Lunar July. Ghost Month. Specifically, the worst day of Ghost Month, the 15th, when the gates of hell are wide open, and all manner of bedevilment occurs. People in Asia are offering up big tables full of food, burning incense, and burning ghost money to appease the hungry spirits.
But some spirits are just a tad bit too voracious, and nothing can be done to fill their gluttonous wants. Those are the ones to avoid. No amount of baksheesh, food or incense will lessen the thirst of their ravening maws.
No need to push Open Source any more; when the opposition is so busy scoring own goals, you can just about pull everyone off the pitch and watch the carnage unfold.
Oh, irony of ironies: what will drive more and more folks into the Open Source world will be the dinosaurs themselves, flailing around whilst trying to hold on to their monopolies and protecting the sacred 'premium content'. If Linux and other Open Source systems just improve incrementally, they can snatch an even bigger slice of the OS pie.
Honestly, playing an mp3 degrades network performance? This has never been an issue on any system I've ever run, and that includes System 7 of Mac OS, hardly the most stable of operating systems. What maroons.
And if you're wondering what the true cost of Vista is, then no finer analysis has been done then right here; degrading performance is all part of the design to lock you in to their 'premium content' distribution channel, and charge you for every view and every listen, forever.
Enter the subscription model for software. Instead of paying for something once and then falling off the radar as a revenue source for several years, subscription-based content and subscription-based software guarantee a continuous revenue stream for the vendor. If Microsoft controls the distribution channel for content (which is what Vista's content protection is trying to achieve) then every time you view or listen to some content (no matter whose content), Microsoft gets paid for permitting that content to be played on their system.
Thankfully, some folks have decided that enough is enough, and will allow you to stream content to your heart's desire; the French are following the lead of the Chinese, and saving the content is little more than a trivial exercise.
I'm guessing that huge firewalls will have to be constructed to stop any traffic heading to or from those countries, or any other countries that harbor or sanction 'Piracy!!!!'. And what's up with that pay for every view and listen model?
This is basically a form of blackmail in which the user's hardware is held to ransom by the operating system and only released when the appropriate amount of baksheesh has been forwarded to Redmond. As the Groklaw analysis puts it, "Why would anyone agree to something like this? Perhaps I can chalk it up to Microsoft innovating again. They must be testing the outer limits of what a customer will put up with before bolting to Linux, certainly a valuable scientific study from my point of view". Microsoft has already quietly trialled pay-as-you-go functionality for its software in out-of-the-way countries where it won't attract much media coverage, providing applications like MS Office in a manner that gives users "the flexibility to pay over time".
Not even boneheaded moves like this can slow down Moore's Law; CPU speeds get ever faster, storage space gets ever cheaper and smaller, and the ability to share stuff gets ever easier. What were they thinking? They can't be intentionally sabotaging their own company from within, can they? Is this a bug, or defective by design?
And if you're thinking that this doesn't affect you, no big deal, etc., then what about the fact that the very same company is helping the Chinese government to encourage anonymous users to use their real identities? One would suspect that 'encourage' has a slightly different meaning to the leaders in Beijing. Is this another one of those 'trialled in out of the way countries' bits, tested before it's rolled out in the home market?
Or what about tailoring ads based on your online behaviour? Something that would at the very least require keeping a record of where you surf, if not outright snooping through your emails and private data? They're in the process of patenting that very behaviour right now.
Enough with the abusive practices, the creepy user monitoring, and the distinctly decider-ish behaviour regarding what you can or cannot do with your system and your data (not to mention your legally paid for 'premium content'). Open Source is only getting stronger, and with allies like these, will soon book a place in the World Cup finals.
As always, consider this a thread for tech-related stuff, even if you have little to say regarding above post; any questions or tips needed regarding any OS are welcome.
Some Compiz Fusion fun: