In the same day I saw marketting from both Seagate and Hitachi for 1TB consumer drives.

Having seen both articles, this is particulary amusing :-P

At 1TB, if no other hard disk drive manufacturer can catch up, Seagate will have the highest capacity hard drive product to market first.

Looks like they're hot on your heals Seagate!

This is not really a big deal. Pretty much anyone who wants a Terabyte drive is:

1. An organisation - not "consumers"
2. Nerdy enough to be able to find a retailer anyway

Thats not to say I disapprove of this, I just like a good whine now and again. In fact I'm looking forward to this marking the beginning of dropping prices on high-volume storage. Whats got me confused is the big deal that appears (to me) to be being made over it.

I'm still looking for a nice Terabyte drive myself, I find that you can save a significant amount of money if you just buy multiple of smaller drives, say 3 300G drives (okay, not quiet a terabyte, but near enough). It works out cheaper. It also requires more drive interfaces, with most older boards just having 2 IDE sockets, slightly newer normally having 2 IDE and 2 SATA, and the even newer having 2 IE and 4 or more SATA, the number of drives only becomes an issue for those with older rigs.

Course I'm low on interfaces already! I already have four drives hooked up in this machine, 3 in 2 other machines.

P.S. there is actual tech content on the way - I promise! It's just a case of HTMLifying it all. Patience is a virtue.

Obviously this has been on digg, but I thought I'd link my non-digger readers to this neet peice of software.

Actual Python Script, youtube-dl.

Blog I saw it on - some information on how to use it there, linked because I'd pretty much just end up repeating what they said.

I found mplayer played the output of this script for me (flv format file), whereas VLC did not (which is fine! I prefer mplayer), at the end of the day, it pretty much boils down to what codecs you have for what, and whilst VLC has a mass of codecs, so does mplayer. Just different ones.. it seems. xine also played the files but didn't appear to have audio. Oh well.

About time! Representatives of all the major (or even minor!) Linux package management protocols have meet up to discuss how to create a standardised platform for packagement as part of the Linux Standard Base (LSB)

I myself, liked their conclusion, it was reasonable and would allow for the vast choice that Linux Provides to developers and users of Linux, whilst making things easier for everyone to know where they stand.

By this I mean that a Distribution developer can still choose precisely how it works, and the user can make this choice by choosing the distro. Then the common package management API allows inter-connectivity between the implementation and the concept of installing/removing/configuring and so on.

I look forward to hearing about further proposals on this subject

Ian Murdock had some good things to say on why the current scattering of software installation systems on different Linux Distributions just isn't cutting it.

He, in a later post, goes on to explain how he sees it going down, and why.

Several commenters suggested that what we need is a brand new package system. That's a non-starter—for one thing, the distros aren't going to be too keen on replacing something they're hugely invested in, and if ISVs aren't going for RPM today, why would they go for something different tomorrow?

An EXCELLENT point in my opinion.

Read more at Software installation on Linux: Tomorrow on Ian's blog.

It does seem, as they have said, that there is some distance to cover first. After that however, we can all enjoy a unified interface to package management, or at least thats the hope.

See also:
Free Standards Group Packaging Wiki