* Posts by bombastic bob

10515 publicly visible posts • joined 1 May 2015

LibreOffice 7.1 beta boasts impressive range of features let down by a lack of polish and poor mobile efforts

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: "Across the free software world we have a problem in getting people to pay for things"

I've never understood what that is supposed to mean

Here's an example: you sell a product that consists of hardware and "value add" software that's necessarily open source, or has open source libraries or "helper" applications that it needs to function.

You still sell the software, or bundle it as an added value for customers. It's not free of cost to the consumer, like "free beer" would be. But it's open source, so it can be 'freely shared', because it's the nature of open source. Sure a competitor COULD take your software and modify it for his own gear, and he's "free" to do that. But of course the modified/derived version would need to be open source also if you GPL'd it. And so on.

It's a revenue model that works.

And that's my take on it

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: "Across the free software world we have a problem in getting people to pay for things"

learn to counter the bullshit the marketing department in Redmond tries to baffle people with.

A well known brand-name car dealer mechanic once tried to tell me that using aftermarket spark plugs (particularly the high performance kind made by Bosch) would cause a "check engine" light. Obvious B.S. as I've exclusively used those aftermarket spark plugs in more than one car for DECADES. Never had a problem.

Same idea, yeah.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: "Across the free software world we have a problem in getting people to pay for things"

Don't ask me how they did it

Micros~1 could sell ice cubes in the Klondike. That's how they did it.

Once you have a revenue stream, everything else is a LOT easier!

bombastic bob Silver badge
Linux

Re: "Across the free software world we have a problem in getting people to pay for things"

How many businesses have actually seriously considered LibreOffice?

Probably not enough. However, if your office has Linux users, chances are it's there already.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Meh

Re: Whilst I agree that cloud collaboration is important these days...

Do people really try and use things like this on mobile (excluding tablets)

I think most people would say "no", but someoe out there WILL push for an unnecessarily large development effort for mobile, anyway...

It would *GREATLY* irritate me if the UI were "tweeked" (read: ruined) to support "mobile things". Better to stick with what it's already good at, I say. Let someone else fork it for mobile if they want that.

(office things on "mobile" are *HIGHLY* overrated!)

Where's the mysterious metal monolith today then? Oh look, it's atop a California mountain

bombastic bob Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Technically ......

I'm reliably informed that it will quite happily continue to burn underwater, once started.

several metals will do that, by essentially burning hot enough to react with the water itself.

Pure Al metal instantly forms a protective oxide layer when exposed to air. This is why you need inert gas to weld it. You can't solder to it either. Titanium is similar. A lot of metals are actually like this.

Everyone remembers Jr. High science teachers lighting magnesium and putting sodium into water, right?

bombastic bob Silver badge
Alien

Re: Not aluminium?

fake vs "real" monoliths

like fake vs "real" crop circles

(just because SOME people fake them...)

icon, because, well YOU know!

bombastic bob Silver badge
Go

Re: "Where will the mysterious metal monolith appear next?"

garden gnome photos would actually be pretty awesome!

the vacation places I really have no simultaneous time+money to visit...

bombastic bob Silver badge
Trollface

Re: "Where will the mysterious metal monolith appear next?"

where's "Waldo" (the stainless steel monolith)

Trumpian politics continue as senators advance controversial Republican FCC commissioner nominee

bombastic bob Silver badge
Megaphone

Re: The DNC need to win at least 1 seat in georgia

4 years of deadlock

Not a BAD thing, as a consolation prize.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Georgia Dominion voting machines

More TLDR.

Regarding those voting machines, have you seen THIS? (it's Texas' assessment)

https://www.sos.texas.gov/elections/laws/dominion.shtml

That's the Texas page that has the PDFs for the various evaluation reports. (now where's the 'Sauce' icon...)

bombastic bob Silver badge
Thumb Down

Re: Like trashing a rental home

So go look.

TLDR _AND_ telling me to "go look" ?

No.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Pirate

This is a real tHreat for any democratic system.

I think you meant it to say 'threat' and not 'treat', right?

bombastic bob Silver badge
Thumb Down

Re: what's going on?

basically take what YOU said, invert it, and that's close to what I would like to say.

