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Forget the bike!

Buy a real musclecar. Not some silly Honda with a bunch of stickers and a 3" exhaust tip on the 1" diameter manifold-back pipe, but something old and with a V8 driving the rear wheels. And restore it for the fun and love of the machine.

*Nothing* keeps you in shape better than lying on the floor of your garage trying to hold a transmission above your head with one hand while you fumble the bolts in place with the other hand. The threat of having a transmission fall on your head makes you discover strength you never knew that you had.

Carrying an engine block into your house to keep it from flash-rusting over the winter, or dragging a pair of cast iron cylinder heads *and* a toolbox from one end of a self-service junkyard to the other, all serve to keep you in excellent shape.

Never mind the feeling down below when you start that motor up for the first time, freshly rebuilt with 12:1 compression, a lopey camshaft and solid motor mounts... forget the bike! :)

Also, I drink like an Irishman, I eat like a pig, and I walk a lot because I like it.

Net effect? 6'4", 34" waist, 200lbs even, toned all over, and I can lift and hold a LaserJet 4si above my head. Also, mechanics coveralls and a welding helmet make a good Halloween costume when you're too lazy to go shopping.

Dating isn't a problem. (But make a habit of holding the drink in the left hand so that the right isn't cold and clammy when you shake hands with potential mates...)

Are you fat? If you want to fix the situation, the solution is really easy, but often overlooked. Stop eating so much, and/or get more exercise. That's it, that's all.

How about Gaston Lagaffe (sample comic strip included) which premiered in 1957?

Of course, computers only entered the picture around about 1977 when the earliest personal computers started to appear in offices... but before that, there was plenty of other hardware hacking. Photocopiers, cars, airplane engines, perpetual motion machines...

How about Gaston Lagaffe (sample comic strip included) which premiered in 1957?

Of course, computers only entered the picture around about 1977 when the earliest personal computers started to appear in offices... but before that, there was plenty of other hardware hacking. Photocopiers, cars, airplane engines, perpetual motion machines...

How about Gaston Lagaffe (sample comic strip included) which premiered in 1957?

Of course, computers only entered the picture around about 1977 when the earliest personal computers started to appear in offices... but before that, there was plenty of other hardware hacking. Photocopiers, cars, airplane engines, perpetual motion machines...

How about Gaston Lagaffe (sample comic strip included) which premiered in 1957?

Of course, computers only entered the picture around about 1977 when the earliest personal computers started to appear in offices...

Speaking of Evolution, I really wish that Ximian would speed up theirs.

It takes it 8 minutes to exit on my PIII-500. I refuse to believe that I should need to upgrade an e-mail drone beyond that.

If there were truth in advertising, Ximian would have called it Continental Drift.

You just reminded me of something that happened to a friend in the late 1980s.

We were die-hard members of one of the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A user's groups. He had his PEB (Peripheral Expansion Box) at a meeting, and was carrying it on a cart up a set of stairs. He was at the top of the stairs when it feel off the cart.

Before I continue, a word on the TI-99/4A. If there's a nuclear holocaust, I have every faith that the only survivors will be the Jews, Dodge Darts, McDonalds uniforms, and the TI PEB. You see, Texas Instruments built them out of stamped steel, with each card housed in a cast aluminum case. They were overbuilt for military use, let alone as a "home computer".

So, the PEB went end for end down the terazzo stairs. Bang, bang, bang. Little chips of terazzo breaking off the corner of each step, and a few small dents in the PEB.

He picked it up and shook it. Nothing sounded loose inside, so he hooked it up, and it still worked. Until he tried to save to a diskette.

The old full-height Shugart 5.25" double-sided single-density diskette drive now had a new feature. He could format a diskette, flip it over, and format it again. One of the heads was now halfway between tracks, so the net effect was that he had a four-sided diskette. 360k to a 5.25" diskette, while the rest of us were only getting 180k.

Waiting for KDE 3.2. KMail will actually have a useful spell checker, which will apparently be available for use in everything KDE, including Konqueror forms (like what I'm using to write this).

The Linux kernel is ready. KDE is almost ready. Then, all we'll need will be apps developers to produce stuff which doesn't feel/look/act/work like bad Windows shareware. (Integration, developers, integration! I need OpenOffice Impress to seamlessly handle videos, and Calc to do a polynomial regression!) Then Linux will actually be ready for the desktop and I'll be able to take that damned page off my site.

Waiting for KDE 3.2. KMail will actually have a useful spell checker, which will apparently be available for use in everything KDE, including Konqueror forms (like what I'm using to write this).

The Linux kernel is ready. KDE is almost ready. Then, all we'll need will be apps developers to produce stuff which doesn't feel/look/act/work like bad Windows shareware. (Integration, developers, integration! I need OpenOffice Impress to seamlessly handle videos, and Calc to do a polynomial regression!) Then Linux will actually be ready for the desktop and I'll be able to take that damned page off my site.

Yeah.... thank you, thank you.

How about some useful features instead? Integration between applications so that xine can play a video file from an Impress presentation, or any number of the other things Windows users take for granted that either don't work or aren't even under development for Linux.

'Course, the important stuff is already taken care of. Linux applications crash more often that the Windows kernel, so we're good there. And with KDE's blistering speed, you'll approximate the lagged feeling of having a good Windows virus e-mailing all the doc files on your hard disk to everyone in your Outlook address book.

I wonder if Cathy Rogers liked my Junkyard Wars entry tape from a couple of years ago. Bobo hates cans. And sometimes garlic cloves, too.

Well, ignoring the power requirements of RAM, bus controllers, network adapters, hard disks which are probably used for boot only...

Intel rates these things for 74.0W thermal dissipation, which is a pretty good measure of the electrical power consumed... since, unless something is badly wrong, your Xeon chip will not dissipate energy as light or sound.

74W x 1,024 = 75,776W continuous.

Assume they're on 24/7. Assume a cost of $0.06 per kWh, including distribution, debt retirement, Ontario's capped electric rates, etc.

There are 30 days in the average month. There are 24 hours in the average day [grin]. Therefore, there are 720 hours per month.

720 hours @ 75,776W = 54,558,720kWh.

Just a little over $3.2 million per month.

I'd imagine it's less than that; their electric rate is probably somewhat less based on their consumption. But consider that the depreciation on that hardware is probably a greater monthly expense than the electricity to power it...

I'm glad Linux is ready for Pixar, because Linux sure ain't ready for the desktop.

Thanks! It's done; check it out and tell me how you like it.

www.glowingplate.com/dissent

If you look at the desktop experiences of one advanced user who isn't a developer, I think it's safe to say that this is an ongoing problem.

A viable desktop operating system is more than a kernel and associated utilities; it's dependent on applications which *do what the competition does* and which look good and work well.

After all, to Joe Sixpack, the computer is a tool, not a toy.

The threshold which developers have to cross before we, as a community, can say that Linux is ready for the desktop, is one where the developers stop thinking about stuff as being "cool", but start to think of useful features, common interface guidelines for everything, and color schemes which don't make ordinary users wince every time they start a given application.

(Don't argue to me that you can easily adjust the color schemes in the preferences, you *know* most idiot users can't figure out how to do this.)

