Monthly Archives: August 2003

Manufactured diamonds

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How many things change when $15,000 gem-quality diamond can be had for $200?  People have been trying (and literally dying) for almost 200 years to manufacture diamonds.  They’ve finally succeeded.  This has some interesting consequences to the traditional diamond industry, and has resulted in a flurry of new technologies for detecting the difference between natural and manufactured diamonds.  I think this will be effective in the short term, but I suspect De Beers’ lock on the world diamond market is nearing its end.

More important than gem stones, though, are the implications for the semiconductor industry.  Diamond is the best semiconductor material known and can run at much higher temperatures than can silicon.  It’s not used currently because it’s been impossible (or prohibitively expensive) to create high-quality diamond wafer.  But with this new technology, that could change very quickly.  Imagine, I’ll have more and higher-quality diamonds in my computers than my wife has in her jewelry.

More on public computers

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One more thought on the public computers idea from yesterday.  This is a move that Microsoft would have a very difficult time countering.  Their whole business model is based on licensing software on a per-computer basis.  The XP licensing scheme stores information about the machine on which it’s installed, and will force you to re-register if the hardware changes.  Unless they came up with a thumb drive that had a built-in license key of some kind (and imagine what privacy advocates would have to say about that!), it’d be impossible to use Windows in this manner.  That’s assuming you could get any version of Windows to auto-detect hardware and boot into a usable system without having to install onto the hard drive.  I’m sure Microsoft could cobble something together, but I doubt you could do it with any existing version of Windows right out of the box.

Just a thought.

Knoppix

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Knoppix is a Linux distribution designed to be used from CD.  With a Knoppix CD in hand, you can run Linux from CD on any supported PC that can boot from the CD drive.  If you want to save your work, you’ll have to mount a drive or store it to an external device (USB thumb drive, diskette, CD-RW, etc.).  Knoppix comes in handy for a number of things:  booting failed systems for troubleshooting, demonstrating Linux without having to install it, or quickly booting any system for use as a quick network test.

The last was especially useful to me this week.  I was setting up a test server on its own little network and needed to test the DHCP server.  My test client was a 400 MHz Dell that had XP running, but I didn’t have a user ID and password to log into the box.  Rather than reinstall Windows on the box, I booted Knoppix.  Three minutes and I was ready to test.

The coolest thing about Knoppix (and I hinted about this last week when I mentioned Damn Small Linux) is the possibility of putting it on one of those thumb drives.  A 1 gigabyte thumb drive goes for about $320.  A full Knoppix distribution will eat up about 700 MB, leaving you 300 MB for data.  For most of us, 300 MB is more than enough to hold our current work.  You can carry your working software and your data on your key chain, and use any modern computer as a workstation.  Forget wireless hotspots in hotels and coffee shops.  Imagine instead public computers with no hard drives, CDs, diskettes, or other data storage devices; just a USB port and a connection to the Internet.  Walk up, plug in your thumb drive, and you’re working.

The biggest problem with doing something like this is that it’s just a gimmick unless those computers are ubiquitous.  I guess that’s how wireless got started, though.  Just a few hot spots at first, slowly building until even McDonald’s is selling wireless access with their Big Macs.

A brief look at current Linux distributions

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I’ve examined 8 different Linux distributions over the past week, and I’ve been quite impressed with how much more polished they’ve become in the past couple of years.  Sure, some are still hard for a non-techie to install (Debian and Slackware, for example), but others like Lycoris and Red Hat are just as easy as—maybe easier than—Windows.  When you factor in the added complexity of installing additional Windows applications, the Linux distributions are easier.  That is, when you’ve finished installing Red Hat, Lycoris, SuSE, or one of the other major desktop distributions, you’re done.  The office productivity software and most everything else is there.  Once you install Windows, you still need to install Office and any other applications you need.  I’ll be charitable to Windows here and call installation a draw.

