Killing OpenOffice - the Novell Agreement

As I've told you before, Novell did a bad deal with Microsoft, which we should protest against. Steve Ballmer from Microsoft already started using this to do erroneous bad publicity to Linux, but this time is Novell with it's intention to put OpenXML into OpenOffice, which includes filling it with DRM stuff.

*sigh*

Even they find it stupid

Following my post about Zune, where CNN reporters just show that there's no way marketers can be right when clueless observers find some piece of technology wrong, this time I'm going to talk about iTunes.

As pvaneynds points out, a Belgian ISP has a publicity that goes like this:

Two romantic souls are communicating with email, and 'he' tries to find romantic music. So off he goes to the 'skynet itunes music shop' and searches the list of songs. Then he replies that he cannot select a fitting song from the long, long list. She (I presume) replies that she can, and sends a romantic song.

Now, what does this mean? Preety simple. The ad shows what consumers want to have, so, they're presenting the scenario on how stuff should be so consumers would be happy. Unfortunately, this scenario is far from real, both in terms of feasibility and legality.

Besides the fact that the itunes shop doesn't give you an mp3 (what most people expect), this is also blatant illegal sharing of music unless they went through the whole 'authorise that computer to play my songs' song and dance, which is unlikely given the 'becoming an item' setting.

The most important thing that they're pointing out with this, IMHO, is that DRM technologies preventing this to be true are just wrong.

If you happen to have a video with that ad, please tell me something.

Traveling by Train

I always loved traveling by train: I have that peaceful feeling that nothing matters - I'm there until the time runs out, and I'm there all by myself. Peace. One of the things I like to do when I'm on a train is to fiddle with my laptop. Stuff like finally setting it up to suspend with all the data encrypted to disk, trying to use The GIMP (I suck on graphics editing) to create some artwork for a CD, or coding and getting some open source project to have another release. It's particularly fun to watch the reaction of others on the train. It's cool to see that people find it boring when I'm coding, amused when they notice I'm listening to neo-classical music, and awed when I'm doing some GL Magic... It's cool to use Linux :-P