I'd have to say that apple itunes did in fact pretty much copy what the patent holder had.
Stuff like winamp what not... has a completely DIFFERENT interface then what this guy had, which is why he 's not suing every mp3 player out there, only iTunes.
read a bit more carefully.. the patent is more about the interface over the technology behind it, and a patent on a specific interface I think is very valid especially since there are alot of eeriely similar looks to iTunes (which came out later) from the patent's which came out first.
Google is not what one would consider a "small" company..
a small company is less then 50 employees.
and they are not the highest valued media corporation..
and usually large companies buy out small companies..
I dont see how this comment deserves a 5...
it adds no value.
Do you have free trade or do you stick with protectionism.
Firstly, the bloggers hypothesis about how if the apps were available to linux people will move to linux. The belief in itself is flawed.
Take Baskin Robbins for instance. They offer 31 flavors of ice cream. Yet Haagen Daaz's (with at most 10 flavors?... most i've ever seen) does better.
Dumb argument you say?.. I agree... but so's the more apps on linux/windows one.
Turtleism is just plain dumb. You stifle innovation. If IE is the only browser on the market what's the incentive for MS to update toa new version of IE? The important thing that comes along from porting to other platforms is innovation. Firefox... with it's great features such as tabbed browsing.. is the perfect example. Being ported to windows.. Microsoft (rumors) is going to put out a new IE with the same features as firefox. How is that NOT good? That's what I call progress and the thing is, I know the guys at mozilla will sit back and think about... "hmm what other cool features i can put into firefox to beat IE"... and that is the kind of mentality this country was built upon.
IP is very subjective, but like any market forces it is dictated by what someone else is willing to pay for it. If someone else is willing to pay for the market price of MS products then that is the actual value. Do you think Windows XP home will sell well if MS believes it's worth 10000$?
as with the 1000-1 markup being valid. It is not valid because MS will never charge that amount to even it's corporate clients.
But stupid thread, stupid post, and overly zealous linux users who probably run windows.
FYI, if they are good at guessing... they do not become mutual fund managers..
because I sure as hell would be pissed if a mutual fund manager was fucking around with my money like that.
Hedge fund managers, speculators, prop traders are a more likely type of person who would be willing to bet on a shady company =)
As with diversifying your risk, a clarification would include diversification of both foreign and local stocks along with large, mid, and small cap companies too. Throw in a couple of bonds and you'd have a truly diverse portfolio.
Again this should be done in the long term like koreth mentions and not a short term trading solution.
which begs to ask the question. Why the hell am I putting my money into a mutual fund instead of just buying all these individual stocks.
leverage. It'd be pretty stupid to buy 1 stock/bond/ADR of all these various companies because if you can imagine the fee you'd have to pay for all these transactions.
what a mutual fund allows me to do is simply diversify my holdings by holding a single share of the mutual fund, thereby lowering my transaction costs.
You could of course buy index stocks such as the Spyders, Cubes or the Dow but again you'd run into the problem of having three separate transaction costs right there. On top of that you'd only be buying US indexes when you should really diversify to other markets such as the FTSE or the Bourse.
So suggestion... you should buy mutual funds but make sure you read their prospectus and see what index they're trying to match. Some mutual funds focus on small cap (higher risk)
some on mid/large cap (lower risk)
some split between bonds and stocks (lower risk)
and some simply buy nothing but indexes (probably the lowest risk)
Apparently a good chunk of people don't know what
on
Java vs .NET
·
· Score: 1
.net is..net allows the developer to develop in any language you can think of.
you want to do it in assembly? go right ahead..
how about C++, C#?, JAVA ?
it's all about choice..
As with being tied to MS products once again you guys have it all wrong.
Try using sharp develop. I'm sure someone did it on the *nix side too... Btw
Mono?... what's that?... oh wait it's a.net run time component for *nix boxes...
I think.net is a great tool for developers and it's what java should have been. It gives you the flexibility of a real programming language like C but at the same time you can have the safe and robustness of Java.
First off the sys admin should have been fired. Subscribe to Cert or what not I learned about the patch as soon as it came out and I'm not being paid the big bucks to maintain a nuclear power plant.
Second, how the hell did you fools get "ANALOG BACKUP SYSTEM" mixed up with Microsoft?
But then again you can also see the pure honesty among people at this point
For a person to use the diamond as a semiconductor you'd have to inject impurities in it to get it to conduct, since diamond is a natural insulator.
