Letters

Just wanted to contact someone at Linux Journal and say, hey, this is a really neat idea to send a Linux calendar. Way cool!!

—Valden Longhurst

Before this gets started the wrong way, I must say that I enjoy Linux Journal very much and usually read it cover to cover. I do wish to complain, however, about the RAV ad on page 125 of this month's (August 2002) LJ. Language of that type is inappropriate in such a fine publication as yours. I still enjoy the magazine, and I know that you get paid in great part by the advertisers, but I would ask that you be, perhaps, a little more picky in your choice of ads.

—Keith Sutton

In 1998 the Gartner Group says: “There's little hope for free software” (Linux Journal 100, page 73). But if you look today from the perspective of a Nasdaq at below 1,300, when software companies cut staff, it's great to see that innovation still happens on a daily basis in a whole host of open-source projects such as Linux, Apache and Jakarta. These probably are the seeds of some future success stories.

—Boris Debic

In your recent Linux Timeline [August 2002 issue of LJ], you mention VA Linux Systems purchase of Andover.net, “...owner of the popular web sites Slashdot.org and Freshmeat.org....” The correct site is Freshmeat.net. Freshmeat.org now appears to be unpopulated. At one time, it was host of a site of quite a different sort.

—Daniel D. Jones

One would think that a product review that took four people to write it would be pretty good, however, that's not the case in your August 2002, 100th issue article titled “The Linux Router” on page 121. Your authors would have done much better by stating the actual throughput numbers of the Cisco alongside their price and let the reader decide which route (and router) they wanted to take.

The writers admit that (on page 122 and 123) only one set of their numbers is correct. It states that “The measurements for the Pentium I are misleading, as the bottleneck is the 90Mbps practical limit of 100Base-T Ethernet...” and “The bandwidth of the PIII-based Linux router cannot be calculated...” It sounds to me that this test is totally bogus and should have been conducted with an actual internet speed connection, with network cards capable of handling speeds that Cisco routers operate in, should have given the Cisco router bandwidth numbers and should have been done by a team that has done product reviews before and is not still in college.

—Wayne

LJ, August 2002, “How a Poor Contract Sunk an Open-Source Deal”, by Henry W. Jones, III

MySQL AB is based in Uppsala, Sweden, not in Finland.

LJ, August 2002, “OmniCluster Technologies' SlotServer”, by Linda Hypes

The URL is: www.omnicluster.com, and the price is: $499.00+ (US list). This review is specific to the SlotServer 1000; the SlotServer 3000 has additional features and memory.