In almost all respects, there is Linux-based software available for all of the basic home and office uses.  The most important missing piece—and this might turn out to be the killer app for Linux—is a personal financial management package.  GnuCash exists, but as I mentioned in an earlier entry (see August 12), the project is in trouble.  And, quite honestly, people expect a certain amount of accountability from the software that’s keeping their books.  Whether or not it’s true, people feel better with the thought that Intuit stands behind Quicken. They’re not going to get that warm fuzzy feeling for a bunch of hackers who work on GunCash in their spare time.  I would expect Intuit to come out with a Linux version of Quicken in the next 2 years.  If they don’t, somebody will come out with something to fill that space.

The other relatively recent innovation that’s impressed me is the emergence of CD-based distributions.  Knoppix in particular has really opened my eyes to some interesting possibilities.  More on that tomorrow.

Irresponsible spam black hole

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I sent email to one of my clients today and promptly got a message back from their email server telling me that my message was rejected because our IP address is being blocked, and to check the relays.osirusoft.com website (purposely not linked) for details.

It turns out that Joe Jared, operator of relays.osirusoft.com and a very aggressive (to put it mildly) anti-spammer, decided yesterday to discontinue his service.  Rather than do something reasonable like just shut down the server or remove all entries from his blocking list, he decided to mark every IP address as a spammer domain so that people would get the message that he’s no longer offering the service.  This affected a huge number of mail servers because over-zealous systems administrators had been relying on that list as their primary or only weapon against spam.  Never mind that there are some well documented cases of the operators of this and similar lists behaving quite irresponsibly.

Yet another argument against using filtering to fight the spam problem.  If you think a client-side filter is subject to false positives, imagine what happens when a legitimate ISP is blocked by one of these filters because one person has a personal score to settle.

Who’s at fault for fat?

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This AP article does a pretty good job of summing up the two major camps in the debate over who is at fault for America’s obesity problem.  As the article states:

The left’s view is that the food industry and advertisers are big bullies that practically force-feed people with gimmicks and high-calorie treats.  They say Ronald McDonald is the cousin of Joe Camel.

The right’s argument has been dubbed:  You’re fat, your fault.  They say people can make their own choices about food and exercise.

In the left’s view, we’re all at the mercy of “Big Food.”  Their argument implies that people are sheep, powerless to resist the barrage of advertising for Big Macs, Hostess Ding Dongs, and Kellogg’s Pop Tarts.  We’re like moths drawn to the flame of high-fat, high-calorie foods promoted by beautiful people, and spurred on by gimmicks like million-dollar giveaways.  Our children are mindless puppets, unable to resist Ronald McDonald, free toys, and in-restaurant playgrounds.  Parents’ voices cannot be heard over the television; the sight of their good examples blocked by billboards.  Toucan Sam, Tony the Tiger, the Lucky Charms leprechaun, and the Trix rabbit are evil influences, heirs to Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man.

What a load of crap.

A new computer

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I had hoped to wait another month or so before upgrading computers, but I needed to re-task my big desktop test server (a Celeron 666).  So on my way home from work yesterday I stopped by Fry’s and picked up a new machine.  This is a Shuttle SK41G (no link available to specs on Shuttle’s Web site).  Small as it is (11-1/2 inches deep, 8 inches wide, and 7 inches tall), it’s surprisingly roomy inside, and the cables are well laid out.  There’s room for a hard drive, diskette (or second hard drive), and a DVD.  Documentation is surprisingly good, and I was able to get everything installed with a minimum of fuss.

The motherboard has everything:  diskette, IDE, video controllers, 2 serial ports, infrared comm port, AV and S-VIdeo, 2 USB connectors, 2 1394 connectors, and built-in 10/100 Ethernet.  The front panel has speaker, microphone, USB, and 1394 connectors, which makes it very convenient when hooking things up.  There is one AGP slot and one PCI slot, but I don’t know what I’d need to hook up.  Maybe a second Ethernet card if I’m going to use it as a router.

This machine will eventually be my home file/print server, so it doesn’t need a whole lot of horsepower.  I put in 512 MB of RAM and an AMD Athlon XP 1800.  Windows reports that it’s running at 1.150 GHz.  It was the slowest processor I could get at Fry’s.  I scavenged the DVD from my other system (it only needs the CD), and paid a whopping $13.00 for a diskette drive.  The hard drive is a new Maxtor 120 GB unit that, once I get the $30 mail-in rebate, will have cost me less than $80.  I don’t know what I’ll do with all that space, but the drive was cheaper than the 80 GB units, and only a few dollars more than a 60 GB.  All told, the system was less than $600.

