SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
I had an idea for a story I don't think anyone has written, although I'm probably wrong, as it seems obvious. I had Mars, ho!, and a voyage to Earth, and I thought, "it's time we left this solar system." I mean, I'd spent a lot of time on Mars and several of the larger asteroids, what's next?
Research for Grommler informed me that you could get to Sirius and back in a little over ten years, although a hundred years would pass on Mars during that time, so I thought "Why not Alpha Proxima?" Note: although college research prohibits using encyclopedias as sources, researching a fiction story needs no citations.
I found that the calculations I got from Wikipedia for a trip to Sirius at 1g thrust were wrong (so sue me) but at that amount of thrust you could get to Alpha Proxima in a year, so I'll make it two. Of course, it will seem a lot longer to us here, but I haven't figured out how much yet. Math guys?
Proxima B is in that star's habitable zone, but Jesus, what a shitty name for a planet! It will probably be hundreds of years before we get to the point where we can produce that much thrust for that long a time, and by then we will have had an awful lot of probes to our actually existing but poorly named planet.
Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf that rotates around A and B, which should make some really cool visuals for a movie set on that planet, and also a hint at what its name will be in a few hundred years. It Certainly won't be "B". Bee, maybe? Could life begin on a planet like that? I have my doubts, but could be wrong.
Also, the star's sisters have more "normal" star names, Rigil Kentaurus (Alpha Centauri A), and Toliman (B).
Anybody have a good name for this planet? And its poorly named star? Or should I just name it the same as Isaac Asimov did in Foundation and Earth? I've forgotten what it was, I'll have to read the book again.
I named the CEO of the Green-Osbourne Transportation Company after the guy who thought of whores in space as we were discussing Nobots in Felber's beer garden and a coven of crack whores walked down the street, and gave him an acknowledgement. If I use your planet name and you wish, I'll do the same for you.
We used to not have any worker safety laws. Nobody forced us to put doors on the elevators. If somebody died, so fucking what? We could foul the water so badly rivers caught fire, nobody cared what poisonous garbage we poured in it. We could spew so much poison in the air that you had to roll the windows up driving past our Monsanto plant because of the pain it caused your lungs. We could get the government to wage pointless wars so that gold would pour into our coffers, even having the government draft men to die for our filthy money.
Then those pesky kids came along.
They picketed, demonstrated, voted and wrote letters on paper to their elected representatives. They got the war stopped, damn them, and the draft. They got OSHA so now we have to put doors on our Purina elevators and guard rails. Guard rails, for Christ’s sake! The nerve!
What’s worse, they got the EPA started. Damn them!
But we’ll show ‘em. Now, we’re paying all the federal tax, and they’ve made us actually pay our full-time workers a living minimum wage. But we’ll fix their wagons. All it will take is for us to keep raising the price of the worthless junk the fools buy from us until the minimum wage won’t buy shit, and bracket creep will raise taxes so high everybody will be paying them. Then we’ll shower the dishonest fools in congress with cash and convince them to lower OUR taxes to the point only the poor will pay them.
The best part? We’ll fuck up the education system to the point that their grandchildren in the twenty first century will be too stupid and apathetic and feel too powerless to do a damned thing about it. They’ll be so damned dumb they’ll vote against their own interests. We’ll be BILLIONAIRES!!
President Biden’s lawyers found a few classified documents last November in an office he used after he was Vice President, and he immediately informed the Archives and other authorities. Then they started searching in earnest, and found more in a box in his garage and an adjoining room, mixed with private documents.
The “liberal” media found out about it this month and went absolutely insane, screaming “Where’s the transparency you promised us?”
Joe Biden’s job isn’t to inform the American people of his every little fuckup, that’s the media’s job itself. He could have done what Trump would have done and shredded the documents, and nobody would have been the wiser. But being an honest man, unlike his predecessor, he went about it by the book. He didn’t hide anything.
Someone should inform those who are charged with informing us that a window is still transparent even when nobody is looking at it.
