Microsoft

Here I was, earlier today, simply trying to swap the default gateway of the Ethernet card of my Windows 7 box, and ran into the following peculiarity. First off, as soon as I swapped the gateway, my Ethernet connection went down. To investigate this, I popped into the command-line and tried pinging the new gateway only to run into the error message below:
General failure.

WPA 2 is pretty much the default encryption standard for wifi networks nowadays. However, standard XP installations do not support it by default. To enable WPA2 support, an update - KB893357 - needs to be downloaded and installed.

If you are not keen on going through the whole Genuine Windows (sic) crap, googling for KB893357 should provide you with a direct download link for the update.

If you ever run into an error along the lines of 1155 instmsi30.exe not found specifying a directory, usually your CD-ROM drive, you need to update your Windows installer.

A very interesting article that was brought to my attention today. Didn't realise that it was this fucking bad :/

A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection

Peter Gutmann, pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz
Source: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt
Last updated 27 December 2006

Executive Summary
-----------------

Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called "premium content", typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it's not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server). This document analyses the cost involved in Vista's content protection, and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry.