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Slashback: Drives, Errors, Copyright
Spin control for some IBM drives? If you are one ofthe people who have the same results with IBM 75GXP hard drives that Sean Kelly did when he posed a recent Ask Slashdot, you may be interested in this report from legLess, who writes: "Pair Networks is swapping out every IBM 75GXP hard drive they have "[b]ased on an amazingly high failure rate." Pair is a big host: 114,000 sites all running on FreeBSD 4.1.1, including cdrom.com and Tom's Hardware. "We currently use and recommend Maxtor drives" they say. Big black eye for IBM."
GNU isn't Linux, either. Amid the stream of recent and upcoming software releases (Suse 7.3, Red Hat 7.2, Qt 3.0), it's sometimes easy for projects with smaller followings or more esoteric goals to get lost. BorrisYeltsin writes: "The Debian HURD iso images are now available from your local ftp.gnu.org mirror. There are 3 iso's available, so get downloading now!" (And read through the recent months' on the HURD Kernel Cousin too.)
Update: 10/16 14:20 GMT by T : Please note that the GNU Project maintains a list of ftp mirrors -- look for one local to you for best results all around :)
Placing warning signs along the road to consumerism brigc writes: "Good interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education with Jessica Litman about changes in the copyright arena since the publication of her book.
For those who were asleep, Litman's book 'Digital Copyright' does a good job of discussing why the copyright process got handed over to the industry and Congress has failed to protect the rights of the public."
Litman's book got a rave review from Michael a few months back; I suggest you check it out, and better yet ask you local library to put it up on display. Libraries have a strong vested interest in not ceding all control to copyright holders forever and ever amen.
It might pay to have a big fat mouth and ask for a refund on defective merchandise, too. anonicon writes: "Here's a heads up to the web site I'm running at http://www.fatchucks.com. I've started both a Corrupt CDs list for people who wish to report 'copy-protected' CDs or find out which ones they are, and an Indie Rec for people who want to recommend independent artists to the public. Thank you."
"Copy protected" CDs are going to be a shambles, good on the owner of that site for starting a list! And even better for compiling ways to, ahem, deal with the problem :).
These CDs will do little to stop online piracy. Everyone knows, if it can be heard it can be copied. Working a line-in jack on a stereo or computer isn't hard. Heck, you probably lose more fidelity in the MP3/OGG/Whatever compression than the digital-to-analog conversion with good audio equipment. All it takes is one good copy to be released and online music piracy will be off again.
Basically, if you want to stop the problem of music piracy, you've got to go back to the root issue -- the users themselves versus the bands in question.
I have a friend who was firmly on Metallica's side during the Lars Ulrich vs. Napster debacle. Why? He respected them as artists, and as a result owns every album they have ever put out.
This is what the RIAA doesn't get. The bands themselves are the only ones who can convince users not to copy, not any fancy technical or legal hurdles -- or have they forgotten that the bands exist apart from phony marketing images?
So here's a plan to decrease piracy. Every band has a back catalogue of covers, garage recordings, and so on that will probably never get released and are next to worthless commerically. All they have to do is say "From now on, we're monitoring KaZaA/Morpheus/Gnutella/etc, and every fortnight where there's an average of less than XYZ files shared from us, we release new material for you to legally download free of charge".
Think about it. Dedicated fans, who already respect the band for their abilities, will start to police these file-sharing services for them. Problem halved.
Does this stand a chance, Slashdot? Ideas?
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Yeah, that is a bit of a blow to IBM. However the real question this raises is: Why is pair using consumer level IDE drives in their servers?!
Q.
I wonder if Pair Networks runs AMD on VIA boards with that quirky chipset problem. Someone pointed out the last time this IBM Deathstar issue came up that a lot of the people affected have VIA boards. I have one of these drives with a VIA board and my machine when screech screech screech .... clickety, clickety, clickety too 8^(
Anyone running AMD on VIA with the GXP?
Well, there are a couple of benefits to using Hurd:
/dev/random that I've seen based on EGD)
1) Hack value. It's fun to play.
2) Secure infrastructure that permits to user to do quite reasonable things.
In the Hurd, any user can create a secure chroot jail. Any user can mount a remote file system off of their home directory. Any user could mount a file (ISO or whatever) as a filesystem.
3) Translators
The concept of a translator is the "Everything is a file" taken a step further. If you imbed a program in an inode, it can then deal with filesystem calls to that inode as it sees fit.
This means that things like the Linux "proc" file system are easy to write, and could trivially show things like SQL data, or an FTP-fs.
Device drivers can either be colocated in the kernel (Which they generally are now, similar to Linux), or can be emulated in user space (Like an implementation of
This means that implementing PPPoE is going to be very simple for us, since we just need to write a simple translator the reads from the Ethernet card, and pushes those packets into the IP stack.
These are just beginning sort of examples of what's possible. Other clever stuff is doable if you're willing to think a little bit outside of the typical "unix" box.