Features? Examples:

• Microsoft Excel 97 does polynomial regressions with about three clicks of the mouse. OpenOffice Calc 1.01 doesn't do more than linear regressions.
• Power Point 97 allows you to embed video into presentations. OpenOffice Impress does, too, but good luck getting it to work. (Do we have a standard interface for OLE between applications? What do I have to do to get OO to launch xine and seemlessly play a video file in my presentation?)

Note that I'm comparing a *CURRENT* version of OpenOffice unfavorably with a *6-year-old* Microsoft product. That's not something we want to brag about - "The leading office suite for Linux has most of the features of a 6-year-old version of Microsoft Office!"

Thank you. It's good to hear an increasing chorus of voices who're worried about this, especially as we reach a point where, on the surface, it looks like Linux is a viable alternative to Windows on the desktop. Those ordinary users who make the switch now will be dissatisfied very quickly, and will become staunch Microsoft proponents and purchasers for years to come, even when all the current problems with a Linux desktop have been addressed - public perception changes more slowly than the feature lists of open-source software.

As for Dad, no. He's 63 years old. If I were to install a really locked-down version of Linux on his machine, I'd have to place "Internet Explorer" and "Outlook" icons on his desktop. If I were to change the location of the Send button in Outlook, he'd never figure out how to send an e-mail, let alone swapping him into a whole different program on a whole different operating system.

He called me up and asked me why he couldn't get to a website that someone told him to check out. The URL was all-revealing: blahblah@domain.com. The difference between an e-mail address and a website address is apparently too much for him.

Nah... I'd use transformer oil, and I don't think a Lipton Cup-a-Soup would taste quite the same.

Transformer oil, however, is probably quite suitable for use in a CPU cooling system.

It has a higher breakdown voltage than air and is almost infinitely less conductive than real-world (ie. impure) water. Transformer oils are specifically designed for use as an insulating material in large power distribution transformers. Electric utility transformers at power substations, operating in the range of hundreds of thousands of volts, would arc between windings if the oil leaked out of them and air - with its lower breakdown voltage - seeped in. (Air breaks down at about 3kV per millimeter.) You can feel pretty confident that leaked oil won't short out IC pins on your motherboard. Hell, you could also ditch your power supply fan and fill that full of oil, too - just beware of relays and other mechanical components.

Heat transfer is a big reason for oil, too. In a car engine, much of the heat is generated by friction in the bearings, and motor oil pumped through the bearings takes that heat away. Transformer oil doesn't have to lubricate, nor does it have to carry away huge amounts of impurities or combustion by-products as in a car engine - the biggest requirements are heat carrying capability and high breakdown voltage. Large pole pigs (pole-mounted power transformers) are usually oil-filled and often have pipes coming from the bottom and going to the top - they serve as radiators. Oil flow is not by pump, the reliability would be too low - they're convective, too.

Finally, viscosity. Yes, this might be difficult, but transformer oils are available in a variety of thicknesses. You want a viscosity corresponding to SAE 0, which is the same as water. Even less might be available, though I've personally never seen it.

Density changes with temperature rise will have to be considered, since the lower density of hot liquids causes them to rise in the system (and is also the physics behind lava lamps). The system that guy designed is based on the density changes of water. Transformer oil won't behave the same way; accordingly, you'll have to whip out the old slide-rule and do some math. Calculus is your friend. Fortunately, the data on transformer oil should be readily available, it's an important design criteria.

Voltesso and Diala are good trade names which I've personally used in transformers loaded to hundreds of kilowatts at over 250,000V, at RF frequencies. (FAA obstruction lights on large VLF radio transmitting towers.) They're ALL PCB-free, and while you don't want to drink it, they're no more toxic than motor oil. And it takes a hell of a lot of work to make them catch fire.

In short, transformer oils are available in a variety of viscosities, are specifically engineered for their thermal transfer capabilities, are not electrically conductive, not dangerous, and are suitable for almost all of your electronic cooling needs.

The only problem I forsee is that you're gonna have a hard time buying them in quantities less than 45-gallon drums... though the drum would make a great passive radiator. Seriously, talk to a couple of linesmen with your local power utility, maybe you'll be able to talk your way into a couple of gallons of it.

And once that's done across all the machines in your compile farm, you can get to work tackling the big problems of why Linux isn't ready for the desktop yet.

Sorry to be the voice of dissent here, but I'm hoping that I can piss off enough developers that they start to address some of the usability issues currently plaguing Linux' feasibility for the desktop. Sure, the kernel is *beautiful*, but a desktop operating system is a lot more than that.

KDE and Gnome are both the best contenders for the desktops of the masses. Let's forget Fluxbox and other things. People want taskbars and Start buttons.

But they're fat and slow. Application skins and default color schemes look like they were designed by a Run Lola Run fan from East Berlin. Basic features are lacking. Interoperability and standard user interfaces become afterthoughts as developers only write what *they* like, not what Joe Public wants. Unfortunately, ( developer != Joe_Public ) in terms of interoperability and applications.

One developer flamed my website chronicling Linux current unsuitability for the desktop, yelling at me that "vi is the best word processor out there, why would any user want anything else?" I'm a vi user and lover, but it's not suitable for writing a business letter, anymore than using that old 1982 Epson MX-80 dot-matrix printer is suitable for printing resumes.

We have to change the mindset.

I know developers write code in a volunteer effort, and I don't discount that at all. We're probably pretty united on wanting to break the Windows monopoly, and we have to somehow convince developers to focus on that more than "well, who cares if it doesn't have this feature... but hey, it's skinnable!"

Here's a thought I had, but probably will never get around to building.

Lots of people go to the expense and effort of building/buying radiators or using large tanks of water as the heatsink for their water-based CPU cooler systems.

Last year, I started measuring the temperature of the water in my toilet tank. After a flush, it drops to 5-6 degrees Celsius. Between flushes, it gradually reaches room temperature, of course, but this is still no worse than a radiator or bucket. In practice, however, it never actually gets above about 10C (while room temperature is about 20C).

In other words, it's a supply of cold water which you were going to simply flush away.

Place a small bucket inside the toilet tank. Put a submersible pump in there, run the water to the CPU coolers, bring the water back and drain it over the bucket in the tank.

Everytime you flush the 6 beers you went through while flaming me for my Linux isn't ready for the desktop article, you can rest assured that the water which cools your CPU is being replaced with fresh, cold water. No mold, no mildew.

The purpose of putting the pump in the bucket is so that there's always a supply of water for the pump, even during the flush. And the purpose of draining the return line over the bucket is so that if your toilet tank doesn't refill for some reason, you'll still keep your bucket full of water and buy some time for hardware monitors to shut the system down if it's getting too warm.

I don't know how hot the water in the toilet will get, but think about this:

• The bucket full of water in the toilet tank is replaced during each flush but isn't actually available for a flush. You'll save water.
• You'll be removing the CPU-heated water from the house and will therefore reduce the load on your air conditioning system.
• You get to piss on the scourge of the overclocker, that excess CPU heat.
• Warming liquids enhances their ability to dissolve things, including ...dark matter. You might have to clean the toilet less often.

Of course, the only thing I'd worry about is the quality of the submersible pump. After all, if water leaked into the pump, then the water in the toilet could come into contact with one side of the AC line... the other side of which is grounded to your fusebox. If you happened to touch another grounded object while urinating (concrete floor, sink faucet, etc), then enough current could find that your stream of urine and urethral tissues are a more attractive ground path than the plastic sewer pipe. I think I'd invest in an isolation transformer (search ebay) to reduce the risk of highly ...unpleasant... damage.

