I recently got a brand-new ATI All-In-Wonder 7500 and combined it with an older PCI ATI Mach 64 card to build a nice fast dualhead Win XP machine for some friends.
(I'm Linux-only myself these days, but they needed to run a particular Windows program which requires dualhead and has no current Linux equivalent.)
With the latest drivers from ATI's web site, TV in didn't work, and TV-Out didn't work properly. It turns out that buried in their knowlege base was an acknowlegement of this problem and that "it is being worked on". Ok great, so they shipped this thing with the MAJOR FUNCTIONALITY simply not working???
After messing around with several reinstalls and driver versions, (by the way, Red Hat 8 is _easier_ to install than Windows XP these days) I ripped the thing out and put in a (cheaper!) Matrox card which worked perfectly out of the gate.
On the contrary, Red Hat 8 is what got me to switch from Mandrake. And I ditched my last Windows 2000 machine at the same time. Now all my computers run Red Hat 8.
The desktop integration thing wasn't a big deal to me, I prefer to mostly use gnome apps anyway. But it looks good, the font rendering and display control panel with resolution switching is sweet, it has all the latest n greatest development tools, and an up-to-date-enough Ximian Evolution that I didn't need to install Ximian RedCarpet - so I can update and manage the whole thing just with up2date instead of up2date + redcarpet.
I'm really pleased with it. There are just a few little things I need to fix from a default installation:
- add/sbin, usr/sbin, usr/local/sbin to every user's path, not just root,
- fix rc.sysinit to start the firewire drivers before attempting to mount/home (I keep my/home on an external firewire drive)
- Compile and install lame from source, and install the XMMS mp3 plugin for mp3 support...
- Install the real Java SDK and JRE from Sun.
And that's about it. Everything else just works fine.
I even paid for a subscription to the Red Hat Network.
Re:Just to remind people why more bits is good..
on
AMD's 64-bit Plot
·
· Score: 2
64-bit really should be enough for a hundred years. If you could turn every atom of the earth into a bit of storage, 64 bit addressing would still be enough to give every byte a unique address. (or something like that.)
So, unless we find a way to make computers without atoms (memory made entirely of energy in some sort of star-trek-esque subspace lattice?), or, it becomes common for single computers to contain as much matter as a planet, 64 bits will be enough...
I'd bet you a petabyte of memory we'll be fine for 100 years:-)
Its also readily apparent that both Microsoft and Big Media have bet the farm on DRM.
I disagree - two of the papers at the conference were presented by Microsoft Research people. They are quite interesting, one shows how to defeat any currently deployed watermarking scheme, and the other discusses the bigger picture of DRM and watermarking vs. peer to peer networks and other forms of file sharing.
Both papers are very sceptical of DRM.
Microsoft may be playing the DRM game for now, but I'm sure it's just a temporary thing... if they convince Hollywood and the record studios that Windows Media Player is the "only secure" format, they will potentially gain a short term advantage over the competition. And in this industry, a short term advantage can be leveraged into a long term industry lead... Profit !
Yeah, in the long run all the schemes will be broken and Microsoft knows it, but they're happy to play the game for now.
My 4 year old Marantz CD player has a digital SPDIF out. My M-Audio Audiophile 2496 sound card has a digital SPDIF in. They work perfectly together.
Soooooo.... if my old CD player can play it, I can make a perfect digital copy. And I will.
The only thing the record companies achieve by attempting to copy-protect stuff is annoying me, which will make me buy less new stuff, and more likely to give copies of music to my friends.
Re:Devil's advocate
on
Fritz's Hit List
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Well, I don't think we'd ever quite reach the point of modifying a toy cash register.
There would be lots of interesting market effects if this law passes though. For instance, if the law passes there will be a short grace period to allow non-compliant hardware to be sold through the supply chains.
So, I expect that there would be a rush to stock up the last generation of uncrippled hardware. I personally would try to buy at least a dozen of the biggest hard drives I could get my hands on, and a few fast computers to plug them into.
