source wikipedia: In 1988, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) went into effect... [victims] were compensated with awards totaling $903 million.
Everyone is told they are safe, but like it or not, millions and millions are paid out to children that were injured by vaccines. I've actually done some research into this and it is pretty hard to win a vaccine injury claim, contrary to what some say in some later posts. Everyone in the vaccine chain is pretty defense and tend to blame a problem on everything but the vaccine.
I get MSDN magazine and the latest issue has a seriously good article on sqlight. They said it works really well on cell phones, etc., where it was almost impossible to install a database server and/or could not always have access to a server to connect back to a database.
Off Amazon, order a book called the Hidden History of the Human Race (The Condensed Edition of Forbidden Archeology) . They have been discovering tool marks on bones older than they should be (think dinosaur) for many, many years . Some people even lost their jobs over it. Why? It seems that before Darwin, they went by the evidence and didn't need to make anything "fit" a timeline. After Darwin was firmly rooted, evidence was covered up, because it didn't fit the timeline. Some people who stood by their work, were just fired or blacklisted. There is case after case in the book.
Now it seems that technology has made it hard to cover up. That's good.
And you totally gloss over the dog slow part. hmmmmm
Interestingly, after I hit submit, Ubuntu popped up with a Firefox update to 3.6.7. Flash still doesn't work and it is still dog slow compared to Chrome. Hmmmmm
I would almost like to have downgraded Firefox to an earlier version that "just worked", but it it tied into Ubuntu almost as bad as IE is in Windows. Hmmmmm
Typing this on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS using Google Chrome. Why Chrome? I used 8.04 and Firefox for about a year, year and a half and loved it. Then one day Firefox updated to 3.6.6 and Flash quit working. I also got to noticing that web sites took a long time to load (I thought it was because I use a WISP). I messed around with Flash and the best I could get was intermittent flash and it took a lot of browser restarts just to get that. So I updated to 10.04 in hopes that would fix the problem. I think Firefox actually got slower.... annoyingly slow.
Just for the sake of testing, I installed Google chrome and it worked amazingly better. Flash works the first time you start it up and it is amazingly fast compared to Firefox.
But I'm a Firefox fanboy and, though I like Google, I hate to see them take over the world. More than speed, I like the plugins available for Firefox.
Firefox is an integral part of Ubuntu and you would think of all things, this would be the one thing that "just worked," Not. And during this same period of time, Firefox on my XP system works exactly like it has since I installed it.
I didn't put it through exhaustive tests, but I actually tried to make some link files and put them on a usb drive and have them install something when I accessed the shortcuts in Windows explorer. No luck whatsoever. I looked for some working examples but I couldn't find any, either.
And funny, I did some work for a large oil/gas company that stored the config files for some flowmeters on usb thumb drives and left them in the battery boxes. It was really fun when the first wave of thumb drive viruses hit! That's one reason I find this story interesting.
I know I will probably get flamed for this, but as someone who just developed some.NET projects (it was the right tool for the job), I did so using Firefox almost exclusively for testing. Note that every component used was a straight.NET component, no third party anything. One day I fired up IE 8 just to see what it looked like. There were things broke all over IE that "just worked" in Firefox (w/ the.net plugin).
On top of all the broken things in IE...the most annoying thing about IE is that links are tied to the navigation sound in Windows when clicked. Yes, that can be turned off, but most people don't.
I'm no MS fan at all, but I can't see exactly how they dropped the ball so bad on IE. I don't know, maybe that is a good thing?
Massive investment in CCTV cameras to prevent crime in the UK has failed to have a significant impact, despite billions of pounds spent on the new technology, a senior police officer piloting a new database has warned. Only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe.
But here's the problem.... usually, when you use the printer object in VB to print with, it puts MORE PCL code round what you send (or PostScript, depending on the driver you use) and that messes the whole thing up.