If these two companies were truly serious about promoting the computer industry they would get into talks with De Beers and say, "Look, fund our shit and we'll only make impure diamonds to allow for semiconducting/manufacturing"
and De Beers should be smart enough to reply
"Sure, your family will never have to work again"
And this would be an incredible deal because
1. You can't exactly melt your semiconductors down to get em diamonds =)
2. It's a win win for everybody, De Beers still gets it's diamond industry, and we get our diamond CPUs.
3. And if you can REALLY convince your gf/wife to wear a flat chip regardless of what material it's made of on her finger all the time, then you truly are a pimp.
Very good assessment.
Plus if you look at the shares outstanding which is well over 13 million. 119k shares is nothing
It's just common sense that when your stock was previous 52 week low of.52$ that you would sell it when it goes up to 14$ first then begins to trickle down to 12$
You've just made a 500% increase in price... I doubt many people would be that gready.
With a market cap of 130 Million selling a million dollars worth is not bad. When your insiders being "dumping" shares. You'd see them getting rid of 5-10% of shares.
You're not exactly the brightest bulb in the room. Nor are you the sharpest tool in the shed.
Perhaps you'd need to join that tour with me and perhaps you may learn a thing or two about how these systems actually DO work.
First off you were talking all about embedded systems in the previous argument. Another point I will bring to your attention is if you for even a moment think that the nations weapons system is controlled by a laptop, you must be smoking something pretty good.
And if I were smoking the same thing I just might see Santa Clause, Tooth Fairy or Easter Bunny.
The above embedded systems, such as traffic lights, utility systems nor weapons systems do not use ANY MAJOR distribution of linux.
As with your last statement, you have demonstrated your exceptional ability for reading. Did your teacher ever tell you about the acronym RIF? - Reading is Fundamental. It's very important you catch that because you seem to have trouble doing so. Where in my response did I mention anything about MSCE?
And someone should have slapped your parents for bringing you into this world.
This post is retarded, why is it even remotely a 4
First off the previous post mentioned nothing about win2k3 not requiring new certification. He said give it time.
And if you haven't recalled Windows 2k has been out for a while now and it has a strong user base on top of that. To quote your mongoloid statement (Worst case, I AM the support).
On top of that MS will support their products way after their life spans. You can still get support for the old office 95 suites.
Now I won't argue the merits of anything before Win2k because there are none. But you must compare apples to apples. What the hell are you talking about when you mention aircrafts and traffic lights? Win2k and Any major flavor of linux used in the context of the government certification has NOTHING remotely AT ALL related to traffic lights, utilities and weapon systems.
But the problem really lies in asses like you who add nothing of value to the computing world. I completely support a previous users comment that a competent Win2k Admin can be just as good as a Nix Admin on their respective systems.
So Unless you are trying to point out that you don't understand the nature of GPL open source, what exactly is your point?
or are you goign to tell me that the government has the right to violate a contract? In that case I'd tell you to go back to high school and relearn your US History and read up on what this government is acutally formed upon.
In the sense that it saves the tax payer incredible amounts of software license purchases for large scale systems.
Of course I'm only referring to the GPL licensed open source. It would be pointless if someone open sourced something and refuse to deliever the source unless you pay em a billion dollars.
But back to main point why governments should be using open source.
1. We all know that the government systems are probably just a step up more secure then university systems. Colleges have been strong supporters of *nix / open source but never truly as secure as businesses, so why bother? Well because colleges like government are big entities that are kinda very inefficient because the markets don't punish (I'm definitely dumbing down the issue... you bond/rating agency guys must forgive me) governments or colleges for inefficiencies. The cost of these inefficiencies acutally do produce savings because government employees are not paid a lot and it wouldn't be worth it to pay so much more to buy 10000 licenses when you can just buy 1 and distribute.
2. Another reason why the government should be open source is because it's tied very closely to academia. Most of the huge research labs/super computing facilities are sponsored by the government. I'd shudder to think how little work would be done with a closed source solution when the scientists are acutally intelligent enough to know how to hack the code.
3. The fact that all top secret military stuff like nukes and all that dangerous shit is definitely not open source and probably some ass backwards properitary system that you'd have to learn san script to break in.. just makes me all the more comfortable knowing the government doesn't use open source on shit like that.. which comes back to the Terry Pratchett quote... "If there was a big red button and you put a big sign next to it that said 'Don't push' some idiot is bound to push it" kind of mentality that retarded people in this world have when it comes to dealing with classified information.
