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Feed Judge Says Too Bad To Webcasters Upset About New Webcast Rates (techdirt.com)

Last month, when the RIAA pushed through new webcasting royalty rates that were clearly designed to kill off a lot of webcasters, many people said not to worry, that the whole thing was just part of a negotiation. While the Copyright Royalty Board finally noticed that people weren't too happy about the new rates and agreed to hold some hearings, today they rejected those complaints and said that they won't change the rates, and everyone better pay up by May 15th. Webcasters are now looking to appeal to both the Appeals Court as well as Congress -- but recognize that either move will probably take a while, and go well beyond the May 15th deadline. The end result, of course, is actually going to hurt the music industry greatly. Webcasting has always been a huge promotional driver for artists -- especially niche artists who wouldn't get any publicity any other way. The recording industry apparently still hasn't figured out that it can expand its market by letting people promote the content for it. Instead, it wants to charge for that promotion, in a short-sighted effort to charge for every use of the content, even ones that expand the market and allow the overall industry to make much more money.
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Bootable IDE ports disappearing- why & how to

wattsup writes: "It seems that bootable IDE ports are disappearing on newer motherboards.

I recently purchased an MSI G965M-FI motherboard for a system upgrade. Overall the board is pretty good with lots of features, but it had one "unexpected feature" that I didn't know about when I bought it. The PATA100 IDE port won't allow you to install an operating system from a CD-ROM attached to it.

While its on their website, MSI doesn't tell you this on the retail packaging, until you break the seal on the static wrap and look at the motherboard. There, with a tiny label placed over the IDE connector they inform you "This IDE does not support OS installation in hard drive".

This made my out-of-box experience rather maddening, as I had to get a USB based CD-ROM to install a fresh copy of XP. This seems like a pretty lame way to save money, disabling functionality on an IDE port that's included. Some research shows me that other manufacturers are doing the same thing. Why?

My question is; Does anybody know if this is an issue that can be fixed by upgrading the BIOS, or is this hard-wired in the IDE controller?"
Space

Submission + - Mars Global Surveyor died from single bad command

wattsup writes: "The LA Times reports that a single wrong command sent to the wrong computer address caused a cascade of events that led to the loss of the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft last November, NASA investigators reported Friday.

A command that oriented the spacecraft's main communications antenna was sent to the wrong address. The mistake caused a problem with the positioning of the solar power panels, this in turned caused one of the batteries to overheat, shutting down the solar power system and the batteries drained in 12 hours."
Linux Business

Submission + - New Ubuntu project code name "Gutsy Gibbon"

Go2Linux writes: "The code name for the new Ubuntu project that is going to be release this October is Gutsy Gibbon, It was introduced by Mark Shuttleworth, early today, this release will come full composite as default, according to Mark. Read more about Gutsy Gibbon "

Comment This is why my company is starting a move to Linux (Score 5, Interesting) 893

My company builds custom video display systems for TV news, weather, and digital signage. I've always been running a Microsoft shop because we could deploy new designs the fastest. We don't need eye candy, just a stable and compatible OS that we can build on.

Our favorite used to be Windows 2000 Pro, because it didn't spend a lot of time getting in our way of booting up and running automated applications.

Then, Microsoft pulled Windows 2000 last year. So we moved to XP Pro..after some pain in getting rid of most of the "were Microsoft, and we are going to think for you" eye candy and automated autoconfig BS, we again had a stable OS to build on, or so we thought.

But having been burned, we started one of our new digital signage projects last year based on Slackware Linux...and we are quite happy with it. Yes it took longer, but we don't have to worry about MS pulling the rug out from under us. We don't have to worry about losing our development investment with Linux.

Apple's Steve jobs pulled a similar stupid stunt when he pulled the plug on the Power PC and all the development around it. We had built products around that too, but after having our products rendered useless by Apple's decision, (not once but twice, remember Nubus?) we'll never ever develop for Apple ever again.

What MS doesn't get about companies like mine is that there is no way we'd ever build a dedicated box or appliance application on Vista. The premise is a joke. If MS had any sense left, they'd keep XP around so that the OEM market had something to work with that wasn't just a collection of glorified myopic and incompatible eye candy.

PC Games (Games)

Journal Journal: Independent Game Development, after one year.

Here is my game after one full year ov development. (see my last journal entry). Not quite done, but here is the demo. Built using the following the following technology: c++, Boost, gcc, kdevelop, mingw, code::blocks, Ogg Vorbis, OpenAL, OpenSteer, Open Dynamics Engine, Irrlicht 3d engine, The GIMP, Blender, SLackware Linux, Windows XP.

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