Arcoarena

‘Surprised’ Western Digital to revisit multimedia file-sharing limits

A “very surprised” Western Digital Corp. (WD) may reconsider its decision to restrict certain types of file-sharing using its remote access software, a company spokesman said yesterday.

This appeared on our companies newsletter (they send out a summary of storage related news each week - gripping). I’d already seen the story before because it’s the kind of thing that the news sites I read like to get irritated about.

I do have a few questions that I would like WD to answer though

1. Why are they surprised? (”Here’s your new car, now you can only drive it at 20mph in case you break any speed limits”)
2. Why did they think it was their job to stop people illegally file-sharing? (do Ford feel responsible for all the ram-raids performed in Transits?)
3. What exactly did they think people would use it for?

Now the third point is interesting. Documents on the whole don’t take up much space and can be carried round on a USB stick quite easily (and cheaper). It’s only really video and music collections that are so large that they need an HDD (ignoring CAD files, databases etc. which are likely to be a company who shouldn’t really be using this product, the should probably be using this). So WD produce something that is only really going to be used for sharing video and music…..and then stop people sharing video and music. Nice one guys.

On a side note it’s interesting that nobody supports .ogg files as a rule but WD even stop you sharing those.

Back at Imperial (briefly) and Linux on the Desktop

Well I spent Thursday back at Imperial College (Union). It was cool to be back. Slightly odd as each year I go back I recognise fewer and fewer people. I did have a quick chat to Kristine from the office though.

I have to say I wasn’t expecting much from a Xyratex point of view as I went last year and spent most of my time explaining what Xyratex does to people whilst thinking ‘I wouldn’t employ you if it was my choice’. This year I spent most of my time explaing what Xyratex does to people who seemed quite promising. It was much better than Bath careers fair (sorry Nia) where we had a couple of good people. At Imperial it was probably in double figures. This was all largely helped by being at the end of the UDH so we got fewer people visiting but those that did make it were the motivated ones.

Whilst on the subject of Imperial it is possibly time to say that I do miss Dramsoc. Not university as such but Dramsoc and the stuff related to it. I get very few chances to do anything big like Freshers week now, the big society thing and bar nights were good too. Having said that I’m determined not to say ‘I wish I was back at university’ it’s very much a one opportunity ends and another begins, sort of. I still get urges to march up to the staff in clubs and demand to do some decent lighting rather than the crap they have. I’ve also spent the weekend looking a various techy website and discovered how simple DMX appears to be compared to other serial busses.

Finally, there has been much argument about whether Linux is ready for the desktop or not and usability as a whole. I got a phone call from Andrea wanting to check her email so I told her the details to log onto my Ubuntu system (so a Gnome desktop). Now Andrea isn’t the most computer literate person, but a while later I phoned back and she said that everything was in an obvious place, that it was easy to use and that she ‘prefered it to Windows’.

GPL and Broadband

I’ve just bought a ADSL Modem/Router to go with the broadband connection that will get activated soon. One of the manuals had a statement on the back stating that “This product contains GNU GPL licensed code which is available for ……”

Interesting (It’s a D-Link product by the way)

Busy, busy, busy

Well, the card I designed has come in and I’m half way through testing it. I’ve still got a bit more work in the thermal chamber to do and I’ve got signal integrity testing to complete (once the probe arrives). All seems to be well. I’ve also finally got anti-static shoes so I don’t have to wear that irritating foot-strap now.

Cycling’s still going ok. I need to buy a pair of proper cycle shoes though because my trainers take waaaay to long to dry when it rains. I’m seriously considering buying SPD cleats too for the shoes although I’ve only just got used to the toe clips and it’s guarenteed that the first time you pull up to traffic lights with SPDs you’ll slowly fall sideways when you can’t release your foot from the pedal - quite comic really. One of the other cyclists at work slipstreams busses in order to cycle faster. He’s so scared the bus it going to stop he doesn’t even look down at his speedo. I’m convinced one day I’ll see a bus with a big human shaped dent in it a-la Tom and Jerry (or any other cartoon come to think of it)

Other thing’s I’ve bought are: a dvd-writer (my DVD drive broke and since I have movies and Operating Systems solely on DVDs this became irritating after a while). a Drill (cordless, natch). I only needed to drill two holes (we’ve got a towel rail in the airing cupboard now) but I’m sure it will come in useful for Tour.

Apart from that I’m not sure a lot has happened. See many of you soon.

Spam, spam, spam, spam

Well my attempts to propogate my newer email addresses appear to have worked and bar a few mailing lists I think I might be able to ditch my bigfoot.com account which appears to recieve a fair amount of spam. On the same topic, I have now setup my mail client to use spamassassin to do my own mail filtering but at the moment it seems to think everything is spam. D’oh!

I’m also about to try out Fedora Core 2 so I might let you know what I think of it.

Mandrake 10

I installed Mandrake 10 on my shiney new 80 gig hard disk drive today. It’s quite cool having lots of space, my old hard disk drive was getting a little cramped. I’m a little disappointed with how the installation stuff works though. It doesn’t appear to have configured quite a few things (mouse, sound etc.). How annoying. Oh well, playtime begins.

Gmail

It seems quite good. However I don’t really use it. If I could send emails with the only email being my arcoarena one then I’d use it as it’s one of the best webmail clients I’ve seen. But you can’t. So I dont’ really use it. Except for file storage. Anyone want an invite as the invite buttons are starting to annoy me.

The March of Open Source

I’ve just seen a PC (admittedly one of those Hi-Fi come PC things) on Scan.co.uk with the following:

MS Windows XP Home Edition (CD Provided)
OpenOffice Software - Full Office Software
(Wordprocessing, Spreadsheet, Presentation and more - MS File Compatible!)

Interesting choice. Obviously they can’t supply Linux as it isn’t quite that usable and no-one would buy it but OOo is an interesting addition. Free and almost as good as MS Office (notice the almost it isn’t quite there yet)

IE

http://www.fogma.co.uk/foggylog/archive/122.html

It’s not that handy, well a little maybe.

Quoting the site

These missing feature can be found in Mozilla and Netscape. Nothing more to say.

Atleast Mozilla doesn’t get broken or messed about with for no good reason

Judge OKs Microsoft Lin—s offensive

Judge OKs Microsoft Lin—s offensive - Objections dashed [The Register]

Ok so maybe Lindows does sound too much like Windows and infringes on their Trademark, and I can see why Microsoft would want to combat a company trying to directly take business away from it’s own products. But Lindash? Even complaining about Lin—- was a little harsh but Lindash. According to Microsoft “[Lindash] bears an auditive resemblance to Windows”. How? Surely that means OS X should have to change it’s name because poor little windows users might confuse it with XP.