I think if one were pumping water through tubes soldered to the heatsinks of their power supply, the risks would be compounded, conceivably by a failure on the primary side of the power supply: I think I'd make a point of running the computer on an isolation transformer as well.

Ahh... the joys of being an eccentric genius.

Here's a thought I had, but probably will never get around to building.

Lots of people go to the expense and effort of building/buying radiators or using large tanks of water as the heatsink for their water-based CPU cooler systems.

Last year, I started measuring the temperature of the water in my toilet tank. After a flush, it drops to 5-6 degrees Celsius. Between flushes, it gradually reaches room temperature, of course, but this is still no worse than a radiator or bucket. In practice, however, it never actually gets above about 10C (while room temperature is about 20C).

In other words, it's a supply of cold water which you were going to simply flush away.

Place a small bucket inside the toilet tank. Put a submersible pump in there, run the water to the CPU coolers, bring the water back and drain it over the bucket in the tank.

Everytime you flush the 6 beers you went through while flaming me for my Linux isn't ready for the desktop article, you can rest assured that the water which cools your CPU is being replaced with fresh, cold water. No mold, no mildew.

The purpose of putting the pump in the bucket is so that there's always a supply of water for the pump, even during the flush. And the purpose of draining the return line over the bucket is so that if your toilet tank doesn't refill for some reason, you'll still keep your bucket full of water and buy some time for hardware monitors to shut the system down if it's getting too warm.

I don't know how hot the water in the toilet will get, but think about this:

• The bucket full of water in the toilet tank is replaced during each flush but isn't actually available for a flush. You'll save water.
• You'll be removing the CPU-heated water from the house and will therefore reduce the load on your air conditioning system.
• You get to piss on the scourge of the overclocker, that excess CPU heat.
• Warming liquids enhances their ability to dissolve things, including ...dark matter. You might have to clean the toilet less often.

Of course, the only thing I'd worry about is the quality of the submersible pump. After all, if water leaked into the pump, then the water in the toilet could come into contact with one side of the AC line... the other side of which is grounded to your fusebox. If you happened to touch another grounded object while urinating (concrete floor, sink faucet, etc), then enough current could find that your stream of urine and urethral tissues are a more attractive ground path than the plastic sewer pipe. I think I'd invest in an isolation transformer (search ebay) to reduce the risk of highly ...unpleasant... damage.

Ahh... the joys of being an eccentric genius.

I'm an advocate of Linux on the desktop, too. I can't wait to see it. But from the perspective of an *average user*, I'm still convinced that it isn't ready. We *need* the average user to feel *more* comfortable working at a Linux desktop than a Windows machine, especially since he's gonna have to deal with a Windows world trying to suck him back into its comfortable embrace... at least until we've finished the takeover of the desktop.

This is good. I cannot corroborate it using a pre-compiled distro. Why am I using a pre-compiled distro? Because that's what Joe Sixpack is gonna be using. More optimization is needed, and more carefully made binaries are required from the major distros; especially Red Hat in the current #1 off-the-shelf position.

I think part of the problem is that we need developers to try actually using the pre-compiled binaries of their works which end up being shipped with the Red Hats and the Mandrakes of the world.

Most of them have formatting problems, cannot handle inline images (properly or at all). Table support from Word 2000 is lacking. I know this is a serious pain in the ass to reverse engineer, but it merely frustrates end-users who are already gonna be pissed off about having to learn something new when their company moves to Linux.

You're not Joe Sixpack. "How come it says I cannot save my file in /bin? Huh? I didn't log in as root, whoever that is." Screams of RTFM or "Get a life" would abound on mailing lists or IRC, whereas a 1-900-DRONE would calmly answer, explain, and the user would be supported. Sure, the example I cited is an operating system issue instead of an application issue, but it's a problem every bit as simple, stupid and pervasive.

KMail is great, the only programming complaint I've had with it is that it silently dies if it runs out of disk space. But the spellchecker is right out of 1995. We have to match feature-for-feature to be adopted. You're not going to sell Linux/KDE (or Linux/Gnome or OpenBSD/AfterStep or whatever) by screaming from the hilltops, "ALL THE FEATURES OF WINDOWS 3.1!" in a Windows XP world.

Evolution was too slow to be usable on my PIII-500. That's insane. It's just an e-mail client, not a genome sequencer, for Gawd's sake!

It's a good start, yes.

But the biggest problem is that if a feature which an Excel user would take for granted is lacking, it's a negative perception. Most users will already resist the change to something new and "strange".

We've grown up with the idea of piping the output from one program to another; it's the Unix way. But it's *not* acceptable on a desktop system. You don't do your spreadsheet in OpenOffice Calc, then save it in some format that Gnumeric handles so that you can use the point-and-click data analysis tools, then open int up in OpenOffice again. If you're paying a secretary $20/hr to do this, it doesn't take more that a few months to make back what you would have spent to install Windows on the machine.

I don't know how well Evolution handles e-mail. My main machine is over the hill, but easily captures video from my TV card in real-time. I find it hard to believe that responding to e-mail in Evolution should require such a fast computer as to be unusable on a machine which will capture NTSC video at 29.97FPS with 16 bit stereo sound with 0 dropped frames... (unless I open Evolution while I'm capturing video).

Mozilla is great. It's fast, attractive, and it works well. The only problems I have with it are fault tolerance (delete your JRE without telling Mozilla, then try to use a website infected with applets; it crashes with no warning), lack of ability to send a mailto: link to anything other than Mozilla's mail client, and the inability to tailor the browser string to be whatever I want without recompiling (at least one website I *have* to use will ban you if your browser doesn't say "MSIE" in its string).

For sure. This is a good step. But part of the problem is with the overall look of it. Red Hat 7.3, for example, with probably the biggest marketing department in the Linux world, comes with a highly saturated eye-straining blue background.

Contrast this to the relatively neutral backgrounds of Windows and Mac environments, and it looks more like we're trying to sell a product than design something useful out of the box.

Even XP's default meadow is less eye-straining.

If some Joe Sixpacks can't figure out how to move the Windows taskbar to someplace they like better, do you really think they'll change the backgrounds and skins to something less displeasing? The desktop's defaults must be *neutral*, *inoffensive* and *non-eyestrain-inducing* out of the box with *every* distribution.

Who do you call when you need support with OpenOffice or xine? I haven't tried either; I've got the luxury of being able to pursue the source code.

I do know that at one of my former employers - a huge defense contractor staffed by engineers and computer scientists - we spent a lot of our IT budget on calls to Microsoft looking for support on how to create PowerPoint slides with embedded video and other dead-easy things like that.

Sucky as that may be, it's reality for lots of organizations. We have to address that.

Sorry. $299, according to the Microsoft website, for Windows XP Professional, in single units, as a standalone operating system instead of an upgrade.

It remains that the purchase price is a very, very small part of the total cost of ownership.

This is true, but let's stop kidding ourselves about it being ready. It's not ready for the desktop yet.

Linux has made amazing strides since its inception a mere 10 years ago. It's already a secure and stable server operating system, with mature tools for sysadmins.

But it's still at workstation space. We can take heart; it's more usable on the desktop than a $30,000 Sun workstation, but it's still not ready to supplant Windows yet.

