I don't mean to be overly pedantic, but it would be more correct to say that IE = 7.0 is trying to be a better Firefox. Firefox and Opera regularly take features and ideas from each other.
And web 2.0 apps and chat clients are basically better versions of Usenet and IRC.
Most web 2.0 applications are attempting to duplicate functionality that was once better suited to standalone desktop applications. Instant messaging clients are the new IRC whilst web forums have largely replaced Usenet.
But there hasn't been anything truly revolutionary in the world of desktop software in a long time.
This is true, but I expect that we will soon be seeing proprietary desktops playing catchup to open source ones rather than vice versa. We're already seeing this happen with the 3D compositing window managers that debuted on Linux and had certain features cloned in recent proprietary desktops.
The article doesn't mention what happens to the data on legal plates. Suppose the DHS decides it wants a permanent archive of who was where, when?
Think about all the cameras that are going up in cities and semi-urban areas in the name of "public safety". London is completely blanketed is cameras and New York is aiming to do the same. Then, consider that in most cities, you're driving under at least one red-light camera every half-mile and more are going up all the time because they're essentially pole-mounted money machines. Now they also have these cameras that can read your license plate when you're in shopping for groceries.
So, you're being watched when you're walking around town, driving around town, and even when you're parked in a private lot. Now that we have facial recognition software, license plate readers, cell phone tracking, and even gait recognition, we know for a _fact_ that we can definitely be tracked whilst going about our daily business as well.
The only question is whether or not somebody is putting all of these pieces together into one system that not only makes permanent records of our movements, but can infer personal and business relationships based on who we're with or near. And I think you already know the answer.
And do these problems, in turn, have something to do with RoHS certification, due to lead-free solders being less durable?
The motherboard is not RoHS compliant, and so presumably was built with lead-based solder. However it seems that most new machines are built with lead-free solders, all of which seem to have various problems.
That's quite a theory, except that the solder has nothing at all to do with a graphics chip overheating. It holds the components to the board and that's it. These chips are failing internally. If the problem were mechanical, lead-free solder is actually going to be more durable in high-temperature electronics because it has a higher melting point than lead solder.
Just because companies and open source projects are abusing the definitions of alpha, beta, and n.0 versioning schemes doesn't mean it's okay to continue abusing them. Companies and projects should be publicly admonished both when they release something as 1.0 when it's clearly not finished for end users and when they cling to the "beta" tag for years to use as excuse just in case a major problem is found.
* Alpha: Incomplete early preview for testers and developers
* Beta: Feature-complete but needs testing and debugging
* 1.0 (or 2.0, 3.0, etc): Feature-complete, tested, debugged, and ready for end-users to enjoy
Any deviation from this means your marketing department is dictating your development cycle and I think we can all agree that no good could possibly come from that.
That being said, I like KDE a lot and used 3.x for years, but I'm staying on Ubuntu until I can be sure that KDE 4 is relatively stable and complete enough for daily use. Unfortunately, since they're so confused about their version numbers, there is no clear indication of when that will be.
KDE sounds like it's becoming the new Gentoo: a very nice system that was torn apart from the inside out by people who'd rather bicker than program.
I was once a happy user of both KDE and Gentoo, but for the last year I've been using stock Ubuntu on everything. Since then, my Linux experience has been a lot more... peaceful.
I don't know if this is "industry standard", legal, or whatever, but I'd run away very fast from this hosting company. Find another hosting company that'll give you assurances in writing that they won't look at your data without your permission. They can't ALL be douche bags.
From the submitter's own description of things, it sounds to me like the support techs were just doing their jobs. At the hosting company where I work, 99% of our customers expect us to have full control over their hardware, software, and data so that we can fix any issues as quickly as humanly possible.
It's industry standard because it's what the our customers demand, and it certainly is legal because we own all of the hardware and software in the data center. We don't own the customers' content of course, but that doesn't matter because we doing anything with it other than hosting it.
