Month: July 2002

Economist.com | Weblogging

For all the costly and failed efforts by media companies to create and charge for online material, blogging suggests that the web works best as a link to other people—and a way of finding and raiding their content.

Quiz: Does Your Weblog Own You?

12.5 %

My weblog owns 12.5 % of me.
Does your weblog own you?

A Computer’s Eye View (from 1972)

How far has computer technology advanced since this was written in 1972? In the proceeding chapter, Kemeny describes the then-new GE 635 machine that ran the Dartmouth Time Sharing System: the “dual processor system is capable of some 10 million multiplications per minute.”

That works out to be 166,166 multiplications per second. (I’m assuming these are “fixed-point” multiplies: no decimals allowed.)

A Pentium 4 can do at least one multiplication per clock cycle; for a 1.7GHz P4, that’s 1.7 billion multiplications per second. Rounding a bit, that 2002 Pentium 4 is about 10,000 times faster. (And if that GE 635 cost 10 million dollars

The question I have to ask is, where has all that power gone? On what have we spent all the speed? Do we do anything 10,000 times faster or even 10 times faster? Or do we instead use this tool more than the other (pen and paper, sliderule, calculator, ledger book), thereby soaking up the capacity?

As much as it seems we should have a surplus, when you look at examples like the one above, there still seems to be the demand for more.

I was doing some shopping at my local Fred Meyer and as I left, I was greeted by a fellow handing out flyers, saying something about a “burger giveaway.” As a vegetarian, I’m not going to be interested, but rather than get into that, I took the flyer and dropped it into the cart. As it left my hand, I saw the word “baptist” and realized this was actually an invitation to visit a local church, burgers provided.

The early Christians were willing to face the lions or the griddle, any number of horrific fates, for their faith, while today’s evangelical Christians seem unwilling to risk a polite refusal or disapproving glance for theirs.

While some are reluctant to publicly profess their faith, others are assassinating their enemies and then fleeing, rather than standing up for their beliefs. I know of no recent violent acts, planned or committed, against religious leaders here in the US.

That seems hypocritical to me. It suggests a lack of real conviction: not that I condone or encourage killing doctors or blowing up healthcare facilities, but commiting the act as a declaration of your faith and then hiding is not the act of a true believer, merely a murderer, a criminal, and a terrorist.

Is the fellow hiding his church’s fellowship meetings behind free burgers evil? No, I don’t think so, but what is there to be afraid of? I suppose some could claim my reluctance to engage him on burgers and vegetarianism constitutes a lack of conviction on my part, but I’m not evangelizing. I could suggest pizza as a more ecumenical approach, food-wise, but that’s another matter. The bottom line is, I’d rather see someone be open about what he’s doing.

Matt Stephenson, the maintainer of the samba package for OS X, liked my docs and based on my feedback will move the package into the stable tree. It seems he has gotten no feedback from anyone, and never knew if it just “worked for him” or just worked.

So send an email to the author of that port, package or utility you use daily and tell him what it means to you. In the gift culture that is the open source world and to some extent the internet, that kind of thing really counts.

Do it now.

“Mother died yesterday. Or was it today?”

So runs the opening of Camus’ “l’etranger”, variously translated as “The Stranger” or “The Outsider.”

It was today, somewhere between 1 and 2 am, that my mother died. We hadn’t spoken in any meaningful way in 30 years, so we weren’t exactly close.

The best summation I have for how the past 48 hours have gone for me is that I feel bad that I don’t feel worse. After all, losing the person who brought you into the world is a milestone for most people.

I first learned she was gravely ill Friday night, about 11 pm, in a rather roundabout way: an aunt with whom I have never had a close relationship telephoned from England earlier in the day to say she wanted to speak to me personally. When the timezones permitted, she told me what was happening: cancer everywhere, no hope of recovery, thought I might want to know.

The best case was that she might last the week, but her suffering ended just a day later.