I have a lot of respect for you. I think you’ve done amazing things with Amazon.com. Indeed, truly remarkable things. When idiot investors were walking away from your presentations, you were creating the amazing future which eventually became Amazon.com.

Example: You started Amazon.com as a book store, then just took it to the moon. Outstanding!

Example: Amazon created wish-lists. I don’t know if y’all were the first, but amazon.com was the first site I found that did wish-lists. This made it easy for me to keep track of the items I was saving up for.

Example: Amazon One-Click. It’s very convenient, fast, and easy to set up. Makes shopping on amazon.com a cakewalk! No one else did that, and not many other sites do that now either.

Example: Amazon Associates. Made it possible for me to have an online bookstore without the actual bookstore (or moviestore, etc.).

Example: Amazon Marketplace. I’m not saying eBay hadn’t hit the mark first, but you guys there did a bank up job on the Marketplace and I still find amazing deals there, when I don’t want to pay full price, or when it’s out of print.

Example: Amazon MP3. I like being able to buy the songs that I like on an album, instead of being forced to buy the whole thing. In the past, I have purchased CDs for just one song on the disc. The downloaded MP3 is high bit-rate, and not DRM’ed. This is a big point, as I can put it on any of my audio player devices (like my phone).

Example: Amazon Unbox. I just may use Unbox for all my video purchases. I’m kinda undecided on it, but it’s still intriguing. I can buy a movie and start watching it within about 10 minutes (sometimes less) right on my big-screen computer. Nobody beats 10-minute shipping. Plus, it’s there for me forever (can’t lose it); that’s a big plus.

And finally… The Amazon Kindle. Wow! I love it! I just LOVE IT! This is the device that I want all my stuff on. This is the one. It’s just the right size, in my humble opinion, because I can slip it into my side pants pocket (even with the cover on). I love all it’s features, except the DRM’ed books. I can only read ‘em on the device, not anywhere else; that’s a minus.

From my perspective, it looks like you are giving us people/consumers what we want. I think this is exactly the right thing to do. How do you know what we want? Do a survey. Doing surveys with enough people will give you a very accurate picture of what we want.

In a Charlie Rose interview with Marc Andreessen (creator of Netscape), Marc spoke about the Kindle. He said something like, “Oh, Kindle, I mean, it’s just–it’s gigantic.” He then went on about form factors… “The iPhone with a sort of three or four inch screen… a laptop or netbook with a 12 or 14 inch screen… and now you’ve got the Kindle with a sort of seven inch screen.” He and Charlie Rose go on to talk about others making a bunch of little “pads”, or “net pads”… Marc continues: “Somebody will figure it out. That thing, I mean, the Kindle does books and magazines and newspapers, but that form factor and that shape of a device and that weight in a couple of years is going to be doing video, it’s going to be doing music, it’s going to be doing video conferencing. It’s going to be doing telephony. It’s going to be doing Web browsing. It’s going to be doing everything, right? And so that’s the next — one of the fascinating things is that’s the next screen size and the next killer device, I think, is what’s going to happen.

In a recent interview, you were asked about putting other media (such as video) on the Kindle, and you said something like, “Would you use a Swiss-army knife at the dinner table?”

Actually, I would. But that’s because I’m a geek. And I have used a Swiss-army-knife-style spoon-and-fork thingy for eating a whole meal. It worked quite well, no problemo.

Anyway, here’s my point: I (the consumer) want a device just like the Kindle, which can do e-books (just like it does now), play my MP3s (with all the features of an iPod), full color e-paper, play movies (e-paper is almost there, you can watch demos on YouTube of video-capable e-paper now), with a big SSD (Solid State Disk) to hold my entire library (of everything, audio/video/ebooks/PDFs/etc), two additional SD card slots for my own SD cards, wireless access to the internet (just like it does now), GPS services (just like it does now), longer battery life, and a good internet browser for web surfing & email (such as Mozilla Firefox). You could even hook it in to Amazon Unbox and sell me movies directly to my Kindle. Cha-ching!

I would pay a lot for a device that did all that. I’d bet others would, too.

Cell phones come close, but they’re too small to read whole books on (plus they don’t use e-paper), and they’re also too small for movies/videos. The best a cell phone has going for it is that it’s already networked. I can do a lot with my little flip-phone: web, Gmail, Google Maps, Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, texting, IMs, take pictures (and post them to Flickr), listen to my MP3s with sterio Bluetooth headphones, and so on, but it’s not a good e-book reader, and it doesn’t have a fast-enough processor for video.