If the submitter wanted to keep his off-web data private, he should have ordered a colo box or an unmanaged server where he has full control of the box and can dictate who has access to it. The only downside to this is that he would probably have to pay a steep hourly rate for any administrative work that he's unwilling to do himself.
Often times people will put private stuff on a server they rent/own and make the files/folder private so that they and a select few can only view the files. So what right does hosting company have to look at information that's private without my consent?
If he's renting a managed server, then they have every right in the world.
If the submitter's hosting company is anything like most that I've worked for or dealt with, they probably have an "unmanaged" hosting option where nobody at the datacenter has remote access to the box. It usually costs less and you get to keep all the privacy you want, but you have to pay a steep hourly rate for any troubleshooting or administrative work that you can't or don't want to do yourself.
The submitter should have asked his hosting company about this before Asking Slasdot.
Yep, this is definitely the norm. But it sounds like the submitter is a little confused about the meaning of "managed hosting." I work at a big hosting company (possibly the one that the submitter is talking about) and if you pay for one of our managed servers, our support techs have free reign over any managed server or account in the datacenter.
This is not because we're control freaks or enjoy perusing your off-web data (we're too busy for that anyway), it's because 99% of our customers don't have a clue about hosting technology and expect us to fix any given problem immediately and without delay. They don't want us to waste time by asking for permission to look inside your database when we already have root access to your entire server. When you give your money to us and say, "here, I want to host some stuff," you're implicitly giving us permission to do anything necessary to keep your stuff working properly. Yes, that means we look at your behind-the-scenes data like email and database tables. But as the supervisor informed the submitter, our privacy policy prevents us from divulging or talking about anything that we run across. I can't speak for other hosting companies, but ours takes this very seriously.
If you want to host a dedicated server in our datacenter but still don't trust us with your data, you can always get an unmanaged server or bring in your own box to colocate. An unmanaged server is basically the same thing as a colocation except we install the OS and then rent you the hardware. We cede all administrative, monitoring, and support tasks to you. You'll pay less per month and retain the privacy of your data, but then the only thing we'll do for free is jab the reset button at your request. Support for an unmanaged box is entirely at our discretion and carries a significant hourly cost.
Those are your choices: either managed where we get access to everything in order fix problems, or unmanaged where we stay out and you take full admin responsibility.
I listen to WDBM in East Lansing, Michigan. They were the first college station to broadcast in HD Radio and every so often they play a little 10-second spot about it. I don't know if any other stations around here broadcast in HD Radio because the rest (other than NPR) are complete crud.
As a side note, Windows Vista Media Center supports FM tuners built-in to TV tuner cards. But it provides no means of time-shifting radio, even though it can do so for TV (and that is arguably its primary purpose). I have often wondered why this is so. What is the benefit of listening to radio on your computer if all the same rules apply as when you're listening to it on any other device? Doesn't it just become sort of a pain in the ass?
I would suspect that the companies who design the tuner chips (Connexant, Brooktree, etc) throw in FM radio as well because it's not a costly addition and makes a good marketing bullet-point. The companies who make the cards just copy and paste the tuner chip specs onto their box.
Microsoft probably didn't bother to implement radio timeshifting because it's not something that's in demand. If it were, they would have put some coders on it.
You had a problem finding Win2k3 printer drivers? Huh, I guess nobody uses print servers any more. Either that or you're trying to use some $20 inkjet printer with drivers that barely work on a supported OS.
We didn't have a choice in selecting the printers, in most cases they were already bought and paid for by the client well before we were brought on board to do the terminal server. In some cases, we did have to spend a bit to buy a print server or JetDirect card.
I'm very confused by your post. You stated "because it was the only major MS operating system at the time that didn't have some sort of workstation edition." I'm confused because Windows XP is the workstation edition of Windows 2003 Server, just as Vista is the workstation edition of Server 2008.
