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April 24, 2000
Personally, I found your Byte column to be
remarkably positive in favor of Linux and WPOfL. Your column is a
validation that Linux is *lots* closer to ready for the desktop than it
was last year. The bright boys at Redmond used to be able to say, that's
OK, not really a threat, Jerry Pournelle says that it ain't there. Now
you're saying it's just about there (and I would agree, as I do 80% of my
work in Linux, and with the release of Canvas 7.0 for Linux (an
Illustrator-like tool), I may be able to approch 90%.
Don't let'm get to you - I believe that you've
already known that asbestos hip-waders are part of the Linux-space
wardrobe.
Regards,
-- Brian P. Bilbrey :: bilbrey@orbdesigns.com ::
http://www.orbdesigns.com "I have a cunning plan, my lord..."
"Shut up, Baldrick!" E. Blackadder
And be it further enacted, That when a person held
to service or labor in any State or Territory of the United States, has
heretofore or shall hereafter escape into another State or Territory of
the United States, the person or persons to whom such service or labor may
be due, or his, her, or their agent or attorney, duly authorized, by power
of attorney, in writing, acknowledged and certified under the seal of some
legal officer or court of the State or Territory in which the same may be
executed, may pursue and reclaim such fugitive person, either by procuring
a warrant from some one of the courts, judges, or commissioners aforesaid,
of the proper circuit, district, or county, for the apprehension of such
fugitive from service or labor, or by seizing and arresting such fugitive,
where the same can be done without process, and by taking, or causing such
person to be taken, forthwith before such court, judge, or commissioner,
whose duty it shall be to hear and determine the case of such claimant in
a summary manner; and upon satisfactory proof being made, by deposition or
affidavit, in writing, to be taken and certified by such court, judge, or
commissioner, or by other satisfactory testimony, duly taken and certified
by some court, magistrate, justice of the peace, or other legal officer
authorized to administer an oath and take depositions under the laws of
the State or Territory from which such person owing service or labor may
have escaped, with a certificate of such magistracy or other authority, as
aforesaid, with the seal of the proper court or officer thereto attached,
which seal shall be sufficient to establish the competency of the proof,
and with proof, also by affidavit, of the identity of the person whose
service or labor is claimed to be due as aforesaid, that the person so
arrested does in fact owe service or labor to the person or persons
claiming him or her, in the State or Territory from which such fugitive
may have escaped as aforesaid, and that said person escaped, to make out
and deliver to such claimant, his or her agent or attorney, a certificate
setting forth the substantial facts as to the service or labor due from
such fugitive to the claimant, and of his or her escape from the State or
Territory in which he or she was arrested, with authority to such
claimant, or his or her agent or attorney, to use such reasonable force
and restraint as may be necessary, under the circumstances of the case, to
take and remove such fugitive person back to the State or Territory whence
he or she may have escaped as aforesaid. In no trial or hearing under
this act shall the testimony of such alleged fugitive be admitted in
evidence; and the certificates in this and the first [fourth] section
mentioned, shall be conclusive of the right of the person or persons in
whose favor granted, to remove such fugitive to the State or Territory
from which he escaped, and shall prevent all molestation of such person or
persons by any process issued by any court, judge, magistrate, or other
person whomsoever.
Section 6, Fugitive Slave Act, 1850
Hi Jerry,
I wanted to recommend several motherboards that you
could use for your son's PC. These all use the AMD 500 MHz K-6 cpu which
has given me excellent results in Windows and Linux.
Asus and Tyan are premier Taiwanese motherboard
manufacturers. They both have excellent quality products and good web
sites for driver downloads and tech support tips. Asus' manuals are
somewhat better than Tyan, but both make excellent motherboards. I've used
all the motherboards I've listed below with excellent results. All these
motherboards will work fine with the AMD K-6 500 MHz cpus.
Asus has some motherboards based on the SIS 530
chipset which incorporate decent 3D AGP video in the chipset (the models
are P5S-B for the AT form-factor and P5-99VM for ATX form factor). You can
also disable the built in video and use a standalone PCI video card. The
SIS web site has drivers for Win2000, Win98, WinNT, Win95, and Linux for
the built-in video. They cost about $100 at www.dalco.com. Dalco is a
reliable mail-order company which can get you the parts quickly. You can
also get the P5S-B with sound built into the motherboard for $110. These
boards support DMA66 hard drives. The OEM versions of the 500 MHz K-6 seem
to be around $55. I use the PC Power &; Cooling Z1-H cpu cooling fan.
