Patrick’s Rants

In a surprising move against the music industry a judge has ruled against the RIAA.

The entire ruling is available in PDF format.
Just having files on your computer is not considered infringement if we follow this ruling. Making copies of your CDs to play on your computer and your MP3 player will not be considered infringement. And it shouldn’t be. There is a concept of fair use that consumers have been able to fall back on. If I buy a CD I can listen to it in my car, on my MP3 player and I can make copies for backup purposes. Note that I wrote, “if I buy a CD”. I don’t personally (nor by extension do any of my family members) download music that I haven’t paid for unless the creators have made it available. Nor do we trade CDs or any of the other stuff that is explicitly illegal. The fair use stuff I’m going to keep doing.

K12LTSP based on CentOS 5, dvd format
K12LTSP_v5EL-dvd
Grab it, burn it seed it.

This is why some people call it Digital Restrictions Management:
Don’t bother to try listening to your music on another computer. You don’t own it, you don’t have the right to play it, Bill Gates gets to decide when, where and how you listen to music you bought rented from him.
And in case you didn’t follow the links in the story, Major League Baseball isn’t without its own faults.
I want my music, my movies, my entertainment unlocked and available for me to play when where and how I want. I will not buy restricted or encumbered music.

The wireless bridge was still out when I got to work yesterday morning. That meant that the outside world, in the form of email and internet, still did not exist. To top it off, road construction crews ripped out a huge bundle of wires cutting off phone service to something like a few square miles. So there were no phones either. Well, at least things would be quiet.

Qwest fixed our phones sometime around 3:00 pm and tech services walked in about 4:15 or so with our half of the new bridge. After banging on it for a few minutes - perhaps half an hour - he walked back out with the device in hand. Well, it’ll be another day before it’s all sorted out. Around 6:15 I was surprised to see the head of our tech services department walk in with the transceiver unit and plug it in. Surprised because I figured we wouldn’t see anything until the following day, their schedules over there are pretty much 8-4 or something along those lines. But here he was plugging in the unit, logging in and making configuration changes. He chatted on the phone with the tech from earlier who was working on the other end of the bridge. After about 20 minutes or so it seemed we were back online. They had decided to leave our machines on the static IPs assigned on Thursday. I also learned that our machine wasn’t a backup domain controller or whatever it’s called due to the wireless bridge. I guess it was decided that would be too much data to periodically transfer to have our machine as a backup. The offices are supposed to move to a different building so we’ll get a primary controller at that point along with a rumored T1.

I walked into work last Thursday and was told that the network was down. There was no internet access, nothing. We have a “departmental server” which holds such things as departmental data, but it does little else. When the network is down there are some interesting things that happen. The work is only about half done on the configuration over there. All of our login and authentication is done by the PDC (perhaps AD?) on a server in another building on the other end of a Cisco wireless bridge. It was the bridge that was down; the other end had effectively melted down. Slowly but surely our machines in the office have their dynamic IP addresses expire (7 day lease time according to one of the tech guys who showed up later) so no one notices right away when their logon to the server goes down. The internet though is noticed right away. So too are the remote logins to the district software: accounting and student database. And the network printer stops working as well.

After the tech guys - nearly the entire department - arrived to work on our stuff I learned a number of things:

1. Our server is not a BDC, doesn’t authenticate users, offer dynamic IP addressess, or even have the same user names as the PDC - it probably should be a Backup Domain Controller
2. The network printer stops functioning because of a “legacy IP address” - it was assigned a public IP address when every device had a public IP address at a time when everything flowed through NAU
3. The printer IP address, and of many other printers, has not been switched over to the private network within the district because it would require reconfiguration of the finance software in the district
4. Currently, the public IP address is magically routed at a switch in the district office back to the right printer - print jobs head out through the wireless link, bounce through the tech services building, through the administration building where the switch directs it back through tech services back over the wireless link and finally to our printer
5. Our tech services department is understaffed - they could use some help building out some of this redundancy, but they have to work on an “if it aint broke” schedule

I noticed last night that instead offering news, the local Fox affiliate seemed to be driving page views on their web site.

…cops are looking for the suspects to get a description check out our web site

The very next story did something similar. In other words instead of using the web site to provide complementary information, they neglected to broadcast it altogether. Now Fox runs their news for an hour and a half so it’s not like they miss out when compared to the half hour news of the other channels.

Not everyone has internet access and if what they are reporting is that important they should at least give the information with follow up or additional information online. Instead they are attempting to herd people onto their web page.

This is such a beautifully written and humorous letter in response to a Cease and Desist letter written to a little cable maker company.
Blue Jeans Cable Strikes Back - Response to Monster Cable — Audioholics Home Theater Reviews and News

• The housing market is crumbling, but we’re not in a recession.¹
• The financial markets are crumbling, but we’re not in a recession.
• Interest rates are at an all time low (except that doesn’t translate to lower credit card or home mortgage rates), but we’re not in a recession.
• More American citizens have fallen out of the middle class and are now below it and the increase in living standard has stagnated during Dubya’s reign.
  

  Essentially, for as long as we have records, when there have been economic expansions people have gotten raises, which is to say their pay has increased more quickly than inflation; their buying power has grown. That’s happened in every economic expansion since World War II, until the current one, or the now past one. Between 2000 and 2007, the typical family did not actually get a raise.

  ²

• The government is spending billions of your dollars to entice you to spend, but we’re not in a recession.
• Several airlines have filed for bankruptcy protection with most just stopping all services, but we’re not in a recession.

Remember, everything that the government tells us (epitomized by the movement of Dubya’s mouth) is true; Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, Saddam personally funded Al Qaeda, we’re winning the war against terror, I showed up for all of my National Guard service, the country’s not in a recession.

1. Housing, in general
2. Middle Class survey story

K12LTSP based on CentOS 5EL CD isos: torrent file grab ‘em, burn ‘em and seed ‘em

Kubuntu Linux based distribution extends the life of older hardware and gives IT workers what they are looking for down under:
Computerworld - Ubuntu breathes new life into school’s abandoned hardware