You're familiar with Windows Terminal Services, right? If not, go read up on it and my post will make sense. We were deploying Windows 2003 as a terminal server, so when users connected to a desktop session via a thin client (running Linux), they had a Windows 2003 desktop on their monitor. It would defeat the purpose of a terminal server to buy a WinXP license for every client machine. We used license-free thin clients to save our clients a lot of money (and therefore make us a lot of money).
...and then complains because it was read and responded to?
You'd be surprised how many people go on the Internet just to complain about an Evil Corporate Entity and never stop complaining, even when a reasonable solution is provided.
I work for a hosting company that puts a high priority on customer support and service. One thing our managers do is keep an eye on the popular web hosting forums and other online outlets to see what people say about us. When someone posts a bad experience they're having with us, a manager usually contacts them directly to get the situation resolved. This isn't just to bolster our corporate image. We want happy customers because happy customers give us much more money than the unhappy ones.
Occasionally we get someone who's being completely unreasonable, though. They rant and rave about how crappy our products are, how incompetent our support is, and so on. (This is usually the person that's trying to resell 600 shared hosting accounts on a $50/month VPS.)
A few months back, we had a fiber cut in the middle of the night which took a small number of our customers offline for about 6 hours. Instead of calling us, this one guy puts up a YouTube video in which he whines about us for a good solid 15 minutes. Then links to the video on his blog and every web hosting forum he can find. A manager responded with a comment saying that A) he didn't contact us before making the video and B) we were happy to give him a free month of service and that he could call in and speak directly to a supervisor to resolve any issue he had. Well, this wasn't good enough. He posted a second video, refusing the free month of service and going on about how he was going to cancel and how much we sucked, etc. He just wouldn't stop complaining no matter how many freebies we pitched at him nor how much we tried to reason. Thankfully, a group of our happier customers banded together to put him in his place. (I believe he still has an account with us, although the manager who attempted to reason with him was sorely tempted to terminate his account and be done with it.)
I have to agree. This sounds too much like they're deliberately setting it up for failure so that the next time a an anti-software-patent movement starts, the pro-software-patent crowd can say, "gee, sorry guys, we tried that and it didn't work..."
If there's such a question as to whether cell phones and other radio equipment causes cancer, why hasn't anyone bothered to study the cancer rates of people who constantly work around high-powered radio equipment like ham operators, or radio and radar technicians? A thorough study like this would finally put the "radio waves from electronic equipment causes cancer" theories to rest. To my knowledge, there has been no correlation made between radio technicians, their work, and negative effects on their health.
I worked with radio equipment in the military (both aircraft system and ground-based systems) and if there were any doubt about radio waves causing health issues, the Air Force would have been all over it and we would have had to watch gruesome safety training videos every six months. The only thing that we were actually warned about was not standing in front of an aircraft radar system while it was being tested. Not because you'd get cancer or anything, but because the energy was in the 2.4Ghz band and would cook your insides like a microwave oven.
(And before the paranoids try to use that to prove their point, no cell phone carriers that I've heard of use 2.4GHz in their phones.)
SQLite is meant to be an embedded application database that just happens to speak SQL. It's not a general-purpose database engine. You might use it, for example, to store contacts in the addressbook of an email client you are developing. Although SQLite can be handy for prototyping web applications, you wouldn't deploy it on a production website for a number of reasons, the biggest being that it can't handle concurrent writes.
Drizzle, it is expected, will be specifically designed for use with web apps, minus the enterprise features that web applications rarely (or never) use.
Journaling filesystems are not meant to prevent data loss, they only (help) prevent the filesystem from becoming trashed if the disk loses power in the middle of a write. No amount of software can change that.
TDS does this as well and their tech support didn't know what I was talking about when I brought it up. Way to break the RFCs! This is one of the reasons I went back to another provider.
The right of first sale has been consistently upheld by every court decision I am aware of.
You might want to remind Microsoft's lawyers, then.
