The RIAA (not to mention the MPAA) and the recording industry are just plain WRONG! What ever happened to fair use? Down the toilet with a lot of the rest of our rights. And don’t blame President Bush alone. Congress and most of our governing bodies are at fault for taking away our rights along with our complacency.
I see the pattern here — you buy a CD and so you have a license to listen to it from that CD. But if you copy it to your iPod, Zune, or computer, well that is another copy and so of course you have to pay a new license fee to use it that way. Bullsh*t!
And I feel so sorry for Jammie Thomas. What ever happened to the punishment fitting the alleged crime? $222000US? Oh man! That really fits the crime now doesn’t it? And please don’t get me started on jury instructions that block the jury’s right to decide the case.
Of course the artists, producers, distributors, and sellers have a right to make a profit. We have the right to use the material personally as we see fit as long as no profit is being made (unless it falls into academic, artistic, and documentary fair use). There needs to be a balance. Come on industry, come up with a business model and pricing scheme the average Joe will accept and move on. The industry is just as much at fault for the file sharing as the people performing the file sharing.
There still aren’t a lot of downloads out there that can really improve Vista, but we’ve found twenty real keepers that will allow you to tweak it and improve your experience with the OS.
Preston Gralla
Nice overview of various downloads that you can use to tweak and improve your Windows Vista PC.
Whip Vista into Shape
09.24.07 Microsoft Windows Vista is a pretty muscular operating system, but it still needs toning. These three utilities give your new OS more speed and endurance.
PC Magazine online has a good article on tweaking Windows Vista. Not as thorough as more technical sites, but good for what it covers.
intro LEDs for Beginners
This instructable shows how to wire up one or more LEDs in a in a basic and clear way. Never done any work before with LEDs and don’t know how to use them? Its ok, neither have I.
Planning on upgrading my PC, I have been itching to do some case mods. Searching produced the above article at Instructables.com. I pretty much knew the content but it helped refresh my memory.
Recently purchased Leadtek WinFast PX8800 GTS TDH video card (was an ATI X1950XTX until my daughter needed a more powerful card and so I got the new card).
Lite-On DVD burner (don’t remember the exact model)
Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit (upgraded from Windows XP Pro earlier this year)
Because of issues I have been having (on board LAN is now dead) and apparent load issues, I had to pull two TV tuners I had installed. I have enough power to run everything and it was working fine for quite some time.
2 sets of G.SKILL F2-6400CL5D-4GBPQ DDR2 (5 5 5 15) memory (2×2GB for 8 GB total) (DDR3 is too expensive to go that direction yet)
Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit
PCIe SATA/IDE card for the two 500 GB ATA-100 drives since the motherboard has only one IDE port and my DVD burner has to go there
Video editing, Photoshop, some programming, games — this should be able to do these for me easily. I picked the quad core that I can afford for the video editing and Photoshop work and from the reviews I have been seeing, it overclocks like a dream, which is why I picked the Tuniq Tower for cooling.
More memory will definitely help with video editing and Photoshop work. I may pick up a 750 GB SATA II hard drive for speed and capacity and move the two 500 GB ATA-100 drives to my server.
Alternatively, I may buy an ABITIP35 Pro motherboard instead of the Gigabyte.
You all know the slogan: “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” At the Digital Rights Strategies conference in New York City, a similar message could be heard: “DRM doesn’t anger consumers, content owners abusing DRM anger consumers.”…
So true! I understand the want of DRM by the content makers. However, fair use is important. Since the sale is a license and not a transfer of ownership, the consumer must be able to backup their purchase. Or are the DRM proponents going to give a new copy of an accidentally destroyed work for a small fee?
I am against DRM. Educate the comsumer base, remove DRM, and come up with new, innovative business models please.
Deepest Sender is a client that will allow you to post to blogs from directly within Firefox. It is primarily a LiveJournal client, although it supports Blogger (GData) and WordPress (metaWeblog) too, with support for more stuff to come.
Deepest Sender is a client that will allow you to post to blogs from directly within Firefox. It is primarily a LiveJournal client, although it supports Blogger (GData) and WordPress (metaWeblog) too, with support for more stuff to come. Note that the actual Deepest Sender website will always have the most up to date version.
Works with: Firefox Firefox: 1.5b1 – 2.0.0
I posted this from Deepest Sender. It is quite nice to be able to surf and then blog about something you find, directly from Firefox.
Well, its been a week from…somewhere. The air conditioner is finally fixed with a wireless system including a wireless thermostat. Cool.
No updates, no updates! Why? Been dab-nabbit busy and little to no access to my computer. I think its about time I get a laptop so I can update from somewhere other than my den (or at work on break).
