It is quite rare to see a Slashdot troll of such charming simplicity and style as this one.

Every time you discover another link to goatse.cx you have the option to warn others using one of those links:

• a warning sign
• http://www.oralse.cx

VIRII

ever wondered about just why using "virii" as the plural of (i.e. computer-) virus isn't right?

I was to write more on this, but then, why not refer people to a link?

Now if only they would get it...

Please read and enjoy this IMO excellent article on how Gnome2 is not for gnome users anymore.

Its a bit lenghty, but some of the links in there really provide an interesting read...

A shame I don't know the AC who wrote this. If you know him, drop me a mail,

Here's the link

I have just switched from my old system (Intel Celeron(Coppermine) FC/PGA 700, running very stable at 1050MHz, 320MB PC100RAM, 2x 10G HD) to my shiny new Dual Athlon Board!

Yay! Go me!

specs:

• Asus A7M266-D Motherboard
• 2 AMD Athlon XP 1800+ CPUs
• 2 arctic cooling Pro Coolers (and the included thermo paste)
• 256 MB no-name DDR PC2100 RAM (CL2.5 running fine at CL2!)
  • UPDATE: got another 512MB, which definitely speed up gentoo emerges...
• maxtor 6Y060L0 60GB IDE ATA100, 2700RPM, 2MB cache
• Asus cd-S500/a 50x CD-ROM
• HP 8230+ external USB CD-R/RW
• no-name GeForce3 Ti200 TVin/out 64MB DDR
• Creative SBLive! 5.1 Digital

I managed to mod the two Athlon XP 1800+ CPUs to duality by painting. You will find info about that on the web, but heres the short description: look on the CPU for a number of pins labeled L5. they look like this .::: and the rightmost bridge is very likely to be cut at the factory, unless you got some rather old XPs, and you have to reconnect those pins in order to enable multi-processing. The CPUs are then recognised as MPs by the BIOS.
You have to scrape off the protective plastic film from the pins first, I used a small but strong needle for this. I tried the trick going over the pins with a pencil at first, but that did't work. So I bought conductive paint, and connected them using a very fine brush. I had to look very hard in my city to find that paint, all the paint shops ;) didn't have it, and found some at a local car accessory store (the stuff is used to repair the heating wires in the back windshield of cars). My brand was called BERU RLS001 (price: Euro 9.20, quite expensice for the small about needed, but you save a lot on the CPUs)

For a HD i would have loved to get a WD Caviar of the "JB" variety, because they have a very nice cache of 8MB, but had to settle with a maxtor 80GB(2MB), and as the MoBo was rather expensive already, I only got 256MB unbuffered DDR2100 RAM.

Speaking of the MoBo, it's the Asus A7M266-D. If you want to run linux on that, there are a number of caveats:
Oh, yes they really meant hat about the 400W power source! If in doubt, get even more!

• BIOS
  Some say PNP OS should be DISABLED in the BIOS, but I have not seen any problems with this. One IMPORTANT setting is to set MPS1.4 Support to DISABLED, or else your linux wont boot.
  Also, one review I read said they had problems with the board in JumperFree mode, so better leave that alone and set your dip-switches on the board manually (the default is OK though). The same review said something about the "Turbo Mode" for the DDR mem was dangerous, so watch out.
• kernel
  well, use SMP ;)) and perhaps set you processor type to Athlon.
  As the time of this writng, there is no special support for the AMD MPX chipset on that board in the kernel (2.4.19/20), although it is in some ac trees and in some 2.5 trees. But it runs with the AMD7xxx drivers in the 2.4 kernel. Also be sure to enable RTC clock and optionally the AMD random number generator. If you want to use lm_sensors (see below), enable i2c.
  Oh, and the onboard sound chip is driven by the cmpci (C-MEDIA something)) module. Note you can specify the number of speakers to use in the kernel config, and set line-in to "rear out", so you can plug your stereo or rear speakers in, or to "bass out" if you want to drive a subwoofer.
  The USB chipset is OHCI-compliant, but I did't try the included USB2.0 (EHCI) card yet.
• lilo/grub/others kernel parameters
  I use nothing special (devfs=mount, hdc=ide-scsi), but if you encounter problems, try issuing "linux mem=nopentium" and/or "linux noapic"
• lm_sensors
  the needed modules are called amd-756 and w83781d.

  modprobe i2c-amd756
  modprobe w83781d force_as99127f

  to get correct fan readings you have to do

  echo "4 4 2" > /proc/sys/dev/sensors/w-i23782d-0-2d/fan_div

  or edit /etc/sensors.conf accordingly.

• other
  on SMP systems, setting the MAKE variable to "MAKE=make -j3" should speed up kernel and other compiles.
  gcc 3.x supports special optimisation for AMD CPUs with the -march and -mcpu options. Valid values are athlon-xp, athlon-mp, athlon-4, athlon-tbird, athlon, duron. I also like the gcc parameters -pipe and some of the -f parameters.
  I use these CFLAGS: CFLAGS="-march=athlon-mp -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -falign-functions=2 -falign-loops -falign-jumps=2"

  I had some problems with IRQs at first, switching the NIC and sound card around in the PCI slots helps.

<<insert aprupt end of journal entry here>>

So this post is definitely worth a read, the article was about scome obscure breakthrough concerning knots (nods?), but that post is for everyone who's enjoyed reading flatland as much as I did.

Also, I found this reply hilarious.

Well, I have finally decided to make use of the journal.

Figured (rather creatively) I might just mention the rare posts on /. discussions _I_ personnally find interesting.

Enjoy or go away.