A while back, I tried selling some broken laptops that came with legal OEM Win2k certificates of authenticity. My mistake was including the COA in a picture of one of the laptops. On the last day of the auction, the listings were cancelled by eBay. A week later I get 3 copies of a DMCA letter from Microsoft telling me that only authorized distributors can legally sell Microsoft products and that I, in particular, am not one of those. (The letter also vaguely hinted that I better not be up to some software piracy scheme.)
I would have liked to have the money to challenge this in a legal setting, because it would have been quite a fun time explaning to the court how ridiculous the premise is. Thousands of computers (new and used) are sold daily on eBay (let alone other "non-authorized distributors") with Windows on them, but try to sell one broken laptop with a COA and Microsoft sends all kinds of lawyer-generated legal nonsense at you.
Even though I've been an open source advocate for some time, until this incident I had always given Microsoft the benefit of the doubt. That they weren't really all that bad, just unusually incompetent and maybe a bit greedy with a touch of power-hungry. Now I'm fully convinced that there is some kind of rotten fucking evil permeating that organization.
First of all, HD radio is a new technology and one that isn't being very actively marketed. I have a feeling that the main reason for this is that most people are just fine with the audio quality of normal radio. Also, the medium of radio has been destroyed over the last few decades so now 99% of the people who listen to radio these days just have it on as background music in their cards or at work. You don't need high definition and a fancy receiver for that kind of use. People who want actual content coming through their speakers subscribe to satellite radio although I hear the (content) quality of that is starting to go downhill too.
Probably the best solution for the sumitter for now is simply to buy a regular receiver and plug it into the sound card of a PC. Use an IR blaster for changing the channel, turning the receiver on and off, etc.
Many Linux-compatible TV tuners come with FM tuners built-in, I suspect it's only a matter of time until they start putting HD radio tuners on those too.
Slashdot Mirror
Firefox and Safari are trying to be a better IE.
I don't mean to be overly pedantic, but it would be more correct to say that IE = 7.0 is trying to be a better Firefox. Firefox and Opera regularly take features and ideas from each other.
And web 2.0 apps and chat clients are basically better versions of Usenet and IRC.
Most web 2.0 applications are attempting to duplicate functionality that was once better suited to standalone desktop applications. Instant messaging clients are the new IRC whilst web forums have largely replaced Usenet.
But there hasn't been anything truly revolutionary in the world of desktop software in a long time.
This is true, but I expect that we will soon be seeing proprietary desktops playing catchup to open source ones rather than vice versa. We're already seeing this happen with the 3D compositing window managers that debuted on Linux and had certain features cloned in recent proprietary desktops.
Why are we posting so many rhetorical questions to Slashdot lately?
The article doesn't mention what happens to the data on legal plates. Suppose the DHS decides it wants a permanent archive of who was where, when?
Think about all the cameras that are going up in cities and semi-urban areas in the name of "public safety". London is completely blanketed is cameras and New York is aiming to do the same. Then, consider that in most cities, you're driving under at least one red-light camera every half-mile and more are going up all the time because they're essentially pole-mounted money machines. Now they also have these cameras that can read your license plate when you're in shopping for groceries.
So, you're being watched when you're walking around town, driving around town, and even when you're parked in a private lot. Now that we have facial recognition software, license plate readers, cell phone tracking, and even gait recognition, we know for a _fact_ that we can definitely be tracked whilst going about our daily business as well.
The only question is whether or not somebody is putting all of these pieces together into one system that not only makes permanent records of our movements, but can infer personal and business relationships based on who we're with or near. And I think you already know the answer.
And do these problems, in turn, have something to do with RoHS certification, due to lead-free solders being less durable?
The motherboard is not RoHS compliant, and so presumably was built with lead-based solder. However it seems that most new machines are built with lead-free solders, all of which seem to have various problems.
That's quite a theory, except that the solder has nothing at all to do with a graphics chip overheating. It holds the components to the board and that's it. These chips are failing internally. If the problem were mechanical, lead-free solder is actually going to be more durable in high-temperature electronics because it has a higher melting point than lead solder.
