So I've been looking at compact flash in replacement of a hard drive. Right
now a 16gb card plus 2gb microdrive is ~$90. Or $5 per gb.

Well, I sat down & estimated what It's going to take to build my scout. Look
like a low of $7k and a high of $30k. could always be worse

Looks like Bobby Fischer has been checkmated by death at age 64. his next
tournament will be against all the masters who came before.

Bah. All the computers at oit are busy. I should have gone to kcc.

I've got an idea for a distro fork. Tentativly named MARsco, or Mips ARM freesco.
Basically port to the above, update (usb), trim excess.

Christians seem to suffer from 'stockholm syndrome' not sure about others,
but suspect all abrahamic sects suffer likewise.

So i learned something new while tweaking firefox portable: 5 mb is not enough
memory to run firefox.

Are preachers failed used car salesmen, or are used car salesmen failed preachers?
Both seen to want to be drama stars

Is there anything as annoying as extensive hold times?

So i finished 'variable star' by robinson & heinlein. if you haven't, go
read it. I see why robinson is called the new heinlein

So king george supports the dc gun ban. No surprise there. But I wonder
how 9 amendments are for individuals, but one is for government

So I've started posting from the cell phone. Hard to be expressive with only
140 characters. Too bad i don't have a camera phone. Yet.

I really hate people who use deception to get their way. Especially when
they think It's funny afterwards

Updates are coming

I haven't posted in forever, been months since i had regular net access.
but I'm working on a major revamp of my web site and also moving my
blog off Google.

why leave Google?

This was the straw that "broke the camels back":

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-427212-highlight-china+google.html

as I've said before, my Asian fetish has a Chinese fetish. I've met
and interacted with dozens of Chinese, they are intelligent and
resourceful people, and there is little that repulses me as much as
censorship. one cannot change if one does not know what needs changing.

OK, Haven't posted in ages...

Last week on the Gentoo Forums someone asked "What manufacturers are the most supportive of open source?"

I thought my response was worth repeating here, especially since many OS advocates aren't necessarily using Gentoo...

jesnow wrote:

What manufacturers are the most supportive of open source?

Sun.

Open Source is About Sharing: Ideas, Code, Innovation

In Sun's view, open source is the ideal development and business model for today's massively connected, Participation Age economy. The open source model offers liberties to every user and developer that encourage genuinely collaborative innovation.

Open source software can lower customer barriers to: access, switching costs, and greater value achieved in an environment that allows for increased participation and competition. Companies gain compensation for their innovations by building on the contributions of others. In a first move towards open sourcing the Sun software portfolio, Sun has announced a no cost offering of its server side software.

Quote:

If I wanted to buy hardware with the specific intent of having my money go to companies that support open source, what should I buy?

A Sun.

Q:
Why would Sun "open" its current hardware chip design?
A:
We also believe the open source model can help solve some serious issues created by more traditional licensing terms in a rapidly-changing semiconductor industry. In particular, we think it can be a key enabler for the increasingly important "System On a Chip" (SOC) design business.
Everything these days is fast enough/cheap enough.

Quote:

I want easy linux intergration and support for open source projects.

Sun

#1 in Open Source

A recent report on Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) prepared for the European Commission measured Sun's activity within the GNU/Linux community.

The report found that Sun contributes substantially more code to a Linux distribution than any other organization, including IBM, Red Hat, Novell, Hewlett-Packard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In fact, Sun's overall contribution is more than three times that of its next closest competitor, IBM, in second place, and more than five times that of Red Hat, in third. According to the report, Sun has contributed more than $400,000,000 worth of source code to the GNU/Linux distribution.

Quote:

Everything these days is fast enough/cheap enough.

Well, with Sun it's more like you get your moneys worth

We had a requirement to support 60 Sun Solaris databases; we estimated that running the systems would take 16 kilowatts of power. But after putting energy consumption on the agenda, we decided to become early adopters of Sun’s CoolThreads technology. This choice helped to reduce the power required to 3 kilowatts.

Quote:

Pesumably the two go hand in hand. Do they?

They seem to at Sun. Course not all is perfect. I'd rather see Solaris released under GPLv2, and i'd like to see atx form factor boards and entry level notebooks, but AFAICT, Sun wins the arguement of "What manufacturers are the most supportive of open source?"

Oh, and when I talk about Suns to my friends, I always hear varients of "how can a Sun be so good if it only runs at 1.{2,6)Ghz and my P4/AMD runs at 3+Ghz?"

To which my reply is to ask which is better, a Supra that can do 200+MPH, or a semi that can carry 20 tons?

So when You go buy your next computer, you might just consider who will give back to the community, and choose Sun.

I'm planning to at least give them a try.

Regarding my last post, I stand corrected. I found a real "power supply" for more information, click here.

Oxymoron: Power Supply.

Power: The term used for the product of voltage and current. It is measured in watts.

Supply: provide or furnish with; "We provided the room with an electrical heater"

A power supply doesn't provide one watt, volt or amp. it's a transformer. it takes houshould current and converts it to 12 volts at x amps.

Power supply my ass. I've got 50 of the things laying about. and 500 different things they'd be hooked to if they supplied power. I wonder if 300 watts is enough to power the well? or maybe I'll have to combine a few to get enough wattage.

Oh yeah, I guess I should mention I switched from SuSE to Gentoo 3 or 4 months back. I still reccomend SuSE for a user who doesn't want the level of control a "source" distro, such as Gentoo offers. I especially advise against installing RedFat.

I had planned to transition over to PPC, and went to Gentoo for that reason. However, since Stevie is gonna be making Macs with Intel chips in them, I'm staying with AMD. guess I'll spend my money somewhere else (RAID ;-) )

6 months. maybe I should update this more often.

This is currently being written on a 'doze machine (not mine, do I look stupid enough to not install Linux?). I was running a duron 600, but was given a 800 chip. turns out the 800 was bad, and, being the considerate chip it is, fried my board.

Fortuantly, besides regular backups, I always do both a Stage 4 backup and a backup of /home. so I'm fairly safe if my drives are also fucked.

A fortnight from now, I should have a new board & chip. AMD, of course. I own an Pentium, but didn't (and won't) pay for that crap. Gonna also pickup a 6-700 watt transformer, as I'll be increasing my SCSI count to 9. 7 drives + tape + cdr.

PSM and Galeon

Had trouble viewing secure sites with Galeon. after a bit of googling, found
this:

http://lists.ximian.com/archives/public/users/2002-June/005275.html

2 pointers:

a symbolic link (instead of copying the file) worked fine
he misspelled libsmime3.so. took me half a sec to realize.