I will be posting more soon. The following watched movies are awaiting review:
Flushed Away
The Island
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
I have a few political posts on my “to do” list and I want to review a few computer items I bought.
My daughter’s D-Link® router is giving out and she absolutely has to have Internet access for school work. She is studying toy design and has LOTS of homework. Being able to get access to school through the Internet from home keeps here at home, safe and sound, when it most counts — after hours.
I decided on the Linksys® WRT54GL. It uses Linux as its operating system (OS). Being familiar with Linux and the availability of third party Linux builds for it makes getting one exciting. My router is IPCop on an old Sempron™ system I had laying around.
The Last Mimzy is a whimsical and fun movie, especially for children. The plot revolves around two siblings, Noah and Emma Wilder, who find a strange box floating in the water near their family’s vacation home.
Inside the box they find toys. The two children begin developing strange abilities after opening the box.
A stuffed bunny speaks to Emma and forms the basis of a lot of conflict in the movie between the parents, Emma, and later the US government.
Noah figures out that two of the “toys” react when near each other and end up combining into another toy. This causes a power surge the blacks out all of the city.
The Department of Homeland Security tracks down the source of the power outage to the family home and takes them all into custody.
The children manage to escape and return to their vacation home to retrieve one of the toys that fell and rolled under a bed. They need the toy because they had figured out that the stuffed bunny is actually a non-biological, living toy called a Mimzy sent from the future. They need to send it back to save humanity and ultimately succeed.
I need to mention a special feature of the widescreen version of the movie I watched. It includes a feature called Infinifilm.
You enable the feature when you start watching the movie. If you enable it, during the movie prompts will pop up allowing you to view extra content on the DVD. The extra content is also available as extra feature content through the DVD menus.
If you chose to watch the extra content, the movie will start up where it left off when you start the optional content. I found it useful after watching the movie once without it enabled to go back and watch it again with it enabled to see the behind the scenes content and commentary. It gives a new perspective to the movie and what it took to make it.
My rating [5 of 5]
Rated PG or some thematic elements, mild peril and language.
Released 2007
Released to DVD 2007
Director Robert Shaye (Wikipedia)
Main character Actors:
I have been using Cloudmark Desktop for several years and have been quite satisfied with it. Cloudmark Desktop is an anti-spam add-in for Outlook Express and Microsoft Outlook. It adds a tool bar and automatic processing of incoming email messages.
Messages marked as spam are moved to a user configurable folder. Overall, its is fairly accurate in processing spam but you still need to look in that folder periodically, like any anti-spam software, to verify any false positives. The tool bar includes a block and an unblock button to mark or unmark messages as appropriate.
Unblocked messages are sent back to your default inbox. After you unblock a sender twice, it will ask if you want to always unblock that sender. This is called whitelisting and is quite nicely implemented. If you block a message, it remembers and sends information to their service to build the spam database.
By default, all new messages, even SPAM, are left in the unread state. You can change this through the options.
Installation is fairly easy. Be sure Outlook or Outlook Express is not running when you start the installation process. Once finished, you can start your email program. Cloudmark Desktop will ask you to login because this requires an internet connection to work. A failure dialog box will display if your internet connection is not working. You won’t be able to get your email, turn off the internet connection, and then have it filter spam due to the way it is designed.
The add-in works with what they call collaborative security. Each email message is compared to caught spam in the collaborative security network that Cloudmark Desktop forms. As new spam is caught, the database grows across all the users of the service and more spam is caught in an efficient manner. I do not know what pariticular information they collect and this might be a privacy concern for some people. This information is maintained on Cloudmark servers.
The service rates you based on the qualify of blocks you perform. The fewer non-spam messages you block, the better the rating. The rating is listed in the tool bar. The methods they use to determine if blocks are valid or not is not known nor listed (that I could find) on their web site.
The service is paid for annually and costs $39.95US a year with automatic renewal as an option.
After using it for such a long time, comparatively, I can say it is quite effective — more effective than anything else I have tried except SpamBayes.
Cloudmark also provides services for businesses and a number of ISPs use them.
System Requirements
Operating System:
Microsoft Windows 2000 / XP / Vista 32-bit
Email Software:
Microsoft Outlook 2000 / XP / 2003 / 2007 or
Microsoft Outlook Express 5 / 6
Email Supported:
Cloudmark Desktop works with any type of email account supported by Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express:
IMAP
POP3
SSL POP3
Microsoft Exchange (Microsoft Outlook only)
Gmail using SSL POP3
MSN/Hotmail using HTTP, or Hotmail Plus using POP3 or HTTP
got the new card).
from Amazon.com
