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Slashback: Drives, Errors, Copyright 440

Posted by timothy from the immer-etwas-anders dept.
Slashback brings you updates tonight on book reviews past, intentionally defective CDs, failing disk drives, and joining the HURD. Enjoy!

Spin control for some IBM drives? If you are one ofthe people who have the same results with IBM 75GXP hard drives that Sean Kelly did when he posed a recent Ask Slashdot, you may be interested in this report from legLess, who writes: "Pair Networks is swapping out every IBM 75GXP hard drive they have "[b]ased on an amazingly high failure rate." Pair is a big host: 114,000 sites all running on FreeBSD 4.1.1, including cdrom.com and Tom's Hardware. "We currently use and recommend Maxtor drives" they say. Big black eye for IBM."

GNU isn't Linux, either. Amid the stream of recent and upcoming software releases (Suse 7.3, Red Hat 7.2, Qt 3.0), it's sometimes easy for projects with smaller followings or more esoteric goals to get lost. BorrisYeltsin writes: "The Debian HURD iso images are now available from your local ftp.gnu.org mirror. There are 3 iso's available, so get downloading now!" (And read through the recent months' on the HURD Kernel Cousin too.)

Update: 10/16 14:20 GMT by T : Please note that the GNU Project maintains a list of ftp mirrors -- look for one local to you for best results all around :)

Placing warning signs along the road to consumerism brigc writes: "Good interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education with Jessica Litman about changes in the copyright arena since the publication of her book.

For those who were asleep, Litman's book 'Digital Copyright' does a good job of discussing why the copyright process got handed over to the industry and Congress has failed to protect the rights of the public."

Litman's book got a rave review from Michael a few months back; I suggest you check it out, and better yet ask you local library to put it up on display. Libraries have a strong vested interest in not ceding all control to copyright holders forever and ever amen.

It might pay to have a big fat mouth and ask for a refund on defective merchandise, too. anonicon writes: "Here's a heads up to the web site I'm running at http://www.fatchucks.com. I've started both a Corrupt CDs list for people who wish to report 'copy-protected' CDs or find out which ones they are, and an Indie Rec for people who want to recommend independent artists to the public. Thank you."
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Slashback: Drives, Errors, Copyright More

Slashback: Drives, Errors, Copyright

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  • GNU HURD (Score:3, Interesting)

    by s20451 ( 410424 ) on Monday October 15, 2001 @07:13PM (#2433991) Journal

    HURD -- a testament to the never-give-up and never-think-things-through spirit of GNU.

    "Linux is nothing, work on the HURD" -- Stallman

    • RMS was then heard to say, "If this doesn't work, we'll get on the 'Net, and take the last kernel out of 2.4.

    • Re:GNU HURD (Score:2, Informative)

      by karlm ( 158591 )
      There's plenty of talk about thinking things through. They've discovered that the HURD is much more Mach-specific than many had claimed. Mach exposes over one hundered system calls. Mach is big and slow. There are efforts to fix mach and efforts to move HURD to a different microkernel.


      The l4-hurd mailing list has been talking about porting the HURD to a "virtual kernel" and creating a virtual kernel layer for the L4 microkernel, to minimize all of the retooling that has to been done in the future when things move past current microkernel thinking.

  • That IBM warning came just in time for me... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by disc-chord ( 232893 ) on Monday October 15, 2001 @07:15PM (#2433995)
    I was planning on upgrading my own small servers with some of these drives, but have also made the switch to Matrox. I grew up the son of an IBM company man, who had great pride in IBM. This pride was passed down to me, and I've always trusted IBM for quality and dependability when it came to hardware for "Business Machines"... this is not just a black eye for IBM, but an end of an era.

    • Re:That IBM warning came just in time for me... (Score:5, Funny)

      by el borak ( 263323 ) on Monday October 15, 2001 @07:27PM (#2434045)
      I was planning on upgrading my own small servers with some of these drives, but have also made the switch to Matrox.

      Will you then be plugging a Maxtor into your AGP slot?

    • As the son of an IBM employee with that same sense of pride, and now an IBM employee, I have to say (without commenting on the alleged bad batch of storage devices) that the IBM storage warranty is second to none.

      The company lives up to it's responsibility to customers of drives that fail under warranty.

    • Just because the 75GXP has had some very noticeable reliability problems, that does NOT mean that IBM does not make a good drive! The IBM 60GXP is well known to be a better drive, in price/performance, performance, and reliability. These drives work great, I have them running in both Workstation and Server environments with no problem. I am also going to plug the much-maligned SCSI protocol, and say that the IBM SCSI Drives are some of the best I have ever used!

      I have had horrible luck with Maxtor drives, I have had about 6 fail on me, and have not had a single good experience getting them replaced. Other than IBM drives I have had good luck with the SCSI Seagates, however all of my IDE Seagates have developed many bad sectors in short periods of time, though Seagate has swapped them out no problem.
      -OctaneZ
    • Don't switch too fast. IBM's other drive lines are still some of the best in the business, including 60GXP drives of similar capacities.

      Meanwhile, Maxtor's drive failure rate in my experience is nothing wonderful, and while IBM will switch every one of your IBM drives that fails quickly and without complaint, Maxtor is *much* harder to work with when something fails, especially if it fails repeatedly.

      One or two unreliable products backed by incredible service may be better (especially for the little guy) than a slightly less unreliable product with problematic service. Just my experience.

      • Right.

        I find it interesting that people give up on a company's solid product history soo quickly with the fact that one bad product model was made.