Asus and Tyan also makes excellent motherboards
which do not have built-in video. They are the Asus P5A in ATX form
factor, the Asus P5A-B in AT form factor, and the Tyan S1598 Trinity ATX
motherboard and the S1590S Trinity AT motherboard. These are in the $100 -
$120 range. I think that Fry's carries the Tyan motherboards.
If you want to spend a bit more, I highly recommend
the new Asus K7V motherboards for the AMD Athlon cpu (this uses the new
PC133 SDRAM). Dalco has them for $206 with built-in sound. I bought an OEM
Athlon 650 MHz cpu at a computer show last weekend for $180. I use the PC
Power &; Cooling K1A Athlon cpu cooler. So for less than $400, you can
get an Asus motherboard and a 650 MHz Athlon and have a very fast machine.
You might want to consider setting up his PC as a
dual-boot machine using Linux and some flavor of Windows. If he has any
interest in programming, Linux comes with all sorts of programming
languages and tools.
I was pleased to see your review of the Corel Word
Perfect Office 2000 for Linux. I have a copy and I'm very impressed with
it. I think for most people it will do everything that they might use MS
Office for and the price differential is incredible. After the rebate,
Corel's suite, including their Linux distribution is $99. By my
calculation that equivalent price of MS Office and Windows 2000 is $960,
almost 10X as much. It looks like competition is a good thing, although I
guess MS doesn't realize that it might have competition, yet. You might
want to setup your son's PC with a copy of Corel Office for Linux (or send
the software with him and let him set it up himself).
Lately, I've been setting up my friends and
relatives with a Linux partition and dual-boot. That way, when Windows
gets goofed-up and they're in a panic because they can't get their email
or get online, I can tell them, just boot up Linux, it will work (and it
does). This saves me having to run over to fix their Windows right away.
Having tried a number of different methods, the
easiest way, by far, I've found of installing both Linux and Windows on a
PC is:
1. Use Partition Magic 4.0 or higher (I use the
diskette version you can create from the OS/2 directory on the Partition
Magic CD) to remove any existing partitions. I'm using version 4, but
earlier versions might work for this and later ones should, too.
2. Once the disk is empty of partitions, use
Partiton Magic to create a FAT32 (or NTFS or FAT16 partition, although
I've personally only tried this method using FAT32) partition at the
"END" of the drive which uses some fraction of the drive space (i.e
what you will end up with is a FAT32 partition which takes up, for
example, the last 4 GIGs of a 10 GIG drive, leaving the first 6 GIGs
free). You put the Windows partition at the end of the drive because with
a modern BIOS Windows doesn't seem to care where it is on the disk, but
for Linux's LILO boot loader to work, you have to have the Linux kernel in
the first 1024 cylinders on the hard disk (this can be a small
"/boot" partition, but I haven't fiddled with that yet, so I
can't tell you how to do that). Partition Magic will probably give you
dire warnings when you create the FAT32 partition at the end of the disk
that the partition is beyond the 1024th cylinder and may not be bootable,
but in the PCs I've worked on it works ! anyway.
3. Use Partition Magic to make that FAT32 partition
ACTIVE.
4. Apply the changes and exit out of Partition Magic
and use whatever method you like to use to install Win98, NT, W2K. The
Windows installer should find your active partition and use that.
Obviously don't let the Windows installer partition your disk, but if it
finds a working partition it will probably just use the one you created
with Partition Magic.
5. Once Windows is installed, reboot using your
bootable Linux CD (or a Linux boot disk) to install Linux. Most current
Linux installers will give you the option of installing Linux in the
"free space" and that is the option to use.
6. Once Linux is installed it will normally setup
LILO automatically so that you can boot to either OS when you boot up the
PC.
I hope this will be of some help. --- Holden
===
Jerry,
Reguarding online ordering, prices, etc. I was in
the market for an Asus P5A-B motherboard a few weeks back, and didn't want
to pay more than $75 for it. Searching pricewatch came up with a couple of
possibilities but after filling out the forms they would then reveal that
they were tacking on an outrageous handling charge (an extra 13% in one
case) bringing my total to over $90!