Additionally:

Editing, banning, or "fact checking" what a politician says during an election, showing bias against one candidate and towards another, COULD be considered an "in kind" contribution, and as such, would fall under the umbrella of campaign finance laws and regulations. An "in kind" contribution could violate existing laws, in other words.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Black Helicopters

foxes and henhouses.

So ask this question: who's the "fox", and where's the "henhouse"? And just HOW deep does this rabbit hole go?

icon, because, black helicopters

bombastic bob Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Other opinions are available

from the article:

the destructive partisan politics it has persistently fanned

in reference to the CURRENT President, naturally.

Other opinions ARE available.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Trumpian appointments

YES

OpenZFS v2.0.0 targets Linux and FreeBSD – shame about the Oracle licensing worries

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: I can't stand misleading charts

great performance and compression ratio.

I use ZFS's compression feature a LOT on FreeBSD workstations and servers. It's ok for binaries, really good for text (like source and e-mail repositories). Additionally for source and e-mail storage on the server I use automatic data replication (basically 2 copies of the stored data). With compression, the replication isn't that much of a 'hit'.

on a fairly large project's source tree (which had some compiler output files in it) "du -A" (actual reported size, not on-disk size) showed a total file size of 1.9G, but without the '-A' (actual on-disk size) it showed 593M. That's using the native ZFS compression. Overall in the 'catch all' source tree, with lots of already-compressed tarballs, svn and github metadata, and other binary files, there was a size reduction of about 25% (14G vs 19G). So YMMV on that one. [but I nearly always use compression anyway, especially for archived files and text].

I'm pretty sure that compression works poorly for downloaded cat videos and compressed audio, so as would be expected I turn it off on those directory trees. It's just a setting. (you create it as a separate zpool that's part of the main zroot, basically, and set up compression/replication etc. for that particular pool. easy enough, but a little planning helps).

Back in the winders 'stacker' days (and when NTFS finally got compression) I confirmed that compressed data often read faster than uncompressed due to drive speeds, so it made sense to just compress the entire drive by default. I don't know if that's still the case with spinny drives (i.e. compressed data reads faster), but it may be a performance hit for SSDs. Still it seems to be fast enough as far as I'm concerned, using large spinny drives.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: "acting within the rights granted"

if you use OpenZFS as intended, why is there a legal issue?

The licensing issues have to do with GPL as I understand it. Just go with the CDDL or whatever it is that the OpenZFS is licensed under, and it's no problem. If you need to NOT have the "tainted kernel" warning, all you need is a "BLOB wrapper" kernel module that allows building for any kernel config, then link in the CDDL-licensed re-distributable pre-compiled BLOB when you install it locally. Simple. (a 'build from source' package could do this quickly and efficiently)

YOU (the end user) can do whatever you want with GPL'd or CDDL'd code, if you're NOT distributing it. The people who have to "sweat the load" over licensing are the people who DiSTRIBUTE the code. As far as I understand it there's no restriction for ANY kind of commercial usage with the OpenZFS code. So what's the probem?

(maybe it's "GPL purity", an UN-realistic expectation)

Marmite of scripting languages PHP emits version 8.0, complete with named arguments and other goodies

bombastic bob Silver badge
Linux

in the last 2 years I have designed no fewer than 3 major projects that have a PHP back-end for a web interface, typically for a touch screen on an embedded system (not to mention the supporting web server, a 4th project in a way). I specifically chose PHP as the best solution for rapid development to customer deployment, for its maintainability, and for overall performance.

PHP is most certainly _NOT_ dead, nor has it been relegated to "maintenance only".

bombastic bob Silver badge
Happy

Re: You know the script

no angry comments here, as long as reasonable backward compatibility is maintained.

And from my experience, PHP is pretty good with that.

