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You are estatic that Forbes has finally taken interest? I know how you feel. I was estatic when they originally took interest in July of 1998.

Yes. You read that correctly. They did their homework and reported on the trend before it was common knowledge. Which is what they are supposed to do, and is why their audience reads them.

Take a look at this timeline for proof. Yes, that is Linus holding a daisy on the cover of Forbes. Before the Halloween articles. Back when Bill Gates had never had a customer who had asked him about Linux. Back when big database distributers like Oracle were busy doing flip-flops and announcing that they would develop Linux versions after all. Back when everyone was still in shock that IBM was going to be cooperating with the Apache team. (For a lot of hackers then, IBM was still The Evil Empire.)

In short, this is not a first. They have been on the Linux bandwagon longer than you have. And longer than the people who thought that your post was "insightful". Even though tech is not their field, they noticed the trend and correctly reported it well ahead of most of the incompetents who pass themselves off as IT reporters.

This discussion is excellent proof that Slashdot is full of people who want to cheer for a cause, but don't actually know, say, basic history about the cause they are cheering for.

Take a look at this timeline. As those of us who were around then know well, in July of 1998, Forbes gave Linux and Open Source one of its first big pieces of mainstream publicity.

Linus Torvalds on the cover of Forbes back when Bill Gates could still say with a straight face that he had never had a customer ask him about Linux was a shock. Now? Who cares?

Heh, think that's bad?

You'd be amazed at the places still running old apache versions despite the ominous warnings!

(Yes, I found the lwn link very ironic too, but not as funny as this)

Heh, think that's bad?

You'd be amazed at the places still running old apache versions despite the ominous warnings!

(Yes, I found the lwn link very ironic too, but not as funny as this)

beg me pardon, on the risk of beeing downmodded etc. why the hell is everyone thinking debian is the only free distribution ? go to http://www.bsd.org/, http://old.lwn.net/Distributions/ or http://www.distrowatch.org/ if you want a unbiased answer to what`s free software based systems - have a look there, and discover there is more to *n?x than redhat and debian.
why is everyone so biased and mainstream ?

regards,
anonymous rocklinux, openbsd and slackware user.

And for getting even more useful information out, try Prospect. It works with OProfile - there was a talk about it at this year's Ottawa Linux Symposium, which you can find in the conference proceedings (gzipped PDF).

Linux Weekly News now offers daily updates on it's front page in addition to putting out a great weekly news section.

Hmmm, that hat-wearing Tux has a crossed out W on the front - a reference to Linux *Weekly* News.

Nasty!

Linux Weekly News's distribution list has several CD-based distros on it.

He's sexier than a stack of kuro5hin calendars.

I just saw the link on... Slashdot. Gee, these little side boxes are helpful sometimes. ;)

I thought HP had announced that they were focusing on Debian?

HP.com and Bruce Perens support this.

Does this signal a shift? Will HP now contribute to Red Hat at Debians' expense?

rho

Well said.

DAMN well said!

This echos my thoughts exactly. This is not "creating" something, this is a large group of talented folks getting together and doing something one way to atain a singular goal... the SAME WAY. This can only be good.

It's like if you read LWN, for instance, and you see RH security announcement, or SuSE patch available, or MDK release of Foo available, etc. Now, with these bigger players (MDK excluded from that, obviously) sharing all their ideas and findings, there is MUCH less confusion (in theory, of course) and certainly MUCH less hunting and pecking the Internet trying to make sure your distro is "safe". It'll now just be "United Linux security update for Foo released".

SO much easier.

Hmm.. Apparently lwn.net thinks patenting software is a legitimate business.

See here

...was this quote from Linus:

Yes the post was from Linus. Here's the orginal posting

Yes the patch was from Linus. Here's the orginal posting

It sounds like you aren't looking for a source-based distro, but you don't need one in order to use Linux.

Crux is small. You want their i586 version.

Peanut Linux, as the name implies, is compact. They have an abiword package if you don't want to compile it yourself.

Some major distros like Mandrake offer minimal install options.