I finally found a place called www.thebigstore.com
and got the motherboard and a fan for $86 after shipping (a reasonable
$4).
I've also noticed that alot of the supposedly 'good
deals' on eBay are overpriced as well. CPU's are going for way too much on
eBay these days, some fools having paid over $90 for an AMD K6-2/500
At least there are lots of options out there. McGlen
Micro has a nice system, and reasonable prices on some of their stuff (www.mcglenn.com)
Brian
Brian C. Lane / KC7TYU bcl@brianlane.com HAM, EET,
Linux Consultant, Programmer www.brianlane.com
I got my driver's license photo taken out of focus
on purpose. Now when I get pulled over the cop looks at it [moving it
nearer and farther, trying to see it clearly]... and says "Here, you
can go." -- Stephen Wright
Jerry,
Having been away from your site for the last month
or so, I see that I've missed a number of interesting items, in particular
the evolution discussion and the more recent "Seven Daughters of
Eve" item. Although I don't have time right now to talk about the
evidence for evolution, I'm afraid your statement that everyone in Europe
is descended from "seven women only" is wrong, as can be seen by
a simple example. Mitochondrial DNA, which is what was studied by Bryan
Sykes, is passed on as a more-or-less exact copy by a mother to each of
her children; for all practical purposes, a father does not pass on any
mitochondrial DNA to his children. Let's assume that your maternal
grandmother had mitochondrial DNA of sequence "A", while your
paternal grandmother had mitochondrial DNA of sequence "B". Your
mother then has mitochondrial DNA of sequence "A", inherited
from her mother, while your father has mitochondrial DNA of sequence
"B", inherited from his mother. You, however, have mitochondrial
DNA only of sequence "A", inherited from your mother. Thus, by
looking at you (or even your sister, if you have one), we only find one
sequence type of mitochondrial DNA, type "A". Of course, this
does not mean that you are descended from only a single grandmother! As
you can see, it is much easier to lose a mitochondrial lineage through a
family where all reproducing offspring are sons than it is to create a
"new" sequence type by mutation. Thus, all we can really say is
that *at least* 7 different female "clans" are still represented
among the current European population. It *is* true (based on the
research) that modern Europeans can trace their lineage back to at least
one of these 7 "clans", but also to an unknown number of
additional "clans", whose mitochondrial DNA is now lost. One can
do similar research with the bulk of the Y chromosome, which is passed on
from father to son only. If such work also showed the existence of exactly
7 "male clans", and the "male clans" corresponded
exactly with the female "clans", then the assertion of descent
from *only* 7 "clans" would be strongly supported.
Thanks very much, Armand MacMurray armands@mindspring.com
I don't know enough about any of
this to have an opinion, so it was not "my" statement; I merely
reported it and gave the source. I note that last night Sixty Minutes
showed that one of the South African tribes that has always claimed to be
Jewish seems to have lots of Cohen Y chromosomes.
Thank you.
I thought perhaps Roberta might be interested in
this.
====== General Interest ====
11. Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching
Children to Read [.pdf] http://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/nrppubskey.cfm
National Reading Panel (NRP) http://www.nationalreadingpanel.org
On April 13, the National Reading Panel (NRP)
released the results of "the largest, most comprehensive
evidenced-based review ever conducted of research on how children learn
reading." Established in response to a 1997 congressional directive,
the NRP is composed of "leading scientists in reading research,
representatives of colleges of education, reading teachers, educational
administrators, and parents." The report, which is available in .pdf
format along with the reports of the subgroups, concludes that the best
way to teach children to read is through a combination of methods,
including phonemic awareness, phonics, guided oral reading, and the
application of reading comprehension strategies. The NRP Homepage offers
background information, additional documents, and related links. [MD]
We have seen this before; not sure
what it means. It sounds like a safe thing to say, and a weasel way out of
a dilemma. If by "phonemic awareness" we mean that letters have
sounds, and phonics means what it usually does, then the rest of it is
simply gubbage: of course one tries to show kids that there are fun things
to read, and to try to get them to understand what they are reading. What
this seems to say is "Teach them to read by phonics, then encourage
them to read by other means, but we don't want to endorse phonics for fear
of offending anyone..."
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