The Haus

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Pondering the Imponderable -- 9:50 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Yesterday I was attempting to reinstall Windows 98 on my in-laws old box (original story). There's some software that I need to run on it that doesn't run on anything newer (not that I'm about to shell out money for XP anyway). Unfortunately, I don't have any of the disks that came with it and I couldn't find the driver disc for the NIC I installed in it. Since Win98 won't use my USB drive without drivers, I had to find the NIC drivers, burn them to a CD-RW, and install them. The cool thing is that because I remembered that the computer was an IBM Aptiva, all I had to do was go to this page on IBM's site in Internet Exploder and click on "Detect my system". It automatically detected which Aptiva it was and gave a complete list of all of the latest drivers, including mobo drivers. Very slick indeed.

Real to Linux: DRM or Else -- 9:30 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

A RealNetworks Vice President claimed that Linux must support DRM or risk never making inroads on the desktop. Unfortunately, folks at Red Hat and Linspire seem to agree with him. The very real problem is that it is impossible to support DRM in Linux. The DRM code could not be open-source. It relies on security through obscurity to do what it does. The real problem is that DRM doesn't stop piracy, it just makes life difficult for legitimate users. I'm all for content producers making money. I'm not for criminalizing anyone who uses a computer.

Of course, all of this implies that RealNetworks is somehow still relevant, which is a dubious proposition at best.

No Old News

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