I've created a piece of software which makes it rather trivial to create custom bootable FreeBSD CDs. With a little work, it could be used to make a bootable CD with the same functionality as Knoppix. Sadly, I have yet to write any documentation, and the code is in a fairly early stage.
Feel free to check it out.
Wow. Did anyone notice that the sentence about the cisco woman being unqualified and then quitting was removed from the paragraph? Looks like someone had second thoughts...
I worked for a lab for about 18 months, during which time I setup a unix server with Samba and Netatalk to support several workstations. There were definitely some glitches with the cross-platform sharing, but it seemed to work moderately well, over all. Samba is *highly* configurable, and I suspect there is a way to get it to "play nice" with Netatalk's locking. Unfortunately, I'm not enough of a Samba guru to know what this would involve.
I'm an avid FreeBSD enthusiast, and I'm disappointed to see that Plex86 doesn't look like it will run under FreeBSD any time soon. Bochs, on the other hand, works fine under FreeBSD, but lacks many essential features that Plex86 appears to have. I was wondering what you will be doing (if anything) to ensure the platform independence of Plex86. Will you be leaving Bochs as the multi-platform solution? Will the Bochs be abandoned in favor of Plex86?
I'm a sophomore at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY. We have a manditory laptop program, and it seems to cause nothing but trouble:
Instructors are encouraged to integrate laptops into their courses, regardless of whether this integration actually benefits the student, or complements the material of the class. This leads to having online tests, simply to use the laptop. This would be fine, if the online test software functioned properly, which it doesn't. I have seen far more examples of poorly planned integration than I have seen of anything else.
On another rant: With workstations, the school is able to provide support for computing, instead of computers. Everything must be functioning properly on a campus workstation, because it is maintained by campus personell, and it must be available for coursework. Sadly, this doesn't work with laptops. If you have last year's model laptop, and your course demands software preloaded only on this year's model, it is your responsibility to get that software. You become your own sysadmin. This is fine for most computer-oriented people, but the majority of the students in most schools do not need to learn to be system administrators in order to benefit from classes. If your laptop is broken or is stolen (like 10% of last year's laptops), you fight your way through a 5-week backlog to get a repair or replacement.
I'm really sad to hear of the decision in this article. Politicians should not be deciding these things. If you want to see more rants about RPI's laptop program, These Folks do it better than I can.
I know you can do this with pppd under FreeBSD, and I bet you can do it under linux, as well. With FreeBSD, at least, a fairly simple set of options in/etc/ppp/ppp.conf will setup multilink ppp. Any number of connections could be shared this way, so if you wanted to have three or four modems on each end being split equally, it would work as easily as two. You shouldn't have to worry about routes, etc., any more than you do with PPP in a normal scenario.
If you haven't given FreeBSD a chance, yet, you're cheating yourself. It can do just about everything that linux can do, but usually it's easier to setup.:)
I was recently introduced to Evangelion. It is easily the best anime I have seen. The series gets more and more thought-provoking and introspective through each episode, until it finally ends in an amazing and thoroughly confusing climax.
Many readers have been posting about Evangelion's availability on VHS. I can confirm its availability on DVD, since I have the first DVD of the series. This DVD, released about a week ago, is the only one available. I picked it up at Electronics Boutique, but it's available online from www.buy.com, I believe. This DVD contains the first four episodes. The remaining 22? episodes should be released on DVD in the near future. I haven't heard any details about the future release dates. The DVD sports a cool menu interface, and the main 'extras' are: Japanese/English/French/Spanish voices, optional English subtitles, and a character/angel bio section.
I've watched this DVD three times in the last week. I can't wait for the rest to be released.
I don't think most schools are even close to ready to roll out anything resembing a laptop to students. Most teachers, sadly, have very little computer training, and hardware costs are still obscene.
My college, RPI, has a laptop program, and it has proven to me that even college-level educators have no idea what to do with computers in the classroom. Primarilly we use our Thinkpad 600E's for ICQ & AIM (in class), and to save RPI the money usually spent on upgrading desktop computer labs. Tuition does not cover these machines, and tuition just went up another 5% this year, putting it around $30,000 per year.
High schools and middle schools would be better off handing out something a little smaller, cheaper, and easier to understand. How about a palm-pilot, or a visor? For a few hundred dollars, a student would get a machine that would store assignments, write/read e-mail, and could beep students to remind them to go to their next class.:) I have a Visor now, and I keep thinking "I wish I had this in high school..."
My two cents: Endorse a hand-held now. Wait on the laptops, etc., until they are cheap, and teachers know how to use them. +++
I grabbed a TNT2 last summer, in a quest to build the *ultimate computer*. I ran linux, dual-booting win2k for games. Recently a friend talked me into trying out FreeBSD. So, I reformatted, and started running nothing but FreeBSD. I love the OS, and I don't intend to reformat again. Unfortunately, this still leaves me with a TNT2, and I probably won't even be able to load these "binary only" drivers that nvidia STILL hasn't released yet.
C'mon, Nvidia, where's the love? Why not release some open-source drivers, so that the non-windows and even non-linux world can love your hardware, too?
I heard from a grad student at my college that the language of C++ was invented on a bet that you couldn't do it. I was wondering if this was true, and what else inspired you to invent this language. +++
In the information age, digital forms of art, especially music and video, need to be sold as a service, not as a product. One cannot blame large traditional companies for not quickly realizing this, but one can definitely blame them for their efforts to hamper such progress.
Once the primary method of distribution is the internet, the cost of distribution should drop sharply. If the drop in cost of distribution is passed on to the user, the piracy problem is solved. Who will spend the time making and trading MP3s when higher quality versions are available faster for pennies, or better yet, for a flat fee of ~$20 a month?
My real worry is the following: The record and movie industries realize that the internet is the distribution medium of the future. The recent attacks on MP3s and DeCSS are not to prevent eventual internet distribution, but in fact to give the record and movie industries time to cement their control of this distribution medium. With standards like DVD and CSS in place with the backing of laws like the DMCA, one organization can have control of distribution of music or video for an entire medium. Imagine a future where CSS-like standards are in place for internet-distributed movies and audio. Laws like the DMCA make it a felony to remove such encryption, or even to write programs capable of removing such "protection". The companies in question then sell these protected files dirt-cheap, or as a cheap service, and completely replace MP3's. Only problem is, they still have complete control, and no competition. Record companies can still screw the artists and the customers. The movie industry can do the same. This is why MP3.com is being sued. This is why DeCSS is under attack. The corporations in question are not as dumb as we'd like to believe.
I used to wonder why some of my friends at RPI are so hostile to Jon Katz articles. I understand a little better now. For every good article he makes, he makes 3 bad ones. The AOL-Timewarner Merger article was good, the Hellmouth series was great, and I have a hard time remembering anything else of worth from Jon.
This is great. Dilbert and The Simpsons busted on Albany pretty good.... Now, the first time I see my hometown on Slashdot, it's because of a lizardman. What's with this punishment by the media? It's a conspiracy!
This is indeed an amusing announcement, to say the least. Let me give a little background:
I am a freshman at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). This year, they issued every freshman an IBM Thinkpad 600E. The configuration they gave us had an empty partition which basically said "put linux on me." We did. And we discovered the problems with compatability. I daresay this is one of the least compatable laptops with any version of linux. Let me list the problems:
1. Modem doesn't work at all under linux. Probably a winmodem.
2. IBM EtherJet CardBus 10/100 ethernet is REALLY hard to get working. After 10 hours of research and tweaking, I managed to get it to run using pcmcia-cs-3.0.14, but only if I tell it to bind to the tulip_cb driver. This isn't necessarily a good solution in 100% of the cases, either, according to one of our local tech guru's at RPI. Apparently the chip in the card isn't exactly the tulip. Oh, and this only works after you've changed the memory addresses that pcmcia scans for.
3. The number lock key that turns on the "numeric keypad" does not function under linux.
4. Hibernation mode and suspend mode lock up the laptop. (unless I've set something wrong on my config)
5. The sound card is a crystal audio CS4239. It's not quite supported by the kernel. ALSA will get it to work, as the rumors go, but I'm still trying on my laptop.
For this laptop to be "Redhat Linux Compatable", redhat and/or IBM will have to do some serious work on this, or Redhat will lose much credibility.
I'm using an overclocked dual celeron machine right now... This article was VERY VERY misleading about a lot of things related to overclocking these beasts...let's begin:
* You can't change the multiplier for the celerons with any celeron except for the 300a. After the 300a, intel installed a multiplier "lock" on their celerons after that. The 366, 466, etc., all have a locked multiplier that you must use to make the machine boot. I have a celeron 366, and I use the 5.5 multiplier that the chips specifies.
