Now What?

June 1, 2005 Rand Simberg

Firefox has let me down. I haven’t previously used it that much in Linux, but I was forced to today with my current computer problems. I notice that on my Fedora box (Core 3), it’s started crashing with regularity. I had several instances of it running, some with multiple tabs, and they suddenly all disappeared. Now when I try to reopen it, sometimes it will open, and after I open up a couple tabs, and switch to another one, it gets blown away. The last time, it died even before it finished loading the first page.

Does anyone have any idea what the problem is? (If anyone’s wondering, I’m posting this from another Windows machine.)

[Update a few minutes later]

I decided to upgrade from 1.0 (which was a preview version that came with the Fedora install) to 1.04, which is the latest version. We’ll see if it’s more stable. So far, so good…

Technology and Society

Should Bill Gates Have Been Born?

June 1, 2005 Rand Simberg

How about Isaac Newton? Arthur Kaplan asks some interesting questions:

As genetic testing moves into the world of mental health, we are going to face some very tough questions. Will medicine suggest that any and every variation from absolute normalcy is pathological? How can we draw lines between disabling diseases such as severe autism and more mild differences such as Asperger

Media Criticism

Maybe They’re Right

June 1, 2005 Rand Simberg

Joe Katzman says that the media is right–Iraq is another Vietnam. Just not in the way they think it is.

Media Criticism

Maybe They’re Right

June 1, 2005 Rand Simberg

Joe Katzman says that the media is right–Iraq is another Vietnam. Just not in the way they think it is.

Media Criticism

Maybe They’re Right

June 1, 2005 Rand Simberg

Joe Katzman says that the media is right–Iraq is another Vietnam. Just not in the way they think it is.

Space

Misplaced Parentage

June 1, 2005 Rand Simberg

Jack Parsons is an interesting character in the history of American rocketry, but it’s a major slight to the memory of Dr. Robert Goddard to call Parsons the father of it.

Administrative

Computer Woes

June 1, 2005 Rand Simberg

My primary Windows machine is glitching. This morning, it woke up dead. Or rather, I woke up to find it in a zombie state, with power on but no video signal. I couldn’t even do a hard reboot.

I shut it down for a while, than powered it up, at which point it booted. For a few minutes. Then mouse and keyboard froze, and I had to power down again. After repeats of this, with different applications running, I came to the conclusion that it’s a hardware problem, most likely some component on the motherboard overheating. The fan seems to be running all right, but the CPU seems like the most likely suspect to me. Are there other reasonable possibilities? It’s really bad timing, because I’ve got some data on that machine that I need for some deadlines today.

I’m posting this from my Fedora box.

[Update at 9 AM EDT on a rainy south Florida morning]

I managed to get it up just long enough to drag some files over to the other machine, but I suspect it will be a long slow process in continuing to reboot it until I get everything I need. I really need to set up a nightly cron job to automatically back up to it.

[Follow up at 11:22 AM EDT]

In response to questions in comments, the cabinet is open, the fan is running (though I don’t know it it’s at an adequate speed), and the (Athlon XP) processor is running at its default speed of 1.8 Gigahertz (no reason to overclock this machine–I just use it for office work).

It’s now gotten to the point at which I can’t do anything useful with it–it bluescreens shortly after logging in. It’s been fragile for a while, often locking up or bluescreening randomly, or occasionally right after boot, but whatever the problem was seems to be coming to a head. I’ll try swapping out fan/CPU, because that seems like the most likely source of the problem. I’ve been wanting a faster processor anyway. But probably not today–no time to mess with it

Technology and Society

Predictions Of The Future

May 31, 2005 Rand Simberg

From the past.

Some of them held up pretty well, and some of them didn’t really happen until the twenty-first century, and some haven’t panned out at all (like using electric currents to encourage plant growth, and the quiet cities). Slightly subsonic electric ships don’t seem likely to happen any time soon, and pneumatics came and went, being used only for niche applications. Still an interesting set of prognostications for the time.

[Update a few minutes later]

D’oh!

As Paul Dietz points out in comments, they’re only calling for ships that go a mile a minute. I was somehow thinking ten miles a minute (close to sonic velocity). Don’t ask why I was thinking that–I don’t know. Yes, sixty miles an hour is theoretically possible, but it’s high power consumption.

Political Commentary

For Crying Out Loud

May 31, 2005 Rand Simberg

I hadn’t previously paid much attention to Senator Voinovich until his lachrimose performance on the Senate floor over John Bolton. Now I think that he’s one of the most asinine members of the Senate (which is to say, he still has lots of competition among his colleagues). Apparently, some of his constituents in the Buckeye state think so too. Send him a hankie.

Political Commentary