Never been one to let the carrier drop

You know, considering the fact that [until now] I was a reletively affluent computer geek, being paid to be a computer geek, there are a few things you might wonder about.

The most obvious you might wonder why I didn’t buy a P-IV – or indeed, any machine faster than 750 mhz

The second most obvious you might wonder is why I never went to XP. After all, I _bought_ both 95 and 98. [Well, okay, so I only bought one copy of each and ran them on all the computers I own. Seems obvious to me that with microsoft, you can’t use more than one computer at once, because if you try to use any microsoft product to run a server, it blows up fairly quickly. Hence, I’m one person, I need one licence. Never mind the fact that I use ten computers or so – that’s not the issue here.

So why didn’t I buy XP?

Well, two reasons, really. One, I have a major problem with the idea that I might ever need a microsoft server to clear my OS for takeoff.

Have you people THOUGHT about what this means? This means you need microsoft’s permission to upgrade! If microsoft ever goes out of business [likely], or decides to become a world information dictator [not so unlikely, now is it. Look at how they’ve treated the rest of the world. And has anyone noticed that bill gates’s salary is $666 thousand dollars? You think he didn’t PICK that number?] you’re done for. Your OS will not work – will the filesystem mount on another OS? Are you sure? Did you make backups with a program that can be read from a non-XP tape? Are you sure?

People, you’re signing up for hell, at least in a digital sense. DON’T DO IT!

I need a bumper sticker. ‘XP – just say no’. This isn’t a joke. I’m not kidding. Go back and read the licence agreement. THEN THINK!

DO YOU TRUST MICROSOFT THAT MUCH?

I’m serious. It’s a really simple question. Here is a corperation too big for the US government to break up. There’s no doubt that they’ve been naughty, naughty, naughty – look at the transcripts of the microsoft trials! The proof is there. I don’t know who bought the judge to go off to the press like that – maybe he just couldn’t deal with the vile actions he’d seen – but the truth is out there.

As if we don’t _all_ know that microsoft is evil.

Keep your favorite unix geek well fed. You may need him someday. 😉

[And I’m not just saying that because I’m a unix geek. Really. I swear. ;-)]

Interfacing with this atmel part is interesting. I’m using this little dataflash – 4 megabits on a chip the size of your finger, persists after you turn the power off – pretty damn cool, really.

The abusive uses of these things are endless. But I digress.

Anyway, they have the world’s wierdest interface. Each page is 264 bytes. Think they’re encouraging one to include checksums? 😉

[Do these people seriously think I have the RAM to do page checksums?]

[well, maybe I do]

People keep encouraging me to change processors. The TI parts are apparently a order of magnatude better on some important issues, including RAM, for the same price.

I’m not thinking I’m going to do it, though. First of all, the TI’s come in form factors that are a bitch to do prototyping operations with. Second, I don’t see TI product in very many stable products. Third, I have this _thing_ about supporting texas. They gave us Dubya, the first unelected president the US has ever had. Dark, dark days, friends.

Listening to Bruce Springsteen, Bruce Hornsby [he ROCKS! really. Download or buy some live hornsby. Then go to a show. I can’t beleive no one told me about him. His words are, literally, several layers deep. Every time you listen, you take away something new – it’s like the Indigo Girls for Men. ;-)]

[Don’t get me wrong, I love the indigo girls and I think everyone should be required to listen to and explain their songs in school or something. ]

On another topic, I think my biggest fear is that Bush et al will continue the oil wars.

I’ve tried to show him another answer, but he just doesn’t listen to people like me. 😉 [No, I’m not kidding. I have sent him email. Hey, there was always the roll of the dice that my email might have been selected to be read. ]

One of my biggest hopes for the internet is that it will enable the peoples whos governments elect to fight wars to talk to each other. I keep waiting for this to kick in in the middle east – but I guess we’d have to actually get the net there and operational before it could happen. And, face it kids, with all our deadly toys lying around, that ain’t gonna happen.

Why, why, WHY were we SO stupid as to give them guns?

“Yah, you’ve got oil, we’ll sell you weapons!”

There’s gotta be a less bloody way to set this situation up. Really. There does in fact have to be a way. The world is a puzzle, and we’ve got to solve it. But there are no impossible problems, just hard ones.

[“He’s gone Crazy Eddie!”]

Well, yes. I am Crazy Eddie. I know that. I also think Crazy Eddie was right.

How did I come to this conclusion? Well, if you’re me, it’s a interesting story. If you’re not me, it’s probebly kind of boring. But let me explain anyway.

I’ve decided to try – yes, seriously try – to change the human race from oil to electricity.

I’m convinced there are several reasons why it’s the right choice:

a: it’s a lot easier to make tens of thousands of large power plants clean than a hundred million mobile ones.
b: We already have the power capacity. At night, the grid is _idle_
c: If every car were also a 20kW battery bank, the US would be battery backed up. Yes, the entire country. How’s _that_ for defense?
d: Most of our power is domestically generated. More could be – we have hundreds of thousands of nuclear bombs, and there are ways to build nuclear power plants that are actually safe. [No, not how we currently do it. Are you kidding? Read about CANDU]

What could be better than taking those bombs offline? Every nuclear bomb is a insult to the entire human race, a shame on every man alive. How we could ever be that egotistical, I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with the christians telling us god made us in his image. Liars. You’re telling me you couldn’t design a better human, if you were all-powereful and had unlimited CPU? No, I’m serious.

As a side note, I think we should not allow cloning until the DNA geeks can hand us a commented version of the human source code. Look at how long it took to aquire it – and the stuff isn’t binary, it’s quadrary – each bit can have four states. That’s, um, gonna take a while.

It does, however, show certain signs of intelligent design.

But then, does anyone seriously beleive we’re alone in the universe? If we are, that’s _really_ terrifying.

I sometimes wish I could live forever, though. It’s easy to understand the temptation the christian virus offers. The thought that you don’t lose people.. that they don’t fall off. Strictly speaking this is true – assuming we don’t destroy all life on this planet, every atom in you will be in another living creature eventually.

How much data can be stored in a atom?

[I think we might find the answer to be suprising. But what do I know?]

Just reread another Dianne Wynne Jones book. She’s good. Rereading some Heinlien, reread some Pournelle. Need to hit the library again.

How’d it get so late, so fast? Time flies when you’re babbling about things that your readers aren’t even remotely interested in.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 6th, 2002 at 11:43 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.