* To overclock the celerons, rather than upping the multiplier, you increase the bus speed of the board. Celerons default to 66MHz bus. If you increase that in small increments, you can get higher speeds. I managed to get my bus speed to 95MHz, so I'm running my dual 366's at 523MHz. It's hot, and requires a BIG case, with a LOT of fans. (8 in this computer)
*Disadvatage: When you change bus speed to anything other than 66MHz or 100MHz on this motherboard (abit bp6), you are overclocking or underclocking your AGP bus, and your PCI bus. This does WEIRD things to hardware, sometimes. If the hardware doesn't have a high tolerance for this sort of thing, you can have problems, like frequently losing data on the hard drive.
I was pretty lucky with my setup. I ordered two celeron 366's "guaranteed" to reach 550MHz. This would be ideal, because I'd be running the 5.5 multiplier at the 100MHz bus speed. The AGP and PCI buses would be running at their standard speeds. Unfortunately, I cannot get the machine to stay stable at 550MHz. To make it reach that speed, I have to change the voltage on the chip from 2.05 volts for 523MHz, to 2.3 volts for 550... If I don't change the voltage, the machine refuses to boot any os before getting an error. If I change the voltage, the computer is only marginally more stable, and quickly overheats and locks up, despite my cooling.
To make a long story short, BE CAREFUL with this offer. The 366->550 is about as far as you can really take the celeron chips. The chance of doing that successfully is 1/4 per chip, I think. The 466 isn't going to overclock to the full 100MHz bus speed, because the celeron fabrication process maxes around 600MHz. Maybe you can squeeze 620 or so out, but you're really pushing it. If you really want to be guaranteed a good overclocking experience, get yourself some 300a celeron chips. They go to 450Mhz (100MHz bus) 80% of the time... But they are rare, and are as expensive as the 366 multiplier-locked chips, sometimes.
Don't buy one of these pre-built machines and expect to run 8x anything... The author was very confused. Go to http://www.arstechnica.com/ and read about overclocking a little, and you'll be a lot safer in the end.
Also, don't ignore the advantage to running these machines without overclocking... Dual processor is nice. Celeron 533's are going to max out the celeron line, before they hit a new chip-fab...so... If you wait a little while, maybe 3 months or so, you can pick up some 500 or 533 MHz celeron chips, pop them in one of these boards, and maybe do some slight overclocking to squeeze another 50MHz out of it... and you've got yourself a great dual processor board that will outperform comparable pentium II's, due to the higher cache speed.:)
A friend of mine is playing with the redhat stock...Got accepted by etrade for the IPO...I hope he makes a nice hefty profit, so he can put a nice chunk into VA Linux System's IPO, a few months from now. VA is waiting to see what happens to redhat. Expect to see the IPO announcement in the next week or two, if redhat does well. You can quote me on this.
The poor performance of IPO's in the market recently might make this a good time for Redhat's IPO, from the investors' standpoint, inluding IPO buyers, and investors in the secondary market. If it opens lower, because of market performance, that just leaves more room for profit when it inevitably shoots up. There is a *lot* of interest in the redhat stock. Everyone from HP to SGI to IBM is supporting linux, and thus supporting redhat, indirectly, if not directly. Get in while you can. This timing might be your chance to catch it at a temporarily lower price.
I looked into this etrade deal seriously, because I'd like some redhat shares too, even though I don't have the letter. Here's the deal:
Etrade has all people interested in IPO's fill out a profile. The profile asks for information, such as assets and investment experience. The reason for this is as follows: a) IPO's are very risky, it's for your safety, and b) Etrade gets introduced to new IPO's based on how well it maintains price stability. More experienced investors are more likely to heed etrade's warning about selling shares before 30 days have passed.
The solution? Just get a real broker. If you have a letter, a real stock broker will be able to get you your shares. That simple. Yeah, you'll end up paying $60 per transaction commission...but let's face it folks, redhat is going to skyrocket. If you get a few hundred shares at $10 a share, you're not going to care much about paying $120 in commission.
Something was obviously very wrong with their benchmark. I wonder if they did something funny, like disabling SMP for linux? Convenient mistake when compiling the kernel?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes...but what matters is the relative speed between the two objects. I'm no physics major, though. Hell, I dropped physics, in college.
I've created a piece of software which makes it rather trivial to create custom bootable FreeBSD CDs. With a little work, it could be used to make a bootable CD with the same functionality as Knoppix. Sadly, I have yet to write any documentation, and the code is in a fairly early stage. Feel free to check it out.