So one of my colleagues found a reference at MicroSoft on how to do what they call Raw Printng, which is direct to the printer not thru' the driver. We experimented with it and it does work. Here's the url: http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q154/0/78.asp
Two drive bays, just stick hard drives in them and you can use them as eSATA or USB:
"eSATA USB to SATA External HDD Dock for Dual 2.5 or 3.5in Hard Drives" by Startech... approx 50.00 on Amazon.
Even with USB, you could easily use 1.5 TB drives and get 3 TB. Need more, just pop a drive out and stick a new one in. Need 6 TB? Get two docking stations.
Going to build something yourself?
"External AC Power Adapter for SATA drives"... approx 13.00 on Amazon.
And just to throw a USB thing out there, even though you said you didn't want it:
"USB Extender over Cat5 Cable 50-meters 150-FT Extension"... approx 18.00 on ebay with free shipping.
I just ran USB to my wiring closet with a set of the above (about 35 feet away). Speed seems to be just like it was directly connected. Run to a wiring closet and use a USB hub and you can easily have multiple TBs of storage online all at the same time. No pile of drives setting around on your computer desk.
I've spent a lot of time the last week or so looking at this. I came up with USB over CAT5 to my "wiring closet," the Startech dual drive docking station, and a 4 port USB switch (like an A B switch for USB). With this setup, I can hook up 4 computers to 3 TB of storage. I only use one computer a lot, but if I need to access the drives on another computer, I just go and push a button on the USB switch.
PROs:
The Startech does eSATA Get a docking station at work and you can easily take a drive to work and not have to mess with cables. Easily add more drives for the cost of a 2.5 inch or 3.5 inch SATA drive
Cons:
Only 2 drives online at a time unless you buy more docking stations. I have to go to a closet and push a button to access the drives from another PC. Have to have extra CAT5 to all comptuers to use the USB over CAT5 adapters
I looked at some USB auto switches, but they are all windows proprietary.
Also, be real careful looking at cheap USB to NAS adapters. On most of them, they can use NTFS as read only.
Biochemist Zheng Cui’s had grants and funding while researching cancer, but after he found a very promising approach to fight cancer -- it worked so well that he planed to move to human trials -- all the money dried up. Here is what he said:
There is some private funding and the university put some funding into it. And also, at early stages when we studied the mechanisms of these mice, we had one Mitchell Cancer Institute grant, several small grants from Cancer Research Institute. But they all stopped funding me. It was kind of a strange situation. I thought it was our common goal to come up with a new weapon to fight cancer, but the moment I announced I had a new weapon to test in real human cancer situations, everybody shied away.
I would like to point out that, while converters work just fine for almost everything, they do not work for everything. I've personally ran into equipment that would not read with a serial to USB converter. I've worked a little in SCADA, and you just about had to special order a laptop with a real serial port on it, or you just couldn't read all the equipment in the field.
But if you know what you are wanting to use with a converter works, then they usually work just fine.
What you say may have been part of it, but Stack nailed it. Companies paid in all their taxes regularly. When it was pushed to the private contractors, they had to make quarterly estimates.
The burden went from one big company, to a lot of little contractors. The IRS preferred the steady stream of money from the big company, vs the irregular quarterly estimates from a lot of contractors, who may or may not be being honest about everything.
Making everyone work for a company was part of their goal, but I'm not sure how many thought about the temp slave thing, you mentioned. That was probably just a fringe benefit for them.
I watched Food Inc last night. In it, they said E. coli H157 could be removed from the intestinal tract of factory farmed cows by giving them grass for around five days. Instead of looking to see if there was a problem with the system, they expanded the current system in an effort to get rid of the E. coli, which didn't work.
While watching it, that is exactly what I thought about what will happen with Joe Stack. Instead of stepping back and asking if there could be a problem with the IRS, they will expand the system in order to "fix" the system.
I saw they were going to look at cracking down on small plane owners, as if that would have helped. Yeah, a flight plan would have stopped him, and he was a freaking engineer. Yeah, good luck with that.