Just because companies and open source projects are abusing the definitions of alpha, beta, and n.0 versioning schemes doesn't mean it's okay to continue abusing them. Companies and projects should be publicly admonished both when they release something as 1.0 when it's clearly not finished for end users and when they cling to the "beta" tag for years to use as excuse just in case a major problem is found.
* Alpha: Incomplete early preview for testers and developers
* Beta: Feature-complete but needs testing and debugging
* 1.0 (or 2.0, 3.0, etc): Feature-complete, tested, debugged, and ready for end-users to enjoy
Any deviation from this means your marketing department is dictating your development cycle and I think we can all agree that no good could possibly come from that.
That being said, I like KDE a lot and used 3.x for years, but I'm staying on Ubuntu until I can be sure that KDE 4 is relatively stable and complete enough for daily use. Unfortunately, since they're so confused about their version numbers, there is no clear indication of when that will be.
KDE sounds like it's becoming the new Gentoo: a very nice system that was torn apart from the inside out by people who'd rather bicker than program.
I was once a happy user of both KDE and Gentoo, but for the last year I've been using stock Ubuntu on everything. Since then, my Linux experience has been a lot more... peaceful.
I don't know if this is "industry standard", legal, or whatever, but I'd run away very fast from this hosting company. Find another hosting company that'll give you assurances in writing that they won't look at your data without your permission. They can't ALL be douche bags.
From the submitter's own description of things, it sounds to me like the support techs were just doing their jobs. At the hosting company where I work, 99% of our customers expect us to have full control over their hardware, software, and data so that we can fix any issues as quickly as humanly possible.
It's industry standard because it's what the our customers demand, and it certainly is legal because we own all of the hardware and software in the data center. We don't own the customers' content of course, but that doesn't matter because we doing anything with it other than hosting it.
If the submitter wanted to keep his off-web data private, he should have ordered a colo box or an unmanaged server where he has full control of the box and can dictate who has access to it. The only downside to this is that he would probably have to pay a steep hourly rate for any administrative work that he's unwilling to do himself.
Often times people will put private stuff on a server they rent/own and make the files/folder private so that they and a select few can only view the files. So what right does hosting company have to look at information that's private without my consent?
If he's renting a managed server, then they have every right in the world.
If the submitter's hosting company is anything like most that I've worked for or dealt with, they probably have an "unmanaged" hosting option where nobody at the datacenter has remote access to the box. It usually costs less and you get to keep all the privacy you want, but you have to pay a steep hourly rate for any troubleshooting or administrative work that you can't or don't want to do yourself.
The submitter should have asked his hosting company about this before Asking Slasdot.
Yep, this is definitely the norm. But it sounds like the submitter is a little confused about the meaning of "managed hosting." I work at a big hosting company (possibly the one that the submitter is talking about) and if you pay for one of our managed servers, our support techs have free reign over any managed server or account in the datacenter.
This is not because we're control freaks or enjoy perusing your off-web data (we're too busy for that anyway), it's because 99% of our customers don't have a clue about hosting technology and expect us to fix any given problem immediately and without delay. They don't want us to waste time by asking for permission to look inside your database when we already have root access to your entire server. When you give your money to us and say, "here, I want to host some stuff," you're implicitly giving us permission to do anything necessary to keep your stuff working properly. Yes, that means we look at your behind-the-scenes data like email and database tables. But as the supervisor informed the submitter, our privacy policy prevents us from divulging or talking about anything that we run across. I can't speak for other hosting companies, but ours takes this very seriously.
If you want to host a dedicated server in our datacenter but still don't trust us with your data, you can always get an unmanaged server or bring in your own box to colocate. An unmanaged server is basically the same thing as a colocation except we install the OS and then rent you the hardware. We cede all administrative, monitoring, and support tasks to you. You'll pay less per month and retain the privacy of your data, but then the only thing we'll do for free is jab the reset button at your request. Support for an unmanaged box is entirely at our discretion and carries a significant hourly cost.