Big catagorized lists of distros are here and here and here.

You can get about any distro to work nice if you use a lightweight window manager such as blackbox or xfce (which is actually a complete lightweight desktop environment). Every major distro has a few like these.

• Reasons to Use SuSE Linux
  
• Choose from among XFS, ext2, ext3, reiserfs, and others during install
• choose to encrypt your filesystem
• free security updates, unlike RedHat
• improved YaST2, the ultamite in system configuration utilities, let's you configure everything from a DHCP server to CUPS
• YaST Online Update, for automatic upgrading of your RPMs
• conformance to the LSB, the only compliant distro so far
• the most secure distro, according to LWN.net research
• Personal Firewall configuration through YaST
• 90 days of tech support through email or telephone with the Professional version

I don't know how far along they are yet, but it APPEARS, from lurking on the mailing list, that there is some support for .ogg format media files (i.e. .ogg file with vorbis audio and, say, XVid video), and I BELIEVE they will be adding support for the format for mencoder as well, at some point. Depending on how soon this takes place, this may be an option for people wanting to archive their DVD collections...

(I wouldn't be surprised to see support for the vp3 codec soon as well, since according to a blurb on this weeks' Linux Weekly News, they (that is, the guys the made vp3) apparently posted to one of the ogg development lists about getting a 'vp3 in .ogg' project going. It'll be nice to see some more semi-official work on video in .ogg...)

everything I have is at http://www.hungry.com/~shaver/gropt.tar.bz2 but it's not for the faint of heart, and I don't have time to talk people through it.

Back in late 1998 lwn ran a status report of GNU Rope by Nat:

What is the status?

The link-time optimizer is fully working, benchmarks indicate 30% less memory usage, and it is better than twice as fast on many machines.

The ordering algorithms need tuning. The post-link optimizer needs debugging. It will be released soon:

http://grope.net.org/

Bruce Perens as sent an open letter to Michael Robertson requesting that they release the code to the software that he wrote that they are distributing.

so they have to go down the route of intellectual property ownership, enforcement and RAND (reasonable and non-discriminatory, whatever "reasonable" means) licensing fees.

Licensing terms: what's in a name? Richard Stallman recently objected to our use of the term "reasonable and non-discriminatory" to describe certain classes of software and patent licenses. These licenses, require a payment for the use of the patented technology; the RAND terms just ensure that everybody can use that technology for the same payment. According to Mr. Stallman, the name RAND is inappropriate because:

• 
  
• By requiring a fee for use, the license is clearly discriminatory against free software.
  
  
• This discrimination, of course, is not reasonable.
  

Mr. Stallman's suggested term is "UFO" for "Uniform Fee Only."

Just wait... once the scandals and such with kazaa/morpheus hit the fans, development really kicked in at giFT or whatever they're calling it now. I hive high hopes for that project, and it's already cross-platform and usable (albeit not so user-friendly, yet).

LWN: And where did the name "Mandrake" come from in the first place?

GD: From my child's head. Mandrake is magic!

That's from an old interview with Gael Duval.

People seem to be assuming that subterfugue is kernel code. I just looked at the source, and it's not. It depends on some kernel patches for 2.3.x, but subterfugue itself is a user-level syscall interceptor. When they refer to sf as the subterfugue driver, they mean "driver" in the mushy sense of "anything that's not an application is a driver", not in the precise sense of something that gets loaded into the kernel. Also, only programs (and their descendants) run explicitly via subterfugue are affected at all; it doesn't hook in at a level that allows it to operate on arbitrary processes.

Subterfugue is basically a Python wrapper for strace, so you can inspect and modify syscalls and their arguments in Python instead of in C. Yes, it's neat, but not nearly as neat as being able to implement real drivers or network protocols or filesystems in Python (like this).

I think we're more sober now than we used to be. There was a period during the dot-com boom in '99 when I think a lot of people were in some danger of getting distracted by the prospect of lots of easy money.

Heh, yes, well remembered :-)

saying I had to google, and that I would be right back. Five minutes later, I had my [sourceforge.net] response. [spoiled.org] (And implemented [freshmeat.net], too! Download today.)

