Faith Enquired

Mundane day again, week in and back to gym. Schule has been desessioned long enough for some of the educationalists, most administrative weight bouncers, to have returned. Happily they are not loud, only threatening.

Along which azimuth I noted an article [Link] last week entitled “Testing the Faith of the Linux Masses” that asks whether Linux users will ever abandon the OS. Several people are interviewed, mostly revealing that there is no OS that is absent warts and complaints except for the slime moldest of bogs.

This did however, lead me to reflect on the nature of the question. I started by being a bit put off by the faith casting, as if this is all about irrational emotionalism. No mention is made in the article of loyalty and the distinction is telling of the ferdishness of the author, or at least her editors, for while the piece claims to be blog, it is entirely too journalistic and commercial,

I quickly honed in on the fact that no OS, no distribution, is without aspects that I dislike. Not too long ago I spent a couple of blots lamenting my search for a distribution that actually worked with Broadcom wireless. I ended up finding two, mostly because of the disappointment of finding Fuduntu just days before it went toes up. The distro I found in its stead, Manjaro, is almost good enough in that it works with the wireless, and has a good package manager. It does however lack a software (as opposed to package) management system but it is a rolling release that means I don’t have to have the fight with Canonical’s alternating quality. It is based on Arch which meant I had to learn a lot of new stuff – a mixed bag and it did start off unable to get a lock on repositories and thereby no updates. This latter does not bode well for a smooth road.

I think the question has to be divided into tow parts. Will a user ever dump Linux for Apple OS or Winders? and will a user ever change distributions? The answer to the latter is a resounding yes that is fundamental to the culture that is linux. The answer to the former, neglecting the dictates of work and family organizations, is rarely and then only because the user is temperamentally unsuited to be a Linux person from the get go. In effect, that person may want to be a Linux user but lacks the calling. There is no shame in this. The human species satisfies Sturgeon’s rule. Nine of ten must be bogs, and even those who are not do not always have the constitution to be Linux users.

What this gets to is the evil that Canonical is practicing, trying to attract users to Linux who have no business trying. I do not fault these people for trying. If anything I respect and sympathize them. It is a horrible thing to be unhappy with Winders or Apple OS and lack the capability to use another OS. It is also horrible for Canonical to sell these people the idea that they can when they cannot and will fail miserably. Such behavior is criminal.

Fundamentally, Linux is about being free. We cannot avoid using computers, but we can, if able, assure that we use them as free humans and not serfs or slaves. And Linux should not be used as a coffle.

computers, humans, behavior, OS, tyranny

Once more into week out, and it bodes to be a good week out at that. Admittedly we have the rather tedious nonsense of Father’s day to endure, a punishment visited on us by women whose cooking we consume as compensation for not reproducing and running away. Or at least that’s what the brain sty at fair Hahvahd is telling us these days.

Not that there is much cooking these days. Mostly it’s fast food, maybe brought home, or fast food extracted from boxes purchased at the local MalWart. Regardless it is going to make sure the current generation lives fewer days than its predecessor generation. So the expenditure of effort on cooking is a lot less than it was when society invented family. Of course what men do these days is a lot different from then, and Sturgeon’s rule applies because at least 0.9 of it can be done by a woman, so it comes down to the fact that men are a convenient sperm factory and that is not far off from being it.

That’s why Father’s day is such a farce. The hypothesis that it only exists to balance Mother’s day, which does have some validity, is more than just viable. Sons don’t make a big thing of the day; daughters do. And wives, although whether the latter is part of the conspiracy or not is unclear.

Anyway, what makes things good is that the Lord High Justicers of the Yankee republic have decreed that genes cannot be patented. [Link] To comprehend why this is good, we need only, in good maths practice, consider the opposite. Simply put patenting of genes is slavery. Pure and simple. If some corporation owns the intellectual property of a bit of DNA, then they own the people who have that snippet. And that’s a worse evil than Father’s day.

humans, corporations, behavior, government, society, stupidity, slavery

Walk Think

Week in end. Just back from a nice constitutional in the park and the day portends to be less heatful than yesterday. I can well understand the attraction and frustration of walking. It is very good for thinking and getting kinks out of the body, two things that are highly difficult to impossible in a gym. But by the same token it is very easy to overextend oneself and it is very hard to capture thoughts. I have toyed with carrying a recorder but even that little bit is a horrible mental intrusion. As are some of the whack jobs one meets along the trail.

