I hate to be around one of those things without ear protection. Earlier this week, an old, slow, Barracuda crashed its heads on me, and I dropped in a 7.2K or 10K Hawk (forget which one) as a replacement. Man, that thing sounds like a jet engine when spinning up.
The story doesn't mention the Db of the 15K drive. The noise from high speed drives almost precludes them from being used on the desktop, if you keep your machine constantly on. Now that I need to get another drive, for a "semi-hot" standby replacement, I'll definitely be asking the ambient noise level before I get anything.
It's nice to see Seagate getting back into shape. Back in the ancient times (mid-80s), they were the undisputed king of hard drives. They almost bit the dust, but are now making some pretty good iron. --
There's no need to reinvent the wheel. The latest version of RPM is capable of building binary RPMs directly from pristine tarballs (if the tarballs are formatted a certain way) using one invocation with the -ta flag. It would be rather trivial to extend that to automatically install it, after the binary RPM has been built. Let's say...
rpm -taci tarball.tar.gz
("-taci" is the acronym for tarball compile and install)
or,
rpm -tacir tarball.tar.gz
... which would be the same thing, except instead of installing the binary RPM directly, it would execute su root -c "rpm -i tarball.%{_arch}.rpm". This would be usefull when doing non-root rpm build-roots (as everyone should be doing already). --
There was once a period of time where I had too much free time on my hands, and, for a lack of anything better to do, I chose to entertain myself my engaging in useless Usenet flame wars.
There were completely useless, but they were fun. And I learned something very key while doing that.
The key to winning a confrontation relies on setting the rules, and taking advantage of your strength, and avoiding placing yourself in a position where someone can exploit your weaknesses.
As a very brief example: I'm pretty good at writing scripts, and little hacks, so when I found myself engaged in a drawn out flamewar with a typical usenet.whacko, I wrote a bunch of macros which assisted me in putting together replies to that unnamed whacko's posts. They were pretty predictable in nature, and somewhat repetitive, and by leveraging my scripts I was able to put together the requisite replies very quickly, in a very short period of time. As the flamewar progressed and expanded, he was forced to expend a great deal of time posting in response, while my comebacks took almost no time to put together. Eventually, he got tired of it all, and I could stake a claim to another useless "victory".
I believe that the way to attack the assault from the DVD industry is to adopt a similar kind of a strategy. Figure out what our strengths are, and change the rules of the game to take advantage of them.
The DVD industry's main strength are the resources by which they can legally harass individuals. I think that fighting this out in courts is something that few of us are prepared to do. The combination of brain-dead judges, brain-dead politicians, and brain-dead legislation, works to DVD CCA's advantage. Battling this in court is a losing battle.
So, let's rewrite the rules of the game. Move it to the grounds where we have unprecedented advantage over the DVD industry: our computers. We can beat the shit out of them, and nobody is going to stop us.
Simply put: move our butts, put our collective heads together, write a Linux DVD player, then tell the DVD CCA to go and fuck themselves. They won't be able to do anything about it. The code is out there. Anyone will be able to download it, and use it. The DVD CCA will not be able to do anything about anyone viewing DVDs that they legally bought and paid for.
DECSS is already out there, of course, but in its present form it is of very little use to anyone.
Phase 1: rewrite DeCSS into a more modular, recyclable form.
Phase 2: develop a standalone DVD player, that is only capable of playing unencrypted DVDs. It is my understanding that DVDs to do not have to be encrypted, like your home movies, for example. The DVD CCA's entire legal claim is based upon either trade secret or copyright law, depending on which side of bed you get up in the morning. With a player for unencrypted videos only, none of that applies, and I think that even our brain dead politicians would raise an eyebrow if the DVD cartel would try to go after even this kind of a software product.