TikTok given another week to sort out how to sell itself

bombastic bob Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: faffing around

I'm glad someone could would actually post that!

bombastic bob Silver badge
Happy

not a bad take on all of this, actually

Physicists wrap neutrino detector in cosy blanket to shed light on the Sun's secondary fusion cycle

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Astrophysicists love approximations

apparently unstable big bang proto-stars made the heavier stuff earliy on, within the first few million years or something like that. I remember seeing a discussion about that a few months ago, on the El Reg comment board

bombastic bob Silver badge
Boffin

neutrinos are emitted when neutrons decay

Just to keep everyone up to speed ln this, in the presence of a large gravity, a neutron can decay into a proton, an electron, and 2 anti-neutrinos. The reason for the particle count is conservation of spin; hence 1 neutron decays into two particles and two anti-particles. Mass+energy are also conserved, as well as momentum. So the decay product particle velocities will reflect any mass defect from the reaction as kinetic energy, and their resulting directions of motion will conserve momentum.

This is why scientists believed the anti-neutrinos actually existed, because they apparently observed a difference between the mass+energy of the neutron vs its decay products, and possibly a difference in total momentum as well [implying the existence of unknown/undetected particles].

European Space Agency will launch giant claw that drags space junk to its doom

bombastic bob Silver badge
Happy

Re: They should have gone with the James bond scoop design

a set of satellites with a net might be more effective, catch as much as you can and then dispose of it in a similar way...

But this is a good start in the right direction. I hope it is highly successful.

Amazon's ad-hoc Ring, Echo mesh network can mooch off your neighbors' Wi-Fi if needed – and it's opt-out

bombastic bob Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Neighborly

ANYONE who does a drive-by WiFi crack on ANY home "in the mesh" would now (potentially) have one of several "attack vector" IP addresses at his disposal. And also, several subnets to scan for vulnerabilities on...

You are LITERALLY relying on your neighbor's IT skills protecting YOUR network from abuse. And tracking. And possible identity theft.

Considering the colonisation of Mars? Werner Herzog would like a word

bombastic bob Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Humans like locusts

Mars would be like "a frontier".

People who want to be FREE would go there for THAT reason, alone.

I know _I_ would, if I could.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Boffin

Re: There’s hope yet!

100% solar energy for HOW many cars? 10 million in California?

without going into the details, if there were 10 million cars consuming 15kwH per day of electric power [let's say daily commute and around town travel normalized to a 7 day week], and the sun puts 1.4kw per square meter onto the earth, when you work out efficiencies of conversion and other less than ideal energy conversion, you end up with around SEVEN SQUARE METERS OF SOLAR PANELS FOR EVERY CAR BEING CHARGED (according to my figurin'), if you want it ALL to come from solar panels [and they wouldn't be able to power anything else, and you'd have storage issues for varying demand and sunlight,yotta yotta].

I'll leave it to someone else to work out how much that infrastructure might cost... cloudy days, seasonality, latitude, and night time notwithstanding.

[and producing solar panels is NOT an "environmentally friendly" process]

This is, at least to some extent, relevant to colonizing Mars. Solar energy density THERE would be less half as much, and be subject to periodic dust storms and their aftermath.

Intel chief pens congratulatory letter to President-elect Biden urging work on immigration and domestic manufacturing

bombastic bob Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Stop it

nobody said there was anything wrong with immigrants nor immigration.

The problem is the use of H1B visas and similar kinds of immigration for the EXPLICIT purpose of "watering down" the pool of available employees such that wages are artificially DEPRESSED, particularly in regions of the U.S. where *EXPENSES* are artificially INFLATED. So while living expenses in the region of Silicon Valley would be INCREASING, the potential INFLUX of people [which makes rents go up, i.e. more people, less housing] who are willing to work for LOWER wages, causes OVERALL wages to DECREASE for everyone else, and existing employees are stuck in their jobs without raises and without other jobs to move into [or get laid off and replaced], unable to keep up with rising costs of living in one of the MOST expensive regions of the USA.

Did THAT explain the problem, here? Intel OBVIOUSLY wants something _LIKE_ this.

(if they want to reduce costs they could open up an office in Alabama or New Mexico or some other place where it costs WAY less to live, and people would WILLINGLY work for less when they end up with MORE disposable income after making those "much lower" cost of living payments every month)

bombastic bob Silver badge
Meh

Re: Stop it

education as in STEM - yes.

education as in "indoctrination" - no.