The biggest obstacles are not the Linux kernel, or even Linux itself, of course. The obstacles are a fast, feature-filled and stable desktop metaphore (be it KDE or Gnome or whatever) with good *USER* applications readily available. (Don't even bother sending me flames telling me that vi is the greatest word processor ever made because Joe Sixpack isn't gonna even gonna figure out how to bring up the help screen.)

I can't wait to see what it's like 20 years from now.

I've been waiting 15 years to see the end of Windows.

I want to be, but I can't (yet). [grin]

Here's the problem:

To put Linux on the desktop, we're asking them to give up the comfort, familiarity and applications of Windows. For what benefits?

• A user interface which is slow, designed by computer geeks for what *we* like, rather than designed by marketing departments for what *the public* likes, and usually ships, by default, with color schemes which are somehow even more garish and offensive than Windows XP.
• Inconsistent support. If Joe Sixpack were to look for support on a Linux program, usually there's no 1-900 number. If he were to dig up the mailing list info and send in a question, how long would it be before someone says "RTFM!"? What's he gonna do when TFM is half-written or poorly translated from some strange Tibetan dialect?

• Poor applications. Quoting an e-mail I received: "But a lot of it - and mainly the GUI stuff - is still lagging behind, being a slower and buggier version of a half-decent program on Windows. And priorities are wonderful - when we build a GUI application, the most important thing is that it's skinnable. Bugs? Features? Competition? Who cares?! It's skinnable!"

  The same writer continues... "And for the biggest question: Mr. Rupert wants a financial software for Linux (his son installed it for him). So he calls his son over to install a simple financial software - just something which can calculate his loan repayments. His son opens google (or freshmeat), and finds 31 financial programs. Each has a different set of features, of course. He downloads and compiles each of them (ah, yes, the rpm was compiled using an ancient glibc version, and no, Mr. Rupert doesn't know what glibc is). The only two candidates which could actually be compiled (and didn't require libobscure.so.2) and actually have this option in their ugly programmer-designed-GUI menus die as soon as you choose the option. That's right - the operating system is stable as a rock, but the programs die immediately. What's Mr. Rupert going to use? hmm.... Maybe a respectable program from a respectable company (on Windows, of course).

  But wait! John Rupert (the little 15 year old) can program - he's got some C tutorials, and he's written a few small programs. Why can't he write the program for his father? And the 32nd version is on its way."

• Good stability and core networking and filesystems. (Joe Sixpack really seems to care about this, after all, he's still running Windows 98 with FAT32. But he's happy, 'cause it's 98SE.)
• Free to download, cheap to buy. Ahh, but if you're in business, you're paying people to use computers. You're paying people to surf the 'Net and try to figure out why OpenOffice Calc won't do the polynomial regression that Excel 95 and up will do in two mouseclicks. You're paying people to punch Ignore/Ignore/Ignore as KMail chews through an e-mail with the names of people it doesn't recognize, rather than quietly underlining them so that you may passively ignore them. You're paying people to wait 1/2 hour as KDE parses a directory full of JPG images of the latest marketing brochures. Suddenly, the $200 or whatever Microsoft is currently charging for Windows is pretty unimportant.
• An ordeal every time someone sends you a Microsoft Office file. These are basically standard in the business world, and while you expect this to be a problem with an alternative desktop, it's incredible how pervasive the damned things are. Are you gonna tell a potential employer to re-send his offer of employment in HTML because you can't read a Word file properly? Wouldn't it be even worse if you were a large company dealing with clients who sent you stuff in XLS, PPT, DOC?

We need to work on this stuff. Linux still isn't ready for the desktop.

The usual hype. But I was surprised by the lack of one hugely important game:

Hunt the Wumpus.

Hunt the Wumpus was apparently an old Unix text-based RPG, which Texas Instruments brought to life on their under-rated but massively overbuilt TI-99/4A home computer in 1980 or so.

The TI-99/4A (and its rare older brother, the TI-99/4) had a 16 bit TMS9900 processor chip (in 1979 and 1981, boys and girls!), a kick-butt video chip (the TMS9918) which had 32 sprites and a video overlay feature. But Texas Instruments, a company which is/was making more chips than Frito-Lay, hobbled the machine by using the video chip's RAM as the console's main memory, bottlenecking the expanded memory down to 8 bits, and creating the single slowest BASIC interpreter ever designed by having it interpreted TWICE (from BASIC to GPL - "Graphics Programming Language" - then to machine language).

With this nasty kludge, they released a graphical version of Hunt The Wumpus. Horrible sound effects, and game play which made you feel like you were drunk and on LSD. Oh, and attempting to add graphics to an old text-only game is doomed to fail, don't even attempt it.

Agreed. But look at it this way.

At least Microsoft has a budget to sit people down in focus groups and see what they like. If we had that in KDE/Gnome/$any_other_full-service_desktop_metaphor , then it's probable we wouldn't have new stuff being released with color schemes that make corporate users vomit, or xine logos designed by eurotrash 14-year-old Run Lola Run fans from East Berlin.

Microsoft spent millions developing that GUI look and feel. If user Joe Average didn't like it, they wouldn't have released it. We could do far worse than to take Microsoft's lead on UI design - KDE is the best of the free desktop metaphors for Linux, and well, frankly, it sucks.

By copying the good features of Windows software while avoiding their pitfalls of poor security and castrating inflexibility, we have no place to go but up.

The same, of course, applies to analyzing and "sharing" what makes the Macintosh GUI great. But you have to crawl before you can walk...

Linux isn't ready for the desktop.

I think the fast route is actually making Linux ready for the desktop.

Linux is NOT a viable alternative to Windows, and you're deluding yourself if you think it is.

It's a foregone conclusion that we need a comprehensive desktop environment like KDE. We need an underlining spellchecker in KMail. We need KDE not to be so slow that it takes half an hour to parse my MP3 collection every time I open the folder. We need people to match feature for feature every Windows product, instead of whining about "highly advanced math" like polynomial regressions. We need xine to work, instead of having their developers wandering around talking about changing the default logo to something which looks like it was designed by a 14-year-old Run Lola Run fan from East Berlin.

I think most North Americans have no particular love of either Windows or of Bill Gates, and will jump ship to the (free/reliable) alternative as soon as it's really there.

Linux simply isn't ready for the desktop yet.

I run Linux on my primary desktop. While the kernel and system-space stuff is leaps and bounds above Windows, from a UI standpoint, it's still about as painful as going from Windows 2000 to Windows 3.1.

I think the fast route is actually making Linux ready for the desktop.

Linux is NOT a viable alternative to Windows, and you're deluding yourself if you think it is.

It's a foregone conclusion that we need a comprehensive desktop environment like KDE. We need an underlining spellchecker in KMail. We need KDE not to be so slow that it takes half an hour to parse my MP3 collection every time I open the folder. We need people to match feature for feature every Windows product, instead of whining about "highly advanced math" like polynomial regressions. We need xine to work, instead of having their developers wandering around talking about changing the default logo to something which looks like it was designed by a 14-year-old Run Lola Run fan from East Berlin.

I think most North Americans have no particular love of either Windows or of Bill Gates, and will jump ship to the (free/reliable) alternative as soon as it's really there.

Linux simply isn't ready for the desktop yet.