Those are your choices: either managed where we get access to everything in order fix problems, or unmanaged where we stay out and you take full admin responsibility.
I listen to WDBM in East Lansing, Michigan. They were the first college station to broadcast in HD Radio and every so often they play a little 10-second spot about it. I don't know if any other stations around here broadcast in HD Radio because the rest (other than NPR) are complete crud.
As a side note, Windows Vista Media Center supports FM tuners built-in to TV tuner cards. But it provides no means of time-shifting radio, even though it can do so for TV (and that is arguably its primary purpose). I have often wondered why this is so. What is the benefit of listening to radio on your computer if all the same rules apply as when you're listening to it on any other device? Doesn't it just become sort of a pain in the ass?
I would suspect that the companies who design the tuner chips (Connexant, Brooktree, etc) throw in FM radio as well because it's not a costly addition and makes a good marketing bullet-point. The companies who make the cards just copy and paste the tuner chip specs onto their box.
Microsoft probably didn't bother to implement radio timeshifting because it's not something that's in demand. If it were, they would have put some coders on it.
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical
You had a problem finding Win2k3 printer drivers? Huh, I guess nobody uses print servers any more. Either that or you're trying to use some $20 inkjet printer with drivers that barely work on a supported OS.
We didn't have a choice in selecting the printers, in most cases they were already bought and paid for by the client well before we were brought on board to do the terminal server. In some cases, we did have to spend a bit to buy a print server or JetDirect card.
I'm very confused by your post. You stated "because it was the only major MS operating system at the time that didn't have some sort of workstation edition." I'm confused because Windows XP is the workstation edition of Windows 2003 Server, just as Vista is the workstation edition of Server 2008.
You're familiar with Windows Terminal Services, right? If not, go read up on it and my post will make sense. We were deploying Windows 2003 as a terminal server, so when users connected to a desktop session via a thin client (running Linux), they had a Windows 2003 desktop on their monitor. It would defeat the purpose of a terminal server to buy a WinXP license for every client machine. We used license-free thin clients to save our clients a lot of money (and therefore make us a lot of money).
Right, but the clients are a Win2k3 terminal session so you'd still need Win2k3 drivers and you're back at square one.
...and then complains because it was read and responded to?
You'd be surprised how many people go on the Internet just to complain about an Evil Corporate Entity and never stop complaining, even when a reasonable solution is provided.
I work for a hosting company that puts a high priority on customer support and service. One thing our managers do is keep an eye on the popular web hosting forums and other online outlets to see what people say about us. When someone posts a bad experience they're having with us, a manager usually contacts them directly to get the situation resolved. This isn't just to bolster our corporate image. We want happy customers because happy customers give us much more money than the unhappy ones.
Occasionally we get someone who's being completely unreasonable, though. They rant and rave about how crappy our products are, how incompetent our support is, and so on. (This is usually the person that's trying to resell 600 shared hosting accounts on a $50/month VPS.)
A few months back, we had a fiber cut in the middle of the night which took a small number of our customers offline for about 6 hours. Instead of calling us, this one guy puts up a YouTube video in which he whines about us for a good solid 15 minutes. Then links to the video on his blog and every web hosting forum he can find. A manager responded with a comment saying that A) he didn't contact us before making the video and B) we were happy to give him a free month of service and that he could call in and speak directly to a supervisor to resolve any issue he had. Well, this wasn't good enough. He posted a second video, refusing the free month of service and going on about how he was going to cancel and how much we sucked, etc. He just wouldn't stop complaining no matter how many freebies we pitched at him nor how much we tried to reason. Thankfully, a group of our happier customers banded together to put him in his place. (I believe he still has an account with us, although the manager who attempted to reason with him was sorely tempted to terminate his account and be done with it.)