Phase 3: put two and two together. I still have a vain hope that there is a spot of dirt somewhere on this Earth of ours where sanity still prevails, and the individual's right to free speech and expression is still sacred, and where a fully-featured DVD player can be published and supported. Once a useful DVD player is out there, no amount of legal harassment by the DVD cartel will make it go away. Once it happens, the DVD industry has lost.
Redefine the rules. Play their game, but according to our rules. --
Last evening I was experiencing an intermittent bout of nausea, which started soon after I had the misfortune of accidentally catching a Jenny Craig tee-vee commercial, starring the former White House intern.
Yeah, I bet the president would want to order a couple of those -- "Yeah, baby, let's see how that sounds, sugar!"
... pard'n me, looks like I need to go and hurl into the toilet bowl, again... --
I seemed to get an inconsistent rpm database and from that point no installation or desinstallation would go cleanly.
It does appear that RPM might have a couple of tiny bugs lurking in there somewhere. I did ran into some minor RPM database corruption once, rpm --rebuilddb cleared it up. Mind that this was on a machine that I use for development, where I install, upgrade, and remove RPMs constantly. Given the kind of beating it took, I consider rpm's reliability to be above average.
I couldn't keep track of what files where installed...
rpm -q -l -vv package tells you where package was installed. RPM takes some getting used to. --
I wonder if there's anything that keeps etoys.com from simply refiling the lawsuit before next year's holiday spending season again. My impression is that etoys.com is really getting off scot-free here.
Let's face it, the only way that this kind of bullshit stops would be when ANYONE who brings frivolous and punitive lawsuits of this nature has to pay severe financial sanctions for abusing the legal process.
I'm, of course, not talking just about the etoys episode, but of others like that, like the current nonsense with the DVD-CCA. I'm not a big fan of class-action lawsuits, but I think that something like that, a class-action lawsuit, would be perfectly appropriate here. In my dreams, I see every Linux owner who wants to be able to play DVDs certified as a member of a class in an action against the DVD-CCA for restraint of trade and anti-competitive practices. The DVD-CCA is preventing anyone from introducing competitive DVD playing software, using coercion and intimidation. Microsoft is about to be grabbed by the short hairs, for doing something very similar, why can't the DVD-CCA? --
There was a thread on binary module compatibility on linux-kernel last month.
The short summary is this: it ain't gonna happen. Search the mailing list archives for the details.
I'm not sure I understand what is so terribly difficult for someone in that company to simply recompile the modules for every kernel rev that comes out. It's not like that we have a new kernel rev every day. Gee, how terrible: someone actually has to type 'make' every other month, or so.
This seems to me to be very logical. If you want to keep your module source closed, you can go ahead and do that, but then it becomes your sole responsibility to maintain your binary-only driver.
It seems that companies simply are looking for a free lunch. They want to keep their source closed, but then they also don't want to actively maintain their driver. Well, that's just not going to fly. If you want someone else to make sure that your module works in the next kernel rev, and you don't want that to be your responsibility, well, that's fine, but you'll have to open your source. Seems a fair tradeoff to me. --
UUNET was UDPed about a year and a half ago. Right now, their spam levels are barely a tenth of what they used to be before the UDP.
The last four times a UDP was called, it never actually went into place, after the waiting period. The recalcitrant provider always figured out how to get their collective sh*t together, and the UDP was called off. --
If Red Hat lowers the (certainly) obscene price of this package, and starts bundling this CC validation code with their commercial distro bundling, I wouldn't be surprised to see it reverse-engineered within a year from now.
Right now, the only reason that the CC validation code hasn't been reverse-engineered is probably because too few people have the code to play with, or that few people even know where to get it. For example, this is the first time I've ever heard of a CC validation code being available for Linux in the first place.
Red Hat will probably burn this 'ware onto the commercial version of their distro, which should be sufficient to flood the market with umpteen copies of it.
