Tristan Rhodes has come up with a great analysis of Open Source vs Proprietary software by using fruit. It’s on the same par as Neal Stephenson using the car metaphor to describe Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Here are some of the key arguments that I loved.

Mabolosoft is a company that sells seedless fruit. They have orchards full of fruit trees that they have genetically-altered to be sterile, so that no seeds will be included with the fruit. Consumers want fruit, so they buy it from Mabolosoft. This fruit is seedless, so when people need more fruit they must go back to Mabolosoft.

View it here!

Dell has introduced (or, if it’s been around for a while, it was just recently brought to public attention) the nSeries Desktops. These are computers that have no installed operating system - so you don’t have to pay for windows. It comes with a Freedos disk. So you can install Linux, *BSD, or whatever you want onto that clean machine - without having to first get rid of windows!

Yesterday Democratic Senator Joe Biden was announcing his candidacy for president when someone asked him what he thought of presidential candidate Barack Obama. His response?

[Barack Obama is] “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”

This immediatly became a huge race issue. I mean, it just boil’s people’s potatoes to hear educated blacks called “articulate”. Why doesn’t anyone say, “Man, you should vote for Hilary. She’s articulate.” It seems to imply that all blacks speak ebonics and it’s some kind of wonderful achievement for them to speak articulately.

According to “Power Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life” (p17) Steve Jobs created Breakout! That’s right, that wonderfully addictive game, second only to Tetris for most, was created by the man who created Apple, NextStep, Pixar (via financing), and the iPod. Is there anything the black turtle-neck clad man hasn’t had his finger in?

DO NOT UPGRADE! There are many reasons, but here are the most important ones - Norton Antivirus does NOT work with Vista as of now. It will make some graphics and sounds cards work at reduced capacity. Finally, they are ALREADY talking about a Service Pack 1 - meaning there are flaws they know about. Wait until those flaws are fixed. Service Packs mean big flaws, not little ones as are in every piece of software.

Existential Ponderings on Vimeo

DRM and why it’s evil…..

DRM on Vimeo

Had a small outage last night after I switched to a new router. Took some time for the DNS tables to catch up.

First they release news that Barack Obama went to school in a madrassa in Indonesia. When CNN decides to do some research and proves that it’s just a public school, Fox comes out and shows their anti-muslim racism outright.

From ThinkProgress.org we get this transcript:

GIBSON [W]hat did they see when they went to the madrassa where Barack Obama went to school?

HOST: Kids playing volleyball.

GIBSON: Playing volleyball, right. They didn’t see them in any terrorist training camps?