Kalimat al-Mutafalsif

Ordinarily I don't browse Youtube that much. I mean, sure, when I need my fix of kittens and puppies and everything huggable, yea I go there. And, occasionally, when I have to find out about guys with cool accents talking... sure I'll throw youtube a bone. Heck, I've even got a user on there (of course, since every alias I've ever used was already taken, and I tried 14 times, no lie, to get something I knew, i generated a random 12 digit one...). But this is one of the best videos I've ever seen, dealing with how to load Vista onto a machine. Anthony Cumia (of Opie and Anthony fame... so I'd guess him), I salute you! If you ever find me in real life (further than a month away) I owe ya a beer.

Installing Windows Vista

Now here's an interesting story I ran across today. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev is asking lowly Bill Gates to "show mercy" to a Russian school teacher, Aleksandr Ponosov, who's being charged with software piracy. Now in this country you might be thinking, "Who cares?" In Mother Russia this crime carries a penalty of up to five years in prison, but a Russian prison in the Urals is a far cry from the nice warm places we've got here. Especially for white-collar criminals.

The story gets better. This poor man, literally, is charged with stealing $10,000 worth of software. There is a good chance he makes as little as $100 a month (judging by comments I've seen from people living in Russia) which shows just how ridiculous Microsoft prices are. This man works for the school, and bought a few computers assuming they were legal. In return, he might spend 5 years in the Gulag (might be an exaggeration, might now be) for trying to help his school.

Ok, and now for the part that really blew my mind. A former world leader begging Bill Gates not to punish this man. How sad is that when a software company gets pleas like this from such (former) powerful men? To this Microsoft supporters who say its not too powerful, please think again. Gorbachev didn't think to go inside his own country to the prosecutors involved, no he went to where the real threat was, Redmond, Washington. Of course Microsoft ducked this plea for help by saying they didn't file civil charges, and this was all Russia's doing. Right, and I'm sure this had nothing to do with it? Filing a bunch of law suits worldwide... and then when one guy wasn't specifically charged you claim you didn't do it. Also, when there's surveys claiming Russia to be the second worst offender of piracy, I find it hard to believe Microsoft wouldn't want in on that.

Hey, I just thought of a solution... everyone chip in, and lets mail a box of Linux distros (some are specifically geared towards education) to Russia, and let them decide which way to go. Spend more than a teachers yearly salary on software, or take this free route and avoid dealing with the evil that is Microsoft.

Two months ago Curse-gaming made a huge site resdesign. One that I was not too happy about for a number of reasons. Now, it might have been a bit unfair for me to make that assessment when I did, as curse had just released the update. naturally there was a bunch of bugs to work out as no testing phase catches all of them, and I pounced at a bad time for them. Well, in the past two months Curse has fixed most of the bugs, and I'm back to using the site as a distribution vector for my addon.
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