All walking trails and tracks are right handed. Failure to observe that should be grounds for internment at Guantanamo if not summary execution. Failure to moderate audio should be punishable by extermination of the genetic line. And overload talking should be rewarded with a reverse colonoscopy.

I notice that there is yet another superman movie. Given that all of the previous, except the depression era serials, were abysmal I am not wagering that this one will not be. Although I do find it amusing for all of the rabid christianists loping off to be among the first to view. Perhaps this story is a more doctrinally comfortable messiah fable?

I noted this week an article [Link] of some Swedish work that indicates that the brain, the hypocampus at least, is constantly building new neurons. (No, that isn’t an Agnewism.) This is a reversal of what researchers have found, and educationalists have instructed, for years. The question that immediately pops up is if we are constantly building new neurons why are there so many neuronegs? It has to be genetic. Some form of Strugeon’s rule, that 0.9 of humanity has to be sub-rational?

Which brings me to a theory I heard the other day. One of my colleagues advanced that a possible benefit (the only one?) of helicopter parenting and the exceptionality propaganda is that an increasing number of GEN Y may be planning not to have children because they won’t be exceptional. He was still working on data collection so it wasn’t at all clear if this trend is rational or emotional. I suspect the latter since the former would indicate an improvement in the species that no other metric indicates.

Enough.

humans, behavior, stupidity

Cynical State

Yesterday was a horrible day. The heat was oppressive. Even with the air conditioning. Too hot to even contemplate the stupidity of the climate change denialists.

I fear that I am in a bit of a cynical mode. It started Twosday when I listened to a podcast interviewing a structural engineering academic who was saying that it would only take ten years to achieve full protection from tornadoes and hurricanes.

Stercus Tauri!

His pronouncements struck me as the flimsiest of moonbeams. Not only are we not going to replace almost all of the buildings in the Yankee republic in the next ten years, but the majority of people are not even going to make fixes to their existing buildings. And since most of the fixes require trained craftspeople, that means it further won’t be done because of shortage of such people and their cost. So it sounds good on a science podcast but fails disastrously in the reality of society.

Then I came home – finally – and learned that we don’t do a good enough job of washing our hands. [Link] This is actually a bit encouraging since it indicates this may be why auto-immune disorders aren’t as widespread as one would expect given the hand sanitizer addiction. But it also rather worries me about medicalists. Am I going to start timing their hand washings?

One of my colleagues sent me a link to some physics videos yesterday. I had to explain to him that I had disabled the audio on this PC. I got rather disturbed about opening a string of web pages and half of them having audio blaring. Especially when FD SCP is still asleep. And I couldn’t find a way to suspend browser audio – easily. And as a result I don’t do videos much.

But then I got to examining things. I gets lots of links to videos sent me by colleagues and acquaintances. They obey Sturgeon’s rule, and I have gotten where I just shrug and move on. But last night I dug out one of my laptops – I needed to update anyway – and played a couple of the videos my colleague had pointed me to. They were good, as far as such ever are, but that served to lead me to a realization. Videos are information thin. I don;t watch them because nine times out of ten I don’t get to  the end. Becuase they can’t keep my attention.

So the real reason I don’t watch videos is because they are a poor information form for me. Too empty. I am glad to have discovered this about myself but now I have to try to figure out why so many people watch them, and what that means. Especially GEN Ys.

humans, behavior, stupidity

Text Blocker

Finally! After all this grrr brrr about the Yankee government being too nosy. Which will result in the whistle blower either being ‘eliminated with prejudice’ or hidden at Guantanamo until the dinosaurs come back. Now they are talking about finding “a technological solution, some sort of innovation” in which the device or the car would recognize when the driver is using a mobile device and deactivate it.[Link]

Ayeh. The Yankee government transportation safety apparat has finally wised up. The device already exists but its a Canadian technology and hence totally unacceptable for an Amerikan program.

At least this makes more sense than their previous one, rumored to be a cop in every back seat with a large handgun and a box of dumdum rounds. Of course I’m not sure even the new cops would be unsmart enough to execute a driver while the motorcar in under way? Of course that would solve a lot of the highway congestion problem.

