Gnome 2.8.2

If there is a silver lining to having to rebuild a machine in the middle of an already tight project schedule (?) its that I have all new everything on my ad0 partition; freshly compiled applications, everything zips along, and I didn’t bother compiling any but Gnome—these last releases really feel quite solid, and , well, it delivers some bang for the memory and resources it uses. Even that’s not a fair comment – Gnome now feels very zippy on this 2.4GHz 1GB RAM machine, and the network integration is a plus that I just don’t get with fluxbox and the like.

I still run Windows for specific market analysis applications that I just can’t get on *nix, and I must say over the last year X and *nix have moved from being “just a little more work” to being “just a little bit easier” to deal with than Windows. Perhaps its my own knowledge level rising, but I think the underlying applications and OS deserve most of the credit. It does feel like the Open Source world is closer to making a breakthrough with ordinary folks than ever before.

There must be an investment angle in that, too. It may just be “short MSFT”, but that too is a valid strategy (not to be rolled out indiscriminantly!)

It must be time to short Western Digital

I don’t think I’ve ever had such a bad rash of drive failures. 4 drives out of the last 8 I’ve bought from Western Digital have failed, all 3 of them with the same failure. Two years ago I bought 5 drives and of those, 3 failed sooner or later with what can only be described as “random head parking”.

A loud click tells you you are done for, and then the operating system—doesn’t matter which, both Windows and FreeBSD have succumbed to this beast of an issue—can’t go on and gives up.

I’ve replaced one under warranty so far, and just gone through a 24 hour plus ordeal getting my primary development and writing machine back up and running thanks to another boot drive which has gone.

The fourth drive just died, with different symptoms. It was a newer 80GB model no less.

4 of 5 EIDE drives failing is too many. I won’t be buying another WDC anytime soon.