Caveat kleptor?

[unixronin]

It’s probably not too surprising that, even though you can still download the Windows 7 release candidate for free from Microsoft and will be able to do so “at least through July 2009”, with no restrictions upon the number of product keys available, Windows 7 RC is widely distributed on — and frequently downloaded from — pirate sites.

It probably also shouldn’t come as a surprise that many of these pirated Windows 7 RC downloads come pre-compromised. Security researchers at Damballa say the trojanned version first appeared on April 24, and had infected around 27,000 hosts before Damballa managed to locate and gain control of the botnet’s command-and-control server on May 10.

“We continue to see new installs happening at a rate of about 1,600 per day with broad geographic distribution,” Tripp Cox, Damballa’s vice president of engineering, said in a statement. “Since our takedown (of the command and control server), any new installs of this pirated distribution of Windows 7 RC are inaccessible by the botmaster.”

However, the botmaster still controls the existing installations, Damballa said. The infected systems are mainly concentrated in the U.S., with 10 percent, and the Netherlands and Italy, with 7 percent each.

“You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.”

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Almost anything's better than Vista.


...OK, more seriously: You can try it for free without obligating yourself to ever buy it, but the release candidate will expire in July 2010, after which it will only run for a maximum of two hours at a time. You can use a tool like EASEUS Partition Manager (http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/11/29/easeus-partition-manager-30-home-edition-free-download-partitionmagic-alternative/), which is a free download, to non-destructively repartition your disk, then install Windows 7 on the second partition and (with a minimal amount of setup) be able to boot either OS at will; that way, if you don't like it, you can just delete that partition again and be back where you started.

And actually, snark aside, the word from people I know who've tried the release candidate is that Windows 7 is a lot better than Vista. They've apparently made a lot of real-world usability improvements, made it more responsive, improved the interface, and trimmed a fair bit of the fat out.

[lebo-superman.livejournal.com]

. . . . but, is it worth dropping XP for?

I still fondly remember DOS 3.1 - and kick myself for not saving THAT OS to a CD before I "upgraded" to Win 98. Win Millennium was even worse, and when I got XP I said "NO MORE". I'm not changing to another OS until I know I've got a better one. Oh, and I would have already gone to Mandriva Linux, except that I have about 2 Terabytes of data on my computer that I can't find a good program to convert to Linux.

*sigh*

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

What kind of data? Two terabytes of most kinds of data is a lot, and the type of data that typically comes in multi-terabyte quantities is usually pretty OS-agnostic.

[lebo-superman.livejournal.com]

Mostly it falls into 3 groups - music, pics/graphics, and self-help .mov files. I had a lot of old .33 rpm LP's of classical music (I learned to enjoy orchestra music when I was in one as a kid). Between that, movie soundtracks, and early (50's to 80's) rock-n-roll music, I have a good sized library. I might not be the only person to have both Mozart and KISS, but I'd bet there aren't many. I'm on 4 newsletter type email lists that send me several new wallpaper graphics every week, and I save what I like from them. Plus I actually have software I've bought that makes self-help MP3's w/ subliminal messages.

So far as I know, it only runs on Windows, and I've yet to see a reliable Windows emulator for Linux, let alone anything that would convert them all to something a Linux-based program would read. I have Linux on my laptop, but when I burned some of my favorite wallpapers to a CD, the laptop acted like it couldn't even find the disc.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I don't have either any Mozart, or any KISS. But I have Wagner, Beethoven, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, the Electric Light Orchestra, Queen, Rush, Cobalt 60, VNV Nation, and the Irish Rovers. :)

Most of what you describe should be perfectly playable on Linux. For the Windows-specific software, you always have the option of WINE, or a Windows instance running in VirtualBox or Bochs.

I have Linux on my laptop, but when I burned some of my favorite wallpapers to a CD, the laptop acted like it couldn't even find the disc.

Honestly, that sounds as though you got a coastered disk, or there's a problem with the laptop's drive — which may be as simple as that it can't reliably read the type of CD blank you used. Not all CDs are created equal, and not all CD drives — particularly older ones — will reliably read all media types.