Isn’t it amazing how long it takes for ideas to percolate (diffuse?) into the minds of political appointees?

government, tyranny, stupidity,

Computer Crap

Late last week I ran across an article [Link] on “How to Choose the Best Mechanical Keyboard (and Why You’d Want To)” and this prompted me to consider the matter.

What, is a non-mechanical keyboard? The inference is that the mechanical is somehow different and that only leaves non-mechanical. I am at a loss for this. Since every keyboard I have ever seen/used has been a machine for converting finger taps/presses into ASCII characters or some action. To the author mechanical evidently means individual keys but this again is a distinction that is elusive. I am forced to the hypothesis that the author is a ferd.

But the meat of the cognition was once I got past the journalism of the article and settled into considering that nature of things. The question emerged over the weekend of ‘why are keyboards so terrible?’ By this I do not mean the QWERTY layout but the machine quality of the device.

It may be argued that the personal computer began in the early ’80′s with the IBM PC. One may argue variously for earlier computers but I find those arguments to lack inertia. At that time the IBM PC cost somewhere in the neighborhood of a kilobuck to a kilobuck and a half. It was well made and highly dependable. And the keyboard was wonderful.

At the same time, automobiles, especially those made in Amerika, were junk. They lost half their value when driven off the lot, and often had to be replaced within three years. One was pressured to pay them off before they had to be discarded. On the other hand the IBM PC is still good today, those who have not been discarded as obsolete, and the same goes for the keyboards which command great prices in the marketplace.

Nowadays, automobiles last at least a decade. My morning motorcar, a Honda CRV, has seen more than fifteen years. Additionally, prices have decreased, at least in constant year dollars. So automobiles, and to a great extent appliances, have vastly improved in both durability and cost.

On the other hand, the quality of computers – PCs – has steadily declined. I long ago began to purchase refurbed workstations to try to recapture the durability of the original while obtaining price reduction. PCs are cheaper now, but they are not as durable, mostly due to poor design.

But compared to the keyboards, PCs are adamantine. The keyboard that has come with every PC I have bought in the last ten years was a flimsy feces. Especially the ones from HP who used to build the best calculator keyboards – and calculators – on Tellus and now has runny stercus. I refuse to use these pieces of plastic poo. I use one of my Northgates from back in the days when tower cases were built out of steel. IT is well I do because FD SCP does use those keyboards and I need a lot since they seldom last more than six months.

Similarly, laptops are now flimsy cracker boxes compared to what we had in the ’80′s and ’90′s. And it is now impossible to find a major brand laptop with a decent keyboard.

Why is this? Why have automobiles and appliances gotten better and computers, especially keyboards, have become trash?

computers, machines, humans, quality, extinction

Archy, no Dancing

It’s ice cream day and I didn’t need it during my morning constitutional. I rather hate it when it’s hot before the sun rises.

On which azimuth, Chinese researchers have unearthed the skeleton of the oldest primate, [Link] Archicebus Achilles.

The beastie was about 55 MYA and was about the (body) size of a mouse. One more thing for the religionists to marvel at during pseudo-shabbat services.

Meanwhile, the administration’s direction that all refereed articles paid for by Yankee government money have to be publicly available has finally bashed the crania of some capitalist journal publishers. [Link] I personally would have liked a bit more use of truncheons but if they give on this maybe their overweening prices will be next?

Next, a report from U Waterloo [Link] indicates that flourocarbons rather than carbon dioxide are responsible for global climate change. This bears watching. It may substantiate – again – that correlation (or consensus in this case) is not causation.

humans, biology, science, greed, capitalism, corporations, chemistry, climate

Insert Foot

Nothing screams INCOMPETENCE as does inserting the word “like” in the middle of an otherwise meaningful sentence.

Nothing screams IGNORANCE as does inserting the phrase “you know” in an otherwise meaningful sentence.

Insertive catch phrases are the hallmark of the neuronegative.

humans, behavior, stupidity

Dystopian Morality

Back from constitutional. It’s a foggy morning, good for cerebration, and that is pretty much what I did.

I started off with a rather nasty little article [Link] in Wired about some ambulance chaser in Atlanta who takes photographs at Civil War re-enactments. No mention of how he does this. My first thought was that someone wandering about with a contemporary camera at a re-enactment would be about like the episode of Big Bang Theory where Sheldon wears Spock at a Medieval Fair.