What the “liberal” media won’t tell you is that “liberal media” is a lie in America, told by America’s people’s true enemies, its ultra-rich, like the Sacklers, Waltons, and Kochs. The media are owned by selfish, greedy billionaires who don’t even pretend to care if you live or die. Black lives matter? To them, only rich lives matter, and no poor life, White, Black, or Asian, matters.
There are two media, the entertainment media and the news media. The greedy, selfish, amoral 1% own almost all of both types of media, and have been trying for the last half century to combine the two; witness the network morning news shows leading off about a football game when there were dozens killed in an airplane crash and dozens more in Ukraine were murdered by the terrorist state Russia’s president with a huge missile.
To the amoral, soulless 1% who own the networks, the football game is more important than people’s lives. After all, they own football teams, they need the media a lot more than a murderous foreign terrorist who, by the way, controls atom bombs. But tell the news of the game first, despite the fact that anybody who gave a damn already watched the game! After all, it’s the rich people who own that game, they don’t give a damn about democracy, and in fact are jealous of Russia’s authoritarian government and its easy loot for their evil oligarch class.
The entertainment media have been liberal for decades; bread and circuses don’t matter to the owners, although entertainment media started becoming more “conservative” (meaning authoritarian) with Dirty Harry. It’s their wealth. But all of the network news shows are conservative, with some, like Fox and Sinclair, going all the way to the Fascist right.
Their wholly owned media will say “I don’t want to hear about class warfare” while waging it against Americans. If the media were liberal, let alone transparent, they would inform you young ignorant fools that in 1965 when I was thirteen the federal minimum wage was a living wage, and America had no working poor. They wouldn’t hide the fact that when my dad was eight in 1940, the lowest taxable income rate was four times the median income. These are all facts that you can easily look up.
There are still a few liberal newspapers; the Illinois Times is pretty liberal. Mother Jones is as liberal as Fox is conservative. But liberal papers are few and far between, and there are no liberal TV news outlets.
Thanks to the media, the meaning of a lot of words has become rather fuzzy. To a working class conservative, he wants to conserve social norms, like marriage and heterosexuality. That’s nothing at all like a rich conservative, who may be Jeffery Epstein or some other child molester. All they want to conserve is what is theirs: their wealth, power, and privilege. Liberals didn’t kill Aunt Jeremiah, the rich conservatives who own the food company who owned her did. It’s not about Uncle Ben, it’s about the Benjamins.
It seems to me that the only people who aren’t being transparent are the media itself. But don’t expect them to be transparent about the fact that they are owned by rich conservatives who were born rich and want to continue becoming richer and richer until everything collapses like it did in 1929. There are no patriotic billionaires and never have been.
This is intended for a far more general audience, but I thought I'd see what you folks thought about it before I loose it on normal people.
Unless you’re a mathematician or a computer programmer, the chances are that you’ve never heard the term “number system” before. It simply never comes up in the normal bits of life.
When I was born, only mathematicians knew about number systems, and they were the only ones who could program a computer. Then, despite everyone saying it couldn’t be done, Grace Hopper invented high level programming; computer languages like Assembly, FORTRAN, and COBOL. No longer did you have to be a mathematician to program computers. Her accomplishments should be taught in primary school!
Normally, we think of a number system as simply counting. There’s no system, you start with one, and if you’re recording your counts, when you reach nine, the next number is ten, a one and a zero. But that is a number system. It’s base ten, or “decimal”. It’s base ten because it’s based on ten digits, zero through nine.
But that’s not how counting has always worked. Have you ever wondered why clocks go from one to twelve and there are twenty four hours in a day? It’s because at some time in the past, they had a base 12 or 13 number system (the zero is a relatively modern concept), perhaps why 13 is now considered unlucky. 12+1=“Time’s up.”
The very first number system wasn’t written down, because nobody had yet invented writing, but was very obviously base six; zero, which was meaningless then, through five. The digits were the fingers on their hands, the very first calculating devices. One finger on one hand was equal to five on the other hand. “One sheep,” one finger, “two sheep,” two fingers... “five sheep,” open hand. “Six sheep,” one finger on the other hand, first hand closed. You could say a closed fist is zero. “fifteen sheep,” three fingers on one hand and two on the other. Easy to keep track of how many sheep you’ve counted, as long as you don’t have to pick anything up or scratch your ass.
