Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Drives, Pods, OEMs
Drive-n to strong drink and harsh words. Kenneth Yu writes: "You might recall the overwhelming response to a recent 'Ask Slashdot' regarding the abnormally high failure rates of IBM 75GXP Hard drives, and the pulling of all 75GXP from Pair Networks' Servers. A class action lawsuit has been filed by Michael Granido, Jr., on behalf of himself and all others similarly situated. You can view the complaint in PDF format at http://www.sheller.com/IBM_complaint.pdf. This story was initially reported by Tech Report (http://www.tech-report.com)."
Apropos that, jriskin writes: "Storagereview.com has its new reliability database up and running. I have no affiliation with the site, but it only benifits the community to have as many people contribute as possible. The database is a listing of hard drives and whether or not they have failed, when they were purchased, etc. So get over there and put in all your HD data!" Things like this could help eliminate the anecdotal-only nature of many of hardware complaints, especially if people who are happy with their hardware bother to report it.
Falling far from a tree has nothing to do with it. Majik writes "A quick correction - the iPod has *10* gigs of storage, not 5 (or 6 like the Nomad). And with the Firewire interface you can move an entire CD in under a minute. Although I admit I was hoping for more out of the product announcement, it's still pretty darn cool ... "
On the other hand, jchristopher writes: "Love it or hate it, Apple's new iPod digital music player is here. Yesterday, many people commented that "at least it has no copy protection" and praised Apple's attitude toward digital music. Unfortunately, this may not be the case - according to this New York Times article, the iPod does indeed have copy protection - MP3 files copied to the iPod from one Mac to the iPod CAN'T be offloaded onto a different computer. Ouch!" That means (at least without further hacking) it can't be used as a transfer medium between the G3 and work and the iMac kept hidden in your darkest closet, which is sort of a shame considering that it has all the right things built in to be even better than the several portable firewire drives on the market.
Unorginal Equipment Makers. An Anonymous Coward writes: "This is a follow-up on a previous story posted to Slashdot about Microsoft's anti-competitive OEM contracts." It's a report by German journalist Erik Möller (hi, Erik!), who too an extremely thorough look at the details of OEM bundling deals, and what they mean to customers. Möller's conclusion: "No operating system will ever be able to compete with Microsoft Windows on the desktop market as long as OEMs cannot legally install it besides Windows without losing their license."
'Technical meaures' covers a pretty broad swath. Robotech_Master writes "The RIAA has responded to the 'license to virus' story, calling it a false Internet rumor and explaining their side of the story." So the RIAA officially does not want a license to hack, at least on paper.
Quite a troll... But why not make something good come from it? There isn't huge demand for Linux because there isn't huge awareness. If I could afford to spend 250 million dollars in advertising alone on just one day (Windows XP: Regis, Frasier, Media, ... all rented by Microsoft) my OS would be on top too. If Microsoft didn't engage in anti-competitive practices, such as the boot loader "thing," Linux, OS/2, and BeOS all would've been installed on dual-boot systems with Windows a long time ago, and then later people would order Linux-only systems. ...and I'd hardly call Linux table scraps. What kind of an analogy is that? Think of something better for your next troll, please?
A solution to the problem with music today
You ask a good question. "Why would they want several hundred megs of unusable crap on their disks?" Windows XP, for example, takes up at least 1GB I've heard, and it doesn't seem much better than Windows 98, which takes up about 300MB, or Windows 95, which I was able to install on a 120MB hard drive and still have room for Duke Nukem 3D.
A solution to the problem with music today
Lots of people choose not to see anonymous posts, no matter how high the score. It's one of the new options.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!