A coworker of mine (hey KT) pointed me to this nice article at http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html that talks about the DRM (Digital Restrictions Management, as one of my favorite hackers calls it) in Vista and how much time, money, and effort are wasted on it (for end users as well as developers).

For those interested in copyrights and/or law, Massachusetts Institute of Technology is offereing a free Introduction to Copyright Law course. I found the link on Groklaw.

In the interest of "encouraging" more people (not just our normal developers) fix bugs, Andrew Stitt has proposed a bug fixing contest. The current rewards are 50USD for first, 35USD for second, and 15USD for third place.

Haven pointed out a blog entry about some of the work done for SuSe Linux Enterprise Desktop 10. Novell Open Audio has a podcast about this as well.

WSU's EECS department may be interested in this as it apparently works directly with a Microsoft Active Directory server and can not only join the domain just as a Microsoft Windows client does, but it can also supports password expiration, password changing, cached offline Kerberos information, login time restrictions, and many more.

Attached is the PostScript of the order we will be placing with OfficeDepot for our networking gear. This order includes:

• 1 D-Link DGS-1005D 5-Port Gigabit Switch
• 3 Linksys EtherFast EZXS16W 16-Port Workgroup Switch
• 2 D-Link DSS-16+ Express EtherNetwork 16-Port 10/100Mpbs Switch
• $451.44

The gigabit is for the 'backbone' that all of our switches should be connecting to (at most 4, with one port connecting to the server). The 3 Linksys and 2 D-Link are for filler if my 16-port and ribo's 24-port are not enough (the reason I'm getting a mix of Linksys and D-Link is that Office Depot doesn't have 5 of either).