Letters

I think it's about time for LJ to cover companies that claim to support Linux with their products, but fail to deliver. InterVideo (www.intervideo.com) claims to have ported their windvd player to Linux, but their web site keeps telling us this:

Cyberlink claims to have ported PowerDVD. Status: same as above.

Bioware keeps telling paying Neverwinter Nights customers that the Linux client will come, but every week the reason why it doesn't come yet is a different one. Last week, the coders were on vacation; this week we can't get status updates because “the PR people will all be at Gen Con.”

—Mathias Homann

Congratulations on your 100th issue! Linux Journal has been for years one of the critically important elements in the value-net that surrounds the Linux development community and is one of the reasons why Linux has become the fastest-growing operating system for platforms ranging from wristwatches to supercomputers. I'm looking forward to the next 100 issues. Keep up the good work!

—Daniel Frye, IBM Linux Technology Center

Thank you for all the calendars! I am extremely impressed with what you have managed to put together from my renderings and proud to hand the calendars out to my friends. I have already been contacted by an American company who had found my web site via the calendar, and they offered me a gig!

—Robert Karlsson

Loved the article on the Ultimate Linux Box [LJ, September 2002]. Just one complaint—no prices anywhere. It would have been great to see what you paid, even if that was super-secret pricing.

—Eric

PC component prices in effect when we write something are usually insanely high by the time you get your LJ. Anybody got a model for predicting them?

—Editor

I'm glad to see issue 100 out. LJ has been a great source of inspiration to many of us all along. You'll keep my subscription for as long as you don't replace the true Linux/Open Source spirit with advertising from Microsoft and, to add insult to injury, come up with some cynical “justification”.

—Renato Carrara

You used 8 Maxtor drives in the “Ultimate Linux Box” [LJ, September 2002] to get 1TB of storage. Now, if these are 120GB drives, 8 of them adds up to almost 1TB, but not if you use RAID-5, because you need to use at least one disk for parity partition, so you are down to 7.

—Fedor

We used 160GB drives and should have said so in the article.

—Editor

“How a Poor Contract Sunk an Open-Source Deal” [LJ, August 2002] is simply wrong. It should be “Sank”, of course.

—Jacob E. Goodman

There is another system for checking for memory overruns and leaks that was not mentioned in Cal Erickson's “Memory Leak Detection in Embedded Systems” [LJ, September 2002]. The bounds checking patches for GCC can check local and static variables in C modules, which makes it much more powerful than a malloc debug library. Check the GCC Extensions page at gcc.gnu.org/extensions.html.

—William Bader

Thanks for the Tux calendar, well done. I've been a subscriber for several years, and have often been surprised and pleased—I think this is the first time I can say delighted.

—Carla