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Karpe asks: "I noticed that the Brazilian Telecom Agency is not sure if they should use the American Digital TV standard or the Japanese. Brazilian media is saying that if most TV programs we watch are american and not japanese, we should use the american standard, but the agency is not sure because of the technical aspects. I was wondering, in this world of patents, can someone help on which patents should be licensed in order to make ATSC DTV devices? I think this should be a fundamental aspect in the decision. Dolby says it will license it's AC-3 audio under reasonable terms and conditions, but what does that mean?"

Karpe writes "For those of you who don't read comp.text.tex, they are offering a calender for next year." Click below for more details - it's pretty cool. " The TeX merchandising project proudly presents:

The \year=2000 TeX calendar

Features:

• Y2K compliant :-)
• format ISO A4
• 13 pages (12 month plus titel)
• each month with a picture by Duane Bibby from the books by Donald Knuth
• titel picture by Duane Bibby especially for this calendar
• protective cover and backcover
• wrap-around binding
• printed with 1200 dpi on 120g paper

This is a limited edition - it's printed on demand.

Price: DM 20 plus postage (3 DM Germany, 8 DM Europe, 16 DM rest of the world (air)).

Available \emph{now} from the TeX Merchandising Project.

The title picture and the calendarium can be seen at this web site

Eagerly awaiting your orders Martin"

Karpe writes "You can read it in news.com. Microworkz will sell a $199 computer for surfing the Web. It's called iToaster, and will run Linux." They aren't giving out much real data except that its x86 based, and it won't feature tons of advertising as part of your web browsing experience (as most of the "Free" PCs floating around seem to want).

Karpe writes "There's a new editorial on freshmeat regarding the future of UNIX (especially Open-Source) as an end-user desktop solution, in a market where prices are expected to go even cheaper in the next decades. It describes strategies on building more and better aplication software, and how the existing business model can't live with a market of ultra-high volumes / ultra-cheap prices. "

Roberto Jung Drebes writes "This story from Wired News is pretty nice, not simply because Netscape had any profit, but because it had such profit after "changing the focus of its business to avoid direct competition with rival Microsoft". It's a good example for the open-source cause. "

Allright we've got something of a doozy this time guys. Iuri Wickert has written in with a strange problem involving updating his RH system, and a mysterious problem that prevents his drives from being unmounted. When he reboots, it needs to fsck despite being, at least theoretically, properly shut down. Hit the link below for the full details of this whole conundrum. The following is an Ask Slashdot question submitted by Slashdot reader Iuri Wickert

I had installed RedHat 5.0 (mirrored in April, from CheapBytes), and installed all the recent updates in the CD. When the 2 HDs reached the compulsory 'fsck' (after 5 mounts), fsck reports something like: "/dev/hda2/ Deleted inode XXXX has zero dtime. FIXED" (/dev/hda2 is my root partition, and XXXX is a number). I always shutdown or reboot my computer cleanly, as the "clean" file system flag is always clean.

When I updated my RH 4.1 to a RH 5.0 (December's 97), this error occured to me almost every time the computer booted, so I updated initscripts, the kernel (2.0.32->.33->.34), glibc, gcc, util-linux, everything. It got better, but didn't solve it completely. I noticed that the initscripts pack of Dec. RH 5.0 is noticeably buggy (and different from the great RH 4.1). I also noticed that the pre-compiled kernel, and all the kernel I've built with the RamDisk option enabled got problems in the boot, like "crc error" after the loading of the ramdisk, and messing with "mount" (trying to fsck my root partition already mounted RW); now I compiled the kernel without RamDisk, but the original fsck error persisted.

Examining my /var/log/messages file, I found something "strange" (at least I didn't understanded it):

Jun 7 01:06:12 Bauhaus kernel: Partition check:
Jun 7 01:06:12 Bauhaus kernel: hda: hda1 hda2
Jun 7 01:06:12 Bauhaus kernel: hdc: [PTBL] [330/32/63] hdc1
Jun 7 01:06:12 Bauhaus kernel: VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
Jun 7 01:06:12 Bauhaus kernel: Adding Swap: 66020k swap-space (priority-1)
Jun 7 01:06:16 Bauhaus init: Switching to runlevel: 6
Jun 7 01:06:17 Bauhaus syslogd: exiting on signal 15
Jun 7 01:10:37 Bauhaus syslogd 1.3-3: restart.
Jun 7 01:10:37 Bauhaus kernel: klogd 1.3-3, log source = /proc/kmsg started.
Jun 7 01:10:37 Bauhaus kernel: Cannot find map file.
Jun 7 01:10:37 Bauhaus kernel: No module symbols loaded.