There is a lot of good educational material on the web. Take Project Links for example.
Wow. Did anyone notice that the sentence about the cisco woman being unqualified and then quitting was removed from the paragraph? Looks like someone had second thoughts...
I worked for a lab for about 18 months, during which time I setup a unix server with Samba and Netatalk to support several workstations. There were definitely some glitches with the cross-platform sharing, but it seemed to work moderately well, over all. Samba is *highly* configurable, and I suspect there is a way to get it to "play nice" with Netatalk's locking. Unfortunately, I'm not enough of a Samba guru to know what this would involve.
I'm an avid FreeBSD enthusiast, and I'm disappointed to see that Plex86 doesn't look like it will run under FreeBSD any time soon. Bochs, on the other hand, works fine under FreeBSD, but lacks many essential features that Plex86 appears to have. I was wondering what you will be doing (if anything) to ensure the platform independence of Plex86. Will you be leaving Bochs as the multi-platform solution? Will the Bochs be abandoned in favor of Plex86?
Instructors are encouraged to integrate laptops into their courses, regardless of whether this integration actually benefits the student, or complements the material of the class. This leads to having online tests, simply to use the laptop. This would be fine, if the online test software functioned properly, which it doesn't. I have seen far more examples of poorly planned integration than I have seen of anything else.
On another rant: With workstations, the school is able to provide support for computing, instead of computers. Everything must be functioning properly on a campus workstation, because it is maintained by campus personell, and it must be available for coursework. Sadly, this doesn't work with laptops. If you have last year's model laptop, and your course demands software preloaded only on this year's model, it is your responsibility to get that software. You become your own sysadmin. This is fine for most computer-oriented people, but the majority of the students in most schools do not need to learn to be system administrators in order to benefit from classes. If your laptop is broken or is stolen (like 10% of last year's laptops), you fight your way through a 5-week backlog to get a repair or replacement.
I'm really sad to hear of the decision in this article. Politicians should not be deciding these things. If you want to see more rants about RPI's laptop program, These Folks do it better than I can.
I know you can do this with pppd under FreeBSD, and I bet you can do it under linux, as well. With FreeBSD, at least, a fairly simple set of options in /etc/ppp/ppp.conf will setup multilink ppp. Any number of connections could be shared this way, so if you wanted to have three or four modems on each end being split equally, it would work as easily as two. You shouldn't have to worry about routes, etc., any more than you do with PPP in a normal scenario.
:)
If you haven't given FreeBSD a chance, yet, you're cheating yourself. It can do just about everything that linux can do, but usually it's easier to setup.
I was recently introduced to Evangelion. It is easily the best anime I have seen. The series gets more and more thought-provoking and introspective through each episode, until it finally ends in an amazing and thoroughly confusing climax.
Many readers have been posting about Evangelion's availability on VHS. I can confirm its availability on DVD, since I have the first DVD of the series. This DVD, released about a week ago, is the only one available. I picked it up at Electronics Boutique, but it's available online from www.buy.com, I believe. This DVD contains the first four episodes. The remaining 22? episodes should be released on DVD in the near future. I haven't heard any details about the future release dates. The DVD sports a cool menu interface, and the main 'extras' are: Japanese/English/French/Spanish voices, optional English subtitles, and a character/angel bio section.
I've watched this DVD three times in the last week. I can't wait for the rest to be released.
My college, RPI, has a laptop program, and it has proven to me that even college-level educators have no idea what to do with computers in the classroom. Primarilly we use our Thinkpad 600E's for ICQ & AIM (in class), and to save RPI the money usually spent on upgrading desktop computer labs. Tuition does not cover these machines, and tuition just went up another 5% this year, putting it around $30,000 per year.
High schools and middle schools would be better off handing out something a little smaller, cheaper, and easier to understand. How about a palm-pilot, or a visor? For a few hundred dollars, a student would get a machine that would store assignments, write/read e-mail, and could beep students to remind them to go to their next class. :) I have a Visor now, and I keep thinking "I wish I had this in high school..."
My two cents: Endorse a hand-held now. Wait on the laptops, etc., until they are cheap, and teachers know how to use them.
+++
I grabbed a TNT2 last summer, in a quest to build the *ultimate computer*. I ran linux, dual-booting win2k for games. Recently a friend talked me into trying out FreeBSD. So, I reformatted, and started running nothing but FreeBSD. I love the OS, and I don't intend to reformat again. Unfortunately, this still leaves me with a TNT2, and I probably won't even be able to load these "binary only" drivers that nvidia STILL hasn't released yet.
