Or should that be clairvoyant? Just yesterday I was talking about certain companies wanting to lord it over us little folks, having us pay out the nose in perpetuity, and today there is an article in the New York Times that lays out the case for perpetual copyright. I won't even provide a link as it does not deserve the traffic.
Lawrence Lessig promptly slaps down all of it with a crushing blow, you can see what he has to say here. If you are unfamiliar with who he is, you can read a bit of background on him here.
Linux, of course, is not affected by all that nonsense as it is licensed under the GPL. If you wish to know more about the GPL (soon to be version three), then you can read up on it here.
Speaking of perpetual corporate overlord control, some corporations are just so misunderstood lately; who else could get an Indian city (Gujarat) to call for a bandh, or general strike, because of heavy-handedness enforcing, you guessed it, their intellectual property. That's a pretty big slice of the world market to be pissing off. Seems like the monopolists are just getting some much-needed tough love of late.
I'm planning on upgrading my hardware (a bigger hard drive, damn you Jamendo!) and will be sticking with Ubuntu at least until CNR opens up it warehouses, which should be any day now; they are discussing what web logo to use for visitors, which to my mind suggests that they are almost there. Expect an announcement shortly.
If you want to set up MythTV (an open source TIVO alternative), the instructions to do so are here; if you are more interested in Ubuntu as a server, then a quick and easy guide to set up a LAMP server can be found here.
I would not be surprised if Ubuntu plays a major role in making Media Centers more accessible to the masses; not everyone has the bucks to shell out for a TIVO or similar PVR. Just this morning I was at a local electronics vendor, and the newest cool techie item they were pushing was a plug in for your computer (both desktop and laptop) that allows your computer to become a MythTV engine.
How sweet would that be? No more perpetual fees to a company to use their easily re-created hardware in an open source form. That word, perpetual, just seems to be coming up again and again with some of these companies.
Perpetual upgrades, fees, fixes, patches, rental payments, and threats of lawsuits. When the customer becomes the enemy, then maybe you've taken a wrong turn. It might be time to reconsider whether it's worth it to keep all those companies afloat, particularly as they don't seem to be offering any more value than what you get for free.
Free from fear of prosecution; free from the unending chain of having to buy new hardware, because surprise (!) your present hardware is no longer functional; free from having to make payment after payment for the system 'upgrades' that offer little to no new functionality; free to share and modify to your heart's content; and free as in no cost.
Yeah, there's a bit of a transition, but from what I've experienced in the past six months, the pain is small, and the benefits are huge. Not a bad trade-off, and you learn something in the process. And this coming from a perpetual Mac user; as we all know Macs are light-years simpler to use than Windows, so if I can do it, then literally anyone on the planet who has handled a mouse and keyboard can do it, and likely much more easily and painlessly than I have.
I've said that I'll stick with Ubuntu until CNR goes online, but I wish they would hurry up, dammit! Lots of exciting new distro releases to try out, the latest being PCLinuxOS. Fedora 7 will be out shortly, and I've never really gotten Debian Etch working properly on my main (or newly-revived test) machine. Just have to virtualize, I guess.
Speaking of which, VMware-server is now in the Ubuntu repositories and works flawlessly upon install; all you need to do to get it going (apart from installing it) is download the free registration key. Installation is as simple as
sudo apt-get install vmware-server
and then running the command 'vmware-server' will take you through the set up process for your virtual machine. Someone actually went as far as virtualizing OS X and Vista on top of Ubuntu; I'm sure the Mac lawyers will have pulled it from youtube by the time I publish this diary, so won't bother to link.
And if you haven't done so yet, be sure to download and install the latest open source version of the popular Microsoft fonts, newly liberated by Red Hat developers; they are called ttf-liberation and are in the Ubuntu repositories;
sudo apt-get install ttf-liberation
and there you go. No more fugly fonts in Firefox or wherever.
Will be offline for a while as I prepare to upgrade this machine, so my apologies in advance. Hate to be an absentee diarist, but it just can't be helped. Will update later. Update: Well, I may now a bit about Ubuntu, but when it comes to being careful about hardware purchases I'm an absolute bonehead; my current machine uses a SATA drive, and my test machine uses an IDE drive, so any chance of swapping the old one for the not so old one went out the window when I stupidly got an IDE drive; now my test machine has a huge honking hard drive, while my main machine whimpers in envy.
Some troubles trying to install Ubuntu on the test machine, and problems with LinuxMint; seems I needed to update the BIOS of the machine or some such, and finally GParted comes to the rescue! Got all of the disk partitioned, thanks to GParted being included in the Elive 0.6.8 install disk. Going to try and triple boot Linux. Insanity.
And for your viewing pleasure, more spinning eye-candy (I am so not ready for this new, new digital revolution):