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.
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.
MTTF (Mean Time To Failure) in near line (low duty cycle) workloads of 1,000,000 Hours!
These are the enterprise versions with an SATA 3.0Gb interface. macsales.com has a great price. See their site for details. They have other capacities also.
Maxtor was acquired by Seagate. The MaXLine line of drives have been discontinued as far as I can tell. These should come with full warranty and support from Seagate.
got the new card).
from Amazon.com