Now, let me go back a step, back to before there was a Kindle. Sony had a pretty good e-book reader, but it wasn’t networked, you needed to have a computer to put the books into it, there were not a lot of e-books available for it, and it cost a friggin’ arm and a leg.

I would bet I could not have convinced anyone to put any money in to a project to create a cute little e-book reader which used e-paper, ran for days/weeks on a single charge, was networked (for free), had a deal with a big book-seller such as Amazon.com for all of it’s content, ran on a free, open-source operating system (Linux), and did all the other things (such as note-taking) that the Kindle does… and make it affordable. No way, bub. I would have been laughed at, all the way out the door.

Then Jeff Bezos creates and releases the Amazon Kindle. Bam!, now it’s possible. Before that, it was not within the realm of possibility. Now that it’s been released, the Kindle has shown that such a device is actually possible… and is really what people want.

NOW I could convince someone to make such a device. Indeed, I could convince someone (with money) to invest in a project to create the all-my-media-needs device described above, the one which is fully networked over the existing Sprint wireless network, portable (with long battery life), color e-paper, full-motion video, MP3/music player, with lots of storage, web browsing, email, VoIP, everything.

Google may already be working on such a device. Google has money to throw around, and they’ve got talent as well. Just look at what they did for cell phone operating systems with Android. They’ve also got a huge e-book project already in production, and one for the iPhone & G1.

The guy who owns that big news network, Rupert Murdoch, he’s got money to throw around. And he loves the Kindle. I’d bet he’s working on a device to do what you, Jeff Bezos, won’t let the Kindle become.

Let the Kindle fulfill it’s destiny. Create an API for it and let people play around inside it and create with it (just like Google’s Android OS for cell phones).

If you don’t, you will lose the market to devices which do what we want them to do, not necessarily what you want them to do. And if you lose the market, your dream of “everything ever printed available in the Kindle” will not happen.

Thanks for your time.

-Hawk
Humble Kindle owner

powernow-k8: failing targ, change pending bit set

I thought to myself, “Eh?” I had no idea what it meant. Then I did some research and discovered it was due to a hardware bug with some AMD processors, and that there was a process in linux (CentOS/Redhat) which was unable to update a bit due to this hardware bug. This process was responsible for changing the speed of the processor on the fly, to help save power.

However, this process then did the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen: it repeatedly displayed this message to the console:

powernow-k8: failing targ, change pending bit set
Once
powernow-k8: failing targ, change pending bit set
per
powernow-k8: failing targ, change pending bit set
second.
powernow-k8: failing targ, change pending bit set

This is, without a doubt, the most suppressive error message I’ve ever seen. Because it was displayed to the console once per second, I was unable to debug the issue using the console. The best I could do was configure one of the network cards (blind, I might add), so that I could then SSH in to the machine from elsewhere. Then I was able to debug it.

Any process which repeatedly displays anything to the console, overwriting anything you’ve got up there, on any virtual terminal, is a suppressive process and should be completely eliminated with prejudice.

Here’s what I did to stop these suppressive error messages:

# /etc/rc.d/init.d/cpuspeed stop
Disabling ondemand cpu frequency scaling:                  [  OK  ]

Now those annoying (and suppressive) error messages stopped appearing on the console, and I breathed a sigh of relief. However, the dang thing would start back up again after a reboot:

# chkconfig --list cpuspeed
cpuspeed        0:off   1:on    2:on    3:on    4:on    5:on    6:off

chkconfig is telling you that this process will start for all runlevels except 0 and 6.

Here’s what I did to prevent it from loading up again:

# chkconfig --del cpuspeed

Now check the status:

# chkconfig—list cpuspeed
service cpuspeed supports chkconfig, but is not referenced in any runlevel (run ‘chkconfig—add cpuspeed’)

There, it’s gone forever. This did not fix the hardware bug, it just prevented my system from trying to change the cpu speed and, failing, spewing forth suppressive error messages all over the console continuously.

I hope this helps.

checking for BASE\_DEPENDENCIES... Requested 'glib-2.0 >= 2.12.0' but version of GLib is 2.4.7
configure: error: Package requirements (glib-2.0 >= 2.12.0 atk >= 1.9.0 pango >= 1.12.0 cairo >= 1.2.0) were not met.
Consider adjusting the PKG\_CONFIG\_PATH environment variable if you
installed software in a non-standard prefix.

