Day: September 23, 2010

By arfore | Published: July 26, 2008

So there is a nice report on cnet about an human denial of service attack on the Apple Retail Store Genius Bars.

According to this story, and the FSF site DefectiveByDesign, the goal is to book as many 10-minute time slots as possible over a two-day period at the Apple Store in a lame attempt to bring more attention to what the FSF sees as the defective nature of the iPhone 3G.

Richard Stallman, the founder of the FSF, has stated:

The motive for DRM schemes is to increase profits for those who impose them, but their profit is a side issue when millions of people’s freedom is at stake; desire for profit, though not wrong in itself, cannot justify denying the public control over its technology. Defending freedom means thwarting DRM.

He also describes DRM as Digital Restrictions Management:

However, since its purpose is to restrict you the user, it is more accurate to describe DRM as Digital Restrictions Management.

If Stallman’s purpose is to be obstructionist and unhelpful then he and his campaign has succeeded.

While it is laudable for Stallman and his FSF pals to despise DRM, it is definitely not laudable for him to block well meaning customers from receiving customer support by the vendor of a product they have purchased or use.

As for his whole campaign against DRM, I think that he is barking up the wrong tree.  If he really wants to eliminate the completely legal restrictions against the usage of DRM files on his favorite platform, then maybe he needs to work on changing the law.

It’s fine and good for him to characterize the anti-piracy claims as being propaganda by the media companies, but if people weren’t stealing the movies and music, then there wouldn’t be a need for the DRM.  I know plenty of people that download illegal copies of music, movies and television shows.  That means that no money is going to the artists, actors, and producers for those copies that are stolen.  And while I don’t agree on the statistics that the media companies are touting when it comes to the stolen media, I do agree that these thefts are making it more expensive to abide by the law.

As for not having a legal player on the free software platforms, maybe if the GNU and Linux crowd weren’t quite so rabidly against paying for software then there might be some incentive for a developer to license the codecs from Microsoft and Apple.  If these companies are as greedy as Stallman claims then it is doubtful that they would pass up the chance to have yet another market for their products.  I know that I would personally pay for the ability to legally play all of my iTunes Music Store purchases on a Linux-based media center computer.

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By arfore | Published: June 8, 2008

This is part one of a short series of articles detailing the process I went through to restore a friend’s table pc after her hard drive dies due to a head crash.

Background

My friend has a Gateway CX210X Convertible Notebook. This model uses a SATA internal drive. Her drive died sometime last Friday afternoon while working in Windows. You got the standard click of the drive arm against the platter that wouldn’t stop.

I tried some basic restoration techniques to see if I could at least see the drive:

Nothing worked. So I went out and bought a new hard drive for her from one of the local computer places in Valdosta, Belson’s pcXchange.

Installation Problems

At this point I thought I was going to be homefree, boy was I wrong. The first hurdle was getting the Windows install cd to even see the hard drive. Apparently the bios for the CX210X does not have a legacy option to allow the SATA controller to be seen as a standard IDE controller. No problem, I can just use a USB floppy drive to load the drivers before the install, right? Wrong.

According to Microsoft there are only three USB floppy drives that are supported in the Windows XP installation process. While the one I had was a Sony drive, it was not the right model. When using the F6 installer option the drive was read, but later in the installation process when it needed it the second time the drive was not seen. At work we had run into this problem when installing Windows Server 2003 on a Sun x86-based server. The way around it for us was to used the ILOM port and install the OS remotely. This was not an option in the restoration of this machine.

Slipstream to the rescue

After reading a lot on Google, it turns out the best solution for this was to get the driver from Gateway’s support site and adding it to the installation cd.

While I have done this with a service pack before, I had never added in drivers, but I doubted that it would be that difficult.

I found a site or two that discussed adding the drivers into the cd by hand using Microsoft’s sysprep process, but there was a better solution. The guys over at nLite have put together a great piece of software that made the whole process like butter. It makes adding patches, drivers and hotfixes a breeze, and you can even use it to create an ISO to burn and boot.

Installation Time

Time to let her rip! So the installation process worked out just great. The installer recognized the drive and after installation I had network right off the bat.

What’s next?

The next step will be to get all the updates and see about the Tablet hardware.

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