i do understand research costs money, but please provide figures and resources to back up your wild guesses, when i argue my view point i do, see my multipul posts elsewhere in this story that relates to the profits made by teh drug companies at.90 per pill would come to appox 1.8B per year!
so on your list of bad things (TM) you rate stealing higher than murder? you would rather these people were murderd by a durg company in the name of intelectual property and profits? the math i have says that at $0.90 per pill the Pharm. companies could turn a PROFIT os 1.8B per year... on the LOW side... i commonly see people quote that it costs 1,000,000,000 to develope a drug like this and not provide any source.... my source and math follows...
Take the cost of the drug as sharged by the competor out of India ($0.45 per tfa) use that as the base cost of the drug (although im sure there making profit on it, ill assume its AT-COST for the sake of argument), multiply it by 2, brings you to $0.90 per pill... now http://www.avert.org/worlstatinfo.htm/ estimates world wide aids infections at
37.2 million adults and 2.3 million children now thats 39.5 Million people world wide and growing (assume 40 Million for arguments sake) so at $0.45 per pill profit (total of $0.90 per pill) and a doseage of say only 100 pills per YEAR that comes to $45 profit per person... at 40 Million people infected, my math says that comes to 1.8 Billion in profit for 1 year!
ok i came up with a "reasonable" figure simply by taking what the competition is charging (at minimum the cost of materials and labor, but im sure theres some profit in there too) $0.45 per pill (as stated in tfa), and simply multiply by 2. that gives the brand name competetor 100% or more profit off the pill (say appox $0.45 per pill on the low side). Per http://www.avert.org/worlstatinfo.htm the estimated number of aids infections world wide are:
37.2 million adults and 2.3 million children 37.2+2.3= 39.5 Million so some simple math....45 cents per pill, assume 100 pills per person... $45 per person times 40 Million people 45*40,000,000 equals 1.8 Billion dollars in profit.... thats at a cost of $0.90 per pill, and only assuming each person only needs 100 pills for a lifetime and that the AIDS population doesnt grow...
drug companies took advantage of the act by filing frivolous new patents designed to extend their hold on the market, the two senators say. "Drug companies are not spending all their time innovating new drugs. They're innovating new patents," Senator Charles Schumer of New York told a Senate subcommittee.
This drove up the average length of market exclusivity of drugs from 9.0 years in 1982 to 10.1 years in 1999.
9 years in alot of cases is too long to wait for a life saving drug millions of people need now. The way things are going though, the wait for a patent to expire will last alot longer than 9 years....
please provide a (legitimate) source for that one billion dollar price tag, one that accounts for the bulk of the spending (lab costs, raw materials, etc) as i have seen that number quoted often, but never with any source to back it up... my suspicion is that its either a made up number, or that the bulk of that Billion is spend on fancy hotels, big houses, and big screen TV's for Corperate heads and Congress...
yeah the price was insane, the company Brazil went to only is charging $0.45 per pill, and you know there making a profit... Merck was wanting to charge over $1.30 per pill which is essentially a 300% markup... if they had priced it reasonably (say $0.75 or so) then im sure negoations would have taken place, and they probably would be buying in BULK from Merck! i feel that drug companies (well life saving ones anyway) shouldnt be based on free market, that section should be reduced to the likes of asprin and antacids... when it comes to a life, there shouldnt be a value placed on it... asto who should fund the R&D on the life saving sector, increase the tax on the wealthest 10% of the world by oh say 2%, and require all countries to pay a membership fee into a orginaztion that provides the drug if they want access to it.... call it WDO or sompthing World Drug Orginazation.... each country pays 1% of its net income to join the orginization, and it gets the drugs at manufacturing costs (including employee labor shipping etc... because the R&D has already been paid for)...
oh, and one last point about the profit... the knock off drugs there buying cost $0.45 per pill, and you can bet your fat white ass that that company is turning a profit, $0.65 cents for the brand name which respects copyright is reasonable, hell even $0.85 wouldnt be too bad, but to charge more than double what it costs to manufacture the drug and still turn a profit ($0.90) to me, is just wrong...