The thesis of the article is that civil war re-enactments are hot beds of racism. And that this is terrible. What is terrible is that we are stuck with this whole thing of racism, including journalists who have to pretend to moralize about it. (And if the moralizing is sincere is it not worse?) The fact is that the whole idea of race is a perversion forced upon us by a government that needs a taxonomy of differentiation and people who want to benefit from using that taxonomy. So getting morality from a justicer would be laughable if it were not so horrible.

Let s admit, up front, that the American Civil War is a story of abject incompetence on the part of the political and governmental instrumentality of the Yankee republic. Those two organizations had eighty (or so) years to eliminate slavery after the nation was begon and not only failed to do so, but studiously avoided doing so. If nothing else this is a parable of why government needs to be restarted every ten years or so, and no politician should ever be permitted power for more than six months.

Despite this, the war was not fundamentally about slavery. That was just the moralistic excuse used by Yankee politicians to sell an unpopular and inept war. It had the singular effect of placing the Union on the moral high ground and the Confederacy in a moral swamp. And this article plays that card once more.

I will not claim that ante bellum Southron society was ideal. Far from it. But it was characterized, in many segments, by a pace of life and a respect for human dignity that is woefully absent in modern society. Is that worth the slavery of the day? Is what we have today worth the slavery of this day?

Before proceeding, let me put the race thing once more into an unremarked grave. The genetic differences that characterize the “races” – skin hue, facial features, … – are less than the internal difference within each race and the whole. That I have early risers mutation and lack any of the cattle herder mutations (adult lactase secretion) are a greater differences than those between my “race” and the others dictated by government. Race, except the human race, and that only possibly, is an debunked taxonomy only of use by government in dividing its citizens into manageable noyaux.

Why do people go to re-enactments? Not as a component of everyday life, I can assure you. They go for the difference. For some it is play acting, for others recovering some imagined loss, and for most, a means of distancing themselves from the hellish sameness of modern society.

So don’t be lawyerish and decide that if something is entertaining it has to be bad.

humans, government, behavior, lawyers, stupidity

App Rex

It’s Friday and I have just returned from my off-gym days morning constitutional in the park and the distribution of seed for the tree mammals and the dinosaur descendants. The weather beavers are foretelling rain – again – and I hope their accuracy is better than it was yesterday. I walked about most of the day wearing a waterproof and it proved unneeded.

On which azimuth, I ran across a rather humorous article [Link] about HP putting an Android lapbox into the marketplace. And at what may be a lesser price than a Winders Ate equivalent? It is hard to tell given the journalism.

The author seems to consider this a bit of a wonder although this may be nothing more that journalistic emoting. I find it considerably less so but I am a bit amazed that HP would do this. After all, Android is just a special distribution of Linux, isn’t it?

My first thought is that someone failed to tell the journalist about “its the apps, not the OS” or if they did, he failed to comprehend the meaning and ramifications. I’m not at all sure that path is worthy of any travel at all. After all, journalists are the lemmings of the Information age.

But if one considers that lots of folks define themselves in terms of their so-called mobile devices and they use Android cellular telephones and/or tablets for a variety of reasons, not least being a dislike for the mind slavery of Apple, then it makes rather good sense to project backwards to a more workable device. After all, isn’t this the reverse of what MegaHard and Canonical are tearing themselves apart to achieve?

It’s not that Android doesn’t have work apps.It does. But most of them aren’t usable on the small screen. Or absent a real keyboard. So if one defines oneself by one’s cellular telephone apps and has to occasionally do the semblance of work, a laptop running Android may make a bit of sense. At least enough for HP’s current so-called management.Which is another path we won’t travel right now.

Especially since Dell is off selling Ubuntu laptops outside Amerika. And folks are happily buying them, opening terminal, and installing a functional GUI. And maybe, blowing away Unity although most are just letting it be, not worth the effort of one statement on the command line.

And the chromebook is evidently the new itty bitty lap box although I don’t think it is doing as well outside the urban tarpits. Something about density of connectivity? But for those whose lives are defined by high rise apartments, coffee shops, and cubicle dungeons, it makes quite a bit of sense.

As I’ve said all along, the tools evolve to fit the people. And eventually both turn into appliances. But that’s a path to be trod otherwhen. As is the discussion of the evolution of the “mobile” device.

humans, computers, behavior, OS, nonsense