From: newsletter-bounces@thepcgurus.com on behalf of Kevin-PC Gurus
[microdome@seidata.com]
Sent: Thursday, November 29, 2007 9:20 PM
To: jpdurbin@jpdurbin.net
Cc: PC Gurus Newsletter
Subject: GuruNews, Volume 7 Number 45, 11-29-07
Attachments: ATT00056.txt
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Vol. 7, No. 45
11-29-07
1 Wrap up
2 What were her parents thinking?
3 iPhone WiFi, Google tracking, Wii triumphant, future flash drives
4 Easy renaming
5 Christmas laptop
With 2007 drawing to a close and Christmas rapidly approaching I want to use this week to bring readers up to speed on some stories we’ve covered over the course of the year.
The favorite target of Hash’s ire recently has been the “SCO v. Everybody” lawsuits flying around. To refresh your memory, several years ago SCO sued IBM, Novell and others claiming Intellectual Property (IP) theft of UNIX code for Open Source Linux distributions.
The counter-suits commenced and SCO has lost court decision after court decision in the battle. In September SCO decided to try to staunch the hemorrhaging of funds by filing Chapter 11 Bankruptcy.
This week a court decision in Delaware upheld a request by Novell to allow their suit against SCO to continue despite the bankruptcy. SCO sued Novell years ago, Novell counter-sued years ago and both sides are ready for trial. SCO has already notified the SEC that they are in deep financial trouble and this may well be the straw that breaks their back.
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/11/28/novell_sco_to_court/
At least it’s a nice pre-Christmas gift :)
My favorite whipping post, as most of you know, is the RIAA. They suffered a big setback this week when EMI reported it was considering cutting back on its contribution to the US music group as well as the British counterpart the IFPI.
EMI, one of the “Big Four” that also includes Sony BMG, Universal and Time-Warner, publicly stated Wednesday that funding cuts are being considered strongly due to falling CD sales. The lack of progress in curtailing “piracy” and the general result of all the lawsuits the RIAA has brought against 11 year-olds, dogs and dead people may have led to that decision.
In short, the RIAA has managed to steer public opinion away from supporting the music companies and toward despising them. Hopefully the other large media companies will learn from the RIAA’s mistakes and follow suit.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071128-report-emi-looking-to-slash-funding-for-riaa-ifpi.html
On a related note, it’s been rumored for some time that ISPs have been hijacked into curtailing P2P usage on their networks. Naturally they all deny it but the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has introduced evidence in a lawsuit this week against Comcast that shows definitively that they are using forged and spoofed data packets to interfere with subscriber’s usage on P2P networks like BitTorrent, eDonkey and Gnutella.
Apparently Comcast is using some sort of hardware in their network that monitors for the specific activity and immediately starts injecting fake abort/reset flags into the data stream of the user. This basically informs the person at the other end of the stream that the user has logged off or blocked access.
If this is so, the FCC rules and regulations specifically forbid such action with the statement that ISPs may use “reasonable” networking shaping technologies to maintain data flow for all customers. Injecting spoofed packets into all data streams for a certain data type, regardless of size, is hardly reasonable.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/22375
If you want to test your connection for interference the instructions can be found at http://www.eff.org/wp/detecting-packet-injection. This is extremely complicated and requires two users on different ISPs to perform but if you’re a hard-core geek have at it.
Cox is another like candidate for this sort of activity and rumors are flying about that Insight is throttling traffic in some way so you may find something interesting.
Next week I’ll start on the annual Christmas Buyer’s Guide for those of you shopping for techies. I also want to apologize for last week’s lack of newsletter. I neglected to mention a couple of weeks ago that we would be taking the Thanksgiving holiday off and some readers thought we’d gone belly-up. I assure everyone, we’re still here :)
Until next week,
Kevin Mefford, Editor
Terry Wise
Tech News of the Week
Apple Inc. and AT&T Inc.
plan to begin selling a
version of the iPhone next year that operates on a
wireless network for surfing the Internet at fast
speeds:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119637146638508345.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Google launched a location service for mobile
users on
Wednesday that DOES NOT rely on GPS:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140080-c,webservices/article.html
Nintendo of America said on Tuesday that it sold
more
Nintendo products during the week of Thanksgiving than
at any other time in the company's history:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140061-c,games/article.html
Solid-state drives are still going to be somewhat
hard
to find and expensive in 2008, but mass production,
cheaper flash, and tech advances will start to change
that in 2009 and 2010:
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9825675-7.html?tag=nefd.lede
Matthew Dattilo
thepcgurus@gmail.com
www.mattstodayinhistory.com
Download of the Week
Anyone with a digital camera
has felt the need to rename a whole bunch of files at once. Windows can do this
chore easily, but not well. The result is a bunch of files with the same name,
differentiated only by a number in parenthesis. That's where Rename Master
comes in. This freebie by JoeJoe's Freeware Utilities offers a
cornucop...er...plethor...er...lot of mass renaming options. You can add text
at specific points in the names, replace text, remove unwanted strings, and
even pick how you want the file names capitalized. You also have considerable
control over how the counter distinguishes one file from another. Get it here: http://www.joejoesoft.com/vcms/108/
Art Maley
Email Question of the Week
Q: I plan to buy a Toshiba laptop tomorrow morning at Office Depot. This will be my first computer with the Vista operating system. Have most of the bugs been worked out of Vista? Are Microsoft Office 2000 as well as AOL software compatible with Vista? Do you still have any serious reservations about the Vista operating system?
A: I'll have
serious reservations about Vista until Service Pack 1 comes out for it, then
I'll re-evaluate. It's so bad that even manufacturers that had switched
to strictly Vista have added XP selections back to their lineups.
As a matter of fact, Microsoft knows it's pretty bad so they made
the Vista Business CD Key valid for XP Pro.
Office 2000 should work fine with it but you'll have to obtain AOL
9.0VR. That's the only version that works, at least to my knowledge.
Hope that helps and be careful out there, Black Friday can kill
you :)
Kevin Mefford
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