I suspect that there is something wrong with initscripts (maybe "shutdown" ?), so a proccess remained (unkilled) with a file opened after "shutdown" unmounted root (keeping the "clean" flag clean, but with some inconsistency in the filesystem). Maybe a result of the "strange" killing sequence of lpd, syslogd and klogd (2 times killing ???) ?

My system is a Pentium 120, 32Mb RAM, WD2340ah (hdc)& WD21600 (hda) winchesters, ZipDrive, Hitachi CDROM (hdd), Crystal Soundcard, modem. All the peripheral work fine.

Anyone can help me? Any help is greatly appreciated!

Allright we've got something of a doozy this time guys. Iuri Wickert has written in with a strange problem involving updating his RH system, and a mysterious problem that prevents his drives from being unmounted. When he reboots, it needs to fsck despite being, at least theoretically, properly shut down. Hit the link below for the full details of this whole conundrum. The following is an Ask Slashdot question submitted by Slashdot reader Iuri Wickert

I had installed RedHat 5.0 (mirrored in April, from CheapBytes), and installed all the recent updates in the CD. When the 2 HDs reached the compulsory 'fsck' (after 5 mounts), fsck reports something like: "/dev/hda2/ Deleted inode XXXX has zero dtime. FIXED" (/dev/hda2 is my root partition, and XXXX is a number). I always shutdown or reboot my computer cleanly, as the "clean" file system flag is always clean.

When I updated my RH 4.1 to a RH 5.0 (December's 97), this error occured to me almost every time the computer booted, so I updated initscripts, the kernel (2.0.32->.33->.34), glibc, gcc, util-linux, everything. It got better, but didn't solve it completely. I noticed that the initscripts pack of Dec. RH 5.0 is noticeably buggy (and different from the great RH 4.1). I also noticed that the pre-compiled kernel, and all the kernel I've built with the RamDisk option enabled got problems in the boot, like "crc error" after the loading of the ramdisk, and messing with "mount" (trying to fsck my root partition already mounted RW); now I compiled the kernel without RamDisk, but the original fsck error persisted.

Examining my /var/log/messages file, I found something "strange" (at least I didn't understanded it):

Jun 7 01:06:12 Bauhaus kernel: Partition check:
Jun 7 01:06:12 Bauhaus kernel: hda: hda1 hda2
Jun 7 01:06:12 Bauhaus kernel: hdc: [PTBL] [330/32/63] hdc1
Jun 7 01:06:12 Bauhaus kernel: VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
Jun 7 01:06:12 Bauhaus kernel: Adding Swap: 66020k swap-space (priority-1)
Jun 7 01:06:16 Bauhaus init: Switching to runlevel: 6
Jun 7 01:06:17 Bauhaus syslogd: exiting on signal 15
Jun 7 01:10:37 Bauhaus syslogd 1.3-3: restart.
Jun 7 01:10:37 Bauhaus kernel: klogd 1.3-3, log source = /proc/kmsg started.
Jun 7 01:10:37 Bauhaus kernel: Cannot find map file.
Jun 7 01:10:37 Bauhaus kernel: No module symbols loaded.

I suspect that there is something wrong with initscripts (maybe "shutdown" ?), so a proccess remained (unkilled) with a file opened after "shutdown" unmounted root (keeping the "clean" flag clean, but with some inconsistency in the filesystem). Maybe a result of the "strange" killing sequence of lpd, syslogd and klogd (2 times killing ???) ?

My system is a Pentium 120, 32Mb RAM, WD2340ah (hdc)& WD21600 (hda) winchesters, ZipDrive, Hitachi CDROM (hdd), Crystal Soundcard, modem. All the peripheral work fine.

Anyone can help me? Any help is greatly appreciated!