So if you've read down this far congratz on listening to an old man rant.. but it wouldn't be complete with out a point.. which is PEOPLE...
there are places for open source.. and there are places for closed source... the government doens't just look at MS or linux...
unlike some certain group of readers of a certain website... So instead of being hard core open source or hard core closed source..
Sit back... think about what each is good for... and choose appropriately.
Those pictures look AWFully like the subway posters advertising Lavalife.com...
muhahahah Pit copyrights against patents!!
Re:Analysts aren't paid to help you...
on
Wall Street Meat
·
· Score: 2, Informative
most of the time you're not getting the bank's research... those guys are really more for the institutional/reallyreallyreally investors.
as with anythign you spend money on, you should always do your own research. Any company that's public must file a form 10k to the SEC which gives you the financial information of a company. (unless the company lies..:))
you also have rating agency's that give you a somewhat more fair view (at least to the private investor)... so basically if a company has a research department
and they're researching one of their own clients
then find another bank that doesn't have the company as a client and compare results.
Re:Mere logic screams that this is all oxdung.
on
Wall Street Meat
·
· Score: 1
Umm a broker is not a trader..
the job of a broker is just that peddling stocks to investors
he then passes the info to the trader
who does the buying and selling.
Plus like in any market it's about volume. I believe you make alot more money when 1000000 people are buying from you then if you were buying yourself
look at how stock works... the company goes out and gets investors because it doesn't have enough money on it's own to do what it wants. So the same logic applies. A company on it's own may be incredibly profitable but they won't have anywhere near the capital they'd have if they IPOed and tapped the public.
Then you shouldn't even be thinking about open source.
Because you aren't familiar enough with the concept to even propose such to a production environment. Which says that you're expertise is definitely not in the open source world which doesn't put you in a position to make that decision.
now I'm not saying all managers are smart but I'm saying you dont want to be the fall guy when shit doesn't work. If you do suggest something like this you better be damn well positive on ALL the facts and not just some things that/. users spit out.
As with paying the developer for the support... That's the dumbest thing I've heard in years. What doy ou do when yer system rolls over at 3am in the morning the the guy is too busy looking at his internet pr0n?.. What's this ther'es another developer to call.. so you call him up and he's prolly too busy getting into a flame war about windows/nix to care... what do you do then? Go down the list to every available developer hoping to wake them up from their slumber because you need help?
well if it's an importnat system.. first off you get fired.. and if yer firm is big enough... you get blacklisted from working in the industry...
So if you really think open source is the way to go (and it is for some firms... usually the ones that happen to be software development companies) you just be damn well sure you have someone to blame when systems roll over because nobody will listen to "well that open source developer guy said he was going to help us" which of course is going to have yer manager remember "Who was it that offered open source again?"
Aren't you just slightly curious as to what they stick in yer laptop?
Pop em open and they're very cool inside. And as long as yer careful about that sticker you can take a gander inside. I've done it with plenty of various compaqs and hps (sonys are a bitch and a half tho).
How can you verify yer getting good components instead of second grade refurbished parts like Packard bell used to stick in their systems?
That and bestbuy has that 30 day return no questions asked policy... Just return it.
My point was to explore instead of calling up obvious incompetent tech support. There are always excuses I could come up with about not wanting to learn about what's inside of something I spent alot of money on but I still pop the hood and check out what's underneath regardless.
For someone trying to install a "real" OS
you should perhaps learn more about how to tell what your individual components are
You can tell the ali chipset because usually near the main chip (the big thing with ALi written on it) or bottom right hand corner there's a version and a serial number which you can goto the ALi website and check up. Besides that you can also guess it by see what features you have, which processor you can take that should easily narrow yer selections to 3 or 4 mother boards.
And I'm assuming since you said an ALi chipset for the mobo it probably has a built in sound chip? either a Qlogic, Cmedia or on of em Cirrus Logics.
Being a slashdot reader I would assume it'd prolly woulda been more helpful if you came here instead of calling up their tech support for 8 hours:-P (even if it does turn into a Windows vs Linux Rant eventually)
Slashdot Mirror
I believe what mukund said was correct
... has a completely DIFFERENT interface then what this guy had, which is why he 's not suing every mp3 player out there, only iTunes.
Just by looking at the two interfaces
I'd have to say that apple itunes did in fact pretty much copy what the patent holder had.
Stuff like winamp what not
read a bit more carefully.. the patent is more about the interface over the technology behind it, and a patent on a specific interface I think is very valid especially since there are alot of eeriely similar looks to iTunes (which came out later) from the patent's which came out first.
