Archive for October, 2008
Why do commercial blogs advocate stealing
One thing that really vexes me are the tech blogs that freely post stories about how to rip copy-protected DVDs or illegally save music from music sites or that list ways to get hold of MP3s.
down with DRM
Now, we all want free stuff and the good news is, there is a lot of free stuff out there – free pictures, free music from new artists, free software, heck, even free operating systems. All of them legal and completely free. So why do people feel the need to steal stuff as well. And yes, however you may like to argue it, copying friends music and films and downloading music streams IS stealing. You do not own the media, you did not pay for it, so you are stealing it.
The sad problem with the influx of technology is that people have lost contact with what goes into producing something. They forget about IP. Artists who make a song deserve to profit from that song or not, if they so choose. But we as their fans have no right to steal their music just because it is in MP3 format and we aren’t stealing a CD so what’s wrong?
And to top it all off, tech blogs go on posting ways to do this, when these very same blogs depend upon advertising revenue and the capitalist system. You can be damn sure that these blogs will never post a way to circumvent advertising revenues, or how to steal someone’s advertising clicks and they are pretty unlikely to post any advertising blockers 
Kinda smacks of hypocrisy if you ask me.
Music, films and software that are not free should not be stolen.
The problem with Ubuntu
Now, I am a huge fan of Ubuntu. It just works, in fact, I have never ever had it crash on me, whilst good old Vista and XP throws wobblies on the odd occassion. However, I think it has a fundamental flaw. It is written by techies, who know Linux inside out and are very happy with the command line. As such, if you want to do anything more than simple web browsing, IMing and emailing – which maybe most users want to to – then you start to get a little undone. Why? Because anything more slightly advanced requires you to start to know some command line stuff and be happy editing text files.
This includes setting up samba, setting up apache etc etc. Now, one could argue that those kinda things are pretty advanced and if you know about them, then you should be techie enough to be happy with the command line and text files, but I disagree. Looking at Windows, you can do pretty much whatever you want with it and you never have to edit a text file. This seems to be somethhing endemic within Ubuntu.
For example, I was trying to work out how to carry out simple incremental backups of certain folders in Ubuntu. After googling, it appeared that I need to use some command line tools like rsync or rdiff. Now, since I am still not that comfortable with scripts and cron, I just didn’t know what to do. Whereas in Windows, there are a million and one different options, all having a nice GUI. Thus me, being probobly the average Ubuntu user hits a huge barrier, and this is feel is the major problem of Ubuntu. It has not yet fully converted to the idea that simple users need GUIs. However, it is moving towards this belief and is much much more friendly than earlier versions, I just feel until it gets to the point where there is a GUI for every option and tool and all the packages that can be downloaded via synaptics have a GUI then it is going to have problems.
Windows 7 Hysteria
So, news of Windows 7 hits the internets and the tech sites go wild.
Why this obsession with yet another OS, when Vista still has barely bedded in? It seems that people have got use to Vista now – there are hardly any articles produced these days about the woes of Vista, most now are just about the usual tips, tricks and hacks you can do to it to make it work how we want. Funny that, I am sure the same thing happened when XP was first released (everybody freaking about the lack of driver support and all the new features people hated, now though, people love it for its stability and the way you can hack it).
I’m not saying MS shouldn’t develop new versions, but I wish the tech world would just relax a little bit and wait for the RCs, as opposed to desperately hunt out anything new. This to me is the problem with the tech industry, new is always better, even if in many cases it aint.
Hello world!
Welcome to my new blog.
I am going to procrastinate like there is no tomorrow. But I’m going to start tomorrow.