This base six number system became Roman numerals, with IV meaning “one fewer than all fingers” and V signifying an outstretched hand. As their society became more complex, so their method of writing down numbers became more complicated.
The decimal system was invented between the first century and the fourth by the Hindus, and the Arabians learned it from them in the ninth century. We use the Arabian marks for the numbers, as does almost everyone else these days, with variations.
After fingers, the first computer was a pile of rocks, and nobody knows when the first pile of rocks was used as a primitive abacus. The rocks later advanced to become beads on the abacus. The math could be done in any number system with an abacus as long as you have enough beads on a string to cover all the digits in your number system, or a pile of rocks.
A modern digital Turing computer uses the binary number system, with two digits: zero and one, on or off. Five in binary is 101, and yes, you can count on your fingers in binary. The prehistoric base six lets you count higher on your fingers than base ten, which ends at ten, and binary lets you count even higher on your fingers. Yes, in school you can cheat in math class by using your fingers as abacuses if they won’t let you use a calculator.
You can do things in binary math you simply can’t do in decimal, like ANDing or ORing. The Who most likely didn’t know, when they sang “Bargain”, that the lyrics “one and one ain’t two, one and one is one” that they were talking not about romantic love, but boolean algebra. In it, 101 (binary five) AND 011 (binary three) are 001; or:
101
AND 011
----
001
That’s 5 (101 binary) AND 3 (011 binary) equals 1. So if someone says “five and three is one,” they’re correct. With an AND, both numbers must be one for that digit to be one. An OR is the opposite; the answer is one if either is one. 5 OR 3 = 7.
That’s really handy in programming. Not so much in day to day life.
The prehistoric base six number system became base 12, an easy conversion from base six, for timekeeping. Because, of course, there are twelve full moons in a year (thirteen in a year unlucky enough to have a blue moon).
Programmers also use octal, or base eight, and hexadecimal, or base sixteen, because they are the easiest number systems to convert to binary.
A digital computer is basically a complex abacus with one bead each on thousands or trillions of strings. Some people say a big enough computer could become sentient. I’m still asking, how many beads do I need to add to my abacus before it becomes self-aware?
Donald Trump had an excellent catchphrase: Make America Great Again. Too bad he had no intention of doing so. The motto was as empty as coal is black. His entire administration was one of enriching himself and his friends; witness the 2017 tax cut that slashed his taxes but did nothing to yours. He was about White supremacy and hatred of foreigners. He was the world’s greatest fraudster, greater than Ponzi or Maddoff (both of whom went to prison; Trump is still free).
But what makes it such a great slogan is that it’s exactly what America needs. Not trickle down tax cuts that never trickle down, because wealth flows upwards, but restoring America’s greatness to the fifties and sixties.
Back then, we were number one in everything. Europe, Asia, and a big chunk of Africa had been destroyed in the war while we came out relatively unscathed. We had the best infrastructure except the German Autobahn, which President Eisenhower set out to remedy with the Interstate Highway System, and the Russian space technology, which Eisenhower tackled by starting NASA.
There was poverty, but far less than today. There was no such thing as the “working poor,” in 1965 the federal minimum wage was $1.50 and a McDonald’s hamburger was 15¢. Now that same sandwich is $2.49. To match 1965’s greatness, we need to raise the minimum wage to $24.90. And to keep the rich from continuing to steal our labor, tie the minimum wage to inflation like Social Security is; the rich benefit from inflation. Where do you think billionaires came from? None existed when America was great.
The rich, who own the media, stole America’s greatness and sold it to foreigners. Its media claim that raising the minimum wage raises inflation, when no minimum wage increase in history has ever led to prices rising; you can look the data up, they’re all on the internet.
The rich have another evil tool to use against America (meaning the 95% of Americans who aren’t filthy rich legal thieves), racism. Our only dark spot in those great times was Apartheid, that we called “Jim Crow Segregation”. It, and the continued racism of today are Elon’s and Donald’s and Jeff’s and the Sacklers’ and the Waltons’ way of keeping us at each others’ throats so we won’t notice who’s really holding us down.