Google is not what one would consider a "small" company ..
a small company is less then 50 employees.
and they are not the highest valued media corporation..
and usually large companies buy out small companies..
I dont see how this comment deserves a 5 ...
it adds no value.
It's a very well argued economic concept.
... most i've ever seen) does better.
... but so's the more apps on linux/windows one.
... "hmm what other cool features i can put into firefox to beat IE"... and that is the kind of mentality this country was built upon.
Do you have free trade or do you stick with protectionism.
Firstly, the bloggers hypothesis about how if the apps were available to linux people will move to linux. The belief in itself is flawed.
Take Baskin Robbins for instance. They offer 31 flavors of ice cream. Yet Haagen Daaz's (with at most 10 flavors?
Dumb argument you say?.. I agree
Turtleism is just plain dumb. You stifle innovation. If IE is the only browser on the market what's the incentive for MS to update toa new version of IE? The important thing that comes along from porting to other platforms is innovation. Firefox... with it's great features such as tabbed browsing.. is the perfect example. Being ported to windows.. Microsoft (rumors) is going to put out a new IE with the same features as firefox. How is that NOT good? That's what I call progress and the thing is, I know the guys at mozilla will sit back and think about
if you had to load a tsr it might be a compression reading scheme like what ms dos had way back..
but then again i don't know enuf to really say =)
IP is very subjective, but like any market forces it is dictated by what someone else is willing to pay for it. If someone else is willing to pay for the market price of MS products then that is the actual value. Do you think Windows XP home will sell well if MS believes it's worth 10000$?
as with the 1000-1 markup being valid. It is not valid because MS will never charge that amount to even it's corporate clients.
But stupid thread, stupid post, and overly zealous linux users who probably run windows.
FYI, if they are good at guessing ... they do not become mutual fund managers..
because I sure as hell would be pissed if a mutual fund manager was fucking around with my money like that.
Hedge fund managers, speculators, prop traders are a more likely type of person who would be willing to bet on a shady company =)
As with diversifying your risk, a clarification would include diversification of both foreign and local stocks along with large, mid, and small cap companies too. Throw in a couple of bonds and you'd have a truly diverse portfolio.
Again this should be done in the long term like koreth mentions and not a short term trading solution.
which begs to ask the question. Why the hell am I putting my money into a mutual fund instead of just buying all these individual stocks.
leverage. It'd be pretty stupid to buy 1 stock/bond/ADR of all these various companies because if you can imagine the fee you'd have to pay for all these transactions.
what a mutual fund allows me to do is simply diversify my holdings by holding a single share of the mutual fund, thereby lowering my transaction costs.
You could of course buy index stocks such as the Spyders, Cubes or the Dow but again you'd run into the problem of having three separate transaction costs right there. On top of that you'd only be buying US indexes when you should really diversify to other markets such as the FTSE or the Bourse.
So suggestion... you should buy mutual funds but make sure you read their prospectus and see what index they're trying to match. Some mutual funds focus on small cap (higher risk)
some on mid/large cap (lower risk)
some split between bonds and stocks (lower risk)
and some simply buy nothing but indexes (probably the lowest risk)
.net is. .net allows the developer to develop in any language you can think of.
.net run time component for *nix boxes... .net is a great tool for developers and it's what java should have been. It gives you the flexibility of a real programming language like C but at the same time you can have the safe and robustness of Java.
you want to do it in assembly? go right ahead.. how about C++, C#?, JAVA ?
it's all about choice.. As with being tied to MS products once again you guys have it all wrong.
Try using sharp develop. I'm sure someone did it on the *nix side too... Btw
Mono?... what's that?... oh wait it's a
I think
Completely pointless.
First off the sys admin should have been fired.
Subscribe to Cert or what not I learned about the patch as soon as it came out and I'm not being paid the big bucks to maintain a nuclear power plant.
Second, how the hell did you fools get "ANALOG BACKUP SYSTEM" mixed up with Microsoft?
And if you ever thought that buying IBM is cheap you're smoking crack and a bunch of other stuff to.
So yea they may support it but it's going to cost you an arm and a leg.
Because we all know that a worm by definition spreads only when it takes over an OS that acutally DOES own 90% of all OSes out there.
So you're going to be waiting a long time my friend and it's not because linux is more secure =)
But then again you can also see the pure honesty among people at this point
For a person to use the diamond as a semiconductor you'd have to inject impurities in it to get it to conduct, since diamond is a natural insulator.
