As Ars Technica and others have reported, Microsoft is rolling out, via Windows Update, a new version of its Windows Genuine Advantage system to combat piracy.

The software, which is an optional install (it can be declined by not accepting the EULA) checks the validity of a user's copy of Windows and pops up an on-screen message warning that the copy may be "counterfeit" if the number doesn't check out. The message is displayed both via a system-tray alert icon, and a dialog box which pops up while the computer is in use. After 14 days of inaction, the message will pop up hourly. One article reported that according to Microsoft, once installed, the notification system is not removeable.

The new version has been rolled out to Windows users in Australia, New Zealand, and a limited number of users in the U.S., with a wider rollout expected in time.

Sources:
TechCentral
Geek.com
and of course, Ars Technica.

Voice of America news, among other sources, is reporting that Research In Motion, makers of the BlackBerry mobile email device, has settled its ongoing 2001 patent dispute lawsuit with US-based NTP, Inc., to the tune of $612.5 million USD. The settlement "settles all claims" between the two companies, and prevents either a shutdown of the BlackBerry service, or the need for RIM to roll out a potentially problematic workaround for the disputed features. The settlement comes after all of NTP's patents had been rejected by the US Patent and Trademark Office, although this did officially did not impact the case. The settlement may come as a disappointment to those who have lauded RIM for standing up to what has been called an abusive use of junk patents.

While many problems with Linux, especially ones encountered by non-technical people, may be solvable with a quick Google search, many people are uncomfortable with the fact that there doesn't seem to be a "phone number of last resort" that they can call, if they run into a problem that they can't find an answer to.

Most commercial desktop OSs, including MacOS, Windows, and SunOS/Solaris, have either pay-per-use technical support numbers, or service contracts that an individual user can purchase to get support. However, on Linux most "professional" support comes from consultants and is targeted at organizations and enterprise environments, not individuals and homes or small businesses. This can be confirmed by reading most of the companies that are on the Ubuntu site's list; very few of them (none, that I've seen so far) focus on individual users.

Now that LinuxCare is dead, what suggestions does the Slashdot community have as to sources of professional, individual end-user support for Linux?

Very odd, I Meta-Moderated earlier today, then this afternoon I get prompted to do so again on the homepage. I thought it was set only to do so once a day. Are there that many moderations being done now, with not enough meta-mods? Too sad, if that's the case.

As much as I gripe about the editors and the way they pick articles, Slashdot belongs (in a very real, if figurative, sense) to all of us. We all need to participate in moderation and meta-moderation for the site to function well. So come one, guys and gals, give a hoot, meta-moderate! Remember, only you can stop unfair moderation!

So it's been (almost) two months, and I thought I'd record some of my musings, after having lived with my $293 HP xw5000 Intel-based "workstation" for a while.

You can read part I if you want the backstory. Suffice it to say I finally decided to give Linux a fair shot, after being rather dissatisfied with all my previous experiments with it, which all involved trying to run it on sorely outdated hardware.

I have the xw5000 hooked up via a 2-port USB KVM switch, so I can use the same set of input devices to control the Linux machine and my Mac, an aging 400MHz Sawtooth. For a Linux distro, I decided to go with Ubuntu, although not for any particularly scientific reason. I noticed it was at the top of the Distrowatch charts, and had an active user forum and a good release cycle. Sounded good enough for me.

Installation was fine, I can't complain there. Although I really never have had many complaints with installing Linux. I figure there are a lot more important things with an OS than whether or not it uses a text-mode installer or a true GUI. But Ubuntu was fine, it recognized all of the internal hardware without problems. (Which it ought to have, since this machine was desiged to run Linux -- albeit RedHat Enterprise Linux -- from the beginning.)

About the only thing that the installer didn't do a good job on, was detecting my monitor's maximum resolution. My monitor isn't anything special (a MAG 19" CRT), and I had thought it would have done a better autodetect job. But it didn't blow it up, so after some Googling I found out that I could specify the maximum H and V refresh rates in the X.org config file, and it would figure things out from there. Not too bad.