I’m happy with the size of the box, but a little disappointed that it’s not a little quieter.  Sitting on my desk, it’s as loud as the Dell that’s sitting on the floor.  I know that it’ll be a bit quieter once I get this one on the floor, but I was hoping for a little less noise.  Still, I’m very happy with the size and the way it looks.  I have Windows 2000 Server on a 60 GB partition.  Until I get the other system (it’ll be 3 GHz or faster with at least 1 GB of RAM), I’ll use the other half of the drive for installing and playing with different Linux distributions.

Damn, this is fun!

Lycoris Desktop/LX

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I downloaded the beta version of Lycoris Desktop/LX, burned the image to a CD, and installed on a spare partition of my hard drive here.  Lycoris (formerly Redmond Linux) is a Linux distribution, based on Corel, that the developers have modified so that it looks and feels more like Windows.  Lycoris is unlike any other distribution that I’ve tried.  Previously I’ve used Red Hat and SuSE, and have built my own system from scratch following the instructions on the Linux From Scratch site.

What’s so different?  When I booted the machine with the Lycoris CD, the setup program automatically started, detected my hardware, and walked me through a handful of very simple screens on which I confirmed the keyboard, mouse, and video hardware, selected DHCP, and created a user account.  It automatically detected the unpartitioned space on my hard drive and began installing.  No package selection screens or other stuff to complicate the installation.  After 20 minutes of copying files (during which I tinkered with the solitaire program that they so kindly provided), I created a rescue diskette and rebooted the system.

Lycoris installs the GRUB boot loader, which on startup let me choose between Windows 2000 and the new Lycoris installation.  My only gripe here is that GRUB placed Lycoris as the first boot choice, and it gives me only 5 seconds to choose Windows 2000 before automatically booting Linux.  I’ll need to change the default to Windows 2000, and set the delay to a more reasonable 20 seconds or so. 

OS boot time is comparable to Windows 2000, and when the system comes up I’m presented with a graphical login screen.  Lycoris installs the KDE desktop, an office productivity suite, Mozilla Web browser and email client, and a host of multimedia tools.  Some games and system utilities round out the installed applications.  The default UI settings are very nice and, unsurprisingly, very Windows-like.  Unlike other distributions I’ve tried in the past, everything that I’ve tried so far has worked as expected and I haven’t had to futz with any settings.  I’ll want to adjust the mouse sensitivity and make a few cosmetic changes to the desktop appearance, but those are minor.  A bigger problem is the speed.  I expected the UI to be a bit more responsive on my 700 MHz Pentium 3.  Mozilla and KWord take a long time to start, and video performance is a bit sluggish.  I hope they fix that before they release the next version.

I’ll have to use the system for real work before I can say for sure that I like it, but my initial impression is quite favorable.  Installation was painless, and the distribution appears to have everything that a casual home computer user would want for a starting system.  It’s still Linux, and I’m free to download and install any other packages that I want.  Desktop Linux has come a long way in the past three years.  I might just be on the verge of recommending it as a serious option to Windows.

Damn Small Linux

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I downloaded a Linux distribution today called Damn Small Linux.  At just over 48 megabytes, this Knoppix-based distribution fits on one of those little business card-sized CDs.  It’s designed to boot from CD and operate without touching a hard drive, using a RAM disk instead.  It’s also possible to modify the distribution slightly to fit it on a USB memory stick.  With a 128 MB USB memory stick, you could carry your OS and a good bit of your work around in your pocket, and use it to boot almost any computer.  Carry the OS and the data, and borrow a machine wherever you are.  Now that is portability.

The other (or perhaps the primary) use of Damn Small Linux is as a diagnostic or troubleshooting tool.  With it, you can boot a crashed system, mount the hard drive volume, and explore to find out why the system isn’t working.  I burned a CD and added it to my little toolbox.  I know this one will come in handy.