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If you are a Shakespeare lover you probably have found Richard III
difficult to understand. If, like the majority, you have not
seen/read/heard of Shakespeare I suggest that you start with Richard
III. Have I gone mad? Well, I am not suggesting that you try to read
through the dry text; instead, watch Al Pacino's movie version of the bard's
piece. Looking for
Richard is a making of, the actual play, historical notes,
humor and expert opinion rolled into one. I can assure you that you
will not be disappointed.
As a younster I liked pop & rock; classical and anything that even
smelled of jazz were not be on my radar screen. On hearing ELP's
(Emerson, Lake and Palmer) version of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an
Exhibition I began to like classical. Similarly with the eclectic
jazz-fusion band The Mahavishu Orchestra I started liking
jazz. From that tenuous thread my interests expanded. Often one needs
to build a bridge from where one is to some place else. You might
stand on one side and say "Why the heck do I need a bridge?". The
answer is, of course, to get to the other side where one might have a
better view. But in order to build a
suspension bridge you need to throw a thin line over to the other
side and over this thin cable transport a thicker cable and an even
thicker one until you have enough to bear the weight of the people you
want to transport across.
Shakespeare has a lot to say but most of it is inaccessible to mere
mortals like us. We need a bridge. Al Pacino's movie is that
bridge.
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Intel has announced
that their top of the line Pentium 4 now runs at 2.53 GHz - the latest
fanfare to confirm Moore's Law. Somehow it has left me cold - no
feeling of envy or must have one of those when I view my
machine that runs at 500MHz. One-fifth the speed of the latest one
and no urge to rush to the stores. Once upon a time it would have
kicked adrenaline into the bloodstream. I think that my machine is
fast enough for my purposes. Why would I want any more?
I am sure that I am not alone with these sentiments. In the past
one could use every MHz of CPU power one could pay for - GUI's needed
all of it. Now, however, the applications run fast enough on decent
machines. One could not speed them up appreciably by getting faster
CPUs. Memory, PCI bus speed, disk speed and other things need to be
improved in order to make a qualitative difference. I confess that I
do not play games - that would be a different ball game (pun intended).
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I've had a cable modem since last September. I could finally retire
my Zyxel ISDN router and move to a
faster channel to the Internet. Cablecom installed the wiring, I
swapped out the ISDN and replaced it with the supplied cable
modem. Ahh the wonder of having network devices! That, however, was
the silver lining; the dark cloud was that I was on the Internet
all the time and I had to protect myself from the baddies out
there.
I had looked into firewalls, both commercial and free. The
commercial ones are in my opinion limited: if you want a feature that
isn't provided you are hosed. More importantly, that is very ungeeky!
I decided to go with a free floppy-based router. The first one floppyfw had various
limitations. The next one is what I stayed with: Freesco. The version of 0.2.7 is
less than confidence-inspiring but let me assure you that it has been
quite reliable. It runs for months on end without a reboot, quietly
humming away in the basement. Read a review
by another happy camper.
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My main machine at home has been running SuSE for many years starting with
version 5.3 on a Pentium 133Mhz machine. I have been going through the
upgrades at regular intervals. The latest incarnation, 8.0, got
plonked on to the disk. It was painless except for printing. What used
to work earlier is in shambles now. Deinstalling and installing the
LPRng did not help. I tried out CUPS; no comfort there. So right now I
cannot print from my linux machine. How different Windows is in this
regard!
But the amount and quality of other software makes up for this
deficiency. My favorites: Mozilla, xemacs, gimp, samba, etc.
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I have been the envy of many of my colleagues ever since I became
the proud owner of a Sharp
Zaurus PDA. I bought the
developer model at Java One
for USD 200; the commercial one sells for USD 500. The only difference
is that the commercial model has 64MB of RAM whereas the developer
model has 32MB. I also bought a wireless LAN (802.11b) card with which
I could surf the Net at the conference; at home it is useless as I do
not have a base station for it.
It is based on an embedded
Linux kernel and Qt from Trolltech. It has the regular
Unix tools including - get this - xterm, bash, vi and friends! It is
mainly for geeks though non-geeks will certainly be able to use the
machine. It has a calendar, to-do list, address book, clock, MP3
player, image viewer, etc. I could download a password manager and
there are numerous other programs at ZaurusZone.
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