Monthly Archives: September 2005

Blasphemy

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I hate Linux.

There. I said it. Linux is rubbish; the emperor has no clothes.

Okay, it’s got some things going for it. As a server operating system, it’s very useful. It’s so much more secure than Windows that comparing the two is like comparing Fort Knox to a child’s piggy bank. For high-volume Internet server applications, it can’t be beat for the price.

But as a general desktop operating system? It’s bunk. Want to know why? Because there’s a dirty little secret about open source software…it’s made by amateurs!!!

And until those amateurs get their shit straight when it comes to installers, it will never beat Windows regardless of how many problems Windows has and how many security holes Windows suffers from.

So last night I tried installing Fedora Core 4 on one of Shelly’s computers. Fedora core 4 uses a graphical installer called anaconda, which is the worst pile of crap ever to disgrace a computr screen. Want to know why? It’s the user interface, stupid!

I’ve had problems with various Linux installers before–they’re all pretty and friendly and turnkey until the slightest unexpected thing happens, and then you find out that they’re poorly debugged and as fragile as a soap bubble, and when they crash, man, it ain’t pretty. See, writing installers isn’t all sexy and doesn’t give you street cred the way writing kernel software does, so nobody really wants to do it. It’s the castor oil of programming; people have this vaguue notion that installers are good, somehow, but nobody wants to get near them. And you get things like anaconda, which crash into exception traces and stack backtraces when they don’t like a particular brand of network card, or which don’t have even basic error checking and recovery.

Take the problems I had last night (please!). It took four tries to get the damn thing to install, even from media that had been verified and was known to be good.

The first problem was my fault, kinda. See, FC4 fits on four CDs. You run the installer, and when it’s done with a CD it pops out and asks for the next CD. You put the next CD in, click OK, and off it goes, and so on.

Well, when the installer asked for the third CD, I popped it in, and then (stupidly) clicked the OK button right away, before the CD finished spinnig up. Now, any other program I’ve ever used for any other operating system waits for the CD to finish spinning up, then does its thing. Not anaconda, oh my, no. Instead, if the operator foolishly hits the OK button before the CD finishes spinning up, he instantly gets an error message ‘The CD can not be read. Sorry, this error is fatal. Click here to reboot.” No “click here to try again”–no, that’d be too robust, and we don’t want Linux to be robust, do we?

The next three attempts to install met with similar fates. Even though I carefully waited until each CD finished spinning up before I hit OK, at three random times during the install, I got a message “A file could not be read or written. This may indicate a problem with the media, with the hard drive, or with your hardware. Sorry, this error is fatal. Click here to reboot.”

Yeah, it may indicate a problem with the media, or with the hard drive, or it may indicate that the goddamn installer is crap, with poor error checking and no error recovery.

Now, the Linux users of the world pride themselves on the overall robustness of their operating-system-cum-religion, yet write crap installers that fall down if the wind blows from the wrong direction.

I once had a problem with a Windows CD. The CD-ROM was defective from the factory; it had a scratch on it that caused some of the sectors to be unreadable. Want to know what happened when the installer hit that spot? Listen up, Linux boys, there’s a lesson in here for you. Ignore this lesson at your peril:

It displayed an error message saying “The CD could not be read. Click here to try again, or click here to cancel the install.”

“Click here to try again.” My goodness. What will those satanic Redmond monsters think of next? Retrying an operation that failed is just…it’s just…well, diabolical!

I finally got it to install, by holding my breath and making the proper incantations, but lordy, I have yet to be impressed.

Goddamn LiveJournal, anyway.

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So, over the past couple of months, I haven’t been getting all the email notifications of replies to my entries and comments, and it’s steadily been getting worse. Right now, i seem to be getting email notifications for perhaps one out of six replies, and the notifications I’m getting, I’m getting multiple times seven copies of one reply, for example, over a five-day period).

If there’s anything I’ve missed that really needs a reply…um. I’d say “post a comment about it here,” but I might not get a notification of that. Hmm.

Whoa!

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Courtesy of purplespark: Scientists create mice able to regenerate lost limbs and regrow damaged organs.

The experimental animals are unique among mammals in their ability to regrow their heart, toes, joints and tail.

And when cells from the test mouse are injected into ordinary mice, they too acquire the ability to regenerate, the US-based researchers say.

Their discoveries raise the prospect that humans could one day be given the ability to regenerate lost or damaged organs, opening up a new era in medicine…

“We have experimented with amputating or damaging several different organs, such as the heart, toes, tail and ears, and just watched them regrow,” she said.

Now, this kind of stuff has always been within the laws of physics, but development of new techniques in genetic engineering and nanomedicine are both progressing faster than even the most optimistic of us transhumanists had expected. And speaking of biomedical nanotech, I bring you another article, Research scientists at Georgia Tech have built nano-scale detectors so sensitive that they will be capable of spotting individual cancer cells.

The detectors are based on a new kind of quasi-one dimensional nano material, dubbed nanobelts or nanoribbons, which can be made from a variety of materials, like zinc or tin oxides. They are typically between 30nm and 300nm wide, and can be a few millimetres long.

The semiconducting nanobelts, first synthesised in 2001, can be tuned to exhibit certain behaviours. Introducing oxygen vacancies can affect their conductivity, surface and optical properties…

These nanostructures are ideal objects for building sensors with biomedical applications, Professor Wang said, ahead of a presentation at the EMAG-Nano 2005 conference in Leeds yesterday, such as force sensors, blood flow sensors and cancer detectors.

I think a lot of people who aren’t really paying attention now are going to be very surprised when these things start hitting the market. I also suspect that people fifty or seventy-five years from now are going to look back on this as the Age of Barbarism: “Someone had a heart attack and you savages thought the best solution was to SLICE HIM OPEN??!!”