Laser Blog

Articles tagged "opinion"

65 You are kidding arent you?

Friday 16th March, 2007

Link rot. Shame on ZDNet.
Rob. April 2015.

This has got to be a hoax. A funny one though. It is a comment on a ZDNet article.

Are you saying that this linux can run on a computer without windows underneath it, at all ? As in, without a boot disk, without any drivers, and without any services ?

That sounds preposterous to me.

There's more folks, there's more ... well worth the read. :)

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62 Let free music files ring

Tuesday 13th March, 2007

Richard Stallman has written a short article for the Boston Globe about file sharing.

The record companies, seeking to bully people who share music, have demanded that colleges identify students who share. They use smear terms such as "piracy" and "theft" that imply sharing is wrong. Don't believe it. Sharing is friendship; to attack sharing is to attack the basis of society.

Well, we all know that most musicians get almost nothing from the record companies. In fact, the record companies almost seem like drug pushers, the way they pay just enough to maintain the artists' dependency on them.

"Authors own their books and license them to publishers. When the contract runs out, writers gets their books back. But record companies own our copyrights forever."

Courtney Love

Back to Richard Stallman:

The real solution is to legalize sharing. This won't affect the record companies much, but if they did go out of business, we could rejoice that they can no longer threaten anyone.

They pay zero cents of your CD purchase price to musicians (except for superstars), so the absence of these companies would be no loss to society.

Hear, hear.

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46 I hate Macs

Monday 5th February, 2007

Charlie Brooker has written an amusing article for the Guardian Unlimited's "Comment is free" section, entitled I hate Macs. Judging by the number of comments beneath it, it seems to have attracted a lot of attention. Interestingly, the first comment was written by Brooker himself, an interesting revelation on how some of these articles get edited before being published.

The ads are adapted from a near-identical American campaign ... in which Mitchell plays a repressed, neurotic underdog, and Webb plays a selfish, self-regarding poseur. So when you see the ads, you think, "PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers." In other words, it is a devastatingly accurate campaign.
Myst, the most pompous and boring videogame of all time, a plodding, dismal "adventure" in which you wandered around solving tedious puzzles in a rubbish magic kingdom apparently modelled on pretentious album covers, originated on the Mac in 1993. That same year, the first shoot-'em-up game, Doom, was released on the PC. This tells you all you will ever need to know about the Mac's relationship with "fun".

This is classic stuff, but as usual there are those who love to take this sort of thing too seriously. :)

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25 The current state of computer security

Wednesday 29th November, 2006

The Security Absurdity website is still around, but none of the links in the article seem to work.
Rob. April 2015.

The first link above is a very interesting and insightful article about the current state of computer security. I thoroughly advise anyone who uses a computer, whether you are an individual PC user or the IT director of a company, to read this article.

The article assesses the risks, covering spyware, phishing, trojans, viruses, worms, rootkits, spam, botnets, web vulnerabilities, denial-of-service attacks, active-x weaknesses, passwords, patch management, wireless networks, internal attacks, and more.

There is then an analysis of why these problems exist.

The second link above is a follow-up article continues on the same theme, but focuses more on possible solutions.

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21 Microsoft claims Linux has stolen it's "intellectual property"

Sunday 19th November, 2006

Just a few of the more interesting links related to these sordid claims. It's something that Ballmer has claimed before, but that was back in the heyday of the SCO debacle which is now nearly over. It's typical FUD, possibly the actions of a desperate man? Who knows how these people think, except others like them.

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