Tuesday, October 6, 2020

American Pie

American Pie

 
Comparing an average American’s eating habits with ours is a revelation by itself.
 
An American eats a cow / bull every ten years.
 
In every American there are at least 5 cows in him / her by the time s/he is fifty.
 
If he has not got mad cow disease or Alzheimer’s disease what s/he eats in the rest of his life is any American doctor’s guess.
 
He eats a pig every three years.
 
He eats at least 50 chickens and one turkey a year.

Some Americans of course eat much more than this.

My worry is every cow/bull s/he eats, at least an equivalent of 8Kg of fodder is needed to support its life to obtain 1Kg of meat.
 
If an American stops eating 1Kg of beef s/he is saving about 8Kg of grain for a poor soul in Africa or Bangladesh.

Out of the tons of grain produced more than half (this ratio has gone up with the increase of Chinese Middle Class population) is spent on animal feeds and some American cows are better fed than African kids. 
 
These Chines factories now BREED Coronavirus. 

 
Only to be sacrificed as human food.

The current Pope should give due consideration to these facts and he should give a hearing to this fiasco and if the grain saved by saving the poor cows / or bulls is multiplied by the factor of eight by 1000 (well the fed cow’s weight) there is an excess grain in this world to feed everybody.

Equally FAO should take this into cognizant.

Looking by some of Ceylonese who lavish on food I cannot say there is any difference to American mentality, here in Ceylonese (especially who visit here to take a break from the winter).
 
Coming back to a single meal, if an American or Western guy sacrifices a single meal a week, like our Buddhist monks who live on a single meal a day, we would be able to feed some hungry children in Africa and Asia without any problem or NGOs.
 
WHO also should take this fact to their cognizant.
 
I don’t believe in what our agriculture minister who says, that food prices have gone up because of biofuels.
 
The production of biofuels has being going on for over 25 years.
 
One should realize that the ancient man and his closest friend the dog survived on a single meal in spite of their aggressive hunting skills.

Eat less is my recipe!
 
Three rice meals a day is two much (unless one is heavy manual labour).
 
I lost my weight only after stopped eating rice.
 
I was like a pig when I was eating meat including pork!
 
I wanted to celebrate 12 years without eating a single grain of rice but differed it due to Coronavirus epidemic.
 
I am compiling all the bad things about rice cultivation currently.
 
My conviction is to stop cultivating rice in this country BUT import RICE like Dhal.

Suse or Trisequel or Mandriva

Reproduction

I only USE Debian Now!

Suse or Trisequel or Mandriva

I looked at my blog posts and discovered that I have no entry for Suse.
This is to rectify that omission.
Unfortunately I am bit explicit here.
Suse or Trisequel or Mandriva
Suse Linux had a special place in my choices before it went commercial. I left Fedora and embraced Suse Linux and had been using it from Suse 8. Till Suse 10.1 there was no problem and when it was taken by Novel I had lot of expectations. Novel concentrated on server but I believe like Redhat neglected the desktop version. 
By Suse 11.1, I was changing my allegiance. Mainly due to it’s failure in commercial support of the desktop version.
It was less than ideal.
Then it’s alliance with Microsoft was not a favorable enterprise.
I will talk about the plus points first.
It had one of the best installation script even though unlike Redhat sometimes tends to miss some of my other Linux distributions already installed in the box. It also had a very good partition utility when compared to other Linux distributions except Mandrake, Debian and Redhat. 
It’s YAST was a very good configuration utility. Its KDE was bulky but very attractive. Then it introduced the Suse Studio where one can Mix and Match utilities and make one’s own Live distribution. In fact, I made one distribution myself. 
ChromeOs is one of those distributions a that took root from Suse Studio. 
From then onwards I shifted my allegiance totally and it’s Milestone releases are “pain in the neck” and worse than the Fedora experience for me.
I stopped downloading and testing them after the last version 11.2. 
When I saw many innovations in other Live CD/DVDs it was easy for me to ditch it in favour of PClinux.
 
Now few of my reason for ditching it.
It is bulky and consumes lot of RAM.
It is slow in boot up.
Its downloading of Linux images was bad.
It tends to pile up all the junk temporary files and what really annoyed me was it did not have a way of cleaning up and deleting large files. 
With time file corruption ensued. 
At that stage to save time I had to dump it and never used it again.
It stopped reading partitions above 15 and with me having 5 to 6 distributions in one box it was restricting my freedom. 
With disks of 500 GiB coming to the market restricting to 15 partition was a stupid idea. 
Only Microsoft would have done it that way. 
New Windows 8 not allowing alternative operations to boot is a case in point.
It also take the belief and shoot that belief out of window that commercial ventures do add value and complementary and better than community work.
Suse desktop was a commercial failure for the happy faces of Microsoft and Apple CEOs.
I wanted to write about Trisequel here instead of Suse but took the decision if I do not write little bit of Suse and its history, justice is not done to those developers who created Suse.
 
Trisequel
I will be brief in here writing about Trisequel. Suse and Mandrake took Open Software theme to the extreme and in their early releases excluded all packages which had slightest taint of commercial tags and did not include things like Flash and the like limiting the functionality for those who were migrating from Microsoft background. They then bundled them in their commercial counterpart to lure them to buy their distributions. 
This was not a healthy ploy, and the clever customer like me can see the commercial intent. I have personal experience with Suse the details which I decline to state here.
XandosOS is another good commercial product which apply this principle.
I should close this entry with why I have not included Mandrake. Many reasons as stated above an it’s split recently into two. Mandrake has been acquired by a Russian company and it is applying rigid and regimental style, somewhat akin to military. 
The breakaway Mageia is not yet mature. I wish both of these endeavors success but hesitate to recommend them just for now.
Coming back to Trisequel if one wants a pure Linux derivative and beautiful and clean distribution too, I have no hesitation of recommending Trisequel that come from Spain and has English version too.
It has everything except cloud utilities.
That shoots two birds with one go.
1. No commercial involvement or enticements.
2. True to it’s Linux base.
So if any Linux distribution goes commercial like Redhat focus that commercial aspect and give customer due care which Suse failed in desktop range. I am not stating that Redhat customer service good. 
It is far from it but it knows it’s obligation and working towards that goal at least in the server section.
Redhat is well known for failing the desktop clients.
My current resolution is to use only Debian which is the God Father of all Linux distributions.

Why I say Ant Colony is more successful than An Army Brigade

Why I say Ant Colony is more successful than An Army Brigade


I do not run short of ideas to write, even though, I have shed satire and academic comments by default or dysfunction.
I have seen only one company in Ceylon who practice Alexander Dreaming's, an American by descent, 5S protocol, get it right first time principle.
Army fails in 5S but ant colony succeeds.
This company in Panwila are experts on lingeries but I want to promote Linux and Python derivatives but failed.
Why?
Our computer education in Linux is zero and only 31 guys use a Linux Box, excluding me in Ceylon.
Ants and Kadia in my rooftop garden succeed, simply due to self organizing work force.
There is no command chain.
Every individual until there death look after the well being of the colony, not the Queen who is responsible for reinforcing the lost members.
King can father but cannot produce a child who needs 25 or 35 years to mature in intellect in Ceylon.
Long and unproductive, whereas an ant is productive few hours after hatching.
 
So mobilizing army means more commanders who do not work but give orders which are not self organizing like in an ant colony.
 
All over the world including Hitler’s to Idi Amin to Qaddafi and lately Myanmar's military failed.
 
It will definitely fail in Ceylon, since orders are given to the army by non productive monks, who are a drain on our economy.
In that sense religion is a global failure in the Middle East, Pakistan, Ceylon and in America.