        Switch to Maxtor? Is anyone kidding me here? I personally wasn't impressed with the quality of their products and I've had to replace several of their drives, zip of IBM's.
        • I was required to take 30 "humanities" credits, and this is the first opportunity I've had to put this "valuable" knowledge to use, so please excuse me.

          I seem to vaguely remember something in Psychology 101 about how people would prefer something that was reliably unreliable to an alternative that seemed to violate a their conception of how reliable it was. In short: a system of unreliable reward modifies behavior with greater effect than a system of reliable reward.

          That said I've had my share of HD's, only the Maxtors have failed under their listed mean time before failure (my bad luck YMMV). But they've always replaced them, of course I fell asleep while on hold waiting for a person once.
      • Right on, one company got a bad batch of drives. 75 systems out of thousands...

        Jeremy

    • Try Seagate... (Score:2, Informative)

      by SectoidRandom ( 87023 )
      My company pumps out quite a few systems per month, and we have been using Seagate HD's for the past two years UNTIL now. For some reason for a period of 2 months we were getting back almost 2 in 3 of the Seagate 20Gig 5400rpm drives (cant remember model number) in our systems. That lasted for two months, until changed to Fujitsu.

      The drives would just completly fail anywhere between 1 hour and 1 month from purchase. :( But none of the other Seagate drives has any similar problem, not even the 20Gig 7200rpm. So i would say its very much like the IBM problem, and alike also in that it hasnt been fixed quickly enough! :(

      /rant...

  • Heard on the radio tonite.... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Soko ( 17987 ) on Monday October 15, 2001 @07:16PM (#2433998) Homepage
    From Tim Baker of Sunrise Records [sunriserecords.com] during MusicNotes @ 6 [htzfm.com] on my local radio station CHTZ-FM [htzfm.com], best as I can remember the quote:

    "You know the Panasonic or Yamaha CD burners you want to get this Christmas? Well, I've got news for you - save your money. After Christmas all new releases will be encoded and you won't be able to burn your own - and it's about time"

    This is really paraphrased, but I have the gist of the quotation. I guess our fair use rights are supposedly forfeited because of the evil Napster. I wish these people would realise it's the price of a CD that was driving the Napster thing, not a willingness to steal. I alomst feel sorry for the record stores, though, since they take orders from the RIAA cabal.

    Soko

    • Re:Heard on the radio tonite.... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by harlows_monkeys ( 106428 ) on Monday October 15, 2001 @07:27PM (#2434042) Homepage
      You never had any "fair use" rights to forfeit. The fair use law (and the common law doctrine it was codified from) never gave you a right to copy...it merely made it so certain copying did not violate copyright.


      The copyright holders have always been allowed to stop fair use copying, by contract or by taking technological steps to prevent the copying. Fair use merely prevents them from using section 106 of the Copyright Act to stop copying.

      • This is not insightful, it's redundant and also deceptive, since, yes, you have always had the right to copy. Fair use limitations were not carved out of a wall of non-permission, but shaded out of the glaring assault of government-granted monopoly.

        Furthermore, the very fact that there are laws inventing copyright is supposed to have something to do with the ability to copy something. If that ability is eliminated through technological tricks, the moral basis for copyright is wholly undermined.

        These kind of measures should be recognized for what they are; a raw, naked, fuck-the-consumer power play by businesses who don't give a shit about anything once they've got got your money. This is about as defensible as spitting in your food.

      • Re:Heard on the radio tonite.... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by GTRacer ( 234395 ) <gtracer308 @ y a h o o .com> on Tuesday October 16, 2001 @09:46AM (#2436032) Homepage Journal
        IANAL, but...

        What is so frigging hard to understand? We have the "right" (I thought they *were* rights, but whatever the permission is called...) to format-shift. We have the right to time-shift. They (for now) have the right to make it hard for us to do these things.

        Mutual exclusivity aside, until the Supremes do something about it, we still have fair-use rights.

        What we don't have is the right to distribute copies. There's a big difference. I don't care if 90% of burner owners use them with illegal MP3's. That doesn't mean I do, or that I should be further deprived of my fair-use rights.

        GTRacer
        - Stop the insanity!

    • b/c of Napster? lol. It is b/c of the artists and the companies believing that these services (and CDRs) are taking away their percious fucking money. WRONG. It is poor business practices, bad pricing, and the fact that no one wants to buy a fucking CD for 3 or 4 good songs...

      Make a CD in which EVERY song is as good as the title track and then there will be less of a chance that it will not be bought. That's how it worked before and that's how it will always work.

      Enjoy your freedom of music and support those that allow it.
      • Make a CD in which EVERY song is as good as the title track and then there will be less of a chance that it will not be bought. That's how it worked before and that's how it will always work.

        Wrong. It's never always been like that, like you imply. There have been tons of singles artists in the past, and there'll be many more in the future.

        I think my Usenet .sig pretty much sums it up: "Oh yeah? Well my Top 40 crap was better than your Top 40 crap!"

        Hell, I've had albums that I've hated on first listen, then got into in a major way with later plays.

        Musical taste is something that's so damn personal, that stating that every record made has only 3 good songs on it is total bullshit.

    • It would be interesting to see what would happen if that was the case. My guess is that it won't stop MP3 sharing, but instead it will only make people that actually buy the CD angry.

      I personally would be pretty upset if I the only way I could listen to the CD I purchased on my computer would be to download an illegally ripped MP3 from the net. Especially since I am working on ripping my CDs to ogg.

      Perhaps WMA files will be good enough for the majority of folks, but they aren't likely to be good enough for me. I no longer have any Windows machines lying around.

      My guess is the harder the RIAA cracks down the more likely it becomes that consumers will look for an alternative source for music. After all, there are plenty of bands that are happy to let you download MP3s of their music. The question is how much will the RIAA's customer base put up with before they start experimenting with the new methods of marketing and distribution that the Internet affords.


