Some months ago, I posted about proposed changes to copyright law that would have made life much less painful for anyone using copyrighted material in this country. I only just found out that the Attorney-General today announced legal changes as a result of that review; there’s an excellent (and detailed) summary over at LawFont.

The good news: we will finally have law that makes format-shifting legal.

The bad news: the AG chickened out. The amendment allows format-shifting and time-shifting, and provides new exceptions for libraries, schools, and people with disabilities — but beyond that, there’s nothing to help shift the balance of copyright back towards consumers and away from owners.

What’s being done is little more than the bare minimum changes proposed in the original Issues Paper! Never mind the fact that most of the submissions were strongly in favour of big changes, with widespread calls for a broad ‘fair use’ doctrine.

The opportunity for some real reform of copyright law has been blown, and instead we’ve got an amendment that panders to the big businesses who said “the sky will fall down if you allow fair use!”. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised, but this is very, very disappointing.

Last night, with extensive assistance from Daniel, I parked my new Dell SC430 server into its permanent home — the rack in his back room.

After giving it Ethernet and a terminal server connection (GRUB over serial is madness!), I decided I’d also build it a new kernel with SMP, to take advantage of both CPU cores. So I downloaded some sources and went through menuconfig ticking things I needed, like tg3 for the Broadcom network card. Then build, reboot, and … kernel panic!

Trouble was, I hadn’t made an initrd (never been much a fan of those!) and by default, the driver for the SC430’s Intel ICH7 drive controller is built as a module. Ergo, no SATA chipset driver when the system boots, no mounting the root volume, and no joy.

After some hair-pulling, I finally enabled both the PATA and SATA drivers for the Intel PIIx and ICHx controllers (there are separate tickboxes — one listed under “ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support”, and another under “SCSI low-level drivers”). Twas silly of me to not realise that SATA support is hidden underneath SCSI support in menuconfig …

If you have a Dell PowerEdge SC430, and can’t be bothered choosing kernel options yourself, this .config file (for 2.6.16.16) will build in everything you need for the system to boot, and give you modules for just about everything else. And it’s got EM64T and SMP, so you get dual-core 64-bit joy!