Silicon.Com does Linux week

A number of people have submitted the Silicon.Com Linux week. They're doing an excellent coverage, with RealPlayer interviews with ESR, and other folks as well. This is a great story for your PHBs to look at-answering the perennial question of whether Linux is ready for wide-spread use.

Did anyone else receive "personalized" spam?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did anyone else receive this bit of spam from (I presume) Silicon.com?

Subject: Fred, Something that might be of interest?

Dear Fred,

Have you seen this story on an exclusive Silicon.com poll? It says that Linux is ready for corporate use - you can see the full thing at
http://www.silicon.com/linuxspecial

The survey, which marks the start of Silicon's week-long Linux Special, found that 71 per cent of viewers believe Linux is ready for business, while only 25 per cent disagreed.

There's a whole Linux Special running this week on the site (http://www.silicon.com/linuxspecial) - exclusive interviews ... etc., etc.

Vanessa

Gee, "Vanessa". Sorry. I'd say that all your credibility was shot by this bit of spam.

List of URLs for the ESR interview

[davie]

Here are the URLs for the silicon.com interview with ESR, painstakingly extracted from the HTML. It's only 4:55 long, just a telephone interview, no video of ESR.

• 28.8 http://www.silicon.com/html/1_ent1 80599sk.rm.ram [silicon.com]
• 56K http://www.silicon.com/html/2_ent1 80599sk.rm.ram [silicon.com]
• 128K http://www.silicon.com/html/3_ent1 80599sk.rm.ram [silicon.com]

Too Bad RealPlayer doesn't work

[gavinhall]

Posted by mudmonkey:

It's a damn shame I can't get RealPlayer to work on RedHat 5.2 with kernel 2.2.9...

Mindcraft IV :)

[hawk]

Rob bet that NT couldn't handle slashdot's load, and won :)

SPAM from Silicon.Com for their Linux story

[Per Abrahamsen]

I got this unsolisticated mail, advertising for the Linux week on silicon.com. Was it just me, or have they had a regular SPAM campaign?

PS: I don't know any "Vanessa Carlisle".
PPS: that is the second piece of Linux spam I have gotten. The first was from Linux Mall.

From [e-mail] Wed May 19 23:58:21 1999
Return-Path:
Received: from th-gt141-094.pool.dircon.co.uk (th-gt141-094.pool.dircon.co.uk [194.112.58.94])
by sheridan.dina.kvl.dk (8.9.0.Beta5/8.9.0.Beta5) with SMTP id XAA07454
for ; Wed, 19 May 1999 23:58:19 +0200
From: [e-mail]
Message-Id:
Date: 19/05/99 22:25:48 Pacific Daylight Time
Reply-To: [e-mail]
To: [e-mail]
Subject: Per, Something that might be of interest?

Dear Per,

Have you seen this story on an exclusive Silicon.com poll? It says that Linux is ready for corporate use - you can see the full thing at

http://www.silicon.com/linuxspecial

The survey, which marks the start of Silicon's week-long Linux Special, found that 71 per cent of viewers believe Linux is ready for business, while only 25 per cent disagreed.

There's a whole Linux Special running this week on the site (http://www.silicon.com/linuxspecial) - exclusive interviews with people like Eric Raymond, Miguel de Icaza and so on.... probably worth a look.


Vanessa

Hahah

[Matts]

OMG the irony of an interview with RMS in realplayer format is just killing me... I hope others see the humour as much as I do... :)

perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-: ,hacker Perl another Just)'

RealPlayer sucks

[Tet]

If the interviews are in RealPlayer format, then for my money, the coverage can't be described as "excellent".

It's a closed, proprietary format and I can't use it. What's that you say? Get of your high horse, and just use the binary version that Real have kindly made available? Well, perhaps I would if they supported Linux on my Sparc or OpenStep on my NeXT...

Proprietary formats are not ideal, but you can live with them on standalone systems. However, when will people learn that on the Internet, they just plain don't work?

Anyone have a login?

[Disconnect]

TSIA .. "Sorry, you were logged out at xxx"...

/*He who controls Purple controls the Universe. *

Realplayer

[Gary Franczyk]

Unfortunately, no one has been able to write a free version of Realplayer. If shoutcast was a compatible format, that sure would be nice. Really, what keeps Real networks from releasing the source to Realplayer and the server? I suppose the server is their only real form of income....

Re:Too Bad RealPlayer doesn't work

[Gary Franczyk]

Yet ANOTHER reason why realplayer should become open-source... (GPL in particular would be nice)

Re:RealPlayer sucks

[Arkham]

The problem is that there is not a non-proprietary streaming video format (yet). Quicktime is moving in this direction with it being the basis of MPEG3 and distributing the server source, but as of now there's no solution. Your options (AFAIK) are:

1) Windows Media
2) Real

Of the two, Real is more cross-platform. It runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux. Windows Media runs on Windows, and it crashes on the Mac. There's no other option for it.

I sincerely hope that Apple will release Quicktime for Linux, but it's not an option yet.

Re:Slashdown down?

[mwillis]

Yes. from around 10pm EST last night until around 1230pm EST today.

Cracked? If so, who's cracking it? Those 10 guys Microsoft hired? Maybe Rob should post an explanation whenever there is downtime, lest we worry.

Re:RealPlayer sucks

[mistabobdobalina]

if you go to www.statmarket.com you will notice that ~ 94% of users are on the win32 platform. therefore, it's more profitable to just go ahead and make software that runs on windows, and possibly mac or redhat if you're really big. i also prefer open formats but businesses tend to make money on closed architectures...

While we're being off topic...

[Trojan]

How exactly is this moderation thing regulated? A week ago or so I Slashdot told me I had 5 moderation points. In two days time I used exactly one of them (to increase a score of some article to +2), and the third day the whole moderation thing was gone. Does anyone know what happened? Is this normal?

Linux spam

[Trojan]

My name/e-mail is on a webpage listing Dutch Linux users. A few weeks ago that brought me two pieces of spam. One about some expensive Linux seminar that I'm not interested in. The other was kind of funny. It stated that people using Linux are usually rather smart and the right kind of people for their company. Checking the company's webpages [pureit.nl] revealed they only do NT...