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If only that were true. The majority of highly-rated posts dwell on off-topic political commentaries, ridicule of the board's blacklist, and various distracting but irrelevant side-shows. (Thankfully, meta-discussions of Groklaw have subsided.) There is a lot of good information, but I would use Yahoeuvre and start with posts having at least 20 recs.

  I started a wiki about Jeffrey Vernon Merkey, net.kook, peyote pusher, and all around weirdo. He threatened to sue Wikipedia, and I'm pretty sure the Uncyclopedia is a response at least in part to the, er, contributions of other members of the Yahoo SCOX stock board regarding Merkey's behavior.

http://merkey.info/ is a nice place to start or you can read for yourself starting with http://yah.warmcat.com/ - his user ID is jeff_v_merkey, and be careful as there are many, many trolls :-)

Sound like they're trying to get a Groklaw+Tuxrocks+Yahoeuvre+Legal Scorecard, but without the commentary.

Losers.

Oh, well. Guess it could get hilarious if they add their spin to things.

There was a bit about Jeff Merkey on Groklaw recently. Seems that he's associated with the Canopy Group, SCO's parent company. It should be extremely obvious why *they* would want a non-GPL fork of Linux. There's also been a lot of discussion about him on the Yahoo SCO board, and you can find a lot of those comments here.

YES!!! There is a Linux driver for this card!

Chris Pascoe has written a Linux driver for the Austrailian version of the card. See: http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~chrisp/DVICO-Linux/. AFAIK, the only difference between the Austrailian and American versions is the tuner. If we can find the codes (perhaps by sniffing them w/ a homebrew I2C sniffer), we should be able to have a fully-functioning driver for the US card.

Bonus: the card is half-height, and comes with a low-profile PCI backplate, which would make it fit nicely into a small MythTV-powered PVR.

This nets you the ability to play progressive scan DVDs,

The Xbox can do this easily. There is a one bit flag in the dvd player executable that turns it to progressive.

a remote that can power on and eject the drive on your media device

You can power off (or reset) the xbox via remote thru XBMC also. And eject implies that you'll have to get up and switch/insert discs anyways, so why do you need it on your remote?

the ability to play back MP3, OGG Vorbis, OGM, DivX (3.11, 4.x, 5.x), AC3 audio, JPEG, PNG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4

so XBMC can play all that, and more. XVID, QT5, AAC, etc. etc. ad nauseum. Did you even RTFA?

The total cost for this is way less than your Xbox

Wrong. I bought a new xbox ($150), modded it with a homemade cheapmod ($7.50) and simply use the stock hard drive since I stream all my media from my fileserver anyways, thru Samba. I bought a cheap 3rd party remote, ($15) which brings my total to $172.50. Oh, and a simple switch to turn off the mod chip, and I play xbox live games till the cows come home.

I don't know why you'd go to the hassle of an Xbox that doesn't let you completely control every by IR remote, and also requires you mod it.

I dont know why you think this- I can do everything I need thru the xbox remote.

Get your facts straight next time.

Another interesting resource, the new Yahoeuvre megachart. Plots shareprice vs events (and more).

I mean register each machine with another e-mail address, so they would all be free.

... Script it so you parse ...

Yes, I know I could do that. I could use up3date. I could subscribe to Bugtraq, parse out all of the RedHat updates, and they wouldn't even have any of my e-mail addresses. There are probably many ways I haven't even thought of.

The point is that they (quite reasonably, IMHO) ask(ed) for $60/year for this service. I used that service. I find it hard to believe that if people followed that (even giving the first machine away for free), they would lose money. Evidentally, there were too many leeching, so they did lose money, and now they're moving to their WS/ES/AS levels and leaving all of us (including those who did pay real money) without an alternative for the services to which I was referring - namely the low-end DNS/DHCP/firewall/non-critical WWW, for which ES is overkill and Fedora is both too unstable and will require version updates too frequently.

Anybody work in that industry and have any insights?

Yes, and not really. We're still sitting here trying to decide what to do about it. Chances are, we'll be installing the latest quasi-stable release of Fedora on it and brand it as a "Linux Server". We'll probably use up3date pointing to a local repository of tested RPMS to manage auto updates for clients, but we haven't decided for sure yet.

You're right in that our margins are already pretty thin. $65-year for a supported server was doable for us to be able to provide some sort of warrantee, but $399+ isn't.

Taking a wait-and-see approach, but we'll almost certainly not move to FreeBSD as a provider-supported option (too complex, and foreign to most of our customers), nor will we stop selling the "Dedicated Linux Server" product; it's just too useful to people.

Apologies for the blatent plug, but you might be interested in up3date, which is free in the GPL, money and survey senses, and lets you autoupdate as a cron job from Redhat FTP mirrors or set up your own local HTTP mirrors for supporting multiple machines.

I am going to have to call him a fool for buying 3 matrix modchips for use in this cluster. The matrix mod chip is just an excuse not to soider and the pogopins on it are not the easyest thing to line up so I think that is why he said moding it was too much work.

Using Cheapmods would have been a much cheaper solution (the matrix is $59 each!). If a MUCH larger cluster was to ever be built I would suggest flashing the TSOP on each board by using the idea behind The Milksop Project.

Also, if a cluster was going to be built for just running linux, I would suggest either unlocking all the drives or buying low capacity drives and imaging 1 drive thats already configured to all the other drives using a standard PC to save time.

I am going to have to call him a fool for buying 3 matrix modchips for use in this cluster. The matrix mod chip is just an excuse not to soider and the pogopins on it are not the easyest thing to line up so I think that is why he said moding it was too much work.

Using Cheapmods would have been a much cheaper solution (the matrix is $59 each!). If a MUCH larger cluster was to ever be built I would suggest flashing the TSOP on each board by using the idea behind The Milksop Project.

Also, if a cluster was going to be built for just running linux, I would suggest either unlocking all the drives or buying low capacity drives and imaging 1 drive thats already configured to all the other drives using a standard PC to save time.

On my site there is a $4 modchip that most 12 year olds could fit.

The xbox is also attractive at its price for DVD drive and a modern video chipset, plus excellent TV-out.

http://www.xboxhacker.net/

The BIOS hacking forums there is a focus of efforts to reverse-engineer the X-Box for the purpose of allowing Linux to run on it.

In the last few weeks we have successfully recovered the RC4 key used to encrypt the second bootloader in the BIOS, this has led to discoveries about the PIC chip that have allowed a minimal clean BIOS to run for the first time.

I also run a site at http://warmcat.com/milksop which has a variety of GPL hardware designs that are of use in getting the X-Box to run Linux (although they have many other applications).

On the prize, I worry it will change the ethos of people working towards this goal, which until now has shown the best side of people with a common, righteous purpose working together.