Also, there would be a black market for uncrippled hardware smuggled in from free countries to the US. Imagine buying hard drives and motherboards made in China out of the back of a car under a bridge somewhere...
I expect there would also be some sort of "pro" hardware without the crippling locks. It would either be a lot more expensive or you would need a "media production license" to buy it. But some of it would leak into the regular market anyway.
But anyway, I'm not too worried about digital music storage. Four 120 GB drives would make a RAID-5 big enough for me to rip and store another two thousand CDs together with the ~2000 I already have on-line. I'd keep enough spare hard drives in storage to replace the ones I'm using as they fail over a decade or two. Even if they are obsolete, they will still work and be big enough.
By then the law will have been found unconstitutional, or I'll have moved to a free country, or both.
Er, I don't think so. You can be an NT admin with a 6-month cram course to get your MCSC right out of high school. An NT admin doesn't need to know any computer programming at all. Their job is about ACLs, registry settings, configuring IIS, and rebooting when things go wrong. This is not a very creative job.
Software engineers, on the other hand, typically have a BSc. in computer science at least. They do computer programming. They know about things like analysis of algorithms, optimization, theory of relational databases, how to write a parser, (and what a parser is), and typically are skilled in at least three computer languages. They have taken a lot of math. Their job is mostly about solving problems - maybe not always breaking new ground, but on a good day it deserves the name engineering.
Yes, this is a generalization. Yes, there are NT admins who can program, there are good software engineers who never graduated from high school, yeah, yeah, I know. But mostly, NT admins are NOT software engineers.
Well, I didn't know that Epson had their own software for Linux. That's cool, and I'll certainly check it out when they sort out the GPL thing... but I've got an Epson 1240u scanner which works just great under Linux with the SANE software that comes with most distributions.
SANE is very nice - integrates with the GIMP, so you can scan directly into the GIMP, plus has a standalone scanner app, does color correction and all the other basic stuff you'd expect.
Backups are easy. Get two drives. Spend $100 bucks to get a firewire card and IDE-firewire external case.
One 320 GB drive in the computer. One in the external firewire case. Every few days, mirror from the internal to the external, and then put it back in the safe.
Really, it isn't rocket science. What's the problem?
Well... I think it depends on the drink as much as the culture or country.
For example, in my one experience in a Munich beergarden, I found that Coke came only in small glasses.
Beer, on the other hand, could be ordered in a few sizes, including "large", "very large", and "2 litre, two-hands-required-to-lift the 20-pounds-of-glass-and beer" size.
Companies that spam know that what they are doing is illegal in many places, of course. They typically attempt to firewall themselves by hiring "independent" people to *cough* "send their advertising only to those who have requested it". You know.... " If you are receiving this mail, it is because you signed up for it!"
Then when those independent people spam every email address on the planet, if you go back to the company to complain, they would say (if you could pin them down), "oh dear, the independent advertising agent we hired must not have followed best practices, we asked them not to spam!"
"No, we can't really help you track them down and sue them, we just have a post office box address and a cashed cheque..."
"good luck... (giggle)"
So then you think: The solution is to make it explicit in law that companies are responsible for the actions of anyone they hire to advertise for them.
No, won't work. The company will claim to have never paid anyone to advertise (spam) for them. How will you prove it?
All you have is the company name and phone number on a spam bounced off some anonymous relay in Korea, and the company claims they had nothing to do with it. They will claim that someone is trying to make them look bad by forging spam from them. It might even be true.
My best idea is public execution of spammers, preferably by hanging. After the first few die on live TV, the others might become discouraged.
Yes, it would be AWESOME if Evolution just had a checkbox in the mail preferences dialog where you could turn on SpamAssassin or other filtering programs.