Leaving everyone except the hard-core KDE lovers what????
Gnome. :/
I have to agree. This sounds too much like they're deliberately setting it up for failure so that the next time a an anti-software-patent movement starts, the pro-software-patent crowd can say, "gee, sorry guys, we tried that and it didn't work..."
If there's such a question as to whether cell phones and other radio equipment causes cancer, why hasn't anyone bothered to study the cancer rates of people who constantly work around high-powered radio equipment like ham operators, or radio and radar technicians? A thorough study like this would finally put the "radio waves from electronic equipment causes cancer" theories to rest. To my knowledge, there has been no correlation made between radio technicians, their work, and negative effects on their health.
I worked with radio equipment in the military (both aircraft system and ground-based systems) and if there were any doubt about radio waves causing health issues, the Air Force would have been all over it and we would have had to watch gruesome safety training videos every six months. The only thing that we were actually warned about was not standing in front of an aircraft radar system while it was being tested. Not because you'd get cancer or anything, but because the energy was in the 2.4Ghz band and would cook your insides like a microwave oven.
(And before the paranoids try to use that to prove their point, no cell phone carriers that I've heard of use 2.4GHz in their phones.)
SQLite is meant to be an embedded application database that just happens to speak SQL. It's not a general-purpose database engine. You might use it, for example, to store contacts in the addressbook of an email client you are developing. Although SQLite can be handy for prototyping web applications, you wouldn't deploy it on a production website for a number of reasons, the biggest being that it can't handle concurrent writes.
Drizzle, it is expected, will be specifically designed for use with web apps, minus the enterprise features that web applications rarely (or never) use.
Journaling filesystems are not meant to prevent data loss, they only (help) prevent the filesystem from becoming trashed if the disk loses power in the middle of a write. No amount of software can change that.
TDS does this as well and their tech support didn't know what I was talking about when I brought it up. Way to break the RFCs! This is one of the reasons I went back to another provider.
The right of first sale has been consistently upheld by every court decision I am aware of.
You might want to remind Microsoft's lawyers, then.
A while back, I tried selling some broken laptops that came with legal OEM Win2k certificates of authenticity. My mistake was including the COA in a picture of one of the laptops. On the last day of the auction, the listings were cancelled by eBay. A week later I get 3 copies of a DMCA letter from Microsoft telling me that only authorized distributors can legally sell Microsoft products and that I, in particular, am not one of those. (The letter also vaguely hinted that I better not be up to some software piracy scheme.)
I would have liked to have the money to challenge this in a legal setting, because it would have been quite a fun time explaning to the court how ridiculous the premise is. Thousands of computers (new and used) are sold daily on eBay (let alone other "non-authorized distributors") with Windows on them, but try to sell one broken laptop with a COA and Microsoft sends all kinds of lawyer-generated legal nonsense at you.
Even though I've been an open source advocate for some time, until this incident I had always given Microsoft the benefit of the doubt. That they weren't really all that bad, just unusually incompetent and maybe a bit greedy with a touch of power-hungry. Now I'm fully convinced that there is some kind of rotten fucking evil permeating that organization.
Edit: I temporarily forgot that "HD Radio" doesn't mean "high definition".
First of all, HD radio is a new technology and one that isn't being very actively marketed. I have a feeling that the main reason for this is that most people are just fine with the audio quality of normal radio. Also, the medium of radio has been destroyed over the last few decades so now 99% of the people who listen to radio these days just have it on as background music in their cards or at work. You don't need high definition and a fancy receiver for that kind of use. People who want actual content coming through their speakers subscribe to satellite radio although I hear the (content) quality of that is starting to go downhill too.
Probably the best solution for the sumitter for now is simply to buy a regular receiver and plug it into the sound card of a PC. Use an IR blaster for changing the channel, turning the receiver on and off, etc.
Many Linux-compatible TV tuners come with FM tuners built-in, I suspect it's only a matter of time until they start putting HD radio tuners on those too.