and when you get sick with a FATAL disease, that they have a treatment for, but are asking $10,000 a month for the treatment, thats NOT coverd under insurance, maby you'll change your point of view, we have the benifit of not living in a 3rd world country, and having decent jobs. The price there charging is the equivlant of highway robery here... even the drug underground here doesnt usualy make much more than $2-$3 per pill for illegal painkillers (loritabs)... why should a legitiment goverment have to pay top dollar for a drug that will greatly help their population out.... a profit is one thing, but if there selling the drug to thiland for about 1/2 of what there willing to sell it to Brazil for (and you can bet there still turning some profit on thiland), then a 100% markup is unjustified.... (especially considering the massive quantity they want... there not asking just for 100 or 1,000 pills, there gonna need MILLIONS of pills... a guarenteed sale, if the price is right)
yes, but the core market thats gonna make the difference to the webcam developers is the windows market, by developing linux drivers (and not fixing the windows ones) he hasnt really provided much value add to the companys, and at the same time done a huge service to linux, because now linux works "better" than windows does with the same hardware! this is a huge plus and shouldnt be seen as a bad thing. Also asto the analogy of the car, if i were looking at a $50,000 car that just had a leaking oil pan i knew i could fix for free or cheep, and they were willing to drop the price to say $15,000 for the vehicle, you bet your ass id buy it if i could..... (a good webcam costs around $50, these generic ones im gussing cost between $10-$20...) so yeah... dont complain, he enjoyed the work, released it to the world, did linux a huge favor, and didnt hurt anyone doing it... i see no problem with that...
there is some confussion in the article, as both the slashdot story and actual artical title state 352, however in the actual artical and the slashdot title it states 253, it would seem 253 is the correct number, and someone cought a touch of dyslexia and the/. editors didnt catch it....
probablt cause is a OLD legal term, what is means is that the police have gatherd enough evidence to support you "probably did it" that it merits a search warrant to actually establish weather or not you did it, and in cases where they "did it" or where its unclear, its upto the courts to sort it out. In this case, they gatherd probable cause (he probably did it because the ip address was his), searched his house, found kiddie porn laden DVD's in his room (establishing he DID it), the courts took over from there... finding him guilty of the crime.
now....
step 1: spoof cheesy apple commercial
step 2: ????
step 3: profit!!!
could step 2 be creating a botnet of agent computers, using a virus that plops the host OS into a virtual machine running on linux (agent smith distro) transparently....
sounds like someone tryed gentoo as their first distro, last time i checked, linux had very proficent package managers to deal with dependancies automagically, and that "compile" stuff, although its still a option, 99.9% of the people will opt for installing pre compiled binary packages.... check out ubuntu, or if you like kubuntu www.ubuntu.com or www.kubuntu.com... package managment has come a LONG way in the last few years, and its VERY easy for a new guy to use (baring gentoo anyway... but i do like gentoo myself, i do keep a gentoo box running, i just dont think it will ever make it as a desktop replacment for joe sixpack...)
funny the only problem i had was a toasted soundblaster sound card (that wouldne even work in windows) and a very nasty hack to get my PRINTER working... everything else was nice, but i had to chuckle that i couldnt get my NETWORK printer working correctly in linux (although it was a cheep Brother MFC series printer, it had built in NETWORK functionality, and still didnt work in linux without some nasty hacks) but atleast Brothers website provided me the tools and info i needed to go about doing it, no matter how horrible the documentation, i did manage to get it working (well the printer part anyway)...
wow, what version of ubuntu live have you tried?? ive poped it into litterally hundreds of machines no problem... (everything from drapper drake, all the way throught feisty fawn beta last night....) id like to see what problems your having, maby its sompthing that needs to be submitted as a bug report...??? my email is emberingdead|\|05P4|\/|@gmail.com (drop all the letters and numbers between the first and last |)
so going on the "knock-off" idology, microsoft wears a apple jacket, next socks, and a unix ball cap, mac wears microsoft pants, a unix bulletproof vest, a next ball cap, AND linux wears a microsoft jacket (that looks just like the apple jacket), stole apple's unix bullet-proof vest (although it had the vest first), and a next ball cap....
the os market hasnt been about orignality for years, and yes while apple has come up with some innovative products especially in the gui field, alof of whats there they knocked off from someone else, or someone else knocked it off from them soon....