I was getting something to eat and it was on TV. A guy walked by me and said rather loudly, for being in mixed company, "he didn't destroy that building enough!"
Wow, maybe if they treated people with more dignity and respect -- you know, like people -- maybe there wouldn't be that sentiment.
They put out poor to mid-quality radios, with a solid one here or there, with a large number used in public entities and paid for with taxpayer money...and then the cash rolls in as they force dealers and users to buy updated programming software every time they turn around (ok, you get updates for a year, but just about the time your subscription runs out, is when someone walks through the door with an updated radio firmware version that you can't program with the software you just paid hundreds of dollars for just 13 months ago.)
And with the mandated move to P25, motorola is just bending taxpayers over. And a few years from now, taxpayers will get bent over again when the entities using them are forced to buy updated programming software for radios that are just a few years old.
Forget winning the lottery, the scam that is motorola commercial radios is where it is at.
With some of the crap they pulling now, I wouldn't mind it if some lawsuits started flying to return some money to the agencies that purchased the stuff.
Do some research. There are authors out there that made way less than 30% of sales, while the publisher took a big chunk. I was just reading a published author that has had over eight books published. On some of them, he got.50 cents per book. On others, he got a flat rate and no royalty fees at all.
If an author dumped their publisher, went with Amazon, and happened to sell a lot of books, 30% wouldn't be a bad deal, in my opinion.
See the above statement. Who do you think are stirring the pot here? Authors or Publishers?
Yes, there is very much an RIAA type of situation here, where the publisher often does promotion and advertising, but a big name could write a book and go straight to Amazon with it.
Now they could get their own servers, marketing team, etc, and go it on their own. How much time and money do you think all of that will cost?
Amazon isn't spotless in the situation, DRM and all, but a lot of publishers treat their authors like the RIAA treats its artists.
They will send trivial amounts to a collection agency, too. I had a dispute with them and changed to Dish. You prepay for DirecTV, and the disputed bill contained a month of service, plus the new month (and the service was off). I refused to pay and they sent the entire bill to a collection agency, even though the last month of service was not used. My credit history is almost spotless, except for that one DirecTV bill hanging out there...
I worked at a place with monthly subscriptions and we discussed sending outstanding bills to a collection agency. Everyone decided against it because we thought it would generate more negative feelings toward the company than it would bring in money. Apparently, they never had this meeting at DirecTV!
No matter how much money is made in America from items assembled in China, everyone can't work at Wal-Mart and Burger King and be able to afford said items. Don't get me wrong, those are real jobs and I even worked at a Wal-Mart many years ago, but in the past, service jobs were not the base of the economy. If everybody is making minimum wage with no benefits whatsoever, who can afford services? Thus a service-based economy isn't sustainable in the long run. Yeah, we will survive and life goes on, but we shouldn't just count the beans and proclaim everything is alright. We need to take into account several things:
How citizens are treated by the governments of our trading partners, for instance.
What happens to our economy when nothing left but service jobs is another one.
When the trading partners are using the profit from us to build up armies to come back over here and kill us, should make the list as well.
It would totally wipe out Microsoft's current business model. I think they better wait until they sucker everyone into software rental agreements before this is unleashed on Windows.
Have a full installation of Window's go bad on you to the point of a reinstall (no backups, like most people). Say over time you have installed quite a few shareware apps that you have grown to love. Now reinstall windows and go to Google and start searching for all your favorite apps again. You have to wade through tons of shareware sites, full of adds, and text designed to mislead you to what you are downloading. And sometimes when you go to download things, they put download buttons for other software close to the download button of what you want in order to trick you into downloading something else.
I usually try and download from the author's website, but there is so much crap out there now, that sometimes it is quite a job actually finding the real author's web site.
Now do the exact same scenario, only with Linux. Sudo Apt-get install xmoto, and 10 minutes later you are done.
I have a friend who modded an Xbox to make it a media center and it is awesome. I went the PC route and made a central PC server and stream to my TVs with a d-link set top box.