I wonder how much "unaffordable" student loan debt has been accumulated for "fill in the blank" studies and "liberal arts" majors... when STEM and/or 'school of business' classes would get you an actual JOB.

So a qualified agreement with you, that proper STEM education as early as 1st grade and kindergarten would be a HUGE help in making any population "employable" in the future, and eliminate the excuse that some employers have used when justifying over-use of H1B visa hiring to depress wages...

bombastic bob Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Stop it

don't forget environmental restrictions, cost of new construction [especially bureaucracy]. and TAXES.

those are HUGE "drivers" for where you put your factory. And last I checked, wafer fabrication uses a LOT of very dangerous materials...

Google binned two apps by China’s Baidu, which says researchers got it wrong by linking it to personal info leaks

bombastic bob Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Not invented here

looked for this specific comment (or one like it), the first thing that popped into my head, upvoted

bombastic bob Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Pot? Kettle?

The Pot called the Kettle "Aluminum"

Icon, because, snark

NASA building network cables that can survive supersonic flight - could this finally deliver unbreakable RJ45 latching tabs?

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: No need to reinvent the wheel

well, when I was in the Navy I went to a soldering school where they taught soldering techniques according to NASA specs. You had to visually QA your work under a lighted magnifier, no 'pits' no 'tits' etc.. You had to use solder with mildly activated flux that was 63:37 (Pb:Sn) which has the tightest thermal range for the plastic region [meaning that you're way less likely to have a cold solder joint] and you used specific types of crimp connections when making cables, crimped with the correct tool, through-hole leads were bent in specific ways before inserting into the circuit board, yotta yotta.

In short, it restricts you procedurally to constructing and repairing things in a manner that gets the highest possible reliability. In this case, it was for equipment used to control nuclear reactors, which had to stay running on a warship that might get hit by things that explode and send massive vibrations throughout the ship, potentially causing electronics to 'jitter' or even fail. The last thing you want is to have a nearby depth charge cause a reactor safety shutdown, leaving you without propulsion for a short period of time, and then NOT being able to start it back up again because it keeps shutting down when the system is shocked.

anyway, similar requirements here for handling in-flight vibration and supersonic shock waves.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Trollface

Re: No!

paperclips are also useful for opening desk locks when the keys are inside the drawer

The GIMP turns 25 and promises to carry on being the FOSS not-Photoshop

bombastic bob Silver badge
Thumb Down

see icon

bombastic bob Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: 25 years and still a pain to use

Hard to use and the developers are more interested in adding new features than improving usability.

I'm curious, would you expect a "modern" (*cough* *cough* *cough*) interface to be migrated to instead of adding NEW features [and NOT breaking the old ones nor re-inventing the UI in the process] ???

Isn't the entire point of software DEVELOPMENT to a) improve existing features by making them work more efficiently or enhancing their abilities and b) do so without breaking what people are already doing with it?

And I say this with the full snark that's due for ALL of those projects whose managers *FEEL* as if they have to completely (and capriciously) re-invent the user interface to comply with whatever "So and So" is doing to THEIRS... or maybe just whatever's trending at the moment on some social media platform.

So, my love of gimp INCLUDES its having kept that very stable familiar user interface every time I update it, which is still pretty much the same thing I've grown used to over the years, quirks and all. I suppose there are similar graphic editors out there that could be considered "even more complex", like Blender...

but that's the point - they found something that worked, and aren't "scampering about" trying to re-invent something that works, instead they are focusing their LIMITED available development time on things that ACTUALLY IMPROVE it.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Can you really get a version that says "Bringing on........

there is a real need out there that is being served.

Not only that, but there have not been any *RADICAL* *RE-DEFINITIONS* of the existing interface, either!!! (and if there were, I'd consider FORKING it to resist any "change for the sake of change" like we see in OTHER things... mutter mutter mutter)

Once you learn how it works, gimp is an 'easy to hack with' way of editing graphical things. I've created lots of useful work-related and fun-related graphics with it. Photo editing is easy, and the 'rope select' lets you chop off sections and move them, etc. even things like pasting a head from one photo onto a different body for laughs, easily re-adjusting for size and so on.

