Ergonomics

Posted on December 11, 2005 by ward

I’ve been looking at upgrading my work-from-home environment to make it more ergonomic. The department of labor has some information and a checklist that is quite handy to evaluate your current work setup, and see where improvements can be made. In my case, on quite a few of their points.

So I’ve been dreaming up an ideal setup, after some input from Justin:

I said I was dreaming – the total cost of this setup is currently about $2200, before shipping or tax. That’s pretty steep. On the other hand, if it avoids future medical problems, it’s not a bad investment. I’d expect to spend a similar amount on a new laptop, and these puppies last about 2 years for me. One could expect the ergonomic work environment to last much longer; so as a business expense its probably not so bad…

Posted in Everything else | 1 Comment

Kudos to Dell

Posted on December 10, 2005 by ward

I had not thought I would (ever?) say this, but I’ve got a warm fuzzy feeling for Dell right now. They have done something no other computer manufacturer has done before: they’ve released a 100% GPL’ed solution for upgrading the BIOS on their systems, pretty much across the entire product line. Yes, that includes laptops, workstations and servers.

I’ve tried it on a PE600SC thousands of miles away, and it worked, just like that. No rebooting with dos floppies, no crappy proprietary tools, just a plain in-band upgrade & reboot. Very, very nice.

The way the upgrade is done is actually pretty clever. You need 2 kernel modules (included in 2.6.14 and higher), and some userspace tools downloadable from the link above. The userspace tools essentially load the rom image into RAM, and then flip a bit in the CMOS of the computer to tell it to reload its BIOS upon reboot.

Simple, elegant, and 100% free software. Of course, as it is, one would still use these tools to load a proprietary bios, but presumably this makes the work of the Linuxbios people somewhat easier. Linuxbios apparently focusses mostly on AMD these days, but since Forbes seems to think we’ve got Dells with AMD inside coming our way…

Posted in Free Software/Open Source | Leave a comment

Defensive publishing

Posted on December 9, 2005 by ward

The BBC reports that India has embarked on a massive defensive publishing project. They are building the ‘Traditional Knowledge Digital Library’, a 30 million page (!) encyclopedia describing traditional medicine, and will release it into the public domain.

Why?

They want to stop the (mostly) Western parasites that are patenting certain qualities of plants, many of which originate from India. It’s a classic defensive publishing move. The cost? $2 million. Peanuts.

This is awesome. Yay India!! But we need to deal with the root of the problem – we need serious patent reform. Why the hell is patenting (properties of) plants allowed?

Ah, of course, plants and their properties are obviously inventions by humans. And the fact that say, turmeric, has been used for its medicinal properties for thousands of years (in India, for instance), means that the wound-healing properties of turmeric are clearly novel. And, for that matter, non-obvious. Of course the properties of turmeric should be patentable!

Well, at least that particular patent was overturned. But at what cost! Millions of dollars in legal fees, and years in court – the patent system is sick.

Posted in Copyright, patents, and trademarks | Leave a comment