So I download and install glib from source. It installs perfectly, no problemo. Then I go back to my gtk install dir and run ‘./configure’ again, but I get the _same exact complaint_.

This is really, _really_ annoying.

The thing to understand about this is that the newer glib I just installed was placed in ‘/usr/local/lib’, rather than ‘/usr/lib’. But ‘/usr/lib’ is checked first! So the old version is found rather than the new one I just installed.

Solution:

export PKG\_CONFIG\_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig

This tells pkg-config where to look for the proper (newer) installed libraries. See here, this is the original:

> cat /usr/lib/pkgconfig/glib-2.0.pc
prefix=/usr
exec_prefix=/usr
libdir=/usr/lib
includedir=/usr/include

Name: GLib
Description: C Utility Library
Version: 2.4.7
Libs: -L${libdir} -lglib-2.0
Cflags: -I${includedir}/glib-2.0 -I${libdir}/glib-2.0/include

And this is the newer one I just installed:

> cat /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/glib-2.0.pc
prefix=/usr/local
exec\_prefix=${prefix}
libdir=${exec_prefix}/lib
includedir=${prefix}/include

Name: GLib
Description: C Utility Library
Version: 2.12.3
Libs: -L${libdir} -lglib-2.0
Cflags: -I${includedir}/glib-2.0 -I${libdir}/glib-2.0/include

[http://gtk.org/](http://gtk.org/)

Technical issues like this are what is keeping Linux off the mainstream desktop.

I use my Linux desktop as my primary workstation, and my Windoze machine is for anything that I can’t do in Linux, like RAdmin and games.

In Linux, I let everything run. I let it run for months and months. I let it run until it dies. Then I start it back up again and let it run some more.

I usually don’t do this with my Windoze machine. I usually shut it down when I’m done with it, or put it in Stand-by mode.

Okay, back to my point… In Linux, I’ve got two browsers (at least) running all the time: Mozilla and Firefox. Mozilla is the full suite of apps, so that’s what I use for my email too. Firefox is just the Mozilla web browser. I’ve got Mozilla running on my left monitor, and Firefox running on my right monitor. This way I can log in to both my Yahoo Mail accounts at the same time.

Every day, I (usually) check my various email accounts. I have about a dozen. I have two for Yahoo, and just one for Google Mail. I keep a tab open for each in Firefox, and one tab open in Mozilla for my primary Yahoo account.

Here’s the point: Yahoo times out in 24 hours. This means I have to re-login every day. Google Mail sits there for two weeks, then I have to re-login. Google’s 2-week timeout rocks. Yahoo’s 24-hour timeout sucks ass.

Hey Yahoo, do you hear this? Your 24-hour timeout _sucks ass_. That means it’s _bad_, _too short_, and _annoying_. Also it’s a _pain in the ass_ to have to re-login every day. It’s a pain in the ass because I take full responsibility for the security of my computer… so _you don’t have to_. You don’t have to bypass my responsibility on this; I know what I’m doing with my logins.

Google seems to appreciate this. Thanks, Google. Keep up the good work!

I have an automated system setup to make a backup of the entire database nightly. During this procedure, I got this error:

mysqldump: Got error: 1105: File '[filename]' not found
(Errcode: 24) when using LOCK TABLES

I didn’t know what to make of it, as the [filename] that it was looking for was right there on the disk, and it had correct permissions. I ran the mysqldump program manually and got the same error, but on a different file. Much more research later and… as it turns out, the problem is NOT that it can’t find the file, but that the system had run out of file handles. I added this line to /etc/my.cnf:

open_files_limit=8192

Then I restarted the database and all was well.

This is one of those rare cases where the error message is not entirely helpful. I hope this helps explain things.

The main design difference between this calculator and other calculator programs is that it’s designed to take advantage of the capabilities of a computer, rather than go through all the trouble to simulate a regular calculator device in a computer.

A very good example of a calculator device simulation for your computer is the [DreamCalc 3 Scientific and Graphicing Calculator](http://dreamcalc.com/). This sucker rocks, is easy to use, does graphs, has a ticket (history) window, and I would have bought it until I found the [Haxial Calculator](http://haxial.com/products/calculator/).