However, I have SpamAssassin working with Evolution now. It was kind of a hassle to set up but it works... here's the overview:
- get and install SpamAssassin, test that it works by piping a good email and a spam email through it - check that my fetchmail works, write a.fetchmailrc file - check that my procmail works, write a.procmailrc file - disable the regular pop mailboxes in Evolution - add a new "local delivery" mailbox to Evolution - wrote a tiny script I called "getmail" that does "fetchmail -m procmail" and make sure that it gets my email from the POP3 server correctly - added the getmail to my crontab to run every 5 minutes - added a filter rule to Evolution: if specific header X-Spam-Flag = YES, drop the email in my Spam folder
and that was it.:-/ No more spam! But you can see why having this integrated into Evolution would be nice.
Recording Industry Association of America president Hilary Rosen calls the proposal "the most disingenuous thing I've ever heard. It's ridiculous."
Yeah of course it's ridiculous Hilary - if this catches on, not only would artists get paid (maybe _better_ than they get paid under the current cartel scheme) but the RIAA would quickly become pointless... and then where would your job go? Boo hoo.
If a lot of recording artists put their support behind this proposal, the RIAA might be just a memory in a few years. I like it. Of course the devil is in the details - how to track usage while respecting privacy, how to pay artists...
simply set up a schedule where you withdraw the exact same amount of cash from the same ATM every couple of days... like, every Saturday morning without exception, take $100 cash out of your bank's ATM. Use that for all your purchases for the week. Keep the extra cash, if any. At the end of every month, deposit the extra cash on Friday...
that would make it really hard for anyone to correlate cash purchases with your cash withdrawals. Much more likely they'll have image/face recognition software hooked to security cameras before then.
Actually, that's what worries me... there are millions of security cameras in North America now, and if they were all hooked together to some sort of network with facial recognition, that would be one killer tracking system. And the government wouldn't even need to get involved... a private company could do it, and offer it as a service to stores.
Merchants! Join the SecuriTrack Network, and we'll automatically notify your in-store security the minute any known shoplifter, protestor, or other troublemaker walks onto your property... even if they've never been to your store before! We provide a system that attaches to your existing in-store camera system, and does facial recognition against our nation-wide database of thousands of offenders...
Why should the government pay for research and development of software under a license that allows Microsoft to take it, modify it (perhaps trivially, perhaps integrate it into the OS) and then sell it back to the US government and citizens for $big profits?
If the government pays for research and development of GPL'ed software, they are ensuring that the government, US citizens, and US corporations will always be free to use the fruits of that work, even after it has been extended. That's how I would prefer my tax dollars to be spent, thanks.
And I don't want to hear any whining here about how no-one will bother extending or improving the software if they can't profit from it. The entire history of Linux and other GPL'ed software has proven that theory wrong...
Well, back before domainnamebuyersguide was bought out, I used it to pick Domain Discover
Their prices have gone up a little since I originally registered arnor.net and my other site, but their domain registration agreement is still readable, clearly states that you own the domain, and they can only take it away according to ICANN policies or non-payment. The web site makes it easy to modify the configuration for your domains. The free features like email and web site forwarding are really useful. If I register more domains, I'll keep going there.
And I should also mention Hosting-Network, Inc where I've got my site. I'm on the $60/year plan, they don't mess with your site, server is BSD/Apache with PHP,CGI and Perl, you get email addresses, lots of webspace, and your own IP address. It rocks.
At prices like this, everyone should have their own domain, website, and set of email addresses...
1. Run a good cable from the SPDIF out of your CD player to the SPDIF in of sound card (1) 2. Start digital recording software on PC that came with sound card 3. play cd track by track, splitting recording into tracks on computer 4. Encode tracks to.ogg 5. Add to your.ogg jukebox music collection 6. If in Canada, you can legally burn copies for your friends, that's what the levy on blank CD's is paying for.
(1) I recommend the MAudio Audiophile 2496 sound card. It is well supported by the Linux ALSA drivers, comes with some good software for Windows, and has complete override ability for the SPDIF copy control system. Also, the onboard 24-bit 96 Khz analog to digital converters are very good, if you ever need to do an analog rip.
I would be most interested if anybody has information that might clarify why non-Windows operating systems are locked out.
