Desktop Linux only really started to take off around 2006-ish, when Ubuntu began to gain momentum. While rootling around in an old bag, I found this disk for Corel Linux, an old Linux distro. It eventually became Xandros. Ugh.
Let’s just say that I don’t plan on letting this loose on any of my main machines any time soon: it’ll probably end up on the Antiques Roadshow 2070.
You have received a new message, originally uploaded by Jonathan Rothwell.
I am incredibly piddled off with Windows Vista. I decided, as I was already using the machine, that I’d use it to upgrade this blog to WordPress 2.7 Beta 3.
Bad move, it turns out. Explorer took ten minutes to extract half of the ZIP archive before it decided to crash. Annoyed, I restarted the process. I clicked through the endless prompts (do you want to merge? do you want to overwrite? ARE YOU SURE? POSITIVE? You never know, it’s open-source, it might be dangerous…)
Anyway, after lumbering through the zip file again, it again crashed. Mightily piddled off, I deleted the folder it had previously been extracted to, and restarted the process again. Again, after five minutes of extracting at a painfully slow rate, Explorer died. Again.
I started again, this time using the 7-Zip shell extension. Everything was done in ten seconds. Compare that to the five minutes using Windows’s own extraction libraries and you see why I consider Vista to be sub-standard.
Anyway, now to upload using FTP. It took Windows AN HOUR AND A HALF to upload a 5.4mB folder. Using Nautilus or Dolphin, that normally only takes fifteen minutes, even with my crawling Virgin Media connection.
Is this really the best MS can do, after FIVE YEARS of gestation? It’s a perfectly simple task: extract archive, FTP to server. I am appalled that people actually pay money for this. I would rather they hadn’t included the function to extract ZIP files at all, instead of the stupid situation where we have a system that simply cannot work through a basic ZIP file.
I’ve been following the ultrasub-notebook market very closely of late. Eee PCs (and MacBook Airs) have been selling like hotcakes, whilst other manufacturers have somewhat failed to penetrate the market.
However, I’ve just come across the HP Mini-Note. (True, that’s a rubbish name, but it’s better than “Eee PC”, or, worse still, “G-DIUM” - what were they on when they thought of that?) And, I have to say, it looks to be a very promising little machine.
Note: This is a copy of the present version of the article available at Jonathan Rothwell’s Brain Dump here. More up-to-date (or incorrect) information may be available there.
The Asus Eee PC is a fabulous little computer. However, it has one big Achilles’ heel: it only has 512mB of RAM by default on the lower-end models. This means that even applications such as Firefox, Evolution and OpenOffice.org can struggle. In most cases, RAM is more of a bottleneck than the CPU clock speed.
The Eee PC accepts up to 2gB of 200-pin SO-DIMM random access memory. (The Eee only uses a 32-bit CPU by default, and therefore can handle a theoretical maximum of 3gB of RAM, but as there’s only one RAM slot on the logic board, it can only handle 2gB without replacing the motherboard and CPU.)
I ordered my RAM from Crucial, who are, I have to say, excellent. The module arrived within sixty hours, along with an anti-static wrist strap. Their pricing is reasonable too.
I highly recommend the anti-static wrist strap. It’s a little strap with an adhesive side that you wrap around your wrist, and a copper tape on the end which is connected to ground. Normally, you’d connect it to the chassis of the computer: but as the Eee’s chassis is plastic, this will not do any good. Anything metal and exposed should work. I connected mine to the pipe of a radiator.
With regards to other tools, you should have access to a small-ish cross-headed (Phillips) screwdriver, and you should also have a large, clean-ish workspace, with access to a suitable grounding device and a spare thirty minutes or so, if you’ve never touched the inside of a machine before. If you have, it’ll probably take less than ten minutes. I swapped mine in less than a quarter of an hour, and the process would have been a lot quicker if I didn’t have to keep stopping to take photographs.
Upgrading the Eee PC’s RAM will most probably void the warranty. On some machines, an additional warranty sticker is stuck over the RAM access panel, so you would void the warranty by opening it. It’s no use coming round the other way either: all Eees have a warranty-void sticker on the spacer plate between the keyboard and the logic board. If you’re using the Eee 4G Surf (i.e. the 4gB disk drive but no webcam), you have no choice but to come down through the keyboard and trackpad, as there is no RAM access panel. On the 2G Surf, don’t bother: the RAM is soldered directly onto the logic board, so you’d have to replace the logic board as well as the RAM - and as the hard drive is soldered onto the motherboard, you’d need to replace that as well. Overall, it might be more economical for you to return the Eee and buy the next model up, if you are desperate for more RAM.