Have you been living in a Afgani cave for the last 3 years? Ext3 has been around since 1999.
Its even the default filesystem in RH 7.2.

ResierFS went in to the 2.4.1 kernel in
2001, but I know for a fact that the first patches appeared much earlier than that.

saying I had to google, and that I would be right back. Five minutes later, I had my [sourceforge.net] response. [spoiled.org] (And implemented [freshmeat.net], too! Download today.)

Have you been living in a Afgani cave for the last 3 years? Ext3 has been around since 1999.
Its even the default filesystem in RH 7.2.

ResierFS went in to the 2.4.1 kernel in
2001, but I know for a fact that the first patches appeared much earlier than that.

So, while Red Hat is hardly failing, its claims of sustained profitability only work with sustained funky accounting.

Is this an Enron in the making?

See lwn.net and distrowatch for really long and uselessly comprehensive lists.

Oh, but nice try, anyway... ;)

This is what you get when you value short-term convenience over freedom, when you get excited over something because it's "cool," when you think that any software for Linux is good for Linux (forgetting what made GNU/Linux special in the first place).

You're completely dependent on the whims and fortunes of a single vendor, and are now up a creek. By all means, beg them to release it as free software, but don't hold your breath.

There's a time and a place for proprietary software, but there is also a very real cost that has nothing to do with price. Valuing freedom over features is not just thinking with your gonads.

and when did he say that? Was it not, oh, back in Dec 2000?

Microsoft could collapse in 6 months

"I think Linux will become dominant before it is really ready technically for the end users. And the reason I believe that is because I now think that Microsoft monopoly is going to collapse for other reasons in the near future."

(Emphasis added for people who cannot discern subtleties in written text.)

Allow me to explain.

Alan Cox; Richard Stallman; Bruce Perens; Wichert Akkerman; Miguel DeIcaza.

What do you see in this list of names? Are there any African-Americans on it? Absolutely not, none of those names sound like one a self-respecting black person would have! No Maurice, no Luther, no Lil' Kim. There are many other lists such as this, you can see one here. Flip through each page, do you see anything other than white faces? Of course you don't, because Open Source and its adherents are ardent racists and they absolutely forbid access to the sacred 'kernel' by any person of color.

Lets look at another list, this time a compendium of the companies using Linux. Are there any black owned companies on that list? Nooooooo. How about these companies? They all have something to do with Open Source software, any of them owned by an African-American? No again. Here is an extensive collection of photographs from a LUG (Linux User Gathering) meeting, more can be viewed at that link. What is odd about these pictures, and every other photograph I have ever seen of a LUG meeting, is that there is not one single black person to be seen, and probably none for miles.

More racist overtones can be found by examining the language of Open Source. They often refer to 'white hat' hackers. These 'white hats' scurry about the Internet doing good, but illegal, acts for their fellow man. In stark contrast we find the 'black hat' hackers. They destroy the good works of others by breaking into systems, stealing data, and generally causing havoc. These two terms reflect the mindset of most Linux developers. White means good, black means bad. Anywhere there is black, there is uncontrollable destruction and lawlessness. Looking further we see black lists that inform other users of 'bad' hardware, Samba, an obvious play on the much hated Little Black Sambo book, Mandrake, which I won't explain except to say that the French are notorious racists. This type is linguistic discrimination is widespread throughout the Open Source culture, lampooned by many of its more popular sites.

It is also a fact that all Unix 'distros' contain a plethora of racist commands with not so hidden symbolism.

It can hardly be coincidence that the prime operating system of choice of the 'open source supremacists' - Linux, features commands which are poorly disguised racist acronyms. For example: 'awk' (All White Klan) , 'sed' (shoot nEgroes dead), 'ln' (lynch negroes), 'rpm' (raical purity mandatory), 'bash' (bring a slave home), 'ps' (persecute sambo), 'mount' (murder or unseat nubians today), 'fsck' (favored supreme Christian klan). I could go on and on about the latent racist symbolism in Linux, but I fear it would take weeks to enumerate every incidence.

