Eric S. Raymond's Slashdot Hangover

It was dark in the Holland, Michigan office nestled deep within Slashdot's Geek Compound. Shifting and moaning, ESR laid sprawled over his filthy desk. Dried spittle stuck several Post-It notes to his cheek. His PC, running Linux, silently printed swap error after swap error to the screen, lighting ESR's sickly form. As he burped several times he attempted to recall the night before that had led to this stupor. Holding his head in his hands, he was interrupted by lights and doors slamming. Someone was in the office!

As Rob CmdrTaco Malda walked past ESR, he noticed the several empty bottles of Jägermeister and what appeared to be fecal stains on the floor and walls surrounding the recovering ESR — nothing new. He also noticed the some semen bubbling in the cracks of ESR's chafed lips.

Another all-night office orgy, Eric? Rob asked coyly.

Tilting his head gingerly toward Rob and raising his eyebrows slowly, ESR spoke softly. Oh shit. Is that what happened last night? I believe I blacked out at some point, I can't remember anything. Who was here last night?

Well, CowboyNeil got there a little late last night, but he said that by the time he got there that Alan, Emad, Jamie, Michael, and Signal 11 were already pretty drunk, Rob said just a little too loudly for ESR's tender head.

Closing and opening his eyes gently, ESR muttered to himself about having not invited Signal 11. He also started sniffing the air and licking his lips. I can smell dried feces on a dick a mile away. Just where were you last night, Robbie? You get a piece of ass last night and decide to ditch my party?

What's it to you? Your breath smells like semen and you don't hear me asking whose it is, Malda shot back.

ESR smiled and swiveled with a gleam in his eyes. Ah, but you see, this is my own sperm!

And it must taste specfuckingtacular! Rob shot back.

Eric interjected before Rob could go on. Ah yes. You see, I like to add a shot of Jäger to it to give it a little kick.

No, Rob replied with anger rising in his voice, You fucking raging alcoholic. Your semen tastes like old motor oil. I think you may have ruptured both of your testicles and now your colon is shooting diarrhea out of your cock-hole.

What!? You little fudge-packing piece of shit! ESR threatened, Ditch one of my office parties because Hemos calls up and says he's lonely, will you? I bet that's what happened. Well, guess who I'll be recommending we lay off at the next LNUX board meeting? How do you like that, Taco?

Whatever, Eric. You don't scare anyone except your parents, Rob said as he stormed out of ESR's office, his green plaid flannel whipping in the wake behind him. You would be nothing without Slashdot.

ESR stammered and shook. Ever since the LNUX stock had plummeted, things were so tense around the office. Relations were falling apart between he and the Slashdot admins. Last night, Michael and Jamie had pounded each other exclusively, ignoring ESR's crooked, erect penis, and Eric had to convince Emad and Alan to restrain CowboyNeil before he could engage in homosexual intercourse with him.

With a flick of his wrist, ESR popped a dozen extra-strength Bayers down his stinking gullet and washed them down with some Jäger from the bottle he had woken up holding. Depressed, aching, and on the verge of vomiting up the entirety of last night's semen binge, ESR cried silently and went back to sleep at this desk, ignoring the pile of work that sullied the landscape of his desktop.

Clapping twice to darken his office, ESR curled into fetal position as best he could and rested, preparing to do it all over again later that night.

Trading Megahurtz For Megahertz

For the last few years Motorola has been the sole supplier of Apple's high-end chips, all from the G4 family. And for the last few years, Mac fans and industry pundits alike have expressed grief over the speed — or lack thereof — Motorola has reached with these processors. While Intel and AMD reach speeds nearing 3 GHz, or 3,000 MHz, the Motorola/Apple camp have slowly crawled to 1.25 GHz.

A cacophony of possible solutions to the Megahurtz problem have been heard from within the Mac community, and finally an end is in sight. The light at the end of the PowerPC tunnel is shining, Mac faithful, and we can all breathe a sigh of relief.

Well, not quite yet.

This October, at the microprocessor industry's annual Processor Forum, IBM officially announced the long-rumored sequel to the Power4 — the PowerPC 970 — with the specs to match. And the thing is a monster.