If these two companies were truly serious about promoting the computer industry they would get into talks with De Beers and say, "Look, fund our shit and we'll only make impure diamonds to allow for semiconducting/manufacturing"
and De Beers should be smart enough to reply "Sure, your family will never have to work again"
And this would be an incredible deal because
1. You can't exactly melt your semiconductors down to get em diamonds =)
2. It's a win win for everybody, De Beers still gets it's diamond industry, and we get our diamond CPUs.
3. And if you can REALLY convince your gf/wife to wear a flat chip regardless of what material it's made of on her finger all the time, then you truly are a pimp.
Very good assessment.
.52$ that you would sell it when it goes up to 14$ first then begins to trickle down to 12$
Plus if you look at the shares outstanding which is well over 13 million. 119k shares is nothing
It's just common sense that when your stock was previous 52 week low of
You've just made a 500% increase in price... I doubt many people would be that gready.
With a market cap of 130 Million selling a million dollars worth is not bad. When your insiders being "dumping" shares. You'd see them getting rid of 5-10% of shares.
No the job of the CEO is to maximize Shareholder value.
It is not the goal of ANY business.
The goal of any business is to simply be a business and make money.
I enjoy sublime ability for crassness.
You're not exactly the brightest bulb in the room.
Nor are you the sharpest tool in the shed.
Perhaps you'd need to join that tour with me and perhaps you may learn a thing or two about how these systems actually DO work.
First off you were talking all about embedded systems in the previous argument. Another point I will bring to your attention is if you for even a moment think that the nations weapons system is controlled by a laptop, you must be smoking something pretty good.
And if I were smoking the same thing I just might see Santa Clause, Tooth Fairy or Easter Bunny.
The above embedded systems, such as traffic lights, utility systems nor weapons systems do not use ANY MAJOR distribution of linux.
As with your last statement, you have demonstrated your exceptional ability for reading.
Did your teacher ever tell you about the acronym RIF? - Reading is Fundamental.
It's very important you catch that because you seem to have trouble doing so. Where in my response did I mention anything about MSCE?
And someone should have slapped your parents for bringing you into this world.
This post is retarded, why is it even remotely a 4
First off the previous post mentioned nothing about win2k3 not requiring new certification. He said give it time.
And if you haven't recalled Windows 2k has been out for a while now and it has a strong user base on top of that. To quote your mongoloid statement (Worst case, I AM the support).
On top of that MS will support their products way after their life spans. You can still get support for the old office 95 suites.
Now I won't argue the merits of anything before Win2k because there are none. But you must compare apples to apples. What the hell are you talking about when you mention aircrafts and traffic lights? Win2k and Any major flavor of linux used in the context of the government certification has NOTHING remotely AT ALL related to traffic lights, utilities and weapon systems.
But the problem really lies in asses like you who add nothing of value to the computing world. I completely support a previous users comment that a competent Win2k Admin can be just as good as a Nix Admin on their respective systems.
Again I was referring to GPL licensed software.
So Unless you are trying to point out that you don't understand the nature of GPL open source, what exactly is your point?
or are you goign to tell me that the government has the right to violate a contract? In that case I'd tell you to go back to high school and relearn your US History and read up on what this government is acutally formed upon.
In the sense that it saves the tax payer incredible amounts of software license purchases for large scale systems.
Of course I'm only referring to the GPL licensed open source. It would be pointless if someone open sourced something and refuse to deliever the source unless you pay em a billion dollars.
But back to main point why governments should be using open source.
1. We all know that the government systems are probably just a step up more secure then university systems. Colleges have been strong supporters of *nix / open source but never truly as secure as businesses, so why bother? Well because colleges like government are big entities that are kinda very inefficient because the markets don't punish (I'm definitely dumbing down the issue... you bond/rating agency guys must forgive me) governments or colleges for inefficiencies. The cost of these inefficiencies acutally do produce savings because government employees are not paid a lot and it wouldn't be worth it to pay so much more to buy 10000 licenses when you can just buy 1 and distribute.
2. Another reason why the government should be open source is because it's tied very closely to academia. Most of the huge research labs/super computing facilities are sponsored by the government. I'd shudder to think how little work would be done with a closed source solution when the scientists are acutally intelligent enough to know how to hack the code.
