Tirane, Albania: Route to great circle.

1267 km by Google, 216 km straight arc. Score is 5.866.

It's kind of a pain because you have to snarf the lat/lon from Google's URL and adapt it to the great circle calculator, but it's fun to exploit holes in Google's map coverage.

Simple tasks like switching between Firefox and Thunderbird are driving the load on my machine up over 4, and if I'm trying to run Amarok at the same time, it drives it up to 8. In fact, my machine frequently climbs up into the 7-9 range, bringing my apps to a crawl and frustrating the hell out of me.

So I've decided it's time to buy a new computer. I'm going to replace my aging Sony Vaio desktop machine (which runs Linux) with something newer that has more RAM, a faster processor, and a bigger hard drive.

The thing is, I'm not entirely sure where to start looking. A quick walk through Circuit City a month or so ago lead me to believe I can get a rather "big" computer for as low as five hundred bucks, which further leads me to believe that if I were to buy something online, I can get a huge pile of RAM, a fast processor, and a big honkin' hard drive for even less.

I run Kubuntu, and use KDE as my desktop (though I occasionally switch to Gnome when I get bored) and I mostly use Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, Amarok, and run PokerStars in wine. I'm looking for something that can do all of that without slowing my machine to a crawl.

Anyone have any suggestions on where to start looking?

Edit: I don't think I have the patience to build my own machine out of individual parts. I also don't have any real loyalty to any particular company or architecture. New Egg has lots of machines with AMD processors, and though I've always had Intel processors because more things seemed to run on x86, that's not as much of an issue as it once was, right?

I've decided to move any "journal entry" type outpourings to my occasional blog at blog.gornall.net

Wearing a blue suit and a tight smile, the fed faced his audience.
And this wasn't just any audience. It consisted of 300 potential offenders, rounded up on Tuesday so Jon Dudas could lay down the law to them.

In this Star Tribune story, Jon Dudas, the director of the USPTO was speaking to an elementary school assembly of second through fifth graders. So instead of "students" or "kids", it's now acceptable for reporters to refer to them as "potential offenders"? This is plus ungood.

[This is actually just here for reference - it's a post from my history that I've referred to a couple of times, and it's a pain to find...It's been slightly updated for formatting, clarity and grammar. Here's the original Post]

Some history:

Waaay back in the mists of time (1988) I was a 1st-year undergrad in Physics. Together with a couple of friends, I wrote a virus, just to see if we could, and let it loose on just one of the networked machines in the year-1 lab.

I guess I should say that the virus was completely harmless, it just prepended 'Copyright (c) 1988 The Virus' to the start of directory listings. It was written for Acorn Archimedes/BBC micro's (the lab hadn't got onto PC's by this time, and the Acorn range had loads of ports, which physics labs like :-)

[edit: the above is misleading - it only worked on BBC's. The lab had 50 or so BBC's and 2 Archimedes, and I was trying to convey that as well, and mixed up the words]

It spread like wildfire. People would come in, log into the network, and become infected because the last person to use their current computer was infected. It would then infect their account, so wherever they logged on in future would also infect the computer they were using then. A couple of hours later, and most of the lab was infected.

You have to remember that viruses in those days weren't really networked. They came on floppy disks for Atari ST's and Amiga's. I witnessed people logging onto the same computer "to see if they were infected too". Of course, the act of logging in would infect them...

Of course "authority" was not amused. Actually they were seriously unamused, not that they caught us. They shut down the year-1,2,3 network and disinfected all the accounts on the network server by hand. Ouch.

There were basically 3 ways the virus could be activated:

• Typing any '*' command (eg: "*.", which gave you a directory listing. Sneaky, I thought, since the virus announced itself when you did a '*.' When you thought you'd beaten it, you'd do a '*.' to see if it was still there :-)
• The events (keypress, network, disk etc.) all activated the virus if inactive, and also re-enabled the interrupts, if they had been disabled
• The interrupts (NMI,VBI,..) all activated the virus if inactive, and also re-enabled the events, if they had been deactivated.

On activation, the virus would replicate itself to the current mass-storage media. This was to cause problems because we hadn't really counted on just how effective this would be. Within a few days of the virus being cleansed (and everyone settling back to normal), it suddenly made a re-appearance again, racing through the network once more within an hour or two. Someone had put the virus onto their floppy disk (by typing *. on the floppy rather than the network) and had then brought the disk back into college and re-infected the network.