My guess is that it's because Microsoft has the majority of desktop systems, and also because they are working on building copy protection stuff right into the OS. Signed drivers, Windows Media Player and WMF, forced automatic upgrades, EULA's that allow MS to disable your system if they think you're trying to get around their control...
remember kids: if you run a Microsoft OS, it isn't really your computer anymore...
Microsoft is well aware of the Linux at University threat and is trying to deal with it.
I live in Redmond, and one of my friends works for Microsoft in their university PR / support department. I can't remember the exact name of their group, but it is a fairly large, well funded part of Microsoft that tries very hard to push MS products in education. They know that if they don't win this, a whole generation of computer science students will have lots of Linux experience, and will have learned the relative merits of the various operating systems out there. The consequences for Microsoft would be disasterous. Fortunately they are not doing so well in this area, even when they give away software and hardware for free.
Adding to the damage for MS is the fact that many of these students contribute to GPL'ed software, and also have opportunities to work on Linux and other free software on exotic hardware. Beowulf clusters are commonplace now, and university research teams are doing all sorts of wild and crazy stuff with Linux.
Microsoft just can't compete with that - in desparation, they are allowing some universities to have access to Windows source code, but they are still losing the mindset war.
Every time you hit refresh, Slashdot pays for the server & network bandwidth to send that to you.
It's only fair that you pay for the bandwidth you use. You can easily reduce your number of page views... just wait until the story has been up for a while, and then read it and all the (filtered) comments on it just once.
I like the proposed plan. Slashdot pays per gig of bandwidth, so the only fair billing scheme is one that considers bandwidth used. I think I'll probably sign up, but I'll wait until there's an alternative to PayPal. .
I need to re-read Diamond Age... the Judge is an awesome character.
If you have made some progress on your project, and have it at the point where some infrastructure and architechture is done, with enough content in it that people can play with it and see the potential... then you are at the right point to open source it! I would be interested in looking at it and contributing to it, I have a 1-year old nephew that I'd like to see have this sort of thing...
I assume you are already leveraging the masses of free content out there? What kind of hardware platform? (I'd suggest assuming hardware slightly better than the very best available now, by the time you have the software ready the hardware will be available and cheap.)
Slashdot Mirror
Amen to that.
I recently got a brand-new ATI All-In-Wonder 7500 and combined it with an older PCI ATI Mach 64 card to build a nice fast dualhead Win XP machine for some friends.
(I'm Linux-only myself these days, but they needed to run a particular Windows program which requires dualhead and has no current Linux equivalent.)
With the latest drivers from ATI's web site, TV in didn't work, and TV-Out didn't work properly. It turns out that buried in their knowlege base was an acknowlegement of this problem and that "it is being worked on". Ok great, so they shipped this thing with the MAJOR FUNCTIONALITY simply not working???
After messing around with several reinstalls and driver versions, (by the way, Red Hat 8 is _easier_ to install than Windows XP these days) I ripped the thing out and put in a (cheaper!) Matrox card which worked perfectly out of the gate.
On the contrary, Red Hat 8 is what got me to switch from Mandrake. And I ditched my last Windows 2000 machine at the same time. Now all my computers run Red Hat 8.
/sbin, usr/sbin, usr/local/sbin to every user's path, not just root,
/home (I keep my /home on an external firewire drive)
The desktop integration thing wasn't a big deal to me, I prefer to mostly use gnome apps anyway. But it looks good, the font rendering and display control panel with resolution switching is sweet, it has all the latest n greatest development tools, and an up-to-date-enough Ximian Evolution that I didn't need to install Ximian RedCarpet - so I can update and manage the whole thing just with up2date instead of up2date + redcarpet.
I'm really pleased with it. There are just a few little things I need to fix from a default installation:
- add
- fix rc.sysinit to start the firewire drivers before attempting to mount
- Compile and install lame from source, and install the XMMS mp3 plugin for mp3 support...
- Install the real Java SDK and JRE from Sun.
And that's about it. Everything else just works fine.
I even paid for a subscription to the Red Hat Network.
64-bit really should be enough for a hundred years. If you could turn every atom of the earth into a bit of storage, 64 bit addressing would still be enough to give every byte a unique address. (or something like that.)
