Microsoft used cracked software to edit sound files ?

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In a Groklaw story about Novell suing Microsoft over Wordperfect I found this interesting comment.

“German PC-Welt magazine reports that Microsoft used an illegal copy of
SoundForge 4.5 for editing Wave files shipped with Windows Media Player. You can
check that yourself by opening any file in the 

$WINNT\Help\Tours\WindowsMediaPlayer\Audio\Wav

folder in notepad or other editors of
your choice and looking at the last line. There you will find a reference to
SoundForge 4.5 and also a user called “Deepz0ne” who happen to be one
of the founders of an audio software cracking group called Radium.”

I’ve just checked this out on an OEM’d XP filesystem that hasn’t been changed since the machine was delivered (I don’t use XP, but I didn’t blow the filesystem away just in case.
As a case in point I can see:

# pwd

/mnt/windows/WINDOWS/Help/Tours/WindowsMediaPlayer/Audio/Wav

# strings wmpaud1.wav | tail

#51O

 6Sr2

$$0,

LISTB

INFOICRD

2000-04-06

IENG

Deepz0ne

ISFT

Sound Forge 4.5

So if PC-Welt's explanation of that is correct, then MS has some explaining to do...

Aurora possibilities tonight ? (updated)

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Update: Been outside whilst it’s clear, but can’t see anything. There’s some high cloud so that may not help, but looking at the auroral oval maps below it looks like reporters may have been a little over-optimistic on this unless you’re in Tasmania.. Hey ho, another time..

Apparently there is the possibility of Aurora tonight, courtesy of a large solar storm going on at the moment.


Details in these links:


New Top 500 List out – IBM now number 1, Earth Simulator down to 3!

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Well after a 2.5 year run at the top of the Top 500 the Earth Simulator has been toppled by not one but two new clusters!

SGI overtook it with a cluster at NASA and has already been doing useful modelling of hurricanes.

But even that beast is dwarfed by IBM’s Blue Gene which has taken the No.1 spot by almost doubling the Earth Simulators Linpack measure of Rmax when it’s only part built!

Dell breaches a patent by selling computers abroad ?

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More patent stupidity reported by the Register, apparently Dell are being sued for breaching a patent on automatically working out international shipping charges on a website.

Personally I’d have thought it obvious that if you’re selling things overseas the customer needs to know that this before they commit to paying. Apparently Amazon were doing this well before the patent was filed in 1997 which will be handy prior art.

Public liability crisis means saying “You Can’t Do That” is all you can do

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The rise and rise of the premiums for public liability insurance has been going on for a long time now (that article was written in 2002) and now it’s getting even further out of hand.

The Tasmanian town of Maydena has had to close all recreational facilities because of a doubling in premiums for public liability insurance.

So no town hall, swimming pool, playground, garden centre and tennis courts..

Automatic RSS feed detection

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The following caught my eye when reading the release notes for the preview release of Firefox:



Live Bookmarks


You can now subscribe to and read RSS feeds in your Bookmarks. When you visit a page that advertises a RSS feed by using a tag, a icon will appear in the status bar. Click it to view a list of feeds the page is offering. Click one to subscribe – this adds a Bookmark Folder that contains all the recent posts from the feed.




This of course begs the question, how do you create one of these links ?



The answer is suprisingly easy, the best answer I found (or at least the first useful one :-)) said to do:



<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS” href=”url/to/rss/file”>

So, for my site, it looks like:



<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS” href=”backend.php”>


If you’re using the latest Firefox to view my page you should see a little tag in your status bar (normally bottom left) that says RSS which you can click on to subscribe to the RSS feed from this site.



This strikes me as a really useful little hack with HTML and I encourage others who are producing RSS feeds to consider using this!