How about tax greatness? Before World War Two, only the rich paid federal income tax; in 1940 the lowest taxable income was over four times the median income. In 1955 the top tax rate was 95%, why aren’t Musk and Bezos paying that? Instead, they pay no tax at all! Yet, nobody is willing to change it.
Perhaps that’s because we have ceased to be a truly democratic nation and have become a plutocracy, where the campaign contributions determine who wins an election. The Republicans worked to overthrow Roe for half a century, where is the party that will work to overturn Citizens United? A name, by the way, that was as much a lie as “right to work” laws, which gave no one any rights, except giving the rich the right to destroy labor unions.
How about health care? We used to have the best health care in the world, but since the rich, who are so averse to the taxes that pay for civilization, haven’t allowed America to have universal payer like the rest of the industrialized world, we have dropped from the best to among the worst. There are third world nations that get better health care than us!
Make America great again? Don’t be foolish enough to ask a billionaire to do it, because they have no clue what it’s like to be a real American, one who actually needs to work.
It’s that time of year again. The time of year when everyone and their dog waxes nostalgic about all the shit nobody cares about from the year past, and stupidly predicts the next year in the grim knowledge that when the next New Year comes along, nobody will remember that the dumbass predicted a bunch of foolish shit that turned out to be complete and utter balderdash.
I might as well go ahead and do it anyway. Just like I did last year (yes, a lot of this was pasted from last year’s final chapter).
Some of these links go to /. (these would be old stuff), S/N, mcgrewbooks.com, or mcgrew.info. As usual, first: the yearly index:
Journals:
Articles:
No, We're Not Entering a Recession!
A little advice for a Terrorist War Criminal
Only Yesterday (The Invisible Hyphen)
Review:
Song
Fixin' to Die Rag (Russian Version)
Last years’ stupid predictions (and more):
I completed my seventh decade of life, turning 70 last April.
I pedicted that I would have another volume of Random Scribblings, because all it lacked was a table of contents and cover art. I still haven't made the art; when I go to Track Shack on 3rd and Laurel, there are never any trains until I leave. Oh, the HTML for that book is less than half done.
I did get Only Yesterday done, but I didn't write that, although it was as much work.
But I’ll also hang on to most of last year’s predictions.
But here's a new one: I predict that there will thankfully be no elections in 2023, at least here.
Someone will die. Maybe you, maybe me. Not necessarily anybody I know... we can only hope.
SETI will find no sign of intelligent life. Not even on Earth.
The Pirate Party won’t make inroads in the US. I hope I’m wrong about that one.
US politicians will continue to be wholly owned by the corporations.
I’ll still be a nerd.
Technophobic fashionista jocks will troll slashdot (but not S/N). I have no idea if that one or the following held up, anybody been there lately?
Microsoft will continue sucking.
The pandemic will continue plagueing us.
Happy New Year! Ready for another trip around the sun?
Forty years ago last summer I learned how to program computers. I was thirty then, and bought a cheap computer, a TS-1000. It was monochrome, text only with a dozen blocks that do very primitive graphics, 1 mHz clock speed, with 2 kilobytes of memory. A very small, primitive computer.
I bought it because I hated my job pumping gas at Disney World, despite its numerous perks, and had read that a teenager had become a millionaire writing computer programs. A teenager? I could do that! Hell, I was hacking electronics as a teenager, making a guitar fuzzbox, like was sold for $300 in music stores, out of a broken $10 transistor radio!
The computer came with a tutorial on how to program it in Sinclair BASIC. It took a few weeks of spare time to learn well enough that I could write an analog clock display, albeit not a very accurate clock, and simple 2-D video games, building up in complexity.
The most ambitious game I wrote at that time was a two player battle tanks game, similar to what Windows would have decades later. The only trouble was, the slow clock speed of the machine, with the added overhead of its BASIC interpreter made it unplayably slow.