3. The fact that all top secret military stuff like nukes and all that dangerous shit is definitely not open source and probably some ass backwards properitary system that you'd have to learn san script to break in.. just makes me all the more comfortable knowing the government doesn't use open source on shit like that.. which comes back to the Terry Pratchett quote... "If there was a big red button and you put a big sign next to it that said 'Don't push' some idiot is bound to push it" kind of mentality that retarded people in this world have when it comes to dealing with classified information.
So if you've read down this far congratz on listening to an old man rant.. but it wouldn't be complete with out a point.. which is PEOPLE... there are places for open source.. and there are places for closed source... the government doens't just look at MS or linux...
unlike some certain group of readers of a certain website... So instead of being hard core open source or hard core closed source..
Sit back... think about what each is good for... and choose appropriately.
supports 64 bit itaniums too if you need em
that and they have the 24/7 "I fucked up" support
the consumer one relies on calling slashdot users for help
1) You waste alot of time
:)
2) Since when can't GPL'd code be used in any commercial application?
3) I'd have to agree with you on this one tho
http://about.mailblocks.com/challenge.html
...
Those pictures look AWFully like the subway posters advertising Lavalife.com
muhahahah Pit copyrights against patents!!
most of the time you're not getting the bank's research ... those guys are really more for the institutional/reallyreallyreally investors.
:))
as with anythign you spend money on, you should always do your own research. Any company that's public must file a form 10k to the SEC which gives you the financial information of a company. (unless the company lies..
you also have rating agency's that give you a somewhat more fair view (at least to the private investor)... so basically if a company has a research department and they're researching one of their own clients then find another bank that doesn't have the company as a client and compare results.
Umm a broker is not a trader.. the job of a broker is just that peddling stocks to investors he then passes the info to the trader who does the buying and selling.
Plus like in any market it's about volume. I believe you make alot more money when 1000000 people are buying from you then if you were buying yourself
look at how stock works... the company goes out and gets investors because it doesn't have enough money on it's own to do what it wants. So the same logic applies. A company on it's own may be incredibly profitable but they won't have anywhere near the capital they'd have if they IPOed and tapped the public.
Then you shouldn't even be thinking about open source.
/. users spit out.
... what do you do then? Go down the list to every available developer hoping to wake them up from their slumber because you need help? .. first off you get fired.. and if yer firm is big enough... you get blacklisted from working in the industry...
... usually the ones that happen to be software development companies) you just be damn well sure you have someone to blame when systems roll over because nobody will listen to "well that open source developer guy said he was going to help us" which of course is going to have yer manager remember "Who was it that offered open source again?"
Because you aren't familiar enough with the concept to even propose such to a production environment. Which says that you're expertise is definitely not in the open source world which doesn't put you in a position to make that decision.
now I'm not saying all managers are smart but I'm saying you dont want to be the fall guy when shit doesn't work. If you do suggest something like this you better be damn well positive on ALL the facts and not just some things that
As with paying the developer for the support... That's the dumbest thing I've heard in years. What doy ou do when yer system rolls over at 3am in the morning the the guy is too busy looking at his internet pr0n?.. What's this ther'es another developer to call.. so you call him up and he's prolly too busy getting into a flame war about windows/nix to care
well if it's an importnat system
So if you really think open source is the way to go (and it is for some firms
Aren't you just slightly curious as to what they stick in yer laptop?
Pop em open and they're very cool inside. And as long as yer careful about that sticker you can take a gander inside. I've done it with plenty of various compaqs and hps (sonys are a bitch and a half tho).
How can you verify yer getting good components instead of second grade refurbished parts like Packard bell used to stick in their systems?
That and bestbuy has that 30 day return no questions asked policy... Just return it.
My point was to explore instead of calling up obvious incompetent tech support. There are always excuses I could come up with about not wanting to learn about what's inside of something I spent alot of money on but I still pop the hood and check out what's underneath regardless.
For someone trying to install a "real" OS you should perhaps learn more about how to tell what your individual components are
:-P (even if it does turn into a Windows vs Linux Rant eventually)
You can tell the ali chipset because usually near the main chip (the big thing with ALi written on it) or bottom right hand corner there's a version and a serial number which you can goto the ALi website and check up.
Besides that you can also guess it by see what features you have, which processor you can take that should easily narrow yer selections to 3 or 4 mother boards.
And I'm assuming since you said an ALi chipset for the mobo it probably has a built in sound chip? either a Qlogic, Cmedia or on of em Cirrus Logics.
Being a slashdot reader I would assume it'd prolly woulda been more helpful if you came here instead of calling up their tech support for 8 hours