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Here's LinuxPlanet's Review.

The summary page sounds pretty positive. Their two criticisms are relatively minor.

- They used their own partition tool and scheme and then complain they got an unexpected out of disk space error (no-one in this age of 40G drives has any business creating 100M partitions and expect to install a whole OS on it)

- CLOS didn't recognize their LAN card. I use the same LAN card and CLOS1.1 didn't have a problem with it. However, the card only marginally supports Linux, in that it uses a Tulip OEM chipset that there is a Linux driver for. The card doesn't claim to be plug-n-play for Linux.

Overall they liked the distro for current Windows users, and conclude: "The Win98 installation living on the same computer has a doubtful future once 'The Sims' has worn out its welcome."
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What's next, a Linux powered hearing aid?

How about pacemakers? Now that is device that really want to make sure is crash proof.

It does raise the point though that at some point the differences between a BIOS and a RTOS disapear and the two merge.

Think about Transmeta, the OS is embedded in the CPU. Same for planned system-on-a-chip devices. QNX is another example. If the RTOS only has to boot once, it becomes pointless to run it on top of a BIOS.


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What's this thing that SlashDot as for flightless birds that live in the Southern Hemisphere?

I mean, emus aren't even cute and cuddly like penguins. Though according to the Encyclopedia Britannica emu meat tastes like beef, which is curious for a bird, since so many non-birds have meat that tastes like chicken.


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The bacteria example is microevlotion, but finches on Galapagos is not. Yes, no one can prove that they evolved from a single parent species, but these species don't exist anywhere else on the planet, and some of the species fill an ecological niche that no other finch species on Earth does. Should we just assume that they got stranded there following the flood? According to the Old Testament, even all the species of birds on the planet were on board Noah's ark, so somehow these 8 species of finches were extirpated from everywhere else on the planet? Meanwhile, a species of finch who has DNA very similar to that of each of these 8 species lives just 1000 miles away on the South American mainland.


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How about this:

When you get a bacterial infection and treat it with antibiotics, there is a chance that a few of these bacteria (the one with greatest resistance to the antibiotic) survive. Those bacteria that have survived reproduce, and their progeny (if you can say that about life forms that reproduce asexually) will also be resistant to the same antibiotics. That bacteria goes on to infect someone else. They take the same antibiotic that was given to you, but it has no effect, so a different class of antibiotics has to be used. Eventually a strain of bacteria remains that is resistant to all known antibiotics, and people infected with it die.

This has happened in our lifetimes. Its not a theory, it can be demonstrated. This is natural selection.

This is what Darwin theorized, based significantly on the variety of species of finches found on the Galapagos islands, all aparently 'evolved' from a common ancestor. Darwin didn't know about DNA, and even today we can only work with an incomplete fossil record, but applying the proven fact of natural selection to what we do know from the fossil record and the similarity of DNA from one species to another that seems to correlate with that record, the most reasonable explanation is over hundreds of millions of years the variety of species on earth today evolved from simpler organisms.


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I took a look at Camp Sussex and other than the name of the camp itself, which you think would also cause problems for 1000's of British sites, the only thing I could find that possibly trigger a filter was in the source.

On the main page of the site, there is a picture of 3 girls at the camp, the filename for the picture is girls1.jpg this seems like pretty weak evidence to block the site on though.

There is also the possibility that the server hosting the camp's website also hosts a pr0n site and that the camp is blocked because of its IP address.


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Impressively comprehensive archive.

My favourites at the time they were released were Cello (developed at Cornell Law School) and Wollongong's Emmisary.

Cello (the first graphical web browser) was impressive in that it emulated a terminal window right in the browser window, so if you clicked on a telnet: URL you'd go right into your shell account.

Emmisary was a revolutionary GUI development that worked much the same way Windows Explorer does with Active Desktop. You could telnet, read newsgroups, email, ftp, or manage local files all from the browser window. Unfortunately Wollongong was bought out by Attachmate for its technology who then abandoned Emissary as a seperate product in the face of MS releasing IE for free.

Another important browser in the development of the web was SlipKnot, that let Windows 3.1 users piggyback on Lynx running through a shell account, in case their ISP didn't provide or charged extra for SLIP/PPP accounts.


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Corel LINUX OS: Second Edition is to be Previewed at LinuxWorld. It will be the first public viewing of the new and enhanced Corel LINUX OS.

Press Release


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Per this c|net story, pretty much all of the major distro's are gearing up for beta releases of new versions so they will be ready when the 2.4 kernel goes final.

Caldera will even be selling their beta as a $20 'Linux 2.4 Technology Developer Release Preview'. If find this humorous, in that not only would you be paying to run beta software, you'd be paying to run beta open source software. But they will rebate the purchase price back to you, so your really just paying shipping. (or you can just download it).


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Actually, a more approriate display technology to take advantage of these would be projection video. If set up a 1600 x 1200 array these behind a projecting lense, you should be able to create virtually any size 1600x1200 monitor just by projecting it onto a white surface.

You could use this for computing or hi-res TV, or perhaps even for projecting digital movies at theatres (an even higher resolution may be required for that).


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Looks like we will be getting some late fireworks this year, I recommend they plan the deorbiting to coincide with the beginning of the millenium.

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It seems a lot of the questions so far could be answered by reading a 1996 PBS interview with Cringely on the PBS website.

For example, there are several people who want to know what the X stands for. His answer from the 1996 interview was: "X stands for Xavier, my mother's maiden name."


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to whom does the NSA answer?

The NSA, like every agency in the Executive Branch, answers to the President, and to one or more oversight committees in Congress.

In this case, the NSA's oversight committees are The Senate Select Committee On Intelligence and the House Committee on National Security.


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They believe that the people who have just boycotted them were pirating all their music anyway.

In fact, the boycott itself may provide just the sort of evidence the RIAA wants to use in court. They were already citing a drop in CD sales in College areas, this will just increase that effect.

Maybe a solution is to only buy used CDs. This will demonstrate that there is a market for CD's but that we have no interest in giving RIAA any additional money. Of course, they may attribute the spike in used CD sales to people selling the CD's they have already ripped.


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