:-)
So, unless we find a way to make computers without atoms (memory made entirely of energy in some sort of star-trek-esque subspace lattice?), or, it becomes common for single computers to contain as much matter as a planet, 64 bits will be enough...
I'd bet you a petabyte of memory we'll be fine for 100 years
Both papers are very sceptical of DRM.
Microsoft may be playing the DRM game for now, but I'm sure it's just a temporary thing... if they convince Hollywood and the record studios that Windows Media Player is the "only secure" format, they will potentially gain a short term advantage over the competition. And in this industry, a short term advantage can be leveraged into a long term industry lead... Profit !
Yeah, in the long run all the schemes will be broken and Microsoft knows it, but they're happy to play the game for now.
Yeah, there's lots of ways to do this.
My 4 year old Marantz CD player has a digital SPDIF out. My M-Audio Audiophile 2496 sound card has a digital SPDIF in. They work perfectly together.
Soooooo.... if my old CD player can play it, I can make a perfect digital copy. And I will.
The only thing the record companies achieve by attempting to copy-protect stuff is annoying me, which will make me buy less new stuff, and more likely to give copies of music to my friends.
Well, I don't think we'd ever quite reach the point of modifying a toy cash register.
There would be lots of interesting market effects if this law passes though. For instance, if the law passes there will be a short grace period to allow non-compliant hardware to be sold through the supply chains.
So, I expect that there would be a rush to stock up the last generation of uncrippled hardware. I personally would try to buy at least a dozen of the biggest hard drives I could get my hands on, and a few fast computers to plug them into.
Also, there would be a black market for uncrippled hardware smuggled in from free countries to the US. Imagine buying hard drives and motherboards made in China out of the back of a car under a bridge somewhere...
I expect there would also be some sort of "pro" hardware without the crippling locks. It would either be a lot more expensive or you would need a "media production license" to buy it. But some of it would leak into the regular market anyway.
But anyway, I'm not too worried about digital music storage. Four 120 GB drives would make a RAID-5 big enough for me to rip and store another two thousand CDs together with the ~2000 I already have on-line. I'd keep enough spare hard drives in storage to replace the ones I'm using as they fail over a decade or two. Even if they are obsolete, they will still work and be big enough.
By then the law will have been found unconstitutional, or I'll have moved to a free country, or both.
Software engineers, on the other hand, typically have a BSc. in computer science at least. They do computer programming. They know about things like analysis of algorithms, optimization, theory of relational databases, how to write a parser, (and what a parser is), and typically are skilled in at least three computer languages. They have taken a lot of math. Their job is mostly about solving problems - maybe not always breaking new ground, but on a good day it deserves the name engineering.
Yes, this is a generalization. Yes, there are NT admins who can program, there are good software engineers who never graduated from high school, yeah, yeah, I know. But mostly, NT admins are NOT software engineers.
(a software engineer, and proud of it.)
BTW, LVM is already taken, it's "Logical Volume Manager", used for managing big hard drives, resizing partitions, and stuff like that.
VLM for Virtual Linux Machine would have been good, but too late now I think. Oh well.
Well, I didn't know that Epson had their own software for Linux. That's cool, and I'll certainly check it out when they sort out the GPL thing... but I've got an Epson 1240u scanner which works just great under Linux with the SANE software that comes with most distributions.
SANE is very nice - integrates with the GIMP, so you can scan directly into the GIMP, plus has a standalone scanner app, does color correction and all the other basic stuff you'd expect.
Backups are easy. Get two drives. Spend $100 bucks to get a firewire card and IDE-firewire external case.
One 320 GB drive in the computer. One in the external firewire case. Every few days, mirror from the internal to the external, and then put it back in the safe.
Really, it isn't rocket science. What's the problem?
Well... I think it depends on the drink as much as the culture or country.
For example, in my one experience in a Munich beergarden, I found that Coke came only in small glasses.
Beer, on the other hand, could be ordered in a few sizes, including "large", "very large", and "2 litre, two-hands-required-to-lift the 20-pounds-of-glass-and beer" size.
That was a good size.
I think your ex-workmate is just messing with your head.
Companies that spam know that what they are doing is illegal in many places, of course. They typically attempt to firewall themselves by hiring "independent" people to *cough* "send their advertising only to those who have requested it". You know.... " If you are receiving this mail, it is because you signed up for it!"
Then when those independent people spam every email address on the planet, if you go back to the company to complain, they would say (if you could pin them down), "oh dear, the independent advertising agent we hired must not have followed best practices, we asked them not to spam!"
"No, we can't really help you track them down and sue them, we just have a post office box address and a cashed cheque..."
"good luck... (giggle)"
So then you think: The solution is to make it explicit in law that companies are responsible for the actions of anyone they hire to advertise for them.
No, won't work. The company will claim to have never paid anyone to advertise (spam) for them. How will you prove it?
All you have is the company name and phone number on a spam bounced off some anonymous relay in Korea, and the company claims they had nothing to do with it. They will claim that someone is trying to make them look bad by forging spam from them. It might even be true.
My best idea is public execution of spammers, preferably by hanging. After the first few die on live TV, the others might become discouraged.
However, I have SpamAssassin working with Evolution now. It was kind of a hassle to set up but it works... here's the overview:
- get and install SpamAssassin, test that it works by piping a good email and a spam email through it
- check that my fetchmail works, write a
- check that my procmail works, write a
- disable the regular pop mailboxes in Evolution
- add a new "local delivery" mailbox to Evolution
- wrote a tiny script I called "getmail" that does "fetchmail -m procmail" and make sure that it gets my email from the POP3 server correctly
- added the getmail to my crontab to run every 5 minutes
- added a filter rule to Evolution: if specific header X-Spam-Flag = YES, drop the email in my Spam folder
and that was it.
Why? Because some of us have a heckuva lot more than 5 GB of music.
1000 songs? Big whoop. I've got well over 1000 CD's ripped - 86 GB of MP3 and OGG files, including the stuff I never listen to.
5 GB to me means having to make a relatively small selection of my favorite stuff, so having a removable drive is a great idea.
If a lot of recording artists put their support behind this proposal, the RIAA might be just a memory in a few years. I like it. Of course the devil is in the details - how to track usage while respecting privacy, how to pay artists...
but it might work...
Well, if you're that paranoid...
simply set up a schedule where you withdraw the exact same amount of cash from the same ATM every couple of days... like, every Saturday morning without exception, take $100 cash out of your bank's ATM. Use that for all your purchases for the week. Keep the extra cash, if any. At the end of every month, deposit the extra cash on Friday...
that would make it really hard for anyone to correlate cash purchases with your cash withdrawals. Much more likely they'll have image/face recognition software hooked to security cameras before then.
Actually, that's what worries me... there are millions of security cameras in North America now, and if they were all hooked together to some sort of network with facial recognition, that would be one killer tracking system. And the government wouldn't even need to get involved... a private company could do it, and offer it as a service to stores.
Merchants! Join the SecuriTrack Network, and we'll automatically notify your in-store security the minute any known shoplifter, protestor, or other troublemaker walks onto your property... even if they've never been to your store before! We provide a system that attaches to your existing in-store camera system, and does facial recognition against our nation-wide database of thousands of offenders...
eep!
Why should the government pay for research and development of software under a license that allows Microsoft to take it, modify it (perhaps trivially, perhaps integrate it into the OS) and then sell it back to the US government and citizens for $big profits?
If the government pays for research and development of GPL'ed software, they are ensuring that the government, US citizens, and US corporations will always be free to use the fruits of that work, even after it has been extended. That's how I would prefer my tax dollars to be spent, thanks.
And I don't want to hear any whining here about how no-one will bother extending or improving the software if they can't profit from it. The entire history of Linux and other GPL'ed software has proven that theory wrong...