    • Copying cds are not going to stop with one technical protection measure of an existing format.

      You are against too many people who want to break it. Its just a matter of time.

      And not everone has to be able to do it. Just one small set of groups who can do it can easily provide the rest with all the new mp3s. So breaking it could be difficult/hard but it won't matter once the mp3s are out.
    • I've been trying to think of something along the lines of a "Boston Tea Party" to protest the dismantling of consumer rights.

      Trashing a bunch of CDs would only be to the RIAA's benefit since we'd have to pay for all those CDs. Unless we steal them, but I doubt breaking into record stores would be good PR.

      So my idea is to distribute copies of "corrupted" CDs for free. We do it standing outside the stores, too. Now, we could say that we're only providing computer-readable copies for people who have legally bought the CD, but it's such a hassle to have to ask every single person to show a receipt.

    • Well, Tim Baker can suck my fat cock. If he doesn't want to sell me CDs that I can use fairly, well, I won't buy them. Fuck him!

  • Copy protection is the wrong way to stop piracy. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gusnz ( 455113 ) on Monday October 15, 2001 @07:17PM (#2434002) Homepage
    "Copy protected" CDs are going to be a shambles, good on the owner of that site for starting a list! And even better for compiling ways to, ahem, deal with the problem :).

    These CDs will do little to stop online piracy. Everyone knows, if it can be heard it can be copied. Working a line-in jack on a stereo or computer isn't hard. Heck, you probably lose more fidelity in the MP3/OGG/Whatever compression than the digital-to-analog conversion with good audio equipment. All it takes is one good copy to be released and online music piracy will be off again.

    Basically, if you want to stop the problem of music piracy, you've got to go back to the root issue -- the users themselves versus the bands in question.

    I have a friend who was firmly on Metallica's side during the Lars Ulrich vs. Napster debacle. Why? He respected them as artists, and as a result owns every album they have ever put out.

    This is what the RIAA doesn't get. The bands themselves are the only ones who can convince users not to copy, not any fancy technical or legal hurdles -- or have they forgotten that the bands exist apart from phony marketing images?

    So here's a plan to decrease piracy. Every band has a back catalogue of covers, garage recordings, and so on that will probably never get released and are next to worthless commerically. All they have to do is say "From now on, we're monitoring KaZaA/Morpheus/Gnutella/etc, and every fortnight where there's an average of less than XYZ files shared from us, we release new material for you to legally download free of charge".

    Think about it. Dedicated fans, who already respect the band for their abilities, will start to police these file-sharing services for them. Problem halved.

    Does this stand a chance, Slashdot? Ideas?
    • yeah the bands themselves do it but the companies and bands have every right to stop piracy any way they know how. I do agree that this is not the best way to do it (creating better music is not going to stop it it will probably just help to spread it).

      Personally I believe that the best way to do it is to allow free recording of every show that an artist puts out. A devout fan is more likely to BUY a studio album if they can already get a taste of what the band is capable of on stage.

      I hate the idea of copy-protected CDs (and personally I will not buy them) but I have a feeling we won't have a choice. Boycotting them won't work (try boycotting any chain, etc) it is HIGHLY unlikely that numbers of bought CDs will drop in any significant amount. (Just as they haven't dropped due to Napster, Gnutella, whatever).

      Individuals will NOT police services themselves. That's fucking ridiculous. People are accustomed to copying music (I know I have been making my own compilations for years why would I stop now).

      Support bands that support free music. Don't support bands who are in it only for the money.
      • Personally I believe that the best way to do it is to allow free recording of every show that an artist puts out. A devout fan is more likely to BUY a studio album if they can already get a taste of what the band is capable of on stage.

        Actually, IIRC, Metallica does exactly that; they allow (and I think even encourage) their fans to make and trade concert recordings. They felt (reasonably, IMO) that they had a fan-friendly view of copying and trading songs, and really exploded only when they found out that one of their works in progress was being traded online. That's why they phrased so many of their complaints in terms of protecting their artistic integrity; they felt that the public trading of a song that they hadn't finished yet got in the way of their ability to change it further.

      • Re:Copy protection is the wrong way to stop piracy (Score:5, Insightful)

        by jeffy124 ( 453342 ) on Monday October 15, 2001 @08:46PM (#2434294) Homepage Journal
        Personally I believe that the best way to do it is to allow free recording of every show that an artist puts out. A devout fan is more likely to BUY a studio album if they can already get a taste of what the band is capable of on stage.

        Dave Matthews does exactly that. He allows recorders at his shows and allows his music to be freely traded/swapped/copied/etc. He's ok with people making CD's out of his shows and selling them (including those shows he makes into albums). He's ok with people making MP3s (and other formats) out of his albums and shows and then placing them on p2p services.

        Why does he do this? His philosophy is that of a Jazz musician (his music has an element of Jazz to it, btw) (i shouldnt really be singling out jazz, a lot of other types of musicians are the same way). They like their music to be listened to and enjoyed, not the monetary value they get in return. That philosophy is very similar to programmers who contribute to Open Source projects.

        You are correct by saying a devout fan buys music - I have all of Dave's CDs :) There are many other artists like this, Dave is just one of them.

      • Re:Copy protection is the wrong way to stop piracy (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Wolfstar ( 131012 ) on Tuesday October 16, 2001 @02:12AM (#2435096)
        I hate the idea of copy-protected CDs (and personally I will not buy them) but I have a feeling we won't have a choice. Boycotting them won't work (try boycotting any chain, etc) it is HIGHLY unlikely that numbers of bought CDs will drop in any significant amount. (Just as they haven't dropped due to Napster, Gnutella, whatever).