The Power4, designed in 1999, is a 64-bit PowerPC processor with two cores per chip and the ability to access up to 128 megs of L2 cache. Features like that don't come cheap, of course, and until now the processor has been relegated to IBM's expensive servers and mainframe systems. After over three years of research and development, however, Big Blue has morphed the Power4 into something a Mac can finally use. And everyone's favorite fruit company is buying.

Apple's Megahertz Myth campaign notwithstanding, the Intel/AMD camp has conquered the speed arena by brute-forcing their chips clockspeeds into the stratosphere, leaving Apple in the dust. But now it seems like the Mac faithful can heave a sigh of relief and rest their weary heads over the Megahurtz dilemma, right? Well, the answer to that question is a little cloudy. If there's one thing that we Apple customers have learned from the past, there is almost always a catch. And this situation is no different.

IBM will not be manufacturing the 970 until late 2003 — optimisticly the final quarter of that year — which means that at best we can expect only an announcement of systems based on the new chip at the January 2004 MacWorld. And the likelihood that anything but the XServe (or whatever high-end Appler server systems are around then) will be getting the upgrade is slim. So where does this leave us in the interim, megahurting for high clock speeds that can compete in the numbers game with the PC world?

Apple has a few options on the table right now, and some of them aren't all that bad. IBM continues work on its G3 variants to this day and it's more than likely that we'll see its 750FX in new iBooks sometime in 2003. Motorola already has its 8540 in production for the embedded market, and it's rumored to have a variant in the pipeline for use in desktop Macs, which could be the long-rumored G5. Short of a G5 showing up anytime soon, the G4 architecture right now still has some room to grow, but a lot of its performance is stymied by Apple's own motherboards. Correcting system problems could let the G4 shine and feed the pros' need for speed in the near future.

My take on the 970 news is that we don't need to worry about anything — Apple won't be switching to x86 anytime soon, we're covered for the year 2004 and beyond, and Apple has proven it can and will innovate in both the software and hardware arenas with what it's been given up to this point. For such poor economic times Apple still delivers and, given a glimpse of their future strategies, they have enough foresight to weather far worse than Megahurtz.

My advice, gentle Mac users, is to kick your feet up and relax. It's going to being an interesting ride.

Drug Use & Mac OS X

After months of painstaking research on prerelease versions of Mac OS 10.3, AKA Panther, I have proven my theory that Mac OS is really just a suite of drug tools. Steve Jobs and Apple promote drug use! After following the simple steps below, you'll see how Steve Jobs and company are promoting illegal drug abuse through Panther, the most popular Mac OS ever!

1. insert your Mac OS X Install Disc 1 CD (optionally, for you elite #macfilez pirates, mount the image of it)
2. navigate to /Mac OS X Install Disc 1/System/Installation/Packages/
3. control- or right-click on the OSInstall.mpkg file you'll find in the above path, and choose the Show Package Contents option
4. double-click on the folder called Contents, and again on the Resources folder that appears next
5. see firsthand the terrible drug propaganda: the file called Pusher!!!

Another stinging clue are the dozens — if not hundreds — of files that end in .plist, which are found scattered all over a Mac OS hard drive. Obviously they are some sort of informational resources regarding replacing pee, or urine, a common technique criminals employ to pass drug tests! This is clear proof that Mac OS X is some sort of twisted junkie tool created to assist in selling drugs and subverting justice!

Let's take a look at some other aspects of Mac OS X that are clearly drug-related.

• Address Book: No drug dealer's bag of tricks is complete without an address book, filled with the names and numbers of other dealers, steady customers, and his suppliers.
• Backup (a .Mac application): If the deal ain't up to what they feel they hit the steel an' instead of gettin' jacked up, they get they backup.
• Preview: Everyone knows that drug dealers hook prospective customers by giving out "samples," otherwise known as Previews. Obviously this app was designed to make doing so easier for the dealer.
• Grab: When things get hot and shit goes down, any dealer worth his weight in marijauna won't hesitate to grab what's due to him.
• Terminal: What quicker way to make it across the city for that sweet drug deal than using the terminal? And what better way to keep track of the routes and schedules than with a Mac OS X application?