Worthy of mention, the stretch/perspective tools are pretty intuitive, so you can do the head-pasting trick, or take a blank wall or computer screen or white board that's at an angle in the photo, and then paste text and/or graphics on it, like with a funny 'meme' thing, and do so easily and with good quality results (as in 'it looks believable' if you do it right).

There are a few things that Windows does more easily, and I'd used the old MS Office photo editor before. The older MS Paint from before the "ribbon" appeared has a few features like making circles and rectangles and filling them with a color, for example, as well as bezier curves, and stuff like that. However, I usually don't do "those things" and maybe there's a "Script Fu" thing written out there that WOULD do them... [I've found a few hacks for the circles and rectangles already]

All in all, 'gimp' is a VERY useful application! I don't know of anything better in the OSS world.

Bloated middle age beckons: Windows 1.0 turns 35 and is dealing with its mid-life crisis, just about

bombastic bob Silver badge
Linux

Re: Windows 1.0 would run on 256KB of RAM and a pair of floppy drives

Linux hardware requirements these days are not too dissimilar from those requirements

NOT true... I run Linux on older hardware quite a bit, actually. I still have an old Laptop (from 2003-ish) that has Linux on it, an older debian release, that I used for consulting a year and a half ago when I needed a Linux box and they didn't have one available for me. All I needed was ssh and some file and network utilities to talk to a couple of RPi devices, but windows is _SO_ pathetic for that, so I used a 2003-ish laptop with only 512Mb of RAM and a relatively TINY hard drive as a PRODUCTIVITY booster.

A week later they handed me a year-old CPU box that I took home and put Linux on, overnight. No problems since.

Now I _WILL_ admit that *GLUTTONOUS* *PIG* applications like Chromium and Firefox [which manage memory about as well as an alcoholic manages booze] won't run very well on that old laptop, since they're so "modern" and all, but pretty much everything ELSE [including gimp] seem to work JUST FINE on a system with less than 1Gb of RAM, running X on a 1024x768 laptop screen, with a debian release that barely pre-dates its inclusion of systemd.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: PrestoChangoSelector...

Then wonder how a company with coders like this came up with IE, Teams and ShitePoint.

I've wondered how a company that came up with the 3D Skeuomorphic look for Windows 3.x _AND_ OS/2 PM 1.2 (or was it 1.3?) could *SUDDENLY* *ABANDON* *IT* *ALL* and *GO* *BACK* to a 2D FLATTY FLATSO look that Windows 1.x and 2.x had... _ESPECIALLY_ since the reason Windows 3.x _WAS_ _SO_ _SUCCESSFUL_ is _EASILY_ explained by that very same 3D Skeuomorphic look that they *ABANDONED* in Windows 8 through 10 !!!

So yeah, same *kind* of frustration, more or less.

CodeWeavers' CrossOver ran 32-bit Windows Intel binary on macOS on Arm CPU emulating x86 – and nobody died

bombastic bob Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: I'm waiting for them to...

I'd just like to see Wine actually WORK for applications I want to run and NOT have to use Windows "Ape" nor Win-10-nic to do it (the ones that scream how they won't support running on 7 any more, like stuff made by Intuit that I need at tax time)

YouTube is going to splash adverts all over your videos, and won't pay creators unless there's a big enough audience

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

time to leave youtube then

There's already an alternative for Twitter (Parler)

There's probably going to be an alternative for Facebook if anyone wants it [I heard about one recently, could not remember the name]

There may already be an alternative for youtube.

It may simply be time to ABANDON the arrogant google+facebook+twitter monopoly and go elsewhere until they start treating customers like CUSTOMERS instead of "revenue generating units"...

The ones who brought you Let's Encrypt, bring you: Tools for gathering anonymized app usage metrics from netizens

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Good idea, but...

how they're going to prevent this.

don't log any personally identifying information - that'd be a good start. then assume that a single application's usage information might get duplicate entries, so some other means of transactioning (besides personally identifying info) would be needed. A reasonably long hash based on a user's info might do it. THAT kind of thing.

Nione of this is hard, it just means setting it up so that the aggregate data can NOT be tied back to whoever or whatever generated it.