IF it works, people will use it, in the OS market, "knock-off" goods arnt "lesser quality" goods, simply a reimplimentation of a good feature... (would you agree buttons and zippers are good features? are Levis Jeans knocking off Gap jeans because they both use buttons and zippers??... does it matter?)
anyway im not trying to flame you back to whence you came, because other than that i agree with you, that parody was trying to show that linux can put on a nice gui that either the MS or Mac guys can be jealous of... and that its free to do so... but lets also remember these commercials are knock off commercials of Mac commercials and will never make it to prime time TV slots....
archive.org DOES provide a opt-out option, she DID opt-out (after the archiving had occured), and archive.org DID PROMPTLY remove their stored archives of her site, she then sent a letter thresting to EXTORT $100,000 for the copy's they had made, and archive.org went to the courts for a summery judgment on the issue, at which point she SUED for dammages, including copyright violation, breach of contract (her pre-agreed, pre-click, post-worded poorly written contract), RICO, civil theft, and some other minor charges, with that said, all the charges have been thrown out except the orignal summery judgment for copyright infringment, and as a consiquence breach of contract stuck aswell.... (atleast thats the way i understand it, IANAL). and being as the contract had to be agreed to before you could even read it, and that it was poorly worded, would seem to make it pretty much invalid... as such the only real worry is copyright infringmrnt, which (like youtube) upon notification, archive.org removed the content... so if this (and other lawsuits like this) proceede this may be the death of web2.0 but it could also be a nice way to set a precident for the robots.txt file to carry some legal bearing on wether the act was copyright infringment, or simply accidental (in this case it would be accidental, as no robots.txt existed)
just to note once again IANAL but thats the way i see and understand it...
you do realize that most all mail clients use one large file to store most mail in, not just MS, but FOSS projects too... Thunderbird.... pine.... etc... all have one large file for all mail and folders, or sevral large files for mail in individual folders, if any one of them happens to redeve a virus laden email, than that whole folder, or whole mailbox all togeather gets hosed...
Also, im by no means a MS fanboy, but the NTFS filesystem isnt half bad, and this defect has NOTHING to do with how the filesystem works, more how the AV handles the detection of viruses in certin "special" places, such as inboxes... It would seem more of a bug, and one that alot of AV's share, as there doesnt seem to be a good way to tell what file is a mail folder, and what isnt just by looking at it, it would need to be pre-programmed into it, and updated accordingly for each new mail client, and each time a existing mail client changes the way it stores its mail...
2 problems with your post....
1... If outlook or outlook express in RUNNING, the file is locked, and cannot be coppied, therefore, onecare skips quarantine, and deletes it directly (which i would imagin it has some difficulty doing, but apparently it manages)
2... You dont need to OPEN the file, just RECEVE it, when OneCare sees theres a virus laden attachment in the PST file, even if it hasnt been opend and the virus never run, it attempts to quarantine the whole pst file, and when it fails it simply deletes it, and i would suspect that once you reopen the mail client, it recreates the file, possibly overwriting the original "deleted" file, making even the best recovery tools useless in most cases...
so basically, OneCare delets your inbox, go buy a mac or linux box... MS's software is broken anyway, and dont even get me started on the exploitability of Outlook, IE, or the horror that is Vista!
i cought my self thinking this would make for one hell of a mushroom trip if you painted the walls with this stuff, but left doors and windows (and frames) regular color, and then painted some black light ink on the walls in the form of some alice in wonderland charaters.....
what gives THEM the RIGHT? did you by chance read the EULA While installing windows, the line that states ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US! MAKE YOUR TIME! gives them the right... but seriously, when you purchased windows OS, you purchased it with the understanding they would support the OS untill a spefic time frame, products prior to XP are now out of the parimary support timeframe, and into extended support, meaning only SECURITY patches will be issued, as this has nothing to do with security it isnt coverd, and they can charge extra for providing that support, or not provide ANY support for it at all, and FORCE many customers to UPGRADE to XP or Vista... (if you can call Vista a upgrade...) so yes they HAVE the right to do it, and you need to read the software licences better before you accept them, or atleast before you complain about what rights they have...
XP was released about the same time they considerd changing DST im not sure if XP (orignal unpatched version) was DST compliant, however by the time SP1 was released, they had already decided to change DST in 2007, so many companies have had tons of time to prepair, and now that its upon up, people are just NOW rushing to patch (which could have been done YEARS ago) and making a scene about not being able to get patches, products prior to XP are out of the "primary support" cycle from Microsoft, and as such patches are no longer provided, MS has said they will patch previous products for a price, which is what they are doing (cheeper than they orignally stated too!) none the less, this is a good point for open sorce software, as another poster here said, it should be a simple config file change, easy to patch, if it isnt thats MS's bad coding practices, and as such im sure pretty much all OSS software still being activly developed already has patches avalable...