If we thought authority was unamused last time, this time they held a meeting for the entire department, and calmly said the culprit when found would be expelled. Excrement and fans came to mind. Of course, they thought we'd just re-released it, but in fact it was just too successful for comfort...

Since we had "shot our bolt", owning up didn't seem like a good idea. The only solution we came up with was to write another (silent, this time :-) virus which would disable any copy of the old one, whilst hiding itself from the users. We built in a time-to-die of a couple of months, let it go, and prayed...

We had actually built in a kill-switch to the original virus, which would disable and remove it - we didn't want to be infected ourselves (at the start). Of course, it became a matter of self-preservation to be infected later on in the saga - 3 accounts unaccountably (pun intended :-) uninfected... It wasn't too hard to destroy the original by having the new virus "press" the key combination that deleted the old one.

So, everyone was happy. Infected with the counter-virus, but happy. "Authority" thought they'd laid down the law, and been taken seriously (oh if they knew...) and we'd not been expelled. Everyone else lost their infections within a few months ...

Anyway. I've never written anything remotely like a virus since [grin]

Simon.

I'm impressed!

So far, pretty much everything but playing DVD media has just worked right the first time out of the gate. I decided to run the Gnome based core system and I'm liking it. Still miss KDE, but the differences are not stark enough to worry too much about. What I need is there with few hassles.

Most importantly, the package management system is top-notch. Things just install with few worries. It's not that I can't go get some code and install it, then configure, etc... I can. It's that I don't often want to. Very good show so far.

One worry these days. How does one capture a snapshot of all the important software in case of a shutdown. With the legal environment today, this is a clear reality. As much as I love just grabbing the necessary bits online, will they be there later when / if I need them again?

I am absolutely stunned that Slashdot's editors would give credibility to a completely false story, pushed by a paid industry PR professional. As Rugrat said,

The "article" is not an article, but a press release written by an employee of a public affairs company.

"Tom Harris is mechanical engineer and Ottawa Director of High Park Group, a public affairs and public policy company."

For a website that spends so much time and energy combating FUD from Microsoft, and the MPAA and RIAA, it is baffling that FUD that was paid for and is pushed by the oil industry would make the front page here.

Come on, Slashdot. You can do better.

For the last year or so, I've been happily using Debian, with a mixture of sources so I was stable, but current, just like nearly everyone who uses Debian.

Then I tried to upgrade or something insane like that, using aptitude, and the whole thing went tits up on me. No amount of cussing, kicking things, or actual tinkering with the software could save my machine.

I thought about asking for some advice in the Debian forums, or on one of the lists, until I ran out of fingers in my entire family tree to count the times someone said some variant of, "Shut up, noob! Your stoopid and not leet leik I am! Go back to Winblows! Ha! HA! HA!!!1"

Yeah. Guess I'm not venturing into those waters, so I figured I'd just have to grab my network install CD and start over (luckily, I set up /home on its own partition a long time ago, so if I fuck something up really bad, I don't lose all my porn very important data.

The day I planned to reinstall Debian, I read that Dapper Drake had been released, and everyone loved it so much, they totally wanted to marry it. A friend of mine, who is wise in the ways of science and the air speed velocity of unladen swallows has also been singing the praises of Ubuntu for a long, long time, so I grabbed a Live CD to see what all the fuss was about.

Holy shit. What an awesome bit of work it is! It's the first Linux distro to find every single bit of hardware on my old Sony Vaio desktop machine, including all the USB ports. It looked great, too, and was the most "Mac-like" Linux I've ever used.

I realize that a lot of you are mocking me right now, but listen for a second: I'm not interested in hacking on my kernel to make sure something is detected during boot, or modifying all sorts of settings in a text editor just so I can make the damn thing find my camera . . . and don't get me started about CUPS. I love technology, and I love and fully believe in "free" as in speech, and I'm grateful for free as in beer. But also really into "works," as in just does. And on my machine here, Dapper Drake just works, and it's awesome. This is the Linux distro that I can take to my parents, and to my friends who are drowning in a sea of FUD, and convince them that they don't really have to be part of the Borg if they don't want to.

And ultimately, I believe that has to be our goal if we're going to convince people to give Linux a real, serious try as an alternative to Windows. We need to be able to tell them, with confidence, "Put this CD in your machine, and give it a try. I think you'll like it, because it just works."