So I learned Z-80 assembly, re-wrote it based on the BASIC version I had written; BASIC is incredibly similar to assembly, and I had to assemble it by hand because that computer had no assembler I knew of. Then I had to add timing loops to slow it down.
A couple of years later, I discovered that the teenager was Bill Gates, his parents were rich lawyers who worked for IBM, and he became a millionaire making an operating system he had bought to work on an IBM-PC, then licensed that OS to IBM. And I bought another computer with my meager Disney wages, a Radio Shack TRS-80 MC-10. This was color, but text-only as well.
I bought its repair manual because I’ve always wanted to know as much as I could about stuff I owned, and discovered that although it was text-only, its video chip was capable of graphics. It was fun finding its address and what value to POKE there to make it do things; trial and error, short routines, etc. I had hacked its hardware with software.
I wrote a graphics program for it called HRG, bought a classified ad in Byte Magazine, and sold enough copies for $20 each to pay for the ad, but not for the blank cassettes or postage.
Learning was always easy as a young man, as long as I worked my ass off on it.
But half a decade later during a bad recession I got a job with the state of Illinois on the basis of my knowing about computers; they were still new in offices, and most people had never seen one. Of course, the state had mainframes for decades, but “microcomputers” were still new.
I started out entering data, and wound up writing the databases in dBase, later taking a college course in NOMAD. I still have the textbook in my basement, I think. The two languages are similar enough that I suspect that dBase was originally written as NOMAD on a PC.
Four decades after haunting the library and devouring dozens of books learning assembly, and almost a decade after retiring, I find the books I’ve written are listed on Goodreads and sign up for an author account.
It requires RSS for a linked blog. I’ve never used RSS on either end, and as of when I created the Goodreads account yesterday knew nothing of it whatever, except that a thing called “RSS” existed. I searched for information all afternoon yesterday and wound up where I should have started, W3C Schools.
I’m seventy now, but I’ll bet I have that RSS feed up and running faster than I had that machine code tanks program running when I was young!
Update: Two hours. Who says you can’t teach am old dog new tricks? Of course, XML ain’t hand assembled machine code...
Was there another S/N crash, or did I screw up? Probably the latter; I posted this a week ago and it disappeared. [Edit]: The former, all the comments I made yesterday are also gone, and few stories have any comments at all! Now to what was lost:
I have the Linux computer pretty useful, thanks to your comments, although I’m still sharing files with Sneakernet.
But I think my biggest Linux problem, as a few of you mentioned, is kubuntu. So now I’m looking for a better distro, I think I’ll try Mint. What I’d probably like best is one with the biggest repository.
Kate works okay as a text editor, but it’s too busy, has too many functions I have no use for, and worse, it’s completely nonstandard, with the stupid Chrome nonsense. Doubly stupid in an interface as busy as Kate has. Any suggestions for a Linux text editor that’s as minimalist as Windows Notepad?
I’m still going through your answers. Thanks again!
Here is the deleted journal, which can also be found in my real web page.
The Man With No Belly Button
A True War Story
You may think that the movie “Forest Gump” was unbelievable because you can’t believe anyone that dim could ever be accepted by the military, but I wasn’t in the Air Force long before I found that if you have a mental disability, you’re fine. Maybe intelligence is a detriment, although there are some stupid stunts that they won’t stand for.
One was possessing marijuana, a felony in 1972, outlawed on the basis of lies.
It was my day for clean-up duty in the barracks, as well as the duty sergeant’s. I can’t remember the fellow’s name, but Private Gump was a lot smarter than him. As we were cleaning the day room, where there were couches and a TV, the sergeant found a doobie. A big fat one, a real hog’s leg. He asked me if I knew what it was.
I took it and looked at it. “It’s a hand-rolled cigarette.”
“Could that be... marijuana?”
“One way to find out,” I said, and broke it in half. “I never saw green tobacco before,” I said, handing it back to him.
“What should I do with it?”
I shrugged. “Throw it in the dumpster.”
“You don’t think I should turn it in to the SPs?” The SPs were the Security Police, what other branches call the MPs.
“Hell, no! If you do, you’re going to be there all damned day filling out paperwork.”
He did. I saw him in the hall the day after next.
