Slashback: Courseware, Towers, Drives

Slashback with more on ridiculously equipped PCs, Telstra's ambivalent stance on equipping its thousands of desktops, California's state-sponsored Oracle oversell, and more -- read on for the details.

Your school or mine? Francis Esmonde-White writes "Dr. Joe Schwarcz (aka 'Dr. Joe' on the discovery channel & Montreal radio station CJAD), Dr. Ariel Fenster, and Dr. David Harpp at McGill have been running the OCS (Office for Chemistry and Society) for some time now. Their view is that it is academia's responsibility to communicate science to the public. One such facet of this has been to put up a series of lectures available freely through the internet.

I thought this may be interesting in light of MIT's OpenCourseWare, and that there are other major online university education projects around... even if they aren't on the same scale. In any case, here is your chance to learn about all the neat stuff you were interested in, but never learned in your introductory chem class. My first class (world of chemistry) with 'Dr. Joe' included topics like medications, plastics, explosives and pollution, so it isn't the boring chemistry you may have been tortured with in high school!"

Put this in your drive and smoke it. Linuxfr.org says (translated from French):

' GNU Generation, a student association at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne, proudly announces the release of GNUWin-II, a collection of free and open source software for Windows, which luckily contains most of the software that was proposed some days ago on slashdot.'

It comes on a CD with more than 50 applications, articles, and a four-language (yes it's Swiss) html based interface to help newcomers discover Free Software. The complete GNUWin-II can be browsed online. The ISO image of the CD can be downloaded here or better on Swiss SunSITE mirror ftp or http.

But who can fit the most soundcards in one machine? An anonymous reader writes "As a follow up to the 37 operating systems, 1 PC you should check out this site http://fileserver.coleskingdom.com 24 hard drives in one PC. And he managed it under Windows 95."

Maybe it was the Zip factor. generic-man writes "Dataplay, a company built around creating a new miniature optical disc format, has announced that all employees have been put on leave as the company tries to come up with the $50 million it needs to stay afloat. The future of Dataplay is still up in the air."

Recursive trailers. A lot of readers were disappointed in the viewing options for the Two Towers trailer posted yesterday anakin876 writes "The TTT Hi-Res trailer is out, but still semi-hidden. The Apple Quicktime Page doesn't have the trailer listed (yet) but it does exist."

Harm, foul. Boone^ writes "You'll remember when California signed a huge deal with state consultant and Oracle reseller Logicon Inc. only to have it blow up in their face [1,2,3]. Gov. Gray Davis finally signed legislation ending the exemption for the state's information technology purchases from California's conflict-of-interest laws. Similar bills have come across the Governor's desk, but Pete Wilson and Davis both vetoed them in the past. Apparently the policy of 'no harm, no foul' reigns out west, since it takes a fiasco to produce change."

That many licenses must be worth some jetlag. In August, we mentioned the possibility (floated by Telstra itself) that the Australian phone company was considering rolling out Linux on as many as 45,000 desktops; an anonymous reader notes that Microsoft is not sitting by for that, and has dispatched Steve Ballmer to convince Telstra otherwise.

Comments

Ballmer vs. the jetlag

[Anonymous Coward]

"Microsoft is not sitting by for that, and has dispatched Steve Ballmer to convince Telstra otherwise. "

I think I see a pattern here -- announce move to linux on day 1, on day 2 sign a deeeeeply discounted deal with Microsoft.

Hmmm...

Re:Ballmer vs. the jetlag

[pyman]

I think I see a pattern here -- announce move to linux on day 1, on day 2 sign a deeeeeply discounted deal with Microsoft.

Or more likely: day 2 MS threatens to audit, sending telstra scrambling for 45000 WinNT4 licenses... day 3: telstra signs standard subscription deal for next X years to avoid lawsuit.

Only 24?

[CaptainCarrot]

Presumably the two missing letters here are for his floppy and CD-ROM. He should try it with some OS that doesn't insist on using single letters of the alphabet to designate partitions. Like VMS, better known as the Operating System of the Gods, where you can find such euphonious device names as DKA0: Real VMS gurus know without being told that any device so bold as to be called DVA0: had damned well better be a floppy drive!

Which one's my CD-ROM? Ummmm....

My View On Dataplay

[MBCook]

Here is my view of Dataplay. First off the technology is very good. And it's perfect for MP3s. The cost per meg (if you only count the disks) is very cheap (compared to other removable media that size). I recently saw the play and disks in person at a Best Buy and I've gotta say it looks really cool. The problem is that it's out too late. If it came out back when MP3 players were pretty new (origional Nomad and whatnot) it would have been amazing. But these days, if I'm going to plop down $400 for a MP3 player, I'm going with a 20gig iPod (those rock), not a little 500meg thing.

Maybe if I could use it to do other things like buy music for it like I can on CDs. They even say you can! But wait! Can you find any? I doubt it. Can't find a player either (unless the MP3 player does it too). You wanna use it as a tiny CD-RW? Cool! So would I, it's small (and rules compared to Click! drives (or Zip Pocket as they're known now)) and holds alot. But wait! You can't get a drive. You could use the MP3 player as one but, should I have to buy a $400 MP3 player if all I want is something to backup a few files to? How 'bout a PCMCIA type 3 card that could read them and such? Nope. Despite all the drives that they have promised, nothing is really going on. The only thing that's new is it's no longer vaporware, it's just unwanted.

Once again, we see a good technology that could have done great just a few years ago, but they just took too long. This is what hapened to 3Dfx (my opnion, let's not get off topic), BitBoys (the ultimate in vapor), and many other things. Excessive delays can seriously hurt you in the market. How many of you are enjoying you're Segway HTs right now? That's what I though. They should be careful too.

FINE PRINT: This is all my opinion, blah blah blah.

Re:Windows?

[Forge]

Corect. This realy is none news.

It is trivial to put 26 SCSI drives on a single phisical controler card (2 SCSI 3 chanels. 14 devices each, including the controler itself. 26 SCSI drives total).

Or as this guy has done. IDE controlers. Some of which alow up to 4 chanels (I.e. 8 drives). I actualy built a test server with over a terabyte of storage space.

6 X Promise IDE controlers.
24 X 60 GB Hard Drives.
1 40 GB Drive
1 CDRW Drive
1 DVD Drive
1 IDE Zip Drive
2 10/100 NICs.

1.480 TB Raw Storage.
1.08 TB RAID 5 protected Storage.
40 GB On the primary tape backup protected drive (Only 1.3 GB used).

Either way, it's a good thing

[Goonie]

Whilst I'd love for Telstra to start using Linux across all their desktops, it's a pretty good second best for us Aussies even if they're only using it as a negotiating tool to beat down Microsoft's pricing.

Why? Because it's going to be millions of dollars that gets distributed back to the Australian economy either in the form of lower pricing of Telstra's products or as profits to shareholders (and as the government is still a 51% shareholder that means all of us).

The next point is that once a few more CEOs see that you can screw Microsoft in this manner, they're going to try it for themselves. At least some (and more as time goes on and Linux apps continue to improve) are going to decide that the Linux option is viable regardless of what deals MS offers, and the others will save a packet. Net result? Less money floating across the Pacific to the money vault in Redmond and more in local customers and shareholders' pockets, and a growing Linux user community who will spend money and use their buying power to get the features they want.

Now, if only Telstra could be levered out of their monopoly or quasi-monopoly positions, then we'd *really* be in good shape :)

Re:Windows?

[neonsam]

Nope. You can't map more than the 26 letters. And B: is pretty rare these days...

Double letters? Where did you come up with that?