I got my TiVo in the mail today. Finally a Linux box that I can get to work properly …

Sam Williams tells the story of the rise and fall of VA Linux today at Salon.

Ars Technica reviewed Mozilla 1.0 today.

It looks like the whole country had to revise its earnings for 2001.

I missed Tom Friedman’s column the other day that said that what makes America successful is not big business, but that we have a governmental structure with basic integrity that regulates business interests. You should read it for yourself. For the past few years, I’ve come increasingly to believe in the argument that Friedman makes, or my own variation of it. If you give government unchecked power, it turns into something awful like the old Soviet system or any number of other examples that we could cite. If you give business or any other powerful private party unchecked power, you get exploitation on any number of levels. Either situation is terrible for the regular guy. I have a theory that the business climate is better under Democrats than Republicans because Republicans let big business (and small business) get away with whatever it wants, and generally people in business don’t know what’s good for them in the long term. Democrats let business get away with almost everything, but there is some regulatory impulse there that keeps companies from totally running amok. I have no economic evidence to back this up, but if I were a professional economist who did research for living instead of a programmer and writer who spends way too much time working on the projects I get paid for, I’d be looking into it.

Brazil to Paul O’Neill: shut your pie hole.

I took my Linux question to comp.os.linux.portable, no dice on the response front yet. I also got some other advice that has not worked as yet. I did discover that I can use Fn-F8 to send turn on the external monitor after X has started, but then I have to run the external monitor at the same resolution as the built-in display.

Farhad Manjoo has a state of online music article today at Salon. It’s really specifically about the state of file sharing and the RIAA’s ongoing efforts to put an end to it, as well as the legal file sharing services that are currently being offered. My state of mind is still that the best thing that could happen is for the music industry followed the telecom industry down the toilet.

I’m desperate to get a Linux question answered. I have Red Hat Linux running on a laptop, and I want to use an external monitor with that laptop. When I boot up the laptop with the monitor plugged in, everything works fine in console mode. However, the X absolutely refuses to use the standalone display. Xconfigurator correctly surmises that there is a monitor there, and even identifies the monitor correctly. Unfortunately, it won’t actually display anything on it. In fact, it refuses to send a signal to the monitor at all. I’ve Googled the issue but have come up with nada. Surely there must be a way to get things up and running properly, but I have no idea what it is. Anyone know how to get a Linux laptop and an external display to play nicely together? (As far as I’m concerned, you can file this under things that ought to just work.)

Addendum: this person had the same problem I do last fall (using the same computer no less), and didn’t get a response. Here’s another.

All Things Considered aired a very detailed story yesterday on Nigerian 419 scams. For some reason I’ve been getting tons of Nigerian scam spam lately, not that I have to sift through it any more, thanks to the miracle of SpamAssassin.