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Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Thu, 16 Mar 2000 13:00:00 GMT
I battled with installing my new LinuxPPC 2000 until about 3am this morning. I selected everything and installed it right over LinuxPPC 1999. Bad move. It booted up, but the GUI wouldn't start, and someone was spawning off copies of gcc (the GNU C Compiler) which in turn spawned off more copies. I moved my personal bits to another drive, reformatted the drive, and reinstalled only what I thought I needed. Now it works fine. I got Sawmill under Gnome. It's quite a bit faster than KDE used to be, but I'm not sure I like it as much. It also seems pretty stable. I'm using KDE because the version of Enlightenment that came with LinuxPPC 1999 was very unstable, and KDE is the first alternative I discovered. Still haven't figured out how to stop kppp from asking me for the root password when it starts up.

Last Saturday I said that the web site of TeraBeam Networks would go live this Monday. Forgot to look until now. They've got a nice Flash video that introduces their service. It looks really neat, at least for the last mile of connectivity in a city. Dan Bricklin's got a picture of one of their transmitters here (you'll have to scroll down a little to see it). That page is part of Dan's PC Forum 2000 Album. It's great that lots of people are getting digital cameras; I can see all the people I usually just read about. [script]

I downloaded the free version of The Brain. It looks like a good idea, and appears to be a good implementation of that idea. I've tried other similar products and never ended up using them. We'll see.

Stephen Shankland at CNET - Jini's bottleneck: What is holding up Sun's much-hyped technology? It's been a year since Sun announced Jini. "The hype is way ahead of the market," International Data Corp. analyst Kevin Hause said. "Sun is definitely moving in the right direction with it, but it's going to be a long process." [cafe]

" POVTalk... is a Natural Language based 3D scene generator. Sounds strange. Basically you type statements, such as 'create a large red ball called jim', 'make jim bigger', and 'make jim blue' and in turn manipulate 3D scenes. Its easy to use and heaps of fun. It is developed using Python, and you need Python and PyOpenGL to run it." [lw]

Chris Oakes at Wired - Hack Spurs Hit 'PC' -- and IPO?: Ken Segler figured out how to hack the $99 Netpliance with a cable to a hard drive. This turned a simple web browsing machine into a complete Pentium system, for only $200. Netpliance's business model depends on people buying their internet service for $21.95/month. Hehe. [wired]

Reuters via Wired - Hard Drives Hit 75 GB: "The products are the first IBM desktop drives to use glass disk platters instead of aluminum." [wired]

Matt Drudge - Census Breakdown: Citizens Tell Sam to Shove it over Probing Questions; Will Pay Fine [sierra]

Charley Reese at the Orlando Sentinel - Is it fair for hard-working folks to pay those who aren't? "A welfare state is a slave state. The slaves are the productive citizens whose taxes are used to support the unproductive. The beneficiaries are simply the politicians who take the money from the productive people and use it to buy the votes of the unproductive... Former Congressman Jack Kemp used to make a good point. Whatever you tax you discourage, and whatever you subsidize you encourage. And the government taxes work, savings and investments, and subsidizes unemployment, indigency and improvidence." Well said!

Camille Paglia at Salon - The pussy-whipped princelings of the press corps: "Most of those who cast their ballots for McCain did so, I maintain, with little sense of his flawed character and thin legislative record... Only the pussy-whipped princelings of a press terrain soaked with feminist cant could mistake a stunted Uriah Heep like McCain for a 'real' man..." She likes Bill Bradley, not "Gore the epicene lie-monger". A letter from Arkansas about Queen Hillary says, "In Arkansas, Hillary was always seen as a bit of a carpetbagging Yankee albatross around ole Billy's neck." Some Eve Ensler bashing (Hillary hand-picked Eve for her senate campaign exploratory committee). Another reader corrects Camille about the nature of Mt. Carmel. It was not a "ranch" or a "compound", it was a church camp, "less well designed to resist attack than the typical YMCA building." A few other readers remind us that David Koresh had broken no laws when he and his followers were gassed and roasted alive. More support for the right to keep and bear arms: "As I've indicated in the past, I firmly agree with this view of the Second Amendment as the crucial recourse of private citizens against government tyranny, which world history shows can arise with stunning speed."

Miguel Llanos at MSNBC - Fuel-cell future for gasoline?: Ray Gorte at the University of Pennsylvania has developed a fuel cell that runs directly on gasoline. They expect a 3-fold increase in miles-per-gallon plus a decrease in polution. My next car will probably be one of the gas-electric hybrids, like the Honda Insight or the Toyota Prius, but the one after that will likely be fuel-cell powered. [wnd]

Jon E. Dougherty at WorldNetDaily - Feds blamed for high gas prices, Libertarian Party cites 'endless government meddling': "As federal officials and lawmakers decry the current dramatic surge in gasoline prices, they should 'look in the mirror' if they're serious about finding out who is most responsible, says the California Libertarian Party." [wnd]

Joe Farah at WorldNetDaily - A congressional whitewash: the congressional committee charged with investigating politically motivated tax audits has released its report without even talking to Joe Farah, the guy who alerted them to the problem in the first place after Slick Willy got Joe's Western Journalism Center audited. [wnd]

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