all products releast post windows XP SP1 are already for the DST change, the only products that need to be patched are those released at or before the change was announced... aslong as you stick with XP (or god forbid VISTA) than you wont be double tax'ed by microsoft..... Also, as others have mentioned, there are sevral "unofficial" patches that should work just fine, as a it guy, you should be able to test them aganst they system's your planning on implimenting (if they are pre XP) to make sure they wont cause any problems...
i fail to see how its nonsense as it is microsoft's track record, and although it may be anti-microsoft, so is the article. and reguardless as to how it comes off, it still would seem "off topic" isnt exactly the correct classification... maby over-rated....
Slashdot Mirror
i do understand research costs money, but please provide figures and resources to back up your wild guesses, when i argue my view point i do, see my multipul posts elsewhere in this story that relates to the profits made by teh drug companies at .90 per pill would come to appox 1.8B per year!
Take the cost of the drug as sharged by the competor out of India ($0.45 per tfa) use that as the base cost of the drug (although im sure there making profit on it, ill assume its AT-COST for the sake of argument), multiply it by 2, brings you to $0.90 per pill... now http://www.avert.org/worlstatinfo.htm/ estimates world wide aids infections at 37.2 million adults and 2.3 million children now thats 39.5 Million people world wide and growing (assume 40 Million for arguments sake) so at $0.45 per pill profit (total of $0.90 per pill) and a doseage of say only 100 pills per YEAR that comes to $45 profit per person... at 40 Million people infected, my math says that comes to 1.8 Billion in profit for 1 year!
9 years in alot of cases is too long to wait for a life saving drug millions of people need now. The way things are going though, the wait for a patent to expire will last alot longer than 9 years....
please provide a (legitimate) source for that one billion dollar price tag, one that accounts for the bulk of the spending (lab costs, raw materials, etc) as i have seen that number quoted often, but never with any source to back it up... my suspicion is that its either a made up number, or that the bulk of that Billion is spend on fancy hotels, big houses, and big screen TV's for Corperate heads and Congress...
yeah the price was insane, the company Brazil went to only is charging $0.45 per pill, and you know there making a profit... Merck was wanting to charge over $1.30 per pill which is essentially a 300% markup... if they had priced it reasonably (say $0.75 or so) then im sure negoations would have taken place, and they probably would be buying in BULK from Merck! i feel that drug companies (well life saving ones anyway) shouldnt be based on free market, that section should be reduced to the likes of asprin and antacids... when it comes to a life, there shouldnt be a value placed on it... asto who should fund the R&D on the life saving sector, increase the tax on the wealthest 10% of the world by oh say 2%, and require all countries to pay a membership fee into a orginaztion that provides the drug if they want access to it.... call it WDO or sompthing World Drug Orginazation.... each country pays 1% of its net income to join the orginization, and it gets the drugs at manufacturing costs (including employee labor shipping etc... because the R&D has already been paid for)...
oh, and one last point about the profit... the knock off drugs there buying cost $0.45 per pill, and you can bet your fat white ass that that company is turning a profit, $0.65 cents for the brand name which respects copyright is reasonable, hell even $0.85 wouldnt be too bad, but to charge more than double what it costs to manufacture the drug and still turn a profit ($0.90) to me, is just wrong...
and when you get sick with a FATAL disease, that they have a treatment for, but are asking $10,000 a month for the treatment, thats NOT coverd under insurance, maby you'll change your point of view, we have the benifit of not living in a 3rd world country, and having decent jobs. The price there charging is the equivlant of highway robery here... even the drug underground here doesnt usualy make much more than $2-$3 per pill for illegal painkillers (loritabs)... why should a legitiment goverment have to pay top dollar for a drug that will greatly help their population out.... a profit is one thing, but if there selling the drug to thiland for about 1/2 of what there willing to sell it to Brazil for (and you can bet there still turning some profit on thiland), then a 100% markup is unjustified.... (especially considering the massive quantity they want... there not asking just for 100 or 1,000 pills, there gonna need MILLIONS of pills... a guarenteed sale, if the price is right)
yes, but the core market thats gonna make the difference to the webcam developers is the windows market, by developing linux drivers (and not fixing the windows ones) he hasnt really provided much value add to the companys, and at the same time done a huge service to linux, because now linux works "better" than windows does with the same hardware! this is a huge plus and shouldnt be seen as a bad thing. Also asto the analogy of the car, if i were looking at a $50,000 car that just had a leaking oil pan i knew i could fix for free or cheep, and they were willing to drop the price to say $15,000 for the vehicle, you bet your ass id buy it if i could..... (a good webcam costs around $50, these generic ones im gussing cost between $10-$20...) so yeah... dont complain, he enjoyed the work, released it to the world, did linux a huge favor, and didnt hurt anyone doing it... i see no problem with that...