        Actually....

        So quickly we forget the details. It's kinda sad in a way.

        I remember seeing something on CNN in early 2000 right when the Napster lawsuits were filed and/or aired to the general public as a whole. The news went something like this:

        "The RIAA has filed a lawsuit against Napster, the online music-sharing service, due to it's ability to facilitate piracy of music and potential to cripple sales.

        "In other news, CD sales this quarter are up almost 20%, a near-record quarter for the music industry."

        The teeny little smirk of irony that the guy let slip through spoke volumes for those that saw it.

        Very shortly afterwards, hundreds of people started boycotting the RIAA by refusing to purchase CDs released by RIAA member labels. Everyone was outraged by the total ridiculousness of the charges in the lawsuit and by God they were going to DO something about it!

        And you know what? It worked. Unfortunately, because it was such a grassroots and spontaneous choice by hundreds and even thousands of individuals, nobody bothered to tell the MEDIA that people were boycotting the RIAA. And so it backfired on us.

        Whatsernutz, the RIAA's Head Hatchetwoman... er... spokeswoman, that is, pointed to CD sales in 2001 being down even further than usual to points much lower than in the past two to three years as proof that Napster and other music-sharing services ARE hurting the industry. Never mind the fact that the major player - Napster - has been stopped cold, with no way to trade anything over it. Never mind that online music piracy has been reduced, effectively, to that of pre-Napster levels. CD sales are slipping. They know why, and can even truthfully say that it's because of Napster. They just haven't bothered to tell anyone that, hey, it's because we SUED Napster that they're slipping. The cause is Napster, but not in the way that they want everyone to think.

        And nobody's bothered to point this out to the Media, the courts, or the world at large.

        So you say that it's highly unlikely that a boycott would do any good. I say that you're right, but not for the same reasons. Boycotts are USELESS if the public isn't made aware of them. The number of CDs purchased in the past year HAS dropped significantly, and as of right now, it's only filling their ammo bins. We need someone to step up and tell people that the reason CD sales are slipping is because the people who buy the majority of music aren't buying anymore in protest. And it needs to be someone famous - or at least vaguely well-known - and respected.

        Just some food for thought for all of ya.
        • Online trading has dropped? Well, maybe a little but I doubt it! Ever heard of Morpheus? Kazaa? Bearshare? Gnutella? Sure it's not in a nice shiny package like Napster was. It's not totally Music either. Personally, I might download a MP3 when I want to here something then delete it. I may also download clips from TV shows as well on Morpheous.

          I would BUY every CD I wanted if it was only about 5 bucks. The RIAA and music agents steal from artists. Take a look at artists like TLC and a few others. Yeah yeah they may have been lame one hit wonders, but I don't know anyone who doesn't know their songs and they went totally broke right about the time they were the most popular and selling lots of CD's. Then, all of a sudden, noone listened to TLC anymore and/or someone started to wondered what happened to them. Watch any beyond the music or behind the music or whatever and lots of artists have a similar story. Very few reach the heights of bands and musicians like Aerosmith, Eric Clapton, Mariah Carey (ok her new one sucks be she had way more hits then most of the current musicians) or heck even Metallica has done extremely well and held on for a while.

          If the music industry wants to increase sales, they need to make the purchase worth it. Enhanced CD's while cool, are usually poorly executed. They want to install 3-4 year old software like Quicktime 2.0 and even old versions of flash. They don't recognize that PC owners have there stuff already installed. Where am I going with this? Fans will buy regardless, but if you give that new listener something other then 10 other songs that don't get airplay, they may be more apt to buy future CD's. A real well done enhanced CD could go further towards that. Include some professional Winamp skins or Windows Media Player skins and things such as wallpaper and professional Windows and Mac skins and themes. Ditch the auto launching flash presentations, or if you have one, don't go too crazy with it. Include a link in the flash presentation that will launch a file explorer. Real fans will eat em up and new users may get more then the song they hear on the radio 15 times a day.

    • Um, WRONGO! (Score:3, Funny)

      by gnovos ( 447128 )
      How the hell is this supposed to stop piracy? So these bands will just play thier little tunes while the pirates are our raping and pilliaging on the high seas? How will this help? The ONLY way to stop pirates is to protect every convoy with armed naval ships!

      ...um, wait a second... Wha? Since when did pirates copy music anyway?

      :)

    • They're going to get sued a lot on this. And juries hate 'em now.
    • I'm sure the industry would love that. Nobody could prove how many songs were traded online so they'd release a couple songs to get people's attention and then claim rampant copying when they felt like quitting.

      They'd come out looking like the good guys, after all, it was the users who didn't do the right thing... Just like Stephen King and his bullshit with "The Plant". He ran out of time so he stopped writing it (leaving everyone who had bought the first parts in the lurch) and blamed it on piracy. What an ass.

      I really never cared about MP3s until now, but I'll definately encourage people to download MP3s from copy protected discs instead of paying for them. It's getting to the point where we need to fight this shit instead of sitting and taking it.

    • Wrong. It's not about fan respect. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Kasreyn ( 233624 ) on Monday October 15, 2001 @10:19PM (#2434510) Homepage
      Take the example of my best friend. He owns TWO copies of every Metallica CD up to the Napster fiasco. One copy of every cassette tape up to then. 4 or 5 posters, up to then. 5 or 6 T-shirts. A baseball cap. He was The World's Biggest Metallica Fan, all caps, in stereo. He was also the second-biggest Napster user I ever met. Then came the Napster Fiasco, and he got banned for an mp3 of No-Leaf Clover, found on his machine, *ripped off his own legitimate CD and not available for downloads*. Result?

