12/17/2000

Last Updated on April 18, 2017 by Dave Farquhar

Radio Free Linux? I found these instructions for broadcasting audio with Linux very interesting, though of questionable legality. When you broadcast music, you’re supposed to pay the artist, or the artist’s representative, a cut. That’s how Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney made their money–they bought up rights to songs besides their own. Their record royalties are a pittance in comparison.

I’m guessing we’ll be seeing plenty of Linux-based pirate Radio stations, since the required software’s all free and the system requirements minimal.

Search engine hits. I’ll take these recent search engine queries as questions. Editthispage keeps track of the links people follow to get here. I’m sure some of the privacy people out there are throwing a fit about this, but that’s pretty standard behavior for Webservers. The better you know your audience, the better you can serve them, as I’m going to attempt to demonstrate. (Might as well reward these people if they come back, eh?)

As usual, the difference between good and evil or right and wrong comes down to the answer to one question: What’s your motive?

The built-in memory test. I assume this person was looking for information on the standard POST (Power-On Self Test) built into every PC. What about it? It’s worthless. If the memory module is in really bad shape, it might fail that test. But many of these tests simply count the memory, since fast memory tests give the impression of being a faster board. For a good memory tester, see RAM Stress Test (expensive, unfortunately). For troubleshooting, maybe a local computer store has a memory tester. For preventative maintenance, it’s less expensive to buy quality name-brand memory.

Windows Me DNS cache. Ah, someone’s thinking. A DNS cache is an outstanding way to speed up or optimize Internet access. The only true DNS cache that I know of that runs under Windows is Naviscope , which also does ad blocking but doesn’t do as good of a job as AdSubtract or Proxomitron. Since Naviscope can use a proxy server itself, you could point it at Proxomitron, assuming you have buckets of memory for running Internet utilities.

If you happen to be running a Linux box to route packets to a broadband connection, you can take this advice.

Underground ADSL. No idea what the user meant but I know exactly why it hit. I’ve talked about ADSL, and the site’s name will produce a search hit. Since DSL uses existing underground cable, sites talking about DSL installation will get hits, as will a lot of sites of questionable character (hacking and phreaking sites).

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