Well, the new roto-tiller worked so well, I took it for a test spin, for two tanks of fuel. This is the easiest-starting small machine I have ever owned. From an empty tank to running was one pull of the cord… One drawback is that it has only one speed, maximum, so some of my tough spots are a very rough ride. I was used to running the old machine at 3/4 throttle. Another weak spot was the wheel mount. After 15 minutes, the wheels actually came off. There was a factory-defect, two of four tack-welds broke and the other two were not fused to the two pieces of the joint, giving a huge mechanical disadvantage to the other two. I ground off the paint and the tack-welds and welded with E6013 at -95 amps on a 1/8” electrode. It was not my best weld but much stronger than the unit as shipped. Think more than ten times the area of weld and several times deeper. Instead of 4 tack-welds, I have two continuous beads, going “around the corners” to give no freedom of movement whatsoever. I knew about the weak welds when I bought the thing because of a comment in the forum at Sears. Some things don’t frighten welders and the price may have been better because of the weakness.
Continue reading ‘Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune…’
Author Archive for Robert Pogson
Today is the day my new roto-tiller arrives, and the Stucco-man gets to work finishing the outside of our home. My new workshop and my new lawn are taking shape, too. If only the little woman would stop giving me ToDo lists of errands, I might actually accomplish something in the near future.
My last accomplishment was fabricating a custom-built steel channel to reinforce a loose Newell post. Being a welder really helps when you have to make something strong and compact. Having the drill-press finally installed helped, too. I have yet to repair an old watering hose for the yard and she wants me to do errands fixing the old homestead as well… Yesterday, I was spraying dandelions on both properties. I also repaired the old mower to mow the old property. Then there’s fertilizer for both properties. The list keeps growing.
I look forward to the day when things are actually as they should be and I can get on with my life instead of doing things elsewhere. Isn’t that what retirement is supposed to be about?
Sometimes, the Problem is the Pointy-headed Boss
A database of deadbeat parents (not making child-support payments) in UK was moved from one IT system to another and finally yet another and along the way the opening balance was lost so arrears can no longer be calculated properly… Ouch! Sometimes the problem is not the OS or the application or even the operator. It’s the PHB who is supposed to “manage” the system.
see The Register – Child support IT fail: Deadbeat mums ‘n’ dads off the hook
NAO: Child maintenance computers unable to keep tabs on payments
I’ve made a few mistakes in my life. Once I forgot about password changes in a system of 4 terminal servers… Another time I changed one report card in a school to a new format while forgetting the elementaries had 3 separate cards for different ages. An hour or two of labour fixed those mistakes. The UK seems to make larger blunders, with the cost of fixing them being larger than the benefit of fixing them, resulting in a once-useful system becoming a burden rather than a blessing in spite of huge outlays of cash to maintain and to operate the system.
We have hardware manufacturers and OEMs willing to crank out supported systems. The last barrier to adoption are retail chains catering to the Wintel monopoly. Read all about it in a thoroughly researched report by The Association of Open Source Software Companies of Portugal.
see Laptop retail oligopoly:
the unnoticed digital divide
“We conclude that retail oligopolies are very prone to filtering new products independently of the likelihood of their acceptance by consumers when the new products compete with heavily established ones.
…
The Linux on laptops combination became viable relatively late, in terms of Microsoft presence. But having been technically possible and economically interesting for many years, it is still kept out of the market by the retail anomalies described in this article. That happens even in the presence of interested consumers and suppliers.
We therefore question the effectiveness of the existing legal framework (section 5) with the following statement: from the standpoint of consumers and suppliers, the behavior of a small number of dominant retail chains is not significantly different from that of a single retailer.
Regulators should evaluate the direct and indirect losses caused by this situation [7] and put corrective measures in place.”
- PostgreSQL improves scalability with release of version 9.2beta:
“Major performance and scalability advances in this version include:- Index-only scans, allowing users to avoid inefficient scans of base tables
- Enhanced read-only workload scaling to 64 cores and over 300,000 queries per second
- Improvements to data write speeds, including group commit
- Reductions in CPU power consumption
Cascading replication, supporting geographically distributed standby databases
PostgreSQL 9.2 will also offer many new features for application developers, including:
- JSON data support, enabling hybrid document-relational databases
- Range types, supporting new types of calendar, time-series and analytic applications
- Multiple improvements to ALTER and other statements, easing runtime database updates
“
- Debian 7.0 Wheezy adds new features to the installer (WPA support, Btrfs, Linux 3.2.16, convenient multiple .iso in USB stick installs, ZFS support, etc.) and release forecast for early in 2013. I have been using the testing flavour for months and the only problem is the steady stream of updates.
- vlc has had a billion (109) downloads since 2005, not counting the GNU/Linux installations which are usually a part of a distro. It looks like hundreds of millions use/choose it.
- The Debian Administrator’s Handbook has broken even and has been released as a work under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. I learned a lot from this book before I finished it.
- Pakistan donates 125K Ubuntu GNU/Linux PCs to university students increasing opportunities and introducing future leaders to FLOSS.
There are a lot of good things happening in the world of FLOSS. This list is just the tip of a huge iceberg.
Another Government Gives Active Support for FLOSS
Published by May 14th, 2012 in technology. 57 CommentsWe have read of many governments beginning to show preference to use of FLOSS in procurement and internal use but only a few actively support/promote FLOSS as a national priority. Now Aragon, Spain, has set up an organization to promote FLOSS by encouraging businesses to adopt FLOSS and to facilitate adopting FLOSS.
