weirdness on the news

Most afternoons I turn the radio on for a 5 minute piece called Perspective, where a variety of people give a very short talk on some topic dear to the heart. Normally I turn it off again straight afterwards because it is followed by the news and I find it too skewed and depressing these days to bother with. Today I was doing something and didn't turn it off immediately and heard a couple of gems:

"the company was remorseful"

Some guy was injured working for Energex and he took the company to court. Apparently some total knucklebrain told the court that "the company was remorseful". How unutterably stupid is that? Companies don't feel anything. They are fictitious entities, developed (as I wittily heard someone say recently) so that people can obtain profit without being held accountable. Some of the people in companies can feel remorseful, but the company definitely can't.

"oil prices have been falling for years"

This was very strange. We were told that oil prices as dollars per barrel had been falling for years(?) and that OPEC nations had decided to cut back on production to increase prices again. Huh? Maybe I misheard the timeframe. If price per barrel has been falling why have the prices we pay been going up? Or need I bother even asking? Is the term "skimming"?

Linux file tree and over-complexificatoryization

For some time now I've been trying learn how to use Linux well... though, I have to admit, not in a concentrated, concerted effort. I've been attacking it piecemeal, hoping to absorb the info simply by immersion. It has worked well with many things I've done in the past, but it doesn't seem terribly successful in helping me get to grips with the file tree layout in Linux. I keep getting the impression that it owes a lot to bandaids patched onto other bandaids. This is one of the major problems with Windows... at least until Microsoft started all over again with WindowsNT.

In Linux there are all these bin and sbin directories -- the two at the root of the filesystem, then another couple in /usr, and yet another couple in /usr/local. I keep wondering, why so many? Other systems work fine keeping all their core executables in just one, or maybe two directories.

And the names of the major directories:
etc - for configuration files. Why not call it something descriptive, like... oh, I don't know, "config"??
usr - contains files that should not be changed by the user. Huh??? It is for files that you don't want to be overwritten when the system is upgraded.
var - is for temporary files, like log files and such... like tmp except it isn't. Hmmm...

What is worse, different flavors of Linux depart from the "standard" layout to greater or lesser degrees.

There comes a point when the time required to learn all this exceeds its potential usefulness. And unfortunately, all too often, learning this stuff is a bit like that joke: to understand recursion, first you must understand recursion.

The explanations in Linux manuals often require that you already understand what is being described in order to understand the explanation. [sigh]

Now, I don't think I'm a stupid person. I've taught myself almost 20 computer languages, and become proficient with about half of those. Some of those languages are assembly languages. I've designed and built digital circuits to perform a number of functions. If I have problems coming to grips with Linux, how can people who aren't even interested in computers going to fare?

Puppy is a lot easier to get my mind around than most of the other Linuxes I've fiddled with, but even it still leaves a lot to be desired.

It makes me positively nostalgic for the Amiga and for OS-9. Now there were a couple of clean operating systems. Not that they didn't have problems and shortcomings, but it really didn't take much effort to understand the layout and function of the system as a whole. A day or so invested in it and you were up and running, doing useful stuff. With Linux, Windows, and other "modern" operating systems you just better hope nothing ever goes wrong or that you don't need to track down a configuration problem, because you could be looking at days wasted in solving it.

more thoughts on email and eliminating spam

It occurred to me that perhaps the biggest problem is in how email is set up to work just like snail-mail. You write a letter, send it, it arrives at the destination, and the recipient plucks it from their mailbox to read it.

But email doesn't need to work like that. It is electronic, with all sorts of wonderful capabilities conferred by the different medium. We should use those capabilities to advantage.

We could effectively eliminate spam by the sender simply notifying the recipient that they have an email for them. The receiver then acknowledges that they'd like to accept the email... or not. This has a subtle effect. If the user has to explicitly request the email then it must be fetched from the sender. This makes it useless to forge the sender address because the email can't be delivered from an address that is not genuine. Spammers would gain nothing by forging addresses. Forcing spammers to use genuine addresses would make it easy to block them and for police to nab their slimy asses.

free hot water

The plumbing here doesn't work properly so I've perfected the art of washing in a one litre bowl of water. It's not as difficult as you might think. I was going to heat up some water for a wash today. Normally I heat the bowl of water in the microwave oven because the water is so laden with minerals that it cakes the kettle... but I'm not keen on using the microwave oven for that because, although it is a very efficient device, it still costs money to run, and money is scarce.

Today I got an idea. There is a nice hot sun out there, so I put a glass plate over the bowl of water. Then I put a stainless steel bowl inside a black plastic garbage bag and nestled the glass bowl of water inside that. This all went out in the sun on a black, cast iron frypan for a nice stable surface that also helped warm things.

An hour or two later I checked on it, and disappointed that the glass bowl wasn't very warm, I lifted the glass plate off the top and dipped my fingers into the water. What a surprise! The water was hot.

I got my wash... for free. :)