Is there a single unix command out there that does not have some hidden racist connotation ? Suffice it to say that the racism pervades Linux like a particularly bad smell. Can you imagine the effect of running such a racist operating system on the impressionable mind ? I don't have to remind you that transmitting subliminal messages is banned in the USA, and yet here we have an operating system that appears to be one enormous submliminal ad for the Klan!

One of the few selling points of Open Source software is that it is available in many different languages. Browsing through the list I see that absolutely none are offered in Swahili, nor Ebonics. Obviously this is done to prevent black people from having access to the kernel. If it weren't for the fact that racism is so blatantly evil I would be impressed by the efforts these Open Sourcers have invested in keeping their little hobby lilly white. It even appears that they hate the Japanese, as some of these self proclaimed hackers defaced a web site with anti-Japanese slogans. Hell, these people even go all the way to Africa (South Africa mind you, better known as White Africa) and the pictures prove that they don't even get close to a black person.

Of course, presenting overwhelming evidence such as this is a bit unfair without some attempt to determine why these Open Sourcers are so racist. Much of the evidence I have collected indicates that their views are so deeply held that they are seldom questioned by the new recruits. This, coupled with the robot-like groupthink that dominates the culture allows the racist mindset to continue to permeate the ranks. Indeed, the Open Source version of a Klan rally, OSDN (known to the world as Open Source Developer's Network, known to insiders as Open Source Denies Negroes) nearly stands up and shouts its racist views on its demographics page. It doesn't mention the black man one single time. Obviously, anyone involved with Open Source doesn't need to be told that the demographic is entirely white, it is a given.

I have a sneaking suspicion as to why their beliefs are so closely held: they are all terrible athletes.

Really. Much like the tragedy at Columbine High School, where two geeks went on a rampage to get back at 'jocks', these adult geeks still bear the emotional scars inflicted upon them due to their lack of athletic ability during their teen years. As African-Americans are well known for their athletic skills, they are an obvious target for the Open Source geeks. As we all know, sports builds character, thus it follows that the lack of sports destroys character. These geeks, locked away in their rooms, munching on stale pizza and Fritos, engage in no character building activities. Further, they interact only with computers and never develop the level of social skill that allows normal people to handle relationships with persons of color.

Contrasted with the closed source, non-geeky software house Microsoft, Open Source has a long, long way to go.

Join me in my next article where I will lay bare the rampant anti-semitism in the Open Source community.

Allow me to explain.

Alan Cox; Richard Stallman; Bruce Perens; Wichert Akkerman; Miguel DeIcaza.

What do you see in this list of names? Are there any African-Americans on it? Absolutely not, none of those names sound like one a self-respecting black person would have! No Maurice, no Luther, no Lil' Kim. There are many other lists such as this, you can see one here. Flip through each page, do you see anything other than white faces? Of course you don't, because Open Source and its adherents are ardent racists and they absolutely forbid access to the sacred 'kernel' by any person of color.

Lets look at another list, this time a compendium of the companies using Linux. Are there any black owned companies on that list? Nooooooo. How about these companies? They all have something to do with Open Source software, any of them owned by an African-American? No again. Here is an extensive collection of photographs from a LUG (Linux User Gathering) meeting, more can be viewed at that link. What is odd about these pictures, and every other photograph I have ever seen of a LUG meeting, is that there is not one single black person to be seen, and probably none for miles.

More racist overtones can be found by examining the language of Open Source. They often refer to 'white hat' hackers. These 'white hats' scurry about the Internet doing good, but illegal, acts for their fellow man. In stark contrast we find the 'black hat' hackers. They destroy the good works of others by breaking into systems, stealing data, and generally causing havoc. These two terms reflect the mindset of most Linux developers. White means good, black means bad. Anywhere there is black, there is uncontrollable destruction and lawlessness. Looking further we see black lists that inform other users of 'bad' hardware, Samba, an obvious play on the much hated Little Black Sambo book, Mandrake, which I won't explain except to say that the French are notorious racists. This type is linguistic discrimination is widespread throughout the Open Source culture, lampooned by many of its more popular sites.