      Well, first he hacked his way out of the ban like any self-respecting music fan. ;-) Second, he dropped Metallica cold, and hates their guts today, Lars in particular. He gets a grim satisfaction from anti-metallica sites like killmetallica.com. He is now one of the biggest Metallica HATERS I know. There is no evidence that his Napster use ever cost them a dime, and he must have spent hundreds on them over the years. Would have spent hundreds more if he'd remained a fan. Now, nothing.

      Talk about your Operation: Footbullets.

      This is not about fan's respect. A fan who likes a band is MORE likely to share its music. Metallica was all in favor of tape trading back in the day, when they were little. We haven't forgotten, Lars, even if fame has made you forget. Face it - this is about money, and about destroying those fair-use rights that cut in on corporate profit. Nothing more, nothing less.

      -Kasreyn

      P.S. Doubly ironic, they banned him for a reallu sUxx0r song like No Leaf Clover, when there were also mp3's of Master of Puppets, Orion, One, etc...
    • or have they forgotten that the bands exist apart from phony marketing images?

      In 1981 or therabouts, the Record Industry almost lost it all to MTV. Why? They suddenly lost control of the promotional media. For the first time all the payola and underhanded promoting meant nothing in the face of artists who could not only be seen, but heard.

      Then the record company learned their lesson, and signed all the unpopular bands that MTV 'made', and promptly ruined them. Almost all of the really good 80's bands that didn't understand how the record industry worked are now lucky to show up on Vh1's 'Behind the Music' or 'Where are they Now?'. God, I really had a crush on Belinda Carlisle when I was a kid, too.

      Now, the record industry pumps an 'Artist'-- and I do use that term loosely-- as much on their visual image as they do on their sound.

      What, you think Britney got those new cookies because she particularly wanted them? Or do you think some fork-tounged record-executive/producer told her that they would boost her popularity and sales enough times that she started to beleive him?

      Real good example of the way this works. Look at the Monkees. Crap band with some charismatic, but not really good-looking members. They were made up out of whole cloth. Pete, Peter, Mickey, and Davey were the winners of an audition. They were just barely good enough to get a TV show as part of their promotion package.

      Let's contrast and compare with O-town, yet another group that was manufactured by the Hollywood machine. They *started* with a TV show *about* the audtions, because the record industry now understands that video is an important part of the 'image'.

      Remember, it has *always* been about the perception of pop music stars, be it 'Sound' or 'Image', and *never* about their musical talents.

      If it was about talent, there never would have been Disco.

  • HURD (Score:3, Funny)

    by Phroggy ( 441 ) <{slashdot3} {at} {phroggy.com}> on Monday October 15, 2001 @07:19PM (#2434008) Homepage
    The Debian HURD iso images are now available from your local ftp.gnu.org mirror.

    Shouldn't that be Debian GNU/HURD, just to be fair?

    • Re:HURD (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Actually, it's "Microsoft/HURD", since so many of the keyboards used by HURD developers were made by Microsoft.

    • No, it should be Linus/HURD... just to irritate RMS. :->

    • Actually, I believe its official name is Debian GNU/HURD.

  • IBM (Score:2, Insightful)

    by lavaforge ( 245529 )
    Does anyone else have any anecdotal evidence of IBM drive problems? For all we know, Pair is just damned unlucky.
    • Funny, all I've heard so far is "anecdotal" evidence. That's where one guy tells a personal story about a specific instance right? - an anecdote.

      It sounds like Pair may actually have some "statistical" evidence: "X out of Y drives have failed on us so far, which is an unacceptably high percentage. These statististics have prompted us to abandon this product."

      • The last place I worked ordered 12 IBM zpros (dual xeon w/scsi). Of the lot, we lost 9 of 12 9G SCSI drives over a year and a half. Not sure what happened to the last 4 units...

        They were good about replacing drives, BTW... prepaid and cross shipped with the dead drives.
        • I had a 9GB SCSI DeskStar fail after two months. For various reasons (mgmt was too cheap to buy a tapedrive), it wasn't backed up... Thank G-d for Ontrack and their clean room!
    • I've had two failures out of two in the last six months. That's 100% in 6 months for me. Those with them know the sound. Repeat after me. Click zitt zitt zitt. Click zit zit zit. Click zit zit zit. They work fine until after they were shut down. On boot up, they are corrupt and dead.

  • Copy-protected the best way... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Nijika ( 525558 ) on Monday October 15, 2001 @07:36PM (#2434081) Homepage Journal
    Hey, if you CAN'T EVEN PLAY THEM, they're totally proofed from copy. I think they should just start selling blank CDs with covers, then when you want the actual music you can download it off your HD where you probably already have it and burn it on to the blank CD you just purchased.

    The RIAA will never change, ever. Remember when tapes first got easy to record on?

  • How goes the rip CD's from XP thing [nwfusion.com], or has this been dropped? It looked like a pure publicity exercise to me, it'd be weird to see 'rip with windows' or something on a CD sticker. MS'd have to pay a shedload of money for the privilege I guess, not that they don't have it.

  • So pair is swapping out IBM 75GXP drives... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Quikah ( 14419 ) on Monday October 15, 2001 @07:38PM (#2434090)
    Yeah, that is a bit of a blow to IBM. However the real question this raises is: Why is pair using consumer level IDE drives in their servers?!