Here is my experience. I used to get movies and watch movies. Boy, were those the days. Now I get movies, rip movies, convert movies to avi or mp4, and move huge files around (very slowly). The last drive I bought was a 1.5 terabyte, and I'm thinking about getting another one...because what else do you freaking back up a 1.5 terabyte drive to but another drive? And my UPnP server was on Linux, but the box was dual boot, so if someone was in windows, we couldn't watch streaming video...so I just built a new server to fix that issue.
When I finally get to sit down and actually watch a movie, it isn't uncommon for me to get up in the middle of it and kick off another DVD folder to be converted.
If I went over to my friend's house to actually play a game on his Xbox media center, we would probably have to wait an hour and a half to play something, because he would probably be FTPing a big movie to it at the time!
And hey, I just ordered a mod chip and picked up an Xbox so he could build me one. Why? I don't know. It's just cool.
Personally, I think Mikrotik is in the same boat as Tivo. They may not be violating the letter of the law, but they are certainly violating the spirit of the law. Of course, I could be wrong...but I've looked into it and they will provide source code if you order it on a CD or something. And I think they only provide source for packages that they modify. And it is a little pricey if you ask me.
I work in a business which is involved in a WISP and they use Mikrotik fairly heavily. On one hand, I think it is awesome stuff. And on the other hand, it seems just stable enough to keep you buying it, but just quirky enough that you understand why phone companies aren't throwing out their Cisco routers. And then on the other hand, it might not be carrier class, but it sure is better than your average consumer stuff.
I have a mikrotik unit on the side of my house right now, and RouterOS is far more configurable than DD-WRT, OpenWRT. or Tomato. Winbox also kicks butt.
Slashdot Mirror
source wikipedia: In 1988, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) went into effect ... [victims] were compensated with awards totaling $903 million.
Everyone is told they are safe, but like it or not, millions and millions are paid out to children that were injured by vaccines. I've actually done some research into this and it is pretty hard to win a vaccine injury claim, contrary to what some say in some later posts. Everyone in the vaccine chain is pretty defense and tend to blame a problem on everything but the vaccine.
Yes. I wish Slashdot had an edit feature. Crap just doesn't show up until you hit submit...
I get MSDN magazine and the latest issue has a seriously good article on sqlight. They said it works really well on cell phones, etc., where it was almost impossible to install a database server and/or could not always have access to a server to connect back to a database.
transporter_ii
They had experts in other fields examine the bones and concluded they were tool marks.
The author makes few claims himself, it is all testimony from real scientist. That's one of the things that impressed me about the book.
I see truth that doesn't fit gets modded down on /. as well. :)
Off Amazon, order a book called the Hidden History of the Human Race (The Condensed Edition of Forbidden Archeology) . They have been discovering tool marks on bones older than they should be (think dinosaur) for many, many years . Some people even lost their jobs over it. Why? It seems that before Darwin, they went by the evidence and didn't need to make anything "fit" a timeline. After Darwin was firmly rooted, evidence was covered up, because it didn't fit the timeline. Some people who stood by their work, were just fired or blacklisted. There is case after case in the book.
Now it seems that technology has made it hard to cover up. That's good.
No, haven't tried that. I have uninstalled and re-installed all kinds of things.
The one thing I know is that there are a lot of people it has happened to. Bug reports on Mozilla of the exact things happening to me.
And you totally gloss over the dog slow part. hmmmmm
Interestingly, after I hit submit, Ubuntu popped up with a Firefox update to 3.6.7. Flash still doesn't work and it is still dog slow compared to Chrome. Hmmmmm
I would almost like to have downgraded Firefox to an earlier version that "just worked", but it it tied into Ubuntu almost as bad as IE is in Windows. Hmmmmm
Typing this on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS using Google Chrome. Why Chrome? I used 8.04 and Firefox for about a year, year and a half and loved it. Then one day Firefox updated to 3.6.6 and Flash quit working. I also got to noticing that web sites took a long time to load (I thought it was because I use a WISP). I messed around with Flash and the best I could get was intermittent flash and it took a lot of browser restarts just to get that. So I updated to 10.04 in hopes that would fix the problem. I think Firefox actually got slower.... annoyingly slow.
