Thursday, September 26, 2002
82160170:: 1:10 PM

I had a funny thought today. What if apple's OS X ends up being the culprit who kills Linux? Slashdot would implode.

My reasoning is this: Open source software is pretty cool, but as the companies who provide Linux distributions mature, they will become more and more like the companies that Linux users hate. Having several leading distributions will cause interoperability problems in the long term and the Linux front end will take years just to get to the level of polish of WinXP. All the while, Apple already has a stable *NIX OS based on BSD with an exemplary shell UI *and* it is being ported to Pentium machines. This means very cheap *NIX machines with excellent UI and a much lower barrier of entry for non-techies. The machines would be easy to cluster, easy to use as servers, and offer all the development platforms that Linux hackers are fond of.

So why Linux?

Tuesday, September 17, 2002
81742920:: 3:33 PM

Today I got my first real HD failure.

At age 11 I remember backing up important files from my 386 onto 5.25" floppies to ward off such a possibility. The years passed... 486, P200, PIII 850, multiple drives, no failure. I figured it was a myth invented by disk manufacturers... well today the myth has asserted itself. The HD of my main work computer (with its well utilized shared directory) can no longer be recognized.

I saw the bits suffuse into data heaven.

Sunday, September 01, 2002
80995990:: 9:45 AM

swimming hole in august:
the sun's a smudge
of egg yolk
stirred in the hot soup of the sky