Archive for December, 2007

How Miscrosoft fights warez/piracy

Friday, December 28th, 2007

Well, it’s "official": Microsoft is SUPPORTING piracy. Sure, not officially 🙂 but unofficially. How’s that? Well, it’s pretty strait forward:
– in the US, one Windows XP Professional retail license is $299
– in the US, my brother-in-law, working in some factory doing manual labor, earned a little over $1000 per month
– in Romania, somebody doing the same kind of job, earns around $250-$300 per month (actually, most of them are earning around $200 but if I take that figure it will only look worse)
– in Romania, one Windows XP Professional retail license is aproximatly 350 [b:c126e682ab]euro[/b:c126e682ab], which is around $500

Conclusion:
– one less-average working guy in the US can buy 3 WinXP Prof retail licenses from 1 month of work and still have some money left
– the same guy in RO can buy 1 WinXP Prof retail license from 2 months of work and have aproximatly the some money left

a little more "graphical":
– in order for the US guy to buy 3 licenses, he needs to work 1 month
– in order for the RO guy to buy 3 licenses, he needs to work between 5 and 6 months

And Microsoft is complaining about a high piracy level in the balcans. No shit!

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Mysql 5.0 update

Monday, December 10th, 2007

I just updated my mysql installation from 5.0.27 to 5.0.45 (windows xp) and my server would not start.
I looked in the error log: "mysql Page directory corruption: supremum not pointed to"
I searched the net, nothing. I then compared my my.ini files and foudn the problem: the idiotic update removed my datafile (I’m not sure if it was me re-configuring the server)
in any case, just pay attention when updating 🙂

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