C'mon, Nvidia, where's the love? Why not release some open-source drivers, so that the non-windows and even non-linux world can love your hardware, too?
Who wants my TNT2?
+++
I heard from a grad student at my college that the language of C++ was invented on a bet that you couldn't do it. I was wondering if this was true, and what else inspired you to invent this language.
+++
In the information age, digital forms of art, especially music and video, need to be sold as a service, not as a product. One cannot blame large traditional companies for not quickly realizing this, but one can definitely blame them for their efforts to hamper such progress.
Once the primary method of distribution is the internet, the cost of distribution should drop sharply. If the drop in cost of distribution is passed on to the user, the piracy problem is solved. Who will spend the time making and trading MP3s when higher quality versions are available faster for pennies, or better yet, for a flat fee of ~$20 a month?
My real worry is the following: The record and movie industries realize that the internet is the distribution medium of the future. The recent attacks on MP3s and DeCSS are not to prevent eventual internet distribution, but in fact to give the record and movie industries time to cement their control of this distribution medium. With standards like DVD and CSS in place with the backing of laws like the DMCA, one organization can have control of distribution of music or video for an entire medium. Imagine a future where CSS-like standards are in place for internet-distributed movies and audio. Laws like the DMCA make it a felony to remove such encryption, or even to write programs capable of removing such "protection". The companies in question then sell these protected files dirt-cheap, or as a cheap service, and completely replace MP3's. Only problem is, they still have complete control, and no competition. Record companies can still screw the artists and the customers. The movie industry can do the same. This is why MP3.com is being sued. This is why DeCSS is under attack. The corporations in question are not as dumb as we'd like to believe.
-Larry Lansing
www.fuzzynerd.com
+++
I used to wonder why some of my friends at RPI are so hostile to Jon Katz articles. I understand a little better now. For every good article he makes, he makes 3 bad ones. The AOL-Timewarner Merger article was good, the Hellmouth series was great, and I have a hard time remembering anything else of worth from Jon.
-Larry Lansing
+++
This is great. Dilbert and The Simpsons busted on Albany pretty good.... Now, the first time I see my hometown on Slashdot, it's because of a lizardman. What's with this punishment by the media? It's a conspiracy!
This is indeed an amusing announcement, to say the least. Let me give a little background:
I am a freshman at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). This year, they issued every freshman an IBM Thinkpad 600E. The configuration they gave us had an empty partition which basically said "put linux on me." We did. And we discovered the problems with compatability. I daresay this is one of the least compatable laptops with any version of linux. Let me list the problems:
1. Modem doesn't work at all under linux. Probably a winmodem.
2. IBM EtherJet CardBus 10/100 ethernet is REALLY hard to get working. After 10 hours of research and tweaking, I managed to get it to run using pcmcia-cs-3.0.14, but only if I tell it to bind to the tulip_cb driver. This isn't necessarily a good solution in 100% of the cases, either, according to one of our local tech guru's at RPI. Apparently the chip in the card isn't exactly the tulip. Oh, and this only works after you've changed the memory addresses that pcmcia scans for.
3. The number lock key that turns on the "numeric keypad" does not function under linux.
4. Hibernation mode and suspend mode lock up the laptop. (unless I've set something wrong on my config)
5. The sound card is a crystal audio CS4239. It's not quite supported by the kernel. ALSA will get it to work, as the rumors go, but I'm still trying on my laptop.
For this laptop to be "Redhat Linux Compatable", redhat and/or IBM will have to do some serious work on this, or Redhat will lose much credibility.
-Larry Lansing
zanzar@nycap.rr.com
"Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday September 13, @12:23PM EDT"
:) September? Cool... Temporal distortions on slashdot...
Anyone else notice this?
-Larry
I'm using an overclocked dual celeron machine right now... This article was VERY VERY misleading about a lot of things related to overclocking these beasts...let's begin:
:)
* You can't change the multiplier for the celerons with any celeron except for the 300a. After the 300a, intel installed a multiplier "lock" on their celerons after that. The 366, 466, etc., all have a locked multiplier that you must use to make the machine boot. I have a celeron 366, and I use the 5.5 multiplier that the chips specifies.
* To overclock the celerons, rather than upping the multiplier, you increase the bus speed of the board. Celerons default to 66MHz bus. If you increase that in small increments, you can get higher speeds. I managed to get my bus speed to 95MHz, so I'm running my dual 366's at 523MHz. It's hot, and requires a BIG case, with a LOT of fans. (8 in this computer)
*Disadvatage: When you change bus speed to anything other than 66MHz or 100MHz on this motherboard (abit bp6), you are overclocking or underclocking your AGP bus, and your PCI bus. This does WEIRD things to hardware, sometimes. If the hardware doesn't have a high tolerance for this sort of thing, you can have problems, like frequently losing data on the hard drive.
I was pretty lucky with my setup. I ordered two celeron 366's "guaranteed" to reach 550MHz. This would be ideal, because I'd be running the 5.5 multiplier at the 100MHz bus speed. The AGP and PCI buses would be running at their standard speeds. Unfortunately, I cannot get the machine to stay stable at 550MHz. To make it reach that speed, I have to change the voltage on the chip from 2.05 volts for 523MHz, to 2.3 volts for 550... If I don't change the voltage, the machine refuses to boot any os before getting an error. If I change the voltage, the computer is only marginally more stable, and quickly overheats and locks up, despite my cooling.
To make a long story short, BE CAREFUL with this offer. The 366->550 is about as far as you can really take the celeron chips. The chance of doing that successfully is 1/4 per chip, I think. The 466 isn't going to overclock to the full 100MHz bus speed, because the celeron fabrication process maxes around 600MHz. Maybe you can squeeze 620 or so out, but you're really pushing it. If you really want to be guaranteed a good overclocking experience, get yourself some 300a celeron chips. They go to 450Mhz (100MHz bus) 80% of the time... But they are rare, and are as expensive as the 366 multiplier-locked chips, sometimes.
Don't buy one of these pre-built machines and expect to run 8x anything... The author was very confused. Go to http://www.arstechnica.com/ and read about overclocking a little, and you'll be a lot safer in the end.
Also, don't ignore the advantage to running these machines without overclocking... Dual processor is nice. Celeron 533's are going to max out the celeron line, before they hit a new chip-fab...so... If you wait a little while, maybe 3 months or so, you can pick up some 500 or 533 MHz celeron chips, pop them in one of these boards, and maybe do some slight overclocking to squeeze another 50MHz out of it... and you've got yourself a great dual processor board that will outperform comparable pentium II's, due to the higher cache speed.
-Larry
sorry about the length of the rant.
Now if someone had just hooked me up with some redhat shares, I'd be in the position to donate some hardware to you....
hehehe
-Larry
A friend of mine is playing with the redhat stock...Got accepted by etrade for the IPO...I hope he makes a nice hefty profit, so he can put a nice chunk into VA Linux System's IPO, a few months from now. VA is waiting to see what happens to redhat. Expect to see the IPO announcement in the next week or two, if redhat does well. You can quote me on this.
The poor performance of IPO's in the market recently might make this a good time for Redhat's IPO, from the investors' standpoint, inluding IPO buyers, and investors in the secondary market. If it opens lower, because of market performance, that just leaves more room for profit when it inevitably shoots up. There is a *lot* of interest in the redhat stock. Everyone from HP to SGI to IBM is supporting linux, and thus supporting redhat, indirectly, if not directly. Get in while you can. This timing might be your chance to catch it at a temporarily lower price.
-Larry
I'm in a similar situation, I think. I was going to experiment with HylaFax. Would a hylafax/samba combination be enough?
I looked into this etrade deal seriously, because I'd like some redhat shares too, even though I don't have the letter. Here's the deal:
Etrade has all people interested in IPO's fill out a profile. The profile asks for information, such as assets and investment experience. The reason for this is as follows: a) IPO's are very risky, it's for your safety, and b) Etrade gets introduced to new IPO's based on how well it maintains price stability. More experienced investors are more likely to heed etrade's warning about selling shares before 30 days have passed.
The solution? Just get a real broker. If you have a letter, a real stock broker will be able to get you your shares. That simple. Yeah, you'll end up paying $60 per transaction commission...but let's face it folks, redhat is going to skyrocket. If you get a few hundred shares at $10 a share, you're not going to care much about paying $120 in commission.
-Larry Lansing
zanzar@nycap.rr.com
www.fuzzynerd.com
Something was obviously very wrong with their benchmark. I wonder if they did something funny, like disabling SMP for linux? Convenient mistake when compiling the kernel?