Apple is Worse than Microsoft

Read this one carefully.

http://www.eff.org/cases/odioworks-v-apple

The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) has a provision that makes it illegal to circumvent Digital Rights Management (DRM). This is intended to prevent people from removing copyright protection from music and movies since there is no way to technically perform that feat. Even when used as intended this is a flawed provision, but Apple has stretched the interpretation of this law to the edge of believability. Apple claims that since they have software to prevent you from doing things they don't want you doing with hardware that YOU PAID FOR, that anything you do to circumvent their efforts is in violation of the DMCA.

Internet Explorer Critically Flawed, Switch to Firefox

Microsoft classifies IE8 upgrade as a critical update and forces IE8 to be default browser. Apparently IE7 is critically flawed and you should not be using it. Switch to Firefox (www.firefox.com). They are not perfect, but they are honest about their flaws and very quick to fix them.

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/01/002237&from=rss

Deregulation 10 Years Later

This article from the New York Times in 1999 made some uncanny prediction about our current financial crisis.

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/05/business/congress-passes-wide-ranging-bill-easing-bank-laws.html

Microsoft Bad, Switch to Linux, Part 2

Groklaw is a website that discusses legal issues open source software. This posting caught my attention. It is about a paper from European Committee for Interoperable Systems that provides brief history of the anti-competitive practices of Microsoft.

It introduces the concept of middleware, which explains why there is a browser war even though no one ever pays for a browser.

It also gives a great description of Microsoft's systematic method of using its monopoly on the desktop operating system to attack competitors.

This is the Groklaw article...

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090421111327711

This is the European Committee for Interoperable Systems paper...

http://www.ecis.eu/documents/Finalversion_Consumerchoicepaper.pdf

Ubuntu 9.04 NBR on eee pc 1000

I installed Ubuntu 9.04 netbook remix on my eeepc 1000. I had been using an unofficial Ubuntu derivative prior to that which worked well but lacked a little polish in some areas. This is the first official Ubunutu NBR release and it works great.



The process of downloading the USB stick image and writing it to disk was the most time consuming. The instructions at www.ubuntu.com worked without a hitch. The actual install took the standard 20 minutes for Ubuntu, then I was ready to go.

The only changes I made to the standard install were to install nfs-common to talk to my nfs file server and setting temp and log files to write to RAM since I have a solid state drive and don't want the contstant writes to wear it out. These are the lines I added to /etc/fstab...

#mount the raid array on the nfs server
192.168.15.6:/home/documents /home/brett/server nfs defaults 0 0

#mount temporary data to tmpfs to reduce disk writes
#(https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EeePC/Using)
tmpfs /var/log tmpfs defaults 0 0
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0
tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0

I should have used aptonCD to transfer the installed software from my old install. Since I didn't, I had to manually install the applications I like. Not a major task with a package manager, but it could have been avoided.