Even if you do not void the warranty, should your Eee fail and you want a refund from Asus, you would have to prove that the fault exists with the original hardware. This means restoring the original RAM module. If you intend on retaining the warranty’s validity, you’ll just have to put up with the RAM how it is.
I can take no responsibility for any damage that arises out of you following the instructions provided here. They are provided in good faith and are correct to the best of my knowledge, but they are provided as is and with absolutely no warranty whatsoever.
Right then… let’s go
This method comes in five parts: preparation, opening the case, installing the RAM, closing the case, and testing. This method should work for the Eee PC 701 4G, 8G, the 900 and the 901. I’m unsure about the 902 onwards, and the 1000 models. The 2G 701 has RAM that is impossible to replace, and the 4G Surf has no RAM access hatch. RAM can still be upgraded in the 4G Surf, but the ‘opening’ procedure should be modified to involve removing the keyboard, trackpad and top part of the case, and lifting the motherboard out of the case to access the RAM. Instructions for this can be found elsewhere on the Internet.
It’s worth grounding yourself again before doing this, just to be safe.
Place the RAM access hatch back where it was, and click it back into position. Replace the two screws, this time screwing clockwise to screw them in.
The Linux distribution that ships with the Eee PC has a kernel which is only compiled to handle 1024mB (1gB) of RAM, downwards. If you have a 2gB module and want to take full advantage of it, you will need to recompile the kernel. Instructions for this can be found elsewhere on the Internet.
Speaking of which, if you’re still using the default distro, why? It may be easier and cleaner for you to install Ubuntu Eee or Eeedora than to use the default, buggy, ugly, messy Xandros distribution.
According to this BBC News article, Gartner analyst Steve Prentice predicts the mouse will be dead within five years. He claims that multi-touch interfaces (such as those on some modern smartphones including the OpenMoko and the iPhone) and three-dimensional controllers will eventually take over from the mouse’s position as the de facto dimensional pointing device for modern computing system.
However, I’m a little sceptical, and there’s a simple reason for this: the problem of familiarity. Many people refuse to use new concepts simply because they’re unfamiliar with them. This is why the QWERTY keyboard layout persists to this day, despite the fact that some people find the Dvorak Simplified layout to be more efficient. It’s because people simply prefer the layout they’re familiar with. (With regards to this, I find the QWERTY layout to be more efficient, personally, because I find it’s easier to perch four fingers on ‘ASDF’ than to perch fingers and thumbs on ‘AOEUI’.)
The problem is that the computer environment is still largely 2D environment. We still only generally go left and right and up and down - this is largely due to the constraint of working on a 2D screen. Although touch displays are becoming more common, they generally lack an ability to perform a secondary or teritary click, and people may find it more ergonomic to use a mouse than to reach across their desk to touch their computer screen.
That said, 3D interfaces are becoming more common. Mac OS X’s Time Machine backup system has a beautiful 3D interface, and Windows Vista’s new task switcher, Flip 3D, also uses a 3D interface. Accellerometer mice are becoming more common (hardhack sites are overflowing with howtos) and this makes it quite possible that 3D mice could be common within the next decade or so. With this in mind, I think it’s quite likely that to use Time Machine in Mac OS X 10.12 “Snagglepuss” released in 2017, you could lift the mouse from the desk, hold it vertically parallel to the screen, and hurl it forwards or backwards to browse backups from the past.
Here’s this week’s weekly news round-up, and we begin with a continuation of Crackergate from last week. The Republican National Convention, which will be held in the Xcel Center, across the road from the Science Museum of Minnesota, has stepped up security, including the ludicrous step of getting the Science Museum to close to the public. Do they expect mutant scientists to emerge from the museum with octopus armies and test-tube cannons? If so, then Jeremy Clarkson’s claim that, in some parts of America, some people must have started mating with vegetables might well turn out to be true.
In technology news, E3 was this week, and there’s been the typical fest of corporate cock-waving that usually takes place at these conferences. There was an unfortunate incident where the soul singer Duffy was asked by confused journalists about the company strategy and corporate characteristics of a company whose product she was promoting - whoops…
In the world of chip-making, AMD has found a ten-pound note on the road, and has decided to spend it making more Phenoms (the high-end triple- and quad-core processors) and launching a new mobile platform to compete with the Centrino. It’s called the Turion X2 64 Ultra, and I can’t really think what else to say. And AMD wonder why they’re making losses. Intel, on the other hand, is doing quite well with profits up 25%.
Borgsoft hasn’t been doing too well either.
