And YOU think what?

I like your magazine!

I have a link ( or 2) that you might find of interest.

The first is Women Online Worldwide

WOW offers a hub for women on the Internet by focusing on the spirit of womankind and facilitating personal and professional development of women. very cool site!

This other link is for a site which just rattled me, right down to my toes.

http://www.ciriello.com As an Italian freelance photojournalist covering exclusively war/conflict areas all over the globe, this is a truly rich section from several Afghan issues (Landmines, daily life in Kabul, Bamiyan, Northern Alliance, Taleban) - a comprehensive reportage about Afghan Women, from before (1995) and shortly after (winter 1996-1997) the Taleban took over in Kabul.

Both of these links will take you to places you haven't even dreamed about! Heard about...maybe check them out Rod!

Thank you
Cath J


From Ed C., Pontiac, MI, USA:

Re: Nearsighted God

Brother Rod(silly rabbit),

don't you know, God answers prayer in three(3) ways. Sometimes he says yes; but not very often, 'cause you ain't God, so your request may not fit in with the big picture. Sometimes he says NO; for the aformentioned reason, AND, your nearsightedness. Sometimes he says, "try this:you may not like it, it's not what you asked for, but try it anyway 'cause I am the loving creator and I know the plans I have for you." Those lightening bolts and near misses: those shots were right on target, God just wanted to keep you on edge, keep you wondering why, keep you raging against the machine and all the little cogs and gears that seem out of adjustment, to keep you one of those who "care about people,and social injustice........".

PAX,
ED C.

P.S. It's the same reason he led me to your cool little site.


From Ed C., Pontiac, MI, USA:

Dear Rod:

I agree that we do not have the mental capacity to even start to understand a "Creator of All", in fact, I am under the distinct impression that there is no logical explanation for reality, in much the same way that scientist still don't have an explanation for why particular atoms have the particular number of protons and neutrons they have, or , since all of the atoms which make up our "reality" are basically electrical charges, where did all that electricity come from. The Big bang theory requires a not much talked about "fudge factor": basically, if you can accept that all the electricity that makes up all of the atoms,that make up our universe and "reality", came out of nowhere, the "Big Bang"theory works. Then we can start into the peculiarity of a balanced and seemingly symetrical order to all those atoms, most life forms and my personal favorite(since it allows me to communicate with you, and enjoy food & sex,etc.) COOPERITIVE REALITY(CR).

CR means that: I see a blue sky- you agree its blue; I take a piece of chicken out of the bucket and say,"this is good"- and my companion says,"you're right, it's good". I think of religion as being an attempt by like minded souls to reach a state of CR, where all participants in our "reality" interact in accordance with things that should self-evidant if we would just accept reality at face value - unexplainable yet subjectly real.

Kindness,compassion, understanding,fairness: in a state of CR, everyone would agree that these are the best ways to interact. Son of God/Lamb of God: IF all of our "reality" was created by intent, then all of us are the Children of God, Jesus is a Son, one who has special significance - a poster boy for a CR. If our "reality" is just a happenstance of unexplained electrical attractions, then me and you are possibly not real, or maybe we are as unrelated to each other as water and steel. Short of an explanation, I personally like the idea of striving toward CR: beats buying lottery tickets or killing the other unasked members of my "reality". ;O

Have a good one,
ED C.


From Jack F. (No City Provided,) USA:

Rod, this is simply a great article. I am a proud member of the Joe Q. Public group although I have been online for more than 10 years. I downloaded Linux a year or so ago. It was impossible. I loved Win 3.1, gave it up at the point of a gun and took on Win 95. I love it. I have never, since I sold my PC Jr., had a computer crash. That is, an incident which I could not solve with the emergency boot disk and maybe a reload. I have never lost a hard disk.

Ed Cantarella is to be applauded for his no-nonsense totally realistic appraisal of the situation.

Nonetheless, a man who accumulates $15 million in 15 years may not have had Joe Q. Public in mind with his business strategies.

Jack


From Jason S. (No City Provided,) USA:

Well, I certainly must say that Mr. Cantarella makes some valid points. I would have to agree that average folks have not jumped on the Free Software, GNU/Linux bandwagon for the very reasons he states in his article. I also say, "So what?"