After that, it was wireless card time. As I've written in several Slashdot posts, the wireless situation on Linux is deplorable. Although I'm not sure that it's really the fault of anyone in the Linux community -- more the card manufacturers themselves -- it's a shitty situation. I won't rehash the entire saga here, but I got what I thought was a compatible Linux card, only to bring it home and find out that they'd changed the chipset (made by Marvell, curse them) to one that there aren't any native drivers for. So I ended up using ndiswrappers, and being stuck with an odd side-effect: every time I want to change the SSID of the network I connect to, I have to completely reboot the machine. Not a huge problem on a workstation, but it's something I have to keep in mind whenever I'm re-jiggering my wireless settings.

(It's worth noting that the reason I'm using wireless is because the Mac, which sits 6" away from the Linux machine, acts as the internet gateway to the house and only has one Ethernet port. Perhaps at some point I'll get a router-gateway and do away with the Linux box's wireless card entirely.)

Next stop, NVidia drivers. Can't say I had any problems here; props to NVidia for making the procedure fairly trouble-free. I never played with the system enough to determine whether there's a noticable performance boost as a result of having the drivers installed. The video card that came in the machine is a NVidia Quadro4 200NVS, 64MB -- not particularly perky by today's standards. It's designed to drive dual displays, although I'm only using one through the KVM.

My first comment regarding Ubuntu is that I quickly decided that I'm not a big fan of Gnome. Sorry guys, but I just don't like it. I really did try to like it, because I'd heard all these unflattering things said about KDE (e.g., "it's Windows-ish," "it's a resource hog," "it's poorly designed,"), and perhaps if I had spent time customizing Gnome I would have liked it, but I've got better things to do. I grabbed the Kubuntu packages and never looked back. (Except to use the system-management utilites like the Networking control panel, which don't seem to work for me in KDE.)

The only downside to Kubuntu is that there isn't as much of a user community for it as plain-old (Gnome-based) Ubuntu. If you look at the number of people in each forum at any given time, the numbers usually run 2:1 or 3:1 in favor of Gnome. Also, there's no free CD available of Kubuntu, so you have to either burn it yourself, or install Ubuntu and then grab the Kubuntu-desktop packages.

The other thing I like about KDE is that it offers a MacOS-style screen-top menubar, that changes options depending on the application currently in focus / on top. Also, I think Konqueror is a good web browser, and renders more nicely than Firefox. Both of these things are attributable to my previous experience with Macs and resultant bias -- I use Safari on my Mac, which is based on the same rendering engine as Konqueror -- but they stand just the same. I also like the "fish" feature of Konqueror: you can type a URL in the form "fish://user@remotemachine/~" and it will let you access that machine just as if it was a local volume, through an SSH session. You can view text files, copy things back and forth, etc. -- all without having to set up file sharing on the remote machine (aside from SSH). Personally I think that's worth the price of admission (installing KDE) by itself.

I just submitted this article, let's see if they run with it:

I'm sure most Slashdotters have heard about the Mohammed cartoon controversy already, but here's an update. Fox news is reporting that gunmen have started storming hotels and apartment buildins in the West Bank looking for potential European hostages. This is on top of the large and loud protests in half a dozen Muslim countries, with protestors chanting "Death to France" and "Death to Denmark". If a little cartoon can cause this much uproar, can the Dar al-Islam (Muslim nations) and Dar al-Harb (everyone else) ever live in peace? Should we have any respect at all for a religion with this much contempt for freedom of expression?"

[This was originally posted here, but I wanted to retain it after it falls off my Recent Posts page.]

I think you summed up my feelings on the issue quite well.

I'm pretty cynical when it comes to companies and their mealymouthed "corporate values" statements. Publicly held companies exist to make money and generate value for their shareholders, and they'll basically do it in any way that's legal. In fact, they'll do everything that's legal and then some, according to a formula that takes into account the risk of getting caught times the possible reward. (I doubt any major corporation would admit to doing this, and I'm not suggesting that they sit down and actually run through some algorithm to figure out whether to buy a judge, but if you look at the outcome they might as well have.) I accept this. As an investor, I'd expect this. I wouldn't want some ex-hippie executive's personal hangups getting in the way of his job, which is making me money. If having their product line manufactured by indentured 14-year-olds in Thailand will increase the share price, and it's legal to do so, I expect a CEO to either do it, or step down (or be voted out) in favor of someone who will. I would have greater personal respect for the person who refused to do it, but my opinion of the organization wouldn't change -- companies are amoral; or are moral only to the extent that their investors require them to be, which isn't much.

Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco, IBM -- they don't go around touting themselves as the corporate equivalents of Mother Teresa. So when I see them contributing to government oppression somewhere in return for the proverbial fat wad of cash, I accept it.

But when Google sold itself to the public as a new kind of company, one that was going to be run by people who hadn't exchanged the concept of "evil" with "bad for shareholder value," I have a lot less tolerance. Especially because they sold many of their services to the public, which people might have otherwise been uncomfortable with (GMail's advertising, search history, etc.), on the strength of this reputation.

Although Google's technological innovations were obviously the key to their success, I don't think that their reputation should be easily discounted. They sold themselves to the public as a new kind of company, under a new kind of management, and that means we held them to newer, higher standards.

How popular would GMail have been -- software which unabashedly scans your emails in order to target ads -- if it had been run by IBM? I'm willing to bet not as much. Would you have signed up for a service that retains everything you've ever searched for, if Microsoft was going to have the keys to the data? I wouldn't.

They made a decision earlier this week to burn that reputation. Someone decided that, in the end, marketing to China is going to be worth a lot more to the bottom line than whether they're well-liked by a bunch of Americans or not. This doesn't surprise me; obviously a lot of other companies have decided the same thing. I find their decision distasteful, but from an analytical position they're almost undeniably right.

I forgive -- if forgive is the right word; as Google isn't actually a person or anything else, it's not as though there's anything there to forgive -- Google for working with China. What I don't forgive, and see now as the height of arrogance, was the lengths to which they went to convince everyone that they were saints, come to show I.T. the path to rightness.

It was a nice show, boys. P.T. Barnum would have been proud. But then again, I -- like many others, I think -- were easy marks. We wanted to believe that a company could both be insanely profitable and remain morally righteous. You fooled us good; just don't expect to do it again.

I have scored MAJOR positive karma with HIGH positive mods, you conformist piece of shit clinging to my bootheel.

I am the iconoclast. You are the bleating sheep whose elite-dogma ideology I crush beneath my bootheel.

Suck it up, sheeple conformists. I rule over you with my dogma-bursting comments that reap much karma....

Oh, this is too much. Yesterday, I submit an interesting article about global warming being not-so-global, and it gets rejected. Today, I submit an article about bee flight and make a lame editorial comment about Intelligent Design, and it gets posted to the front page! Global warming, and both the science and politics behind it, are arguably far more important than how bees fly, but the article with the flamebait, anti-religion comment in the submission is the one that gets posted, not the one criticizing liberal beliefs. Sheesh, they're not even trying to hide their bias anymore, are they?

Hey Taco, if you're reading this, maybe you should look in the mirror the next time you want to yell at your site visitors regarding story selection.

The liberal editors of Slashdot keep rejecting my submissions, so I guess it's time I start entering them in my journal, instead. Here's one that was rejected, despite the interest so many Slashdotters have in the environment and the subject of global warming. Guess they don't want to publish anything that will go against the prevailing liberal myth of human causes of global warming:

According to this Yahoo News article, from LiveScience.com, 2005 is the second warmest year on average since accurate records began being kept in the late 19th century. This is significant because it was predicted to be the warmest, showing that the climate data models being used aren't as accurate predictors as some claim.

Also, most of the warming is shown to have occurred in the North Pole. From the article, "It just doesn't look like global warming is very global," said John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Given that the warming shown around the world is still 3C cooler than 800 years ago, I really wish the hysteria about global warming would just go away. Humans, and the rest of nature, have experience far more pronounced climatic shifts than what we're seeing today and not survived, but prospered. Even as bad as the Little Ice Age was, if it hadn't happened we wouldn't've had the large influx of immigrants to America (bad for the natives, good for everyone else), wouldn't've had the French Revolution (bad for the nobles, good for everyone else), and might not have had the Renaissance (since the severe population decline from the onset of the ice age and the Black Death that was fueled by it led to higher wages being paid to the few craftsmen who were left, and hence a higher standard of living for the survivors...I'll try to find the article I read about it but it's not coming up in the first few results so far). So while the climate is changing, we don't yet know if it will be a net boon or not to mankind.

