A couple of years ago when I was studying Articificial Intelligence as part of my Computer Science course at university I played around with a couple of AI bots.
One of those that I found was Ikea’s “Ask Anna”, which is prominently advertised on their home page.
I was curious as to how they handled input validation, so I tested with some potentially objectionable words.
One of the “inappropriate” terms I tested was “dumb”. Unfortunately Anna’s interpretation of this word could be improved, as it’s not appropriate to equate “dumb” with “disabled people” or their carers.
I downloaded and installed Windows 7 beta1 and unfortunately my first impressions are somewhat poor (yes, I *know* it’s beta1, and it’s meant to be broken ;). The installer was quite easy to use, although it was slow.
After installation, I installed the NVidia drivers from Windows Update, as well as a couple of other things like Lightroom, DVB Viewer, and the Technotrend drivers. After rebooting the result was a blue screen of death.
The familiar BSOD STOP error: “A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer”. “Attempt to reset the display driver and recover from timeout failed.” The error is in nvlddmkm.sys.
This results in the familiar “Safe mode or not” on the next boot…
I first started looking at the WD TV because I was interested in buying one, and once I found out that it was running Linux, started to investigate if I could customise it to my needs.
Update: 9th Feb 2009. WD released a new source code package some time ago (WDTV_GPL_Code.zip version 1.01.02), but it’s still a GPL violation. See below.
Disclaimer: I Am Not A Lawyer, nor do I have expert knowledge of GPL enforcement. I am merely a free software enthusiast and *nix sysadmin.
Unfortunately the WD TV product, by the well known hard disk manufacturer Western Digital, appears to be violating the copyright of various free software projects, including those of the GNU and mtd-tools projects.
Of most concern to the GNU project is that a “toolchain” consisting of a binary-only version of gcc is provided. Of concern to mtd-tools is that the firmware contains a binary version of mtd-tools, but no source code appears to be provided.
Personally I think that it is unacceptable that WD is making money out of violating the GPL, and effectively distributing pirated software. There would be an uproar if WD was using pirated Microsoft software, for instance.
Information
The firmware and “source code” is available from
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=1001&sid=112〈=en
The first problem is that the “source code” is only for version 1.00.01, while the binary version is 1.01.01.
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