I know there are those in the community who seek "world domination" and to "beat" Microsoft. I am among a rather silent group who don't. We use GNU/Linux because it does what we want. It provides us with a working operating system that we can use to tinker and to get our work done. We don't care if you use it, or not. We don't care if you can use it. We can and that's all that matters to us. If you want to use Microsoft, I won't stop you. (I am, after all, required to use it a the office.)

I always find it amusing when folks who lack the patience and technical understanding to use GNU/Linux start bashing on the community for not making it easy enough for them. None of us hard core hackers invited any of you to the party. It was the neo-capitalist rip off artists who sell GNU/Linux on CD that want you to join our party.

Yes, I'm elitist. However, I'm willing to allow anyone who is willing to take the time and effort to acquire the skills that I have taken the time and effort to acquire to joing that elite. I, for one, do not want to see GNU/Linux dumbed so it can be used by folks who can't even program their VCR.

Everything that Mr. Cantarella cites as a liability or difficulty with GNU/Linux, I see as a strength.


ED CANTARELLA RESPONDS: I applaud this writer for his decency in conveying that he veiws it as a matter of choice, not necessarily a choice for everyone. I am not so worried that some professionals want their own niche OS; I just cringe at the way it is being presented to people who don't have the time or skills to even start up that hill(let alone making things hell on their family, if they have one that uses said machine.) I am hoping my article will scare a few non-cooks, to stay out of the kitchen - for their own sanity.

Gotta Love ya folks,


From Ron D., Wendell, NC, USA:

I was trying to write to you when I got into the feedback loop. So let's try again. I am writing in response to Ed Cantarella's article on Linux.

Judging by his picture, his prose, his talking points and his overall direction, I suspect ol' Ed and I could get along well. In general, I agree with what he says about Linux and about the evolution (read, changes) without standardization. Madness.

But maybe, just maybe, this is the first of several operating systems. And the most likely to be successful could very well be the most simple. The kernel could be very simple, indeed, with the proper specifications. Then individuals could write expansions of that kernel, diagrammable in the form of concentric circles around the kernel.

Remember the proprietary operating systems of DEC and DG that they wrote for their small minicomputers? These operating systems set up the input/output channels and laid out an efficient (and pathetically small) memory and - with their linkers or binders - gave full access to the available instruction set, in their later versions with multi-tasking and multi-programming and shared memories. There were operating systems that one would use for a few weeks, with the "tune" option turned on; then with the cumulated results of operations one could "tune" the operating system to implement only those features that were really needed.

Not all applications require a fully developed graphics user interface. Not all applications need immediate access to the Internet. Some applications need only immediate access to the Internet.

Let's hope that developments like Linux continue and that we learn from out successes and mistakes.

Ronald E. D.
Wendell, North Carolina


ED CANTARELLA RESPONDS: Dear Rod:

Like this user, I have logged thousands of hours on mainframes, running Unix. Maybe I should have kicked in the points that these people are out of synce with the mainstream - e.g. the software their kids use at school, the software their spouse uses at work, the software any of them might use at the public library, at home or at a store when they are checking out "puters of any stripe or flavor(didn't forget you Mac folks -love my daughter's E-mate.OY!). Small kernals are great, simplicity is great, but simple solutions are not often made for compex problems. The size of the kernal is not such a problem -memory and disc space are trivial expenses today. Buy a Celeron 500 or an AMD K63-475 for $450-500, slap in two(2) $99(Officemax last week) 128MB PC100 SDRAM chips and you are "good to go" for 99.9% of your real world needs.

Final poke: I attend church with a guy who is,"in charge of the largest server room in North America, short of the military"(his words); his wife had to ask me to come over to work on their PC, because he was so lost on it and the kids wanted to play their Christmas games - ;O)

Right on, Ed! I also must be missing something here, because I also enjoy the ease with which Microsoft products work and (for the most part) integrate. Never in my life has using a computer been so easy!

I have mostly been a mainframe computer user all of my life, raised on Big Blue, dedicated to the world of MVS, mostly watching the world of PC's from afar. Within the last 7-8 years, however, I have participated in the PC arena - first as a home user running CPM, then on to DOS, Win 3.1, Win 95 , Win 98, then on to OS/2 (at work) and finally to Win/NT (at work). OS/2 was a highly reliable operating system (nearly like Windows 95), but it never made the cut, bowing out to the more popular Windows operating system (Gee - wonder why IBM didn't sue over that?)