  • Don't turn this into a stigma for IBM (Score:5, Informative)

    by Fnord ( 1756 ) <joe@sadusk.com> on Monday October 15, 2001 @07:51PM (#2434135) Homepage
    IBM drives are on the whole very good. Yes the 75GXPs are crap. On the other hand the 40GXPs and 60GXPs are some of the best consumer level drives on the market right now. If you're trying to avoid a faulty drive don't go to a slightly less faulty alternative like Maxtor (I have seen too many Maxtors (of varying generations) fail, I will never trust them again) rather than one of the products that gave IBM their previous reputation for reliability.

    P.S. No I don't work for or are in any way affiliated with IBM. I'm just a sysadmin thats run a lot of hardware into the ground over the years, and am a happy owner of a 60GXP.

  • I'll ask again (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Obliqueness ( 321184 )
    How the hell long is it going to take for people to grow some spine and not buy a single CD from any artist from any RIAA member? It isn't that bad, folks. The only chance for us to break this racket is to not buy the product from the racket's participants.

    • Re:I'll ask again (Score:2, Interesting)

      by mls ( 97121 )
      How the hell long is it going to take for people to grow some spine and not buy a single CD from any artist from any RIAA member?

      Well, you may wish to preach that message to the teeny-boppers that buy CDs in volume and feed the monster that is RIAA. If you can't communicate your message to that crowd, your approach is doomed to fail.

      On a side note, how many of you remember the copy protection computer software used to attempt to use in the late 80s, early 90s? The more I see of this new scheme by RIAA members, the more I am reminded of that failed attempt by software vendors. In the end it was the laziness of the end consumer that seemed to break that cycle. They didn't want to have to do the secret dance and jump through hurdles to use their software - they just wanted it to work. People hacked ways around those protections, and eventually the vendors just gave up as it wasn't cost effective to alienate their market segment to keep the few from copying their product.

      • No, let the RIAA sell to the teeny boppers and let the real music be released through credible means. A child market is fine, lets just try to ensure that they lose all control over the adult market (and here the adult-child distinction is simply the difference between the music that is created solely for marketing reasons and the music that is created for anything else). Imagine the fun of each artist deciding whether they want to jump on the cash wagon and sell to a select market, or go for credibility and hope they are good enough to make good money. Personally I would rather see the MPAA, RIAA and every media company (especially TV stations) hauled through the courts for child exploitation, but I doubt that is going to happen.
    • Actually, I gave up buying ANY CDs or DVDs over a year ago.

      There are only a few musicians I'm interested in listening to, and only a few movies that might capture my attention.

      The RIAA hasn't seen any profit from my in over a year. The MPAA got a few bucks when I saw Shreck in the theatre. (Couldn't resist taking my wife to the movies... what can I say?)

      I'm with you in boycotting, and I hope others figure it out sooner rather than later.
      • I've been boycotting Videos, CDs and DVDs now for nearly two years and have broken it once... on my birthday I went from the early house (drinking establishment that opens in the morning) to the off-licence to get some vodka to drink while I was dragged to the cinema to watch Scary Movie. Other than that I have not bought a single CD or DVD or rented any films. I want to buy a DVD so I can test playing them on my Linux box but keep stopping myself. The closest I have come was the "Still Smokin" DVD by Dr. Dre, Snoop et al which is a Region 0 DVD and a German Metal DVD which didn't carry any logos or info on encoding (not even a DVD logo on the box, pity it just looked tooooo crap). I'd say that so far the movie and music industries have lost about $4000 of mine (I bought quite a few videos and went to the cinema frequently along with the odd CD purchase). Join in everyone, look for alternative ways to ethically spend your money, tell poeple that you do it and why (though it is a challenge to explain it), discourage your friends from spending their money. When your elected oficials are looking to get re-elected tell them! The only fears are that if the boycott is successful some stupid politicians will make more laws in the industries favour (hence tell everyone so that these laws can become potential vote losers and wont be touched by the conservative politicians democracy breeds) and that artists we would actually like to hear will fail and dissappear (that's why we need every artist on the planet to register their prefered direct donation method so we can support artists in a way that tells them why you aren't buying their product). As long as all other things remain equal, the boycott will be successful as the MPAA/RIAA/etc will be forced into either raising prices to compensate for the lost revenue, which will in turn lose them more revenue until the entire model collapses OR they will re-evaluate what they are doing to bring the boycotters back into the fold. For me to return they would need to drop copy-protection and all other format obfuscation (including trying to license media with EULAs and regoinal encoding), and a price reduction or long term freeze would help.
    • How the hell long is it going to take for people to grow some spine and not buy a single CD from any artist from any RIAA member? It isn't that bad, folks. The only chance for us to break this racket is to not buy the product from the racket's participants.

      s/CD/DVD/g
      s/people/Slashdotters/g
      s/RIAA/MPAA/g

      It's the same thing folks. /.ers bitch and moan about how evil the MPAA is for the anti-DeCSS -- ooh, look a brand new Star Trek DVD! Let's go buy it!
    • How long is it going to take for you and those who put forth the same arguments to realize that IT WILL NOT WORK and as a bonus IT HURTS ARTISTS YOU LIKE.

      I like Cake, Ivy, and a number of other arists quite a bit. When I buy those CD's, sure I'm giving some money to RIAA but I'm also supporting the arists I like (I also support local artists too, I just happed to like some signed bands).

      Even if everyone reading /. stopped buying DVD's and CD's, the simple fact is that they wouldn't even notice! We are a small minority buying a (relativley) small amount of music/movies, especially compared to the army of nSync fans ready to buy at the drop of a hat.

      In fact, what would really happen are that for a few bands that a lot of people around here like (Daft Punk? Cake?) that the sales numbers would be put off as we're a larger percentage of that sub-market - so they'd still have almost as much money as before, but would think your favorite band was dropping in popularity fast and it would be a damn long time before you see another CD from them!! You'd be saying "Hey, wasn't that my favorite lead singer in Dark Days II?"

      What we can do here is use something we have proportionally more of - money - than the population at large to fight against them. Donate to the EFF!! They are the ones fighting the battles that will get the laws we hate overturned, if they are going to be overturned at all. They are, to paraphrase, our last hope.

  • I love BBSpot (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Check out The record industry's newest copy protection scheme. [bbspot.com] ;)

  • The VIA SouthBridge and IBM 75GXP Connection (Score:4, Interesting)

    by KidSock ( 150684 ) on Monday October 15, 2001 @08:16PM (#2434211)
    I wonder if Pair Networks runs AMD on VIA boards with that quirky chipset problem. Someone pointed out the last time this IBM Deathstar issue came up that a lot of the people affected have VIA boards. I have one of these drives with a VIA board and my machine when screech screech screech .... clickety, clickety, clickety too 8^(

    Anyone running AMD on VIA with the GXP?
    • I don't know waht Pair is doing. I do know that I can't run Linux Mandrake 8.1 on my VIA KT133A-based Athlon. Mostly it works, but mounting the SCSI-emulated CD-RW causes kernel panic. Various discussions on abUsenet a.o.l.m end up with "VIA chips are buggy". Funny, Windows has no trouble with them. But who knows what is happening there if Pair is running Linux.

      Maybe the problem is Linux and a lack of time spent learning how to work with VIA chips.
      • Windows has no trouble with them

        Try reading viahardware [viahardware.com] sometime - no end of people with problems with KT133A systems, on Windows too!

        My own KT7A-RAID was extremely flaky with more than one IDE device in it until I tweaked it a lot - new BIOS, different soundcard, new 4-in-1 drivers, PCI bus settings... all sorts of things.

        It now runs Win2k and SuSE 7.2 with no trouble at all.

  • HURD (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fsmunoz ( 267297 ) <`fsmunoz' `at' `member.fsf.org'> on Monday October 15, 2001 @08:50PM (#2434308) Homepage
    Just to give my input on the assorted comments about GNU/HURD:
    • GNU/HURD should indeed be called just GNU, since it's the GNU OS proper; RMS said recently in a mailing-list that although this is the case one should use GNU/HURD whenever there is need to differenciate (e.g. "Debian GNU" would be awkward and misleading, hence GNU/Linux and GNU/HURD). Apart from that, the HURD is indeed GNU (since the kernel is part of the GNU system there is no need to use GNU/HURD, unlike GNU/Linux where there is such a need).

    • Usability: how many people have actually tried installing and running GNU/HURD? From the comments, not a lot... Sure, there are still several things missing, but the concept of the HURD is elegant and interesting enough to make it worthwhile... the fundamental servers are already done, many interesting translators are done and others being developed (think for example of the ftp translator... that give system wide transparent FTP, with no modification on any user program...). All the gnu shell and text utils are there, and so is Emacs and hundrends of other programs, including XFree. I wouldn't call this 'useless'...

    • Some limitations and shortcomings are still there, and some of them probably give the appearance of a slowdown in development (threads, the 1GB limit for the partitions that the it can handle and the ppp code); this will be hopefully soon solved (I would say very soon). The truth is that, apart from the hardware support - that will be greatly improved with oskit-mach - and some programs that depend on libs that are hard to port everything is available. I can browse the web on GNU/HURD; I can program in GNU/HURD; I can do huge ammounts of important stuff while using GNU/HURD, and all this without even going for HURD specific features that are very intriging and useful (again, servers and translators come to mind... check the GNU/HURD website [gnu.org] for info on all this.

    Instalation and packaging is pure Debian, so nobody should have major problems (always keeping in mind that it's still being developed).

    All in all I'm very pleased with the status of it and the possibilities it gives (and the ones that are to follow).

    Try it; get involved; you could just come to like it.

    • Re:HURD (Score:3, Insightful)

      by rodgerd ( 402 )
      What happened to giving credit where credit is due? RMS claims the name of a system should be GNU/Linux because you can't run Linux without GNU tools. You sure as shit can't run the HURD without a microkernel - so it should be the Mach/HURD.

      • GNU/everything (Score:3, Interesting)

        by DickBreath ( 207180 )
        This is drifting off topic, but this is not a troll. Just honest thinking about it. Questions to ponder. More questions than answers. But one conclusion at the end.

        Shouldn't it really be called: GNU/Linux/XFree/ALSA/Qt/KDE? I mean, that's what I run. Honest. And my system wouldn't be usable (to me at least) without these.

        In all honesty and complete candor, my system really wouldn't be usable if I didn't call it...
        GNU / Linux / XFree / ALSA / Qt / KDE / StarOffice / XMMS / LAME / Apache / Java / Python / PHP / PostgreSQL / htdig / et. all.

        Now in my progression of names, you might argue that some of them are merely "packages" that enable specific functionality. But there are two good counter arguments to that which are seperate and distinct.

        1. Isn't GNU just a collection (or package) of software that enables specific functionality? Is it really more necessary in order to have an operational system, than say, Apache?

        2. Isn't what constitutes a "usable" system dependent on the user and intended use?

        For instance, one might argue that Apache isn't necessary. But if the system's intended use is a webserver, then Apache might be necessary, and GNU tools might be unnecessary. For instance, can't you replace most GNU tools with perl scripts? (In fact, I remember a project once to replace most of the tools with perl scripts.) Imagine a web server appliance. It might have a Linux kernel, an Init program, a web server, a scripting language, and NO GNU tools. No command line. No compilers, etc. It seems clear that this hypothetical system would not properly be called GNU/anything.