It is also a fact that all Unix 'distros' contain a plethora of racist commands with not so hidden symbolism.

It can hardly be coincidence that the prime operating system of choice of the 'open source supremacists' - Linux, features commands which are poorly disguised racist acronyms. For example: 'awk' (All White Klan) , 'sed' (shoot nEgroes dead), 'ln' (lynch negroes), 'rpm' (raical purity mandatory), 'bash' (bring a slave home), 'ps' (persecute sambo), 'mount' (murder or unseat nubians today), 'fsck' (favored supreme Christian klan). I could go on and on about the latent racist symbolism in Linux, but I fear it would take weeks to enumerate every incidence.

Is there a single unix command out there that does not have some hidden racist connotation ? Suffice it to say that the racism pervades Linux like a particularly bad smell. Can you imagine the effect of running such a racist operating system on the impressionable mind ? I don't have to remind you that transmitting subliminal messages is banned in the USA, and yet here we have an operating system that appears to be one enormous submliminal ad for the Klan!

One of the few selling points of Open Source software is that it is available in many different languages. Browsing through the list I see that absolutely none are offered in Swahili, nor Ebonics. Obviously this is done to prevent black people from having access to the kernel. If it weren't for the fact that racism is so blatantly evil I would be impressed by the efforts these Open Sourcers have invested in keeping their little hobby lilly white. It even appears that they hate the Japanese, as some of these self proclaimed hackers defaced a web site with anti-Japanese slogans. Hell, these people even go all the way to Africa (South Africa mind you, better known as White Africa) and the pictures prove that they don't even get close to a black person.

Of course, presenting overwhelming evidence such as this is a bit unfair without some attempt to determine why these Open Sourcers are so racist. Much of the evidence I have collected indicates that their views are so deeply held that they are seldom questioned by the new recruits. This, coupled with the robot-like groupthink that dominates the culture allows the racist mindset to continue to permeate the ranks. Indeed, the Open Source version of a Klan rally, OSDN (known to the world as Open Source Developer's Network, known to insiders as Open Source Denies Negroes) nearly stands up and shouts its racist views on its demographics page. It doesn't mention the black man one single time. Obviously, anyone involved with Open Source doesn't need to be told that the demographic is entirely white, it is a given.

I have a sneaking suspicion as to why their beliefs are so closely held: they are all terrible athletes.

Really. Much like the tragedy at Columbine High School, where two geeks went on a rampage to get back at 'jocks', these adult geeks still bear the emotional scars inflicted upon them due to their lack of athletic ability during their teen years. As African-Americans are well known for their athletic skills, they are an obvious target for the Open Source geeks. As we all know, sports builds character, thus it follows that the lack of sports destroys character. These geeks, locked away in their rooms, munching on stale pizza and Fritos, engage in no character building activities. Further, they interact only with computers and never develop the level of social skill that allows normal people to handle relationships with persons of color.

Contrasted with the closed source, non-geeky software house Microsoft, Open Source has a long, long way to go.

Join me in my next article where I will lay bare the rampant anti-semitism in the Open Source community.

Completely agreed.

While I'd love to own this movie, especially on DVD, I refuse to give another cent to Disney. After what I read about what Eisner had to say at the Senate hearing, I will NEVER purchase another Disney product, and I encourage others to do the same.

Check out this quote from the above link:

"Eisner confessed that the only reason he could think of for Michael Dell not to build in ubiquitous copyright-policing functions in his products was that Dell wants to sell his products to infringers."

In the face of such blatent corporate doublethink, how can anyone who's at all concerned about Fair Use justify the future purchase of even a single Disney product?

Linux kernel hackers raised these fears last year. If there was any place to inject DRM into the hardware, ACPI is it. It's a huge and complex spec with its own programming language, ACPI Machine Language (AML). It requires an interpreter which runs with kernel privileges and executes closed source code provided by hardware manufacturers.
Just to be fair, I'll also point you to this rebuttal of their concerns from a linux-acpi developer.

