Too good not to repost

Found by yndy: The Blank Top Chronicles, the blog of a cab dispatcher in Arlington, VA and the fools he does not suffer gladly.

Steve Jobs says, "Ditch DRM"

As c|net reports, Steve Jobs has posted an open letter on apple.com in which he calls on record companies to abandon DRM.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it?  The simplest answer is because DRMs haven't worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy.  Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music.  That’s right!  No DRM system was ever developed for the CD¹, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

[1]  Well, actually, Sony tried it.  I think we all remember how well that worked out for Sony.

Appeal to Geekish Authority

I seek a geek with the fu of PC card support under Linux.

Specifically, I have here a Thinkpad 600E, model 2645-3AU.  It has a very recent and almost completely stock Slackware 11 install, except for a 2.6.20 kernel and pcmciautils 0.14.  I have also a Xircom Cardbus Ethernet 10/100 NIC, and a Linksys Wireless-G NIC.  The laptop has two TI PCI1251A CardBus bridges, both of which show up in lspci output.

Unfortunately, I can't get the cards to work in the slots.  Under kernel 2.4, cardmgr announced that it was managing two slots, then said it couldn't do so because of resource conflicts.  (However, the cards were visible to lspci when inserted.)  using kernel 2.6, all the services appear to be running, but inserting a card yields only the following kernel message:

llioness kernel: cs: pcmcia_socket1: cardbus cards are not supported

I'm pretty certain I enabled and properly configured every PCMCIA and CardBus related option in the kernel, including enabling PCI hotplug.  Can anyone with experience at having done this before give me any pointers?  This is the first time I've tried to deal with PCMCIA under Linux, and I don't really know enough about what I'm doing to know how to debug it.  I've been able to find exactly two relevant hits with a web search, and neither was helpful.  (In fact, one was someone having exactly the same problem with a SuSE install on a Thinkpad 600E, who as far as I can see never got an answer.)