there is some confussion in the article, as both the slashdot story and actual artical title state 352, however in the actual artical and the slashdot title it states 253, it would seem 253 is the correct number, and someone cought a touch of dyslexia and the /. editors didnt catch it....
probablt cause is a OLD legal term, what is means is that the police have gatherd enough evidence to support you "probably did it" that it merits a search warrant to actually establish weather or not you did it, and in cases where they "did it" or where its unclear, its upto the courts to sort it out. In this case, they gatherd probable cause (he probably did it because the ip address was his), searched his house, found kiddie porn laden DVD's in his room (establishing he DID it), the courts took over from there... finding him guilty of the crime.
now.... step 1: spoof cheesy apple commercial step 2: ???? step 3: profit!!! could step 2 be creating a botnet of agent computers, using a virus that plops the host OS into a virtual machine running on linux (agent smith distro) transparently....
i see a cheep Matrix style commercial comming with both mac and PC morphing into agents at some point in the commercial.... or not...
sounds like someone tryed gentoo as their first distro, last time i checked, linux had very proficent package managers to deal with dependancies automagically, and that "compile" stuff, although its still a option, 99.9% of the people will opt for installing pre compiled binary packages.... check out ubuntu, or if you like kubuntu www.ubuntu.com or www.kubuntu.com ... package managment has come a LONG way in the last few years, and its VERY easy for a new guy to use (baring gentoo anyway... but i do like gentoo myself, i do keep a gentoo box running, i just dont think it will ever make it as a desktop replacment for joe sixpack...)
funny the only problem i had was a toasted soundblaster sound card (that wouldne even work in windows) and a very nasty hack to get my PRINTER working... everything else was nice, but i had to chuckle that i couldnt get my NETWORK printer working correctly in linux (although it was a cheep Brother MFC series printer, it had built in NETWORK functionality, and still didnt work in linux without some nasty hacks) but atleast Brothers website provided me the tools and info i needed to go about doing it, no matter how horrible the documentation, i did manage to get it working (well the printer part anyway)...
wow, what version of ubuntu live have you tried?? ive poped it into litterally hundreds of machines no problem... (everything from drapper drake, all the way throught feisty fawn beta last night....) id like to see what problems your having, maby its sompthing that needs to be submitted as a bug report...??? my email is emberingdead|\|05P4|\/|@gmail.com (drop all the letters and numbers between the first and last |)
so going on the "knock-off" idology, microsoft wears a apple jacket, next socks, and a unix ball cap, mac wears microsoft pants, a unix bulletproof vest, a next ball cap, AND linux wears a microsoft jacket (that looks just like the apple jacket), stole apple's unix bullet-proof vest (although it had the vest first), and a next ball cap....
the os market hasnt been about orignality for years, and yes while apple has come up with some innovative products especially in the gui field, alof of whats there they knocked off from someone else, or someone else knocked it off from them soon....
IF it works, people will use it, in the OS market, "knock-off" goods arnt "lesser quality" goods, simply a reimplimentation of a good feature... (would you agree buttons and zippers are good features? are Levis Jeans knocking off Gap jeans because they both use buttons and zippers??... does it matter?)
anyway im not trying to flame you back to whence you came, because other than that i agree with you, that parody was trying to show that linux can put on a nice gui that either the MS or Mac guys can be jealous of... and that its free to do so... but lets also remember these commercials are knock off commercials of Mac commercials and will never make it to prime time TV slots....