I still read Slash daily, but have cut back on posting for some reason. Love the community, but have been spending my posting time elsewhere, mostly blogging and yacking about classic Atari game programming.

http://www.atariage.com

http://www.opengeek.org

(In reverse order)

Been doing a lot of thinking about political issues lately as well. Where Slashdot is concerned, the whole "protect the children" bit and net neutrality are the biggies.

Of course, parents need to watch their kids online just like they do anywhere else. There is just no way we can dumb the whole thing down in a way that makes any sense at all... unless!

We give up net neutrality! That's it, we can save the kids and shut up all the noisy (and increasingly relevant I might add) folks who have just a bit too much publishing power.

Makes me sick.

So, geeks start learning about advocacy and start practicing it, or we will not be happy geeks in the near future.

Think otherwise? By all means, enlighten me. I can use all the help I can get!

So, this just occurred to me. It probably ought to have occurred earlier, but hey, I'm getting on a bit these days, and since I'm blogless [oh the shame!], here is as good a place as any to post it ...

France and Apple are about to have an argument... France wants home-grown companies to have some chance of competing with Apple, and under the guise of "won't someone think of the children^W consumers", they're trying to level the playing field. (I think it's already established that I'm a cynic...)

Apple, on the other hand, see no reason to give their competition the keys to the door. As I've posted before, Apple sells a media-experience - from alpha to omega, Apple try to make it easy for people to buy itunes tunes for their ipod. This model may in fact survive this new law, any French machinations to the contrary, but from Apple's perspective, why take the risk ?

So, the French government has spoken, and apparently Apple ought to have "seen it coming"... How could a mere company have any hope of outwitting them ? Well, there's this thing called the "internet"....

Consider if Apple did a deal with the credit-card companies - they make an Apple- (or perhaps, given the 'other' Apple, iTunes-) branded credit card with the following perks:

• Now, if you're in France, you *always* get free delivery of physical Apple goods - even though it's being shipped from (wherever). Just like when you buy over $X normally.
• The previously "French" site can be re-hosted in the US (say), and users from France with Apple cards get to buy the same tunes as they currently do in France (to work around any international rights issues). You could play games with auto-recognising users at www.itunes.com to make it easier...
• They could even offer itunes-points. Let's face it, you're more likely to spend sufficiently to be able to claim a free $0.99 tune, than a 2-week holiday in Hawaii, and unlike other $0.99 "gifts", a free tune has value...

This way, Apple get to keep most of the business (all those people with ipods whose addresses Apple know) and poke the French government in the eye (all the profits that were being taxed in France are now being taxed in the US (or wherever).

From Apple's perspective, it's a better option than "pulling out of France" and sends the message that Apple aren't just going to roll-over when anyone comes knocking. The movement of the tax revenue might sway other nations not to do the same thing, as well. Sure - it's pure 'noise' in the grand scheme of things, but every trend starts with a single event, and no government likes to *lose* tax revenue...

Now Steve (perhaps that's "Mr. Jobs" to the likes of me :-) might not like it - from what I can see he's generally opposed to brand-dilution (well, duh!), but if Apple need options in the face of a hostile foreign government, perhaps it's worth considering. Just a thought :-)

Simon.

EVENTS:

• 1986 - Halley's Comet is visible in the night sky as it passes in its 76-year orbit around the sun.
• 1962 - Ranger 3 is launched to study the moon. The space probe later missed the moon by 22,000 miles (35,400 km).
• 1802 - The U.S. Congress passes an act calling for a library to be established within the U.S. Capitol; eventually this becomes the Library of Congress. It's a geek thing.

BIRTHS:

• 1961 - Wayne Gretzky, Canadian hockey player, coach, and team owner.
• 1918 - Nicolae Ceausescu, Romanian dictator (d. 1989.) I only picked Ceausescu because I remember how much the Romanians enjoyed executing him.

DEATHS:

• 1997 - Jeane Dixon, American astrologer (b. 1904.) And she never saw it coming!

For those regulars who read my posts, I've started a Museum of Gold Coins and Gold Bars that I'll be updating daily for the next 2 weeks. I know many of my "fans" are starting to show interest in coins, and I hope this museum will eventually have enough facts on coins so that one can decipher the real deals from the "collectible" scams out there.

Come check out my bro's band Maps and Atlases.