Here is a screenshot:

This is the standard calculator window. Many more screenshots are available on [Haxial's website](http://haxial.com/products/calculator/).

http://dag.wieers.com/packages/

Contains well over 1400 projects.

Hope this helps.

During my search for a solution, I found this site:

http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-fc3.shtml#ipv6

And therein lies the problem and solution: IPv6. By default, FC3 tries to use IPv6 for all DNS lookups. When that timed out, then it would use regular. IPv4.

So I disabled IPv6 using the command from the guide linked above:

(as root)   echo "alias net-pf-10 off" >> /etc/modprobe.conf

And then (believe it or not) you need to reboot.

Hope this helps.

[root@jedihawk work]# rpm -Uhv w32codec-0.90pre7-3.i386.rpm
warning: w32codec-0.90pre7-3.i386.rpm: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID e01260f1
error: Failed dependencies:
        rpm-build-tools is needed by w32codec-0.90pre7-3.i386

[root@jedihawk work]# rpm -Uhv rpm-build-tools-4.0.2-109.i386.rpm
warning: rpm-build-tools-4.0.2-109.i386.rpm: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID e01260f1
error: Failed dependencies:
        rpm-build = 4.0.2 is needed by rpm-build-tools-4.0.2-109.i386

[root@jedihawk work]# rpm -Uhv rpm-build-4.3.3-8.i386.rpm
error: Failed dependencies:
        rpm = 4.3.3-8 is needed by rpm-build-4.3.3-8.i386

[root@jedihawk work]# rpm -Uhv rpm-4.3.2-21.i386.rpm
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
        package rpm-4.3.2-21 is already installed

[root@jedihawk work]# rpm -Uhv rpm-build-4.3.3-8.i386.rpm
error: Failed dependencies:
        rpm = 4.3.3-8 is needed by rpm-build-4.3.3-8.i386

[root@jedihawk work]# rpm -Uhv rpm-4.3.3-8.i386.rpm
error: Failed dependencies:
        rpm = 4.3.2-21 is needed by (installed) rpm-python-4.3.2-21.i386
        rpm = 4.3.2-21 is needed by (installed) rpm-build-4.3.2-21.i386
        rpm = 4.3.2-21 is needed by (installed) rpm-devel-4.3.2-21.i386

[root@jedihawk work]# rpm -Uhv --force rpm-4.3.3-8.i386.rpm
error: Failed dependencies:
        rpm = 4.3.2-21 is needed by (installed) rpm-python-4.3.2-21.i386
        rpm = 4.3.2-21 is needed by (installed) rpm-build-4.3.2-21.i386
        rpm = 4.3.2-21 is needed by (installed) rpm-devel-4.3.2-21.i386

[root@jedihawk work]# rpm -Uhv --nodeps rpm-4.3.3-8.i386.rpm
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
   1:rpm                    ########################################### [100%]

[root@jedihawk work]# rpm -Uhv rpm-build-4.3.3-8.i386.rpm
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
   1:rpm-build              ########################################### [100%]

[root@jedihawk work]# rpm -Uhv rpm-build-tools-4.0.2-109.i386.rpm
warning: rpm-build-tools-4.0.2-109.i386.rpm: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID e01260f1
error: Failed dependencies:
        rpm-build = 4.0.2 is needed by rpm-build-tools-4.0.2-109.i386

[root@jedihawk work]# rpm -Uhv rpm-build-4.0.2-6x.i386.rpm
error: Failed dependencies:
        rpm = 4.0.2 is needed by rpm-build-4.0.2-6x.i386
        libbz2.so.0 is needed by rpm-build-4.0.2-6x.i386
        libdb-3.1.so is needed by rpm-build-4.0.2-6x.i386
        libdb.so.2 is needed by rpm-build-4.0.2-6x.i386
        librpm.so.0 is needed by rpm-build-4.0.2-6x.i386
        librpmbuild.so.0 is needed by rpm-build-4.0.2-6x.i386
        librpmio.so.0 is needed by rpm-build-4.0.2-6x.i386

It was here, at this point, that I gave up. If a lowly programmer/sysadmin like me, who likes to play with linux, decides that it’s just not worth it, what do you think the average mouse-pusher is going to do? Pursue this endless course? No, I don’t think so.

I’ll just compile from source, it’s easier.

I should also point out that it’s fairly obvious why Windoze is the dominent desktop platform.