It took our company a long time to make the switch to Win/NT, but it was well worth it! Now we were finally in sync with the rest of the world - a point well worth considering! Anyway, Windows/NT greatly simplified my life with it's well integrated, easy to maintain software. I now run a 3270 emulation program on top of Windows/NT and enjoy the advantages of both the Mainframe and PC environment with an ease never before dreamed of! Realibility? Win/NT runs forever without a twitch. Speed? No problem here either. I also enjoy the advantages of OLE, DDE, and all the other stuff we take for granted!

I don't have NT on my machine at home - yet, I am still using Win 98 for the time being. The biggest improvement I ever made to Win 98 was when my hard drive crashed and I decided to install Win 98 as a clean install! What a difference in realibility! Internet Explorer integration? Who cares? I still use Netscape Navigator 4.07 now (and it still crashes occasionally), but I have not found the integration of IE with Win 98 to ever be a big problem and I still like the familiarity and style of Navigator 4 ( hate Nav. 6 PR1 though).

The nicest thing about my Windows machine at home is the fact that I have no fear of it! So what if my hard drive crashes - I can re-install the same day and be back in business in about an hour or two.

I think that Microsoft bashing has become a way of life for many and now they have become so entwined in their own individual operating syustems, that MS bashing has become a rationalization for them to continue rather than admit just how difficult some of these OS's are to setup and maintain!

The KDE and Gnome desktops are good examples of how Linux tries to emulate Windows. Why don't you Linux and UNIX guys just stick with your cryptic, boring command lines and leave the GUI to Windows! Oh yeah - and while your at it - try to explain that Linux Kernel to some part time home user as well...

Yours Truly,
A Satisfied Windows User


From Tina G., (No City Provided,) FL, USA:

You wrote,

"I would have accepted a good idea based on little more than the blood of a lamb... "

So why don't you just give it a try? The miracles are for dumb people, not you and me. :-)

I'm not trying to get into a debate with you... we both know that would not be good business practice! Your article was thought-provoking for me, though. So I'll just leave you with a tidbit:

"Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?"

"But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong." Paul in his letter to the Corinthians

t
--------- Tina G.
Freelance Writer
http://gasperson.com
tina@gasperson.com

AND your favorite e-mails from The World's Mailbox

Sheesh!

We are writing in the hopes that you will consider doing a piece on our site; http://www.ccadp.org (all the news reports can be found at http://members.tripod.com/ccadp/newsccadp.htm - ) which has been featured recently in the Miami Herald, Canada's National Post, Court TV, the Buffalo Times, KTXL Fox News in Sacramento, Newschannel50 in Santa Rosa, ABC news in Atlanta Georgia, Network Indiana Radio, El Mundo newspaper in Madrid, Veja - Brazils weekly newsmagazine, Argentinian FM radio, Florida's Steve Kane radio and TV show, The Seattle Times, Knight Ridder news service, Toronto Star, Denvers Rocky Mountain News, Birmingham News, many more.

We are the directors of the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty and we currently maintain personal webpages for over 200 death row prisoners across the United States and the Caribbean, as well as over 500 death row prisoner penpal requests - with more being added in a daily basis. We post death row prisoner art, writings, essays, case information, legal documents, photos and more.

The pages and requests are provided free of charge and this is a not for profit site.

It is our intention to provide a forum to help educate on the death penalty - and where death row inmates can have a window of outreach to the world.

The page has the wrongly convicted, juveniles, people denied their rights under international law, reports of prisoner abuses, a student resource centre where university and upper level high school students can contact prisoners with research questions either directly or through us, urgent action alerts, photos of the recent torture by electric chair of a prisoner in Florida, a collection of over 500 links including real audio and video, much more.

Historically, when prisons, mental hospitals and things of that nature have been opened up to public scrutiny, and when the public truly becomes aware of what goes on, their opinion on this treatment offellow human being changes.

We hope to be a conduit to this sort of change by shining international light on the dark corners of America's justice system - Death row.

Please visit our pages at http://www.ccadp.org. Mirrored at http://members.tripod.com/ccadp/homepage.htm

We are available to be interviewed either by email at ccadp@home.com or by telephone at 416 686 1630 or 416 693 9112. We would be more than happy to discuss this initiative and the reactions to it, both internationally and in the US should you have an interest in the coverage of this story.

Thank you so much for your time - and please do take a moment to drop by the webpage.

Tracy Lamourie and Dave Parkinson ccadp@home.com Directors, Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty http://www.ccadp.org

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