Personally, I'm much more worried about the pending magnetic reversals. Though seeing the Northern Lights in Texas will be quite a sight!

A few days ago, I posted a comment in response to someone else claiming that they had just bought a dual-Xeon HP rackmount server for about $300. In the comment I was rather skeptical of the pricing -- the phrase "one for each foot" was used, right after the words "I'd buy," and preceding "if they cost that much." I thought it was a pretty safe bet.

But oh, the tech world moves quickly. Apparently the dot-bombers had a lot of old gear to move quickly when their investors decided to move their retirement money into safer avenues, and it went for cheap. One of the many companies which arose to deal with this glut of liquidation, as well as the continuous flow of corporate surplus, was RetroBox.

I can't say I know very much about the company. I had never heard of them until they were mentioned in a response to my post, and I did a little Googling and apparently they're growing quickly, and seemed to be loved by all. Almost all, anyway. They do have a small but significant caveat on their website: "Final pricing will be at the full and total discretion of RetroBox.com." Essentially they're reserving the right to change the price of what you're buying, after you place the order. Now I'll grant that I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that wouldn't fly in court. Something about me buying a particular good at a particular price and all that. I'll say for the record though, despite this disclaimer, I didn't have any problems working with them, and in fact found their employees to be universally helpful.

Moving on. So I was definitely eating some crow for my disbelieving comment about server prices -- they really are dirt cheap these days. You want a 1GHz Xeon in a 1U rackmount? Sure -- 150 bucks. 800MHz Dell Poweredge? $104. Not bad; and this is from a fairly legitimate establishment, not some random-ass person on eBay.

I couldn't resist. (Have you ever seen the "Go broke saving money" tagline on Dealtime? That's me.) I toyed for a while about buying a 1RU pizzabox for a while, and although there's nothing cooler in my mind than neatly rackmounted gear, the downside to them is that they require a rack. Which I don't have. Which I'd have to build. Equipment racks aren't the most challenging carpentry project in the world -- any idiot with a table saw and a power drill/driver can build one in an afternoon out of MDF and some predrilled rails from Sweetwater -- but the resulting box is HEAVY. Even commercial steel units are pretty hard to move around if any lifting is involved, at least for one person. And knockdown aluminum units are very pricey.

And did I mention I don't really have any legitimate use for a rackmount server? Sure, it'd be cool, and who knows what sort of cool stuff I might be able to come up with if I had the hardware sitting around, begging to be used. But in the end, practicality won out. Also, a rackmount box takes a lot of floorspace; they're optimized for density and not area, and in my house it's area that counts. (Yes I know I could have mounted it vertically.)

So what'd I do? I bought a desktop instead.

It's been something that I've been meaning to do for a while. I like the concept of Linux, but I've never really given it a fair shot versus my Mac. While my Mac cost $1600 when it was new and is still worth a few hundred bucks now (if the people at everymac.com are to be trusted), the most expensive PC I've ever bought was a $90 P133 clunker from the Pratt & Whitney industrial surplus store (check it out if you're ever in East Hartford, CT). Linux had always been a bit of a letdown in the experience department.

Now that's going to change. I can't afford a new Mac, much as I'd like to, but I could afford what would have been a smokin' sweet Intel workstation from not too many years ago. An HP xw5000, 3.2GHz P4, 512MB, 60GB; total cost with shipping: $293.

Although the xw5000 isn't really what I'd call a "workstation" in the traditional sense -- it's not RISC, for one -- it is a very nice PC. Or rather, it's what any self-respecting desktop computer ought to be. Big case, good power supply, lots of bays and empty slots, well-supported chipset and components, easily upgradable, excellent technical documentation. It was, except for the choice of processor, basically the sort of computer that I would build from components for myself, already prebuilt. And did I mention it was under $300?