I run Linux on my primary desktop. While the kernel and system-space stuff is leaps and bounds above Windows, from a UI standpoint, it's still about as painful as going from Windows 2000 to Windows 3.1.

I used to feel exactly the same way.

My best friend and I were very similar. We were the guys who'd sit at the back of the class, making fun of the teacher. Everything was more exciting than homework.

After being expelled from high school for driving a motorcycle down the hallway mostly because I was bored, I went out into the real world. So did my best friend.

As roommates for several years, we knew each other very well. Massive career changes were routine, though we worked well for a professional audio and video company where the tasks at hand changed every day and the stress kept us focussed.

The house situation was interesting. I came home one day to find that he'd had a couple of friends over to play guitar. There was stuff everywhere: amps, guitars, guitar strings, cables, sheet music. Only a very select few would wheel an old Ariens snowblower into the living room to clean it up: I did. He came running down the stairs, and with the pressure of a running snowblower dealing with his cheap old acoustic guitar, eveything else was cleaned up quickly.

We drank a case (12) of beer a day, and each smoked over a pack a day. Food was secondary.

We mutilated several Chevettes, including building a V6 Chevette, a Chevette targa (a convertible with no top) and a Chevette with the back end of a 1956 Dodge Custom Royal welded on. Short-term creativity was a hallmark.

Then my best friend was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder.

Much as I was a skeptic, on dexadrine, he became a model of management, confident ability and skill. The creativity remained, but it was nowhere near as impulsive. All of a sudden, there was consideration to the question, "Is it really a good idea to cut the roof off the car I have to drive to work on Monday?".

After a while, I noticed little things like my fidgeting, the fact that I was always told that I was "careless" when doing math problems, I'd slept with most everyone in two large towns mostly because I wasn't interesting in any commitment, was the world's greatest procrastinator, I like to amuse myself by shocking other people, etc. I did an online test, and it showed that had a strong leaning toward ADD, too.

I printed out the test results and took them to my doctor, who *immediately* wrote a prescription. I tried out Ritalin and found that it improved things, but the biggest improvement simply came from knowing the diagnosis.

Yes, I have attention deficit disorder. I pop a pill when I need to be able to focus for something really important, but for the most part, I am as I am.

Is there a benefit to ADD? Yes, absolutely. Most people with ADD are exceptionally creative problem solvers. This isn't a feature that you wish to stifle with medication, but it can cause problems in situations, ie. academia and some workplaces, where conformity is an asset.

And yes, there is a physiological basis for ADD. Look it up. Consider the fact that, outwardly, this is a hyperactivity disorder which is medically controlled with stimulants. It shouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that using stimulants on hyperactive people should only make the problems worse.

Yet, stimulants control ADHD's hyperactivity and ADD's poor impulse control. Many people with ADD/ADHD consume huge quantities of coffee and cigarettes, because caffeine and nicotine help with focus. Stimulants are used because they increase activity in the part of the brain responsible for impulse control, a part which is shown by MRI images to be less active among people with ADD/ADHD.

Finally, there appears to be a genetic predisposition, though there are other factors involved. Much like homosexuality, there is no definitive proof of a genetic origin, however, both Helen Keller and Ray Charles could see a pattern emerging from the data.

It's not the condition-of-the-week, it's real.

I used to feel exactly the same way.

My best friend and I were very similar. We were the guys who'd sit at the back of the class, making fun of the teacher. Everything was more exciting than homework.

After being expelled from high school for driving a motorcycle down the hallway mostly because I was bored, I went out into the real world. So did my best friend.

As roommates for several years, we knew each other very well. Massive career changes were routine, though we worked well for a professional audio and video company where the tasks at hand changed every day and the stress kept us focussed.

The house situation was interesting. I came home one day to find that he'd had a couple of friends over to play guitar. There was stuff everywhere: amps, guitars, guitar strings, cables, sheet music. Only a very select few would wheel an old Ariens snowblower into the living room to clean it up: I did. He came running down the stairs, and with the pressure of a running snowblower dealing with his cheap old acoustic guitar, eveything else was cleaned up quickly.

We drank a case (12) of beer a day, and each smoked over a pack a day. Food was secondary.

We mutilated several Chevettes, including building a V6 Chevette, a Chevette targa (a convertible with no top) and a Chevette with the back end of a 1956 Dodge Custom Royal welded on. Short-term creativity was a hallmark.

Then my best friend was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder.

Much as I was a skeptic, on dexadrine, he became a model of management, confident ability and skill. The creativity remained, but it was nowhere near as impulsive. All of a sudden, there was consideration to the question, "Is it really a good idea to cut the roof off the car I have to drive to work on Monday?".

After a while, I noticed little things like my fidgeting, the fact that I was always told that I was "careless" when doing math problems, I'd slept with most everyone in two large towns mostly because I wasn't interesting in any commitment, was the world's greatest procrastinator, I like to amuse myself by shocking other people, etc. I did an online test, and it showed that had a strong leaning toward ADD, too.

I printed out the test results and took them to my doctor, who *immediately* wrote a prescription. I tried out Ritalin and found that it improved things, but the biggest improvement simply came from knowing the diagnosis.

Yes, I have attention deficit disorder. I pop a pill when I need to be able to focus for something really important, but for the most part, I am as I am.

Is there a benefit to ADD? Yes, absolutely. Most people with ADD are exceptionally creative problem solvers. This isn't a feature that you wish to stifle with medication, but it can cause problems in situations, ie. academia and some workplaces, where conformity is an asset.

And yes, there is a physiological basis for ADD. Look it up. Consider the fact that, outwardly, this is a hyperactivity disorder which is medically controlled with stimulants. It shouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that using stimulants on hyperactive people should only make the problems worse.

Yet, stimulants control ADHD's hyperactivity and ADD's poor impulse control. Many people with ADD/ADHD consume huge quantities of coffee and cigarettes, because caffeine and nicotine help with focus. Stimulants are used because they increase activity in the part of the brain responsible for impulse control, a part which is shown by MRI images to be less active among people with ADD/ADHD.

Finally, there appears to be a genetic predisposition, though there are other factors involved. Much like homosexuality, there is no definitive proof of a genetic origin, however, both Helen Keller and Ray Charles could see a pattern emerging from the data.

It's not the condition-of-the-week, it's real.

You know what terrifies me about Hello Kitty?

Apparently, it's a *big thing* in Japan. No, I've never been to Japan, nor am I a Nipponophile ("Nippophile" sounds racist somehow...). Hell, I don't even like anime. But I hear the stories from friends who've been there.

I wake up in the middle of the night with a scream caught in my throat, with visions of Japanese engineers designing brakes and steering systems for Honda and Toyota cars, doing their back-of-the-envelope sketches and calculations on Hello Kitty stationary. The senior engineers in my nightmares have Hello Kitty sliderules.

Not coincidentally, people often wonder why I drive a 1976 Dodge Ram. I figure, if I'm going to share the road with cars whose balljoints were designed using Hello Kitty pocket calculators, I may as well keep myself wrapped up in some good thick steel.

How about the bow tied on one of the cat's ears? I tried that on my cat, and she had it off in nanoseconds. Hot melt glue was only slightly more effective, but not enough to build a franchise on the concept. A staple gun is the only alternative that I can think of - I'm simply amazed that PETA isn't up in arms about the tacit advocacy of using staple guns to affix bows to fluffy little pussycats.

