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Tech news:

Crack in space shuttle foam delays launch. NASA managers are keeping their options open for a Fourth of July space shuttle launch, even though a piece of foam insulation the size of a bread crust fell off Discovery’s external fuel tank. For now, Discovery’s mission management team has decided “to continue with the plan that we’re on,” John Shannon, the team’s chairman, told reporters here at Kennedy Space Center. But inspections and analysis would continue, and a decision on proceeding with Tuesday’s countdown would be made Monday night, he said. The issue arose after pad workers were doing a post-scrub inspection of the shuttle orbiter and found a crack in the foam on a liquid-oxygen feed-line bracket near the top of the fuel tank. Later, they noticed that a piece was missing from the cracked area, and that piece was found on Discovery’s launch platform.

BPI gets to sue AllOfMP3. The British recording industry has been given permission to sue Russian music website allofmp3.com in the High Court. Members of the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) want to prove the site, which offers downloads for as little as five cents, is illegal. They were given the go-ahead to sue the company last week, and say proceedings will be issued in Russia this week.

Yet another Windows on a Mac program appears. CodeWeavers is in early testing with CrossOver Office for Mac now and plans to release a final version of the software in July or August. But with Apple Computer’s shift to Intel chips, the pool of options has expanded considerably. Apple has its own Boot Camp software, which lets Intel-based Macs boot up with either Windows or Mac OS X. Parallels has released software that lets the Microsoft operating system run in a separate virtual machine with only a slight loss in performance. CodeWeavers uses an open-source technology called Wine to allow some Windows programs to run under Mac OS X. This will be yet another option, which, unlike the current choices, doesn’t even require a copy of Windows.
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Hack: Change Windows XP Home to Windows XP Pro

When looking for copies of Windows in the store, the upgrade from home to pro will run you an extra $100. Now it seems you can get that ‘pro’ flavor for that ‘home’ price. It sounds pretty simple to do (just some registry changes), but you can’t install Service Pack 2, so you might try to slipstream in the changes to your modified install disc. You can’t change an installed copy of Windows but only your Installation CD

1. Copy the root directory and the i386 directory of the WindowsXP CD to your harddisk
2. Extract the Bootsector of your WindowsXP CD

3. Change 2 Bytes in i386\Setupreg.hiv:
a) Open Regedit
b) Highlight HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
c) Menu: File -> Load Structure -> i386\Setupreg.hiv
d) Assign an arbitrary name to the imported structure e.g. “Homekey”
e) Goto HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Homekey\ControlSet001\Services\setupdd
f) edit the binary key “default” and change “01” to “00” and “02” to
“00”
g) Highlight “Homekey” and select menu: File -> unload structure

4. Burn your new XP Pro CD
5. Install WindowsXP as usual. Your XP Home Key will work.

Note: You cannot apply SP2 to such a WindowsXP Pro, so step 1.b) might be to integrate SP2 in your Installation CD.

via Gizmodo.com
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Related Episodes:

1. Geekcast #17