No less than once a week I hear about random corporation violating the license on some piece of open source software. The Free Software Foundation says that this happens all the time, but once the infringers are informed about their violation they typically correct the problem very quickly. Such failures typically include: not including a copy of the GPL or whatever license the software has been released under; not providing source code or an offer to supply source code; blatantly using GPL code and then licensing the complete work under a restrictive license.

Instead of notifying these companies and asking them kindly to comply, and then letting them off scot free, why don't the developers freakin' sue already? Sure, it costs money, but the great thing about lawyers is that they tend to overlook your lack of funds if they can see dollar signs on the horizon. They do it for insurance, liability and accident claims, I'm sure there's some ambulance chasers looking to make big bucks in copyright law too. The whole "sue for revenue" model isn't likely to go away. Large companies are just too pitiful at due diligence to actually follow a license as complicated as the GPL.

So what do you need to pull off this get-rich-quick-scheme? Well, number one is you need some copyrights. Thankfully, that's really easy to get, just hire some student programmers to work on open source and put your company name on the contribution. Once you've got a stake, no matter how small, it's my understanding that you can sue any infringers just as well as the major contributors. Of course, this tendancy by open source projects that are run by corporations to get copyright assignment on all contributions will trip you up.. guess you'll have to avoid those projects. Next, you'll need lawyers. Scum sucking, bottom feeding ones. You'll need them to review violations that you pay people to find in some "work from home" scheme. You'll also need them to send nasty letters and pull dirty tricks so the company can't weasle out of paying by complying with the license after the fact.

Speaking of paying, how much can you expect to get out of these fat corporate giants? Well, if you were to go to court you could expect to get at least "statutory damages" which is a minimum of $200/copy. But that's chump change. Typically any profits the company made that can be attributed to the violation will be awarded to the copyright holder, and that almost always exceeds the statutory damages by an order of magnitude. Then there's the punitive damages, which apparently don't exist in copyright law but always seem to be claimed, which tend to be around $70,000/copy.

So really, suing people who didn't bother to read the license on your open source software and have made a mint by unlawfully distributing your code is so easy even the most Lionel Hutz of lawyers should be able to get you a big fat payout. Then you can hire more developers, more people to look for copyright violations, and more lawyers in an endless regression.

"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union...

The 13 colonies didn't necessarily get along all that well. There were disputes over water navigation rights. There were trade disputes, and there were some condescensions from the Eastern states against the more rural Western and Southern states. We had gained enormous attention abroad for our secession from Brittain and our experiment in governing under the Articles of Confederation. But we'd also attracted more than a little derision for our disorganization and non-payment of debts.

Much of the world watched to see if we would succeed in forming one or more solid governments or devolve into anarchy and be swallowed by some creditor nation. Or would Brittain resume governance over its errant children?

It was clear that as things were going, the Articles weren't sufficient to keep the organization of states peacefully cohesed as a single entity. Shay's rebellion in particular highlighted the fragility of the governments that made up the Confederation as well as the whole itself. So a meeting was called to discuss changes to the Articles. Any action, of course, would have to be approved by the member legislatures, etc.; but it was obvious that something had to happen to change the direction in which our young country was headed.

50 delegates were invited, though no more than 30 were ever present at one time for the convention. They came from all walks of life and worked together in the sweltering heat of summer, cramped into a surprisingly small room with the windows shut to keep secrets in and insects out.

It soon became apparent that amending the Articles would not be sufficient. The secrecy of the meetings then sprang from the fear that if it became common knowledge that a new form of government was being proposed and drafted the delegates might all be called back to their states and chastised. So over the next 3-4 months the delegates hashed out a common form of government, debating such things as the value of a strong judiciary, the necessity of a military, and how these things would be paid for.

There was even a serious debate about whether or not George Washington should be appointed King and his heirs given hereditary rights to the throne.

As the convention wore on intermediate drafts were made of various positions. Toward the end of the convention the "Committee of Stile and Arrangement" drafted what whe now know as the Constitution. At the top of this Constitution was the now familiar Preamble excerpted above. It had not been agreed upon. In fact, the Preamble was a bit of a surprise, and had not been discussed in the larger "Committee of the Whole". Gouverner Morris had drafted it himself. But it struck a chord with the delegates. Particularly striking was the bold declaration of Unity referenced twice in the first sentence alone. It redefined the delegates who had thought of themselves as former British citizens, or revolutionaries, or Virginians. To these things, and perhaps around them, they added the idea that they were citizens of the whole. They were citizens of the United States of America. Strange that it had not been so plainly put before as it was the very root of the need for some new government.

Despite their differences and indeed through their differences, these men recognized their common purpose and existence. They and their fellow Virginians, New Yorkers and Carolinians were a society. They had a consensus that although they wouldn't always get what they wanted from government individually, they were a common group that would benefit by governing themselves as such. They were all of them people of the United States of America.

The Constitution, our branches of government, our elections; these are all expressions of that unity, that democratic consensus and spirit. Our democracy didn't spring from the Constitution. It happened the other way around. How then, do we best export democracy to other peoples? How do we give them this consensus that was so vital to our own nascent Union?

Looking back it all seems so obvious. But how do you get a people to see it in themselves? Can you simply tell them? Can you repeat it until they believe it? Alternatively, could you replace the government they have with one that looks like ours and rely on those mechanisms of our own democracy to work backwards and create the Unity from which they sprang in our own nation?

The former seem too simplistic and naive. But what about the latter? Would it work? We've tried it before. In the last 100 years we've tried it in a handful of South American states, in Haiti, and we're trying it again in the Middle East. The Brits tried it in Arabia during World War I. They gave military assistance to the Arab resistance under Prince Feisal and helped them to defeat the Turks who held them under slavery. They might have formed one Pan-Arab nation under Feisal but for religious and historical differences they could not put aside. In South America, Wilson pursued the goal of making the continent "safe for Freedom and Democracy". We used political pressure, financed oppositions, and even made targeted assassinations to get the governments we wanted down there. And those governments we wanted were not merely democratic; but were also governments that would deal with American businesses favorably. The term Banana Republic resulted from this practice. Our government used whatever influence it could wield to secure profits for the United Fruit Company. Decades later South America is a hodgepodge of pseudo-democratic states, socialist states, and communist regimes. Pity that Wilson's ideal of democracy was so perverted into something so base as greed. It's not likely that it would have worked anyhow. One thing history has shown us over and over is that a people who want and are ready for democracy will create it on their own. These lessons were played out again in Haiti where anarchy prevails despite our stopping a coup attempt and forcing elections.

The answer then, to my question of how to export democracy is that you can't. Democracy is a consensus and that is not the sort of thing that you can gift to a people.

The better idea, it seems to me, would be to do our best to foster consensus here at home and to spend more time examining the commonalities of our own society. We should spend less time tearing each other apart, and more time displaying those traits we're trying to foster in others.

My friend Steve Dekorte suggested that I have a go at the old shareware game. He makes a comfortable living off a collection of Mac mini-apps that, he tells me, pull in about the same per year as he got working at a dot com. When I worked at dot coms I got paid above average so it sounds like a pumb to me.

Apparently Windows shareware developers make a lot more than Mac shareware developers, so I've cranked out a (hopefully) useful app called TcpSafe on Windows. It allows you to monitor where your computer is connecting and who is trying to connect to your computer. Good for catching spyware and trojans that "phone home" in the act, debuging sockets applications, troubleshooting network problems, monitoring the network for worms and hackers, etc.

I'm using Paypal for a payment system and I've integrated it into both my web site and the application. The licensing system is per machine. So if you want to use the registered version on multiple machines you've got to pay multiple times. As such, I've set the price really low ($9.99) and hopefully we'll make up for it with volume.

Steve had this great "I've Paid!" button idea which I've duplicated. So if you need to reinstall the software for some reason and it comes up in evaluation mode you can just hit the button and it downloads your license key automagically. Support costs are apparently the killer in shareware, so here's hoping everything runs smoothly!

The rightwing mods are determined to knock down my karma. THey have been consistently modding me down lately.

and maybe even slashdot admins are modding me after my CONSUME postings...