Let's put it this way: I'd be very much disappointed even this doesn't get reverse-engineered within a year. --
This is the first article that I've read which actually touches on the subject that I don't think I ever heard anyone mention before:
---------------------------------------------
[ Talking about the Windows OS ]
Worse, nobody dares change it. Nobody dares to fix bugs because it's such a mess that fixing one bug might just break a hundred programs that depend on that bug.... Whoa, that's some serious dissing. But I have to agree; as I work, I can just sense the inefficiency of the Windows OS.
[ Talking about trying out the Linux OS ]
I could just feel the power under the hood of this slick and efficient interface.
---------------------------------------------
Literally, when I use Win 98 or NT, I can really sense the inefficient, bloated, puddles of fat rippling behind the monitor screen. And I'm not running on ancient hardware - I've got a dual PII with 256 MB RAM and UW SCSI. Still, that's not enough to cover up all that bloated waste of code.
Running Linux "feels" different, and I'm not really talking just about the immediate responsiveness. Right from the beginning, you begin with a fresh start. When you boot Win98, when the splash screen disappears and the initially blank wallpaper pops up, and you sit there waiting for all the icons to show up, as the disk grinds an grinds away, you can't help but wonder what in ghods earth is going on down there. You sit there, cross your fingers, and hope that whatever crap its trying to load will work right, and not BSOD on me. Time and time again I swap some bit of hardware in the system, then boot into Windoze, and be greeted with some unwholly DLL upchucking all over the place, and then leaving me with a mess to clean up.
Cycle the machine, and after LILO load the kernel, I just don't get the same feeling that there's a voodoo ritual going inside the gray box. Everything comes up, nice, lean, and mean. You know exactly what's going on. Everything is highly modular, well organized, and in its place. --
At this point, due to netsol's track record along these matters, I'm too skeptical not to believe that things will continue to go the way of anyone who has a bigger wallet, and this is simply eye candy that's designed to merely put an air of legitimacy on this whole thing.
If someone doesn't want his domain to be yanked out from under him, the only way to assure that is to take his business to a different registrar that has much more sane dispute resolution policies.
This brings up a related point: I just happen to notice that aol.com is now registered by AOL's own domain registrar. Of course, there's no way in hell that anyone would permit aol.com to be reregistered in such a way as to make the domain vulnerable even for a split second, like what happened to races.com.
Which begs the following question: how can Joe Shmoe have his domain moved to a competing registrar without any chance of losing it due to netsol's usual fuckage, or is this a privilege that's only reserved for huge corporations with a fleet of lawyers? --
This NOT how you deal with errors that are billed to the credit card.
As soon as you discover a billing error, you contact the merchant. You report the problem to them, and you log the name and the time of everyone you spoke with. 48 hours later, call your credit card company, and find out if they issued a credit to your account. If not, call the merchant again, and repeat your request.
If 48 hours later there's still no credit, you write your credit card company, informing them that the charge is in dispute, attach your supporting information, and they will remove the charges for you, and charge it back to the merchant.
It's probably too late now, 9 months later, but this is what you should do next time. --
I'm happy to see that Linux software, in general, is definitely getting more shelf space in retail stores.
This afternoon I took a stroll into the local "Software Etc" franchise store in midtown Manhattan. They had an entire shelf space stuffed with Red Hat 6.1 Deluxe boxes (plus a handful of Mandrakes and SuSE boxes).
Last time I was there was about a month ago. They did have a handful if Red Hat boxes tucked away, but that's about it. Now, they have an entire shelf up front near the entrance, which is not too shabby. Keep in mind that this is midtown Manhattan, where retail estate is pretty expensive, and stores tend to be really tiny (this Software Etc store was about as large as a medium-sized living room). Shelf space is at a premium. --
CNN still makes most streams available for Realplayer. If you still need your daily fix of streaming media, you can always visit them. I'm not really much of a fan of streamed media, it's just that I get my news mostly from CNN anyway. --
Well, the fact that they may be "hard as hell to get ahold of" is beside the point. Allegedly poor customer service is not really why some people around here have an axe to grind with E*Trade.