Good day sir....
archive.org DOES provide a opt-out option, she DID opt-out (after the archiving had occured), and archive.org DID PROMPTLY remove their stored archives of her site, she then sent a letter thresting to EXTORT $100,000 for the copy's they had made, and archive.org went to the courts for a summery judgment on the issue, at which point she SUED for dammages, including copyright violation, breach of contract (her pre-agreed, pre-click, post-worded poorly written contract), RICO, civil theft, and some other minor charges, with that said, all the charges have been thrown out except the orignal summery judgment for copyright infringment, and as a consiquence breach of contract stuck aswell.... (atleast thats the way i understand it, IANAL). and being as the contract had to be agreed to before you could even read it, and that it was poorly worded, would seem to make it pretty much invalid... as such the only real worry is copyright infringmrnt, which (like youtube) upon notification, archive.org removed the content... so if this (and other lawsuits like this) proceede this may be the death of web2.0 but it could also be a nice way to set a precident for the robots.txt file to carry some legal bearing on wether the act was copyright infringment, or simply accidental (in this case it would be accidental, as no robots.txt existed)
just to note once again IANAL but thats the way i see and understand it...
you do realize that most all mail clients use one large file to store most mail in, not just MS, but FOSS projects too... Thunderbird.... pine.... etc... all have one large file for all mail and folders, or sevral large files for mail in individual folders, if any one of them happens to redeve a virus laden email, than that whole folder, or whole mailbox all togeather gets hosed... Also, im by no means a MS fanboy, but the NTFS filesystem isnt half bad, and this defect has NOTHING to do with how the filesystem works, more how the AV handles the detection of viruses in certin "special" places, such as inboxes... It would seem more of a bug, and one that alot of AV's share, as there doesnt seem to be a good way to tell what file is a mail folder, and what isnt just by looking at it, it would need to be pre-programmed into it, and updated accordingly for each new mail client, and each time a existing mail client changes the way it stores its mail...
2 problems with your post.... 1... If outlook or outlook express in RUNNING, the file is locked, and cannot be coppied, therefore, onecare skips quarantine, and deletes it directly (which i would imagin it has some difficulty doing, but apparently it manages) 2... You dont need to OPEN the file, just RECEVE it, when OneCare sees theres a virus laden attachment in the PST file, even if it hasnt been opend and the virus never run, it attempts to quarantine the whole pst file, and when it fails it simply deletes it, and i would suspect that once you reopen the mail client, it recreates the file, possibly overwriting the original "deleted" file, making even the best recovery tools useless in most cases... so basically, OneCare delets your inbox, go buy a mac or linux box... MS's software is broken anyway, and dont even get me started on the exploitability of Outlook, IE, or the horror that is Vista!
i cought my self thinking this would make for one hell of a mushroom trip if you painted the walls with this stuff, but left doors and windows (and frames) regular color, and then painted some black light ink on the walls in the form of some alice in wonderland charaters.....
what gives THEM the RIGHT? did you by chance read the EULA While installing windows, the line that states ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US! MAKE YOUR TIME! gives them the right... but seriously, when you purchased windows OS, you purchased it with the understanding they would support the OS untill a spefic time frame, products prior to XP are now out of the parimary support timeframe, and into extended support, meaning only SECURITY patches will be issued, as this has nothing to do with security it isnt coverd, and they can charge extra for providing that support, or not provide ANY support for it at all, and FORCE many customers to UPGRADE to XP or Vista... (if you can call Vista a upgrade...) so yes they HAVE the right to do it, and you need to read the software licences better before you accept them, or atleast before you complain about what rights they have...
XP was released about the same time they considerd changing DST im not sure if XP (orignal unpatched version) was DST compliant, however by the time SP1 was released, they had already decided to change DST in 2007, so many companies have had tons of time to prepair, and now that its upon up, people are just NOW rushing to patch (which could have been done YEARS ago) and making a scene about not being able to get patches, products prior to XP are out of the "primary support" cycle from Microsoft, and as such patches are no longer provided, MS has said they will patch previous products for a price, which is what they are doing (cheeper than they orignally stated too!) none the less, this is a good point for open sorce software, as another poster here said, it should be a simple config file change, easy to patch, if it isnt thats MS's bad coding practices, and as such im sure pretty much all OSS software still being activly developed already has patches avalable...
all products releast post windows XP SP1 are already for the DST change, the only products that need to be patched are those released at or before the change was announced... aslong as you stick with XP (or god forbid VISTA) than you wont be double tax'ed by microsoft..... Also, as others have mentioned, there are sevral "unofficial" patches that should work just fine, as a it guy, you should be able to test them aganst they system's your planning on implimenting (if they are pre XP) to make sure they wont cause any problems...
i fail to see how its nonsense as it is microsoft's track record, and although it may be anti-microsoft, so is the article. and reguardless as to how it comes off, it still would seem "off topic" isnt exactly the correct classification... maby over-rated....