BTW, Linux is not ready for the desktop.

I'm trying to incite riots, with "I'll show him!" bouts of productivity.

You see, I'm in a position where I might be able to get 600 machines with the Canadian Federal Government switched from Windows to Linux. But I can't - for a variety of reasons, Linux simply isn't ready for the desktops of the masses.

Why? www.glowingplate.com/dissent. Linux simply cannot be heralded as a viable replacement to Windows while the most common off-the-shelf distro (RH) is as slow as it is, KDE lacks such basic things as a spellchecker which doensn't suck, and xine's developers are having long debates about which logo to choose (all of which look like they were designed by a 14-year-old Run Lola Run fan from East Berlin) while the xine UI lacks something as simple and common sense as a friggin' repeat button.

And while Open Office is a great start, it amazes me that, despite its Sun ancestry which is the bread and butter of engineering workstations - OO's Calc apparently lacks the ability to do a simple linear regression. Excel's been doing them for years. (It's worth noting that I've RTFM and even though I've designed radar equipment for a living, I still can't figure out how to turn on OO Writer's page numbering...)

As Linux advocates, these things must be addressed. The party lines must be crossed, distro wars must be ended, and a concerted effort to actually get a real 100% ready x86 desktop operating system must be mustered. After all, Linux is almost there.

If I'm so passionate, why don't I program? While I can make Hello World in about a dozen different languages, my programming style ranges from brute force to ignorance. It's so horrible that Microsoft keeps on trying to hire me to work on the IIS Development Team. You don't want to commit my code. I'll contribute in advocacy, documentation, and fanning the flames instead.

Check it out.

Now it's 10:30PM on a Saturday night. Time to go out and drink beer.

(BTW, just kidding about Microsoft trying to hire me. Well, I think I am, anyway; there's a headhunter trying to scout me for an undisclosed position just outside of Seattle.)

I'm trying to incite riots, with "I'll show him!" bouts of productivity.

You see, I'm in a position where I might be able to get 600 machines with the Canadian Federal Government switched from Windows to Linux. But I can't - for a variety of reasons, Linux simply isn't ready for the desktops of the masses.

Why? www.glowingplate.com/dissent. Linux simply cannot be heralded as a viable replacement to Windows while the most common off-the-shelf distro (RH) is as slow as it is, KDE lacks such basic things as a spellchecker which doensn't suck, and xine's developers are having long debates about which logo to choose (all of which look like they were designed by a 14-year-old Run Lola Run fan from East Berlin) while the xine UI lacks something as simple and common sense as a friggin' repeat button.

And while Open Office is a great start, it amazes me that, despite its Sun ancestry which is the bread and butter of engineering workstations - OO's Calc apparently lacks the ability to do a simple linear regression. Excel's been doing them for years. (It's worth noting that I've RTFM and even though I've designed radar equipment for a living, I still can't figure out how to turn on OO Writer's page numbering...)

As Linux advocates, these things must be addressed. The party lines must be crossed, distro wars must be ended, and a concerted effort to actually get a real 100% ready x86 desktop operating system must be mustered. After all, Linux is almost there.

If I'm so passionate, why don't I program? While I can make Hello World in about a dozen different languages, my programming style ranges from brute force to ignorance. It's so horrible that Microsoft keeps on trying to hire me to work on the IIS Development Team. You don't want to commit my code. I'll contribute in advocacy, documentation, and fanning the flames instead.

Check it out.

Now it's 10:30PM on a Saturday night. Time to go out and drink beer.

(BTW, just kidding about Microsoft trying to hire me. Well, I think I am, anyway; there's a headhunter trying to scout me for an undisclosed position just outside of Seattle.)

I 100% agree with you. I *am* using Linux on my desktop and have been for quite some time now, but it's painful.

I've been deliberately sticking with RH because it's the most common distro. But there are many problems not isolated to Red Hat's overzealous behavior (and gcc 2.96).

KDE lacks an underlining spellchecker, in particular for KMail. Do you know how much you come to take a passive and unobtrusive underlining spellchecker for granted, especially when presented with a popup window asking you for interaction on *every single word* it thinks you've misspelled?

Allegedly, that feature is coming in KDE 3.2. But most Windows apps have had that feature since 1996. And we wonder why Gates is a rich man.

Xine is a great video player, but rather than adding something as basic as a repeat button or as essential as a working GUI that doesn't have decorative do-nothing buttons, the developers are running around trying to devise a logo for it. All the logos so far have looked like they were made by 14-year-old East Berlin Run Lola Run fans. I cannot show my boss software with logos and GUIs which are that tacky: there's no way I'll get it onto the desktops.

Browsing a collection of 2,800 MP3s on a local hard drive is dead slow. It takes my Pentium III-500 several minutes to show the contents of this directory. Why? I think KDE/Gnome are checking EACH and EVERY file. A similar problem occurs when I open a directory full of images, and it appears attempt to generate several thousand thumbnails on-the-fly, rather than using a caching scheme and merely checking for new ones. And no, I think a PIII-500 should be perfectly adequate for browsing a directory full of MP3s. I'm not bitching about the fact that it's too slow to play DVDs in xine (but oddly enough, PowerDVD in Windows is just fine).

OpenOffice is a good start, but that's all I'll call it. OpenOffice Calc doesn't have half the statistical functions of Excel, which amazes me given the fact that it springs from Sun. Sun is, of course, the engineer's workstation of choice, so it blows my mind that I can't find a built-in function to do a linear (let alone quadratic) regression from Calc. Excel has done them for years. OO is slow, fat, and quite frankly, ugly. And while I have designed radar video processing systems in use on ships around the world, I still haven't figured out how to get OO to put fucking page numbers on my documents.

I sometimes suspect that the people who write this software don't actually use it.

There has to be some sort of organization dedicated to improving the desktop Linux experience, or else we're all screwed.

Check out this link on Linux desktops: www.glowingplate.com/dissent

The problems with Microsoft don't stem from Bill Gates being evil. I've met the man (albeit briefly), and I don't believe that he's evil. I don't even believe that it's the money.

I believe that Bill Gates is utterly convinced that the Microsoft way is the right way. Mercilessly killing the competition saves the world from the threats of what he perceives as unreliable and overcomplicated software produced by everyone else.

His vision is powerful, and he's (through luck and ruthlessness) achieved a position where he's capable of realizing it. Of course, he's blind to its inherent flaws. His competitive streak is so fierce that *everything* gets turned into a game, including (and I'm not kidding), "Let's see if I can run this lavalier microphone through my shirt faster than you can put a battery into the transmitter."

Similarly, I don't doubt for a second that Adolph Hitler was convinced that everything he did was for the good of the German people. Of course, the recants of history tend to be less forgiving than the heat of the moment. Something about hindsight being 20/20, and the discovery that Auschwitz wasn't really a sausage factory.

Bill Gates would never have ended up as an ordinary average Joe. He's too intelligent, too competitive by nature and too committed to his dream. I have a lot of admiration for the man, as flawed as his vision and his horrible software may be.

Having said that, there are a few reasons why Linux isn't yet ready for mass adoption on the desktop.

Lest you forget, I'm the Bobo guy. And Mike's car was a 1975 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme in primer. But we did find out that Tremclad (based on the empty spray can in the middle of the street) is very hard to sand off a quarter panel.