Well, this is a rather interesting development, to say the least. --
I'm surprised nobody submitted the one where a man is suing Starbucks because the toilet in their restroom crushed his penis.
Hey, that doesn't sound like such a bad deal to me. Get your 1.5 million bucks, then go on a vaction to Australia. While you're their, stop by the local cosmetic surgeon and pay a small fee to have your penis reconstructed. Afterwards, you're good as new, and you have an extra million bucks in the bank account. --
Something tells me that free email and stock quotes aren't far behind.:-)
Prediction: within the next couple of months expect to see free email @redhat.(com|net). Although I myself admit that this is very silly, there is definitely some amount of geek appeal to having @redhat E-mail address. It'll certainly impress the PHB who reads your resume (if he doesn't know any better). --
For those who didn't get "the letter" (including me) and don't have million dollar accounts, you can try to get in on the deal with some online brokerage firms. (Etrade, for example)
Someone moderate that post 'Funny'. Sir, your suggestion that E*TRADE is going to underwrite this IPO is the funniest thing I've read in a long time. I can assure you that VA Linux was definitely in the loop, and they are acutely aware of the spectacular results of E*TRADE's last venture in underwriting a Linux-related IPO. In fact, I have a link somewhere to a CNET interview, which happened shortly after RHAT started trading, of VA Research tactfully promising to "avoid" the same mistakes.
I'm pretty confident that nobody in the Linux world will want to have to do ANYTHING with E*TRADE, for a long, long time. --
Yes, that's what my understanding was. The question then becomes: what does "The Letter" really gets you?
The only thing I can think of is that there might be an upper limit on the total number of participants, and the invitees get the first dibs. Nothing to do with the eventual share price, but the total number of participants might be limited. --
I hope everyone has seen the page where they present a fill-in-the-blanks demand letter from MS and Hasbro lawyers. It's just as funny as the "game" itself, however I wouldn't be surprised if they end up getting a real demand letter.
IANAL, they are clearly using several trademarks there. They should be OK on the copyright end, because it's a clear parody, but trademark-related issues might get thorny... --
About a year ago I replaced the motherboard in my server with a dual PII-400 board. The board+CPUs+RAM ran me just a little bit more than a thousand (I kept everything else - disk, monitor, etc...)
That was a year ago. Although I haven't checked the prices lately, I would expect a dual PIII-500 to run for about the same. According to this article, the complete system runs about $2500, so I'd be surprised if a complete dual PIII-500 server can't be had for the same amount of money.
Well, I got curious, and looked up VA Linux's prices. They quote $3600 for a dual PIII-500, but that's with a separate SCSI controller, and an 18 gig SCSI disk. That's a thousand bucks right there. I wasn't able to find what Kryotech puts in this machine, I'd be very surprised if they bundle something similar. Also, VA Linux usually comes out a little bit on a pricey side, and almost always you can get a better deal on the individual components elsewhere.
If you're looking for a cheapest way to boost the power of your existing system, it'll definitely be cheaper just getting a motherboard+CPU+RAM, and reusing the rest of your equipment, instead of buying a complete system like that. You'll probably get better performance too in a multi-tasking environment. A single 1 GHZ CPU would will come out on top only in situations that involve linear processing. Try benchmarking 'make -j 4', for example. A single CPU won't buy you much there. --
How does this switch handle hi res modes? The problem with my current KVM is that the quality of the video in hi res modes is completely unbearable. I'm not sure whether its the switch itself, or the cabling, or both.
By "hi res" I mean 85Mhz pixel clock (62.5 hsync, 76 vsync). That gives me 1024x768. I can probably go higher with my video card and monitor, but my current KVM can't even handle that resolution cleanly. --
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to be around one of those things without ear protection. Earlier this week, an old, slow, Barracuda crashed its heads on me, and I dropped in a 7.2K or 10K Hawk (forget which one) as a replacement. Man, that thing sounds like a jet engine when spinning up.