“Open source has shown to be of greater technological efficiency in both public and private sector”
Amen! I recommend Debian GNU/Linux. It’s the right way to do IT. GNU/Linux is a cooperative product of the world, not just an OS but applications and data for clients and servers freely shared with a licence to use, examine, modify and to distribute the code under the same terms.
See Spanish region of Aragon to support growth of open source companies | Joinup.
My spies are painting the old homestead using my new scaffolding.
It was Mother’s Day as well…
Yesterday Judge Allsup overruled the jury on one item in their list of questions, “our court of appeals has held that it is the amount of copying as compared to plaintiff’s work that matters for the de minimis inquiry, not how the accused infringer used the copied work. Newton v. Diamond, 388 F.3d 1189, 1195 (9th Cir. 2004). Here, Google has admitted to copying the entire files. No reasonable jury could find that this copying was de minimis.”
Java is huge. Android is huge. How any jury could find such little copying was any more than de minimis is beyond me. Files are not at issue. The copyright in question is the entire body of Java SE, not a few files. Expect an appeal…
see The Ruling
I noticed a post about an ASUS netbook with Ubuntu GNU/Linux and was curious where it was sold.
Using Google search with
- asus 1015px blk003U found 790 hits
- asus 1015px blk003U site:.it found 430 hits
- asus 1015px blk003U site:.br found 4 hits
- asus 1015px blk003U site:.com found 299 hits most of which are from Italy or about the product being sold in Italy.
So, GNU/Linux on netbooks is not dead, just localized… Anticipating claims of “old stock” I looked up this message about interpreting the serial number. The first character is the last digit of the year and the second character is the hex month (1-C). So, this unit starting with “C1″ was made in 2012-01.
HP has announced a public beta of HP Cloud services. Price for the beta is 50% of the regular price.
It looks like
- computing prices are 1 to 4 cents per gB-core/h depending on classification from small to super-dooper large,
- object storage is 12 cents per gB/month,
- storage requests are 1 cent per K requests,
- uploads are free and downloads are 5-12 cents per gB, and
- cloud bandwidth is 7 to 39 cents per gB depending on billing address and not where the content is consumed.
It’s always fun to shop and, at these rates, this blog would cost about 4 cents/h for compute, 25 cents for bandwidth and 36 cents/month for storage, about $30/month… I think I will stay where I am. Still, it must be attractive for a lot of businesses to do a calculation like this instead of maintaining staff, real-estate, power-company, etc. It’s an interesting business model, the customer taking care of the content mostly and the supplier taking care of a bunch of machines somewhere.
“HP Cloud Services offer a public cloud infrastructure along with platform services and cloud solutions. Designed with OpenStack™ technology, the open-sourced-based architecture ensures no vendor lock-in, improves developer productivity, features a full stack of easy-to-use tools for faster time to code, provides access to a rich partner ecosystem, and is backed by personalized customer support.”
I expect HP will find customers for this thing. It’s a good example of a business using Free Software to make money. HP is one of 170 companies contributing to OpenStack.
During the trial, Oracle v Google, Larry Ellison was a witness and gave false testimony even after declaring he had personal knowledge of Java:
“When Larry Ellison was asked whether the Java APIs are needed to use the Java language, Google objected on the ground that the question called for expert testimony. RT 290:15-19. The Court overruled the objection, but only after Mr. Ellison assured the Court that he was testifying based on personal knowledge. RT 290:20-24. Mr. Ellison then testified that a UK company named Spring had built its “own Java environment” called Spring, which used the Java language, but not the Java APIs. RT 290:25-291:6.
Mr. Ellison’s testimony was incorrect. The Spring framework is open source software, and the documentation for the Spring framework is readily available on the Internet. This documentation demonstrates that Mr. Ellison’s testimony was incorrect, and that the Spring framework uses the J2SE APIs. For example, the Spring package “org.springframework.ui” has a class named “ModelMap,” which is a subclass of “java.util.HashMap” —a class that is in the accused java.util package. This Spring class implements the interfaces Serializable (part of the accused java.io package), Cloneable (part of the accused java.lang package) and Map (part of the accused java.util package).”
See GOOGLE’S MAY 10, 2012 COPYRIGHT
LIABILITY TRIAL BRIEF
I wonder how many layers of lying are involved. Did he lie about “personal knowledge”, the use of the Java API from SUN by a company or both? It’s not as if there was a matter of opinion or point of view involved. This was a “yes or no” situation. Did Spring use SUN’s Java API or not?
Google’s response was to a list of questions posed by Judge Alsup after he read an EU decision about non-copyright protection for APIs.
Oracle is in pretty deep doo-doo with this judge. Either Oracle is an evil corporation or they have a really evil legal firm running the case or both. Lies could fit either or both scenarios.
SJVN has it right when he observes that M$’s exclusions of non-M$ software in “8″ will be just another reason to avoid the platform both as developers and users of software. M$ had a monopoly on DOS which they leveraged into a monopoly on the GUI by encouraging anyone and everyone to write for that other OS. Preventing people from writing for “8″ on ARM will make monopoly on that architecture stillborn.
see SJVN – ZDnet – Is Microsoft blocking Chrome and Firefox from native Windows RT a big deal?
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