It was not quite a year ago when I posted about the seemingly downward spiral that post-modern online culture is taking (Has Gamer Culture Gone Out of Control?) and linked to Why the Trolls Will Always Win on Wired.com.
Now, following a very controversial run as interim CEO of Reddit, Ellen Pao has published an opinion piece on the Washington Post: The trolls are winning the battle for the Internet
Perhaps the Internet is not the Great Equalizer (Business Week circa 1996), as earlier speculated, but rather anonymity has brought out the worse of humanity to the online world?
July 17, 2015
July 10, 2015
Mac G5 PowerPC Update
Here's the specs on this project:
Mac G5 Tower, Dual PowerPC 2.7 GHz, 4.5 GB RAM, original 250 GB HD (vintage late 2005). Purchase price was $100 + shipping. Not bad, all things considered. The case was in good shape with very little signs of wear and just a bit of cleaning up to do inside to chase out the 10 years of dust bunnies. Since extra SATA II hard drives are so inexpensive on eBay, went with a second drive for installing the new OS.
After much consideration, decided to proceed with installing the latest stable release of Debian "Jessie" (see previous post of the distributions in the running). Downloaded the ISO, burned to a DVD-R and read through the installation guide on PPC Luddite for some tips.
First item to note, the resulting DVD was not a "Live" disc like what's popular now. Booting from the DVD went right to business going through the steps for installation. Since this was a blank hard drive, selected the options to use the entire partition. Another option was which display manager to use (opted for kdm), and selected the Debian default, KDE and MATE desktops, just to have some variety. Other choices was lightdm for the display manager and GNOME, Xfce and LXDE for desktops - plenty to read up on and consider at the Debian Desktop HowTo page.
Second note, you'll be prompted to set the root password and then create an user account. Remember those passwords! The user account does not automatically belong to the "sudo" group, so that's one of your first tasks after the installation. Read up on that here.
The results? A pretty sweet, massively powerful and elegant system! Seems to be some issues with the sound over the built-in speaker that needs additional research. More comments to come soon!
Mac G5 Tower, Dual PowerPC 2.7 GHz, 4.5 GB RAM, original 250 GB HD (vintage late 2005). Purchase price was $100 + shipping. Not bad, all things considered. The case was in good shape with very little signs of wear and just a bit of cleaning up to do inside to chase out the 10 years of dust bunnies. Since extra SATA II hard drives are so inexpensive on eBay, went with a second drive for installing the new OS.
After much consideration, decided to proceed with installing the latest stable release of Debian "Jessie" (see previous post of the distributions in the running). Downloaded the ISO, burned to a DVD-R and read through the installation guide on PPC Luddite for some tips.
First item to note, the resulting DVD was not a "Live" disc like what's popular now. Booting from the DVD went right to business going through the steps for installation. Since this was a blank hard drive, selected the options to use the entire partition. Another option was which display manager to use (opted for kdm), and selected the Debian default, KDE and MATE desktops, just to have some variety. Other choices was lightdm for the display manager and GNOME, Xfce and LXDE for desktops - plenty to read up on and consider at the Debian Desktop HowTo page.
Second note, you'll be prompted to set the root password and then create an user account. Remember those passwords! The user account does not automatically belong to the "sudo" group, so that's one of your first tasks after the installation. Read up on that here.
The results? A pretty sweet, massively powerful and elegant system! Seems to be some issues with the sound over the built-in speaker that needs additional research. More comments to come soon!
July 04, 2015
Bring a Mac PowerPC Back to Life
It's hard to believe that well over 10 years has past since the Power Mac G5, touted by Apple as the fastest personal computer ever built, was the hottest desktop PC around. In it's prime, the Mac G5 tower sold for $2,500 - 3,000 new.
Now these beautiful works of computer art are selling on eBay for $100 - 200. And it's because nobody is producing new software that runs on the PowerPC platform. Or is that entirely true?
Good things comes to those that wait ... so it's been said. I've recently acquired one for a tiny fraction of that. Doing a little research, it's entirely possible to run this beast with a nice selection of current operating systems:
Linux MintPPC
Debian for PowerPC
Lubuntu or Kubuntu (flavors of Ubuntu)
So, we'll see how this goes. Might be a wonderful adventure or a disaster. Stay tuned!
“He that can have patience can have what he will.”
― Benjamin Franklin
PS - I could always run the G5 with the last version of OS X that supported PPC, Leopard 10.5.6, but what fun would that be?
Now these beautiful works of computer art are selling on eBay for $100 - 200. And it's because nobody is producing new software that runs on the PowerPC platform. Or is that entirely true?
Good things comes to those that wait ... so it's been said. I've recently acquired one for a tiny fraction of that. Doing a little research, it's entirely possible to run this beast with a nice selection of current operating systems:
Linux MintPPC
Debian for PowerPC
Lubuntu or Kubuntu (flavors of Ubuntu)
So, we'll see how this goes. Might be a wonderful adventure or a disaster. Stay tuned!
“He that can have patience can have what he will.”
― Benjamin Franklin
PS - I could always run the G5 with the last version of OS X that supported PPC, Leopard 10.5.6, but what fun would that be?
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