“You were right, I should have thrown it in the dumpster. I spent all damned day yesterday at the SP’s filling out paperwork!”
Two friends I was stationed with there were Stan Rogers and Chuck Woods. Chuck hated the tongue twister “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck would chuck wood?”
Late one afternoon as I was reading, Stan dropped by my room to show off a gun he had gotten, from God only knows where. It was a snub nosed .38 pistol.
My dad was a hunter, so I was brought up around dogs and guns. I was taught dog safety and gun safety at an early age. It was obvious that Stan had never seen a gun of any kind except on TV and movies, and the two days during basic training.
I ran him off, despite his protestations that it wasn’t loaded. I was sure someone was going to get killed and I didn’t want to be around when it happened, especially if it happened to me.
Later in the evening a fellow whose name I don’t remember, the company clerk, a practical joker and doobie toker who hung with and smoked with the guys I hung around with, knocked on my door. I put down my book again and answered it.
“Stan shot Chuck!” He seemed really excited. Nice acting, I thought.
I frowned. “Peddle your sick joke somewhere else.”
“No! Really!”
I slammed the door and picked my book back up, a truly evil book I had checked out from the base library. It was Aleister Crowley’s “autohagiography”, the book that Ozzy Osbourne obviously named his album “Diary of a Madman” for, and sang about in the song “Mister Crowley”. It’s a book of black magic with instructions on how to perform it, drug abuse, murder (he claimed the King of England was Jack the Ripper), rape, sodomy, bestiality, suicide, ocean voyages, and mountain climbing. Four thousand evil pages. I read the whole damned thing, Delaware was the most boring place I’ve ever been in my life.
But real life was just as ghastly that night. The fellow wasn’t joking, Stan really did shoot Chuck! But it wasn’t on purpose.
I don’t know why I didn’t hear the gunshot or hear the sirens. I never thought about that until now that I’m writing it down. Maybe I had dozed off? A C-5 took off at the same time? Those things are really loud, although an SR-71 is a hell of a lot louder. Or maybe I was so absorbed in the batshit crazy book that I was just oblivious.
At any rate, Stan had visited Chuck after I had run him off. They took turns playing with the gun that Stan had insisted was unloaded.
I learned gun safety at a young age, as I said, and rule one is to never treat a gun as if it’s unloaded, even if you just unloaded it yourself. My dad always said that more people are killed by unloaded guns than loaded ones; I don’t know how accurate that was. But Stan and Chuck sadly didn’t know the rules.
Chuck later told me what happened.
He was leaning against a wall. Stan, a tall thin fellow, was twirling it like the “cowboys” (the word “cowboy” was an insult in the 1800s, referring to a drover, who held America’s worst job) do on TV and in the movies.
His unloaded gun went off. The slug hit Chuck square in the belly button and exited from his left buttock. He told me as he recounted the tale, “When I die, I want it to be from getting shot. The only way I knew I was shot was my leg started twitching.”
He slumped down the wall.
“Oh, shit!” Roger exclaimed. “Shit! Shit! Oh, fuck! Are you okay?”
“No, God damn it! You fucking SHOT me!”
I imagine a lot of blood was pooling, but he didn’t mention the blood, but said he wasn’t freaking out. I imagine it was like the car wreck I had in 1976; I was calm, but the ambulance guys were freaking out.
Stan was frantic. “Oh shit! Oh Shit! What should I do? What should I...”
“Get the God damned duty sergeant you fucking moron!” Chuck yelled. Stan ran down for help, and came back with the sergeant, of whom, as I said, Terry Pratchett might have said wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, and might even be a spoon.
“Holy fuck! What do I do?”
“Get an ambulance! Jesus, what the fuck is wrong with you?!”
Yes, unlike TV and the movies, in real life military men freak out and panic sometimes, just like civilians. The ambulance came and took him to the hospital and the doctors started surgery.
The hospital lost power halfway through the operation, and they had to get a generator from the flight line.
Before they started sewing him up, the generator went out. In my 3½ years on the flight line towing AGE (Aerospace Ground Equipment), that was the only time I ever heard of those things failing; the military keeps a sharp eye on their equipment. Most of the vehicles I drove were older than I was.