Heh. Those were fun days.

A fog chiller like this will work almost as well as a professional one. The professional fog coolers essentially blow the fog through an refrigerator evaporator.

Halloween of 1994, I had the police at my house 6 times, each time with them begging me to stop doing what I was doing... he so badly wanted a reason to arrest me, but could think of none.

Picture it: The doorbell was connected through an optocoupler to my computer's keyboard. Everytime the doorbell rang, there was a pause (as the stereo audio file loaded) then a loud scream played from a speaker (left) hidden in the trunk of one of the cars in the driveway. The right channel had a nasty kind of chewing sound, and it was played through a speaker hidden in the engine compartment of another car which was parked close to the door.

My roommate and I were car nuts, and we had a junked Toyota that we were waiting for the scrapyard to haul off. With the chain hoist, we put it on its side in the front yard, with a mannequin's arm sticking out from underneath. We hooked its electrical system up to a car battery charger and left some of the parking lights on, with a turnblinker flashing and the AM radio playing quietly inside.

I was working in the professional sound and lighting business then, so I borrowed a fog machine, fog chiller and 6,000 watts of Leko stagelighting.

The fog machine and the chiller from work went outside to provide a ground mist, but not too much. I needed for the kids to see, by the light of the flashing signal, the arm sticking out from under the Toyota.

The Lekos and my own fog machine were set up inside. The Leko dimmer pack was powered off the 40 amp 240V service to the stove outlet, and all 6 lights, at 1000W apiece, were pointed and focused to a point 1 foot outside of my front door.

And then there was the chainsaw. Beg, borrow, steal or rent a chainsaw. Take off the chain and protect the kids from the potentially sharp edge of the chain guide with a rubber edging like people use around the outlines of their car doors.

The Spectacle:

Mom or Dad would stand at the end of the driveway as Little Tommy would walk past the Toyota with the flashing lights and the arm poking out of the ground mist.

Little Tommy, dressed in his finest Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles costume would press the doorbell. He'd hear the ring of the bell, then a couple of seconds later, the scream from the trunk of one of the cars he'd just passed. Gradually, he'd become aware of a wet chewing sound right behind him.

If Little Tommy was still standing at the door by the time I got downstairs, he'd be greeted to the sound of the door opening, and a wall of fog in front of him; invisible foggy blackness.

Of course, wearing black and a black ski mask, I'd be standing there watching the look of fear on the kid's face as it flashed on and off in time with the doomed Toyota's right turn. And then, just when we thought Tommy was getting ready to leave, Mike would kick the foot-pedal that turned on all 6kW of stagelights, focused right at the kid's face.

Blinded and disoriented, Little Tommy would start to retreat as I started up the chainsaw. And his first sight of me would be the silhouette, through the fog, of a black shadow with a running gas chainsaw.

Frozen, the kid would stand there, a deer caught in the headlights, as the chainsaw-wielding black shadow pressed the blade of the saw to his neck and revved the motor.

Of course at this point, the parent, standing at the end of the driveway, would feel that Little Tommy was in mortal danger, scream, drop the bag of candy, and attempt to rescue him from the chainsaw which would have already taken off the kid's head if it still had a chain.

The next morning, I had 4 broken windows, hate messages spray-painted onto the side of my roommate's car, the smell of two-cycle oil in my living room, and a hell of a lot of toilet paper and broken eggs to clean up. But I only had to give out 1/2 bag of candies, so I think I did okay.

Linux isn't ready for the desktop yet.

For The People Who Live Inside Of Your Walls?

We're the people inside of your walls,
We live here inside of your walls
We're watching you daily with great fascination,
At night we curl up inside pink insulation,
We're the people inside of your walls.

Of course, we're not like average people you know,
We eat tiny bugs for our dinner
We're all just as tall as your average joe,
But why, we'll admit we're much thinner,
We're the people inside of your walls.

- The Frantics, "Four On The Floor" TV series, 1986, this song was the source of many childhood nightmares.

Almost as many nightmares as this.

Hey, I needed a Pentium IV at 2.0GHz just to be able to get KDE 3's file browser to display my MP3 directory in under a minute.

And if there were truth in advertising, it wouldn't be called Ximian Evolution. Instead, it would be called Ximian Continental Drift.

www.glowingplate.com/dissent

I will be.

If Linux is ever going to replace Windows as a viable desktop operating system - which I think the majority of the Linux community rightly wants - then it's time to get your head out of the sand and look at the reality.

I'm typing this on a Windows XP box at work. It's not by choice that I am using Windows, in fact, I have defenestrated my home computers despite several problems with Linux as a viable desktop operating system.

This XP box is insipid, insulting, cartoonish, wasteful of CPU cycles and hardware resources. And, I think, Windows is almost at the point where any idiot can use it.

If you've ever done a stint in tech support, you know how the operating system must pander to the idiot who doesn't realize that a case sensitive password must be entered with the Caps Lock in the same mode as it was when the password was created.

Linux should not go this way by default, or else we will drive away both power users and developers.

But there's plenty of room for distributions and tools which are designed to make Linux easy for the proles to handle.

Don't knock them, applaud them. Unless you want to see all Internet protocols commoditized by The Borg.

www.glowingplate.com/dissent

I will be.

If Linux is ever going to replace Windows as a viable desktop operating system - which I think the majority of the Linux community rightly wants - then it's time to get your head out of the sand and look at the reality.

I'm typing this on a Windows XP box at work. It's not by choice that I am using Windows, in fact, I have defenestrated my home computers despite several problems with Linux as a viable desktop operating system.

This XP box is insipid, insulting, cartoonish, wasteful of CPU cycles and hardware resources. And, I think, Windows is almost at the point where any idiot can use it.

If you've ever done a stint in tech support, you know how the operating system must pander to the idiot who doesn't realize that a case sensitive password must be entered with the Caps Lock in the same mode as it was when the password was created.

Linux should not go this way by default, or else we will drive away both power users and developers.

But there's plenty of room for distributions and tools which are designed to make Linux easy for the proles to handle.

Don't knock them, applaud them. Unless you want to see all Internet protocols commoditized by The Borg.

www.glowingplate.com/dissent

Yes. Imagine HP Vectra computers on shock-proof feet to protect them from engine vibrations. We often used to use these as part of our ISIS engine management systems in engine control rooms: hot, steamy, smelling of saltwater and diesel fuel.

The Vectras lasted just fine. I think any other quality computer would, too. The biggest killer is the vibrations; the heat, humidity and salt are no worse than if you lived in, say, Tampa, with no air conditioning.

Equipment specifically built for a marine environment is always very tough, but that's the same for almost anything sold to industry instead of consumers. Industry more often wants quality; consumers claim they want quality and then run out and buy Samsung TV sets.

Here's a radar system with a 68000-based computer doing the video processing. Here's a Great Lakes bulker, pretty small potatoes in the marine world, yet it still has a diesel engine approximately four stories tall.

Yes. Imagine HP Vectra computers on shock-proof feet to protect them from engine vibrations. We often used to use these as part of our ISIS engine management systems in engine control rooms: hot, steamy, smelling of saltwater and diesel fuel.

The Vectras lasted just fine. I think any other quality computer would, too. The biggest killer is the vibrations; the heat, humidity and salt are no worse than if you lived in, say, Tampa, with no air conditioning.