Linux kernel hackers raised these fears last year. If there was any place to inject DRM into the hardware, ACPI is it. It's a huge and complex spec with its own programming language, ACPI Machine Language (AML). It requires an interpreter which runs with kernel privileges and executes closed source code provided by hardware manufacturers.
Just to be fair, I'll also point you to this rebuttal of their concerns from a linux-acpi developer.

No big news here. Linux has sufficient ACPI support for most uses, as does FreeBSD. The full, nasty, evil interpreter may not work, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

If you take the Sorceror requirement of 1Gig of swap that is a large portion of my disk.

Ok, since there seems to be a lot of people who still doesn't know this I'll explain the reason Sorcerer requires such abhorrant amounts of memory

It's not like applications magically require lots of more RAM when running under sorcerer. The fact is that compilation requires a lot of diskspace, but rather than using normal partitions for this, Sorcerer performs all compilation inside tmpfs filesystems. This has several benefits. It can significally affect performance (try compiling X without ever writing to disk, possible if you have enough real memory) and it drastically reduces filesystem fragmentation. The drawback is that it requires a lot of memory to be available, which is solved by specifying the 1g ram+swap minimum.

This means that you are not USING any more diskspace than you would in any case or with another source based system, the necessary space is just locked up in a swapfile or partition instead.

... because his VA Linux stock has made him fabulously wealthy. Do we need anymore reasons why we shouldn't take the latest ramblings of this pillock seriously?

It's clear that allowing NuSphere to continue shipping code they have been shipping for the last seven months won't, by itself, do much more harm, if any, so the GPL issue was left alone.

Trademarks are another matter -- the more and longer they are abused, the greater the harm to the owner.

When the case itself goes to court, the text of the GPL will leave the judge little choice: NuSphere's product really is a derived work, and there is lots of case law about derived works, even with software.

For some background, see my letter to LWN last year. (Scroll down to the end. Incidentally, it appears I was the first person to tell Monty about this feature of the GPL.) Evidently it took this long to establish that NuSphere just wouldn't figure out where they stand without help from a judge.

Are you sure it is fixed at all? How could this have been fixed in 2.4.18-pre1 when the bug was first discovered when 2.4.18-pre7 was out?

I think I'll keep mem=nopentium until someone can point me to a changelog entry that mentions this directly.

In the article they are talking about this readahead problem in the kernel. Just something they found. You can work arround it simply by setting you readahead to a higher value. This is not ideal for everyone.

As Linux becomes more and more popular, the question becomes more and more important: which distribution should I use? I use SuSE Linux for several reasons. Firstly, it is the most LSB-compliant distribution. It comes with huge amounts of software (6 CDs of binaries for the Professional version, and (arguably) SuSE has the largest security team. SuSE updates are free and released often. Announcements are even GPG-signed. According to LWN.net research, SuSE has the best security after TurboLinux (which much less security-related bugs than RedHat.

On a more subjective note, many consider SuSE to be the most polished distribution, and YaST2 is considered one of the best all-around system configuration utilities.

It was called SnapFS. You can find traces of this in a LWN article. I don't know if the projects still exists, go ahead and google .....

First, for those that didn't get it from the parent post, HZ is a system wide timing value. It has nothing directly to do with the mouse.

What it does deal with is how many times a second the system's interrupt timer fires. The problem with increasing the interrupt timer frequency is that you waste more time servicing interrupts than doing real work. It may improve interactive "feel" because the timer interrupt will trigger higher priority tasks to be rescheduled more often, but at the price of higher system time and lower "throughput".

Compared to the preemptible kernel patch, increasing HZ is actually harder on throughput, especially on slower systems. Much work has been done on finding and killing long held locks not covered by the preempt patch (thanks to Andrew Morton and RML), an approach which has been shown to be quite effective. Increasing timer interrupt frequency means you're creating more pointless interrupt load, which goes against the approach and advances of the other low-latency patches.

There is an interesting discussion of the HZ value and how it effects Linux in a VM at Linux Weekly News and for more arcana check out the high resolution timers project.

