Why you should NOT buy a Zune

This article provides a nice list of the reasons why you shouldn't spend any money on Microsofts new Zune music player. I don't understand why they have sold even a single player, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Zune sells pretty well. Why? Because most people aren't aware of these problems and if they are made aware of them, they don't really care (I don't think I'll ever understand why people don't care?). MS is also usually very good at marketing and they will most certainly spend a lot on that.

A look into the development of Vista

Joel Spolsky, a well known software developer. Recently he made a post titled Choices = Headaches which talks about the shutdown menu/buttons in Vista. It is very much worth reading! Since then a developer working on exactly that feature posted this interesting reply. It provides a rare view into how Vista development progressed. Joel Spolsky has since posted a short comment about that reply. I can only agree. If that is how development generally have progressed at Microsoft, then it is no surprise that Vista has been delayed several times and important features have been withdrawn.

Linux users owe Microsoft money?

Well, that is what MS CEO Steve Ballmer claims:

"Novell pays us some money for the right to tell customers that anybody who uses SUSE Linux is appropriately covered," Ballmer said. This "is important to us, because [otherwise] we believe every Linux customer basically has an undisclosed balance-sheet liability."

Tristan Sloughter have a nice suggestion.

Switching to Ubuntu...

This person have recently switched to Ubuntu and documented the proces. It is a nice read I think and it really shows how far the Linux desktop has come and why I think we'll see more and more people switching to a open source desktop.

I am a proficient Windows XP user and more, but after seeing what’s Vista going to be with all the issues in relation to implementing security and the way Microsoft wants to license it, I decided that it is time for me to try to find an alternative. This was happening around a month ago after I attended a Microsoft Techday dedicated to Vista. So in the past month I used exclusively Ubuntu Linux 6.10 on my laptop. Below is the journal of what happened.

Cool photos from Toronto

Found them on Boing Boing.

More Ballmer FUD

Microsoft’s Ballmer steps-up Linux infringement suit rhetoric

Google Tech Talks: Ubuntu Linux with Mark Shuttleworth

I have great respect for Mark Shuttleworth and the way he has handled building a new Linux distribution. In this tech talk given recently, he speaks and answers questions about Ubuntu Linux for close to an hour.

He spends quite some time on launchpad.net and the only thing I wonder about is the decision to keep it proprietary. I'm complaining about it, I'm just wondering what the reasons for doing that is?

He also have some funny comments on the Novell - MS deal. All in all I very much enjoyed seeing this talk and I can only recommend to watch it if you are at all interested in hearing about Ubuntu Linux.

Is DRM good or bad for consumers?

This short article gives a few viewpoints on that, basically the industry is claiming that DRM is good for consumers:

But Andrew Moss, senior director of technical policy at Microsoft Corp., said DRM will be important to consumers as more of them began to create their own digital content. DRM will allow them to control how their creations are used, he said.

"What [DRM] is intended to do is give people choices," he said.

That's a nice rewrite of "We want to get paid each time you want to do anything with any kind of music/video/text/whatever". In a few years you can expect to have to pay for many of the things you considered fair use.

Hilarious view on the Vista license

This Wired article is a hilarious view on the Microsoft Vista license :)

Peace through pork!

I love this and I love bacon too :)

Ballmer starts the FUD engine

Novell and Microsoft has entered a deal and it didn't take long for MS CEO Steve Ballmer to start the FUD engine:

The distributors of other versions of Linux cannot assure their customers that Microsoft won't sue for patent infringement. "If a customer says, 'Look, do we have liability for the use of your patented work?' Essentially, If you're using non-SUSE Linux, then I'd say the answer is yes," Ballmer said.

"I suspect that [customers] will take that issue up with their distributor," Ballmer said. Or if customers are considering doing a direct download of a non-SUSE Linux version, "they'll think twice about that," he said.

Surprises in the Vista EULA

So, Microsoft is going to release Vista soon. It looks like a quite nice OS in many ways (and it should considering the time it has taken them to create it) but it is not just the OS that has changed, the license has changed as well and it is not exactly what I would call improvements unless you're Microsoft.

Software patents and lawyers with a sense of humour

This is hilarious!

Upgrading from Dapper to Edgy...

I upgraded my Kubuntu from Dapper to Edgy recently and that upgrade wasn't exactly flawless as I've written before. It seems quite a few people have had the same experience. The reason for most of the problems is most likely because people use unofficial repositories and tools to make their system work as they like. I do this myself too (installed proprietary codecs to be able to play various videos and music files) and other such things.
I think this blog post sums up the problems quite well and also gives a few good suggestions as to what can be done to make the situation better. The basic idea is to make the upgrade process more intelligent. This will of course never be perfect, but it have the potential to make it a lot better and cut down on the complaints. If people get the nice warning ("you are using unofficial repositories which might cause the upgrade to fail and make your system unusable" or something like that) before the upgrade proceeds, lots of people would think twice before continuing.

Packaging in Linux

Mark Shuttleworth writes about packaging in the free software world in his latest blog entry and I totally agree with him. Why do we have .deb and .rpm and so on? It would be nice if most would use the same thing. It should be made as easy as possible to make packages of a given piece of software that would work in all the major distros. The easier it is, the less errors will be made and having to make packages for different distros takes time away from doing other stuff like fixing bugs in the software you're packaging.

Scott Adams "hacked" his brain!

This is quite cool I think. He partly lost his ability to speak 18 months ago in what is called "Spasmodic Dysphonia". No one has recovered from it, but being an optimist, he "hacked" his brain and he can now speak again:

The day before yesterday, while helping on a homework assignment, I noticed I could speak perfectly in rhyme. Rhyme was a context I hadn’t considered. A poem isn’t singing and it isn’t regular talking. But for some reason the context is just different enough from normal speech that my brain handled it fine.

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick.
Jack jumped over the candlestick.

I repeated it dozens of times, partly because I could. It was effortless, even though it was similar to regular speech. I enjoyed repeating it, hearing the sound of my own voice working almost flawlessly. I longed for that sound, and the memory of normal speech. Perhaps the rhyme took me back to my own childhood too. Or maybe it’s just plain catchy. I enjoyed repeating it more than I should have. Then something happened.

My brain remapped.

My speech returned.

Not 100%, but close, like a car starting up on a cold winter night. And so I talked that night. A lot. And all the next day. A few times I felt my voice slipping away, so I repeated the nursery rhyme and tuned it back in. By the following night my voice was almost completely normal.