        And on my system, I have lots of GNU tools installed. I don't think about them any more than I give any special thought to Qt, KDE, XFree, Apache, Python, etc., etc. or other major projects which are the product of major effort. I don't mean to downplay the effort that has been put into GNU. So should my system be called GNU/Linux? Shouldn't the other important major projects which make all the difference to my system being usable get a place in the name? Why should going from my hypothetical embedded webserver appliance to a desktop system where GNU tools are added, mandate a prefix of GNU?

        Maybe the people who package my system should choose the name? The box says "SuSE Linux 7.2 Professional". What if they wanted to call it the "Aardvark" operating system which includes and is based on lots of software works including Linux, GNU, KDE, etc., etc.?

        I'm not suggesting that GNU should not receive credit. I also don't want to fail to recognize the wonderful work of untold thousands in many other major software projects that I make use of daily and take for granted, with hardly a second thought.

        Imagine a system geared for end users. Not stupid people. Just non-geeks who want to do useful work. They never use the command line, compilers, etc. How hard would it be for such a system to be GNU free? Even if GNU parts were installed on the system as part of the distribution, does GNU play a big or even any part of making the system usable to them in any significant way? Doesn't Linux and (let's suppose) KDE, XFree and StarOffice play the bigger roles of making this system operational and usable?

        Suppose Apple were to include GNU tools as an optional install in Mac OS X? What part do those tools play in the overall system? Should they call it GNU/Mac OS X? How much does this system resemble the non-Mac system of the previous paragraph?

        Like I said, I have a lot more questions than answers. I'm not ooposed to using GNU/Linux in a lot of contexts. But in the end, the real problem I have is that I think RMS is a control freaque. I applaud the many good things he has done. But I don't worship him as much as I do some others. And as I read more and more articles I find myself more and more pissed at RMS as time goes on. (I should use the term alienated, but I'm more in the "pissed" mindset at this moment.) Just as a longtime Apple user (20+ years, predating Macintosh and even IBM PC) I find myself very pissed at Steve Jobs as I've read more accounts of behind the scenes.

        This is a rant. Not intended as a troll or flame or to draw flames. An opinion for sure. Questions. No definite answers. Blowing off steam.

    • Re:HURD (Score:4, Informative)

      by BlowCat ( 216402 ) on Monday October 15, 2001 @11:25PM (#2434751)
      I tried GNU/Hurd about a year ago. The filesystem support is quite stable, so it probably won't wipe your data. It's stable enough to compile serious stuff (e.g. gcc). It's not stable if you start playing hard (killing processes, running "ls -lR /", using too much RAM). It's very slow. It feels 3 times slower than GNU/Linux. Color isn't supported on the console. Needless to say that there were no sound drivers when I tried it, not to mention USB.

      On the other side, I think that GNU/Hurd with its microkernel design is much better suited to handle modern hardware for on single-user systems. If only they had more qualified developers with enough time.

  • I work for a start up with many ex-IBM'ers, we decided in the begining to use the above mentioned IBM harddrives. For me, I could care less about quality of warranty, or past reliability. What I care about is that I have to swap 100's of IBM drives, full of data. I have had this drive fail 3 times in a 6 month period on my mail server, each time requiring me to take time out of my evenings to rebuild a busy machine. I'm busy enough without crappy hardware. My users are yelling for replacement drives from a diffrent manufacturer.

    We went with drives from Western Digital. My my time and companies money is wasted.

  • Maxtor? (Score:3, Informative)

    by MSG ( 12810 ) on Monday October 15, 2001 @09:39PM (#2434416)
    "We currently use and recommend Maxtor drives"

    Shit, Maxtor drives? Those are at the very bottom of my list of reliable drives, trying hard for a place next to Western Digital. Seriously, couldn't they have picked a better drive? Fujitsu still makes some good quality drives. They're very quite, too.

    OTOH, maybe Maxtor's gotten better since they incorporated Quantum... but I dunno. It doesn't seem terribly likely to me.
    • Ive been using Maxtors since my 486/66, those and Western Digitals, I have not had any go bad on me, seagates and quantums however...

      trying to remember the sizes...
      540*, 880 (x3)*, 1.2 (x2), 4.3(x2), 10 & 30(x2)
      (*not positive on ths sizes, been a while since I looked at em)

      maybe Ive been lucky...
    • Almost all companies made bad HD models at some point. First it was Maxtor, then Western Digital, now it's IBM. I'll not be surprised if it will be e.g. Seagate tomorrow.

      The problem is that good testing requires months, which is unacceptable on the consumer market with growing demands, tough competition and clueless users.

      For Joe Sixpack, the drive size is like processor frequency - the only measure of its "quality" (possibly along with the brand name). You cannot compete against a 40G drive with a 20G drive just by saying that the model has gone through a rigorous 1-year long test and has shown good results.

  • Under the Corrupt CD's is a banned book area, very interesting. He has them in areas by banned on political, religious, sexual and social reasons. I think I'll use this as a must read list. Been wanting to read 1984.

    -
    "The worst part of censorship is XXXXXXXXXXX." -- Unknown

  • Wrongful use of CDDA Logo (Score:5, Informative)

    by Biedermann ( 70142 ) on Tuesday October 16, 2001 @01:21AM (#2435010)
    This [sony.com] Sony page tells us that any CD carrying the "compact disc digital audio" logo is compliant to the IEC 908 standard and/or the Philips-Sony Compact Disc Digital Audio System Description (the RED Book). Any way to get the labels in for wrongfully using that logo (if they do) ?

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