Well, back before domainnamebuyersguide was bought out, I used it to pick Domain Discover
Their prices have gone up a little since I originally registered arnor.net and my other site, but their domain registration agreement is still readable, clearly states that you own the domain, and they can only take it away according to ICANN policies or non-payment. The web site makes it easy to modify the configuration for your domains. The free features like email and web site forwarding are really useful. If I register more domains, I'll keep going there.
And I should also mention Hosting-Network, Inc where I've got my site. I'm on the $60/year plan, they don't mess with your site, server is BSD/Apache with PHP,CGI and Perl, you get email addresses, lots of webspace, and your own IP address. It rocks.
At prices like this, everyone should have their own domain, website, and set of email addresses...
Or, an even better all-digital solution:
.ogg .ogg jukebox music collection
1. Run a good cable from the SPDIF out of your CD player to the SPDIF in of sound card (1)
2. Start digital recording software on PC that came with sound card
3. play cd track by track, splitting recording into tracks on computer
4. Encode tracks to
5. Add to your
6. If in Canada, you can legally burn copies for your friends, that's what the levy on blank CD's is paying for.
(1) I recommend the MAudio Audiophile 2496 sound card. It is well supported by the Linux ALSA drivers, comes with some good software for Windows, and has complete override ability for the SPDIF copy control system. Also, the onboard 24-bit 96 Khz analog to digital converters are very good, if you ever need to do an analog rip.
remember kids: if you run a Microsoft OS, it isn't really your computer anymore...
.
Microsoft is well aware of the Linux at University threat and is trying to deal with it.
I live in Redmond, and one of my friends works for Microsoft in their university PR / support department. I can't remember the exact name of their group, but it is a fairly large, well funded part of Microsoft that tries very hard to push MS products in education. They know that if they don't win this, a whole generation of computer science students will have lots of Linux experience, and will have learned the relative merits of the various operating systems out there. The consequences for Microsoft would be disasterous. Fortunately they are not doing so well in this area, even when they give away software and hardware for free.
Adding to the damage for MS is the fact that many of these students contribute to GPL'ed software, and also have opportunities to work on Linux and other free software on exotic hardware. Beowulf clusters are commonplace now, and university research teams are doing all sorts of wild and crazy stuff with Linux.
Microsoft just can't compete with that - in desparation, they are allowing some universities to have access to Windows source code, but they are still losing the mindset war.
Woohoo!
Every time you hit refresh, Slashdot pays for the server & network bandwidth to send that to you.
It's only fair that you pay for the bandwidth you use. You can easily reduce your number of page views... just wait until the story has been up for a while, and then read it and all the (filtered) comments on it just once.
I like the proposed plan. Slashdot pays per gig of bandwidth, so the only fair billing scheme is one that considers bandwidth used. I think I'll probably sign up, but I'll wait until there's an alternative to PayPal.
.
I need to re-read Diamond Age... the Judge is an awesome character.
If you have made some progress on your project, and have it at the point where some infrastructure and architechture is done, with enough content in it that people can play with it and see the potential... then you are at the right point to open source it! I would be interested in looking at it and contributing to it, I have a 1-year old nephew that I'd like to see have this sort of thing...
I assume you are already leveraging the masses of free content out there? What kind of hardware platform? (I'd suggest assuming hardware slightly better than the very best available now, by the time you have the software ready the hardware will be available and cheap.)
Regardless of wether it's a good idea or not, it's not as bad as you thought.
Read it again. Or at least read it:
The author of this guide did not use the dremel anywhere near the open hard drive.
The instructions boil down to:
- in the cleanest air you can make, pop the metal cover off the drive and immediately cover it with saran wrap
- take the metal cover out to your garage, cut the window in it, glue in the plexiglass, and then carefully clean every last speck of dust off it.
- back in your "clean room", take the saran wrap off the drive and put the modified cover back on.
This is still pretty risky of course, but it's not like he's suggesting taking a dremel tool to metal parts right next to the platters...
Actually, I'm tempted to try this on an old 10-GB drive I've got just for fun. It just might work.
And regarding the RF emissions other people have been whining about: geez, give me a break. Don't we all run our machines with the covers off anyway?