The story doesn't mention the Db of the 15K drive. The noise from high speed drives almost precludes them from being used on the desktop, if you keep your machine constantly on. Now that I need to get another drive, for a "semi-hot" standby replacement, I'll definitely be asking the ambient noise level before I get anything.
It's nice to see Seagate getting back into shape. Back in the ancient times (mid-80s), they were the undisputed king of hard drives. They almost bit the dust, but are now making some pretty good iron.
--
There's no need to reinvent the wheel. The latest version of RPM is capable of building binary RPMs directly from pristine tarballs (if the tarballs are formatted a certain way) using one invocation with the -ta flag. It would be rather trivial to extend that to automatically install it, after the binary RPM has been built. Let's say...
rpm -taci tarball.tar.gz
("-taci" is the acronym for tarball compile and install)
or,
rpm -tacir tarball.tar.gz
... which would be the same thing, except instead of installing the binary RPM directly, it would execute su root -c "rpm -i tarball.%{_arch}.rpm". This would be usefull when doing non-root rpm build-roots (as everyone should be doing already).
--
There was once a period of time where I had too much free time on my hands, and, for a lack of anything better to do, I chose to entertain myself my engaging in useless Usenet flame wars.
There were completely useless, but they were fun. And I learned something very key while doing that.
The key to winning a confrontation relies on setting the rules, and taking advantage of your strength, and avoiding placing yourself in a position where someone can exploit your weaknesses.
As a very brief example: I'm pretty good at writing scripts, and little hacks, so when I found myself engaged in a drawn out flamewar with a typical usenet.whacko, I wrote a bunch of macros which assisted me in putting together replies to that unnamed whacko's posts. They were pretty predictable in nature, and somewhat repetitive, and by leveraging my scripts I was able to put together the requisite replies very quickly, in a very short period of time. As the flamewar progressed and expanded, he was forced to expend a great deal of time posting in response, while my comebacks took almost no time to put together. Eventually, he got tired of it all, and I could stake a claim to another useless "victory".
I believe that the way to attack the assault from the DVD industry is to adopt a similar kind of a strategy. Figure out what our strengths are, and change the rules of the game to take advantage of them.
The DVD industry's main strength are the resources by which they can legally harass individuals. I think that fighting this out in courts is something that few of us are prepared to do. The combination of brain-dead judges, brain-dead politicians, and brain-dead legislation, works to DVD CCA's advantage. Battling this in court is a losing battle.
So, let's rewrite the rules of the game. Move it to the grounds where we have unprecedented advantage over the DVD industry: our computers. We can beat the shit out of them, and nobody is going to stop us.
Simply put: move our butts, put our collective heads together, write a Linux DVD player, then tell the DVD CCA to go and fuck themselves. They won't be able to do anything about it. The code is out there. Anyone will be able to download it, and use it. The DVD CCA will not be able to do anything about anyone viewing DVDs that they legally bought and paid for.
DECSS is already out there, of course, but in its present form it is of very little use to anyone.
Phase 1: rewrite DeCSS into a more modular, recyclable form.
Phase 2: develop a standalone DVD player, that is only capable of playing unencrypted DVDs. It is my understanding that DVDs to do not have to be encrypted, like your home movies, for example. The DVD CCA's entire legal claim is based upon either trade secret or copyright law, depending on which side of bed you get up in the morning. With a player for unencrypted videos only, none of that applies, and I think that even our brain dead politicians would raise an eyebrow if the DVD cartel would try to go after even this kind of a software product.
Phase 3: put two and two together. I still have a vain hope that there is a spot of dirt somewhere on this Earth of ours where sanity still prevails, and the individual's right to free speech and expression is still sacred, and where a fully-featured DVD player can be published and supported. Once a useful DVD player is out there, no amount of legal harassment by the DVD cartel will make it go away. Once it happens, the DVD industry has lost.