Equipment specifically built for a marine environment is always very tough, but that's the same for almost anything sold to industry instead of consumers. Industry more often wants quality; consumers claim they want quality and then run out and buy Samsung TV sets.

Here's a radar system with a 68000-based computer doing the video processing. Here's a Great Lakes bulker, pretty small potatoes in the marine world, yet it still has a diesel engine approximately four stories tall.

Yes. Imagine HP Vectra computers on shock-proof feet to protect them from engine vibrations. We often used to use these as part of our ISIS engine management systems in engine control rooms: hot, steamy, smelling of saltwater and diesel fuel.

The Vectras lasted just fine. I think any other quality computer would, too. The biggest killer is the vibrations; the heat, humidity and salt are no worse than if you lived in, say, Tampa, with no air conditioning.

Equipment specifically built for a marine environment is always very tough, but that's the same for almost anything sold to industry instead of consumers. Industry more often wants quality; consumers claim they want quality and then run out and buy Samsung TV sets.

Here's a radar system with a 68000-based computer doing the video processing. Here's a Great Lakes bulker, pretty small potatoes in the marine world, yet it still has a diesel engine approximately four stories tall.

I ranted about this the other day when there was the article about the Linux user who went back to Windows.

Add my list of gripes to the things that the community needs to do.

This is especially frustrating because Linux is so near to being a viable desktop alternative to Windows, and yet I suspect that many in the community won't see these problems as important.

Look at the default mail client (kmail) on the most popular desktop (KDE). The spell-checker has to be manually invoked and doesn't show potential errors by underlying it, but by forcing you to take active steps by evaluating the context of each suspect word. That's *so* 1996. ("Woah! I haven't seen a spell checker like that since before we got Outlook!") Stupid things like this cost us credibility to purchasing managers, and keep up off corporate desktops, who otherwise would jump at Linux (no Klez virii, free licenses, etc.).

We shoot ourselves in the foot each time.

Mechanical Engineers build can crushers with moving parts.

Electrical Engineers build can crushers with no moving parts.

However, whatever the discipline, no mad science lab is complete without a Furby Testing Program.

Well, Wesley is a weenie, but thanks to Wil, at least he's a cute weenie.

Now that he's what - thirty? - hopefully he will have weathered those raster-burns and keyboarding callouses well. Too bad he's straight. [sigh]

All the best, Wil. Now got get yourself an Emmy.

Just e-mail them this link: www.glowingplate.com/ida.shtml. Tell them that a friend sent it to you.

The link goes to a page offering a real-time view of the new worm attacking my machine.

Build one! The worst part is three stepper motors driving an XYZ table under computer control.

I like EDM myself. Here's a little on EDM, including a link on how to build a very simple one.

While I take no responsibility for anyone getting killed by following my suggestion, I've built my own EDM system for taking broken iron bolts out of aluminum automotive castings. It uses a microwave oven transformer and a bank of oil-filled capacitors. It's a profoundly dangerous machine if you build it wrong. But I've also blown 1/2" Grade-8 bolts out of aluminum castings in a matter of hours.

Wanna hire a computer geek who also knows how to do stuff like this? Great for integrating computers into robotic, industrial and automotive manufacturing processes.

Oops. I posted a link to my video of that as a reply to the first post, just to make sure that it was about the first thing you see if you read the comments. (Yeah, I'm a karma whore, and I'm looking for work, so I'm trying to keep myself Slashdotted.)

Anyway, my mirror is here.

Kegs and organs are neat, but amateurish. A friend sent me an e-mail with an attached MPEG of a bunch of British nuts throwing a CAR.

Yes, a car. My favorite part is how the nutcase shoots a hole in the floor to be able to tie it securely to the catapult's sling.

Beware that this will Slashdot my server, be patient if the download is very slow.

Heh. Interesting perspective. I suppose all the nasty compatibility issues imposed by assemblers are all but erased, are they?

Never mind the debugging you'll have to spend with machine language. Assembly has its own issues, of course - mistyped register numbers, wrong hardware addresses, then the usual programming errors you get in any other language. But with machine language, you have to count your zeros and ones very carefully... of course, you'll eschew the bourgeois luxury of hexadecimal, won't you?

:)

I love Assembly. Back in high school, I was ordered to write a program that made a computer play music. Everyone else wrote little Pascal and structured BASIC programs to play Chopsticks on the school's Macs 512s.

I wrote a TMS9900 Assembly program which played Flight of the Bumblebees in three-part harmony with the stepper motors of my TI-99/4A's three 5.25" full-height SSSD diskette drives. Percussion was achieved by toggling the head pad solenoids.

My Computer Studies teacher didn't like it because he couldn't understand it to critique it. But he gave me an A+ anyway, probably because the source code was about 30 pages long.

Ahhh... High school.

While I haven't programmed in Assembly in about ten years, you can check out my resume here, since I'm looking for work!

I'm a purist. I've got a DEC VT-100 terminal in my kitchen, and it's connected to my BSD box. The best part is that it has video and genlock input jacks - so it can double as a TV set.

I love that thing.

Indeed. In fact, your quote of my original posting included the assertion that Microsoft has indeed has some practical uses.

And I will give Microsoft credit where it's due. Microsoft can be at least partially credited for standardizing the Intel x86 architecture, for one thing. IBM may have created it, but it was the clone makers selling it to run MS-DOS that standardized it. For sure, it was a dated kludge of an architecture even when it was introduced in 1981, but the fact that we don't have 18 different popular desktop platforms has terrifically simplified buying a computer. The adoption rate has been increased greatly as a result of Microsoft selling MS-DOS.

On the other hand, Microsoft did not invent Plug and Play. The Amiga had it in 1985, the Mac in 1984 and the TI-99/4 in 1979. They merely managed to make it work (sorta) on the Intel platform that IBM designed and they standardized.

Microsoft did not invent the Internet, did not invent TCP/IP, multitasking, multi-user operating systems, e-mail, etc. Hell, they didn't even invent MS-DOS.

So, what does Microsoft do well? Sell their products and implement standards. Not good standards, usually.

Like VHS winning over Beta, Microsoft usually pushes the technically inferior standard, of its own or someone else's creation. Just on sheer volume. And again, like VHS winning over Beta, a default operating system and platform sure makes it a lot easier to use your computer.

Anyone else here old enough to remember trying to mount DOS diskettes on an Amiga, or Amiga diskettes on a Mac, or Mac diskettes on a TI-99/4A? That's the only part of Microsoft which has been a blessing to the industry.

As with most other people who've got experience with more than one operating system (and, better still, several hardware and CPU platforms), I've seen enough variety of computers to know that Emperor Bill has no clothes.

VHS versus Beta? Beta's still very much alive, thank you. Consumers don't know quality, but TV stations sure do.

I've yet to meet anyone with any degree of experience in multiple operating systems who still feels positively about Microsoft. If all you've ever driven is Hyundais, I guess it's pretty hard to understand how someone could like a Plymouth Superbird or a Porsche 959.

And, lemme tell you, Windows 2000 makes a nice daily driver. Disposable, just like a shiny new Hyundai Sonata.

True. It's so much better to have similarly incompetent people actually managing to get online, contract every dread e-mail virus known to man, and then continue to pollute *my* webserver (paid for with *my* money) through *their* idiocy, right?