Monday, April 23, 2001

Another Idiot Patent -- 8:39 pm CST, Update by The Master

According to Yahoo News, a company called PumaTech (I've got a better name, but I'm not gonna go there) has gotten itself awarded a patent on checksumming of webpages to detect changes.

Wow-that's a completely unique idea. And windowing was a completely new idea when that stupid patent was done as well. Can we just nuke the patent office, or what?!? Thanks to Slashdot for this positive note in my day.

Bleh -- 11:30 am CST, Update by The Master

Been awhile since I've done much posting on here (yeah, yeah A.T.) but something showed up on Yahoo! News that I thought was rather interesting. Yahoo reported today that PSINet, one of the monster ISPs that was flying so high so recently, has had their stock trades halted and will be delisted shortly. PSINet is also claiming that they will be needing to file for bankruptcy shortly.

Now, I'm not surprised at the slide all of these no-business-plan e-com companies have taken, but an ISP like PSI being taken down really surprises me. I do hope that internet-based businesses learn a real lesson from this whole stock crash. Have a plan. Don't just expect people to keep throwing money at you so you can have BMWs for everyone and pool parties for the whole company every night of the year.

J.t.Qbe comments: It's shakeout time, i.e. return to reality. This year's slower economy is weeding out some of the gravy train riders who are/were solely in it for a quick buck. These are quieter days. I'm currently looking for a job in Michigan (anyone need a Unix admin or Perl/C programmer?) and the job market is definitely tighter than it was 1-2 years ago.

Sunday, April 22, 2001

FreeBSD 4.3 Released -- 9:23 pm CST, Update by J.t.Qbe

It's been a banner week for Unix geeks. I just spotted the announcement that FreeBSD 4.3 has been released. I've been using FreeBSD 4.2 extensively during the last few weeks while telecommuting. It's a nice, clean, fast system and runs well on my 100 MHz machine. I'm afraid even to think about running the latest Mandrake or Red Hat on this system. Now if Netscrape would just stop crashing every few hours, I'd be a happy guy.

Pondering the Imponderable -- 6:07 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Today is "A.T. in LinuxLand" day. I've spent most of today fiddling around with my new RH 7.1 install. Now that I've gotten the bugs ironed out (mostly), I'm very impressed. The only problem I'm having is that my old 4.3G drive just isn't cutting the mustard for my Linux install. Installations of Quake III Arena, Shogo, and Soldier of Fortune eat up disk space in a BIG hurry.

My next quest is finding a decent word processor. I don't think KWord is going to do it for me. Later today, I plan on checking out Star Office. For some reason, my copy of WordPerfect 8.0 doesn't want to install.

J.t.Qbe comments: Hmmm, for your purposes WordPerfect is probably the best choice. However, check out this article on word processing options for Unix. Maybe you'll find something else. StarOffice is nice, but it's a big hawg.

Past Two Days' News

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