Redefine the rules. Play their game, but according to our rules.
--
Last evening I was experiencing an intermittent bout of nausea, which started soon after I had the misfortune of accidentally catching a Jenny Craig tee-vee commercial, starring the former White House intern.
Yeah, I bet the president would want to order a couple of those -- "Yeah, baby, let's see how that sounds, sugar!"
... pard'n me, looks like I need to go and hurl into the toilet bowl, again...
--
Oh, give me a clone,
a clone of my own,
with the Y chromosome changed to X.
And when it's full grown,
my very own clone,
will be thinking of nothing but sex.
Chorus:
Clone, clone of my own,
with the Y chromosome changed to X,
and when it's full grown,
my very own clone,
will be thinking of nothing but sex.
--
It does appear that RPM might have a couple of tiny bugs lurking in there somewhere. I did ran into some minor RPM database corruption once, rpm --rebuilddb cleared it up. Mind that this was on a machine that I use for development, where I install, upgrade, and remove RPMs constantly. Given the kind of beating it took, I consider rpm's reliability to be above average.
I couldn't keep track of what files where installed...
rpm -q -l -vv package tells you where package was installed. RPM takes some getting used to.
--
I wonder if there's anything that keeps etoys.com from simply refiling the lawsuit before next year's holiday spending season again. My impression is that etoys.com is really getting off scot-free here.
Let's face it, the only way that this kind of bullshit stops would be when ANYONE who brings frivolous and punitive lawsuits of this nature has to pay severe financial sanctions for abusing the legal process.
I'm, of course, not talking just about the etoys episode, but of others like that, like the current nonsense with the DVD-CCA. I'm not a big fan of class-action lawsuits, but I think that something like that, a class-action lawsuit, would be perfectly appropriate here. In my dreams, I see every Linux owner who wants to be able to play DVDs certified as a member of a class in an action against the DVD-CCA for restraint of trade and anti-competitive practices. The DVD-CCA is preventing anyone from introducing competitive DVD playing software, using coercion and intimidation. Microsoft is about to be grabbed by the short hairs, for doing something very similar, why can't the DVD-CCA?
--
Are SB Live drivers now in the kernel tree, or is it that the source is merely downloadable from Creative? Just curious.
--
There was a thread on binary module compatibility on linux-kernel last month.
The short summary is this: it ain't gonna happen. Search the mailing list archives for the details.
I'm not sure I understand what is so terribly difficult for someone in that company to simply recompile the modules for every kernel rev that comes out. It's not like that we have a new kernel rev every day. Gee, how terrible: someone actually has to type 'make' every other month, or so.
This seems to me to be very logical. If you want to keep your module source closed, you can go ahead and do that, but then it becomes your sole responsibility to maintain your binary-only driver.
It seems that companies simply are looking for a free lunch. They want to keep their source closed, but then they also don't want to actively maintain their driver. Well, that's just not going to fly. If you want someone else to make sure that your module works in the next kernel rev, and you don't want that to be your responsibility, well, that's fine, but you'll have to open your source. Seems a fair tradeoff to me.
--
UUNET was UDPed about a year and a half ago. Right now, their spam levels are barely a tenth of what they used to be before the UDP.
The last four times a UDP was called, it never actually went into place, after the waiting period. The recalcitrant provider always figured out how to get their collective sh*t together, and the UDP was called off.
--
If Red Hat lowers the (certainly) obscene price of this package, and starts bundling this CC validation code with their commercial distro bundling, I wouldn't be surprised to see it reverse-engineered within a year from now.
Right now, the only reason that the CC validation code hasn't been reverse-engineered is probably because too few people have the code to play with, or that few people even know where to get it. For example, this is the first time I've ever heard of a CC validation code being available for Linux in the first place.
Red Hat will probably burn this 'ware onto the commercial version of their distro, which should be sufficient to flood the market with umpteen copies of it.
