Manda QoP

After much trial and error at the weekend (at least 10 minutes of investigating), it appears that the HDD hasn't gone kaput on the monster PC at home, the CPU has died a horrible death. What a terrible shame, now I'll have to buy a new motherboard, CPU, memory... blah de blah... The thing is though, do I just want to get spannerbox to make me a spiffy new 64-bit machine that I can dual-boot (cubase and 64-bit do not play well together), or shall I just upgrade the current box. It'll probably cost the same whichever way I do this but I guess if I upgrade the Thermaltake box at least then I'll get some moolah back - the box itself is worth a few hundred bucks. If anyone has a spare (free) i7 processor lying around with a compatible motherboard, feel free to send it my way. :) Rest in pieces CPU.

This morning I had a horrible fright. Background To The Scare I recently backed up my entire life onto a new 1TB external HDD, and I mean everything . All the poems, lyrics, music, artwork that I've created since my school days, all the photos of friends and family going back to the year dot, all my certificates and numerous other things. You get the drift, it was shit loads of data and a lot of it had great personal meaning. I imagine that a lot of us nowadays keep our life on the computer, so this could happen to anyone. My PC has recently done a bit of travelling, it's been from Auckland to Whangarei and back sitting in my 4x4 that Mum & Dad kindly babysat whilst I was gallavanting round the UK. I arrived back a few weeks ago but have been using the laptop. Last weekend I decided to set the PC back up. Nothing untoward happened. The PC booted up. I plugged in the external HDD, again, all good, everything showing up. Now I fully deserve what happened to me next.

It was interesting to read how web use in Sweden dropped overnight by 40% since the introduction of a strict new copyright law... see here: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/web-2-0/news/article.cfm?c_id=363&objectid=10565443 , I'm wondering if perhaps a point has been missed in the NZ Herald article. I'm guessing they've copied the information from one site that seemed credible without putting in any actual thought or real journalism; the first result returned by Google gave me pretty much the same information that was contained in the NZ Herald article. This prompted me to do a bit of reading up of my own, especially as 4 0% seems rather higher than would be expected by just losing the file swappers. Surely 40% of Internet users in Sweden aren't using the Internet purely for file swapping and illegal downloads? Who knows? One day really isn't a long enough sample period and things may bounce back next week when people get over the shock of the new law. Swedish Pirate

We have Pat Martin from Microsoft presenting at the April meeting. The meeting will be at Level 7, Fronde House, 131 Queen Street starting at 6pm. Go to www.aucklandsql.com for more information and to register.

Sharepoint Designer is now available as a free download. Check out this link for more information. http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/04/02/sharepoint-designer-available-as-a-free-download.aspx

www.girlgeekdinners.co.nz has joined the blackout to protest against Section 92. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

I am very concerned about section 92 of the Copyright Amendment Act which comes into force at the end of February in New Zealand. This law assumes guilt upon accusation. No courts or legal system of any kind are involved. Your ISP is expected to act as judge, jury and executioner based upon a copyright infringement notice. For more information about this new law, check out Mauricio's blog as he's written a very good article, or the Creative Freedom Foundation or you could even go and read the law amendment on the NZ Legislation website . How do they prove guilt? That's all the proof they need. A signed notice from the copyright owner. 92D Requirements for notice of infringement A notice referred to in section 92C(3) must— “(a) contain the information prescribed by regulations made under this Act; and “(b) be signed by the copyright owner or the copyright owner's duly authorised agent. Because I am so concerned about this I've done something I would not normally do