Just for the sake of testing, I installed Google chrome and it worked amazingly better. Flash works the first time you start it up and it is amazingly fast compared to Firefox.
But I'm a Firefox fanboy and, though I like Google, I hate to see them take over the world. More than speed, I like the plugins available for Firefox.
Firefox is an integral part of Ubuntu and you would think of all things, this would be the one thing that "just worked," Not. And during this same period of time, Firefox on my XP system works exactly like it has since I installed it.
I didn't put it through exhaustive tests, but I actually tried to make some link files and put them on a usb drive and have them install something when I accessed the shortcuts in Windows explorer. No luck whatsoever. I looked for some working examples but I couldn't find any, either.
And funny, I did some work for a large oil/gas company that stored the config files for some flowmeters on usb thumb drives and left them in the battery boxes. It was really fun when the first wave of thumb drive viruses hit! That's one reason I find this story interesting.
transporter_ii
I know I will probably get flamed for this, but as someone who just developed some .NET projects (it was the right tool for the job), I did so using Firefox almost exclusively for testing. Note that every component used was a straight .NET component, no third party anything. One day I fired up IE 8 just to see what it looked like. There were things broke all over IE that "just worked" in Firefox (w/ the .net plugin).
On top of all the broken things in IE...the most annoying thing about IE is that links are tied to the navigation sound in Windows when clicked. Yes, that can be turned off, but most people don't.
I'm no MS fan at all, but I can't see exactly how they dropped the ball so bad on IE. I don't know, maybe that is a good thing?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/may/06/ukcrime1
Massive investment in CCTV cameras to prevent crime in the UK has failed to have a significant impact, despite billions of pounds spent on the new technology, a senior police officer piloting a new database has warned. Only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe.
Did some quick research on it and it does look like it would work. But I did find this information:
http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=655463&page=6
Two drive bays, just stick hard drives in them and you can use them as eSATA or USB:
"eSATA USB to SATA External HDD Dock for Dual 2.5 or 3.5in Hard Drives" by Startech ... approx 50.00 on Amazon.
Even with USB, you could easily use 1.5 TB drives and get 3 TB. Need more, just pop a drive out and stick a new one in. Need 6 TB? Get two docking stations.
Going to build something yourself?
"External AC Power Adapter for SATA drives" ... approx 13.00 on Amazon.
And just to throw a USB thing out there, even though you said you didn't want it:
"USB Extender over Cat5 Cable 50-meters 150-FT Extension" ... approx 18.00 on ebay with free shipping.
I just ran USB to my wiring closet with a set of the above (about 35 feet away). Speed seems to be just like it was directly connected. Run to a wiring closet and use a USB hub and you can easily have multiple TBs of storage online all at the same time. No pile of drives setting around on your computer desk.
I've spent a lot of time the last week or so looking at this. I came up with USB over CAT5 to my "wiring closet," the Startech dual drive docking station, and a 4 port USB switch (like an A B switch for USB). With this setup, I can hook up 4 computers to 3 TB of storage. I only use one computer a lot, but if I need to access the drives on another computer, I just go and push a button on the USB switch.
PROs:
The Startech does eSATA
Get a docking station at work and you can easily take a drive to work and not have to mess with cables.
Easily add more drives for the cost of a 2.5 inch or 3.5 inch SATA drive
Cons:
Only 2 drives online at a time unless you buy more docking stations.
I have to go to a closet and push a button to access the drives from another PC.
Have to have extra CAT5 to all comptuers to use the USB over CAT5 adapters
I looked at some USB auto switches, but they are all windows proprietary.