Let's put it this way: I'd be very much disappointed even this doesn't get reverse-engineered within a year.
--
This is the first article that I've read which actually touches on the subject that I don't think I ever heard anyone mention before:
---------------------------------------------
[ Talking about the Windows OS ]
Worse, nobody dares change it. Nobody dares to fix bugs because it's such a mess that fixing one bug might just break a hundred programs that depend on that bug. ... Whoa, that's some serious dissing. But I have to agree; as I work, I can just sense the inefficiency of the Windows OS.
[ Talking about trying out the Linux OS ]
I could just feel the power under the hood of this slick and efficient interface.
---------------------------------------------
Literally, when I use Win 98 or NT, I can really sense the inefficient, bloated, puddles of fat rippling behind the monitor screen. And I'm not running on ancient hardware - I've got a dual PII with 256 MB RAM and UW SCSI. Still, that's not enough to cover up all that bloated waste of code.
Running Linux "feels" different, and I'm not really talking just about the immediate responsiveness. Right from the beginning, you begin with a fresh start. When you boot Win98, when the splash screen disappears and the initially blank wallpaper pops up, and you sit there waiting for all the icons to show up, as the disk grinds an grinds away, you can't help but wonder what in ghods earth is going on down there. You sit there, cross your fingers, and hope that whatever crap its trying to load will work right, and not BSOD on me. Time and time again I swap some bit of hardware in the system, then boot into Windoze, and be greeted with some unwholly DLL upchucking all over the place, and then leaving me with a mess to clean up.
Cycle the machine, and after LILO load the kernel, I just don't get the same feeling that there's a voodoo ritual going inside the gray box. Everything comes up, nice, lean, and mean. You know exactly what's going on. Everything is highly modular, well organized, and in its place.
--
At this point, due to netsol's track record along these matters, I'm too skeptical not to believe that things will continue to go the way of anyone who has a bigger wallet, and this is simply eye candy that's designed to merely put an air of legitimacy on this whole thing.
If someone doesn't want his domain to be yanked out from under him, the only way to assure that is to take his business to a different registrar that has much more sane dispute resolution policies.
This brings up a related point: I just happen to notice that aol.com is now registered by AOL's own domain registrar. Of course, there's no way in hell that anyone would permit aol.com to be reregistered in such a way as to make the domain vulnerable even for a split second, like what happened to races.com.
Which begs the following question: how can Joe Shmoe have his domain moved to a competing registrar without any chance of losing it due to netsol's usual fuckage, or is this a privilege that's only reserved for huge corporations with a fleet of lawyers?
--
This NOT how you deal with errors that are billed to the credit card.
As soon as you discover a billing error, you contact the merchant. You report the problem to them, and you log the name and the time of everyone you spoke with. 48 hours later, call your credit card company, and find out if they issued a credit to your account. If not, call the merchant again, and repeat your request.
If 48 hours later there's still no credit, you write your credit card company, informing them that the charge is in dispute, attach your supporting information, and they will remove the charges for you, and charge it back to the merchant.
It's probably too late now, 9 months later, but this is what you should do next time.
--
I'm happy to see that Linux software, in general, is definitely getting more shelf space in retail stores.
This afternoon I took a stroll into the local "Software Etc" franchise store in midtown Manhattan. They had an entire shelf space stuffed with Red Hat 6.1 Deluxe boxes (plus a handful of Mandrakes and SuSE boxes).
Last time I was there was about a month ago. They did have a handful if Red Hat boxes tucked away, but that's about it. Now, they have an entire shelf up front near the entrance, which is not too shabby. Keep in mind that this is midtown Manhattan, where retail estate is pretty expensive, and stores tend to be really tiny (this Software Etc store was about as large as a medium-sized living room). Shelf space is at a premium.
--
CNN still makes most streams available for Realplayer. If you still need your daily fix of streaming media, you can always visit them. I'm not really much of a fan of streamed media, it's just that I get my news mostly from CNN anyway.