Someone on the internet said that my science fiction story “But Sir, I’m Just a Robot” was unbelievable because of the string of bad luck that befell the robot’s owner, but Chuck’s story is actually true; all of this happened to the best of my memory. Mark Twain said ”truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be believable” (Terry Pratchett disagreed).
I never saw poor Stan again. He was immediately incarcerated, and stayed in jail until he was court-martialled on the charge of bringing a prohibited weapon on base; the only firearms are supposed to be owned by the government, and Chuck’s injury illustrates why.
Stanley was found guilty, and spent the next six months in Leavenworth, before receiving a dishonorable discharge. Nixon was in office, and the nation would be in a recession until Clinton’s administration, so life must have been really rough for Stan after the Air Force.
Chuck was in the hospital for a long time, but bore no ill will towards Stan. It was an accident, and it could have been just as easily Chuck shooting Stan. But he was pissed off at the hospital; they had incinerated his shirt and jeans because of the blood. He wanted them for souvenirs, I guess the big scar wasn’t enough.
He did recover from his injuries, but lost his belly button.
If you’re thinking about buying a firearm, please take a safety course. More gunshot wounds are accidental than murderous.
I’m a n00b all over again.
I first started using Linux with Mandrake, after trying unsuccessfully to get Red Hat to behave on my hardware, later learning that that distro was better suited for a web server than a desktop. I used Suse for a while on one machine, and lately kubuntu. All were dual-boot, and the Linux side was honestly not used much except for a laptop that was stolen; Windows was annoying but worked okay.
At least, until I got a virus. I assume it was a virus, but who knows, it could have been targeted. I don’t know why I would have been, but it would be possible. At any rate, all my efforts to vanquish it led to the computer becoming unusable, so I just replaced the computer. I would have replaced the hard drive when I was young and poor. Replacing the computer’s pretty easy to do when the data are all on a network drive.
The replacement was the same make and model computer, and both were running Windows 10. I never got around to installing Linux on the new one, and the useless one sat under a table sulking.
Several times in the past, Microsoft had instituted measures to cripple Audacity with its Windows “updates”. Rolling back the updates fixed it. But the last time, they also disabled THE COMPUTER’S OWNER who bought and paid for it from rolling back updates. Virus? Microsoft is its own malware.
So I bought a new hard drive for the unused infected computer. They’ve really gotten cheap and huge lately! I tired of building computers years ago; hell, I’m old. But I opened the infected box up and replaced its infected drive with the new, giant clean drive that was physically smaller. It’s not properly installed, but fuck it, it works. Well, after the Linux Install CD formatted it and installed Linux, anyway.
But I never had to do two things: find a new repository and install it, and install the network drive that Windows and Android have no trouble with. I want GIMP and XMMS and Audacity, since Audacity was the reason I bought the drive.
I was able to download a working copy of Audacity from their web site, but it won’t install, it just runs. At least it’s usable, although I can’t run it by clicking one of its files. I also can’t record the internet with it, but I can record the Windows computer through a patch cord.
The network drive is what drives me crazy, because I had it working on the old infected drive. And I’d like to be able to install shit.
This brings up something else, something my daughter Patty and I were disagreeing about the last time she visited home from Cincinnati. She’s going back to college at age 35, and grew up with shareware, freeware, and open source along with some commercial software, but the college, probably bankrolled by Microsoft, has brainwashed its students into believing that normal people can’t use open source software, only freaks like you, me, and her.
I tried to convince her it’s just what you’re used to. But then, I bought my first computer as a birthday present to myself on my 30th birthday, forty years ago and I’m having trouble with Linux.
Yes, an OS isn’t an app, but try explaining that to a college professor who has been likewise brainwashed. But at any rate, I’m looking for good information on how to connect the network drive; what I’ve found on the internet is missing a lot of needed info.
Then there’s new software, Kubuntu’s repository is tiny, missing much of what I need, like Audacity, XMMS, and GIMP. Where can I find these apps and how do I install them?