Regards

1. Eric "esr" Raymond
2. Richard "rms" Stallman
3. ...even our own CowboyNeal

Are they unhealthy because they are geeks, or are they geeks because they are unhealthy? I venture to say that it is the latter. Let's face it, if you are unhealthy and/or unattractive, you are likely to develop a more introverted personality. That, by it's very nature, will estrange you from the public eye. Technology is a wonderful haven for people who are hiding from the general public, and as all of you know, the more time you spend with technology the more profecient you become, and the more likely you are to make a significant contribution to the public through it.

As an example, let me ask a question: Would Stephen Hawking have made the same advances if he had not been confined to a wheelchair and so severely disabled? He is one of my true heros, but he has since he has chosen not to give up and let his handicap destroy him, the only way he has to fight it is to use his mind--so that's what he does, constantly. I daresay that if he were not disabled, he would have spent more time in social situations, with family, etc., and would have had less time to explore the universe with his mind and report the results.

Unfortunately, under- and over-nourishment is dangerous, and a serious detriment to anyone's health. When this is the staple that geeks swear by, how can we expect to stay healthy?

What we need to realize is that, while we should praise the endeavours of geeks around us, and even those of ourselves, we should come to an awareness that our health needs to be our number one priority, regardless of our social status (ascribed or percieved). Personally, I've begun to work out on a daily basis (I gave up on gyms...get a Bowflex, they're worth the money, and it's yours to keep long after a gym membership has expired!), watch what I eat (lay off fried foods, cut back on caffiene, cut out most beef and pork), and get plenty of rest.

It may seem futile now, but a lifestyle altered for the better will likely extend your life for many years, and make those last years good ones. It's time to spread the word, but most of all, to heed it yourself. The following are some great books and articles with more information:

1. An interview with a "fitness guru" on Fatgeeks.com.
2. An eating guidebook by two computer geeks with a child and active careers.
3. A website dedicated to "Yummy teen and geek nutrition...
4. A discussion on Slashdot about this very subject.

--SC

1. Eric "esr" Raymond
2. Richard "rms" Stallman
3. ...even our own CowboyNeal

Are they unhealthy because they are geeks, or are they geeks because they are unhealthy? I venture to say that it is the latter. Let's face it, if you are unhealthy and/or unattractive, you are likely to develop a more introverted personality. That, by it's very nature, will estrange you from the public eye. Technology is a wonderful haven for people who are hiding from the general public, and as all of you know, the more time you spend with technology the more profecient you become, and the more likely you are to make a significant contribution to the public through it.

As an example, let me ask a question: Would Stephen Hawking have made the same advances if he had not been confined to a wheelchair and so severely disabled? He is one of my true heros, but he has since he has chosen not to give up and let his handicap destroy him, the only way he has to fight it is to use his mind--so that's what he does, constantly. I daresay that if he were not disabled, he would have spent more time in social situations, with family, etc., and would have had less time to explore the universe with his mind and report the results.

Unfortunately, under- and over-nourishment is dangerous, and a serious detriment to anyone's health. When this is the staple that geeks swear by, how can we expect to stay healthy?

What we need to realize is that, while we should praise the endeavours of geeks around us, and even those of ourselves, we should come to an awareness that our health needs to be our number one priority, regardless of our social status (ascribed or percieved). Personally, I've begun to work out on a daily basis (I gave up on gyms...get a Bowflex, they're worth the money, and it's yours to keep long after a gym membership has expired!), watch what I eat (lay off fried foods, cut back on caffiene, cut out most beef and pork), and get plenty of rest.

It may seem futile now, but a lifestyle altered for the better will likely extend your life for many years, and make those last years good ones. It's time to spread the word, but most of all, to heed it yourself. The following are some great books and articles with more information:

1. An interview with a "fitness guru" on Fatgeeks.com.
2. An eating guidebook by two computer geeks with a child and active careers.
3. A website dedicated to "Yummy teen and geek nutrition...
4. A discussion on Slashdot about this very subject.

--SC