--
Well, the fact that they may be "hard as hell to get ahold of" is beside the point. Allegedly poor customer service is not really why some people around here have an axe to grind with E*Trade.
Well, this is a rather interesting development, to say the least.
--
Since when did E*Trade became a LNUX underwriter?
VA Linux has some 'splaining to do.
--
I'm surprised nobody submitted the one where a man is suing Starbucks because the toilet in their restroom crushed his penis.
Hey, that doesn't sound like such a bad deal to me. Get your 1.5 million bucks, then go on a vaction to Australia. While you're their, stop by the local cosmetic surgeon and pay a small fee to have your penis reconstructed. Afterwards, you're good as new, and you have an extra million bucks in the bank account.
--
Something tells me that free email and stock quotes aren't far behind. :-)
Prediction: within the next couple of months expect to see free email @redhat.(com|net). Although I myself admit that this is very silly, there is definitely some amount of geek appeal to having @redhat E-mail address. It'll certainly impress the PHB who reads your resume (if he doesn't know any better).
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Someone moderate that post 'Funny'. Sir, your suggestion that E*TRADE is going to underwrite this IPO is the funniest thing I've read in a long time. I can assure you that VA Linux was definitely in the loop, and they are acutely aware of the spectacular results of E*TRADE's last venture in underwriting a Linux-related IPO. In fact, I have a link somewhere to a CNET interview, which happened shortly after RHAT started trading, of VA Research tactfully promising to "avoid" the same mistakes.
I'm pretty confident that nobody in the Linux world will want to have to do ANYTHING with E*TRADE, for a long, long time.
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No need for a letter.
Yes, that's what my understanding was. The question then becomes: what does "The Letter" really gets you?
The only thing I can think of is that there might be an upper limit on the total number of participants, and the invitees get the first dibs. Nothing to do with the eventual share price, but the total number of participants might be limited.
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I hope everyone has seen the page where they present a fill-in-the-blanks demand letter from MS and Hasbro lawyers. It's just as funny as the "game" itself, however I wouldn't be surprised if they end up getting a real demand letter.
IANAL, they are clearly using several trademarks there. They should be OK on the copyright end, because it's a clear parody, but trademark-related issues might get thorny...
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About a year ago I replaced the motherboard in my server with a dual PII-400 board. The board+CPUs+RAM ran me just a little bit more than a thousand (I kept everything else - disk, monitor, etc...)
That was a year ago. Although I haven't checked the prices lately, I would expect a dual PIII-500 to run for about the same. According to this article, the complete system runs about $2500, so I'd be surprised if a complete dual PIII-500 server can't be had for the same amount of money.
Well, I got curious, and looked up VA Linux's prices. They quote $3600 for a dual PIII-500, but that's with a separate SCSI controller, and an 18 gig SCSI disk. That's a thousand bucks right there. I wasn't able to find what Kryotech puts in this machine, I'd be very surprised if they bundle something similar. Also, VA Linux usually comes out a little bit on a pricey side, and almost always you can get a better deal on the individual components elsewhere.
If you're looking for a cheapest way to boost the power of your existing system, it'll definitely be cheaper just getting a motherboard+CPU+RAM, and reusing the rest of your equipment, instead of buying a complete system like that. You'll probably get better performance too in a multi-tasking environment. A single 1 GHZ CPU would will come out on top only in situations that involve linear processing. Try benchmarking 'make -j 4', for example. A single CPU won't buy you much there.
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How does this switch handle hi res modes? The problem with my current KVM is that the quality of the video in hi res modes is completely unbearable. I'm not sure whether its the switch itself, or the cabling, or both.
By "hi res" I mean 85Mhz pixel clock (62.5 hsync, 76 vsync). That gives me 1024x768. I can probably go higher with my video card and monitor, but my current KVM can't even handle that resolution cleanly.
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