Now I have to ask the OTHER data slurpers why THEY aren't doing it THIS way... since it IS _SO_ SIMPLE!!!

Billionaire's Pagani Pa-gone-i after teen son takes hypercar out for a drive, trashes it

bombastic bob Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Why this

secretly we all like a bit of schadenfreude.

Lesee... rich kid wrecks daddy's $3m car toy.

while test -n "$breathing" ; do roll_on_floor ; laugh ; done

America's largest radio telescope close to collapse as engineers race to fix fraying cables

bombastic bob Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Lack of long term investment in decaying infrastructure?

And since Puerto Rico is an island in the Caribbean it stands to reason the telescope cables were exposed to a LOT of salt spray.

From the article: An official investigation into what caused the cables to break away was launched in August,

I can already tell you what did it: chloride embrittlement and corrosion in general, combined with cyclic stress fatigue with continuous tensile stress. *SNAP*

Certain kinds of stainless steel are affected by chloride embrittlement, and though you may not see corrosion, you might STILL see pitting on the metal, and with constant tensile stress it causes microfractures into which the chlorides (from salty air and hurricanes and stuff like that) embrittle it (if I remember correctly). This is also somewhat the case for copper conductors and "just plain steel". Salty air is bad for them, yeah.

You would generally need to paint and/or coat all cables with some kind of anti-corrosion paint (or other coating) that typically has chromates or some similar material in it, and possibly use sacrificial anodes [if even possible] to limit galvanic corrosion. As far as chloride stress corrosion goes, you might not be able to stop it if the material is susceptible.

Also 'work hardening' due to cyclic stresses can also result in cracking and even total failure. 50-something years of hanging there through hurricanes might explain that, yeah. If you bend soft metal back/forth enough times, it cracks and breaks. Same idea.

And when a stress crack forms, the physical properties of it (along with salty air) form corrosion that just makes it worse.

Google tells court: Our rivals gave US govt confidential dirt on us to fuel antitrust case. Now we want to see it

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: IANAL....

if the information is filed in the court case, then the defendent receives a copy. However, they are NOT privy to everything the Feds have if they do not actually FILE it. That's my understanding of the evidence rules. Should the judge decide otherwise, it would become a motion to compel or similar, in which the government would have to produce requested documents as a part of the discovery process. But the government would be able to object to this, and the judge would then decide whether the evidence would have to be disclosed (or not).

Basically, if it's not filed, it's not part of the case. Anything beyond that would require a subpoena and other legal processes to get it. But IANAL either, I've just had to deal with all of this sort of thing before. Laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but the general idea is that once it's filed as part of the case, BOTH parties must have full disclosure with one another. But if not filed, no need to disclose it. I'm sure the DEFENSE doesn't want to disclose everything THEY have, now would they?

Google Nest server outage leaves US, European smart homes acting dumb

bombastic bob Silver badge
Facepalm

"The Cloud" is highly overrated

"all eggs" "one basket"

yeah, THAT'll work well, right? Look at how much we save in baskets!!!

nevermind if multiple servers are involved, it STILL b0rked and went TITSUP for a while...

GitHub restores DMCA-hit youtube-dl code repo after source patched to counter RIAA's takedown demand

bombastic bob Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Ha!

as a musician, I object to RIAA's monopolistic dominance in music distribution, their marketing and royalty policies that harm musicians by promoting CRAP at the expense of royalties to GOOD musicians, and their general attitude towards their CUSTOMERS (content consumers). What they did to used CD purchases, for example, should be CRIMINAL.

And worthy of mention, RIAA hall of shame:

* Smashing Pumpkins

* Prince (who had to change his name for a while)

* The Beatles (why they formed Apple and couldn't perform old hits)

* Salt-N-Pepa

(and MANY, many others who've had horrible contracts, even leading to bankruptcy)

bombastic bob Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: What comes next is most interesting

Hopefully RIAA will sod off for a bit

unlikely. they seem to act as if every web site is Napster, and every content consumer is ripping them off or something.

I have one suggestion to RIAA: stop force-marketing CRAP at inflated prices, and if it's good, affordable, AND available for purchase, people WILL pay for it. Suing everyone for revenue is a BAD model, kinda like patent trolling...