Also, be real careful looking at cheap USB to NAS adapters. On most of them, they can use NTFS as read only.
Biochemist Zheng Cui’s had grants and funding while researching cancer, but after he found a very promising approach to fight cancer -- it worked so well that he planed to move to human trials -- all the money dried up. Here is what he said:
There is some private funding and the university put some funding into it. And also, at early stages when we studied the mechanisms of these mice, we had one Mitchell Cancer Institute grant, several small grants from Cancer Research Institute. But they all stopped funding me. It was kind of a strange situation. I thought it was our common goal to come up with a new weapon to fight cancer, but the moment I announced I had a new weapon to test in real human cancer situations, everybody shied away.
Very interesting interview that can be read here: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/4273366
None dare call it a conspiracy!
I would like to point out that, while converters work just fine for almost everything, they do not work for everything. I've personally ran into equipment that would not read with a serial to USB converter. I've worked a little in SCADA, and you just about had to special order a laptop with a real serial port on it, or you just couldn't read all the equipment in the field.
But if you know what you are wanting to use with a converter works, then they usually work just fine.
What you say may have been part of it, but Stack nailed it. Companies paid in all their taxes regularly. When it was pushed to the private contractors, they had to make quarterly estimates.
The burden went from one big company, to a lot of little contractors. The IRS preferred the steady stream of money from the big company, vs the irregular quarterly estimates from a lot of contractors, who may or may not be being honest about everything.
Making everyone work for a company was part of their goal, but I'm not sure how many thought about the temp slave thing, you mentioned. That was probably just a fringe benefit for them.
I watched Food Inc last night. In it, they said E. coli H157 could be removed from the intestinal tract of factory farmed cows by giving them grass for around five days. Instead of looking to see if there was a problem with the system, they expanded the current system in an effort to get rid of the E. coli, which didn't work.
While watching it, that is exactly what I thought about what will happen with Joe Stack. Instead of stepping back and asking if there could be a problem with the IRS, they will expand the system in order to "fix" the system.
I saw they were going to look at cracking down on small plane owners, as if that would have helped. Yeah, a flight plan would have stopped him, and he was a freaking engineer. Yeah, good luck with that.
I was getting something to eat and it was on TV. A guy walked by me and said rather loudly, for being in mixed company, "he didn't destroy that building enough!"
Wow, maybe if they treated people with more dignity and respect -- you know, like people -- maybe there wouldn't be that sentiment.
They put out poor to mid-quality radios, with a solid one here or there, with a large number used in public entities and paid for with taxpayer money...and then the cash rolls in as they force dealers and users to buy updated programming software every time they turn around (ok, you get updates for a year, but just about the time your subscription runs out, is when someone walks through the door with an updated radio firmware version that you can't program with the software you just paid hundreds of dollars for just 13 months ago.)
And with the mandated move to P25, motorola is just bending taxpayers over. And a few years from now, taxpayers will get bent over again when the entities using them are forced to buy updated programming software for radios that are just a few years old.
Forget winning the lottery, the scam that is motorola commercial radios is where it is at.
With some of the crap they pulling now, I wouldn't mind it if some lawsuits started flying to return some money to the agencies that purchased the stuff.
Do some research. There are authors out there that made way less than 30% of sales, while the publisher took a big chunk. I was just reading a published author that has had over eight books published. On some of them, he got .50 cents per book. On others, he got a flat rate and no royalty fees at all.
If an author dumped their publisher, went with Amazon, and happened to sell a lot of books, 30% wouldn't be a bad deal, in my opinion.
See the above statement. Who do you think are stirring the pot here? Authors or Publishers?
Yes, there is very much an RIAA type of situation here, where the publisher often does promotion and advertising, but a big name could write a book and go straight to Amazon with it.
Now they could get their own servers, marketing team, etc, and go it on their own. How much time and money do you think all of that will cost?
Amazon isn't spotless in the situation, DRM and all, but a lot of publishers treat their authors like the RIAA treats its artists.
They will send trivial amounts to a collection agency, too. I had a dispute with them and changed to Dish. You prepay for DirecTV, and the disputed bill contained a month of service, plus the new month (and the service was off). I refused to pay and they sent the entire bill to a collection agency, even though the last month of service was not used. My credit history is almost spotless, except for that one DirecTV bill hanging out there...
I worked at a place with monthly subscriptions and we discussed sending outstanding bills to a collection agency. Everyone decided against it because we thought it would generate more negative feelings toward the company than it would bring in money. Apparently, they never had this meeting at DirecTV!
No matter how much money is made in America from items assembled in China, everyone can't work at Wal-Mart and Burger King and be able to afford said items. Don't get me wrong, those are real jobs and I even worked at a Wal-Mart many years ago, but in the past, service jobs were not the base of the economy. If everybody is making minimum wage with no benefits whatsoever, who can afford services? Thus a service-based economy isn't sustainable in the long run. Yeah, we will survive and life goes on, but we shouldn't just count the beans and proclaim everything is alright. We need to take into account several things:
How citizens are treated by the governments of our trading partners, for instance.
What happens to our economy when nothing left but service jobs is another one.
When the trading partners are using the profit from us to build up armies to come back over here and kill us, should make the list as well.
It would totally wipe out Microsoft's current business model. I think they better wait until they sucker everyone into software rental agreements before this is unleashed on Windows.
.
Have a full installation of Window's go bad on you to the point of a reinstall (no backups, like most people). Say over time you have installed quite a few shareware apps that you have grown to love. Now reinstall windows and go to Google and start searching for all your favorite apps again. You have to wade through tons of shareware sites, full of adds, and text designed to mislead you to what you are downloading. And sometimes when you go to download things, they put download buttons for other software close to the download button of what you want in order to trick you into downloading something else.
I usually try and download from the author's website, but there is so much crap out there now, that sometimes it is quite a job actually finding the real author's web site.
Now do the exact same scenario, only with Linux. Sudo Apt-get install xmoto, and 10 minutes later you are done.
Linux is the crappy download/warez site killa!
I have a friend who modded an Xbox to make it a media center and it is awesome. I went the PC route and made a central PC server and stream to my TVs with a d-link set top box.
Here is my experience. I used to get movies and watch movies. Boy, were those the days. Now I get movies, rip movies, convert movies to avi or mp4, and move huge files around (very slowly). The last drive I bought was a 1.5 terabyte, and I'm thinking about getting another one...because what else do you freaking back up a 1.5 terabyte drive to but another drive? And my UPnP server was on Linux, but the box was dual boot, so if someone was in windows, we couldn't watch streaming video...so I just built a new server to fix that issue.
When I finally get to sit down and actually watch a movie, it isn't uncommon for me to get up in the middle of it and kick off another DVD folder to be converted.
If I went over to my friend's house to actually play a game on his Xbox media center, we would probably have to wait an hour and a half to play something, because he would probably be FTPing a big movie to it at the time!
And hey, I just ordered a mod chip and picked up an Xbox so he could build me one. Why? I don't know. It's just cool.
Personally, I think Mikrotik is in the same boat as Tivo. They may not be violating the letter of the law, but they are certainly violating the spirit of the law. Of course, I could be wrong...but I've looked into it and they will provide source code if you order it on a CD or something. And I think they only provide source for packages that they modify. And it is a little pricey if you ask me.
I work in a business which is involved in a WISP and they use Mikrotik fairly heavily. On one hand, I think it is awesome stuff. And on the other hand, it seems just stable enough to keep you buying it, but just quirky enough that you understand why phone companies aren't throwing out their Cisco routers. And then on the other hand, it might not be carrier class, but it sure is better than your average consumer stuff.
I have a mikrotik unit on the side of my house right now, and RouterOS is far more configurable than DD-WRT, OpenWRT. or Tomato. Winbox also kicks butt.