In the metablogosphere, WordPress 2.6 has been released. It includes a host of new features, such as the fixing of several bugs in the admin panel, and a new version control feature called Post Revisions.
In politics, it turns out the MoD has lost over 100 USB flash disks, some of which had sensitive data on them. This is getting quite silly now. And the Government has claimed it hasn’t made a decision yet on whether or not it will change its own borrowing rules. Overall, a bit of a fiasco, then.
In other news, the latest edition of Simon’s Cat has appeared online, having been premiered on The Culture Show on BBC Two on Tuesday. Keeping in with this theme, some lolcats have wormed their way into this site lately, so I shall now go hunting for them and put them somewhere else.
I haven’t been blogging much, lately. Silly me.
This is mainly because I (a) haven’t got enough time, and (b) sometimes can’t think of much to write about. Annoyingly, these two criteria are never both fulfilled at the same time.
However, I shall try and combat both of these problems with a new weekly news round-up, issued on the Friday of every week (well, every week I can be bothered.)
A small note - this is not likely to resemble the ‘real’ news. It represents news that I find interesting and relevant, from around the Internet, and from around the world of these carbon-based bipeds (and, if relevant, quadrupeds, or cephalopods if PZ Myers has upset a lot of people that week.)
And, somewhat fittingly, we begin this week with exactly that: PZ Myers has angered several Catholic lobbyist groups by making a joke about a communion wafer. Prof. Myers was writing about a rather ludicrous situation where some idiot removed a communion wafer from a Catholic church - presumably just to irritate the congregation. Little did this (admittedly idiotic) person realise that he would receive death threats over the matter. He wrote that the wafer was a ‘goddamned cracker’ and suggested that later he would find a cracker and desecrate it, just to annoy these people.
Before long, he had received personal hate mail, including demands that he be fired and death threats. The right-wing Catholic League has set up something of a witch-hunt for him, and both sides have started letter-writing campaigns to the president of the University of Minnestosa, demanding for him to be (or not to be) fired.
I personally think the situation is summed up in this comment:
That said, I hope this thing blows over soon — the kid who kicked this whole thing off was a douchebag for stealing the cracker, the (very few) Catholics who issued death threats were exponentially bigger douchebags, and this whole thing seems to be on the edge of exploding into a supernova of gratuitous asshattery.
(Yes, it’s just a cracker, but it’s a cracker that some people find very important, and the cracker-worshipers were doing their thing in a church service where the cracker-stealer didn’t have to be, so there was no point in taking the damn thing except to piss a bunch of people off)
To my mind, it seems that Prof. Myers made the comment as a geniune joke. I sent a personal letter, via air mail, to the President of the University of Minnestosa today, in support of Prof. Myers. I spent 56p and missed some of Golden Blockbusters to Fifteen to Twelve to Three to No Deal, or whatever is occupying the Channel 4 daytime slot this week.
Anyway, in other news, iPhone chaos! iPhone 3G customers have been infuriated to find out that their local AT&T/O2/Rogers/Telecel/PhoneyCompany store has not stocked enough iPhones, despite the fact they pre-ordered them. First-generation iPhone users trying to upgrade to iPhone OS X 2.0 have had problems too: Apple’s servers have buckled under the load, and iTunes has gone down.
This has the side effect of stopping the iPhone from reactivating itself once the firmware has been updated, therefore bricking the iPhone (albeit temporarily). My advice is just wait, before going out to buy an iPhone, or updating the firmware.
And, in yet more news, Fake Steve Jobs may or may not be dead. I sadly suspect the former. It seems Dan Lyons was getting tired with the character - but not to worry. A book of the best of the blog is being published.
Or maybe, Real Steve Jobs may decide to take up the baton. But, of course, he’d blog using iWeb, and the brand-spankingly-new-launched MobileMe.
In politics, David Davis has won the Haltemprice and Howden by-election, which he induced. Labour and the Lib Dems, and even the BNP, didn’t even put in a candidate - presumably as damage limitation. However, turnout was only ~30%, and this may come back to bite Davis in the future.
And in yet more news, Mock the Week is back on British TV, as is Would I Lie To You? The latter of which starts in five minutes or so - so, with that in mind, good night, don’t fall out of bed and accidentally hemmorage the floor and/or yourself, and have a fantastic weekend.
I’ve blogged about AQA 63336 (leaving our site) before. This afternoon, I’ll be pitting it against 118 118’s new Ask Us Anything service (leaving our site). To ensure complete fairness, the question will be sent to both services at 1415 GMT today exactly.
Right… allons-y…
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